by David Guymer
After about thirty metres the tunnel widened sharply into a conoidal basement chamber. The cyber-ghouls were warehoused there in the weeks and months between tournaments. A single servitor occupied the space, guarding the iron-barred door across from the tunnel. It was not one of the cybermantic constructs but a high-grade weapon servitor, mindslaved to the uncomplicated task of keeping the occasionally unstable cyber-ghouls at bay.
Rauth’s appearance caused its sentry algorithms to initialise.
It lurched forwards on caterpillar tracks wrapped in spiked chains. Power flowed to the arc flail in its right arm, stiffening the previously trailing chain-links and discharging from its spiked head with pealing claps of thunder. The left arm had been replaced with a jury-rigged heavy stubber twin-link. It emitted a clunk-clunk-clunk complaint as it was force-fed on the ammo belts coiled about its waist and shoulder. It regarded Rauth with cog-socketed eyes and a fixed grimace.
It opened up.
Khrysaar ploughed into his back, knocking them both down as the twinned stream of solid lead shot tore into the ground between them.
The heavy stubbers cut out and Rauth staggered back up, wincing at his foot.
With a grinding of gears, it slowly backtracked, turning on the spot to track Rauth. Because I was just born lucky. Muzzle flare lit up its cyborgised rictus, like a corpse on a pyre, and stub-rounds pulverised the wall. There was nowhere to hide. Solid slugs riddled Rauth’s light armour, banged off metal bionics. Several dozen punched straight through his body and splattered the wall behind. He grunted, jigging back against the wall and painting a bloody arc across it as he sank to the ground.
The servitor clattered noisily in for the kill.
Khrysaar grabbed its arm from behind as it raised its arc flail. A sharp yank, a twist, and bone snapped. The arc flail suddenly bled power, the chain-links loosening and thumping the head to the ground. The servitor issued a confused code-burst, pivoting round and round on the spot. Khrysaar jumped onto its motive unit and moved with it, always behind the servitor. He took the unit’s head between both hands and twisted.
There was a moment’s resistance, muscles bulging in the servitor’s neck, then Khrysaar turned its neck half around with a bellow and a splintering of bone.
The Scout jumped down from the servitor’s still-grumbling chassis and staggered back.
‘Can you walk, brother?’
Rauth drew himself to a slouched kneel and grimaced. Breathing was painful, a dozen solid lumps of pain where bullets resisted the simple up-down inhalation of his chest. Air tickled his insides where others had passed straight through.
‘At least they didn’t explode,’ he said through gritted teeth.
‘Not like you to notice a bright side,’ said Khrysaar.
With a shuddering effort and the help of the wall, Rauth got himself up. He was leaking badly. Space Marine physiology could only hold a body together so long. ‘I’ll need an Apothecary.’
‘Did you bring one?’
Rauth nodded.
‘Lucky for us,’ said Khrysaar.
‘He stayed with the shuttle.’
The other Iron Hand smiled grimly.
Rauth shuffled painfully for the door that the servitor had been guarding, pressed himself against it and peered through the iron bars of the viewing hatch. He could hear screams, muted by smoke, rockrete and distance. Smelled burning. The sporadic thud of bolter fire.
‘I don’t suppose you managed to conceal a weapon somewhere?’ asked Khrysaar.
‘No, did you?’
‘No.’
‘Thought not.’ With a preparatory grunt, Rauth shouldered through the door, reducing its reinforced timbers to kindling.
‘Are you going to make it, brother?’ asked Khrysaar, concerned.
‘You know what to do if I can’t.’
Twenty-odd steps later and Rauth was back on the storehouse floor.
His multi-lung wheezed as it accepted great gulps of smoke. Corpses littered the ground, scattered with the detritus they had dropped as they fled. Food cartons. Data-slates. Swipe keys. Staying low, Rauth reached out with one hand and drew what looked like a length of pipe towards him. It had been deliberately melted at one end, reshaped and bound in synthskin to make a handle for a crude walking stick. He tested its weight, and slapped it lightly against his bionic hand. Better than nothing. Crouching low, he looked around. Muzzle flare lit up the smoky storehouse. Eye-lenses gleamed like bolts of las. Rauth estimated four Space Marines in the building. One more then, outside the primary entrance, assuming a conventional combat squad. Answering flashes returned from elsewhere in the building. Bursts of auto-fire. Ribbons of plasma. Lightning jabs of arctricity. As far as Rauth was concerned there were no innocents here, but some were less innocent than others. And it looked like the Frateris Aequalis were fighting back.
‘There has to be a rear access or a window somewhere,’ he muttered. ‘Omnissiah, a skylight even.’
‘There’s a freight access to the back of the building.’ Khrysaar pointed into the smoke, breathing easily but noisily on the toxic fumes. ‘It’s where I was brought in after Laana handed me over.’
Rauth nodded.
‘I should go first,’ said Khrysaar.
Rauth threw him a look. ‘I’m injured, dispensable. I should go first.’
Bent low to the ground, one of them limping, the two Iron Hands ran.
Radium rounds blizzarded from a walkway that passed tangentially overhead. A green afterglow seethed into the smoke as the radium half-lives bled energy. The Hospitaller that the cultists had sought to down shone like a golem of jade as he raised his bolter and shredded the walkway with a tight semi-automatic burst. Honeycombed metal crashed to the ground. Rauth screamed in frustration, skidding on the debris-strewn floor as he tried to drag his damaged foot out of the way. Khrysaar wrapped arms about his waist and dragged him clear.
‘This way! We can go around.’
Rauth coughed. A bad sign. His body was starting to give in. ‘This time… you can… go first.’
With a slow creaking of metal, the roof above the collapsed walkway began to bow. Rainwater trickled in. It was only a matter of time before the entire warehouse came apart. Perhaps that’s the intent? The Hospitallers were practically invincible in their power armour.
A wall loomed out of the murk. The overhead walkway was still just about attached to it, but the bracing bolts were horribly bent and sagged a little further with every squealing second.
‘Come on!’
Khrysaar ducked through the gap between the crippled walkway and the wall. Rauth followed, swatting aside the dangling cables and stays on his length of pipe, and emerged on the far side coughing. He heard a muffled snarl and came up sharply, taking his improvised weapon in both hands. He spun around, and stared into the harsh white curve of a Hospitaller’s gorget ring.
Rauth swung without thinking.
His pipe drove a miniscule crack into the warrior’s ceramite and exploded in his hands. He let what was left of the handle fall with a clatter, palms ringing. Khrysaar was already running away. Good for him. This is no servitor. With a deathly hum the Hospitaller clamped his bolter to his thigh plate, drawing a gladius in the same powered motion. The knife was half a metre of artisan steel, a shortsword in mortal hands, and etched with flowing script that glittered like gold in the occasional glare of his armour’s lights. The crosspiece was made of some dense alien bone. Ork? The pommel had been hand cut from the same material into a likeness of a human skull.
The Hospitaller struck out with it, blindingly fast. Rauth leapt back, arms out, the blade drawing a red lin
e across his chest and digging a nick out of his pectoral bionics. He grabbed the Hospitaller’s knife-hand with his bionic before the Space Marine could readjust, gripping the Hopsitaller’s gorget with the other. With a grind of servos, the Space Marine shook him off and smashed him against the nearest wall.
Rauth coughed, face scrunched in splitting agony as a slug that had been lodged in his lung wall worked its way in and popped into the alveolus. His next in-breath was a liquid rattle. He looked up, hand on his chest. The Hospitaller towered over him like the wrath of the God-Emperor.
A wild scream tore the air. A woman with braided locks stapled to her scalp drove a diamantite spear at the softseals between the Space Marine’s leg and groin. In her wake came a tide of dirty-robed and patch-garbed cultists. Menial labourers with the skin of their arms peeled back and replaced with electrical mesh. Magi with blood seeping from ragged cowls and torn sleeves. Ex-gangers in cobbled together skitarii armour, the twisted Aequalis emblem daubed half and half onto flesh and steel, flickering electoo and dried blood.
For a second, Rauth couldn’t move. Could barely breathe.
He’d seen men and women like this before, he was sure of it. On Thennos? He couldn’t remember the details. Something was stopping him. He could feel an itch in his skull. Like a man trapped in a box, screaming, trying to get out.
‘Brother!’
Khrysaar called to him from the direction that the cultists had just come from.
The Hospitaller delivered the Emperor’s valediction, amplified to ear-splitting volumes by his helmet’s augmitters, as he clubbed men to death with blows from his knees and fists. Rauth saw a man’s arm ripped from his torso, another’s ribcage shattered with a kick that caused bits of spine and organ pulp to erupt from his back.
Rauth wasted no more time in crawling away.
Khrysaar was prying a flechette blaster from the hands of a magos, recently bludgeoned to death and slumped against the arch of a large doorway. Smoke flowed past him, suggestive of an exit somewhere inside. The Scout clutched his borrowed weapon and pointed it in the direction of the current.
‘This is the way.’
Khrysaar led the way now, walking quickly, the sound of breaking bones and prayers for the Emperor’s forgiveness echoing behind them. Winches hung from the ceiling like drowsing bats. Lift-tripods lined an unmarked path, stacks of rusty metal crates blocking off any possibility of hiding between the tripods or taking a wrong path. The smoke thinned as they moved further. A rectangular smudge of light burned feebly in the murk ahead. A thin figure was silhouetted against it.
It was armed.
Khrysaar cursed under his breath and aimed his blaster.
The smoke cleared enough for Rauth to make the figure out. He hesitated a moment, tempted to let his brother fire, then grunted and stayed Khrysaar’s hand.
Laana Valorrn spotted the two scouts a moment later. The smoke was thicker where they stood. Her eyes were feebler. ‘I was about to leave without you,’ she said, her eyes narrowing as she noted Rauth’s hand over Khrysaar’s lowered pistol. She dipped her own. A heap of robed corpses littered the ground around her. They were already beginning to bloat, the most horrific bio-toxins known to the death cults of Medusa accelerating their decay.
Rauth blocked his nose with a finger and blasted blood and snot from the other nostril. ‘I’m glad you… didn’t. There’s something I… wanted… to tell you in… person. Your plan… was… terrible.’
She gave him a knife-wound of a smile. ‘Did you even try not to die?’
Push me, human. Push me once more.
‘Where is Inquisitor Yazir?’ asked Khrysaar, not even out of breath, the wheeze of his genhanced lungs having lessened now that the smoke was clearing.
‘Nearby,’ said Laana.
Rauth frowned; something in the way she said it triggered a faint nudge of suspicion. When was the last time I actually saw Talala Yazir?
‘My brother must see Mohr now,’ said Khrysaar.
‘Soon,’ said Laana, backing away.
‘Now.’
‘Soon. Yazir has the adept.’
X
A distant explosion pressed a fingerprint of ruddy orange to the splintered armourglass. Jalenghaal thought-selected the infographic to open a data-link to his clave.
There were no competing sounds as there would have been even on a helmet-to-helmet vox transmission. If not for the positional information relayed to Jalenghaal through the clave’s data-tethers he would never have known that Burr was arena-side, metres away from two duelling Knights.
There was a quarter of a second’s delay. An aeon in electronic discourse. From the trickle of metadata, Jalenghaal could infer his brother’s distraction.
With a grimace, Jalenghaal thought-selected Lurrgol’s rune.
‘That is my forge-temple,’ said Exar Sevastian.
‘It is salvation,’ said Alfaran.
‘It is a sovereign enclave of the Adeptus Mechanicus!’
‘Your implication being that there are regions of this galaxy where the Emperor’s light cannot reach?’ Sevastian opened his mouth, then quickly shut it again. Alfaran smiled thinly. ‘I had hoped not.’
Sevastian turned to Fabris for support.
The princeps looked with pursed lips from one to the other, weighing up the importance of the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Hospitallers to the coming war. Or more likely Jalenghaal gave Fabris far too much credit and he agonised only over loyalty to a longstanding ally versus his immediate need for an unproven one. Commanding a Knight changed a man. Some said it ennobled him, but that was not the word that Jalenghaal would have used. Chivalry, honour and unreasoning loyalty were not qualities to be admired. A loyal man would not betray a brother to secure a victory. A chivalrous one would not abandon an ally where victory was impossible. The Calculus of Battle could demand either.
With a sigh that sounded as if it had been torn, grudgingly, from his throat, Fabris demurred at last to Chapter Master Alfaran.
‘The self-styled Frateris are a nuisance but a persistent one. Who can say what their mischief might have wrought while our attentions were rightly focused upon the greenskin menace.’
‘They will be dust on the wind before the first greenskin makes planetfall,’ vowed Alfaran.
‘Thanks indeed,’ muttered Sevastian.
‘If any greenskins make planetfall.’ Alfaran’s eyes turned to Kristos.
The Iron Father had not moved or spoken. At least not aloud. His binaric link to Sevastian remained unbroken. But if Jalenghaal did not know better he would have thought Kristos impressed by the Hospitaller’s ruthlessness. Surprised even. And that was a rare insult to inflict upon an Iron Hand. They factored for every detail, planned for every contingency.
How better to militate against the unreliability of instinct or emotion?
‘You have acted as I would have had my warriors been in situ as long as yours,’ he said finally, no trace of reluctance in his vocabulisers. ‘But you will respect the sanctity of the forge sacrarium.’
‘I am inclined to disagree,’ Alfaran murmured. He glanced briefly at Sevastian. ‘We go wherever the rot of men’s souls leads us.’
‘If it should be necessary,’ said Kristos, ‘if there is evidence that a taint lurks within, then I will lead my own warriors to purge it.’
Alfaran’s eyes narrowed as he studied the Iron Father.
On the twenty-hour haul from the system’s Mandeville point, Jalenghaal had inloaded thousands of first-hand witness simuli detailing the Hospitallers’ ability to pierce a mortal’s soul with their gaze, to read their hearts and to know when and how a man will die.
What, if anything,
would such a gift reveal of Iron Father Kristos?
‘Interesting,’ the Chapter Master said after a while.
‘I speak from a position of logic,’ said Kristos. ‘The priests of Mars would see the infringement of an Iron Hands clave as a lesser affront. Even you must know that it is unwise to antagonise the Adeptus Mechanicus.’
‘Even I?’
‘If you are so distrustful of my motives then leave some of your own to my command. The tech-priests will be forgiving of a small detachment, provided they are sworn to me.’ Kristos’ optic glow flowed towards the trio of lenses that faced Venerable Galvarro. ‘Your value would be diminished in a void-battle, Ancient.’
Alfaran and his Dreadnought seneschal shared a look, something passing between them that no cryptex wetware could ever crack. ‘The temple is yours, Iron Father,’ said Alfaran, shaking his head slowly. ‘For now, I believe it to be time for the Venerable and me to return to the Shield of the God-Emperor. May He look favourably upon your defence of His realm, princeps.’ He dipped his head to Fabris. Then to Sevastian. ‘Fabricator-locum.’
Jalenghaal, Tartrak and Ulikar clumped aside for them. The floor shook under the Dreadnought’s tread, carillon bells tolling, the dolorous mnemonic immediately casting Jalenghaal’s mind to his simulus memory of the Hospitallers battle-barge.
He shrugged it off with an electrical shiver.
Kristos watched them depart without needing to turn his head. ‘As you wish it, Chapter Master.’
XI
Rauth sat in the dead end of a blind alley, between a lumpy pair of split refuse sacks, and quietly leaked out. Not exactly the way I’d imagined my last moments. The slap of running feet on wet metal interrupted his thoughts, and he wormed deeper into the refuse pile, reaching for the holster of a weapon he wasn’t carrying. The runner splashed past the alley’s mouth and plunged on. Weapons fire popped and burst in the adjoining street. Muffled klaxons cried out into the night.
