‘Vox,’ Zerberyn recognised. ‘The last thing I remember… I was at Operations. Your crew allowed the dorsal void bank to overload.’
‘An inevitable consequence of going into battle with a numerical, strategic, and technological disadvantage, lord captain,’ slurred Marcarian, stumping clumsily into his field of view. ‘An emitter overload when we translated out threw you down the walkway and struck your head on the rail. You’ve been out for just over an hour.’ He shrugged apologetically, or tried to. ‘I’m not sure exactly how long. The chronos are out.’
With a groan, Zerberyn made to pull in his elbows and draw himself up.
Nothing moved.
In consternation more than concern, he jerked on his arms, then his legs, but neither moved a millimetre. He could feel them, a pins-and-needles tingle across his various points of contact with the ground, but he couldn’t command a single muscle to twitch. It was as though the servo-muscular connections to his armour had been severed. Without power assistance and nervous control, half a tonne of bonded ceramite was little more than an ornate null-sensoria tank, the kind used to prepare neophytes for the experience of mucranoid hibernation.
Indignity piled upon indignity.
‘I cannot move.’
Marcarian gestured across his body with an open palm. Zerberyn rolled his head the other way, and met the leering half-skull of Mendel Reoch.
The Space Marine’s armour was bone-white and bore the modified double-helix of the Apothecarium on the shoulder pad. All well within the diktats laid down in the Codex Astartes, and Zerberyn therefore felt obligated to approve, but, as with the Chaplaincy black, it seemed inimical to the Exemplar spirit. An alternative variable was that Zerberyn simply did not like Reoch. And he did dislike his Second Company brother, with a self-sustaining passion. Binoptics glowered dully from the eye-pits of the organic upper half of the Apothecary’s face, the lower part constructed by the ugly fusion of an iron grille to the son of Dorn’s once-noble cheekbones. The reconstructive work was so extensive, so obtrusive that given the Apothecary’s long service and skill its unsightliness could only have been intentional, as if Reoch had deliberately cut back his face to bare cold metal, and a darkness he no longer wanted to conceal.
‘You will heal. Your paralysis is induced and temporary.’ His voice was a grizzle of vox-corruption. His optics glimmered with every intonation. ‘I have noted an alarming tendency amongst our Chapter brothers to not lie still when commanded to do so.’
Zerberyn held Reoch’s unblinking, back-lit stare.
‘Flush it out of me. Now.’
Reoch sighed. ‘I blame Oriax Dantalion. He persuaded the primarch-progenitor to adopt the Codex Astartes and now every Exemplar believes himself a martyr to his own special wisdom.’
‘Except for you of course, brother.’
‘I am an Apothecary,’ said Reoch. The diamantine drill-bit of his narthecium gauntlet revved and reversed. A spring-loaded injector attachment clicked out of the reductor, cycled through various combinations of syringes and needles until a hyperfine carbon tip slotted into a slender glass vial, locked, then extended forwards. The plunger drew back into the apparatus, slowly filling the syringe with a milky fluid as the Apothecary leaned in. ‘I always know best.’
Zerberyn clenched his jaw and tilted his head to expose the vulnerable fibre bundles and cabling hidden beneath the gorget ring. He felt a sharp pain as the hypodermic squeezed between the vertebrae at the top of his spine, and then a rush of cold. He gave an involuntary gasp, then shuddered as the sensation passed down his spinal cord and dispersed into his peripheral nervous system. He wriggled his fingers and this time they moved, gauntlet servos whirring as armoured digits rolled clumsily in and out, up and down. On impulse, he shifted his hand to fumble over his weapons belt.
His fingers closed around the grip of his bolt pistol and squeezed. Fingers, wrist, shoulders: the sensation of being bundled up in a skin-tight carapace of thick wool began to recede. An Umbra-pattern bolt pistol’s uncompromising menace left no place in its proximity for that kind of uncertainty.
He sat up slowly.
A tangle of twisted and torn walkways crisscrossed the command deck, smoke and dust rising from the cogitation pits with each slow grinding whup of fans. The strategium display was static, the encircling image-boosters and visual feeds hissing noise. The main viewer crackled with electromagnetic distortions, flickering with augur traces and warp energy residuals that stained the eye with afterghosts. Everywhere the frail bodies of crew serfs lay under blood-lashed metal.
Anger, real anger deep in his transhuman belly, filled him with excoriating fire.
A Chapter-strength deployment, the might of the Fists Exemplar fleet, had been brushed aside. Ship to ship, man to man, the Adeptus Astartes would always triumph, but the weapons and technologies that the Beast could call on were just too powerful. Dantalion transported the bulk of the First Company, a few squads of the Second, Seventh and Tenth. What had happened to the rest of the fleet? Bulwark, Faceless Warrior? Alcazar Remembered? Could the Fists Exemplar have been reduced to little more than the First Company and a handful of squads from three others?
There had been no other option. Any other commander of the Fists Exemplar would have taken the same decision as him.
‘How did this happen?’
‘We were not as worthy as we considered ourselves to be,’ answered Reoch, clenching the reductor back into his narthecium as he turned and walked away.
Marcarian stepped back to allow Zerberyn to stand up, the Space Marine’s genetic gifts just about compensating for the dizziness and slight lack of motor control that lingered in his system courtesy of Mendel Reoch. The bruising round his neck restricted his range of motion, but breathing at least came easier now that he was upright.
‘What is our status?’
‘The orks took out the system. The whole damned system. We were lucky, if you’d call it luck. We were already heading out, and were able to make an emergency translation before we suffered too much heavy damage.’ A ruptured power conduit running through the ceiling sprayed the walkway with sparks and made the shipmaster flinch. ‘The rest we suffered during,’ he shouted, as the hiss of sparks died down. ‘I saw the Interdictor make it out ahead of us. I also saw Grey Ranger crushed like she was nothing.’ He was silent a moment. ‘My first ship.’
‘Did any other ships manage to escape?’
‘No sign yet, but it’s only been ten minutes or so since we emerged. Systems are still coming back online and we’re still assessing the damage. And…’
He gestured to the wreck of the vox-turret.
‘Suggestions?’
The Fists Exemplar hierarchy was no different to that of any other Codex-compliant Chapter, but the lines were enforced with a stringency seldom seen elsewhere. They were notoriously free and independent thinkers in their founder’s mould: not the barbaric affectation of the Wolves of Fenris, nor the solitary temperament of the hunters of Mundus Planus, but a mentality born of absolute conviction their personal infallibility. It was, when properly managed, their greatest strength.
‘The Codex would suggest we resume our original heading,’ said Marcarian. ‘If anyone made it out of Vandis then they could be anywhere in the subsector. Rejoining the Last Wall at Phall would be their most logical destination.’
‘I doubt the ship would survive such a journey,’ Zerberyn grunted as he stood. ‘Walk with me to Vox.’