Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [29]
‘You dare desecrate our tongue?’
Again, he bashed the greenskin back, the alien’s head splitting wide as it struck a girder.
The ork’s struggles died immediately. Grimaldus let the creature fall to the metal decking, where it hit and folded with a muffled thud.
Priamus.
The fury was fading now. Reality asserted itself with cold, unwanted clarity. Priamus lay on the deck, head to the side, bleeding from his ears and open mouth. Grimaldus came to his side, kneeling there in the darkness.
‘Nero,’ he said quietly.
‘Reclusiarch,’ the younger knight returned.
‘I have found Priamus. Aft, deck four, tertiary spine corridor.’
‘On my way. Assessment?’
Grimaldus’s targeting reticule flicked over his brother’s prone body, then locked onto the scrap-weapon carried by the orks he’d killed.
‘Some kind of force-discharging weapon. His armour is powered down, but he’s still breathing. Both his hearts are beating.’ This last part was the most serious aspect of the downed knight’s condition. If his reserve heart had begun to beat, there must have been significant trauma done to Priamus’s body.
‘Three minutes, Reclusiarch.’ There was the dampened suggestion of bolter fire.
‘Resistance, Cador?’ Grimaldus asked.
‘Nothing of consequence.’
‘Stragglers,’ Nerovar clarified. ‘Three minutes, Reclusiarch. No more than that.’
It was closer to two minutes. When Nerovar and Cador arrived at a run, they smelled of the chemical combat stimulants in their blood and the acrid tang of discharged bolters.
The Apothecary knelt by Priamus, scanning his fallen brother with the medical auspex bio-scanner built into his arm-mounted narthecium.
Grimaldus looked at Cador. The oldest member of the squad was reloading his bolt pistol, and muttering into the vox.
‘Speak,’ the Chaplain said. ‘I would hear your thoughts.’
‘Nothing, sir.’
Grimaldus felt his eyes narrow and teeth grind together. He almost repeated his words at an order. What held him back was not tact, but discipline. His rage still boiled beneath the surface. He was no mere knight, to give in to his emotion and remain flooded by it. As a Chaplain, he held himself to a higher standard. Putting the chill of normality into his voice, he said simply:
‘We will speak of this later. I am not blind to your tensions of late.’
‘As you wish, Reclusiarch,’ Cador replied.
Priamus opened his eyes, and did two things at once. He reached for his sword – still chained to his wrist – and he said through tight lips, ‘Those whoresons. They shot me.’
‘Some kind of nerve weapon.’ Nerovar was still scanning him. ‘It attacked your nervous system through the interface feeds from your armour.’
‘Get away from me,’ the swordsman said, rising to his feet. Nerovar offered a hand, which Priamus knocked aside. ‘I said get away.’
Grimaldus handed the knight his helm.
‘If you are finished with your lone reconnaissance, perhaps you can stay with Nero and Cador this time.’
The pause that followed the Chaplain’s words was pregnant with Priamus’s bitterness.
‘As you wish. My lord.’
When we emerge from the wrecked ship, the weak sun is rising, spreading its worthlessly dim light across the clouded heavens.
The rest of my force, the hundred knights of the Helsreach Crusade, is assembling in the wastelands around the broken ship’s metal bones.
Three Land Raiders, six Rhinos, the air around them all thrumming with the chuckle of idling engines. I think, for a strange moment, that even our tanks are amused at the pathetic hunting on offer last night.
Kill-totals scroll across my visor display as squad leaders report the success of their hunts. A paltry night’s work, all in all, but the mortals behind the city walls have the first blood they so ardently desired.
‘You’re not cheering,’ Artarion voxes to me, and only me.
‘Little was cleansed. Little was purified.’
‘Duty is not always glorious,’ he says, and I wonder if he refers to our exile on the planet’s surface with those words.
‘I presume that is a barbed reference