"Know (some) Fear"

Chapter One - Hadrian

CHAPTER-SPECIFIC TW: death and near-death experiences, mutilation, medical horror, medical restraints and drugs

The hive colony stank of rust and decay. 

Hadrian moved through the corridor in standard formation, third position behind Brother-Sergeant Castus, his bolter held at ready-low. The passage was narrow here — barely wide enough for Astartes in full plate. The walls wept condensation that hissed when it touched his armor's surface. Something in the water was corrosive. Something in the water was always corrosive, down here.

The mission was simple. A minor relic had been stolen — a data-crystal containing tactical records from the chapter's involvement in some long-forgotten campaign. Not valuable, not strategically significant, but stolen nonetheless, and the Blood Ravens did not tolerate the loss of their possessions. They were thorough about such things. Relentless, some would say.

Intelligence indicated that the thief had fled to the primary hive city of this planet, hoping to lose pursuit in its labyrinthine depths. A reasonable strategy against Arbites or PDF. Less reasonable against a chapter with millennia of experience tracking relics through hostile territory.

Hadrian's helm display painted the corridor in shades of green and gray, thermal overlays showing the ambient heat signatures of machinery and leaking pipes. Nothing human-shaped ahead. Nothing moving. The vox was quiet save for the soft breathing of his brothers and the occasional click of Sergeant Castus's tactical notations.

Ahead of him, the sergeant moved with the fluid precision that had earned him the promotion last month. Only five years of service, and Castus had already been selected for squad leadership. Hadrian's jaw tightened behind his helm as he willfully suppressed the tendril of envy creeping into his mind. It wasn't as if Castus had stolen the opportunity from him—Hadrian had never even been in contention. In the seven years since becoming a battle-brother, the most generous assessment he'd ever received was adequate.

He tried not to think about it. He thought about it anyway.

"Contact ahead," Castus murmured over the squad channel. "Thermal bloom. Multiple signatures."

Hadrian's focus snapped back to the mission. He shifted his grip on his bolter, thumbing the safety with practiced ease. Whatever inadequacies plagued him, whatever doubts whispered in the back of his mind, they had no place here. Here, there was only the next step, the next corner, the next potential threat.

"Formation holds," Castus ordered. "Hadrian, you're on point."

Hadrian moved forward without hesitation. Point position meant first into danger—either a test or an acknowledgment that he was the most expendable member of the squad. He didn't let himself wonder which.

The corridor opened into a junction ahead, pipes and cables snaking across the ceiling like mechanical veins. Hadrian's helm display registered the thermal signatures Castus had identified—a dozen of them, maybe more, clustered in the space beyond. Warm bodies. Living bodies.

He raised a fist. Hold.

"Squad, I have visual," he reported. "Approximately fifteen contacts. Armed. They're positioned behind cover—looks like they were expecting us."

"Impossible," Brother Hektor said from the rear. "Our approach was clean. No way they knew we were coming."

"Nevertheless." Meron's voice was flat. "Hadrian, assessment."

Hadrian studied the junction. The ambushers—because that's what they were, whatever Hektor believed—had positioned themselves well. Multiple angles of fire. Decent cover. A kill-box designed for anything that came through the main corridor.

But they'd made a mistake. They'd positioned for humans. The pipes running along the ceiling were thick enough to support an Astartes in power armor, and the shadows up there would hide movement until it was too late.

Hadrian opened his mouth to suggest the flanking route, but before he'd formed a single word, the world turned to fire.

+ + +

Later, Hadrian would try to reconstruct what happened. He would piece together fragments of memory and tactical data, trying to understand how a simple retrieval mission had become a slaughter.

The explosion came from beneath. Not from the ambushers ahead—from the floor itself, shaped charges placed hours or days before, waiting for exactly this moment. The corridor buckled. Hadrian felt himself lifted, thrown, his armor shrieking warnings as systems overloaded from the electromagnetic pulse that accompanied the blast.

He hit something—a wall, a pipe, a piece of debris—and then he was falling, tumbling through darkness as the floor gave way beneath him. A disposal chute, some part of his mind registered. The charges had blown him into a disposal chute.

He fell for five seconds, ten. Hit something hard. Fell again. His helm display flickered, died, came back in fragments. He heard distant bolter fire above him—his brothers engaging the ambushers—and then another explosion, bigger this time, and the vox dissolved into static.

Hadrian hit the bottom of whatever he'd fallen into with enough force to crack ferrocrete. His armor's impact absorption saved his life, barely, but something in his chest shifted in a way that sent white-hot agony through his torso. Internal damage. Significant internal damage.

He lay there in the darkness, surrounded by refuse and rust and the distant sound of gunfire, and tried to make his body obey him.

"Sergeant Meron," he rasped into the vox. "Squad, respond."

Static.

"Anyone. Respond."

Nothing. Either the vox was damaged, or—

Or there was no one left to respond.

Hadrian forced himself to move. Every motion was agony, but he was Astartes. Pain was a signal, not a barrier. He rolled onto his side, then his stomach, then pushed himself to his hands and knees. His helm display was showing only fragments now—partial thermal, no tactical overlay, no squad markers. Useless.

He removed the helm. The air down here was thick with chemical stench, but breathable. Barely.

He was in some kind of waste processing facility, long abandoned. Mountains of debris rose around him—metal, plastic, organic matter in various states of decay. The ceiling was far above, lost in darkness, and the hole he'd fallen through was invisible against the black.

Footsteps. Multiple. Approaching.

Hadrian tried to raise his bolter and found it wasn't in his hands. Lost in the fall. He still had his combat knife, mag-locked to his thigh, but his arm wouldn't respond when he tried to reach for it—something was wrong with the armor’s shoulder joint.

The footsteps grew closer. Lights appeared—handheld lumen-sticks, bobbing in the darkness. Voices, speaking in the clipped argot of the underhive.

"—told you I heard something. Look at that. Look at that."

"Is that—?"

"A fuckin’ Angel of the Emperor. Throne, he's still moving."

Hadrian tried to rise. His body refused. The internal damage was worse than he'd thought. His enhanced physiology was fighting to keep him alive, but it was a tenuous victory.

“Citizens,” he rasped, weakly. “I require aid. Alert the nearest authorities.”

The men ignored him.

"Get the paralytic. The heavy stuff."

“Are… are you sure? Someone will probably come looking for him.”

“By then, we'll be far away, drunk off Amasec-Vint and covered in whores.”

A face swam into Hadrian's field of vision. Lean, scarred, with the pale complexion of someone who'd never seen natural sunlight. The man was smiling.

With what little strength he could, Hadrian forced out words. “Do not dare to touch me! I am Adeptus Astartes, a warrior of the Imperium!”

"Shhh, big guy," the scavenger said, putting a finger to his own lips. "Save your strength—we’ll get more scrip if you're alive.”

Hadrian felt something sharp punch through the back of his neck. Cold spread through him. His vision blurred.

The last thing he heard before the darkness took him were the voices of the scavengers.

“Throne. It actually worked.”

“You didn't think it would? That was a triple dose.”

“He’s an Angel, who knows what chems work on them? Give him more every few minutes — we do not want him waking up before we get to the Pale Hand.”

+ + +

Hadrian woke to the sound of liquid dripping in a steady rhythm. His nostrils were filled with the heavy scent of blood. He forced his reluctant eyelids apart, vision slowly bringing his surroundings into focus.

Bright lights blazed in the ceiling above him. He was lying down on something. A surgical table—he could feel the cold metal against his back. His armor was gone.

He tried to get up, but was stopped by thick leather straps over his arms and legs. He was exposed, laid out like a specimen.

The pain hit him, then. Agony wracked his body in white hot lashes of fire. The worst came from his chest, a vast and terrible wrongness that went beyond anything he'd experienced in seven years of combat. Even for a Space Marine, it was almost enough to incapacitate him.

Almost.

Gritting his teeth, Hadrian lifted his head off the table and looked down at his body.

His torso was …open. An enormous incision ran down his midline, abdominal wall spread wide by surgical retractors. There was a large square hole in his ribcage, as though cut by rotary saw. It opened into a cavernous empty space within his chest. Where there should have been organs, there were now only cauterized stumps. 

Physical pain faded to a distant thrum as Hadrian realized his progenoids had been stolen.

The gene-seed of the Blood Ravens, extracted from his living body like ore from a mine. Sold, presumably, to whoever paid highest. There were markets for Astartes biological material—dark markets, hidden from Imperial oversight, where the desperate and the heretical paid fortunes for the stuff of Space Marines.

Hadrian held no illusions about his chances for survival. He would not live long enough to reach his brothers. But if he was to leave this world for the next, he was taking the organ-stealing bastards with him. 

Voices, nearby. Footsteps.

"—vitals are decreasing, but slowly. Remarkable, really. I've never had a specimen stay alive this long after extraction."

"The enhancements must include an improved ability to form blood clots. It is likely from one of the remaining organs, since he has not bled out.”

"Ah, yes, that was intentional. ‘Larraman’s organ,’ I believe it’s called. I'm leaving that one for last. It will keep the rest of the tissue fresh."

The figures moved into his field of vision. Two of them—surgeons, based on their garb, with the pale green smocks and blood-spattered aprons of medical professionals. They were examining a data-slate, comparing notes, utterly unconcerned with the mutilated Astartes on their table.

Hadrian tested the muscles of his arms and legs. They responded, albeit sluggishly. Whatever the scavengers had injected him with was wearing off. It appeared that the organ-thieves hadn't bothered with additional paralytics, trusting the table’s leather straps to restrain their victim during vivisection. 

For a human, it would have been enough.

Hadrian pulled, putting all of his effort into freeing the arm nearest to the surgeons. When the strap snapped, the men had just enough time to realize their approaching death before Hadrian's hand closed around the nearest one's throat and squeezed.

The man's neck broke with a wet crack. Before the body had even started to fall, Hadrian’s arm was already moving to its next target. The motion caused his chest to scream in agony. He took the pain and channeled it into a strike so powerful, his fist broke through the other surgeon's ribs and lodged next to his heart.

Hadrian pulled his bloodied hand out of the man's torso with a wet sucking noise, letting his body fall unceremoniously next to the other. 

With one hand free, Hadrian made quick work of the remaining straps. With both hands, he grabbed the retractors holding his chest open and bent them in half, flinging the mangled tools away. The edges of the gaping incision sagged, no longer under tension.

Hadrian rolled off of the table, landing clumsily on the floor. The room spun around him as he forced his still partially paralyzed limbs to support his bulk. He blinked sweat from his eyes, looking for a way out. His vision was narrowing, darkness creeping in at the edges.

He didn't have much time left. Not enough time to find his stolen progenoids. Not enough time to find every other member of this—“Pale Hand,” the scavenger had called it—and cleanse the Emperor's realm of the desecration that was their existence. 

All Hadrian could do with his dwindling life was try to get a message to his brothers, alerting them to the stolen gene-seed, and ensure that the organ-thieves were unable to finish their unholy harvest.

Hadrian grabbed a surgical tool from the tray beside the table. Some kind of cutting implement, sharp and heavy. Good enough. He staggered toward the door and pushed through into the corridor beyond.

The facility was small—a converted warehouse, perhaps, or an abandoned manufactorum. The walls were stained with old blood and older rust. He passed other rooms, other surgical tables. Some were empty. Some were not.

He didn't look at what was on the occupied tables. He just moved, one foot in front of the other, desperately fighting for distance from the butchers who dared to defile a Space Marine. 

Hadrian killed two more people before he found the service lift — one guard and another surgeon. He killed a third as she was exiting the lift. He stepped over her corpse and into the lift, then shoved her body out of the way of the closing doors. The lift descended, groaning and shuddering. 

Hadrian leaned against the wall, watching blood drip onto the floor. There was only so much his enhanced physiology could do. This was how he died. Not in battle. Not in service to the chapter. Gutted in some underhive butcher shop, harvested for parts like a broken servitor.

The lift stopped. The doors opened onto darkness.

Hadrian stepped out and kept walking. Down corridors. Through junctions. Past humans who screamed and fled at the sight of him.

He walked until his legs stopped working. Then he crawled. He crawled until his arms gave out, and then he lay on the cold metal floor of some forgotten passage and stared at the ceiling, waiting to die.

He thought about his brothers. Were they dead? He had only survived because he'd been blown into a trash chute. The only member of the squad to escape the second blast, and all because he'd been in the wrong place when the charges detonated.

Well, at least he wouldn't be the sole survivor much longer.

The darkness crept closer. His heartbeats were losing their rhythm, beats stuttering and uneven. He could feel peripheral systems shutting down throughout his body as his physiology prioritized core functions. It wasn't going to be enough. There wasn't enough left of him to save.

He should pray. A final benediction to the Emperor, a commendation of his soul to the chapter. That was what a proper Space Marine would do. It was disgraceful that he had taken this long to think of it.

…He couldn't remember the words.

Hadrian was still trying to remember when he heard footsteps approaching. Light. Quick. Human.

A figure appeared at the edge of his vision. A female, aged early to mid-thirties. She had dark brown hair pulled back into a messy braid, and wore a stained medical coat on top of simple, functional clothes. She was carrying a large pile of unfolded laundry and a small, sputtering candle. The tiny flame cast her face in shadow, accentuating dark purple rings below her eyes.

Her countenance lost all hint of fatigue the moment she noticed the dying Astartes on the ground before her.

 "Emperor's balls!" she cursed, skidding to a halt.

Hadrian tried to speak. What came out was more of a gurgle.

The mortal woman stared at him. Her horrified expression intensified as her eyes moved over his wounds—the opened chest, the missing tissue, the blood that had painted him from throat to thigh. 

She spoke Low Gothic with the characteristic twang of the hive’s local accent. "By the Throne, how are you still alive?" 

The mortal dropped her pile of clothes and knelt beside Hadrian. Her hands moved to his neck. She was trying to check his pulse, he realized dimly.

"You're a Space Marine," she said, not really a question.

He managed a nod. Barely.

"What in the name of Holy Terra happened to you?" 

Hadrian tried to speak—to rebuke her profanity—but she cut him off.

“No, don't answer that. It's not important. What's important right now is to get you back to my clinic so I can close these wounds.” She gave him a sardonic grin that seemed entirely inappropriate to the situation. “I knew I should have brought my surgical tools with me! You never know when you're going to stumble across someone carved open like a feast-day grox.”

Hadrian forced a weak breath out, shaping it into four quiet words. “You are… a physician?”

She nodded. “Yes. Of all the places you could've collapsed in the underhive, you actually picked a pretty good one. My clinic is only about twenty yards that way.”

The woman pointed in the direction from which she had come. Her demeanor shifted to something more serious as she turned back to look at him. “I hate to ask, but can you move?”

“I… cannot.”

“Alright. Uh… I don't suppose you have any other ideas how to get to the clinic?”

Hadrian did not, but it didn't matter. He coughed weakly, clearing his throat of phlegm and blood. 

“Citizen,” he whispered. “Where do your loyalties lie?” 

She frowned. “I'm going to go get the stretcher—it’ll probably snap under your weight, but-”

Hadrian cut her off. “Stop. Answer me.”

For a few seconds, the human looked at him in thoughtful silence. “Mostly to Vervunhive Recaf, though _____ is a close second. But you probably mean the Imperium. I won't pretend to be [someone pious] but I'm not a traitor.”

Her insouciance did nothing to reassure him, but Hadrian was out of options. “I am Brother Hadrian of the Blood Ravens. You must go to the nearest Arbites and convey the message that my organs were taken by a group called ‘The Pale Hand.’ Do not let them find my body.”

The woman's face blanched at the name. Evidently, she knew of them. “That's what happened? Throne above—I knew they were bad, but butchering one of the Emperor's Angels? Do they want the Imperium to blow up the entire hive?!” She pulled distractedly at her hair, further undoing the braid. 

Hadrian wheezed, coughing up more blood as he spoke. “Do you understand? Tell the Blood Ravens—”

The woman put a tiny, gentle finger across his lips, stunning him into silence. “Shh, stop, you're hurting yourself. I understand. Blood Ravens. Organs. Pale Hand. Got it. But let's see if you can tell them yourself.”