Fire Warrior

“What do you want?” he said, staring down at the creature. “Why are y... What are you doing here? Why are you fighting us?” Lame questions. Halfhearted questions. He was no water caste por’la, after all. But the need to try — the need to do something the right way — was too strong to ignore.

The language itself felt just as bizarre now, grating against his throat, as it had done when the fio’ui medics grafted it into his mind at the third didactic treatment. He remembered spending decs afterwards with Ju and Y’hol, trying out the strange alien words appearing as if from nowhere inside their memories.

The sobbing human didn’t seem to hear his questions. It just clutched at his leg gibbering. “Please throne no don’t sweet emperor no don’t kill me oh living god not now, p-please don’t I’m begging you...”

“Quiet. Human. Be quiet.”

It would not be silent.

“Please oh I don’t want to, no, I... oh, I don’t want to die oh Terra please...”

It would not be silent and, worse, it was bleeding all over his legs. Sticky warm gue’la blood, dribbling and filthy against his hooves.

“Throne no please Emperor no no—”

He pumped a shot into its head and blotted out the horror and revulsion before it even hit him. He was getting good at that.

Something was clanging nearby, a rhythmic knocking that sent him dropping into an alert crouch, wary of every shadow, senses racing on overdrive. His slow scan of the room ended on a thick metal door, whorls of rust and moisture patterning it obscenely. A crude magnetic lock to one side winked its red eye conspiratorially at him. He lifted the rifle and obliterated the small device, quickly turning the gun on the door to face whatever horrors were revealed.

The metal disc rolled aside with a throaty roar. A dead man stepped out.

“Kais?” said Y’hol.

The apparition outside his cell could hardly be less friendly in appearance. Its polished shoulderguards and taupe armour were dulled by dust and filth, splattered with a drying galaxy of blood. Its fio’dr regs were stained and torn, an ugly singe mark marring its upper arm. Its weapon — a tangle of human blood and flesh decorating its tip — tilted up to glare at him.

But the unit code on its breast was clear, even beneath the filth. Shas’la T’au Kais. Y’hol stared at his best friend in astonishment, mind refusing to work.

They greeted each other in a tangle of relief, all horrors forgotten, clasping arms and pressing twice on the circle of armour over their hearts, a greeting reserved for familiars and friends. Kais kept repeating, over and over:

“We thought you were dead... We thought you were dead...”

Y’hol nodded, amused. Kais had always been too ready to expect the worst. “Of course not,” he smiled grimly. “Just a scratch.” He grunted and lifted his leg, a singed chunk of flesh missing just below the knee. Kais hissed, scrabbling in his utilities for a spare medipack.

“Relax,” Y’hol winced, easing the limb back to the floor. “It’s sealed over. A snae’ta gue’la cauterised it in the shuttle on the way here. Said prisoners aren’t allowed to die until they’ve answered some questions.”

“There are more survivors?”

“Yes...” Y’hol blinked, the insanity of the situation finally catching up with him. “Kais, what’s going on? Where is this place... a-and why are you even here?” The morass of jumbled questions subsided as a single, overbearing enquiry bubbled in his mind. “What’s happening, by the path?”

“They’ve captured an Aim,” Kais said, leading him out into the corridor. Y’hol didn’t recognise the voice — full of a sharp resonance he’d never heard before. It sounded focused, an attribute he’d never have associated with Kais until now.

“An Aun?” he breathed, horrified.

“That’s right,” his friend nodded, gelatinous gore clotting across his limbs. “I’m here to find him.”

“What’s happened to you?” Yhol whispered, suddenly afraid. Kais just stared at him, expressions hidden behind the glaring optic of his helmet.

“I found my niche,” he replied.

Together they worked their way back to the sealed access ramp, Vhol leaning on Kais with every painful, limped step.

“Can you open it?” Kais said, all business, nodding at the smoking panel beside the ramp.

Y’hol frowned. “B-but... The Aun—”

“That’s my path, Y’hol.”

“Your path?”

“Can you open it?”

Y’hol sighed, turning to the controls. This was all too much, too bewildering. Dealing with mundanity seemed the only way to cope. He squinted at the blasted circuitry, sparing a disparaging shake of his head for the crude gue’la technology, despite his bewilderment. “Yes,” he grunted, “Yes, I can open it. It’ll take me a whi—”

“Fine. I’ll send the rest of the prisoners here. You should be safe when you reach the surface. I think El’Lusha has everything under control.”

“But Kais...” The grime-covered warrior, shadows lurking in the scored depression of the helmet’s central optic, turned to look at him. Yhol suddenly couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Good luck,” he grunted, lamely.

Kais nodded once and ghosted away into the shadows. Y’hol wondered whether he’d ever see his friend again. Part of him wondered whether Kais — the Kais he knew — existed any more anyway.

Captain Ardias, veteran of the sacred Astartes Ultramarines Chapter, leader of the 3rd Company and Commander of the Arsenal, rarely enjoyed the opportunity to sleep.

In accordance with the stringent non-campaign daily agenda documented within the Codex Astartes, every Marine was accorded four hours of natural meditation-induced sleep every day. It was dreamless, supposedly, a time for bodily relaxation and total mental rest. Ardias hated it. It was four hours wasted; four hours that might be spent on the firing range, or in a training hangar, or conducting any one of the multifarious and complex ceremonies of worship that the monastic life of a Space Marine entailed.

Seated enormously on the cold floor, eyes fixed on the miniature shrine devoted jointly to the Emperor and to the Ultramarines’ Primarch, Roboute Guilliman, Ardias fidgeted distractedly and tried to get comfortable. Divested of his armour and its servomusculature he felt slow and ponderous, subject to niggling distractions like the coarseness of his robes and the drafts of his cell. He sighed and closed his eyes, trying to focus his mind.

It wasn’t even that sleep was necessary, especially. Deep in his skull the artificial catalepsean node could, when required, divert the ceaseless flow of his mental activity, allowing each cerebral lobe to rest whilst the other remained alert. In such a state a Marine could operate indefinitely, relentlessly serving the Emperor in a fashion unthinkable to normal, inferior humans. Only because it was so decreed in the Codex (and, he admitted, because of the vague danger of cranial trauma and psychosis), did Ardias accept his four wasted hours with good grace. He didn’t have to like it.

But today... today sleep wouldn’t come.

Perhaps, he considered, it was the unfamiliarity of his surroundings. For a man raised beneath the martial disciplines of Ultramar, thereafter growing accustomed to the simple but inspiring magnificence of the Fortress of Hera upon Macragge, this small naval cabin with its duct artery walls and rusted bulkhead hatches was an untidy, disordered distraction. The vessel’s distant generariums elicited a constant hum, refusing to seep away into the subconscious in a stave of tiny variations, forever reminding his ears of their presence.

But that was an excuse, he knew. He’d slept under far worse conditions in the past. He’d entered the fugue state on Galathas II whilst the population of the ice city trembled, waiting for the eldar to come... He’d slept in the shuddering hold of a strikehawk following the campaign to push back the orks on the moons of Feal’s World... He’d calmly slipped into meditation without concern or fear in the catacombs of Yielth, waiting for the tech-priests to fix the access elevator before the rainwater drowned his entire squad. He could sleep through a meteor strike, if the need took him.