The First Heretic

Xaphen was reading the data screeds scrolling over his eye lenses. ‘There’s an order for the coming engagement, sanctioning the presence of remembrancers during combat operations. That cannot be correct, for I know you would never acquiesce to such a thing.’

Argel Tal grunted something that wasn’t quite an answer, and made his way to the door.

‘Wait.’

Argel Tal froze, already at the chamber door. ‘Yes?’

‘Think of all that has come to pass, brother. Focus upon how events are flowing faster towards the inevitable insurrection. Are you feeling anything within you? Any... changes?’

The Chapter Master’s hands ached with sudden ferocity. It was if his knuckles and wrists were hinged by broken glass.

Without knowing why he did it, Argel Tal lied.

‘No, brother. Nothing. Are you?’

Xaphen smiled.

Making war upon another human culture was always a distinct kind of poison, and Argel Tal loathed every time it became necessary.

These were unclean wars, and fought with bitterness bred into every soul doomed to take up arms against the Imperium. It wasn’t that the enemy dared resist that discomfited the Crimson Lord, nor was it the expenditure of munitions or the fact each of these worlds was peopled by defenders he came to admire for their tenacity. Those aspects grieved him, but the waste of life and potential from their defiance – that was what left scars.

He’d tried to raise the point with Xaphen in the past. With characteristic bluntness, the Chaplain had lectured him on the rightness of their cause and the tragic need to crush these cultures. Such discussion told Argel Tal nothing he didn’t already know. Similar talks with Dagotal and Malnor had progressed the same way, as had one with Torgal. The Gal Vorbak dispensed with all ranks outside of Argel Tal’s own, rendering all its warriors equal under the Chapter Master, and the former assault sergeant had struggled hardest to understand what Argel Tal was trying to explain.

‘But they are wrong,’ Torgal said.

‘I know they are wrong. That’s the tragedy. We bring enlightenment through unification with mankind’s ancestral home world. We bring hope, progress, strength and peace through unmatched might. Yet they resist. It grieves me that extinction is so often the answer. I pity them for their ignorance, but admire them for the fact they will die for their way of life.’

‘That is not admirable. That’s moronic. They would rather die being wrong than learn to embrace change.’

‘I never said it was intelligent. I said it grieved me to reave a world clean of life because of ignorance.’

Torgal mused on this, but not for very long. ‘But they’re wrong,’ he said.

‘We were wrong once, too.’ The Chapter Master held up a gauntleted fist to make the point: it was crimson, where it would once have been grey. ‘We were wrong when we worshipped the Emperor.’

Torgal had shaken his head. ‘We were wrong, and we adapted rather than be annihilated. I do not see the source of your grievance, brother.’

‘What if we could convince them? What if the flaw is with us, that we merely lack the words to win them to our side? We are butchering our own species.’

‘We are culling the herd.’

‘Forget I mentioned it,’ the Chapter Master conceded. ‘You are right, of course.’

Torgal would not be moved. ‘Do not mourn idiocy, brother. They are offered the truth and they have refused. If we had resisted the truth unto destruction, then we would have deserved our fate, just as these fools deserve theirs.’

Argel Tal hadn’t tried again. A treacherous and unworthy thought plagued him in those grimmest moments – how much of his brothers’ unquestioning belief was born of their own hearts, and how much was bred into them by their gene-seed? How many souls had he consigned to destruction himself, silently urged into bloodshed by sorcerous genetics?

Some questions had no answers.

Reluctant to burden Cyrene with his own troubles when she already served as confessor for hundreds of Astartes and Euchar soldiers, the only other time he’d spoken of his unease was with the one soul he knew he needed to guard against.

Aquillon understood.

He understood because he felt the same, sharing Argel Tal’s subtle lament at the need to destroy entire empires simply because their leaders were blind to the realities of the galaxy.

The latest world to earn destruction was called Calis by its inhabitants, and 1301-20 by the 1301st Expeditionary Fleet. A planetwide invasion was in the making even as Calis’s primitive orbital defences fell, burning, back into the atmosphere.

The population was sentenced to destruction on account of their dealing with xenos breeds. The purestrain human biological code of Calis’s citizens had been unalterably corrupted by the introduction of alien genetics. The people of the world below would not surrender the exact details to the Imperium, but it was clear from blood samples that the Calisians had cultured alien deoxyribonucleic acid into their own cells at some point in time.