Blackness. And a dull, distant pain.
Images began to blur into being, but so too did the pain. He tried to move, but this brought the pain into focus. There was a dull throb throughout his body. A distant itch in the lower half of his face. A piercing pain in his right eye. A numbness in his extremities. A dryness in his throat, such dryness.
He attempted to swallow, but nothing happened, nothing moved. Panic began to set in as he realized that his entire lower jaw was missing.
“He’s coming around. Heart rate climbing.”
The cold, sterile voice of an apothecary. Yes. He was in the apothecarion. This calmed him. He began to recite the Litany of Iron, but movement caught his eye. He focused. Green letters appeared on a dataslate hung near the work bench he knew he must surely be strapped to.
“The Litany of Iron. So he is still with us.”
The hard edged voice of an advisor. The Temple did not usually send someone round until the apothecaries were finished with him. This time must be very bad indeed.
“Oh yes. It is very bad.” The advisor read his thoughts from the dataslate and leaned in. He could not make out the face beneath the black hood of the advisor. Not that it mattered. Uncomfortable under the scrutiny he turned his one good, bleary eye toward the red hooded apothecary.
“The jaw and eye are simple problems. Your limb actuators are intact, so reattaching new bionics will only take a few moments.” The white armoured hand of the apothecary held another dataslate before his one good eye. The apothecary tapped through a series of images showing the extent of the damage and the measures he was willing to take to fix it. The bionics he was being offered were shockingly crude.
“Yes.” The hard voice of the advisor again. One whose voice he had never heard before. Full of dread suspicion, he did not want to look at the grey shape hovering dangerously close to the workbench. “Gone are the days of gold and silver.”
“There is still mercy.” The apothecary placed a hand on his chest in what was surely meant as a soothing gesture, but the weight felt like fire and sparked his anger. The carnifex that the Grand Company’s apothecaries used was no less instantly fatal than those used throughout the Imperium, but much, much less clean. This however, was not what bothered him.
++I WILL NOT BEG FOR MERCY LIKE A SERVANT++
The words scrolled across the black dataslate screen in blocky green letters.
++I
AM A WARRIOR++
“A warrior, certainly.” The advisor retrieved his own dataslate and began tapping through the files he kept on every marine under his care. “But a most mediocre example. You barely passed purity standards during initial selection. You barely survived the trials. Your body fought against every single implant. In every single engagement since your ascension to the ranks you have been graded merely adequate by your leaders. In each squad you have served in your comrades have had little to nothing favourable to say on your behalf. You survive when others die, yet there is not a single warrior who will stand in assembly and claim you as a brother or recite tales of your courage and bravery. You have the sole distinction among the brethren of the Grand Company as being the only warrior to have personally attended our famously capricious Warsmith on multiple occasions while earning neither praise nor rebuke, and I don’t think you appreciate how boring that must make you.”
++JUST FIX ME AND SEND ME BACK TO MY SQUAD++
“There is no squad for you to be sent back to.” The advisor tapped on his dataslate some more. He silently flicked through the most current version of the Grand Company’s TO&E for many unbearable heartbeats before drawing a deep breath and continuing. “The survivors of your artillery battery have been reassigned, and the battery itself deactivated. The guns were all destroyed, you see, so the few remaining warriors went to replace losses in the Havoc squads.”
There was silence in the apothecarion. His world became the sound of his own labored breathing and the rushing of blood through his ears. He was furious and in pain, and suddenly wanted nothing more than to take this advisor by the neck and scrape the flesh from that face with his teeth.
In a moment of sudden clarity he knew that he could make that grim thought happen.
All the pain could be gone, the stress relieved, the doubt erased. All his failures could be drowned in the blood of his so-called brothers, and he could cast aside the crude, weak bionics that made up most of his body now and replace them with the living flesh of his victims. He felt a climax of pleasure creeping through his ruined body, on the verge of eruption, the edge of a precipice.
He allowed himself just a moment to wallow in his misery, then he steeled his resolve. The temptation had been there a long, long time, he realized. It had for years been whispering excuses for his failures, rationalizations for his compromises, jealousy toward his brothers, hatred for his leaders. It had been resentful of his bionics, and had eased the pain of his mutations. And now that he recognized it for what it truly was, he rejected it altogether, once and for all.
The pain, the full measure of the true pain he had earned, all came rushing upon him at once.
“He’s going into cardiac arrest.” He heard the apothecary’s voice. “What is your verdict?”
++FROM IRON COMETH STRENGTH. FROM STRENGTH COMETH WILL. FROM WILL COMETH FAITH. FROM FAITH COMETH HONOUR. FROM HONOUR COMETH IRON. FROM IRON COMETH STRENGTH. FROM STRENGTH COMETH WILL.++
“Can you stabilize him?” He heard the advisor ask. His one good eye flashed stars of pain, and then tunnel vision turned the inspecting face of the advisor into a retreating smear of light in a black void. There was nothing then but a raging sea of pain, and the Litany of Iron was all he had to hold on to.
“The warp infection has not penetrated his primary nervous system. He will not last long, but there is enough salvageable for your purposes.”
+++++++++++++++++++
He was online now.
The fog of induced lethargy slowly rolled away, and his senses began to return.
++ONE LAST TEST++
The words, scrolling in bright green letters superimposed over his vision of the blasted battlefield were not his. He intuitively knew they were the words of the advisor.
++IT IS PASS OR FAIL. GO OR NO GO. THERE ARE NO RETAKES.++
“What is the situation?” He had his own voice back, somehow. It was modulated and shot through with static, but it was his own. A bionic, crude but effective, and one he was extraordinarily grateful to the apothecary for. Another crude bionic, he felt chemical sympathisers automatically stimulating his awareness with direct injections to his brain.
As soon as he asked the question his vision became overlayed with tactical maps and picter feeds. He did not need a visual compass, coordinates, or azimuth. He simply knew where he stood in relation to the order of battle and the myriad phase lines. He knew the breach in the fortress walls was close. He knew the enemy was near. He felt the other members of his new squad around him. He was not surprised that he had been on the move through No Man’s Land long before he had become fully conscious.
Shapes moved among the fire and smoke, and tracers streaked in all directions. The concussion of explosions and stinging grit of ejecta were nothing to him. Death was all that mattered.
Death.
His failure had always been the secret fear of it.
A horde of ragged soldiers hastily assembled in ranks before him, desperately trying to secure the breach or at least escape the brutal Commissar urging them forward. They leveled bayonets and muzzles in his direction, too many to count, it seemed. In a heartbeat he would be among them, if only the fear of death did not cause him to hesitate even a fraction of a second.
He took direct control of the chemical sympathisers embedded along the length of where his spine once was and made his own adjustments. The angry fire of a fatal overdose coursing through his veins, he revved his built-in chainsword and was among them with hatred and fury.
“IRON WITHIN!” His unnamed sergeant at his side called out as his comrades plunged into the melee after them.
“IRON WITHOUT!”
The rest was madness.