James Swallow - The Flight of the Eisenstein

Some part of Garro expected himself to explode with fury, but all he felt now was disappointment. 'I eschew the lodge and then I learn a most trusted

friend within my inner circle is a part of it. Such a thing might make me seem weak or short-sighted to others.'

'No,' insisted the Astartes, 'Lord, please know, I did not choose this in order to undermine you! It was only… the right choice for Meric Voyen.'

Garro was silent for a few moments. 'We have been brothers in warfare for decades, over thousands of battlefields. You are a fine warrior, and a better healer. I would not have had you join my cadre otherwise. But this… you kept this from us all, and made our comradeship cheap. If you stay under my command, Meric, you will not find it easy to earn back the trust that you have lost today' He met the other man's gaze. 'Go or stay. Make the choice that is right for Meric Voyen.'

'If I wish to remain, will my departure from the lodge be a condition of that, lord?'

The captain shook his head. 'I won't force you to disassociate yourself. You're still my battle-brother, even if your decisions are sometimes not in line with mine.' Garro stepped forward and offered Voyen his hand. 'But I will have a pledge from you. Promise me, here and now, that if the lodge ever compels you to turn from the face of the Emperor of Man, you will destroy that medal and reject them.'

The Apothecary took Garro's hand. 'I swear it, lord. On Terra itself, I swear it.'

The matter dealt with for the moment, Garro gath­ered his men back together and briefed them on the battle plans the Warmaster had outlined. By his example, not a single harsh word was said to Voyen, but the Apothecary kept silent and to the edge of things. No voice was raised in question as to why

Voyen still stood with them, but Garro saw reserva­tions in the eyes of Decius, Rahl and the others.

When it was done, Garro left his dress wargear to Kaleb's attention and took his own council. So many things had come and gone in so short a time. It seemed like only moments ago that he had been looking over attack simulations for the raid on the jorgall world-ship, now the Legiones Astartes massed for the first hammer-blow strike on Isstvan Extremis, and Garro saw conflict in the heart of his own com­pany.

Had he made the wrong choice in letting Voyen remain? His mind moved back to the conversation with Mortarion before the war council, where ques­tions of the lodges had risen as well. It troubled the captain that he could not determine an easy path through these thoughts. At times he wondered if he were at fault, holding firmly to a conservative course, keeping the tradition and heart of the Legion alive while time moved on and things changed.

Yes, things were changing. The shift of mood here on Endurance was slight, but visible to his trained senses, and aboard the Warmaster's ship, it was more obvious still. Bleak emotions gathered at the edges of his thoughts like distant storm clouds. He could not shake the sensation that something malign was wait­ing out there, gathering strength and biding its time.

And so Garro did what he had made into a quiet personal habit, in order to clear his mind and find focus for the coming battle. High up atop the Endurance's dorsal hull lay the oval dome of the ship's observatorium, a space put aside so that naval crew might be able to take emergency star fix sightings should the vessel's cogitators become inoperative. It also served a purely ornamental function, although

there were few among the Death Guard who ever used it for so trivial a purpose.

Garro dimmed all the glow-globes in the chamber and seated himself at the control console. The opera­tor chair shifted back and reclined on quiet hydraulics. Presently, the battle-captain was tilted so he could take in the unfettered sweep of the starscape.

Isstvan's blue-white sun was a bright glow off in the lower quadrant, attenuated by a localised polar­isation in the augmented armourglass. He looked away from it and let the blackness surround him. Gradually, tension eased from the knots in his mus­cles. Garro felt adrift in the ocean of stars, cupped in the bubble of atmosphere. He saw past the silver flashes of ship hulls, out into the deep void, and not for the first time, he looked and wondered where home was.

Officially, the home world of the XIV Legion was Barbarus, a cloud-wreathed sphere near the edge of the Gothic Sector. It was from that troubled world that most of the Death Guard's number originated, men like Grulgor and Typhon, Decius and Sendek, even Kaleb. Garro had learned to have deference and respect for the planet and its testing nature, but it would never be home to him.

Garro had been born on Terra and drawn up into the Legiones Astartes before men had even known the name of Barbarus. In those years the XIV Legion had gone by a different title, and they had no pri-march but the Emperor himself. Garro swelled with pride to remember that time. They had been the Dusk Raiders, so known because of their signature tactic of attacking a foe at nightfall. Then, they had worn armour without the green trim of the current Legion. The wargear of the Dusk Raiders was the

dull white of old marble, but with their right arm and shoulders coloured in a deep, glistening crim­son. The symbology of the armour showed their foes what they truly were – the Emperor's red right hand, the relentless and unstoppable. Many ene­mies had thrown down their weapons the moment the sun dipped beneath the horizon, rather than dare to fight them.

But that too had changed. When the Emperor's done-sons, the great primarchs, had been sundered from his side and scattered across the galaxy, the Dusk Raiders joined their brother Legions and their master in the Great Crusade that began the Age of the Imperium. Garro had been there, centuries past.

It did not seem so long ago, and yet there were countless years of time measured by Terran clocks that he had lost in the confusion of the warp, in cryogenic stasis and through the strange physics of near-light speed travel. Garro had been there as the Emperor crossed the galaxy in search of his star-lost children – Sanguinius, Ferrus, Guilliman, Magnus and the rest. With each reuniting, the Lord of Mankind had gifted his sons with command of the forces that had been created in their image. When at last the Emperor came to Barbarus and discov­ered the gaunt warrior foundling leading its oppressed people, he had located the avatar of the XIV Legion.

On Barbarus, where Mortarion had come to rest after falling through the chaotic turmoil of a warp storm, the boy-primarch found a planet where the human colonists were ground beneath the heel of a clan of mutant warlords. He grew up to fight them and liberate the commoners, creating his own army of steadfast warriors to lead the way into the

poisonous heights where the warlords hid. These men Mortarion named the Death Guard.

So it was written, that when at last the Emperor and Mortarion met and defeated the dark master of the warlords, Barbarus was free and the primarch accepted a place in his father's Crusade at the head of the XIV Legion. Mortarion's first words to his army were carved in a granite arch over the airlock gate of the battle barge Reaper's Scythe in memory of the moment. He had come at the Emperor's bidding with the elite of his Barbarun cohort at his side and hun­dreds more on the way. Garro had been there, as nothing more than a line Astartes, when he heard his new primarch speak.

'You are my unbroken blades,' he told them. 'You are the Death Guard.' And with those words the Dusk Raiders were no more. Things changed.

On the day of Mortarion's coronation as primarch, a good majority of the XIV Legion had been of Garro's stock, men born on Terra or within the con­fines of the Sol system, but slowly that number had dwindled, and as new recruits joined the Death Guard fold they came only from Barbarus. Now, as the Thirty-First Millennium turned about its axis, there was only a comparative handful of Terrans in the Legion. In his blackest moments Nathaniel imag­ined a time when there would be none of his kinsmen left among the XIV, and with their deaths the traditions of the old Dusk Raiders would finally fade away. He feared that moment, for when it came to pass something of the Legion's noble character would die as well.