by David Guymer
Shutting down external feeds, he squirted his consciousness through the clave link.
His clan brethren appeared to him as dense regions in a bright, ever-changeable sea of code, sergeants superimposed where they, as he, adhered to precedent and sought solution in the manifold. The skitarii were a loose swarm of red, auto-strategos units continuing to compile and disseminate even if the warriors that carried them embedded in their systems had ceased to function. One demi-clave alone drew his attention.
In delayed response, the battlegroup’s noospheric generators lagged with the surge in demand on its cogitation power, their icon highlighted in his mind, cleaving like a perfect mechanism into five flawless sub-signatures. He focused on one, mentally establishing a connection via their bridging data-tether. A codewall interrogated his authorisations, but they were meticulous, and he was not challenged again as his overlay slurred into a rushing datastream of indecipherable binharic screed.
He opened his brother’s eyes.
Or, more accurately, hijacked his visual feeds.
A squall of radiation static filled the lagged noosphere between them, and the view from his brother’s optics was poor. It was enough to see the smoke that poured in through a twisted panel between the rear compartment and the operator’s cabin. Four armoured figures were sprawled across one another, unmoving, unresponsive to his noospheric probes. Jalenghaal had no control over his host, and he received no sound. He could only watch as the flames flickered over the Razorback’s ammunition hoppers in grainy silence. He remained in situ long enough to transmit override codes to his host’s battleplate, and remotely activated a diagnostic routine.
As he suspected. Trellok was dead.
He calculated an even probability that the entire demi-clave was dead or soon would be.
Pushing against the tide of data, he returned to his own mind and re-sanctified its seals. His optics chirruped as they powered back online. Helmet chrono indicated he had been absent for ninety-two seconds. He appeared undamaged. Vand was still beside him.
‘Orders?’ he repeated, as if the intervening ninety-two seconds had been scrubbed from their meme-logs.
‘Stronos is disabled, probably dead. The possibility of retrieval is negligible. I am sergeant.’
‘As it should have been.’
‘Ambition is weakness. As is discontent.’
‘Yes, brother-sergeant.’
Jalenghaal’s battle systems built to full purr as he started forwards, asserting battlefield authority over Stronos’ defunct codewalls to furnish himself with temporary sergeant’s protocols. The firepower impacting on his front armour intensified as he strode into it and narrowed its angles. If he still felt the stirring that he might have called pride in the ticking metal of his breast then he might have smirked. If he had ever felt such a thing. The slow awakening of a long dormant gestalt from within his iron core, however, was something that even he could not wholly ignore.
‘Exterminate,’ ordered Clave Jalenghaal.
And to a man they obeyed.
>>> TERMINATING SIMULUS.
III
The hatch hit the sand with a muffled clang, flame roaring briefly through the open space before an armoured figure stepped through. Sand turned to glass and then shattered as, with mechanical precision, Kardan Stronos turned towards the blip of hostile markers, raised his pistol and fired. Thunder on dead ears. Again.
It was well known that the ships and vehicles of the Iron Hands were capable of limited autonomy, but that was just the beginning.
Stronos’ power armour unleashed another burst and then, detecting no further hostiles within a pre-coded perimeter distance, delivered him a powerful electric shock that jolted his body out of its sus-an state and jerked his flesh eye open.
Five hook-limbed skitarii infiltrators lay ruined at his feet, their cyborgised remains torn apart by bolter-fire. It was reasonable to conclude that he had killed them.
Through the incessant swirl of dust, sand and micrometallics he could see huge black warriors advancing into the skitarii’s heavy guns, the cohesive perfection of Clan Garrsak broken down into a dozen or more firefights between independent demi-claves and Sicarian infiltrators. Stronos saw one infiltrator clade sprint from one firefight to another and scatter into the cover of an ork battlewagon that looked as though it had been deliberately driven over a mine a thousand years before. Stronos was the nearest warrior. Still operating semi-autonomously he began to turn towards the decaying truck, just as an ethereal ribbon of plasma bled out of the air in an unbroken line between the vehicle and a Rhino to the fore of the column, and the entire area mushroomed into blue-white fire.
Cooked shrapnel, millennia old, and acid-yellow glass rained over Stronos’ armour. The restorative chemicals in his blood and charge residuals on his nerve axons made him feel sick.
Anger and confusion passed through him like a cold transfusion of blood. He frowned in consternation. The interlink. His armour must have connected him while his mind had been shut down. For a moment, he thought to resist, but it would have been as easy to seal his brain’s left hemisphere from his right. He could feel the bitterness of his brothers, amplified a hundred-fold by the buried rage of so many, and yet at the same time disseminated evenly amongst them all. It was the same logic discontinuity as simulus.
1 + 1 ≠ 2
He should have felt more, but he felt less.
1 + 1 = 0
He felt nothing. Illogical, but there it was, and he dealt with it accordingly.
The crunch of boots on sand brought Kardaanus, Lurrgol and Burr to his side. Trellok was dead. The three Iron Hands radiated heat. Lurrgol and Burr both exhibited extensive surface damage, the multiple breaches to Kardaanus’ armour enough to overwhelm his autorepair and fry the systems thus exposed to the radiation. He was already walking with the shamble of an end-of-life servitor. His left arm hung at his side, its control systems locked down.
‘My function is impaired.’ With difficulty, the giant Space Marine disconnected his lascannon’s power leads, then let the weapon thump to the ground. ‘Direct me, sergeant. I will draw the enemy fire.’
‘No,’ said Stronos, feeling a portion of his brother’s confusion before it could be dispersed and repressed.
‘I can be of no further use to the clave.’
Stronos turned his bolt pistol so he held it by its brick-like barrel, the grip extended towards Kardaanus. ‘You have one hand. Use it.’
Kardaanus looked at the weapon as though its like appeared nowhere in his memory. ‘Illogical,’ he managed to grind out. ‘Now you are disarmed.’
‘Momentarily.’ Stronos bent and collected the discarded lascannon. His suit suspensors swiftly adapted to its weight, but the familiar mass of a real weapon in his hands was pleasing. For a moment, at least, until the interlink spread the emotion thin. ‘Plug me in,’ he said to Burr. Ordinarily, a servitor would perform the function, but in its absence his Iron Hands brother dutifully connected the cannon’s power leads to Stronos’ backpack. His plant’s output was not equivalent to Kardaanus’ but it would suffice for half a dozen shots.
‘This is…’ Kardaanus still looked as though he would protest.
‘Errant,’ Lurrgol finished for him.
Hefting the lascannon in both hands Stronos pointed it towards the reverse-jointed silhouette of a Sydonian walker, waited for the green rune as his optics sought to lace with the weapon’s targeting hardware. A sudden burst of bolter-fire distracted him from his shot, and he glanced sideways as Sergeant Artex and his clave emerged from behind the Rhino immediately ahead in the convoy and marched across him, laying down fire as they went. Stronos grunted and pulled his shot before he immolated one of his brothers. The Sydonian picked off one of Artex’s clave with a volley of auto-fire, but the rest continued remorselessly on the vector they had set for themselves. Neither sergeant ackn
owledged the other.
Once the clave had passed, Stronos lined up his target again, hard bangs of bolter-fire as his own clave began to advance.
It briefly occurred to Stronos that Artex could have helped him and his brothers from the wrecked Razorback, and he wondered why the other sergeant had not thought to try.
Had Stronos been unable to free himself then his value to the current engagement could have been presumed to be minimal. Better to let him burn, enact recovery and repair in the aftermath provided the damage was not too severe.
And now Trellok was dead, a brother, part of his system, an arm he could still feel even though it was no longer there.
A green rune. The Sydonian walker collapsed into steaming slag before his finger had released the trigger.
Despite everything, he felt… angry. It was a sensation he was determined to share more widely than the interlinked battle group.
‘We should re-link with Jalenghaal,’ said Kardaanus. Now that a role had been foisted upon him he acted as though determined to fulfil it. His pistol worked with accuracy and haste, and though his left leg dragged a furrow in the rad-sand he had not yet slowed his brothers down.
‘I cannot,’ said Stronos. The denial migraine from his data-tether told him what must have happened while he had been functionally dead. ‘The interlink has been locked down.’
‘Orders,’ Burr demanded.
‘Ares is no longer transmitting. I do not know why.’
‘Perhaps he is disabled?’ said Kardaanus.
‘Perhaps.’
But unlikely. Anything so prosaic and Artex, as senior sergeant, would have immediately assumed command.
‘Brother!’
It was Lurrgol who called out, but he and Kardaanus opened fire together as a clave of Sicarian Ruststalkers split off from the larger maniple that had effectively drawn Clave Artex out and bogged them down in crossfire. The combat builds tore towards them, shockingly fast, shifting easily between biped and quintaped and every integer between as if they had been rolled downhill towards them like grenades. The two Iron Hands’ bolters tore through their spidery frames, but they were too many, and too quick. A split-second later, too short a time to be anything but co-ordinated, a second splurge of hostile markers appeared from the opposite direction. Burr opened fire on them and Stronos thumped his helmet. Either the skitarii had somehow modified their exoskeletons to mask themselves from the Iron Hands’ auto-strategos or someone had failed to upload their tracking data. Neither solution was satisfying. Stronos overkilled one with a blood-red blast from his lascannon, then dropped it to drag by its cables and drew his power-axe.
The Ruststalkers seethed into close combat range like a riled nest of spiders. Barbs and hooks tore through ceramite as if it were putty; transonic blade-limbs flashed faster than bionics could keep pace, forcing Stronos to rely on his imperfect organic eye as he parried and moved. He had never seen such vicious mobility. The cyborgs’ humanity had been little more than a distant starting point. Lurrgol took a mindscrambler device square in the face and shuddered to his knees. Kardaanus caught the twitching cyborg by the throat before it had a chance to deliver a killing blow. The towering Space Marine wrested it off the ground, then without trace of effort or emotion began to tighten his grip.
Something in the Ruststalker’s throat clicked and initiated a whirling rotation about the neck, propeller-like blade-parts shredding Kardaanus’ plastron to rags. With a machine roar, the Space Marine hurled the skitarius off him, then fell to the ground with the lack of care peculiar to men who do not expect to rise.
There was something about these skitarii, the uncanny speed with which they reacted, as if augmented to prognose the actions of the Iron Hands before they were made, the way their armour gleamed in spite of dust, as though treated and polished far beyond the demands of function.
Stronos sent one sprawling with a sidelong swipe of his lascannon, then swung for another with his axe. He had meant to split the construct’s head, but fighting these Sicarians was like grappling with a greased cable: it slipped away from the blow, but gave the bladed extremities of two appendages in exchange for its life. The remainder of its irrational bodyplan spun, clicked, and reformatted into a defensive ball as it crashed to the dust and rolled clear. Stronos lifted his boot to stamp after it, then grunted as another leapt for him with a scream of explosively-boosted spring.
It arced towards him, hindblades drawn, back and up, foreblades angled down, mid-blades parted like the mandibles of a mechanical predator. Stronos raised an arm to take one, his axe another. Both were irrational gestures.
1 + 1 ≠ 5
A barrage of heavy assault cannon fire shredded the Ruststalker just as its weapons pierced the outer protective layers of Stronos’ armour. The construct disintegrated under the sudden imposition of firepower and Stronos’ pauldron did not come off much better. He hit the ground on his side, at least one severed blade that he could see sticking out of his thigh plate. He felt a hiss of caustically ionised air burn his face until his suit effectively sealed the hairline crack. His vox crackled.
‘Lord sergeant. Stronos. Is that you?’
Stronos looked up, eyes protectively filling up with mucranoid tears, to see a muddle of red approaching from the line of black Clan Garrsak tanks like a mirage. Ares towered above like a monolith to all that was brutal, four metres tall, power built into every etched facet of his armoured frame. The sacred schemata worked into his warplate appeared to pulse as the unrelenting output of his assault cannon lit them with red fire. To see him was to see the Omnissiah’s wrath incarnate, an avatar that men had raised up, a god of war that time had thought lost and now returned to them with a vengeance.
Some gods were like Iron Hands. They just could not die.
>>> SIMULUS INLOAD
>>> SOURCE >>> PULUS, PRIME WORLD ULMETRICAN REACH
>>> ORIGIN >>> ARES, TUBRIIK
>>> DATESTAMP >>> 903807.M31
>>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>
His rib plate ached with rage as he sprayed the melee with bolter-fire, picking off the runny, fleshmetal aberrations that threatened to swarm his brethren. Blood ran down his face. His chest heaved, his dark carapace vest creaking as it rose and fell. He could feel his heart beat against it as though he had enemies inside and out. >> CURATE’S NOTE >> IT IS WELL DOCUMENTED THAT THE IRON HANDS OF THIS ERA HAD YET TO FULLY EMBRACE THE RATIONALISATION OF THE UNIVERSAL LAWS. NEVERTHELESS, FEW SIMULATED REMEMBRANCES OF SUCH AGE EXIST AND CIRCUMSPECTION MUST BE EMPLOYED IN THEIR EXPERIENCE >> A machine-daemon thing slithered leglessly towards him, trailing spinal ichor. He detonated its face with what was left in his magazine and splattered it across the flagstones. His entire body trembled with fury, as if he were a weapon building to charge, or a voidship priming for warp translation. Every square centimetre of flesh stood desperate to oppose the gargantuan wrongness of the Reach.
The structure through which the embattled Iron Tenth currently fought had once been the home of a grand palladium, a devotional construct to the Machine God of the >> DATA CORRUPTED >> Transparent conduits pushed blood through metallic walls that shivered like naked flesh, came out in pimples when brushed by the quasi-mechanical processes that Pulus passed as wind, and shrieked when burned. Cables wound around columns like veins around muscle, slippery, alternately tensing and relaxing to reveal tormented, half-human faces fused to the metal, issuing dense binharic screams before being smothered again in ichorous paste.
Ignore it.
He made the repetitive punch of his bolter into his chest carapace his centre, willed his genhanced hearing to render everything else gone. For the first time in his new life, the gifts of the Emperor proved unequal.
‘Death to the Sapphire King!’
A cyborgised horror of pink metal and lopsided, melted, human aspect shuffled towards him with sickening speed. It raised a carbine of light
s and colour, and before he could react unleashed a volley of hyper-accelerated glass. Ares dropped to one knee, raised an open hand to shield his face, and returned fire beneath the improvised faceshield. Unable to see, he missed, but something hit it, and the onslaught died with a squeal of metal and the sigh of a machine.
Breathless, he smothered the pain of his ravaged left hand and nodded thanks to the power-armoured veteran who loomed over him, crackling power-axe embedded in the perversion’s spinal column.
‘My gratitude, sergeant.’
>>>
‘Gratitude?’ Stronos clasped his ruined pauldron with his iron hand, creating an air seal to aid his armour’s repair mechanisms in their work, and looked up at the towering, gore-slicked Ancient. Crimson vapour wheezed from the disruption field that enveloped the Dreadnought’s power fist like incense from a chaplain’s censer and blessed Stronos’ damaged wargear. The imperative to give up the shoulder for lost and instead take up his lascannon was powerful. Some fell technothurgy of the Thennosian Mechanicus had clearly unbalanced the Ancient’s mind. ‘Gratitude for what?’
‘The abominations pour from the old palace. There is a gate to the north east, not six kilometres from here.’ Ares’ voice boomed, but Stronos did not think the Dreadnought sought to shout over the bolters of any brother he could see. ‘No, sergeant,’ he thundered in answer to no question asked. His vocabulisers affected a mangled attempt at sorrow. ‘I am the only one. We must raze the city as we advance, tear down everything the daemon has touched, or he will use it against us. By the Father’s iron, let the warper of steel be there when we arrive.’ With a redoubled whine of his assault weaponry, the Iron Father stomped ninety degrees on the spot to face the skitarii infiltrators that were still sniping from the dune, then opened fire on the move.
Stronos let him go.
It was not as if he could possibly have stopped him, even had he a reason to.
