But pragmatism drowns any pathetic stirring of morality. Conscience and guilt are concepts brought into being by those too meek to face up to their failures, seeking to mark their hesitations as virtues.
He has to survive. That’s the beginning and end of it. He matters infinitely more than a single legionary. Nicanor’s own actions prove the truth of it.
‘Ascension,’ comes a servitor’s bland tones over the chamber-wide vox. The transport begins its rise in shaking inelegance.
Arkhan Land weaves through a compressed sea of moaning, wounded forms, and sits with his back to the chamber wall. Sapien squawks an entirely unsimian sound as he takes his place upon his master’s shoulder.
‘Run!’ Nicanor’s voice, even weakened, is a roar above the wind. ‘Run, damn you!’
He turns with his boltgun braced against his shoulder, trusting that the technoarchaeologist’s arrogance and fear will serve even if Nicanor’s command fails. The war machine lopes and lurches closer, leaping over the wind-smoothed grey rocks that lie across the Martian surface like the tumbledown shamanic stone circles of Old Earth.
And it is the same machine. It bears the scars that Nicanor already inflicted upon its armour plating with bolter and bomb back in the Mesatan Complex. It sprints forwards on backward-jointed legs, its chain-toothed limbs revving in the silence of its empty rotor cannons.
Nicanor’s boltgun barks in futility. Explosive shells strike true, detonating against the stalker-killer’s insectoid cranial housing, doing little more than jerking the head with its bulbous golden eyes to the side.
He knows he can’t kill it. He knows he doesn’t need to. Sigismund didn’t send him here to kill this thing.
He drops the bolter the instant his retinal display chimes that his magazine is empty. His power sword flares to life in both hands before the gun has even hit the ground.
The hunting machine could circle around him if its cognitive processes choose to do so, but threat sensors flicker with suggestions of caution. This prey has thwarted it once already, and time is short. The kill must be now, or it will be never.
It charges, janky legs clanking. Spear-limb joints bunch up, driving back into their piston housings. It leaps, emitting a scrapcode shriek for want of a true battle cry.
Nicanor hurls himself to the side, rolling in the dust and dirt, defacing his damaged armour further by occluding the proud symbols that have stood upon the ceramite for over three decades. His injuries leave him slow, slower than he has ever been. He comes to his knees in a sense-lost haze of disorientation, thrusting upwards with the blade.
It bites. It bites deep, with the snarling kiss of an aggravated power field knifing into sensitive mechanics. Sparks fly in place of blood’s spray. He feels the machine buckle above him, its thwarted core straining, the sword buried in the underside of its hip joint threatening to plunge the beast-machine to the ground.
He must live, Nicanor thinks, tasting blood in his mouth. And he will.
He pulls the blade free from the crippled war machine in exalted silence, stoic to the last, leaving the bellowing of war shouts for the warriors of lesser Legions that require such pageantry. The sword snaps near the hilt as the machine whines and staggers back.
Nicanor is rising, turning, just in time for the stalker-killer’s primary limb to emit a peal of crunching thunder as it pounds through the Space Marine’s plastron. It shatters the reinforced casing of his fused ribs, kills the motive force of his Mark II battle armour as it lances through the suit’s back-mounted power pack. It annihilates both of his hearts, two of his three lungs, the progenoid gland in his chest.
He coughs blood as the crippled machine drags him up before its alien face. He is grinning when he hears the engine cacophony from the transport lifting off.
‘He lives,’ he tells his killer. These will be his last words. ‘You have failed.’
They are almost to the landing site when Arkhan Land realises the severity of the Space Marine’s wounds. The warrior’s limp becomes a stagger, his stride arrested as he seeks to pull his helmet clear and breathe without the filtration grille. It comes free to reveal a dark face with a typical Terran equatorial skin shade, blood riming the gritted teeth. It is the first time Land has seen the warrior’s features. He makes no comment on this because he doesn’t care.
Since emerging from the underground complex, there has been no sign of their pursuer. Ahead across the rusty desert, the orbital lander sits with its gang-ramps down, accepting evacuees and materiel in a shuffling and stumbling trickle.
It is not the ship that Land would have chosen for himself. Nor would he associate with the scavengers and dregs now boarding it, had he any other choice. But it is said that beggars cannot be choosers. The same can be said for refugees.
Without even realising he is doing it, Land shields Sapien from the gathering wind, holding the psyber-monkey in the folds of his magisterial, crimson robe. Sapien accepts this treatment, displaying a fanged maw no natural simian had ever possessed. The expression may possibly be a smile.
‘Space Marine,’ Land calls over the wind.
‘All is well,’ the towering warrior calls back. Plainly, it is a lie. All is anything but well. Nicanor touches a gauntleted hand to the shattered ceramite at his side. The armoured fingers come away red.
‘Your kind do not bleed this much,’ Land accuses him with lazy vehemence. ‘I have read the physiological data myself. In detail.’
‘We bleed this much,’ the Imperial Fist replies, ‘when we are dying.’ He gestures to the segmented evacuation craft being slowly abraded by the rising wind. ‘Keep moving, Technoarchaeologist Land.’
But Land doesn’t keep moving. He fixes his multilens goggles over his eyes, looking back the way they came. Not for the first time, he wishes he was armed. His collection of antiquities boasts many archeotech weapons, the pinnacle of his hoard being a deliciously beautiful sidearm with humming aural dampeners, rotating magnetic vanes, and the capacity to fire micro-atomic rounds. But it – along with many of his possessions – is elsewhere. A significant portion of his priceless finds are safely secured and await him once he reaches the Ring of Iron that surrounds Mars in a sacred dockyard halo.
Even so, he is already cataloguing the innumerable precious items he has been forced to abandon on the planet today.
Evacuation is such a dirty word.
Sapien hisses in his cradle of robes. Land nods as if the sound held some kind of sense, adjusting his goggles’ visual range with a clicking twist of a side dial.
‘Space Marine,’ he says, looking over the dusty plain behind them. ‘Something is approaching from the southern ridge.’
It had followed them through the complex, after all. All of those byzantine twists and turns, hoping to put distance between themselves and their foe, had been nothing more than wasted meandering.
The wounded warrior clutches his weapons tighter as he turns. Land hears the click of Nicanor’s eye lenses resetting, cancelling their zoomed view.
This ends now, Land thinks. One way or another, this ends now.
‘Get to the ship,’ the Space Marine says. And when Land moves at a slow, exhausted jog instead of a sprint, Nicanor’s temper finally flares. ‘Run!’ he says, his voice a crack of breaking arctic ice. ‘Run, damn you!’
They walk through tunnels of flickering light, the power systems feeding the Mesatan Complex failing one by one, falling to abandonment or treachery. Their passage is sung in the sound of their footsteps – the technoarchaeologist’s ragged, tired tread, and the Fist’s own fading gait.