The Eye of Medusa

by David Guymer

  ‘Unsalvageable,’ Dumaar rasped.

  ‘Pass your final trials,’ said Tartrak. ‘Become a Scout-brother of the Clan Dorrvok. Then you will have proven your worth.’

  ‘To Clan Dorrvok,’ added Dumaar.

  ‘I have one arm.’ Rauth had to fight to keep from yelling. ‘I have one lung and a useless heart. How am I to pass this trial?’

  ‘The unyielding mind, the unyielding body,’ Tartrak quoted from the Scriptorum. ‘You will overcome. You will demonstrate your strength and then you will be remade.’

  ‘What is the final trial?’ Rauth asked Tartrak.

  ‘It is a trial, neophyte. It will not come at you announced. The new-forged blade is hardened by the blows of the hammer, yet even the proven relic will benefit from the strike of the stone if it is to retain its edge. We are under constant challenge.’ He gripped Rauth’s murdered shoulder, the force equivalent to being clamped to the pallet under a vice. ‘Sarokk survived, by the way. In case you were concerned.’

  ‘I was not.’

  Tartrak nodded – the correct answer – and stepped aside as Apothecary Dumaar leaned in. A handsaw whined from his arm bionic. Liquid cauteriser dribbled from a nozzle and hissed where it spotted the deck. The Apothecary’s optics flickered, muttering in a dozen languages as he planed Rauth with his eyes.

  Rauth readied himself. This was going to hurt.

  II

  The enginseer was shaking as she left the apothecarion and hurried down the cloistered ambulatory towards the enginarium subdeck. There was blood still on her hands, between the fingers and under the nails. There was even a bloody scrap of blue papyrus cleanser that must have caught on her medicae-dendrite in her hurry to get out.

  There was a washbasin further along the ambulatory. She walked towards it. It was an iron bowl, fixed to the wall next to the door that led to this section’s exterior hatch for the cleansing of armour and weaponry of dust, but Melitan had seen visiting priests use it for the same reason. The water was lit from beneath by a red light, and something about the way it seemed to lap and slurp at the basin’s rim made her uncomfortable. Cringing, she slipped her hands into the lukewarm water. She sluiced off the worst of the blood, not wishing to linger long enough to deal with the rest, then leaned forward to splash her face with water. She gave a chesty cough and pulled back the hood of her coverall robes and wetted her bald head.

  Melitan Yolanis shuddered and closed her eyes, almost convincing herself that the squeal made by the cycler fans as they rattled the apothecarion deck through the transverse ducts had always sounded like tortured screams.

  She never would have believed that a Space Marine could make a sound like that.

  Not for the first time – far, far from the first time – she wondered why Dumaar had not administered anaesthesia. Again, she shuddered, because she suspected she knew the answer, and suddenly wanted very much to be in a foetal curl under the scrap of blanket waiting in her dormitory cell.

  Recalling the young girl that had been so pleased, no, thrilled, to have been given the honour of serving the Omnissiah on Medusa made her want to scream back through time.

  Every cog of the great Machine Trinity serviced the whole, but not all gears were equal: a secondment to one of the Space Marine Chapters was what every initiate privately craved. What could be more glorious than servicing the wargear of the Emperor’s Angels in war? What better way for the child of an impoverished Knight World on the dim outskirts of the Segmentum Obscuris to win the recognition of Mars?

  She had grown up under the age-blackened frescoes of Fabris Callivant’s X Legion conquerors. In the height of summer, when the ozone smog was so dense she couldn’t see her own hands, she had felt the presence of the Angels still above her and not been afraid. She tried to remember what it had felt like to cross the sky-bridge to services with nothing but the data-peal of the temple’s bells and her faith to keep her from falling, but it felt like someone else’s life. She’d been particularly good with the harpsiclave, she remembered, good enough to catch the notice of the magos harmonica who ordered the temple choirs. Her parents had spent what little they had to encourage her talent, but at six years old she had spoken her first vows and been ordained as a novitiate. Her manual apprenticeship in the manufactories, painting night-glow radium stripes on flare canisters, had cost her her hair and her teeth, and ruined her lungs, but she had achieved her parents’ wish, after a fashion.

  She had got out.

  Turning off from the cloister’s echoing hallways, she passed under a bolted arch, ancient door mechanisms shuddering open and then shutting again behind her.

  The atmospheric ionisers in this section of the clan fortress always gave Melitan a dry mouth, and prickled the back of her neck. As though she were being followed. The periodic clank of heavy machinery did nothing to ameliorate the sensation. Spectral polarisers placed over the lumen sockets to preserve Clan Borrgos’ precious technologies accentuated the ultraviolet range, and gave every edge an exaggerated violet shine. It was like being submerged in something mildly corrosive. There were only ever a handful of Iron Hands here, engaged in training or meditation or the ablution of their wargear, and this occasion was no different. No occasion was ever different. They ignored her, and she did nothing to discourage their disregard.

  With a deep breath that racked her chest with coughs, she approached a thick metal door set solidly into the bulkhead. Rust had chipped into the frame. An augmitter grille in the corner between wall and ceiling piped the chastening truths of primarch, Omnissiah and Emperor – in that sequence – into the corridor while red-lit consoles displayed cycling messages of castigation as they slept. She presented herself before the door and formed of her hands a cogwheel across her breast.

  ‘Spirit of the machine. See me. Judge me.’

  She bowed her head and in response the door’s seeing eye, a blue-green marble set at face-height into the door, swept the corridor with fields of light. She felt a tingle of religiosity down her spine as the locking mechanism’s machine-spirit scanned the electoo on her scalp. There was a gearing crunch from somewhere just behind the metal side panels, a data-blurt in a binharic form that Melitan did not know, and the doors slid apart.

  The smell that struck her was of warmed nutrient gels, human sweat, the sulphides and nitrites that leaked from the ancient, semi-mythical pipework of the lowest levels. The engine noise grew louder, taking on a percussive quality, but despite the power of the Broken Hand’s castigatus plants, other sounds also made themselves heard. She almost sighed in relief. She could hear real human voices. She could hear music.

  She crossed the threshold as if she were slipping out of blood-stained coveralls after a treble shift, the blast doors to the enginarium subdeck sealing away the Iron Hands behind her.

  A steep ramp led her into a teeming scrap-town, so removed from the rigid order of the Iron Hands cloisters that it was difficult to see how both could co-exist inside the same vehicle, however massive the Broken Hand might be. In purely numerical and operational terms, however, the Mechanicus quarters were the Broken Hand, the vibrant nucleus that ran the adamantine colossus without.

  From warehouses and junk bays that had been consecrated to numerous regional aspects of the Machine, cult priests delivered their sermons to crowds of workers as they came on or off shift. The Iron Hands imposed onerous ten-hour shifts – Melitan imagined that they appreciated the decimal efficiency, and often wondered if the Legiones Astartes of old had earned the moniker ‘Iron Tenth’out of perspicacity or choice – but thought nothing of working their labour force for as long as their task demanded. As such, the sermonisers too worked to an exhausting rotation.

  The music Melitan had heard was seeping through the walls of a still that had been annexed from the water purification system.

  She tarried a while, her fingers moving with the tempo. The rhythm was algebraical, apparen
tly random, though with a root in prime theory that Melitan found she could solve quickly despite a lack of recent practice. Her harpsiclave was still in storage. She’d not opened the box in years, for fear that she would cry if she did, but her fingers effortlessly plucked the air position of every field string.

  ‘Melitan!’

  An enginseer in postulant coveralls of identical cut to her own waved enthusiastically from the electrolytic heat-glow of a victualler’s stall. Callun Darvo had assured her many times that everyone on his world shared his bottomless reserves of energy. A mitochondrial mutation, Melitan assumed, though Callun had thus far rebuffed her professional interest in his organellar genetics. His interest in her, she well knew, was less to the glorification of the Omnissiah. They had no secrets.

  ‘I was starting to worry you weren’t coming,’ he said as she crossed the thoroughfare to join him.

  Melitan glanced to the chrono of the nearby shrine to the Machine God As Manifested In The Saint Engine Of Tarsus Ultra and marked the position of the hands. ‘You have no life. You know that, don’t you?’

  He play-pushed her shoulder. An excuse to touch her, but she let it pass. ‘I like to listen to the sermons.’

  Further up the path, a fulgurite preacher gave blessings to those whose disposable income didn’t stretch to the temples’ denomination fees. Verses about ‘the true legacy of the father of iron,’ and the ‘deviant path of flesh’ drifted towards her. Melitan found herself in agreement with Callun; it was soothing to listen to. Provided she didn’t have to listen too closely.

  While she watched the electro-priest, already half asleep, Callun bought her a portion of jerked blackmite from the stall. She hated blackmite. It got stuck in her prostheses and irritated her gums, but it was one of the few mass-harvestable life forms, a microalgae that somehow drew energy from particle friction in the upper mesosphere, native to Medusa. It came in a greasy bag. She ate with her fingers as Callun led her from the stalls and she surrendered to his energy. She felt better for the food.

  She concluded that the flesh really was weak.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘I can afford it.’

  ‘Track repair again?’

  He sighed theatrically ‘Track repair. Again.’

  ‘You must have an aptitude.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said sarcastically. ‘But I pray nightly for an internal assignment.’ Melitan nodded. Callun, she was sure, hadn’t slept more than four hours a night since they had been dormed together. He had to do something with that time. ‘I’ve promised the Machine God half of what I’ve earned doing tracks. If I could just catch the attention of one of the Lords Adeptus Astartes, like your Apothecary.’

  Melitan warned him off topic with a look. ‘Where are we going?’ she said instead. Rather than take the corridors to the dormitory block, Callun had led her onto the starkly lit arterial to the Forum Mechanicus.

  ‘To pick up my next duty block. I have a good feeling.’

  ‘I’m tired, Callun. I just want to cleanse and crawl into bed.’ He grinned at her, imagining either or both. She sighed inwardly, too tired. Having spent the last seven years sharing a cramped dormitory and the grubby little ablutorial with ten other junior adepts there was precious little of either of them held back for the imagination. ‘Not now, Callun. Just… not now.’

  His smile twitched. Suddenly embarrassed, he looked over his shoulder to the crowds gathered there as if searching for a reason not to make eye contact with her. ‘Look, I… it’ll just be a little while and then I’ll leave you alone. I just need some of your luck.’

  ‘Remind me to tell the magos instructor that you slept through the Systema Praeordino,’ she sighed, but hadn’t the strength to protest as Callun, swiftly recovered, found a new excuse to take her hand and draw her onto the Forum Mechanicus.

  The forum was one of the crawler’s larger spaces, clan areas included, but the thick pillars of trunk cabling and low ceiling made it as claustrophobic as the dorm-blocks or the common spaces. Lume nets hung between insulated pillars like the luminous webbing of some stalking mecharachnid, ricocheting heavy shadows from the columns. Cabling ran in bundles along the ground and through the air towards the cogitator stack at the centre of the web. Incense burners surrounded it, palimpsest papyri fluttering over the rising warmth. A small legion of infocytes in dark robes and with fractal-lensed eyes siphoned data from cables as they passed, the recovered data there inloaded to pre-sanctified slates.

  There wasn’t much of a queue. Most people would have been coming on or off shift and, like Melitan, would have rather put off the observance until morning. After a wait of about forty-five minutes during which Callun chatted on and off on interests as diverse as metallurgy and lumen chemistry and the various artificial condiments used to convert blackmite into something acceptable to the human palate, they reached the front of the line.

  Callun went down first. He lay his hands on an exposed portion of cabling and sank onto both knees before one of the elaborately gowned data-savants that acted as gatekeepers to the Omnissiah’s harvest. He stiffened as the blind priest, eyes replaced by bulky binharic readers, read his electoo, and handed him the relevant slate, voice scratching like a worn vox-thief recording, ‘Ave Omnissiah.’

  Callun visibly deflated as he unlocked the slate and read it.

  ‘What is it?’ said Melitan.

  ‘Never mind.’ He looked up with such a forlorn expression that Melitan couldn’t help but laugh.

  ‘Track maintenance?’

  ‘I don’t know why I keep hoping.’

  He handed the slate back to the data-savant for re-consecration as Melitan got down, knees and feet slipping easily into the grooves that millions of initiate-labourers like her over several thousand years had left in the floor. By rote, she echoed the observance. With equally practised piety, the savant repeated his end of the ritual and reverently laid the slate containing her duty block in her hands. She keyed in her personal authorisation phrase and read it.

  Her heart jumped like a body under defibrillation, and after a few seconds she became aware that she was gaping. She read it again.

  Looking up at the data-savant, she tried to return the slate with the formula for ‘thank you’ but her lips wouldn’t shape the words and her hand didn’t seem to want to let go until the data-savant prised it off her. It wasn’t the new orders themselves that had stunned her as much as the signature at the bottom of it.

  Logi-Legatus Nicco Palpus. Paramount Voice of Mars.

  She’d been noticed. At last, Mars had recognised her talents.

  ‘Exterior duty?’ Callun smiled at her. ‘Out there with the rest of us, is it?’

  She smiled back, shakily, her blood fizzing euphoria. She was going to have to requisition an environment suit.

  >>> SIMULUS INLOAD

  >>> SOURCE >>> DAWNBREAK

  >>> ORIGIN >>> ENGRAMIC RECONSTRUCTION OF CAL DORTMUND, GENERAL, METACHIRURGEON TALOS EPSILI SUPERVISING

  >>> DATESTAMP >>> 561100.M41

  >>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>

  The truck bounced through the slurry of the roadside, its heavy-duty suspension finding the rutted mud left by Basilisk and Griffon tanks tougher going than it was built for. Rain drummed on the tarp roof. Wipers swished frantically side-to-side, water getting in through the window and the bullet hole over the passenger side of the windshield. The wind and the wet rifled in under the roof ties, but a baking heat blasted out of the electrical heater under the dashboard. Vane had the wheel. He was fourteen years old, kitted out in the bright red uniform and golden carapace of the Dawnbreak local militia, folly bells and frogging included. The shoulder insignia was that of the municipal reserve. His features were tight. Dortmund could see the boy’s concentration from the back seat in the poorly angled rear-view mirror, white-lit by the reflected glare of headlamps on heavy rain. The
general looked through his steamed up window.

  This part of Dawnbreak never saw rain. Bloody typical then that the skies piss themselves empty now while the chance was still there. Taking the handle in one hairy fist he wound the window down. The cold knifed in, wet, but Dortmund had sat through worse and thanked the Emperor for a half hour’s uninterrupted sleep, and simply unbuttoned his jacket with one hand as he glared into the rain. The darkness rumbled like a jungle full of Catachan devils in heat.

  ‘Sound the horn,’ he said

  ‘But sir, it’s–’

  ‘Sound it.’ The Dawnbreak boy suddenly felt Dortmund’s sidearm poking him in the neck through the stowage netting between his headrest and the top of his seat. ‘Sound the bastard horn or you’ll sound it with your face after I shoot you in the back of the head.’

  ‘Sir!’

  The reservist thumped the horn with gusto, hitting it a second time for good measure and letting the note linger.

  ‘And buckle up,’ said Kerrick. Dortmund’s adjutant sat across the back seat, passenger side, bent head pushing up the tarp and causing the rain to soak down his back. One heavily tattooed arm was wrapped around the headrest of the empty front passenger seat, the other deposited over the back into stowage. Sergeant Kerrick was the proverbial rockcrete outhouse of legend. ‘I don’t want to hear about you getting shot and headbutting any steering wheels afterwards, you hear me, trooper?’

  ‘Sir!’

  The boy fidgeted one-handed with his harness, the other struggling with the terrain. The devotional saints hanging from the rear-view swung on their elasticord like men hanging from the gibbet.

  ‘Pull us in closer,’ said Dortmund.

  Without even bothering with a ‘sir’, the boy dragged the wheel to the right, bumping the protesting truck over the more established ruts left by the retreating artillery. Dortmund clenched his fingers over the open window and narrowed his eyes. It was dark, no lights but the truck’s own jumping, rain-chopped beams, but Dortmund had made it to the age of five because he’d learned how to spot dark things in the dark.