Although the Fifth Company has achieved a great victory over Chaos, it was not without cost. Brothers Ebenezar, Tycharias, Moliath, Ashkelon and Techmarine Dancred have lost their lives to the horde. Their bodies are laid out as custom dictates, with all the horror of their battle wounds on display. Tycharias particularly is a mess. Dancred is a butchered carcass of Adeptus Astartes flesh and twisted, claw-mauled hydraulics, electrical systems and bionic framing. The Techmarine fought bravely, but his position on the line was overrun and the abominations pushed on into the city. Members of Squad Contritus were instrumental in holding the invasion back – their sniping talents put to the test as the steep streets of the Saint Bartolomé-East district became wall-to-wall Chaotics. The Excoriators Scouts thinned out the misshapen mass with precision fire, giving Skase and several of his Squad Cicatrix brethren time to redeploy and push the monsters back. It took several bombing runs by the Thunderhawk Impunitas to fully sanitise the vicinity of hellspawn and their taint, however, leaving the district a derelict waste.
Whereas my Excoriators have upheld their proud tradition of attrition, I must accept responsibility for the failure of almost everyone else. I ask too much of the cemetery world’s common humanity. Without the weakness of Imperial citizenry there would be no need for the Adeptus Astartes, and nothing has made this clearer than the manner of the Certusian retreat. History records the accomplishments of all-too-ordinary men: the war for Armageddon, the Euphrassic Massacres and the numerous Black Crusade honours of battle-hardened Cadians. Our species can be strong and our spirit beyond measure. This is what is celebrated in the myth and legend of song and saga. But for every Imperial citizen who has ever held their ground in the face of the xenos invader, the heretical traitor or Chaos marauder, a thousand have fled. It is in the fear and dread of those thousand that the Imperium’s doom is written. Men, women and children in whose trembling hands weapons turn to water. The faint-hearted majority who run for their lives in the expectation that others will save them. Perhaps the Adeptus Astartes are to blame for this. The Imperium’s strength is its weakness. The existence of demigods turns common men into bystanders. They catch a glimpse of the divine and consider themselves beyond the calculus of fate. The Emperor’s Angels will save them. They are witnesses to the clash of good and evil in the galaxy, failing to recognise that it is upon their collective shoulders that the destiny of an empire resides.
For all my gene-bred superiority and Angel’s arrogance, I find it hard to blame them. I am more than human and yet, on the dark fringes of my understanding – lapping against the bedrock of my warrior heritage, my training and experience – I feel it too. The vertiginous, ice-water plunge of fear, simple and pure. The irrational and almost irresistible desire to run, to take oneself away from the source of danger and disgust. How common humanity manages to steel itself for such a storm of chemistry and emotion is an everyday miracle in itself. That most fly when I need them to fight is regrettable. Unlike Skase and Joachim, spitting their curses and bawling remonstration at fear-wrought statues of Certusian cowardice, I cannot find it in myself to hate these mortals. My sacrifice is my own. I do it for the Emperor and not for them. In truth, I feel nothing for their survival. We share nothing like a brotherly bond – although amongst the Fifth that too has been sadly lacking. Should they survive, neither they nor their progeny will go on to change the Imperium. Their continued existence means only one thing to me: the denial of enemy victory. I suspect that the gall-fever and the madness of an immaterial incursion are simply intended to soften us for the body blow. The Cholercaust is coming. The Ruinous Powers wish to take this world and its people from me. They will be denied. They will fail. I will ensure it.
With Brother Novah I stalk the smouldering ruins of Saint Bartolomé-East. A crater and fireball-ravaged remnants are all that remain. With the Fifth Company battle standard held high, Novah crunches through the scorched rubble. He scans the battered landscape for any signs of corruption with his boltgun while relaying orders back and forth over the vox-channels.
‘Second Whip Scarioch has been confirmed as missing.’
I nod. Novah continues. ‘Second Whip Etham repeats his request to go out and search for Brother Ishmael.’
‘Denied,’ I snap back. ‘Ishmael is lost. Tell Etham that Squad Castigir is his responsibility now and he needs to start acting like it.’
‘Brother Simeon is up at the Memorial Mausoleum as instructed. He reports burning bodies in the plaza. It looks like the Sisters opened fire on the crowd.’
‘The Sisters?’
I stop and consider Palatine Sapphira. It would be hard to imagine the stoic Sister succumbing to the frenzy and torching Certusians for sport.
‘They claim they were attacked.’
‘By ether-filth?’ It seemed unlikely that rift forms had penetrated that far into the city, even from Saint Bartolomé-East.
‘Cemetery worlders,’ Novah replies.
The gall-fever. The city churning. I shake my head. The influence of Chaos within and without the perimeter. In the wake of the initial assault, abandoned by many of the cemetery worlders and up to my helmet in immaterial filth, I had little time to consider the consequence of mass desertion. While I was fighting for my life and the lives of others, hundreds upon hundreds of wild-eyed Certusians were running uphill towards the spiritual safety of the Memorial Mausoleum. Out of their minds with fear, militiamen, members of ammunition supply chains and terrified Charnel Guardsmen fled screaming from the unleashed horror of the warp and the desperate gunfire barely keeping it at bay. For some – their minds broken – the screams would have turned to howls and anguish, and then anger. The line between fear and fury is one easy to cross in the fragile, erratic mind of a mere mortal. With the gall-fever firmly taken root, the cemetery worlders would have torn into the thousands at prayer about the walls of the great Mausoleum, some deserters still with weapons in hand.
Faced with unreasoning mobs of murderers – men intent on slaughtering all, even their own friends and families – I can imagine that Palatine Sapphira had little choice but to order her flamer-wielding Sisters to torch the rabid interlopers.
‘Have Brother Simeon set his serfs to organising labour parties from the cemetery worlders,’ I order Novah. ‘I need them to move bodies – they should be good at that.’
As we search through the charred remains of cloisters and chapels, I outline to the standard bearer how I want the bodies of dead defenders and penetrating spawn moved from the battlements and dumped outside the perimeter. I order the last of the city’s promethium barrels tipped out across the cadaver mounds of the fallen – a fuel-soaked hillock of flesh, both Certusian and immaterial – surrounding the perimeter.
The orders keep coming. Command structure and a sense of purpose nourish the aftermath of battle. Having stood amongst the killing fields of innumerable conflicts, I know that disbelief, shock and a sense of fatalism are soon to set in, combated only by leadership and labour. Without hard work the mind is allowed to dwell – on horrors experienced, the odds of survival and the futility of resistance.
I instruct Lord Lieutenant Laszlongia to reorganise his Charnel Guardsmen. I am now only interested in men who have proved their worth. Men of strong mind and spirit who held the line. Men who now know what they are facing and have the resolve to kill it. I order Laszlongia to recover weapons and ammunition and, with my Excoriators, re-establish themselves on the exterior perimeter. The blood-splattered battlements are ours again. For how long I cannot know.