Field Commendation — Ref. DM/OPF/7741-Ω
Departmento Munitorum, Officio Prefectus Division
Raxar Secundus Theatre, 996.M36
This commendation is submitted in respect of Commissar Sidran Corvus, formerly attached to the now defunct Brandt 513th.
On the date of filing, Commissar Corvus engaged a confirmed Chaos Space Marine, Undivided affiliation, in direct combat. He was accompanied by the regimental Enginseer, Gamma 77 Corvinus. Both sustained significant casualties in the course of this engagement. Neither withdrew.
The engagement was sustained beyond reasonable expectation. The Commissar engaged the target directly and was incapacitated. The Enginseer assumed engagement and continued to press the target after sustaining significant augmetic loss. Upon the target redirecting toward the incapacitated Enginseer, the Commissar re-engaged from the ground with his bolt pistol, drawing the target's attention until my intervention. He had a broken sword arm, a broken leg, and five broken ribs at this point.
I note additionally that Commissar Corvus had, in the hours preceding this engagement, led the Brandt 513th through a sustained urban advance under conditions of significant attrition. The regiment held cohesion throughout. This is not unremarkable.
Upon my locating the Commissar after the engagement, his injuries were extensive. His attitude was commendable.
I recommend commendation in the strongest available terms. I further recommend assessment for assignment to operations requiring officers of exceptional capability and uncommon endurance. The Imperium must make full and complete use of such men, before they are spent on something unworthy of them.
Sergeant Valdael
IXth Legion, Blood Angels
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My medals come out one at a time.
My cloth is dark chamois, folded twice. My brass bowl of polish to the left — sharp chemical smell, the kind that cuts clean through everything else. Finished pieces go right, on a velvet square cut from a coat lining. It does the job.
The room is a bunk, a desk, a window onto a courtyard I haven’t visited yet. Impersonal. The kind of room that forgets you when you leave. I’ve been here two weeks and started leaving impressions regardless.
The Duelist Honours first. Small thing in dark bronze on a plain ribbon, lighter than it looks. My chamois catches on the cast detail. The metal warms and comes up bright. Good. I set it on my velvet.
The Triple Skull.
Three faces on dull grey, each looking a different direction. I’ve always thought that was either very stupid design or very deliberate. Men don’t die facing the same thing. One at the sky. One at the ground. One at whatever was in front of them when it happened.
This medal has two clasps now.
The first one I earned in the normal way — two years of campaign, a regiment that took its share of losses and kept working. Sixty-six percent casualties. More than enough for the device. I’ve never cleaned it. The grime in the crevices is part of what it is.
The second clasp is newer. Cleaner. Brighter.
The Brandt 513th is gone. All of them. The ones who survived the urban advance, who went through the breach, who held the line while I was against the wall — gone. So the second clasp comes, and it goes on the same ugly piece of grey tin as the first one, and the Triple Skull sits heavier on its ribbon than it used to.
I turn it over once. Set it down. Move on.
The Silver Aquila. The Raxar Secundus badge — bronze crossed sword-and-bolt on black with a thin crimson stripe, still newer than the others. Both get my cloth. Both go to the velvet.
Then the three.
The second Medallion Crimson clasp. Cold when I pick it up, colder than the others. Small bar, stamped with the same device as the medal it joins. You get a second one when the first wasn’t enough of a deterrent. The first I remember earning. The second I remember differently — I remember the cold. The arm that stopped being an arm. The way the fight kept moving around me anyway.
I earned this one.
I attach the clasp and set it with the others.
The Winged Skull. Iron, wings spread, skull at the centre. I read the citation once and put it down. What it means is: five hundred men held cohesion all day in the wake of five Blood Angels, and someone who outranks me noticed.
I hold it the way I held the clasp. Turn it once. Set it down.
Then the last one.
The Order of the Bastium Stellaris sits in its case — denser velvet than the others, lid that barely opens. Small raised device inside. Bastion and star. I run my thumb across it before lifting it out. The metal is warm. Someone polished it before shipping it. Of course they did.
I pick it up.
Absolute loyalty in the face of terrible danger.
It sits in my hand a moment too long.
Gamma was going to die if I didn’t do something, and the only something available was the bolt pistol and my left hand and whatever was left in my legs. So I did it. It was loyalty. I’ll give them that much. Just not to the Imperium. The Bastium Stellaris is for absolute loyalty in the face of terrible danger, and what I felt in that ruin was exactly that — it just had a face on it, and that face was Gamma’s and my men, not the Emperor’s. They gave me the right medal for the wrong reason. A beautiful medal. Beautifully wrong.
I pin it anyway.
Refusing would take longer than accepting. You’d need to explain, and explaining leads to a formal inquiry, and a formal inquiry means a Munitorum officer sitting across a desk asking me to characterise my own motives under oath, and I would rather wear an incorrect medal than sit through that. The tenth bead on my left wrist knows what happened. The Winged Skull knows. The clasp on the Crimson knows. The Bastium Stellaris doesn’t need to.
I set my coat down and look at what’s there.
A campaign’s worth. Not a chest full of tin — never that — but enough that my coat sits differently now. My medals are where they belong. My braid is precise. My trim is unscuffed. My hat is on the hook by the door. Everything in its place.
Two weeks. My arm still catches occasionally if I reach wrong. My leg is mostly reliable. My ribs have stopped announcing themselves every time I breathe, which I had started to doubt would happen on schedule.
I pick up my cloth and start on my pistol.
* * *
Gamma arrives at the third hour after midday. He has never been late for anything in seventeen years. Not once.
He looks slightly too new, the way he always does after a rebuild — the mechadendrites moving with a precision that hasn’t worn in yet, the bionic eye sweeping the room on entry. The robes are fresh. In the corridor outside something hums — ventilation, or a servitor on circuit — and then fades. He’s wearing his medals. Medallion Crimson, the Hawk Claw — bright grey on red, a stylised talon, awarded for battlefield valour against overwhelming odds — the Triple Skull, the campaign badge. He hasn’t cleaned them.
“The flesh,” he says, by way of greeting, lowering himself gingerly into the chair across from my desk, “continues to be an embarrassment.”
“Yours or mine.”
“Both. Mine more immediately.” He sets a data-slate on the desk. “Files are loaded. Cross-referenced, annotated, flagged.”
I pull a cigar from the inside pocket and light it. The match smell cuts clean through the room before the tobacco takes over — dark and earthy, a slow burn that sits at the back of my throat and stays there. Better cigars existed once, on a world I barely remember.
“Must you,” Gamma says.
I blow a slow stream in his direction. He watches it arrive with the expression of someone logging an objection for the record.
“They were better on old Terra,” I tell him.
“Most things were.” He taps the slate. “Shall we begin.”
It wasn’t built for this. Nothing in standard Munitorum formation doctrine covers what we’re building. Which is why there are twelve thousand files on the slate and we’re going through all of them.
I pick it up. The slate is warm from his hands. Or from whatever Gamma has instead of hands.
“You flagged them.”
“I flagged the ones the algorithm missed. Which is most of them.” A pause. “The algorithm was not built for this.”
First file: four seconds. No. Second: three seconds. No. Third — something in the psych profile that the citation writes around but the incident report doesn’t. Maybe. I mark it and keep going.
Gamma watches the room while I read. He never simply sits — his eye moves, the mechadendrites make small adjustments, the soft click of them in the quiet a sound I stopped registering around year three. He processes. When he has something to say, he says it.
“The compatibility modelling,” he says, around the twentieth file.
“What about it.”
“A team built heavily from sole survivors develops particular cohesion patterns.” He’s watching the window. “High individual function. Low immediate trust. Eventual solidarity that’s difficult to build elsewhere and harder to break.”
I mark another maybe. “That sounds like a recommendation.”
“Observation. Whether it’s a recommendation depends on what you want the team to be.”
What I want is people who have already done the arithmetic. Who looked at the odds, made whatever peace they needed to make, and kept moving — they understood the odds and were still there anyway. Still functional. Still doing the work when everything said to stop.
I’ve met a lot of people in two years. Most of them are dead. The ones who aren’t — there’s something in them I can read now that I couldn’t at the start. A stillness under pressure that isn’t calm. Harder than calm. Something that went through the fire and found out what was left on the other side.
That’s what I’m looking for.
“Run the weighting again,” I tell him. “But weight for that.”
“Define that.”
“You know what I mean.”
A pause. The mechadendrites settle. “No label for it.”
“Find one.”
Another pause. Longer than the first. “Tempered.”
“Run it for tempered.”
He does. The slate updates. Some maybes drop out. Two nos come back as maybes. I pull the first up and start reading.
We work through the afternoon. I read and mark. Gamma calculates and annotates and occasionally says something useful and occasionally says something that’s a recommendation dressed as an observation and occasionally says nothing for long stretches — the click of mechadendrites, the scratch of the stylus, the silence that means Gamma is thinking rather than absent. Seventeen years of it.
He makes recaf at some point. Facility standard — the kind that tastes of filtering rather than of anything it started as. He puts a cup on my side of the desk without being asked. I drink it. My back has started making itself known. I shift and keep reading.
The files keep coming.
No, no, no, maybe. No. No. Then one that stops me before I finish the first page.
The regiment this man came from is listed as combat-ineffective. Total loss. Every man in it confirmed dead or unaccounted for in the action record. Every man except this one, who was recovered from a position three kilometres from the engagement by a logistics column passing through two days later.
Three kilometres.
I read it twice. Set the slate down.
Gamma has already noticed. His eye is on me rather than the room.
“The psych profile,” he says.
“I saw it.”
A pause. “The survival probability for his position in the engagement is consistent with evasion rather than circumstance.” He says it the way he says all difficult things — flat, precise. “He moved away from the engagement. Deliberately. Early enough to reach that distance before the action concluded.”
“You’re telling me he ran.”
“I’m telling you the data is consistent with it. The psych profile supports it. The incident report does not contradict it.” A beat. “He is alive because he ran. Everyone else is not.”
I look at the file for a moment. The cigar finds the corner of the page. It catches faster than you’d expect — the paper curls brown then orange at the edge. I set it on the ferrocrete floor between the desk and the wall and let it burn. Gamma watches me do this without comment.
“No.”
Gamma processes this. “He is technically qualified across all objective metrics.”
“I know. No.”
The mechadendrites shift. He marks the file and moves on.
The files keep coming.
No, no, no, maybe. No. No. The third maybe is a yes — I know before I finish the page, and the page confirms it. I mark it differently. Set the slate down.
Gamma notices.
“Good one?”
“Good one.”
“The psych profile was anomalous.”
“I know. That’s why.”
“The anomaly that flags as disqualifying.”
“Is exactly why.”
He picks up his recaf, finds it cold, drinks it anyway.
“Continue?”
“Continue.”
The files keep coming.
* * *
A week after that.
The range is empty at this hour, which is why I booked it at this hour. Ferrocrete walls, functional lighting, the flat near-silence of a space that swallows noise without quite killing it — footsteps arrive, then disappear. Propellant and solvent and mineral dust. Nothing that doesn’t need to be here.
I start at the range.
The bolt pistol is in my left hand.
Eight rounds. Drill loadout — solid slugs, no warheads. First target at fifteen metres. I raise, acquire, fire. My recoil snaps my arm up and I ride it back down and the slug punches clean through and buries itself in the backing plate. My wrist is fine. I check it anyway, then move on.
Second target — my arm kicks, I let it go, bring it back. Third. Fourth. The rhythm settles: raise, fire, ride the snap back down, acquire. My wrist ache that’s been there for two years — eight rounds per engagement, every engagement, across all of it — isn’t there. Not managed. Not gritted through. Just gone. The bone healed and the tendon healed and the joint healed and the thing that was always there simply isn’t anymore.
Fifth. Sixth. Seventh. Eighth. My arm snapping up and riding back on each one.
Eight for eight. Centre mass. The last three at moving targets, because stationary targets are not what my pistol is actually for.
I reload. Live rounds — drill mag on the bench, standard eight in. Pistol in my holster.
Footwork first, before the blade. Triangle steps — tatsulok — moving to the third point and never crossing the feet, controlling the angle. Forward triangle, back triangle, lateral. My ginunting stays sheathed. Ten minutes of this.
Then the blade. I draw the Ginunting and move through the twelve angles of attack — diagonal forehand, diagonal backhand, horizontal left and right, downward, upward, thrust — the triangle step driving into each one, the abaniko: a short wrist-snap that rolls the blade in a tight arc, whipping the tip across a close target faster than a full swing would reach. Sweat at the temple by the third pass. Good.
Then the amara — the free-flow drill, no pattern, no sequence, just my blade moving through the angles in whatever order presents itself, the body responding to imagined attacks, the feet working the triangles underneath. This is the part that either works or doesn’t. When it works, my blade is where it needs to be and the feet are already there and nothing has to wait for anything else. When it doesn’t work, you know immediately, because you have to think. Today it works.
I sheathe the Ginunting and move to the automaton bay.
Standard facility model — articulated, human mass and speed, six response patterns. It won’t surprise me.
I draw the Ginunting.
Field stays off. I’m not testing the weapon.
The automaton engages.
I step into it.
My cut comes around in a committed arc, the steel doing the work my field normally accelerates. The automaton deflects and my blade skids off the housing with a hard ring through my hilt and into my palm. My arm is fine. I work through the first two response patterns at pace, the third with more attention — the third changes the angle, and the angle is where I used to get clipped.
Not today. I catch the shift, redirect, and the flat catches the sensor cluster hard enough to count and not hard enough to break. The automaton resets.
I run it again.
And again. Six times through. My blade ringing on the frame with each deflection. I push into the problem areas — the close-quarters transition where the forward curve wants to overcommit if I don’t control the arc, the moment after a deflection where there’s a half-beat of reset before the next cut can begin. On the third run I start adding the half-steps, moving offline after each exchange, forcing the automaton to track a changing position. On the fifth I’m not thinking about individual techniques anymore, just moving through whatever the automaton gives me. By the sixth the footwork and my blade are the same thing.
The automaton resets for the seventh time.
I stop pulling the resets.
My sword arm has given its answer. Time to ask the rest.
I touch the activation control on my hilt.
My field comes up — the high whine in the back teeth, the blue-white haze at the blade’s edge, ozone sharp and immediate. So familiar I spent the first month of campaign not registering it consciously. Not absent now.
I push through all six patterns back to back, the automaton escalating as it’s designed to, and somewhere in the fourth I draw the bolt pistol left-handed and keep the Ginunting going right-handed and I stop thinking about either of them. My pistol kicks and comes back. My Ginunting meets the deflector and my field screams white at the contact, burning through the housing instead of skidding off it. The ozone is thick now. The scorched metal underneath it.
The automaton takes a cut across the shoulder actuator. Keeps moving. I put a bolt round into the processing cluster — arm up, ride it back down — and it staggers and I close the distance and my Ginunting comes around in the arc I’ve been practising since before I could grow a beard. My field hits the primary structural member and sheers it. Not a deflection. The thing comes apart at the point of contact with a sound like a stressed weld giving.
It lists. The lower chassis cycles uselessly and then fades. Wreckage.
Three left. Breathing up. No more than the work asked for.
My wrist is quiet.
My arm is quiet.
My shoulder is quiet.
I stand in the quiet with the smell of ozone and propellant and hot metal.
There it is.
I lower the Ginunting.
My field cuts when I engage the safety toggle. The whine fades. My blade is dark from tip to half — the automaton’s internals, char-edged where my field ran hot. I’ll clean it properly later.
I slide it home. My scabbard takes it cleanly, the family sigil catching the light for a moment and going dark again.
I pick up my overcoat, shrug it on, and walk out.