Not One Step Back

I. An Opened Body

The road to Vortan Hive was paved with wrecked vehicles.

Not entirely. Only just enough that every transport, every field carriage and every man who could still march had to pass them and see with his own eyes what a retreat cost. Burnt-out Chimeras. Overturned ammunition wagons. A shot-up medicae crawler whose red cross had burned to a black stain. Among them corpses, mostly already dipped in dust and oil, that no one would recover now.

Senior Commissar Ilya Voss rode on the running board of a leading Taurox and looked back.

Behind her the 77th Belisarian Line Regiment was withdrawing into the outer districts of Vortan Hive. No panicking mob. Not yet. But the column had taken on that soft, dangerous disorder that sets in shortly before real disintegration. Wounded on cargo beds. Platoons mixing. Officers who looked back too often. Vox operators having the same order confirmed three times because no one was sure any more whether orders still applied at all.

Six hours ago the retreat had still looked like an orderly redeployment.

Three hours ago like a forced change of position.

Now it looked like what it was: an opened body in which every organ was trying to get itself to safety first.

Beside Voss, Colonel Leron sat in the Taurox's interior, pale, his left arm in a makeshift sling. Since morning he had ordered four lines of retreat, discarded three of them again and finally accepted the fourth when the enemy was already in the process of taking the choice from him.

"If we reach the lock districts we can re-form," he said.

Voss did not look at him. "You said that an hour ago about the refinery rings."

"Back then we did not yet have an accurate enemy strength."

"And now?"

Leron was silent.

That was answer enough.

The truth was simple: no one knew exactly how many traitors were at their heels. Only that they were fast, relentless, and led by something that was more than an ordinary rebel column. For days, vox reports had piled up from the southern plains about black banners, about silver tanks and about Astartes contacts. At first it had been taken for panic. Then for exaggeration. Now the outer forts lay in ruins, and Vortan Hive was the last usable position between the enemy and the inner continental arterials.

A vox operator in the rear tore the headset from his ear. "Contact report! Third rearguard squad broken through. Enemy vanguard on the eastern feeder road. Armour support confirmed. Possible Astartes silhouettes in the smoke."

Leron cursed softly.

Voss laid a hand on the Taurox's grab rail and felt the vibration of the engine beneath the metal. "Have the convoy halt."

Leron stared at her. "What?"

"Halt."

"If we halt now we lose our distance!"

"If we do not halt, you lose the regiment."

"It is already half lost!"

"Then kindly save the other half in the condition of an army and not as plunder for the enemy."

Leron looked at her as if she were mad.

Perhaps she was. Commissars often had to operate on the narrow ridge between discipline and madness, because all the sensible ways had already come too late.

She drew the bolt pistol and rapped it against the cab. "Stop."

The Taurox slowed. Behind them the braking propagated down the column. Engines whined. Men shouted. An ammunition wagon nearly ran into a medicae transport. Somewhere a loading crate banged to the ground.

Within seconds the retreat was no longer a movement but a stalling, dangerous confusion.

Voss jumped from the running board into the dust.

"Signal horns!" she shouted. "All companies fall in at the roadsides! Wounded in the centre! Armour to the front!"

"This is madness," said Leron behind her, yet in the next breath he was bellowing the orders onward. Not from courage. From habit.

Sometimes that was enough.

II. Hold

The road ate minutes as if they were blood.

Platoons were shoved into shape. Chimeras set crosswise. Heavy weapons teams dragged from cargo beds and set up in doorways. An old Leman Russ ground its way into a crossroads and turned its turret south. Soldiers knelt in oily puddles, changed power cells, fixed bayonets, retied bandages.

Voss walked past them.

She did not say much. There was no time for that. She only looked. Into an officer's face until he stopped turning his back on his men. At a wounded vox operator until he put the headset back on. At a weapons crew until they finally set up the heavy bolter tripod with still hands instead of shaking ones.

That was her job. Not only to shoot whoever ran. But to see to it that fewer people wanted to run at all.

When she reached the head of the improvised line, Sergeant Deren was kneeling there with his rearguard squad behind a cracked wall.

"Report."

"Southern feeder road open. First enemy vehicles in sight in five minutes, perhaps less. Infantry following in the smoke. We have two full cells per man. Heavy bolter ready. Missile launcher down to two rounds."

"Artillery?"

"No more support. Last battery lost contact."

Voss nodded.

In the south the horizon stood as if made of iron. Black smoke crept closer between burnt-out refinery towers. Muzzle flashes glowed within it. Engine noise. Tracks. Once she thought she heard, for a fraction of a second, the deep bark of a bolter, as distinct from every other weapon sound as a verdict from a plea.

"Good," she said.

Deren glanced up at her. "Good?"

"Yes. Now at least we know where they are coming from."

He almost smiled. But did not.

Then the first impact struck the roadblock.

Concrete burst. Splinters struck façades. A soldier was flung against a bulkhead and lay there motionless. Two more shells followed. Not artillery. Tank cannon.

"Enemy armour!" someone shouted.

They came out of the smoke like things that had never been built for peace. Conversions of Imperial Chimeras and Leman Russ, draped with black flags, chains, spikes and improvised plates. Behind them infantry, first as a grey mass, then as individual figures in filthy uniforms, breath masks, with banners and the hard, short movements of men who knew that fear stood on the other side of the road.

And right at the back, just visible on a rubble rampart, stood three silhouettes, too big for humans, with long weapons and shoulder plates like gravestones.

Astartes.

Voss lifted her chin.

"Fire."

III. Like Predators Through Side Alleys

The whole road broke open.

Las-beams flickered from windows, gaps in walls, wrecked vehicles. The heavy bolter hammered into life. A missile shot crookedly through the smoke and hit a Chimera in the flank. The vehicle burst at the running gear, tipped into a ditch and spat out a burning crew.

The traitors answered at once. Stubber fire sawed across the barricades. A second tank shell tore away the upper floor of a magazine house. Men died without their names mattering any more.

Voss did not duck.

She walked along behind the first line, coat open, bolt pistol in hand, and every time she stopped, shoulders near her straightened again.

Hardly out of reverence. Mostly because people did not like to fall apart before the eyes of a commissar.

A Guardsman suddenly leaped up, threw away his lasgun and stumbled backwards out of his position. Voss shot him before he could take two steps.

The effect was immediate.

Terrible. Useful. Imperium.

"No one gives way!" she called into the noise of the street. "Not one step! This line is Vortan! Whoever loses it loses the Hive!"

She believed every word of it and none. That was called duty.

Then the Astartes attacked.

Not in heroic assault. Not with banners raised. They came like predators through side alleys and over shot-up walls, using the human attack only as a screen. Black armour with faded Chapter badges, overpainted with heresy and improvised spoils of war. One still wore half an aquila on his chest, as if even his damnation had been stitched together from captured remnants.

The first bolter strike nearly tore Deren in two.

The second hit the heavy bolter and turned weapon and crew into a red mist. Panic shivered through the front like current.

Leron reached Voss panting behind a foxhole. "We have to go back now! If we don't go now we'll be encircled!"

"If we go now, we no longer go in order."

"Order is dead!"

"Then we make sure dead comes at a price."

She grabbed the field vox from the fallen operator.

"To all armour. Target marker three. South alley. Fire at once. All reserves to the left. Hold. Hold. Hold."

A second later the old Leman Russ roared its answer. The cannon hacked into the side alley. Masonry, dust, bodies. One of the Astartes vanished briefly in the explosion cloud, came staggering out of it again. His left arm was missing. He kept walking.

For a moment Voss felt something cold in her belly. Not fear. Something closer to hand. The realisation that brave men and correct orders sometimes still were not enough.

IV. Dark Green Out of the Smoke

Then came a new sound.

Engines. High. Fast. Different.

All who could still raise their heads looked up.

Through the smoke ceiling broke Thunderhawks.

They shot low over the road, black against the grey sky, and dropped drop pods into the middle of the enemy deployment. The pods struck like iron verdicts. Ceramite petals sprang open.

Space Marines in dark green stepped out.

Salamanders.

Voss had never seen any. Only heard of them. Of Nocturne. Of their fire. Of their unfashionable habit of counting human lives where other Chapters saw only objectives achieved.

Their captain walked at the head, flamer in one hand, power weapon in the other. His armour was green like deep forest under volcanic light. The face beneath was black like polished stone, the eyes red like melting points.

He saw the road. The fraying edges of the line. The traitor Astartes. The commissar.

Then he nodded to her once, as if acknowledging rank and task, not person.

"You held," he said.

"So far," Voss answered.

"Good. Then keep holding."

He did not turn round again.

His brothers went into close combat like living forge hammers. Flames cut through the traitor infantry. A Salamander seized a renegade Astartes by the gorget and rammed him through an opening in a wall as if the opponent consisted of less than ceramite and rage. Another covered the head of the road with a heavy flamer until even the smoke seemed to burn.

The human line did not react with cheering. It was too late for that. But it reacted with hardness.

Deren was dead. The heavy bolter gone. Two platoons almost torn apart. And yet the survivors reached for their rifles again, aligned the barrels, pushed in magazines and fired into the gaps the Salamanders opened.

Voss heard Leron breathing beside her. Irregular. Exhausted. Perhaps ashamed.

"They saved us," he said.

"No," she said. "They bought us time. We saved ourselves when we stopped."

It was cruel to say that in this moment. So, correct.

V. Some Fires Must Be Watched

The counterattack lasted less than twenty minutes.

Afterwards the road belonged to the Imperium again.

Not safe. Not clean. Only back under their control. The traitors withdrew into the refinery ruins, their tanks burning, their infantry shredded, the three renegade Astartes dead or broken among wall remnants and molten metal.

The Salamanders did not gather in the centre. They walked the road, checked doorways, helped the wounded out of wrecked vehicles, themselves carried two Guardsmen out of a collapsed cellar, as if that were something natural.

That disturbed Voss more than all the rest.

She had seen too many Astartes to believe that superhumans were mild. But these here applied fire and mercy with the same calm matter-of-factness.

The green captain came up to her.

Close to, he seemed less like a hero than like an ancient weapon that had at some point learned that precision did not consist only in killing.

"Senior Commissar."

"Captain."

"Why did you hold?"

She looked past him at the road, where the dead still lay between the barricades. "Because retreat in that condition would only have been a slower dying."

He nodded.

"And because otherwise you would have shot us?" he asked.

It was no accusation. Only curiosity in the form of a scalpel stroke.

"Yes," she said.

Another Astartes would have had contempt to spare for that. Or approval. This one showed neither.

"Then," he said, "you did what your office required."

Voss raised an eyebrow. "And you?"

"I do what mine requires."

"Carrying people out of cellars?"

For the first time something moved in his face that one might almost have taken for an expression.

"Some fires must be watched," he said.

Then he turned away.

Later, when the road had been fortified again, the wounded sorted and the line turned into a real defensive sector, Voss stood alone on the old barricade and looked out into the night.

Behind her no one slept. Before them the enemy was gathering anew. Vortan Hive still stood. For the time being.

Leron stepped up beside her, a fresh bandage on her arm.

"I owe you an apology," he said.

"No," she said. "Next time you owe me an earlier halt."

He took it without objection.

Below them the dead Guardsman was being carried away, the one Voss herself had shot. No one spoke his name. Perhaps no one knew it just then. Perhaps that was better. Not every dead man received dignity. Some received only function.

Voss looked down until the bearers vanished in the half-light.

Not one step back, she thought.

On signs and banners that had always been a sentence made of steel. In truth it was made of flesh. Of fear, obedience, rage and the few seconds in which a human being decided whether to stay.

Today enough had stayed.

Tomorrow that would have to hold again. And the day after. And for as long as it took until there was no one left who could stay.

That was the part the banners left out.

VI. The Count

The count came at daybreak.

Voss received it standing, because at that point sitting would have been a statement. Of the four hundred and twelve Guardsmen who had held the sector the day before, two hundred and fifty-one were standing. Seventy-nine lay at the collection points, forty of them ones for whom the medicae service had not yet decided whether they were wounded or expense. The rest was remainder.

"Two hundred and fifty," said Leron.

"Two hundred and fifty-one."

He looked at her.

"One came back last night," said Voss. "Out of the rubble field. Without weapon, without helmet, without explanation. He reported at the barricade and asked for his post."

"And?"

"He got it."

Leron was silent a moment. "By regulation it would have been something else."

"By regulation it would have been to shoot him," said Voss. "I already shot one yesterday. Two in two days is no longer an example but a habit. And habits stop working."

Later she did not write it that way in the report. She wrote: Isolated returns of scattered forces; disciplinary situation stable. It was not a lie. It was only the part a report could carry.

VII. He Read the Ident-Tags

The Salamanders left at midday.

There was no formation, no address, no standard. They gathered at the drop pods the way craftsmen gather their tools, and one of them first walked the row of the dead once more. Not their own. The Guardsmen's.

Voss watched him and did not understand what he was doing until she came closer.

He was reading the ident-tags.

"You have scribes for that," she said.

"Yes," said the Astartes.

He read on.

The captain found her half an hour later at the barricade.

"We are being moved south," he said. "The blocking line there has fallen. You are getting two companies of replacements from the sixth district, if the report is right."

"Reports are seldom right."

"No."

They stood side by side a while and looked out at the same road, each from a different height.

"Captain." Voss waited until he turned to her. "Yesterday you said some fires must be watched. Which one here?"

He did not answer at once. When he did, it did not sound like an answer, but like something he had decided long before.

"Yours."

Then he went to his people.

VIII. It Held Today

The Thunderhawks lifted off at fourteen hundred and two minutes later were nothing more than a sound above the smoke ceiling.

Voss stayed standing on the barricade until that too had vanished.

Before her the enemy was gathering again. Behind her ammunition was being distributed, names struck from lists and others written in. Vortan Hive stood. The sixth district perhaps too. The rest of the world was a question for people with better maps.

A young Guardsman stepped up beside her to take his post. Without helmet, without weapon the day before — today with both. He said nothing. She said nothing. It was not necessary.

Not one step back, Voss thought for the second time in two days.

The sentence was still made of flesh.

But this morning, for the duration of a count, it had also been something else: a decision that two hundred and fifty-one people had made without anyone having to point a weapon at them.

That would not hold.

It held today.