The main embarkation deck of the Mare Nostrum remained a throng of activity. Gunships, shuttles and landers arrived and departed in an unending procession, depositing the wounded and the dead and leaving with the ones who would take their place. Battle tanks and transports, their hulls pockmarked and blackened by ork artillery, were offloaded to be restored under the ministrations of Eighth Company Techmarines and enginseer repair crews. Every soul within the hangar watched with awe as a brace of the Chapter’s venerable ancients stomped by in their blessed sarcophagi, a living inspiration to all as they served the will of the God-Emperor even beyond death.
For hours Helios had stood there, watching, granting blessings to warriors and weapons poised to enter battle and answering the call to minister final rites over brothers too badly wounded for the Chapter’s Apothecaries to save. He performed this last duty a great many times, shepherding the souls of the fallen to the golden light of the Throne. His faith never wavered, yet he could not help but count their number as it continued to grow, knowing that the Eighth’s strength would be that much more diminished to finish the war for Meto, and their numbers considerably fewer when the next war began.
The Chaplain took solace at that moment that he would be taking only one more Ultramarines legionary from the Eighth as he made ready to take up Numitor’s mission. He awaited him now, to be pulled from the crucible just as Helios had been.
A Thunderhawk limped through the integrity field. The vessel’s drives shuddered from the effort of keeping her aloft, and smoke trailed in oily gouts from her turbines. Half of the resplendent blue lacquer on her hull was gone, scorched and shattered and burned away down to the bare metal. One of her heavy bolter sponsons was nothing but a tangled knot of ruined metal, gaping from the nose of the gunship like a missing tooth. Helios saw pieces of the servitor that had manned the cannon, charred bits fused to the wrecked armour plating.
The landing claws of the Thunderhawk managed to deploy fully, but still she skidded shrieking across the deck for ten metres before the vessel ground to a halt like an exhausted bird in a shower of keening sparks. At once emergency response teams rushed around the craft, taking diagnostics and putting out the half a dozen fires burning across the superstructure. The assault ramp in the craft’s nose began to open shakily, struggling with shot hydraulics.
Helios looked up the ramp, but saw no one standing ready to descend. He made his way towards it, walking a winding path around fevered repair teams and squads kneeling in prayer. The Chaplain stopped, coming to a halt beneath the nose of the Thunderhawk.
The assault ramp had failed to fully descend, stalled halfway between the gunship’s hull and the deck. Helios reached up, taking hold of the lip of the ramp, and pulled down. The pistons of the ramp groaned in protest, their mechanics grinding and spitting. The servos in Helios’ shoulders thrummed as he hauled it level with his chest and then pressed it down until it hung at knee height. His boot and weight pushed it down the rest of the way, until it made contact against the deck plating with a heavy clunk.
The crew bay within the Thunderhawk was dark as the Chaplain climbed the ramp, devoid of even the swirling red of emergency klaxons. Helios’ retinal display banished the gloom, resolving it into a long corridor flanked by empty restraint thrones. The surface of the assault ramp was scorched, streaked with lines of black carbon that travelled up half the length of the bay. Large shapes lay on the deck in the rear, covered by sheets of plastek.
The image struck Helios oddly. Even in death, a Space Marine was a glorious symbol of the Imperium’s righteous might, his armour a beacon of glory no matter how scorched or broken. To see them covered, obscured from sight, stirred a sense close to blasphemy.
Who could have covered these sons of Ultramar? he thought. And how great was their shame to have provoked them to do it?
Helios ran a scan for life signs. There was no pilot, only the data return impression of a mortal, likely a Chapter-serf, lying dead in the control throne. The Chaplain deduced that he must have succumbed to injury in transit, forcing the craft’s machine-spirit to take it the rest of the way here. It was not unheard of, and explained the inelegant nature of the landing.
His visor detected a single active armour transponder aboard. Helios saw a figure at the end of the bay, seated in the last of the restraint thrones. A half-destroyed jump pack lay next to him, still smouldering. He was bent forward, looking down at an object he held cradled in both hands.
Helios recognised what it was that he was holding. The crimson helm of a squad sergeant.
‘Hail, brother.’ Helios’ voice reverberated through the crew bay in clashing echoes that ran down the walls. The warrior in the hold’s grip tightened by reflex around the helm, but he did not look up.
‘Brother-Chaplain,’ he replied, his voice a mix of distance and exhausted anger.
‘I seek Veteran Sergeant Pomibius.’
The warrior took one hand from the helmet, raising his gauntlet to point at one of the plastek-covered heaps on the deck. ‘There he lies.’
Helios looked over the dead warriors lying on the deck and the shrouds that covered them, counting six. ‘Where is the rest of his squad?’
‘There is only me,’ the other Ultramarine answered. ‘These were all that I was able to recover from the battle. I am Squad Pomibius.’
Helios whispered a benediction inside his mask. Another squad of Ultramarines, greatest warriors of the Imperium, lost. Added to that, a complication to his mission. Pomibius had been assigned to join Helios on his task, a reliable veteran of over thirty campaigns. He had anticipated casualties, but not to this extent.
‘Do you require the Apothecary?’ asked Helios as he stepped deeper into the gloom of the crew bay.
The other Ultramarine looked up. His shaved scalp was lacerated, caked in ash and blood that had fused to his flesh in a black crust. His eyes met the crimson lenses of the Chaplain’s helm, bright despite the darkness.
Helios saw loss there, and anger. The guilt that came from surviving where all of the brethren he had sworn his oaths beside had fallen.
‘No,’ the other answered.
Helios stopped in front of the seated warrior and offered a hand to him. ‘Then rise, brother.’
He looked up at Helios and, getting to his feet, took the extended hand into his grasp in the old way, wrist to wrist. ‘I am Theron.’
This Helios knew already. His transponder had told him as much the moment the Chaplain had stepped aboard the Thunderhawk.
‘Well met, Brother Theron.’
The two walked down the crew bay, stepping around the forms of Squad Pomibius where they lay in eternal slumber. Theron’s gaze lingered over each of them, his grip tightening on the helm he held as they stepped out onto the landing bay.
‘I was sent here to enlist the sergeant of Squad Pomibius in a task of great importance,’ said Helios, his boots clanking down the assault ramp before meeting the worn steel of the deck. ‘He has now gone to the God-Emperor in glory, as we all shall in time. And yet, the task set before me remains. It is to you, Brother Theron, that this responsibility passes. Duty to Chapter and Emperor brings it now to your shoulders.’
Theron looked at Helios.
‘The primarch and Emperor call, brother. Do you wish vindication for Squad Pomibius? Will you answer, and be the agent of their will?’
Helios saw the jawline of the Assault Marine set. He saw oaths to dead brothers become sworn in his eyes. ‘I do, and I will.’
Helios reached down, placing Theron’s other hand upon the helm he held. ‘Then you are its sergeant, now.’
Helios watched a brief confusion join the quiet storm within Theron. The events of this day had been very much a journey for him, and its path had taken him to places the Chaplain doubted he had anticipated. Yet Helios had no time for sermons.
‘We have little time, sergeant,’ Helios told him, emphasising Theron’s new rank to focus his attention. ‘But we have some. Tend to your spirit as the artificers do to your weapons and armour, and be ready for when our ship arrives.’
Theron did not answer, giving only a short nod. The two Ultramarines stood in the shadow of the Thunderhawk for a minute, silent in the midst of the ordered bedlam of the surface war’s continued orchestration.
‘Will you help me, Brother-Chaplain?’ said Theron after a time, looking back up into the ship’s crew hold. ‘Will you help me carry my brothers?’