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  By: Silent Sorrow x Show Full Post

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  Exiles At Last
  
  By the light of Tartarus’ fading sun, the corkscrew clouds that punched through the sky took the shape of yellow daggers. They buried themselves in the drifting smoke below, the fat of the field. In places the dark cushion was ripped apart by metallic flashes, cleared for brief moments like a rough hand sifting dirty water, searching for something at the bottom. Under these furious volleys of missile, plasma and slug, somewhere some part of Tartarus died, even if it was just the air itself, poisoned beyond breathing.
  
  It was a place that minute by minute Tender was less inclined to visit despite the pledge grief had driven him to make. From inside the hidden observation craft he stared at the viewscreen. Sometimes, when he wanted to feel closer to the fight, he used the craft’s viewport instead and watched the battle unfold as charcoal smudges and smears. He saw less when he used his own eyes, but it allowed his mind to imagine more.
  
  All around him were other Guardsmen, some from his home, others not, crowded over the screens, the dampers muffling the ionizing sizzle and piercing cracks tearing the sky to pieces. Even second hand, they couldn’t get enough of this glorious revenge, for their dead worlds and his. Not that Tender had missed Norha retching in a corner, unable to drown out the Space Marines’ battle hymns, sighing shifts of electronic tones propelling righteous saw into bone and bolt into flesh.
  
  But there was too much smoke for unaided eyes. The only point clearly visible was the hill, the great prize, and if Tender wanted to see any of what lay below it, he would have to watch the feed from Apothecary Sintus, Blood Ravens. So he shouldered his farm-broad frame between privates Hur and Dixala and joined in the silent, wide-eyed wonder.
  
  “For the emperor!” Sintus chanted as the tip of his bolter came into view with a chattering, fire spewing roar. All along the line more bolters joined in a concerted volley, the cacophony urging Tender to rip the links from his ears. The target was some hulking giant skinned grey in the muddied feed, otherwise green, waving what looked like an axe and rivet-stamped metal tube that belched red-orange flame in answer. Tender looked on, stunned. It was perhaps this creature, or certainly one like it, surely millions like it, that had swarmed over Oftan IV’s precious, purple-coloured aden fields, slaughtering brine ox and citizens alike. He had yet to see the aftermath in person, though the video had been enough. He wouldn’t say he’d been lucky to be on the moon, training. Even now, so close to evening the score, to rushing in alongside Space Marines he’d never before seen in the flesh, these gods in armour, he would have preferred to be next to Jinvey, her hands in his, on fields he’d worked himself, and beside mama and papa, vapourized and clawed apart by the things he now could admit made him hopeless with fear, and then go to see the Emperor at last, at least together.
  
  Captain Sayatna, decorated hero, lead of the Imperial Guard’s 203rd, stalked behind them, hands clasped behind his back, not once looking at the screens. He took audio reports, from time to time touching his ear, his features eroded to an unreadable stone. He would lead 250 soldiers into battle alongside the marines if it became necessary. But so far the marines hadn’t called for help. And history said they never would. Every fight was their own and unauthorized aid, especially from regular troops, was grounds for execution. But the soldiers of the 203rd were hungry for blood and it seemed to them that their collected sorrow was weapon enough to meet any horror.
  
  Sintus swept the field as a forest of numbers and symbols flashed by and counted up and down in his heads-up display. He turned to another marine and a gasp went up in the OC at the sight of the metallic death’s head that looked back. Its eyes had the luminescent silver glow of solder but were unmoving and the mouth was sealed by a prison-like grill of vertical bars. The cheeks bulged as if filled with venom the marine could spit at enemies when the rest of his lethal body ran dry. The marine swept an arm up and out and Sintus turned to follow, his gaze riding a sea of tracer fire racing out to a ridgeline humpbacked by dark, undulating shapes, appendages pumping up and down, all kinds of death in those limbs.
  
  Suddenly, Sintus was up and running, his power-armoured legs propelling him like a rocket through the trench the marines were using for cover. He moved from shield to shield, from one broken outcropping to one shattered mound of brickwork. Here and there he paused by a marine and kneeled at his side, sticks at the ready, exchanged some words on a secure channel the OC couldn’t hear, clapped a shoulder in solidarity and moved on. Near hits showered Sintus with dirt and stone, but he raced on, coming to a stop near a massive tank painted in Blood Ravens red. It rocked on its chassis as plasma fire jetted from its long, dual-barrelled main gun and its side mounted bolters rattled. So that all its guns could be brought to bear, the tank sat on an elevated portion of ground underneath a half destroyed bridge. But the position also left the vehicle more exposed. In the glimpse afforded by Sintus’ sweeping pass, Tender saw deep, molten furrows and pockmarks spattered across the tank’s front.
  
  “They have to get that Predator out of there,” came a murmur from someone near Tender.
  
  Perhaps a second later a white smoking line streaked across the boiling, cratered no-man’s land and struck the tank with the tremendous screech of metal being rended in two. In the rolling concussion Sintus’ feed shivered as if alive and freezing. In the next moment the distant ridge seemed to break apart and lurch like some avalanche of stones down a hill, all toward the marine line. Sintus peered over the edge of the trench and for the first time Tender saw without the bracing screen of a Commissar’s oratory what he might be called into battle to fight. The creatures rushing in a screaming, bellowing tumbleweed were alternately bulky and sinewy, greyish green, festooned in what looked like random pieces of burnished brown, blue and black armour, studded and spiked. They waved guns and axes and swords. The creatures were of all different sizes, but even the smallest was half again as wide as a normal man and a minimum of a foot taller. Tender could sometimes see their teeth, sharp and filed to points or blunt and worn down to stumps, their mouths open in roars that punctured the marine battle hymns that changed tone from grim to apocalyptic.
  
  Several of Tender’s squadmates brushed past him as they stepped back like old men unsure of the ground. Now there was more than enough room for his shoulders. How could their thoughts not all be the same? There were so many of these green monstrosities. They filled the ground and, in seeming to climb over themselves to get at the marine line, blotted out the sky. Even Tartarus’ daggers couldn’t cut through them all.
  
  “How …?” someone muttered.
  
  A distant boom, as if through a tunnel, made its way to Tender’s ears. More followed in measured succession with the cadence of a giant’s footfalls. Sintus turned and brought into view a lumbering metal beast, painted blood red like the dead Predator. It was many times the height of a man, barrel-chested and squared off like the Adeptus Mechanicus creations of antiquity. Its torso swivelled at the waist, the left arm ending in a great claw, the right in a massive chain gun. No neck or head, just a flat, cockpit-like face nestled between two broad shoulders. Tender had seen these Dreadnoughts in countless action vids, but never live, never this close. Legend said slain marines were entombed in these machines, serving the Emperor even in death.
  
  The moan of a voice that floated over the link was devoid of emotion, metallic yet somehow organic. “For the Emperor.” A few around Tender stepped back another pace. But on the field the marines began to surge forward and the Blood Ravens’ sergeant raised his chainsword with a roar of his own, battle flag waving in defiance above his head.
  
  The howling Ork horde struck, crashing into the marine line in a cyclone of fire and metal. They were met by a fusillade of slugs from the dreadnought. Tender watched amazed as perhaps a dozen Orks were shredded in mid flight over the marine trench. In the next instant, the marines were over the side and Sintus was running to a nearby marine. The marine stood planted like a tree, legs spread wide and clutching a two-handed heavy bolter he used to spray covering fire for his charging comrades. The thump-thump of the dreadnought wading further into battle was steady punctuation in Tender’s eardrums. Sintus reached the other marine just as the latter had his helmeted head taken off at the neck by a cascade of fire. Sintus caught the marine as the body tumbled backward. He tossed it aside, popped up and continued to fire his bolter at the onrushing Orks.
  
  There were so very many. A bubbling murmur rose in the OC.
  
  Tender stayed quiet and fingered his rifle like he couldn’t remember how it worked. He might yet go. The enemy horde stretched in all directions around the marines and who could say how many more lay beyond the ridge from which they had burst? The report from Oftan IV said the Orks had come in just like this, a steady tsunami of numbers.
  
  Sintus was singing now, a baritone drone that to Tender’s ears sounded like mourning rather than victory. Tender didn’t claim to understand these marines who had fought on a thousand worlds, but never on his and made it such that he would have to fight the Emperor’s enemies himself anyway. His teeth ground in his mouth.
  
  The enemy seemed to be only haphazardly armoured and the marines’ weapons cut through them in great gouts of blood whose colour Tender couldn’t tell. And yet the Orks returned all of it, blow for blow. The OC fell back in silence as here and there marines, heavy armour and all, fell, chopped in two or five pieces, gutted, disembowelled by an enemy that fought with a frenzied, tireless lust. And there were so many. …
  
  “Men …” Captain Sayatna, as if holding straining beasts by a leash. Tender looked around. No one seemed eager and more than one pair of eyes searched the steel floor.
  
  The droning music swelled and settled, then swelled again. The dreadnought was in the middle of the fight, spinning, mauling, shredding and burning Orks with its claw and its guns. Sintus continued to pick off fighters, his voice dropping another two registers as if answering the music’s call. The air shimmered with the heat, warping combatants into such garish shapes that friend could hardly be told from foe. Sintus stared at the dreadnought for a moment and then with a sudden jerk was over the trench.
  
  The view in the OC tilted and yawed. Sintus was running again, the numbers in his hud flashing, his bolter raised and firing, cutting down Ork after Ork. One of them dropped into Sintus’ path as if from the sky. Sintus didn’t so much as break stride as his left hand flashed up and outward. The Ork, its chest criss-crossed by an ammunition belt, was cut in half. The spray of blood coated Sintus’ helmet and viewport. Tender flinched. Sintus was still firing in the direction of the dreadnought when another Ork bounded up to the twisting machine and in a blur tossed something at its side. Sintus was already skidding to a stop when the screen blacked out, came alive in static and then went black again.
  
  The link switched to s-cam. The remote probe’s view wasn’t as good as the helmet link, but it was enough to reveal what had happened to the original. An area perhaps 100 feet or more in diameter was flattened, debris and bodies leaning away from a centre as if caught in a permanent, stiff breeze. The dreadnought was nowhere to be seen and neither was Sintus. His singing was gone. Even the drone hymns had stopped.
  
  And for a moment there was no fire in the sky, no blades clanging against each other. Tender could see nothing of the Ravens except the dead. And then the s-cam picked up movement.
  
  Captain Sayatna touched his ear, nodded.
  
  “Sir, the Ravens are still alive!” cried private Tubh.
  
  And there was the sergeant, helmetless, tattered battle flag clasped in huge hands. He rose from the ground in his great armour, now badly damaged and bent in strange ways. His eyes were pinched with rage as he started to run up the hill. Stray embers punched flaming holes through the fraying, smoking flag. There remained many Orks and through air so thick with smoke it looked in places like a wall, they poured fire at him. Sparks flew from his body where bolts and bullets struck. He closed on the top of the hill. The Orks continued to fire, their misshapen faces twisted in something that approximated glee. Tender hefted his rifle and took a deep breath.
  
  “Men, prepare yourselves,” said Captain Sayatna. “Our hour of glory is at hand.”
  
  Tender saw how the other Guardsmen in the room seemed to shrink like aden stalks in the wind season’s rising. The clicking of rifles and straps was slow and scattered.
  
  “No, wait!” It was Tubh again, decorum abandoned. “Raven reinforcements! Uh … sir! Look, the dropships are coming!” It was true. Descending along the shafts of those golden daggers were dozens of the pear-shaped craft emblazoned with the Ravens’ royal seal. They were just barely visible far to the left of the marine sergeant’s position.
  
  “He got the flag down!” Tubh cried. “He got the flag down!”
  
  Everyone turned to look at Captain Sayatna, who only barked, “Tubh, you will maintain decorum!” before returning the wide-eyed stares with his customary coldness. Go down there and face that horde? Tender had wanted to be buried on Oftan, not here on this world he didn’t know.
  
  “Sir?” Maybe that was Tubh again, maybe Norha if he had managed to tear himself away from his corner. Tender supposed it didn’t matter. The voice spoke for all of them, a pleading much different from the start of this crusade two months earlier where each stop at a dead planet had picked up more rage and bravado.
  
  Captain Sayatna said, “We are the anvil, men. The Ravens by themselves are not enough. We are the Emperor’s footsoldiers. Return honour to your slain worlds and cleanse the galaxy of this scourge. Board the Chimerae! We engage in five minutes. We engage!”
  
  And Captain Sayatna was always on time. Because exactly five minutes later, Tender and the rest of his company, the 203rd, the Exiles’ Wrath, masked and screaming battle chants, waded into the smoke and monsters on a battlefield never meant for men and went to their separate homes at last in spirit.
  

  Dec 02, 2007 9:25am PST
  Exiles At Last By the light of Tartarus’ fading sun, the corkscrew clouds that punched th... : Silent Sorrow