He snapped several picts of the venerable old girl, pleased with each and every one of them.
‘What’s her name?’ he asked the pilot, who was standing around with the two dozen Army soldiers on the hangar deck and looking just as annoyed.
‘They didn’t name them back when she was made. Too many, produced too fast, by too few facilities.’
‘I see. So what do you call her?’ He pointed at the faint, stencilled print along the hull: E1L-IXII-8E22.
The man thawed a touch at Kadeen’s interest. ‘Elizabeth. We call her Elizabeth.’
‘Sir,’ Ishaq grinned. ‘Permission to come aboard your fine lady.’
So it’d started well. Once they were down, things took a turn for the worse. The officer in nominal command of their expedition wasn’t an officer at all – he was a Euchar sergeant who’d drawn the short straw and had to babysit the gaggle of pretension and nervousness that made up ten highly-strung artists in a warzone.
Ishaq half-listened to the sergeant arguing with a handful of the other remembrancers about just where would be acceptable for them to enter the city. He was already bored, standing on the edge of a rise about three kilometres from the city limits. The place itself looked no different from any industrialised sprawl on Terra, and there weren’t even any obvious signs of battle.
The nature of Astartes assault presented a problem for the people attempting chronicle the event. A direct drop-pod attack against the palace meant the remembrancers had to cross an entire hostile city alone, or would remain outside the city limits and ultimately witness nothing at all. The former was never going to happen. The latter almost definitely was.
Ishaq Kadeen was a naturally suspicious soul, and he felt a bleak sense of humour behind all this. Someone, perhaps even the Crimson Lord himself, was making fun of them all. Inviting them down here, but keeping them tediously safe and out of the way.
He trudged over to his minders: two men in the neat ochre uniforms of the Euchar 81st. Each of the remembrancers was similarly guarded. Ishaq’s own sentinels looked both bored and annoyed all at once, which was quite a feat for human facial expressions.
‘What if we just flew over to the palace?’ he suggested.
‘And get shot down?’ The Euchar was practically spitting. ‘That piece of shit would catch fire and fall out of the sky as soon as it came into range of the anti-air guns.’
With effort, Ishaq kept his smile cordial. ‘Then fly really, really high, and come down sharp on top of the palace. Then find somewhere to land.’ He demonstrated this feat of aeronautics with his hands. They didn’t seem convinced.
‘Not happening,’ one of them said.
Ishaq turned without another word, heading back into the dark confines of the Greywing’s passenger pod. When he emerged again, he had a plastek personal grav-chute pack tucked under one arm, clearly taken from the overhead storage lockers.
‘Then how about this? We fly really damn high, and anyone who actually wants to do their job can jump out and do it.’
The two soldiers shared a glance, and called their sergeant over.
‘What is it?’ the sergeant asked. His face painted enough of a picture: he needed another whining artist like he needed a hole in his head.
‘This one,’ the soldier pointed at Ishaq. ‘He’s had an idea.’
It took twenty minutes for the idea to become reality, and Ishaq regretted it right about the same time he jumped out of the gunship and started falling.
Below him sprawled the white-stone palace, like something from Ancient Hellas in Terra’s decadent past. It was coming up to meet him with surprising speed, while the wind was doing its best to beat him unconscious.
This, he thought, may have been a mistake.
He tapped the switches on his chest buckle that would engage the grav-chute. First one, then the other. First one, then the other.
‘Wait twenty seconds before you switch it on,’ the sergeant had said to the few of them that were making the drop. ‘Twenty seconds. Understood?’
Wait twenty seconds.
The wind roared against him, and the ground swelled below. Was he going to be sick? He hoped not. The queasiness in his stomach flipped and bubbled. Ugh.
Wait twenty seconds.
No sign of anti-air fire, at least. He could make out a spot among one of the inner courtyards – a blackened stain where a red drop-pod had beached itself. That was a good place to start.
Wait twenty seconds.
How... How long had he been falling?
Oh, shit.
Ishaq looked up, through bleary goggles he could see his two minders above. Both were far, far higher than him, shrinking all the while. Even smaller, above them both, were the others who’d caught onto his plan and given it enough credence to come with him.
He flicked the switches, first the blue, then the red. For several moments, absolutely nothing happened. Ishaq continued his plummeting death-dive, too surprised to even swear. He started flicking the switches in random panic, little realising that by doing so he wasn’t giving it time to warm up and engage.
The grav-chute finally kicked in hard enough to wrench the muscles in his neck, its gravity suspensors humming as they came alive. The late activation saved Ishaq from becoming a red smear along the wall of a palace tower, but he paid the price for distraction. Laughing with terror, he careened off the stone parapet, bouncing, giggling and trying not to soil himself as he tumbled through the air.
Forty-eight seconds later, the first of his minders touched down in the courtyard. He found Ishaq Kadeen a bloody mess, cradling his picter in bruised hands as he sat on the grass, rocking back and forth.
‘Did you see that?’ he grinned at the soldier.
Three remembrancers, six Euchar soldiers – a strike force of nine souls, moving through the corridors of the palace. It was a scantly-decorated affair with little in the way of art or ornamentation. The architecture was all pillars and arched roofs, while uncarpeted stone floors led them deeper into the structure, which had all the charm and warmth of a mountaintop monastery.
When they’d first entered the palace, leaving the fire-blackened Astartes drop-pod behind, Ishaq had wondered how they’d know which way to go. It turned out to be a needless worry. They just followed the bodies.
Evidence of the Astartes’ passing was everywhere. This wing of the palace was swept clean of life, with ruptured corpses left in place of traditional decoration. One of the other remembrancers, a whippet-lean imagist by the name of Kaliha, would pause every few minutes and compose a pict around the dead bodies. It was clear from the angle of her picter that she sought to avoid any real focus on the slain, perhaps leaving them as blurred images in the foreground.
Ishaq had no interest in chronicling this butchery – artfully, tastefully or otherwise. The ambitious, mercenary part of his brain knew there’d be no point: such work would never enter the most treasured archives. Truly morbid pieces rarely did. People on Terra wanted to see what was humanity was capable of creating, not the aftermath of what it destroyed. They wanted to witness their champions in moments of glory or struggling in righteous strife, not slaughtering helpless humans that resembled Terrans far more than the Astartes themselves did.
It was all about presentation, about presenting what people wanted to see, whether they knew it or not. So he left the bodies unrecorded.
He tried not to look at the corpses they passed. Their ruination was so brutally complete it was difficult to imagine that these gobbets of meat had ever been people. They hadn’t just been killed, they’d been destroyed.
One of the soldiers, Zamikov, caught Ishaq’s eye. ‘Chainblades,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The look on your face. You’re wondering what does this to a body. Well, it’s chainswords.’
‘I wasn’t wondering that,’ Ishaq lied.
‘No shame in honest horror,’ Zamikov shrugged. ‘I’ve been with the Serrated Sun twelve years now, and I puked my way through the first two. The Crimson Lord’s lot do messy work.’
They took a left, stepping through another broken barricade that had failed to do its job. Gunfire in the distance hastened their strides.