Within mere moments of hitting the metal-grated floor the twelve mercenaries had gone their separate ways, old club-arm half limping and half jogging away, the Kroot loping off in search of fresh DNA, and one-by-one they disappeared off on their separate errands until Phant was left all by himself. Above was only the gaping maw of the pod, the red lights continuing to blink even after the internal klaxon had been killed; how then was the klaxon still- Ah! Realisation filtered into his mind, the pirates had finally become aware of their presence, and someone - probably a little more clever than the others - had now put the place on the highest of alerts. Soon every section of the depopulated colony would be stiffened by a slowly more determined resistance, and it was up to he and his fellow killers to make sure that it was not merely [i]broken[/i], but annihilated utterly.

Soft but quick steps carried him further into the complex and, if his usually accurate memory served him faithfully, in the very direction of the colonies comm-section; once there he could silence the alarm, destroy any chance that his enemy may have of contacting their absent fleet, and hopefully find some records or transmissions that may be of interest to his employers.

It was some half-an-hour later that he came upon the first body, clearly what had once been a pirate but was now no more than a corpse separated from its head. As he pressed on, sounds of battle reaching him from far and near, the tally of bodies began to pile up - all of them pirates, not a mercenary among them.

Upon reaching a junction, his lasgun strafing from left to right in practiced swings, the Krieger came upon one of the most glorious and at the same time one of the most piteous sights he had ever seen in all his years of constant war.


[hr]


Propped with his back against one of the cold metal walls was the behemoth of a man from his pod, before him a veritable sea of broken and decimated bodies - man, xenos and some he could not identify alike - every one slain by the 'man' before him, a man who had emerged from the pod wearing nothing but plain grey combat fatigues and wielding only a combat knife that would have been a sword to any other being; all manner of wounds, from las-burns to stubbers shells to gashes caused by melee weapons, were visibly upon the frame of the once proud and powerful transhuman warrior.

"Some...foul xenos poison," sputtered the ashen-faced giant, his voice like two rocks grating against one another, blood seeping from his wounds and from between his lips, "they have killed me this day." His head lolled back against the metal, his eyes focusing and then becoming unfocused in turn, even the super-human organs unable to stop the insipid progress of the foreign poison that was slowly shutting them down.

Phant stepped over the closest bodies and came to kneel beside the Astartes, one gloved hand holding his lasgun at the ready, while his other cautiously reached out...in one swift motion a huge hand, still more than capable of snapping the Guardsmans own limb with ease, came to grasp the outstretched limb in an almost gentle embrace.

"Have I done enough, brother?" Queried the dying angel, his face a sudden mask of pain and his eyes staring off into some memory only he could see, "have I atoned? Will the Emperor have me back?" Whoever he was looking at, it was not Phant and the Krieger gave a small nod of his head.

[I]In life, war. In death, peace. In life, shame. In death, atonement.[/i]

The words echoed in his head, and Watchmaster 1511 felt not for the last time the sudden pang of guilt which was part of him from the moment he was [i]born[/i].

"You have done what I have thus far failed to do," he assured the Astartes in a muffled voice that sounded as if he were sucking soup through his masks filter, "you have given your life for the Emperor and atoned for your past transgressions, be at peace and know that he will welcome you. You are his son, and now you go to be with your father."

There was something almost childlike about the Marine as he died, a smile spreading across his previously pained features, everything relaxing and his last breath rattling through his lips and out into the blood-tinged air. It was mostly sobering, seeing such a being laid low, yet not all in the Imperium or beyond were wielders of mighty weapons or cybernetically augmented fights, some were just men. Had Phant had the knowhow to withdraw the progenoid gland of the dead warrior he would have, and that saddened the soldier more than the death itself.

Many believed that a Krieger could not be sad, that he could feel about as much empathy as a piece of rock, or one of the lifeless Necrons, and for the most part this may have been true - Phant could still recall the feeling of the shrapnel hitting his head, carving through his helmet and into his brain, causing him to [i]feel[/i]. Oh he had had emotions before, but as with every soldier of his planet he had been raised only to fight, to fight only to die, and he had been the worst at that even [b]before[/b] the injury that caused him to desert his post.


[hr]


Returning to the present, both hands going once more to the lasgun and its forty-five centimetres of sharpened metal, he rose once more to his feet and moved forward with a little more urgency. Eventually his steps carried him to his target, apparently the Astartes having killed every pirate between him and the comm-section in his death throes, a blessing that he would make sure to take full advantage of.

The comm-section was actually made up of several rooms, including a clerks office where a record of each transmission and important business documents had been kept - as well as those assertaining to security, supplies and so forth - while the comm-relay itself sat in another room. Inside the rooms were around a dozen or so of the Scarred Maiden thugs in total, including a large and scaly Tarellian Dog-soldier and a xenos unknown to him - this latter figure looked for all intents and purposes like a bipedal ant, its eyes two globes of pure black and its mandibles clacking together in some crude form of communication.

Phantasm felt a familiar rage building inside him, a burning hatred for both the renegades and killers of the innocent and the abominable things with which they consorted. There was a certain hypocrisy to his feelings, but he did not pause to dwell on it, instead favouring the traditional Kreigan doctrine of blanking out all thoughts of fear, retreat or surrender and hurling oneself into the jaws of his enemy. It was a tactic that had always served him well in the past.

Twenty-five supercharged shots were all that each of his four or five charge-packs contained, capable of searing through flesh and most forms of armour with relative ease, the Lucius-pattern often referred to as a 'hotshot' lasgun on account of this particular aspect of the weapon; it was not with this that he drew first blood however, a quick yank of a pin and a heave sending the standard-issue no. 38 frag grenade spinning away through the air to land with a [b]clunk[/b] in the middle of the comm-chamber.

"What the frak i-"

Fragments of lethal shrapnel burst apart from the central charge, five of the pirates immediately injured or killed - effectively taking them out of the coming engagement - blood spraying across the various consoles and instruments as limbs were slashed and flesh flayed. The response from the rest of the dozen was admirably fast, weapons appearing in hands and yells erupting from enraged throats, most looking up just in time to see the skull-shaped respirator appear at the doorway with his lasgun raised.

Using the door as a chokepoint he fired into the seething mass of adversaries with parade ground precision, a burning shot practically evaporating the face of one scruffy man as he scrabbled for his stubber pistol, a second shot gutting a gangly woman as she screeched her hatred at the veteran blocking her escape, one fluid sweep bringing the ant-thing into his sights and a brief seconds squeeze of the trigger sent the thing tumbling back into one of the blood-slicked consoles with a screech of its own.

"Get him! He can't kill us all!"

Return fire forced Phant to duck back into the corridor as sparks and melted metal followed him, the four remaining degenerates close on his heels.

Twenty-two shots left.

Two more pirates were shorn apart by superheated laser as they tried to close on him, a lucky shot from an autogun winging him and sending him to the deck by the force of the shot alone.

Soon enough the remaining two reavers were on him, the first being the recipient of two blasts of laser and inches of steel jutting from his back, the Tarellian giving a feral hiss as it saw it's last comrade lifted from his feet and blown from the nozzle of the Kriegers lasgun. Now it was he and the human, alone of twelve pirates, and he did not intend to lose.

A hiss proceeded the attack of the shorter but broader creature, its tale swinging like a club as it attacked, strong hands grasping for the Krieger only to recoil somewhat as Phant did the last thing it had expected - instead of withdrawing or pausing to shoot it dead from a distance, the Death Korpsman simply yelled a warcry and hurled himself headlong at the beast, professional thrusts from his bayonet drawing blood from a dozen wounds as the Tarellian swung this way and that at the black-clad annoyance.

It was no good - raw strength and brutal attacks were nothing when compared to a Watchmaster forged first on Krieg, then on a hundred other worlds, through campaigns that saw thousands of his comrades fall and his promotion assured by such suicidal charges as this - Phant weaving away from the final attack and leaping forward, aiming down and then thrusting with all force behind the blow, driving his blade straight through the brain of his adversary from above.

Just like that it was over.


[hr]


All across the colony the klaxons fell silent, only the sounds of battle able to be heard now, those that survived of the forty-eight slowly but surely driving the Scarred Maidens back to their ultimate fates; with the comm-section secured, as well as the only apparent prisoner in the complex, all that was left to do was to mop up the last vestiges of resistance, storm the command chambers and execute the Captain, and report back to the Ordos Thran on a job well done.

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