A Father Slain (part 1)

My mother’s embrace is warm. I’m small enough for my head to rest on her tummy. I’m gently lulled by the rhythm of her breathing. I feel good. I feel happy. Still, there is something… she’s just told me that I’ll soon have a brother or a sister. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Maybe it will be fun to have someone else to play with?

The dream ends. My only flesh-eye opens. I’m cold and I’m not breathing. I’ve not needed to since the Jyrex campaign in 004.M31. I push myself off the reinforced cot with the whine of servos. Other than it, my weapons, an armour rack and a small box of my personal effects, the chamber I’m in is completely bare. No attempt has been made to soften the industrial look of the riveted metal walls. There is a moment of cursed vulnerability while my brain attempts to reconcile the radically different vision coming from my left organic eye and the bionic right. The chron in the lower right hand corner of my vision tells me in glowing green that day-cycle has just begun. For a moment I waste time dwelling on the fading echoes of my dream. I’m not that boy any more. I’m not even a man — I never was.

73.2% of me isn’t even flesh any more. It has been replaced by adamantium, cabling and circuitry.  I wonder how much more flesh I need to lose before I reach the inhumanity that is considered a virtue by far too many of my legion brothers. I fear that even were I to be reduced to nothing but a brain in a metal exoskeleton I would still be afflicted with the weakness that caused Ferrus Manus to cast me out into the outer dark that the fledgling Imperium calls the Antona Australis sector. At this point it is nothing more than an exercise on parchment. Oh, some of it has been mapped but there are vast swathes of space we know absolutely nothing about, silently awaiting discovery. Not for the first time, I wonder what fresh wonders, what fresh horrors lay in wait for us.

“Lord.”

My head swivels like an owl’s. My arming thrall takes a step back involuntarily. We’ve talked about this before, but apparently there are somethings that a baseline human can’t get used to. I smoothly rotate my body one way and my head another until I am facing him directly, accompanied by the hydraulic hiss of pistons.

“What is it, Kleph?“

“Captain Rouvroy has asked to see you.”

“On fleet business or the usual?”

“The usual.”

I feel mixed emotions. On the one hand, I yearn for an end to this tedium. For the past 74 cycles, we have been becalmed, the fleet’s navigators waiting for a break in the storms so that we may venture deeper into the dark and bring the Emperor’s light to the survivors of Old Night. However, Captain Sebastian Rouvroy of the Emperor’s Children is perhaps my only true friend out here. The hours I spend in his pleasant company are one of the few genuine pleasures I have in an otherwise joyless existence, consumed as it is by duty, routine and the processing of inhuman quantities of data through my cognitive implants.

Eight hours later, once daily firing rites, tactical exercises and strategic reviews are over, I head to the room where Rouvroy and I meet. In contrast to the spartan emptiness of my quarters, it has some decoration. Banners adorn the walls, there’s a poorly stocked wine rack and the centre of the room is dominated by a Regicide board and some chairs that are scaled and reinforced for Astartes in fully plate that have seen better days. Sebastian is waiting for me. Not for the first time, I pity the thralls who have the futile task of restoring his armour from battle-damaged to parade-standard. It positively gleams and makes mine look ill-kept and unimpressive by comparison.

“Do you remember our first game of Regicide?”, Sebastian asks as he starts play with a seemingly conventional gambit. Such is his way.

“Of course. We were relaxing after the Narjul Compliance. You thrashed me. I was shocked. It seemed so…”

“Unexpected, given that I’m not exactly known for my strategic thinking.”

I nod while moving a piece of my own. ”Then you said that you had spent the entire game seeing how my micro-expressions changed with every move you made.”

“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t told you that. Not because it’d mean I’d win more often,” he says. “It’s uncomfortable playing against you for hours without seeing a single expression on your face. Even though you’re one of my oldest friends, I sometimes forget that it’s you in there and I’m not playing against a servitor-savant. It’s a bit like that time on Alphex III, when I made that horrific faux-pas and kept eye contact with the translator instead of the Crowned Prince. Captain Elix apparently came this close to removing me from the diplomatic detail.”

I look at him as he speaks. Once again, I am captivated by the way that his face is so… imperfectly perfect. There is not a single feature that has the beauty expected from one of his legion. There are too many scars, too many laughter lines. In the artificial stillness of a pic, he seems to possess no aesthetic qualities whatsoever. But as I watch him, somehow the broken imperfect pieces come together to form a harmonious whole, like a living Kintsugi piece. He shoots me another of his trademark wicked grins and I wonder if he practices them in front of a mirror. Nothing as far as he’s concerned would surprise me.

Not for the first time, I wonder if the sheer imperfection of his countenance explains why, like me, he’s so out on the fringes. It’s a waste, even if his impressive service record and genius with a blade mean nothing to you. There’s a lesson here, but not one that Fulgrim and his perfumed popinjays would ever hear. We can be more than the sum of our parts.

He’s still speaking. I have to cheat and use my built-in autosenses to spool back a few seconds to cover my moment of distraction.

“It’s funny how you try to appear cold and emotionless to everyone around you, but if anything your passions run closer to the surface than mine do.”

“Please don’t remind me. If I was more the kind of Iron Hand that the Gorgon wants his sons to be, then I wouldn’t be here.”

“Is being here so bad?”, he asks. The Regicide board is half-forgotten by this point. There is the briefest flash of pain in his eyes.

The half of my face that is still made of flesh cracks a smile for his benefit. “It has its compensations. For one thing, it’s not lacking in good company. And besides, at least I only have to put with Altac Gorr and Foraz Yull. They’re a lot easier to cope with when they don’t have an entire Legion of Medusa-born to back their arguments up. ”

He takes a breath and nods. “I feel the same way. Yes, I’m as far from my primarch and the glory that surrounds him as I could be, but it feels bloody good not being expected to be perfect in every single way every minute of every – are you alright?”.

There’s an urgent concerned tone in his voice. I don’t know why. I don’t know — my vision blurs. I see… rain? It is dark, the only illumination comes from flashes of lightning and orange-red glows from far-off explosions. My arms are quicksilver. My metal hands hold a huge warhammer. I’m swinging it at a howling creature. The hideously garish paint and the expression of rancid hate make what is supposed to be one of the most beautiful faces in the Imperium hideous. We swing our weapons at each other again and again. I know the blade he’s trying to kill me with. I forged it with my own hands. My metal hands. As we fight I’m dimly aware of our sons fighting and dying all around us. Figures in once pristine purple and coal-black armour fall in the mud in droves, cut down by each others’ guns and blades. For once there is a gap in his normally oh-so perfect guard. I swing my hammer with all my might, intent on smashing his head clean off his shoulders. It does not happen. There is the strangest sensation at my throat. My opponent’s face looks drained, as if all his fury has drained away and been replaced with heart-rending guilt. Then I’m falling. My vision spins, like I’m tumbling end over end. Three times I look up at the sky, down at the blood-drenched ground and at the back of a vast black and chrome figure with many metal limbs slumping to its knees as a gout of blue-white fire leaps from the stump of its neck. That’s me. That’s my body. Which means…

I’m looking at Sebastian again. My bolter is in my hand and I’m pointing it at him. I have no idea how it got there. He’s staring at me in horror.

“DID YOU KNOW?”

He looks at me in incomprehension. As he does so, I analyse every micro-expression on his face to a level I’ve never done before. He’s reacting as any Astartes would at having a loaded weapon being pointed at them by a staunch ally but it’s slowed by simple bewilderment. He honestly doesn’t know why I’m acting the way I am. For that manner, neither do I. I have never liked my gene-father nor I have thought that the changes he has made to my Legion has been for the better. But his blood runs in my veins and that means that there was still a bond between us. A bond that is now as dead as he is.

“Know what? Peace cousin, why this sudden choler? Please lower your bolter. You know I mean you no harm.”

“My gene-sire is dead. Dead at the hands of your primarch.” The emphasis I put on ‘your’ is like the twist of a knife in an already open wound. His face blanches as I say it. There is a terrible moment as he seems to come to the conclusion that what I say is plausible.

“I swear to you on my honour as an officer and a gentleman that I know nothing about this. You know as well as I that we’ve been cut off from the wider Imperium and our superiors for months, if not years.”

I nod. The air of disgrace that has hung over the XIVth Expeditionary fleet had hardly been conducive to the recruitment and retention of the best Astropaths and Navigators. We had to make do with the dregs and even the most talented would have struggled to pierce the storms that flared up all around us. I wonder if our counterparts in the Ultramarines and Alpha Legion have had any better luck in that regard, but I doubt it.

As we speak, we both become aware of the anguished howling that’s coming from all around us. Some of my Legion brother are taking it far worse than I. We look at each other, realising the same thing in the same instance. Getting him off ship is now the priority. I cannot ensure his safety any other way. I may be deceiving myself. My vox crackles live while an accompanying data-blurt tells me the sender is wearing active Saturnine plate and has gone weapons-live.

“WHERE IS HE?” Altac Gorr’s voice roars over my aural sensor array. There is a tone to it that I have never heard before from one of the Medusan-born. The sheer amount of pain and loss in it would have stolen my breath away if I hadn’t already been numbed to it by experiencing the same loss practically first-hand. “Maclachlan, tell me you’re not protecting him.” Gorr has dropped his voice down to a battleground bellow as opposed to squeezing every decibel of sound he can get from his three post-human lungs.

“I’m right in front of him, Altac, and he’s already sworn to me that he knows nothing.”

“And you believe him?” It’s a more of a statement than a question. “Why does that not surprised me, you Terran wretch. I’m coming for him and I’m going to turn his skull into paste. Don’t even think of trying to stop me.”

“That’s not going to happen, Gorr. He’s getting off this ship and I’ve already given the order that we’re not to fire upon the Emperor’s Children.” That’s technically a lie. I’m actually giving that order via data-blurt as we speak.

“The hell he is. They’re all complicit. They are all filthy treacherous murdering scum and they’re all going to die for it.” There’s a pause.  “For Emperor’s sake, Maclachlan, our Sire is dead. Does that mean nothing to you?”

“I felt him die too, Gorr. But our oaths are to the Emperor. If the betrayal is as vast as I saw in my vision, then He will have need of every loyal Astartes. If we blindly kill our own now, then we’d be doing the traitors’ work for them.”

“Even if you’re right. how long will the Emperor’s Children in our fleet remain loyal, once they learn the truth?”

That’s an annoyingly good question. I look at Sebastian. He may have only heard half of the conversation, but he can fill in the blanks.

“Gorr’s asking how long your forces will stay completely loyal, once news of Fulgrim’s treachery reaches them.

I’ve never seen an Astartes look so… uncertain.