Aaron Dembski-Bowden - Helsreach

'Leave him be,' I say to Artarion. 'Let him hunt. He needs to stand alone for now.'

Artarion pauses before answering. I know him well enough to know he is scowling. 'He needs discipline.'

'He needs our trust.' My tone brooks no further argument.

The ship is in pieces. The floor is uneven, torn and wrenched from the crash. We turn a corner, our boots clinging to the sloping decking as we head into a plasma generator's coolant chamber. As huge as a cathedral's prayer chamber, the expansive room is largely taken up by the cylindrical metal housing that encases the temperamental and arcane technology used for cooling the ship's engines.

I see nothing alive. I hear nothing alive. And yet…

'I smell fresh blood,' I vox to Artarion. 'A survivor, still bleeding.' I gesture to the vast coolant tower with my crozius. The mace flashes with lightning as I squeeze the trigger rune. 'The alien lurks beneath there.'

The survivor is barely deserving of the description. It lies pinned under metal debris, impaled through the stomach and pinned to the floor. As we approach, it barks in its rudimentary command of the Gothic tongue. Judging from the pool of cooling blood spreading from its sundered form, the alien's life will end in mere minutes. Feral red eyes glare at us. Its porcine face is curled in a rictus of anger.

Artarion raises his chainsword, gunning the motor. The saw-teeth whine as they cut through the air.

'No.'

Artarion freezes. At first, my brother knight isn't sure what he'd heard. His glance flicks to me. 'What did you say?'

'I said,' I'm stepping closer to the dying alien even as I speak, looking down through my skulled mask, '…no.'

Artarion lowers his sword. Its teeth stutter to a halt.

'They always seem so immune to pain,' I tell him, and I feel my voice fall to a whisper. I place a boot upon the creature's bleeding chest. The ork snaps its jaws at me, choking on the blood that runs into its burst lungs.

Artarion must surely hear the smile in my voice. 'But no. Look into its eyes, brother.'

Artarion complies. I can tell from his hesitation that he does not see what I see. He looks down and sees nothing but impotent rage.

'I see fury,' he tells me. 'Frustration. Not even hatred. Just wrath.'

'Then look harder.' I press down with my boot. Ribs crunch with the sound of dry twigs snapping, one after the other, as the weight descends harder. The ork bellows, drooling and snarling.

'Do you see?' I ask, knowing the smile is still evident in my voice.

'No, brother,' Artarion grunts. 'If there is a lesson in this, I am blind to it.'

I lift the boot, letting the ork cough its lifeblood through its blood-streaked maw.

'I see it in the creature's eyes. Defeat is pain. Its nerves may be dead to torment, but whatever passes for its soul knows how to suffer. To be at an enemy's mercy… Look at its face, brother. See how it dies in agony because we are here to watch such a shameful end.'

Artarion watches, and I think perhaps he sees it, as well. However, it does not fascinate him the way it does me. 'Let me end it,' he says. 'Its existence offends me.'

I shake my head. That would not do at all.

'No. Its life's span is measured in moments.' I feel the dying alien's gaze lock with my red eye lenses. 'Let it die in this pain.'

Nerovar hesitated.

' Nero?' Cador called over his shoulder. 'Do you see something?'

The Apothecary blink-clicked several visualiser runes on his retinal display. 'Yes. Something.'

The two of them were searching the ruined enginarium chambers on the level beneath Grimaldus and Artarion. Nerovar frowned at what the digital readouts across his eye lenses were telling him. He looked to the bulky narthecium unit built into his left bracer.

'So enlighten me,' Cador said, his voice as gruff as always.

Nerovar tapped a code into the multicoloured buttons next to the display screen on his armoured forearm. Runic text scrolled in a blur.

'It's Priamus.'

Cador grunted in agreement. Nothing but trouble, that one. 'Isn't it always?'

'I've lost his life signs.'

'That cannot be,' Cador laughed. 'Here? Among this rabble?'

'I do not make mistakes,' Nerovar replied. He activated the squad's shared channel. 'Reclusiarch?'

'Speak.' The Chaplain sounded distracted, and faintly amused. 'What is it?'

'I've lost Priamus's life signs, sir. No heightened returns, just an immediate severance.'

'Confirm at once.'

'Confirmed, Reclusiarch. I verified it before contacting you.'

'Brothers,' the Chaplain said, his voice suddenly ice. 'Maintain search and destroy orders.'

'What?' Artarion drew breath to object. 'We need—'

'Be silent. I will find Priamus.'

He wasn't sure what they hit him with.

The greenskins had melted from their hiding places in the darkness, one of them carrying a weighty amalgamation of scrap that only loosely resembled a weapon. Priamus had slain one, laughing at its porcine snorting as it fell to the deck, and launched at the next.

The scrap-weapon bucked in the greenskin's hands. A claw of charged, crackling metal fired from the alien device and crunched into the knight's chest. There was a moment of stinging pain as his suit's interface tendrils, the connection spikes lodged in his muscles and bones, crackled with an overload of power.

Then his vision went black. His armour fell silent, and became heavier on his shoulders and limbs. Out of power. They'd deactivated his armour.

'Dorn's blood…'

Priamus tore his helm clear just in time to see the alien racking his scrap-weapon like a primitive solid-slug launcher. The claw embedded in his chest armour, defiling the Templar cross there, was still connected to the device by a cable of chains and wires. Priamus raised his blade to sever the bond even as the alien laughed and pulled a second trigger.

This time, the channelled force didn't just overload his armour's electrical systems. It burned through the neural connections and muscle interfaces, blasting agony through the swordsman's body.

Priamus, gene-forged like all Astartes to tolerate any pain the enemies of mankind could inflict upon him, would have screamed if he could. His muscles locked, his teeth clamped together, and his attempt to cry out left his clenched jaw as an ululating, shuddering ''Hnn-hnn-hnn''.

Priamus crashed to the ground fourteen seconds later, when the agony finally ceased.

The greenskins hunch over his prone form.

Now they have managed to bring him down, they seem to have no idea what to do with their prize. One of them turns my brother's black helm over in its fat-knuckled hands. If it means to turn Priamus's armour into a trophy, it is about to pay for such blasphemy.

As I walk down the darkened corridor, I drag my mace along the wall - the ornate head clangs against the steel arches. I have no wish to be subtle.

'Greetings.' I breathe the word from my skulled face.

They raise their hideous alien faces, their jaws slack and filled with rows of grinding teeth. One of them hefts a heavy composite of detritus and debris that apparently serves as a weapon.

It fires… something… at me. I do not care what. It's smashed from the air with a single swing of my inactive maul. The clang of metal on metal echoes throughout the corridor, and I thumb the trigger rune on the haft of my crozius. The mace flares into crackling life as I aim it at the aliens.

'You dare exist in humanity's domain? You dare spread your cancerous touch to our worlds?'

They do not answer this challenge with words. Instead, they come at me in a lumbering run, raising cleaver swords; primitive weapons to suit primitive beings.

I am laughing when they reach me.

Grimaldus swung his mace two-handed, pounding the first alien back. The sparking force field around the weapon's head flashed as it reacted with opposing kinetic force, and amplified the already inhuman strike to insane levels of strength. The greenskin was already dead, its skull obliterated, as it flew twenty metres back down the corridor to smash into a damaged bulkhead.