Legends of the Smoke Jaguars Chapter 15
Sedaxus floated weightless amid pure nothingness. He was nowhere, no when, nothing existed not even as a concept. There was no up, no down, no space, no time and yet there was awareness. Sedaxus knew who he was but his body seemed to be missing. The painful genhancements that had made him a Space Marine no longer sank knives into his nerves, the heaviness of his bones was gone and the double heartbeat in his ears had finally stopped drumming. For an instant he knew peace, and then reality came crashing back with a vengeance.
Sedaxus hit the deck with the ringing of Ceramite on Plasteel. The crushing weight of his bones hit hard, crushing him to the floor with inhuman mass. Bones thicker than a mortal man could bear crushed downwards, extra organs had been crammed into his chest and his body had been stitched open and sewn back together by uncaring hands, leaving him a scarecrow of badly healed scars. For a moment the eternal agony of being an Astartes scraped his soul raw, but then his genhanced physiology kicked in. Twin heartbeats flooded his organs with hyper-oxygenated blood, hormonally swollen muscles took up the weight of his body and the extra organs stimulated his biology to inhuman levels. The pain remained but Hypno-indoctrination finally caught up and he was able to compartmentalise the ache and pretend it didn't exist. Sedaxus was once more what he had been and lifted his head to see what had happened.
He found himself in one of Implacable Justice's deeper workings, somewhere between the plasma reactors and the sewage recycling plants. His helm's autosenses flooded his vision with reams of icons and info-graphs, feeding more data than eyes alone could ever tell. The long corridor was strewn with mortals, some on their knees, many of them unconscious or throwing up, but all sickly and weak. A woman curled into a foetal ball and wept as she clutched her knees to her chest. A man slammed his head into a wall over and over, trying to drive out the memories of whatever he'd seen. A young boy gibbering insanely to himself as he rocked back and forth while an old hag clawed at her eyes, trying to pluck them out of her skull, preferring blindness to whatever she'd seen. They were hurting and filled with despair, and they were the lucky ones.
Among their ranks were the less fortunate. Men and women were reduced to offal or more hideous forms. Across the walls red entrails painted gruesome murals, like a dissection of the human body. Sedaxus idly noted complete sets of at least four people decorating the walls, his long experience with removing people's innards letting him count them exactly. A man and a woman had been fused together, their corpses running together like molten wax, thankfully dead, there was no survival in that condition. Oddly a thin slice of a person had been lent on the walls, a neat sectioning of an individual, with no signs of where the rest of them had gone.
Sedaxus shook his head as he tried to remember what had happened. Implacable Justice had been sailing for the Copan system, charting a course through the roiling madness of the Empyrean, when the translation alarums had sounded. Too soon, far too soon, with no chance to make preparations or secure the ship against the hazards of crossing the veil betwixt dimensions. They had crashed through the interface with all the grace of a hurled rock hitting a pond, ripples spreading through spirit and flesh as much as matter and energy.
Sedaxus forced himself to his legs, feeling an uncustomary weak shiver in his muscles. He snarled, "Get yourselves together, it's just a bad translation," then he set off. He left the mortals to their distress as he lurched away, heading upwards as fast as his legs could take him. He passed hundreds of mortals, all suffering in a variety of ways. It annoyed him but there was nothing to be done, they'd be useless until they pulled themselves together. He passed by without pausing, but then he ran into something that made him halt in his tracks.
Set in a blank wall was half a Marine, one of the Neophytes, a young boy who had barely begun his life. The boy had been fused with the material of the wall, half his innards merged with unyielding metal, but not enough. The boy's eyes gaped widely, as his mouth moved, trying to suck in air that would not come. His lungs were compromised, unable to draw in enough air to talk but just enough to prolong his torment. Sedaxus had seen the risks of Teleportation take sterner warriors and knew this boy was doomed, the only questions were how long it would take him to die and was Sedaxus going to allow him to suffer.
"Sorry lad," Sedaxus breathed as he placed his fist on the chest and triggered the claws, driving twin points into thundering hearts, "You got dealt a bad hand." The boy' mouth went still and it would have been nice to pretend there was gratitude in his eyes, but all Sedaxus saw was confusion, pain and accusations of betrayal. Then they went blank and the boy died. Sedaxus slowly withdrew his claws and moved off, muttering, "I really must be going soft."
Sadly he climbed the decks, heading upwards towards the command sections. He saw the crew slowly recovering, starting to get their legs under them but gave them no heed as he pressed onwards, making his way to the Strategium. Set near to the bridge the palatial arena of the Strategium awaited, a tiered amphitheatre leading down to a Holopit as wide as a stage. The place was stark and bare, freshly built and lacking the adornments of more gregarious Legions, the Raven Guard favoured austerity in their designs and the Tech-guilds of Kiavhar had little truck with the fetishes growing among their Tech-priest cousins.
Standing at the Holopit was Nolaro, hands dashing over comms-runes as he barked a series of orders into a vox-horn. His face was tense as he tried to impose order on this bedlam, but by the looks of things he wasn't having much success. Sedaxus quietly slid in and plonked himself on the bottom tier of the seats, knowing there was nothing he could do to help. After a lot of minutes Nolaro finally seemed to be getting on top of things and stepped back, rubbing his brow in dismay.
"How bad?" Sedaxus interrupted.
Nolaro sighed, "Truly awful. We're getting reports from all decks of casualties, early estimates are we lost a twelfth of the mortals in the jump. Engines are cold, hangers are a mess, guns… Throne let's trust nobody out there is looking for a battle, we couldn't fight off a strong breeze right now."
"Did we at least make it to Copan?" Engar asked from right behind Sedaxus.
"Gah!" he yelped, "How long have you been sitting there?!"
"I have always been here," Engar sniffed, "But that's not what I asked."
Nolaro shook his head and lamented, "No way to tell. Astrogation is cogitating our position. We can only trust we made it, else we'll have to jump again."
Engar muttered, "Not sure the crew can handle another jaunt through the warp."
"Not sure I can," Sedaxus snorted, "That was rough."
"At least our squads are reporting," Nolaro affirmed, "We should get the ship back under control within the hour."
A chime from the consoles interrupted as the Hololith sprung to life. A single point appeared, the ship's icon, then another ping emerged, hanging fifty thousand kilometres off the port bow. Sedaxus tensed at the implied threat but Nolaro exclaimed, "A nav-beacon! Cogitators reading ident… it's a Copan beacon, we're in the right system at least. Further out than I expected, the most isolated jump point in the system, but we made it."
"That's a relief," Sedaxus breathed, "What else can we see?"
"Auspex is ruminating, give it a… hold on… here it comes."
The Hololith shrank as range increased, revealing the Copan system in all its glory. A gas giant appeared, dominating the outer reaches and hoovering up all the asteroids and moonlets that drifted in the vast wastes of space. Another icon appeared, a planet sitting in the habitable zone, Copan XII itself, then a dozen more planets popped up, rad-scoured hellscapes of tortured land. Tiny flecks denoted asteroids drifting randomly, waiting for a planet to snatch them up. The whole system was a mess of intersecting courses, rough and raw as solar systems went.
"What a mess," Engar muttered, "You weren't kidding when you called it a dump."
"This is nothing," Sedaxus snorted, "Imperial cartographers predicted Copan III and Copan IV will collide in ten-thousand years. Two planets slamming into each other, that will be a sight to see."
"I doubt you'll live that long, but what baffles me is how there can be a life-bearing world here. This system is far too young."
Sedaxus sniffed, "A mystery, but our working theory was Copan XII was terraformed at some point. Xenos perhaps, or some human enterprise from the Dark Age of Technology. We did find some ruins and outposts of a fallen empire in the system. Never identified who they were, but they weren't local to the system."
Their discussion was interrupted as Damolos bounded in, his face red and breathing hard as he gasped, "What hit us?!"
Sedaxus looked up to reply, "A bad translation, nothing more."
"Was there…" Damolos gulped with a nervous edge, "Was there a chronometric slip?"
Nolaro snapped, "Frak, I didn't think to check, hold on… No… The beacon's timestamp is broadly in accord with ship chronometers, we lost a few months in transit, but that's to be expected in such a long journey. We are where and when we are supposed to be."
"Be still my beating hearts," Damolos exhaled with nervous relief.
Sedaxus interjected, "Now the real question: is there anyone alive out here?"
Nolaro began fiddling with the controls and muttered, "Too far out for Auspex to find anything that small, but vox is picking up signal traffic from Copan XII. There are survivors, human survivors. That's surprising. Further in there's a hell of a lot of noise, having trouble isolating individual signals but it looks like…" All eyes went wide as the Hololith filled with a snowstorm of hostile green, the inner worlds blanketed in signal noise. Orks, teeming multitudes of Orks, covering the planets and their orbits in blizzards of icons. Sedaxus had never seen such density, not in this system. It seemed the Greenskin had multiplied ferociously in the decades since he had last been here.
"Crap," Engar spat.
"Crap on a stick," Damolos agreed, "It's worse than I expected."
"A Legion would have issue facing that lot, a mere Chapter…" Sedaxus exhaled.
But Nolaro firmly admonished, "There's no use gawping. We're here, we know the scale of the task, what I need are solutions. Work the problem people."
Everybody paused and applied their minds to the task and Engar mused, "No point taking that lot on in a straight assault. We'll have to be sneaky."
"We usually found it best to pick of leader beasts and let them degenerate into infighting. One precise shot worked better than thousand bolters hammering away," Sedaxus agreed.
Damolos frowned as he pondered, "Lot of space to cover. We could use a base to operate from. Didn't you say the Night Lords abandoned a starfort in system, could we make use of it?"
"That cesspool?!" Sedaxus snorted then cursed in Nostramean, "Vek Tah Neh'kula!"
"I'll take that as a no," Nolaro growled, "We'll set up on Copan XII, but not until the system is secure. I don't want to draw the Orks down on us. We'll operate from the ship, until the situation stabilises."
"Orders?" Engar pressed.
Nolaro paused for a moment then said, "We can't do anything without more current intel. We need to find how many Orks we face, if they have a leader and if so how well guarded he is. We need to get closer. Signal the bridge and tell them to activate Reflex shields, secure all compartments and lock down the auspex and vox. We're going to go in quietly and if fortune favours us our enemies will never know we're here, until we slip the knife into their backs."