The Eye of Medusa

by David Guymer

  >>> SIMULUS INLOAD

  >>> SOURCE >>> PORT AMADEUS

  >>> ORIGIN >>> ARTEX, SERGEANT

  >>> DATESTAMP >>> 101412.M41

  >>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>

  Artex thumbed the quick release catch of his bolter’s magazine and slammed in a fresh load. It clicked, locked. The orange slash along the base indicated dragonfire rounds. Raising the bolter to his chest to align the weapon’s sight with his helmet optics, he aimed for the fallout shelter at the far lower end of the foot ramp. It was an angular rockcrete bunker, lower than the surrounding blocks. The approach was marked with hazard lines, its frontage covered by radiation warnings and plaques extolling fallout protocol in a detail that no one in need of knowing would care to read. Every work district contained, at some accessible central location within it, a structure like it, integrated into the base schematic for the protection of Port Amadeus’ valuable labour force during test firings of the techno-priesthood’s more… spectacular weapons systems. They had never been intended to hold off a ground invasion.

  A ground invasion was unthinkable.

  Artex aimed for the gashes in the walls where Venerable-Brother Orfo’s lascannon had already punched in the diamondplex vision slits and pumped a single round through each one. The incendiary bolts sizzled like signal flares and left an arc trail of red sparks as they shot through the hands-width apertures. There was a moment of quiet, and then the tripled mass-reactive explosion blew out what was left of the diamondplex and crumpled the door as though someone had just tried to break it down from inside.

  There were still seventeen rounds in the magazine but Artex replaced them with a conventional sickle pattern regardless. Mission parameters placed a low priority on ammunition conservation and a high one on kill counts. Optimisation was a product of balanced inefficiencies.

  ‘Ten seconds.’

  Smoke gouted from the windows as the superheated gases contained within the dragonfire rounds found substances to ignite and burn.

  Nine. Eight. Seven.

  A secondary explosion, an oxygen canister or a petrochem generator, rocked the bunker and threw off a hazard plate from the front wall. It clunked onto the foot ramp and slid down a way.

  Six. Four. Five.

  Artex and his demi-clave of brothers readied bolters. Venerable Orfo continued to stump backwards. Four metres tall, his armoured sarcophagus more massive than all of Clave Artex combined, the foot ramp trembled under his weight. His left ‘arm’ lascannon hummed with gathering charge while his right arm missile rack angled over the Iron Hands’ heads. The Hellfire variant’s sheer firepower gave Artex an electric shiver, quasi-spiritual, the Iron Hands credo of overwhelming force encased in the adamantium frame of a revered ancient brother.

  Three. Two. One.

  ‘For the Kristosian Creed, brothers. Hail the warleader.’

  ‘Hail the warleader.’

  The door burst open exactly when Artex had calculated it would, belching up a pall of black smoke that in turn disgorged a panicked mess of rebreather-wearing figures swaddled in cumbersome Thennos-pattern environment gear. Artex saw one go down under the stampede, appearing to drop to scoop up what looked like a distressed child and failing to rise. Clave Artex had already driven the traitor skitarii ahead of them towards Habitation J, but every body counted in the final calculus.

  ‘Objective is extermination.’

  He felt the kick of his bolter against his heart as he and his brothers opened fire.

  He felt nothing else.

  >>>TERMINATING SIMULUS.

  III

  With a grunt of effort, Lurrgol jacked the fire escape that opened from the barrack block onto Warehousing and Transit C, then stepped aside to allow Kardaanus a short run up to bulldoze it open. The vehicle haulage truck that had been blocking it from the other side was shunted two metres into the street, the door clanging against the tailbar and refusing to be forced a centimetre further. Kardaanus edged in and tried to push himself sideways between the wedged door and its frame, despite being clearly and irreducibly half a metre too broad even at his narrowest point. It took Stronos and Jalenghaal several minutes to rip out enough of the doorframe for the giant Space Marine to get through. With clearance enough for their largest, the rest of the clave flowed through like molten steel through a dripper.

  They fanned out, keeping the gigantic eighteen-wheeler to their right. Its long trailer was open-sided, three tiers of rad-weathered vehicles stacked tight and enclosed within a diamond pattern of metal bars. Leaving the rest of the clave to proceed, Stronos used the ready handholds to climb up onto the top of the trailer. He may no longer have had the armament of a Devastator, but the battle calculus was imprinted. Its bias for high ground would take more than a change of wargear to shake off. Standing with one knee against the backward slope of an Achlys dune rover that buckled slightly under his weight, he scanned the ruined skyline.

  Warehousing and Transit C was a space-efficient nucleation of narrow freightways and multi-storey stowage blocks. With each additional storey above surface level, the buildings encroached a little further over the freightways until they met in the middle, turning them effectively into tunnels. Corrugated steel shutters were up or down or somewhere inbetween, wherever they had been when the power had failed. The asphyxiated bodies of Warehousing and Transit C’s menial population lay over one another, covering the visible freightways like a badly lain red carpet. Electoos flickered feebly in a dim proxy of life. The scale and immediacy of their battle calculus’ human cost took him aback, but only for a moment. The interlink commuted the emotion amongst his brothers and blunted his sense of it.

  The Iron Hands were not here to subjugate or to hold. They were here to eradicate.

  ‘I feel… sorrow,’ voxed Lurrgol.

  ‘The Mechanicus can build another base,’ said Jalenghaal.

  Stronos did not think his brother had been mourning the buildings. He looked up, his display jumping. The sky was a warzone between native yellows and fiery, insurgent reds. Thunder bursts of bolter-fire rang out over pockets of flame amidst the lighter rattle, like rain on metal rooftops, of radium rounds, arc weaponry and las. Smoke still poured from the wreckage of the power distribution grid, lightning flashed by the bolter spreads and missile flares of Thunderhawk gunships. Despite the determined intention of all sides to obscure it, the atomic haze was thick with stars. Thennos’ atmosphere layer was so thin they didn’t even sparkle. They just lit the sky, decorative irrelevancies like laurels for the dead. The nearest was a roiling bolt of purple.

  Sthelenus.

  Seeing his own sun burning back, so close, filled Stronos with a feeling he no longer had the emotional vocabulary to describe. It was as if his bionic internals had unilaterally decided to drop their temperature by ten degrees. As if his hearts had determined it to be of pressing import to beat harder. Or perhaps he had just been angry too long to recognise the feeling for what it was.

  It was not the star. Stronos still remembered the myths of ‘the sun’ from his mortal life, and had not been the only newly admitted Scout to conceal his awe at the sight of it when Clan Dorrvok had first lifted them above Medusa’s dark clouds. It was what the star represented. The children of Ferrus Manus were not the force they had once been. They had allowed themselves to become distracted, their gaze turned inward to questions of doctrine, and like iron left to rust, their strength too had corroded. He knew that. The dispute had been driving cracks through the Iron Council for a hundred and fifty years, but he would never have believed their outlook could become restricted to the extent that they could overlook insurrection on their own outermost world until it was too late.

  It had to stop. Now.

  Though Stronos had been thinking that for almost a hundred years.

  ‘Clear,’ he voxed, and jumped off the other side of the truck.

  The long vehi
cle lay on a diagonal across the freightway, the driver’s cabin rammed head-in to the opposite block, bent at the coupler in a stress position that made the metal keen lightly even without any further attempts at force. Stronos saw now why Kardaanus had been unable to push it further. Its monotask driver was still in the cab, blankly waiting on further instruction. Following Stronos’ direction, and with no other obvious way around, the Iron Hands stepped one at a time over the bent coupler between truck and trailer. Their boots crunched on broken glass. The block walls gaped like engines stripped for parts. Most of the windows had been blown into the street by decompression. The handful still in situ rattled, feeling every distant explosion and rumble of gunfire. The clan manifold came and went, slurring code, strident efforts overridden by static and noise.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Jalenghaal voxed.

  Without breaking stride, Stronos dispatched an objective marker to his brother’s overlay. He saw Jalenghaal turn that way. From the jumble of rubble-strewn rooftops, underlit by splashes of burning promethium, an orbital uplink tower rose into the choking black smoke like a coil of barbed wire.

  ‘High ground,’ Stronos said.

  ‘We are not Devastators.’

  ‘We are Iron Hands,’ said Stronos firmly. ‘I need data if we are to reconvene with Draevark’s assault. With luck, the altitude boost will allow me to regain access to the manifold.’

  Jalenghaal snorted. ‘Luck.’

  ‘You do not think that there is such a thing?’

  ‘There is such a thing as randomness – it exists where a system defies logical reasoning. To call it “luck” is a crude attempt at apophenia. It implies control where none exists and thus creates weakness.’

  ‘This argument is a waste of frequency bandwidth,’ Burr growled.

  ‘What is the cart-grid of that structure?’ asked Lurrgol.

  ‘A moment,’ said Stronos, and pushed an inload request into the static storm swell of the manifold. He waited several seconds, continuing to break glass underfoot as he did so, until something snarled back to him. ‘One-nine/seven-two/eta.’

  A string of red runes blurted across Stronos’ display.

  Denied.

  ‘Denied,’ said Jalenghaal, and a shiver of exclusion passed through Stronos’ data-tethers into his spine.

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘One-nine/seven-two/eta,’ Jalenghaal answered, as if reading off a script displayed for him on his overlay. ‘Flagged as a storage facility for three Kastelan class battle robots of the Legio Cybernetica. The Mechanicus have been engaged in stress tests of experimental armour patterns against a range of xenos-tech weapon systems. Amendment to battle orders – one-nine/seven-two/eta is to remain a strict no-fire zone until all Kastelan units can be accounted for or confirmed absent.’

  ‘On whose instruction?’

  ‘Logi-Legatus Nicco Palpus, the paramount Voice of Mars.’

  ‘I appear to be lacking this addendum to my briefing link,’ said Stronos.

  ‘We deployed in some haste,’ said Burr. ‘Certain rituals were overlooked at your order.’

  Stronos grunted. ‘A Kastelan is a match for a Dreadnought. It is inconceivable that an enemy on the defensive would continue to hold such potent assets in reserve. It is considerably more probable that the robots were removed from Amadeus to more secure facilities in the proving ranges prior to our assault.’

  ‘Supposition,’ said Jalenghaal. ‘Your mind is singular. It bears no insight that is not shared by the interlink.’

  Stronos hesitated before answering. This was not his first time transferring between clans, and he knew that each had unique customs of which they were rightly proud and sensitivities over which they would tolerate no encroachment.

  He knew what it was to be of the Iron Hands, but he had yet to learn what it was to be Clan Garrsak.

  ‘The manifold is barely functional. I have command of this clave. We will proceed as I have outlined.’

  Lurrgol made to take a step forward, then hesitated, stalled with one heel off the ground as though caught out by some irreconcilable internal logic conflict. ‘Amendment to battle orders – one-nine/seven-two/eta is to remain a strict no-fire zone until all Kastelan units can be accounted for or confirmed absent.’

  Stronos turned towards the uplink tower. ‘Then let us go and account for them.’

  >>> SIMULUS INLOAD

  >>> SOURCE >>> PORT AMADEUS

  >>> ORIGIN >>> DRAEVARK, IRON-CAPTAIN

  >>> DATESTAMP >>> 101412.M41

  >>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>

  Iron Captain Draevark strode imperiously into the heavy gunfire, distanced from the hammering it struck up on his armour by the thirty centimetres of adamantine, ceramite and titanium of tactical dreadnought plate. His faceplate displays sizzled with static, radiation heat and white noise. Stacked targeting icons jittered against the electromagnetic swell of white. Near-invisible brackets, coded by priority in bleached-out colours, swarmed left to right, up and down.

  A five hundred strong maniple of skitarii legionaries and battle servitor constructs, easily the largest single hostile force on Thennos, had holed themselves up under the splayed feet of a power distribution pylon in Habitation J.

  The district was inherently defensible. It was boxed in on three sides by high rise habs, themselves booby-trapped warrens of Sicarian ambushes and room-to-room fighting. The closeness of the buildings alone would have made bringing down a Thunderhawk to offer close ground support a challenge, but the periodic discharges of arctricity from the splayed pylon stump made it too hazardous even for an Iron Hands servitor to attempt.

  The only reliable access was the single elevated road bridge that passed from Habitation H over the trans-rail lines.

  The skitarii had driven a Balius pattern in-battlefield refuelling tank across the middle of the bridge and overturned it to block the approach. Bullets spat from overlooks on neighbouring structures. Heavier fire from the weapons squads crouched on the stripped down Chimera chassis’ sky-facing side raked the roadway with searing plasma, energy beams and high calibre shot. Draevark waded through it, ignoring the impact alarms and the scarcely registered hits to sweep up his right hand.

  It was Draevark’s intention to unblock that approach.

  Energy chained across the blades of his lightning claw, and he hacked into the Balius’ lightly armoured roof. He raised a boot, slowly, heavy gauge ammunition slapping off the enormous armour plates covering his head and shoulders, then stamped down through the still-molten tear in the Balius’ armour. His own mass wasn’t much less than that of the support tank, and coupled with the ripping back of his lightning claw, the boot driving into it caused the whole vehicle to pitch towards him.

  A skitarii ranger fell into the road with a blurt of alarm, and Draevark forced the rest of his bulk into the breach after his boot, clawing out spall lining and interior decking like a parasite burrowing into a man’s chest. Those skitarii that had managed to hold on quickly fell back as Draevark carved open the Balius’ underbelly and then drove the skull-inset solid stone of the Crux Terminatus through the tear.

  The bolters of Claves Soloron and Plutarrk, following over the road bridge from Habitation H, made straightforward work of the felled skitarii now that their captain had occupied or otherwise dealt with the worst of the enfilade.

  Draevark tilted his helmet to the right and rolled the monstrous left pauldron to rid himself of a bit of undercarriage, complete with a trailing length of track, and looked over the fortified pylon on the other side of the bridge. Barricades of mangled steel provided cover for plasma calivers and neutron lasers. Ballistari and ground-hugging machine crustacea, Onagers, packing eradication beamers and heavy stubbers filled gaps in the line. Lengths of conductive cabling as thick as a man’s arm that had fallen from the damaged pylon were concealed as tripwires. Through bursts of static,
Draevark’s autosenses picked out the traps, sometimes attached to plasma or haywire grenades at one end or both. Sometimes not.

  Heavily defended. The calculus had told him as much.

  Observing the ebb and flow of battle through the tactical manifold, such as it was, was like watching two finely matched tactical cogitators engaged in simulated warfare. The Iron Hands moved from strategic point to strategic point, eradicated then moved, while skitarii units retreated before them, observing varying doctrina imperatives to counter their opponents’ battlefield supremacy. Their strategy was one of fend and frustrate, uniting with other fractal elements to engage demi-claves or unescorted Dreadnoughts in kill zones, fighting for as long as it took the action to seep through the confusion of the manifold and counter-actions be executed. But it was a decaying cycle. Draevark could see that. A contest of attrition favoured only Clan Garrsak, but it would be a victory bought with a mounting expenditure of time, munitions and replacement parts. Perhaps even lives.

  Which was why the calculus had ordained that their resistance be crushed here.

  He glanced up at the tall uplink tower that stood against the north-west face of Habitation J. It presented numerous potential firepoints and backed onto a district that was, if his overlays could be trusted at all, firmly in the new Clave Stronos’ control.

  It would have been an obvious route by which to flank the besieged skitarii, and yet his mind slipped across the possibility with the fading neural imprint DENIED stinging his cortices. Wincing, the cause of the pain already consigned to codewalled adjunctory meme-bins and Stronos forgotten, he strode ponderously on from the wrecked Balius. Frag and smoke bombs whistled from his shoulder launchers to cloudburst, Plutarrk and Soloron falling in behind as he spearheaded the final assault.

  >>>TERMINATING SIMULUS.

  IV