Fame Cimex Chapter 6

Down the passages of the Battlebarge Captain Toran strode, passing serfs and servitors without comment. They made way swiftly for his pace was rapid and brooked no delay. As he marched his hands balled into tight fists, while the clenched line of his jaw and the furious glare of his augmetic eye betrayed his thoughts.

Suddenly he came to a non-descript hatch and he pounded his personal access code into the rune panel, causing the door to slide up out of the way, Toran stomped through and found himself in an officer's quarters. It was considerably larger than the standard initiate's cells and contained various features not found in a regular billet. There was a reliquary and weapon's maintenance bench, a large desk covered in reports and missives and a small shrine in one corner. The walls were covered with soft Nalwood panels, an exorbitant expense now the world of Tanith was gone. One wall held a long mirror and opposite that was a small Hololith projector. Toran found all this a trifle ostentatious and unnecessary, but the room was older than he was, so he could not really comment.

Sitting at the desk and working through the reports was a mortal serf, an equerry appointed to him upon his promotion. The man's name was Jareq and he stood to bow as the Captain entered saying, "Welcome Master, there are one hundred and fifty-seven urgent messages requiring your attention."

"Leave," Toran growled, "Now."

Jareq bowed again and hurried out, closing the hatch behind him as Toran stood glaring at the walls. He breathed hard, as if he had been in combat but he was utterly still. Suddenly he turned and stomped over to the reliquary and drew the Sword of Thiel. He grabbed a cleaning cloth and a pot of blessed oil and briskly wiped off the Xeno ichor from the blade, then he shoved the weapon into its receptacle and slammed the doors. Many brothers would have been horrified by such disrespectful handling of a treasured relic-weapon, but right now Toran didn't care.

He threw his bolter onto the maintenance bench then growled, "Attend me." From an alcove a pair of servitors trundled forwards, their mechanical arms fitted with lathes, screwdrivers and drill bits. They rolled forwards on caterpillar tracks and began removing his artificer armour, the arming servitors were another privilege of rank, a Master of the Chapter could hardly strip off his plate with the rest of the Marines.

The process of removing his armour was not a swift one, first each ceramite plate and the backpack had to be removed with due reverence and placed onto an arming stand. Then the fibre-bundle muscle layer had to be stripped away as the servitors intoned appeasing litanies to the machine spirits. Finally his undersheath had to be peeled off and the connections to his implanted neural interface sockets removed in ritual order. Through it all Toran stood fuming, fists clenching and unclenching as the monotone servitors droned ancient psalms. Finally he stood naked, muscles covered in a network of scars and burns that testified to a lifetime of war. He grabbed a plain blue shrift from a drawer in the wall and shrugged it on, then threw himself onto a stool before the maintenance bench.

Toran drummed his fingers for a moment then picked up his bolter, it was a masterpiece of craftsmanship, worked and ornamented to a ridiculous degree. At its heart lay a standard Godwyn Mark Vb bolt-rifle, with a sickle pattern magazine that held thirty 0.75 calibre rounds, but every inch of it was tooled to surpassing quality. It also had several features that a standard bolter did not boast, micro-suspensors to compensate for recoil, magnetic accelerators along the barrel to increase armour penetration and a targeting uplink to his autosenses. Toran swiftly dismantled the weapon in the time-honoured ritual manner, muttering litanies under his breath the whole time. Once the rifle was disassembled he grabbed a cloth and dipped it in cleansing oils and began attending to his weapon. He rubbed dirt and debris off the casing and soothed the firing mechanism with appeasing unguents. He cleared carbon scoring out of the barrel with a soft brush and polished the engravings over its casing. When he reached the firing pin he scowled, a speck of grit was caught in the mechanism, grinding against the action. Toran paused and closed his organic eye, replaying the fight on Veltri in his eidetic memory. Yes there it was, a point zero two second delay every time he pulled the trigger, totally unacceptable.

Suddenly Toran froze, the thought of Veltri making his hands shake and his jaw clench. He replayed the war over and over in his mind's eye and felt a fury growing within him at the outcome, the losses and the deaths that had occurred. Something in Toran snapped and he screamed in rage, he stood up and grabbed the bench in both hands and effortlessly flipped it over, spilling tools, oils and his dismantled bolter all over the floor. He roared and threw the brush in his hand at the wall, it impacted the wooden panels handle first with such force that it stuck there like a dart on a board. Toran turned looking for something to hit and his fist lashed out at the large mirror, shattering it to spray jagged pieces of glass everywhere in a shower of glass. Toran was breathing hard, his chest heaving with rage, he wanted more destruction. He wanted to kill something, anything, he wanted to kill and kill and kill until the pain disappeared in a tide of spilled blood. But then he saw something.

In the shattered shards upon the floor Toran glimpsed his reflection, it was twisted and distorted, caught somewhere between rage and madness, completely warped into something not quite human. Toran could not tell if it was the twisted glass or his own face but in that second he looked less like a noble Space Marine and more like a berserker of Chaos. Toran staggered back, aghast at what he had done. The loss of discipline he had displayed was unforgivable, a Space Marine could not afford to lose his self-control at any time. He looked at his bleeding hand, embedded with splinters of glass and whispered, "What is wrong with me?"

His distress was interrupted as the door chime sounded and without even thinking about it his mouth automatically said, "Come in." The door rolled upwards to reveal two armoured figures, one a giant in Mark III plate, the other in black ceramite adorned with decorative skulls. It was Sergeant Furion and Chaplain Wrethan and they stood in the doorway, looking shocked at what they saw within the room. These two were hardly comrades, but if the pair of them had come together then that spoke volumes about the seriousness of the situation.

Furion stepped in, "Looks like we got here just in time."

Toran lowered his fist and said, "What are you doing here?"

Wrethan answered, "The way you hared off from the bridge raised more than a few eyebrows. We decided to come talk to you."

Toran frowned, "Who is manning the bridge?"

Wrethan replied, "Persion."

Toran was surprised, "You left Persion in charge?"

Furion answered with a straight face, "You would prefer it if we had left Novak running things?"

Toran snorted and a faint grin tugged at his lip, he lowered his fist and waved at the desk covered in reports saying, "You had better sit down."

The three Space Marines sat down in reinforced chairs and Wrethan probed, "Care to tell us what's bothering you?"

Toran said, "You have to ask?"

Furion nodded sagely, "Veltri."

Toran sighed deeply, "We took eight hundred Brothers to save that world and were sent packing in short order."

Wrethan's voice bcame grave,, "Defeat is never an easy thing to process, there is a reason we have rituals of mourning and lamentation. This is a dark day but it does not rest upon your shoulders alone, the whole Storm Heralds Chapter saw the bitterest of reversals. You did as much as could be done, more in fact, without you those transport ships would never have made it out. One hundred and twenty thousand souls saved…. I could not have done that."

Toran clenched his fist and said, "One hundred and twenty thousand… out of a population of seventeen million."

Furion was consoling, "You saved some of them Captain, it was more than anyone could have hoped for. But that is not what is really bothering you… this is personal."

Toran looked away and confessed, "Captain Laryen."

Wrethan crossed his hands, "Ah I see... yes the loss of a good officer and his men is hard to bear, especially as you were in charge of their rescue mission."

Toran couldn't look at them, "I can't shake it, I keep thinking if only I had been faster, pushed the squads harder, taken a riskier route, maybe I could have saved them."

Wrethan frowned and said, "Toran…"

But the Captain interrupted by spitting the words he had been holding back, the secret that had been souring his soul, "I failed! Since the first day of my induction it has been drilled into me that defeat is not an option, that failure will not be tolerated… yet today I was charged with a mission and fell short."

Furion drew in a slow breath to say, "Captain, if you don't mind me saying, this is a situation you are ill-equipped to handle. I have known you for nigh on a century now and I have seen you pull off some remarkable victories, especially when conventional wisdom says you should have fallen. Even those times you were bested it was only by betrayal or unexpected circumstance. This is the first time you have known true defeat. It is a test you must overcome as any other."

"How," Toran lamented, "How do I face our Brothers after failing them so completely?"

Wrethan replied, "It is easy to command when the fighting goes well, but the true test of leadership is to lead when the times are hard. When all you want to do is lie down and die, but still knowing that your Marines need you to stand proud and lead them on. Remember your codex, the Primarch himself wrote: No leader can claim to have known only victory, for all must taste the bitterness of defeat at some point. A leader who has not known defeat, at least once, is of no worth for it is only when all pretensions are laid bare that one can learn and grow."

Toran fixed his eyes on his hands, "How am I to learn from this?"

"By being better," Furion answered, "By taking the harsh lessons of defeat within yourself and using the fire of your rage to forge a sterner, harder warrior. Let this be your apotheosis. You must become a greater Captain than you have been up till now and lead your men better than you have before."

Toran looked at them and said, "How am I supposed to start going about that?"

Furion answered, "Ultimately no victory is ever total, no defeat is ever complete, it is he who has the courage to continue that will emerge victorious."

Toran stared at him quizzically, "I don't recall that passage from the Codex."

Furion smirked, "Still sounded good though, didn't it."

Toran couldn't help but let out a snort of laughter, his tension easing as he looked at his comrades and he said, "My thanks, you have been a beacon in my darkest hour."

"It is our honour to serve," said Wrethan, "Now clean up this mess and show some contrition for the poor treatment you have given that bolter. Meet us on the bridge when you are ready, Chapter Master Gorgall has called for a command conference once the fleet reassembles, the Chapter needs to plan our next step in this war."