by David Guymer
Rauth forced himself to relax and let his genhanced regenerative process do its work. He tilted his head back. Lukewarm droplets of rain splashed his face, sneaking through the cobweb of conduits and gantries between him and the acidic cloud layer.
How long have I been here? How close are the first ork ships now, I wonder?
For some reason though, his thoughts returned to the Hospitallers.
He had always thought that the Iron Hands – and if he were pushed, their successors – were superior to the warriors of other Chapters. In his core, where it mattered, he still did, but that belief had been challenged today. The Hospitallers’ skills had been sublime. A Chapter he had never even heard of before setting foot on Fabris Callivant, and they had almost proven too much for him and his brother. Something to think about. He frowned to himself, trying to get comfortable. It was impossible that the Hospitaller he’d fought in the storehouse would have been overly troubled by a few dozen mortals. He would have recognised Rauth for what he was, neophyte Adeptus Astartes, and would not have had too much difficulty working out the Chapter he belonged to. It’s not as if there are more than two on Fabris Callivant. Even Laana could work that one out.
He held up his metal hand and watched the rain roll down it.
What would happen when he did?
If it sows distrust between Kristos and the Hospitallers then perhaps that’s to Yazir’s benefit. And mine. He had no loyalty and less affection for his gene-brothers, beyond the immediate imperatives of the mission in hand. His mission was not to save Fabris Callivant, but to claim the Dawnbreak xenotech before Kristos could do the same, and maybe save his Chapter from itself.
He didn’t know the details of what they sought or why. He hadn’t asked. It was enough for him to give Tartrak and Dumaar a bloody nose and, if the emotion could penetrate that far, some embarrassment too.
‘You look awful.’
Rauth snapped his head around. Harsid was crouched behind him, back to the lichen-encrusted tin wall of the cul-de-sac, black armour matted with wet. Rain clad the alabaster smoothness of his face. His eyes were wide, wholly red. Rauth masked his unease with a snarl. There was something about the Death Spectre he could just not bring himself to trust.
‘How did you get behind me like that?’
Harsid’s expression was like a tombstone as he passed Rauth a bolt pistol and a knife.
Rauth slid the blade into the leg of his boot and hugged the pistol one-handed to his chest. ‘Thank you,’ he grunted, making it sound more ambiguous than the words should have allowed.
Soon after, Khrysaar appeared in the alley’s mouth, also clutching a bolt pistol in his right hand and clad now in unmarked Scout carapace. He turned his back and aimed his pistol into the street. Laana came next, leading a miserable-looking adept on the muzzle of her needler. I know you. Mohr shouldered between the group, auto-flensers and scalpel probes flicking from his narthecium gauntlet as he walked to where Rauth lay.
Rauth flinched instinctively, rustling the refuse sacks, but Mohr’s initial observations proved relatively painless.
‘My foot will need replacing,’ said Rauth through gritted teeth. ‘My lung too.’ The last bit of my own respiratory system. For something I’ve never seen, I’ll miss it when it’s gone.
Mohr tried on disapproval before settling into his default frown. ‘The foot, maybe. We will see. I can seal the boot for now, brace it, supplement your body’s natural pain killers. It will keep you moving.’ There was a click as a long ball-tipped probe switched from the Brazen Claw’s narthecium. It wobbled as it neared Rauth’s breast. The metal touched his skin. He felt something inside him pulling. A tearing pain.
‘Aarrgh!’
His flesh tore, a crumpled disc of lead shooting from his chest in a small spurt of blood. It clanged, quivering, to the magnetised probe in Mohr’s gauntlet. A slot flapped open, a nozzle extending from the narthecium’s knuckle, and sprayed the wound with a cold gas that caused the puncture to shrink until the edges curled together.
‘Your lung however will be just fine,’ Mohr announced. ‘And this should stem the bleeding long enough for your body to heal itself. Now.’ The Apothecary looked up. Unlike his captain, Harsid, he was helmeted and the lenses shone like copper coins. ‘Are there any more in you?’
Reluctantly Rauth pointed them out, and Mohr repeated the process of extraction and freeze-treatment until the Apothecary held a collection of five slugs in the palm of his gauntlet.
‘You’ll be weak for a day or so, but you’ll heal.’
What kind of half-hearted practice do you call that? ‘Thank you,’ Rauth said. For sending me back into action at less than full-strength in the lame hope I might survive it to heal in my own time. He took a deep breath, wincing at the excruciating tightness that came well before the lung was full. He spluttered the breath out and grimaced. No, really. Thank you.
‘I am not shy with the knife, neophyte,’ said Mohr, flicking away his tools. ‘But nor do I draw pleasure from the cutting.’
Rauth looked away, thinking back to Dumaar and the cutting table aboard the Broken Hand. Perhaps the Brazen Claw’s way was not the worst he could hope for.
‘Where is Ymir?’ he muttered, unwilling to meet the Apothecary’s gaze.
‘Still on the ship,’ said Mohr.
‘Someone has to be,’ added Harsid.
‘The Hospitallers picked the perfect time to stick their foot into that hornet’s nest.’ Khrysaar pointed to a mushrooming explosion, superimposed by the intervening tangle of guttering, locks and paddled wheels, rising from the general direction of the forge sacrarium. In the surrounding districts, the lights started to blink out.
‘That’s zealots for you,’ said Mohr.
Holding one hand to the tightness in his chest, Rauth sat up. He could smell electricity, the faint bitterness of corruption. He felt the breath of movement that suggested someone else was in the alley with them. Except everyone’s already here. Where before there had been only vacant air, there now stood a feminine figure. Her slender frame was clad in body-contoured armour of vibrant yellows and blues, silvery wires of etheric energy stroking the scalloped plates. Gemstones decorated it. A large, crab-shell power pack lowered her shoulders, made her hunch. But she was still tall. The jewel-studded hilt of a sword stuck out of a fabulously jewelled scabbard. She wore a brace of inhumanly delicate pistols in holsters of yellow flax at her hip.
Yazir.
And then Rauth understood.
He did remember when he had seen her last. A reflection in an armourglass porthole perhaps, glimpsed as his mind had wandered. He looked into the inquisitor’s face. The mask she wore reached inside his skull, terrors that he had forgotten how to feel wriggling to the surface like worms to the rain.
It wasn’t Yazir. There had never been a Yazir. Yazir was a mask.
She wasn’t even female.
His mouth contorted into the frame of a syllable, the starting point for a word, a name he couldn’t quite remember how he knew.
‘Yeldrian.’
XII
‘Would you like to see the device?’ asked Exogenitor Oelur.
Melitan stared at him a moment, gaping, pain throbbing outwards from the implant in her medulla. ‘I–’ She didn’t have enough breath. ‘I–’ Couldn’t think for the formless warning being drawn neuron by neuron across her brain.
‘Do not stroke, Magos Vale,’ Oelur sniffed. ‘Nicco Palpus has wound you so tight. Of course you cannot see it.’
‘O- of course.’ She tried to laugh.
‘That audio glitch is becoming quite distracting.’
‘I will see to it promptly, exogenitor.’
Oelur gestured towards the enormous set of multiply locked containment doors at the far end of the gantry. ‘No one may enter the quarantine chamber. Even the servitors that brought in
the technology from Dawnbreak are still inside.’ His primary head turned back towards Melitan with a crunch of gristle. ‘You may relay that to Nicco Palpus.’
‘I will, exogenitor. I will.’
Her breathing was quick and shallow, and it was starting to make her giddy. She turned her back on the containment doors, hoping that would help settle her, and caught a movement from the corner of her eye. It was the skitarii alpha that had caught her when she had stumbled earlier.
He had drawn his plasma pistol and was pointing it at Oelur.
Her eyes widened. Her mouth dropped. She probably had time to react, to do something, probably, but what exactly was she going to do to stop an alpha skitarius? The emission coils burned blue-white, and for a split second Oelur’s primary head and the alpha’s pistol were connected by a string of plasma.
Then the exogenitor’s head exploded into crimson vapour.
Melitan issued a startled mammal sound.
Louard Oelur’s steaming hulk crunched down into his litter and tilted over. His servitor bearers adjusted for the shift in balance but were otherwise unperturbed by their master’s sudden demise.
‘The high will fall,’ said the alpha, his insectile helmet hazing as his pistol vented heat. Around him, the other skitarii were drawing their sidearms. Arc weapons and phosphex pistols. A scattering of taser prods and fist blades.
Chains rattled as the robo-mastiff fought rabidly at the end of its leash, but to Melitan’s rising horror it was not the skitarii maniple that had offended its spirit. Its keeper regarded Melitan with bovine eyes, muscular arms shaking with the robo-mastiff’s efforts to get free, a mouth overspilling with audio-sounders and wiring stretching into a cruel smile.
The gantry stab-lumens winked out, then the illuminations within the subject cages, then one by one the runebanks fell offline. Everything went black. Infocytes continued to tap on lifeless keys. Melitan’s heart hammered in her breast.
Only the twinned glow of the alpha’s optics pierced the gloom.
‘The Dawnbreak Technologies are an idea,’ the voice behind them said. ‘The very essence of that which cannot be contained. Would you like to see it?’
And she screamed.
XIII
Stronos wished he had teeth to clench. The pain of having the roof of his skull cut away was tremendous, and in spite of all his neural safeguards and endorphin pain blockers he almost blacked out on more than one occasion. But it was over now. With a soft crack, like the hatching of a monstrous egg, Magos Phi removed the top of his head. Her attendant was already there, slurping at the membranous dura mater with a suction hose. While they had been waiting on Stronos’ servitor, Phi had introduced him as Jeil. As if current proximity to his higher functions made them close. Most of his attention however was on the blood swirling away from him through the net of transparent tubing. Jeil’s hose sucked around the rim of his brain pan. A curious sensation, but a blessedly painless one.
His eye rolled to the side, his bionic, of course, fixed to a wide-angled but forward view of the ceiling. His equerry-servitor stood against the shelved wall, watching with wide-eyed placidity as the magi cut. Stronos found its presence reassuring nevertheless.
‘I am going to make a single longitudinal incision into the meninges,’ said Phi, out of view behind the head-end of the operating slab. ‘Once that is removed I will insert probes into your frontal and parietal lobes in preparation for implantation. Then I will draw your brain fully from the skull in order to access the dorsal regions of the temporal lobe and the cerebellum. I have never performed the procedure on a conscious subject before. I cannot say what you will experience.’
Stronos could feel his hearts beating, nervous, out of sync, his cold skin was clammy. It was not pain he feared, but the surrendering of control. Absolute control. He was allowing the agent of an unfriendly power into his brain.
Mars was not even, he reminded himself, technically a part of the Imperium at all.
He glanced again to his servitor.
He would review the entire procedure as soon it was finished. Once he returned to Medusa he would have Lydriik and Apothecary Haas go through it with him frame by frame.
‘Are you waiting on my permission?’ he grunted.
Phi chuckled. ‘I told you I have never done this with a conscious subject. I am enjoying the novelty.’
‘Get on with it, magos.’
There was a hum as the magos instructor’s arc scalpel moved in to cut. There was no physical sensation of contact, but light flashed across his eyes as the blade cut in. Both eyes. As if, to the manifold synaptic connections of his mind, he were still the pure organic being that had received Ferrus’ gift one and a half centuries before. ‘How far from our Father’s likeness we have both fallen,’ said Tubriik Ares, his voice resonating from within the light. ‘You do not save a soul by cutting it away.’
And then the light was gone.
Stronos blinked, vision returning, but leaving his hearts floundering.
He looked around. Everything was dark. The arc scalpel had lost power and it was not alone. All the little sounds of life support and power generation that had maintained life in Scholam NL-7 were gone. In its place, silence.
‘What the–?’ Phi began, before Jeil stabbed her through the back of the head with his suction hose.
She spasmed in the menial’s embrace. Stronos pulled furiously on his restraints as chunks of the magos’ brain matter and the occasional lump of something metallic disappeared noisily into the evacuation tubes. He concentrated all his augmented power on freeing just one arm. The slab rattled beneath him, but there was no breaking the clamps.
‘The high will fall,’ sang Jeil’s voice from behind him. ‘The low will rise. That which is within shall be without.’ Stronos shivered under the phantom sensation of fingers running down the ridged lobes of his brain. ‘The Sapphire King will rejoice.’
>>> INFORMATIONAL >> THE KRISTOS HETERODOXY
There are one thousand and fourteen distinct forms of spoken Medusan, in addition to three hundred and seventy-two discontinued variations, and there is no direct translation for the word ‘chance.’ This was why the majority of Medusans at the time, technologically advanced yet culturally stunted, saw the arrival of Ferrus Manus as an omen, a glimpse into the schema.
It is worthy of remembrance that his descent in fact burned the sky and broke Mount Karaashi, previously Medusa’s highest peak – the Omnissiah could not have delivered the tenth primarch in more spectacular fashion had He presented him with His own hand.
For this reason too did his gene-sons receive the death of their primarch with more stoicism than those who suffered a similar loss, at least outwardly. They raged, they sought to lay blame, and for the ten thousand years that followed they indulged their bitterness, but on some level they had known.
It was meant to be.
Chapter Ten
‘I do not fear you, Space Marine! In the eyes of the true Omnissiah we are all equal.’
– Anon.
I
Stronos clenched the muscles still present in his jaw and pulled. Servos shuddered as reserve power flooded his arms. The clamps over his wrists began to creak. He closed his eye and pulled, a roar, tinny and hollow, emerging from his mouth like a blast from a horn. But the clamps had been built to restrain his kind, an adamantite alloy manufactured to the same process used in the production of Terminator plate, and they would not give.
Chuckling, Jeil circled the operating slab. Without a functioning spirit in control of the base the darkness was absolute, and Stronos’ occulobe organ could barely scavenge enough stray photons to pick out the moving outline. He blinked his augmetic to the far-red, the switch conjuring a humanoid wraith thing of dull crimson, haloed in purple, spots of yellow over the nose and mouth. An electoo burned like a branding iron against the side of the mortal’s fac
e.
‘Your rage is empty, Iron Hand.’
‘You know nothing.’
‘I knew all that your kind would have me know. Now I know better. You are desolate. And I am free.’
Stronos tried to rise off the table. Failed. The clamp dug into his forehead.
‘Would you like to know what an Iron Hand really feels?’
Jeil responded with tuneless laughter. He leaned over the foot-end of the slab, hands to the sides as though caressing a perfect machine. ‘Oh, I would. Yes I would.’
‘Stand when you address an Iron Father,’ said Stronos.
Jeil looked surprised, but grinned as he did as he was bidden, a yellow gash opening the red of his face.
His eyes bulged suddenly, bright discs widening as his feet left the ground.
It was as if he levitated. The mortal made a choking sound, kicking out with his legs, pulling at the room-temperature darkness locked around the redness of his throat.
Stronos let the power to his arms dissipate.
With a last gasp of air, Jeil expired.
His legs gave one final twitch.
‘Target deceased,’ intoned the servitor, cold-bodied and utterly invisible in the dark.
As tenth sergeant of Clan Garrsak, Stronos had held the ultimate power, of override, over each of the nine battle-brothers of his clave. Exercising remote operation of an equerry-servitor that had been mindslaved specifically to him did not compare.
He closed his eye and for a moment his perspective was split into two.
He saw the reclusiam. A yellow sphere directly above where the overhead lume source had left its heat. Purpling handprints on book bindings or on bits of equipment where Jeil or Magos Phi had touched them. The cooling carcass of Jeil himself, hung from the servitor’s patiently unmoving fist. At the same time, his closed eye of flesh saw himself through the servitor’s optics. A dark giant of crude flesh and hard metal, scalped, smeared with blood, illuminated by the faint glow of his armour’s own energy sources. He saw his own brain. It pulsated within the shelled wreckage of his cranium like an alien parasite. The sight of flesh made the servitor ape his grimace.
