by David Guymer
Despite the heavy Mechanicus presence and legions of servitors, Jalenghaal had yet to see any evidence of an actual crew.
Emerging from their alcoves stumbling and disoriented, the rest of his clave looked around as he did.
Burr stood in the alcove directly opposite, buried to the waist in electrically glowing smoke. Lurrgol looked down from the far end of the long line as if he might drift away. Borrg, unhelmed as was coming to be his preference, was grinning widely, looking up at Strontius and trying to put words to his excitement.
‘Simulus is no substitute for real training,’ Thorrn complained.
‘On the contrary,’ said Jalenghaal. ‘It is more efficient than physical practice. You will adapt.’
The very act of simulus changed a warrior. Subjecting him to the galaxy of woe and experience could not help but degrade his notion of self. With good reason were the Garrsak clan seen by their brothers as little better than robotic killers. ‘Garrsak obeys’ was the mantra. Simulus, Jalenghaal was coming to realise, was part of the reason why.
Garrsak and Raukaan held that in common.
The doubts were Stronos’ doubts. Or they had been. They were a part of the clave now. ‘Garrsak’ in old Reket Medusan meant unity, and to be Clan Garrsak was to be one. That, Garrsak and Raukaan did not hold in common. The Raukaan clan was Iron Father Kristos. The Garrsak clan was a gestalt of them all, a pyramid of machine-linked souls with Draevark at its pinnacle, each warrior dependent on the strength of every other. It was what made them strong.
It was also what made them weak.
Stronos had understood that from the beginning.
‘Why does Kristos exload his meme-files of the Hospitallers flagship to us?’ asked Burr. ‘We are here to fortify Fabris Callivant against the orks, are we not?’
‘That is my understanding,’ said Jalenghaal.
‘Why then does the Iron Father want us to experience the inside of the Hospitallers battle-barge?’
Jalenghaal did not answer.
He did not have one to give.
II
Kardan Stronos hunched under the hard metal of the doorframe, wariness sparking into interest as he found himself in Magos Instructor Yuriel Phi’s private reclusiam. Curiosity, as he had often been reminded, was his own personal weakness. The chamber belonged to a separate wing of the facility to the neophyte’s dormitory cells and common areas, barely accessible at all to one blessed with Adeptus Astartes physiology and armour. Stronos envied the magos her sanctuary.
The walls were lined with aluminium shelves of identical length and spacing. The bronze-spined tomes and archeotech curios salvaged from the facility’s older, failed sections were fastidiously arranged. Scholarly interest? Ancillary projects? Stronos could only speculate, but he doubted that the magos’ day began and ended with the hours of instruction between first and last prayers.
Phi made her way to a sturdy metal table that stood in a circle of light from an overhead lume source.
Hinged clamps glinted like fangs in an open jaw, a pair at the foot end, another, larger, at the head, two more off centre to either side. Restraints. A hooded menial was tightening the screws that secured the clamps to the hinges using a manual driver. He shuffled off without speaking as Phi began to tap at the set of ivory runekeys set into the head end of the slab. Stronos followed the departing menial with his eyes. He thought he recognised him from the calefactory, but could not be sure. Most mortals looked vaguely alike. Disregarding him for now, Stronos looked up, his bionic shuttering against the lumen’s brightness. A nest of folded, skeletal servo-limbs hung from the ceiling, like a dead spider withered in the sun.
‘Why am I here?’ he asked.
Phi looked up from the runebank. Cable dreadlocks fell across her face, diffracted the glow of her eyes. ‘Why do you socialise with the other aspirants? It serves no purpose.’
‘They are not as I thought they would be. Perhaps I would understand them better.’
‘Spoken like a scholar rather than a warrior.’
‘Is it not within us to be both?’
‘Why?’ She shrugged, cables sliding from her shoulders and down her back. ‘You are an Iron Hand – you have the legions of Mars to fill the role of the scholar for you.’
‘Perhaps I am unconvinced by that arrangement.’
Phi bared her teeth, white enamel against the energy-damping metal of her exo-carapace. Not for the first time, Stronos was struck by the sheer wattage of personality that was put out and somehow contained within her tiny frame. ‘Maybe. Perhaps. Has anyone ever mentioned that you are slow to cement an opinion?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
Stronos’ finger traced the silvered edgework of his girdle plate. Barras’ knee had put a serious dent in it, but Clave Jalenghaal’s exloads continued to trickle-feed into his systems from the data-tether there, warped and time-lagged by the distances involved, a slow poison of doubt and mistrust.
‘Why am I here?’
‘There is no need to be so suspicious,’ Phi chuckled. ‘I trained Feirros, and Fell, and Bannus and Gdolkin and Verrox, and Kristos.’
‘And Ares?’
She smiled coyly. ‘Just how old do you think I am?’
‘Are you inviting me to guess?’
The magos laughed at that. ‘Kristos was the same, you know. He too demanded answers, was never satisfied when he had them.’ Stronos’ one eye glowered at the implication. ‘You are not like the other aspirants here. You do not study solely to become a Techmarine. Worthy as the pursuit may be, it is as deep into the mysteries of the Machine-God as those not of the Iron Hands may go. You are to become an Iron Father, a leader of your world, the custodian of secrets that the ancient alliances between your world and mine have opened to you. It demands special instruction.’ She tapped meaningfully on her table. ‘It demands special upgrades.’
‘I have entered the Eye of Medusa,’ Stronos muttered, circling the operating slab.
He had seen how the Iron Fathers had been able to interface with the ancient technologies of the Eye and with each other to forge a network in which communication was almost instantaneous. The assembled Iron Fathers had been able to coordinate with allies, debate complex points of dispute with rivals, all while simultaneously addressing the Council in archaic spoken Medusan. As an example of how proprietary technologies could be exploited to improve the efficiency of the Chapter’s affairs, it was a marvel, and yet…
He folded his arms over his chest-plate.
‘The Adeptus Mechanicus provides and maintains our equipment. The Voice of Mars votes on the Iron Council. The magos calculi advises us on all decisions.’ He used the word ‘advise’ loosely, for most iron captains took the calculus as writ. ‘You instruct our leaders.’ His facial muscles struggled with a frown. ‘And you modify those leaders’ brains in the process.’
‘You make it sound so sinister.’
‘If our positions were reversed, would you not think so?’
‘Were our positions reversed I would approach your question logically.’ She raised a finger. ‘You speak of a conspiracy, but there is no conspiracy, Kardan. There is almost never a conspiracy for they are impossible to maintain.’ A second finger. ‘Furthermore, as great a force as a Space Marine Chapter represents in its own fief it is insignificant before the might and reach of Mars. There is nothing you have that we could not take if we so decided.’ A third finger went up. ‘And point of logic number three. Mars honours its alliances.’ She studied him a moment, eyes blinking, switching colours, the slab still between them. ‘The question then becomes – do you wish to assume the rank of Iron Father?’
Stronos nodded grudgingly.
He had entered the Eye of Medusa, and had seen all that was wrong with the workings of the Iron Council. In the disastrous aftermath of the battle on Thennos, his mind had
conjured an apparition of Tubriik Ares who had persuaded him to pursue the fallen Ancient’s mantle. After his convalescence, he had made a similar vow to his friend Lydriik.
‘I made a promise.’
‘Do you wish to change how the Iron Hands are ruled?’
The question took Stronos aback. From a certain perspective, every individual Iron Hand existed in a perpetual state of improvement, but change, principally and collectively, was anathema. For the last one hundred and fifty years of Stronos’ transhuman existence he had watched the Iron Council sclerose under the paternalistic indifference of the Voice of Mars. He had bemoaned it, derided the weakness of the Iron Fathers, but change it? He had never entertained it as a possibility.
When he said nothing, Phi patted her hand on the slab. He wanted to like her. She was competent, wise, inhuman, but ‘never trust’ was the first dictum of the Scriptorum of Iron and it rang in Stronos’ head.
He had learned on the battlefield and in the ruling sancta that the interests of Medusa and Mars were seldom as closely aligned as they appeared.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Make your upgrades.’
Magos Phi made to speak.
‘But. I will summon my equerry-servitor. It will observe and record the entire procedure.’
‘Agreed.’
‘And I will remain conscious.’
‘That would be inadvisable. The risks would be tremendous. To say nothing of the pain.’
‘Those are my conditions.’
‘It is your flesh,’ the magos sighed. She clapped her hands for her attendant and Stronos hauled his massive iron-and-ceramite frame up onto the slab.
The menial fluttered in, closing the clamps over wrists, ankles and forehead, and slotting in the pins to lock them shut. As the man bent over Stronos’ face, he saw, briefly, the flicker of an electoo, that strange, inverted symbol.
‘Well then,’ said Magos Phi, hands resting lightly on the runekeys while she waited. ‘You will experience pain almost immediately.’
III
With Rauth, Laana, Bohr and Harsid all aboard the shuttle craft, Little Grey was cramped to say the least. The late Epicurate Hypurr Maltozia XCIII apparently exhausted his imagination reserves with the naming of his ship. The lightweight vessel bumped through spoils of atmospheric turbulence. The transorbital ship movements resembled cyclones, tapering into orbit from the principal baronies on the planet’s surface. Landers frantically moved the last payloads of troops and equipment to the ground while fleet strategos and administrators moved back up. Departmento Munitorum operatives in airspace control turrets shaved every available second off their departure windows until the take-off of one ship and the landing of the next occurred practically concurrently. Collisions, even with augmented pilots, were an inevitable hazard, and added more to the sense of bedlam than they took away.
Confirmation requests and wide spectrum code-blasts from the control turrets lit up Little Grey’s cockpit boards, but with so much traffic it was easier to ignore the automated challenges than reply. They had the requisite codes, of course, but quicker simply to slip through the net.
They had had about forty-eight hours before the greenskins arrived.
Now they did not even have that.
Kristos was coming. And just as he had with Dawnbreak one hundred and fifty years before, he would salvage the xenotech and leave the world to burn. Not that I could care less about Fabris Callivant, or Dawnbreak for that matter, but I’ll not be beaten. Not by him. His feelings towards Iron Father Kristos were murky and confused. Dwelling on the subject for any length of time made his skull ache. He dabbed at his nose with a finger. No blood this time. He looked out of the window and tried to think of something else.
‘Commencing our final descent,’ said Harsid.
Clouds boiled up from beneath them, followed mere seconds after by the first lashings of rain. This is Fabris Callivant. Of course it’s raining.
The Death Spectres captain was armed and armoured and ready for combat, helmet sealed, sleek black plates drinking in the low-level cockpit lights. Laana was strapped into the co-pilot’s throne. Mohr was in the back, setting up his equipment. Because someone’s going to get hurt. Ymir was still on the ship. The Wolf had complained bitterly, but someone had to stay behind and, as Harsid had put it, it wasn’t going to be Harsid.
Rauth held on to the ceiling grips with his metallic hand, crushing the leather in its grip, swaying with the atmosphere’s attacks on the unarmed craft.
He had never actually engaged in a full-scale combat drop before, so could hardly draw the comparison, but it seemed to him as though Little Grey was compensating for the absence of hostile flak admirably.
The clouds began to disperse. The deluge grew more insistent. A sweep of crusty, barren terrain scuffed into soft focus beneath him.
Fabris Callivant had been stripped millennia ago. Her crust was a warren of former extraction tunnels. Even her mantle had been tapped, episodes of high-explosive mining breaking open entire continental plates to eke out what precious minerals she still held close. That too was in the past, but the geological scars were still visible from the air. There was no vegetation. Heavy acidic rains scoured the surface daily. The only feature to disturb the barren vista of craggy grey was the slight indent of road, the bristling of hab towers and weather shields that marked one of House Callivant’s vassal outposts. To the west, a string of low, humpbacked mesas stood up against the environmental scouring. They were in darkness, the rising sun a half-ring of acid pink beyond their peaks. The near slopes glittered with hive lights, the capital of some petty barony whose fief bordered the royal tracts of proud, beggared, Fort Callivant.
The geology enlarged as the shuttle dropped, the horizons hurtling in from all sides. Fort Callivant itself rose firmly into view.
The planetary capital was a rising shard of rust-brown ferrocrete and grey plasteel. Rainwater streamed from its pitted outer shell, dumping it in edge-of-the-world cascades onto the basement dwells and sub-tenement striae, homes to tens of millions that sprawled into the surrounding landscape under the hive’s own vertiginous mass.
Peering through the triangular side windows, Rauth tried to catch sight of the Princeps’ shard palaces through breaks in the rain.
The tourney fields of House Callivant were reputed to be an awesome spectacle.
>>> HISTORICAL >> THE BATTLE FOR FABRIS CALLIVANT, 212414.M41
Burning drive plasma at several thousand degrees beyond tolerance [ACCESS INSTRUCTIONAL >> RITES AND OBSERVANCES OF VOIDSHIP DRIVE FUNCTION] had brought the Adeptus Astartes flagships to Fabris Callivant in less than twenty hours. The staged withdrawal of the Alloyed, the Brutus and the ships of the Hospitallers’ fleet held the orks at bay, but the orks’ numerical advantage was too great, and more ships continued to arrive every minute. The strike cruiser Golden Soldier was boarded and subsequently destroyed while covering the withdrawal. The Last Rites and the Clan Borrgos frigates Mount Volpurrn and Corpus Mechanicus disappeared from auspex somewhere between the sixth and seventh planets, their wrecks lost to the interplanetary gulf. Contemporaneous accounts from Magos Qarismi predicted the first exchange of shots between the ork invasion fleet and Darkward to occur eighteen hours and twenty-five minutes from that point.
The magos calculi would, of course, be proven entirely correct.
IV
The hemispherical arena stood open to the murderous outpourings of the sky, jutting from the side of the artificial mountain like an armoured plate from the shoulder of a Space Marine, ringed by the torrential roar of a waterfall. Tiered seating for a hundred thousand aristocrats and peasants-elect climbed its leeward side, built into the eastern precincts of Princeps Fabris’ ancestral abode. Two-score brightly coloured banners replete with technomythic symbols and Dark Age heraldic icons fluttered limply in the wind and rain.
A quartet of Thun
derhawk gunships, three black, one white, descended towards the arena basin. Four colossal Knights, the deep burgundy of their heraldic war-plate replete with honours, stepped out from under their banners and fired off a thunderous salute, the noise of heavy stubbers and Icarus autocannons temporarily drowning out the orchestrated cheers of the Callivantine citizenry that had been herded into the sodden arena seating.
The gunships touched down for a matter of seconds, and Space Marines piled out. The mixed squadrons of Imperial and Taghmata interceptors flashed overhead, pursued by a rippling, rolling sonic boom as they split and rocketed back on a loop towards the exosphere. Jalenghaal’s boots thumped on the hard, cratered granite of the arena.
The rain danced on the expanse of ground, splashing and pooling in pockmarks and craters. It beat against Knight armour, fizzling to steam on ion shields.
Targeting objectives and tactical information blinked through the visual mess of Jalenghaal’s displays, picking out power sources and weapon profiles. His systems muted the roar of the crowd, dulled the thunder of the Knights’ portable artillery to a quiet ache. And he manually sorted his displays one threat at a time.
Lurrgol was drifting at the back of the column, and the timing of the others was becoming ragged as a consequence. Jalenghaal’s annoyance was not going to cure his brother’s episodes of confusion, but it seemed that once one emotion got in, the gates were opened to the gamut.
Kristos had chosen to represent each of the Clans Raukaan, Garrsak and Borrgos with a full clave led by Sergeants Ulikar, Jalenghaal and Tartrak respectively. They plodded mechanically behind their leaders.
