by David Guymer
He nodded reluctantly. When one joined a clan, one joined absolutely.
Lurrgol appeared amused by Stronos’ hesitation. ‘Kardaanus and Vand look forward to fighting under you, brother-sergeant.’
Stronos had never met the clave’s two heavy-weapon specialists, but somehow he found he knew them well. They had a shared appreciation of firepower. ‘I look forward to fighting alongside them as well. With all of my clan.’ He glanced at Jalenghaal’s brooding form as, with a serried click, Artisan Rawl’s lasers snapped back into folding sheaths.
It is done,’ said the artisan. ‘May the Omnissiah watch over this instrument of holy war. May the Motive Force move it. May the Machine God see it unmake the impure works of the heretic, the abomination and the alien.’ He made a complex concatenation of gestures.
‘Ave Omnissiah,’ the four Iron Hands legionaries rumbled in unison.
Stronos rose. The cot creaked with the removal of his immense weight. He risked a turn of the neck. Stiff, but the pain was bearable.
‘How does it feel?’ said Burr.
‘Weak.’
Stronos grunted as he pushed the softseals of arm and neck joints to run his fingers down the forgechain. The augmetic vertebrae symbolised acceptance into his new clan. The first that every new Scout received was the plain steel of Clan Dorrvok. Next down his chain was the opalxanthine of the Clan Vurgaan, followed now by the acid-etched gold rosarium of Clan Garrsak. He felt a frisson of connection to his prior, lesser selves, an unbroken chain that ran back, through his initiation, to his long-discarded humanity.
‘With this link we bind you to our clan,’ Jalenghaal intoned. There was a single century cog-stud bolted into his helm. He clasped Stronos’ wrist in a grip that was stronger than superhuman and harder than plasteel. Stronos returned it with equal stiffness.
‘You are fully connected?’ asked Burr.
Through the constant feed of inload/exload from individual to clave to clan, Stronos found that he could see the ident-runes of every battle-brother aboard the cruiser, the Alloyed. Recognised by the interlink manifold as a sergeant, he was able to pinpoint their approximate location, determine their combat status, listen in on private vox loops, and even see through a brother’s eyes by siphoning input from his visual feeds.
It felt… godlike.
‘I am.’
‘What is the calculus of battle?’
Stronos quickly read the runes. ‘Full-scale deployment. An example must be made.’
Chapter Two
‘Your failure is one of calculus.’
– Sergeant Tartrak
The wind was biting, dark with Medusa’s dust. The temperature hovered just above freezing, average for the season; day or night made little difference, visibility was in the tens of metres. Weird columns of rock dotted the plain, wind-carved over millions of years into flutes and coils, rugged stacks that looked from the corner of the eye like giant men and lopsided plinths that defied gale and gravity simply by enduring. Backing under one of the twisted formations, Arven Rauth crouched into a crevasse on its leeward side. Dust crunched and swirled around his boots. The Oraanus Rocks extended several hundred kilometres north to south; the ultra-hard lumps of diorite, a metamorphic crystal found only on Medusa, were all that remained of an ancient mountain range. Granite, limestone, soil, all of it dust now, pulverised by erosion and the winds thrown down by Medusa’s ferocious spin.
Appreciating the brief respite from the storm, Rauth broke his rebreather’s rubberised seal and forced up a cough of blood-phlegm and debris. He peeled off one glove, partially exposing the wrist, and carefully scraped his lips of dust on the underside. Then he did his best to blow and brush clean the inside of the mask and reaffixed it over his mouth and nose. He scowled as he replaced his glove and hugged the action of his shotgun to his chest carapace.
It got everywhere. His armour had been scoured to a mottled eggshell pattern of raw armaplas and black metallic paint. It clogged the joints of his knees, hips and neck. The bare skin of his arms and face had been abraded beyond mere redness, to the point where the as-yet unestablished grafts of black carapace became as prominent as second degree burns. Birth marks. He rubbed his burning eyes, gritted his teeth and turned out from cover. The wind struck his sore cheeks with all the kindness it knew. Laying his shotgun over bent knee, stock up by his shoulder, muzzle in the dirt, he held up a hand to shield his face.
If all worlds were Medusa there would be no war. That was what they had drilled into him. If all worlds were Medusa then what would be the point?
Raising battered magnoculars to his eyes he glared into the wind and spite. He panned across, the sameness blurring, cardinal runes checking left and right on the viewer’s sliders. He stowed the instrument in its belt pouch with a grimace. The storm was too heavy. As he considered that, a spasm of self-loathing brought the realisation that he’d allowed himself to be taken in by the shelter of the rocks and remained stationary too long. His spine prickled as he turned and looked over his shoulder.
Dust over carved rock. Wind.
He still remembered how it had felt to be hunted, when it had been his turn to face the rocks. He had been the only survivor that day, and that included the elder neophyte who had then been tasked to hunt him and his ‘brothers’ down.
There will be no such upset today.
It took him a second to distinguish the crackle of his vox-bead from the gale.
‘You are immobile, neophyte,’ came a voice. Sergeant Tartrak of Clan Borrgos. It was more than just distance and a distorted connection that robbed his machined tones of heart. Rauth scowled. The distance was an improvement. ‘Have the Oraanus Rocks defeated you? Are you dead or do you simply surrender?’
Rauth ground his teeth. Anger beat against his breast and beat hard, giving his muscles a fizz of energy. It hurt. His rib plate was fully formed, his chest enclosed in a slab of bone, but the new growth was yet to harden and he felt the full-powered thump of both hearts like a slow fracture in the bone. He gripped the shotgun’s muzzle with his ugly bionic left hand and rose.
‘The clan could always use another servitor,’ Tartrak growled. ‘More than it needs another neophyte without the strength to endure his initiation.’
Rauth bit his tongue and sighted into the swirling dust. From what little his mentors deigned to teach, he knew that the technical capabilities of the Iron Hands were superior to most other Space Marine Chapters, with the possible grudging exception of their immediate genetic successors.
They could have managed a two-way vox if they’d really wanted to. ‘I’m the eldest,’ Rauth muttered to himself, spoken with an emotionlessness that he most certainly did not feel. ‘I should be on Thennos with Clan Dorrvok by now.’
‘The Iron Fathers say that Medusa’s spin slows year by year.’ Tartrak’s voice was a belittling bluster in his ear as Rauth pushed into the gale. ‘The storm had twice its power when I was given the Trial of Rocks.’
Rauth forced himself to concentrate.
With an application of will, his Lyman’s ear tuned out the bile from the vox. Even the wind dropped to a whisper as the audial implant belatedly responded, allowing him to disregard his environment and focus on that which moved within it. With similarly enhanced powers of vision, smell, and even taste, he scanned the rocks.
He was a killer, a hunter, biologically rooted to his birthworld in a way both overly familiar and not in the least bit pleasant. It disconcerted him, his genhanced prowess, so fundamental to what he had become, and yet so contrary to his conditioning to the Creed of Iron.
He paused, shotgun trained between two darkly glittering stacks three times his height. The wind brushed the gun barrel, scraped the side of his face. Something lay on the ground there.
It was dark and at first he’d taken the dark lump to be another rock, one of the many smaller fragments of old stacks or more
altitudinous veins that now littered the floor of the plain, but now he looked directly at it, it did not glitter like diorite. He parted his lips just enough to expose his tongue and tasted the air. The wind left little of the original spoor except a trace, but it was enough for him to taste. Gun oil. Fyceline. Blood. A body. He turned his face downwind to spit grains of dust from his lips.
One down. He thought back to his first Trial of Rocks, when he had been the neophytes’ age. We fought amongst ourselves too. Somehow, Tartrak had neglected to mention that we were all being hunted.
Senses straining, gun loose, he zigzagged towards the body. It took him a full minute to cross the thirty or so metres and crunch down beside the dead man.
Rauth recognised Sarokk, the youngest of the neophytes.
The armour he wore was the same as Rauth’s, weather-ravaged black carapace, moulded plates over chest and back and the lengths of arms and legs, ballistic thread covering the exposed joints. Blood splashed the chest plate and left arm. Shot to the back. Pathetic. Rauth could see no obvious wound to his chest. He looked thirteen or fourteen years old – Terran standard; Medusan years were desperately brief – but already packed more heft than a fully-grown mortal man. There was little augmentation. A surgical scar that ran down the throat, another under the orbit of each eye, a steel plate bolted across the right side of his forehead where a power maul had shattered the skull and destroyed his frontal lobe, subsequently reconstructed once Apothecary Dumaar had deemed him sufficiently chastened. He’d not spoken out of turn a second time.
He felt little remorse for his brother.
Whatever tenuous bond of empathy might once have existed between them, their brutal indoctrination had beaten it out of them. He had been hardened, as his instructors had desired him hardened. If he had thought for one moment that a show of weakness on his part would spite them sufficiently to make them care then he would have shown it, but he knew that it would not. He was raw material, as easily replaced as a jammed magazine or a frontal lobe if judged defective.
The powerful crack of a bolter rang from the looming columns at the same instant Rauth spotted the shooter – belly down, on a rock shelf about three metres up. He observed the muzzle flare with split-second disdain. In that time he’d seen three additional vantages, all of which offered superior cover and concealment.
Already on one knee, Rauth dropped through his supporting leg and rolled.
In perfect conditions the bolt-round would have punched him through the skull, but the wind bent its trajectory, and it whistled past his head into the rock formation behind him. The mass-reactive blasted out lumps of diorite as though it were a mining charge. He turned his roll into a rise, using his escape momentum to sidestep into cover.
The second bolt-round boomed out, the echoes of the first still ringing from the rocks, and tore open the rock plinth that Rauth sheltered behind at head height. He ducked and kept moving. A rain of metamorphic debris chinked off rock and carapace, finer dust finding its way into the filter pads of his rebreather, clogging his airways with the smell of cordite and burned crystal. Coughing, trying to force his breathing to heel, he scraped and shuffled around the formation. He heard a third bolt-round punch into the other side of the rock, but the structure at that point was too thick and the mineral too hard to present any danger, and Rauth didn’t flinch. Guided by biology, psyk-conditioning, and hard, hard practice he subconsciously calculated ranges and trajectories.
The shooter hadn’t moved from his initial vantage. Rauth’s disdain for his brother grew. There would be some small pleasure in forcibly instructing him on his inferiority.
He pulled up with a skid, intending to double back rather than attempt to circle about his ambusher’s vantage as his brother had clearly anticipated. As he swung round, he saw another figure charging towards him from the way he had come.
Deviance from the anticipated caused Rauth to momentarily stall.
Impossible. I missed no one.
There was no time to react. The newcomer was big, blood splashed across his arm and torso, war shout muffled by a rubber mask as he dropped his shoulder and tackled Rauth through the waist. Rauth gave a grunt as the air was pushed from his chest, then a tortured wheeze as his multi-lung autonomously dragged that air back in. His vision swam, and he landed hard with the other man on top of him. They rolled a way, blocking each other’s knees and elbows with their own before spraying to a stop in a dust dune with Rauth underneath.
A ruse. Idiot. You mistook the bait for the hunter.
With a grunt of annoyance, he got a bent knee under Sarokk’s chest piece and kicked him off.
Bigger than an unimproved mortal the neophyte might have been, but he was at the beginning of a process of enhancement that Rauth was soon to conclude.
Sarokk flew back six metres before smacking into a tall rock. The back of his head cracked on a projecting spur, and he cried out in pain as he dropped back to earth in a heap. Rauth found the display of weakness unconscionable. He drew up his shotgun.
He could have willed the imbecile dead from that distance, but he had time to be precise. He aimed down the barrel, square to the chest, and tightened his grip on the trigger at the same instant that a bolt-round thudded into the dusty underfoot half a metre to his left and blew out a geyser of coal-black chips. He glanced aside.
The shooter had appeared from behind the column, signalled by Sarokk’s initial shout. He came through the storm with the unwavering stride of an automaton, the heavy stock of his bolter pressed between shoulder and jaw. At this range, Rauth had little difficulty picking out the iron jaw replacement, the mother-of-pearl bionic eye that shone through the dark like a data-savant’s prophecies. Khrysaar. The second eldest.
When granted their choice of weapon, most opted for the bolter, but Rauth was better than most. Most are idiots. Compared to a shotgun, the bolter was by far the superior weapon, but range and accuracy were no advantages when cast into the elemental wrath of Medusa or the close cover of the Oraanus Rocks. More damning however – and thus, Rauth suspected, true – the bolter was almost symbolic of the Adeptus Astartes. The neophytes could not don power armour, few yet had their iron hands, and so they took the next best thing.
It makes you look strong, brother, but where is the substance?
Rauth coolly returned his attention to Sarokk. A pull on the shotgun’s trigger and Sarokk was blasted into the rockface. Rauth stepped back, going with the recoil, and allowed a second bolt-round to fizz across his pauldron guard. The bolt cut a track across the Iron Hands motif but didn’t penetrate deep enough to set off the mass-reactive. It whistled into the storm and detonated out of sight with a muffled crump.
Khrysaar came on without a sound, just a biomechanical grunt from his semi-reconstructed jaw as he lifted his bolter like a club and swung it at Rauth’s shoulder.
Rauth’s weight was over that foot, and he had to pull away to avoid having his shoulder smashed in. He pivoted over the ball of the opposite foot and whipped out his knife, then slashed the thirty-centimetre combat blade at Khrysaar’s neck even as the bolter swung past him. Khrysaar bent back and the blade nicked just shy of his neck. The bolter hit the dust as Khrysaar dropped it. Unexpected. Rauth still had one eye on the weapon as Khrysaar shattered his kneecap with a crunching blow from the heel of his boot.
Pain receptors automatically shut down as Rauth staggered back, parrying the stinging blows of Khrysaar’s gauntlet and a suddenly drawn knife. And still, Khrysaar never said a word. Hatred poured from Rauth like Larraman cells to a wound. Enough to terrify him with its intensity, had he been thinking at all. With an embittered snarl, he smashed Khrysaar’s knife a ringing parry that knocked his own blade from his grip and sent Khrysaar’s streaking for the rock column where it sank into the superhard crystal matrix to the hilt. Rauth simultaneously kneed him in the groin and chopped him across the throat. Khrysaar was good, probably good
enough to survive to see the Iron Moon, but skill alone wouldn’t bridge the gulf between them.
He caught Khrysaar in a lock, one arm bent backwards, his own hand pushed into the younger neophyte’s throat, and drove him back against the rock column. Khrysaar’s knife was there, still vibrating from its impact, and Rauth ripped it free, then cut sharply down across Khrysaar’s body. The younger neophyte raised his left hand to block the more critical targets of throat and face. Betraying his inexperience. Easier to have twisted to take it on the shoulder guard. The knife carved diagonally through Khrysaar’s open palm from the knuckle of his forefinger to the wrist bone.
The younger neophyte screamed at last as blood spurted from the mangle of bone and tissue, and his fingers, still attached to the larger part of his hand, hit the ground. For all that he shrieked, however, he seemed pleased, as though something he had always been ambivalent about had been taken from him.
‘You will never trust,’ said Rauth, quoting from the Scriptorum of Iron as he kicked his younger brother onto his back. Drawing heavily on his oxygen supply, he found his shotgun where it lay, already half buried under black dust, and brought it to bear on Khrysaar’s half-metal face. He thumbed fresh cartridges coldly into the loading breech located between trigger and muzzle. ‘You will never dilute your strength by fighting alongside another. We alone are strong.’
A bolt-round exploded in Rauth’s shoulder blade. The shot pulped his left lung and primary heart, explosively amputated his arm from his body and flipped him ninety degrees before his next experience, a second later, when he slapped into a rock crag like raw meat fed into a tenderiser. He fell in an ungainly sprawl, but managed to stand, genhanced biologies struggling hard with the system shocks of extreme blood loss and pain. Rauth realised that he’d lost his shotgun along with the arm that had been holding it, and fumbled with Khrysaar’s knife, faltering into a fighting stance.
