Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Kurande still couldn't quite shake the feeling that none of this was real.

Barely fifteen minutes ago they had been staring death in the face. Now they were sitting safely aboard a ship — though something about this ship nagged at him, just a little.

Setting aside the wings and dragon-head prow he'd seen on the way up, what in the Throne's name were those engines?

The 'Imperial Fists' veterans who had flown up alongside them were each carrying one or two greenskins by the scruff — and without checking whether the xenos were still breathing, they simply stuffed them into what could only be described as an enormous gaping maw built into the ship's hull. A few greenskins with some fight still left in them tried to claw their way back out, only for a supervising Felyne to clout them back in with a hammer.

The maw produced wet, grinding sounds of mastication. The stuffed greenskins were vanishing at a rate visible to the naked eye. Even these belligerent creatures, famed for their WAAAGH-howls, could not manage a war cry now — they could only stare in horror as their own bodies were consumed piece by piece.

It was the first time Kurande had ever heard greenskins scream.

He hadn't known greenskins were even capable of making sounds like that.

The screaming gave him a grim sort of satisfaction — but watching flesh and blood being devoured sent a cold crawl up his spine.

He watched with his own eyes as the thruster vents on the trailing edges of the ship's wings suddenly flared noticeably larger after the greenskin flesh was consumed. That change left him with only one possible frame of reference —

Daemon Engines.

Those were the mad creations born of binding daemons into machine-frames. The fusion of daemon and mechanism meant those half-mechanical, half-daemonic vehicles required no conventional fuel — only blood and souls could drive such dark Chaos-wrought things.

Though Kurande couldn't sense from these mechanisms the aura of death and hatred that a true Daemon Engine ought to radiate, the operating principle looked wrong no matter how he examined it.

He wanted to ask. But everyone here was a senior veteran of the Imperial Fists. These warriors had rescued him and brought his entire group aboard — a debt amounting to the salvation of the entire Imperial Fists chapter. He wasn't entirely sure whether he had any right to open his mouth.

The Legion has no secrets.

A lie, that.

Having risen to the position of Second Company Captain of the Imperial Fists, Kurande knew perfectly well that no Legion could be entirely without its private matters. Some things — however curious they made you — were simply not to be asked aloud. And these men were his elders, besides.

What if one careless question of his punctured some private secret these veterans had carried with them since the Legion's own age?

In the end it would be an internal matter for the Imperial Fists regardless. The wisest course was to wait until they were assigned a designated rest area and investigate quietly from there…

But what made the situation awkward for Kurande was that since boarding, not a single soul had come to attend to them. He could only stand with the remaining Imperial Fists warriors, bunched together self-consciously in the corridor near the cargo bay entrance, watching the Felynes bustle back and forth around them.

He had no way of knowing that Admir and the others were deliberately avoiding further contact because they could no longer keep the act up.

Fortunately, it wasn't as though their predicament went entirely unnoticed. The ever-helpful Magos Biologis Lin, who had vanished the moment they boarded, now 'happened' to pass by.

"Why are you all still standing here?" Lin said, with a convincing air of puzzlement. "Why haven't you gone to the armoury?"

Kurande blinked. "Are we allowed to just… go to the armoury?"

"You're all brothers of the Imperial Fists — why ever not? …Ah, you don't know the way to the armoury, do you. I'll take you. The ship is small; walk it once and you'll have it memorised."

Lin waved off Kurande's thanks before it could be voiced, and set off at the head of the group — though he soon slowed his pace to walk abreast of Kurande. Glancing at the still-unsettled captain, he smiled and asked:

"So — what's your impression of the ship?"

"Ah…" Kurande hadn't expected Lin to raise the subject himself. "I think it looks a bit… heretical."

The augmented mind of a Space Marine told him what topics were best left alone — but Dorn's famously inherited stubbornness meant that once he touched on a subject, there was simply no such thing as a diplomatic way to say it:

"To speak plainly — that engine, the one that runs on greenskin flesh and blood, looks exactly like a Daemon Engine to me. Why would a vessel belonging to the Imperial Fists be using technology so deeply heretical?"

"You're right," Lin said, with a tone of easy candour. "Because it originally was a vessel seized from daemons."

"Seized from daemons? I don't follow…"

"There's nothing complicated to follow, Captain Kurande."

Lin looked him squarely in the eye. "I have no wish to dwell on the horrors of Cthonia — but the facts are these: we were boxed in by Sons of Horus warships at odds of three to one or worse, forced into a desperate ground defence that hammered us from front and rear simultaneously. All of it simply to prevent Cthonia — the traitor Horus's homeworld — from continuing to feed fresh recruits into his Legion without end."

"Castellan Evander Garrius charged our company with delivering the secret intelligence on Cthonia to Lord Dorn personally. But we had not a single ship left that could still fly."

"We had no choice but to seize a small vessel from the Sons of Horus — one whose machine-spirit had already been tainted by Chaos — and plunge headlong into the churning Warp storms… But don't be alarmed. I have already conducted the purification rites on this vessel. You need only think of that engine as one fuelled by biomass from here on."

The highest form of a lie is one that is half truth.

Lin's first half had been no lie at all — and Kurande, who possessed at least a fragment of knowledge about what had truly transpired on Cthonia, believed the second half as a matter of course. He nodded gravely, and seemed to feel in Lin's understated telling the full crushing weight of that history.

Lin led the squad of Imperial Fists through the ship's corridors. Thanks to the vessel's compact size, it didn't take long to reach the armoury at the stern.

Lin pushed open the armoury door. "There isn't much space aboard this ship, so I hope you don't mind squeezing in with your 'brothers.' I'll come by later to assess your physical condition and your wargear. For now, rest."

"Once you've recovered, we'll go to find Lord Dorn. Our orders were to deliver the intelligence and then consolidate in place to participate in the defence of Terra — so there's a good chance we'll be fighting side by side before long. Until then, take this time to get acquainted with the rest of our company in the armoury."

Kurande agreed — but when the armoury hatch swung fully open and he saw what lay inside, his face went still with profound shock.

What he saw was a group of Space Marines — missing arms, missing legs. Nothing like the ten elite warriors who had looked every inch the part when they pulled him off the surface of Jingang. These warriors wore no power armour, and many of the disabled among them bore only simple prosthetics.

None of them appeared to be in any immediate danger of dying — but the majority had clearly lost all combat capability.

Yet they sat together quietly in that cramped armoury, helping to assemble and fabricate small components as best they could, assisted by the Felynes. The Imperial Fists company banner that Lin had been carrying earlier was cradled among these wounded warriors now, and it looked immaculate — pristine as the day it was made.

Remembering that his own company's banner had been lost somewhere in the chaos of the earlier fighting, Kurande felt as though a fish-bone were lodged in his throat.

Without question, these silent wounded warriors were, like himself, unyielding sons of Dorn.

Kurande knew that a company during the Great Crusade, like a Chapter today, numbered around a thousand warriors. But a rough sweep of the armoury told him that even counting the ten-man squad that had conducted the rescue, there were barely a hundred souls in that room.

A thousand-strong company, reduced to fewer than one in ten during the breakout while carrying intelligence to deliver — and even so, they had never ceased to guard their company banner with everything they had…

Kurande felt it deeply: he had no right whatsoever to have ever doubted these veterans who had given everything during the Siege of Terra. In that moment, every last trace of suspicion he had harboured toward these warriors fell away.

He turned back. He caught Lin by the arm just as the Magos was about to leave, and with some difficulty, said:

"I know this may be difficult to understand — but Magos Lin, I must tell you… The Siege of Terra ended fully one thousand years ago."

At those words, an expression of genuine shock crossed Lin's face — right on cue.

He spun around and seized Kurande by the arm, his voice dropping to a ragged hiss:

"What did you say? One thousand years?!"

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