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Ciaphas awoke in darkness and the stench of blood. Not the nicest way to start a new day, but given how the presence of both factors should have resulted in his death before he had the chance to wake up, he'd take the relief that his body was still in one piece.
He called for Jurgen, only for a coughing fit to rip through his suddenly dry throat. He shuffled around to retrieve his trustworthy chainsword, but his limbs met abnormal obstacles cold at the touch. It felt uncomfortably like being pressed into a metallic case. There was already a cramp forming in his right leg.
It had better be a joke-
A detonation. The cockpit suffused in a red light. Losing altitude, fast. Unresponsive controls. Spiralling toward a fast-approaching building. Kasteen screaming his name.
Pain.
Right. He had been shot down during an assassination attempt while en route to the governor's palace. Ciaphas remembered the inside of the shuttle turning into a deadly knot and the sickening crunch of most of his bones snapping, before he mercifully lost consciousness. He refused to think that word. He was awake, breathing, with a leg cramping like crazy due to the unnatural position. Bless the Emperor, he was alive.
Ciaphas fought back the urge to puke. His nostrils were already full of – his – blood; there was no need to add another foetid fragrance to the mix.
The only problem with being compressed in a coffin made of scrap metal was that there weren't many things to focus on beyond one's lousy situation. The creeping blackness amplified the reach of Ciaphas's senses, giving him the impression that his heightened heartbeat filled the minuscule space. Unwanted thoughts of doom – how he would be left forgotten in this artificial tomb after nobody bothered to pry open the warped panels to retrieve his mangled body from within, how his unnatural survival would make him the target of far more zealous inquisitors, and how he'd be whisked away and entombed in a hidden dungeon to be tortured for information – incessantly pervaded his mind.
A ray of light suddenly invaded what had once been a cockpit. Ciaphas squinted, his eyes watering after having acclimatized to the darkness. To his annoyance, the beam illuminated the bloodied space next to him and part of his ripped greatcoat rather than him.
“...Here! ...Blood everywhere...”
Indistinct chattering poured from outside, voices either too dim or too loud to make heads or tails of them. Lovely, surrounded by gaping civilians, as if Ciaphas's treacherous imagination wasn't already working full-time on coming up with bowel-loosening consequences.
The gap widened with a deafening noise; this time, Ciaphas felt warm light on his exposed skin.
“...Careful... The body.”
“Is there anyone there?” Ciaphas's voice cracked. The sheer obviousness expressed by his words would have had him snide internally in any other set of circumstances; however, in that exact moment and place, he sympathized with the countless troopers whose apparent stupidity he had once made fun of.
“...Hear something?”
“...Can't be...”
Another roar, which Ciaphas recognized as the whirring of some machinery beloved to the cogboys, claimed another portion of the vehicle. A rugged face popped into sight. It belonged to a lowly Guardsman whose name currently eluded Ciaphas.
The man grimaced. “We'll have to cut this completely open to extract him.”
“Thank you. It's rather cramped in here,” Ciaphas replied.
The trooper reeled back in shock, disappearing from view altogether. There was a muffled thump. Ciaphas imagined the Guardsman had lost his balance and had landed on the fundament. “The Commissar's alive!”
“WHAT? But that's... How?”
The external buzzing intensified, although not to the level Ciaphas could understand what the onlookers were saying. The butchering of the shuttle started anew with unprecedented vigour, and Ciaphas consoled himself that he would soon be free to stretch his suffering limb.
Indeed, the squad tasked with the retrieval of his mortal coil attacked the flyer with such zeal that they did away with finesse and settled down for ripping the whole thing apart, showing almost no sense of preservation for their fingers and hands. Before long, four troopers carefully hauled Ciaphas out of the smashed cockpit, undoubtedly believing that he was suffering from crippling compression and only the Emperor's will kept him alive at all (going by the number of prayers and symbols of the Aquila they were making), and on a hard cot, where he was enveloped in crash webbing so that the continuous jolts wouldn't cause his unresponsive body to slid off.
Under the harsh and smog-heavy light of the day, Ciaphas mused what a terrible spectacle he made. His undeserved reputation had forced him to become intimately familiar with pictcasters and various pieces of propaganda, where his appearance was polished to a suitable level of heroism for the morale of the Imperium. Watching one of their so-praised heroes positively bathing in their own caked, congealed blood, the commissarial greatcoat a tattered memory, and the iconic cap nowhere to be seen, must feel akin to a kick in the jaw.
Ciaphas suddenly felt giddy and dizzy in equal measure. Laughter gurgled in his bruised throat, which soon turned into a weak coughing fit. The truth was out there for everyone to see, yet the troopers were still fussing about him for some misbegotten reason, even though he wasn't in the position to shoot anyone summarily.
“Was there...” he coughed again, despite how the Guardsmen protested that he should stay silent. While there was a strong possibility that he was being wheeled straight into a nightmare, he still had a reputation to maintain. It was a better use for his synapses too.“Was anybody hurt...?”
“Commissar!” Jurgen's odorous bouquet preceded him as always. Ciaphas craned his head in the general direction of his lifelong friend, and he was utterly astonished by how dishevelled Jurgen looked. Jurgen's quirk of birth severely impaired his hygiene, given his perennial psoriasis and collection of skin conditions barely hidden underneath his beard, but Jurgen's bloodshot eyes and rancid breath intertwined with his habitual halitosis would have had Ciaphas cautiously inch backward for space had he been on his feet. “Bless the Emperor, you're alive...”
Ciaphas shuddered at Jurgen's crazed stare as the troopers loaded him on a Chimera. He had no idea how they pretended to drive the thing in the heart of a Forge world city, and he wasn't going to indulge in his curiosity with Jurgen silently hovering around like a cursed spirit.
---
The ride back to the base the Valhallan 597th Regiment had set up in Ciaphas's absence was uneventful if rather crowded, especially with the recycled air imbued with Jurgen's redolent miasma, who had taken to acting like the fussiest mother hen in the Imperium. The troopers hadn't bothered to bring a medic along, which Ciaphas couldn't fault them for as his survival had been an unexpected event for him too; thus, he had been immediately transported to the medicbay the moment the Chimera was safely parked in the hangar.
Of course, the sense of relief that had pervaded Ciaphas after being extracted by the wreck had steadily trickled away as the realization that his unnatural resilience would be an open secret dawned on him.
For all of Ciaphas's experience at artistically slinking away from a dangerous situation (and punctually ending up involved in an even worse nightmare), he couldn't come up with a reasonable motive to avoid a medical examination altogether. So he lay there in shame, being prodded by an increasingly puzzled chirurgeon, who proceeded to give him a bill of complete health before starting to praise the Emperor's magnanimity loudly.
Ciaphas was still confined to the bed for a few more days under observation, with Jurgen steadfastly refusing to leave him alone unless night had fallen, which had the pleasant side-effect of warding off everyone but the most tenacious of visitors.
Said list consisted of Kasteen and Broklaw, who had wasted no time in dropping by at the earliest occasion available and bringing all sorts of silly paraphernalia that bored Guardsmen were known to get their hands on. Ciaphas put the porno slates aside for Jurgen and conveniently forgot to take note of whoever had had the brilliant idea to send them as a get well soon gift to a regimental Commissar.
“Sometimes, I don't know if you're the luckiest or the unluckiest man I've ever met,” Kasteen commented good-naturedly as she handed over a few dataslates with the latest reports. Ciaphas skimmed them as usual, the overly flowery and convoluted wording barely registering in his mind. “Anybody else would have died, but if the perpetrators hadn't caught you in the open, you would have been lost in the city.”
“This is Periremunda all over again,” Broklaw grunted, doing an admirable job at ignoring Jurgen's smell. “We'll have to double check our men for possible infiltrators. Wouldn't want any of those Chaos-worshipping frakheads to get the drop on us.”
Ciaphas could have left it at it, praised the Emperor for having bothered to lend him a hand, and forgot that he had ever woken up marinating in his vital fluid. But there was something in Kasteen and Broklaw's countenance, a reticence that hinted at a niggling doubt that they were suppressing but couldn't fully quell, the kind that Ciaphas had seen inevitably evolve into a pile of bodies.
“This information doesn't leave this room, understood?” he started at last, his course of action decided. Both Kasteen and Brocklaw glanced at each other, their expressions now openly marred by uneasiness. Ciaphas took a long, deep breath and mentally prepared himself to rip the band-aid off once and for all before the damage beneath could fester. “Right. Your assessment was correct, Regina. By all means I should have died in that crash. I believe that's what happened.”
They recoiled in shock, eyes popping open to an extent that, for a moment, Ciaphas wondered if they were going to fall off. Beije used to make that face ofen when he found the latest surprise Ciaphas had left in his bunk back when they were still cadets at the Schola. “I distinctly remember feeling half of my body being squashed in the impact.” Ciaphas shivered at the flash of phantom pain gripping his nerves. “Yet, I later regained consciousness without a single wound on me. I have no idea of what made it possible, but my greatcoat and all the blood that decided to leave for other pastures certainly support my memories.”
It was easy to see that everyone not named Jurgen, who had limited himself to a nod and the usual look of calm befuddlement, was suffering from a serious bout of jitters. Ciaphas couldn't hold it against them; if anybody had come to him with the same story, he would have seriously considered shoving the matter to the Inquisition and let the Emperor's pet psychopaths do their thing.
That the poor sod who would become their next plaything was him was, obviously, not an appealing prospect.
After a few tense moments, Kasteen looked at him solemnly. “Ciaphas, I say this as both a colleague and a friend,” her voice was slow and uncertain, but there was a comfortable warmth behind it. Broklaw nodded along approvingly. “You are no traitor to the Imperium or mankind. We'll stand by your side no matter what.”
The lump in Ciaphas's throat melted away like a snow cap under the actinic flare of Jurgen's melta; had he been less experienced in keeping up a mask of competence at all times, he might have torn up at such undeserved admission of faith in his character. Ciaphas exhaled slowly, the worst of the mental images vanishing into the ether, and mentally noted to put aside something nice for her and Broklaw.
“Well then,” he began with a false air of composure. If the others heard the roughness in his voice, they didn't comment on it. “We should focus on the more imminent threat for now. Has the governor said anything while I was otherwise unavailable?”