by David Guymer
Zagdakka was shelling them, his own fighters be damned.
‘Down,’ Stenn yelled, and tried to disengage to find cover, only for the ork that faced him to bellow in his face and take the opening to trap his arms and grapple with him. He shouted in frustration, power-enhanced musculature warring with cable-thick alien sinew. The ork’s eyes were filled with psychic fire, but Stenn doubted whether the greenskin would have broken off the fight to save its own life even if its mind had been its own.
The air sizzled. There was a whine like that of an arcing firework, only these rockets fell like the emerald tears shed in the laughter of an inhuman god, and then the ground bucked as the first searing bolts hit.
They exploded amidst the melee, vaporising orks and Raven Guard with such indiscrimination that it was frightening. Not artillery, Stenn realised. He could taste the familiar aberrant foulness of a psyker’s touch. Zagdakka and his retinue pressed the breach themselves.
An ectoplasmic limb twice the girth of an armoured Space Marine manifested from the random snaps of energy and smacked down on a Raven Guard that had been about to deliver the kill shot to the ork at his feet. Stenn strained as his own adversary’s brute strength slowly pushed him towards his knees. The ork gave a roar of surprise as another great fist snatched it away and hurled it through a rockcrete wall. Stenn too cried out as, for the first few seconds of flight, the ork’s grip on his arms took him with it. He hit the ground like a grenade dropped from a Land Speeder, and clattered through wreckage until his helmet smashed into the keystone at the base of an ablutorial block and he was lumped bodily against the wall.
He groaned. Gauntlet fingers crunched through the rubble as he drew his hands under him and began to push. Then he looked up. He swore as the confusion of contradictory threat markers suddenly parted around the black shape of the Rhino that was somersaulting towards him. He dropped back to the ground, body flat, feeling the tremendous shift in air pressure as the tank turned overhead and smashed through the ablutorial wall like a rock launched from a trebuchet.
‘Kristos,’ he coughed. His helm’s respirator seals were damaged and blast debris from the demolished building was making his breath catch. ‘Engage, damn it.’
Screams penetrated the death haze. Urgent signals through vox and data-link lent it a crackling, chopped-up dimension: red lit, threat markers circling with malign intent. He discharged his pistol, full charge, then screamed aloud as something grabbed his ankle and dragged him through what was left of the ablutorial. He bumped and slid over broken tiling and then put another wild shot through a standing column as he was turned upside down and pulled into the air. A greenish coalescence had him by the leg. A flurry of short-lived plasmic tendrils burst from his pistol, and through the force that held him as though it were a hallucination. He fired until the weapon emitted shrill overheat tones and then he fired once more.
The pistol exploded in his hand, a newborn star about half a metre across that turned his arm to a crisp and buckled his plastron with the ferocity of its birth. Yelling in delirious fury as bio-implants flooded his bloodstream with clotting factors and powerful neuralgics, he activated his jump pack. It roared, shuddered madly for several seconds, then burned out, having moved him nowhere.
The force around his ankle hardened into the clear form of a fist as it dragged him over the battleground until he hung upside down in front of an enormous greenskin wreathed in psychic flame. The ork regarded him quizzically through a pair of green-tinted goggles. It was encased in war plate of white bone, arcane sigils of alien design daubed in pink using, or so Stenn’s Scouts had reported, the mashed brains of its human captives. Its helmet was made of scrap metal and buckled tightly under its chin, a single massive spike coiled with razor wire rising from the crown like some breed of antenna. Green energy spat from the coils and swirled in the lenses of its goggles. It watched him writhe as it would a worm on its claw.
Stenn gave a grunt of pain as psychic fingers tightened around him and squeezed. ‘Damn you >> RESTRICTED DATA >> Just kill me yourself.’ His armour cracked like a sea-crustacean’s shell, blood spurting from ruptured seals as his body was crushed. He screamed, genhanced anatomy fighting a battle with pain that had been stacked well against it from the outset. ‘Emperor forgive you!’
With every scrap of conscious thought locked away in hardened centres of his brain structure he cursed the Iron Hands. He cursed the casual brutality, the bare calculation of risk versus reward. His last thoughts before those final redoubts succumbed to braindeath were not of the pain, nor of his brother Raven Guard that fell to the mind-blasts of the warpboss’ retinue, nor even of the Iron Hands themselves as they finally descended on the fray. With the enemy leaders bottled up with the last of the Raven Guard, the Iron Hands opened fire. Tactical Marines, Centurions, Land Raiders, each warrior a cog in a war machine that sprayed fire to a perfectly choreographed maelstrom that consumed Warpboss Zagdakka, his retinue, the Raven Guard, and Stenn himself.
But he was not thinking about that. He was thinking about Dawnbreak.
Because Iron Hands did not make mistakes.
>>> TERMINATING SIMULUS.
Stronos opened his single eye to find himself looking into the lidless, expressionless grey eyeball of a servitor. He winced in pain as the unit unplugged the optical feed from his bionic and wrenched its spidery wire attachments from his nerve axons. He did not react. His hearts, however, thumped as if he had just been in a battle for his life and it was through an act of self-control that he did not tear the servitor’s head from its shrivelled neck.
He was furious, horrified, sickened – to the point that he could no longer discriminate between the three and could not say which emotion disgusted him more. Nor was he sure whose mind was responsible: Stronos, Stenn, or even meme-leachate from some cross-networked simulus file, but he also began to feel… doubts.
He had never thought himself Kristosian. He abhorred the labels of disunity, and he despised the man, but he had always accepted the inherent ‘rightness’ of the former warleader’s interpretation of the Creed. But now? Now he thought he saw what Ares had wanted him to see. This, here, was the ultimate consequence of a calculus that placed value only on outcomes, and measured only against the cost in Iron Hands resources of achieving them. From a position of such cost-benefit objectivity, Stronos could see that the defence of Urdri had indeed been the crushing victory that he had learned of as a neophyte.
And it had been wrong. The lives of his gene-cousins had value of their own.
It was with some discomfort that he realised that this thought was now incontrovertibly his own.
Drawing in a lungful of sub-zero gases, he slumped exhausted to the chamber floor. Cold gases welled up against his broad shoulders and spilled over them. Brittle hairs rose along the exposed flesh of his face and neck, his skin responding with a wave of goosebumps and a shiver that he barely noticed.
‘I had… no idea how… inefficient… my… lungs… could be.’
‘We said that it was powerful.’
Stronos could not tell just by looking whether Ares had been fully unplugged. Disconnected cabling hung off him like netting from a high-atmosphere trawler, servitors and adepts crawling over his armoured bulk to free cables that had been caught on the ancient Dreadnought’s gothic trim. Coolant vapours hissed around his legs.
‘It… certainly… is.’
‘With proper usage it is an invaluable tool, a treasure of our ties with the Adeptus Mechanicus. But Stronos feels already how it dilutes oneself into the many, how its returns diminish. Perhaps the priesthood of Mars welcome such a trajectory towards the hardness of the machine, but we are crafted in the Father’s likeness. We are gifted with the Emperor’s flesh, and with it comes a burden of responsibility that the machine cannot embrace. Stronos sees. Simulus breeds reliance. It embeds the tried and the tested over the innovative. It becomes a blinker. He sees ho
w our brothers freeze in the face of the unprecedented.’
Not for the first time, Ares’ misuse of the present tense for events centuries past left Stronos momentarily confused. ‘You do not trust the Mechanicus. Why?’
‘We do not distrust, but Mars has its interests as we have ours. To think that they align in all things is irrational, and yet we do so anyway.’
Stronos frowned. ‘Stenn spoke of Dawnbreak. That is another world I have heard of, though I am unfamiliar with it. What happened there? I heard that it was where Lydriik was sent with the Deathwatch though he tells me he may not speak of it.’ He worked at the punctured skin around his bionic eye with gauntleted fingers. It ached. ‘Why does the Ordo Xenos now turn its attentions to Thennos?’
‘Another question. One we cannot answer. The relevant simulus is more thoroughly redacted, with little at all from the Raukaan that took part. And we should know, for we have had to inload it all.’
Stronos took hold of a plug-in socket set proud of the bulkhead and used it to pull himself to his feet. He had been about to ask Ares another question – what he was expected to do with this knowledge, perhaps – when an alert klaxon broke out into keening yips of warning. Cycling red lights splashed the vaporous clouds that hung amidst the girders and piping, automated alert protocols dimming the lumens and powering down ancillary systems, the simulus banks included. As much a part of the Commandment’s workings as cogitation and illumination, the servitors and enginseers immediately ceased whatever work they were doing and hurried to find their allocated battle stations. Stronos looked to Ares, but the ancient simply stood there, patiently, as though content to await the question that Stronos had been about to pose.
Stronos gave Ares one more second to show that he was aware of the sudden disappearance of his attendants or the alarm peal splitting the air.
‘Ancient?’
Bracing himself against the bulkhead, he walked to the internal comms panel bolted to the bulkhead beside the door. He punched in his sergeant’s authorisation key. ‘Command deck,’ he ordered the operating system as it blurted acceptance of his credentials.
‘Command,’ came the stressed reply from, Stronos assumed, the ironbarque’s master of vox. There were some functions that a servitor simply could not perform.
‘Battle stations have been called,’ said Stronos. ‘There is nothing on my display. Explain.’
‘The shipmaster has been attempting to install an interlink buoy low enough in the Thennosian atmosphere to interface with the Rule of One. He’s just succeeded. Captain Draevark has held the Amadeus bastion as ordered, but there have been further skitarii incursions and he has suffered losses. Lord Verrox has transmitted a fleetwide instruction for expedited deployment.’
‘Where is the Iron Father?’
‘I believe he is already in the embarkation deck, lord.’
Stronos removed his gauntlet from the panel. There was no need for an acknowledgement and so he did not give one, and the communication hardlink clicked off.
An unexpected sense of frustration tightened through his chest as he began the mental litanies and purges that preceded a return to combat. He had always seen the time expended on mobilisation and demobilisation as an inefficiency, an unavoidable waste product, like the heat put out by a lumen lamp, but now it felt too brief a time. The nagging concern that he was an individual, flawed like their father, with no right to challenge the collective wisdom of the Iron Council remained with him, but the simulus he had just experienced could not rationally be ignored.
Ares posed a question that had stricken the Iron Council for two hundred years. Kardan Stronos alone could not find a resolution to it in the minutes stolen below decks. And on some level, he understood that it had always been this way. He sighed, his hand going unbidden to the flesh housing of his organic eye. Klaxons wailed their urgency.
It would have to wait.
Chapter Ten
“For some this is your first mission, others have waited years for acceptance by the battle clans. Know that I care not.”
– Veteran-Sergeant Maarvuk
I
Dust and grit spanked off the rigid black fuselage of the Land Speeder Storm, sulphurous yellow flares sputtering from the exhaust chutes every time the ramjets sucked up something larger than a grain of sand. The combination of non-complementary roles of mobile weapons platform, scout transport and fast attack vehicle had left something boxy and inelegant, its forward plates angled for deflection rather than aerodynamics. But it was still fast.
The tufts of hair that Arven Rauth had left on his head tore in the wind. He hung by one hand from the crew rail, one foot inside the cabin compartment, the other on the footstep, and watched the vista of actinic dunes streak by. They were so bright a yellow it was almost as if they had been painted. The sky was a similar, albeit thinner colour, the stars hazed out by the radioactive glow of the dust clouds that churned through the narrow atmospheric band. Only a handful of shiplights twinkled. The Thennosian clouds might have had the tiniest of niches in which to persist, but their life cycles were vicarious and brutal. Vast rolling banks tore themselves apart, differentials of density and charge roiled and pressed. Chemical lightning rippled out in sheets. Xanthous streamers swirled and frayed, merged, split again, for brief seconds at a time laying infinity bare before great scuds pressed together in a clash of thunder.
Distinctions of earth and sky were semantic. Dust blew across the dunes like chimerae of wave and cloud. Tornados swelled from nothing and swept over the cratered landscape at speeds that would have outpaced the shuddering Land Speeder with ease, travelling a few kilometres before gusting out and disintegrating into dust and wind. Rauth could see tiny flashes in the storm, like light signals from a lantern, engine burn and flare-offs from Clan Dorrvok’s other Land Speeders.
They were arrayed in herringbone formation, scouring the wastes for enemy survivors left behind Clan Garrsak’s forward push. Khrysaar and Borrg were out there. He spared them a moment’s thought. I’m here. At last. Now I’ll make them all pay. He could have laughed with excitement. He wanted to kill something, anything, and a cold, bitter rage the like of which he had never felt before and did not know what to do with grew within him with every bump of turbulence. Against that basal fury, the absence of a beat from his cold metal heart felt at once giddying and terrifying. As though he were by some innate reckoning unalive.
He turned his attention inward for a moment, heeding the efficient continuous flow of blood through the mechanical pump that Dumaar had stapled into his chest. His grip tightened on the crew rail, and he revelled in the grip-strength of his bionic left arm. The pull of flexsteel tendons on the muscles of pectoral and shoulder was as near as he would get to a sensation of actual physical pleasure.
He took a draught of concentrated oxygen from the plastek breather mask that he held to his face with his organic hand. It was connected by a transparent hose to a gas canister buried in the fuselage at the back of the cabin. He looked back to the wastes, thinking he saw the blunt glimmer of the locis-theta test complex ahead. The air smelled of depleted uranium. Rad alerts blinked across his visor, a wraparound sheath of impregnated plastek that extended from the side of his helmet armaplas and over one eye as far as his nose. Smiling tightly, he watched the engagement alerts ping and vanish, and followed the binharic data-chatter of the clave commanders with half an ear. He tightened his grip on the rail still further, testing its strength, his curiosity over how far the metal could be stressed outweighing any vanishing concern he might have held for his personal wellbeing.
‘Would you all look at the novitiate?’ Maarvuk cackled. ‘Look at him and remember what it was to be a child.’
II
‘I am Veteran-Sergeant Maarvuk,’ the human breacher suit that towered over the mustered Scouts had announced on their arrival.
His face was adamanticlad, plated like an
armoured reptile. His eyes were small and red, buried under a mass of cutaneous shielding. His mouth was a polyp of rebreather and feed tubes. He didn’t wear a helmet. He hardly needed to. His ‘voice’ came from a grille sliced into the side of his throat. Sectional plates had been pulled apart to make way for augmented musculature, the widened separations in the power armour stitched with layered synthskin and flexsteel.
Every Iron Hands brother took his own route to perfection, and from that first meeting it had been clear to Rauth that Maarvuk’s was a fundamentalist view of strength.
‘I was with the company that held Shreevon Ceti starfort for eighteen months against the dark eldar of Archon Faer. I prosecuted the purge of the Jova.’ He indicated the trio of century cog-studs worked into his metal dermis. ‘For one hundred and seventy years I led a clave of Clan Avernii to victory on thirty-nine separate worlds, until I discovered that there is but one thing that still brings me joy.’ His gimlet stare swept the Scouts. No one asked the question he was waiting for. He glared at Rauth. No chance. Then, as if Rauth had imagined the pause, Maarvuk went on. ‘It was during the razing of Farfaron that I learned the simple pleasure of bringing suffering and misery upon the weak. Now I am first sergeant of Clan Dorrvok. That is not a coincidence.’
Rauth glanced sidelong to Khrysaar and Borrg. Along with Jerec and Praal, the other two surviving recruits that had been brought into Clan Dorrvok on the Iron Moon, the neophytes were distinguishable at a glance from the older Scouts. They lacked the heavy augmetics and scarred carapace of their veteran brothers, the grim set to their eyes, the unblinking arrogance that Rauth could only mimic. He despised them that. The evidence of their rebuilt bodies and patched wargear was enough for him to know that the selection for full battle-brother status would be as merciless as novitiate training had been. Only Borrg still looked keen. His face was drawn, but stretched by an eager, unconscious smile that was masked only partially by the blank half-visor they all wore.
