Inquisitor Tergenos was dead.
Not perhaps just yet, but as he breathed the acrid fumes of cordite and burnt flesh of a dead world, he reflected that life was a short lived, ephemeral thing.
He looked down at his communicator, the one where he had just given the order. Where he had heard first consternation, then acceptance as the Navy crew in the Eternal Vigilance processed his access and security codes and authorized the final sanction against the enemies of mankind.
"5 minutes, Inquisitor," Admiral Ling had said, as the final codes were accepted by the Cruiser's Machine Spirit and a low pinging noise had echoed in the bridge behind him. "It was an honour serving you."
"The honour was mine," Tergenos had said. "Escort as many civilian craft as you can outsystem, and then mass with Battlefleet Gothic." He paused.
"The Emperor Protects."
The Admiral saluted. "The Emperor Protects. Good hunting." Then the communicator fizzed out and died, and the Inquisitor had looked at it fondly.
He still heard some final shots and shouts as the brave men and women he had fought alongside continued to defy the horrors of the dark Gods and earned quick, swift and merciful deaths in honourable battle. He knew what was reserved for those they took prisoner. He had no interest in becoming one.
A great gash had been bitten into his torso, great rents in his armour and blood crusting from the wounds. But he paid it no heed, for the abomination of an offering missing its head scant feet away from him had come off decidedly second best at their meeting. As had the dozen or so hooded figures with terrifying mutations and reassuringly dead expressions. But to no avail, either. He could sense the stench of evil permeating the flat plain and makeshift altar before which he had been beaten to his knees; could see the cloaked figures in the far off distance through the smoke and fumes with yet more terrified looking innocents to be bound to the twisted energies that he could still feel gathering and growing at this place. Each brave man and woman with the Emperor's grace yet fulfilled further the great rent into the fabric of space with each battle cry, each last gasp, each curse of anger.
His heart had sunk. But not entirely, for he knew he had had one last chance, and he had taken it.
A soft moaning awakened him from his reverie. He looked down and saw the delicate eyes of Ada, his Interrogator, looking up at him. They shone with a pale blue intensity dulled slightly by the large, sucking chest wound that was stealing the life from her body. The Inquisitor wrapped his arms more tightly around her shoulders, making sure she was as comfortable as she could be and that her airways were draining of blood. He had used all of his combat drugs on her, and he had hoped that her body, as it was dying, was ignoring the pain that should be wracking it.
"I'm sorry," he said to her, softly. "I was looking forward to recommending you for Inquisitor."
Her eyes looked up at him, still sharp even with the slight haze. Just as sharp as when he had first seen her, a frightened, terrified child in the hold of a black ship... who had escaped her cell. He knew then that she was made for the Inquisition.
But not any more. A hint of a glaze settled over her eyes, and then the irises sharpened again as she took back control of her body.
"It's OK," she said, and a faint hint of a smile twitched up from her burnt lips. "Never wanted the job anyway."
A loud crump underscored that point as a guardsman at the end of his tether detonated a plasma grenade in his hands, killing several heretics advancing on him as he killed himself. A clod of Earth fell next at the Investigator's left hand, stretched out to make it more comfortable.
"Is it going to be over?" Ada rasped.
"Soon."
"Oh Good." She coughed up a little globbet of blood, and the Inquisitor wiped it away from her mouth.
They lay there in companionable silence for a while, punctuated only by the Inquisitor raising his bolter and killing yet another of his Divine Majesty's enemies. The ring of Guardsmen shrunk ever smaller around them, the horde beyond the thin green line increasing. They did not waver, but he saw more and more of them cast their eye back at him. There was fear. Not of him, precisely, but an animal fear, one controlled by discipline and training.
Ada spoke up as she surveyed the scene and smiled weakly in support at the faces glancing back at them. "You know," she said faintly, "I learnt something for times like this at the Schola."
The Inquisitor paused, his brow creasing, and then he smiled. He remembered as well.
Ada whimpered slightly as some of the pain fought its way through the cloud of drugs in her system. Her voice was hoarse. "Inquisitor... sing for me?"
And then it happened. A voice rang out, a pleasant baritone, full in tone and hearty. He was surprised he still had such voice left in him.
"Some things in life are bad…"
"They can really make you mad…" Ada whispered, smiling.
Startled at this new sound, the heretics stopped for a moment. There was silence across the ruined remains of the city that had once housed two million people. Then the singing began.
"If you're chewing on life's gristle, don't grumble, give a whistle!" rang out from the shell holes surrounding the inquisitor, as the guardsmen made peace with the Emperor in their last moments. A quiet chuckle began to infect the last few remnants of his Divine Majesty's servants, and suddenly, the cries of pain and agony settled into quiet grunts as they made peace with theirselves and damned their killers to make them pay for their lives.
The Inquisitor looked up at the night sky, and saw one of the stars within it glow brighter as the Eternal Vigilance followed his orders. He could imagine them now, innocent looking torpedoes, manhandled into position by a thousand ratings. The countdown, the final votive blessings, a prayer from the ship's chaplain for all the souls on the planet below, and a warning to the Emperor that his servants were on their way to him. The light from the instruments of cleansing breaching the atmosphere, their heat shielding glowing white hot as they cut through the air as a preliminary to burning it.
"… you must always face the curtain with a bow…" Tergenos sang, as the now terribly confused enemy shrank back at the insanity of these… singing Guardsmen. Were they wrong in attacking kindred, that the Imperials left on this planet followed some other Chaos God of insanity?
The night dark began to lighten, as the cyclonic torpedoes began to disassociate, the warheads streaking into the planet's atmosphere and beginning to disassociate all matter in the planet's biosphere to the core.
As his Interrogator died gently in his arms, Inquisitor Tergenos could only look up at the beautiful sight in the sky and smile, as the Emperor's final sanction began to set the night sky on fire. A moment before the exterminatus shockwave hit him, he made his peace with the Emperor and closed his eyes, content.
"Always look on the bright side of life," he whispered.