The thirty seconds are almost gone before the regiment is fully oriented.
I have read every engagement report I could find on encounters with Chaos Space Marines. I know the numbers. Eight feet of transhuman mass in power armour. Six hundred kilograms moving under its own direction. Running speed comparable to a ground vehicle. Strength sufficient to tear open armour plating with bare hands. I have known these numbers for two years. I have been expecting to meet one since the first week of this campaign.
Knowing is not the same as seeing it move.
It comes out of the ruins at the far end of the approach at a speed that my eyes won't accept. Something that size should lumber. It doesn't. The gap between what I'm seeing and what should be possible keeps opening, and my eyes keep sending the same information back, and the gap keeps opening, and the distance closes.
The weight of it on the rubble — not the crunch of a man's footfall but the crack of stone compressed under load. And underneath that, the chainaxe already running, a high mechanical shriek that doesn't get louder as it closes so much as more present.
The Leman Russ fires.
Direct hit. The battle cannon round connects centre-mass — the impact, the bloom of the detonation, the smoke and light of it — and the CSM walks through the explosion. Not staggers. Walks. The pace does not change. The direction does not change. It walks through a battle cannon round point-blank and the only evidence the round is happening at all is the smoke it's moving through.
Five hundred men open fire.
The sound of it is immense — a sustained roar that sits in the chest and the jaw and the back teeth simultaneously, too large to be processed as sound, felt as pressure instead. The volume of fire is sufficient to reduce an Ork mob to scattered pieces. Sufficient to strip a light vehicle to its frame. The CSM walks through it the way you walk through rain, las-bolts leaving bright lines across the armour, heavier rounds detonating against the plate, the smoke of it rising in a column, and none of it stopping anything.
It hits the Chimera on our left flank at full stride.
The Chimera weighs thirty tonnes. The impact takes it off its tracks — I hear the crash of it, the shriek of tearing hull plate cutting through the regiment's fire, and a pressure wave that I feel in my chest fifty metres away — and the CSM tears the door off with one hand while the vehicle is still moving. The crew are gone before it stops. Something happens to them before the vehicle stops. What's left of the vehicle is enough. I look away.
The regiment is still firing. The volume hasn't dropped.
The men between the CSM and the Leman Russ are in its path and they know it. I watch them hold. Every one of them is maintaining fire on something that has just dismantled a thirty-tonne vehicle with its hands, maintaining fire knowing that the fire isn't working, maintaining fire because the alternative is to run and a regiment that runs stops being a regiment. They are very good at their jobs and it does not help them.
I watch it reach the first man. He fires directly into the helmet from three metres — a las-bolt, point blank, a range where a lasgun becomes something to be reckoned with against light armour. The helmet turns toward him. The CSM reaches out with its free hand and the man is simply gone, the motion too fast for me to parse fully, and then the CSM is past him and the space he was occupying is different in a way that I don't look at for more than a second.
The CSM moves through the line the way a blade moves through water — not around, through. The men it reaches stop being in its path by means I don't look at directly. What I can see from here: las-fire that was horizontal is vertical. Sections of the line that were standing are not. The fire continues from the sections that are still standing and the CSM continues and the distance between those two facts stays constant.
Three squads. That is what it moves through in the time it takes me to reload and draw my Ginunting. Three squads of men who have been in this campaign for two years, who know their jobs, who are doing their jobs, and the CSM walks through them the way weather walks through an open field — not maliciously, not with pleasure, not even with attention. It is going somewhere and they are between here and there and it takes about four seconds per squad.
This I watch.
The CSM gets underneath the tank. The Leman Russ weighs sixty tonnes. The CSM gets underneath it and the hull tilts — slowly at first, the groan of metal under load, and then not slowly, the whole mass going over onto its side with a concussive crash that I feel through my boots from fifty metres away.
The crew hatch, now facing sideways, gets ripped open.
I watch the arm go in. I watch the arm come back out. Something comes out with it that I don't look at directly.
A grenade goes in.
The hatch closes.
I feel the detonation through the rubble under my boots before the muffled sound reaches me. And then it is silent inside the tank, the sounds having stopped entirely, and the CSM straightens and turns and the regiment is still firing and it does not matter.
My bolt pistol runs out of ammo and I put the pistol back on my thigh.
I draw my Ginunting.
"FOR THE EMPEROR!"
It comes out of my chest rather than my throat, the full commissar's voice that carries across a regiment in full contact, and it lands in the men around me — the shift in the fire pattern, the sound of it changing, men who were falling back holding, the line contracting and holding rather than dissolving. Two years of conditioning. Two years of them watching me walk toward things that should have killed me. I give them the voice and the sword and I keep moving and they hold.
I am moving over rubble and bodies and things that were men two minutes ago and I do not look at any of it. The CSM is forty metres ahead and every step of mine covers ground and none of it is fast enough and it doesn't matter because there is nowhere else to be.
This is the job. This is what a Commissar is for — not the execution of cowards, not the bureaucratic maintenance of regimental records, not the political liaison work with senior officers who need someone to sign their orders. This. Walking toward it. Making sure the men behind you see you walking toward it. Making sure they understand that if the Commissar is walking toward it then walking toward it is what is done, and if you are the kind of man who does what is done then you walk toward it, and most of them are that kind of man because they have been that kind of man for two years in this campaign and I made sure of it.
Twenty metres.
The regiment's fire is finding me too — not aimed at me, the angles are wrong for that, but the volume of fire at a single point in space means the air between me and the CSM is full of things moving fast. A las-bolt clips the pauldron and I feel the impact without slowing. Another detonates against something in the rubble to my right and I feel the shockwave and I do not slow. The men are shooting at the CSM and the CSM is between me and them and physics does not care about the distinction.
Ten metres.
The chainaxe is its own sound now, separate from everything else — the teeth screaming, not getting louder as I close but more present, more specific, the sound of it filling in around me the way a smell fills a room. The corruption in the armour is not decoration. Up close it has shapes — not scratched or painted, grown, the metal having changed into something metal shouldn't be. Where it has changed most is where the battle cannon hit and the regiment's fire have done least. The armour is healing itself. Slowly. Not fast enough to matter in the next sixty seconds, but it is healing.
The regiment's fire has left its marks — craters from heavy bolter, burn scoring from las, the evidence of five hundred weapons at point-blank range for the past two minutes. All of it. None of it deep enough to matter. Where the corruption has taken the plate fully the markings barely register, the damage already knitting back into the surface.
Five metres.
The CSM is in front of me.
I don't see it cross the distance. One moment it is twenty metres away and the regiment is between us and then it is not, the movement happening in the space between one step and the next, and it is simply there, and the chainaxe is coming down.
*
I get my Ginunting up.
Not a choice. Reflex, years of muscle memory, the blade coming up to intercept the overhead swing the way training says to intercept overhead swings. The geometry is correct. The angle is correct. The technique, in the context of fighting a thing that is not subject to the same physics as the opponents the technique was developed against, is completely insufficient.
The chainaxe meets my Ginunting and the sound is wrong — not the ring of blade on blade but a shriek, the chain teeth catching against the power field, metal on energy for the fraction of a second the weapons are in contact — and then the impact travels up the blade and through the hilt and into my hand and through my hand up my forearm and I understand, in the half-second I have for understanding anything, that what I am hearing is the sound of bones going. Sequentially. Not one. Five, from somewhere near the wrist climbing toward the elbow in rapid succession, each one distinct and wrong in a way I will hear for a long time if I survive long enough to hear anything. The arm goes cold immediately, the cold arriving before the pain, and then my Ginunting hits the ground because the hand that was holding it is not doing that anymore.
my Ginunting hits the ground.
The chainaxe arm drops.
The other hand closes around my head.
Each finger is individually present. The gauntlet is large enough that the palm covers my face entirely, the fingers wrapping around to the back of my skull. The gauntlet is hot — the armour running heat through the ceramite, the warmth of something that has been doing violence for the past two minutes — and this close it smells of burnt metal and something older underneath, ten thousand years of war worked into the plate. The grip is not tight. Not yet. The potential of it is what communicates, the way a vice communicates before it closes. When this hand closes fully, it will not stop until there is nothing left to close on.
This is how it ends.
The world becomes movement without sequence. Acceleration. The brief experience of not being in contact with the ground. And then the wall — the sound of my skull on plascrete arriving before the pain does, a flat crack that I hear from inside rather than outside — and the wall gives back everything it has been given: the leg, snapping on the right side below the knee, bright and specific; five ribs along the right side in rapid sequence, each one a separate wrong note; and then the darkness, coming up from somewhere below all of it, taking everything.
*
I surface.
Not all at once. The wall behind me arrives as a sensation first — stone, cold through the coat — and then the rubble under me, and then the pain, which is several things at once. The leg — the specific wrongness of a bone that has stopped being load-bearing. The ribs, five of them, each one a separate bright point along my right side. The arm, which is cold in a way arms are not normally cold and which is simply hanging.
The fight is still happening. The regiment's weapons at close range, still firing. They are still fighting.
The bolt pistol is on my left thigh. My left hand still works.
The mag I loaded on the way in is empty — I burned through all eight rounds firing at the CSM as I closed — and the pistol is dry. I need to reload.
With one working arm, reloading a bolt pistol is not a simple problem. I get the pistol into my left hand, brace it between my knee and the wall, work the release with my thumb, and the empty mag drops into the rubble. The fresh mag is on my belt. Getting it out one-handed takes longer than it should. Getting it into the housing and seated takes longer than that. My right arm is not helping and I do not look at my right arm. I hook the rear sight on the edge of my boot and push down to rack the slide. Slow. The round chambers.
I turn my head to the right.
Merck is there.
He was on my left flank. I put him there yesterday, after his brother died in the second squad engagement. He was good at his job and he followed orders and he was twenty-two years old and something got to him while I was against the wall and there is nothing to be done about any of that now and I turn the other way.
Gamma is fighting the CSM.
I watch. I cannot look away and I cannot affect it and I watch.
My ribs are making breathing a problem and I am doing it anyway, each one a separate event.
Gamma moves — committed fully to each action before the next, nothing wasted. The Omnissian Axe is out. The servo-arm is extended at full reach. He is not fighting the way a man fights, in the sense that there is no urgency in the movement, no fear-driven acceleration, no moment where the body overrides the mind and does something irrational. He is solving the problem the CSM represents the way a Mechanicus Enginseer solves any problem — methodically, without wasted motion, beginning from the first principles of the situation.
He knows what I know — the joint between the pauldron and the gorget is the weak point, the place where my Ginunting found purchase before the arm gave out. He's moving in a tight arc around the CSM's left side, servo-arm reaching for that gap, Omnissian Axe held between him and the chainaxe. The axe is the shield. The servo-arm is doing the real work.
It's the right call. I couldn't have made it.
The Omnissian Axe finds the gap on the third pass. Not the second — the second is caught on the pauldron edge and Gamma has to disengage and reset, moving back two steps, the arc widening before it tightens again. The third pass goes in clean. The power field on the axe blade burns differently from my Ginunting's — lower frequency, more sustained, less the bright white of contact and more the deep red of prolonged work — and I can see from here the effect it is having on the tissue beneath the joint. Not armour. What is underneath the armour in a Chaos Space Marine is not quite flesh, not quite metal, and the axe's field is doing something to it that I don't have a technical term for and Gamma probably does.
The CSM adjusts to it. Not fast — it hasn't moved with urgency once since it came out of the ruins — but it starts rotating, cutting off the angle the servo-arm needs. Gamma moves with it. They circle.
The servo-arm locks onto the pauldron and pulls.
The armour shifts at the joint. I can see it from here — the gap opening, the Omnissian Axe going in at an angle that finds the corrupted flesh beneath the plate, the power field burning where it contacts something that is not metal. The CSM reacts. This is the first time I have seen it react to anything — not pain exactly — I don't think it feels pain the way a man does — but the joint is a problem now and it knows the joint is a problem. It brings the chainaxe down on the servo-arm.
Gamma releases the servo-arm before the chainaxe connects.
The chainaxe takes the servo-arm at the mounting point anyway. The arm drops. Gamma is already moving, the Omnissian Axe pivoting to cover the new angle, his remaining mechadendrites extending to replace what the servo-arm was doing. He doesn't stop. He has lost a limb and he is still moving and the axe is still working and the joint is still compromised and he hasn't stopped.
Gamma goes to one knee with the loss of it — a half-second where the missing arm's weight throws the balance, his body catching up with what just happened — and then he's up again, moving, and I notice that the arc has tightened rather than widened. He's inside its reach now. Close enough that the chainaxe can't get a full swing. He's used losing the arm to get inside and I watch him do it and I cannot do a single thing to help him.
Twenty seconds.
I count them. I cannot do anything except count them and hold the pistol in my left hand and breathe through the ribs.
The CSM takes his right arm at the shoulder on the twenty-third second. Not the servo-arm — the arm, the bionic arm, torn free at the shoulder mounting with a sound I can hear from fifteen metres away, a sound like a stressed weld giving way, and then the arm is in the CSM's hand and then the arm is gone, thrown somewhere behind it without looking.
Gamma keeps moving. He has the Omnissian Axe in his remaining arm and the mechadendrites are still working and the joint is still there and he keeps moving.
I can hear his internal systems cycling harder now — autosanguine, something else compensating for something else, a soft rapid clicking underneath the weapons fire that surfaces in the brief silences. The sound of a body doing what it can with what it has left. Gamma either cannot hear it or does not care. Both seem equally possible.
The left arm goes on the twenty-eighth second.
Two seconds after that, the legs. The CSM drops the problem of the axe entirely — steps inside the arc, takes the strike on the pauldron gap where the axe has been working all this time, lets the field burn into the corrupted tissue again and does not register it — and takes the legs at the knee joints simultaneously, one hand each, the bionic joints shearing at the weakest point with a sound I feel in my back teeth. Gamma goes down hard. The axe goes wide. The bionic eye is still tracking.
From somewhere in the rubble, I can hear the faint cycling of internal systems. Autosanguine. Something compensating for something else. Gamma is alive and unable to move and the bionic eye is tracking and the CSM reaches down and picks up the Omnissian Axe and throws it in the opposite direction from the arm.
Thirty seconds.
The CSM moves toward Gamma.
*
The pistol is already in my left hand.
The broken leg is the first problem — I need to brace against the wall to get any useful angle and bracing against the wall means moving my right side and moving my right side means the ribs, and the ribs mean a brief period where the world whites out at the edges and I have to wait for it to come back. I get the sight picture.
Eight rounds. Left-handed. From a man who cannot stand.
The CSM is twelve metres from Gamma and walking.
I fire.
The round hits it between the shoulder blades. The detonation goes off inside the armour gap and the CSM stops.
It turns.
Sees me.
Begins walking toward me instead of Gamma.
Seven rounds left. That's not going to be enough. I fire anyway.
Second round. Third — each one finding plate or a gap and detonating, the detonations clear and visible, the smoke of each one rising in a brief column, and the CSM not slowing. Fourth. The pace doesn't change. It has not changed once since it came out of the ruins. I can see the damage from previous rounds on the armour — mine, the regiment's, Gamma's axe-work — all of it, the accumulated evidence of everything that has been tried today, and none of it has changed the pace.
The left-handed shooting is worse than it needs to be. The grip is fine. The problem is everything else — the broken ribs, the bracing, the way every shot kicks the muzzle wide and I have to drag it back. Each round costs me time I don't have. I can see it closing the distance between shots and there's nothing I can do about that except keep pulling the trigger.
Fifth. Six metres.
Sixth. Five metres.
Seventh.
Eighth round.
The bolt pistol locks back on an empty chamber. The specific click of it. The specific silence that follows.
Four metres.
I meet its eyes through the helmet lenses. Nothing behind them. It is not considering me. It is not weighing anything. It is coming to where I am because I am between where it is and where Gamma is, and in approximately two seconds it will have resolved that. The chainaxe is still running. I can hear the teeth from here.
My sword arm is broken in five places. My left leg is broken. I have no ammunition. I have bought Gamma forty seconds.
Well. Shit.
*
The thunderhammer arrives before the CSM does.
Valdael comes from somewhere above — through an upper floor, the details don't resolve in the time available. What I see is the hammer coming down and the sound of it — the concussive crack of a thunderhammer at contact, felt in the chest before it reaches the ears — and the CSM's head simply ceases to exist as a coherent structure. The body takes three steps from the momentum of what it was doing and goes down.
Half a tonne of armoured mass meeting the ground.
Then the silence that comes after a fight — not the absence of sound but the presence of different sounds. The regiment, still moving. The wind through the broken district. The ringing in my ears from six hours of sustained fire that I am only now noticing because there is nothing louder than it anymore. The air smells of spent propellant and scorched metal and the particular sweetness of promethium residue from the Hellhound that went down three hours ago, still present, underlaid now by something older and more corrupt that is coming off the armour of the body on the ground.
Valdael stands over what's left of the CSM. The markings on his armour are the same ones I noted in the briefing this morning, which means it has been a very long day since that briefing. The thunderhammer is in his right hand, still resonating slightly. He is looking down at me like I am a curious bug.
He looks at me. I look at him. My coat is soaked through on the right side, dark and wet, and I have known about it since I came to and have not done anything about it because there was nothing to be done about it. My sword arm hangs at an angle that communicates its status without words. My left leg is straight because bending it is not currently an option.
"You fucker," I rasp. My voice comes out wrong. "That was my kill."
A beat. The helmet is at an angle that on a human face would indicate amusement, processed across four centuries of existence into something that no longer precisely resembles what regular humans mean by the word.
"Seek medical attention immediately, Commissar."
The ringing in my ears continues.
I put my head back against the wall as my vision darkens.