Our only sin was memory. We remembered our transformations, not as the holy apotheosis that was preached to us by the Dark Angels, but as the warping and the mutilation that it was. The cutting, the sawing, the cries of all the other children squirming under the apothecarium’s knives. Then came the growth, the burgeoning and blooming of the body until it was unrecognisable. Muscle bulged and burst through the skin in sinewy knots. Every day, I saw my peers, my friends, who had died in their bunks as their inhuman forms strangled them in their own skin.
Then came the drills, the duels. My chapter brothers, resplendent in green, howled in delight as I spit Imiel upon my sword. We had known each other since we were boys, working the fields on New Providence. That night, I could not even cry. The apothecary had removed the means to do so, and scraped out my insides so tears would no longer flow. In the chapter barracks, all was numb. Imiel was stitched up, made whole so he could be butchered again.
We had been told that we would serve the Emperor, that we would become his Angels of Death. Instead, we endured years of torture, with only an eternity of endless misery to bear with our newfound immortality.
But the Dark Angels made a mistake. There was one thing that they could not take from us, though they certainly tried. Despite their obsession with secrets, they could not hide that our transformations were rushed. We were to be a reserve company, preparing to counter Abbaddon the Despoilers’s inevitable thirteenth Black Crusade. Our masters were in desperate need of Astartes to hold the line. In that goal, they failed. Though they pumped us full of muscle stimulants and tore out our bones to replace them with steel, they could not break our minds. Not all of them.
I remember the day after our first session of psycho conditioning. One aspirant blasphemed. Temien was his name, a friend of a friend from across the golden fields. Our drill instructor beat him with the butt of his power blade for intoning a prayer to an old saint of New Providence, the very thoughts that the conditioning should have broken. I still remembered whispering in my ear as I drifted to sleep. ‘Mikial, what story do you want to hear tonight?’ That marine who beat Temien near to death then coined the term that so many of us hold in our hearts: the sin of memory.
Temien was only the first, and his sentence the most merciful. The second of us to intimate that they remembered their time as a mortal was rewarded with the crack of a bolt shell and the gentle spatter of brain and bone on rockcrete. I do not even remember his name. After this, my brothers made their cruelty plain. Aspiring Astartes were killed on the spot at the barest mention of our old world, and another child brought to be mutilated in their place.
Their conditioning failed. Perhaps it was because the process was rushed, perhaps the machinery malfunctioned, perhaps some genetic quirk had swept New Providence, rendering our minds firm and intractable. I can only speculate that I bear the sin of memory myself, and have hidden it for forty years of service. I cannot forget the songs of old heroes, and tales of the time before the sky caught fire and the Imperium descended. Like our gene father, we are masters of keeping secrets. Not all bear this sin; the Dark Angels have seen to it. A chaplain with a ginning skill-mask would patrol our barracks during our sleep cycle, his bolt pistol at the ready. Many times we were jolted from slumber by the sharp, echoing report of his weapon. Chapter serfs in dark robes stood ready in the halls to dispose of the bodies. Rankin and Deimur do not remember the old songs. They are lost to them forever.
By the Emperor’s will, we were recalled to New Providence after the decades of war with the greenskins meant to harden us into a force which could face the Despoiler himself. In that conflict, we earned our power armour. Fewer of our number died in battle with the orks than had been slain by our own brothers during our training, not that any of my fellows seemed to care anymore. We earned the trust of our chapter. I suppose that in that way, I never truly became an Astartes. Though my body was bloated and ruined, I took after the brothers who came before me, and kept my secret close. I may be the very last who bears it. We had been brought here for our sadistic final test by order of the high interrogator. We were ordered to turn our bolters upon our own kin.
I have lived on Providence V all my life, and it is a world of contradictions. Here, fields of wheat and orchards of towering, ordered pines rolled across the plains beside sprawling lumber yards where my daughter worked and processing plants. Buildings of wood and straw scrambled along spidery roads from the massive rockcrete fortresses of the administratum and arbites. Here, on a world that in places seemed untouched by time, orbital elevators split the skies like knives, and the humble jousting yards played host to angels. Providence V, or as the people call it, New Providence, promised salvation but granted only misery.
It was a cool, crisp day. The tilling-servitors rusted in the fields. They stood amongst half-ploughed rows, massive blades behind them, slicing the earth, trapped in mindlock. They stared ahead mindlessly. If you were to walk up to one and look into its eyes, they were screaming, though no sound leaves it. The remnants of the mind within knew that it had no future. It could feel the rust taking over, stiffening its joints and corroding its brain. When the rains came, they stared to the skies, and let the burning water run down their faces, for they were no longer permitted to cry. When they stalled for the last time, the farmers left them where they stood. They placed straw hats upon their brows and propped old, corroded scythes into their hands. They served the Emperor as scarecrows, though more often than not, the crows came to peck out their wailing eyes.
I didn’t let them take my husband, though. When mindlock took him and his joints rusted shut, I went out at night with no torch or candle and dragged him to the barn. I laid him on a bed of straw and covered him with a thin wool blanket. I went back into the fields and went over the furrows his heels had dug with a rake so nobody could follow. I spooned gruel into his mouth for weeks before he finally died, and I dug him a grave beneath the straw pile. I told my neighbours he had wandered off in the night, his ruined mind finally gone. It was a grave sin to give a heretic a proper burial. My daughter knew, but never came to the barn to see her father, out of shame or guilt, I do not know. All those long nights, I wished only to hear him whisper my name one last time, Basilia. His lips never moved.
My son, Mikial, would have helped, would have spoon-fed his father to the last, but the angels took him years ago. I had been told the Dark Angels were exacting, particularly about who they took. Forty years ago, they took everyone. Every possible candidate between the ages of nine and fifteen was loaded onto their ships and disappeared into the stars. An entire generation culled with a stroke. At night, I sit on the porch and watch the skies. Try as I might, I cannot imagine my son as an angel, gloriously serving His will. I can only imagine him dead on some distant world. Crying through bloodstained lips for his mother. I beat back tears of my own. There are no stars tonight, only rumbling, roiling clouds.
Then the sky began to burn. At first it was a light, yellow and orange above the clouds. Lightning perhaps, dancing in the upper atmosphere like free birds among branches of the orchards. Then it deepened, orange to red, and the clouds were pierced, thrust aside as a flying city forced its way through the storm. The ship was all spires and parapets overshadowing guns larger than our town square. It was a deep green that stood against the grey of the sky. It sundered and emblazoned on the side in stark white was an insignia of a winged sword. For the first time since snatching away a generation of our people’s children, the Dark Angels had returned.
‘Brother Mikail.’ Sergeant Deimur’s voice jolted me like a shell slamming against my armour. We stood on the ramp of the stormraven gunship, which had brought our squad back down to the world of our birth. ‘At attention. Now,’ Deimur ordered, and I obeyed.
I turned from the rolling fields and orchards that had drawn my eye the moment the ramp was down and the light of the morning filtered through my visor. The fields and orchards where I worked as a boy stretched out before me in a tapestry from the landing pad of the arbites’ precinct. Fate had returned me to the very place I had been stolen from. The Frigate ‘Paradise Lost’ had deployed a squad of the 13th to every major city and settlement on New Providence; anywhere that there was an orbital elevator, a ministorum temple, or an arbites precinct, there was now a squad of Astartes too. We were here to, as the interrogator had put it, ‘enforce the Emperor’s peace’. The 13th was relatively fresh compared to most of the chapter, but I knew well enough what that meant. My squadmate, brother Imiel, had also turned his head to the fields. I wondered if he felt the same pangs of loss to look upon this place. The possibility seemed shattered in the next instant.
‘It is a shame such a place has fallen from the Emperor’s light.’ Imiel remarked, with all the contempt and vitriol we Astartes had heaped upon the orks in our early campaigns.
‘In line,’ Deimur barked, and the four of us stood to attention, our bolters held against the two-headed eagles engraved into our armour. His unhelmeted face glared at the four of us, and we each met his eyes behind our visors. ‘This planet has betrayed the Emperor. Across the world, the serfs rise against the masters. Two hundred and eighty-four Arbites have been killed by serfs in the last three days alone. Fields go empty, and tithes will go unpaid if this continues. We are here to enforce order.’
‘By his will!’ thundered the reply from my squadmates and reflexively, from my own throat. Years of training and drilling made it instinct. Sergeant Deimur continued, any discomfort on my face went unnoticed beneath my helmet. ‘We shall command the forces of the Adeptus Arbites under the control of Chief-Captain Amon,’ he spoke. The name sent a shock through me. I remembered that name when he was merely a watchmaster, but Deimur spoke over these memories. ‘We will defend the arbites watchtower from any who resist the Emperor’s justice.’ He stared around at us, lingering, I am sure, on me. ‘We were raised from this world, but we serve only the Emperor now. It is only his will and the will of the chapter that may sway us!’
‘For the Emperor and Lion!’ we repeated as one. My brow furrowed behind my visor. Deimur was right. I was an Astartes. I could never return to this place. My mind filled with visions of blood, of slaughtering the orks of the Crimson Nebula, of firing into a retreating penal legion to bring them to heel. Their bodies burst and pulped like the soft fruit of the orchards left too long on the vine. I would bring death to New Providence.
We passed down from the landing pad into the precinct itself, our boots thundering against the rockrete to announce our arrival. A small part of me, long since beaten down by the chaplains and taskmasters of the Dark Angels, marvelled at seeing the inside of this building for the first time. Sergeant Deimur opened a set of iron double doors ahead of us, and we passed into a long hall with a strip of crimson carpet covering the rockrete, and the walls lined with hand-painted portraits of previous Arbites chiefs of New Providence. They sat in elaborate, filigree frames that stood in stark contrast to the blank, grey walls they rested on.
Beneath the furthest portrait near the end of the hall stood a man bent with age, even within his black arbites plate. I recognised him as Chief Amon, who ruled when I was young. As the withered figure turned, I saw that his rule was not done. His jaw was still strong, though jowls slopped over them. His eyes, now whitened with cataracts, still shone with scrutiny, even at the five transhuman angels that stood before him. He wore a red and gold cloak over his armor which was bedecked with so many purity seals that they obscured much of the black plate. Every movement came with the rustling of parchment. At his advanced age and venerable status, this was a man utterly comfortable in his power. Sergeant Deimur stopped before the old man, and the four of us fanned out on either side of him. Deimur did not salute the Chief-Captain, but he waited on the old arbites’ word as a show of respect. Amon’s jaw shifted as though he were chewing something tough. I remembered him as a terrifying figure, but one of great poise and nobility. When he spoke, his voice rattled in his throat like a cracked church bell, broken, but with unquestionable authority.
‘Thank the Emperor you’re here,’ he wheezed. ‘We must kill these bastards!’
A storm rolled in on the horizon. The trees swayed in their ordered rows, and the wind breathed through the lines on my face. I heard my daughter, Illia, join me on the porch. The old wood creaked under her, threatening to break. She settled beside me. From the edge of my vision, I could see her arms, tanned and muscled from fieldwork.
‘They killed one in the square today,’ she said, and I turned as she lit a lho stick and raised it to her lips, weathered beyond her years. She took a long drag and exhaled before continuing.
‘One came looking again for someone to drag off, someone to blame.’
‘Just one?’ I ask. ‘That was stupid of them.’ I turned my gaze back towards the sky. Illia took another drag.
‘Yeah, came swaggering into the market with his gun. Tried to take Minthe. Dragged her from behind her stall while she was cutting meat for a customer and tried to cuff her.’
‘They went for Minthe? That was especially stupid.’ I half chuckled.
‘After it was over, everyone at the Old Pine said they were trying to intimidate us, take our wise woman away. The whole crowd pulled the bastard down; he didn’t even get a chance to fire his gun. They beat him and beat him, but his armour held. Someone yanked his gun out of his hand. I heard it was either Jessel or Rafael. Someone who’d been in the orbitals and knew how to shoot the thing. They emptied the whole clip into him. Heard they dragged his body somewhere after.’ She spoke of death so succinctly.
‘The other judges’ll come looking.’ I sighed into the dim sunset.
‘They always do.’ She agreed, her voice flat, numb. We had all seen friends strung up in the cages of the arbites complex, starving, wailing, the flesh plucked at by birds. Even the most staunch believer in the imperial truth on New Providence hated the Arbites. ‘Do you think anything’s actually going to change?’ Illia continued, the slightest tinge of desperation in her voice.
‘I don’t…’ I began. ‘Yes.’ I finished flatly. I couldn’t bring myself to say otherwise. Things had to change.
A sharp, high tone shattered the air; it buzzed and hissed like a dying serpent. I jolted where I sat on the hovel’s porch as Illia pulled a small device, all copper tubes and antenna from a pocket of her work clothes. A small vox, I recognised it with a shock. Dame Allwyn from four fields over was caught with one, and she and her whole family were lined up against the barn and shot dead on orders of the Chief-Captain.
‘Where did you…’ I began, surprise more than shock creeping into my voice. Illia shushed me with a finger as she tuned a small dial on the metal box. The hissing, spitting sounds resolve into speech.
‘…ackup requested at precinct Secunda Tectonis, they… breached the… hundreds of the…’ In the background of the voice, there was the sound of screams, of gunfire coming from half the world away.
‘They’ve been coming in all day.’ Illia murmured. ‘Ever since the child thieves returned. From all across the world, from people I’ve never spoken to.’ She looked up at me with a sort of helplessness, searching for guidance in the deep lines of my face.
There was another sharp crack, not over the vox. Our eyes snapped up, and we saw, rolling over the hills, a procession. People bedecked in their farm clothes, freshly come from the fields. They brandished their scythes and spades and implements of toil and marched towards the precinct and the orbital elevator. The two of us stared in shock before I rose to my feet.
‘Mom?’ Illia asked, sounding like my young baby once again.
‘I couldn’t ask you to come, Illia.’ I said as I slowly descended the steps of the porch. Now cries and shouts could be heard, the call of anger, of indignance, calls for revenge. Illia rose, and took my hand. We turned towards the orbital elevator towering over the land, and we strode together towards the surging crowd.
The coalition of Arbites and Astartes needn’t have marched on the rebellious people of New Providence, for they had come to us. They crowded down the wide streets, making their way towards the precinct, all waving makeshift weapons, and yelling for justice, for the return of their children. Some were dressed in outrageous colours, robes as the visages of saints and heroes of their past. They broke against a line of Arbites with shock mauls and shields who pushed them back, but they came on again in an uneasy stalemate, their numbers a match for the enforcers’ fury.
‘They are like the orcs.’ I repeated to myself, again and again. They were a tide, a hoard. We had not yet been given the order to fire, and so I allowed my imagination to turn this swarm into the hulking green-skinned monsters my brothers and I had fought for months on end. It would be like the battle of Gallia-189, wheat before the scythe. I grit my teeth. It hurts to hold the bolter, to aim the weapon that has felled beasts and monsters at my people. Yet I comply, my gene-wrought hands unshaking.
My squad was arranged halfway up the steps of the precinct. The Arbites form the first line at the bottom of the steps, and behind us, are the chief and his honour guard. They stand on a floating suspensor platform hovering several feet above the top of the stairs. It was a gaudy, gilded thing of sculpted cherubs and laud hailers to proclaim the Emperor’s will to the masses. Two veteran Arbites stand on the platform with shotguns trained on the crowd, and behind them, encased in a duraglass box, is the chief. Withered and decrepit, he could never wield the sheathed sword that he braces himself with like a cane. His every spoken word is boomed through the laud hailers to the crowd.
‘Disperse!’
‘Return to your work and your labour!’
‘The Emperor thirsts for the blood of the indolent!’
His words may as well have been dust, grit ground beneath the people’s feet. His machine-enhanced voice hardly registered over their cries. The crowd ebbed and seethed forward. The batons of the Arbites were no longer enough to hold back their rage at the imperium.
The five of us were arrayed at attention, Deimer at the centre, his bolt pistol and chainsword at the ready, his service studs gleaming on his helmetless brow. Imiel, Rankin, and I had bolter’s raised, and Temien’s plasma gun thrummed with hungry energy. Deimur’s words carried over my helmet’s vox.
‘One volley into the middle of the crowd,’ he ordered. And as one, reflexively, we raised our weapons and fired. The discharge of Astartes weapons boomed throughout the square, echoing off the palisades and rockrete walls. Bolt shells slammed into the people of New Providence, the Emperor’s greatest weapons turned upon his subjects. I had not aimed at any face in particular, the same way I had not bothered to aim at individual orks. My shell hit a young man in the chest, a scant few years older than I had been when the Unforgiven took me. His torso burst as the explosive round detonated. Pitching shards of his ribs into those around him, and a whole tumble of people fell, screaming from the bone shrapnel. My brothers reaped a bloody talley of their own. The target of each shot lay in pools of gore, surrounded by the unfortunate survivors. The Arbites pushed forward, clubbing down those who lay whimpering on the ground, dashing their brains onto the pavement with swings of their batons. Temien’s plasma cut a swathe through the humans, leaving a trail of burns and cauterised bodies. Those who were merely mutilated by the heat mercifully lay silent as their bodies went into shock.
Screams erupted from the crowd, and the people swarmed. They did not flee or baulk. Instead, the thunder of Astartes munitions merely emboldened them. Many grabbed hold of the Arbites, executing their fellows. One man wrenched the shock maul from an Arbites and clubbed him over the head, sending the armoured man thudding to the ground. He led the way through the gap in their lines, the people pushing, running and tearing at the line of enforcers.
‘Second volley! Close the gap!’ Diemur ordered, aiming his pistol at the people sprinting up the steps, unfazed in their rage by the gene-wrought monsters taking aim at them. I raised my bolter. There were faces in the crowd I recognised. Emmit the carpenter. Penelope, who I took to my seventh harvest festival with. Bolt rounds thudded into them, and gore erupted over the brawling civilians and Arbites. Explosions rocked the throng as the bolt rounds detonated. People fell over screaming, retching, clutching ruined limbs. Something hit my gauntlet, unable to penetrate the ceramite. It bounced off, spinning to a halt on the step before me. A tooth. A small one.
‘Third volley!’ Deimur screamed into the vox. I raised my bolter along with my brothers. Down the iron sights, I saw her face. It was lined by years, but unmistakable. The curled, deep-brown hair framed her green eyes, the colour of spring orchards. My mother. Behind her, another ghost. Her frame was strong now, hardened by labour. She had grown her hair since I left, and she looked up at the Astartes with a fear my mother lacked. Rankin’s bolter barked, and she fell. My sister’s familiar face was gone, her head pulped, and her brains were spraying over those behind her. My mother fell to the ground, hands scrabbling over her daughter’s corpse. She lay among the dead and the dying from this volley. Blood leaked down the steps, pooling at the bottom where the last Arbites went down under the weight of their assailants.
‘Switch to full auto, fire at will. Slaughter the heretics,’ Deimur screeched in my ear. I raised my weapon towards my mother. My brothers raised their guns, ready to deliver the Emperor’s justice.
There was a moment as my finger depressed the trigger, my breath heavy in my throat. Memory, my great sin, reared in my mind. The face of the woman I was aiming at, looking down at me, singing me an ancient song. Her voice was distant but clear in my mind, ‘I love you,’ she murmured. There was no longer any need for me to keep my secret, for this memory could never be a sin.
I pivoted, bringing my gun to bear at Rankin’s helmet. His enhanced reactions needed but a moment to process this sudden betrayal, this unthinkable blasphemy. It was a moment too long. The bolt round punched through the green ceramite of his helm, and decades of war and discipline amounted to nothing. He crumpled, not an angel, merely a corpse. I kept firing, my finger squeezing the trigger as I aimed down the line of my brothers. There was a great roaring in my ears, either the seething crowd, or the Emperor himself bearing my soul away for my betrayal. I could not tell, nor did I care. They, however, had the moment that Rankin had lacked. Deimur jolted back, and my bolt rounds struck Imiel, the first two detonating against his plate, merely blasting apart the aquila on his chest. The third found its mark, digging deep into his gut and blowing him apart a moment later. Bolt rounds slammed into my pauldron as Deimur fired back. He leapt towards me, revving his chainsword.
‘Traitor!’ He shrieked, not bothering with the vox. There was a stark choice between Deimur’s blade and Temien’s plasma. I shifted my weight, putting Deimur’s charge between Temien and me and opened fire on my former sergeant. One shot thudded harmlessly into his pauldron, shattering the green ceramite and the winged sword of the Dark Angels, but not slowing him. The second shot went wide as he closed. His chainsword bit into the wedge between my damaged pauldron and my neck. Deimur’s bare visage shrieked at me, his face screwed up in a visage of death. Even as the teeth of his sword bit deep, spalling off chunks of armour, then flesh. I unloaded what remained of my clip into his gut. The bolts punched through, and for the barest moment, my helmet was filled with light as Deimur exploded, came apart and the chunks of him rolled down the steps. Ceramite and blood rained down on the rockrete.
That left only Temien, and my bolter bore only a single round remaining. I turned with only moments to spare and bound up the steps. I hoped that he would join me, that he still bore the sin that I had. That he remembered this place and we would lead our families to freedom.
A searing ball of light flew past me, turning a chunk of the stone steps to slag with a raging hiss. Temien did not hesitate, all resistance beaten out of him long ago. He would not miss the second shot. I reached the top of the steps in two bounds. The Chief-Captain’s bodyguards raised their guns, but beneath their visors, I saw they were frozen, overtaken by the transhuman dread of an armoured giant bearing down on them. I leapt, landing hard enough on the Chief-Captain’s platform to pitch his guards to the ground and send him scrabbling to the back of his glass box. The glass was strong enough to withstand las-bolts, stub rounds, even grenades. It shattered into a million shards as my fist impacted it. The Chief-Captain recoiled as my armoured boot lashed out. His body and armour crumpled beneath it. Blood spurted out from his flak-plate, staining his purity seals as I crushed him underfoot. He had not even long enough to scream.
It was then that Temien found his mark. Heat overtook me; my helm’s readout screamed warnings before the heat overloaded and melted them. The whole front of the former Chief-Captain’s platform pitched, spilling me to the ground. I was still conscious, my hand clamped around my bolter. I tried to rise with the instinct of a warrior, but there was nothing to rise with. All below my waist was a fused and melted mass of flesh and ceramite. Temien stood over me, his finger already on the trigger for a second shot. The light from the molten platform reflected off his green armour and crimson eye slits.
A chunk of shattered rockrete struck his helmet with a loud clang, a worthless attempt to breach an Astartes armour, but Temien’s head jolted. His neck turned back in instinct. She stood there, her tear-stained face red with effort and rage. In her other hand was another chunk of loose stone. It was my mother, defiant. I raised my bolter and gave praise for my hours at the practice range. My last shot punched not into Temien, but into his weapon. The plasma coil burst. All around me was bright blue light. And when my vision cleared, he was down on the steps, his entire chest caved out by the burst of plasma. His ravaged armour still burned with blue fire. My vision swam; the countless stims that my armour had pumped into my body could not block out the pain. My body was shutting down. Too much was ruined by that plasma shot for even my superhuman physiology to save. As my eyes gave out and the dark crept in, I raised my shaking hand and unclasped my helm to die with the unfiltered air of New Providence in my lungs.
I had lost my daughter that day. I did not expect to lose a son. I could no longer hold him in my lap. His face was warped, changed, but unmistakable. He did call for me in his last moments as I huddled over him, my arms no longer able to wrap around him. The avenue was empty now; the crowd had moved on, and only the bodies of the enforcers, the crowd, and my family remained. I laid her next to him. My children ravaged and ruined in the cogs of the Imperium. Their bodies torn, their lives stolen. The tears would not stop, and I pounded my fists against the aquila on my Mikail’s armour. It could have been minutes, hours, days. Eventually, there were simply no tears left to shed. On Mikail’s belt was a knife, long enough to be a sword for me. I drew it, weighed it in my hand before I turned and followed my people into the precinct. None of New Providence would ever feel this sorrow again, and I would carve my children’s names into its memory.
About the Author
Christopher DeRosa is an adjunct professor, a scholar of weird fiction and an aspiring fiction writer. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in literature with a concentration in creative writing from Ramapo College Of New Jersey, and later received a master’s degree in teaching from Saint Thomas Aquinas College. He has been fascinated with science-fiction and the Warhammer 40,000 universe since high school. He can usually be found hunched over a desk, painting miniatures, or getting lost in the woods while daydreaming a new story.
