by David Guymer
‘What have you learned?’
What have I… what? ‘Learned?’ Rauth replied, too tired and bitter at that moment to separate his thoughts from his mouth.
Behind him, Khrysaar scowled. ‘Never trust.’
‘Correct.’ Tartrak turned his head, instigating a great whine of actuating servos, and regarded the ironglass etching, Brotherhood. He spent several seconds just looking, until Rauth began to think the sergeant had lost himself in his ruminations. ‘You can never know what thoughts one you call brother really harbours, to whom his ultimate allegiance is given. Remember that. Remember Sarokk. You can never know who might turn on you or when, but you can be prepared.
‘Three is a good number,’ Tartrak continued. ‘Not too few. Not too many. Scout-Sergeant Maarvuk will be satisfied.’
Too many? How could there possibly be too many? ‘Was this our final test?’
Tartrak stared at him, his inhuman eyes inscrutable despite whatever emotion he might have intended them to convey.
‘The tests never end, neophyte. Remember that too.’
Chapter Seven
‘Honourable men are beloved of those who make medals, and those who dig holes in the ground for the dead. Iron is unbeholden to honour.’
– Sergeant Kardan Stronos
I
Warp technology permitted travel at tremendous – albeit relativistic – inherently incalculable speeds, but intra-system transit remained as arduous as it must have been in the pre-expansionist epoch. At their current relative positions, Thennos was five light hours from Medusa. From the vibrations in the decking, Stronos could tell that the Clan Vurgaan system frigate, the Onslaught, was still accelerating towards its maximum velocity, about ninety-five per cent of light speed. One day there, a few hours to convince the Iron Council of the logic of rescinding their interdiction orders, and then one day back. Stronos would be back with his clave before the order to push out passed through the interlink manifold.
Ares had opted to spend the interlude cloistered with his adepts. Verrox was on the bridge. Raan in meditation.
Stronos focused both eyes, organic and bionic, on the gearing wheel in his hand as he brushed yellow grit from his face. His armour, as much of it as he could remove without assistance, had been piled neatly on the armourium floor. Sweat shine added definition to his hard muscles, and gleamed like polished silver under the lumens he had bent over the workbench.
His journeyed copy of the Canticle of Travels lay open on a cleared spot by his elbow. Occasionally, for a few minutes’ respite, he would flick dry his flesh fingers, mop his brow, and read a verse. His own precise annotations, musings and random inspirations, his quill-craft barely altered in a hundred years, filled the margins alongside those of the unnamed Martian scholar who had compiled the disparate tales.
He was barely aware of the fact that he was smiling until he was interrupted.
‘Can I assist you, lord?’
The robed woman before him was small even for a mortal, surrounded by the trappings of giants as though she had stolen into the workshop of some shadowland troll. Medusa was hostile to life without distinction, but it was home to beasts as would make a Fenrisian wolf or a Catachan devil howl for its mother. Stronos could imagine the role that he filled in this particular image and it amused him. Perhaps that was why he did not simply ignore the enginseer and return to his penance.
‘You are not like other adepts, to address me so.’
‘You know many, lord?’
Stronos raised an eyebrow. The woman shuffled another step towards the trestle and gestured to the machinery spread across it. ‘Weaponcraft is not my specialism, but I have some expertise. May I assist?’
‘No.’
The conversation thus satisfactorily concluded, Stronos turned his attention back to the cog in his fingers. He picked up his finest brush, and began to work its bristles between the teeth. A fine drizzle of Thennos dust sprinkled his work surface.
The woman was still looking at him.
‘Should I bid my servitor locate you a chair? Or sustenance?’ He made the offer with such hollow civility that the woman actually smiled. He frowned. ‘What is your name?’
Her smile became a wide ‘O’ of surprise. Her teeth were of a creamy plastek, a few acid-eaten craters still scattered in between. ‘None of you…’ She closed her mouth hurriedly. ‘In all this time, none of you have ever asked me that. Yolanis, lord.’
‘Is that your first name?’
‘Melitan.’
Stronos nodded, a stratagem he had seen employed when humans sought to profess false interest in the words of another.
‘And yours, lord?’
Stronos put down his equipment. ‘You do not know?’
‘Should I?’
To Stronos’ surprise, he began to chuckle, a metallic grating sound, air scratching on his tracheal tract. But the feeling that it pushed into his chest was unexpectedly warm. It passed as quickly as it spread, marked instead by the chill where his augmetics enforced their boundaries. ‘I suppose not. I am not so important. I am Kardan Stronos, tenth sergeant, and only recently inducted into Clan Garrsak.’
‘As am I, lord. I worked in the apothecarion of the Broken Hand until my transfer.’
‘Clan Borrgos.’
‘Yes.’
Stronos detected the hitch in the woman’s voice. Unsurprising. Clan Borrgos were renowned amongst the Iron Hands for their single-minded pursuit of perfection and, amongst the mortals who invariably fell short, for their cruelty. Only Clan Raukaan surpassed them in their adherence to the path of the Machine. She seemed to want to talk, however, which presumably was why she had come, though why here, and why not to her own kind, he did not understand.
‘It’s complicated, you know, awakening a nervous system from torporific suspension. Particularly one as ancient as that of Tubriik Ares. You know how old he is?’ When Stronos nodded she went on, pacing now, her mono-tool servo arm twitching like a serpent held above a fire. ‘Eight and a half thousand years old. Give or take. Eight and a half. He’s eight times older than Clan Borrgos’ Venerable Castron Fell. So many memories to sort through. So many names. So many experiences. So much data. That’s what I’m here for, to help the Iron Father organise his data. If he seems at times confused, I–’ She seemed to become aware of herself and stopped pacing. Proud of the bulkhead at Stronos’ back was an idol of the Omnissiah, half man and half machine, to which Yolanis directed a passing piety. She straightened. ‘It was a tremendous honour to be selected for the task.’
‘I am sure.’
She gave him a small smile. It looked shy. She changed the subject. ‘Will this be your first Iron Moon since…’ She trailed off, uncertain how to phrase it, which words would be most accurate and least offensive. Her eyes drifted to his metal hand.
‘Yes.’
‘You must be looking forward to it.’
‘I am not.’
‘This will be my second,’ she said, appearing not to have heard. ‘We always look forward to it, in the subdecks. We don’t get much to celebrate. And…’
‘And you get to see us suffer.’
The look Yolanis shot him was of someone caught with their hands in the jar. ‘You are not like other Iron Hands either, are you?’
Stronos grunted.
He had heard that before.
II
No one who knew Medusa could have been surprised by the hostility of her welcome, and yet half of the two dozen Mechanicus adepts locked into their re-entry cradles were vomiting into their laps as soon as the shuttle hit the planet’s troposphere. Verrox laughed at them. No one else did. Winds approaching a thousand kilometres per hour spun the transorbital like a moth in a storm; stressed metal groaned, dust raked the heat shields as though the atmosphere had claws. Thickening clouds shot the viewing blocks with black until
that was all they showed, so dense that even the shuttle’s spasmodic lurches gave nothing on the screens. The servitors would be flying on systems. The human adepts felt it in their stomachs. Shaking against his harness, his augmented biology experiencing nothing beyond the sound his armour made as it hit the restraint bars, Stronos watched them retch. To suffer so visibly was clearly a weakness, but he wondered whether it was a worthwhile price: he was as blind as they were, but they felt as he never would again.
The buffeting lessened as their altitude dropped and they entered Meduson’s aegis. Sweaty hands were unclawed from around restraint bars; battered smiles and laughs lit up the compartment.
Medusa’s winds were powerful enough to rip the wings off a Thunderhawk if approached incorrectly. They had to be ridden. Attempting to pit strength against strength was an invitation to be torn apart and cast over the Felgarrthi Mountains, and Medusa would never turn such an offer down. That was on any other day. This, however, was the Iron Moon, and the coming alignment added exponentially to the atmosphere’s violence.
The shuttle extended landing gear and wobbled down, altitude jets sputtering against the gale, onto a pad ringed with blinking lights. The Iron Hands clumped down the debarkation ramp and into the wind. More than one of the enginseers had to be carried.
‘Iron Fathers Verrox and Ares and Captain Raan,’ one of Verrox’s guards growled in the direction of the human ground crew that ran ahead of the maintenance servitors to process the arrivals.
The starport was situated in Meduson’s high ranges, where the peaks afforded partial shelter over the perilous routines of take-off and landing. It wasn’t well used, but its small size crammed that modest traffic into a hive of activity. Servitors performed post flight checks on screaming landers. Fuel hoses snaked through metre-deep vapours that cloaked the ground but for the blink of guide lights. Living ground crew hurried about, dogged by iterator cherubs, and from ramps like that of the Onslaught’s shuttle Iron Hands strode from the landing stages.
Stronos moved through the coolant wash to where he could better see the settlement at the foot of the mountain. The rumble of massed vehicles rolled in off the plain like the warning of a coming storm, a match in sheer volume to the cacophony raised by Meduson itself – a planetary population brought to this one place of sanctuary for a twice-in-a-decade cosmic event. Stronos could taste electricity on the wind. Anticipation. The sky was already beginning to burnish. The ground trembled, as if testing its strength for what was to come. In the dust that shrouded the horizon, Stronos could even see the faint outlines of the mountain range across the plain where it painted the clouds with an early flourish of magmic red.
‘What’s that?’ Yolanis touched his wrist, tentatively, but with remarkable temerity for one so fragile, and pointed back across the parked landers to where a hulking Terminator loomed from the coolant mists.
The figure was exceptionally bulky, perhaps a third of his armour removed to make way for powerful, heavy-duty augmetics. His armour was black, without trim. No clan sigil or clave number adorned it. Even the bionics had been darkened as though by great age. The figure remained unresponsive as the stream of departees crossed his gaze. If not for the steady flicker of his lenses, Stronos might have considered the immense suit inanimate.
‘The Helfathers,’ said Stronos, as softly as he could and still be heard. It was considered bad luck to draw the attention of a Helfather, and even amongst the Iron Hands most believed it. Stronos believed it. ‘They are the most ancient elites, surpassing all others. They serve as custodians of the Iron Council.’
‘I’ve never seen one.’ Yolanis stared in open fascination.
‘They rarely leave Meduson. Perhaps never.’
‘How do you become one?’
‘I do not know.’
‘How can you not know?’
‘By never having been told, and by not caring to ask.’ The enginseer’s interest was beginning to make him uneasy. He touched her shoulder, not out of kindness, but to draw her attention before the Helfather took notice. ‘The Helfathers are not men even as I might still call myself a man. I do not know how many they are, I have never heard them speak, and as far as I am aware they do not even have names. I know nothing beyond that which you now know. Believe me when I say, Melitan Yolanis, that I have no wish to know.’
The woman looked unconvinced. Stronos could see the dangerous light of data-hunger in her eyes, but before she could frame another question Ares approached with Verrox and Raan in tow.
‘We must convene with the Iron Fathers for the ceremony,’ said Verrox.
‘We must,’ Ares echoed.
‘We cannot attend,’ Raan informed Stronos. He did not address Yolanis, but the implication was sufficient.
‘You will find us in the Eye after the ceremony’s climax,’ said Verrox. ‘It is customary for the Iron Council to sit on the night of the Iron Moon and I have already communicated with Nicco Palpus that I will have a vote on the Thennosian battle calculus. He tells me that almost half the Iron Fathers will be present.’
‘A rare gathering,’ rumbled Ares.
‘Time enough first for us to see a little blood be spilt.’ Verrox’s grin was a picture of cruelty.
‘I thought that you would wish to speak with me first,’ Stronos said to Ares.
‘We did,’ said Ares, so hollowly that Stronos could not tell if it was a question. Yolanis gave him a strained look of apology.
‘Regarding my actions in Port Amadeus,’ Stronos added, apropos of an explanation.
‘We did. We will. After.’
‘After the ceremony then,’ said Stronos, as the Dreadnought moved his immaculate armoured sarcophagus towards the exit stages, drawing awed looks from ground crew and Iron Hands alike as he passed.
With the exception of the Helfather.
The sentinel kept his dark omen for his own. For now.
III
Stronos had not set foot in Meduson since his own rites of initiation. Nothing had changed. He could have walked the grid-planned streets with his visor blacked out and his haptic sensors disengaged had he so chosen. Few Iron Hands returned for the Iron Moon unless compelled, even those of the Scout and reserve clans more commonly in the vicinity: Stronos was now beginning to understand why.
Humanity. The raw, febrile vicissitudes of mortal life in all its morass: insects called by some instinct of flesh to fight, mate and die.
Traders hawked their wares from stalls. Mortal enemies drank and diced and sang the verses of the Canticle, full in the knowledge that the man they had their arm around would have shot them in the back had their paths crossed the day before or the day after. A hundred strands of violent Medusan music shook the metal walls, as though the city vibrated. It was energy, excitement, crowded streets filled with nomads born into rusted shells, the smell of cooking fat and spirit enough to fuel a voidship.
‘Scrap here–’
‘No stronger slave this side of the Telesterax–’
‘Amasec–’
‘Ignore that fool. Who do you think took his other ear? No one distils clearer fuel than Clan Brukaal–’
It all came back. The way his hearts had beat in his chest like recoiling bolters. The sky changing colour, like iron poured into a cast. How it felt to be paralysed by his own nerves. The excitement. The power of the engines as they surrounded him. The roar of expectancy from the clans as he’d stepped into the laager and brandished his knife. He had never forgotten, of course – he was incapable – but he had been able to avoid reminiscing until now.
He blink-selected the rune in his faceplate display to narrow his nasal filters and block out his sense of smell.
It helped a little.
He left the hubbub of the mercantile districts that surrounded the starport and began to recognise that while Meduson may have been little changed, Kardan Stronos had been remad
e beyond recognition.
Men with peg legs, hook hands and similarly crude bionics defied physical disability and inebriation to remove themselves from his path. Mortals scarred by wind, weapon and promethium watched him as they would watch a partially unsheathed blade. The last time he had walked amongst them he had been recognisably, if not actually, human, the pride of a clan whose name he could not now recall. Now they looked on him and saw what he saw in the Helfathers, something inhuman, and while he could know no fear, they had no such limitation.
Stronos’ path took him to the most populous of the many Cult Mechanicus quarters.
A few Iron Hands had gathered by the proving cages assembled for the Iron Moon, each armoured figure a bleak island of towering ceramite in the shadow of the spires, minarets and ziggurats of the temples.
Violence was aggressively discouraged during the Iron Moon, but the cages were a ritual exception. Here the strongest of Medusa’s young sons competed for the attention of the Iron Hands. The passage of the Iron Moon would deliver a new injection of worthy blood into Clan Dorrvok, and representatives of clans Borrgos, Vurgaan, Haarmek and Raukaan loomed over the baying mortals to themselves contest the most impressive challengers.
In the main cage, a large fully enclosed structure, about sixty youths stripped to the waist fought a battle royale with clubs, knives and bare hands. The bars rattled as one boy crashed into them, the youth that had thrown him then spraying those same bars with blood as a diorite-tipped spear burst through his chest. The spearman kicked the impaled aspirant off his spear shaft and immediately found himself dragged back into the melee.
Stronos walked past it and saw another cage that was barely as wide as he was. In it, two heavily muscled boys with greased torsos grappled. A mob of men and women beat their hands on the sides of the cage, cheering or jeering along clan lines.
