by David Guymer
The planet is the home port for a flotilla of a dozen semi-retired vessels under the flag of the Mars-class battle cruiser Golden Ratio, their strength supplemented by that of a combined fleet of over fifty vessels tithed from allied and patron forge worlds throughout the sector. Dozens of warships drawn from Battlefleets Trojan and Dimmamar hang becalmed in neighbouring anchorages, alongside the imperious and more glorified vessels despatched from Warfleet Obscurus at Cypra Mundi. The crux of the world’s orbital fortifications however is the ancient star fort, Darkward, a rugged bauble of crenels and turrets painted in the red and black of House Callivant. The troop capacity and firepower of the combined fleets is formidable, but to Princeps Fabris, and the Imperial and Martian commanders to whom he is subordinate, the heart of the system’s defence lies elsewhere.
Nine illustrious warships of the Hospitallers Chapter held anchorages in high orbit, led by the thousand year-old battle-barge, Shield of the God-Emperor.
The Hospitallers are itinerant crusaders [ACCESS SUB-PACKET >> CHAPTERS OF THE TWENTY-FOURTH FOUNDING], their fleets patrolling pilgrimage routes that criss-cross the subsector.
Pilgrimage and trade have both grown in the millennium since the Chapter’s Founding, bringing prosperity and peace to worlds that would not have known either, had Imperial Saints not broken the enemies of Man upon their fortification over the ten millennia past.
Fabris Callivant was not one of those worlds, but it lay near enough for its plight to have imperilled those holier and wealthier, and for the Hospitallers to extend their arm to its protection.
For a brief time in the middle third of M41, Fabris Callivant became the epicentre of the war without end.
Chapter One
‘Weakness will find any excuse.’
– Arven Rauth
I
The augmentician, Janis Gilt, pressed his fingers to Arven Rauth’s throat. He frowned, digging around in search of a non-existent pulse.
The Imperium is a large place after all, and I’m clearly not human, thought Rauth. How long is it since I felt my own heart beat – a year?
As the mortal’s lips shaped ‘twenty’, he withdrew his fingers, flicking them as if to dislodge whatever microbes he might have scraped off under his nails.
Recognising the cue, an indentured aide in a high-necked, tight-sleeved chirurgical gown swiftly presented a towel. He ran it through his fingers, polishing the nails as he looked over Rauth’s corpse-like body once more.
Unblinking, eyes naturally dimmed by a cataract of mucroanid fibres, Rauth stared back.
‘I can certainly certify him dead. Would you like a copy of the documentation, Miss…?’ Janis looked up and over the wire rim of his spectacles, to address the presence that Rauth could feel behind him.
‘Laana Valorrn,’ came the reply. ‘And no.’
The augmentician smiled thinly.
I doubt whether many bring their real names to this shop. Why does he even ask?
Shaking his head, Janis looked down again. He spread his hands along the side rail of the weigh-in gurney and smoothed his expression, obviously trying not to look as though some prickly off-worlder had just dumped the interred remains of Princeps Fabris the First into his clinic. With a finger, he traced one of the flex-rods that ran from Rauth’s reconstructed left shoulder into the neighbouring pectoralis muscle.
Clammy. Cold. No one acts the corpse like an Iron Hand. Rauth resisted the urge to grimace as the augmentician’s inquisitive fingers moved onto his pectoral plate. Another frown spread across the mortal’s face.
‘I can’t find any ribs.’
‘He is not baseline human,’ came Laana’s curt reply.
‘That I see.’ He checked a readout on the side of the trolley that was obscured to Rauth’s eyeline. ‘Two and a half metres tall. Four hundred kilograms. Even accounting for the augments – and fine work, I must say – that is a lot of muscle for two and half metres of man to carry.’ He looked over his spectacles towards Laana again, as if she were a first year medicae scholar with the impertinence to call out a spelling error. He’ll be regretting that soon enough. ‘I don’t normally ask these sorts of questions. I wouldn’t get nearly the business if I did. But I just have to know, what is he?’
‘Nothing like you and I.’
‘One doesn’t need a House-chartered augmentician to tell you that.’
‘One does not need a House-chartered augmentician at all. But I was told you were discreet.’
He sniffed. ‘You were correctly informed.’
The cramped little triage room that served as Janis Gilt’s front-of-shop was already starting to fill with walk-ins, despite the earliness of the evening. Battered bodies sat slumped in chairs, eyes staring, lips going blue, most of them messed by sharp blows to the back of the head, but Rauth could covertly pick out six stabbings, two shootings, one high fall or high-speed impact and even one natural cause with just a cursory look. Some had been brought in by relatives looking to earn a chit from their grief, others by those simply looking to make a chit. They all looked impatient. The heightened Imperial presence in Fort Callivant had seen the value of black market meat rise exponentially.
Locating one of the myriad underground dealers that supplied the Fort Callivant Mechanicus with cadavers had been the easiest part of this mission.
Janis Gilt simply had the distinction of being the unlucky one.
‘I can offer you…’ The augmentician spontaneously removed his spectacles, then quickly reset them and began fiddling with the temples. ‘Twenty-five guilders,’ he declared suddenly, his voice going high as if he were asking a question rather than stating a price. A big man plastered in cult tattoos seated nearby spluttered on a cup of hydrous recyc.
‘Thirty-five,’ said Laana.
‘Agreed!’ Janis snapped, then beamed. He probably would’ve gone to five times that and considered it good business.
‘On one condition.’
The man’s face fell. ‘Go on.’
‘The body contains certain implants. Unique technologies. Things that could be traced back to my employer if a person were so inclined. She insists I witness your procedures and ensure their safe return.’
The augmentician gave the unseen woman a second scrutinising look. Rauth tried to imagine how she would seem to a man like him.
A girl. Nineteen years old. Unhealthily pale. Dark hair, cut to the scalp. She had come dressed in the garb of a serf from some minor House. It would have been a perfect disguise if not for the tough musculature that the Callivantine fashion for short-sleeves exposed. Wire-trace lines of musculoskeletal enhancement accentuated the definition. And there was a tattoo on her bicep. Rauth remembered it well, of course.
A white hand. And the Gothic numeral ‘X’.
Fabris Callivant was a long way from the trade routes and established warzones. Off-worlders were a far from common sight here.
‘I understand perfectly,’ Janis said.
A clap of his hands brought servitor assistance over from its position in waiting. Rauth remained motionless and staring as the gurney swung around and thumped through a set of doors at the back of the shop.
Unlike the grim state of the triage room, which was an extension of the street, Medicae Janis Gilt took pride in his theatre.
Every surface had been swabbed. Every drill bit and scalpel edge glinted as though astringent lighting and daily counterseptic polishes brought out their keenness. The overhead servo-arms and the Militarum-grade diagnostic kit must have been painstakingly acquired, and was almost as good as anything enjoyed by those with the favour of House Callivant. High-end weaponised augmetics and artificial brains, sub-intelligences coded with crude battle algorithms, lined the shelves in bubbling jars of cyborganic fluids.
The servitor hauled Rauth into position under the spot lamps. Chirurgical arms locked the trolley’s whee
ls and it departed with the same unthinking thuggishness with which it had arrived. The lights slowly burned their outlines onto Rauth’s retinas.
Yet he still didn’t blink.
‘Now then,’ said Janis. ‘You can begin by telling me exactly where I can locate your employer’s devices, and then you can collect your thirty-five guilders from my–’
‘This room is sound-proofed, isn’t it?’ said Laana.
‘It is. Most people don’t want to hear–’
The door clicked shut as she leant her back against it.
Rauth felt saliva building up in his mouth.
Finally.
II
Blood and bone fragments splattered his face, followed shortly after by the incinerator stench of lyddite, fyceline and vaporised brain matter. Arven Rauth drew it in through his nostrils and opened his mouth for more. Blood sloshed through his bionic heart like degreaser through a promethium can. It ached. As if the muscles and nerves it was attached to were constantly on edge, and never more so than now, waiting for it to beat.
‘You could have just wrung his neck.’ Laana hadn’t reacted to the shot. Blood speckled her disguise, and the stone-cold features of the Medusan cult assassin inside them. ‘Why did you have to shoot him?’
Because I wanted to. Because I like the sound my bolt pistol makes, the way it rings in my ears, the look on his face as the back of his head exploded. Because I– ‘Be quiet and lift him for me.’
With a grunt Rauth slid from the gurney, muscles clenching, the augmetic sinews in his arm whining after the prolonged spell of inaction. He towered over the mortal woman, twitching and bulging. Laana looked up, controlling her fear well.
‘I am not your menial,’ she said. ‘You lift him.’
Rauth imagined spraying the assassin’s brains across the tiled wall. The chirurgeon had a bodyguard, madam inquisitor. There was nothing I could do. ‘Your temple should have indoctrinated you better.’
‘Some of us must work for what we have. We cannot all be elevated by genic sorcery.’
My bolt pistol just went off in her face. It must have offended the Omnissiah in some way. I cannot imagine how.
‘Weakness will find any excuse.’ A light nudge sent the assassin stumbling, clattering into an instrument trolley, and Rauth bent down, taking the dead augmentician by the sopping ruin of his throat. He hauled him up to eye level as though his hefty weight were nothing.
The man’s height was average for an upper House male. His toes dangled around Rauth’s knees. His age was more difficult to judge as Rauth had become accustomed to functionally immortal beings for whom flesh was a distant, abhorrent memory. If he were compelled to guess, then he would have put the augmentician somewhere in the final third of his years. Fatty tissue hung from his gut and from his arms like a poorly measured raiment. Too late to return to the tailor now. The weight caused the flaccid neck muscles under Rauth’s single-handed grip to stretch.
The head was a stringy mess, like something forced through a mincer. Humans. So fragile. And yet, it was something like this that he had been born as, and some residue of it would always tar him.
‘What was that?’ Laana’s voice distracted him from his thoughts.
‘What?’
‘You just licked your lips.’
‘I did not.’
‘I assure you, you did.’
‘Then why ask the question?’
She scowled as though a mongrel had bitten her hand. ‘I told the inquisitor she would have been better sending Khrysaar.’
A sudden growl caught them both by surprise.
‘You won’t speak of my brother,’ said Rauth.
Laana retreated to the door, hand slipping behind the back of her dress to the not-so-secret pocket and the collapsible needle pistol hidden between the shoulder blades. Rauth shook his head as if to knock loose an unwelcome thought and turned back to the corpse. ‘Go. Discourage anyone from entering.’ She drew her hand from between her shoulders and presented the open palm. As if an Iron Hands Scout would not have been able to disarm her the instant the intent to draw had entered her eyes.
‘I will give Inquisitor Yazir what she wants,’ he muttered, as Laana backed through the door to the triage room.
He sniffed at the augmentician’s burst head. Despite his lack of a pulse, he could feel his eyes begin to throb. He closed them, lips lowering, lowering, and sank his teeth into the soft, pulpy flesh. His eyelids flickered as the recollections of a life not his passed across them.
He bit down, tearing off a chunk, and swallowed it without chewing.
The omophagea organ in his throat trembled with stimulation. The images intensified. A life. A family. A baby girl, growing flicker-book fashion into an adult daughter. Rauth knew he must have once had such memories. He thought of his mortal parents often, though less than he once had, but he could no longer remember what they had looked like or even their names. Ferrus is my father’s name. A god who abandoned me ten thousand years before I was conceived. Seeing these things reflected through a mortal’s eyes meant little to him now, and affected him not at all.
He sank his face into the red meat, gorging beyond that which had mattered most in life to Janis Gilt, to the specific memory that Rauth and the inquisitor sought.
He saw bodies.
Crudely augmented and weaponised, garbed in the surplices of lesser baronies and local syndicates and arrayed for combat. They were in a sealed chamber, crowded with people, sitting and standing in tiers. The walls were metal, hung with banners, a parody of the great open air tournaments hosted by House Callivant, the Icon Mechanicus glowering down upon them all. A Mechanicus enclave. But there was something untoward about the symbol, something Rauth had seen somewhere before. It scratched at the walls of his subconscious, but Janis had seen nothing odd in the symbols, so Rauth, gorging on his memories, could pinpoint no reason for the gut wrench of unease as he re-saw it a second time.
The remembrance moved on.
The buyer.
Crimson robes swaddled him. Or her. With the Adeptus Mechanicus you can never tell. A wriggling apparatus of limbs was mounted on his hunched shoulders. An array of lights, all to the right side of the face, pierced the darkness of his hood. A voluminous sleeve fell away, revealing a hand bound in gooey red bandages as the magos deposited a credit wafer into Rauth’s – into Janis’ – palm.
Rauth inhaled the charnel stink deeply.
‘There you are…’
III
It was raining when they left the clinic. As far as Rauth could determine, it always rained on Fabris Callivant. A soaring profusion of tanks and guttering carried the run-off from the tower tops down through a labyrinthine maze of pipes, clacking through gates, sloshing past wheels, spilling over a cobweb of locks and bubbling up through grates in the pavement as if the city were in the last days of dissolution.
Nose wrinkling, he toed aside the sacks of cyborganic refuse tied up in the alley across from Janis’ chirurgery to uncover his armour. The rain rinsing his naked skin of blood, he began pulling it on.
The dark carapace had been shiny once, a long time before it had come into Rauth’s possession. It was so weathered now it was essentially grey. Even the clan and Chapter icons had been worn away. Cullas had told him that it was just plates of armaplas and did not have a spirit as power armour did. What does an Apothecary know of it? But he had been reassured that his wargear would not return the offence at some later date.
Sheltering in the clinic’s doorway, Laana calmly disassembled her needler. Then, throwing a raincoat over her bare shoulders, she jumped between the oily puddles to join Rauth across the street.
‘Ready?’ Her hands fussed with the coat as though drawing out the creases, while surreptitiously adjusting various concealed holsters.
‘You are remarkably clean,’ said Rauth.
&
nbsp; ‘I dislike mess.’
‘I remember.’
He looked up. The mucranoid coating of his eyes meant that he did not need to squint as the warm rain, which was sick with pollutants, battered at them. Most were industrial aerosols that had accumulated over thousands of years, but his enhanced sense of taste could draw out the specific exhaust traces of eight different classes of Imperial and Mechanicus atmospheric fighter craft and of the Hospitallers’ gunships. His worn carapace creaked as, letting Janis’ blood sluice from his face, he rolled the neck joints. He could just about see the lights in the distant tangle of sky, dimmed by the rain as if by a mist, false stars in the daytime. He wondered if it was the Lady Grey, but it was too far even for his eyes to see.
‘I would never have thought Adeptus Astartes daydreamed so much.’
I would never have thought you could irritate me so much. ‘Let’s go.’
Fort Callivant, despite the militant aspect its name implied, was a city of one hundred and eleven million souls. Vehicles ploughed down its wide highways at speed, the ejections of groundwater streaming over the sides of the glass barriers that protected the pedestrian companionways as though they cut through fast-flowing rivers. The glass was stained with the proud imagery of ancient times, but like everything on Fabris Callivant, they were terribly, achingly, old. The colours were gone, the images faded into the glass and rain. Battlemented hab towers, as vast and pockmarked as any mainline battleship, funnelled the downpour through criss-crossing tiers of road and footbridges. Miniature hurricanes summoned by freak microclimates ripped at sodden banners, creaking and groaning their way between ancient buildings. Weathered gargoyles sneered down on pedestrians and vehicles both. They clutched cogs in distended paws, or were clad in chains, representing the shackling of man’s bestial nature by good order and reason. Yet the rain made them dribble and leer, and no one looked up or cared.
Laana hurried over several footbridges, always rising, Rauth always a step behind, shoulders hunched. A rich off-worlder and her abhuman bodyguard. It was a role they had rehearsed many times. As had Laana and Khrysaar. No one challenged them. In spite of the endless gush of Callivantine citizenry, nobody wanted to walk too close to Rauth.
