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Last Blood

James Mortimore

When they fell upon Arboria the planet was a rural paradise. When they left it was a volcanic wasteland. In between lay one of the most violent battles beheld by living eyes. A conflict so fierce it flattened mountains, rendered oceans into vapour dense enough to extend the atmosphere tens of kilometres into space and gouged mortal fissures in continental bedrock through which the molten heart of the planet bled in boiling geysers bright as any sun.
In the time taken to sire a child, war made a scorched mosaic of a world. But the conflict did not end there. When a planet is deliberately transformed into a star there are no winners, no losers; no good or evil.
Just a minor rest in the endless song of war.

– from The Menologium of the Ordo Malleus
(attr. Inculpatus Prolix Veridicus, Magister
Bibliophagus Athenaeum Delectus)

Secundus Silvanus stared in disbelief at the transhuman wreckage before him.

The Ultramarines skull and wings insignia adorning the chest-plate of Sergeant Cerrano’s armour was lathered in blood, a match for the grizzled warrior within. Like its wearer the skull insignia was missing an eye, the death’s-head features viciously scarred by enemy attack. The armour was broken in many places, and with it the man who had been a mentor to Silvanus since his acceptance into the Tenth Company.

‘Leave me, Silvanus.’ There was blood in Cerrano’s voice. ‘While I yet draw breath these vermin and I have a reckoning.’

Silvanus Secundus supported the dying warrior, half dragging him towards the dubious shelter of a nearby ruin.

‘Silvanus, are you listening to me?’

‘Yes, sergeant, I am listening.’

Cerrano tried to laugh. He coughed blood instead.

‘If you were listening we would not be retreating.’

‘We are not retreating. We are employing a specific tactical strategy.’

‘Silvanus, since you are still a novice and I am nominally your instructor as well as your immediate superior, I’m going to allow you a small amount of leeway in interpreting the–’

Another spasm of coughing overtook the sergeant.

‘Sergeant, you will heal, given time. When you heal the enemy will suffer anew.’

‘The enemy will suffer now, Silvanus, if you would only–’

Cerrano was interrupted again, this time by the resounding thud as Silvanus dumped him into the shadow of a pile of rubble which had once been a public bibliotheca.

‘Scout Silvanus, I must order–’

‘Sir, despite every effort to the contrary, your insistence will not summon enemies from the ether!’ Silvanus controlled his frustration with some effort. ‘You have left nothing here to kill.’

Cerrano cursed. ‘My apologies, Silvanus. It was selfish of me to keep the enemy to myself.’

Silvanus met the ironic comment with a quote from the Codex Astartes. ‘Only the eager martyr hoards a battle.’ He eased himself upright, bolt pistol at the ready, searching the ruins for signs of a hidden enemy. For now the battle seemed to have moved on. ‘As a Scout my place is to gather intelligence.’

‘Because intelligence wins wars, and, yes, I know the scripture.’

‘Walls, trenches and towers are no obstacle,’ The words of the Codex Astartes comforted Silvanus even as he spoke them. ‘Lack of imagination and lack of will are obstacles.’ Silvanus stared out across the battlefield, the clinkered ruin of a once-verdant agri world. ‘Without the dark there can be no light.’

Understanding bloomed suddenly in Cerrano’s one good eye. He struggled to rise. His broken body and armour would not support him. He sank back onto his bower of rubble with a frustrated sigh. ‘Quoting the Codex is no measure of understanding it, Silvanus!’ he hissed. ‘How many times must you be told?’

Despite the quiet of the surrounding battlefield, Silvanus did not risk even a brief glance at his superior.

‘Blessed is the mind too small for doubt, Silvanus.’

At this final barb Silvanus did turn – but his reply went unspoken.

Sergeant Cerrano was dead.

Silvanus took in a breath. The air stank. Blood and iron and smashed stone and scorched flesh. The battle had been hard but he’d expected that. The cry for help from Arboria’s astropaths had been short, chilling, quickly silenced. A daemon incursion was something to be faced quickly, terminated with extreme prejudice. But the galaxy was a large place and war was everywhere. Three squads of Space Marines had been deployed on Arboria, a mix of seasoned warriors to conduct the battle and Scouts – such as Silvanus – to provide intelligence as to the disposition of the enemy. To their cost the Space Marines had quickly learned that the incursion had been much more widespread than at first believed. They had already been stretched thin across the entire planet. Now many of them were dead.

Silvanus’s own squad was wiped out to a man, with him the only survivor. His chain of command was broken, his comms damaged beyond repair. His injured arm would heal given time, but time was a luxury Silvanus could not afford. His mission was clearly defined: to provide intelligence, and to fight as necessary to accomplish that end. Right now there were no living enemies within the immediate battle zone. Silvanus therefore had only one goal. To acquire as much intelligence as possible as to the enemy’s disposition and bring it by any means necessary to whichever of his battle-brothers remained active on Arboria.

There was nothing to anchor Silvanus to the sergeant’s final resting place. The body could be collected later. Assuming victory. Silvanus identified a new vantage position on slightly higher ground and moved warily towards it, continuing to study the battlefield. A once proud city, now reduced to rubble. The bodies of enemies and civilians lay in haphazard piles, human wreckage from the aerial bombardment. Apart from the crackle of fires and the occasional thud of collapsing masonry the city was utterly silent. Or was it? Every living thing had a voice, but broken walls and lifeless halls could also speak if you knew how to listen, and what to listen for.

To a Space Marine, even the dead can speak.

Without the dark there can be no light.

Silvanus knew what he had to do.

Arboria had been a world of hydroponic stations and agri-domes. Animals and adversity were all she’d ever known. Then the Space Marines came, with flesh hard as metal. Armoured giants falling like steel seraphim from the sky, their wrath incalculable, barely comprehendible. They’d razed Arboria, sky to ocean bed, and now they moved purposefully among the tide of human wreckage, seeking out any last spark of life and precisely, inevitably, extinguishing it.

The Space Marines had come because they had been alerted to a threat. They’d come with starships, the hammer of god, to break this world, to smash all life, to sterilise the crushed remains. If Arboria was a field, they had come to burn it, to drive out an infection. In their armoured eyes and minds, there was nothing left to save. All must die.

So she ran, as others ran, and the Space Marines followed, bellowing and burning, hacking and sawing and stamping and crushing. She saw them kill farmers, their wives and children, even their animals. Why not, when any livestock could be host to corruption? She watched them rain armoured bolts on fleeing crowds, saw them melt farmhouses in which terrified families were huddled to molten slag. She saw one armoured giant, ammunition exhausted, snatch up a double fistful of screaming farm hands fleeing a burning church and squeeze them to pulp. The giant strode on, smashing aside buildings and trees and freight-haulers and exo-loaders with equal disdain, its armour stained red and dripping with human slurry.

The mission of the Space Marines was very clear. Corruption was assumed, extermination mandatory.

They were here to kill, nothing else.

Only she knew why.

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