Longtime Dakkanaut
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Space marines are ugly.
I rolled my neck and shoulders, trying to stretch muscles that had gone stiff from a prolonged period of receiving reports, planning and distributing orders, then countermanding them and countermanding the countermanded orders that had already been countermanded. I was micromanaging again, a bad habit, but in this case the campaign was already off to a catastrophic start. I was going to do everything in my power to improve our chance of success, and I could see that it was not garnering me many favors among the ranks gathered in the theater. I hoped that stretching would get the nuisance of the marines out of my head. It merely exaggerated my headache. I leaned onto the table, dipped my head to observe the readouts which still hadn't changed from twenty minutes ago.
Without any news to report, I peered up at the marine from under my cap. Emperor alive, they were ugly. I mean, they’re really ugly. Mutants.
I don’t mean that they represent an ugly idea, or the fact that they leave a wanton trail of carnage in their wake. I don’t mean that they smell like gunsmoke and eviscerated gore even when their battle armor has been polished and cleaned to parade-ground standards. I don’t mean that they are ugly in the way that a torture chamber is ugly—because of its need. I don’t mean that they are ugly because they lack grace and elegance. I don’t mean that they’re ugly because the armor they wear makes them such an eyesore, however impressive they look kitted up.
I mean they really are butt-ugly. I’ve seen and dealt with guardsmen whose faces were so disgusting that the misfit’s own mother wouldn’t even love them. Space marines are uglier by far. Even the trophy heads of all the aliens in the officers’ mess don’t compete with the sheer scale of ugly presented by a space marine. All of that propaganda about the glory and noble handsomeness of space marines is perjury. Yes, those glorious specimens do exist in a rare corner of the galaxy, but they truly are the exception. The disheartening norm is that space marines are physically repulsive.
“I would appreciate, captain Eudemus, if you could stuff your disgusting face back into that helm of yours.” Perhaps I hadn’t chosen to express the request in a politically correct fashion, but we were trying to work on a battle plan. Any normal person might wonder what relevance the space marine’s face had to do with planning a campaign. The simple truth is that the ugly face was distracting me from focusing on unit deployments and working out the acceptable casualty rates. When you are the ranking officer, and weighing the lives of the men you will send to their deaths, an ugly face might seem like a petty distraction, but I’ve had men dismissed from my service for absentmindedly clicking their stylus. I had a task to focus on, and I was damned if I’d let a distraction allow an error in my judgement.
Mutant. Well, not really, but, mutant.
The silence that followed my pronouncement to don his helmet was thick. The room filled with a tension so thick that it could in fact have been cut with a knife. The hum of all the machines powering the air scrubbers, lighting and holo-table faded into silence in the wake of the remark. Even the table expressed shock as the planetary system presently being projected stopped its motion. I made a mental note to string up one of the tech adepts, it was the third time in the past hour. I didn’t have time to waste on repowering the table each time it froze, especially when the adepts promised me that it would work.
The silence continued to hang in the air, and I’m not sure which the greater offense was, having insulted the small band of space marines attached to our fleet, or having interrupted the space marine captain. Perhaps it was the combination of both, but, really, his face was a distraction. And of course, I was in charge of the fleet. Unless the space marine wanted to send this campaign falling apart due to the dispatching of its head and risk the sanction of the imperium, I knew I was safe in my position. We might lose the assistance of the marine detachment because of this, but at least, I had noted, the upper and back tiers of attendants and lower ranking officers had certainly started paying much more attention, so the briefing might still fulfil its purpose.
The silence hung in the air, broken by the background noise of gauntlets digging into metal, denting the edge of the holo-table. The marine’s eyes flashed frosty as this jaw slowly worked to open.
I cut him off before he had the opportunity to make an utterance, “You heard me correctly, captain. We are trying to organize a campaign here, and the sight of your face is unsettling and distracting.”
It really was. I’ve seen guardsmen whose skin looked like ancient shredded leather. I’ve met guardsmen whose only bit of skin on the face was the courtesy of mechanicum interference: synthetic and stretched across the crudest repairs made to return sight to eyes melted in chemical fires. I’ve seen men who had been put back together after an encounter with a chainsword. I’ve even seen men who’ve been put back together, somewhat inventively, after multiple encounters with a chainsword. I even recall a man in the admiralty who had no face to speak of, he had lost it to a near miss from a melta gun. The heat had melted his face, and charred his bone. He’d had his eyes replaced by the mechanicum, crude things that gave monochromatic vision, and the mechanicum had installed some hardware around his jaws to allow him the use of his lower mandible, but past that he kept his bone open and bare to the recycled air of the ship. He was still pretty by comparison to the space marine.
Mutant. Well, not really, but mutant either way. I never understood why we tolerated space marines. We abhor the witch, burn the heretic and kill the mutant, we are taught. We kill the mutant. Anyone who develops genetic flaws, leading to a violation of the human form, is a mutant. Mutants are killed. Even when the mechanicum creates its mutants, these at least are given the respect that is in measure with what they are. The mechanicum will decant an entire legion and throw it away wholesale to complete the task. Those that come out the other end of the campaign are reprocessed as raw material for the next time. It’s all gruesome and disgusting, but, even with their cruelty of creating abominations, both with the genetic engineering or the wanton replacement of the body with machine parts, they at least have the respect and veneration for the human form. Why then is it that we allow among our ranks those kinds of humans that willingly and pervasively overwrite their own sacred inherited genetics to become space marines? I don’t deny that we need them, I simply question the merit, the value and the honor accorded to these abominations.
Outwardly, at a glance, they resemble a man. Looking more closely, they look like primates. They stand tall at seven feet, with massive barrel chests, thick necks of corded sinew shrinking to attach to a head comically small given the proportions of the body. What I’ve seen of them, they have normal skin up to the base of their neck, where their skin develops a mottled blackish color. Below that, the trunk of their body is a hideous shade, looking as though the armor uniformly bruises their torso, to the identical depth and identical intensity, a perfectly tuned bruise. While it’s true that their heads are small for their body, their heads are larger, broader, and slightly pushed out at the back. Their eyes are large, spaced out, with a perpetual dopey, lost look to them. Don’t get me wrong, I know full well the intelligence that hides behind those eyes, but the product of scaling and mutation has altered the face. Their eyes and thick brows give them the appearance of simpletons.
Their mouths opened too wide. It was always discomforting to see them talk, their mouths distending much farther than should have been possible on a human form, with massive wide lips stretching over and past teeth, exposing the gums attached to—well, that depended. Some marines managed to retain the bulk of their original dentition for a number of decades. It was rare for them to have more of their own teeth than implants by the time they reached a century of service. Usually they opted for simple utilitarian implants. The captain before me was one of the worst examples of the same. It looked as though a portion of his jaw had been carved or knocked out with a knife, the same stroke likely having ripped his lip and left a tear all the way to the sharp corner of the left of his jaw. That was a scar six inches long. It had sealed over and healed once before, but scar tissue isn’t as pliable as real skin, and three holes had developed along the length of that scar. The gap where the gums has been looked like an aqueduct running into the side of a hill. A brace had been installed, forming the arches of the duct, and the ‘teeth’, installed into the receiver was nothing more than a single sharpened plate. My guess was that that single sharpened plate was replacing 7 teeth. The same sharpened plate—or perhaps others that had been there before—had ground down on the teeth in his upper palette. The marine had spent a fair bit of time periodically swirling his tongue behind closed lips. Each time he did so—and I suspect he did so to prevent from drooling—it brought unbidden memories of war against the tyranids, and the memory of flesh-eating slugs being vomited out of mouths with the energy of a bolt-gun shot. I shivered internally at the memory.
Even a dwarf of a space marine, that looked 'perfectly' human, couldn’t ever pass as human. I’ve seen guardsmen who had had their noses ground down and off as a product of regular abuse—be that as a natural consequence of completing their duty in the field, or failing to complete their duty on the voyages between deployments, and they never managed to look as mangled as a the nose on a space marine. It looked like bone growths ground into each other to rise up and out of the face at random to form the nose, much like any given world’s tectonic activity will cause mountains to rise. The additional difference here was that it also appeared as though the noses had been repeatedly ground down, and looked like each time the bones would resume their tectonic activity, pushing the old broken nose up and out and trying to replace it with new flat bone.
Ears were another rarity among space marines. Not a one of them had a complete pair of ears after their twentieth year of service. Well, perhaps there were the odd exceptions, but to a tee, their ears had been ground, chewed, shot, cut, sliced, burned, torn off or otherwise displaced from their heads. How, then, he had managed to hear anything I’d said, remained a mystery to me, for despite only having the barest suggestion of torn gristle where his ears were, he heard me perfectly clearly.
Their torsos were massive, a testament to all the unholy filth that had to be sutured into them to make them work. A single marine could easily shield two guardsmen behind his own bulk. Their torsos weren't all that much longer for it though, so the product of their genetic modification resulted in longer arms and longer legs, giving them an appearance of a primate. Like a primate, their temper was often on a short fuse and even with their bare hands they could tear a man limb from limb without any effort. Their powered armor cladding their distended bodies were the only thing that made them appear human, which had the comical effect of making their heads appear even smaller when unhelmeted.
Space marines were terrifying. That fear was due in part because of the capacity for carnage they represented, it was due in part because of the history they carried, it was due in part for the massive presence they commanded in person, and it was due in part of the horrendous appearance of their faces. I suspect though that I struck the nail on the head, and that by and large, they are abhorrent and terrifying for being the mutants they are. Kill the mutant, but venerate the Marines? Once I finally met the marines, I never thought so again. Mutants one and all, and part of the proof is that so many of the marines from any given chapter look so much alike. They call it a gift, to be able to imitate their primogenitors in appearance. I call it a damning curse that one's own human genes should be stripped out and overwritten to become such a horrendous monstrosity.
It had dawned on me that there were gasps and a few mutters about insult and apology following what I’d said to the captain. I have no idea what my aides were whispering to me, only that they were tugging at me and that I would swat them if they persisted.
The marine’s eyes were bloody murder. I was patently aware that he was more than capable of tearing me limb from limb, much like a child enjoys tearing the limbs from insects, yet it still didn’t prevent me a small smile from taking root on my face. He looked like a large simpleton child, impotent in his anger, and afraid of being spanked. I couldn’t help it. The rage in his widely space eyes made him seem even dopier than normal. His subordinates behind him shifted imperceptibly. There was the sound of muffled clicks, their internal voxes relaying messages. There was a final click and a long silence. Perhaps it wasn’t so long, although the tension certainly had stretched the time out. A mutual click-snap sounded from the subordinates, a pair of sergeants and from what I could gather, a line marine. I still hadn’t worked out what a low-ranking runt was doing here, but the space marines were a law unto themselves. Mutants. Grinning, the captain released the table and stood straight, unclamped his helmet and lowered it onto his head.
His scarred bald head disappeared into the cavernous helmet first, followed by his wide dopey eyes, a twinkle of amusement in them. The too wide mouth and horrendous dentition followed by the wide chin as it slid down to his neck. A click-hiss sounded, followed by a faint glow from the eye slits. The bark that followed was earsplitting.
“Is this any better, then?” I’d been expecting this, so hadn’t flinched. Everyone else at the table clutched at the sides of their heads with grimaces on their faces.
“It is, with the exception of the fact that you are still a detriment to the planning of this campaign. It is going to be difficult to have issued orders obeyed when the officers receiving the orders are deaf.”
There was another moment of silence. I couldn’t see the marine’s face, and he wasn’t speaking, but somehow the sound of the grin on his face managed to make it through the snarling vox caster on his helmet.
“I see your point.” This time, the marine’s utterance was at a manageable volume. The sergeants and brother convulsed noiselessly, while the rest gathered around the table looked at each other nervously before realizing the mechanical chocking noise coming from the captain was chuckling. I was at the epicenter of the radiating sighs of relief that rushed across the theater. To my regret the lower ranking officers in the upper back of the theater slumped again and resumed ignoring the holo-table. I took note of the uniforms and insignia, I'd be sure to miss a few of them, and I regret I'd certainly confuse a few of them, but I'd see to it to have them dealt with.
I continued to stare at the marine from under my cap and allowed my smile to stretch farther over my victory, clicked my heels and inclined my head in appreciation to the fulfillment of my request. “Now then, would you like to start again?” Mutant.
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