Arkangel; two days later
"Here," Captain Alrod grabbed an armoured rad-suit from the wall rack and handed it to Emerson, "If the planet is as irradiated as your friend claims, we'll need it."
She nodded and slid her stub revolver, freshly loaded and polished, into its holster. Her re-breather felt hard, foreign against her face, pressing against her chin and nose; even after so long, it never felt like truly part of her body.
Guardsmen scurried around the armoury, grabbing their weapons and armour. The Final Hour orbited Arkangel directly above what used to be Karanovgrad. Emerson did not witness it personally, but from Korramyn's reluctant stories, the city was but no more.
All those people... all the children, the legends, the worship, the beauty and love and hate and happiness and grief and tradition, buried beneath millions of tons of rock. Lost forever to the horrors of Chaos and their depredations. She'd passed Lhisa's room on the way to the armoury and heard the muffled weeping from inside; the pure horror of losing everything was not alien to her, but to the poor girl...
"Ma'am?"
Alrod stared at her, eyebrow raised. His men were clad in flak armour under rumpled rad-suits, slinging lasguns and noticeably distanced from Korramyn. The Ghost was unreadable behind a gas mask. He was, in fact, uncanny in resemblance to the soldiers of Krieg.
"Prepared?" she asked briskly.
"Yes. Do you require heavy support? We have autocannons and anti-armour launchers."
Emerson looked at Korramyn expectantly.
"No," he said. "Terrain is unsuitable. Bring the anti-tank missiles, though."
"What he said."
Despite his clear unwillingness to follow the word of an absolute stranger, one from a forsaken world, no less, Alrod gestured to the Guardsmen to heed it. They relinquished a mounted gun and began packing fire-and-forget missiles.
"Loading up in five. Hup to!" Alrod shouted. A Valkyrie began idling loudly in the hangar.
She shot Korramyn another glance: he was lost in thought, staring at one of the palm-sized bullets and turning it over in his hand.
"Korramyn."
He did not answer.
"Korramyn."
This time, the man jerked upright, then grunted in response.
"Let's move."
*****************
The Valkyrie Skytalon screamed through the upper atmosphere, through layer after layer of smog and cloud cover - it was repurposed for additional transport room, having only a pair of multilasers mounted on the sides of the cockpit. Modified turbines lifted the two squads of Guardsmen with no problem down, down, down into Arkangel. It was nearly silent within but for the sound of whining engines.
Korramyn handled his rifle absent-mindedly. It was long and far from straight, its form wrapped with cloth and screwed with scope, tripod and hanging with all sorts of ornaments. They seemed so meaningless after all that had happened. It also dwarfed the average lasgun, especially the old, dusty ones from the storehouses.
The memory of his home brought tears to his eyes.
Vengeance.
He ignored the accusatory stares of the soldiers' goggles as the Talon descended faster and faster.
*****************
Karanovgrad used to be a towering network of hives spread over thousands of square kilometres, a landscape of ruined city and broken rockcrete bearing witness to the hubris of man. It was, now, even less: rolling plains coalesced into pulverized stone and rock, as if an angry god had flattened the veritable nation of ruins into barely-recognizable fields of forgotten memories. If a child's playset had collapsed into a pile, it could not even begin to recreate the scene of utter destruction before them.
