by David Guymer
Accustomed by now to his cellmate’s peculiar modes of conversation, Thecian picked up the train himself. ‘You should have trained as a Chaplain rather than a Techmarine.’
‘You would not be the first to say so.’
Stronos closed the finished circuit box with a plastek click and placed it on the prayer table, crunching his cheek muscle into the eye to reverse cycle from high zoom. This was, he realised, more than he had shared with another since his extirpation from Clave Jalenghaal. More than he had ever divulged to a non-Iron Hand. He was not entirely comfortable with the idea. ‘Put it down. It is valuable.’
Thecian shut the book and examined the worn binding appraisingly.
‘To me,’ Stronos continued.
The Exsanguinator shrugged, then tossed the book onto Stronos’ cot. It was undressed. His body’s requirement for sleep had been greatly curtailed, and he was fully capable of a satisfactory thirty minutes rest every few days from a vertical posture.
‘How delightfully illogical.’
‘It surprises you that I value my culture.’
Thecian gave a short laugh. ‘Brother! It surprises me that you have a culture.’ Stronos, again, gave no response. Thecian frowned, crossed his arms and regarded him seriously. ‘When you hear “son of Sanguinius” what is the image that your mind conjures?’
Stronos did not answer – the Emperor’s Angels, beautiful, perfect.
Flawed.
Thecian gestured to his own worldly possessions, the manuscripts, the rows of dressing kits and alchemical vials, the half-formed attempts at art. His forearms, Stronos noted, were criss-crossed with scars both old and new. ‘You have one. Of course you do.’ His voice became dusky. ‘I suspect we are all more complicated than our legends will permit. We all have darker natures, daemons of the soul we would prefer our brothers not see.’ He shrugged, as if the daemon he spoke of had a claw on his shoulder. ‘I would rather not see, but the moment I look away, the moment I let it have that, the daemon wins.’ His lips pulled back over hard white teeth as he regarded Stronos at his prayer table. ‘I think that you and I are more alike than any of our brothers here.’
Stronos grunted. ‘I had actually thought the opposite.’
‘Why do you think I volunteered to share this cell with you?’
‘You volunteered?’
‘The magos instructor felt you should be left alone.’
‘She was correct.’
‘I do not know the life of your father, but I know of his death. I know the… burden… of orphanhood.’
Over the century and a half since his implantation with Ferrus Manus’ gene-seed, Stronos’ ability to pick up on non-verbal cues had waned. If there was something that Thecian was attempting to get at or imply then it was lost on him. The Exsanguinator watched him, however, gauging for a reaction, for understanding, and so he affected the slightest nod, neck drawing on the rigid brace of his forgechain. Had Lydriik not practically begged him to use this sabbatical to broaden his understanding of other Chapters?
He sighed.
Had he not tried?
‘Perhaps you do,’ he allowed.
Thecian smiled, as though acknowledging the magnitude of Stronos’ effort. ‘You lost your temper during the exercise,’ he said. ‘With Barras, with Magos Phi. Even with me.’
‘I am master of my emotions,’ Stronos countered.
‘If it’s me you are trying to convince then do not bother.’ Thecian pulled away from the wall and walked towards him. Suddenly earnest, he crouched before Stronos’ prayer table. ‘You are… not alone in needing to control the daemon within. But there are other ways, brother, beyond mere avoidance and repression. I can teach you, if you will allow it.’
Stronos regarded the perfect, avowedly flawed, being that studied him in kind from the other side of his workbench. He recalled the vows of secrecy that Lydriik had undertaken prior to his duty-tithe to the Deathwatch, and how he had scorned the Librarian for doing so. What are secrets after all, but hiding places for the weak and fearful? The Adeptus Mechanicus had extracted similar oaths from their aspiring Techmarines, oaths that made the demands of the Deathwatch look like a steady eye and a firm handshake, and he had been equally disdainful then too.
But secrets were like rust. A little bit of light, a little bit of air, and suddenly what looked like solid iron was flakes crumbling in your hand.
‘I can be better than I am. That is all.’ He thumped the prayer table, making his tools and cannon parts leap. He was not sure what made him do it, and he regretted it immediately. ‘I am an Iron Hand. I should be…’ He trailed off, looking up at Thecian with his human eye. ‘Better.’
‘Then be better.’
Stronos emitted a sigh, poisonous hydrocarbons rasping from his abomination of a mouth. ‘You do not think at all like an Iron Hand. We seldom commit to a course unless it is certain of success.’
‘Where is the challenge in that?’
‘In choosing the course correctly.’
Thecian laughed. ‘You must miss your own brothers?’
‘No.’
‘No? I feel the absence of my brothers like an ache in my hearts.’
‘As do I,’ said Stronos. ‘But not only in my hearts.’ He pointed to his armour’s girdle plate. ‘This is Jalenghaal.’ To his shoulder. ‘Burr.’ His throat. ‘Lurrgol.’ His hand moved to other points of his armour where, bundled in protective ceramite, a system tether maintained a continuous stream of inload/exload to the ether. Occasionally the name of a fallen brother would escape him, become conflated with that of another who had assumed the battleplate of Kardaanus or Morthol or Vand and who he named now in the same thought even though they had never met. ‘And nor are they absent. Bits and pieces of emotion. The occasional stray thought or voice.’ Jalenghaal’s frustration. Lurrgol’s grief. He shook his head slowly, clearing it. ‘They are in the warp. My impression of them is always stronger when they are in the warp.’
‘Time and distance matters little there,’ said Thecian.
‘Perhaps.’
‘Say “perhaps” one more time, Brother Stronos, and I will withdraw my offered aid.’ He chuckled to himself, shaking his head. ‘In any case, I trust that you are finished here?’
‘Why?’
‘Because you have been in here for over a day, brother. Barras is starting to think you will not come.’
II
Before Scholam NL-7 had been Scholam NL-7, a proving facility for the most gifted aspiring Techmarines, it had served as a resupply station for caravans travelling from Ascraeus Mons to the clandestine watch posts of the Noctis Labyrinth. Before that it had been a drilling outpost, scavenging for trace titanium deposits in the exhausted sands. Before that, a terraforming station, when Mars had been green and mankind had with justification called itself master of all the heavens it surveyed. The remnant archeotech was still in evidence, though it was purposeless, degraded, suffering through heresy and schism and shifts in orthodoxy until it was little more than the icon of a memory.
It reminded Stronos of Meduson, the sole city on Medusa, an oasis of civilisation raised out of unforgiving rock by the pre-Imperial foundations on which it sat.
Most of the scholam was inaccessible now. Entire wings filled with ancient technologies had been sealed off by machine-spirits that thought little of their inheritors or the diminished age in which they now found themselves. Others had suffered breaches as the millennia dragged by and remained exposed to the Martian atmosphere, and haunted too, or so some believed. The bulk of the remainder was a labyrinth of service crawlways and common areas built for an era before the Emperor’s dream of a Legiones Astartes had been born. They were too cramped to see much use now, even if mortal men had apparently once been larger and haler than the malnourished Martian stock of M41.
The hub of the facility (literally in fa
ct, for in flyover picts it appeared as a weathered cog, partially buried in red sand) was a chamber of habitable size. If one were to park two Land Raiders back-to-back such that their rear hatches opened onto one another then the shared troop space would have been about this size.
In its epoch as a mining post it had housed the drill. A vertical shaft still ran through the fifteen or so metres of rock to the surface, and several hundred again down to the unmapped arcologies below. In its centuries as a waystation it had been a calefactory, a place for travellers to wait out the infamous Martian dust storms in some kind of comfort and camaraderie. As a scholam it had become that again.
A low-slung metal table occupied most of the chamber. Adeptus Astartes warriors in monastic garb and aspirant tabards sat cross-legged on the floor around it. A pair of menials in sleeveless red robes quietly withdrew the evidence of an unspectacular meal. Stronos regarded the spread distastefully. His requirement for nutrition had decreased in parallel with the decrease in his organics. The destruction of his mouth and oesophageal tract on Thennos had only expedited that process. Direct electrochemical transfer now accounted for seventy-three per cent of his required sustenance with the remainder imbibed by fluid intravenous drip. His desire for company had never been great, but the unsociable method of ingestion had expedited the diminishment of that mortal craving as well.
This, he sometimes thought, was what it felt like to be a Dreadnought, entombed in iron and dead to the living world.
The prospect of achieving that unrivalled honour thrilled him less and less each day.
‘Begging your grace, lord,’ one of the menials muttered nervously, swerving past Stronos with a stack of pewter bowls. His bare arms were covered in electoos, mapping the schema of the augmentation to which he aspired and was unlikely ever to receive. The low-grade electrical implants flickered badly, hurting the eye and making it appear, just for a moment, as if the Cog Mechanicus on his cheek had been imprinted back to front.
Stronos ignored him, and forgot him the moment he was out of sight.
‘It is good of you to join us, Kardan.’ Baraquiel shuffled around and extended a hand in greeting. ‘I hope you will make a habit of it.’
Stronos stared at the hand. It had taken Stronos nearly two and a half hours to isolate the door mechanism from the scholam’s aggravated spirit and release Baraquiel from the corridor.
With a frown, Baraquiel withdrew his hand.
‘Stronos.’ Sigart nodded to him as he stood. Baraquiel rose too. Between the pair of them and Thecian, they immediately began dragging the table from the middle of the chamber.
Removing it created a rough square, ten metres by ten, the table itself forming one side. Add a power-armoured Space Marine and that hundred square metres disappeared fast.
Add two and it began to feel very claustrophobic indeed.
Barras stood against the far wall, massive in his battleplate of bone-white and brown, his bulk emphasised by his folded arms. Honour seals fluttered from the knee and elbow guards. Unhelmed, his scowling face was underlit by the steady blink of his gorget softseals, his deep-set eyes funnelling ever deeper into shadow.
‘I feared you would not come,’ he said.
‘Emotion is weakness,’ said Stronos, moving to stand opposite the Knight of Dorn.
Having come directly from his technical meditations, Stronos was incompletely armoured. Like Barras he was unhelmed. Several sections of his right arm were un-plated, including the hand, but mechanisation more than made up for the lack of powered strength.
Nothing more needed to be said.
The challenge had been offered and accepted. The arena had been prepared. ‘Honour’ could be satisfied in only one way.
For something held in such high esteem, honour was a vacuous thing. Ferrus Manus had been a being of deep and unshakeable honour, but one crack in it, one perceived crack, had been his downfall. The primarch had feared how his brother Fulgrim’s betrayal would reflect on him. It had been a need to prove his honour, more than any skill-at-arms or guile at the traitor Fulgrim’s command that had destroyed him. What was honour anyway? Every warrior tradition bred its own evolution of the theme, a language of their own, unrecognisable from the root form. Put a Space Wolf and a Dark Angel together and they would agree little on the subject of honour, but victory they would both recognise.
‘Unarmed?’ Stronos asked.
‘You are missing a gauntlet,’ Barras grunted.
‘I am unconcerned.’
‘Very well.’
The Knight of Dorn ground his teeth and lowered his head. Stronos threw his opening punch while the warrior’s eyes were still downturned.
What was honour after all, but a bolt pistol held to a warrior’s temple, his own finger on the trigger?
Barras ducked back like a rearing snake. He caught Stronos’ fist in one big open gauntlet, then dragged him lurching off balance and smashed a knee into his plastron. It would have dented a tank, but Stronos’ chest was heavier than most tanks. Barras grunted in surprise when he was not doubled over, and Stronos barged him into the wall. Martian brick dust hazed them both as the two suits of blessed war-plate rattled and growled, their spirit animus stamping and goring like beasts of war. They untangled enough to swing arms. Stronos mashed his elbow into Barras’ face. Again. The pistons in his arm hissed and banged.
A snarl dribbled from the void in Stronos face as his arm ratcheted back for a third drive. Barras roared, face slimy with fast-coagulating blood, eye socket shattered as though with a mallet, but he summoned enough raw dynamism to drive his weight into the Iron Hand.
Stronos was too massive to be thrown, but was forced a few clumping steps back before his own motors reasserted themselves in a squeal of gears.
Barras was already on the attack.
Stronos let the Knight of Dorn’s fist beat against his chest plate, parried the next with his own gauntlet, a feint, and caught an unexpected jab to the lightly guarded rotator rings between forearm and bicep of his right arm. Something crunched. The joint seized for a fraction of a second as the system’s spirit rerouted damaged pathways, gifting a free punch, which Barras hammered into his bionic eye, followed by a kick to the knee that crushed the servo-motors and slammed the joint to the ground.
‘Have you no shame?’ Barras bellowed, backing up with thumping steps so that Stronos could heave himself up onto both feet.
A voice behind him shouted encouragement. Baraquiel. Stronos filtered it out. His onboard battle cogitator crunched through its data, analysing the Knight of Dorn’s fighting style for bias or weakness and projecting its conclusions with an updated stratagem to his optic display. He pressed fingers to his cheek and looked down at them. They were bloody. Barras’ punch must have cut the bionic into the surrounding flesh and burst a vessel.
‘Only in failure,’ he replied.
Anger made Barras’ whole body shake as he started forwards. Stronos moved at the same time. Barely three strides between them, hardly enough to build up a charge, and the two Space Marines collided in the middle with the glacial inevitability of impacting worlds.
Power armour thrummed, whined and trembled with bone-jarring power as the two warriors fought. Ceramite cracked ceramite with every probe, feint and counter. Evasion was out of the question, and so they pounded on one another. Almost taking turns. More skill to it than met the eye. Every shuddering footfall was an offensive act, the inconceivable mass and power of battleplate making every split-second decision final.
Stronos’ cogitator scrubbed and updated with every exchange as the Knight of Dorn switched his tactics, alternating between at least seven distinct martial forms. Muscle memory made him fast. Stronos struggled to keep up, adopting an increasingly defensive style as his systems sought to identify a pattern. There was always a pattern. Only Chaos was completely rando–
A bone-white fist cut through
his guard of calculations and left dented knuckles in his funnel mouth.
Stronos stumbled back, arms out for balance, a flurry of white noise murdering his optic display. His cogitations disappeared under the flood. He felt anger in his flesh, his muscles swelling, a pressure building inside his skull for want of a scream of rage. His first thought was that he had suffered system damage, that some broken valve had flooded his organics with a sub-lethal dose of combat stimulants, but his armour systems coolly reported that this was not so. He was… it took him a moment to diagnose the condition… angry. The buckling to his mouth pipe transformed Stronos’ next outbreath into a propeller-like shriek. He threw his flesh hand as though it were encased in a power fist.
Barras ducked easily. A clumping step took him across Stronos’ chest, and then he rammed his pauldron in to slam the Iron Hand against the wall.
‘Tell me my flesh is weak, Iron Hand,’ said Barras, not even breathing hard. The Knight of Dorn bristled with anger, his deep eyes burning with it, but it was a surface layer, a subsidiary black carapace that energised and engaged him. Every movement announced absolute control. ‘Tell me.’ A low kick crippled Stronos’ second knee joint and he slid down the wall to the ground.
With a whine of servos, Barras lowered himself to one knee. Stronos threw a punch. Barras batted it contemptuously aside on the outside edge of his vambrace and headbutted Stronos in the eye, driving the flat rim of his bionic deeper into the flesh and squeezing out more clotted ooze. They locked arms, scraping, straining. Barras had the position, but Stronos’ heavier build and machine-augmented power were still too great to be overcome.
‘One outlier does not… disprove… the rule.’
The outside of Barras’ boot ploughed through the already weakened servos of Stronos’ right elbow. The arm caved in, and the sudden shift in weight dragged Stronos’ left shoulder forwards and his face into the vambrace that Barras smashed into it. The back of his head recoiled into the wall, and brought another torrent of bone-dry red dust over his head.
