'Waiting for what?' asked Pasanius.
'For someone to find them and reawaken their glory,' said Uriel, the words leaping unbidden to his lips, as though spoken by another, 'to fight their enemies once more, and to bring them home.'
He stopped before a suit that had been punctured through the gorget by some unknown weapon, the plates, seals and inner linings of the armour buckled inwards. Dark stains striated the inner surfaces and, although centuries old, Uriel could smell the ancient hero's blood.
As he stared at the blood, Uriel felt the kinship he shared with this warrior on a level he could not articulate. This was a legacy of heroism that stretched back thousands of years, and even over the aeons of time and distance that separated them Uriel knew that this armour had not just been waiting: it had been waiting for him.
No word was forthcoming from Governor Barbaden regarding the possibility of a medicae examining Pasanius's arm, so Uriel spent the next two days working on his suit of armour, working with craftsmen from the palace forges to restore it to functionality.
Pasanius had been reunited with his own armour, and soon Uriel no longer thought of this armour as belonging to another warrior.
It was his, though he knew that it would be his for only a limited time.
The armour belonged to the Sons of Guilliman and it would dishonour their warriors to wear it for any longer than was necessary. After a thorough inspection, it was clear that the damage was largely superficial, but with broken parts replaced with components from other suits, it was not long before Uriel stood before a fully restored suit of Mk VI plate.
Palace artificers were already attempting to modify the cable heads of their generators in an attempt to recharge the internal power of the armour, and they confidently predicted that they would have the armour fully functional within the day.
In the meantime, Uriel and Pasanius explored the Gallery of Antiquities with Curator Urbican. The gallery held many fascinating treasures, although none was as magnificent as the nineteen suits of Corvus-pattern power armour they had discovered on their first visit.
Urbican was a genial host and a garrulous orator, endlessly pleased to have someone to whom he could hold forth on the history of the Falcatas and the world they had conquered.
On the eastern edge of the Paragonus sub-sector, a lynchpin of Imperial defences of the coreward approach to Segmentum Solar, the Salinas system was one of a dozen that had felt the wrath of an Imperial Crusade some thirty-five years ago. The core worlds of the sub-sector had fallen prey to agents of the Archenemy, and the forces of Warlord Crozus Regaur had begun to swallow up the outlying systems, one by one.
Before the enemy forces had gained an unbreakable hold on the sub-sector, the Imperium had retaliated, raising regiments from the oudying systems to fight the threat. Such measures held the enemy in check, but had not the strength to dislodge him from the sub-sector, and thus regiments from beyond the immediate sphere of the conflict were dragged into it.
The Falcatas had been one such regiment and had been tasked with cleansing the outer systems of taint. For the first planets of the Salinas system, it had already been too late, their governors overthrown and their populace in thrall to the enemy.
Along with a dozen other regiments and a demi-legion of titans from the Legio Destructor, the Falcatas had fought for two decades upon the blasted surfaces of these planets to drive Regaur's forces off-world. Urbican's voice choked as he told of the campaigns, and Uriel could only guess at the horrors and bloodshed he had seen in the liberation of the planets.
Salinas had been the third world in the system and when the Achaman Falcatas had made planet-fall, they had come as an army of conquest. Despite pleas of loyalty to the God-Emperor from the populace, the battle-hardened veterans of the Guard, men and women who had waded through blood and the dead for most of their adult lives, were in no mood for half measures.
The planetary governor had been executed and when his forces had taken arms in response to this, Barbaden had unleashed the full horror of the Falcatas' experiences of the last two decades.
Men and women who had desperately tried to minimise civilian casualties in their first months as soldiers, soon cared little for the collateral damage caused by their assaults and the local PDF regiments had been obliterated within months of planet-fall.
Although organised forces had been defeated, there remained a powerful core of resistance and, for many years, the Falcatas had fought a dedicated and utterly ruthless insurgent army named the Sons of Salinas that murdered Imperial soldiers and bombed their bases.
All that had come to an end with the Khaturian Massacre.
Uriel saw that Urbican was reluctant to speak of this, but gently pressed the old curator over the course of their second day of exploration of the galleries.
'It was close to the fourth year after we arrived,' said Urbican. 'I wasn't there, of course, so I have this only secondhand. Well, the insurgents were getting out of hand and not a day went by without a bomb going off or a patrol being ambushed and slaughtered. We couldn't keep the peace; we were too few and our equipment was beginning to fail. Without re-supply and a corps of trained enginseers, tanks were getting a bit thin on the ground. We were getting weaker and they seemed to be getting stronger.'
'So what did Barbaden do about it?' asked Pasanius. 'He was still colonel then wasn't he?'
'He was,' agreed Urbican. 'He said that Khaturian was a base of operations of the Sons of Salinas and led the Screaming Eagles to surround it. Apparently, Barbaden gave the city fathers two hours to hand over the leader of the insurgents, a man named Sylvanus Thayer, or else he would order his men to attack.'
'I'm guessing they didn't hand him over,' said Uriel.
'They said they couldn't,' explained Urbican. 'They said he wasn't there, that he never had been. They begged Barbaden to call off his attack, but once Leto has his mind set on something, there's nothing anyone can do to dissuade him.'
'So what happened?'
Urbican shook his head. 'You must understand, Uriel, this is hard for me. The Killing Ground Massacre is not something I am proud to have associated with my regiment. All the good we did, all our honour and our glory died that day.'
'I know this is hard for you,' said Uriel. 'You do not have to go on if you do not wish to.'
'No,' said Urbican, 'some shames need to be told.'
The curator drew a breath and smoothed down his robes before he continued. 'Well, the deadline for the people of Khaturian to hand over Thayer came and went, and for a time they thought that Barbaden's threat had been a bluff.'
'But it wasn't, was it?'
Urbican shook his head. 'No,' he said, 'it wasn't. Marauder bombers flew in over the mountains and dropped a dreadful amount of bombs. They blew the city apart. You could see the fires from Barbadus. It was as if the whole sky was aflame, a terrible sight, just terrible, and, well, after that reports are somewhat confused.'
'Confused how?' asked Pasanius, scratching at his arm.
'No one I've spoken to seems to be able to agree on exactly what happened next or even how it happened, but Colonel Barbaden ordered the Falcatas into the ruins of Khaturian and when they came out six hours later, there wasn't a single soul left alive in the city.'
'He killed the entire city?'
'Yes,' nodded Urbican, 'seventeen thousand people in six hours.'
'What happened after the attack?' asked Uriel. The sheer scale of the dead was staggering.
'The Sons of Salinas, what was left of them, came down from the mountains,' said Urbican, shaking his head. 'Supposedly Sylvanus Thayer and many of his followers' families lived in Khaturian and, mad with grief and rage, he led them in one last glorious charge.'