The Beast Arises

‘Bad luck?’ replied Daylight. He noted that Zarathustra had selected the discretion of a helm-to-helm link. There were other wall-brothers in the craft alongside them, not to mention forty atmospherically-armoured shock troops of the Astra Militarum Asmodai Seventieth, Heth’s finest. The Guardsmen and their leader, Major Nyman, seemed to Daylight to be about the finest and most resolute warriors that unmodified human flesh could compose, but he did not want them overhearing dissent from an Adeptus Astartes warrior as they fell headlong into Hades. Through the dark and slightly breath-fogged visor lenses of their faceplates, he could see pale, drawn, anxious faces that winced at every violent buck and lurch the Stormbird threw.

‘Bad luck happens even to good men, Daylight,’ said Zarathustra, his voice chopped and frayed by the interference patterns even on the short-range dedicated link. ‘Sometimes the forces of light prevail, sometimes the forces of darkness take the upper hand. Sometimes, as history teaches us, fate itself intervenes.’

He turned his impassive visor to look directly at Daylight. There was a gouge of raw metal across the otherwise perfectly polished faceplate, a gouge that had been left by the blade of one of the Sons of Horus during the fight at Zarathustra Wall. Heresy wounds were never patched, though the brother who had taken that stroke no longer dwelt inside the armour.

‘Think of Coldblood and his wall, at Orphan Mons,’ said Zarathustra. ‘They took that day against the eldar raiders, full of glory. Then the star went nova and took Coldblood, his wall and the surviving eldar. Victor and defeated alike, levelled by the whim of the conscienceless cosmos.’

‘They say the eldar corsairs engineered that stellar bomb to effect a pyrrhic victory,’ said Daylight.

‘They say… they say… Don’t spoil my story,’ grumbled Zarathustra. ‘My point is sound. Sometimes you kill the enemy, sometimes the enemy kills you, and sometimes the universe kills you both. This may have been a very conventional fight against these xenoforms, these Chrome things. Mirhen was probably wiping the floor with them, soaking the dust with their blood, or whatever they have that passes for blood…’

Zarathustra’s eye-slits were milky pale, and back-lit by a faint green glow, but Daylight could feel the intensity of his old friend’s gaze upon him.

‘Then the planet dies. Solar storm. Gravity anomaly. Tachyon event. Whatever. Doesn’t matter who’s winning then. We end up with a mess like this.’

Daylight glanced at his overhead again. The only time he had ever seen data footage of a planet as catastrophically mangled and tortured as Ardamantua was in feeds of unstable worlds to be avoided as ‘not supportive’. Six weeks earlier, the cream of his Chapter, the majority of his kin, the shield-corps itself, had been down there, dug in and on a solid footing, burning out the last vestiges of a numerous but outclassed enemy.

‘Are you suggesting we turn back and give them up as lost?’ he asked.

‘Of course not.’

‘Then what?’

‘I’m suggesting that we prepare ourselves for the worst,’ said Zarathustra. ‘If this mudball has up and died under Master Mirhen and our brothers, then…’

‘We will make a great mourning like never before, greater even than we did for our Primarch-Progenitor,’ said Daylight, simply.

‘It would be the worst loss imaginable,’ agreed Zarathustra. ‘For the Imperial Fists, the Old Seventh, greatest of all the Adeptus Astartes, and the most loyal of all defenders of Terra, to be reduced to… to nothing, to nothing but the last fifty wall-brothers stationed at the Palace. To lose all but five per cent, to be diminished to a twentieth… How would we ever recover from that?’

Daylight had no answer. Zarathustra was right. It was unthinkable. Even a force of transhuman warriors dedicated to dying in the service of the Imperium did not like to consider what might happen if they all died. The gene-seed loss alone would be an atrocity. Could they ever rebuild, even turning to Successor Chapters for support and bloodline? No loyal First Founding Chapter had ever been entirely swept away, not in the history of the Imperium, not even in the Heresy War.

Would the Imperial Fists be the first to pass into legend?