Night falls as the squad trundles through the spires to the second encirclement zone. Quintus chins his visor to night mode and checks the objective marker.
Ten more blocks. They move carefully, nosing their boltguns toward the low hab windows, pausing for a split second on each alleyway. This world has no moons, and their display is a grainy grey.
When they are within three blocks of the target one of the marines working rear cover breaks comm silence — greenskin in an alley. The squad of eleven strong halts and forms a ring; six Space Marines taking a knee, five taking top cover.
Quintus chins his comm — take him. The spotting marine unclips a grenade and steps out to hurl it into the alleyway, scrambling their night visors with the flash of the detonation. When vision returns, so do the greenskins.
Orks, small ones, clamber from every nook. Bent-metal axes and crude machineguns clatter against the concrete of the hab blocks. Like the rush of water through a burst dam the orks spring their ambush and flow in toward the marines’ defensive formation.
The Ultramarines fire ten meters out and concentrate their fire, building a wall of twisted bodies. Having worked together as a squad for some half a century, their timing is superb, their aim flawless.
The outer circle fire at a nearly uniform pace, the inner circle double-tapping when the outermost marines are forced to reload. When they are done, they check their armour for superficial damage, check magazines, and tread through the slick ocean of broken bone.
For being so close, thinks Quintus, it is too quiet. Orks do not camp, and they do not hold back from a good fight. On the other hand, a Guard encampment would not be so silent as this place.
They form into two single file lines and cross over the red outline of their objective marker.
The reason for such silence becomes clear — they have entered a killing field. Blasted and scarred, the rent bodies of greenskins and Guardsmen alike litter the cratered hab block, spilled over one another in a grisly portrait of battle.
The Space Marines are uneasy and tread heavily, the mechanical whine and hum of their suits scratching at the quiet of the night. Small fires suck their last breaths and waver. The statistical probability of a battle fought to a draw is minuscule. Then, a skitter. A whirl. Some shifting in the darkness above.
Yes, thinks Quintus grimly, this, is a killing field.
“Seek cover!” yells Quintus as the shrill scream of alien weaponry sparks in the night. One of his marines is knocked off balance by a blow across the back, some feathery, glittering substance. Eldar.
Quintus and a group of marines take shelter behind the stumbled wreckage of an Imperial walker. Still four marines back toward their location, trying to pick targets. Taking the first shots into the grey background before them Quintus initiates covering fire and the black hab block lights up with the flash and roar of boltgun fire.
Deafening silence. A brother marines wrenches the sizzling backpack off his fellow warrior, throws it out into the street where the power unit screams and detonates. Quintus leans against the blackened steel.
A warp spider hunting party. An eldar presence is to be expected on the Fringe. But for what reason do they come planetside? This is not their battle. Then, it is probable this is more than a forge world. The eldar have no need for the weapons of men. They are here for something. Exactly what, Quintus is not sure.
“Brother Renault, status,” Quintus breathes into his comm unit. ”We are mobile brother,” the marine chatters back, “advise we lose this kill-team, and proceed.” Quintus nods, pats him on the shoulder. We move now.
The team extricates through the thin dark alleys dividing dark towers. If the warp spiders were playing with them like game they were doing so in some grand, unforeseeable web. Perhaps they had lost their nerve for the fight upon seeing the Emperor’s Space Marines on this world. Perhaps not. They would see, he was sure of that.
Two hundred years hence he had been plucked from a life of work and toil on a forge world within sub-space travel of Ultramar herself. He had worked the forges for the Imperium, like his father before him, casting the hulls of warships under the glow of great molten waterfalls. After ten years of labour, he thought himself lost. His mind wavered. Was this all there was? Was this his life? To live and die alone, fueling some dark war for an invisible patron?
On a Thursday, he started taking his first lives. Three men tossed into the lake of fire, “The Cauldron” they called it, and another beaten unrecognizable. After, he had felt a numbness. A tingling nothingness that hardened his eyes, slowed his breath. It had washed over him, stripped his soul from his bones. He had taken the beating from the local Guard. He had liked it; rather he had agreed he deserved it.
Why they hadn’t canceled his life immediately in some dark room, death by torture or the quick blast of a pistol to the skull, he would never know. But before his sentence could be carried out, he had had a visitor. A tall man, unusually so. Notably wearing what looked like a permanent re-breather cast into the bone; the modulated voice overheard suggesting the absence of a proper jaw. Not a common piece of hardware, not set into the flesh of a man the Imperium didn’t plan on preserving.
His appearance was ageless; looking not over thirty, but having the eyes of an old thing. He squinted and studied. For countless minutes the man stood there, Quintus too confused to pose a question and the strange man too busied, inside his own head. Judging, perhaps, his sentence. After a time the man left without a word.
The next day he was released. Released from prison and the sentence of death, but released in bonds. He spent two weeks in transport, in the hull of a freighter like a dog, in the dark, fed scraps and kept in chains as the dark craft sailed through the void that was space.
For the next decade he served his time as a scout for the Ultramarines’ Third Company, fighting in the border wars against the tyranid threat and undergoing stints of extreme genetic modification and organ induction. His body to match his mind, something more or less than human.
With time his numbness was honed on the endless fight. Ensconced in war, his desolation became his salvation. He forgot life; became death. With his genetic promotion to Space Marine he had proven himself time and again a tireless warrior, unconcerned with his own safety and unnervingly distant. A leader of men, he was not. But that had not been his decision, in the end.
Now, he led his cadre deep into the industrial heart of the dying world as their second and third objective markers faded slowly, the red rings pixelizing and blending with the chalky grey display of the night visor. A new ring appeared, much smaller. Their staging ground.
