Scars

Inside his personal quarters, in the washroom.

Fu Qinghai dipped a sharp little knife into the bowl of thick black liquid and studied himself in the mirror, holding the blade up to his face.

Where should he cut?

Looking at his own handsome face in the mirror, Fu Qinghai found himself hesitating.

He tried to think of handsome men he knew who had scars on their faces.

Franck Ribéry, the footballer with the scar from his eye to his mouth? That had been an accident, and he wasn't exactly handsome to begin with.

Kakashi Hatake, with a scar running across an entire eye socket? His eyelids were so thin—what if the poison blinded him?

Harry Potter, with a Z carved into his forehead? What if he went to J.K. Rowling's universe someday and got killed by one of the bald, noseless man's minions by mistake?

After much deliberation, Fu Qinghai made a shallow diagonal cut right down the middle of his high nose bridge.

The moment the black, viscous liquid on the blade touched his skin, it began to sizzle softly. White smoke rose from the wound.

Though the pain felt like the flesh was being eaten away, Fu Qinghai had prepared himself. All he did was furrow his brow.

His knife hand stayed steady and precise, completely unaffected.

Once he had finished the scar, Fu Qinghai looked at himself in the mirror and nodded with satisfaction.

The next day, Ogedei stared at the shallow little scar on Fu Qinghai's nose with a deeply displeased frown.

"What, are you afraid of pain?"

Fu Qinghai chuckled and scratched his head without offering an explanation. He knew Ogedei wouldn't dwell on something so trivial.

Ogedei said irritably, "Come with me to the war room."

The two of them entered the small war room. It was empty.

Ogedei sat down casually and gestured for Fu Qinghai to take a seat too.

"Qingshan, you're one of us now. I know you have a lot of questions. I can tell you more about our mission and what happened before."

Fu Qinghai nodded.

Ogedei leaned back in his chair and began slowly, "It started when we broke away from the Death Guard's fleet in the Kondax system..."

It turned out that Ogedei and his company, the Falcon Brotherhood, had suffered heavy casualties during the White Scars' Civil War in orbit over Prospero. Many of its members from Terra had sided with the Warmaster, and the company was no longer at full strength. The Primarch, Jaghatai Khan, had therefore assigned them a secret mission—

They were to separate from the main fleet, take a frigate on their own, and escort the gene-savant, Master Kunto, to Mars.

That explained why no other White Scars ships had been in orbit around Chesilatan.

After the Battle of Ullanor in 544.M32, large-scale wars between humanity and the Orks had become rare. Most campaigns were now cleansing operations on individual worlds. The White Scars stationed in the remote Kondax system were the last Legion with a chance to fight the Orks on a large scale.

The Adeptus Mechanicus on Mars took the Orks—the xenos species that had once posed a grave threat to the Imperium—very seriously. They had long studied ways to curb the Orks' reproduction. Kunto Anastasio was an expert in xenos biology, specially sent by the Adeptus Mechanicus to the Kondax system to study the Orks.

All of that had been thrown into chaos by the outbreak of the Horus Heresy.

The rebellion and its suppression had become the foremost concern of every Legion. That included Mars, which had also descended into civil war.

As for why they had to escort Master Kunto to Mars, Ogedei didn't know.

Fu Qinghai recalled the academic cliques and entrenched factions of Earth's research circles in his previous life. He guessed that Master Kunto had his own students and old associates within the Adeptus Mechanicus on Mars. Kunto himself was a loyalist who supported the Emperor. Perhaps Jaghatai Khan hoped to use his influence on Mars to tip the balance a little in the loyalists' favor.

Whatever. Saving the Emperor isn't the job of a new recruit like me, Fu Qinghai thought.

"What happened next?" Fu Qinghai asked. He was more interested in what came after.

Ogedei drew a deep breath. "As we were traveling through this system, our Auspex array suddenly detected a signal from the Sons of Horus. A lone Firestorm-class frigate was heading toward an agricultural world marked 17-974 on the star charts..."

And then Ogedei had lost his head.

The losses suffered by the White Scars during their Civil War had broken the man's heart. They had lost a full two-thirds of their numbers—more Space Marines than they had lost even when facing Orks ten times their strength in the Kondax system.

Worse, those warriors hadn't fallen on an honorable battlefield. They had died in a rebellion that brought shame upon the Legion.

Ogedei blamed the whole thing on the Sons of Horus' rebellion.

Talal had tried several times to talk him down, urging him to focus on the mission first, but Ogedei was determined to teach the traitors a lesson.

Though both were frigates, the Firestorm-class was far larger and more heavily armed than the Falchion-class (the Sword was a Falchion-class). The crew of the Sword only had to look once to know they couldn't win a space battle.

Master Kunto was aboard, to begin with. Even setting him aside, the Sword would almost certainly lose a space battle against the Sons of Horus' Firestorm-class frigate, whether in lances or Macro-cannon batteries.

So the stubborn Ogedei made a daring decision: he handed command of the Sword to Talal, then personally led a Tactical Squad in a boarding torpedo assault!

This was how many Space Marine Legions took on larger foes in space battles.

But it was also extremely dangerous. Boarding torpedo assaults were far deadlier than orbital drops or similar tactics, and were considered the combat operation with the highest casualty rate.

An unarmed torpedo could carry two Space Marines. After launch, it had to pass through layers of laser and Macro-cannon fire and strike the enemy ship with pinpoint accuracy. Then the boarding team had to fight its way through the enemy's counter-boarding forces and destroy the ship's power core.

The whole process sounded like a nightmare.

One more thing: boarding torpedoes had no retrieval system.

So unless they could capture the enemy ship outright, a boarding torpedo assault was practically a suicide mission.

But Ogedei had succeeded, though it had cost him his legs and every member of his Tactical Squad.

At the time, the Sword had the advantage of spotting the enemy first. It hid among the asteroid belt outside Chesilatan, then crept close to the Sons of Horus frigate. Just as the enemy was preparing to deploy its landing craft, the Sword suddenly struck, catching them off guard.

The Sword fired a few shots, launched its torpedoes, and fled back into the asteroid belt to hide, waiting to see whether Ogedei and his Tactical Squad succeeded in boarding the enemy ship.

The White Scars Legion's ships had been specially modified by the Adeptus Mechanicus at the request of their Primarch, Jaghatai Khan. They carried less ammunition and had reduced firepower, but their engines had greater output. As a result, White Scars ships were faster than those of other Legions, making them ideal for surprise attacks.

After Ogedei and his men fought their way to the Firestorm-class frigate's power core and destroyed it, the ship was dragged down toward the atmosphere by the planet's gravity.

It had been in space directly above the colonial settlement, and it crashed not far from the settlement on Chesilatan.

That was how the later events had begun.

Fu Qinghai finally understood.

What a series of twists and turns.

As they were talking, the other Space Marines filed in one after another.

Once everyone had taken their seats, Ogedei spoke gravely from his wheelchair.

"Brothers, Marco van Riel just sent me word. The Warp Storm covering this region has weakened. We should be able to make a Warp Jump within the next two weeks."

The White Scars warriors stared at him in surprise, then broke into cheers.

After drifting through the vast, empty universe for two years, they could finally pick up speed.

Ogedei smiled with them, then continued, "Compared to the Warp Storm covering the whole sector, this is only a brief lull. But if we seize it, we can close the distance to our destination quickly. We're getting closer to the area where the traitors are most active. Be ready."

Everyone answered in agreement.

"Let's go." Ogedei patted Fu Qinghai on the shoulder and left the war room.