Editing Story:Praise the Emperor (and Pass the Ammunition) (section)

== On the Emperor's Shoulder ==

Private Connie Obel of the Interix PDF paced slowly back and forth on the broad shoulder of the Emperor and prayed for rain. Looking to the heavens, she only saw the clear blue sky that had been mocking her for the better part of a week. She didn’t see the streaks of orbital insertion, or the winking lights of a retribution fleet, or any of the other signs of an imminent rescue. Slowly, Connie sat down on the smoothed stone that had been her home for three months and sighed.

“We really need to finish our discussion…”

Connie turned her head, slowly, as if she would see something new when she looked to her left. She didn’t. Sitting, about three meters away from her, was the wiry form of [[Sebastian Thor]]. He looked younger in person than he did in the religious iconography that had surrounded her for her whole life – in the stained glass and statuary and reliefs, he was depicted as he had been at the end of the Crusade of Light: Withered and elderly, a massive beard roiling down his face to his ankles, wearing only the robes of a penitent while he was flanked by the miniscule followers who made up the background, a great river of humanity looking up to him, their hands clasped together in adoration.

Connie rubbed her palms against her eyes, feeling the gritty texture of callouses, dirt and bits of stone worked into her palms by pressure and by constant contact.

“Go away.”

“I can’t simply go away, Connie.” 

Connie stood, with a sudden jerk. She walked towards the edge of the shoulder, moving carefully. The statue that she stood on was a very tall one, as it had been commissioned five centuries before by Governess Alicet Oblique III, to commemorate the victories of Interix’s regiments on distant battlefields. For all of Connie’s life, the statue had simply been a convenient landmark to navigate with: Anywhere in the hive, she could look to the half a kilometer tall statue and see the marble and gold and know which way to go.

She leaned back and put her palm against the slope of the armored pauldron that covered the Emperor’s shoulder and then craned her head down.

A sea of rotting flesh looked back up at her. Even after weeks, the millions of former citizens of Hive-Prime, the capital of Interix II, still thronged about the ankles and shoes of the God-Emperor of Mankind. From this distance, the wind cast their incessant moaning away, and all she could see was an impression of grasping hands, some of them worn to the bones by their futile attempts to climb. She felt the temptation, pressing at her temples…

Then Sebastian Thor put his hand on her shoulder: “Connie…”

“I’m just…doing a head count.” She gritted her teeth, then scrabbled away from the edge, turning to crawl on her hands and knees until she was back at the top. Here, she saw her supplies…there was the makeshift tent, made by taking a regulation frame and then draping it with thin sheets she had looted in her desperate flight. There, the bedroll. There, the dozens of buckets that she had scavenged in the nightmarish final hours of Interix II, some of them shimmering faintly with water. Water that she drank slowly…

But still, more than half were empty. 

Connie put her hands on her hips and frowned.

“The Emperor will provide.” Sebastian Thor stepped between her and the buckets. “But as I said. Our discussion.”

“There’s no point…” Connie turned around. She started to walk away from the long dead Saint, her boots scuffing on the marble of the statue, leaving tiny smudges behind them. She brushed her hands through her short, tightly bound hair – knotty, that was what they had called it – and tried to ignore Thor.

“But there is. Why did it take so long for the call to arms to be sound?” He asked, his feet making no noise as he walked after her. “Use your logic, Connie. When you were deployed, the hive was already half overcome by the walking dead.”

“Shut up…”

“The arbiters were eaten at their homes, far from their combat stations.”

Connie got to the very edge of the shoulder, where the arm of the Emperor reached out, holding aloft a sword, a titanic sword made of the captured chassis of enemy tanks, melted down and reforged into the blade. This close – a mere hundred meters away – she could see the way the different metals and alloys had interacted, creating something as garish and ugly as any she had seen. From far away, the different colors blended into a uniform gold-white hue that she found breath-taking.

Here, she had left her long-las. The rifle was clean and polished, and currently empty. Three charge-packs sat beside it, each of them within an upturned helmet, the interior of the helmets focusing the heat and light of the sun onto the cubical packs.

Connie knelt, picking up one of the packs. She hissed, feeling the burn, but didn’t care right about then. The indicator flashed and numerals appeared: Full Charge.

She nodded, then picked up her long-las with one hand, standing and turning… 

To find herself facing [[Sanguinius]]. The angelic figure was bloodied and battered as when he had fallen in battle during the Horus Heresy, his armor pitted and marked by deep rents. His eyes burned, bright blue despite the massive lacerations that ripped his beautiful face nearly off.

She blinked and he stood, pure and clean as if he had never been touched. He towered over her and his titanic hand pressed to her shoulder.

“The angels are coming.”

She shook the hand off her shoulder, walking past Sanguinius without a backwards glance.

When Connie came to her shooting perch, she had to walk past almost countless marks in the marble, made by a now-blunt combat knife. She didn’t make those any-more, simply for the reason that she had lost count in a moment of distraction. Still, Connie, sat down on the chair she had fashioned from a snapped tent-pole and a stretched out bit of sheeting and a M41 Multilaser tripod. She sat down, sighed, then lifted her rifle to shoulder.

The scope threw the ruin of Hive Prime into intense relief. There, the homes that had been shattered by the rioters and the looters. There, the bones of those lucky enough to be devoured rather than raised. There, the grisly pillars of bone, one which the ecclesiarchs and confessors had been mounted by the victorious heretics that had drowned the hive in blood and rotting flesh. And finally, she swept her long-las down to aim into the massive crowd. By now, the clothes had rotted away from their desiccated bodies, but the faint miasma that rose from the rotting corpses seemed almost supernaturally thick, blotting out detail and obscuring faces.

Connie could smell the rot through her scope.

She adjusted the sights, marked range, then sighed out a slow breath as she squeezed the trigger.

The long-las cracked, a tunnel of ionized air drawing a line from the extended barrel to the forehead of a walking corpse. The corpse fell to the ground, lost in the teeming hoard.

“How many people lived in this hive alone?” Thor asked her as she fired again, exactly one second later, letting the internal heat-sink work. She waited, then fired a second time. “Three? Four billion people?”

She fired a third time.

“And not one of them managed to reach the alert-stations, to call out for help? The [[astropath]]s sent no message to Segmentum Command? The ships in orbit sent no shuttles-“

She fired and missed, the shot impacting into a chest. The corpse she had struck staggered, but then continued to try and crawl over the others to try and get to her. How did they know? How did they know she was here?

“You made me miss…” Her voice was sullen.

“Because you need to listen to me!” Thor’s voice trembled as he spoke. His hands grabbed her shoulders, turning her to face him. “Connie Obel, listen to me! The fall of your world does not make sense.”

“Of course it doesn’t!” She surged to her feet, almost casting her long-las aside in her anger. Instead, she clenched her fists on it, hard, white knuckles showing. “The dead don’t walk! Th…They don’t! They shouldn’t!”

“That is self-evident…” Thor’s face creased into a frown, which made his rugged, narrow features contort into an image of age. “But even if they did not walk, this world was made to resist attacks far more powerful and overwhelming. These things have no ranged weapons, no tactical or strategic capacities. That leaves…”

“You sound like General Somna.”

“I led a crusade, Private!” His finger jabbed her in the chest. “And I will not let you fire on them again, not until you answer me truthfully.” 

Connie looked down at the writhing mass. She bit her lip and worked her way through the bloodshed and the nightmares – it always seemed to be night, her memories of the fall of Interix II. Night, either from the time of day or from the smoke that wreathed the sky, smoke long since burned away and blown to the distant reaches of the world. First…she…had been at home. Her father had been celebrating…

He had been…

She set her jaw, and glared at Sebastian Thor.

But he had gone.

She sat down, scowling. With him gone, there was no one to talk to. And she wasn’t about to start talking to herself.

She raised the long-las to her shoulder and fired.