The Eye of Medusa

by David Guymer

  Rauth squirmed in his fastenings. ‘Who are you?’

  The Space Marine flashed a half-smile, but spoke no answer. The squeeze Rauth felt on his brain withdrew as the stranger retreated. His armour was the nightshade blue of the Chapter Librarius. Rauth’s head hurt and he ached to rub his temple. He held the Lexicanium’s stare, not because he was compelled, but because defiance was all that his mind could still call its own.

  Remember this face.

  Summoning a servitor to undo Rauth’s fastenings, the psyker turned to punch data from a handheld slate into a wall terminal.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Lydriik’s duties, for as long as the Deathwatch demands the Epistolary’s time. Captain Raan assures me he will return soon, but I will believe it when I see it.’ The Librarian’s albino features took on the glaze of the screen, his lips locked in that nerve-dead half-sneer. ‘I am assessing your mind for late-development psychic abilities, or of any mental weakness, ensuring your conditioning controls it as it should.’

  ‘And?’

  The Lexicanium shared a private smile with his screen. ‘You may stand now.’

  His own free will overridden, Rauth found himself pushing up from the chair. The servitor still pulled with slow, routine motions on the straps around his ankles. When it was done, Rauth took a step forward as if to mentally distance himself from whatever had transpired in that chair. His chest ached like bolter recoil in the rib plate from the strain of his one lung and secondary heart, but somehow he knew that his grogginess was not purely physical. His brain itched, the irritation that of some psyk-conditioned scab he couldn’t quite reach to scratch.

  He felt… altered. Nothing overt. As if he’d been roused to find the ceiling of the initiate’s cell an infinitesimally darker shade of black. He found that he was angry.

  ‘He is all yours, Apothecary,’ said the Lexicanium without looking up.

  Rauth turned to look over his shoulder. The figure waiting in the doorway showed his heart a whole new level of pain into which it could sink.

  II

  Preparations for the eve of the Iron Moon consumed the apothecarion and its staff. The sounds of drills and torches and welders rang over the clatter of equipment racks improperly stowed by overworked serfs. The mortals were stretched to breaking point taking the slack left by their augmented lords, their long faces gaunt and pale. Servitors representing various stages of human breakdown and reassembly moved between bays as ‘living’ examples of what awaited those who failed to maintain performance at the pace required, mopping up fluid spills of every kind. Genator adepts and technicians of the enginseer biologis fluttered about in their blood-red robes and odd, floating detachment, which Rauth ignored as irrelevant.

  ‘Samples one through five show a point-zero-five per cent genetic variance,’ said Dumaar, prowling around the med-pallet to receive a fresh syringe from a serf. ‘Acceptable. Within margin of sample error. Implant markers stable. White cell counts contraindicate rejection. Preparing sample six.’

  Rauth braced himself as the Apothecary passed in front of him with a glass syringe locked into his narthecium attachment. Its long needle glinted under the lumens as Dumaar lent in and, without further preamble, plunged it into Rauth’s armpit. The pain was intense, but focused, and at least Rauth had been prepared for it. He tightened the bite on his already clenched teeth and grunted.

  Because you couldn’t have scraped enough blood off the table from the last time I was in here.

  Dumaar moved his other hand to the plunger and began to withdraw fluid. Slowly. Watching Dumaar operate was like watching a static object surrounded by the frantic blur of an accelerated pict-recording. Rauth let out a long, stifled moan.

  ‘Sebaceous lymph,’ said Dumaar, perhaps for Rauth’s information, perhaps for the machine-spirits in his brain. He held the canister to his optics and swirled its contents as though assessing colour and viscosity. Running his gauntleted forefinger up the needle, he flicked off some residual lymph and tasted it, whatever bionic replaced his neuroglottis breaking it down and sampling. ‘Minor thickening. Fluid loss due to prior injuries a possible causal factor. Acceptable.’ The Apothecary passed the canister to a servitor that awaited this single duty with a padded metal case bolted to its forearms, held open.

  At least he wasn’t strapped down this time. Rauth sat up on his elbow and saw Sarokk on the other side of the corrugated partition, waiting his turn under the knife. In the adjoining bay was Khrysaar, sat on a pallet and hooked up with drips, poked and prodded and ritually bled by a small team of magos biologis.

  And I get Dumaar. Blessed by the Omnissiah, that’s what the name of my battleplate will be when I receive it.

  Rauth had endured these procedures a thousand times since he had first made his way to the Eye of Medusa as a child. Then it had been to assess his compatibility to the precious gene-seed of Ferrus Manus. In this, the apothecaries of the Iron Hands were characteristically rigorous, more so even than their counterparts in other Chapters. Fewer than one in a thousand were deemed sufficiently lacking in heritable deficiencies, and it was not uncommon for the Iron Moon to come and go and decades to pass without a single suitable candidate coming forward. Rauth should feel honoured, but part of him wondered how the Chapter managed to maintain its numbers with such a merciless regimen inflicted on an already thin trickle of aspirants. Pray, Emperor, let them have miscalculated. I’d take Dumaar’s knife right now if it meant the line would wither. The process had intensified, however, with the approach of the Iron Moon.

  It was the final opportunity to weed out the weak.

  The servitor turned about on the spot, lumbering in forty-five degree increments, then lurched off with the lymph-filled canister towards the laboratorium of the diagnosticae.

  ‘What happens if you find something wrong?’ Rauth asked.

  He hadn’t really expected an answer.

  Dumaar patted the pallet next to where Rauth sat. ‘Then I have you, neophyte.’ A fresh servitor pushed Sarokk in. The initiate glanced tragically over his shoulder to the other bay, his youth conspiring against his efforts to appear unafraid. Dumaar drummed his gauntlet fingers on the bed, the motors in his bionic hand whirring. ‘Then I have you.’

  III

  The servitor at the end of the firing range had been bolted into an upright position. The expired unit was a cadaver sporting a few scraps of corroded metal. Anything that could be feasibly re-used had already been cannibalised prior to this final duty assignment, its flesh waxy, the early stages of decomposition evident in the blackening crust where augmetic systems had been removed. Rauth took aim, the tremendous weight of his bolt pistol steady in his one hand. The motion of the Broken Hand made the firing range deliberately difficult, but Rauth had been conditioned to its movements and allowed his aim to float accordingly. He tried to steady his breathing, but it proved equal to his will, rasping unevenly, in and out. He sighted down the thick barrel to a mentally calculated blast point behind the servitor’s forehead.

  ‘Fire.’

  Less a command than a temporary secession of control from master to slave, and no sooner had the ‘F…’ made its vibration on the air than bolter-fire barked from the stalls.

  The efficient use of space demanded that the neophytes be packed in close, separated by demi-partitions of metal and plastek. The confines, and a frustrated wrath that kept fingers on triggers for three or four shots more than was required, fomented a savage thunder that Rauth’s Lyman’s ear did well to deaden.

  He lowered his bolt pistol, still breathing like a bellows with a hole in the bag, his air misted with fyceline discharge. The taste was sulphurous. Oddly pleasant. Like a warm wind without dust. It was an effort on his part not to advance down the range, to unload what remained of his clip into what remained of his target. His aim had been perfect. Splatter painted the interior of the target stall, lump
s of red meat barely recognisable as a leg or a torso scattered over several metres as though a servitor had in secrecy removed his target and emptied a bucket full of offal in its place.

  ‘Your aim deviates half a degree to the right, Ehrlach. I will recommend that Apothecary Dumaar conducts a complete remyelination of the optic fibres to enhance hand-eye coordination.’

  Techmarine Yorrvik strode behind the row of neophytes in their stalls, doling out criticism and advice.

  ‘Sarokk, the mass of a human brain is greater than that of his lungs – headshots will give more consistent mass-reactive detonation. Juraa, I registered a millisecond delay between triggering and firing. Submit your weapon for reconsecration at the conclusion of the exercise. Khrysaar, eight shots is excessive. You are rostered for a rest block – I will proscribe you an additional session of meditation instead. We will purge that zeal from you, neophyte.’

  As he spoke, tracked servitor units with ablative ballistic cladding at their rear – because it wasn’t just Khrysaar with the urge to kill – juddered away from their pens and moved down the firing range. They collected the larger pieces for recycling, and then liberally hosed down the target areas.

  ‘Rauth.’ Yorrvik set his hand over Rauth’s torn shoulder. The Techmarine’s gauntlet vibrated against his carapace, like an overpowered engine. Up close, Rauth could smell the oils he used to treat his battleplate and the emission fumes of his modified power plant. ‘You are firing too low. Your flesh hand is weak.’

  Tell it to the Apothecary. ‘I know.’

  The Techmarine held him a moment longer, his helmet lenses a red burn a centimetre from the side of his face. Then Yorrvik released him. Rauth gave a thin smile, nodded, and turned back to the range. Servitors were just clearing away and new targets being led in, their chains fed through loops in the ceiling to hold them up straight.

  Rauth raised his pistol, no need to reload.

  ‘Fire.’

  IV

  ‘You are the gene-descendants of Ferrus Manus,’ said Iron Chaplain Huygens. He stood with crossed arms like a statue on a pedestal, set there in centuries past and there to stand for centuries to come. His skull-faced helm glittered like polished silver under the intensity of several lumen globes, his battleplate streaked with bands of white. If not for his armour’s environment seals he would have found the chamber punishingly hot.

  Rauth and his brothers had no such advantage.

  The doctrinal chamber of the Broken Hand shared a module with the halls of rigour. The waste heat of the plasma, las and melta weaponry discharged in the battle-brothers’ exercises all sank through the conductive metal walls to where thousands of neophytes over thousands of years had sat to memorise the Chapter’s histories and its rolls of battle. And I can smell every one of them still. Thank you, Father, for that particular gift. The walls were hung with ironglass tablets, acid-etched with selected passages from the Canticle of Travel and the Scriptorum of Iron. The ventilation system wheezed as though manually operated by a dying servitor on the other side of the small, rust-clogged grille.

  ‘Manus died because he was flawed…’

  Rauth was already starting to feel drowsy. The day’s regimen would have been punishing had he been at his peak; maintaining the same standard as his brothers with only half his strength had drained him almost completely.

  ‘You are flawed…’

  The Chaplain’s words moved through his mind, unwelcomed yet unchallenged. He was too tired. Something at the back of his mind began to tingle, something he had felt before but been unable to reach.

  ‘Pride. Passion. Trust. These are flaws. Our Father trusted his brother, Fulgrim. In so doing, he bears equal culpability in his death…’

  Istvaan. The Dropsite Massacre. These were seared into his genetic makeup and into his soul. He could recite the episodes by rote. He wore them on his flesh as truly as the elite of Clan Avernii sealed them to their armour.

  The flesh is weak.

  Something in his mind opened: the rattling of the ventilation system became bolter-fire, the massed roar of engines, the soaked-in stench of sweat transmuted into blood.

  ‘Only by eradication of the weak will humanity prevail, only by unflinching example will it accept its path. Thennos’ fate is the fate of the flawed…’

  And so it went on. A combination of heat, exhaustion and sub-psychic cues had left Rauth one step from comatose, but he took it in.

  He took all of it in.

  V

  Rauth had never entered this section of the Broken Hand. Its narrow corridors were the haunt of Praetorian servitor patrols, home to few with a nervous system not slaved to the crawler’s dorsal batteries and auspectoria. The overwhelming forbearance of the Broken Hand itself seemed to make the walls groan. Rauth could feel its eyes behind every flickering terminal. Rust flaked from the surfaces, the locked-in odour of electroplating and aerosolised anti-rust clouding the passageways like spores.

  His supposed mentor, Sergeant Tartrak, strode into the alchemical pall. Rauth struggled a few metres behind, the gap between them widening by increments. Lost a heart? Lost a lung? Don’t slow down on my account.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked, masking his breathlessness with a dose of venom.

  ‘It is traditional for the neophytes of Clan Borrgos to spend their last night before the Iron Moon together. Here. It is called The Smelting.’

  Of course it is. ‘To what purpose?’

  Tartrak didn’t answer. The floor panels creaked under the weight of his passing; the handful of lumen globes still functioning sputtered to the moan of the wind.

  ‘I asked a question.’

  ‘It is traditional.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘It is considered to be a neophyte’s final night of freedom before he is accepted into the Scout claves of Clan Dorrvok.’

  ‘Freedom…’ Rauth almost laughed.

  ‘Innocence, then,’ said Tartrak, his voice cold, even, as impervious to a neophyte’s sarcasm as power armour was to his fists.

  Rauth turned to look down past his left shoulder. So this is what innocence looks like. I always suspected.

  Corridors branched off from the main dorsal spine at regular intervals, just as empty, just as dark, leading to gunnery bays and sensorium suites. Tartrak ignored them all. Several times the sergeant led them through airlocks, heavy-duty shutters locking behind them as they crossed the crinkle-walled connectors between modules. The halls of rigour were far behind now, and still Tartrak walked.

  ‘The flesh is weak,’ said Tartrak, leaving yet another turn untaken. ‘But it is free. Appreciate it while it lasts.’

  Rauth glared after the sergeant, expecting some backhand comment to follow what sounded like honest concern of a mentor for a student, and so failed to notice Tartrak approach a door. The sergeant punched the activation panel to order the mechanism to open, and then turned. Rauth remained still, poised, until it became clear that this was the extent of Tartrak’s action. The sergeant extended an open palm.

  A kind word, and now you want to hold my hand? Do I die and go to Nocturne?

  ‘Your weapon,’ the sergeant prodded. ‘You will not need it.’

  Ah yes, I feel its warmth. Rauth grunted and drew his pistol from its mag-holster, then pushed it barrel-down into Tartrak’s gauntlet. The sergeant clamped it to his thigh alongside his own.

  ‘And the blade. It is–’

  ‘Traditional,’ Rauth parroted, unclipping his scabbard and sliding out his gladius. ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Until the Iron Moon rises.’

  The sergeant left, and Rauth stepped through the open door.

  He gasped.

  Comfort and space were alien concepts. Even from his precious existence as a mortal, he couldn’t recall the sensation of a full stomach, of a padded surface, of a room that had not stunk
of oil, sweat and blood. The chamber he had just entered was disconcertingly spacious, trapezoidal, its forward wall composed of crystalflex cells and aligned to the bullet nose of the Broken Hand. The space was scattered with couches, large enough to seat three or four men of Rauth’s augmented size. The upholstery was well worn, clearly old, but looked comfortable. Rauth regarded them with distrust. The couches were arrayed around tables laden with food and potations. Medusa produced little that was edible, and so most were off-world delicacies for which Rauth had no name. Freestanding sheets of ironglass dotted the area, without purpose. The heavy panes had been acid-etched and then washed with pigment, the final effect serving to retard the light just so to produce florid mezzotints. The scenes so displayed were as diverse as Ferrus Manus’ battle with the Emperor of Man – real dust from the battleground in the Northern Reaches is a nice touch – to the Skarvus purges of Iron Father Kristos.

  It was that forward view, however, that took his breath away.

  Situated over the very front of the Broken Hand, thirty metres above its grinding tracks, it was simply astounding.

  The Felgarrthi Mountains rose high over the basin of the plain, less a product of geology than a challenge thrown down by the gods. Ten patrician countenances, each hundreds of metres in height, gazed down from the storm-blasted summit. Not gods perhaps, in the conventional sense, but any man blessed by the Omnissiah with the machines to tame Medusa warranted the accolade like no other. Their likenesses had brooded over this plain for five thousand years before the next god from Terra had fallen from the sky. As the founding patriarchs of every clan on Medusa, it could be argued – and some did – that the Iron Hands owed as much to these ten mortal men as to their primarch.

  The Dark Age techno-sorceries of those prehistoric giants protected the Felgarrthi Mountains still, and in this shrinking oasis of habitability on the Felgarrthi steppe, Medusa’s solitary permanent settlement had been allowed to grow.