Oh-six-hundred finds me outside a door I don't particularly want to open.
That's not quite right. I want to open it. What I don't want is what's on the other side — or rather, I want that too, in the specific way that a man wants something he knows is going to be difficult. The briefing room is a repurposed command post, formerly the property of a Colonel who no longer requires it. The irony is not lost on me.
I open the door. The sound changes immediately — the particular quality of silence that means something in the room is choosing not to make noise.
The first thing I register is scale.
I am not a small man. Two years of campaign have built me into something considerably more than the noble-born cadet who graduated the Schola Progenium, and I am aware of my own physical presence in a room in the way that only someone who uses that presence professionally can be. I walk into rooms and men straighten. I have grown accustomed to being the largest weight in any given space.
The five Blood Angels make that laughable.
The room smells of recycled air and old stone and something underneath both of those — machine oil, ozone, the particular cold metallic scent of war-plate that has seen a great deal of use. It takes me a moment to place it. I have smelled it before, distantly, in accounts and descriptions I absorbed on a world very far from here. This is what an Astartes smells like.
They are not simply large. That word doesn't contain what they are. They occupy the room differently to how men occupy rooms — not taking up space so much as reordering it around themselves, the way a boulder divides a stream. The briefing table that seats twelve looks appropriately sized for perhaps three of them. The ceiling is adequate. Only just.
I know what Space Marines are. I have known since I was a child on the world I was born on, in a body I hadn't yet grown into, reading about them in paperback novels and watching them in films. Three hundred and fifty kilograms in armour. Twenty-three implanted organs. The modifications that turn a human child into something that is no longer quite human. I know all of this. It does not help as much as you would think.
Knowing all of that, it turns out, does not fully prepare you for the fact of them.
It's the movement. That's what does it.
One of them shifts his weight — a minor adjustment, barely a gesture, the kind of thing a man does without thinking when he's been standing for too long — and the movement is wrong. Not wrong in the sense of incorrect. Wrong in the sense of impossible. Nothing that size should move with that quality of ease. The armour should slow it, encumber it, make it lumber in the way that heavily armoured things lumber. Instead the movement has the particular fluency of something that has never been impeded in its life, something for which the armour is simply the natural medium of its existence and not a constraint on it at all.
Something very old in the part of my brain that predates language and reason and seventeen years of living in the 41st Millennium looks at that movement and files a very quiet report. The report says: you cannot win. Whatever else happens in this room, whatever conclusions are reached, whatever orders are given — you cannot win against that. There is no version of events in which you are the faster, stronger, more dangerous thing in this space. Accept this and proceed accordingly.
I accept it and proceed accordingly.
They are beautiful. That is the other thing, the thing that complicates the dread and lives alongside it without resolving it. The Blood Angels are not merely transhuman — they are the IXth Legion, Sanguinius's sons, and whatever else their Primarch was, he was the most beloved of all the Emperor's children for reasons that went beyond politics and military record. It is in their faces. Pale skin — the gene-seed doing something to the pigmentation over centuries of service — and a quality of feature that stops just short of wrong — close enough to human to read as such, far enough from it that you feel the distance. Noble is the only word I have. They look like what kings were supposed to look like in stories — the kind of face that gets carved into cathedral facades and then prayed to. Grave and certain and untroubled by anything in this room.
One of them is looking at me.
He is the largest, which puts him fractionally above the others and therefore somewhere in the range of deeply unreasonable. The armour is crimson and gold, the Blood Angels heraldry precise and well-maintained even on campaign. A sergeant's markings. When he moves his gaze to the tactical map it is with the unhurried deliberation of something that has never needed to hurry in its life.
The briefing notation on the document handed to me at the door has one name on it — Sergeant Valdael, IXth Legion, Blood Angels. That is apparently all that needs saying.
I find a position at the table. Gamma is against the far wall — not seated, not at the table, the Mechanicus equivalent of observing from a professional distance. The left arm is reattached, the new alloy strut still running slightly warm from the overnight work; I can hear the faint recalibration whir when he shifts position. His bionic eye tracks the room with the steady patience of something that cannot be surprised. I catch it briefly and it does not react, which means he's already processed everything and is now simply recording.
The senior Guard commander — General Thavian, a man I have met twice and found unremarkable both times — sits at the head of the table with the specific quality of a man who is aware he is the least significant person in this room and is coping with that awareness by maintaining excellent posture. Several other officers are present. They are all doing variations of the same thing I just did — absorbing the fact of five Blood Angels in an enclosed space and arriving at similar conclusions about their own place in the hierarchy of things.
*
Valdael speaks without preamble.
His voice is what you'd expect and worse. Not loud — he doesn't need to be loud, the room is simply quiet when he chooses to fill it — but with a voice that lands in the chest before it reaches the ear. The voice of something built differently. He speaks Low Gothic the way a man uses a tool he has long since stopped noticing.
The tactical map lights up under his gauntleted hand — a wash of cold blue light across the room, the low hum of the projector the only sound for a moment. A gesture that should be incongruous, something that large touching something that delicate, and isn't.
"A Chaos Space Marine has been sighted in the tertiary hive district," he says. "Confirmed by three independent sources. Astartes-pattern armour, corrupted. Pre-Heresy markings. Khornate iconography."
The room absorbs this.
I absorb this differently to everyone else in the room.
A Chaos Space Marine. Confirmed. In the tertiary hive district, which is three kilometres from where we are sitting.
The others — Thavian, the regimental officers, the staff — are doing the arithmetic they are equipped to do. I can see it in the way their eyes move across the map. Casualty projections. Firepower assessments. These are reasonable things to think about.
A CSM doesn't appear alone. They're weapons, not scouts, and weapons of that calibre don't get deployed without context. A warband operating in theatre. A larger incursion being staged. The fact that the Blood Angels are here is itself the second data point — someone further up the chain has drawn the same conclusions and found them significant enough to warrant a First Founding Chapter's direct intervention.
I had known, since the runner appeared in Gamma's workshop, that things were bad. I now understand more precisely how bad.
Something cold moves through me — not the cold of fear, which sits in the gut and locks the throat. This is the cold of a calculation completing, a picture snapping into focus with all the wrong colours.
Valdael continues. The Blood Angels will take the breach point — here, on the map, a chokepoint in the tertiary district that feeds into the hive's deeper levels. They will go in first. They will push through and engage whatever they find. The Imperial Guard's role is to follow in their wake, hold ground, prevent the enemy from flanking or retreating, and deal with whatever the Blood Angels leave behind them.
Whatever the Blood Angels leave behind them.
I look at the breach point on the map and do the geometry. It's not a bad plan. It is, in fact, a very good plan, the kind of plan that emerges when you have five Blood Angels available and are willing to use them correctly. Let the spear tip do what spear tips are for. Follow. Hold.
What remains to be determined is who follows.
*
General Thavian clears his throat.
It is the particular throat-clearing of a man who has something to say that he has been rehearsing. I recognise it. I have heard a great many men rehearse things they then said to me — usually just before I shot them.
"The matter of command," he says. "As you are aware, the commander of this section was — recently relieved of his post."
His eyes find me. It is a very brief glance. It carries approximately the weight of a field artillery piece.
"In light of this, and given the necessity of a coordinated push in the wake of our — allies —" the pause carries everything it needs to "— command of the ground operation falls to Commissar Corvus."
A brief silence — the kind that has weight, that you can feel the other officers choosing not to fill. The kind that happens when a room full of officers processes an unusual decision and decides simultaneously not to be the first one to comment on it.
A Commissar being formally assigned operational command is irregular. Leading from the front, taking the line when officers falter — that is expected, that is the role. Being handed the orders with my name on the Munitorum's record as officer of command — that is a different thing entirely, and Thavian knows it. It is not without precedent — the Commissariat's authority is sufficient, and in the absence of a line officer it is a workable solution — but irregular is the correct word. What it is also, beneath the bureaucratic surface, is elegant. If this goes well, the Guard gets a victory and Thavian gets the credit at the command level. If it goes badly — if a Commissar leads men into the wake of Blood Angels in a CSM engagement and it goes catastrophically wrong — then it was the Commissar's operation, and the Commissar who shot his Colonel has now gotten men killed, and the Munitorum's report writes itself.
I find this almost elegant. There's a certain craft to it.
"Understood," I say.
Valdael glances at me. It is the first time he has looked at me directly since I entered the room, and the experience is — clarifying. Being assessed by something that reads you the way a predator reads prey — heartrate, sweat, the micro-expressions a human face produces when it is under pressure — through senses built an order of magnitude beyond anything human is a particular kind of exposure. Whatever he concludes, he offers nothing. Just the look, and then back to the map.
"Oh-nine-hundred," he says. "Be at the breach point."
That is apparently the end of the briefing.
*
The room empties in the way rooms empty when Blood Angels leave them — the five of them file out and something changes — some quality of the air or the light — and men who had been holding themselves carefully exhale. The machine-oil-and-ozone smell fades with them.
Gamma materialises at my shoulder.
"Well," he says.
"Yes," I say.
We walk for a moment in silence. There's nothing to add that the silence doesn't already contain.
"The CSM," Gamma says eventually.
"I know."
"If it's a warband—"
"I know."
"The Blood Angels may not—"
"Gamma."
A pause.
"Yes," he says.
"Give me until oh-eight-fifty and then be at the breach point."
He processes this. I can see it happening — the slight stillness that means he has already run the numbers and doesn't like the result. He has never once successfully talked me out of anything. He knows this. He comes anyway, every time, which is either loyalty or stubbornness and is probably both.
"Understood," he says.
I leave him there and go to find my regiment.
*
Five hundred men.
That's what I have. Five hundred men of the The Brandt 513th — the regiment that has been holding this ground for two years, that charged a trench without orders yesterday because they'd simply decided the waiting was done, that carries its dead every time without being told. Five hundred men in gas masks and grey-green fatigues. The sound of them is the sound of people checking the same things for the third time — the quiet clink of kit, the hiss of respirator seals being tested, the particular silence of men who have decided not to talk about what is coming. They fight with the focused patience of people who have made a very specific peace with their own mortality.
I move through them.
I have given speeches — the vox address before an engagement, the words designed to carry across a regiment and land in the chest of every man simultaneously. That is a different tool for a different moment. The sergeant who needs the tactical picture. The corporal whose squad is undermanned and needs to know how to compensate. The veteran who has been in enough bad situations to read this one accurately and needs to see that his Commissar has read it too and has decided to go anyway.
Sergeant Daven gets three minutes. I tell him what he needs to know — breach point, timing, the Blood Angels' role and ours, what follow-through looks like if the push succeeds and what it looks like if it doesn't. He doesn't write anything down. Hasn't in two years. He listens with the quality of attention of a man who has learned that every word a Commissar says before a hard push is load-bearing, and carries it in his head where it doesn't get lost. He nods once when I'm done. It's enough.
I find the undermanned squads and redistribute. I find the men who are carrying wounds from yesterday's engagement and make three decisions — two stay, one goes forward because refusing to let him would be the wrong signal and he knows his own capabilities better than I do. The newer men, the replacements from after Vorhast — they stand differently to the veterans, a tightness in the shoulders visible even through the armour, eyes that track movement at the edges of their visors. I don't tell them it's going to be fine, because it might not be, and they're not children. I tell them what they're doing and why it matters and that the man in front of them knows what he's doing.
I find Merck.
He's checking his kit with the focused economy of a man who has run out of things to grieve and converted it all into function. Good. He is past grief for now. Function is what keeps men alive in the hours before a push.
"On my left flank," I tell him. He looks up.
"Yes, sir," he says.
I move on.
By oh-eight-forty I have done what can be done. Five hundred men are as ready as they're going to be. Some of what's coming they can handle. Some of it can't be helped. You do what you can and you don't look too hard at the rest.
I find a quiet corner of the staging area and stand in it for a moment. The air smells of promethium and pre-battle tension — that specific quality of five hundred men checking their weapons for the third time and not talking about why. The breach point is two hundred metres away. In nineteen minutes, Sergeant Valdael and four Blood Angels will begin their push and I will take five hundred men in after them.
I look toward the breach point and something old in me is still running the same quiet report from two hours ago. Something else — newer, stranger — is glad to be here. Both have settled into something more manageable now, placed somewhere I can carry them without being carried by them.
Gamma appears at my elbow at oh-eight-forty-three. I told him oh-eight-fifty. Of course he does.
We walk toward the breach point in silence, which is comfortable, because it always has been. The ground underfoot is rubble and compacted earth, uneven, and somewhere ahead there is a sound that might be wind moving through a broken structure and isn't.
Then I say:
"I always did say I'd like to kill a CSM before the end."
A pause.
"You'll die if you engage," Gamma says.
"Ah," I say, "but what a worthy death it will be, my friend."
We walk on.