Guard fic 5.0
The final chapter. I feel a bit sad now.
They had to lift King bodily into the APC, and he could feel the pain lancing through his chest as they did. The rest of the band of survivors were generally in better shape than he, though Bill in particular had taken a battering from the explosion and one of the troopers in the rescue squad was now employed digging shards of twisted metal out of his back. King could feel every bump on the journey as a dagger in his chest and was concentrating on trying not to redecorate the inside of the Chimera with more of his blood than he could spare, while the guards asked him questions he couldn’t speak to answer and argued about medical techniques they didn’t understand. His general impression seemed to be that if they could get him back to the base they thought they could probably keep him alive, though there was hushed tones and tension regarding that and so King assumed that Haine’s declarations about him being a traitor had got round the base. Either that, or they were humouring him about his chances but he liked to think he was still respected enough that they wouldn’t put him through this if the Emperor’s Mercy was going to be needed. He wished he could speak as clearly as he was thinking, but all his effort was being spent on dragging air into his lungs at all. Speech was a luxury extra.
Rossaria had taken charge, issuing orders like she was a damned commander. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, hearing was beginning to go a bit fuzzy. Vision too, he was pretty sure the inside of a chimera wasn’t really as dark as he was seeing it. Frakk. Still, at least they weren’t exactly far forward of the lines by now.
He realised that Rossaria was planning to go back out again, which was causing a lot of polite argument from the guardsmen who clearly thought this was a bad idea. He tried to intervene, but managed nothing beyond a further choking fit. Scrabbling blindly at his belt, he finally found the release catch for his refractor field generator and threw it clumsily in Rossaria’s direction. Bellis recovered it for her from where it landed and she installed it in place on her sash. He may not be able to speak, but he could still make his orders known. With a great deal of effort he gave a nod and Bellis accompanied Rossaria as they threw themselves out the top hatch, not waiting for the vehicle to stop, and ran to re-join the fight. For his own part, King was just concentrating on trying to retain consciousness. Someone stuck a needle into his arm, hopefully a medic. Maybe he should have let the Tau capture Rhys as well, she would have been handy about now.
He was starting to become aware that he wasn’t making as much sense as usual, and that was annoying him. Thinking had become a struggle and it felt like each breath was more of a battle than the previous. Still, if there was one thing he was trained to deal with, it was a battle. Battle was something he could deal with and while he was confident that he would have nothing to hide when his moment came before the Golden Throne, he was equally determined that wouldn’t be today. Thankfully the chimera rumbled to a stop and various people crowded round to rush him to the medical bay. He could barely see anything beyond a blurred haze and voices had become a jumble of noise, but he was still with them until he felt a sharp pain in the side of his neck and everything went from blurry to black.
.....
When he woke up, he still couldn’t breathe. As his eyes started to regain focus he realised that was from the unexpected weight of equipment pressing on him, tubes and wires and suckers and unidentified pieces of metal with dials on. As he relaxed and became more used to it, breathing became easier.
“Hello?” he asked quietly, as much as anything else to check if his voice was working again yet. Hearing that it was, he tried again louder.
“Rhys?”
He was in no way surprised when the short medic responded almost instantly. “Sir?”
“What happened?”
Knowing what he was asking, she didn’t waste his time with medical gibberish or pointless explanations, for which he was as usual profoundly grateful. He took the view that it was her job to understand this nonsense sufficiently to keep him and his men alive, and since she did that job admirably there was nothing further he needed to know.
“Your lungs collapsed sir, because you put most of your rib cage through them. It’s fixed now. We won, it was a slaughter. Bill explained that you’d led them into a trap, they’d assumed we would be defenceless so there weren’t many of them that got away. Seems you got their leader and we downed all their vehicles, the ordinance team are busy exploding them now, so the Tau presence is pretty much gone here.”
“I only got one of their leaders, they have two.” King warned. “They have one for war and one for diplomacy, Poro Tauna won’t have been fighting today.”
“Well if they’ve got no big guns and no war leader, they’re not going to be much of a threat either way. So I think you won Sir.”
King allowed himself a satisfied smile. “Yes, guardsman. I think I did too.”
.....
He was even more sure of it when Rossaria and Aloysius came to see him, to outline what would happen next. He was happy to give Aloysius a full apology for his behaviour, and happier still when the pair of them stood up in front of the entire regiment and outlined how his shocking and treasonous behaviour towards the Commissar had been a ploy cooked up by the three of them to lead the Tau into the devastating trap that had ensured Imperial dominance of the planet with only minimal loss of human life. He formally apologised, far less heartfelt this time but it was only a play, then Rossaria accepted the apology on behalf of the Commissariat and reiterated the warning that this was not a degree of understanding that would be extended to any other guardsman under any other circumstances, and the cheer that the three of them got threatened to start an avalanche.
What few Tau survived abandoned the planet shortly after the devastating counter attack, abandoning the base and presumably what colonists had survived. Whatever became of Sargas, any inhabitants would no doubt be finding bodies in the snow for years to come. While the Tau base would be left untouched until Imperial engineers arrived with the right tools to reclaim the metals and reusable pieces from its construction, King very happily authorised a mission to the abandoned Imperial colony to reclaim their heating systems for the Emperor.
Commander King, now formally reinstated to the title which as far as anyone knew he’d only lost as a sham, was very free with his praise over the next few days, targeting several people across the ranks who had done a particularly good job during the mission. These were the days of bragging rights and celebrations, and while medals were hard to come by in the far-flung outreaches of the back of bloody nowhere, he made damn sure that everyone had a story to tell of their part in the victory on Sargas. Commander Trevanus was ready to step back into his captaincy, demoted again as for a second time King had taken seniority from his shoulders, but King had a suspicion now that he wouldn’t be keeping the kid forever. He was young and desperately enthusiastic, but he had shown himself to have leadership qualities when it came to the crunch, and taking a bunch of near-mutinous guardsmen who’d just lost their hero and forging them back into the fighting unit they had once been, that took more skill than King had given him credit for. Someday King knew he’d be recommending the kid for promotion elsewhere.
The tunnels had been completed without any further incident thanks to some extremely careful work from everyone involved, but the actual retrieval of the artefact via the tunnel system had proven tricky. The size and weight of it meant that while they could bring it down into the tunnel and out that way, it would almost certainly suffer some degree of damage in the initial drop. Fortunately that was no longer an issue, and the Ordo Mechanicus had informed them that they could leave the prize interred in the colony until members of the Ordo arrived to retrieve it. King had refrained from laughing aloud and immediately organised a convoy, almost a parade, of Guard to bring down the building wall and bring the dark age grav plane back to base in glory. Then he fired back a reply to apologise but explain that the ground beneath the artefact had become unstable and delay was inadvisable under the circumstances.
The Ordo Mechanicus arrived anyway, only mildly put out and mostly lacking the facial expressions to show it, with pomp and ceremony and flags and cogs and everything one would expect, to formally take possession of the sacred artefact and generally get it out of the grubby hands of the uneducated oiks of the Astra Millitarum. They also came with a surprise for King that he perhaps didn’t appreciate as much as they had expected: he was to be gifted with augmetics to correct the damage to his arm. Well, they said gift, it was more of an order really, the resources had been assigned and were to be used. King sighed and agreed to trust them, wondering how many arms he was going to come out of this wielding.
.....
King lay voluntarily on the operating table, the first time he’d ever done such a thing.
“Normally I’m unconscious at this point.” He muttered vaguely, wondering if anyone was human enough to pick up on the comment. To his slight surprise his surgeon was, and even seemed to have most of his own face to reply with. Only the metallic whites to his eyes and the constantly whirring optical lenses sat uncomfortably in an otherwise human face. He did have two long mechadendrites that hung over his head like an Eldar warrior and its back banners however, and the hands emerging from his surgical gown were entirely metallic.
“That can certainly be arranged, if you would prefer.” He replied, fastening the straps around King’s wrist and shoulder to secure the arm for the upcoming surgery.
“No, I’d rather see what you’re doing to me. I can take a bit of pain.”
“As you wish sir.” He said it with a strange inflection - not the sir of the chain of command, but rather as a functional term for someone whose name you hadn’t really bothered to learn. “There will not be any pain, we can numb the arm individually.” One of its mechadendrites shot out and did just that, with a syringe attachment on the end of its long chaos-like tentacle. King watched what was being done to him with a kind of detached interest, his mind wandering as he watched things he didn’t understand being done to his precious arm.
Malcath was there assisting too, or at least joining in with enthusiasm. King supposed that he probably didn’t get to see much tech work being stuck out on active duty with a Guard unit, all he really got to do was repair vehicles and, currently, go stare at the artefact any spare moment he got. Still, it was probably a religious experience for him and King was happy to cut just about anyone a fair bit of slack at the moment. The broken statue of the Emperor had been recovered too, and while it had not been possible to entirely piece it back together they had patched it up as best as possible using rockrete and steel. It now stood in a place of honour overlooking the artefact in the large hangar bay.
Back in the surgical bay, King tried to find out exactly what was happening.
“So what’s this going to do to my arm then?”
“How technical do you want this information?” the surgeon asked, a man after his own heart.
“As little as possible.”
“it will repair the function in your arm so that it becomes stronger than previously.”
That intrigued King.
“Stronger?” he asked. “How much stronger?”
The techpriest surgeon grinned, which looked distinctly strange given the circumstances. King didn’t think he’d ever seen one smile before, let alone grin.
“let’s just say that next time you get in a fist fight with a crisis suit, you could be the one punching it across the field.”
Tempting though that sounded, King remained sceptical.
“And what would happen to my hand if I did that?”
“Good point. Don’t do that. I’ll be putting strengthening rods in your wrist so you can use it for lifting, but yes, I sometimes forget how weak flesh is can be.”
Probably not a problem they’d had to deal with in the Ordo Mechanicum too often. Malcath passed him a silver rod, solid looking at first glance but on closer inspection it was made of thousands of segments, allowing it to bend and twist in all directions. The entire length of King’s arm was now stripped open to the bone, still without his feeling anything. The whole thing made his skin crawl and he had to force himself to continue watching, asking more questions to distract himself from process.
“So you can make my wrist stand up to impact, but not my fingers?”
“It’s not a question of can’t.” The techpriest surgeon said, peering inside King’s arm as he carefully lifted away a blackened and burnt piece of muscle. “It’s a question of cost. Augmetics are tricky and expensive, bionics are much simpler. If you want stronger fingers we’ll just have the arm off at the shoulder and replace the whole thing.”
“No!” King interjected, alarmed. “Thank you.”
His shoulders lifted in a shrug while the mechadendrites continued work.
“Thought not.” He said, with the self-satisfied tone of one used to dealing with inferior minds. “I’ll just do the arm then, arms are a lot easier than fingers. Fewer nerves to deal with and far fewer joints, makes then a lot less resource intensive than fingers. You’d have to be a real hero of the Imperium to merit augmetic fingers.”
King really wasn’t sure where his position stood within the Imperium at this point. Finding dark age artefact potentially capable of providing a whole new line of air support - good. Near-single-handedly bringing about the destruction of the Tau forces - good. Accusations of heresy, however inaccurate - bad. Almost being executed for undeniably disrespecting a Commissar - extremely bad. Overall, he wasn’t sure how the tally sheet balanced out. Not high enough for augmetic fingers, clearly. He tried to flex the fingers he did own, causing a shower of sparks somewhere around his elbow and a few choice curse words from both tech priests. Apparently that was something one couldn’t do until they were finished.
“If you really want to shoot for augmetic fingers or a full bionic arm, I can...” the techpriest surgeon began, but Malcath began to laugh in his metallic monotone voice.
“I do not believe Commander King would be interested in such things.” He explained. “The Commander has a remarkably closed mind when it comes to matters of the flesh.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” King protested, though both he and Malcath were well aware that the only reason he wouldn’t say it was due to the phrasing chosen. “I’d just rather use any influence I can bank on something more useful. Like some of those open-topped Taurox things, they look useful. Or a baneblade.”
Malcath certainly perked up at those suggestions, particularly the baneblade. It was probably the equivalent of a fortress cathedral for followers of the machine god, of course, and King felt a pang of sadness that even if he should get such a thing, Hunter would never see it. Nor would Mirton, nor any of the many others who had died, for one reason or another, on Sargas.
.....
A week after the surgery the Ordo Mechanicum left, taking with them the grav plane and the hopes that it would be a usable resource once they got it investigated. The base was warm enough to cope with now, thanks to the generous donation from the traitor colonists, and with the Tau having been cleared off the place was becoming almost like R&R time. King was getting worried, waiting for the tensions to resurface amongst the men. Rossaria had commandeered Bellis as her aide while she was here, so King insisted that he also be made welcome in the officer’s mess like any of his own team - not that Rossaria ever darkened the door, of course, but the principle remained and he figured Bellis had earned some privileges. Jaks had taken a shine to the lad, amused and proud at the circumstances of Bellis’ survival, and the pair seemed to be getting on well.
King’s arm had recovered, as had his lungs, ribs, and pretty much all of him, which felt like a first. Experimentation had shown that the augmetics not only allowed him to hold a sword again properly - and he was so pleased to get his own decent power sword back again, though the battle trophy sword that Scar had taken from his enemy and King had taken from Scar was now sitting against the wall in his quarters as a souvenir - but also significantly increased his strength with the arm. By significantly, he meant that if he lifted at the right angle and didn’t really care what he hit with it, he could carry and fire a heavy bolter emplacement. Accuracy was not the strong point of this plan and he would have been hard pressed to shoot the back of a grox if he was holding its tail, but it had certainly been rather impressive.
Now however, he was holding recaf. As was Rossaria, who sat opposite him in his office-come-quarters, having an informal debriefing session on the events of Sargas. The main point of the discussion was as expected, never ever do that again, but there was a bit more detail in the list of things he should never again do than he had foreseen.
Never correct a Commissar, that he’d been expecting and if she’d added the word “publically”, he’d have totally agreed with it. As was, he decided it wasn’t worth arguing. Maybe he’d mellowed, or maybe he just didn’t want to have the same discussion over again.
“So I take it I’m not in too much trouble for not telling you about my Gloriana Terra plan?” he asked, changing the subject.
Rossaria looked at him over her recaf mug, her blonde hair now back in its familiar and more imposing high braid.
“Let’s just say I’m mostly less likely to kill you now than I was at the time.”
King shrugged “I’ll take that.”
“Then I’ll ask again: is there anything specific I need to know about the regiment *including* secret code words?”
“Nothing I can think of just now, but can I get back to you on that one?”
Rossaria sighed. “You’re just going to be in a good mood regardless now, aren’t you?”
King nodded as solemnly as he could. “Probably.”
“I think I prefer when you’re being obstreperous, I’m more used to dealing with that.”
“I don’t even know what that means.” King admitted.
“It means you.”
“Understood.” He smiled. “We won, Rossaria. We took this frozen hell of a planet, those traitorous bastards who lived here and those evil-minded Xenos who wanted it, and we beat them all. Just give us this one, will you?”
Rossaria looked at him, before giving a slight smile. “Oh very well. I’ll admit it was…”
She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and to King’s eternal frustration she didn’t finish her sentence but rather waited for him to call the visitor in. It was Bill, carrying a data slate.
“Message for you Sir, new orders.” He turned to Rossaria. “You have a message too Lord Commissar, I downloaded it to data slate for you but I didn’t know if you want it here?”
Rossaria put out her hand impatiently and Bill scuttled off back to the comms room as they both entered their security codes and activated the messages, reading silently. King was, unsurprisingly, the first to break the silence.
“Yes! I get some supplies, finally! We pick them up at our next destination, I’m getting…” he quickly thumbed through the list. “I’m going to need some extra drivers to deal with…. Oh, here we go! The Administratum came through on something.”
“So where have you been assigned to now?” Rossaria asked, failing to prevent herself from smiling at his enthusiasm.
“I don’t recognise the name, there’s no briefing information attached yet - welcome to the Astra Millitarum. But wherever it is, I’m going to have the weapons to deal with it. What about you, can I ask or is it classified?”
“My next assignment came through too.” She sighed. “Babysitting some cock-sure borderline traitor who’ll no doubt go off the rails and need me to keep him in line.”
King smiled, and raised his cup as a toast. “Yes, but this time I’ll have a baneblade!”
They had to lift King bodily into the APC, and he could feel the pain lancing through his chest as they did. The rest of the band of survivors were generally in better shape than he, though Bill in particular had taken a battering from the explosion and one of the troopers in the rescue squad was now employed digging shards of twisted metal out of his back. King could feel every bump on the journey as a dagger in his chest and was concentrating on trying not to redecorate the inside of the Chimera with more of his blood than he could spare, while the guards asked him questions he couldn’t speak to answer and argued about medical techniques they didn’t understand. His general impression seemed to be that if they could get him back to the base they thought they could probably keep him alive, though there was hushed tones and tension regarding that and so King assumed that Haine’s declarations about him being a traitor had got round the base. Either that, or they were humouring him about his chances but he liked to think he was still respected enough that they wouldn’t put him through this if the Emperor’s Mercy was going to be needed. He wished he could speak as clearly as he was thinking, but all his effort was being spent on dragging air into his lungs at all. Speech was a luxury extra.
Rossaria had taken charge, issuing orders like she was a damned commander. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, hearing was beginning to go a bit fuzzy. Vision too, he was pretty sure the inside of a chimera wasn’t really as dark as he was seeing it. Frakk. Still, at least they weren’t exactly far forward of the lines by now.
He realised that Rossaria was planning to go back out again, which was causing a lot of polite argument from the guardsmen who clearly thought this was a bad idea. He tried to intervene, but managed nothing beyond a further choking fit. Scrabbling blindly at his belt, he finally found the release catch for his refractor field generator and threw it clumsily in Rossaria’s direction. Bellis recovered it for her from where it landed and she installed it in place on her sash. He may not be able to speak, but he could still make his orders known. With a great deal of effort he gave a nod and Bellis accompanied Rossaria as they threw themselves out the top hatch, not waiting for the vehicle to stop, and ran to re-join the fight. For his own part, King was just concentrating on trying to retain consciousness. Someone stuck a needle into his arm, hopefully a medic. Maybe he should have let the Tau capture Rhys as well, she would have been handy about now.
He was starting to become aware that he wasn’t making as much sense as usual, and that was annoying him. Thinking had become a struggle and it felt like each breath was more of a battle than the previous. Still, if there was one thing he was trained to deal with, it was a battle. Battle was something he could deal with and while he was confident that he would have nothing to hide when his moment came before the Golden Throne, he was equally determined that wouldn’t be today. Thankfully the chimera rumbled to a stop and various people crowded round to rush him to the medical bay. He could barely see anything beyond a blurred haze and voices had become a jumble of noise, but he was still with them until he felt a sharp pain in the side of his neck and everything went from blurry to black.
.....
When he woke up, he still couldn’t breathe. As his eyes started to regain focus he realised that was from the unexpected weight of equipment pressing on him, tubes and wires and suckers and unidentified pieces of metal with dials on. As he relaxed and became more used to it, breathing became easier.
“Hello?” he asked quietly, as much as anything else to check if his voice was working again yet. Hearing that it was, he tried again louder.
“Rhys?”
He was in no way surprised when the short medic responded almost instantly. “Sir?”
“What happened?”
Knowing what he was asking, she didn’t waste his time with medical gibberish or pointless explanations, for which he was as usual profoundly grateful. He took the view that it was her job to understand this nonsense sufficiently to keep him and his men alive, and since she did that job admirably there was nothing further he needed to know.
“Your lungs collapsed sir, because you put most of your rib cage through them. It’s fixed now. We won, it was a slaughter. Bill explained that you’d led them into a trap, they’d assumed we would be defenceless so there weren’t many of them that got away. Seems you got their leader and we downed all their vehicles, the ordinance team are busy exploding them now, so the Tau presence is pretty much gone here.”
“I only got one of their leaders, they have two.” King warned. “They have one for war and one for diplomacy, Poro Tauna won’t have been fighting today.”
“Well if they’ve got no big guns and no war leader, they’re not going to be much of a threat either way. So I think you won Sir.”
King allowed himself a satisfied smile. “Yes, guardsman. I think I did too.”
.....
He was even more sure of it when Rossaria and Aloysius came to see him, to outline what would happen next. He was happy to give Aloysius a full apology for his behaviour, and happier still when the pair of them stood up in front of the entire regiment and outlined how his shocking and treasonous behaviour towards the Commissar had been a ploy cooked up by the three of them to lead the Tau into the devastating trap that had ensured Imperial dominance of the planet with only minimal loss of human life. He formally apologised, far less heartfelt this time but it was only a play, then Rossaria accepted the apology on behalf of the Commissariat and reiterated the warning that this was not a degree of understanding that would be extended to any other guardsman under any other circumstances, and the cheer that the three of them got threatened to start an avalanche.
What few Tau survived abandoned the planet shortly after the devastating counter attack, abandoning the base and presumably what colonists had survived. Whatever became of Sargas, any inhabitants would no doubt be finding bodies in the snow for years to come. While the Tau base would be left untouched until Imperial engineers arrived with the right tools to reclaim the metals and reusable pieces from its construction, King very happily authorised a mission to the abandoned Imperial colony to reclaim their heating systems for the Emperor.
Commander King, now formally reinstated to the title which as far as anyone knew he’d only lost as a sham, was very free with his praise over the next few days, targeting several people across the ranks who had done a particularly good job during the mission. These were the days of bragging rights and celebrations, and while medals were hard to come by in the far-flung outreaches of the back of bloody nowhere, he made damn sure that everyone had a story to tell of their part in the victory on Sargas. Commander Trevanus was ready to step back into his captaincy, demoted again as for a second time King had taken seniority from his shoulders, but King had a suspicion now that he wouldn’t be keeping the kid forever. He was young and desperately enthusiastic, but he had shown himself to have leadership qualities when it came to the crunch, and taking a bunch of near-mutinous guardsmen who’d just lost their hero and forging them back into the fighting unit they had once been, that took more skill than King had given him credit for. Someday King knew he’d be recommending the kid for promotion elsewhere.
The tunnels had been completed without any further incident thanks to some extremely careful work from everyone involved, but the actual retrieval of the artefact via the tunnel system had proven tricky. The size and weight of it meant that while they could bring it down into the tunnel and out that way, it would almost certainly suffer some degree of damage in the initial drop. Fortunately that was no longer an issue, and the Ordo Mechanicus had informed them that they could leave the prize interred in the colony until members of the Ordo arrived to retrieve it. King had refrained from laughing aloud and immediately organised a convoy, almost a parade, of Guard to bring down the building wall and bring the dark age grav plane back to base in glory. Then he fired back a reply to apologise but explain that the ground beneath the artefact had become unstable and delay was inadvisable under the circumstances.
The Ordo Mechanicus arrived anyway, only mildly put out and mostly lacking the facial expressions to show it, with pomp and ceremony and flags and cogs and everything one would expect, to formally take possession of the sacred artefact and generally get it out of the grubby hands of the uneducated oiks of the Astra Millitarum. They also came with a surprise for King that he perhaps didn’t appreciate as much as they had expected: he was to be gifted with augmetics to correct the damage to his arm. Well, they said gift, it was more of an order really, the resources had been assigned and were to be used. King sighed and agreed to trust them, wondering how many arms he was going to come out of this wielding.
.....
King lay voluntarily on the operating table, the first time he’d ever done such a thing.
“Normally I’m unconscious at this point.” He muttered vaguely, wondering if anyone was human enough to pick up on the comment. To his slight surprise his surgeon was, and even seemed to have most of his own face to reply with. Only the metallic whites to his eyes and the constantly whirring optical lenses sat uncomfortably in an otherwise human face. He did have two long mechadendrites that hung over his head like an Eldar warrior and its back banners however, and the hands emerging from his surgical gown were entirely metallic.
“That can certainly be arranged, if you would prefer.” He replied, fastening the straps around King’s wrist and shoulder to secure the arm for the upcoming surgery.
“No, I’d rather see what you’re doing to me. I can take a bit of pain.”
“As you wish sir.” He said it with a strange inflection - not the sir of the chain of command, but rather as a functional term for someone whose name you hadn’t really bothered to learn. “There will not be any pain, we can numb the arm individually.” One of its mechadendrites shot out and did just that, with a syringe attachment on the end of its long chaos-like tentacle. King watched what was being done to him with a kind of detached interest, his mind wandering as he watched things he didn’t understand being done to his precious arm.
Malcath was there assisting too, or at least joining in with enthusiasm. King supposed that he probably didn’t get to see much tech work being stuck out on active duty with a Guard unit, all he really got to do was repair vehicles and, currently, go stare at the artefact any spare moment he got. Still, it was probably a religious experience for him and King was happy to cut just about anyone a fair bit of slack at the moment. The broken statue of the Emperor had been recovered too, and while it had not been possible to entirely piece it back together they had patched it up as best as possible using rockrete and steel. It now stood in a place of honour overlooking the artefact in the large hangar bay.
Back in the surgical bay, King tried to find out exactly what was happening.
“So what’s this going to do to my arm then?”
“How technical do you want this information?” the surgeon asked, a man after his own heart.
“As little as possible.”
“it will repair the function in your arm so that it becomes stronger than previously.”
That intrigued King.
“Stronger?” he asked. “How much stronger?”
The techpriest surgeon grinned, which looked distinctly strange given the circumstances. King didn’t think he’d ever seen one smile before, let alone grin.
“let’s just say that next time you get in a fist fight with a crisis suit, you could be the one punching it across the field.”
Tempting though that sounded, King remained sceptical.
“And what would happen to my hand if I did that?”
“Good point. Don’t do that. I’ll be putting strengthening rods in your wrist so you can use it for lifting, but yes, I sometimes forget how weak flesh is can be.”
Probably not a problem they’d had to deal with in the Ordo Mechanicum too often. Malcath passed him a silver rod, solid looking at first glance but on closer inspection it was made of thousands of segments, allowing it to bend and twist in all directions. The entire length of King’s arm was now stripped open to the bone, still without his feeling anything. The whole thing made his skin crawl and he had to force himself to continue watching, asking more questions to distract himself from process.
“So you can make my wrist stand up to impact, but not my fingers?”
“It’s not a question of can’t.” The techpriest surgeon said, peering inside King’s arm as he carefully lifted away a blackened and burnt piece of muscle. “It’s a question of cost. Augmetics are tricky and expensive, bionics are much simpler. If you want stronger fingers we’ll just have the arm off at the shoulder and replace the whole thing.”
“No!” King interjected, alarmed. “Thank you.”
His shoulders lifted in a shrug while the mechadendrites continued work.
“Thought not.” He said, with the self-satisfied tone of one used to dealing with inferior minds. “I’ll just do the arm then, arms are a lot easier than fingers. Fewer nerves to deal with and far fewer joints, makes then a lot less resource intensive than fingers. You’d have to be a real hero of the Imperium to merit augmetic fingers.”
King really wasn’t sure where his position stood within the Imperium at this point. Finding dark age artefact potentially capable of providing a whole new line of air support - good. Near-single-handedly bringing about the destruction of the Tau forces - good. Accusations of heresy, however inaccurate - bad. Almost being executed for undeniably disrespecting a Commissar - extremely bad. Overall, he wasn’t sure how the tally sheet balanced out. Not high enough for augmetic fingers, clearly. He tried to flex the fingers he did own, causing a shower of sparks somewhere around his elbow and a few choice curse words from both tech priests. Apparently that was something one couldn’t do until they were finished.
“If you really want to shoot for augmetic fingers or a full bionic arm, I can...” the techpriest surgeon began, but Malcath began to laugh in his metallic monotone voice.
“I do not believe Commander King would be interested in such things.” He explained. “The Commander has a remarkably closed mind when it comes to matters of the flesh.”
“I wouldn’t say that.” King protested, though both he and Malcath were well aware that the only reason he wouldn’t say it was due to the phrasing chosen. “I’d just rather use any influence I can bank on something more useful. Like some of those open-topped Taurox things, they look useful. Or a baneblade.”
Malcath certainly perked up at those suggestions, particularly the baneblade. It was probably the equivalent of a fortress cathedral for followers of the machine god, of course, and King felt a pang of sadness that even if he should get such a thing, Hunter would never see it. Nor would Mirton, nor any of the many others who had died, for one reason or another, on Sargas.
.....
A week after the surgery the Ordo Mechanicum left, taking with them the grav plane and the hopes that it would be a usable resource once they got it investigated. The base was warm enough to cope with now, thanks to the generous donation from the traitor colonists, and with the Tau having been cleared off the place was becoming almost like R&R time. King was getting worried, waiting for the tensions to resurface amongst the men. Rossaria had commandeered Bellis as her aide while she was here, so King insisted that he also be made welcome in the officer’s mess like any of his own team - not that Rossaria ever darkened the door, of course, but the principle remained and he figured Bellis had earned some privileges. Jaks had taken a shine to the lad, amused and proud at the circumstances of Bellis’ survival, and the pair seemed to be getting on well.
King’s arm had recovered, as had his lungs, ribs, and pretty much all of him, which felt like a first. Experimentation had shown that the augmetics not only allowed him to hold a sword again properly - and he was so pleased to get his own decent power sword back again, though the battle trophy sword that Scar had taken from his enemy and King had taken from Scar was now sitting against the wall in his quarters as a souvenir - but also significantly increased his strength with the arm. By significantly, he meant that if he lifted at the right angle and didn’t really care what he hit with it, he could carry and fire a heavy bolter emplacement. Accuracy was not the strong point of this plan and he would have been hard pressed to shoot the back of a grox if he was holding its tail, but it had certainly been rather impressive.
Now however, he was holding recaf. As was Rossaria, who sat opposite him in his office-come-quarters, having an informal debriefing session on the events of Sargas. The main point of the discussion was as expected, never ever do that again, but there was a bit more detail in the list of things he should never again do than he had foreseen.
Never correct a Commissar, that he’d been expecting and if she’d added the word “publically”, he’d have totally agreed with it. As was, he decided it wasn’t worth arguing. Maybe he’d mellowed, or maybe he just didn’t want to have the same discussion over again.
“So I take it I’m not in too much trouble for not telling you about my Gloriana Terra plan?” he asked, changing the subject.
Rossaria looked at him over her recaf mug, her blonde hair now back in its familiar and more imposing high braid.
“Let’s just say I’m mostly less likely to kill you now than I was at the time.”
King shrugged “I’ll take that.”
“Then I’ll ask again: is there anything specific I need to know about the regiment *including* secret code words?”
“Nothing I can think of just now, but can I get back to you on that one?”
Rossaria sighed. “You’re just going to be in a good mood regardless now, aren’t you?”
King nodded as solemnly as he could. “Probably.”
“I think I prefer when you’re being obstreperous, I’m more used to dealing with that.”
“I don’t even know what that means.” King admitted.
“It means you.”
“Understood.” He smiled. “We won, Rossaria. We took this frozen hell of a planet, those traitorous bastards who lived here and those evil-minded Xenos who wanted it, and we beat them all. Just give us this one, will you?”
Rossaria looked at him, before giving a slight smile. “Oh very well. I’ll admit it was…”
She was interrupted by a knock at the door, and to King’s eternal frustration she didn’t finish her sentence but rather waited for him to call the visitor in. It was Bill, carrying a data slate.
“Message for you Sir, new orders.” He turned to Rossaria. “You have a message too Lord Commissar, I downloaded it to data slate for you but I didn’t know if you want it here?”
Rossaria put out her hand impatiently and Bill scuttled off back to the comms room as they both entered their security codes and activated the messages, reading silently. King was, unsurprisingly, the first to break the silence.
“Yes! I get some supplies, finally! We pick them up at our next destination, I’m getting…” he quickly thumbed through the list. “I’m going to need some extra drivers to deal with…. Oh, here we go! The Administratum came through on something.”
“So where have you been assigned to now?” Rossaria asked, failing to prevent herself from smiling at his enthusiasm.
“I don’t recognise the name, there’s no briefing information attached yet - welcome to the Astra Millitarum. But wherever it is, I’m going to have the weapons to deal with it. What about you, can I ask or is it classified?”
“My next assignment came through too.” She sighed. “Babysitting some cock-sure borderline traitor who’ll no doubt go off the rails and need me to keep him in line.”
King smiled, and raised his cup as a toast. “Yes, but this time I’ll have a baneblade!”