“All combat units to main deck,” I croaked into my vox, wheezing in the ability to breathe again, now that I no longer had a giant metal foot on my chest. I gingerly rose to my feet, and debated pursuing Sigird in the trajectory I had seen him flung, or turning around for Penitent.
I chose Penitent.
I found her, amazingly, on her feet as well, though her left arm had been horribly damaged, and her step was staggered and lacking her usual grace. Her right arm seemed fine, and was screechingly dragging her Eviscerator behind her. “Are you alright?” I called to her.
“You’re one to ask. Your arm?” she asked.
“I’ll find a third,” I shook my head. “Come here, I’ve got you,” I said, assisting her as best I could with one arm. “Just drop it, we’ll come back for it later,” I suggested, referring to her Eviscerator.
“What was it you told Mr. Hager? You’re just looking for an excuse to embrace me?” she asked, laughing, but did not shirk away from my grasp, instead leaning a bit on me for support after dropping her weapon. I did not mind helping her. “Where is the heretic?”
“Dead or dying,” I answered. “Let’s find out which,” I offered, and she nodded. Having once carried her full weight a handful of miles after her battle with the Eversor, helping her onward here was far easier, if still demanding. I brought her in the general direction I theorized Sigird might be. On the way, I found Mirena beyond the Bird, which she had ‘landed’ on the ship’s main deck. But as that main deck was slanted and slowly sinking into the water, it looked like an awkward landing. That was not my concern in the moment, though. “Get back on the Bird!” I shouted to her as soon as I saw her. “This is still an active combat zone!”
Being some distance away, she merely raised a thumb’s up, then pointed to her left. I understood. She knew where Sigird had wound up. I brought Penitent in that direction, and sure enough, we found the one-armed hulk of a man bleeding out on the hull of his own ship. Except, his newfound fortitude would not allow him to die as a makeshift Astartes, so in reality he was just perpetually suffering on the side of his ship. “Look at the three of us, huh?” he groaned as we came into his field of view. “Each down an arm. Hardly my intent with you. I doubt this was your pilot’s intent with me.”
“Not remotely, no,” I replied, and finally got a better look at him. His face was caved in, having been rammed by an Astartes aircraft and then smashed along the hull of the Scorix Litany. Most of the cybernetics in the back of his skull were destroyed or otherwise disconnected from him.
“Well, Pyrras, what do you know? You were right after all, eh?” he acknowledged, accepting his fate at my mercy, of which I would have none for him. When he asked that question, Silas and his fireteam revealed themselves, joining us by my side. “Do what you must. My usefulness in the Imperium seems to have run its course.”
“If it ever existed in the first place,” I growled, raising my Bolt Pistol toward his head. My allies did the same with their armaments, save for Penitent, who did not have one.
“For Czevia,” Luther hissed.
“For Hans,” Xavier agreed.
“Thaddeus,” Silas nodded.
“Malkyle,” Penitent chimed in.
“For Val Eracian,” I finished.
“Who the heck is V—” Sigird started, but I did not wait for him to finish before lighting him up. My allies fired into him in unison, the four of us pouring every manner of weapon at our disposal into the Rogue Trader-turned-Astartes. Being what he was then, I sensed him retain consciousness into our third volley. And he was still alive by the seventh. I stopped after the tenth, and my allies followed suit soon after. Luther was the last one to stop shooting Sigird, and I did not much blame him. When the smoke breezed away to reveal Sigird’s remains, we saw all that was left was a sizzling slop of flesh and blood, slathered across the already-Vostroyan-red armor he once wore.
“Good frigging riddance,” I sighed. “Silas?”
“Need help with her, sir?” he asked, referring to Penitent.
“Indirectly. We left her sword some distance back that way. Would you mind bringing it to the Bird for us?” I asked him.
“Not at all, sir,” he nodded, and left to fetch it. In the meantime, I helped Penitent to the Bird, whose bay opened as we neared. Xavier and Luther kept our flank safe. I sat Penitent down on the bay’s great, oversized door, and sat next to her. Ahead of us was the city of Abseradon. This was really the first look of it I had since killing Espirov.
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The Hive City was on fire.
Mirena approached me from behind and knelt down to wrap her arms over my shoulders, leaning her head against the back of mine. “I believe it’s time we had our drink, Cal,” she whispered to me.
“Yes, Mirena, it is. Good shot, by the way,” I complimented her.
“Well, best pilot and all, I gotta put my money where my mouth is sometimes,” she chuckled, and Castecael sat down next to me to begin tending to my missing arm.
“Tend to Penitent. An augmetic can be replaced. Hers is in more dire need of attention,” I ordered our medicae. Castecael looked Penitent up and down and nodded in agreement, for once not prioritizing my injuries.
A few moments passed in silence, then, before Silas returned. He tossed Penitent’s Eviscerator aboard and sat to my side, where Castecael had been, and gestured for Xavier and Luther to board the Bird. They obeyed. “What happens now?” he asked, nodding toward Abseradon. Some missiles streaked across the skyline out of the city, heading skyward. I worried that might happen—the puppet-Okustin had known how to use the Skorpius tank too efficiently. I had worried these puppets were given intrinsic knowledge over weapon systems, and it seems my worries were right.
“We can’t do anything to stop that, boots on the ground,” I shook my head. “But we can join the Navy up above and oversee their operation, make sure this crap never gets off Hestia Majoris. After that, we head for Quintus to report in.”
“That’ll be ugly,” Penitent acknowledged.
“Yeah, might be our toughest battle yet,” I scoffed. Explosions, unheard, glimmered above the clouds over Abseradon. Soon thereafter, the naval vessel I had requested be posted there emerged from the clouds, enflamed and falling fast. “Come on. You don’t want to be looking at or hearing that thing’s landing,” I told my crew, who nodded and moved inside the Bird. The bay closed shortly thereafter, and we took off before the colossal blastwave of the vessel’s impact with Abseradon hit us. We left the sinking Scorix Litany, with its incinerated captain, far behind us.
***
In the weeks and months that followed, Abseradon saw massive casualties, as one might expect. The heretics had made 11,000 puppet-Astartes, though only 6,000 were actually deployed. The others either malfunctioned or were destroyed by the initial orbital strike on the production facilities I had ordered Batos to make. The local Arbites were the first responders to the onslaught, and they were completely wiped out, the Proctor I had met included. The PDF then followed up and suffered extreme losses as well. The fighting was intense, stretching all throughout the city and beyond its walls as PDF forces chased down puppets that sought to bunker down elsewhere. Alternatively, the puppets knew that some PDF strongholds were beyond the city walls, and so assaulted them directly on the PDF’s turf.
As I understand it, the intense bloodshed resulted in the formation of a cult of its own, feeding on what appeared to be the end of days for Hestia Majoris. With the ample sacrifice of thousands, if not millions, of citizens daily by the hands of the puppets, daemonspawn began to trickle into the city and make matters even more treacherously difficult for the PDF. In addition to the first naval vessel we saw collide with Abseradon—which in and of itself killed about four billion people instantly—another two were brought down over the course of the ordeal as well, though they landed in the seas.
Eventually, after three months of hellacious fighting, two regiments of the Imperial Guard arrived, one of which was the 38th Mordian Regiment. We passed on Czevia Gao’s remains to them. The Guard were able to wipe out the insurgency, both within and without, after another month. All said and done, Holicar Espirov’s contingency was responsible for 29 billion deaths and the loss of a tremendous amount of infrastructure. The conflict came to be known as the Red Stain of Abseradon, or to the locals, just the Red Stain, which given that I had made three of its four instigators into red stains, I felt the title was fitting.
In the wake of the Red Stain, martial law continued. The Ixaniad Sector was heavily ruled by its noble class, and the absence of the nobles in Abseradon—as they had been abducted by Espirov and the Phaenonites—left a power vacuum that a great deal of wealth volunteered to fill. In time, Abseradon would repopulate and rebuild.
Antonius Sigird was declared Excommunicate Traitoris, his name expunged from the Imperium’s recorded history. Vostroya was met with subtle punishment and shame for having raised the traitor, but they sought repentance and atonement. I did not blame the world for the man, especially not when the world came to hate the man, as I had known they would.
When I sent my initial report of my findings to Lord Inquisitor Halloid van der Skar, my superior, I was initially congratulated on my success on Hestia Majoris, but I was recalled all the same back to Quintus. On my return home, I learned that another Ordo Sicarius Inquisitor, Vertusias Guldwald—whom I had met on Quintus some time before, and knew to be loyal—had been dispatched to Hestia Majoris to ‘clean up.’ I did not know what the details of that meant at the time, though I would soon be able to infer. Governor Merek was killed with a long-range weapon that the (rebuilding) Arbites were unable to recognize, but the Inquisition in charge of the investigation assured Abseradon that all would be well, and that a new Governor would be appointed with, and I quote, “a bit more of a spine.”
This created a political upheaval and thrust Abseradon into militant odds with the Inquisition. Politicians, Planetary Governors included, liked to believe they were above, or at least diplomatically on par with, the Inquisition.
They were wrong about that, of course.