The fading light of Armageddon’s bloated red sun washed feebly over the desert encampment. The twin moons started their long, slow climb into the heavens. As the searing heat of the day faded, the camp came to life. The roar of great engines filled the air as the crew of the Shadow Swords started up their enormous tanks. Slowly, drugged by the heat, the men of the Fourth Imperial Guard Army of Armageddon emerged from their bubble tents into the dying daylight.
The men were tired, listless, not quite awake. Sergeant Raphael listened to them grumble about the heat, the constant threat of spiderscorpions, the possibility of an Ork attack. Their complaints seemed almost amusing to the Blood Angel. These men thought of the deserts lands outside their hive cities as the closest thing to hell they could find without dying.
How little they really knew, thought Raphael. This place was a child’s nursery compared to the world on which he had been raised. These men’s lives, hard though they were, had been sojourns in paradise compared to the upbringing he had endured. But then, he thought proudly, he was a Blood Angel, one of the children of Sanguinius, who had died preparing the Emperor’s way against the Great Evil One himself.
Raphael studied the dunes, so like and yet so unlike the deserts of Baal Secundus, his birthworld.
Convection currents raised small dust devils in the air. Heat haze shimmered on the horizon, making distances all but impossible to judge. One of the great sand storms, capable of burying an army alive, could be approaching at this very moment and they would not know, unless warned by a weather augury from one of the Monitors placed in orbit by the Adeptus Mechanicus. It was true; this was a harsh land, but it could not compare to Baal Secundus.
Here the wasteland was a chemical slag, by-product of a hundred centuries of industrial production. Rivers of sludge, soiled by the output of hive cities like Tartarus and Acheron, ran down to the poisoned seas. On Baal Prime the only sea was the Sea of Glass, a smooth shimmering plain of silica fused by the detonation of ancient, forbidden weapons. The deserts were multi-coloured wastes, the dusty corpses of continents made uninhabitable by the deadly chemical death clouds used long ago in the wars that ended the Dark Age of Technology.
Here men lived in teeming hive cities, protected from the elements by mile-thick plasteel walls. Only the mighty Ork invasion by Warlord Ghazghkull Thraka could have driven them into the desert. On Baal Secundus all the old cities were dead, and their rubble was inhabited by scavenger tribes. Only the Shunned Ones, their faces eternally masked, dwelled among the radioactive ruins, their factories using materials extracted from the corpses of their cities to churn out the endless stream of weapons they bartered to true man and deviant alike.
Here the worst the weather threatened was sand storms capable of shredding an unarmoured man down to the bone. On Baal Secundus there were Hellstorms, where thousand mile an hour winds uprooted great boulders and sent them tumbling across the tortured land, where lightning bolts containing the power to shatter mountains lashed the scarred earth. There was acid rain, which could dissolve armour and eat through flesh. There were chemical blizzards whose multi-coloured snowflakes, laced with the old deadly neurotoxins, could dissolve nerve tissue in fiery agony or send men mad with strange hallucinations or open up the mind of the potential psyker to the dark influence of daemons.
‘Here the main threats were heat and thirst. On Baal Secundus there were other more insidious ones: poisoned wells and deadly rad-zones where the only warning of oncoming death was a strange glow in the night sky or the sudden clicking chitter of a rad alert amulet.
Here, on Armageddon, the only living threats were landragons and spiderscorpions. Only now, during the Ork invasion, would a traveller be attacked by armed warriors. On Baal Secundus roving hordes of mutants and true men wandered the Ash deserts, fighting terrible battles for the possession of scant resources. Defending the sites where they dug up the artifacts of the ancients, or the holy battlegrounds where men might join the Chosen.
Raphael thought back to those days with something like nostalgia. Then he had been a simple warrior, fighting for nothing more than his life, and a chance to join the Chosen. Now he was a Blood Angel and the awesome responsibility of defending mankind against its enemies rested on his shoulders. Now he was sworn to uphold the legacy of Sanguinius, no matter how heavy that burden became.
He had donned more than a protective suit when he put on the crimson armour of the Blood Angels. He had donned the mantle of a tradition that dated back to the time of the Great Crusade, when the Emperor yet walked among men. He had joined the endless procession of mighty warriors who had marched into battle beneath the Blood Angels’ banner. He had become a successor to men who had defended the Emperor's palace on Earth, the holiest site in the entire galaxy, against the treacherous legions of Chaos.
When the Sanguinary Priest had implanted the geneseed that controlled the process that transformed him into a superhuman warrior he had implanted a living link with the Primarch of his Chapter, for the gene-seed contained cells cultured from the generunes of Sanguinius himself. When he had drunk from the Chalice Incarnadine he had sipped wine mixed with the cloned blood of the Winged One himself and that blood had mingled with his own to start the transformation. When he had been shut in the great golden sarcophagus and the meditation nodes attached to his head, visions of the Blood Angel's life had flickered through his mind. Now he could remember them only when the Black Rage came upon him and visions of Sanguinius’ last moments danced through his mind driving him insane with grief and fury. But he knew that he had shared some of the thoughts of one of the Emperor’s Primarchs and had been granted a privilege given to few men, even Space Marines.
With such privileges came a terrible burden. He knew that the Blood Angels were a dying Chapter. Their fading might take many thousands of years but it was happening, slowly and inexorably. Tiny errors in the gene-runes had accumulated down the long centuries, small flaws that gathered together to produce greater ones. The first generations of the Blood Angels had not suffered from the Black Rage, that had come later, had crept in so slowly that it had barely been noticed until too late. There was the thirst too, that sometimes irresistible longing to drink the blood of their enemies that took even the most restrained members of the Chapter. Some of the Chapter’s more philosophically inclined members had theorised that perhaps this taint might lead them to Chaos. Raphael knew this was impossible. The Space Marines of the Blood Angels would rather die than allow that to happen. Still, it was a discomforting thought.
A man in the uniform of a Guard lieutenant approached him, wary respect visible in every line of his face. He gave a perfect salute, as if standing on a parade ground, not in this burning desert. Sergeant Raphael turned his gaze on the man.
“Sir, my men are almost prepared to move out. Are you ready to depart, Sir?”
We have been ready to depart all day, thought Raphael. It seemed best not to demoralise the man by telling him this. His warriors lacked the superhuman hardihood of a Space Marine. There was nothing to be gained by rubbing this fact home. The Guard were true soldiers of the Emperor even if they were only men.
Only men, thought Raphael and caught himself. Yes, to be a Space Marine was to be more than an ordinary man. It was to have keener senses, and stronger muscles, faster reflexes and deadlier weapons. It was to have a life many times longer than an ordinary man, for Space Marines shared some of the gene-runes of the immortal Primarchs. Yes indeed, being a Space Marine was to be more than a man, but it was also to be a man. That was never to be forgotten. Space Marines were drawn from the ranks of men, and it was their duty to serve Man. Many generations ago entire Chapters had forgotten that and fallen into heresy and worship of Chaos.
“Yes, lieutenant, we are ready.”
Suddenly, he heard a single chime, like the tolling of a great temple bell, resound in his comm-net earbead. He touched the rune of communication and listened to the voice of his Company Captain.
“Sergeant Raphael, you and your men are to report to Company headquarters at once. You have been assigned to a most urgent mission. The Emperor be praised”.
“The Emperor be praised”, responded Raphael. “We are on our way.”
