Gnaeus pushed his way through the gathered crowd. It seemed that everyone not busy with duties had gathered to see the Ultramarines depart. They stood in a mass outside the main gate, talking uneasily with each other and craning to get a look. Serfs and locals alike, faces grim and hands wringing. There was fear in the air, and not a little despair. He could practically smell it.
‘They’re abandoning us. Leaving us to be slaughtered,’ he heard someone murmur. A stubble-cheeked person, hair styled like a local with neatly shaved rows.
‘Don’t say that,’ a woman dressed like a medicae worker replied. ‘If they hear you…’
Swallowing hard, Gnaeus continued on. It took the application of his elbows to a few people, but the artificer serf-turned-armsman at last reached the front of the crowd. He pulled up short as the wall of people abruptly ended. None had the audacity to push in close to the lords as they prepared to leave. That unspoken reverence was like a force field, keeping those present arranged in a rough semicircle.
He saw them. The mighty figures of the Ultramarines, resplendent even now in the bright blue of their war-plate. They were organised by mode of transportation, and engaged in checking their vehicles and wargear. Twenty-one of them gathered around the large Repulsor armoured transport and its more firepower-focused Repulsor Executioner cousins. Ten more on the Outrider bikes, providing an armed and highly mobile escort. Thirty-one Space Marines gathering for battle, an awesome sight in any circumstances. Even more serfs hurried amongst them, agents of the armoury, chanting the rites, burning incense and applying sacred unguents needed to awaken the machine-spirits to battle readiness.
‘It’s not given to us to question the will of the lords.’ This time it was a man in old manufactorum leathers. There was no telling what work he did now. He seemed to be talking to himself.
Gnaeus knew that he should agree with the man. More, he should encourage him. Reach out and affirm his faith. Instead, he stood by with his stomach churning. Word had spread fast of the coming attack. No sooner had that sunk in than came the announcement that all but six of the Ultramarines would be departing to strike back at the enemy.
No one doubted the consummate warfare skill of the lords. Gnaeus had seen their sheer power first-hand, hadn’t he? It was hard not to feel like they were being written off, however. The worst attack that Redoubt Primus had ever faced, and they would do it without the greatest source of their strength. What outcome was possible save annihilation?
A stillness fell across the gathered crowd and shook Gnaeus from his gloomy thoughts. The reason for the silence quickly became apparent: one of the lords was approaching, a mighty storm shield on one arm, a power sword at his back and a plasma pistol at his hip. He carried his helmet under one arm, leaving his scarred, patrician face visible. With his short hair combed forward about his brow, he was the picture of a warrior. The ominous figure of the Chaplain in his black armour and skull helm followed in his wake, like a reminder of mortality.
The approaching Space Marine stopped and surveyed the crowd. Then he spoke, a powerful voice that washed over them, amplified by his war-plate’s vox-mitter. ‘Greetings to all, citizens and serfs. A difficult time lies ahead. The enemy comes in force, and we find our backs to the wall. I see the fear in your eyes and hear it in your words. The enemy means to break you before they even arrive. They would rip the very soul from your body with their technomancy rather than face you in battle.
‘I scorn them and their xenos cowardice.’ The warrior drew the power sword sheathed at his back. It flashed in the sunlight. ‘Do you see this blade? It has been borne by better men than I. They have fallen in righteous battle with our foe, yet the sword remains. Battered, but unbroken. I take up their cause as I took up this blade, and should I find my end another will do the same.’
Everyone was listening intently. Gnaeus could practically feel the held breath all around him.
‘We go to confront the enemy in their lair, and break the chains that bind us here. It falls to you. Every moment that you buy, with las and with shell and with blood, will be another life saved to escape to orbit. The shuttles and the Thunderhawks shall run to the end. No one will be abandoned. Not while you still draw breath and fight in the Emperor’s name.’
The Space Marine ran his piercing blue gaze over the crowd. It was electric to lock eyes with the transhuman warrior, even for a brief second. ‘If you stand and fight, you may die. Yet your memory will be carried to a thousand worlds, on the lips of a thousand saved souls, and set ablaze the spirit of the million worlds of the Imperium. Humanity stands as long as we stand together. You will live forever, and your vengeance will rise up and hurl these aliens back into the darkness that spawned them. Will you be the blade? Will you give me your oath?’
There was a moment of silence. Gnaeus wanted to step forward, to make a brave proclamation. He found himself frozen. The memory of those things in the hall, the blood that ran from them. It tied his tongue into knots.
‘I will, my lord!’ called someone else further along the gathering.
Gnaeus flushed with embarrassment. He hastened to add his voice, ‘So will I, lord!’, but it had become a chorus by then, and he was merely part of it.
The Ultramarines commander gave them a solemn nod in response, his voice punching through the shouts with ease. ‘I did not doubt you. You have honoured the Emperor with your service these past months. Hold fast but a few days longer, and you shall join the line of heroes upon whom the Imperium was built.’ He held up a hand in farewell. ‘If the Emperor is willing, we shall see each other again. Until then, remember your oath.’
The Space Marine turned away then and returned to the vehicles. As he approached, the rest of the elite warriors began to board, either piling into the personnel carriers or mounting their dirtcycles. Engines roared, the hot wind of the Repulsors’ turbines washing over the crowd and pulling at clothes and hair. A wave of grit came with it, forcing people to cover their eyes and look away. By the time it was safe to watch again, the Ultramarines were already down the road, headed off into enemy territory.
Some left immediately, but many in the crowd lingered, watching them shrink to specks that vanished into the distance. Gnaeus stood amongst them, arms crossed over his chest as if warding off cold. All he could hope was that this was not his last time watching the lords ride off to war.
With a sigh, the young artificer serf turned away to head back into the redoubt. There was work to be done.
The Ultramarines convoy pulled away from Redoubt Primus and set off through the dusty streets of the ruined city. Allectius did not glance back. Nevertheless, the memory of the mortals they left behind stayed with him. The experience of command had thus far been one of a steadily growing burden of responsibility. Duty was a heavy weight on any Space Marine, but it increased exponentially as his charges grew. No more could he concern himself only with his squad. Now the whole company, the whole world, the whole system, the fate of all hung in the balance of his decisions.
Mortals always imagined themselves discreet, and rarely were. Their low conversations and fearful whispers had been easy pickings for his keen hearing, even before the further enhancement of his armour’s auto-senses. They imagined themselves abandoned to a grim fate. It was not a factual assessment, but was the outcome likely to be much different? Allectius was leading his forces on an assault whose chances were bleak at best, on the thin hope it would save more than a futile garrison.
His brothers were not confused about their prospects. It showed in the demeanour of those aboard the transport. The Ultramarines were never the most boisterous of the Adeptus Astartes, but the air here was downright grim. Each Space Marine was looking death in the eye and refusing to flinch. They waited with silent resolve, performing rites of maintenance on their wargear or meditating. He knew each of them by name and face, and had fought alongside them for decades now in service to the lord commander.
If this was to be the end, he was pleased to face it with warriors like these.
The assignment post was located near the gate to allow easy access to both exterior and interior work parties. The power feeds had been damaged during the last attack and the repairs were not complete yet, so the room was lit only by several dozen candles. It was always busy. People came and went constantly, reporting task completions and seeking new work to do.
At the centre of all this activity sat Ordinate Xavis at his desk. His grey Administratum robes were a bit worn around the edges, but his desk was as fastidiously arranged as always. He was eternally focused on the papers before him, scribbling away with both an ordinary pen and two autoquills attached to a body harness. Originally he had come to this world to oversee the allocation of resources during Cassothea’s fortification. Once that ambition had crumbled under xenos assault, the Space Marines had swiftly put him to work organising the populace instead.
He glowered at Gnaeus through a pair of thick spectacles perched on the end of his sharp nose. ‘Relocation duty.’
‘What does that mean? Where do I report?’
Xavis huffed wearily. ‘You will report to the underground storage facilities. There are still non-combatants sheltering in the redoubt. Even with the accelerated orbital evacuation schedule, some will remain by the time the enemy arrives, and they are being moved below to safeguard them against the coming assault.’
‘When does your transport leave, adept?’ called someone from the rear of the line mockingly.
Xavis’ eyes narrowed. ‘For your information, I was labelled essential personnel by the lords, so I will not be going off-world. You, however, Marrum…’ The clerk made a note on a form without even looking. ‘You will enjoy waste disposal duty, I trust.’ He focused on Gnaeus again. ‘Now, move. Next!’
Gnaeus hurried from the chamber and back into the dim corridors before he got an unfortunate reassignment of his own. He hadn’t ever visited the deep storage vaults during his duties here, but he had patrolled the halls near them and knew where they were. Before he got there, however, he began to pass people lined up against the wall. Elders, children, the severely disabled. Some dragged bags of belongings with them, or carried them in crates.
They had fled here when the onslaught started, as necrons swept through lesser protected settlements. There was nowhere left to run. In some parts of the Imperium, they would have been abandoned as useless in the face of what was coming. That was not how the Ultramarines saw things, however. They would be protected as best they could, for as long as they could.
Most of them looked stricken, lost in their own worlds of misery. Few even glanced at him as he passed by. He couldn’t blame them; the weight of the Nexus dragged everyone down. Those whose constitutions were already weakened had been especially hard hit. The grim tidings that followed the fall of the shroud hadn’t helped spirits. He wondered how Elder Tulla was getting on in the care of the apothecarion. It would have been good to visit her and see how she was doing, but duty demanded most of his time.
He reached the head of the queue shortly thereafter, where a woman in local garb stood with a dataslate. She was middle-aged and rough-built, perhaps an agri-labourer or manufactorum worker. Either way, she was the one marking off the non-combatants as they arrived. Unfortunately, he saw that wasn’t the total extent of her duties as he approached.
‘What’s in the bag?’ she was asking the person before her. An old man with white hair, two children clinging to his legs.
The old man looked down at the sack. ‘Everything we could carry when we left home.’ His hoarse voice was listless.
‘Sentimental goods,’ she said brusquely and made a note on her slate. She reached out and grabbed the bag with one hand, tossing it onto a pile behind her.
This stirred some measure of emotion in the man, who took a half step forward and reached out a hand. ‘But–’
‘There’s no room for anything but necessities,’ she said flatly. ‘You’ll be provided what you need, everything else must be disposed of.’ Noticing Gnaeus standing there she raised an eyebrow. ‘You here to work?’
‘I am,’ the serf replied uneasily.
‘Good,’ she said flatly. ‘Take these thirty down into the chambers and find them empty billets. Then report back.’
‘Right,’ Gnaeus said. He looked to the group, and it was hard not to focus on the tears in the old man’s eyes. ‘Come on then.’ He tried to keep his voice as gentle as he could. ‘Let’s find all of you a safe place to sleep.’
He began to lead them down the circling stairs into the storage vaults. There were great lifts available, but those were reserved for large-scale supply movement. They followed along compliantly. There wasn’t any fight left in these people. What good would struggling have done them, anyway, he mused. The Imperium might be protecting them at the moment, but no one ever imagined it was soft. Even when it was holding back the blade above your head, it was still the iron fist. Obey or be crushed.
They stepped off the staircase and into the vault. It was immediately clear why there was no room for belongings. People were being jammed in down here. The chamber was tremendous, designed for mass storage of supplies and materiel, but it had been converted wholesale into a hab block to make a hive-worlder sweat. Cots were stacked in bunks and laid end to end. A clothing dispensary lay at one end, where simple grey work garb was dispensed by orderlies. In the corner, a sanitation centre had been established, where the people were cleansed and deloused every day.
It was all painfully impersonal. No concession had been made to privacy or comfort. It was only about a third full at this point, but people were coming in at multiple entry points, guided by workers like Gnaeus himself. No one was being boisterous, but the rustle and murmur was constant by sheer weight of numbers. The acrid stink of too many bodies crammed into too small a space was inescapable. The air circulators were running nonstop and each breath felt stale anyway. The only procedure seemed to be taking new arrivals to an empty bed and making a note of which number the cot was labelled with.
For just a moment, the young serf imagined being down here when the attack came. The flickering of the lights, maybe even darkness. The thunder above, dust raining down from the ceiling. Nothing to do but wait for the enemy to inevitably break through and find them. For the slaughter to begin.
Gnaeus swallowed hard. ‘Come with me,’ he said to the people he was leading again, and set off towards the nearest open spot.
One of the children left their elder to hurry up next to him as he walked. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven years of age. Her hair was buzzed down to her skull to help avoid parasites, and her brown eyes seemed huge in her face.
‘Are the xenos going to kill us all?’ she asked.
Gnaeus was caught off guard and nearly tripped himself up on the leg of a cot. Her voice was so matter of fact. He glanced back, but those he was guiding were lost in their own miserable thoughts. No one was paying attention.
Once he’d recovered, he shook his head. ‘No. We’re going to kill all of them instead.’
The child took a moment to think this over. ‘Aren’t there a lot of them?’
Gnaeus nodded. ‘There are. They’re not a match for us though.’ He tried to keep his voice full of a confidence he didn’t feel.
‘Why not?’ she asked.
‘Because the Emperor is with us,’ he told her firmly. ‘As long as we stay in His light, no heretic or xenos can defeat us.’
‘Oh,’ she said uncertainly.
‘What’s wrong?’ the serf asked.
‘I just… I heard someone say it’s all over. That we were all going to die here.’ The girl had lowered her eyes to the floor ahead again.
Gnaeus stopped and dropped to one knee to look her in the face. ‘Listen to me.’ Once she was looking him in the eyes, he continued. ‘The Emperor does not abandon the faithful. As long as there is courage and faith in your heart, He will be there with you.’ He mustered a smile for her. ‘I will be up there for you, and you will be down here handling the believing for me. Together, we’ll drive these xenos back. What do you say?’
The girl nodded sombrely.
‘The Emperor protects,’ he told her, and squeezed her shoulder. He stood and looked back to the other two. ‘Your bunk is here. For now the little ones can share.’
Gnaeus turned and hurried on, not wanting their thanks. He worked his way through the rest of his group as fast as he could. Part of him didn’t want to remember their faces. He wished he believed what he had told her, that if they just held strong they would triumph. It might have been true for the Imperium as a whole. This was only one battle in a greater crusade, after all, and soldiers would flood towards the front by the millions as it went on. That would not save the souls of Cassothea over the days to follow, however.
‘Hey, you! Serf!’ The call snatched him from his thoughts, and he turned with a frown.
Another man was standing there, perhaps a decade older than Gnaeus himself. He had the look of someone who had not lived an easy life; a lined face and weathered skin. He was standing next to one of the cots, on which lay a still form. An older person, grey-haired and shrunken.
Gnaeus walked over to him. ‘What’s the situation?’
The man shook his head wearily. ‘Another one. Give me a hand carrying him over.’ He moved to get a hold of the person, seemingly sleeping.
‘What?’ Gnaeus asked. ‘What’s going on? Another what?’
The other worker looked exasperated for a moment, then peered at him and said, ‘Ah. You’re new to this assignment, huh?’
‘Yes,’ Gnaeus replied.
‘Soul death,’ the man said. ‘People down here have been succumbing left and right. By the time the aliens get here, they’re all going to be dead anyway.’ There was an exhausted bitterness to the words.
‘We have to keep faith,’ said Gnaeus softly.
‘Yeah, sure. Now grab the other side.’
They hefted the form of the old person between them. There was something curiously nondescript about the body now. It breathed, if shallowly, but there was something doll-like and empty about its face. Whoever this was was gone now, and only the crude clay of their existence remained. All Gnaeus could hope was that they’d gone to the Emperor’s side.
They moved on through the rows of beds, hauling the limp form. It was also curiously light, as if when the soul had gone it had taken something material with it. That, or perhaps the person had simply been starving for some time anyway. Rationing was strict to make sure everyone had enough, but it was hard to make sure some took what was meant for them.
‘Are we taking them to the apothecarion?’ Gnaeus asked.
The other man snorted. He glanced over. ‘Oh, you’re not… no. I heard at first they were checking them all, making sure there was nothing to be done. But then the Lord Apothecary left, and now…’ He shook his head.
‘So where are we taking them?’ Gnaeus honestly wasn’t sure he wanted to know.
‘We’re almost there,’ the other said and nodded ahead.
Gnaeus looked and realised they were approaching one of the freight lifts. More bodies were already stacked in the space, listlessly sprawled against each other. The lights of the cab were off, either from a malfunction or to keep people from having to stare at the heaped forms. The serf found himself trying not to look any of them in the eyes, hollow and sightless as they were.
‘Here we go,’ said the other man, and they added the body they’d carried to the macabre collection. He turned to leave.
‘Wait,’ Gnaeus called. ‘We can’t just leave them here, right? There has to be more to it?’
‘Once the lift is full, we’ll send it up and other people will offload them, take them elsewhere.’
‘Where?’ asked the serf.
The man paused. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask,’ he said flatly. He left without another word.
Gnaeus swept his gaze over the surrounding bodies. He could find out, perhaps. Go demand answers. A chill ran up his spine. They would be well taken care of, wherever they were going, he told himself.
Every second spent here was time spent not doing his duty. He had work to do.
Gnaeus worked for hours upon hours. By the time his shift ended, he was struggling to put one foot in front of the other on the way to his quarters. On a physical level, the work was not particularly gruelling, but the shroud of the Nexus made everything weigh heavier. Emotions were where the real burden had lain. These helpless people, waiting for a fate that seemed inevitably grim. Others had already succumbed even where they should have been safe, slain by the machinations of the xenos.
He wanted to scream it out in the hallway, to just cave and collapse. Instead, he shoved it all down. It was a knot in his stomach, a roiling nausea that wouldn’t go away. One foot in front of the other, he told himself. One day after the next. It will all be over soon, one way or another.
That was when the sound of music pulled him from his thoughts. Gnaeus followed the sound, winding through the corridors of the redoubt. It cleared as he came closer to the source. The familiar strains of pyrophonic music, accompanied by dozens of voices raised in chorus. The comforting sounds of the Imperial Creed. His steps sped up as if of their own volition, carrying him on to the threshold of the chamber itself.
Light poured out into the corridor from the great hall. It had been set up as a cathedral to the God-Emperor. Statuary honouring the Master of Mankind and His primarchs and saints lined the sides, and the pews were already crowded with a number of people. At the front a priest of the Ecclesiarchy led a chorus in their song, praising the Emperor. The front of the altar showed the scene of Him being interred upon the Golden Throne, the moment of His ascension.
Gnaeus walked forward unsteadily, finding his way into a pew and falling to his knees next to others already there. His chest ached and his stomach still turned, pressure built up inside him with no release. Then he heard the choked sob next to him, and realised that everyone was in tears. Some wept with their heads down in silence, others wracked by helpless sobs.
His own eyes prickled and his throat felt tight. He leaned forward until his forehead rested against the wood of the pew before him, cold against his skin. There was no holding it back now. The pain was real, but he wasn’t alone.
The first tears streamed down Gnaeus’ face, and he raised his eyes to the altar.
God-Emperor, help us, he mouthed. For we are lost and afraid.