The Smell of Blood and Antiseptic
Campaign game session summary, set in the Fantasy Flight Warhammer 40,000 TTRPG setting, owned by Games Workshop.
The first thing Haka Tonga understood was scale.
Not fear. Not confusion. Not the question of where, or how, or why. The first thing his mind registered as it dragged itself back from wherever it had been was the simple physical fact of his own body: massive, grey-skinned, filling the slab beneath him as though the room had been designed to hold him specifically. The hospital gown split across his back as he moved. The medical station beside him reached his thigh. Everything in this room had been built for someone smaller. Someone human.
He was not human. That much came back first.
The other four stations held figures stirring to wakefulness: a pale warrior with burn-scarred forearms, a compact Astartes whose eyes opened as though he had been waiting for the moment, a broad-shouldered giant studying the ceiling with the methodical attention of a man cataloguing a room before he decided what to do in it, and a figure whose stillness before rising lasted precisely one heartbeat too long, controlled rather than groggy: the economy of a Raven Guard suppressing any outward sign of disorientation until he had something worth acting on.
Standing between all of them and the door was a Space Marine. One arm ended in a bound stump at the shoulder. His face was angular and bruised, his expression level and measuring. The force sword at his hip was already half-drawn.
“You’re awake,” he said. “We have about two minutes.”
His name was Brother Lusandro, Blood Ravens Chapter, seconded to the Deathwatch, the last living member of a kill team that had come to Hekkan III and found it had walked into an abbatoir. He gave them the shape of the situation without sentiment. The planet was under the effective control of a genestealer cult; the governor himself was the cult’s psychic master; a Tyranid fleet would be coming; of that he was certain, though not of when. His team had come to destroy the cult leadership before the planet could be delivered to the hive mind on a platter. The cult had been considerably better prepared than their intelligence suggested. Lusandro was the sole survivor of his kill-team. His ship was in orbit, but it might as well have been in another system. All communication from the surface had been cut, and until whatever was responsible for the blackout was found and destroyed, there was no extraction and no word to anyone above Hekkan III.
He pressed the five marines into Deathwatch service with no ceremony and no apology. There was no time for either. He set his combat knife on the nearest surface and held out his bolt pistol, one clip and no spare. He kept his force sword for himself. Haka claimed the knife. Ignis took the pistol.
Nikodemus Phalko recognized what the claw marks on Lusandro’s armour actually meant. The Scythes of the Emperor had not been a large chapter before the Second Tyrannic War. They were smaller now: a few hundred survivors, rallying around whatever had not been consumed. Nikodemus had spent the closing years of that war looking at rending claw wounds, and the memory of them had not been stored in whatever part of his mind the stasis had taken. He knew what had made those marks, and he said so with flat certainty. Something shifted in the room. The cult’s nature was no longer a briefing. It was a fact that Nikodemus Phalko had carried home from a war that had nearly finished his chapter.
They searched the lab while they could. Azirafale moved to the occupied specimen tank and examined it with professional care, the long clinical habit of a Sanguinary Priest who has learned that what he doesn’t understand is what kills his brothers. What floated in the clouded solution was large, partially carapaced along the outer limbs, human in some prior version of itself and no longer. An experiment that had been discontinued. The dead scientists on the floor had presumably had opinions about the project that were no longer relevant. A data-slate lay face-down on the workbench. Handwritten notes in an interrupted hand. A locked cabinet sealed with an Inquisitorial mark that the right application of an Astartes body was persuasive enough to open.
Inside: ampoules of a clear compound, sealed and unlabelled. They took those too.
The oath of moment was brief and without pomp. Nikodemus Phalko took the words as a declaration rather than a ceremony, the natural register of a Scythes of the Emperor sergeant, a chapter that had learned to do the essential things with what it had left and not wait for the ideal conditions. The others received it. Lusandro held up his hand before the last syllable settled; he had perceived something in the corridor.
Haka Tonga moved before the others. His body knew things that his waking mind had not yet recovered. He was through the door-frame and low along the wall in a movement too clean for a man who had just woken from forced stasis, a Carcharodon’s combat instincts running without waiting for permission
The others followed him out of the room and when the shapes came around the junction, they resolved into bodies: a security captain, four soldiers with lasguns, and behind them an ogryn that filled the width of the passageway like a wall that had decided to walk.
Haka closed the distance with the nearest soldier before the man had raised his lasgun, plunging his knife into his skull.
Orin Kel and Azirafale followed swiftly, their hospital gowns flapping, and engaged two more soldiers with their bare hands. Phalko followed a few steps behind.
Ignis Sontari held back at range with the patience of a man who understood that his purpose was not to close the distance but to cover the brothers who had. He waited for a gap in the press of bodies, found it, and fired his pistol carefully, with a Devastator’s regard for where his shots landed.
Lusandro used his psychic powers to jam the ogryn’s heavy stubber to avoid a point blank burst into his brothers. The brute dropped the weapon in frustration and drew a heavy chain-axe. Haka set his sights on the ogryn next and skewered his arm to the wall. The ogryn grabbed the axe with its free hand and carved open Haka’s chest in retaliation.
Moving like lightning, Phalko snatched a knife from one soldier and plunged it into another. Kel and Azirafale recovered weapons from the fallen and pressed their attack.
In a matter of moments, the corridor went quiet. The security detail was no more and Lusandro was already moving, dragging bodies into the nearest office without a word, closing the door behind him. No one spoke. He led them down the corridor that smelled of recycled air and old carpeting to another room, deeper in the palace’s administrative wing.
Inside was an indoctrination facility that had seen better days. Five reclining chairs with neural interface headsets waited in a row, more throne than seat, the Mechanicus sigil on the wall barely hidden beneath a coat of the governor’s seal. The paint job was uneven. The sigil showed through anyway.
The marines sat. The headsets settled. And then: knowledge.
Not instruction, not voice. More like a room inside each of them that had been locked and was now lit. Weapon weights. Firing solutions. Tactical frameworks. The language of violence, fluent again. For Azirafale it was the weight of a reductor in one hand and the rhythm of a Narthecium in the other: the full architecture of his training returned to him like a room he had forgotten he owned. When they came back to themselves, Lusandro was at the door with his back to them, watching the corridor.
He had not sat down. He would not.
Azirafale worked quickly after that. Among what he had taken from the lab were the sealed ampoules; he examined them now, and recognized the compound: a psychic suppressant, designed for extended continuous use. He set them aside without comment and turned to what else needed doing. He had, in what he had salvaged, enough to do what the team needed: treat what the corridor battle had opened, stabilise what the stasis had weakened, patch Lusandro’s stump with something better than improvised cloth. He had a Sanguinary Priest’s regard for the living and an apothecary’s disregard for bedside manner, and the two together produced results.
The team discovered a weapons locker at the far wall and broke it open with brute force. It yielded a chainsword, a shield, a long-las with two charge packs, and a flamer. Ignis Sontari’s eyes glowed with anticipation as he looked at the flamer. No one argued when he took it.
They stood in a small room, in a palace full of enemies, on a planet whose damnation was already decided. They had no extraction, no communications they could reach, and a tenuous grasp of their own identities.
But they were no longer unarmed, they had a mission, and each other.
That would have to be enough.
Leave a Reply