MEAT

+ Chronostamp: - 03:00 to deployment +

Janus was trembling. And not simply because the entire transport vehicle was shaking like an otter in the winter wind, groaning with the abused metal… Not even because the roar of the generators and the steady clinking of the engines clouded all thoughts. Janus was trembling from fear and excitement, from glorious yet horrifying anticipation. He is a Guardsmen. He is a soldier in the service of the divine Emperor, his weapon, his will manifested! He recalled these words, oh yes, he was smiling brightly with his eyes shimmering with faith when the Commissair-General Karat Onar made his invigorating oratory for all the regiments through the vox network. How he spoke about their courage, their mettle, they artistry in the ways of war to be many tools of his holy will. These were good words…

But they did not stamped out the doubts. Or the fear. Janus felt a righteouss pride in being a part of a famous on entire Grakhus first unit, known as the 42 Grakhian Volunteers, but this pride was rapidly dwindling and crumbling when the two thousand man of their regiment found their place on board titanic warships of the Imperial Navy, when they could gorge their eyes on the weaponry, tanks, machinery and the colors of the regiments known through pretty much entire human-ruled galaxy! This awe and dread, when he spotted for the first time the cyborgized soldiers of the Skitarii clans, modified troops in the service of the secretive Machine Cult. This elation and jealousy when his officers and seniors got huffy about the quality of arms and armours of such renowed elite as Elisian Drop Troopers… And of course the ridiculing smirks on the faces and snarky comments of those famous military branches. One such notion stuck heavily in his mind, a simple sentence dropped on them when they marched beside a tanned, rugged loking veteran… “Here comes the meat.”

Janus could not manage to shake this simple words off his mind, no matter how many commissair speeches or officers promises he listened to, no matter what outrageously stupid boasts and bragging went through his buddies in the unit. Meat. There was no hiding the fact that in comparison to all of this glorious regiments, that between the Elisians or the dreary Death Korps their own regiment looked rather shoddy… More gangers in old rags. Like an unruly, armed in clubs and maces rabble. A filler. Cannon fodder.

And the fact that at the very moment he was stored inside a Crassus class land transport - a huge, slow, heavily armoured can, which most likely served for a few centuries - was not lifting his spirits up. Maybe because they were going to be the first wave. Mostly because of that, really…

And just then, when he finished the thought, the heavy bolters mounted atop the big machine roared their fury, shooting at the enemy yet unseen for the guardsmen stored inside. Janus felt his hands grow sweaty, and so he clamped them down firmly on his las-gun…

“It begins...:”

+ Chronostamp: -00:23 to deployment +

He thought that the noise filling the inside of the transporter, crawling slowly through the rocky desert, was overwhelming. He was mistaken. True cacophony welcomed him and became almost a physical pain. The roar of the bolters was long forgotten, utterly overtaken by a true concerto of sounds - from the hissing notes of the disargches coming from the high energy weapons of xenos origin, through the metallic ringing of the bullets shaving off flakes of paint from the armoured behemoth of his transport up to the air-splitting dissonances of the plasma bolts soaring the skies. It was a true storm of sounds, which managed to paint a truly nigthmarish visions in the canvas of his mind…

Just then the Crassus ceased it’s motion and stood still. Hiss of steam for a moment dulled the cacophony of war. The assault ramp groaned, the pneumatics thick as human thigh began to move. Stiffling, hot air found it’s way inside the vehicle, and with it, the flashing of explosions, raging fire and las blasts all over the place.

And with it, the screams of the dying.

+ Chronostamp: 00:03 +

Time slowed down. Janus could feel each single beat of his heart fully in his chest. He felt the small hair on his arms standing fully to attention. He moved. There was no choice. An order was dully noted somehwere deep in the calmer, colder regions of his mind, which simply was so drilled to it, that it was able to put his body into motion before his consioussness managed to realize that something was happening. He ran. And with him, his team, his sarge, his buddies… All of them were running, a rapid, lungs-burning sprint, just to reach this pile of rocks, just to huddle behind a cover. He could not see any enemies. He heard them though. Hollow, primitive ooks and howls, joyous growl and sharp, edgy language of the greenskins flew at them from all directions, like if the orks could win this war simply by being loud about it.

+ Chronostamp: 00:07 +

Ramkin was dead. He didn’t make it to the cover. The aim and accuracy of the foul xenos is a joke, they truly did not stand to the disciplined fire of the guardsmen, but before Ramkin could jump behind the rocks like the rest of the team one of the orks most likely brought to the field some big, fully automative machine gun, because suddenly through the regular sounds of their crude guns a new one entered, not unlike a saw only followed by a mechanical grind akin to the whole hive of hornets set loose. Ramkin was literally torn to shreds in the rain of lead. His blood was already dripping down to our impromptu cover. No one really paid it any attention. Janus however could not take his eyes of it… Well, at least to the moment when he felt a fist on his jaw, only to try to focus his gaze on his bellowing sarge, screaming at his face from a distance of maybe half an inch.

Need to push onward. Need to brake the enemy line. These are the orders. Move your asses. These are the orders.

+ Chronostamp: 00:12 +

We ran. The guys were dying one after another. Herus lost his leg. No one saw how it happenned, what struck him. He was running, he tripped, and after that he never stood back up, screaming like a wraith, crying in the growing pool of his own blood. Galamatan exploded when a small rocket, following clearly drunken trajectory, passed the face of the sarge by a hair width, scorching his cheek, only to hit the guardmen right in the chest, lifting him up in the air quite a few yards and then exploding, showering us all in a brief rain of guts and hot blood. Sarge was yelling at everything and everyone, he was cursing and calling the name of the Emperor, he was waving his chainsword around, he was urging us onward. He didn’t had to. We ran. From cover to cover, trying to find relief behind anything that looked solid… rubble, bigger chunks of stone, ruined, still smoking skeletons of Chimeras and ramshackle remnants of the greenskins own vehicles. Each jaunty sprint lasted maybe a few heartbeats. Each covered maybe a few yards of land… And with each there was less and less of us.

+ Chronostamp: 00:17 +

When we left the transport there was twenty of us. Now there were sic, maybe seven. No time for an accurate countdown. We opened fire. First time we left the assault ramp of the Crassus. Red traces of our las-guns shoot into the billowing clouds of dust into the blurry silhouetted of our enemies. Truly a remarkable feeling. I never felt better in my entire life… All this fear, all this fury, all this hatred brew in us since the first day of drafting finally found a place to vent, to burn through, to be used with a weapon in my hands in a cause that was truly righteous, to crush and kill the spiteful enemy. We were shooting blindly. As soon as any shape seemed to appear in the dusy, oily smog, we shoot. Sometimes we were rewarded with a pig-like groan of pain. Good. Great. Die. Die in the name of the Emperor! Die from the hands of Janus, the hero of the fucking Imperium of Man!

Chronostamp: 00:19 +

Half of the charge left. That was the meaning of the red dial blinking on the side of the gun, when it happenned. When the head of the valiant sarge rolled next to my feet, flooding my boots with warm blood. Orks weren’t shooting for a few heartbeats now. Naively we believed that it was because we shoot them all down, that our accurate and deadly hail of las blasts forced their cowardly asses to retreat. Oh how funny that was for split of a second! Then they lurked from the cover of the thick smoke and dust, filling the air thanks to the march and ride of thousands of tanks and other war machines. Janus saw only one of them. Oh that was enough for him to drop his gun and scream from pure terror, just to reach for his combat knife with slow, shaking motion. It went out of the sheath like if it was sunken in thick glue, and to make it worse, after he finally pulled it out it looked like a tiny glint of metal barely able to cut open a can of iron rations in comparison to a massive slab of muscles that stood in front of him. In comparison to the monster with bull-like shoulders, oversized head, small, reddish eyes and nasty looking tusks. To a monster, which just laughed a guttural chortle like some bestial animal only to rise above his head a cleaver, a crude piece of metal that looked like if it was shaped with stone tools. Janus closed his eyes, bellow a furious battlecry and jumped onto the beast.

+ Chronostamp: 00:20 +

Janus was swallowing blood, his vision turned blurry. Life was leaking out of him, the pain somehow stopped bothering him, when the sudden felt of chill, no… freezing invided his bones. The duel laster maybe two heartbeats. Excitation and adrenaline pulsing in his body, when he managed to plunge the blade up to the handle into the shoulder of the big xenos. The angered fury in his triumphant cry, when he spotted dark ichor dripping down the arm of the monster. And then, a very brief moment of silence, fleeting and forgotten, when the beast simply laughter a throaty chuckle, when a fist the size of an Ogryn one landed on his chest, crushing his ribs, forcing the air out of his lungs, taking his senses away as much as his breath. He felt to his knees. He spat blood. His armour cracked like if it was made from some low quality plastics. Janus rised his gaze… And then he choked on his own blood when a massive cleaver struck next to his neck, going deep through his shoulder, crushing the bones and organs into a pulp, almost separating his entire arm from the body.

The beast didn’t even finish him off. It did not even take any kind of trophy. It did not even made any sound of joy or triumph. Nothing. It simply freed it’s crude weapon from his body with a sharp yank and then, ooking loudly, it went away, surely joining it’s grotesque brothers in mayhem, leavng him to just die out here, into the grasp of death hold that rapidly enclosed on him….

Janus smiled to himself, only to close his eyes after he checked his chrono-watch. One third of a minute. That is the entirety of his heroic career in the military.

“Meat.” He whispered.