The Eye of Medusa

by David Guymer

  This Lydriik would require watching.

  The Iron Hands were like children, dependent on the guiding hand of Mars even if in their ignorance they thought themselves ready to walk alone. They considered themselves mighty, and like any virile adolescent they could certainly lay claim to the physical potency of an adult, but they were one world. One empty, impoverished, underpopulated world. Mars was an interstellar empire of a trillion souls, the armoury of the entire Imperium of Man, a repository of such knowledge as would addle the mind of Kristos as it had, alas, poor Ares.

  The logi-legatus permitted himself a moment’s grief for the passing of the venerable machine.

  He just needed a moment. There was so much to be done. So much to be ordered.

  Ares’ spirit was with the Omnissiah now; renewal was an intractable constant of the Universal Laws that the great works of preservation and accrual conducted by the priests of Mars could only mitigate. Nicco Palpus looked at his hands. He knew about renewal. He felt no great sadness, in truth. There were other Dreadnoughts of equal to or greater age than Tubriik Ares; it had only been the warrior inside the sarcophagus that had been uncommonly ancient and that did not impress Nicco Palpus as it did the Iron Hands.

  But then children will become attached to their comforts.

  The cawing of a psyber-bird somewhere in the cable-rafters distracted him from his spiritual convalescence and drew his attention towards the shuffling approach of a lexmechanic with the rank of locum overseer. The adept prostrated himself before the dais.

  ‘Rise, Danneil,’ he said. He enjoyed near-instant access to the names and records of every one of the millions of Mechanicus assets situated in the Medusan system or attached to the armies, fleets and vassal holdings of the Iron Hands.

  The adept stood, eyes to the floor, hood over his face, but beaming at the illusion of recognition. Palpus’ mimetic features altered to match.

  ‘You summoned me, legatus.’

  ‘I did. I require a small expeditionary fleet to be dispatched to Fabris Callivant.’

  There was a pause as the lexmechanic consulted his implants. ‘A Knight World, legatus, straddling the boundary of the Astronomican at the outer rim of Segmentum Obscura. I will arrange it. Do you have orders for them?’

  Palpus’ expression shifted into a frown before working back into something more neutral. ‘The orders will be delivered to the archmagos commanding directly.’

  ‘I will be sure to inform them, legatus. Have you any further requirement for me?’

  ‘Yes.’ He steepled his fingers across the lectern, calculating. What to do? Medusa and Fabris Callivant were not the only worlds to receive a portion of the Dawnbreak Technologies for study. He held his head in his hand, calculating, calculating, and shut the infinite number string down, unresolved. There was only one option.

  ‘Arrange a transport to Mars.’

  ‘When do you intend to depart, legatus?’

  The expected smile. ‘Not I. As soon as a ship can be prepared and adept Yolanis put on it. Make sure that it is a fast ship.’

  To his credit, the adept did not ask any further questions, though the requisition of a dedicated transport for the carriage of a single mid-ranking enginseer must have raised more than its share of red flags. In Palpus’ mind, Yolanis bore no blame for Ares’ demise. Ares was a relic of another time, a faithless time, when the Iron Hands had not heeded the universal schematic that the Omnissiah had laid out for them as they did today. The Iron Hands’ interconnectedness was a blessing of the machine, but such false and outmoded dogma could have spread like a scrapcode contagion had it been left unresolved. Yolanis had served her purpose there as he had known she would. One did not escape destitution and drudgery simply to then risk it all on a point of faith. Yolanis had proved herself morally adroit, and would do so again if the offer were correctly tuned to her sensibilities.

  Which it would be.

  ‘It will take at least a day to prepare a ship of the desired specification and to requisition the necessary supplies for a lengthy transit.’

  ‘Very good,’ said Palpus, injecting his voice with dismissal tones, and looked back to the lectern beneath his hands. The spiralling pattern of chrome lines, despite their apparent individual randomness, as a whole united to form the symbol of the Medusa Mechanicus. It struck him as an apt analogy. There was a complicated network of components before him and many operations in flux, but through faith in the Omnissiah there was only pattern.

  ‘Danneil.’

  The adept turned on his way out.

  ‘The vote on Kardan Stronos’ submission to join the Iron Council is scheduled for the next lunar transit. Arrange it to be held tomorrow. He and Yolanis can share a transport. That would be efficient.’

  The adept dipped his head, a habit born of repetition, but looked troubled. ‘Will the Iron Fathers not need to be present?’

  Palpus’ mask shifted to become one of reassurance, his smile quite genuine though not, he could objectively state, his best. It would be useful to be rid of the would-be Iron Father for a decade or two. ‘Do not concern yourself with that, Danneil. I believe I know how they would intend to vote.’

  About the Author

  David Guymer is the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned, along with the novella Thorgrim. He has also written The Beast Arises novel Echoes of the Long War, and a plethora of short stories set in the worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Legend Awards for his novel Headtaker.

  An extract from Shattered Legions.

  There were no surgical lasers available.

  A clustered missile strike over Isstvan V had blown out the Ionside’s flank from the lateral exchangers aft, voiding eight deployment bays and the port-side apothecarion chambers. The smaller medicae annex on the ship’s starboard side was overwhelmed with life-critical cases. Dying legionaries on stretcher boards were lined up along the hallway.

  Shadrak had only lost a hand. He reported instead to a makeshift triage station set up in the forward hold. Most of the staff there were frightened serfs drummed up from the ship’s crew. Gorgonson of the Lokopt Clan was the only Apothecary present, the only one that could be spared from the chaos of the medicae annex. He looked at the hand.

  ‘Excise,’ he instructed the human attendant waiting nearby. ‘Clean down to the forearm bones. Leave some tissue for conjunction and graft. I’ll be back to fit the augmetic.’

  Gorgonson didn’t say anything to Shadrak. There was nothing to say.

  No. There was a great deal to say – just no words with which to say it.

  He treated Shadrak like a piece of broken machinery presented for repair, not as a brother, an old friend or a fellow son of Terra. He didn’t even make eye contact. He just moved on to the next case, a battle-brother whose helm had been fused to his cheek by a melta burst.

  The human was a young ensign, freckle-faced and red-headed. His anxiety made him seem like a small boy compared to Shadrak’s bulk. ‘Seat yourself, lord,’ he stammered, gesturing to a commandeered suit-room recliner that had a metal service trolley positioned beside it.

  Shadrak didn’t much care for the term ‘lord’. He was a captain, and that word alone was more than sufficient. But he was too tired to correct the serf, too empty. He felt like the tombs of Albia that he had visited as a child: vast and enduring, but long since robbed of the precious things they had once contained.

  Using his good hand, he took off his helm and placed it on the deck. Then he unstrapped his weapon belt, so that the harnessed gladius and bolt pistol would not encumber him when he sat. The belt had loops for reload clips. They were empty.

  The recliner creaked under his armoured weight. He set his boots on the foot rest, leaned back and placed his ruined
left arm on the trolley. It would have been palm up, if he had still had a palm.

  The attendant stared at the wound. The hand was missing most of the fingers. It was a bloody mitten of blackened meat, with broken knucklebones protruding like twigs. The wrist was misaligned. The composite ceramite sleeve of Shadrak’s iron-black armour was mangled at the cuff, the torn ends stabbing into his flesh.

  ‘Is there pain?’

  Truth be told, Shadrak hadn’t been aware of any pain – not physical pain, anyway. The other pain was too immense, too entire.

  Surprised, he answered, ‘No.’

  ‘I have no anaesthetic,’ the man added reluctantly. ‘I have some numbing agents, but resources are so–’

  ‘Just do it,’ said Shadrak. His body had autonomically shut down a great number of his neural receptors at the moment of injury. His left hand didn’t feel much of anything anymore. It was just a dead weight, like a piece of kit he couldn’t unbuckle and remove.

  ‘There are no surgical lasers either,’ the serf apologised. Shadrak saw he was wiping a manual bone-saw with a sterile swab. The man’s hands were shaking.

  Under other circumstances, in other wars, Shadrak would have been amused by the sheer pathos of the situation. But his capacity for amusement was as empty as the tombs of Albia too.

  He sighed.

  ‘You’ll never get through the vambrace with that,’ he said. The man looked as though he was about to panic. ‘Do you have medical training?’

  ‘I am a junior gunnery officer, lord,’ the man replied. ‘But I have my corpsman certificate.’

  Again, the ‘lord’…

  Shadrak reached over with his right hand, unclasped the elbow guard and let it fall to the deck. Then he unfastened the clamps in the crook of his elbow and mid-forearm, and tugged the composite plasteel-and-ceramite sleeve off. Parts of the gauntlet were still attached, flapping loose. The buckled wrist seal was impacted into his flesh, and it took a little more effort to wrench it clear. Fluid and flecks of meat spattered the deck.

  He stripped away the undersleeve, tearing the fabric. His exposed skin looked as pale as bone, in stark contrast to the mauled mess of his hand.

  ‘How did this happen?’ the man asked, eyes wide at the fully exposed damage.

  ‘Horus happened,’ said Shadrak.

  He rested his arm back on the trolley. The man approached, gingerly, puffing counterseptic onto the wound from a flask, his hands still shaking. He took a grip on the bone saw, and consulted an anatomical diagram he had called up on the display of his data-slate. Shadrak knew that the man was dying to ask what he had meant, but didn’t dare.

  He rested the saw’s serrated edge against Shadrak’s flesh just below his torn wrist. The skin was covered in spots of fast-clotted blood. The serf swabbed them away, and then made the first draw.

  There was pain, of course, but it seemed minor and distant.

  Shadrak sat back and let it pass over him. He stared at the hold’s gloomy roof, into the darkness beyond the hanging lumens. He let his mind fill with memories – memories from before the pain. He tried to recollect something as far from it as possible. Before this minor discomfort, before the greater injury of the dropsite, before Medusa, before the Gorgon, before the Great Crusade…

  He thought of Terra, and the last years of the Unification Wars. He thought of his first days as a Storm Walker, serving under Lord Commander Amadeus DuCaine in the theatres of Afrik and the Panpacific. Back then, justly proud of their fresh, gene-herited might, none of them had known what the Storm Walkers would become, or what revision of structure and loyalty they would have to undergo. And even once they had known, they had embraced it wholeheartedly. It had not been a matter of reformation or repair, though fates knew that the X Legion were especially resilient when it came to repair.

  It had been a matter of ascendancy.

  It had been a blessing. To be called to your primarch’s side, to become one of his. Shadrak had cast off his Terran surname, a mortal vestige that had fallen into disuse anyway, and taken the name Meduson to demonstrate and affirm his allegiance to his new home world.

  He had become Shadrak Meduson of Clan Sorrgol, Captain of the Tenth Company. The Storm Walkers of Unification had become the Iron Hands. They had expected nothing but glory in their future. Even if calamity chanced to overtake the Iron Tenth on the field of war, it would be a glorious calamity in the Emperor’s service.

  None of them had ever anticipated this inglorious ruin. None of them could ever have imagined such a measure of raw treachery.

  None of them could ever have expected this scale of loss and pain.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the man said.

  Shadrak opened his eyes.

  Despite his clotting factors and vascular shunts, the top of the trolley was running with blood. It was dripping off the edges and making a rectangular, splatter-pattern halo on the deck. The flesh of his wrist was marked with several bloody hesitation wounds. When the young serf had finally found some confidence and purpose, he had opened a gash like a gasping mouth, but the bone was barely nicked.

  The man’s hands were shaking more than ever. ‘Your bones are very… very strong, lord.’

  Shadrak saw that he was sweating.

  ‘They were made that way,’ he replied, sitting up. ‘Give me that slate.’

  The serf handed him the data-slate, and Shadrak reviewed the anatomical graphic as dispassionately as he might check a mechanical diagram. He made a note of the bone formation, compared it with what remained of his wrist, took note of blood vessels and tendon assembly and paid heed to the recommended link points for structural and neural grafting.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said, handing the slate back. ‘It’ll be quicker.’

  The man slowly offered him the bloody saw, but Shadrak had already leaned over the side of the recliner and drawn his gladius. He set the edge of the blade along the clumsy guide cut that the bone saw had scored, paused, and struck his ruined hand off with a single, swift blow. It bounced off the side of the trolley and landed in the pool of blood on the deck. The serf hesitated, as though he felt it would be polite to pick the severed hand up and return it to Shadrak. Then he remembered himself, dropped the saw, and hurried forward to attend with clamps and wadding.

  ‘If it’s going to hurt anyway,’ said Shadrak as the man worked, binding the stump tightly, ‘it’s better that it doesn’t linger too.’

  Good advice, he thought. Applies to so damned much.

  Gorgonson returned an hour later and inspected the wound.

  ‘Do this yourself?’

  ‘It seemed for the best,’ Shadrak replied.

  ‘You’re no surgeon,’ said Gorgonson.

  ‘Never claimed to be. But your man there was intent on whittling me down until I was nothing but a spinal column and a rictus.’

  Gorgonson frowned. ‘We’re doing the best we can, given the circumstances.’

  ‘Well, he made more of a mess of me in ten minutes than the damned Sons of Horus could manage in a week.’

  Gorgonson glared at him. ‘Don’t even joke,’ he hissed. ‘Damn you, Shadrak. Don’t even say the words aloud.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m angry?’ asked Shadrak. ‘I’m beyond rage. I’m in another place entirely. White heat and boiling blood. I’m going to butcher and burn every one of the bastards. Give me my new hand so I can get on with it.’

  Gorgonson hesitated. They had known each other for twenty-four decades. Like Shadrak, Goran Gorgonson had been a Storm Walker, a son of Terra. They had fought through the Unification Wars side by side. At their ascendancy, Goran had elected to join Lokopt, the clan that most remembered and celebrated the Terran aspect of the founding. But he had changed his name to Gorgonson in honour of the primarch.

  ‘Anger’s not going to get us anywhere, earth-brother,’ Shadrak said quietly, ‘exc
ept deader than we are already. Anger’s a blindfold, a fool’s motivation. I reserve it only for killing blows. We need cool heads and clear minds. This is survival, repair, rebuilding. Terra only knows, we’re good at repair – we excel at it, so this should play to our strengths.’

  ‘They’re calling a council,’ said Gorgonson.

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘The clan-fathers.’

  ‘A Clan Council?’ Shadrak asked. ‘What in Terra’s name for? This isn’t a matter of bloodline and heritage.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘The clan-fathers are proposing to assume command? Collective command?’

  ‘I suppose so. In the absence of…’ Gorgonson paused. There were words that were going to be too hard to say, names that were going to be too hard to utter. ‘The clan-fathers take control, for now. Isn’t there comfort and assurance in that? They are veterans who understand–

  ‘A Clan Council is the last thing we need,’ said Shadrak. ‘Command by committee? Pointless. We need positive, singular leadership.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had aspirations of command,’ Gorgonson remarked.

  Shadrak thought about that for a moment. The notion came as a surprise.

  ‘I don’t,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never considered it. I just know we need something now. Someone. We’re dead without it. Just a shattered rabble.’

  Gorgonson sighed. ‘Any Apothecary, even the best of us, will tell you that you can graft on a new hand, but you can’t graft on a new head.’

  ‘Then we’ll have to learn how,’ said Shadrak.

  A servitor beside Gorgonson was holding the augmetic on a tray.

  ‘Nothing fancy,’ said the Apothecary, reaching for a scraper and a neuro-fuser. ‘I have no juvenat packing left either, so you’ll have to let it bond by itself. Don’t test it. It’ll be weak. For months, probably. Let it bed in and heal.’