‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘I was trained to question… when I was asked to remember.’

Arcadese looked away, his face like stone. ‘Not any more,’ he stated flatly and resumed his vigil outside the broken ship.

IV

ARCADESE WAS RELIEVED when Heka’tan emerged at the hatch carrying two bulky munitions crates. Each was Legion-stamped, the Eighteenth and Thirteenth respectively. He tossed them onto the ground, one after the other, and leapt out.

Heka’tan frowned when he saw Persephia. ‘Is she injured?’

‘She’s human, brother – that is all,’ Arcadese replied, busy with unlocking the crate. He smiled at the sleek, gunmetal stock, the spare clips cushioned in tight-fitting foam. Running his gauntleted hand across the bolter, he found the grip and tugged the weapon free.

‘Are you hurt?’ Heka’tan asked the artificer.

‘I’m fine,’ she snapped, whirling to face him. She wiped at her tears. ‘I’m fine. Just let me do my work.’

Arcadese was about to intercede when Heka’tan stopped him. ‘Leave her.’

The Ultramarine snorted, shucking the bolter around his shoulder on its strap. ‘There’s no threat out here, brother.’ He pointed towards Cullis. ‘Our enemies are in there.’

Heka’tan had started to pull on the mesh under-layer of his power armour. He allowed Persephia to assist with some of the rear-mounted joints and clasps. ‘These are peaceful negotiations, Arcadese.’

‘You of all people should know the falsehood of that.’

Heka’tan didn’t answer.

‘We are forgotten sons, you and I,’ Arcadese continued, ‘you by the Imperium and I by my Legion. To be revived from a coma and faced with this… Nikaea, Isstvan V, our beloved Warmaster a traitor – it is beyond comprehension. I should be at Calth with my father and brothers, not on this backwater world, playing diplomat.’

Heka’tan attached his greaves and chest plate in silence.

An incredulous grunt from the Ultramarine made the Salamander look up.

‘Don’t you want vengeance?’ Arcadese asked.

He was referring to Isstvan and the massacre.

‘I don’t know what I want. Duty will suffice for now.’

Arcadese approximated a shrug and went to retrieve the prone pilot.

‘Leave him.’

The Ultramarine stopped, looking to Heka’tan for clarification.

‘He’s dead.’

V

THERE WAS A jagged tear in the fuselage, fringed by incendiary burns. ‘I’ve seen a lot of downed ships. This looks like outside in rather than inside out.’

‘Indeed,’ Heka’tan replied. With Persephia’s help he was fully armoured, a forest-green monolith.

Arcadese was nearby and could barely contain his anger. ‘We were shot down.’ He wanted retribution.

Heka’tan could relate to that. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it now.’

‘What about her?’ Arcadese gestured to the artificer who stood a way back from the wreck, her head bowed.

‘She’s coming with us.’

‘She’ll slow us down.’

‘Then consider it a mercy that no one else survived.’ The rest of the small crew were all dead. ‘I’ll carry her if needs be.’

With an all human crew, the Stormbird had been retrofitted and re-appropriated as a diplomatic vessel, shedding armour and weapons for private chambers, archives and sleeping quarters. Considering the condition of the wreck, Heka’tan wondered at the wisdom of those measures now.

‘This work,’ said Arcadese at length, ‘does not honour warriors.’

‘We are warriors no longer,’ Heka’tan answered, tired of the Ultramarine’s dissatisfaction, and traced his finger down the jagged blast gouge.

Arcadese stalked off, ignoring the artificer. ‘Do what your conscience dictates, brother.’

Heka’tan was no longer listening. He dwelled on the broken Stormbird. It reminded him of another damaged vessel, on another battlefield…

…They were fleeing the landing zone, Stormbirds little more than armoured pyres with his brothers inside.

He was being dragged. Lucidity eluded him, ears ringing with the sound of the blast.

Burned into his mind, Heka’tan saw his father engulfed by fire and death. For a moment he panicked, and struggled against the two Salamanders hauling him.

‘Where is he? What happened? Why are we leaving?’

He tried to get free but he was too weak. His armour was broken and bloody.

A beaked battle-helm, the forest-green streaked with arterial crimson, looked down at him. ‘He is gone, brother.’

‘What? No!’ Heka’tan struggled again, but a jolt of pain from his injuries crippled his efforts. ‘We have to go back.’

‘There is no back. There is nothing there. Vulkan is gone.’

Railing that they had to turn around, they had to find him, Heka’tan passed out and saw only darkness.

Suddenly aware of being watched, Heka’tan came to and looked around. A landman, one of the labour-claves that worked the sump farms at the periphery of Bastion’s major cities, stood watching him. He wore a rebreather, anti-rad coat and sumper-boots. In his left hand, he carried a tilling-stave used to test the depth of sump-ash.

The landman, never before looking upon such a warrior, nodded.

Persephia had gone after Arcadese. Heka’tan nodded back, then went after them.

Negotiation

I

‘RELINQUISH YOUR WEAPONS, brother.’

Heka’tan kept his voice calm and level inside the gallery. Beyond it, through a vast stone doorway, was the auditorium where Bastion’s clave-nobles would hear their petition. As well as being sealed for the duration of the proceedings, weapons were strictly forbidden in the chamber.

It was a fact the Ultramarine didn’t take well.

‘A Legiones Astartes does not surrender his arms. Prise my weapon from my cold, dead fingers – that is the only way a warrior of Ultramar would give up his bolter, so says my Lord Guilliman.’

‘And my Lord Vulkan counsels temperance in the face of impasse. That pragmatism not pride is the solution to seemingly irreconcilable discord.’ Heka’tan unloaded his bolter clip and sprang a shell from the breech before handing it over to a sanctum-marshal. ‘Relinquish it, Arcadese. We cannot negotiate armed and armoured. Nor can we go back.’

The Stormbird was destroyed, and the march through the sump swamp had done nothing to improve Arcadese’s mood, even though Heka’tan had carried the artificer to speed their progress.

‘We will be defenceless.’

Heka’tan returned a carefully impassive expression. ‘A warrior of the Legion is never defenceless, brother.’

‘Cold, dead fingers, remember. I am an Angel of Death. I amdeath.’

Heavier-armoured marshals entered the gallery and levelled rotator-cannons at the Ultramarine.

Arcadese drew his combat blade with a belligerent shriek of steel. ‘To take arms against one is to take arms against all the Legiones Astartes!’

A stern grip on his wrist brought more anger but stopped any potential bloodshed in the making.

Heka’tan’s hold was unflinching. His red eyes blazed with captured fire. ‘Think. Any killing here won’t further our cause, it will end it… And us. Use the wisdom your father gave you.’

Though reluctant, Arcadese saw sense and relented. Scowling at the relieved marshals, he relinquished his weapons.

He was about to move forwards into the auditorium when a pair of marshals blocked his path.

Arcadese glared at them.

‘Now what?’

‘Your armour, too,’ said the high-marshal from behind him.

The Ultramarine shook his head and gave Heka’tan a rueful look as he unclasped a gauntlet. ‘This gets better.’

Persephia moved in to assist him.

‘See that they are well tended,’ Arcadese said in a threatening undertone. The artificer merely nodded, carefully removing a vambrace.