It feels like a desk job. It feels like labour for a bureaucrat or an administrator. It feels as if the primarch is teaching him another valuable lesson about the responsibilities of transhumanity. Learn to take pride in the work of governance as well as war. To be a ruler as well as a leader.
Remus Ventanus understands this. When the war is done, as it must eventually be done, when there are no more enemies to end and no more worlds to conquer, what will the transhumans who have built the Imperium do then?
Retire?
Pine away and die?
Become an embarrassment? A gore-headed reminder of older, more visceral days when humans needed superhumans to forge an empire for them? War is acceptable when it is a necessary instrument of survival. When it is no longer needed, the very fact that it was ever a necessary instrument at all becomes unpalatable.
‘It is the great irony of the Legiones Astartes,’ Guilliman had told his captains and masters, just a week ago. ‘Engineered to kill to achieve a victory of peace that they can then be no part of.’
‘A conceptual failure?’ Gage had asked.
‘A necessary burden,’ Sydance suggested. ‘I build your temple, knowing that I will not worship in it.’
Guilliman had shaken his head to both. ‘My father does not make mistakes of that magnitude,’ he had said. ‘Space Marines excel at warfare because they were designed to excel at everything. Each of you will become a leader, a ruler, the master of your world and, because there is no more fighting to be done, you will bend your transhuman talents to governance and culture.’
Remus Ventanus knows that his primarch believes in this sincerely. He doubts the likes of Primarch Angron or Primarch Russ regard the prospect of a peaceful future with such optimism.
‘Why are you smiling?’ asks Selaton, at his side.
Remus glances at his sergeant.
‘Was I smiling?’
‘You were looking at the data-slate and smiling, sir. I was wondering what was so amusing about a manifest list of eighty superheavy armour pieces.’
‘Very little,’ Remus agrees.
Beyond the observation port, mass-loader engines carry four-hundred-tonne tanks into the bellies of bulk liftships.
Brother Braellen is young, and has not yet fought the greens. His captain has. In the sunlight of the ground camp in the Ourosene Hills, some impromptu training takes place while they wait for the signal to stow and board.
‘Ork, theoretical,’ says Captain Damocles.
‘Head or spine, mass-reactive,’ replies Braellen. ‘Or heart.’
‘Idiot,’ grumbles Sergeant Domitian. ‘Heart shot won’t stop one. Not guaranteed. Filthy things soak up damage, even boltguns.’
‘So, skull or spine,’ says Braellen, corrected.
Damocles nods.
‘Ork, practical?’ he asks.
‘What do I have?’ asks Braellen.
‘Your bolter. A combat sword.’
‘Skull or spine,’ says Braellen, ‘or both or whatever works. Maximum trauma. If it comes to close combat, decapitation.’
Damocles nods.
‘The wrinkle is, don’t let it ever get that close,’ says Domitian. ‘They’ve got strength in them. Shred your limbs off. Sometimes, the damned things keep going when their skulls are off or open. Nerve roots, or something. Keep them at bay, if you can – ranged weapons, bolter fire. Maximum trauma.’
‘Good advice,’ says Captain Damocles to his grizzled sergeant. He looks at the brothers in the circle. ‘And from a man who has fought greenskins six times more than I have. It is six, isn’t it, Dom?’
‘I think it’s seven, thanking you, sir,’ replies Domitian, ‘but I won’t grieve if you won’t.’
Damocles smiles.
‘You have left out one caveat on the practical assessment, though,’ he says.
‘Have I, sir?’ asks Domitian, honestly surprised.
‘Anyone?’ asks the captain.
Braellen raises his hand.
‘Round count,’ he says.
Domitian laughs and tuts to himself. How could he have forgotten to cover that base?
‘For the benefit of the others, Brother Braellen?’ prompts Captain Damocles.
‘Round count,’ says Braellen. ‘Maximum trauma, maximum damage, but watch your load counter and try to balance damage delivery against munitions rationing.’
‘Because?’ asks Damocles.
‘Because, with orks,’ says Domitian, ‘there’s always a shit load of them.’
Brother Androm has also not fought greenskins before. When the captain breaks the circle and sends them to duties, he speaks to Braellen.
They have both recently rotated up from the reserve companies, ready to complete their novitiate period through service in the active line. Both are grateful and proud to have been given places in the 6th Company, to serve under Saur Damocles, and to etch – if only temporarily – the company’s white figure-of-eight serpent emblem onto the blue fields of their shoulder guards.
Oll has land on the estuary at Neride.
The land is about twenty hectares of good black alluvial soil. The hectares are service-shares. Oll has service, and a yellowing record book at the bottom of a store-room drawer to prove it. Good years of service, marching behind the Emperor’s standard.
Oll is Army.
His service ended on Chrysophar, eighteen standard years past. Then, he was known as ‘Trooper Persson’. He got his papers, and his service ribbon, and a stamp on his record book, and service-shares, proportionate to years served. The Army always rounds down.
Oll spent two years on a cattle-boat coming to Calth from Chrysophar. The posters and the handbills all called Ultramar ‘the New Empire’. The slogan seemed a little disloyal, but the point was made. The rich new cluster of worlds that great Guilliman had made compliant, and wrangled into a brawny frontier republic, had the look of a new empire about it. The posters were trying to appeal to the settlers and colonists streaming out towards the Rim on the coattails of the expeditionary fleets. Come to Ultramar and share our future. Build your new life on Calth. Settle on Octavia. New worlds, New destinies!
If you claimed your service-shares on a rising world like Calth, the administration paid your passage. Oll came with the thousand people who would be his neighbours. By the time he reached Calth, he was known as ‘Oll’, and only those who saw the fading ink on his left forearm knew about his past in professional killing.
The fusion plants of Neride generate the power that lights the lamps of Numinus City and Kalkas Fortalice. The plants pump river water to wash the smudge-carbon off their clean-stroke turbines, and thus warm the estuary with a rich black swill that makes the river valley one of the most fertile places on the planet. It’s good land. There’s always a stink of beets and cabbage in the humid air.
Oll has no wife, and knows only toil. He grows swathes of bright flowers to decorate the tables and vases and buttonholes of the Numinus City gentry, and then, on the season turn, he cycles a second crop of swartgrass for the sacking industry. Both crops require seasonal labour forces. Oll employs the young men and women of neighbouring families: the women to cut and pack the flowers, the men to harvest and roll the swartgrass. He keeps them all in line with an ex-Army loader servitor called Graft. Graft cannot be conditioned not to call him ‘Trooper Persson’.
Oll wears a Catheric symbol around his neck on a thin chain, the gift of a wife he had barely got to know before she died and was replaced by Army life. The symbol, and his faith, are two of the reasons he came to Ultramar. It is, he feels, easier to believe out here in the Ultima Segmentum.
It’s supposed to be, anyway.