The squad of Ultramarines moved across the desolate rocky landscape of Quradim in a silent file. The surface of the Imperial world was treacherous to navigate, the ground unstable and prone to collapse from the tremors that reached up from its erratic core. The squad had to double back many times over, skirting about massive sinkholes that descended all the way down to the impenetrable darkness of the planet’s depths.
They passed the remains of great machines, left to moulder away or half consumed by the disintegrating earth. Excavators, drilling rigs and extractors the size of battle tanks littered the area around them. In the near distance they could see flattened sprawls of twisted scaffold, the squat broken shells of iron and rockcrete that had once been thriving ore crushers, refineries and manufactoria.
‘There was great industry here, once,’ said Nicanor.
‘Indeed,’ said Seneca, one eye trained upon the horizon while the other consulted the data readout detailing Quradim’s past. ‘This world was laden with tithes for raw materials, after surveys had uncovered its vast mineral wealth.’
‘A grand bounty of the earth,’ said Helios. ‘Bestowed by the Emperor for His servants to hold in stewardship.’
Ariston watched a colossal drilling rig as its rust-caked bulk settled further into a crumbling pit. ‘It strikes me oddly that the Master of Mankind would desire such that would end in ruination here.’
‘We must all give of what we have to preserve His dominion,’ said the Chaplain. ‘Without the ore and minerals of Quradim, the nearest forge worlds would have starved, depriving humanity of the weapons and ships needed to combat the mutant, alien and heretic. The survival of all eclipses the fate of a single soul, and even a world, and so Quradim gave all that it had. It was far from the first to do this, just as it will be far from the last. A sacrifice is not true unless the cost to the one who gives it is great.’
‘Get clear!’
Jovian heard the rushing scream of dying engines before he saw anything. He went low, looking over his shoulder to seek out the source of the din.
A flaming Thunderhawk breached a bank of noxious cloud, dropping like a stone from the sky. Jovian noticed the iconography adorning it, and the golden hazard striping on the few parts of it that had not been scorched down to bare metal. It belonged to the Iron Warriors.
The Thunderhawk barely crested a block of crumbling tenement towers, snapping sensor vanes from their rooftops that sparked against its underside. It listed to one side as it struggled to remain aloft on one catastrophically damaged engine. One tower clipped the edge of its main portside wing, sending it into a whirling spin as it smashed into the streets with a meteor’s force.
A deafening explosion ripped through the avenue. The main fuselage of the Thunderhawk shattered. Its fuel cells detonated, feeding the fireball with gushes of igniting promethium. Individual parts of the gunship were torn free and sent pinwheeling in all directions from the central explosion, showering the surrounding area with flaming shrapnel.
Jovian ducked as a portion of the starboard auxiliary wing scythed past, coming to a halt as it smashed through the ground floor of an abandoned machine shop. He craned his head, scanning the sky beyond the flames. Just before the crash, he had sworn he had heard gunfire, far above, just within reach of his armour’s auto-senses.
His visor struggled to detect anything with any degree of accuracy, such was the volume of debris filling Quradim’s skies. Much of that belonged to the wreckage of the Excelsior, drowning them in a downpour of its carcass. Combined with the turbulent, storm-wracked atmosphere, Jovian was better suited trusting his own eyes, rather than the limitations of machines.
When he glimpsed a cluster of reflective bits, tiny dots in the distance, he paused. All trailed fire, like comets with burning tails.
The flames adjoined to these shapes pointed towards the earth.
‘Jump packs,’ murmured Jovian.
Flavius moved beside the Apothecary.
‘Where?’
Jovian lifted his hand, pointing to the spot in the sky with his chainsword. Then he was staggering, his breastplate afire, the crashing of exploding bolts all around him.
‘Contact!’ shouted Flavius, firing up as he dragged Jovian back by his collar. ‘Return fire!’
Blood was pumping from a hole in Jovian’s chest, dark crimson spilling over the charred white of his breastplate. He had not taken the full brunt of the detonating shell, meaning it had burst against the surface of his armour rather than penetrating it first. He knew that, with certainty, because he was still alive.
Jovian’s armour was already addressing the wound, teasing pain suppressors and chemical narcotic boosters into his bloodstream. The Apothecary disabled them, knowing that their reservoirs were near exhaustion. Instead, he simply allowed the pain to endure, in all its knife-edged agony. He drew a capsule of sterile clay from his webbing, crushing it in his fist and packing the wound with it. The seal would falter and break after a few minutes, and even quicker during combat, but it would give his physiology the time it needed to work towards clotting and reknitting the flesh.
‘Can you stand?’ asked Flavius as he hauled Jovian behind a low wall. A bolt-round zipped over their heads, clanging off the walls of the abandoned tenement they sheltered within. ‘Can you fight?’
‘I breathe,’ said Jovian, grasping hold of the wall to drag himself up to one knee. He bit down on the pain stabbing at his hearts and racked his bolter. ‘I fight.’
‘Raptors,’ murmured the sergeant, his blue helm twitching as it tracked the skies. ‘I count five – correction – six.’
‘Are there any with meltas or flamers?’ asked Jovian.
Flavius peered over his cover, snapping off a pair of shots before swinging back behind the wall. ‘Yes.’
‘They need to die first.’
The sergeant gave a short, mirthless chuckle. ‘Agreed.’
Jovian rose from his crouch. Pain constricted his lungs, white hot. He shut it out of his head, gripping his weapon as the whine of turbines filled the air.
The Raptors struck the street in a loose pack, the asphalt cracking between their talons. Suppressing fire swept out from bolt pistols as one of their number shuffled forward, his gait some uncanny melding of man and predatory beast. The Iron Warrior cradled a bulky weapon in its claws, pulsing with a faint mauve sheen as it gathered charge.
‘Disperse!’ Flavius was already up and moving when the meltagun fired. A cone of hyper-agitated air burst from the Raptor’s weapon, disintegrating the wall. A scalding wave of ozone washed over Jovian as he rolled, ignoring the hurt that drove the air from his chest.
Steam shrieked from the meltagun’s casing as the Iron Warrior prepared for another shot. One of Flavius’ squad mates rushed towards the Raptor with his combat knife raised, but the distance was too great to cover before the heretic fired. He fell without a sound, a perfect hole burned through his chest.
Jovian fired a burst at the gunner, forcing him back but failing to kill him. He locked his bolter to his thigh, drawing his chainsword as the Iron Warriors gathered to close the distance. His attention was brought away from the heretics and up into the sky, as once more he heard the deep rumble of powerful engines.
A wave of exploding bolts crashed over the Iron Warriors, killing two outright and wounding a third. The Raptors scattered as a massive blue shape shot overhead. Jovian recognised the stout, boxy silhouette at once as a Stormraven gunship, but not in the livery of the Genesis Chapter. This one was adorned in cobalt and gold.
‘Ultramarines!’ called out Jovian.
Flavius advanced, seizing on the disruption. ‘What are the Primogenitors doing here?’
The noise of more assault packs filled the air as a trio of blue-armoured forms fell to earth. One Jovian knew as an Assault Marine, a sergeant by the red helm he wore as he laid into the Iron Warriors with bolt pistol and chainsword. The other two, however, were of a kind the Apothecary had never seen before.
Two behemoths stood behind the sergeant, head and shoulders taller than him and wearing exotic, bulky armour. They looked as though they wore portions of Terminator plate, though they moved with an agility that was impossible to those clad in the wargear of a Chapter’s elite. Each of them bore weapons in both hands, one of them armed with a kind of bolter, the other some unfamiliar design of plasma cannon.
A Raptor leapt towards the plasma gunner, levelling his flamer and loosing a screaming blast of liquid fire stained an unnatural jade. The massive Ultramarine spun through the cone of emerald flame, his war-plate scorched but inviolate against its searing heat. A teeth-itching whine built in his handheld cannons as he fired a barrage of plasma that liquefied the Iron Warrior where he stood.
Jovian pressed the advantage, moving alongside Flavius to crush the heretics against the force of Ultramarines. He rammed his chainsword into the belly of an Iron Warrior, who lowered his guard to wrestle against his grip just enough for the Apothecary to punch his carnifex through the traitor’s throat. A power axe hacked into his shoulder, driving him to his knees, but the second massive Ultramarine rounded on Jovian’s assailant, blowing him apart with a deafening volley of bolter fire at point-blank range.
The last Iron Warrior left standing was the meltagunner. The Raptor hissed out a keening wail from his fanged helm before shooting into the air. The Ultramarines sergeant leapt up after him, seizing him around the chest. He killed his own thrust pack, using his weight and leverage to haul back and hurl the Chaos Space Marine over his shoulder and back down to the ground.
The Raptor struck the earth awkwardly, and the sons of Roboute Guilliman descended upon him. Burnished gunmetal armour shattered and flew in all directions as he was hacked apart by blades and bludgeoned by clubbing fists. The sergeant crunched down onto the street, aimed his bolt pistol at the heretic’s head, and blew it from his shoulders.
A strange silence descended over the gathering. Jovian and his brothers stood, staring at their forerunners who wore the colours and iconography that existed back in the time when the Emperor walked the earth. He finally saw the ravages marring the sergeant’s red helmet, gouges and burns that did not match the rest of his armour, yet made the emerald of his eye-lenses burn all the brighter. By comparison, his hulking charges looked pristine, as though this was their first taste of war.
‘Cousins,’ said the Ultramarines sergeant. His gauntlet banged against his breastplate as he saluted his fellow sons of Guilliman. ‘It grants us a boon, seeing you here.’
The Genesis Chapter squad returned the salute. Flavius stepped forward. ‘Just as it does us to find you on Quradim. We were not expecting any from the Birth Chapter, though we take it with thanksgiving, considering the other visitors we have received.’
Flavius gave the corpse of the Iron Warrior at their feet a light kick. ‘Do you know why they are here?’ he asked. His blue helm settled on his fellow sergeant. ‘Why are you here?’
‘What are you?’ Jovian murmured, his eyes poring over these strange new Ultramarines following in their sergeant’s wake.
The lead Ultramarine removed his helm, revealing a battle-worn visage and dark, hard eyes. ‘You have as many questions for us as we have for you, cousins. For now they must wait. Tell me of what has happened here, and I promise you, we shall find the answers to them all in time.’