The Eye of Medusa
Page 28
As he held the bunker in his gaze his view of it began to clarify, his bionic applying successive code-scrubbers to artificially filter it of dust and debris.
He could see a full cohort of traitor skitarii. And a single clave of Clan Dorrvok.
IV
For as long as he could remember, Rauth had known little beyond anger and hate: of his superiors and their callous sadism, of rivals that, had they been born to another world, he might have called brothers, and then of everyone else. The symptoms of humanity’s enfeeblement were spread across the galaxy like stars, twinkling ignorance, goading him that he hadn’t the strength or the reach to extinguish them all. Conditioning and a harsh regime of discipline had beaten his molten iron core into a more malleable form, but it remained hot, an ever-present and self-perpetuating pit of bitterness and frustration. But a crust-splitting, earth-shattering, tectonic eruption of Medusan rage, was that not what a decade of psyk-conditioning and neuroenhancement had been designed to suppress? He had not felt such an outpouring during his field trials on Scaxxus, nor on the Oraanus Rocks. Even fighting for his life against the death cult assassin aboard the Broken Hand he had retained control.
But there was something about these skitarii.
The veil had been snatched from his eyes and what he saw was red. This was how it was meant to feel to be the offspring of Medusa, a son of Ferrus Manus.
A skitarius with clicking face parts flashed before his eyes, there then gone, the insectoid head ripped from its neck in a shriek of bonded metal fibres. Blood and bio-acid jetted from the ruin of its neck, its body spasming to the ground and spraying Rauth’s carapace with gore as it went down. Swinging his arm like a mace, he smashed the severed metal head through the temple of another. The living skitarius’ head caved in around the improvised weapon, sparks rearing up at Rauth’s bloody arm as the follow through sheered the skitarius’ face from its skull. Shorn electrics spat at him. A minimal optic diode glared hotly from its bed of gold wiring and macrofluidics. And it didn’t die.
Rauth heard the sharp tear of punctured carapace, what felt like a punch to the gut. He ignored it, and punched his bionic fist through the skitarius’ armoured chest and clear out the other side. He gave a roar in exultation of his power, even as the still-living skitarius closed its hands around his throat and sought to choke it off. Dying servos screamed, shuddered, bled off power as the muscles of Rauth’s neck bunched in opposition. Rauth dropped the mangled head from his hand, then forced his fingers into the hole his bionic had punched into the skitarius’ chest. With a howl of exertion, he ripped the skitarius up the middle.
Noticing the transonic knife stuck in his gut, he tore it out, rasping hard on his thinning oxygen supply, and hunted for more victims.
The ground was strewn with leaking body parts. Destroyed skitarii units death-jerked like dismembered worms in barren soil. Men he hated no less than his enemy butchered whatever they could reach. Weapons were forgotten. Wounds were neglected. One warrior ploughed into a retreating clade, dragging the torso of another by the arm-spike lodged in his back. Another beat a skitarius to death against the wall of the bunker even as his skin turned black where rad-bullets had penetrated his armour. Others were missing fingers, hands, entire limbs, transhuman not only in their will and capacity to enact violence but the ability to receive it in turn. They were well practiced in pain. A brother he could not in the furnace of the moment put a name to lifted two densely built skitarii off the ground, then ignored the electrified bayonets thrust again and again into his torso to smash them together until they came apart in his hands and showered him in their workings like rain.
‘–!’
A giant encased in black ceramite and cruelty shouted at the fighting Scouts. Rauth could not make out the words through the swaddling red haze. The giant plucked wounded warriors off the ground as if they were magazines found amidst the ruin of the slain, good still for at least one shot more. Others, still raging over beaten foes, he practically threw in the direction of living enemies. He passed a twitching skitarius that the Scouts, in their frenzy, had failed to fully extinguish, and, without pausing to look down, delivered the Omnissiah’s mercy on the back of a bolt-round. He must have felt the heat of Rauth’s stare through Thennos’ empty chill, because he turned to meet it, and Rauth felt his wrath gutter in the face of the mirror that those smouldering red eyes held up to it.
You feel it, don’t you, liar? spoke a familiar, resentful voice with the calming of the violent tremors. Bury it in as much metal as you want, but it never goes away. Suddenly, he felt a second eruption building. Do they know and continue the same flawed procedure out of obduracy, or have they just forgotten how to recognise the anger they feel?
Maarvuk shouted at him again, this time emphasising the unheard words with a jab of his gauntletted fingers to something behind Rauth’s back. A deep-coded instinct to obey and a resurgent need to pulverise the inferior spun him round, hands called into fists.
And into the muzzle of a boltgun.
Rauth had not felt anything like it since Tartrak had lain him out on the sands of Oraanus. He had been remade stronger now than he had been then, but the power behind the swing still cracked his jaw and knocked him onto his back without a grain of resistance from him. Anger opened up a second fissure in his conditioning’s crust and found, for the first time in a long, long time, that the pressure keeping it molten and hot had been spent. He slumped to the freezing ground, the taste of blood sweet in his mouth, almost laughing aloud about the inconceivable sensation of lightness he was left with.
‘Control your charges, sergeant,’ said the colossus of armour and powered cybernetics that towered over him. His suit transponder identified him as Iron Captain Stronos and he looked down on Rauth with clear distaste. At least he feels something. ‘I have witnessed enough failures of self-control to last my lifetime. The skitarii at least are guided by reason, and a reasonable foe would not have sought to defend this position without cause.’
>>> SIMULUS INLOAD
>>> SOURCE >>> LOCIS PRIMUS, THENNOS
>>> ORIGIN >>> TRAITORIS PERDITA >>ERROR>>
>>> DATESTAMP >>> 101412.M41
>>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>
>> RESTRICTED DATA >>
>> RESTRICTED DATA >>
>> RESTRICTED DATA >>
>> RESTRICTED DATA >>
‘Let it commence.’
>>>
>>> >>> COMMENCING NEW SIMULUS
>>> SOURCE >>> SARDONIS
>>> ORIGIN >>> ARES, TUBRIIK
>>> DATESTAMP >>> 002013.M32
>>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>
The sinusoidal brasswood effigy rose from the bowels of the governor’s fastness. It was knotted with power, whorled, great wings folded around its muscular promise and dripping with moisture as though in a fever. The last few cultists, semi-augmetised things of neither flesh nor metal, had retreated to foxholes and prepared gun nests where the disciplined fire patterns of his battle group calmly mowed them down. Space Marines in black Mk IV armour pounded over the dead to bring weapons to bear on the soaring profanity of living wood and writhing bronze. The Adeptus Astartes, many of their commanders veterans of the Scouring of the Ulmetrican Reach two centuries past, did not waver.
‘Vindicators to the gate,’ called Ares, iron captain of Clan Garrsak, speaking into his gorget vox. He waited a moment, then put a hand to his ear, a habit he had consciously retained and come to shamelessly exaggerate, purely to spite the younger generation of apothecaries who felt that such individualisms warranted only eradication. ‘Say again, commander. I didn’t catch that.’ The unit produced a white hiss. Almost words. He frowned, and collared a warrior as he ran by. ‘Brother. Are you familiar with a Sergeant… Stonas?’
The Iron Hands brother gave him a disquieting look, and hurried on without
answering. Shaking off the nascent chill that look gave him, Ares turned to bark for missiles and meltaguns to start bringing down the pillars of flesh that grew out of the floor like toes.
They surrounded the hellish idol in no particular arrangement, spasming with their own innate impurities and electrical barbs supplied from the wiring that crawled up the walls and along the floor. Special weapons troopers ran up and down the perimeter line to his order, and the siege tanks responded to his call.
The governor of Sardonis had maintained an official residence that was as large as it was opulent, gaudier and more grandiose by far than the governor of a client world of Mars could warrant. Even its corridors were palatial, but the lead Vindicator still made an almighty mess as it roared down the parquet and through the forced entrance to the old governor’s hidden fane. The remains of tastelessly adorned automata lay tangled in the gold wire that had been ploughed up by the Vindicator’s massive ‘dozer blades during its passage through the inner palace. Every so often, one of the tainted robots gave a twitch that owed nothing to the reckless forward plunge of the tanks. They accelerated. Some urgency in their machine-spirits located an extra few kilometres an hour over their maximum combat speed and used it.
As they came, so Ares felt the ground begin to shake.
It would have been easy to ascribe the phenomenon to the tanks’ rapid approach, but he had felt that particular set of vibrations a hundred times before. What he felt now seemed to shake right out of the air, as if the very materium of Sardonis Hive had felt the touch of something toothsome and set to trembling. It transcended time and dimension. He could feel it on his flesh, in the cell nuclei of his bone marrow, on the cold iron of his far future.
‘Be as iron!’ Ares called, but the words rushed out of him in a maddened peal.
The pillars began to spin around him, faster, faster, faster, so fast that in the blur of flesh and energy he could almost see the warp. He closed his eyes, but continued to spin. Most disorienting of all, he could feel his bionics spin in the opposite direction.
Ares roared defiance, the empyrean responding with a moan from the throats of five hundred fleshmetal corpses and a dozen of their obligingly servile automata. He opened his eyes, arms out to steady himself, as the bodies of those they had slain lifted up off the ground. They hung there bonelessly and then, as the flesh pillars shrivelled and peeled with the expenditure of their energies, began to thrash about one another. Even veteran Iron Hands recoiled from them as desperately flailing limbs struck their helmets and pauldrons. Ares heard bones shatter and rebars snap, but the puppets were beyond feeling.
‘Flesh is weak,’ Ares shouted over the din of rubbing flesh and snapping bones, and raised his pistol.
Bolt-rounds splattered dead flesh, his brothers joining him, but the speed with which the universe spun around them only intensified. Ares saw a Vindicator drawn off the ground by the crazed efforts of the robots trapped in its ‘dozer blade. The cybernetics of hardened warriors fought bitterly against the centrifugal force that pulled their bolters out towards the walls of the spinning fane.
‘Imperator, adiuva me,’ he cried, as the brasswood idol cracked open, disgorging a light and sound of such brilliant density it was as though ten thousand machines all tried to conjoin with him at once.
His optics burst into sapphire flames, his entreaty becoming a wordless scream as flesh and metal became one.
>>> TERMINATING SIMULUS.
V
Power flowed downhill, light to dark, high potentiality to low, streaming through cables, vaulting junctions, regulators – accustomed by the unchanging millennia to a far lesser flow – heating through until they glowed. Those with the augments to perceive the flow of electrons would, had they also possessed the basic human curiosity to look up and see, have noticed the mat of overhead wires grow bright. And then something without precedent happened. Gates were opened that had never been opened before, power surging in an entirely new direction to infuse circuits that had not borne charge in five thousand years. Like blood forced into starved or deceased tissue, the influx of vitality brought the machine-spirit. Sparks fountained from the pylons’ insulators, and all, curious or no, would have noticed the hum that crescendoed in the titanic roar of a god-machine jolted from an unrestful sleep. Amber warning lights flashed from gothic spires and crenellations. The slow creak of armaplas and plasteel groaned over the battlefield, cables flexing violently as something colossal haltingly rediscovered that it could move.
And a single candle blew out.
>>> SIMULUS INLOAD
>>> SOURCE >>> LOCIS PRIMUS, THENNOS
>>> ORIGIN >>> VELT, HYPROXIUS, FABRICATOR-LOCUM
>>> DATESTAMP >>> 101412.M41
>>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>
A shower of electrons over the shrivelled receptors of Velt’s pleasure centres conferred a passable facsimile of unfettered elation as he glimpsed the Primus entrance. As with most of Thennos’ permanent structures, defensibility had not been the overriding design principle. Covered by a hood of metal such as that which would shelter a minehead from the elements, it was firmed into its foundations by guy rods and surrounded with shockboards and by heaped cages packed with metallic debris. The doors were rolled steel, reinforced with adamantium bars and shock dispersive meme-foam. They were tough. Against a blast occurring several kilometres into the wastes they were inviolate. A few minutes against the Ordinatus Medusa would show how tough they really were.
One of the trio of cherubim faithfully made note of the tonal oscillations of his gurgle of pleasure.
‘Ave Omnissiah,’ Velt intoned, then summoned a brass-winged scrivener to check that it had properly recorded his devotion. He caught the trail of parchment as the cherub fluttered about his battle chassis. ‘Ave Omnissiah!’ it read. ‘The Legiones Skitarii are visibly empowered by their leader’s proclamation.’ Satisfied, Velt shooed the cyborg off to rejoin its brethren.
‘The seismographers read a magnitude nought-point-eight Regulus ground tremor. The fabricator-locum proceeds boldly forward…’
Velt focused his targeting protocols on a retreating skitarius, zapped it with a pair of arc beams that left it cooked and thrashing on a blackened sheet of metal. Better.
‘Ambulation increases three per cent. Like a crusading dominus, the fabricator-locum presses the assault…’
Finish this before it can escalate further, he thought. And perhaps there will not be such a high price to be paid after all.
A shockwave of astonishing magnitude crashed ove
r them as Velt directed the final advance. His right side sensoria went instantly blind, his legs buckling at the articulation, causing him to wobble like a spider exposed to zero gravity while his chassis’ spirit re-established equilibrium. Cherubs were blown aside, parchment ripping and fluttering. ‘Vector, forty-seven point three degrees, estimated two million megathule blast, seven point six on the Regulus scale, the fabricator-locum weathers the onslaught while all about him fall into disarray…’ He pivoted about. Half his vision had been stripped down to emergency screed, but he could see the test bed, the way the immense pylons had been bent out at the middle as though by a giant with a sudden demand for freedom, the tsunami of vehicle wrecks and debris hurtling towards him. And a searing flash, plasma blue.
‘Hail to the Omnissiah,’ wrote the last cherub.
>>> END OF DATA.
VI
The shockwave threw Stronos sideways, as if physically tearing him and the Clan Dorrvok Scout apart. He saw the Scout dashed against the rugged bunker wall, but Stronos, being heavier, fell onto his side after about half a metre and slid through the dust until he’d ploughed up enough of it to break his slide. He moved his head painfully. His audial baffles had blown out, and the sound of tumbling wreckage and pop of cooling atmosphere came through loudly. Static drizzled through his helm display, intermittent outages blacking him out entirely as he shifted upright and stood.