Back From the Brink

[Firepower]

Even from across the no-man’s land, I can taste the foul stench of these pigs. The greenskins are as careless with their dung as their aiming. Not that ours is fairing much better. This is the fifth bombardment today and the practice doesn’t seem to have improved our gunners’ aim a damn bit. Still, with so many Orks to hit, the only way to miss would be to shoot the cannons strait into the muck beneath them.

 

I feel a shudder run down my spine as the beasts let out another brutish warcry, another jubilant celebration for the massacre about to come. They hulk and lumber over their crude barricades, axes swinging in anticipation and guns blazing. My Lieutenant barks the order without even waiting for my own: we’ve done this so many times over the weeks I’m not sure he should bother saying anything at all. The guns down the line open up, the dozens of lasrifle cracks washed out under our heavy bolters’ roar. In an instant, I know it won’t suffice. My hand is reaching for the hilt of my sword when I’m blinded and hurled into an all consuming pain.

 

I don’t know where I am, or how I got here. I try to stand, but a loud snap from my leg and an agonizing jolt of pain through the ruined limb see me plop right back into the muck. I look about through the haze of pain and smoke from the lucky blast that got me. My Lieutenant isn’t any better off, I can see half of him still smoldering a few feet away. The wretched sound of terrified cries and screams begin to filter back into my mind as I regain my senses: the Orks are almost on us.

 

My hand fumbles through the filth to find my sidearm, fat lot of good it’ll do. I make a note to save a round for myself. The ruined chunk of slag I eventually find is almost as painful a sight as the bloody pulp that used to be my leg. The string of obscenities I mutter out comes to a surprised halt when I feel an armored hand on my shoulder, hoisting me up. A deep, metallic “thunk” registers as something is jammed into the ground behind me, bracing my back.

 

“There are worse things to fear than life with a limp, little brother!”

 

Everything about the voice is foreign. Deep, booming, almost mechanical. When I look up I see the giant hulking over me, a shining outline of gold, violet, and ivory. He doesn’t look like anything I’d expected to see in a forsaken marsh pit like this. He snaps me from my dazed reverie with a thrust of his hand into mine, and he clasps my fingers down over the comforting grip of his bolt pistol.

 

“That’s ‘Colonel,’ Astartes,” I retort, half hoping he’ll knock me back out for the insolence. I’m far more scared to hear the laughter booming through his ivory helm. By the Emperor, a Space Marine with humor. This is a world of madness, I’m sure of it.

 

I watch him draw a small sword from a sheath by his hip to fill the hand that left its shield behind my back. It’s the only weapon he hasn’t squandered on a sorry old cripple half dead in the muck. The confusion must be plain on my face, because a moment later he bellows down to me again.

 

“You can give it back when we run out of greenskins to kill, Colonel,” he boasts, and it’s only then I think to look about us. The pigs are in the trenches, and all around they’re being cut down by this giant’s brothers. The look on my men's faces, it’s not something I’ve seen in decades, not since basic training. Pride and fury, true, honest to Emperor zeal is burning in their eyes as they fight beside the Astartes. After weeks of miserable, bloody attrition, endless hours of firing into a green sea that never ends, watching our brothers and friends blown to smithereens and hacked to ribbons, these lads suddenly look like the fresh faced recruits marching on parade back home.

 

I hear the High Gothic battlecry of our saviors roaring over the death screams of the xenos, and my men echo the roar with joy. I even find myself screaming with them as I lean up to put a round through a charging greenskin’s puny brain.

 

“Nos es humanus! Es legio! Es salus!”