by David Guymer
‘Maybe you should.’
‘Pass me the magnoculars,’ said a brooding slab of grit-alloyed yellow called Suforr. ‘Before they become bonded to your hand.’
Rauth handed them up and the bigger Scout snatched them. Rauth suppressed his indignation as Suforr crunched onto his belly and peered through the scuffed magnoculars. While he waited for the older Scout to get his look and for Maarvuk to bring up the others, he turned up the volume on his vox receiver and listened to the chatter. Most of it was in coded binharic, but he could pick out one back-and-forth that appeared to be in Reket Medusan.
‘I gave you an order, sergeant. Stand down. Iron Captain Draevark will relieve you when he arrives. ETA in approximately seven hours.’
‘No. I consider that order to be illogical and will therefore proceed to disregard it.’
‘You have no authority here, sergeant! You will commit where you are told, when and if you are told.’
Rauth listened a little longer, appalled and yet guiltily amused in equal measure, as if he had just overheard two adoptive parents fighting. ‘Does anybody know a Sergeant Stronos?’
Khrysaar and Sarrk shook their heads. Suforr ignored the question.
‘There are but one hundred sergeants in your Chapter,’ Veteran-Sergeant Maarvuk’s voice growled from behind them, causing Khrysaar to bang his head on the alien tank and silently curse. ‘Most of them have held that rank for your entire lives and you cannot memorise the names even of the score in your deployment? Your failure disgusts me. I demand two hundred and fifty kills from you four before I will sully my name by submitting yours for elevation.’
The truck the clave had commandeered at locis-beta to arrive so far ahead of the calculus was caught in a rubble wall and some wire, and no amount of strain from Maarvuk or Gorgorus or its own engines had been able to force it another centimetre towards Locis Primus. The last of the ten Scouts were jumping out of the stricken vehicle now, and picking across the detritus towards Rauth’s hide.
The other clave of fifteen would be about ninety minutes away from locis-alpha by now, assuming they had not been delayed or killed. Rauth did not much care either way. As he saw it, halving the competition doubled his chances of elevation to battle-brother status.
Maarvuk placed one hand to the smoothly alien contours of the skimmer’s upturned underside and whined down to his bulked haunches to glower at the quartet under its carcass. ‘What do you see?’ he asked Suforr, the demand in his tone leaving no doubt that there was a correct answer and that he knew exactly what it was.
Glad of the magnoculars, brother?
‘Velt has not the strength to envelop the Primus,’ said Maarvuk, impatiently answering his own question. ‘They assault from two hundred and eighty degrees only, which leaves a potential avenue if the facility’s defenders are suitably distracted by the main offensive. Those of you that have data-tethers, disable them. Silence from here on.’
If the sergeant disapproved of the sudden thrill that rushed through Rauth’s cold steel heart at the promise of violence, then it was with a sour glare he shared evenly amongst them all.
‘This is a time of great challenge for any of the Iron Hands,’ he said, gravely. ‘You bear the Medusan fury of Ferrus Manus, but without the iron yet to temper it. You will be tested as never before.’
‘Unyielding mind, unyielding body,’ Rauth murmured, his mind already half on the punishment he intended to mete out upon the traitorous Thennosian skitarii.
Maarvuk dipped his head. ‘Whatever command I give, you will comply.’
>>> SIMULUS INLOAD
>>> SOURCE >>> LOCIS PRIMUS, THENNOS
>>> ORIGIN >>> VELT, HYPROXIUS, FABRICATOR-LOCUM
>>> DATESTAMP >>> 101412.M41
>>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>
The scrivener cherub fluttered out from under a toppling stanchion, parchment whipping about its flight as it dutifully recorded the exact quotient of irritation that had gone into Hyproxius Velt’s facial expression as he hurled the object from his path.
With a blurt of annoyance Velt guided his massive, arachnid-like battle chassis towards the towering Primus shard, las-bolts and gamma bursts from dozens of independent weapon mounts off-handedly spraying the wreckage as he willed the war machine to walk. One multiplyarticulated limb stabbed forwards, mag-clamped to the drum torso of an ork Dreadnought and hauled it up, instigating a mini-collapse that Velt dismissively crunched through. He tossed the Dreadnought over his murky armourglass pod as though it were repurposed plastek, a cherub flying back to make note of where it fell and into how many pieces it shattered.
Data could be mined from the most obscure of troves. It was through unexpected correlations such as the year-on-year increases in salinity of the Rakka Basin on Mars matching precisely the fatality rates of skitarii forces on Scipio IX, or the Moirae Schism lasting the exact number of hours as the decimal value of one over the Gellar Constant, that the Omnissiah revealed His universality.
Not that Velt was paying any more than basic diligence to His glory just then, and only that much because he was prominent enough for his simulated remembrances of the Thennos compliance to be subject to re-examination by his superiors one day.
His skitarii escort traded fire with their renegade counterparts in the ruins. It was difficult to tell that they had once been loyal skitarii. The uninitiated might have struggled to tell the two sets of combatants apart, but to Velt the difference was as clear as that between zero and one.
They were over-fleshed, their oiled, iridescent armour painful to his autosensors and yet allowing his human perceptions to view their subtle flights of colour with only mild fascination and loathing. Most odd. His forelimbs engaged with clearance work; successive volleys of fire from autonomous pintle-mounts drove the aberrant warriors into deeper cover and allowed his own forces to push on. Returning cherubs fluttered over the abandoned corpses to tally their losses and to record the full extent of their moral decay. With the largest wrecks cleared from his path, Velt bulldozed through.
Pure-code vanguard skitarii assaulted through the breach and immediately entered a firefight with a pair of bunkers on the other side, new imperatives disseminating through their tethers and guiding them to take cover behind enormous half-exposed tyres and bent sheets of vehicle armour.
Velt backed through the breach, more of his warriors pouring around and through his armoured legs, as a radium bullet disintegrated against the conversion field that enveloped his module. The magos calculi had assured him that his levels of personal risk were close to zero, but being cornered into the position of pressing the offensive in person felt like punishment for other men’s sins.
He had known from the beginning that the >> RESTRICTED DATA >> technology exceeded Thennos’ allowances. Despite what the Medusans thought of him, he was no fool, and neither had he been in shutdown at his post. But who was he to overrule the decisions of >> RESTRICTED DATA >>?
Once again it fell to Hyproxius Velt to face down the consequences.
Velt was far too important to handle his own communications.
The enginseer assigned to Ares’ service was unquestioning in her faith, albeit in an ambitious sort of way that Velt had found rather cloying, but she was too inexperienced to have been rewarded with such a service. The Iron Father’s deterioration had been instigated the day that her reassignment orders had been stamped. Velt grimaced.
That, at least, should make >> RESTRICTED DATA >> happy.
Velt did not have to retake the facility before the Iron Hands did, and for that he was grateful because he had overseen the installation of a large part of its defensive infrastructure himself and it would be a pity to have to dismantle it. He simply had to ensure that no one but him was able to do so before >> RESTRICTED DATA >> arrived to finish the task.
The magos calculi had determined that there would be plenty of time.
There was a terrific bang, and one of the two bunkers exploded in a geyser of rockcrete. Blast debris showered the area as, acting on adaptive imperatives, the vanguard fireteams that had successfully knocked out the fortification moved to flank the remaining bunker. Judging the immediate situation to be as pacified as it was going to be, Velt picked his way over the deep piles of skitarii dead towards the blasted bunker and adjusted his sensoria.
The Primus was a chiselled shard of yellowed silver that struggled to impose itself against the intervening skyline, a manic tangle of scaffolding and power transfer coils.
The ring of arcana, he knew, was in support of a network of blast bunkers like those his forces worked so hard now to destroy. Gantry-mounted casemates spilled over with heavy-duty tolerance cabling and analytica devices, surrounded by electrified sigils of subjugation and warding. The flash-outlined silhouettes of large, xenos-design gun barrels were all directed towards the castellated derelict at the crux of the test bed.
Even shorn of its legs, its fortress torso buried under stratified layers of successive annihilation events, and trussed with cabling like a wayward initiate bound for electro-coercive treatment, the ancient Imperator Titan, Pax Medusan, towered over all. Its own goliath weapons loadout remained in situ – several xenos species had devised tank-killing weaponry that circumvented heavy Imperial armour by disrupting a target’s power transfer systems. This therefore required the complete suite of power sources and sinks to be available in order for simulated engagements to offer reliable data. However, they had not been blessed or loaded in millennia.
It was dead, standing only by the artifice and need of the Adeptus of Mars, and yet Velt could not explain the shiver of unease that passed into him from his battle-chassis as he stepped into the Titan’s broken shadow.
>>> TERMINATING SIMULUS.
II
Rauth looked up at the fallen god-machine, wondering what it could have done in its former life to be so forsaken now at its end. Even from behind, the wreck’s majesty was arresting. Mothballed batteries bristled from its crenellated shoulders and from the gun tiers of its upper back, its windswept skeleton standing in pyrrhic defiance of time and damnation. Angry streaks of las, red-shifted, high energy, rained from its shoulder bastions, not the Titan’s own batteries of course but rogue fireteams ensconced within their protected casemates, painting the Titan’s hull plating with lurid smears of less than natural colour. None of it fell anywhere near Rauth and his clave.
An upraised hand, a solid outline of black ceramite against the twisted spurs and debris char, and Maarvuk signalled a halt. Rauth had detected nothing, but the auspectoriae of the sergeant’s power armour was more powerful than his. The veteran-sergeant was not stealthy in any recognisable sense, appearing to rely more on towering self-belief and superior data to remain undetected. He squatted down.
The Scouts immediately stopped moving and sought cover.
The vast block supports encasing the girdered feet of the pylon through which they moved was thick with accumulated rubbish, and no sooner had Maarvuk sunk to his knees than the Scouts had hidden themselves amongst the detritus. Rauth crouched in a tangle of sheet metal under a cannibalised engine housing with his back to the rockcrete foundation block. He laid his shotgun on the fissured metal and strained his senses for signs of movement.
The cry of the wind became increasingly disturbed the closer one came to the Titan. Every fractured plate and empty crenel harboured a ghost, distant gunfire echoing dolefully from the teetering array of gantries and pylons. Rauth could hear the hum of power that flowed through the coils above their heads, the occasional crack as voltage arced from one to another, loud enough to obscure even the unsubtle movements of the Iron Hands Scouts. Irritably, he readjusted his rebreather, temporarily breaking the clammy seal around his face and delivering the scent of ozone on a knife blade of sub-freezing air.
He pressed the mask firmly back into place to remake the seal as Maarvuk crunched forward on his haunches, into the partial cover of what looked like a fan engine. The sergeant brought up his bolter and peered through the scope at something in the wreckage ahead. Rauth could see nothing. Feeling the vacuum suck the mask’s plastek into his face, he brought his shotgun round until it was aimed between Maarvuk’s shoulders. His breathing began to normalise. This is strength. See how I take it. He smiled, his near-perfect memory calling back every one of a thousand insults and petty acts of cruelty he had endured, as far back as that memory went. He stroked the trigger. Part of him desired nothing more than to demonstrate to Maarvuk just how weak he was in that moment.
He could not say why he did not.
‘I see it,’ Khrysaar hissed, optics burning a pearlescent hole in the murk, and Rauth pulled his aim from his sergeant’s back.
The first thing Rauth noticed was a tramp of feet on loose metal, still barely audible over the background commotion, when the sentinel servitor shambled out from behind another pylon’s block support.
It was powerfully armed for its size, a hotshot volley gun built into its right arm and belted into a power pack in its guts. It also mounted a flare gun on its left shoulder, presumably in case of an encounter with anything its primary armament could not put down. Its ears had been bio-augmented, like transceiver dishes, its eyes drawn apart to give it an expanded visual field and a cadaverous, ichthyic appearance. Ethereal green light beamed from its eyes as it scanned the darkness under the pylons, drawing flickering lines over Maarvuk’s rotor housing and then over his armour. Rauth held his breath. The servitor’s optics appeared to map the unmoving veteran-sergeant’s battleplate in exquisite detail, before shuffling about and moving on.
Only then did Maarvuk move, relieving some knot of stiffness in his neck with an audible crack. No one could hold still or fool a bio-augur like an Iron Hands Space Marine. Rauth let go his breath.
He could see now the rut in the servitor’s path, a path that had not been deviated from in a long time, since well before Locis Primus’ fall. That infuriated Rauth. It had been assigned a duty to defend the Primus, and even if the taint had arisen from within, it was culpable for its failure. Seeing Khrysaar flex the hard bionics of his hand around the stock of his bolter, he knew he was not alone in wishing to rip off the servitor’s head in punishment for its weakness. And yes, to see what damage this arm can do.
‘I know what you are thinking,’ said Maarvuk, not whispering, but at an unwavering pitch that barely climbed above the
hum of the power coils. ‘Never forget from whence those thoughts arise – they are of the flesh, the traitor within, telling you that you are strong when you are weak, urging you to attack when the logician would defend. Ignore it. You are nothing, until I tell you that you are otherwise.’
His harsh words were heeded unquestioningly, in a way that kinder ones never would have been, and Rauth felt something coiled and angry inside loosen its grip just a little. There was more to it than just words; Rauth could feel it, some interplay of code and conditioning inside his head that compelled him to obey.
Maarvuk gave the sentinel servitor five minutes before getting powerfully to his feet and waving the Scouts back on their way. The crackle of gunfire, of explosions, the buzz of chainblades, grew louder as they skirted around the back of the Titan.
It was far enough away and indistinct enough to be ignored after a while, and yet unmistakeably still the sound of men and machines inflicting bloody harm upon one another. A combination of his conditioning and brutal training kept his senses trained to his particular patch of rubble as they picked their way painstakingly through the debris without incident. They encountered no more servitors, nor any further evidence of the tracks such sentinels might have left behind them. Nor did they pass any sign of ‘living’ skitarii forces: if there had been any stationed in this area then their overseers had redeployed them to where the fighting was heaviest, much as it caused Rauth physical pain to acknowledge that Maarvuk might have been correct.
‘Only the weak demand opportunities to prove their strength,’ Maarvuk announced at one point, stood on a scrap of high ground, speaking as if to whatever shade he uncovered through his bolter’s scope. ‘A bolt-round to the back of the head will end a fight as surely as a power sword to the front. Outcome is all. Consideration of anything more is pride, and pride is weakness.’
