Loveallthings

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.

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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.

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“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”

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”

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.