James Swallow - The Flight of the Eisenstein

They waded back into the morass, fighting and moving. 'This way!'

'He's still my commander/ grated Voyen, 'do you understand that? No matter what is said and done, that will never change. Do you understand, Decius?'

'Who are you trying to convince, Voyen? Me, or yourself?' Decius threw him a hard look. At this moment I don't care a damn for you and your blasted lodge. Just save-'

The rest of the Death Guard's words were lost in a final, shrieking exultation of noise from the top of the pyramid. Every man who could clapped his hands to his ears in blind reflex as the Warsinger sang her last, desperate attack, and died. Decius looked up and saw two figures in shimmering purple at the peak, saw a torn shape in diaphanous robes fall away and tumble unceremoniously down the steep face.

'Eidolon!' cried an Astartes at their side. 'Eidolon made the kill! The bitch is dead!'

An oval object arced though the air trailing white streamers and Decius grabbed it before it could impact on the ground. He turned it over in his hand and found it was a human head. 'The Warsinger/ he pronounced, holding it up by the woman's long pale tresses. The neck had been severed by a single clean blow. With a grimace, he tossed it to the warrior of the Emperor's Children and pushed on, ignoring the cries of victory. As one, the surviving black hoods stopped fighting. Some had fallen to their knees and were weeping, rocking back and forth, or cradling their headsets in their hands, mewing over the sud­den loss of their precious song. Most of them just stood there, milling around like lost children, chok­ing the dome with their numbers.

'Out of my way, out of my way, you turncoat cattle!' bellowed Decius, fighting against the moaning crowd. He began punching them down where they stood, cut­ting the Isstvanians like wheat before the scythe. Other Astartes joined in, and soon it became a wholesale cull. The Warmaster's orders had not spoken of prisoners.

By the time they forced their way back to the foot of the ziggurat, Garro lay before them deathly pale and silent. An Apothecary from the III Legion knelt at his side, frowning.

Voyen, his face tight with distress, shot a hard look at the other medicae. 'Stand aside. You're not to touch him!'

'I saved his life, Death Guard/ came the terse reply. 'You should be thanking me. I did your job for you.'

Voyen cocked his fist in anger, but Decius stopped him halfway. 'Brother/ he began, turning to the other man, 'thank you. Will he survive?'

'Get him to an infirmary within the hour and he may live to fight another day.'

Then he will.' The young Astartes saluted in the old martial fashion. 'I am Decius of the Seventh. My com­pany is in your debt.'

The Apothecary gave a slight smile to Voyen and made to leave. 'Fabius, Apothecary to the Emperor's Children. Consider my care of your captain a gift among comrades/

Voyen's words dripped venom as the Astartes left. 'Arrogant whelp. How dare he-'

"Voyen, snapped Decius, silencing the other man. 'Help me carry him/

Garro was falling forever.

The warm void around him was thick and heavy. It was an ocean of thin, clear oil, as deep as memory, and beyond his ability to know its edge. He sank into it, the warmth wrapping around him in gossamer threads, in through his mouth and nostrils, filling his lungs and gullet, weighing him down. Down and down, deeper. Falling. Still falling.

He was aware of his injuries in a vague, discon­nected way. Parts of his body were blacked out in his sensorium, nerve clusters dark and silent while the patient engines of his Astartes physiology went to work on keeping him alive. 'My wounds will never heal/ he said aloud, and the words bubbled past him, solidifying. Why had he said that? Where had that come from? Garro wondered with elephantine slow­ness and pushed at the thoughts in his mind, but they were impossible to shift, large as glaciers and ice-cold to the touch.

The trance. Part of his brain eventually provided him with this small fragment of data. Yes, of course.

His body had closed its borders and sealed him inside it, all other concerns and outside interests forgotten as his implants worked in concert to stop an encroaching death. The Astartes was in stasis, of a kind: Not the artificially generated fashion, where flesh was chilled down and chemical anti-crystallisation agents were pumped into the bloodstream for long-duration, low-consumable starflight. This was the semi-death of the wounded man and the near killed.

Odd how he could be at once so aware of it and yet so unaware as well. This was the function of the catalepsean node implanted in his brain, switching off sections of his cerebellum as a servitor might douse lamps in the unused rooms of a house. Garro had been here before, during the Pasiphae Uprising, after a suicide attack on the Stalwart's pod decks had ripped the flank of the battle-barge open and tossed a hundred unprotected men into space. He had sur­vived that, awaking with new scars and months of missing time.

Would he live through this? Garro tried to probe his thoughts for an exact recall of his last conscious moments, and found rough, broken perceptions and spikes of brutal pain. Tarvitz. Yes, Saul Tarvitz had been there, and the lad Decius as well. And before that… Before that there was only the humming echo of white noise and heart-shrinking pain. He let him­self drop away, let the agony shadow fade. Would he live through this? Garro would only know when it happened. Otherwise, he would fall and fall, sink and sink, and the captain of the Seventh would become another soul lost, a steel skull-shaped stud the size of his thumbnail hammered into the iron Wall of Mem­ory on Barbarus.

He found he did not have a will to fight. Here, in this non-place, coiled inside himself, he only was. Marking time, waiting, healing; that was how it had been after Pasiphae, and so that was how it should be now.

How it should be.

But he knew something was different even as the thought drifted through him. That shattering pain down in the dome, that had been like nothing he had ever experienced before. Hundreds of years of warfare had not prepared him for the Warsinger's brutal kiss. Garro knew now, too late, after the fact, that she had been an enemy of a kind he had never before encoun­tered. Where her power sprang from, what form it took… These were things new to him in a universe where the Astartes had thought himself incapable of being surprised. That would teach him not to be com­placent.

In his own way, the battle-captain marvelled at the play of events. It was incredible that he had survived to fall into a healing trance after challenging the Warsinger. Other Death Guard, other Emperor's Chil­dren, had also met her might and died of it. He thought of poor Rahl, crushed like a spent ration can. There would be no more wagers or games for him. As those brothers lay dead, Garro lived still, clinging to the raw edge of life. 'Why?' he demanded. 'Why me and not them? Why Nathaniel Garro and not Pyr Rahl?'

Who made the choice? What scales were balanced by a man's death or his life? The questions hooked into him and pulled the Astartes back and forth, burrowing deep. It was such foolishness to ask these poindess things of an uncaring universe. What scales? There were no scales, no great arbiter of fates! It was pagan

idolatry to consider such notions, to insist that the lives of men ran in some kind of clockwork beneath the winding fingers of a deity. No: here was truth, Imperial truth. The stars turned and men died without a creator's plan for them. There were no gods, no here-fores and hereafters, no futures but those we made for ourselves. Garro and his kinsmen simply were.

And yet…

In this place of death sleep, where things were at once murky and clearer, there seemed instances where Nathaniel Garro felt a pressure upon him that came from a place far distant, beyond himself. At the corners of his sensorium, he might perceive a small fragment of brilliance thrown across countless light-years, the merest suggestion of interest from an intellect that towered over his. Cold logic told him that this was wishful, desperate thinking dredged up from the crude animal core of his hindbrain. But Garro could not quite let go of the feeling, of the raw hope that the will of something greater than he was acting upon him. If he was not dead, then perhaps he had been spared. It was a giddy, perilous thought.