Unworthy mongrels

There were hoards of files and maps piled up as high as the eye could see in the room, the stacks appeared more so like pillars holding up the walls and ceiling by the sheer size of it all, the servo-skulls present in the barely habitable space moved like moths or flies while plucking things off from those “pillars” and returning to a round table or a barely made bedframe in search for some content they had been instructed to find and transmit as soon as possible; the wax on the candles that lit the room were almost completely gone, their light casting long shadows on the wall making the unnerving sight of servitors even more unreal than usual. It was in the center of all this mess, hunched over the roundtable at the center of the room, where Elard had been staring at a star map for fifteen minutes without any success of discerning what he was looking at.

The lho-stick on his left hand, neatly rolled up for consumption, shook embers from time to time due to its slow, uneven movements; the fingers holding it trembled not from exhaustion so deep it had made the shaky movements something involuntary and routine, his other hand remained planted against the table to keep himself upright, the joints of the augmetic fingers clicked faintly whenever his weight shifted. There were bags under his eyes, accentuated not only by his age but by the long periods of insomnia suffered through the decades in which this campaign had taken a toll on his health.

A servo-skull drifted beside him, its optics flickering as it pointed to a small piece of parchment casualty estimates across the table’s surface.

“Projected losses for the Helican Front revised upward to-”

“Shut up…just shut up.” His hoarse voice came from his dried lips

Elard exhaled smoke through clenched teeth, his breath wheezed into a dry cough. He could not remember the last time he had slept for more than an hour uninterrupted, or let alone an entire night at all. Now he needed help whenever it came to time periods and which command he had given to which regiment at what moment of the campaign or the current war in some planet; the banners of the regiments had begun to blend in his mind too, no longer being able to identify commanders unless he was hushed into some hint by his right hand man or some other officer close to him in the chain of command.

He was getting old, too old and frail for this whole ordeal; but his chin was always maintained high, making the best of what he could of the greatest honor in all his lifetime, to accomplish the sacred order to reclaim that system in the name of the Imperium. He wouldn’t let his father down for trusting in him to accomplish this mission, nor would Elard back down and show any weakness in the course of his duties. Still, bravery meant nothing if it wasn’t accompanied by a sound mind, which was something that surely but steadily he was beginning to lose…very rapidly.

Outside the chamber walls, somewhere far down in the bowels of the flagship, the great engines groaned like dying beasts, the vibration carried through the deck plating and into his bones. Everything aboard the vessel sounded tired now, even the machine spirits seemed weary of war.

Elard rubbed at his eyes until sparks burst across his vision, the skin beneath them felt raw, soon he would be ready to make planetfall and assess by himself the situation on the front of Zurus, one of the last bastions of the T’au empire in the sector, which according to the reports by the Cadian Colonel Mihael Khorrost was almost ready to completely bend the knee to the Imperial might; but until then, he needed to reorganize, reshape, order and issue orders to other five or so distant regiments dispersed on the eight worlds that remained in the clutches of the Xenos foul power. Entire sectors blinked in pale hues of red and amber before his tired eyes, each mark representing another battlefield demanding men, ships, ammunition or attention he no longer had to spare.

The lho-stick had burned nearly to the filter between his fingers before he finally noticed, he hissed quietly as the ember kissed the skin of his glove and crushed the remains into an overflowing tray beside him, there were dozens there already, piled among parchment scraps and wax drippings. A loud buzz coming from the loudspeakers mounted on the edge of the four walls around him began to sound, insistent and alarming so it was attended as soon as possible, yet the clouded and drifting mind of Elard didn’t caught up on it submerged still in his own thoughts over what he would do and say to those below his chain of command; finally a servo-skull was the one to attend, connecting one of its tendrils to a vox receiver panel, it emitted a low hum as it received the data before turning its “head” in direction of the warmaster.

“Priority summons requesting aid from the warmaster,” Its robotic tone droned, “From Strategium authorities.”

Elard blinked twice as he snapped back to the present, sighing in tiredness when understanding the message; of course there was something, there always was something to discuss with those imbeciles who seemed to know nothing and act upon no orders of their own, they were worse than the very servitors Elard enjoyed having around for even those machines had a better understanding of their orders and did stuff without him having to personally supervise them 24/7. Elard slowly pushed himself away from the table, the joints in his back protesting with dull cracks as he straightened; for a moment he remained there in silence, one hand pressed against the edge of the roundtable while the other adjusted the large row of medals and insignia he had won in his years of service, then doing the same motions with the gold-threaded fabric that adorned the surroundings of said trophies earned while in service of the Imperium.

“Inform them I am on my way,” he muttered.

The servo-skull acknowledged with a burst of static before drifting back toward the vox panel. The Warmaster began moving through the cluttered chamber with measured steps, brushing past swaying parchment stacks and hovering servo-skulls carrying armfuls of reports in their rusted claws; the automatic doors parted sluggishly before him with a hiss of steam, revealing the dim corridor beyond.

He walked with his chest puffed out, rhythm steady as the men and women on his way saluted him with the clinking on their boots as they assumed the position; Elard didn’t salute nor acknowledged them back, nodding once or twice when some poor bastard had not gotten out of the way completely and needed a little encouragement to move. The ship was, too, just as magnific and basking in the glory of decades upon decades of service; the floors were beautifully polished and maintained, the strips of light above their heads always at maximum potency letting no shadow be left without illumination, busts of heroes from old or statues in the name of the Emperor decorated each passageway to the next sector of the ship. It was the pinnacle of Elard’s pride, and so it should be as refined and deserving of honor as he was. Two Tempestus Scions stationed outside a bulkhead snapped to attention as he approached, their hellguns held rigid against their chests.

“Warmaster on deck!”

The blast doors to the Strategium slowly split apart, giving way to the noise of discussion and warfare inside to come into the warmaster’s ears. Dozens of voices overlapped beneath the humming of hololithic projectors and the crackling chatter of vox traffic. The Strategium was enormous, circular in design, tiered with command stations and data pits descending toward the central hololithic display of the system; officers hurried between stations carrying data-slates while servo-scribes mechanically transcribed incoming transmission or the subject discussed there by the figures of power onto endless parchment reels. At the center stood Lord-Admiral Cestus, several Imperial Navy officers, and a collection of Astra Militarum commanders gathered around the projection of Zurus and its neighboring worlds; they all saluted to the approach of the warmaster, Cestus ceding his position to Elard.

“My lord Warmaster,” Cestus greeted with a respectful bow of the head. “Apologies for disturbing you.”

“If this meeting could have been settled without me,” Elard replied dryly while approaching the central display, “then you would not have called.”

The admiral wisely avoided answering by pretending to look down at a report. A hololithic image shifted before them, displaying the industrial world of Zurus covered in clusters of tactical markers.

“Colonel Khorrost reports continued advances through the southern hive districts,” Cestus began. “T’au resistance has fractured into isolated defensive pockets. Casualties remain acceptable.”

“A commendable advance, extend my congratulations to him via a short message, I do not intend for him to have that go over his head so quickly,” Elard answered in a monotone tone

“As you wish, my Lord,” One of the officers exclaimed, already immersed in the task without being asked to.

“However…several railgun batteries remain operational around Point Xray, Warmaster. Our forces there report the guns have been so far unable to damage the structures or even get close to them due to the long range weaponry of our foe.” Cestus continued

“Redirect our heavy artillery Cadian divisions there and bombard it over the course of the night. If by dawn the enemy has kept their stronghold, direct the Admirals batteries on the ship to erase that place from orbit, no matter how much terrain gets affected as well, just advice for impact to our forces there.”

Data shifted across the hololith as officers hurried to relay commands. Elard rubbed tiredly at his temple while more reports were fed into the display, numbers blurred together again; ammunition shortages, delayed reinforcements, food riots in occupied worlds or astropathic interference worsening near the outer reaches of the system; every single inconvenience at once that Elard needed to guide everyone through like toddlers waddling behind their father. Then another figure stepped forward from the edge of the chamber; a thin officer in grey administratum robes, clutching a stack of fresh parchments against his chest.

“My lord Warmaster,” the man said nervously, “there is another matter requiring your immediate awareness.”

Elard looked at him with visible irritation.

“Speak.”

“There have been reports of Cardrean reinforcement troops making footfall on Iopra Maximum approximately three hours ago.”

That caused several officers in the chamber to glance at one another uneasily, Elard’s tired eyes narrowed slightly.

“How many?”

“Current estimates place them at nearly five thousand or so; I am trying to get the numbers right my Lord, but they have just begun to arrive and enough to say they describe it as a “wave” of these…uh…convicts.”

Elard passed a hand through his face attempting to contain his rage. It wasn’t enough not having news from the commissar in charge of that blasted regiment of Cardrea, now he had to deal with a new batch of those ingrates creating more chaos against his structured and carefully planned mobilization between the regiments on his watch; with no “dog” to keep them in check, those barbarians could very well spoil all of his plans for the reclamation of Iopra.

“Who authorized their deployment?” Elard finally asked.

No one answered immediately, that on itself was enough.

The Warmaster let out a slow breath through his nose, weary irritation creeping visibly across his features. It was always the same with Cardrean units; they appeared where they pleased, fought however they wished and with whatever the frakk tactics they wanted and yet somehow still managed to achieve results sufficient enough that the Department Munitorum tolerated their excesses.

A dangerous precedent, one he had never liked but had to swallow his protest whenever that war started and that cursed regiment was thrusted onto him.

“Is there any senior officer currently planetside capable of supervising them?!?” He barked.

Several data-slates were consulted immediately, officers murmured among themselves while servo-skulls drifted overhead transmitting fragmented information streams. Finally, a broad-shouldered Astra Militarum general spoke up.

“General Anael is stationed within the Helsreach districts, my lord. He commands the 82nd Brimlock and portions of the Karsk armored divisions.”

“Yes, yes and although I find him a good soldier he wouldn’t last five minutes with those undesirables before he would start making summary executions; who else is there?” Elard waved his hand, anger starting to build up on his chest

“Colonel Mihael Khorrost remains active in the northern sectors. The Cadians have maintained discipline despite prolonged urban engagement.” Another officer raised his voice, checking a report.

Elard shook his head from side to side, smacking his lips together. Sure, the Cadians were good on their own and could very well ignore the attempts to gourd them that would inevitably spark from the Cardreans to them; but the risk of actually getting diminishing results from that portion of the Cadians essentially crippling their advance to babysit the whiny sons-of-bitches was truly a tragedy.

“He will suffice for now,” the Warmaster muttered. “Transmit immediate authority to Colonel Khorrost over all newly arrived Cardrean detachments until further notice.”

“My lord…with respect, it is unlikely the Cardreans will recognize external authority without direct confirmation from their commissar.” The administratum official hesitated nervously.

Elard slowly turned toward him.

“That,” he said coldly between his teeth, “is why I intend for someone in this Emperor forsaken room to get me Gallius on a vox caster!!! Now!!!” His patience was at its end.

The nearest communications officer blinked uncertainly.

“My lord?”

“You heard me!!!”

“At once.”

The officer hurried toward a nearby vox-station while servitors mechanically adjusted signal relays overhead. Static immediately began crackling through the Strategium as long-range frequencies were cycled one after another; the officer conducting the communication began to sweat as, again, there was still no signs of life nor response from the official channels that had been given to the Commissar in charge of the Cardrean 958th. to respond to; that had been going for years now, when the connection suddenly severed with all astropathic activity the moment their signal was reported near Xanthera VII. 

Then, when all the hope inside of the officer seemed lost, a faded barely audible voice began to transmit from the last channel possible; it was so distant and distorted that the caster had to be amplified and the volume turned all the way up. What was more surprising, however, was that the voice was from the Commissar Gallius, but more raspy, unnatural…wrong, somehow.

“-Thisss…ck…isss Commissar Galliusss-ck…can anyone hear-ck thisss?”

Every head in the Strategium turned toward the vox station instantly, the communications officer nearly stumbled over himself in shock.

“Signal confirmed,” he stammered. “By the Throne…”

Elard straightened slowly.

“This is Warmaster Elard of the Imperial reclamation fleet,” he said into the receiver. “Repeat identification and give the commissariat number of the Commissar Gallius.”

Several seconds passed beneath violent bursts of static, then the voice returned with a sigh.

“Commisssar Gallius-ck…ssspeaking.” A little murmur, unintelligible, “Commissariat…ck…589.5442.14-9”

Although the words were slurred and the cadence left a repulsive image of whatever lips were pronouncing those words, there was no doubt the identifications have been correct and corroborated by the other officers in the Stratagenium; that was Commissar Gallius himself. Even the endless background noise of operators and hololithic projectors seemed quieter now, everyone looked at each other and could feel the same questions forming in their minds but none was brave enough to make them out loud.

Elard’s expression hardened.

“Six years without communication,” he said flatly. “Six years ignoring direct strategic summons from Imperial High Command, and now you answer only when your uncontrolled animals begin flooding my warzones.”

“Careful…Warmassster…your officersss may begin to think-ck…you are angry.”

Several commanders exchanged uncomfortable looks. Elard’s jaw tightened visibly.

“You deployed five thousand convicts onto Iopra Maximum without authorization! Are you even going to explain yourself?!?”

“That…wasss not me-ck, Warmassster.” The genuine confusion in Gallius’ voice didn’t calm Elard humor in the slightest

“Stop this! Stop this insubordination in this very moment Commissar, or I will have you executed by dawn! Why are five thousand, or however the frakking size of their reinforcement, of your troops descending on Iopra right now?!?”

There was a moment when not even static could be heard in the vox, as if the connection had been severed all together by the other end of the line. Elard was hunched forward, his eyes staring unblinking at the projection of the vox in his screen, the veins on his face looked like they were about to pop at any moment. Slowly, the warmaster began to breathe deeply, realizing the scene he was making in front of all his officers; he needed to remain unyielding and strong, this was not helping that image at all. Only when his breathing steadied, the vox crackled back to life.

“Now that you’ve-ck….calmed yourssself Elard.” Gallius spoke as soothing as his raspy voice could allow, “You could perhapsss underssstand-ck…that I have just arrived from a Warp jump done from the orbit of Xanthera VII and had nothing to do with the influx of new Cardrean forces…perhapsss they ck-came here because their homeworld didn’t receive any news from me and thought the regiment had been wiped out, perhaps they did thisss whenever I requesssted reinforcements so long ago and only now did their message arrived…”

“So you’re saying.,” Elard made a long inhalation, “that you, truly, had nothing to do with this?”

“No, my lord-ck…I am sssimply ssstating the truth-ck”

Elard stared at the hololithic display without truly seeing it anymore, his mind instead attempting to dissect every word Gallius had spoken. Warp interference, delayed astropathic messages, reinforcements arriving years after being requested; none of it was impossible. In the Imperium, entire crusades had vanished into the Warp and returned generations later believing mere weeks had passed. Still, something about the commissar’s voice unsettled him.

“Then explain Xanthera VII,” he said at last. “Your entire command vanished upon arrival in-system. No communications. No astropathic trace. Nothing.”

Static rolled softly through the vox, the answer took longer this time.

“Xanthera-ck…was lost.”

Several officers shifted uneasily.

“What does that mean?” Elard demanded.

“It meansss exactly what I said.”

“We translated into orbit and found the world already dead. No lights. No vox traffic. No responssse from the surface.” 

The astropaths stationed near the chamber’s rear shook their heads and shrugged, to them that explanation seemed as plausible as any other, yet that was simply something too…unexpected for everyone there to believe at face value, it was such a bomb of information out of nowhere.

“For six years?” Elard asked skeptically.

“Perhapsss.” 

The Warmaster exhaled slowly through his nose. He was too tired for mysteries, too tired for half-truths and cryptic implications; entire sectors burned while this man spoke in riddles through a dying vox channel, it was unbelievable.

“You will provide a complete account upon arrival,” Elard said firmly. “Every log. Every casualty report. Every movement your regiment made following Xanthera VII.”

“Of courssse, Warmaster.” The response sounded almost amused.

As soon as the vox channel was disconnected, Elard’s grip on the table seemed to relax, the man swayed from side to side as if talking with the commissar had required every ounce of his strength to keep up. He turned, then, to Cestus.

“The moment his vessel and every personnel aboard it enter secured Imperial space, I want them detained and questioned of every little thing for as insignificant as it may seem.” His eyes were fueled with bitter anger, “That is an order, Coronel.”

“As you command, my Lord.”

Elard pushed himself upright from the hololithic table, though the effort looked difficult now. His exhaustion had become impossible to fully conceal; the sharp edge behind his eyes had dulled into something older and far more fragile, a tired old man wrapped in medals and command sigils, forcing himself to continue because there remained nobody else capable of carrying the burden.

The Strategium lights seemed painfully bright suddenly. Inducing a nausea the warmaster was able to conceal due to his request for a iho-stick to put on his lips. 

One of the younger officers cautiously approached the table, carrying a data-slate against his chest.

“My lord Warmaster,” he began carefully, “there is also the matter of the Cardrean landings themselves-”

“Like I said before, you damn fool…leave this whole mess to Mihael to order them however he sees fit, although warn him about the particular way the Cardreans tend to react when exemplary executions happen:”

“Yes, my lord.”

He hurried away almost immediately. Far beyond the Strategium walls, the flagship groaned as its engines adjusted course through the void. Somewhere on the planet they orbited, millions of soldiers prepared for another day of slaughter beneath ash-filled skies while commanders shuffled regiments like pieces upon a chessboard. War continued on, with its master stressed and absent-minded, worried the new developments would only bring more chaos into the war, not relief.

–––––––––––––––––––

Through the geysers smoke and the heating hiss of the ground, there was chaos and revolts wherever Mihael gazed at; not among his ranks, that was for sure, he knew his men perfectly to know those instructed under his watch never knew disorder, it had to be those convicts and killers that the Warmaster had somehow trusted the commander to lead. From the overlook of ferrocrete the man stood on, a column of ships left the human cargo they brought with them on the steams beyond his vision, yet the commander didn’t need any eyes to know what was going on in the patches of land the Cardreans descended on: he could hear the gunshots from officers, the shouting to bring control over to masses of people, fighting between his ranks that had been something rare before this very hour for his regiment. The man cursed his luck and every single human being that had let this happen, it was unacceptable for a man of his stature and renown to be reduced to a babysitter of a bunch of misfits that nobody else wanted to lead, so it fell upon his expert hands to control the uncorrectible.

“I should have got them all killed as soon as they disembarked…” He growled, hearing more distant shouting.

“They’re animals,” muttered one of the Kasrkin standing nearby.

Mihael did not rebuke him, the man had merely spoken what most of the regiment already thought; there were no two pairs of eyes that weren’t staring at the “show” before their eyes with disdain, repulsion for the unfit to bear the Aquila of the Imperium. When the winds of the planet blew the steams to other directions, making the men to have a better view of the scene before them, the Cardreans seemed to be there only to misbehave, like if there was no war going all around them; men with more implants than actual flesh harassed the mechanicus auxiliary tech-priests with wrenches and tools made for disassembling, women with sharp knives flirted and pushed male Cadians around, scholars (“why in the Emperor’s name were there scholars here?” Mihael kept wondering) noted the Karskin features in big ledgers almost as tall as themselves; it was just a clash of cultures aggressively taking over discipline and order that had been firmly established on a military encampment.

“Captain Alden, headcount of the newcomers?” Mihael grumbled, his hand hovered a holster

“About…three hundred convicts and other assets from the L’alen system, sir.” The man scrolled on a datapad, “It appears the number of transports was exaggerated”

“Thank the Emperor for that,” The commander huffed, “See to that they have the breathing system fitting for a gas giant like Iopra and then just…send them on a suicide mission, I don’t know”

“Sir, with all due respect…it appears most of them were already fit for this planet surface sir; the most augmetic prone ones already have inhalators-”

“Well color me impressed, that means you will give them less equipment.”

—---------------------------

Yaror thought she was unruly by Morvane standards; indeed, in her lifetime she had many times rebuked literary analysis of old history books with colleagues, and too had been known for the usage of some…illegal substances to keep herself awake at late hours of the night just to finish essays or papers on different matters of planetary business or theories about the evolution of gangs in the adjacent world of Cardrea; but never, ever in her worst nightmares did she envisioned sharing the same space with any of the inhabitants of Cardrea nor, even, of the dangerous pirates from the Karthion’s asteroid belt. Yet here she found herself now, in the middle of a war she barely knew what it was about, with a Axe grabbing her by the waist and manhandling her to form a line with the rest of recruits from the regiment.

“Just…stay sonen still, pen-dog!”

The gruff voice of another Cardrean behind her came just as the woman felt shoved forward; around her tens of bodies were being pressed together and herded onto neatly made rows of soldiers all facing officers dressed with attires Yaror only recognized by description alone, never before seeing so many Imperials from the Astra Militarum together. Mud sucked at her boots with every step.

She hated this planet already.

The air itself felt diseased; thick, hot, impossible to breathe properly without a proper gas mask. Somewhere beyond the steam fields, machinery groaned endlessly beneath the ground while distant gunfire cracked every few minutes like someone snapping branches in a dead forest; the fact nobody around the scribe was barely reacting to those gunshots was the second most worrisome thing Yaror could think of, the most important thing being nobody was seemingly distributing the precious masks that allowed a regular human being to properly breathe in this environment…her head was already starting to spin threatening with vomiting everything she had eaten that day,

A sharp whistle snapped her attention forward.

“Attention! You all will be handed a gun each! Do not complain about the condition of it nor the firepower of it! When I blow this whistle, I want the first five lines to march forward and engage the Xenos!” An instructor yelled as loud as his throat allowed him to, “I don’t want any excuses and I don’t want anyone breaking formation, understood!?!?”

“Shut the sonen up offbright and give the suicide order already!!!” Yaror heard someone shouting behind her

“Can we skip to the part where I get to kill something? I’m bored as a grox over here!” Another voice was heard, this time coming from her line 

“Silence! Silence all of you!!!” The instructor yelled

“Or what!?!? Do we get to die faster, Concord-blind asshole?” 

“Hey, don’t say that! There are pen-dogs here! They aren’t gonna die, they’ll run away and will get shot in the back!” 

“Shut up!!! Shut up or I’ll start executing whoever disobeys my orders!!!” The officer’s face was blushing red

“Oooooh you made the squeaky officer mad, Rath!”

“Emperor’s balls I hope so!”

Genuine cruel laughter spread all around the rows and rows of Cardreans, entire lines of recruits bent forward cackling while the instructor trembled with fury under the scorching sun over their heads; several of the more heavily augmented recruits slapped each other on the shoulders like men sharing drinks in a tavern rather than awaiting deployment into combat. Had they all gone insane? “No…” Yaror answered herself, “This is just Cardrean typical shit”. 

“I SAID-!” The officer raised his whistle again with a shaky hand.

There wasn’t even time to make fun of the Imperial when a loud boom propelled everyone close to the man backwards, there was a loud flash, a bone chilling sound and then…the officer was no more than blood splattered everywhere, the ground where moments before he had stood on now just a smoking crater where some bomb or rocket or a laser or whatever Xeno technology had just hit the Imperial positions. There was silence for a heartbeat longer, faces of recruits that moments before had been so cheerful now replaced with looks of shock and bewilderment; nobody said anything but the confused stares at one another said everything that words failed to express, Yaror felt like she was about to break into a crying fit of fear, induced by the most primal urge her body had ever felt of running away from there and not look back until she was far away enough from war for it to affect her.

“Well…” A Tech Lunatic ventured to speak, “Now what?”

“We…” One of the Sisters replied, taking a step forward and looking down at the smoking crater, then to the frontlines and finally to the war beyond, “We go ahead and kill those aliens?”

Another uncomfortable silence was felt for a few more minutes; someone sneezed in the last line on the back, another person whistled a tune out of sync.

“Yeah, sounds good…” An Axe broke the silence, inhaled hard and then shouted “KILL THE XENOS! PURGE THE HERETIC!”

“Remember Infernodum!” A voice joined the scream

“REMEMBER INFERNODUM!” The rest of the frontlines retorted; then every man and woman was off to their own devices to charge or entrench themselves as they saw fit.

Yaror remained frozen. The wave of bodies surged around her almost immediately, boots splashing through mud as recruits scattered toward weapon crates, trench mouths, abandoned barricades…anywhere that resembled cover or an opportunity to kill something first. The suddenness of it made no sense to her, one moment they had been heckling an officer like drunken laborers outside a refinery hall and now they moved with terrifying enthusiasm.

“MOVE YOUR ASS, SCRIBE!” someone roared near her ear.

Due to the peer pressure all around her, Yaror stumbled and staggered her footsteps towards the first crate on the trenches that looked like it could contain some kind of weapon; she slid the wooden cover off from it, revealing three rows containing two plasma pistols each, whenever she stretched her hand to take one another pair of hands came from behind and picked it up shouting a quick “Thank ya!” before disappearing into the trenches. She took another in a rush, afraid to have it snatched away from her hands, and quickly threw herself to the first trenchline she could find, lasers and plasma whizzing above her head just as she got into cover. “I-I don’t know how to use this!!!” She screeched, talking to herself as she tucked her knees to her chest. Gunfire erupted from the forward perimeter; real gunfire, not warning shots or disciplinary coordinated fire, sheer raw war happening all around her with death taking a life everywhere she looked and from every direction the sounds of war came from.

A cluster of recruits near the eastern trench suddenly exploded apart in sprays of mud and blood as bright projectiles tore through them from somewhere unseen.; bodies dropped instantly, the survivors shouted in confusion, firing blindly into the steam. Yaror ducked instinctively as another volley hissed overhead.

Emperor save me. Emperor save me. Emperor save me…

Lasfire answered immediately from the Imperial lines, red beams lancing through steam in frantic volleys; shadows moved between the geysers beyond the perimeter, fast, tall shapes of ochre and brown became sometimes hot spots of lasfire and other times seemed to vanish in the blink of an eye before reappearing meters ahead like if it was nothing, fading into a translucid figure before being completely gone from sight. Stealth suits, Yaror had read about them in some of the books back in Morvane and couldn’t shy away from the awe it produced within her, but also the dread of knowing they were there to kill her and all those around her.

“THERE THEY ARE!” A Cardrean woman beside her grinned wildly while reloading.

How could these people sound excited?. Another explosion rocked the staging grounds behind them, sending dirt and debris raining over the recruits; through the chaos Yaror noticed the disciplined soldiers from earlier finally moving past the disorganized masses, the Cadians she and the rest of the recruits were supposed to be supporting and not causing them any more troubles than they already had with the war going on. They advanced in measured lines through the mud, rifles firing in synchronized bursts toward the steam fields. Orders traveled crisply between them despite the noise, every movement controlled and efficient. Watching them felt like witnessing an entirely different kind of humans at war and, to some extent, that was a correct assumption.

“So you finally decided to join the show!” A Sister mockingly gestured a salute to the Imperial forces around

“Shut up convict and keep shooting!” A Cadian replied

“Just like your guard did when your planet-?”

“DON’T YOU FRAKKING DARE FINISH THAT PHRASE!” A chorus of voices rushed to answer

“It’s so sonen easy…” Yaror heard the Sister mumble

The argument dissolved beneath another barrage of incoming fire. Brilliant streaks of blue-white energy carved through the steam choked battlefield and detonated against the forward trench lines with enough force to throw entire sections of mud and ferrocrete into the air with violence. Yaror instinctively flattened herself deeper against the soaked ground, hands pressed over her head while debris rained across the staging field, she had barely fired her weapon at all, which now was all muddied in the ground next to her; the knockback hurt her shoulders whenever she held it and, as she discovered soon enough, Yaror didn’t had quite the aim required to make a shot worth a damn; nobody cared though, there was not a singular soul around her watching what she was up to or how well she was shooting so why bother to shoot at all? What was the point of sending someone all the way from Morvane to here’ The order from the superiors on her covenant back home hadn’t been born out of a punishment for her or banishment, it had been like a privilege, they had made it sound like Yaror and all the other Morvane scholars were being sent to make some holy work in the fields where the Imperium “needed them the most”, but was it really an honor to be in the middle of a pandemonium like this one? However point of view Yaror tried to study those questions from could never and, most likely, would never give her the proper answer.

The battlefield, too, had become impossible to make sense of anything at all. Steam from the geothermal vents mixed with smoke from burning equipment and the chemical stench of discharged lasguns until the entire front blurred into a suffocating haze of red flashes and moving silhouettes. Every few seconds the fog illuminated with sudden bursts of light revealing fragments of horror before swallowing them again; people with one arm less or a leg missing crawling on the ground shouting for a medicae that would never come to assist convicts like them, a Cadian dragging wounded soldiers toward cover without slowing his rifle fire, packs of Cardrean tarns shooting at empty steam geysers only for invisible return fire to cut them down moments later. Whenever the strange xenos shapes appeared, they did so only partially, outlines shimmering in and out of existence like ghosts trapped halfway between worlds. Sometimes she caught glimpses of angular armor reflecting the floodlights, their movements carried an unnatural smoothness, too precise and fluid to resemble human motion; each appearance was followed almost immediately by another series of lethal energy blasts punching through men and machinery alike. The guardsman, Yaror realized with horror, were being hunted by those stealth suits like predators, this wasn’t a common gunfight.

It was then Yaror truly understood how thin the line holding this entire force together actually was. The recruits hated the discipline imposed upon them, the Cadians despised the recruits for existing among them and officers barked threats louder than orders while nobody outside of the men under their command actually listened to them right up until someone was torn to pieces by enemy gunpowder. Nothing about this army felt united except the fact there were aliens trying to kill all of them equally. Somewhere ahead, a section of trench collapsed inward beneath concentrated fire, dragging soldiers and recruits alike screaming into boiling mud and shattered support beams. The disciplined firing patterns of the Cadians shifted immediately, several squads redirecting toward the breach while others advanced forward to cover the repositioning. By contrast, many recruits simply broke formation altogether, running wherever instinct pushed them, years of improvised fights in rooftops of Hive cities or buildings were the only kind of war those people knew and reacted to; there was no coordination between the two regiments, they were literally and figuratively worlds apart in that fight, this was not just noted by Yaror but she could feel how the Xenos realized this too; that was the sole reason for the Imperial wrongdoing that would lead everyone to death. And she couldn’t stop any of it, only cower in fear on her place, watching in slow motion how the Imperium was losing ground meter by meter.

Then a body crashed into her from the side. Yaror gasped as both she and the stranger tumbled hard against the trench wall, the man scrambling beside her wore what remained of a Cadian’s uniform burned nearly black across one shoulder, blood streamed from his scalp while panic consumed his face entirely.

“They’re inside the vents,” he babbled breathlessly. “Throne, they’re inside the damn vents already-”

His words ended abruptly, a narrow beam of pale energy punched clean through his skull; Yaror followed the steam to the hole where it had come from and saw something reflecting the light just below the ground beneath her. She screamed.

—--------------

Mihael realized the day was lost when the sound of war started to come closer to his command position in the artillery batteries trenchline. Bit by bit, section by section, discipline eroded beneath the pressure of a force that understood exactly where to strike. Through magnocular lenses he observed another trench segment buckle under concentrated xenos fire while guardsmen scattered in every direction the moment the bombardment intensified, some attempting to regroup with nearby squads only to disrupt firing formations, a handful charged blindly into the steam with screaming bravado and vanished seconds later beneath precise enemy volleys. And amidst it all, flashes of the Xenos suits of combat sometimes surged from the ground, taking advantage of the clouds of smoke expelled by the geysers to make their sudden strikes, their heat coolers impeding the suits from becoming their entombed dooms; he had never such a thing, never imagined the Xenos coil be that cunning.

Mihael lowered the magnoculars slowly, disbelief and horror contorting his face.

“Sir, orders?” His captains looked at Mihael in search for a plan

The commander’s jaw tightened; an entire month wasted, men wasted, equipment wasted, defensive infrastructure overrun because some distant command structure had decided this mongrel reinforcement experiment was strategically acceptable. Mihael mind was clouded by rage, he wanted to scream, to shout curses directed at the warmaster Elard, he wanted to kick and shoot every last one of the undisciplined bastards that had thrown months and months of careful planning and hard fought victories into the Warp by their sheer incompetence and stupid sense of pride in spitting onto everything the Imperium had gifted them with. Mihael inhaled slowly through the stale recycled air of his rebreather before finally speaking.

“Signal all remaining formations we are leaving.”

“Fallback order, sir?” Alden straightened immediately.

“Yes.” Mihael’s expression hardened further. “Full retreat.”

It was a reality hard to swallow, the commander felt it when he glanced at his officers; how much this pains them to do so, for a proud and decorated regiment like the Cadians 322nd. This was worse than dying out; but Imperial duty came first and honor second, and so the orders were relayed and whatever vehicle still operational was driven back to form a last line of defense and buy the retreating forces some time to get out of the fray. Several disciplined squads immediately began organized withdrawals from the shattered trenches, covering each other with practiced volleys as they retreated through the mud. The Cardreans, however, required some more convincing to leave their posts all together.

They did not collapse once the retreat began, they did not scatter into full panic as many other auxiliary formations would have under equivalent pressure; instead, they fought with a kind of ugly stubbornness that bordered on irrationality. Groups that minutes earlier had looked ready to stab one another over rations now held defensive pockets with desperate cohesion, dragging wounded companions through boiling mud while firing wildly toward advancing xenos silhouettes in the steam. Mihael observed one cluster of recruits hold a collapsed trench junction nearly four minutes longer than ordered, long enough for two crippled Cadian troop carriers to escape encirclement further west, another group detonated their last charges inside a geothermal vent rather than abandon the position quietly, burying themselves and several pursuing stealth suits beneath an eruption of boiling slurry and shattered rock.

Crazy, primitive, undisciplined bastards, all of them; but their results couldn’t be denied by anyone who saw them fighting. The convoy rumbled onward through the steaming plains while darkness slowly crept across Iopra’s horizon; behind them the battlefield continued glowing red beneath bombardments and burning wreckage, a wounded scar stretching across the geothermal fields.The Cardreans were following the convoy on foot, most of them had stopped firing whenever the enemy had stopped pursuing them; battered, bloody and injured, some of the Cadians purposely looked away from the recruits or made small talk between them to pretend they couldn’t see the unfair silent treatment they were giving the Cardreans. An all-time classic way for the Imperials to repay the L’alen inhabitants' efforts: by making them walk on their injured bloody feet while the rest of them could rest and tend their wounds from the safety of their vehicles. The battle was over and with it the last moments of considering Cardrean scum like equals.

Your blood, my blood

From childhood he had seen the posters of the Imperial Guard, had heard the stories of "His Angels" fighting courageously for the good of all; the smiling faces, short blonde haired folks that smiled even through the pain and suffering around them, it looked like fun, it looked like something to dream of being. Yet, now with the bladder of a Death Wisher on his hand, Vesker knew the propaganda and infantilization he had known the war for was far from the truth.

"Pass me uh...500mg of Xantrel" the doctor said, snapping his bloody fingers at him  

"Hmm? Oh...right..." He turned, searching for the vial "Uh we don't have that, there's Chamern"  

"Emperor's damn fingers...fine but more dosage, 900mg of 'em"   

The sight was what impressed Vesker now, the smell he had gotten used to when he made the connection between it and the odor of decomposing meat; yet the sight of intestines and exposed muscle was a sight he still hadn't gotten over. It was bad enough when they had assigned him to assist the medics, worst of all was the fact it seemed he fit there more than in the front. Doing precise cuts, split second decisions and stabilizing pulses or soothing people was something in Hydrora happened a lot, now was only different because of the range of responses he would get, most of them hostile.

Still, Vesker worked quickly, fingers trembling slightly as he drew the dosage into the injector. The doctor, a towering man named Ushad, was already elbow-deep in the patient's opened gut, muttering what was he going to eat for lunch after that shift between swearing under his breath.

"Chamern, now!" Ushad barked, not even glancing up.

Vesker pressed the injector into the port at the base of the soldier’s neck, (what was left of it anyway) and heard the soft hiss as the chemical was released. The soldier flinched, eye twitching. One of them, at least. The other was gone, it was just a hole where a round had completely destroyed it.

The Hydrorer kept his eyes on the injector, not daring to look directly at the mess in front of him. The viscera glistened under the med-bay’s cold lumen strips, thick crimson pooling in the basin beneath the slab. The sound of the suction pump, wet and mechanical, filled the brief silences between both men, the Hydrorer apprentice and the veteran Cardrean.

"You’ve got a steady hand for someone who looks like they’d faint if I showed them a bone saw," Ushad said, his tone slightly mocking

“I took some basic studies in medicine on the colony; I had to pick one academic path if I wished to keep my scholarship” Vesker muttered, a morbid curiosity kept him from looking away from the empty eye socket of the patient

“Academic path…” The doctor spat, “I learnt this from my pa. He used to butcher grox in the morning and had a little illegal clinic on the side by nightfall”

Ushad’s forearms flexed as he reached deeper into the soldier’s open cavity, the wet slap of his gloves against organs making Vesker’s stomach knot; he then yanked something free with a sound like tearing cloth from the moribund, holding up a jagged shard of reddened metal and tossing it to the ground like it was nothing.

The noise around the regiment camp had only increased in volume after the last successful “purge” of a colony; the ambush had left them battered with more wounded than actual dead, meaning people like Vesker and Ushad had their hands full, sometimes literally, with all kinds of injured Cardreans and Hydrorers. It all had started with Gallius instructions of separating doctors from the “old” school from the newcomers, making it so only compatriots attended those of their same world, but when the number of injured surpassed the initial expectations there was no time to make distinctions; now everyone had to work together if they expected to survive whatever could come.

The clatter of boots and wheels on the tunnel’s rock disturbed the little silence that had fell over the medic’s sector; two stretchers stumbled into the section overseen by Ushad and bumped against his “assistant”, stuttering a series of sorries before shoving the stretchers into whatever space they could cramp them into. Ushad didn’t waste time asking what had happened, just raised his mask and cleaned up his gloves as best he could.

The first stretcher was a Cardrean sergeant, chest wrapped in a half-dozen blood-soaked bandages that did nothing to stop the steady trail of blood going down his pectorals; it looked amateurish and the wrapping was at least a day old, probably in an attempt of a bloody Axe to look tough and not go for a check-up on his injury; the results were obvious.

In the second stretcher laid a a Hydrorer trooper, legs mangled beyond recognition, shredded muscle and splintered bone dangling loose where the boots should’ve been. It was well maintained, better than whatever field medic of a Sister or a Mute could have done, but it required assistance if the trooper wanted to ever walk again or not be in an eternal agonizing pain until their last moments of life.

“Lung puncture and double leg trauma,” Ushad barked, looking around for the necessary tools “We’re taking both. Vesker, take the legs and I’ll keep this one breathing. You! Before you go tell the kitchen that I want some Yarish tea if they want me awake for another three sonen hours”

Vesker slid to the second stretcher, his knees splashing into the blood pooled beneath it. The trooper’s eyes were wide but glassy, breath coming in shallow gasps through clenched teeth trying his best to withstand the pain as same as their comrades; seen as weak now could mark a bad experience in their tarn if someone spread the word.

After calming the trooper with some hushed words in their language, Vesker pulled a clamp kit from the wall tray, snapping it open with his thumb. The Hydrorer trooper on the slab twitched when Vesker began cutting away the shredded remnants of flak cloth from around the thighs. Pride kept them silent, but the tremor in their jaw betrayed the agony.

“Pulse is steady…no shock, okay I just need to seal this…this…no, no that one-” The man mumbled to himself, his hands trembling slightly by the anticipation but remembering religiously all the instructions Ushad had given him

From the other table came the wet, meaty sound of Ushad forcing his fingers between ribs. The Cardrean’s muffled groan cracked briefly into a scream before gurgling into a wet cough, it writhed below the doctor, who for the Hydrorers there seemed more like a butcher making his way through an animal than a doctor saving a patient.

“Keep him still!” Ushad snarled to the servitors pinning the sergeant’s shoulders. “One more flinch and I’m sewing your throne-damned lungs together! Take it like a sonen man!”

Vesker ignored the bellowing, his own world narrowing to the ruined legs in front of him. He slid clamps into place along the exposed arteries, twisting each until the flow slowed from a dangerous spray to a sluggish seep. A chunk of muscle came away in Vesker’s forceps with an ugly rip. He set it down in a tray very carefully, away from the view of the trooper so as to not freak them out more than it already was. Vesker adjusted the dose of Chamern when he saw the breathing of the patient growing shallower, managing to stabilize them yet again.

“Clamp is slipping,” one of the servitors called from Ushad’s side.

“Then hold it, Throne take you!” Ushad snarled, even if he knew it was pointless. “These Hydrorers at least know how to keep their cries to themselves, not like THIS fucker!”

It wasn’t the first time Ushad had slipped a jab like that in between instructions and it certainly wouldn’t be the last; what at the beginning was more than enough for Veskar to throw hands with the doctor and defending his compatriots had turned into a grim gallows humor between them; Ushad cursed, Veskar stayed silent, if Veskar cursed, Ushad knew he had to remain quiet. 

Vesker pressed harder on the femoral clamp, ignoring the exchange. His eyes traced the ragged stump, calculating how much of the limb could be saved before gangrene or infection set in. He shifted his grip, fingers steady now, and reached for the cauterizer wand. The trooper’s eyes flicked to the tool, recognition flashing in them. Vesker didn’t speak; words would only confirm what the Hydrorer already knew was coming.

In the other table, Ushad was finishing with his own operation. By a way totally alien to Veskar, the old doctor had managed to cut enough of the lungs to connect a metal implant that would accelerate the breathing patterns in the sergeant, thus saving his life but damning the man to never exhaust himself or the implant would literally make his respiratory system violently implode inside of his body before causing the most choked death he could had ever imagined. Cardrean medicine at it’s finest.

The cauterizer hummed to life in Vesker’s hand. He pressed the glowing tip against the first severed artery. The smell of burning meat was instant, curling smoke mixing with the steam rising from sweat-slick skin. The Hydrorer patient tensed, a tremor running through their whole body, a wailing finally came from the deepest corners of their throat as nobody could had remained stoic in that moment; Vesker didn’t want to think how that felt like, but it was the safest way of sealing everything off.

The sizzling sound oddly gentle as the last vessel was closed. He pulled away, wiping his brow with the back of his wrist. The leg, what remained of it, was clean enough for augmetic fitting if they got a Mechanicus crew in time. He didn’t say it out loud, mostly because the Tech Lunatics around could have taken it as an offense.

Ushad’s voice cut in, louder now, almost amused despite the blood on his face.

“Not bad, Vesker. You’re almost working like you belong here instead of hiding from the front.”

The doctor yanked his gloves off with a wet snap and tossed them into the overflowing bin, the crimson sheen on his forearms making it look like he’d been elbow-deep gutting some animal rather than saving a man. The sergeant on his table was still breathing with a faint hiss each time the new implant cycled, but breathing all the same. Ushad gave the man’s cheek a light slap, the kind of crude reassurance only a Cardrean would consider comforting.

“There. You’ll live. Just don’t sprint, or you’ll pop like a las-round in a promethium tank.” He grinned, teeth white against the blood splattered across his beard. The sergeant, pale and shaking, gave the barest nod

On Vesker’s table, the Hydrorer trooper lay motionless except for the faint rise and fall of his chest. The smell of scorched flesh lingered heavily over the slab and the faint curl of smoke from the cauterized stump gave the impression of a cooking pit after a long night. Vesker adjusted the sheet over the leg, feeling guilty about the incisions and the state of the patient but knowing he couldn’t had done anything else, then stepped back to let the servitors around wheel the patient to the recovery sector.

For a brief moment, both men just stood there in the quiet of their stations, finally being able to sigh audibly. 

“Shift’s over,” Ushad finally said, voice low, like he’d just remembered he had one. “You keep poking at more legs tonight, you’ll start dreaming of doing the exact same shit you do when you’re awake.”

Vesker peeled his gloves away, fingers pruned and raw from hours in sweat and blood. The ache in his shoulders hit him all at once. Ushad was already lumbering toward the back, untying his apron and tossing it over a hook.

“Tea first,” the Cardrean grunted. “Then a smoke. Then… maybe we bother sleeping. Or maybe we just sit there and stare at the wall until someone tells us we are up again.”

Vesker followed, leaving behind the rows of half-conscious bodies. The sounds of the sector faded into the dim rumble of the tunnel as they stepped out, the smell of blood replaced by the cold, damp scent of rockcrete.

The corridor to the kitchen sector was narrow, lit by ghostvine strips that flickered just enough to create enough green light to see where you were going. A pair of off-duty troopers slouched against the wall halfway down, both Cardrean, they eyed Vesker and Ushad as they passed, the Cardreans offering flat stares to the junt. Old tensions didn’t disappear just because the medics worked on both sides now after all. 

“Bet they’re already out of anything decent,” Ushad muttered, adjusting the strap on his shoulder holster. “Goremaws meat always go first after all, with some luck we will just have to make due with cragworms”

“W-w-worms?!” The assistant opened his eyes widely in disgust

“Hah! Well yeah guess it sounds disgusting when you say the name,” The doctor scratched his chin. “It is that, yeah, a worm; but the shits are pretty big, like 2 meters? I have only seen up to one meter and sum’ but they taste good, seasoned that is.”

The kitchen sector was set up in an old maintenance bay, its wide blast doors propped open by the incursion that had intruded upon that sector; the air here was warmer, thick with the scent of boiled grox meats, herbs of yarish and other flora like the ghostvines that were being smushed to extract the oil to set up lamps, a dried frozen goremaw was displayed hanging from a hook on top of a fire awaiting it’s moment to defrost to be prepared. A few battered tables lined the walls, most already occupied by soldiers still in partial armor who wagered in Imperial Tarots to kill time or engaging in conversations that varied from what was the last thing they remembered from home to what new gossip was spreading in the barracks.

Ushad stepped straight to the counter, nodding to the Mute that was serving the plates in total silence and with their big bulky callus hands; the medic cleared his throat and browsed for a second what was left as the Mute stopped stirring the pot it had in front of him.

“Plate of goremaw flank, double portion, charred edges. Cragworm stew on the side and Yarish roots…pickled if you’ve got ‘em.”

The Mute didn’t even nod, just turned and started ladling from one of the steaming pots into a dented tin tray that seemed it had been recycled as soon as it was emptied; Ushad didn’t complain. Vesker stepped up next, his voice more restrained.

“Got corpse stash? That and…um…whatever veg mix is fresh…and water”

That earned him a faintly pitying glance from the cook, who reached for a different pot, emptied a tin can onto it next to a handful of wilted greens and slid the tray toward Vesker without ceremony.

“One. Table” The Mute motioned, pointing to an empty spot near the back.

The two men didn’t utter a word, obediently following the spot given to them; as the ashtrays were set, the metallic clangs for a moment created a perfect synchronization. Not even waiting for a prayer to the Emperor or a polite introduction, Ushad immediately sat himself on the goal of devouring his food.

“See,” Ushad said between tearing off a chunk of goremaw meat with his teeth, “This is why you Hydrorers never bulk up. Too much sonen green; where’s the meat?.” He spoke around the mouthful, a drop of juice running down his chin before he swiped it away with the back of his hand.

Vesker poked at his stash with the tip of his fork. “And this is why you Cardreans die before fifty…your arteries choke faster than a vox-channel in a fleet drill.”

Ushad barked a laugh, the sound echoing in the low-ceilinged room.

For a while they ate in silence, the low hum of the kitchen sector and the occasional shuffle of boots on rockcrete making up the background noise; eventually, Vesker set down his fork, leaning back in his chair and picking his teeth with the fork.

“So…Cardrean,” he began, tone casual but his eyes watching the older man closely. “What was it like? Before all this. What was home like for you?”

Ushad didn’t answer right away. He tore off another piece of goremaw, chewed, swallowed, and only then glanced up with one brow raised. “You’re fishing.”

“Just asking.” Vesker shrugged. “Never met a Cardrean, never knew you lot even existed before…this” He motioned at the tunnels, reminding the medic about the purge of Vesker planet that was still on-going 

A smirk tugged at Ushad’s mouth. “Reebward slum, biggest shithole in the whole capital Hive. Dad was a butcher, I already told ya that, so we used to live on the first floor of a hub block, it made it easier for him to get up in the morning and open shop.” He sighed, taking a sip off from the tea. “I was lucky enough to grow up in one of the slums where you could see the night sky; not many folks got to do that, especially in the overcrowded capital.”

Vesker tilted his head. “And the crime? What got you sent here?”

That got a short, shameless laugh. “Debt. Pa got mixed up with the Lunatics and they came back for the payment, he refused, they threatened him, beat him half to death and left him outside the shop as a warning,” The breath of the veteran hitched for a second before continuing. “I took over the shop, promised them I would pay; they said imperials wasn’t going to cut it anymore so I had to hand them the butcher shop some days of the week for their…deeds”

“And they caught butchered bodies? That’s wh-” Vesker was leaning fully on the table

“Let me finish for Gallius sake…” Ushad huffed, adjusting in his seat. “Because I was handing them the business for a while, I couldn’t make enough to sustain the bloody thing; so I asked for a loan from the Concord,” Ushad continued, spitting the name like it was a rotten seed he’d been forced to chew. “I skipped one…just one fucking month, the Concord found out. Instead of cutting me open, they handed me over to the Arbites. Some deal, I’m sure. Next thing I knew, my name was on a transport roster for this regiment, and the Concord didn’t have to sully their hands.”

Vesker poked at his corpse stash with his fork, knowing it would be rude to not tell his story too. Framing it was what cost him the most, after all his tale ended where this whole thing had started: with Cardreans blasting the doors of the prison where he was locked up and forcing him to either kill people of his own world or die with the rest.

“Coastal colony. Fish, nets, trade. Got into a med program..was supposed to ship off-world in a couple of years.”

“And?” Ushad’s voice was low, heavy with the same curiosity Vesker had shown him.

“And then those technoheretics came, supposedly they went mad calculating numbers or whatever the Warp knows. So, we went underground to the provisional colonies you lot have been…chewing on the way. I suddenly didn’t had money, future, even family since my mom had died of sickness a couple of weeks after we moved to the caverns”

“You robbed to survive.” The man nodded, without any judgment.

“Yeah,” Vesker admitted, his tone flat. “Food, meds, tools…anything I could get my hands on. I knew it was only a matter of time before the Provs caught me, but I didn’t expect it’d be the Arbites themselves. They threw me in with the rest of the colony’s ‘undesirables.’ Figured I’d rot there.” He gave a humorless laugh, eyes fixed on the warped surface of his water tin. “Then one day, boom; blast doors gone, walls shaking, smoke everywhere. And in come your lot, Cardrean squads, yelling orders I barely understood-”

“It’s either us or-” Ushad cut in, as if he could explain it all away.

“I convinced myself of that too, don’t.” Vesker nodded slowly.

Ushad didn’t press further. He just sat back in his chair, working the last bit of goremaw from between his teeth with his tongue before downing the dregs of his tea. The cup hit the table with a dull clang, and for a moment the only sound between them was the nervous tapping of Vesker fingers on the table.

“Well,” the Cardrean finally said, rising with a grunt, “I’m going to hit the bunkbed for whatever time is left to us.”

“I’m going too,” The assistant muttered, his mood changed after the exchange

Vesker pushed his tray aside, joints stiff as he stood. The warmth of the kitchen gave way to the damp chill of the tunnels as they stepped out, their boots clicking softly on the rockcrete. The ghostvine light strips overhead cast their shadows long and crooked on the walls, making them look like they were giants.

The barracks were only a few sectors away, but the path took them past the muted heartbeats of the regiment’s night cycle past guards on their posts, Mutes socializing with their hand gestures, Sisters lulling each other to sleep with folk tales and a few groups of Hydrorers that had been left to fend for themselves as their tarns still hadn’t warm up to them. 

Ushad claimed the lower rack of a corner bunk, his frame sinking into the thin mattress with a creak of old springs. “Wake-up’ll be sooner than it feels,” he muttered, unlacing his boots but not bothering to take off his shirt.

Vesker found an empty rack a few steps away, lowering himself onto it with a sigh that felt pulled from deep in his chest. He stared up at the steel underside of the bunk above, the hum of the ventilation fans lulling his mind toward the edge of sleep. But when he couldn’t reconcile it, be it because of the images of pain that surfaced to his mind or be it because of the neverending buzz of that ventilation fan, the Hydrorer got to his knees beside the bed, clasped his hands together and began to pray.

“Saint Absynthe; ye who knows all and watches over us, may my purpose be fulfilled before I die, may my soul not return to another body for I will accomplish the goals the God-Emperor has destined for me. My you watch over me, as I watch over the wounded and my tarn watches over me. In thy name, amen.”

The one who cares

That night the regiment in its entirety ate and drank without celebration. No dice games. No songs. No shouting contests. The fires they’d lit in the remains of both the dead and the debris all around them danced on their scarred faces, flickering like the litanies painted across their flak armors or the tattoos they had on their bodies.

Mara finally broke the silence.

Sister-Kin Mara squatted beside one of the pires, her hands steady as she cleaned the teeth of her powered entrenching tool, an ancient hybrid of axe and shovel, passed down from all the previous owners of the weapon until it had landed on Mara; as per tradition within the Death Wishers: your weapon will tomorrow be the weapon of those who outlive you.

The others from her squad sat in a loose semicircle around her. There was Credeck, the augmetic-eyed sapper with loose wires for hairs. Felbrin, the youngest, who had spent just shy of four cycles in the regiment, chewing silently on rations. And then there was Jorkh, their Axe, who hadn't spoken since Chirosius.

“Ya seen how the Commissar look'd today?”

No one answered. She didn’t expect them to, just needed to let the words out.

“Looked more serious than ever. Like we weren’t even there. He just pointed west and said, ‘As soon as the tanks can fit through the hole, we move.’”

Felbrin opened his mouth, lips quivered. “They’re not armed. Not like varns or spinerats (backstabber). This is a civ district.”

“They were warned,” Credeck muttered. “He gave warning. That makes it sanctioned.”

Mara stopped her toolwork. “Did he?”

Another silence. Credeck blinked. Felbrin shifted, just slightly.

“I ain't seen 'im using the long range Vox,” Mara shrugged.

“Then that should answer ya if he really did, eh?,” Felbrin said quietly.

Credeck looked around at the others. “They must've done something to be spinerats for Gallius to have done it, right? He's always right, so whatever he found on the colony must've been big...right?"

“Saints forgive me,” Jorkh finally murmured, voice gravelly and low. “That last kid...he couldn't had more than four, I just...did it, without thinking; just squeezed and went on to the next-"

She tossed the tool into the dirt beside her and reached into her side satchel, pulling out the rationed communion flask. It tasted sweet, warm, it had been prepared with care by Jorkh so it was seasoned to the point everyone could enjoy it to some degree.

Mara passed the flask to Jorkh, who accepted it without a word. He took a slow, deliberate sip, eyes fixed on the flickering flames as if drawing strength from their dance.

No one moved.

Credeck shifted, mechanical fingers twitching around his flask. “You did what we were told to do,” he said quietly, but even he didn’t sound convinced. “Orders are orders.”

Even the fire seemed to shrink, casting a silent judgment on the four, hiding their eyes but lightening their expressions revealing it to the rest. Jorkh thought for a moment one of the eyes from the charred corpses was staring right at him, at his soul; he made a long sigh, convincing himself it was just his imagination.

Felbrin’s jaw tensed, his ration forgotten in his hand. He didn’t look at Jorkh, just stared into the flame as if afraid it might show him what he too had done in the previous battle; the skinned parts of his body still had the lingering warmth of what he had done to one of the civvies he had found, her perfume still in his nostrils.

“Orders?” Jorkh spat, though his tone had cracked. “I didn’t wait for the order. Gallius was still screaming at some tarn to aim at one of the traitors. I saw movement, small shadow behind rubble. Thought it was a hailcrawler, like those back home. Pulled the trigger before I could blink.”

He rubbed his hand, the one that had fired, as if the weapon were still fused to it. “Then I saw the doll. Didn’t even have a face anymore. Just…red...so red-"

Mara didn’t flinch. She reached over, took the flask gently from him, and drank deep.

“That’s how it gets you,” she said, voice low, steady. “Not when you pull the trigger. Not when the blood’s fresh. It’s when it won’t come off your hands.”

Felbrin stood abruptly, pacing a short circle. “We ain’t meant to do this to kids. To civvies. That ain’t what we were supposed to do.”

Credeck snorted. “A boy that held hostage an entire bank on the most busiest days of a cycle and pissed himself when the Arbites blew the doors, lining women and children against the vault wall and told ‘em you’d flay ‘em alive if they didn’t open the inner safes?" He said bitterly, maintaining eye contact with the kid "You killed the branch overseer’s daughter even after she handed over the codes. I read your card, kid; is that what you want to go back to do?"

The flame danced between them, the only movement in a tension gone sharp as razors, Mara stood between the two and raised her hands in an attempt to stop them before it escalated.

“Enough.”

Credeck shrugged, throwing a spark of spit into the fire. “Just reminding him who he was before he started acting like he's not supposed to be here.”

Felbrin’s fists were clenched at his sides. His face twitched, like something deep in him wanted to scream or sob but didn’t remember how.

“I was fourteen,” he rasped. “Fourteen. Thought I was hot shit alright? But that doesn't mean I deserve to be shooting sonen kids for a madman!"

Credeck rolled his shoulders, not quite defiant but not apologetic either. “You want penance, Felbrin? This is it. Gallius is our absolution. Our punishment. Know that the only one that will remember your stupid name when you die is him. You don't matter to anyone else, including all of us.”

Felbrin barked a bitter laugh, full of something too young to understand fully what it meant. “Then why doesn’t it feel like penance? Why does it feel like we’re making it worse, like every step forward just drags us deeper into the shit we just got out of back home?”

“Because it is,” Jorkh muttered. He hadn’t moved from his place by the fire, but now his voice was clear, calm, his sorrow was gone, replaced by reluctant acceptance. “We do the shit job so others don’t have to. We carry the weight so they can pretend there’s still something pure in the Imperium.”

He looked at Felbrin now, with no anger, just the heavy gaze of someone who had just swallowed the last bit of humanity left within him.

Mara rose slowly, the embers lighting the edge of her armor in dull black and grey. She slung her entrenching tool over her shoulder and adjusted her belt with methodical calm.

Credeck cracked a bitter smile, shaking his head. “Yes ma'am.”

“Enough talk. You want to cry or keep beating yourself over how you didn't deserve this, do that tomorrow. For now get some sleep. Or pray. Or go to piss, I don't know, you're all grown ups.”

She looked at them each in turn. "The last one to go to bed puts the fire out"

Felbrin glanced around nervously, taking his bedroll and slipping inside, turning his back on the rest. Jorkh merely settled back against a cracked wall, eyes looking forward and arms crossed; soon his body began to relax and fade into slumber, his body twitching from time to time as he began wrestling with a nightmare. Mara lingered by her bedroll for a heartbeat, then nodded to Credeck and fell asleep.

The Lunatic stayed there for a couple more minutes, humming to himself a song until exhaustion got the better of him, with his last conscious stream of actions being putting the fire out and laying on the cold floor.

Mara marched at the front of her squad, her entrenching tool resting over one shoulder knowing she would need to use it in any moment's notice. Her eyes swept the tunnel ahead, scanning for movement, although she knew there probably wouldn't be any; the enemy would be probably entrenched in their own colony, not willing to fight in a tight space like this, she thought. Felbrin walked beside her, teeth clenched, eyes twitching between the path they had come from and hat lied ahead. Jorkh and Credeck took up the rear, watching their flanks. The squad advanced in the fourth or fifth detachment of the regiment, along with another squad of Mutes, easily identifiable by the bone trophies hanging from their pauldrons and their habit of dragging their stubbers like chained hounds behind them.

The light of the tunnel’s seeped weakly through the cavern’s fissures as the sappers of the regiment looked proudly at the fruits of their work paying off; they received a couple of complimentary pats on the arms for a job well done and then the order to get back to their posts, that was enough admiration for them to gloat about it for the next hour or so.

The air was thick with dust and the smell of charred meat combined with unclean bodies; most Cardreans didn't had a proper bath since they had entered the surface of Rattler's Edge. Tanks rumbled forward, the tracks grinding against cracked concrete. Engineers and sappers moved swiftly, planting charges and readying breaching tools whenever the vehicles were having trouble advancing; foot soldiers swung their melts guns, lassguns and bolters to their backs or hips, letting them dangle there as they dragged their makeshift tents or bedrolls and bickered with one another in hushed tones.

The passage ahead was wide enough for two Chimera tanks to roll side-by-side, but the Cardrean infantry trudged through it on foot, keeping their formations tight. The tanks had stopped earlier, unable to proceed past a collapsed rail arch, the Sister-Commander Elira had spent two minutes cursing her team and the entire tank division for not having forseen this event and equipping their machines with more resistant tracks. Now it was just boots until the breach.

Their vox crackled now and then, brief confirmations, check-ins from other squads, the low bark of Gallius’s second in command giving pacing orders and map coordinates. No signs of resistance. No sudden bursts of gunfire. Just this dead, drawn breath before violence.

“All squads, stand down. Orders from command itself. The colony has opened it's gates. No hostile resistance. I repeat: the colony is permitting entrance. March order confirmed. Weapons on safety, eyes forward.”

Credeck had started humming.

Low, tuneless. Just a hum under his breath as he stepped over broken tubing and shattered slates. Jorkh didn’t tell him to stop. None of them did. It filled the air, even if only a little, it made the walk slightly less lifeless, a glimpse of brotherhood in that rocky silent soon-to-be grave. It was still on Credeck’s lips when the vox crackled.

For a moment, no one reacted. The squad froze mid-step.

“What?” Mara lowered her weapon slightly.

The vox repeated the message with the same clipped authority, and then another voice came on, Gallius's.

"Listen up, I don't know why in the fucking hell have they done that, but I'm not willing to risk having a perfect chance to spring a trap on these bastards. If any, any, of you open fire or even lifts the gun at anyone and they get nervous I am going to personally let them have y'all while I laugh from the sidelines"

Jorkh let out a dry exhale, part laughter, part disbelief. “What in the Throne’s name is this?”

"Well, you heard 'im" Credeck said, patting the arm of his squamate "Gallius wants to start the bloodbath from the inside"

Every twenty meters, a civilian dressed in ceremonial garb threw themselves to their knees as the Cardreans passed, scaring the life out of the gloomy soldiers, pressing lips to the ground, crying out praises:

Down through the reinforced gates, past the outer guard posts now adorned with colorful Imperial insignia and propaganda. The wide tunnel was lit by newly-reactivated glowstrips, casting sterile light across the soot-darkened armor of the Cardreans making it seem like they were walking into a party and, in some ways, they were doing just that.

At the sight of the first detachment entering the colony, a crowd lined up in both sides of the procession exploded in cheers and blessings to the Emperor's Astra Militarum forces, confetti rained down from above and servo-cherubs clumsily re-decorated floated overhead, trailing incense smoke that was thick enough to sting the eyes. A choir of schola children, positioned on scaffold balconies, began singing Gloria Imperator in a shrill, trembling harmony that sounded too harmonious to be actually believable.

The children’s white robes were too large, their boots too big for them as they had been most likely hastily placed on them and not the original owners to be seen as cute and pure, most looked too terrified to sing in key.

“Praise the Emperor!”

“Glory to His justice! Glory to His soldiers!”

“We are faithful, oh Most Holy Commissar!”

Some bore bloodied foreheads, having already performed self-flagellation before the arrival. Up ahead, in the most luxurious clothes they could find, the principal nobles and delegates of the Administratum were extending their hands towards Gallius and bowing on his presence.

He did not take their hands.

The man walked past them as if they were stones in the road, his gaze fixed ahead on the building of the Administratum, the nobles trailed the commissar who only muttered, making the marshals and representatives nod and accompany Gallius to his destination, likely to have a "talk" between them all.

Behind them, the ranks of Cardreans filled the plaza like a tide of misfits and prisoners that shun through the crowd surrounding them, mud-stained, their eyes blank, too weaponized for any peaceful welcome. The nobles, despite their theatrical gestures, visibly quivered as they looked back at the regiment as if the sight alone might bring judgment crashing down upon them.

Orsai and Marshal Vorund flanked Gallius now, falling into step beside him as they crossed the threshold. The double doors closed with a low clang, sealing their audience from the sunless sky and every other living being outside, Cardrean or not.

Felbrin bit his lip, scanning the silent marble slabs of the Administratum building. “They look relieved,” he said softly. “Like they might actually survive this.”

Mara watched it all from the plaza’s edge, breathing shallow. She felt Felbrin’s shoulder brush against hers, the man was going to have his knuckles white if he kept holding on to his weapon as tightly as he was doing it right now.

Credeck stood a few paces back, separated from the squad because of the crowd, humming again, the tune distorted by static over his vox-link. Jorkh leaned forward, as if he could see into the gilded foyer where Gallius had disappeared with the "retinue" of nobles from the colony.

“Relief’s a poor comfort,” Mara replied. She forced herself to stand tall, shoulders squared. 

For half a second, there was silence.

A sudden scream accompanied by the sound of glass shattering interrupted the conversation of Mara's squad and every other action going on at that moment in the plaza.

Marshal Vorund’s body hit the marble square. It struck with a sickening crunch, bones snapping on impact, limbs splayed at impossible angles. His rosarius spraying the beads everywhere, then went still. His blood ran bright across the polished white floor.

The choir of schola children froze mid-hymn. One screamed.

“Form up!” Mara barked, snapping her entrenching tool off her shoulder. “On me, now!”

Then the screaming started in full force from every possible angle.

The crowd surged and scattered. Nobles tripped over their own robes. Servo-cherubs spun in panicked loops, spraying incense like smoke grenades. A nearby statue toppled as civilians stampeded over its base, the guards posted as a show of force raised their weapons in confusion before being gunned down by Cardreans; the vox became a chaos of orders and shouts, everyone quickly lunged at the nearest cover they could find as the firefight began in the crowded plaza of Hydrora.

Jorkh was already moving, dragging two sappers back into a defensive wedge. Credeck shoved aside a robed scribe who clutched at him for protection, making the man fall and be hit by a stray round a couple of seconds later, rifle up, scanning windows and towers. Felbrin’s face had gone white, his fingers trembling as he flicked the safety off.

“What the frak was that?!” He shouted over the madness around him

The plaza twisted into a nightmare, flames licking at toppled banners, stained glass shards crunching under boots and people slipping on blood-slick marble. Shadows darted along the edges of alleyways, somewhere on the top floors of the Administratum the sounds of shouting and gunfire kept getting louder.

Mara’s voice cut through the cacophony, sharp and steady despite the chaos.

“I don't have time to ask someone to explain a war zone to you! Keep your heads down and watch your sectors!”

Jorkh barked out rapid orders, herding her squad like a pack of hunting dogs. “Cover the left flank! Felbrin, watch the rooftops! Credeck, suppress that doorway!”

The communication with other squads from their detachment was proving to be quite difficult over the shouting and the overcrowding of transmission cutting themselves off creating static in the main channels. The squad, much like the entire regiment, knew reinforcements for the PDF would only make things worse.

Felbrin’s lasgun roared, searing a hole through a statue and killing the foe behind it. A reply of las-fire sparked near his ear, forcing him to dive behind a stone column as another volley ripped past his position and almost took his head off.

From the corner of her eye, Mara caught movement, a group of sappers were trapped between civilians and some of the local PDF; she tried to give them some cover fire but the moment her muzzle flashed, the return fire tripled. Rounds sparked off the pillar beside her, one searing a chunk of ferrocrete from the base. She ducked, teeth clenched, cursing the void of it all.

Credeck slammed his back against the broken plinth beside the Sister, mag-locked his bolter for a second, and yanked his helmet off just enough to wipe sweat from his brow with a grease-stained glove. “Vox is half-fried,” he grunted. “Someone’s jamming the signals on top of the already messy comms.”

Jorkh slid in next to them, dragging a bleeding Mute by the collar and giving enough aid to make sure it was still breathing. “North corridor’s compromised. PDF are picking their shots. Looks like they pre-sorted the crowd. Civvies are not going down from their shots.”

Mara narrowed her eyes. “You saying this was planned?”

“I’m saying someone was kinda hoping thing's would go to shit,” Jorkh muttered.

Credeck gave a humorless chuckle as he leaned out just enough to fire a few blind rounds. “And here I thought we were the psychos in this story.”

Mara smirked despite herself. “We still are. They were paranoid, it's different"

Felbrin stuck an ear to the Vox-caster and frowned as he tried to make something out of the noise coming from it. "Harker’s squad two streets over. They’ve barricaded...can't make out the place. Says it’s ‘defensible’ if you squint and lower your standards to hell.”

“Sounds like home,” Credeck muttered, thumbing the next mag in.

They moved fast, dodging through alleyways and trampling over ash and broken porcelain tiles, past shattered stained-glass depictions of saints whose names none of them knew. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of blood, sweat clinging to every pore of their bodies. They reached Harker's barricade, a half-collapsed domed structure, walls pockmarked with lasfire, blood and dismembered limbs. Inside were a dozen other Cardreans, filthy, wounded, pissed off and slightly feeling like home.

“Look at this shithole,” said sergeant Harker, grinning through cracked lips and missing a tooth. “Ain’t been this cozy since Hive Amenti's quarantine bunkers.”

Credeck slid to a halt and grinned at a familiar face. “Didn’t think you'd live long enough to get nostalgic, Hark.”

“Didn’t think you’d live long enough to get your balls to drop, so guess we’re both disappointing miracles,” Harker shot back.

Laughter echoed through the archive in dry, weary bursts.

Jorkh slumped against a column and helped himself to someone else’s water flask. “Still no sign of Gallius?” He asked no one in particular

Heads shook. A few muttered prayers or curses.

“Maybe he’s negotiating,” someone joked.

“Maybe he was negotiating,” another replied slapping whoever made the joke.

Credeck flopped down against a pile of ruined household furniture, letting out a groan. “Y’know, I thought the whole point of being the terrifying prisoners regiment was that other people pissed themselves when we showed up...”

Mara took a knee, finally able to rest her arms, eyes scanning the entry points out of reflex.

Shots shattered the brief calm, sharp and sudden, cutting off a Harker joke in the middle of it and hitting someone in the left eye.

Mara didn’t flinch. She was already moving.

“Front arch! Contact!”

The Cardreans scrambled into place, training lasrifles, autoguns, and anything heavier they hadn’t already used up. The frontline was held, although their numbers were starting to dwindle.

“Someone’s pushing us!” Jorkh barked, dragging a half-buried body out of the way.

PDF units stormed the chokepoint, clearly conscripts of the moment not trained frontline Guard. Their uniforms were crisp, ill-fitting, but a lot of them shooting ahead could at some point hit anyone if they weren't careful enough.

“Suppressing!” Harker roared, unloading a full magazine from his battered bolter, the recoil smashing against his shoulder as brass clinked against the marble.

Mara supported the left flank, Credeck coming in beside her. The shadows behind the PDF flickered like candlelight, more silhouettes piling in a seemingly never-ending stream. Felbrin’s hands were steady now, too deep in the moment to panic. He sighted down his lasgun and nailed a blue-uniformed officer through the throat. The body collapsed backward, knocking over another man behind him.

“Reloading!” someone yelled.

“Don’t care, keep pressure!” Harker shouted. “I want this corridor slick with regrets!”

More fire poured in. Chunks of frescoed wall blew apart behind them. One Cardrean caught a hotshot lasbolt to the side of the neck, crumpling instantly with a grunt. No one had time to check if he was dead.

Mara clicked her vox. Static. Then a sliver of sound came through.

"...UNITS....STALEMATE....SONEN HELL....GALLIUS DOWN....STALEMATE YOU BASTARDS!" Dormath voice came in burst of both panic and command

Credeck flinched as the message came through. “Gallius down?”

“Don't you dare say that,” Mara growled, ducking another las-round as it skimmed the side of her pauldron. “Could be misdirection. Could be Dormath being a lowbright (idiot).”

The corridor ahead was clogged now with smoke and corpses, neither side pushing forward, neither side falling back. The PDF had slowed, hiding behind improvised barricades made from the rubble their own shots had created. The Cardreans had dug in, their weapons hissing and barking in rhythmic synchronized trained bursts.

It was a kill zone. And no one was winning.

“Stalemate confirmed across vox,” Jorkh shouted, one hand pressed to his helmet. “Flanks are dug in, Third Battalion’s got the lookout job.”

“Orders?” Felbrin asked, voice tight with adrenaline.

Mara’s eyes scanned the field again. She hated what she had to suggest.

“Fall back.”

Even Harker paused at that. “You sure?”

“They’re not advancing, and we’re bleeding for ground we’re not keeping,” she said flatly. “Pull out, reset. If Gallius is really down, which I will neverbelieve as a Sister, command’s gonna change. Fast.”

Two sappers lobbed smoke grenades down the kill zone. Only after the fog was thick enough for natural eyesight did the shooting dimmed in intensity.

“Retreat in threes! Cover fire only!” Shem, Harker's second, ordered. “Don't waste your sonen deaths over nothing!”

None wanted to admit it, but in the mind's of every Cardrean, the uncertainty of what had happened to Gallius loomed over their every thought. Like children stripped from their parent, more than the fear of dying, it was the absence of his voice. They were killers, yes. Monsters by most standards. But Gallius had given their violence meaning, wrapped it in kinship and care. Without him, they were prisoners again, broken battered bloody sinning prisoners, the lot of them.

One by one, the Cardreans peeled back through the barricade shattered rear, dragging wounded and weapons with more care than the comrades. Jorkh and Credeck joined the ones laying down a wall of suppressing fire, rounds thudding and sparking across the smoke-blackened area. Felbrin helped carry a limping soldier, blood streaking his fingers but no time to check whose it was.

Between blood and convicts

The rays of the sun didn’t reach the small cubicle of space that seemed already overflowing with only three people inside; there were two buckets in the corner, one with blood and the other with water being constantly pumped and filled from a hose which cord disappeared below a steel door, constant drips from the hose and from the very walls marked an obnoxious rhythm as they echoed in the room. For more or less ten hours that room had seen a constant influx of prisoners come and go, the other two presence in the room only had taken a short replacement at the fifth hour, but the methods transcended their personal identities and, frankly, there wasn’t much distinctions to even recognize there even was a change of personnel.

“Who gave the authorization to descend into the atmosphere of Xanthera?” was the first question prompted to every interrogated Cardrean at the start of their interrogations, voices overlapped with each other, quills wrote the answers with the same dull procedure that one dedicates to a dossier a boss asks of you just when the shift is over. Mechanical hands used that instrument, the sheet was electronical, but whoever noted them liked to have the sound be entirely identical as if it had been written in real paper, for both the anxious reactions it provoked and because it reminded them of their time writing on their original position in the Imperial cog.

“Gallius, who else could've? Use your sonen head” An Axe replied, their molars swollen 

“Oh, let me think this one through, is really hard when you just have one officer in command, hmmm.” Maldrak replied, receiving another shock from the collar in his neck for the tone.

“Wasn’t this whole procedure invalid if there wasn’t a lawyer present? Not telling you blite, meat bag” The Sister frowned at the sight of her fingernails totally ruined by the days she had spent in solitary.

“WE. CAN’T. TALK; STOP. TRYING. TO. MAKE. US. OPEN. MOUTHS.” Jobb moved his scarred hands in a vain attempt to explain the inability of the gang to speak, yet the interrogator's grunt told him the message hadn't been of their liking.

“Did Commissar Gallius detail the reasons for the locals’ heresy?” The quill moved again, noting the responses but not recording the “costs” of receiving said answers from the misfits that were questioned. Some were black, others were white, others were pale with burnt marks from a thousand suns that shun over their skins, few had so many implants it was hard to see even a piece of real flesh in their whole bodies. Their ribs cast sharp, skeletal shadows through their rotting gray stained shirts, their skin had taken on the sickly, translucent tallow of severe malnutrition and the constant damp had settled so deeply into their joints that every slight movement on the iron stool was accompanied by the faint, dry sound of joints painfully obeying to the orders of the minds that forced them to move.

“Completely, we all knew those junts were the lowest scum of cowards; who in the sonen Warp goes to hide when their livelihood is in danger? Would you hide if your planet was about to be invaded? No, right? You would do whatever you could to protect it, that’s what they didn’t do, they allowed the festering fear to grow within them, sonne those cowards…” Sister Elira was still maintaining eye contact with her captors, even when her eyelids were burning for being forcefully opened for a minute straight

“We hid from the Techno-maniacs for five years; I remember when the colonies’ leaders told us to evacuate to the subterranean tunnels…” The Hydrorer swallowed some saliva, their lower lips shivering due to their struggles to choke out the tears

“I am not answering any questions until you bastards tell me where Ushad is, I have been asking that for days and nobody has given me a straight answer!!!” Vesker protected Bojan ears when his wheezing voice became a tearful shout of pain

“Kill the Xenos, purge the mutant, burn the heretic…unless the heretic has any grand titles, eh? That’s why we are here and not being awarded with golden aquilas and all the other pompous crap?” The Axe tapped the stump left by the finger that had fallen off due to infection a day ago against the table impatiently 

The sheer, maddening duration of the cycle had turned the very air inside the small cubicle into a viscous soup of stale sweat and the distinct, vinegar-sharp odor of localized tissue death. The two interrogators sat like twin gargoyles behind their polarized visors, their hands moving as they passed from one question to another and the next one tirelessly and without a moment of break between them; the questions always came with a tool: a hammer, a knife, another water spray of the hose, a drop in temperature or a song stuck in an endless maddening loop; their visors had integrated some heartbeat detectors, pleased to see the rates increasing and struggling to lower after every single stimulus coming from the answers. “Relate the signs of heresy in the population, that amounted to a reasonable conclusion to the purge of all those colonies”

“They had symbols…I don’t know how to describe them, since it wasn’t our sonen job to know how the Archenemy operates,” The nervous bite of the nails, due to Yarish withdrawal, moved as if not faster than the quill registering the answer of the Sister

“THEY SHOT US FIRST. THEY HURT THE SAINT. ‘NOUGH REASON.” The Mute moved her hands, finding it hard to find an equivalent gesture for the new title of Gallius that didn’t look suspicious

“All of my neighbors talked about making sacrifices to appease…them…then I knew we were…doomed and they needed to…to…die-” For the life of the people they got to know in the regiment, the Hydrorer clung to the lie he had come up with on their own, but the memory of their family in a pyre was simply too hard to get out of their mind

With the dull, unyielding persistence of a factory stamp, the primary investigator brought up the final line of the sub-sector Prefectus template, a question designed to pin down the exact line of questioning that would be used for the own interrogation of the Commissar Gallius; the eyes landed on the last page, tired eyes blinked a few times to keep themselves awake, in the background the partner of the investigator was two minutes deep into spitting and probing the sides of a Sister, their tongue licking the face of the woman with underlying intentions. “Why do you call the Commissar of your regiment ‘Saint’?”

—----------------------------------------------------------------

The interrogatory was taken in a spacious room, there was people gathered there from all the regiments in the planet, some Colchan, some Cadian, a few Faeburn with no clue why they were there in the first place and one Asgardian ranger who had been called mostly because she was the closest officer to a Holy Terra officer; they were on the first row of onlookers, some of their closest confidants forming part of the rest of the crowd reunited that day to witness a jury very few of them were actually informed it was happening and, amongst those, the lesser art of that handful of people actually knew the Cardreans or Gallius even existed in the first place. The men in trial was with his back turned to them, slightly hunched in the small seat in which he would hear the accusations against his leadership and those under his command; sometimes the commissar twitched slightly, writhed from some spasms or coughing fits which he repressed with grunts and a few cuss words in the Cardrean language. The time of the month where the tyranid sickness afflicted him had come in the worst possible moment, the porous scarred tissue of the right side of his body showed signs of a thin hue of purple on the exposed veins, carrying the infected blood from his heart to his veins pumping the toxin that provocated those uncomfortable and painful cough, the perpetual grin oozed some blackened blood from its “lips”, coming from the yellowed teeth and falling like drops of sweat or water down his chin and into the cloth despite his best efforts to wipe it before it stained the imperial uniform. The good eye of the man was a wreck, tireless nights showed in the bags under the eye, some dried tears had been frozen mid cheek and were still there, accusative of the mental strain the isolation from his troops had caused him; his right glassy eye was more clouded than before, showing the advance of the blindness that accursed it, now being able to just partially see shadows from it. For all intents and purposes, the man was a far outcry from the usual figure of a commissar, from a polished and distinguished commander who had been serving the Imperium for so much time most of his memories were of war zones.

Not a single one of the five officers sitting in judgment had a speck of Iopran mud on their boots; their faces were smooth, well-fed, and currently twisted into identical masks of profound, bureaucratic disgust as they looked down at the shivering, purple-veined monstrosity before them. Lord General Surtur, sitting at the center of the panel, adjusted the zoom of his bionic eyes with a manicured hand, tracking the slow, rhythmic drip of dark blood falling from Gallius’s burnt cheek onto the pristine tabletop below.

The charges were read with the mind-numbing, neutral thoroughness characteristic of the Departmento Munitorum, a laundry list of capital crimes that treated the events of Xanthera, Rattler’s Edge, Zambach and many others like simple notes on the file without much stay in the particulars of every world since, to much of the crowd discomfort, oral penal trials generally were composed by one hearing that lasted 2 hours at the very least, with the capabilities of extending to five if the lawyers from both sides were experts in their fields and hungry for a win. The charges, as demanded by the warmaster Elard, passed from misappropriation of Imperial assets, passing through unauthorized request for troops, insubordination, misuse of penal assets and last but not least important the unjustified order of declaring Exterminatus on the planet of Xanthera VII. As the legalist reached the subsection detailing the logistics behind the misuse of the penal regiment under Gallius command, the commissar was seized by another violent, unbidden spasm, his emaciated frame jerking so hard against the iron stool that the legs of the chair rattled against the marble of the floor plates; there was a pause, every set of eyes settling on his form waiting for the “showmanship” to finish before resuming, one of the preceding ministers of the court cutting through the silence with the request of “abstaining from making any scene during the process”, with a tone that left no quarter for rebutting the order. Beyond that brief interruption, the following hour proceeded with a detailed use of the legal bylaws from the Segmentum Ultima which were used to find the charges against the commissar which the trial was against. 

Gallius heard it all, the anger swelled in his heart at every single opportunity in which he could discern gaps in the facts of the plaintiff; since there was little of what investigations could discern from the events of Xanthera beyond some audio recordings before and after the events by the ships that dropped the regiment and then later picked them off from the scorched earth of the planet, most of what could be found by the claimant was sheer doctrine of previous jurors who had passed judgment on similar situations, he was glad his scarred side always showed a half smile when he noticed there were no declarations about the interrogations made to his troops (which he was sure happened, knowing the Cardreans and the treatment of them by the Imperium very well) nor of the commander Shem disastrous orders to bombard the positions where the Cardreans were back on Zambach. When it was time to hear the defendant statements, Gallius rose to his feet slowly and achingly, feeling the joints of his only leg popping and the implant obeying the commands of the mind to its best abilities despite the crudeness of the augmetic; he noticed how the eyes of the various magistrates dropped to his wounds, to the scars and the burnt flesh with the veins clearly in view, Gallius never felt so small before that very moment, so scrutinized by eyes which did not cared about his particular case at all, which already passed a moral judgment on him before he had even opened his mouth to make a case for his actions. His gut dropped, a shake took over his hand and the stump of his right side, sweat trickled down his forehead, it was a mirror to his own gaze, to the same ways in which he looked at men and women to order their deaths or reprimand them. The lie of caring, of thinking he was better than the bureaucrats that sent them to war was being spit right back at him, in his very bones, he saw what every single Cardrean had seen in him for so many years, what he had denied them until their fear had passed to be a blind faith to the one man that stopped looking at them like the jury was looking at him now.

And thus, his lips opened thrice, indecisive of what to say, until nothing but confessions started to come out of his tongue, like the confessions of truth and sin a a man says when standing before a god so distant it does not judge but still listens.

“Many thingsss have been said in this place-ck; mossst of them have been true to a point…I ck-commanded the Ck-ck-Cardreans through the fields of Zambach-ck, but there I sssaw and heard how the own ssshells-ck from the Imperium’sss tanksss-ck rained down onto my forcesss, without a ck-onsideration for the death count that rackedsss up exponentially due to that; the reportsss themselves-ck, as the plaintiff can attessst, are sssometimes interrupted by the shoutsss of confusssed commandersss that sssaw how they lost ck-ck-comrades left and right becaussse of events outside of their control,” Gallius exhaled, out of breath already, but with the conviction of continuing his statement, he owed that to the dead, “What insssubordination can there be, when the ordersss are to sssend men to die without purpose? Doesss that not go against the ordersss of those we follow the example of, like the blessed Primarch Sanguinius of the Legio Astartes, or the commands of bravery in the face of danger from such a comrade as Commissar Sebastian Yarrick? I have only upheld the Imperial Truth and the tenetsss taught to me in the Comissariat by my tutors-ck, may the Emperor rest their soulsss, and have followed doing so in every battle and war I have fought-ck lessst my wounds prove this truth.”

The rattling echo of Gallius’s voice had barely dissolved into the high, vaulted arches of the amphitheater before the primary plaintiff, a splendorous woman covered head to toe with the garments of any high level lawyer, gray hair attesting the years of service in that field, stepped forward with her heels clicking against the pavement, raising a hand to get the attentions of the magistrates. One of them, an older woman with the hair styled upwards in the common braid style of the aristocracy of a world long distant from Iopra, nodded as the moment of opposition arguments was passed on to them once again.

"The court is forced to remind the accused that the baseline definitions of 'purpose' and 'utility' within the Astra Militarum are not subject to the emotional interpretations of field officers, let alone those commanding penal dregs," The legalist countered, elegantly elevating her voice pitch to sound more regal than what her usual voice would be, “According to the tactical sub-files of the Zambach campaign, the artillery saturation of the secondary medical trenches was not an event 'outside of control,' as the accused falsely claims, but a deliberate, mathematically sound ordnance expenditure authorized by Commander Shem to prevent the T’au vanguard from consolidating a forward firing step. The 958th Penal Regiment is a regiment which specialization is containing enemy assets, which it did so then as the evidence presented in the case shows, said methods with the deaths are not in discussion as these matters on penal regiments actions were defined by the Supreme Court of Terra in the file SCT-3144.331”

Up on the elevated mahogany bench, the five magistrates leaned to one another murmuring words none of the two parts in trial could hear, that meantime gave a moment between the gazes of the plaintiffs and Gallius; the latter seemed to have aged decades in that short amount of time, hearing how expertly the woman had circumvented his arguments within a single argument. The woman's eyes lasted for a heartbeat on his, then went back to give a quick look at the statements that were written on her documents, mentally following how much of the script she had already covered and with a flick of her fingers passing to the points the claimants haven’t touched yet. Once the deliberation between the juries was done, the preceding magistrate of the court, Surtur, inches forward on his chair towards the microphone, his voice causing a little reverb in the audio as he cleared his throat to speak once again.

“Any arguments against the plaintiff's claims, Mister Heiray?”

“...” Gallius swallowed some of the saliva scurrying down his lipless side, feeling his heartbeat increase as arguments and replies weren’t conjured in his mind as quickly as he needed them now, he was no expert in these fields, “I…-”

“Mister Heiray, any time soon, if you will?” The magistrate rolled his eyes impatiently

“No, your Honor, I do not have anything more to add,” The commissar exhaled, feeling the opportunity slip from his grasp

“If there are no more arguments nor discussions on the matter of this case, the jury will take ten minutes to debate the sentence of this case, all raise until the court summons the parts to hear the sentence.” With a low grunt and sigh, all of the magistrates turned their chairs to one another, expecting the order to be obeyed right away.

For Gallius, those ten minutes became an entire epoch of physical and mental dissolution, an agonizingly slow descent where the metallic ticking of the chronometer on the prosecutor's desk marked the steady drainage of his remaining lifespan; the Tyranid sickness, fully capitalizing on his absolute exhaustion, began to surge through his bone marrow with renewed predatory violence, the thin, translucent skin over his neck seemed to tighten until the bones threatened to burst through the tattered fabric of his gray shirt, while the thick, purple-black veins winding through his burnt right side throbbed so violently they could be seen pulsing beneath the charred scars. He would have brought the inhaler or the pills that mitigated the affliction when it was worse out of the pocket from his coat, but it had been registered and taken away from his belongings as soon as he had been arrested, there was no other choice at that moment but to take it all “like a man” and just tighten his teeth so hard it felt like they were going to break under the pressure he was placing on them. Across the short expanse of the floor-plates, the primary plaintiff was leaning on one of the walls from the building, the composed figure inside of the courtroom gone to a shaky frail old woman searching on her purse for some lighter to ignite the Iho-stick that one of her colleagues had given her; she was muttering and conversing very nervously with the other legalist as nervous as her not making an exception for elder nor young ones alike. It was a team of three, with the woman seeming to be slightly younger than the oldest of them, the third looked of the same age as her anyways. Stripped of the capes and theater of the courtroom, they looked normal…in a strange sort of way, like performers stripping of their uniforms as the play nears its end or musicians releasing the tension from their shoulders after a performance is complete, there wasn’t any sort of malice on their eyes or their words, all of what had been said and stated was just that: statements of legal inquiries, words made by the mask of justice that lawyers and legalist often put on their faces and appearance to not be taken away by the whirling headache of laws and justice alike, knowing outside of those walls they are still living people with their own sense of morality and speech.

Exactly as the tenth minute expired a harsh, low-frequency klaxon chimed twice from the overhead vox-grilles, the vibration rattling the loose teeth in Gallius's swollen gums and snapping the courtroom back into its rigid, theatrical order commanding all to put on their masks again and return to the theater of law. The five high-backed chairs of the magistrates began their slow, automated rotation back to face the people returning to their designated seats to hear the sentence; the collective movement of the court rising to its feet whenever signaled to was a wave of rustling metal against metal and mumbling against mumblings. Inhaling and exhaling with all the time in the world for it, the magistrate Surtur cleared his throat, a little wheeze escaping from the elderly throat of the man, attracting all gazes and expectations back to what his words would dictate, fall and impose on those awaiting there for the end of a long enduring hours.

“Considering: In the acts, declarations, evidence and legislation seen on this military court, under the files from the case SIT-142.2452-3, headed ‘Commissar Gallius Hieray v Imperium of Mankind/Warmaster Elard’, by sentence on the day of our God-Emperor 423.998.M42 have in consideration the following facts of law and effect.” The magistrate commenced the speech uttered so many times by him and those who had come before him on the seats of the legal system of the Imperium of Mankind, without stuttering nor correcting himself on any of the subsections of the sentence once.

In his legal hearing, Sultur would go on to articulate a denunciation that meticulously codified Gallius’s absolute guilt across all counts, validating every point of the prosecution's brief with a total indifference for what consequences this would bring to the affected parties, reciting on what had been agreed to by the majority of the jury in session, all eyes set on him. The Lord General detailed how the tribunal found the accused to have willfully stepped beyond the legal boundaries of his tactical mandate, characterizing his defensive realignments at Zambach and his refusal to sacrifice the 958th Penal Regiment as flagrant acts of insubordination that directly disrupted the strategic calculus of High Command, it ruled too that the survival of penal conscripts held no measurable value when weighed against the sacred operational parameters of the Tactica Imperialis, thereby defining Gallius’s preservation of his troops as a criminal misappropriation of Imperial human assets. Furthermore, the broad stroke of the sentence struck heavily against his unauthorized declaration of Exterminatus on Xanthera VII, although it rescinded some of the responsibility of the heretical practices due to the declarations of the Hydrorers accounts (it did not retell, however, the source of said information) back to the Imperium, for which Gallius would have to be noted in the ledgers with some honorable credit for the work he did for the Imperium, as small as that contribution served him anyways.

The final words, however, sucked all the air out of the room when, with a theatrical bravado common to those who know have the final words that decide the destinies of mortals and fools alike, magistrate Sultur looked straight to the eyes of the Commissar as he declared.

“And that, considering the amount of evidence and charges against him, this court sentence Gallius Hieray to be stripped from his Commissariat rank, be notified and formally destitute from his duties as one, ceeding his obligations as commander of the penal regiment 958th of Cardrea to the personnel available to take on these duties since the moment of this sentence be enacted upon. Sir Galius, for you to have been with these convicts for many years, this court deems rightfully so that now you shall be one of those who only serve to die for the Imperium. Notify and archive it, this jury is now over.”

The world crumbled and died all around Gallius, his leg failing him to the point he unceremoniously sat back down on the chair and placed his hand on his healthy side; he felt decades of his life gone, million of wars bringing out flashes of the dead he had to recount, the names of those who were no longer with him, the eyes of Dormath in that last fateful day when the words reached his ears but not his heart; all of what he had done and sacrificed was stripped away from him in a single moment, for what? For not being up to the tactical stakes of a few men who just saw results? Could they not see the blood swirling up to the point of choking his every breath for the rest of his life? Were rules made in parchments and hollow data pads more valuable than the lives of men and women who had given their all for an Imperium that hated them? What would become of Gallius now? He couldn’t blame anyone if he felt a knife on his throat or a bolt ammo ripping his chest apart whenever the Cardreans heard the news, there was so much he had made them go through promising a way out of their life sentences for everything to be false, a lie like all of those lies they had been fed since they were born thinking there was a way out for men like them. There was no way out, Gallus realized, none at all.

Arms wrapped themselves over his elbows, pulling him up and away from the courtroom, dragging his feet across the floor whenever the guardsmen realized the man couldn’t, or wouldn't, move on his own. They looked at one another, feeling some kind of remorse for the situation Gallius was going through, but orders were orders and those two men were nobodies to question the sentence of a court such as the one they had been present for. He had watched a world burn, turning millions of living breathing souls into atomic dust under the clinical guise of tactical necessity, convincing himself that the butcher's work was holy as long as he wore the Commissariat's eagle, now there was nothing to justify everything, not a single argument to explain why he had steady his hand against a room full of feeble and scared governors of Hydrora or to purge his own ranks from honest to the Emperor men like Jaxen…what would that man say to him now if there was still breath on his corpse? What could be the ways in which his mind would stay still in the cold nights alone in his chambers to suffocate the yearning for justice the dead whispered into his ears?

They dragged him forward, his feet trailing uselessly through the pooling, xenos-tainted black blood that continued to leak from his perpetual, scarred grin. With every heavy step, his crude augmetic leg caught against the stone, Gallius didn't even attempt to find his footing, his body completely paralyzed by the psychological flaying of his demotion, his head hanging limply against his hollow chest as the comfortable, amasec-scented air of the high command sector systematically faded away, replaced once more by the freezing, putrid smell of the penal sub sector he was being sent to; the odor of stale rotten blood and untreated open wounds slipped into his nostrils so badly the three men wheezed and almost vomited.

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The remnants of the Cardreans detained with Gallius shuffled into an uneven line of skeletal shells of their former selves, being informed of their liberation felt bittersweet after so much time in those holding communal cells; there was a brief moment of reunion between those who knew each other, tears running free on their callus cheeks and sunken eyes where there were not enough words to express the relief and torment all of them had suffered, Sisters hugged one another, Mutes touched all over each others bodies to convince themselves they were real and not product of hallucinations, Lunatics somberly supported one another and the Axes broke down into each other’s arms with kisses that rained down on their wounds. These were battered, broken things, shunned from the light for so long most of them had recovered the pale skins they originally had back home and adding new burnt marks whenever the sun rays hit their feeble bodies whenever they were being escorted out of those forsaken by the Emperor cells to the sector right outside of the one they were in.

The brief, agonizingly tender oasis of their reunion was violently shattered the exact moment the heavy iron gates of the communal cells slammed shut behind them, the concussive reverberation vibrating through the soles of their bare, calloused feet and instantly reminding them that their "liberation" was merely a lateral transfer within the stomach of the Imperial complex they were in; the tight ventilation of the freezing sector had been replaced by a moderately heated grid of sectors that connected between each other in labyrinthic patterns, which the shock batons from the enforcers made them walk on for Emperor knows how long, they finally were dropped off in the steps of the hangar that would take them from that compound to the frontlines (exactly what frontlines was not clear to any of them. In that journey, the line of convicts was stopped by the arrival of a new prisoner coming from the opposite direction where the assets came from, two guardsmen carried the stranger up to his feet and saluted the enforcers at the front of the line.

“We got one more for ya, direct orders from the guys on the courtroom segmentum” One of the guardsmen pointed to the prisoner

“Fine, leave ‘em here and we’ll take care of it” The voice of the enforcer came out in a bored tone through their helmet

The two guardsmen let go of his elbows with a careless, synchronized shrug, and Gallius collapsed onto the cold hangar steps like a discarded meat bag; from his chest came a small wheezing cough and a few gasps of air before he looked up to the men standing in front of him. The remnants of his regiment took some time to recognize the newcomer due to their clouded, pain ridden minds but when they did there was a collective sigh of relief and breaking formation in unison; whoever was close to the Saint hugged the man for dear life, silent tears rolling off from their faces that told all of what there was to know about the time separated from their leader, the rest peeked and piled up to see Gallius and have a chance to touch their Saint, confirming to themselves they weren’t dreaming. The feeling that rippled through the huddle was profoundly bittersweet; it was the ecstatic, tearful relief of orphans finding a lost father alive in the ruins, entirely poisoned by the immediate, crushing horror of what had been done to him to facilitate that return. They held him with a fierce, protective fragility, their chests pressing against his hollow ribs as if their collective warmth could somehow restart the stalled engine of his will, embracing the man before any questions of what had happened to him or his clothes could reach their lips, it was an oasis for the convicts there, like a weak light on the darkness that shines brightly for all those hopeless to renovate their vigors under the light.

"Saint... what did those offbrights do to you?" Sister Elira whispered, her sibilant Cardrean accent cracking with a raw, bleeding grief that the legalists' torture hadn't been able to wring out of her.

Gallius didn't answer; his good eye remained locked on some distant, internal horror, his lips twitching into a silent, venomous cuss word that never found the breath to become a sound, completely frozen in the psychological aftermath of his bureaucratic execution and his unwillingness to explain, at least for the moment, what had happened to him and what awaited the Cardreans with the new change of command.

—--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

War, as it is its nature, began to stale on the fronts taking human and Xeno alike without letting a position be held by any of the forces in combat more than a few days; for every offensive the Imperials would unleash upon the walls of the big cities from the T’au, those same enemies would reclaim the buildings and pieces of land they had labored on in the past, reinstalling shields, posting sentries of their best combat suits or just mining the zones more or less turning them into no man’s land. All was not so grim for the 958th regiment, however; the battles had slowly but surely carved a little niche between the hearts of commander Mihael and the other officers in control of that sector of the war zone, they had some little liberties here and there whenever they could enjoy a nice break of Yarish between assaults or bury their dead in the ways of the system they came from. Jenira and a few other distinguished elements of the regiment had been recognized as “temporary leaders” of the Death Wishers for the constant “missing in action” outsiders commanders that were assigned to the regiment, whom mysteriously would die shortly after their first deployment or after nasty disagreements with those under their command.

On that theater of war Jenira found himself inspecting in a commander's tent some instructions from Mihael, although conserving a distance from everybody else in the room with a strict policy of not interfering in the plans made on said tents and cottages, having an enforcer always posted right beside him to remind the Cardrean that he was still just one more convict of a regiment that was tolerated for mere convenience than for any affection or prestige earned in the war.

“I’m getting really tired of these frakkiing ambushes…” A Cadian sergeant voiced what everyone in the room was thinking

“The feeling is mutual Arvans, I’m running out of known field tactics for this one; not even those plans from Holy Terra in the last dozen of millennium are helping.” Mihael passed a tired hand through his face in a vain attempt to decompress the tension 

In the far, unlit corner of the command tent, entirely separate from the huddle of decorated officers, Jenira stood in silence, fidgeting with a rock he had found outside the tent to not die of boredom; right beside him, close enough for Jenira to smell the chemical ozone of a primed weapon, stood an unblinking planetary enforcer whose leather-gloved hand remained locked onto the grip of a heavy shock-maul. The man heard the officers passing through ambushes, to boxed killing zones and infiltrations with sabotage efforts not finding one satisfying result in any of them, marking the flaws of each plan and already thinking of the many ways the Xenos could turn them upside down with counter offensives and the warfare tactics so deadly put to test the days before. In a certain bizarre way, it reminded Jenira of the initiatives and deliberations his old gang used to make in Cardrea whenever blood-bread days approached, finding ways to circumvent streets with more security and Hands roaming there and the many ways a robbery could go wrong if a civilian was armed and ready to defend the arduous pay gathered by the efforts of a month worth of work cycles; those thoughts made the man frown, hating the fact his mind wandered off to so distant memories and not to the ingenuity needed for this situation.

“Can I speak?” He raised a hand, in the corner of his eye seeing the enforcer assigned to him tensing up

“Make it short,” One of the officers in the other corner of the room muttered

“Maybe we should try fear tactics?” With only milliseconds to explain his case, Jenira immediately blurted out the next words, “Like, we are all here thinkin’ like soldiers n all that sonne and they too are thinking like that n’ now everyone is going in circles over-”

“I said make it short!” The order rang out in the tent

“I’m gettin’ there ya offbright grox-loving-...all I’m sayin’ is we are wasting time thinking this through conventional means when we need some outside thinking!”

“What’s your idea for these ‘fear tactics’?” Mihael raised an eyebrow, amused

“Well, my tarn have suicide vest…and nothing beats morale more than attacking the weak point of a city.” Jenira regretted saying that last bit out loud when it was too little too late

“Why are we listening to what this man is saying when he is literally proposing terrorism tactics? Are these barbarians really the best things we have?” A Colchan grumbled, pointing a finger at Jenira

“Hey, that sonne gives results, a’ight? Ask any Hive dweller if you don’t believe me”

“You’re making it worse for yourself, convict.” Mihael gaze bore into Jenira’s

The sergeant Arvans chewed some bits of a corpse starsh that was on the table as treats for the officers as his face turned grim; despite the crudeness and lack of tact the wretch had spoken of a change of tactics, he couldn’t deny that in part, on a twisted way, that tactic could very well work with the enemy since no attempt like that one had been attempted before by the Imperial forces, leaving little room for the Xenos to guess correctly what the Imperium was doing and making an opening for an attack on another front while the retching fools immolated themselves. It was a plan, definitely not one he wanted to figure in the ledgers, but worse things had been done in Cadia before it fell.

“They aren’t entirely wrong sir, I’m afraid.” The eyes on the tent were now turned to him, “We’ve been trying to fight these blue-skins according to the manuals for the Saints know how long, and they are using our own discipline to trap us…I say frakk it, if it don’t work the 958th would die anyways by the vests, right?”

“Right…” Jenira spit between his teeth.

“There ya go, a win for everyone.” Arvans grinned

"This is madness! We are officers of the Astra Militarum, not gang-bosses trading turf in some no-good frakking under-hive!" Another officer in the room screeched, his glare darting from Arvans to Mihael, desperately seeking a return to proper, civilized doctrine. 

The commander finally lifted his hand, thinking for a moment before making a decision. He hated to admit it made sense, all of it from the psychological impact to the reduce in numbers of the Cardreans; he had not been born in Cadia, too young for that, but he had heard all the same how his parents proudly told him when he was achild that the Astra Millitarum used everything in its power to seize the victory over the forces of evil, and here there laid a way to do just like when his homeworld was being torn apart literally and figuratively. The records of the meeting would display that the idea had come from the convict anyways, it was very plausible for everyone in the room to lie and say they were forced by any dishonest way to take the advice and go through with it, this didn’t have to be pinned down to his fault or any of those under his command, everything could be course corrected right into the murderers and thieves hands. So, the commander just nodded his head while looking at Jenira, a tacit permission that had a few huffs and grunts from his officers, but that was a sound and real permission.

Jenira smirked, nodded in turn and left the tent, just in time to see a transport unit approach the docking area of the encampment, lighting a Yarish smoke before going to see what or who had arrived.

—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The crowd of the 958th that gathered around the transport bickered and bet amongst themselves who could possibly be on that ship when the doors started to open and the first figures started to emerge from the metallic belly of the flying vehicle; one by one, people that clearly belonged to the Hives and lands of the Cardrea world were under the unyielding sun of Iopra and smokes of the gas planet, yet their spirits…the very souls that could be seen through the windows of the soul that are the eyes, were somehow wrong, foreign in a way that made the crowd gasp in unison.

There was no light in the eyes of those present, their bodies were skeletal and hunched forward, their hands were twitchy and constantly going to hug their own bodies, Cardreans had a name for those who would come back from wars or disputes too changed to fit back into society, Grivane, but the sight before the L’ale system inhabitants was far worse than even the worst cases of such men and women. There was no physical way to explain it, only a wave of sorrow, of heartbreak, of humanity being stripped to the last drops of it with nothing to replace it filled the minds and hearts of those who had been raised under the same skies as those battered beating human beings. There were some, with their eyes lost in a distant point, who carried the sick and elderly in their arms, one of them weeping as an old man with a white long beard, stripped to his bones, was struggling to be held, a little kid in a bad state of malnutrition was attempting to give small steps beside him; like him there were many such cases, with the one seeming to lead from the front having horrendous burnt scars across his entire right side and an arm missing.

Jenira flicked the ash from his smoke, his eyes narrowing slightly as he noted the grotesque physical failures, the man’s head hung limply against his hollow collarbone; as the enforcers roughly shoved the newcomers into an uneven inspection line, the man’s crude, ungreased augmetic leg caught against a rusted iron tracking rail, screeching against the pavement.

“Help…them-ck with food and whatever you can…” The left side of that man focused on Jenira, extending his hand to touch the other’s arm

“We will, we will, stay still.” Jenira offered a shoulder for the ragged man to lean on, shouting to the frozen crowd, “Are you all lowbrights!?! Come and help these lads, for sonen sake! Yarish, stews, water…now!!!” 

Jenira’s raw, commanding roar cut through the stunned silence of the docking bay like a heavy bolter round, instantly shattering the paralysis that had gripped the onlookers. The frontline Cardreans, driven by the solidarity born from the likeness of the blood coursing through their veins, erupted into frantic motion to assist their broken kin bumping shoulders and pushing aside whoever would not stand aside immediately; rusted iron pots filled with grox and goremaws meat were promptly passed from their mess tents towards the hurt and served into whatever containers the newcomers could hold with their own hands, canteens of water and Yarish tea were passed on carefully in tiny cups very carefully with those who did not have any hands to hold the recipients having to begrudgingly accept the help of their compatriots. Soon, others that were not from Cardrea started to help with whatever they could, serving dishes or disinfecting wounds and proportionating a shoulder for those with broken spirits to cry on; the priests of Virex show here their expertise at providing ecclesiastical respite with their prayers and stories to rejuvenate what little hope there was left in those hearts. The disembark site spiraled into a communal gathering, which turned into a little celebration hub for everyone involved once the psychological and physical injuries were healed, past sorrows drowned in Yarish tea’s and friendships or stories exchanged amidst the fires of the stews and foods from a childhood stripped by the war that allowed itself to be kindled by those who shared the same experiences.

Through the sea of reunited souls, Vesker moved from group to group of Cardreans searching without rest; wrapped tightly in his chest under the clothing rags was little Bojan, whose tufted head peeked out against the cold atmosphere, his small fist clutching instinctively at the loose fabric of Vesker's shirt. The wide, blood shot eyes from days on end without sleep were locked in a frantic, unblinking scan of every elder person he could distinguish in the crowds of people, none seeming to be the old man he was looking for, none having the kind smile, warm eyes with bags under them, the abundant beard that adorned the cheeks of his face whenever he was three hours deep into an operation…yet Vesker’s agonizing crusade through the crowd proved utterly inconclusive, none seemed to know where he was or even seeing the old medicare after they had been split up on the initial round up, like if that hellish place swallowed Ushar up and hadn’t spit him back out at all.

At the front of the line, Jenira strained under the sudden, dead weight of the heavily scarred newcomer, his shoulder digging into the man's uninjured left flank to keep him from collapsing face-first into the grease-slicked mud; Jenira knew people in the past that were horrifically scarred, Warp itself his own mother was the brightest example of that, but none looked so…messed up and wrong as the man Jenira had in front of him. 

"Hey! Which one of ya knows this bloke?" Jenira called out to the huddle of newcomers who were guarding the scarred man with such protective ferocity, his voice carrying over the din of clattering tin cups. "Who is this one? He looks truly, royally sonen up to just get that kind of marks from encounters with Hands of the Concord…”

"He dropped from no hive, man," A psyker, stepped into the flickering amber light of the docking bay, his tattered robes smelling weird, the aura of the Warp feeling the space in which he walked on, “It’s Gallius…that Gallius.”

The name hit the encampment like a localized orbital strike, the words instantly freezing the breath in Jenira’s throat as he stared down at the ruined, toothy grin of the half-blind creature leaning heavily against his own shoulder, utterly paralyzed by the realization the protagonist of so many urban legends back on Cardrea, whose features had been formed and arranged in a thousand different ways by a thousand different tales was right in front of his very eyes was real, and it was right there.

“Wasn’t he…you know, a Commissar?” He voiced the question in everybody’s mouth

“He was…” Maldrak looked down at the Saint, prompting the man to speak for himself

The battered figure of Gallius looked up with his good eye, the left side blankly staring at the psyker, “I…I failed you all Mal…by the Emperor I should be dead, Dormath what have I-”

“Jenira, wasn’t it?,” Maldrak interrupted, looking back at the man that had brought the Saint, feeling some curious eyes watching the exchange, “Will you give us a few minutes alone, please?”

With a silent, heavy nod, Jenira hushed the few onlookers that formed around the three men as soon as they heard who that old man was, pushing them back to where the other regiment convicts were, soon leaving nobody to hear nor to be looking at the psyker and the disgraced commissar. As they retreated, the hardened cutthroats began whispering among themselves with a bizarre, star-struck intensity that completely flipped their terrifying reputations on their heads.

“Frakk me sideways, that’s actually him,” an Axe whispered, his calloused hand trembling as he wiped trench-grease from his blade. “I sonen knew he was still commanding the regiment by the time I got tossed into the transport units, but holy sonen Warp dude…”

“Are you sure it’s him? I don’t know, he’s way too old ain’t it? I worked once with one of your uh…Sisters and she would never shut the sonen up about commissar Gallius being so damn beautiful.” A smuggler countered, spitting some roasted grox, “For all we know, that spark-head could be lying to scam us and eat our brains or something.”

“He has been the only guy I’ve seen in my entire life that has gotten a free kiss from Sisters and handled with care by a Mute, I am going to assume he’s truly Gallius, yes.” The Axe bit back, rolling his eyes, “And since when do you believe what Sisters say about literally anything that isn’t war? They eat babies! Gallius is a sonen commissar…or well was one, of course the man will have scars, it’s the whole point of surviving a war!”

“Oh yeah? Then where are your scars?”

“Go to the sonen Warp, offbright!” The Axe huffed, hating the mocking laughter the Karthion smuggler made

—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Once they were alone, Maldrak gaze bore into the eye of Gallius, hearing his incoherent mumbles behind the hand that was covering the healthy side of his face; he was a weeping mess, finally letting out everything he had inside on a wail of incoherent phrases both deprecating his past actions and talking to Dormath and his late wife like if they were standing there beside Maldrak. The psyker waited for some time, enough for Gallius to stop himself from crying, then lifted him up by his clothes and forced the man to back up a few steps.

“Stop crying like a Warp forsaken emberhound puppy…stop it” He hissed, looking around in annoyance and wishing he would’ve brought with him some Yarish smoke, “I didn’t survive six years in a sonen meat grinder and many more before that one to be wiping your sorry-ass tears, come on now!”

“You don’t underssstand…the trial-ck…I burnt-ck that whole frakking planet for nothing, I made-ck you all ck-go through hell for nothing! Dormath-ck…I did thisss to-” Gallius croaked, his left hand blindly clutching at the tattered fabric of his gray shirt where his silver eagle used to rest

“Oh so that’s what this is all about? They stripped you of a fancy coat and a plaque and you turn all offbright preachy on me?!?” Maldrak spits the words out

“No! But it’ssss not ck-right!!! The regiment trusssted in me, trusssted I was doing what-ck wasss right!” Gallius barked back, his hand now going to the little hair he had

“You think you’re the first bastard to find out he was wrong and sent Cardrean to die?!? Look around you, o’ mighty Saint! Every single man and woman out there has been living in the dirt since the day they were thrown out of their mothers wombs. We know the Imperium doesn’t give two hailcrawler’s ass about us, even our own gangs send us to die for a miserable little patch of a Hive!” Maldrak snarled, a low, blue spark of warp-flame dancing across his knuckles.

“Yesss….yesss but-b-but I alwaysss tried-ck to be the one ck-commanding the regiment becaussse they would be worssse than me!!! It was my resssponsability, my duty asss your-ck Ck-ck-commissar!! Now they’re going to treat all-ck of you even worssse becaussse I am not leading you, not ssshielding you from…from them!” The Saint wailed his hand around, pointing to the enforcers posted nearby

“Oh for all the love of the Saints…you still, after all of this time, don’t get it, don’t you? Your sonen junt head is so frakked by the duty and honor, duty and honor, duty and sonen honor than there is nothing else that will enter that stupid head of yours?!?! WE KNOW THAT! WE HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN YOU WERE AN EXCEPTION! And trust me, there were times when many of us wanted to stab a velk in your back, but we knew better!” Maldrak made a humourless laugh, shaking his head, “The whole Saint business, the charges, the swears of loyalty to you, the rumors we would spread back home….frakking everything was done knowing you were different, you were unique in the sense you see us, you took the time to know us”

“And look-ck what that did to you all-ck!” 

“Yes, it made us get here!!! It made the sick resist one day more because our commissar needed us! It made me live one more day because I wasn’t going to be weak when who I looked up to did not ever gave up! You could have blow your brains out whenever you looked at yourself in the mirror after you got those wounds, but did you do that? No! That sent a message to every one of us who survived that blitte hole of Xanthera!” The psyker continued, his grip tightening on Gallius’s shoulder until it started to leave a mark in it, “So shut your sonen mouth, stand up straight like the man I know you are and come join the rest of us. If you’re going to die, you’re going to do it on your feet wearing our colors, like a proper Cardrean Death Wisher. Do you understand me!?!”

For the first time since the gavel had fallen in the high tribunal, the frantic, looping static in his mind went dead silent; slowly, agonizingly, the left side of his mouth twitched, his good eye focusing on Maldrak’s face with a spark of the ancient, terrifying iron that had once commanded the long gone and dead. With a wet, sibilant cough, he cleared the black blood from his throat, his hand dropping from his head to find a grip on Maldrak shoulders…he blinked a few times before offering a lopsided smile.

“Thanksss…I…needed that-ck.”

“Eh, I’m always here to give ya a reality check, only fair after you spared my spark-head life on that mission.”

“Yeah…you could’ve-ck made your point-ck with more ck-kind wordsss, though” Gallius giggled lightly.

“Come on Saint, a Cardrean would sonen never do that.” Maldrak joined him, putting his hands on his pockets and turning around to get back to the group

Gallius sighed, shaking his head lightly as he followed after Maldrak as best as he could. As the two men approached the impromptu gathering of the regiment, the Cardreans instinctively parted for them, the star-struck whispers of the killers died away into a heavy, respectful silence as they looked past the psyker and fixed their eyes on the Saint, who looked with renewed strengths from the “talk” he had with the light-ulb who came before him. Jenira stood at the center of the clearing, the dying ember of his Yarish smoke casting a faint, orange glow across his pale, hive-bleached features; he flicked the stick in his mouth to the side and strolled out to meet both men halfway into the reunion, every head turned to get a better look at what may happen next. 

“I believe it's time to pass on the mission to your shoulders, Saint; I am but a nobody to tell you what to do.” The man offered a smile, passing a filthy rag with crude drawings to Gallius

“You-ck would be right-ck…” His reply got a few laughs out of the crowd, “But with all due ressspect-ck to the leaderssship you had until now, I will not be usssing this-ck.”

“By the Emperor’s frakking balls, good to have snapped you back to your old self” Maldrak muttered, receiving a scolding gaze from Gallius

Under the warm embers from the fireplaces of the stews, under the smell of Yarish and meat sizzling on the plates of convicts, preachers, workers and smugglers alike a plan began to unfold; each and every one was to play a role in the charge against the positions of the Xenos tomorrow, each men and women was instructed for that night only to let their passions, be it sing or crafts or preaching or love, to run free and untamed upon the night gas skies of Iopra, let the Imperials hear and witness all to draw their own conclusions. But, there was one simple instruction which did not bend for as much as Jenira or any other commander from the other worlds from L’alen could object to, not even other Cardreans deterred and made the Saint reevaluate the commands that came from his lips: The suicide bombs would only be strapped into the chests and backs of those that had taken part in Xanthera VII purge, however their mental state or physical complexion may be; for damned they were and from their won deaths they had delayed the hour, but they couldn’t outrun what plagued their nightmares and their emotions since then. Hydrorers, the few that were still there amongst the Cardreans and that voiced their willingness to go, received a stern look from their brethren.

“Onck-ce, I told the ranksss I formed from you that there would be no-ck ck-comfort here for you…I wasss wrong-ck; thisss hasss beck-come your family,” The Saint saw the faces of the same people he had thought nothing of back in the underground colonies of Xanthera, seeing the error of his ways, “And I…am sssorry for tack-king that family away from you for a ssseck-cond time, none of you dessserved thisss nor dessserved what happened back-ck in your planet. But look-ck around you, sssee the facesss of those who’ve-ck learned to ressspect or even love you all…and treasure them, beck-cause they are willing now to pay for what they did to you.”

Gallius paused, letting the tarns say their final goodbyes to one another and exchanging their personal belongings now before tomorrow the explosion perhaps erased everything on them, there were some kisses, some professions of admiration and love; Vesker looked around and was hugged too, yet his choked up words only were of a man still searching for his father figure. There were some exchanged looks between those who had known the connection between him and Ushad, not having enough guts to reveal to the Hydrorer that, in reality, the old man had died in those same cells they were imprisoned for days on end, always worried about his “protégé” and wishing, with all the little strengths he had in his body still, for Vesker to not have his heart hardened by his loss, wanting nothing more but to preserve the smile on Vesker face; if that meant being a missing person in Vesker mind forever, the old man was willing to accept that fate.

“Be ssstrong and resssilient, for you are sssonsss and daughtersss of Ck-Cardrea sssince thisss day forth,” Gallius gave a small smile to those present, swallowing the lump on his throat.

With that, he dismissed them all; returning and/or making space for themselves in the ragged tents of the regiment, that night the Cardrean 958th section of the Imperial encampment did not bicker amongst each other, no fight broke out and there was no need for enforcers to stroll through their tents on the night shift; instead there was music, there was stories, there was kinship and laughter and love, the undesirables joyous gestures shrouded the laughter and noises of the rest of regiments posted on their sections of the camp. Night came with drinks, with shared Yarish and looks of love before the imminent looming death of tomorrow. The Loomer, once casted aside by the society for not being an equal, slept peacefully that day, his naked body wrapped around a young Lethyra man, Vesker finally slept without having to worry about Bojan lulled to sleep by the child’s laughter as it was snuggled and tickled by a Morvane scholar, Maldrak stood up until late that night, mingling with Karthion smugglers and taking special pleasure in scaring Sister commander Elira with his pyromancies. Happiness, as bittersweet as it felt, reigned in the hearts of everyone present, Gallius too included in the celebrations, smothered by known faces and new acquaintances; to conclude the celebrations, many formed around a big fire, bottles of amasec or Lethyra wine on their hands, singing in unison a song which lays transcripted here, yet the rhythm fails to be translated into written words.

I walked between blindness and sinIn Hives which will not know my nameSurrounded by others like me I wentTo kill and die for my crimes

Bells will not ring for my painMy chest burns where my sin bloomsAll I could hope to do in the valley of deathWas looking up at the skies and weepFor my lips knew what to say

And her silver kiss wounded meLike a dagger spoke to my soulAmidst prayers of fire and bloodHer love was my eternal curse

I walked between blood and warIn battlefields which will bury meSurrounded by mud and fearTo die and redeem my crimes

And her silver kiss remainedIts echoes upon my dried lipsIf there is no coming back homeLet her memory be my home!

The corner of the dining hall in the ship where Curiah was in had the worst kind of ventilation ever, she thought as her hands shivered with the cards on her hand, it seemed every last bit of heat the engines could expel on the shafts all around the hall were placed everywhere but the table where she had been playing Imperial Tarot with the others of her tarn.

“Sonen hell…” She muttered

“What? You’re down?” Arael mused

“Hah hah, I’m not being a yeller (snitch in Cardrean) on my own hand, come on now!” The woman replied, full of sarcasm.

Arael snorted, a plume of grey smoke escaping his nostrils as he took a long drag from a crumpled, poorly rolled yarish cigarette, the man leaned forward as the light of the hall cast long, skeletal shadows across his face; the pale skin was filled with the red spots of sunburn, of tattoos of a hand being crossed by a knife, of the logo of the High Axes and all other sorts of tapestries that told a story of their own. He was old by the standards of the few hundred survivors from Xanthera, each scar and mark a bloody receipt of a life stretched too thin by sheer luck.

“Stop fidgeting with the sonen cards then…” Arael muttered, his voice a gravelly rumble that barely carried over the oppressive, bone-rattling thrumming of the voidship’s ancient engines.

Perhaps to finish the game soon, or just because Curiah was getting on his nerves, the Axe threw his “Shattered Galaxy” into the scarred plasteel table, clinking against the cold metal with its edges that had been worn down by the calloused, grease-stained fingers of a dozen different doomed men before him. The dining hall around them was less a place of sustenance and more a cavernous iron tomb. The air was a stagnant slurry of recycled oxygen, tasting heavily of machine-grease, stale sweat, and the bitter, herbal reek of Yarish smoke drifting from the darker corners of the room. The rest of their tarn huddled close, wrapped tightly in their grey cloaks to keep the void-chill from seizing their joints, they were there not only to give each other all the body heat they could have, it was too a way to keep all of their members actually alive if someone was stupid enough to start a fight right in the middle of dinner time.

Curiah narrowed her eyes, her knuckles whitening as she adjusted the remaining cards in her hand. Beneath her frayed sleeve, the faint, black silhouette of a handprints tattoo, the mark of first blood drawn back in the lower hives, seemed to shift under the unstable light. She was certainly having trouble counting numbers, having only learned to do that a few days prior with the help of a Hydrorer of another tarn, and was using all of her brain power to remember what the symbols on the cards represented. She didn’t want to admit it, of course, so she pretended to be purposely going slow to stir drama.

A third trooper at the table, a gaunt soldier named Ferrios whose face was a mask of grim exhaustion, spat onto the iron grating beneath their boots. "He’s going to snap at you Curi…don’t say I didn’t warn ya…”

Curiah grinned, a sharp, humorless flash of teeth. With a sudden, dramatic flick of her wrist, she slammed her cards down onto the table. The parchment slapped the plasteel with a sharp crack that silenced the murmurs of the onlookers of the game. Resting on top was the Harvester, its grim, scythe-bearing figure staring back at them with cold, printed indifference.

"Read 'em and weep, you junts!," she gloated, leaning back into her grey cloak.

Arael huffed, slamming the table until it left a dent in it from his fists, the rest of the tarn jumping on him so the man wouldn’t lunge at Curiah in a fit of rage; she certainly wasn’t helping the situation at all, gloating by giving the Axe both middle fingers and sticking her tongue out, it made the other man so mad he was about to spit foam from the mouth while the veins on his neck started to be as visible as day. Ferrios let out a long, deeply suffering sigh that seemed to come from the very soles of his boots. He reached out with a hand, picked up the Harvester card, and then turned over the rest of Curiah’s face-down hand, squinting at the worn ink under the flickering amber lumen. He stared at the cards for three long seconds. Then, he rubbed the bridge of his nose, where a faint purple scar from a fragment of shrapnel twitched.

“Curi,” Ferrios said, his voice flat, devoid of all hope.

“What?” she snapped, not breaking her staring contest with the straining Arael. “It’s a perfect run. I crushed him.”

“Curi, the Harvester is a nine,” Ferrios muttered, pointing a grime-caked fingernail at the Gothic numeral. “You paired it with a three of Chalices, a upside-down Fiend, and..there’s so much shit in this one I can’t even make out the figure…”

Ferrios raised his voice, lifting the card up in the air as he yelled for everyone in the room to hear the “Does anyone know what the sonen Warp did this card was!?!?”, nobody answered…or at the very least, answered the question, most other groups just giving Ferrios the middle finger or threw insults at him, at most he received clearly sarcastic mocking answers, before giving up and returning to the discussion at hand.

“...What?” Arael rumbled, his anger momentarily derailed by profound confusion.

“She didn't win,” Ferrios explained to the entire table, tossing the cards back down onto the dented metal. “She can’t count. The Hydrorer she’s been sneaking off to see has only gotten her up to five, and I think he spent most of that time trying to teach her which end of a spoon to use.”

The table for a moment stayed silent, then one of the troopers holding Arael’s shoulder named Harl let out a bark of laughter that sounded like a backfiring chimera engine; that broke the dam, the other tarn member dissolved into rowdy, mocking gaffs, slapping Arael on the back so hard the old veteran stumbled forward.

“She bluffed you with a nine and a shit stain!” Harl roared, wiping a tear from his grease-smudged eye. “By the Throne, Arael! The fiercest killer here got terrified by a girl who can’t even count!”

“Hey! A nine looks exactly like an inverted six! Anybody could’ve mistaken it!” Curiah’s smug grin faltered, her cheeks flushing a sharp pink beneath her handprint tattoo. 

“That’s groxshit and you know it!” Arael growled, though the murderous fury in his eyes was rapidly being replaced by the deep, begrudging amusement. He shook himself free from the tarn’s grip, straightening his frayed grey cloak with an exaggerated, dignified huff. 

“I knew she was full of it,” Ferrios muttered, reaching into his cloak and pulling out a heavily dented, silver-plated flask. He unscrewed the cap, the sharp, blindingly medicinal reek of cheap, low-deck synthetic amasec instantly cutting through the heavy Yarish smoke. He took a short swig before passing it to Arael. “Here. Drink before you actually do have a seizure. The Medicae boys won't waste the bio-gel on you.”

Arael snatched the flask, taking a massive gulp, wincing as the fiery liquid hit the back of his throat. He set it down with a heavy thud, his eyes narrowing back onto Curiah, who was now sullenly trying to stack the cards into a neat pile, completely failing to do so.

“So,” Arael rumbled, a slow, wicked smirk finally breaking through his sunburned features. “A Hydrorer, huh? Which one of those junts is trying to put ideas in your head? Is it Vesker? That soft-handed baby lover prick?”

“Shut up, Arael,” Curiah mumbled, her fierce hive-bravado completely deflated as she shoved the cards toward Ferrios once her stack pile failed again. “He’s got nice handwriting. Better than yours. You sign your pay-tithes with an ‘X’ and a thumbprint.”

“At least Arael knows that three Concord credits can buy three bowls of starch. You’d probably give the merchant a high-five and call it even.” Harl chimed in, smirking while discretely leaning over the table so nobody would notice the stray hand going to steal a yarish stick from Arael’s stash.

The table erupted into another round of rough, overlapping laughter, the bitter void-chill of the transport ship completely forgotten for a brief, fleeting moment.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The canvas was struck again by the brush of the woman, creating a soft line of blue paint running down the figure in the canvas; she exhaled, appreciating where should she make the next stroke and mentally choosing the right color for it, a stark, unforgiving silver to capture the cruel luminescence of Varganus as it swelled toward its apex in the choked Cardrean sky.

Here in the vaulted, damp solitude of her inner sanctum, the omnipresent, bone-deep grinding of the lower hive-mills was reduced to a rhythmic, subterranean heartbeat. She was a Hand of the Concord, an arbiter of the delicate, bloody truce that kept the four great gangs of Cardrea from tearing the world apart, and her routine demanded an absolute stillness in everything she did, including the very arts itself in which she indulged her idle mind. She wore no weapons, her heavy, monochrome robes and the silver-inlaid sigil of the Concord at her throat were armor enough. In a world where a blade was drawn for a misspoken word, her lack of steel was the ultimate testament to her terrifying authority. No one touched a Hand, to strike one was to invite the wrath of every judge and executioner on the planet.

She dipped her brush into a vial of thick, mineral-heavy indigo. On the easel before her, one of the two celestial tyrants of Cardrea was taking shape: the moon of Varganus. Through the narrow iron-ribbed armaglass window of her quarters, the real moon was ascending, cutting a sharp, lethal path through the toxic, amber-tinted sulfur smog of the atmosphere. Varganus was a terrifying, beautiful specter in the Cardrean sky, a massive orb of bruised, frozen marble and deep, oceanic sapphires.  Unlike its violent, erratic sibling red moon Helliphax, Varganus was a clockwork executioner. Its surface was scarred by the Gavel’s Edge; a colossal, crystalline trench that split the moon’s northern hemisphere like a jagged, glowing silver wound, reflecting the distant star-fire in a sharp, unblinking glare. The pure whiteness of the star was truly heartmoving, and it would have stirred some emotion into her heart if it wasn’t for the hardened training that had taken every last bit of emotion away from the woman’s organ.

As it neared its full phase, Varganus swelled in the heavens, casting an oppressive, cold cobalt luminescence over the iron spires and soot-choked hab-blocks below. To the common laborer, it was a reminder of unyielding quotas; to the gangs, it was the Eye of Judgment. When Varganus waxed full, the time for treaties and stalemates ended; the juries would convene, the fighting pits would overflow, and sentences of precision elimination would be carried out across every hive. It was a holy, terrible season of legal murder, and she would soon be called to oversee the blood-letting…and relish on the moon’s eye upon her which would ratify her devotion to the cause.

From the desk behind her, there was a soft, faint click, then something whirred to life.

It was her vox relay, brass encased, screeching with static that would bring forth some message for her ears. A low-grade scrap-code signal pulsed through the unit, causing the green logic-runes on its face to flicker violently.

“Hand… [static]… Concordance Sector Seven-Theta… dispute between High Axe enforcers and the Arbites forces…[heavy vox-cough]…blood has been drawn outside the designated boundaries…request immediate arbitration before the midnight cycle…”

The mechanical voice droned on, frantic and laced with the background rattle of distant autogun fire. The woman did not flinch, her hand remained perfectly steady as she brought the brush back to the canvas, dragging a razor-thin highlight of titanium white along the painted rim of the Gavel's Edge. She let the vox continue its droning until the message stopped repeating itself; this was not worth some instant action, nor it was a situation that commanded her to be swift; she was precise, she had time, the Concord would never run out of time for these kinds of judgments, “Let the savages bleed out,” she thought to herself, “It is best for them to cull themselves than waste Concord efforts in doing so”.

She stood back for a brief moment, her dark eyes evaluating the cold blue depth of her painted moon. Satisfied, she carefully swirled the brush in a jar of chemical solvent, watching the blue pigment dissolve into smoky tendrils. She capped the glass vial of indigo, wiped her stained fingers on a coarse linen rag, and placed the wooden palette onto the iron table with a dull, echoing click.

Only when her tools were perfectly aligned and her ritual of preparation was complete did she turn her back on the canvas. She walked over to the buzzing vox-relay, her heavy robes seemed to float over the pristine cleaned floor, and pressed her thumb against the rusted activation rune to send the message back that the Hand of the Concord would be on its way.

The dispute itself was a gory, gridlocked affair. In the shadow of a gargantuan, soot-belching ventilation heat-sink, a squad of Adeptus Arbites, clad in heavy black carapace and carrying crackling shock-mauls, stood behind a wall of reinforced suppression shields. Opposite them, entrenched behind overturned cargo-haulers and heavy ore-crates, were the enforcers of the High Axes, their heavy autoguns smoking, their faces hidden behind Astra Militarum helmets that had been painted over with the colors of the Hive, likely smuggled from the frontlines of some war back to Cardrea. The ground between them was a slurry of grey water, oil, and the twitching, mutilated remains of those who had crossed the invisible territorial boundary line established by the Concord three centuries prior. The Hand inhaled slowly, the twitch on her hands and eyes betrayed the woman of the Hives she once were and the hatred towards the Arbites that had been imprinted within her since her early childhood.

Every kid grows up listening to the tale of Infernodum and the atrocities the Arbites perpetrated there. The crowning achievement of Cardrea, the perfect amalgamation between off-brights and locals alike, where the culture of the eras before the four gangs and the Yarish overconsumption arrived; it was as vast as it was tall, beautiful as it was dangerous. All of those centuries and thousands upon millions of families, erased from the face of the planet by the Arbites in an effort of the Imperium to show their dominance over the Cardreans that thought themselves independent from the orders of the rest of Mankind. Years of picturing the deaths, measuring the tally of deads, being described how the mortuary piles those days were so high they could have formed a skyscraper with them and still there would be enough bodies to do another pile; those kinds of stories would always form deep roots in the hearts and minds of any child that hears them and would be cultivated in the years of youth by seeing the Arbites break into celebrations or funerals to impose “the law” within the crowd gathered in those instances. 

Yet the Hand had to be dominant and step above such petty thoughts and sentimentalisms reserved only for the lowlives of the world. Reinvigorating herself with that mental wall, she took the long, white Vox-Lingum (an instrument which broadcasts like a loudspeaker the voice of whoever handles it) and stomped it against the ground between the two sides of the confrontation creating a screeching high pitched white noise that made everyone stop what they were doing and gaze at the newcomer that had arrived. When the agonizing frequency died out, a heavy, suffocating silence fell over Sector Seven-Theta.

The Hand stood perfectly still, a monolithic pillar of monochrome cloth amidst the industrial decay. She did not speak. She did not need to. Her fingers merely slid down the smooth, white casing of the judicial staff, pressing a sequence of brass runes embedded in its grip. The Vox-Lignumhummed, its internal, minor machine-spirit waking with a low, cavernous drone that resonated through the floorplates. When the staff spoke, it did so with a synthesized, multi-tonal roar that sounded less like a human throat and more like the grinding of tectonic plates.

With a voice that carried no heat, no anger and even less so mercy, she cited the ancient tithe-treaties. She measured the encroachment with a single, sweeping glance; the High Axes had moved their defense perimeter six meters too close to the Arbites’ processing vault, the Arbites had retaliated with excessive force inside a gang-regulated labor sector. Her judgment was delivered in less than three minutes. The High Axes were ordered to execute the lieutenant who had authorized the advance, a sentence carried out immediately by his own comrades with a single, brutal blow from a boarding axe to appease her presence. The Arbites were ordered to cede three crates of specialized shotgun ammunition to the gang's armory as blood-compensation for the slain workers.

It was a cold, transactional peace. There was no apology for the dead, no acknowledgement of the ancient grudge of Infernodum that simmered beneath the Hand’s marble facade neither; the Arbitrators, their shields dented and covered in hive-grime, fell back into the shadows of the ventilation shafts with stiff, resentful discipline, across from them the High Axes lowered their smoking autoguns, dragging their wounded back without a single backward glance. Turning on her heel, the Hand walked away from the clearing, her white staff tapping rhythmically against the rusted iron pathing.

Her route back to the spire was a long, solitary trek through the sprawling anatomy of Cardrea’s misery; this was the broad reality of her existence: she was a ghost weaving through a world begging to be put down. As a Hand of the Concord, her daily routine was an endless cycle of pacifying territorial rabble, measuring the blood-spill between rival gangs and ensuring the Imperial tithes never halted, no matter how many bodies piled up in the gutters. She was the thin, unyielding line that kept the four great gangs from consuming the planet whole, operating in a vacuum of absolute isolation; she could have no friends among the syndicates, no allies within the Adeptus and no compatriot at all would jump in to defend her or give their life for her. She passed through the suffocating heat of the foundry levels, where thousands of soot-blackened laborers worked until their lungs failed, and ascended through the mid-hive transit tunnels where the Yarish-dealers and low-level junts ran from her very shadow. Above her, through the massive exhaust shafts that breached the hive’s outer shell, the sapphire majesty of Varganus continued its slow, mechanical ascent, washing the grime of the world in its cruel, blue luminescence.

The monolithic basalt structure of the Concord Tower finally rose before her, cutting through the amber sulfur clouds like an obsidian spear and overshadowing every single building next to it. She marched past the towering, brass-sheathed gates, where the elite enforcers of the council stood at rigid attention, and entered the vast, echoing registry hall; the air here smelled of perfumes, of lavishing flower smells not present in any other region of the planet or even in the planet at all, there was classical music playing on the loudspeakers of the hall as people dressed just like her made their silent strides from one extreme of the hall to the other. The Hand approached the high, copper-rimmed counter of the central logging desk without a word, drawing her cold-iron signet token from the deep folds of her monochrome habit and slotted it into the waiting receptacle of a massive, brass-trimmed calculating machine to formally re-enter the building as one of the Hands. The machine groaned, its gears shifting with a heavy, mechanical wheeze as it stamped her biometric code into the planetary ledger.

"Your tally is received, Hand," a rasping voice issued from behind the counter.

The registry scribe was a withered creature, his lower jaw replaced by a heavily oxidized, clicking vox-grille that leaked grey smoke with every breath. He did not release her token from the slot making a rusted mechanical servo-arm extend from his shoulder and pick it up, pointing toward the grand, iron-ribbed elevator shafts that climbed into the spire's private pinnacles before handing the token back to the Hand.

"The High Hand has countermanded your rest cycle," the scribe droned, the vox-grille clicking erratically. "You are summoned to the Solar Chambers immediately. A matter of anomalous stability requires your summoning."

She bowed her head slowly, and then made quick haste to the elevator, only then did she dropped her act by physically showing the dread of facing the High Hand; she began to sweat, leaning against one of the walls as she felt light all of the sudden, about to faint if she didn’t do something fast to get her mind out of those worries. She remembered the last time she had slept for more than a few minutes, how tired her legs were, how spent her arms were, she felt so sick on the elevator ride for a moment the idea of just leaving the building by a back door and ignore the summon was a plausible thing to do…then reality hit her, the consequences of what could happen to her and anybody she had ever known for doing such a cowardly act; to become a loomed was to disappear, for a Hand to be a loomed it was a fate worse than death or being forgotten. By some divine act of the Emperor, the Hand managed to stabilize herself just in time for when the elevator stopped and its doors were open.

The Solar Chambers sat at the absolute apex of the tower, beneath a colossal, circular rose-window of reinforced armaglass. The room was bathed in the intense, icy indigo light of Varganus, casting long, skeletal shadows across a massive hololith projector that sputtered with unstable green light in the center of the floor; standing before the projector, his back to her, was the High Hand. His ancient, fragile frame was supported by an intricate harness of brass chronometers, heavy velvet robes trimmed with the golden laurels of the Lex Imperialis and tubes connected to vials of a golden-ish tone, directly injected on his chest.

"You return from Seven-Theta successfully," the High Hand rumbled, his voice amplified by the vox-speakers built into his high, ornate collar. He did not turn around, his eyes fixed on the flickering green images floating in the air. "A trait I have always valued in you, the reason as to why you shall be my tool.”

He struck the stone floor with his heavy staff, and the hololith shifted; the grainy, green-tinted visage of a severe, heavily scarred Imperial officer materialized. The man wore the high, intimidating cap of the Commissariat, his face fixed in a grim, unyielding scowl.

"Commissar Gallius," the High Hand murmured, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper that echoed off the basalt walls. "Six years ago, the commissar asked for reinforcements and then was lost from all connection on Xanthera VII…that was until a few cycles ago, when our assets in the ranks of the 958th say he died in combat and yet he stood back up, for as unbelievable as that may be.”

“How was this possible, Hi-”

“SILENCE! YOUR SUPERIOR IS SPEAKING!” The voice echoed with violence across the room, the vox lignum of the High Hand distorting his voice to a roar so potent and low pitch it shook the Hand down to her bones, “They are calling it a rebirth, Hand, they are calling him now a Saint….a SAINT! Gang filth should not fight for a man but for the God-Emperor, they should only be sent to war to have their hopes crushed, the righteous claim of death for their crimes and yet I hear that they have laughter and moments of peace amongst them!”

The High Hand gave slow steps towards the Hand, she felt the rage boiling inside of her as much as it was being displayed in the voice of her superior.

“A Saint in a penal legion is a paradox that could tear the political fabric of this world to shreds. If it is true, it could give the Inquisition enough excuse to not only repeat Infernodum but to do it to the whole planet, if it is a lie it can compromise the whole authority of the Concord by making it so easy for this filth to escape our authority, the one that keeps those savages in line! You are to take a specialized detail and board a transport to the warmaster Elard and present yourself for this scrutiny. Infiltrate the 958th. Look upon this matter with Gallius. Investigate his 'death,' his 'rebirth,' and determine what is the truth.” The High Hand shoved something into the Hand chest, never taking his eyes away from hers, “And if they proclaim him a Saint…kill him, no matter what happens to you afterwards”

The cold weight of the object pressed into the center of her chest, bruising the flesh beneath her heavy monochrome vestments. Her hand flew up instinctively, her fingers wrapping around the metal before it could fall.

It was a long, slender cylinder of blackened silver, freezing to the touch and heavy as a burial stone. Etched into its dark alloy were the micro-runes of the Concord’s Scythe-Key’s, it allowed her to open the doors on the low levels of the Concord’s Tower and access the rooms where the Varganus troops were kept on the months and years before and after the Varganus full moon. The Hand realized then that her “specialized detail” would be the Varganus raised troops. The High Hand did not pull his arm back immediately, his gaze remained a vice, pinning her to the stone floor while the golden-tinged fluids in the vials on his chest bubbled violently, hissed through the tubes, and forced a rhythmic, clicking wheeze from his mechanical lungs. The ticking of a dozen brass chronometers around the Solar Chambers seemed to accelerate, counting down the final hours of the world's time before the full moon hit the streets of the Hives on Cardrea.

"Go," the High Hand rasped, his voice filtered through the grinding gears of his vocal augments. "The shadow is already crawling across the lower sectors. Do not be here when the light fails."

The Hand did not answer. She bowed, her spine stiff, and backed out of the Solar Chambers into the iron-ribbed elevator, the moment the heavy blast doors slid shut, sealing her in the vertical brass cage, her composure shattered like cheap glass. She collapsed against the iron wall, a ragged, violent gasp tearing from her throat., her hands, usually so steady, so practiced with the fine hairs of her paintbrushes, were shaking so violently that the blackened silver cylinder of the Scythe-Key nearly slipped from her grease-slicked fingers. She caught it against her stomach, pressing the freezing metal into her flesh as if the pain could anchor her drifting mind; sweat poured from beneath her heavy head-dress, stinging her eyes, mixing with the dry, metallic taste of pure panic in her mouth.

The pressure on her shoulders felt heavy enough to collapse her lungs; she had until midnight, less than three hours remaining on the ticking brass chronometers before the celestial clockwork of Cardrea ground into its most terrifying configuration: the Eclipse.  It was the season of total liquidation, when the shadow of the sister moon or the planetary zenith fully blotted out the cold sapphire light of Varganus, the delicate treaties of the Concord ceased to exist. The careful mathematics of gang boundaries, the legal arbitration she had performed only hours ago, all of it would be burned away. The streets would fill with hundreds of her fellow Hands, stripped of their neutrality, transformed into faceless, blind executioners.  During the eclipse, the Concord imparted absolute justice. There would be no trials, no warnings, and no mercy; any living soul caught in the open walkways or the smog-choked alleys would be systematically butchered, turned into a bloody sacrifice to ratify the world's devotion to the iron law. If she was still on the planet when the darkness fell, she would either be swept into the indiscriminate slaughter or cut down by her own peers.

"Breathe," she hissed to herself, her vision tunneling as the elevator plunged past the mid-levels, diving straight into the subterranean roots of the Concord Tower. "Breathe, or the loom will claim you."

The elevator ground to a halt with a concussive, bone-rattling jar; the doors screeched open, revealing a cavernous vault of black basalt and frost-rimed iron, the air down here was freezing, devoid of the perfumes and classical music of the upper levels, there were no sounds of any kind, what passed for light was what seeped through the boardwalks of upper levels and could weakly shine on the path ahead.

This was the Necropolis, the place of so many urban legends. She stepped out, her boots clicking hollowly on the frost-coated floor grates, before her stretched rows of massive, iron-reinforced stasis-coffins, each one humming with the low, mournful vibration of dormant power generators. Inside those glass-fronted tombs were the frozen bodies, attired with the high-end armor of their duties, of the Varganus born troops. These were men and women taken as children from the bloodiest gang wars, their minds completely rewritten and psychologically manipulated by the Hands of the Concord, their bodies rebuilt with steel-weave musculature and heavy sub-dermal carapace armor. They knew no fear, no culture and no identity beyond the cold, unyielding precision of the moon they were named after.

Rushing toward the primary control dais, her breath pluming in white clouds, the Hand thrust the blackened silver Scythe-Key into the central copper receptacle, she twisted it with a brutal, desperate wrench. The micro-runes along the cylinder flared with a sharp, blinding indigo light. A series of heavy pneumatic locks blew open, echoing through the vault like a salvo of artillery; the glass faces of the stasis-coffins hissed, venting plumes of freezing white vapor that rolled across the floorboards. Five figures from the row of tombs stumbled forward, the heavy frost on their customized, matte-black carapace armor cracking and sloughing off in chunks onto the iron grates; they drew in ragged, agonizing breaths, their reinforced lungs expanding with a wet, synchronized hiss as the chemical preservatives were violently purged from their systems; as the vapor cleared, they stood in a loose semi-circle before the woman that had liberated them, their massive, steel-weave frames towering over the Hand.  Slowly, almost in unison, the polarized blast-shields of their helmets retracted with a sharp hydraulic click, exposing their faces to the dim, filtered light of the lower levels.

The Hand felt a cold shiver run down her spine as she looked at them; their faces were smooth, entirely devoid of the jagged scars and arrogant gang tattoos that defined every single living soul on Cardrea. But it was their eyes that were truly unnerving, when they looked at her, there was a shocking, eerie purity in their unblinking stares. Their irises were a clear, vibrant cobalt, wide and filled with a strange, childlike curiosity disconnected from the brutal tribalism of the Hives, the politics of the Noble Houses, and the corrupting vices of the food and drinks of their planet, they possessed the terrifying innocence of newborns…newborns trapped inside the bodies of apex predators.

They stood perfectly still, watching her with a blank, total obedience; if she were to command them to stop breathing, they would do so without a second thought, if she were to order them to jump none would ask how high, if she ordered them to kill only another word from her mouth would stop them from complete annihilation of their target. These were the boogeyman and boogeywoman’s of the world, the mythical people, the humans created by fairytales to keep disobedient kids in line…except they were real and five of them were currently staring at the Hand.

"Designate objective," The lead trooper, or who seemed the leader, rumbled. His voice was flat, synthesized, and utterly devoid of human inflection, yet his wide, clear eyes still retained that unsettling, vacant wide-eyed clarity.

"Orbital transport. Grave of Iron," she commanded, her voice tight, forced through a throat parched by panic. "We deploy off-world immediately. Avoid all hive transit routes. Move."

"Understood. Clear the path," the trooper responded literally.

The five soldiers snapped into a tight wedge formation around her, their heavy, armored boots striking the frost-rimed floor grates in perfect unison. As they hurried toward the high-speed rail shuttles that led directly to the spire's orbital tether, the Hand glanced upward through the iron grating of the ceilings, the amber sulfur clouds outside darkening rapidly; the brilliant sapphire luminescence of Varganus was being manifested on every corner of the world and would stay up there throughout the whole night and the next three days.

The Varganus Eclipse was upon them, the Hand prayed that there was still enough time to get out of there.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

“I’m telling you, it’s a work of pure liturgical art,” Anvios hissed, his mechanical optics clicking and spinning as he adjusted a loose copper wire with a pair of rusted pliers, “The pneumatic pressure alone will let him kick a heretic’s head clean off his shoulders. It is worthy of a Saint like him!”

“When have you ever seen the Saint even throw a kick? And what about…you know, his whole coming back from the dead stuff, what if his Saintly flesh rejects scrap metal?” Cele muttered, leaning against a stack of empty ration crates; the soft-handed tech-gazer was nervously twirling a hydro-spanner between her fingers

“Did you see what the Mutes from the command sector said when they saw him? Every time he limps, it hurts the regiment’s morale. If the Saint has a perfect stride, we have a perfect end of the crusade!” Barked Pip, a gaunt woman whose grey cloak was so singed it looked like a fishing net.

The rest of the tarn murmured in feverish agreement; they’ve all seen or heard in the time they had been stuck in space about how truly bad Gallius' whole body had ended up after the sacrifice and “reborn” miracle he had pulled on their last moments in Xanthera. Every single Lunatic had wanted since then to propose some form of implant or augmentation to the Saint, yet nobody had ever dared to propose it due to how bad was Gallius at…accepting gifts from the regiment, especially of that kind.

“Alright, alright,” Anvios said, wiping his greasy brow and leaving a thick black streak across his forehead. “We do the proposition. But we gotta be smart, we can't just march into his quarters and throw a bionic leg at his head. Who’s going to speak?”

Every single Tech Lunatic present suddenly found the floor plates deeply fascinating.

“Cele should do it,” Pip suggested quickly, pointing her welding torch at the other gal. “She’s got that nice handwriting. She speaks like a proper lowbright, not a gutter-junt.”

“Oh, absolutely not!” Cele stammered, her eyes widening. “The last time I talked to him, he threatened to use my ribs as a reloading rack because the heavy bolter coolant was two degrees over optimal! You tell him, Anvios! You’re the one who stole the actuator!”

“It was for this holy purpose, I told you this a thousand times!” Anvios argued, his voice rising in an octave out of panic. “Besides, I get the stutters when he looks at me with that one good eye. It feels like he doesn’t even have to be on the Web to know my every wrongdoing…”

Before the argument could dissolve into a full-blown wrench-fight, the heavy iron door of the maintenance bay hissed open. Harl poked his head in, holding a half-eaten bar of corpse-starch.

“Hey, you Techies” The Axe called out, grease smudged across his nose. “The Saint is doing his rounds on Deck 3. He’s looking at the ammunition tallies…if you’re gonna corner him with whatever crazy machine you’ve been building, you better do it now before he gets into the bad amasec on his chambers again.”

A collective surge of fanatical, adrenaline-fueled courage washed over the group.

“For the 958th,” Anvios whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of terror and unhinged pride.

“For the Saint,” The tarn whispered back equally excited.

With the manic coordination only a pack of tech-lunatics could muster, the just made prosthetic was lifted off the table with hurried enthusiasm. They formed a tight, awkward phalanx, shuffling out into the narrow, rattling corridor of the transport ship like a multi-legged metal beetle.

“Remember the script,” Pip hissed as they hurried down the iron gangway, their boots clanging loudly. “We praise the Emperor first, then we praise his leadership, then we show him the hydraulic shock-absorbers to better sell the idea of the Saint needing this prosthetic…do not mention that we stole the plating from Captain Marck’s personal locker.”

Turning the corner onto Deck 3, the chaotic pack of Lunatics froze; at the end of the corridor, bathed in the harsh, flickering amber light of a dying lumen, stood the Saint Gallius. His severe, scarred profile was hunched over a heavy brass dataslate, his long black leather coat draped over his shoulders like a shroud with his only leg trying its best to keep him uptight. The clatter of five pairs of boots and the distinctive, hydraulic hiss of a salvaged bionic leg immediately drew his attention. Gallius turned his head slowly, his single good eye narrowed, boring into the group with a gaze so sharp it felt like a las-beam cutting through their skulls; the lipless side of his face twitched slightly in anticipation as he lifted an eyebrow impatiently.

Anvios completely forgot the script, he stood paralyzed, clutching the hip-joint of the prosthetic, his mechanical optics spinning erratically in pure panic. Pip gave Anvios a sharp, desperate nudge with her elbow, nearly causing the man to drop the metallic limb.

"P-Praise be to the God-Emperor, Saint! And to yo-y-your exalted leadership!" Anvios blurted out, his voice jumping an octave just as he had feared, he hoisted the leg that was beginning to slip from his grasp, the pneumatic piston letting out a loud, ill-timed pfft of pressurized air. "The lads and me…w-w-we have a proposition for your person, sir!”

Gallius looked from Anvios’s sweating face down to the concoction of scrap parts, servo-skull gyros, hammered plating and other metallic parts the man couldn’t pinpoint the exact origin of being offered to him by the Lunatic in front, as all of his tarn members were anxiously hiding behind the man like little children. The Saint stepped forward, dragging the sword/walking aid on the floor with a heavy, hollow clack-drag against the floorplates. He stopped just inches from the trembling mechanics, looming over them.

“What in the name of the Emperor-ck isss thissss-ck?” Gallius said, his voice dangerously level. His single eye locked onto a specific weld line on the outer shin.

"It’s... it’s a right leg, Saint. A proper one…built for you! Or, well, built from what we could scavenge, sir."

“You’re not helping our case…” Pip whispered in Anvios’ ear

“Shut the sonen warp up-!” Anvios bit back

Gallius didn't move. He remained balanced precariously but rigidly on his single left leg, his stump holding the sword he used as a makeshift crutch; the empty right side of his trench coat hung straight down casting a long, stark shadow across the floorplates. The Saint leaned forward slightly, the tip of his sword grinding into the iron grate with an agonizing screech, he pointed a leather-gloved finger at a specific patch of hammered metal near the ankle joint.

“Thissss plating," Gallius murmured, his voice dropping into a register that made the blood run cold. "Thisss isss the exact-ck ssshade of sssub-sssector green-ck usss-cked for ck-command-tier ssstorage. Ssspecifically, the armored locker-ck belonging to Captain Marck-ck. The one he keepsss hisss personal ration reservesss in."

A collective, terrified shiver ran through the tarn huddled behind Anvios; Cele looked like she was about to faint right there on Deck 3, her fingers twisting her hydro-spanner so hard her knuckles turned white.

"We... we don’t know what you’re talking about, Saint-” Pip blurted out from the back of the group; she stepped out from behind Anvios, her singed grey cloak fluttering “B-but let’s not get sidetracked by details here…”

"The regiment-ck needsss me to execute-ck my dutiesss, Pip… I ssshould have-ck the five of you lined up againssst the ck-command sector wall for a firing squad by the ssstart of the next watch-ck." Gallius’s single eye snapped to the woman.

"But you're in pain, Saint!" Cele suddenly burst out, her voice cracking with a frantic, emotional desperation, she gestured wildly to his power sword, tears of stress pricking the corners of her eyes. "The Mutes see it, the Axes see it, we see it…even the sonen baby stealers that are the Sisters see it! The whole sonen 958th sees it!"

The Saint went entirely still, his scarred features freezing into a mask of genuine shock that tried to hide the emotion behind a stone cold attitude, but that his single good eye betrayed the emotion that was starting to build up in his chest.

"Xanthera VII took enough from us," Cele continued, her voice trembling but fierce. "It took our tarns, our blood, and it almost took you. Ypu were…are a sonen miracle sir…every time the boys see you missing that leg, it hurts 'em, sir. It makes 'em think of that cursed place all over again, it makes us think of what we did to the…new boys-” She couldnt even hide the offbrights were, too, family now, “We forged it out of Cardrean iron and battlefield salvage…for you…so take it for the Warp sake!”

Gallius stared at the crude, beautifully engineered monstrosity of scrap metal, and then looked at the pale, sweating faces of one of his tarns. They were terrified of his wrath, as any sane penal scum should be, but beneath that terror was an unyielding, fanatical devotion that only a world like Cardrea could breed…they had built it because they loved him in the only violent, broken, desperate way they knew how. He let out a long, heavy sigh, the breath rushing past his lipless scar with a weary, defeated hiss; the commanding and brutal edge in his single eye finally faded, replaced by a gruff irritation with no real bite behind it.

"If thisss pneumatic-ck piston misssfires during a ck-combat drop and blowsss my hip into the ssstratosphere," Gallius rumbled, reaching out with his free hand and effortlessly hoisting the metal limb by its upper frame, "I am going to persssonally use your collective-ck skullsss as target prack-prck-practice for the heavy bolter crewsss. Do you understand me?"

"Does... does that mean you'll accept it, sir?" Anvios’s optics spun in rapid, ecstatic circles.

"Get back-ck to your stationsss before I remember you ssstole sssomething of a ck-commander to make thisss!” Gallius snapped, tucking the bionic under his left arm while keeping his right stud firmly on his sword-crutch.

"Yes, Saint! Thank you, Saint!" The tarn chorused in a frantic, overjoyed whisper; they scrambled backward, bowing awkwardly, before turning on their heels and sprinting back to their shared room in another sector.

Gallius stood alone under the flickering amber lumen, he looked down at the ugly, illegal, brilliantly put-together piece of scrap metal clutched against his ribs. Using his power sword to propel himself forward, he began the slow, arduous process of hopping and dragging his way back to his private quarters; he slid the heavy iron door open, stepping into the quiet, dark room that had amasec empty bottles sprayed all across the floor.

He carefully and very slowly let his old body sit down on his bed, groaning from the effort and sighing deeply; he looked back at the prosthetic leg and to the stump on his right lower limb. With some difficulty and holding his clothes with his teeth so as for it to not get in the way, he tried his best to make the augment adjust to his stump on its own.  It took him more than it should have if he had asked for any kind of help; but stubborn as he was, the augmentic truly wrestled against his limb to properly adjust itself. When it finally did with a click, the Saint tried a few times to make the most basic of movements.

A little smile tugged at the healthy side of his face when he corroborated it worked…not perfectly, since the adjustments would obligatorily need a second hand to help him with the technicalities of it via an operation to wield it firmly in place…but it was better than nothing, a new leg…something to truly help him. And it all had been thanks to the only people in this galaxy that had truly cared for him just the way that he was, asking for nothing in return but acknowledgement and some form of care back. They were gutter filth, but they were his gutter filth. And God-Emperor help anyone who tried to stand in their way; with those thoughts in mind, Gallius laid on his bed taking a long sigh as he stared to the roof of his lonely, cold chambers, for a moment he fidgeted with his stump on the prosthetic leg in and out of the hole made to fit in his cut limb.

“Bring medick-cae to my room…” He extended his arm on the bed and turned on his vox, saying those words as soon as he heard someone pick up from the other end of the line, “And too sssummon-ck the loomer if he ck-can now walk on hisss own”

“Yes, my Saint, at once” He heard a Sister reply, short and precise, before disconnecting the line.

The heavy iron door groaned as it slid open, breaking the brief, suffocating silence of the lonely chambers; the medicae shuffled into the room like a pack of trained scavengers, a ragged crew of battlefield surgeons who, despite being in the presence of their Saint, knew this whole procedure was just like the last one they had done and probably the next one after this one, the person didn’t change a thing for these medicae. They carried no pristine, gold-plated tools of the equipment seen in better, cleaner regiments medics or the sacred, oiled instruments of the Mechanicus; instead, they clinked together battered metal cases filled with industrial-grade scalpels, heavy dermal welders and crude local numbing agents brought directly from Cardrea and conserved on icy packages. The crew bowed their heads to Gallius as a salutation, their eyes darting with fascination at the brilliantly engineered piece of scrap metal that was now dangling from the stud of their Saint, joyous to help with the task at hand.

"My Saint," the lead surgeon murmured, his eyes scanning the bed measurements, the space around them and the position of Gallius in the bed, “We’ll do it quickly sir, just stay there and let the boys do their work. Up and at ‘em-”

"Get… get on with it-ck," Gallius didn't even flinch, merely laying his head back against the pillow, his grotesque, las-scarred face twisting into a silent, bitter grimace that bared his teeth for the incoming pain.

Just as he expected it, the discomfort was immediate and sharp. There was never enough sedative in the stores to completely drown out the raw sensation of cold iron meeting living marrow in small operations, let alone one like this one; the sharp, high-pitched whine of the micro-welder soon filled the cramped quarters, accompanied by the foul, heavy stench of burning flesh and ozone as the scrap-metal prosthetic was aggressively fused into his lower limb without a second glance or a checkup from the medicae if the procedure was giving any sense of discomfort to the patient.

As the agonizing heat rippled up his thigh and into his pelvis, Gallius’s mind began to drift away from the dim, amasec-littered floor, retreating deep into the dark, labyrinthine halls of his own memory to somehow numb the pain by thinking of something else. He thought of Tartarus Prime, of the endless bodies he had counted, and of the young, defiant blue eyes of Dormath…the boy he had saved out of an uncharacteristic instinct, sparking a forbidden, heavy kinship he still couldn't fully wrestle within himself, couldn’t bare with the thought that man could have betrayed him of all people.

He tried to shake his head to make those thoughts go away, but a hand of one of the medicae firmly held his head in place as to not cause even an inch of false movement that could mean the total failure of the operation, defeated, the Saint could only huff then and consciously drop the trail of thoughts about Dormath to something else…like the augmetics for example. He hated them, since he had been a child watching his father tell stories of his time in the Commissariat; his father had worn his battle scars like badges of absolute human purity. “The Emperor gave you a body to break in His name, boy,” his father’s booming, gravelly voice echoed from the past, rattling through Gallius’s fading consciousness, “To replace His design with cogs and-and wires is a coward’s surrender. It means your flesh wasn't strong enough to endure His trials! A true servant of the Throne dies with his skin intact, or he doesn't die a man at all!”.

For his entire career, Gallius had carried that dogmatic pride like a shield; he had watched other officers trade their missing limbs for gleaming silver pistons and hydraulic joints, silently viewing them as lesser…as weaklings who needed artificial crutches to prop up a failing willpower. Yet here he lay, trapped on a sagging cot in a cold transport ship, allowing convicts to bolt an illegal piece of recycled battlefield scrap directly into his skeletal system, his father would’ve been furious, rolling in his tomb if he could have seen his only “boy” like this. Although, Gallius remembered with a weary sigh, there was no tomb or place to visit the remains of his father either, all lost to the attack on his homeplanet that changed everything.

“Good girl, that’s it, accept the flesh…good girl.” Gallius heard the main surgeon whispering, as if he were to a lover, caressing the augmetic as the blood surrounded the joints where it now connected to Gallius’ stump, “Atta girl, seems the machine spirit has blessed this holy union, my Saint! Ahhhh how beautiful…”

The micro-welder gave one final, spluttering hiss before shutting down, leaving only the thick, suffocating smell of seared meat hanging in the air. The heavy structural bolts were firmly set; he scrap-metal limb was now completely integrated into Gallius's system, humming with a low, crude mechanical vibration that throbbed straight up his spine and into his brain. He could feel it now, a cold, phantom pain, as if he was feeling now both his real leg, the one that had been blown away, and the prosthetic that was now being responding to his commands very slowly…both of them at the same time, like if he now had three legs instead of one or two, it was strange, a little sense of dread invaded thoughts that spiraled trying to make sense of it all.

“Ah…yeah, that side effect; uh…did anybody brought the pills?” The chief surgeon asked

“I thought you did…” One of the assistants replied with a side eye

“Emperor damn you and your whole sonen cursed line, you stupid lowbright son of a-!” The surgeon forced himself to do a long inhalation to calm down, “We’ll make sure someone comes and bring them to you, Saint…it’ll help with the weird sensation after the first implant, you’ll get used to it but eh…just in case…Oh almost forgot! Don't go stomping around too hard for the next twelve hours or the structural anchoring pins might snap and you'll bleed out inside your own hip in three minutes flat. Standard stuff,"

"Aye, and if you start tasting copper or rotten eggs in the back of your throat, Saint, don't panic. That just means the neural-coupling fluid is leaking into your lymphatic system. Just spit it out when it builds up…it stops after a couple of cycles." The assistant nodded in agreement, carelessly tossing a pair of flesh-clogged pliers into a rusty tray with a loud clink.

Gallius gripped the edge of his mattress, his knuckles turning white as his mind furiously battled the bizarre, agonizing sensory overload while the medicae bid him farewell and were currently busy packing up their utensils to leave the room. The Saint closed his single good eye, forcing his breathing into a ragged, disciplined rhythm; “Flesh and iron, flesh and iron!”. His father’s phantom voice echoed in the dark corners of his thoughts, dripping with scorn for his machine-tainted son, “A true servant of the Throne dies a whole man, Gallius. You’ll never be that man now!”. Just before Gallius started to feel the drifts of tired slumber try to take him away from the world of the living, the stomping of the boots of the medicae on the ground and a sudden growl coming from one of them forced Gallius to hold back his rest for a little while longer. Besides the door, the chief surgeon and his assistants froze, their bodies turning rigid and their lips curled back over their teeth; their eyes narrowed into slits of profound, deep-seated disgust.

The loomer was at the doorframe, just a few minutes earlier than Gallius had accounted for, great. The assistant medic let out a quiet hiss of scorn through his teeth, deliberately spitting a glob of phlegm onto the floor grates near the newcomer's feet, the chief surgeon just shook his head and averted his eyes as much as he could from the loomer while pushing his retinue past the door. They left the doorframe, but only after deliberately shoving past the silent figure in the doorway and muttering curses under their breaths while doing so. Once the little show was over, Gallius' healthy side grimaced as he tilted his head in the direction of the only table in the room.

“Ah, jussst who I wanted to sssee-ck,” Gallius voice became raspy, his tongue slithered on his face, “If you want to live-ck more than the time it takesss usss to dessscend from the ssship when we ssshould asset foot on Iopra sssoon…you have to do sssomething for me-ck, boy”

“And what would that be, Commissar?” The loomer tried to maintain his composure, feeling the grotesque side of Gallius relish in the discomfort

“Your name, for ssstarters!” The Saint bellowed a shallow laughter, spitting saliva all over his bed, “And after you tell me-ck your ssstory…I ck-ck-can offer you the only thing-ck that will sssave you from their wrath. Ssstaying clossse to the Sssaint Gallius himssself”

Purge

As soon as the main force touched ground, they started to immediately set camp around the landing zone. Tents were quickly raised by Axes who kept their strict chain of command and pulchritude at the hour of coordinating where were the best places to set up the camps and how spaced one had to be from the other, Lunatics helped with the logistic side of it all with their beams aiming at the exact spot where the tents had to be struck to the ground for it to hold them in place. Sisters went on and explored a bit, covering their eyes from the sun heat and wondering where the locals could be hiding, Mutes with their broad shoulders and heavy use of Ogryns spread out to prepare the typical meals for the empty stomachs of their comrades without even glancing or asking about if they should had done that or not.

Gallius had disappeared after receiving all of the news from the two survivors of the previous mission, walking into the ruined crop and rice fields with a solemn grimace that could only mean he was hatching a plan of action for the upcoming weeks or perhaps preparing the initial speeches he would have with the planetary governor. Nobody knew and frankly nobody cared, knowing their radios would rumble with his voice in case the man needed his troops for something. 

With the entire camp set up, the next step was to organize the patrols around the area, Lunatics had the first vote on who amongst them would go, but the Sisters quickly shot them down protesting they had bothered everyone enough the previous few hours with their incoherent technical ramblings about the density of the area and difficulty to communicate via vox-channels across large distances. 

As some sort of twisted retaliation, the dinner served that day was pure “Neurochow”, a dish exclusively prepared by the Techs consisting in a paste-like slurry made from electro-fungus, nutri-oil, and synth-flesh foam laced with some stimulants to add some flavor to the disgustingly inhumane plate which had to be eaten exclusively by direct injection to the veins or via squeeze-tube. Only the members of said gang “ate” it all with smiles on their faces; some of the other regiment guardsmen vomited the paste as soon as it entered their systems or couldn’t finish it all by the chemically-heavy ingredients of the dish. The Sisters were booed and insulted by the Mutes and Axes as soon as they returned from their scouting, vowing to not let the Lunatics get close to the kitchens for as long as that campaign would last. 

As nightfall approached and a very faint orange and yellow sunset illuminated the horizon, Gallius came back into his command tent with a grim face, nobody knew where he had been and the man didn't tell anyone of it; Dormath, who had been following the commissar, made no comment as well. The other regiment heads gathered into the tent in an assembly-line formation to hear his orders and briefing, hoping to give their “tarns” (Squad / gang / unit in Cardrean language) some clear orders before they would get impatient.

After some seconds of awkward silence in the commander’s tent, the commissar spoke plainly and clearly.

"This was an act of treachery to the Imperium." 

He started, looking directly at the eyes of the platoon leaders gathered there one by one.

"A coward's way to surrender this planet and count it already lost by their leaders" The hatred was palpable in every word "Do you know where are they as of this moment? Underground...hiding with the population of this planet, scared like little children in their mommy's skirts as they see their future and lives be controlled by some tech-heretics that had taken the production lines of their crops for themselves and went mad in the process. That is what killed Garran, Drusila and left the poor two bastards that survived-." 

The man paused and sighed 

"We can't let this go unpunished nor ignored. It's our duty to deliver this world into compliance by the Emperor's will, if those people are not able to do so and protect the people then we are going to have to do so ourselves."

"Exterminate orders sir? Ain't that a bit extreme even for junts (Coward/weakling in Cardrean)?" Jaxen said, some of the leaders of the other platoons shared looks amongst themselves.

"Extreme?" The man repeated with a condescending tone "Why is it extreme if those people don't want to die in the hands of the enemy because they couldn't have the balls to stand up against it?"

The entire room went silent after that.

"Sir we barely know anything about the situation-"

"Then learn about it!" He snapped. "Go find the damned locals and make them talk about this planet's problems if you do not follow orders from me anymore!"

The entire assembly went silent, some of the men and women held their breaths, they could sense something about this situation, this planet, was hitting some nerve inside of their commander, but none dared to speak up or make a remark. Gallius closed his eyes and inhaled sharply, calming a slight tremble on his hands after raising his voice like that; the tension in the room was so thick not even a knife would have been able to cut it. 

The seconds passed until the commander waved a dismissive gesture to the crowd, they all swiftly left the man alone with his thoughts.

As the tarns leaders filed out, boots scuffing on the earth beneath their feet, none dared speak a word to each other until they were well out of earshot. The commissar’s words had been clear and the decision had been slightly more unhinged than the usual instructions the regiment had followed in the previous worlds of the system; it felt extreme, even for those convicts.

Outside, the sun had already set, casting Xanthera VII into a murky twilight. The once-busy camp became a web of flickering lumen-lamps, watchfires, and patrolling silhouettes. The air cooled just enough to make men feel the aches in their bones, somehow the ambient was too grim to break it with songs or tales by the fires.

Jaxen, muttering to himself, rejoined the Axes’ sector of the camp, where drill formations were already being adjusted to account for nighttime patrols. The man said nothing as he sat down by a crate and pulled out a drill ration from his canteen, giving the rectangular meal block a bite.

On the other sectors men and women began doing their preparations in silence. Rations were cut and spread for the last time of the day, guns (or “velks” as they called them) were cleaned up and given the last taps of safety, bedrolls were sprayed on the ground and sentinels were posted at the edges of their own sectors to avoid uninvited guests from other tarns in the middle of the night.

The purge had not been ordered yet. But it loomed over them all. At any moment the mobilization order could be delivered, so they all stood by.

Somewhere in the distance, a vox crackled on its own, hissing unintelligibly, a noise like static filtered through rotted lungs. The last vestiges of the tech-heretic doing hissed in painful whimpers until it finally shut down and with it the last traces of heresy the planet could had to explain their failure at the hour of standing tall against their enemies. In a way, it marked their own deaths as well. 

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The first klaxon of morning came not from a horn or a call, but from the groaning cough of the Leman Russ engine cycling through idle as the cold made its machine spirit shiver. The tank’s name, "Fury of Saint Lörgen", was stenciled in half-flaked off white across its turret. She wasn’t beautiful, but she’d crushed more heretics than any of her crew could count.

Inside the cramped tank, heat still lingered from the bodies curled up together in such a cramp space. Private Yurlen was first to move, blinking hard to snap the drowsiness out of his system, face greasy and pinky from sleeping with his cheek on the cogitator panel again that had left a mark on his skin. He groaned and shoved the hatch open, a current cool air rolled in. He peeked over the rim, saw the pale gold haze of morning pressing against the horizon, and spat into the mud below as he saw movement on the tents nearby.

“Up, you sacks of good-for-nothing rats” he muttered into the interior of the vehicle, voice laced with laziness. “Time to pretend we do something around here.”

Below him, someone groaned. It was Krenshaw, the loader, curled around the ammo bin with one boot still on. He responded by throwing the other boot up into the turret. It missed and it landed on his chest, pushing all the air out of his lungs and forcing the man to sit up.

“Come on or we are gonna miss all the good stuff and we will have only the leftovers!” Yurlen called out again, already half out of the tank and dropping down to the tracks. His flak coat was stiff with oil stains and dust, his hair was permanently matted into a style best described as “penal chic.”

The rest of the tank crew, three not counting the private, peeled themselves from whatever corner of the Fury they’d claimed overnight. Groaning, bickering, and armored in the stink of too many campaigns, they emerged like crusty rats from a steel burrow. No one spoke much until they were all out in the open scratching their eyes as they stumbled onto their destination.

The mess tents loomed nearby, big canvas domes with their sides rolled up, revealing rows of folding benches with different guardsmen forming a line to receive their foods or saving seats for their friends. Already, figures from the Mutes were hauling in slabs of grack-meats, their big ogryns fumbling with cauldrons and stirring with metal rods the size of a whole bolter. A Sister at the corner of the mess line snarled at a Lunatic who tried to cut in early, one hand already drifting toward her laspistol and a primal gaze on her eyes.

The tankers made their way in, half-walking, half-shuffling. They looked like they'd crawled out of a chemical bath and, in some matter of speaking, those assumptions would be correct. Captain Brannick, their tank division commander, still had his vox-bead in his ear and a dataslate strapped to his arm, looking more like he was inspecting a battlefield than coming in for breakfast.

“Right,” he said, not looking up. “Twenty minutes. Then we’re off as soon as the last bit of ashcakes go down your gullets. Command’s got us posted along the third entrance to the suspected tunnels where the locals are hiding on with the flamer aimed at the doors.”

“The fire spitter?” muttered Krenshaw, grabbing a bowl of rot-bake. “What’re we gonna do, toast the guys that go in?”

“Do you want the truth or should I reserve that for when that is already been digested in your stomach?” Brannick said, flatly.

Yurlen plopped down on the bench, chewing on a reheated nutrient bar like it owed him money. Around them, other tankers sat in clumps, all wearing the same flak-marked penal colors, all just distinct enough to know which engine they belonged to. They muttered, they traded insults, they glared at the Lunatics who took their food through tubes and seemed immune to taste, tried to mess with the big Mute boys and regretted mentioning their orders to the Axes.

Someone coughed, hard and wet. Another passed around a flask of something that might have been Yarish-tea or amasec. The whole division was seemingly out of the loop of the gangs, they were much closer to their squads than to their tarns and that somehow gave them the enough freedom to be proud of their gang cultures but also see their failures

“Any word from back home?” asked someone down the bench.

Rulf, the driver, shrugged without looking up. “Last I checked a data-slate of news, they were picking Leona Nexon for the next election of planetary governor. Gotta say, the Lunatics will be happier than a ratling on shore leave whenever the new policies of the industries start to roll in”

There was a long silence.

Yarlen chimmed in, “Well she’s good looking at least, right?”

That got a few dry chuckles. The light outside turned a bit more gold, and the tankers shoveled in what passed for breakfast. The Lörgen waited for them just beyond the tent flaps, growling quietly in the dirt.

Krenshaw licked a smear of sauce from his thumb and gave the tank a sideways glance. “Still think she’s gonna explode one of these days. Probably while I’m inside, wiping the turret controls just to fuck with me.”

“She’d never hurt you,” Yurlen said dismissively “She likes you, the last loader died when it suddenly decided to stop on Rulf mid driving and toss the poor sod through the windshield”

Across the table, Rulf flicked a bit of gristle from his tray and grinned. “We had to fish him out with a spoon…the corpse stash made out of him was blite (Trash/ filth in Cardrean)”

Another ripple of laughter broke through the group, brief, sour like a dark joke. Then silence took hold again, as it often did when breakfast neared its end and the real weight of the day began to creep in.

Outside, the camp came fully awake. Barrel fireplaces puffed black smoke; sentries barked orders down the lines of convicts as the day’s formations were shuffled into cruelly efficient shapes. Munitions were being handed out, fuel drums were dragged from the depot, the directives were starting to be set up by everyone who already knew their roles.

A runner in gray fatigues stopped outside the mess tent, checked a scribbled list on a dirty sheet of parchment, and barked through a rebreather, “Third wheels, mount and roll in ten! Formation toward gamma! Maintain assault readiness, velks cold until further notice!”

The crew of Lörgen stood up in almost perfect sync, trays clattering down, crumbs left behind. Brannick tapped twice on his vox-bead, then nodded once.

“Right,” he said. “Fuel her. Prime the flamer. We’re baking vossin for breakfast.”

Yurlen sighed, slipping his helmet on as he stretched his arms. “And just when I was starting to like doing nothing.”

They filed out, one by one, shadows in worn uniforms with eyes sunken from years of war and weeks of poor sleep. The Fury was waiting, her flanks dull, her treads caked with last war’s battles and, as the crew clambered aboard, she seemed to roar to life again with purpose. Her engine rumbled louder, hungrier.

Brannick took his place in the commander’s hatch and lowered his goggles, the lens cracked but functional.

“Lörgen ready, comin’ about over.” He called into the division channel. 

Rulf rested an arm on the seat comfortably as the Russ hummed under his feet, coming about to hold the instructed position, Yarlen grabbed the handle of the flamer and stood by, chewing on gum as all waited for the order to fire after the doors where breached.

Over the vox, other tanks began checking in. “First Wheels in position.”, Fourth, the same.”, 

“Fifth, just give us the sonen order already.”.

The clunk and rattle of tracked armor shifting into place echoed across the staging ground like distant thunder. Penal troopers formed loose perimeters behind them, some clutching stubbers, others with las-carbines resting against their shoulders, their eyes flicking nervously toward the jagged edge of the ridge.

The entrance to the tunnel system was a half-collapsed cogwork ruin in the side of a shale cliff.  On cue, a separate vox-channel sparked into Brannick’s ear.

“Breacher unit’s en route. Frags and meltas. Thirty seconds.”

“Copy.” Brannick replied. “Fury holding. Flamer primed. We’ll torch the hello mat.”

Inside the tank, Yarlen flicked the ignition sequence on the Fury’s secondary weapon system listening for the satisfying hiss of pressure valves syncing. He took one last lazy chew of his gum and stuck it behind his ear with the careless reverence of a practiced pyromaniac. It brought so many memories of home and his trial.

Krenshaw sat nestled in his loader’s harness, fingers drumming a rhythm on the breech of their primary battle cannon. “You think they’ll run?” he asked to no one in particular.

“If they’re not stupid,” Rulf muttered back, peering through the forward periscope slit, 

“...If they got brains,” Yurlen echoed with a snort.

Through the slit in the bunker ridge, movement shimmered. Like ants ready to devour their food, the breaching units jogged forward with the big meltas in their shoulders and the breaching charges primed. Once deployed, they took some proper distance before covering their ears those who could, the ones with the heavy guns jerked their bodies back.

Then, a moment of stillness.

A concussive blast rocked the slope. Dust and black smoke roiled outward like a living thing. The entrance buckled inward before being showered with the bright blasts of the meltas. Cardreans lunged forward, arms raised with their knives and swords and shovels at the ready.

“BREACH COMPLETE. HOSTILES LIKELY INSIDE. FLAMERS, CLEAR THE ENTRANCE.”

Brannick didn’t need to be told twice.

“Yarlen, any day soon please?.”

Yarlen yanked the lever and the flamer bellowed. A torrent of white-hot promethium roared from the Fury into the mouth of the bunker, splashing across the rocks like an angry god’s breath. Screams followed at a insanely high register, the frontlids were closed like always, none wanted to hear and see the results, the screams already painted the scene on their heads.

Krenshaw let out a low whistle.

“Well then, someone’s overdramatic”

Rulf just nodded, expression unreadable beneath his goggles. “Guess there were some death sentences to fill today”

Brannick scanned the firelit breach through his cracked lens after the anguished yells subsided. “Hold position until something else pops up.”

The promethium hissed itself dry. Little bits of fire still lingered in the empty entrance. There was no more movement. No counter-charge. Just silence. Thick, awful silence.

“Nothing?” Krenshaw finally asked.

Brannick grunted. “Nothing. No gutsy bastards running into the open or orders to accompany the foot boys.”

They waited anyway. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Orders might come. They didn’t. 

The vox crackled once with background chatter, something about Axes pinning down a fleeing gunner nest near the southern bluff, Lunatics breaching an old reactor vault and joking about the fleshy bits of the cowards. But nothing for Lörgen’s crew or the other tanks.

Rulf shifted uncomfortably. “You’d think they’d at least let us drive in and squish something.”

Krenshaw sighed and leaned his head back against the interior plating. “No squish for today I’m afraid.”

Yurlen lazily scratched the side of his helmet with a stylus he'd sharpened to a point. “Guess we’re just the breakfast entertainment. Warm it up, light the fuse, then let the rest of the bastards have the fun.”

Brannick didn’t reply, still peering at the blackened tunnel. His eyes narrowed slightly, then blinked once, long and slow, like a tired man giving up on the horizon. 

“Maintain post. Rulf kill the engine. I don’t want to burn half the reserves sitting here.”

The driver obeyed. The tank crew settled into that peculiar kind of limbo familiar to all armored regiments, where boredom met anxiety, and time melted into rusted edges and idle hands.

Outside, the other tanks had shifted focus, some rolling forward to sweep through the outskirts while the penal line secured corpses and trinkets. The crews of the Lörgen sat in their armored coffin, listening to the echoes of war pass them by.

Yarlen eventually spoke. “You ever think we’re the ones being punished?”

Krenshaw gave him a side-eye. “Yarlen, we’re on a penal tank crew. Of course we’re being punished.”

“No, I mean-” Yarlen gestured vaguely, “like they give us just enough justify using us for a bit but that’s it, not even suicide charges”

Outside, the fires had mostly died down. Wind swept ash across the rocky plain in lazy sheets. From the inside of the tunnel came no sound, no movement—just the black, gaping mouth that still steamed with residual heat. Brannick tapped his vox again.

“Command, Fury of Saint Lörgen again. Awaiting further orders still…”

Nothing but static. He leaned back in his seat and stared at the ceiling groaning.

“...Any minute now.”

The moment dragged on like hours. The silence in the tank was suffocating, only broken by the occasional rattle of equipment or the shifting of weight against worn armor plates. Each crew member became lost in their thoughts, staring out of portholes or fiddling with the trivial distractions available to them. Rulf remembered the drag illegal races he used to have back on Infadon before they detained him and tossed his ass to a tank; Yurlen had little callbacks to the little band he used to play on until the governor had enough with him and supposedly arrested him for disturbing the “peace of the Emperor”, whatever that meant; All Brannick was thinking at that moment was the blood of his ex-wife running down his hands after that outburst of his.

Outside, the dust was slowly settling, and the sounds of combat, those distant echoes of explosions and rifle fire, faded into the background. The world beyond seemed as though it had moved on, leaving the crew of the Lörgen to stew in their inaction and die of boredom.

Krenshaw tossed a little diary he had been written on for the last twelve minutes to the air behind him, landing on the feet of Yurlen.

"Feels like we're just waiting for our turn at the firing squad," he muttered, half to himself, half to the group.

Yarlen chewed on the end of his stylus and kicked the notes away from his feet. "What if we just...leave? No one would even notice. Go for a drive. Take the rest of the day off stealing some amasec from the tents or hell just having a puff of Yarish"

Rulf shot him a sidelong glance, his lips tight as though he'd considered the idea himself. "You know the Fury doesn't run without Brannick's say-so."

Brannick raised a single hand towards the gunner. "Keep talking like that and we'll find out if it runs without you."

The threat, though half-hearted, was enough to shut the man up. The reality of their situation pressed in again. And then, finally, the vox crackled back to life.

"Fury of Saint Lörgen. You’re up," came the bored voice of a transmission officer. "Command needs you to move. You’ve got five to reposition. Rally point Delta. Assault line. Sprayed fire. Move it."

Brannick’s eyes snapped open, the fatigue clearing as if a switch had been flipped. "Copy that. Rulf, get her started. Everyone else, break’s over."

The crew of the Lörgen sprang to life with practiced ease. The lethargy that had clouded them for so long was shattered by the sudden urgency and they all seemed gleeful to be on the road again. Rulf slapped the ignition, the engine roared to life, and with a shudder that ran down the length of the tank, the massive machine began to move.

Yarlen and Krenshaw were already pulling themselves into position, checking their stations and scanning the terrain through the periscopes. Brannick clambered into his commander's seat, his hand firmly gripping the vox-bead as he adjusted the channel to report their movement.

"We're rolling out. Prepare for close quarters," Brannick said, his tone had a hint of ecstasy.

As the tank rumbled forward, its heavy treads chewing into the dirt, the crew settled back into their rhythm. Anxiously tapping their legs at the beat of a mental melody, eager to just start killing something and collaborate with the rest of the regiment with whatever assistance they could provide. They wanted to be the center of the attention in battle yet again.

"Get ready," Brannick muttered, his voice low as the Russ powered forward.

Rulf grinned as he pushed the engine of the vehicle to his max potency, entering in “the zone” as his hands maneuvered the controls like a professional racer. The Lörgen bucked slightly as Rulf took a sharp turn down the loose shale path of caverns toward Delta, kicking up a rooster tail of dirt and discarded energy cells in their wake. Most tank drivers moved with the slow, lumbering confidence of a siege machine; Rulf, by contrast, drove like the Fury was a two-ton hovercar late for a syndicate escape.

“Watch it!” Krenshaw barked as the tank leaned dangerously to one side, skidding briefly before the treads slammed into the terrain once again stabilizing themselves.

“That’s the fun of it!” Rulf shouted back over the intercom, laughing like a madman. “You ever feel how she glides on the dust? It’s amazing what this baby can do!”

The Fury of Saint Lörgen wasn’t built for style, but Rulf coaxed it into motion like a living beast. He weaved through half-collapsed debris as if threading a needle at seventy tonnes. At one point, they shot past a rearguard column of foot-marching troopers, and several dived for cover at the sound of the tank blazing by with a bone-rattling roar<, some shouted a couple of profanities down the road.

Brannick was pressed into his harness, gripping the rim of his belt like he might be flung into the sky. “Rulf, by the Throne, this is a Leman Russ, not a skimmer! Knock it off!”

“Sir,” Rulf called back with a grin, “They said we needed to be fast. We’re faster than the Emperor’s mercy right now!”

Yarlen whooped and punched the side panel next to him. “Let him cook, boss!” He bounced slightly as they hit a ridge, the tank grinding down the slope with a scream of steel.

Krenshaw muttered something obscene and resumed locking the ready shell into place. “You all are gonna get me pancaked before I even pass one load to Yurlen.”

Yurlen, still chewing on the stylus, just chuckled. “If we die this way, at least it’ll be cooler than rotting behind some gung-ho Axes squad.”

As they crested the last rise before Delta, the scene of the “battle” came into view: A massive underground city, torched and with it’s building in chunks of ruin, people running anywhere for safety, there were no defenders shooting back at the Cardreans, it was just the population throwing themselves at the exits of their lair attempting to save their own lives from the ongoing purge. Fires flickered along its rim where the first waves of infantry had breached the outer limits. Las-blasts peppered the distance. Somewhere, the heavy thump of another tank’s cannon boomed like a temple bell.

Brannick squinted through the soot and pulled up the latest tactical marker on his screen. “There. South-east quadrant. The third seems to be killing junts slower than the other units.”

He toggled his vox. “Command, Fury of Saint Lörgen, approaching Delta at speed. Eyes on contact. Ready to apply significant pressure. Requesting firing clearance.”

A pause. Then Gallius answered this time, his voice a roar “Cleanse all the filth you lay your eyes on. Fire at anything”

“Yarlen, prepare inferno rounds,” Brannick ordered. “Krenshaw, warm up her throat. Let's punch this shit up.”

“Oh, we’re having fun now?” Krenshaw grinned as he chambered the high-velocity shell.

“Don’t get overly excited” Yarlen added with a crooked smile.

The Leman Russ rolled to a stop just shy of the ridge’s edge, the great beast’s body humming with anticipation. Lining up with the third, there was a brief vox-exchange to identify each other in case there was some cross fire,both units made bets on who would get the most kills.

Brannick lowered his goggles and sucked one of his teeth in anticipation. With a thunderous roar, the cannon belched a shell. The shot streaked across the upper natural underground ceiling like a bringer of doom. Debris fell on one of the exits, blocking it entirely and trapping the fleeing crowd inside.

For the first time that day, the crew of the Lörgen felt an indescribable rush of adrenaline.

The crowd below had barely begun to reorganize before the Fury let loose again. Another shell. Another thunderclap. Another exit collapsed under rubble and the yelling. Civilians, unarmed, screaming, clawing at one another, were crushed beneath falling masonry or vaporized in the backdraft.

Yurlen’s fingers danced across the targeting array, marking clusters of movement like it was some macabre game of connect-the-dots. “Big score left quadrant. About twenty…maybe more. I’ll line ‘em up.”

“Don’t get greedy,” Brannick said with a cold smirk. “There’s plenty to go around.”

He watched through the targeting scope as people sprinted from a burning hab-block, some on fire, others dragging what little they could carry, children, bundles of cloth, old photos. One woman ran holding the limp arm of someone who had already died, tripping and falling, scrambling back to her feet, only to vanish in a wash of liquid fire when Yarlen flipped the inferno launcher to full spread.

The crew howled with approval. It was laughter mixed with thrill.

“Looks like the third owes us drinks,” Krenshaw said. “They’re only tagging the stragglers. We’re bottling the whole damned barrel.”

Rulf leaned into the next maneuver, rolling the tank forward over the crushed remains of what had once been a checkpoint or perhaps a community square. A charred body stuck momentarily between the treads before being ground to paste.

“They really thought they could hole up here and hide,” Rulf muttered, almost offended. “Like gracks in a pantry.”

From the side viewport, Krenshaw spotted a group of what looked like teenage boys holding makeshift weapons; old pipes, hunting blades, one of them with a canister rigged like a bomb. They hesitated at the sight of the tank, then charged with pitiful, desperate cries in a desperate attempt to stop the big machine from causing more harm.

“Idiots,” Krenshaw said and depressed the trigger for the bolter auxiliary rounds.

The air in front of the Lörgen exploded into flecks of red and churned dirt. The boys disintegrated in motion, weapons scattering harmlessly to the floor as the laughter inside the tank rose again.

Brannick, for his part, said nothing. He watched the chaos with quiet satisfaction. Noting on the data of the mission the advances they were slowly moving towards, the progress and the in-check reactions of the crew at the orders given to them; there were no seeds of heresy and, for what that was worth, it was all the information their commander would need.

Then the east flank of the furthest zone began to sway back, like retreating. The communications line to that zone went dead silent for a moment and they did not respond to any attempts to ask what the platoon was doing.

“Yarlen. Grid 8-C. Zoom.” Brannick squinted his eyes and murmured.

Yarlen adjusted the view at the order. It was just enough to make out the figures in the distance. Krenshaw’s breath caught as the figures advanced backwards; tight formation, precise spacing, weapons that weren’t scavenged scrap but actual Imperial army tech. Cardreans helping make a space for the civilians to run off and possibly escape the zone.

Brannick adjusted the vox-channel, trying to get a better sense of the battlefield chatter. Screams, lasgun bursts, panic; the voice of the commander Jaxen rang with a shivering tone, he knew exactly what he was doing, and was too scared to hide it.

“-negative on target engagement. This is Commander Jaxen of the Seventh, I repeat, negative! We are ceasing fire. These are not combatants, I repeat, these are not valid targets! Holding position, requesting reevaluation of engagement protocol!”

The tank crew exchanged stunned glances.

Yarlen pulled the headphones tighter. “Did I just hear what I think I did from that fucker?”

Brannick leaned forward and toggled his command vox. “All armored elements, Fury of Saint Lörgen broadcasting wide. Confirmed: Commander Jaxen of the Seventh has refused to carry out purge orders. He’s pulled back from civilian zones. Repeat, the Seventh is standing down.”

There was a crackle of silence; half stunned, half waiting, everyone inide the vehicle held their breath.

Then Gallius’s voice tore through the static like a thunder, mad with fury.

“All units this is your commissar. Kill the dissidents! Open fire on any unit that stands down! Leave Jaxen alive…alive! I’ll strangle that son of sonen idiot myself before I flay his coward’s soul!”

Brannick stared straight ahead, eyes narrowing as if trying to see through the storm building in real-time.

“Well,” Krenshaw said after a beat, “New orders then.”

The crew of the Lörgen fell silent. Outside, the battlefield had turned surreal; some units still purging, others hesitating, some outright retreating. A civil war in miniature was taking shape amidst the lines of the Cardreans.

Brannick took a slow breath, then keyed the vox again. “Fury of Saint Lörgen to all nearby armor and foot elements. Recommend holding fire. Hostiles are armed and organized. Jaxen’s not crazy. He’s just not suicidal.”

Yarlen muttered, “So…who are we shooting now?”

Brannick didn’t answer right away. Then, quietly, somberly.

“Everyone who points a barrel our way.”

Shellfire cracked in the far flank as one of the tanks who had just deserted to Jaxen’s, Mender’s Hope, by its tag, was lit up by a twin volley from two Russes still loyal to Gallius. The first shell blew apart its side-plating, and the second ruptured the fuel reserve, sending its turret skyward in a burst of fire and screaming crew.

Jaxen’s voice returned over the vox, firmer now, tempered by necessity. “This is Commander Jaxen of the Seventh. We are engaging only those who engage us first. Any tank crews or squads that remember their oaths to the real Imperial, not the bastard telling us to kill for the sake of it, stand now or be counted with the tyrants!”

It was a rallying cry, some listened now, the pit in their guts betraying their shared thoughts about what Gallius had ordered. To the west, Saint Iskander’s Reach pivoted hard and opened fire, not on Jaxen’s lines, but on the rearguard of the Forty-Fourth, who had begun sweeping fire over fleeing non-combatants. Two more tanks pulled away from the fringes, confused, hesitant, but not shooting.

Inside the Fury, Krenshaw grinned viciously. “Look at that. The bastard’s got some pull after all.”

“Shut. The. Fuck. Up.” Brannick murmured.

Gallius was still bellowing, louder now, more animal than man. “All units who still have their damn brains still lodged to their actual heads and can think straight! Do not be led astray, do not let that pompous treacherous dog convince you of whatever the hell is he thinking, or the firing squad when this whole thing ends will be bigger than the mountains of corpses Inferadon Cluster left behind!”

Rulf let out a slow whistle. “Oh…oh he fucken didn’t just said tha-“

Then, a sudden jolt. The Lörgen bucked hard, metal screamed, gears ground. An explosion somewhere near the rear quarter. The whole tank lurched to the side with a shudder. The occupants were yanked from their seats and barely held on because of their seatblets, all of them groaned with a raising pain, shards of metal had encrusted on to their sides and arms.

“Missile!” Krenshaw shouted. “Hit portside tread; rear linkage's locked. We’re crippled!”

“Yarlen-!” Brannick snapped.

“I just fixed it, Throne-damn it!” Yarlen hissed, already moving toward the hatch. “I’ll patch it enough to crawl, just give me cover.”

He slammed the hatch and dropped down again, las-rounds hissing past as he crawled toward the mangled tread, sparks and smoke clouding the air.

Meanwhile, Brannick keyed the vox again. “This is Lörgen. We’ve taken tread damage but remain active. Providing overwatch for Gallius. Any units that can cover, please do so.”

Around them, the chaos only deepened. Tanks dueled like titans in the deep, smoke-wreathed underground city. Infantry fired at friend and foe alike, trying to sort betrayal from loyalty on the fly. Civilians huddled under overturned carts or fled into half-collapsed tunnels, praying the shooting would pass them by. It as Cardrean against Cardrean, just like back home; just that this was not over survival or supplies, but of loyalty.

Inside the Fury, Krenshaw locked another shell into place.

“Permission to fire, Commander?” he asked grimly.

Brannick stared out through the reinforced viewport, watching a pair of traitor tanks pivot to face them. He nodded once.

“Fire.”

Krenshaw didn’t hesitate. The shell slid into the chamber with a hiss of pressurized hydraulics, and a moment later the Fury bellowed like a beast. The shell crossed the ash-streaked divide in a blink, slamming dead-center into the turret ring of the enemy Russ; Hallow’s End, a veteran of five campaigns, sending its command cupola soaring like a severed limb. The turret twitched once, then melted inwards in a cauldron of flame.

The second tank, Godlight Unbroken, backed up fast, tracks squealing as it tried to retreat behind a collapsed thoroughfare.

“Reloading!” Krenshaw grunted, grabbing the next shell with shaky but sure hands.

Outside, smoke and debris made it hard to track Yarlen’s position. The man was crouched behind a slab of ferrocrete, tools gripped in blood-slick fingers as he crawled along the crippled tread. The outer casing of the left linkage was torn open like a ribcage, gears grinding and hissing with superheated steam.

“Brannick!” he called through grit teeth. “I need one more minute. Maybe two. Cover me or we’re a pillbox with dreams.”

Brannick grunted into the vox. “Rulf. Rotate chassis. Get between Yarlen and anything looking his way.”

“On it.”

The half-crippled tank groaned, a wounded beast obeying its handlers. Rulf coaxed the machine sideways with the precision of a surgeon, angling its good tread to pivot them forward while keeping their flank sealed from fire.

“Godlight’s still inmobile,” Krenshaw muttered. “She’s not pulling out.”

“She’s thinking,” Brannick said coldly. “Fucking cowards.”

On the wide-band vox, Jaxen’s voice cut in again—no longer asking, now commanding.

“Loyal elements: Seventh, Fifteenth, fragments of the Twelfth, form on me. Defensive wedge, push toward the southern corridor. Let the civilians run. The rest of you…make your choices.”

Gallius retorted like a force of nature immediately after.

“You gutless cowards! You will all burn for this! Any tank crew seen aiding that traitor: your families will be strung up beside you when this is over!”

Another voice jumped in. Panicked, defiant, anonymous. “You keep talkin’ like this ends with you in charge, Gallius!”

Laughter echoed across the open vox-line, grim and bitter.

Suddenly a loud clang on the Fury’s side echoed through the whole vehicle.

Brannick whirled. “Krenshaw?!”

Krenshaw shook his head. “Not a shot. That sounded like-”

A magnet-clamp. Someone, or something, was on the hull.

“Yurlen, report!” Brannick barked into the secondary vox.

Static.

Then, after a breathless pause: “Still alive. Something hit the top deck. Can’t see from here. Might be boarding.”

Rulf growled. “Oh, great. Because this wasn’t bad enough.”

Brannick grabbed his sidearm and yanked the emergency hatch lever. “Krenshaw, hold fire. Rulf, keep us between the bastards and Yarlen. I’ll deal with the top.”

He climbed up into the shrieking chaos above; smoke and heat hitting like a forge blast.

On the tank’s upper deck, a lone figure in scavenged black armor knelt with a magnetic mine in one hand and a rusted blade in the other. It was one of the footmen, a Mute. His eyes widened when he saw Brannick rise from the same port and jerked him backwards.

“Don’t do it,” Brannick warned, sidearm raised. “You don’t want to be a cripple and see what the commissar does to you”

The man hesitated.

Then lowered the mine. Brannick exhaled.

Behind him, the vox crackled to life with an unfamiliar voice; not Jaxen, not Gallius.

A woman's voice.

“This is Sister-Commander Elira. We are inbound. You’ve all lost your minds.”

Brannick blinked. “Reinforcements?” “Pffft no, no, just a Sister that has a similar deathwish to Jaxen. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK!?!? YES, REINFORCEMENTS!”

Brannick’s laugh was bitter, ragged with the smoke in his lungs. “About damned time that woman showed up”

He kicked the disarmed Mute square in the chest. The man toppled off the hull with a shriek muffled by his oath-silence, slamming into rubble below. Brannick didn’t even glance down. He slid back into the turret, snapping the hatch shut behind him.

“Krenshaw, next shell in,” he ordered.

“Already in,” came the reply. “We’re hot.”

“Target anything still moving in Jaxen’s position”

Outside, the soundscape changed; new engines, heavier, angrier. Overhead, Sister-Commander Elira’s column thundered into view: Penitent-pattern baneblades on smoke-belching stilts, flamer-wielding Immolators flanking the roads like burning seraphs. A hymn chanted through the vox, half prayer, half battle dirge.

This time, Gallius came on the channel himself; tight-voiced, vengeful. “All elements: Elira leads the forward thrust. Collapse their corridor. I want Jaxen’s allies' wreckage, not their surrender.”

“Understood,” Brannick replied, cold steel in his voice. “Fury moving.”

“About the saints-damned time,” Rulf muttered. He slammed the controls forward, and the Fury shuddered into motion, grinding over the corpse of the fallen Mute without a second thought.

Krenshaw swiveled the turret. “Multiple hostiles, southeast. Looks like some Twelfth heavy guns trying to regroup. I can-”

“Kill them,” Brannick said.

The Fury roared again. One of the rebel gun-nests exploded in a rain of twisted metal and shrieking men. More followed as Elira’s column swept in beside them, flamers lighting the rubble like judgment from on high.

Yarlen’s voice came through the vox, ragged but triumphant: “Linkage’s holding. She won’t win a race, but she’ll finish a purge.”

Brannick gave a savage grin. “That’s all we need.”

The tank surged into the heart of the traitor wedge, guns thundering. Behind them, other loyalist crews emboldened by Elira’s arrival joined in; tanks, artillery, even a few battered infantry squads.

The rebel vox-lines went mad with confusion.

“Fall back!”

“We’re surrounded!”

“No way out, bayonets out!”

“I will take you all with me!”

“Cowards,” Brannick spat. “You had a choice. You chose wrong.”

Then, with eerie calm, Elira’s voice again: “This ends today. For Gallius. For the Throne.”

All who heard the woman repeated the battle-cry. Those who died in that last charge were considered the lucky ones. Those, like Jaxen, who survived and were brought alive to the commissar were forced to kneel in front of their previous commander; no words sufficed to plead for mercy, neither whimpers were taken into account as Gallius one by one took his sword and with both hands, as the chant from the other Cardreans sang the execution prayer, and proceeded to cut down each and every traitor cursing their names and their families. He knew where to strike and with how much strength, as the process stretched over the next few hours.

By the time Gallius was carrying out the executions, the battlefield lay quiet; crushed glasses showered everywhere the live Cardreans stepped, the odor from the corpses of thousands and millions more began to go stale needing the preparation of giant burial improvised sites to throw whatever meat of the fallen couldn’t be processed as food, the underground rocky paths were almost wiped out by the tanks that had driven over them and it was too soaked in blood both fresh and dried. No quarter had been given and none wanted to admit what had happened there.

Brannick stood atop the Fury, helmet off, watching the exemplary killings from afar. He did not cheer nor wept for those that returned to the ground. His face was locked in a grim stillness, jaw clenched, eyes heavy with the knowledge that they had done what was necessary. Yarlen sat beside him, tools forgotten in his lap, a rag dangling uselessly from oil-stained fingers.

“Think this time the executions will be actually worth it?” Yarlen asked quietly.

Brannick didn’t answer right away. Below, Gallius raised his sword once more. The next traitor screamed for his mother.

“It’ll do, trust me, it’ll do,” Brannick said, finally. 

Driving past them, Sister-Commander Elira dismounted from her Immolator and approached Gallius as soon as she could. The commissar’s arms were soaked to the elbows in blood, his expression that of a man who knew the actions he had performed that dusk would torment him for the upcoming days, but would admit none of it to anyone.

She saluted sharply. Gallius did not return the gesture.

“All traitors accounted for?” he asked simply.

Elira nodded once. “The data from many reports confirms it.”

Gallius turned his gaze to her, his eyes red from exhaustion. “Good. Then burn the names from the rolls in their tents. Every last one of them. I want their bloodlines broken, their records sealed, their banners fed to the pyres and their guns crushed with strict orders of not returning them to any guardsmen.”

“As you command, Commissar,” Elira replied, voice cold as steel.

Behind them, the remaining loyalist troops formed ranks again, battle-weary and visibly shaken. There was no victory celebration, no marching songs. Only the hollow silence that followed absolute purging.

Later that night, the Fury sat idle with its occupants in various activities. Krenshaw cleaned the interior from gunpowder and loose wires. Rulf slept, twitching with phantom screams. Yarlen’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Brannick stood watch, one eye on the horizon, one ear on the vox.

A junt and her blutzar

Boyle stared at the junt that had taken the seat of Gunda after the Sister had perished two campaigns ago; the Hydrorer was taller than him, her complexion more chunky and healthier than the others in the heavy gun squad which stuck her out more between the other criminals surrounding her, the skin was darker probably because of the obvious different conditions in which she had been raised on and the DNA that she shared with others like her. 

She was a junt, a bloody junt serving next to true gang-born folks; Boyle found it edging the line between insult and simple necessity of survival, truth was they were lacking an extra pair of hands in the team but doing so with one of the newcomers that barely knew what "blood-feud" meant? It was madness.

When the woman noticed the stare she frowned, her curves turning in a slow, deliberate pivot that made no effort to hide her annoyance. Her dark eyes locked onto Boyle’s with a sharp, almost predatory focus that mirrored his. 

Boyle’s jaw tightened. He looked away first, muttering under his breath.

“Bloody newcomer.”

The woman heard it, of course she did, but Ada ignored the man knowing something like a fight was exactly what he wanted to seek, just to prove his point of Hydrorers only arriving to cause trouble. She was tired of being looked at that way, both where she had come from and here, where she thought it would be different from her life up to that point.

She kept walking, back straight, shoulders square, not giving Boyle the satisfaction of seeing her anger. Every step echoed faintly in the tunnel, the sound swallowed quickly by the choking damp of Derathin’s Maw’s approach. For all what was worth, having people that knew these tunnels and names of colonies was an advantage over traversing those mazes blind and always on the edge; it gave command some much needed calm while it gave the regular grunts a reason to not clutch their weapons so tightly. 

Ahead, the regiment slowed as the tunnel widened into a vast antechamber, the broken gates of the colony just visible through a thick mist, signs of a recent altercation. There was silence, eerie and total; muttering and theories over what was going on started to spread along the line; perhaps the scare and brutal tactics had finally taken a toll in the defenders who had ripped each other apart before the invaders did it themselves or maybe they were gathering in the last colony like a horde waiting for their last attempt at killing the Cardreans for good. 

"It's quiet," muttered Apory, sniffing the air above his head as he dragged the twin bolter from one of its sides. “This ain't right.”

Boyle grunted. "Since when has anything been right, eh?"

Ada didn't speak, but she heard every word, learning silently all the calls and mannerisms of the strangers. The silence before a shot, the meaning behind their jokes or when they implied some Tactical formation. She glanced at the colony walls ahead, scanning. What Boyle and his kind saw as just another crumbling outpost was something else to her, systems of irrigation ruined by conflict, outer shells pitted with black scarring, once-productive ground now abandoned without saving the crops first. She’d spent years maintaining structures like that, sweating through endless harvest seasons while the local enforcers taxed them dry before Ada had enough and crushed one of their skulls with her tools.

“Tunnel’s too open,” she said, finally. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it cut through the muttering. “If they were here, we’d have heard it.”

Boyle chuckled dryly. “Oh, now the junt talks strategy.”

Apory snorted, but no one else laughed.

Billie, the other Cardrean dragging the heavy gun with Apory, gave Boyle a look. “Cut it. She's got more working grey matter than half of you it seems. Well said Sister, just guide us”

“Really? Just because she is a woman too?” Boyle raised an eyebrow

“Yes; I'll take the piss out of her later” The two women glanced at each other

Ada caught Boyle’s gaze again after a couple of minutes went by, but there was no challenge in her look this time. She didn’t come from cities that bled violence for fun, neither when being nice to someone else was seen as being too fragile it seemed; perhaps she had been too quick in taking his behavior as a personal action towards her instead of the normal reaction of a man used to always being the “tough” one in a society that only allowed him to show violence. As all the regiment entered through the hole in the gates, the colony returned with only more questions. Personal effects scattered, meals half-eaten on mess hall tables, a set of regalia discarded near a still-flickering holopad. Signs of a panic, but not of a fight. No blood. No bodies. No bullet marks. Boyle’s stomach twisted in a different way now.

Ada crouched near a collapsed doorway, brushing dust from a terminal set into the wall. She pried open the casing with a tool too fine for most Cardrean grunts to carry, hands quick and clean.

“What’re you doing?” Boyle asked, not quite hostile anymore, but not friendly either.

“Trying to see what happened before you get your dumb skull blown off walking into a trap,” she replied flatly, imitating the hostility of the Axe.

Then, a low hum from the terminal. Ada’s face was lit by a greenish glow. Her eyes narrowed as code scrolled, static-choked footage flickering on a cracked display. She looked back to the squad with her eyes opened wide in shock, lips parted to speak but the ground beneath them trembled before the Hydrorer could mutter a single syllable.

A dull, heavy roar echoed from ahead, and then a shriek of twisting metal, followed by a split-second flare of blue plasma.

The Lörgen was ten meters ahead when the trap snapped below its threads. With a sound like a sigh from hell’s lungs, the floor gave out beneath the vehicle and jagged spikes punched up from concealed pits. Simultaneously, magnetic detonators latched to its hull ignited in a chorus of small explosions. The blast lifted the tank’s left side off the ground before a second explosion blew out the internal compartment. A burst of flame surged from the crew hatch.

“Down!” Commander Dormath yelled through the comms

The regiment scattered, weapons raised, but nothing came; just the sight of the Lörgen cooking from the inside, molten circuits leaking from the seams. T hen came the screaming. A survivor.

“GET OFF ME! THEY PUSHED ME OFF-! THEY-FUCK YOU I HAVE TO GO BACK! BRANNICK-!!!”

He stumbled out of the wreckage, one leg dragging, half of his uniform blackened and curling from heat. His eyes were wild, unfocused and blood streamed down one side of his face. A Hydrorer was the first to reach him, grabbing him under the arm before he collapsed.

“They…Rulf…Yurlen…everyone is still inside you bastard! Help THEM, sonen Warp!” Krenshaw howled, voice cracking. “I have to-have to go back for them!”

“You can’t,” Ada heard her compatriot say, gripping his arm with barely enough strength to keep him in place “They gave you the chance!”

“No!” he sobbed, punching at the air uselessly. “No-no they-!”

Behind them, the burning wreck gave a final groan as the munitions cooked off. A secondary explosion tore the turret free, flinging it into the mist like a scrap of toy metal. The blast wave knocked several soldiers off their feet. Then came the clinking, skittering, the scraping of metal on concrete as dozens of pairs of feet suddenly rushing in at speed towards their position. The ambush had begun.

Autogun emplacements unfolded from the walls, spraying down the corridors. One caught Apory across the left arm, spinning him in place before Boyle dragged him behind a broken fountain. Return fire spat in wild arcs, but there were just fast-moving silhouettes behind the fog; giving the defenders a hard time picking their shots.

Boyle swore and pressed himself into a cratered support beam. “They herded us in! Those spinerats herded us!” The words were barely out of Boyle’s mouth when a shuddering crack sounded overhead. A section of the upper gantry ahead came loose and crashed down into Squad Jerthin’s formation. Four Cardreans vanished beneath the debris in a mist of blood and twisted iron, their screams snuffed out in an instant.

“CONTACT-HIGH!” Someone shouted.

Lasfire flared like lightning in the fog, green and red bolts from the shadows above, pinning the regiment in a crossfire. Silhouettes ducked and scuttled, moving with speed and coordination only seen once before, in Hydrora. Now the fight had leveled equally, the colonists were firing back, no longer scared to the bone of the sudden attacks from the Death Wishers nor receiving the outsiders with good intentions; the death of the High Marshall of Hydrora had not only marked the loss of many legionnaires, but too the beginning of the resistance.

Ada hit the ground hard, shoulder first, her side arm clattering beside her. She rolled under the fountain’s little wall and tried to protect herself as best as she could, looking around in a panic for a better position; Apory was still on the ground, groaning in pain but clenching his teeth to not let his own pain distract the rest of the team from what they were doing or hearing. The Hydrorer blinked twice, trying to understand why did he do it, why did he not wail for help and instead swallow it like it was nothing; she crawled to his side fingers already fishing out a sealed ampoule from her satchel. With practiced precision, she snapped it open and poured it over the arm of the Cardrean; then she proceeded to tear the hem of her sleeve and wrapped it tightly on the tended wound; despite the hastily done work, it seemed to have much better results than whatever passed for Cardrean battle medicine.

Green lasfire cracked past them at a frightening close call. The return fire was chaotic, stuttered, but already she could hear the squad leaders howling orders into the vox-nets, in no time the Hive-dwellers started to recover from the blow and rise up once again. Ada and the rest, though wounded, followed suit, setting up in a tripod the bolter once more and beginning to spot where they could assist the counter offensive.

The woman quickly trailed off again, gazing into the other squads around them like a citizen watches circus performers setting up their acts; hand signals that meant different formations, sync’d chants to scare the enemy off, words she did not understand in their language to designate hot spots or pressure flanks. These weren’t wild brutes she had seen shoot one of her own or the ragged filth she had been walked alongside with, these were efficient killers that delighted in being seen as lowlives.

“GIRL! SNAP OUT OF IT!” Billie shook her roughly by the shoulder, yanking Ada back from the edge of her trance.

Ada blinked hard. The thunderous noise of combat crashed back into her senses, snarls of Cardreans directed at Hydrorers that had applied antiseptics or made the bastards inject stabilizers. 

“We’ve gotta move the velk,” Boyle barked, already crouching toward the rig. “They’re falling back, but that means we’re in their next kill box if we don’t hurry.”

Ada nodded, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, moving to the rear of the bolter’s recoil harness. The rig was patched together from hauler scraps, mounted over a trolley base barely holding under the recoil plates. They had been repositioning it for nearly every fight, dragging it from junction to junction to a point that seemed almost comical when remembering it; her back was already aching from it but she dismissed the discomfort with a grunt and pushed past it like those around her.

They pulled the heavy weapon forward, reaching the mouth of a tunnel from which up close and personal brawls were impossible to distinguish in the darkness of it; without missing a beat, Billie helped Boyle and Ada to set up the bolter, with Apory stumbling behind them not bleeding anymore but with his arm still useless in a real fight.  The bolter’s recoil was a constant tremor in Ada’s arms, a jarring rhythm that numbed her fingers and sent every pulse through her chest like a second heartbeat, she fired in measured arcs, like Billie had taught her. Sweep. Pause. Sweep again. No hesitation; it was beginning to not seem as bad each time she did it, little by little, the thought of friendly fire did not seem so bad.

Somewhere in the haze of flashes from the end of the gun something moved too fast for Ada to get an angle before it would have killed her. Her sidearm came up by instinct, a second too late; before she could pull the trigger, the shape dropped. A clean hole through its temple, half its weight slamming against the wall before crumpling forward, still twitching. Smoke rose from the corpse’s chest. Ada turned her head, breath catching; Boyle stood there, right behind her, his sidearm still raised, eyes already leaving the kill. He didn’t look at her, the man just stepped forward again; unbothered, slotting a fresh cell into the gun with practiced ease.

“You alright?” he asked, voice low.

She blinked. “You didn’t have to do that.”

He arched a brow. “You kept Apory from bleeding out. You’re tarn .”

The flicker of warmth that had sparked in her chest turned cold.

“Right,” she muttered. “A… blutzar (Blood pact in Cardrean), right?”

Boyle smirked, the smallest bit of pride in his eyes “So you been listenin’”

With their flanks punched through and encased on their entrenchments, the colonist did not last very much under the weight that was beginning to amount all around them. Hydrorers seemed to already get used to their positions, not needing much “encouragement” from their peers to stay behind them and not get across the firing lines; they healed and weaved around the tarns fumbling over themselves a couple of times but catching up with the pace rather quickly, there was still bitterness between them of course, too the sensation of having to watch their backs if an Axe or a Mute got any ideas of finishing the job that Gallius had started and shooting them again in the face like the commissar had done. As for the man himself, it was the first real fight where he had stayed behind his lines, giving orders through the Vox-casters to his superiors but generally absent from the general channel; although Dormath, Elira, Jobb and Annis had carried out most of the coordination efforts that came after the initial shock and losses, Gallius had taken over the offensive as soon as it was clear to engage in any counter measures pointing to each commander what exactly to instruct and what to say to their respective forces. 

Amongst the mournings, the funerals and oaths to remembrance, Ada couldn’t shake the feeling something was off in the bodies and uniforms of the enemy. She had seen the PDF when she was a teenager walk around her colony and so she knew there was no much variants between hers and what other colonies utilized for theirs; yet despite that she had never seen rags such as those the dead had worn that day, between the cuts and exit wounds from the guns of the Death Wishers there was cloth that did not resemble fabric or leather, but human skin. It could be attributed to the ambush they suffered, them trying to blend as dead soldiers already, but that was against every belief about the resurrection of the soul she had learned to believe in conjunction with the faith on the God-Emperor; it too didn’t explain the strange tattoos, not found anywhere else, not even in those other prisoners freed by the Cardreans presented, these were of symbols she had never seen, with the number “9” being repeated consistently throughout many of the ones she investigated when no one was paying attention to her. 

“Yo! Kid we gonna teach you some bad words, where are ya’?!” The voice of Billie made Ada look back at their squad, all smiling and giving her the finger