Helios dropped to one knee, the cabin of the shuttle rattling around him as it struggled through the Excelsior’s rapidly spreading debris field. He drew in a deep breath, willing relaxation into muscles clenched so tightly that the pain carved through him in an aching rush. Caprico crouched before him.
‘Brother-Chaplain,’ said Caprico. ‘Are you injured?’
‘Nothing that will stop me,’ answered Helios. He coughed, tasting copper on his tongue.
‘Kyros,’ said Caprico. ‘Did you see him fall?’
‘We heard him,’ said Seneca. ‘In the end, over the vox.’
‘He sacrificed himself,’ said Nicanor. ‘And took enemies with him.’
‘We will honour him,’ said Ariston softly, staring off into the wall of the shuttle.
‘I will sing songs of his sacrifice,’ said Caprico. ‘Of his glory.’
‘Which is greater?’
The Primaris brethren turned as one, looking back at Helios as the Chaplain finally spoke. ‘Five, or one?’
The Ultramarines regarded Helios for a silent moment, trying to parse his meaning. Caprico tilted his head. ‘Brother-Chaplain?’
‘Five, or one?’ Helios repeated. ‘Which is greater?’
‘Five,’ said Ariston after a moment. Nicanor nodded in agreement.
Seneca gave a quick glance back from the control panel. ‘Five.’
Helios looked towards Caprico. ‘And you?’
The Primaris Marine considered the Chaplain for a second. ‘I agree with them, Brother-Chaplain. Five is greater than one.’
‘Five.’ Helios reached out, the fingers of his hand spread apart. He tapped his fingertips against Caprico’s breastplate. ‘Or one?’ Helios closed his fist and thudded it against the same spot, sending a clang through the shuttle’s interior.
Caprico was forced back an inch, not from the blow, but from the import of the Chaplain’s meaning that was beginning to dawn upon him.
‘The lions of Macragge are rulers of the plains,’ said Helios. ‘Undisputed in their grandeur and lethality. But what would they be, if you took their eyes, or their hearts, or their teeth? Broken things, cast down and forgotten. The squad is those lions. Each of you alone may be formidable, but when each fights alone to his own purpose, you are weak. Together, you form something that cannot be defeated.’
Helios’ eyes settled on Caprico. ‘You will sing songs of Kyros, who forsook his brothers and our mission in the name of glory? What song shall you sing, drowning in your blood from the foe that Kyros would have stopped, had he been at your side? What will you sing then?’
Silence answered the Chaplain. Helios looked to each of the Primaris Marines in turn. ‘Our primarch did not send us here for glory. He sent us to prevent the very collapse of the Imperium of Man, and the extinction of our race. How did Kyros achieve that, running to his doom, begging for remembrance? What servants of the Throne did he save? What worlds?’
Caprico’s head lowered. Nicanor looked away, while Ariston continued to gaze upon the far wall. Helios laid a hand upon Caprico’s shoulder guard.
‘Each Ultramarine is precious,’ said the Chaplain, his tone softened but undiminished in fervour. ‘As the ranks of our enemies continue to grow, we must only sell our lives for the greatest cost in service to mankind. The burden upon us is all-consuming, and it is our destiny to fall, but never in arrogance. Our lot is to serve, and suffer in place of those we are sworn to protect. There, together with our brothers in the midst of that suffering, is where we shall find our glory.
‘We shall not forget or dishonour Kyros,’ said Helios. Caprico looked up, meeting his gaze. ‘You will remember him, and this truth that his folly has taught you. You will bind yourselves to the brothers around you, and together you will become greater.’
Helios raised his fist. ‘Together, you will become one.’
The Hell Blades swarmed upon the Light of Iax. A sphere of icy gold flashed over her hull as her void shields were dappled by lascannon fire. Bolts of energy stitched out from along the spine of the Imperial warship as her defensive batteries returned fire against the Chaos fighters that orbited her like wasps.
‘Four Zeta.’ Zosime snapped a switch over her head. ‘Moving in for another attack run.’ She checked her auspex for nearby fighters. ‘Request support from Seven Zeta.’
‘Seven Zeta,’ came the static-drenched reply. ‘I have your port flank covered, Four Zeta. Ready to engage.’
A feral grin lit beneath her mask, Zosime urged her fighter into a dive towards the destroyer. She relished the rare sorties that allowed her full control over her craft, the opportunity of maximum expression of her skill as a pilot. She weaved through the chaos of the battle, holding her fire to save the precious shots remaining in her lascannon until she stood the best chance of inflicting lasting harm.
A blinding lance strike from the Damnatio Memorae knifed into the destroyer’s ribs. The enemy’s shields lit and wavered, unstable and intermittent as they defied the overwhelming amount of energy assailing them. They guttered for an instant, leaving the warship open, and Zosime fired.
Each shot rattled the Hell Blade’s hull. A brace of crackling bolts slashed out, scoring a line of direct hits along the destroyer’s battlements. Eye-blink explosions sent puffs of blue wreckage streaming out into the dark.
‘Hit!’ Zosime crowed. She hauled the control yoke to her chest as return fire blurred across her nose. ‘Seven Zeta, pull out. They have me targeted.’
‘Four… Come in.’ the vox came in and out in Zosime’s helm. ‘Sev–’
‘Seven Zeta,’ Zosime hissed, grimacing as she swung her fighter in evasive manoeuvres. ‘Seven, respond!’
The ident rune for Seven Zeta vanished from the auspex. Zosime swore under her breath. ‘Command, this is Four Zeta. We have lost Seven Zeta. Request permission to–’
Zosime felt as though her Hell Blade had been kicked by a Titan. The fighter jolted, thrown violently from its axis. Zosime fought with the controls, using all of her strength to stabilise it. The craft’s responses were sluggish, drifting as another blast sparked against her port side.
‘I’ve been hit!’ Zosime flinched as a jet of sparks burst from her instrument panel. A dozen separate alarms wailed and screamed over each other. Another hit cracked her skull against her throne and suddenly the Hell Blade was spinning. Her vision blurred and began to narrow as the centrifugal force pulled the blood from her brain. There was a flash of light, followed by the greasy whiplash of dislocation and then a rush of all-consuming silence.
‘Got you,’ the gunnery officer smiled as another icon symbolising an enemy fighter blinked out.
‘Bring us around,’ Rayhelm shouted above the din of the bridge. Her hands flew over the controls of her throne, furiously issuing commands to several parts of the Light of Iax’s crew at once. ‘Get us underneath it. We can’t hold if they get us in a broadside.’
The destroyer heaved, pitching crewmembers and robed Chapter-serfs from their feet as the void shields absorbed another lance blast. The screeds of hololithic projections surrounding the shipmistress darkened with damage reports in lines of throbbing red. ‘Balance power to the engines and shields, get us clear of that prow lance!’
Decades of combat training and battle experience flooded through Rayhelm’s mind. There were very few scenarios of an escort-class vessel engaging against a cruiser-class alone, for reasons that were blatantly obvious. The sheer difference in tonnage bordered on hilarious.
Less entertaining was the accuracy of the Chaos warship’s weapons batteries. After watching their foe, confirmed by augur coding to be a Murder-class cruiser of unknown age, smash through the Excelsior and leave it behind as bits of wreckage, Rayhelm had ordered a full burn to the engines, plotting a meandering course that would put the Ultramarines in a position to effect planetfall without jeopardising her ship. Even with their advantage in manoeuvrability, the enemy had still managed to slash away the Light’s void shields nearly to collapse.
‘Status report from the embarkation bay,’ said Rayhelm. ‘Has the Pilum launched yet?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ answered an officer. ‘We have just received confirmation that Lord Theron is away, and en route to the surface.’
The shipmistress breathed a short sigh, before tapping a tattoo against her runepads. ‘Good. Get us clear from orbit. Follow these coordinates. We need to gain distance from that beast and balance the engagement to our advantage. Ordnance?’
‘Ma’am?’
‘Do we have torpedoes?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ The gunnery serf looked back to the spool of parchment issuing from a servitor’s head. ‘Tubes one and six are loaded and primed to fire.’
‘Get them in the void,’ she replied, consulting the tactical hololith for the area surrounding the Light of Iax. She had been firing torpedoes as quickly as they became available, both to inflict damage upon the cruiser and to keep the swarms of its fighters occupied acting on defence, rather than raking her hull with lascannon fire. A few of the small ships had managed to break through, though not in great enough numbers to inflict harm before they were overcome by the destroyer’s spinal point defence batteries.
Rayhelm experienced an uncomfortable sense of relief, now that the Ultramarines had fully deployed from the Light of Iax. Her mind had enough urgent, life-threatening demands upon her attention as it was, and knowing that the lords of Macragge were loosed to take their fight to the enemy meant she could focus fully on doing the same.
The fate of Chaplain Helios nagged at her then. She still had no way of knowing what had become of him, but voiced a quick prayer on his behalf, that he and Seneca’s squad had somehow escaped the disaster that had befallen the Excelsior. In these times, the Imperium needed the Space Marines more than ever.
‘Mistress!’ The call came from the forward pits. Rayhelm could not be certain where. It was a warning that hardly needed to be given, the threat clear to anyone with a view of the armourglass above as the Chaos cruiser began to roll in the void.
‘I see it,’ she snapped. Her mind raced with a dozen commands at once, as their foe spun to present the macro batteries along its pitted flanks. ‘Navigation, come about, heading nine-five. Signal the enginarium we need to redirect power to engines. Void shields to maximum, reallocate to forward screens.’
Scanners wailed as they tracked the building charge that lit the barrels of the monstrous cannons targeting them like miniature stars.
‘Brace for impact!’
The lights along the enemy cruiser’s length dimmed for a fraction of a second before firing. The cannons flared with the discharge, sending blinding smears of liquid plasma rocketing down over the Light of Iax.
‘Get me more power to engines!’ shouted Rayhelm. ‘We need to get clear of–’
The shipmistress’ words were swallowed by the din as two of the blasts made contact. Vision was gone, engulfed in a maddening flash of kaleidoscopic hues as the destroyer’s void shields suffered, overloaded and died.
Zosime was alone in the void. She flailed, seeing her Hell Blade corkscrew away out of the corner of her eye before disappearing in a flaring ball of flame. Her arms flung up before her face as twisting wreckage spun in all directions, cracking and shattering as it flash-froze in the void.
The enemy destroyer surged away from her, its engines fully lit as the Damnatio Memorae rolled in pursuit. Zosime turned away, shielding her eyes from the blinding flashes of the warships’ massive weapons as they duelled in silence.
Protocol overcame panic as she ran her hands over her rebreather feeds. The life support system locked and caught, venting heat and sparks. She fought to control her breathing, remembering the trained method that limited each breath to the minimum necessary to maintain her consciousness.
Wreckage danced and hung all around her, twinkling with the dull light of her surroundings. A tiny piece of creamy white stood out from all the rest, at the centre of a frozen mist of blood. Zosime reached for it, her breathing techniques forgotten, as though her very survival depended upon taking hold of the small item. Her fingertips caught the edge of it, sending it spinning further away before she snatched hold of it with her other hand.
Seeing it up close drove the breath from Zosime’s lungs. A roughly carved charm of dirty bone glittered faintly in her palm. Immediately her other hand shot to her own neck, finding her talisman there. The one with the exact same carvings etched into its surface.
Zosime looked back into the shattered cockpit. The faceplate of the pilot’s helm had been torn away. Burns and the hard vacuum of the void had ravaged the face, but in spite of it all she recognised it. Shock stole all thoughts of Zosime’s dwindling oxygen as she saw her own eyes staring back at her.
Why couldn’t she remember anything? No home. No family. Just a vague sense of images, like dreams that flitted through her mind between the times her masters stirred her to fight.
Zosime wasn’t thinking about the cold overcoming her flesh and leeching into her bones. She was not thinking about how tired she was becoming, how hard it was getting to breathe. She could not take her eyes off herself, as her heart stopped beating.
Why couldn’t she remember anything?