The Eye of Medusa

by David Guymer

  Stronos’ cogitator revised his prospects downwards.

  ‘You think yourself perfect,’ he said. ‘But you are not.’

  ‘You understand little, child. I am flawed. We are all of us flawed. I seek the same perfection as do we all.’

  Stronos roared, emptying another clip into the Iron Father, spreading superficial damage through his massive harness and spasms of crimson arctricity through the air. Kristos built speed as he came towards him, like a Baneblade running to combat power. He backed up towards the metal leg of a leaning pylon and braced himself against it, more certain than ever that his one chance lay in using the terrain against his heavier opponent.

  ‘You are not like your brothers,’ said Kristos, slamming into the pylon like an assault ram and breaking it in half. Stronos rolled around it at the last second, ducking behind another support strut to reload. ‘You remember how to think. I approve of that, in moderation.’ The Iron Father’s servo-arm clamped over the girder frame of the second strut and dragged it from its rockcrete foundation with a protesting wrench. Stronos looked up as the one-legged pylon groaned and fell, dragging a pulse-ordnance multi-driver and a hundred square metres of burning cabling crashing to the ground.

  Stronos looked over the bloodily obscured skyline. The yellow haze was blotted with occasional weaponsfire. The ground flickered where promethium-coated cables now lay, the Helfather moving through it as though the fell champion walked on fire. He traded shots with a pair of indistinct targets amidst the mess of wreckage. By correlating the positions with his tactical overlay, Stronos assumed the two combatants to be Jalenghaal and Burr, and arrived at that conclusion just as a third burst of fire trisected the lumbering Helfather. A storm bolter, by its weightier report. The Helfather turned to track it. A well placed and – Jalenghaal would chide him for thinking it – lucky shot shattered its eye lens, the ensuing mass reaction peeling open its grotesque helmet from the inside.

  Stronos looked in surprise to where the Helfather had been turning, as Drath and a demi-clave of Clan Avernii strode onto the carpet of fire.

  The five-century veteran would have been the very last that Stronos had expected to take up arms against Iron Father Kristos.

  ‘You signalled compliance,’ Kristos intoned without turning from Stronos, without needing to.

  ‘I did,’ Drath confirmed. ‘But new facts demanded my reconsideration.’ He gestured, precisely, to the prior coordinates of Fabricator Velt’s broken Legiones Skitarii, the direction by which the veteran had come. ‘The data transmissions of routed skitarii are not as secure as they should be, Kristos. Though they know as little of their masters’ ambitions here as would be expected, they know more than I.’ He and his clave simultaneously turned bolters on Kristos. Stronos took his opportunity to reload and did likewise. He looked to Drath, waiting on the veteran’s lead. ‘What is the Dawnbreak Technology?’

  ‘The Iron Hands falter,’ Kristos growled. ‘The strength of our Father wavers year by year. What the Imperial Guard found on Dawnbreak was a new direction, a path to perfection.’

  ‘A path laid by whom?’ demanded Stronos.

  Kristos glared at him.

  ‘Answer him,’ said Drath.

  ‘It is of no consequence. The weaknesses of those that passed before are not my weaknesses.’

  ‘I remember you as a mortal, Kristos,’ said Drath, coolly. ‘Headstrong and without heart, much as you remain. Do not speak to me as though I am a child.’

  ‘I speak as I see.’

  Parchment strips brushed Drath’s armoured thighs as he held still. ‘Part of me is gladdened. Having no basis for my dislike of you troubled me.’

  ‘The flesh is weak,’ Kristos returned, as something stirred black through the flames behind him. ‘You are old, but you are still so very weak.’

  In a gearing whine of power servos, the Helfather’s headless frame turned its weapons on Drath. Stronos cried out a warning as the unsuspecting veteran was cloaked in shot and flame. It took more than a casual assault to put down a construct of Drath’s years, and the Helfather filled him with more. Stronos’ throat was raw by the time the veteran’s cooked and bullet-riddled harness collapsed to the floor. Five hundred years up in smoke; it was almost impossible to believe. Stronos locked down the urge to disregard the self-evident truth of the veteran’s destruction as the battered Helfather set about dismantling the elite warriors of the Iron Hands. Watching it bludgeon and crush the power-armoured veterans, Stronos had the dread sensation that what he was seeing was a breed of foe that physical weapons could not destroy. He realised then what it was that had always unsettled him, every time he had laid eyes on the Iron Council’s sinister guardians.

  They were empty. As if there was nothing inside them that was alive at all.

  ‘What is he?’ Stronos demanded, turning to Kristos just as the Iron Father’s open fist smashed across his faceplate.

  His head snapped around and he crashed to the ground in a heap of ceramite. Kristos trod on his axe hand and Stronos’ vision wavered at the sudden rush of pain blockers that fled the crushed bones. He was lying across his other arm, tried to move to bring up his pistol, but the Iron Father’s servo-arm pushed down on his shoulder and pinned his face to the ground.

  ‘Your failure is one of calculus. You must have known that you could not prevail and yet you fought anyway. Disappointing.’

  ‘You taunt a beaten foe. Does that sound any more logical?’

  Kristos’ lenses shone cruelly, the sounds of Drath’s warriors being mechanically dismembered ringing from the dusty yellow. ‘You misunderstand my parameters of victory. A failure of inference, based on an incomplete understanding. I do not want to beat you, Kardan.’ The power of the servo-arm alone sufficient to pin Stronos down, Kristos knelt to swallow Stronos’ helmet in both gauntlets. ‘I want to remake you. Better than you were before.’

  The helmet seals resisted, but only for a moment before Kristos’ boundless strength tore the helmet from Stronos’ gorget ring. Bio-lubricants trickled from the tear, fizzled with electricity, wisps of purified oxygen puffing from savaged life support systems.

  Stronos choked on arid toxicity, his eye and mouth burning up as he watched Kristos drop the ruined helmet on the ground. Stronos tried to make a grab for it, could have reached it easily had Kristos not been holding him down. He clenched his eye shut, but could already feel the radioactive burn moving down his throat and into his lungs. He held his breath, but even a battle-brother of the Iron Hands could only go without for so long. He gasped, gurgled, writhed under Kristos’ servo-appendage like a fish whose lungs had been filled with concentrated hydrochloric.

  After what felt like an eternity without breath, the weight was removed. He flapped an arm for his helmet, knocked it, but was already too weak to pull it to him.

  ‘You have the makings of an exceptional warrior,’ came Kristos’ voice, fading into dust. ‘You will come around.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘What part of this nightmare are you?’

  – Arven Rauth

  I

  ‘Breathe, lord.’

  A female voice, familiar. There was a crinkling of plastek as a rebreather mask was pressed over the overlarge spread of his nose and mouth. It was still warm from a mortal’s breath. The taste of the condensed exhalation brought flashes of recent memory: bombardment, as if the sky were falling in, the certainty of death, a limping run through the wreckage field, a friend sprawled in the ash, terror, the determination not to lose another.

  The remembrances were fragmentary and painful. He could feel the cells of his omophagea organ dying, the mushy quiver of his tattered lungs as they tried to process what they were being given. He had never felt such pain. He sought to turn his head away from the mask, but in a cruel reversal of their fortunes the emaciated adept held him down, making a soothing noise.

  �
��They are coming, lord. Just breathe.’

  ‘I… thought… you… hated… us.’

  ‘Sshhh.’

  A dark, reddish form blurred the gel of light and dark that had become his vision, an oblique blemish that could have been a servo-arm, or something else entirely. He tried to blink the gum from his eye, but his eyelid was gelled half open with a layer of protective fatty acids. His optic was off. Everything he could discern felt strangely slowed down.

  Sus-an coma. In response to its injuries, his body was beginning to shut itself down. It was making it harder and harder to think clearly, but he was certain that there had been no time for such a measure. He could remember Kristos standing over him, his lungs melting.

  He should be dead now.

  Lips cut off from central control by powerful neurasthetics struggled to form a word. Thankyou. They did not move a millimetre.

  He heard the rustle of plastek and felt Thennos’ frigid wind on his mouth as his rescuer drew the mask from his face to take a breath of her own. By the time she returned it he had stopped breathing.

  ‘How far from our Father’s likeness we have both fallen,’ said Tubriik Ares, and to Stronos’ diminished and ill-valued mortal soul the presence of this young neophyte in his torpor was entirely natural.

  ‘I will return for you,’ Stronos promised, closing his eyes. He felt cold, so cold. When had his body become so cold? ‘Stronger than I was before.’

  II

  Arven Rauth sat forward, his elbows on his knees, watching the soapy mixture of blood and cleanser drip from his brow to the tiled floor. He had no idea how he had come to be here.

  The last thing he could remember was kneeling over the prophet-alpha, the feeling in his wrist and arm as his knife had gone in and in and in and…

  He closed his eyes as a servitor emptied a pail of cold water over his bowed head. He stared into the bloody whorls that drained from his bare feet, down the inclined floor towards the centre of the chamber. He tried to remember what the skitarii leader had said to him before the end, but it evaded him, assured him it was not worth his notice. He gritted his teeth and concentrated.

  He. Had. Said…

  With a gasp he relinquished the act of defiance and slumped deeper towards his thighs. Uncaring of his pathetic paroxysms, a servitor roughed down his back with a towel.

  Head pounding, Rauth spat a gobbet of fresh blood onto the steel tiles to be rinsed away.

  The ablutorial was utilitarian, unwarmed and barely lit. Beads of condensation clung to the iron walls like the aroma of counterseptic on the air. From somewhere amidst the honeycomb of chambers came the slosh of a pail being plunged into water. In the centre of Rauth’s chamber, delineated by a drain, was a font presumably very much like the one he could hear being used elsewhere. The susurration of a voidship at low, sub-warp velocity rippled the black water. It made Rauth realise that he had no idea what ship this was, or even what class, but from the spartan iconography and brutalist weapon displays he assumed he was on a Clan Vurgaan vessel.

  Khrysaar was on the bench opposite.

  The cold dimpled his impressively muscular frame, a sodden loincloth provided for the Iron Hands brother’s meagre needs regarding modesty. Rauth’s eyes were drawn to the folded scar tissue that abutted his brother’s left hand. I did that. It feels like another life. An uncertain flicker of warmth struck in Rauth’s breast at the sight of his brother alive and well. Khrysaar glanced up from the pattern of ripples disturbing the water in the font, and then looked back down. Neither said a word.

  As Rauth regarded him, dwelling on the curious sense of… affection that he seemed to be harbouring for his brother, he became aware of the sound of whispered voices in an adjoining chamber.

  Neither voice was familiar. Most of the words were being spoken with the cultured authority of one accustomed to having his words pass without challenge. The other was harsher, speaking little, but rang through the metal walls like the idle snarl of a chainblade. This was the voice of one accustomed not only to speaking unchallenged, but needing rarely to debase himself with the custom at all. Rauth turned to the intervening wall to listen, but could make out little enough to string together anything that made sense. Something about the Ordo Xenos, a mission to a Knight World of some kind; Clan Raukaan and the Mechanicus were both mentioned several times. It occurred to him that if he were to walk to the wall then he would have no difficulty making out what was being said, but for some reason he could not make himself care enough to do so. He felt sluggish.

  The servitor began to dry his hair.

  With the clump of armoured feet, the whispered conversation broke up. Rauth looked up as the owner of one of the two voices walked through the frigid gloom into the chamber.

  The likeness of a warrior in nightshade blue armour, the emblem of Clan Raukaan on his pauldron, lanced through Rauth’s mind. He grunted, pinched his eyes. The newcomer was an Epistolary of Clan Borrgos, his armour filmed by condensation and only recently painted, judging by the smell and the shine. He was unhelmed, his head backed instead by the velveteen whisper of a psychic hood. His dearth of augmetics would have put him of an age with Rauth, but his eyes were old and two century cog-studs pierced his brow.

  He sat down on the bench between Rauth and Khrysaar, then leant forward to dip a bare hand in the water. He swirled it a moment, saying nothing. Rauth stared at him.

  What part of this nightmare are you?

  ‘The Dawnbreak Technology,’ he said after a time. The cultured voice. Rauth felt relieved. ‘When you saw it, what did you feel?’

  Rauth’s mind was a blank.

  ‘The what technology?’ said Khrysaar, slowly.

  The Epistolary looked from one to the other, his eyes an uncanny blue, bright enough to bear a light to the deepest reaches of a man’s soul. He nodded, as if hearing only what he had expected. ‘Their minds are guarded by a decade of indoctrination. Kristos’ Librarian would possess the suggestive keys to manipulate their defences or subvert them entirely if he so wished. It is apparent that he saw to these two before we could.’

  The sound of splashing water made Rauth start, and he turned from the concerned Librarian to where an alabaster-faced warrior with full red eyes squatted by the font. He had the pail half submerged in the water. Rauth blinked, certain that he must be suffering another unaccounted lapse in memory, for there was no way a power-armoured warrior could have entered the chamber unseen.

  ‘This water is freezing,’ he murmured. ‘How does it remain liquid?’

  ‘Chemicals,’ the epistolary answered, which seemed to satisfy the ghoulish warrior in black. ‘I believe that I can unlock their minds, Harsid, given time,’ he continued.

  Rauth’s bare skin crawled, and not with cold.

  ‘Your tithe of service is paid, Lydriik. You do not have the time.’ The Epistolary bowed his head in acknowledgement. ‘But Inquisitor Yazir knows other, more powerful minds that have been waiting two hundred years for such a chance.’ The Space Marine’s red eyes looked up from his pail. Without pupils, it was impossible to tell whether he was looking at Khrysaar or Rauth. Perhaps both. ‘Lydriik tells me that the Iron Hands make their recruitment programme deliberately lethal. I have often wondered why.’

  ‘So that only the strongest prevail,’ Rauth answered automatically.

  ‘Or is it to ensure that not too many do? You Iron Hands are particular about the wars you involve yourselves in, and I have never seen as many service studs in one place as I have during my short stay on your world.’ A nod towards the Epistolary, Lydriik, watching patiently, his pair of cog-studs white with a cold film of moisture. ‘Thennos has proven costly, but it would surprise me if more than a score of your brothers are permanently out of action.’

  Rauth thought of Maarvuk, a bolt pistol to his jaw.

  ‘Everyone is dead,’ said Khrysaar, echoing Rauth’s though
ts. ‘Whatever we have been through to now, we are certain to be elevated to battle-brother status.’

  Harsid nodded. ‘If more of the same is what you wish, but Brother Lydriik’s secondment to the Deathwatch is at an end, and while you are both too raw for the same service, Inquisitor Yazir has a place in her retinue for warriors of your talents.’

  Khrysaar just sat there, tight-lipped.

  ‘To what end?’ Rauth asked, haltingly.

  Lydriik turned to him then, and Rauth felt the full weight of the Librarian’s mind behind his gaze. He felt his own opened, just a crack, and after a moment Lydriik smiled and the instant of violation passed. ‘Our brothers took something from Dawnbreak that they should not have. The wrongdoers must be punished. Do you want to pay back the people who have hurt you, brother?’

  Thoughts of Maarvuk ran to those of Tartrak, Dumaar, and a long litany of petty outrages. He saw his knife cutting Khrysaar’s wrist, in the flesh of the young aspirant, Morvox. He turned to Khrysaar, not at all guiltily. Even now the recollection fed him a tiny morsel of pleasure.

  Hate, I know.

  ‘What does she need us to do?’

  ‘Let us speak for a moment unheard,’ said Lydriik, reaching out and placing the palm of his hand on Rauth’s forehead.

  >>> END OF SIMULUS.

  III

  Nicco Palpus slumped over the lectern of the warleader’s podium and reached up behind his head. With a sucking, absorbing pain in his scalp, the simulus helmet came loose. Blood dribbled from the neural input rods that protruded from the inside of the cap as the helmet swung on its cables, bronze cladding winking at the dark as it swayed through the shaft of light that poured into the Eye of Medusa. Wincing in pain, he drew up his hood, then stared into the chrome-chased cog that ornamented the lectern beneath his shaking hands. He had not expected the meme-file to terminate so abruptly.