Rescue was a word he certainly did not like.
The Stormbird began to shake more furiously as they entered the outer radiation bands of the high atmosphere. Plumes of what looked like flame flashed past the small, semi-shuttered cabin ports. The tongues were blue, mauve and green, like noxious gases burning in a lab. For a moment, Daylight wondered if they were some trace of the warp, some daemonic lightning. All along there had been quiet rumours that the silent hand of Chaos, whose actions had been absent from the galactic theatre for a troublingly long time, might be playing a part in the Ardamantuan misadventure.
But it was not false fire or warp-scald. It was a geomagnetic display, auroras of charged particles ripping through the maddened thermosphere.
‘Any indication of vessels in nearspace?’ asked Daylight.
‘Negative,’ replied the tech-adept.
Another hope dashed. There was a fleet here, somewhere, the best part of the entire Imperial Fists battlefleet, unless it had been utterly reduced and annihilated already. Where was it? It could be directly in front of them, but veiled from them by the tumult.
The descent turbulence became progressively worse. The Stormbird was shaking like a sistrum at a fervent ritual. Lines of red alert lights were flashing into life along the pilot’s enclosing consoles, filling entire rows. Deftly, with great calm, the pilot took one black-leather-gloved hand off the helm and muted the alarms.
Daylight began to flick through the meagre and imperfect surface scan readings they were finally obtaining, as they got closer and their auspex systems penetrated the atmosphere a little more deeply. They were on a pre-selected dive towards the location of the blisternest, working on the tactical assumption that the site was the last place their forces had been reported. But there was no clear sign of the structure, and little of the surrounding landmass matched, in relief or topographical schemata form at least, the geography logged by the survey teams that had accompanied the original assault.
‘Is this just bad luck?’ asked Zarathustra.
Daylight turned and looked at the wall-brother strapped in beside him. Zarathustra’s war-spear was mounted like a harpoon on the weapon rack above his grim-helmed head. He was the oldest of all the wall-brothers and had been the most reluctant to abandon the old tradition and leave the walls of the Palace behind.
‘Bad luck?’ replied Daylight. He noted that Zarathustra had selected the discretion of a helm-to-helm link. There were other wall-brothers in the craft alongside them, not to mention forty atmospherically-armoured shock troops of the Astra Militarum Asmodai Seventieth, Heth’s finest. The Guardsmen and their leader, Major Nyman, seemed to Daylight to be about the finest and most resolute warriors that unmodified human flesh could compose, but he did not want them overhearing dissent from an Adeptus Astartes warrior as they fell headlong into Hades. Through the dark and slightly breath-fogged visor lenses of their faceplates, he could see pale, drawn, anxious faces that winced at every violent buck and lurch the Stormbird threw.
‘Bad luck happens even to good men, Daylight,’ said Zarathustra, his voice chopped and frayed by the interference patterns even on the short-range dedicated link. ‘Sometimes the forces of light prevail, sometimes the forces of darkness take the upper hand. Sometimes, as history teaches us, fate itself intervenes.’
He turned his impassive visor to look directly at Daylight. There was a gouge of raw metal across the otherwise perfectly polished faceplate, a gouge that had been left by the blade of one of the Sons of Horus during the fight at Zarathustra Wall. Heresy wounds were never patched, though the brother who had taken that stroke no longer dwelt inside the armour.
‘Think of Coldblood and his wall, at Orphan Mons,’ said Zarathustra. ‘They took that day against the eldar raiders, full of glory. Then the star went nova and took Coldblood, his wall and the surviving eldar. Victor and defeated alike, levelled by the whim of the conscienceless cosmos.’
‘They say the eldar corsairs engineered that stellar bomb to effect a pyrrhic victory,’ said Daylight.
‘They say… they say… Don’t spoil my story,’ grumbled Zarathustra. ‘My point is sound. Sometimes you kill the enemy, sometimes the enemy kills you, and sometimes the universe kills you both. This may have been a very conventional fight against these xenoforms, these Chrome things. Mirhen was probably wiping the floor with them, soaking the dust with their blood, or whatever they have that passes for blood…’
Zarathustra’s eye-slits were milky pale, and back-lit by a faint green glow, but Daylight could feel the intensity of his old friend’s gaze upon him.
‘Then the planet dies. Solar storm. Gravity anomaly. Tachyon event. Whatever. Doesn’t matter who’s winning then. We end up with a mess like this.’
Daylight glanced at his overhead again. The only time he had ever seen data footage of a planet as catastrophically mangled and tortured as Ardamantua was in feeds of unstable worlds to be avoided as ‘not supportive’. Six weeks earlier, the cream of his Chapter, the majority of his kin, the shield-corps itself, had been down there, dug in and on a solid footing, burning out the last vestiges of a numerous but outclassed enemy.
‘Are you suggesting we turn back and give them up as lost?’ he asked.
‘Of course not.’
‘Then what?’
‘I’m suggesting that we prepare ourselves for the worst,’ said Zarathustra. ‘If this mudball has up and died under Master Mirhen and our brothers, then…’
‘We will make a great mourning like never before, greater even than we did for our Primarch-Progenitor,’ said Daylight, simply.
‘It would be the worst loss imaginable,’ agreed Zarathustra. ‘For the Imperial Fists, the Old Seventh, greatest of all the Adeptus Astartes, and the most loyal of all defenders of Terra, to be reduced to… to nothing, to nothing but the last fifty wall-brothers stationed at the Palace. To lose all but five per cent, to be diminished to a twentieth… How would we ever recover from that?’
Daylight had no answer. Zarathustra was right. It was unthinkable. Even a force of transhuman warriors dedicated to dying in the service of the Imperium did not like to consider what might happen if they all died. The gene-seed loss alone would be an atrocity. Could they ever rebuild, even turning to Successor Chapters for support and bloodline? No loyal First Founding Chapter had ever been entirely swept away, not in the history of the Imperium, not even in the Heresy War.
Would the Imperial Fists be the first to pass into legend?
Some said, quietly and very informally, that it was inevitable. The Adeptus Astartes were a dying breed. Bloodlines and gene-seeds were gradually failing over time. The vigour had waned, and long gone was the time, pre-Heresy, when thousands upon thousands of Space Marines marshalled under the stars. The bitter gall of the Heresy had cut them down, halved their Legions, decimated the surviving loyalists, and tragically reduced the Chapters’ ability to produce new Space Marines in anything like the numbers of old. With the possible exception of the Ultramarines — and even there, there was the contention that the same plight ultimately afflicted them too — the Adeptus Astartes were diminishing. They were a finite resource, used only for the most elite missions and efforts. They were slowly, very slowly, dying out. Senior men in the Chapter predicted that within four or five hundred years, unless effective new methods of gene-seed synthesis could be developed and a new Golden Age brought about, the Space Marine would be a thing of myth.
In his early life, before the honour of wall-brother had been granted him, before he had become Daylight, Daylight had fought the eldar. In fact, it was his deeds in the face of the eldar that had led to the wall-brother honour being bestowed upon him.