James Swallow - The Flight of the Eisenstein

'In fear! Garro corrected. 'He allowed his emotions to overtake him for a moment. He is chastened by his actions. I won't put a man to the whip for that.'

'Your warriors question it/ pressed the other Astartes. 'For now they see it as lenience, but some might think it to be a sign of weakness.'

He looked away. Then let them. Brother Voyen is the best Apothecary we have. I need him. Decius needs him.'

Ah/ the Luna Wolf nodded. 'It becomes clearer to me. You want the youth to survive.'

'What I want is to lose no more of my brothers to this madness!' snapped Garro tersely. The rest of my Legion may fall to disloyalty or death, but not these men! Not mine!' His breath came out in clouds around him. 'Mark me, Iacton Qruze. I will not have the Death Guard become a watchword for corruption and betrayal!'

There was a note of genuine pain in the old war­rior's words as he looked down at the power armour he wore, still bearing the altered colour scheme of the Sons of Horus. 'Good luck in that, kinsman/ he said quietly. 'For me, I fear that moment has already passed.'

Power routed to the valetudinarium from other sec­tions of the Eisenstein ensured that the infirmary was kept at a functional level. Garro was aware that Voyen had initiated a move of all but the most badly injured patients to the deeper levels of the ship, in towards the core of the vessel. The battle-captain did not see the Astartes healer as he crossed the chamber, and felt better for it. Despite his words to Qruze, Garro still smarted at Voyen's actions on the bridge and he did not want to encounter him again so soon afterwards. It was better that the Apothecary kept his distance for the moment.

Garro stepped around an injured officer whose only inhalations came from a mechanical breather machine, and stopped at the glass pod of the isolation chamber. With care, Garro took his helmet – the repairs upon it were still visible, unfinished spots where paint had yet to be applied – and sealed it to the neck ring of his armour. Then, after checking the seals

on every joint and vent, he locked down the battle suit, preventing any possibility of outside contagions enter­ing his wargear. Garro passed through the chamber's airlock array and entered the sealed room. A medicae servitor tended to Decius with slow, deliberate care. The captain noted that the fleshy components of the machine-helot were already grey with infection. Voyen's reports noted that two servitors had died already from slow exposure to whatever poison Grul-gor had poured into the youth's wound. It was a testament to the potency of the Astartes biology that Decius was not dead a dozen times over.

Inside the armour Garro would be safe, and the strin­gent purification systems of the isolation chamber would stop any contamination following him out. He had no doubts that the chance of infection still existed, but he would risk it. He had to look the lad in the eye.

There on the recovery cradle, Solun Decius lay stripped of his power armour and swaddled in a mesh-like covering of metallic probes and narthecia injectors. The wound where Grulgor's plague knife had cut him was a mess of pustules and livid flesh on the verge between bilious life and necrotic death. It refused to knit closed, bleeding into a catch-bowl beneath the cradle. Portions of Decius's skin were missing where the medicae had plugged feed ducts and mechadendrites directly into the raw nerves. A forest of thin steel needles colonised the thick hide of the black carapace across his torso. Thin, white drool looped from Decius's lips and a pipe forced air into his nostrils with rhythmic mechanical clicks.

The Astartes was an ashen rendition of himself, the colour of a week-old corpse. Had Garro seen such a body on the battlefield, he would have cast it on to the pyre and let it burn. For a moment, Nathaniel

found his hand near the hilt of Libertas and Voyen's words echoed in his thoughts. You should consider granting him release.

'That would make a lie of what I said to Qruze/ he said aloud. 'The fight is all that we have now. The struggle is what defines us, brother.'

'Brother…'

The voice was so faint that at first Garro thought he had imagined it, but then he looked down and saw a flicker of motion as Decius's eyes opened into slits. 'Solun? Can you hear me, boy?'

'I can… hear you.' His voice was thick with mucus. 'I hear it, captain… inside me… the thunder in my blood.'

Suddenly, Garro's sword seemed to be ten times its weight. 'Solun, what do you want?'

Decius blinked, even this smallest of motions appearing to pain him terribly. 'Answers, lord.' He gasped in a breath of air. 'Why have you saved us?'

Garro pulled back in surprise. 'I had to,' he blurted. 'You are my battle-brothers! I could not let you per­ish.'

'Is that… the better path?' the wounded warrior whispered. 'Unending war between brothers… We saw it, captain. If that… if that is the future, then per­haps…'

'You would have us embrace death?' Garro shook his head. 'I know your pain is great, brother, but you cannot submit to it! We cannot admit defeat!' He placed his hand on Decius's chest. 'Only in death does duty end, Solun, and only the Emperor can grant us that.'

'Emperor…' The word was a dim echo. 'Forsaken… We have been forsaken, my lord, lost and forgotten. The beast Grulgor did not lie… We are alone.'

'I refuse to accept that!' Garro's words became a shout. *We will find salvation, brother, we will! You must have faith!'

Decius coughed and the pipes in his mouth gur­gled, red-green fluid siphoning away into a disposal tank. 'All I have is pain, pain and loss…' His blood­shot eyes found Garro and bored into him. 'We are lost, my captain. We know not where or when we are… The warp has made sport with us, cast us into the void.'

'We will be found.' Garro's words seemed hollow.

'By what, lord? What if… if the time we were lost in the empyrean was not hours… but millennia? The warning… worthless!' He coughed again, his body tensing. We may be ten thousand years too late… and our galaxy burns with chaos…' The effort of speaking drained the Astattes and he sank back into the cradle, the shambling servitor creaking to his side with a fan of outstretched fingers made of syringes and blades.

Garro watched Decius's eyelids flutter closed and the youth's consciousness slipped away once more. After a long moment, the battle-captain turned back to the airlocks and began the arduous process of cleansing his wargear of any lingering taint.

When he stepped out of the isolation chamber's outer hatch, he saw Sendek charging towards him across the infirmary, his face tight with tension.

'Captain! When I could not reach you, I feared something had happened!'

Garro jerked a thumb at the chamber's thick walls. 'The protective field baffles in there are electromag-netically charged. Vox signals won't penetrate inside.' He frowned at the alarm in Sendek's voice. What is it that requires my attention so urgently?'

'Sir, the Eisenstein's sensor grids were badly dam­aged in the shock from the warp flare and the engagement with Typhon, and we have only partial function-'

'Spit it out/ snapped Garro.

Sendek took a breath. There are ships, captain. We have detected multiple warp gate reactions less than four light-minutes distant. They appear to be moving to an interception heading.'

He should have felt elation. He should have been thinking of rescue, but instead, Garro's black mood brought him only imagined terrors and predictions of the worst. 'How many craft? Mass and tonnage?'

The sensors gave me only the vaguest of estimates, but it is a fleet, sir, a large one.'

'Horus?' Garro breathed. 'Could he have followed us?'

'Unknown. The ship's external vox transceiver is inoperable, so we cannot search for any identifier beacons' Sendek paused. They could be anything, anyone, perhaps an ally, perhaps ships on their way to join the Warmaster's insurrection, or even xenos.'