The Botany Bay was a forlorn sight. A dead carcass half buried in the waves of sand that stretched from horizon to horizon under a sky like an open door into Gods own oven. The sun was at the apex of its arch and in another nine hours would dip below the eastern horizon and envelope them in the bitter chill of the night. In the eighteen hours of darkness before the sun rose in the west the Botany Bay would glimmer in the starlight and seem almost alive.
It would be the only living thing on this gritty ball of sand and sunshine thought Brother Dromus Hurango, known to everyone as Drongo.
What sins must his ancestors have committed, he wondered, for them to have crashed the ship on this of all planets. There was a brief, ear splitting sound. It sounded like something tearing an iron girder in half. The sound was accompanied by an incredible stench of O-zone.
Brother Drongo aloud himself a brief smile. The void shields were still operational, but for all that he tried he could not get them above eighty percent of full output. This was possibly because none of the three surviving plasma reactors were safe to operate above seventy-five percent output, and that was because the ancestors had been forced to cannibalise pieces of the cooling system to keep the water cyclers working (at fifty percent output but one hundred percent efficiency).
For a time there was cool beneath the dome of the void shield. For a time. Regardless of what Chapter Master Jimmy demanded, Drongo was not going to keep the shield up for more time than was absolutely necessary for the people along the emitters to perform their diagnostications. The longer they were up the more likely it was that something would burn out and trying to beg a spare off of the Mechanicus was an exercise in futility.
A brief squawk of static on the much patched together radio receiver told him that the teams dotted around the skin of the ship had finished their work. With evident relief Drongo flipped the big red switch and the void shields flickered off again. The sun beat down with renewed vigour and the only evidence of its respite was a circle of fused sand around the ship where the shield wall had touched the ground.
Apothecary Mordred was reviewing the new neophyte. And that was just the thing; there was only one of them. Genetics was like that, you went through spells when you couldn't turn around without bumping into people who were compatible, and then you got times like this. On any decent planet the quirks of the human genome would just be subsumed into background statistics and, over a population of, for instance, two billion, you would not notice a thing. But the planet Purgatory only had a population of, counting unborn children, four thousand seven hundred and thirty seven. So the statistical blips were more pronounced.
On the positive side the vague eugenics, if that's what you would call it, programme the ancestors started seemed to be working. If viewed over the passing of centuries there were always compatible aspirants enough to counter the casualties.
Mordred often wondered what it must be like to work for an important chapter, like the Iron Hands or the Salamanders, who didn't have this sort of problem to worry about, who actually had proper equipment made by Mechanicus Magus's.
The Aspirent, Trevur Quindog, was seventeen standard years old and, as he had been found genetically suitable for the transformation, was encouraged to father at least two children to carry on his favourable genes.
There were complications with trying to alter someone at such a late stage in life; biopsychosis, organ rejection, organ mutation, SIDS (Sudden Inexplicable Death Syndrome), neural decay, seizure, strokes and a whole host of lesser problems. But it seemed to be working out so far, the chapter got a steady trickle of Neophytes and the gene pool of the Purgatorians was never irreparably plundered.
To look at, as he spared with the Chapter Master, the Neophyte was not the pinnacle of human perfection. Almost certainly he would have been rejected by the likes of the Ultramarines or the Dark Angels. He was one of those gangly youths who seemed to be made entirely out of elbows and, on a planet of such unremitting sunshine, still managed to be pale and pasty. But he was certainly very quick. Mr Quindog possessed a means of motion that was utterly unpredictable. He did not so much move as jerk from one position to another in a series of jolts. When he ran he could cover a deceptively large amount of ground.
And he was enthusiastic. That counted for a lot. He had been sparing for three whole hours but had not yet managed to land a blow on CM Jimmy. The enthusiasm would wear off, but it may last long enough to help him survive the ascension.
Chapter Master Roberius Hardrew Jameson, better known as CM Jimmy, was training the Aspirant. The boy was fast, impressively fast, for a human. Not as fast as an astartes, but very fast non-the less.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Dr Mordred observing them. Being watched always annoyed Roberius, it reminded him too much of the time they were being stalked by Eldar Rangers. They had not been attacked and the pointy-eared xenos had always been too far away or too inconveniently positioned to confront. They still did not know what the whole thing had been about. The two most popular theories were; it was a training exercise or they were being observed out of some alien notion of curiosity. The Chapter Master secretly believed that they were being warned. The Rangers would not allow themselves to be seen unless they wanted you to know that they were watching you.
The job of Chapter Master, he reflected as he casually sidestepped an uppercut that would have had a human spitting teeth, was not what it was all cracked up to be. There was a copy of the full collection of the Codex Astartes, it took up a whole shelf, in his room and it had a very detailed list of things a Chapter Master was supposed to do when he was ruler of a planet. Few of them were ever going to be applicable to him. There was a whole chapter, haha bad pun, on procedure and hierarchy when dealing with the Mechanicus enclaves on your planet. There were no Mechanicus enclaves on the planet. There were more than a hundred pages on how to keep the Eccelicarchy happy whilst not wielding too much power. There was no division of the Imperial Cult on the planet. It had a section on etiquette when dealing with the Navis Nobillite. There wasn't a navigator within thirty light-years, unless one got lost. There was an entire volume on dealing with other Chapters. This was unnecessary because all the other Chapters refused to acknowledge their existence, even the Guard tried to look down on them (until they begged for help). The only piece of useful information was at the end book on dealing with resource management and protracted campaigns in dessert environments. And half of that he had known since he was a child in any case.
The job of Chapter Master, he reflected as he deflected a kick to the stomach, was not as glamorous as books made it out to be.
Carefully, carefully. Just a few more seconds. There, done. The drinking straw was brought into contact with his cold dry lips.
Librarian Jakes was not a happy person. He had been a great warrior once. A true horror that could freeze the marrow in a mans bones with dread.
Now he was probably the only Space Marine who needed two walking sticks. That damned Apothecary had told him that he would recover eventually. But eventually was a bloody long time to have the Shakes. It was embarrassing, more than anything. Humans got the shakes when the inhaled or drank something that damaged their nerves. Marines should be immune to such mundane rubbish. It was such a shame he had spent two long weeks breathing in nerve gas. It hadn't been until a few days afterwards that that his body started to let him down.
Now he was stuck, always stuck, on the ship acting as a relay post for the bloody astropath.
It was no life for a Space Marine.
Mind you it was a better life than being dead, and at least he would recover eventually without the need for massive cybernetic reconstruction. Shaky Jake did not like cybernetics. There was just something about them that freaked him out, it being a part of you but not alive.
There were veterans of particularly intense engagements who had lost limbs. He could see the absent appendages, ghostly shimmers that were there and not there, dancing flickering wisps in shapes and forms that were lacking in substance. In their minds they were whole. The ghost limbs fit over the replacements like a second skin, alive but dead and oddly disturbing, like Cortex Technology.
And he needed a shave. Did he dare try using a razor? A quick trim with the scissors? No. Holding an edged object close to the arteries of the neck could be just about the stupidest thing he could do right now.
He walked along the corridors of the fallen ship, sticks clicking on the ancient deck plate, drinking straw-bag telekinetically held up to his cracked cold lips.
It was always cold around Shaky Jake, frost formed in his boot prints and chill radiated off his skin.
The planet once named by the Imperial Navy Stella-Cartography Institute as Pyros III had been home to a human population for nearly three and a half millennia if only by accident. The planet had an atmosphere that was utterly dead and stale. A temperature range that was habitable, if barley. An intensity of gravity that was one point one Gs, well within tolerance. And not a drop of water. It was not hell, but it was the next best thing. On all star-charts now it was named as Purgatory, where people earned their place in heaven. But to most who paid it more than a moments notice it was just Home. And although the world was neither caring nor loving to its people in the closing days of the forty-first millennia it was the next best thing.