by David Guymer
First things first.
‘Compliance,’ the servitor muttered, responding to the neural imperative.
And Stronos felt a hand that wasn’t his own move towards the clamps.
II
Stronos lay a finger along the dent in his vambraces. He pulled fists. The right gauntlet betrayed a point one-second delay in responsiveness, the left a six-kilogram reduction in grip strength. He released his fists with a grunt of annoyance. Between his duel with Barras and trying to break out of the chirurgical clamps, his armour’s spirit was in dire need of ministration. He glanced up before he could think about it, offering a wordless prayer to the scholam’s spirit and the Omnissiah of which it was a part. It would need to wait a little longer yet.
He walked around the operating slab. The equerry-servitor moved automatically out of his way. It still held Jeil’s corpse in its hand, lacking any direct instruction to do otherwise. Stronos had yet to decide on the most fitting manner of disposal. He dismissed his still-smouldering anger and pressed it down hard.
Revenge was illogical. Regardless of whether the object was living or dead.
‘You are all my sons and the fires of the forge burn as hot in your hearts as they do in mine,’ warned the Scriptorum of Iron. ‘Chain them, master them, and you shall wield a deadly weapon, but allow them to rule you and you shall be lost.’
The runebank at the head of the slab was still giving off a faint heat.
The body of Magos Instructor Yuriel Phi was slumped beside it. Spots of blood lay around her like scattered flowers. She was still warm, but her eyes were dark. Looking more closely, Stronos realised that it was because her eyes were not there anymore, sucked into her skull by the vacuum hose still sticking from the back of her head. Stronos removed it, set it lightly on the ground, and put his hand on her small, still body. He had wanted to like her.
Strange how much less complicated that wish became now that she was dead.
‘The Motive Force abandons you, magos. But the Omnissiah neither creates nor destroys, He merely rebuilds anew.’ He bowed his head. The Chaplaincy had always been his true calling. He withdrew his hand and rose to his feet.
He saw what he had come looking for.
The top of his head, pale skin and thickened transhuman bone, sat upturned in an organ tray, cleaned and glistening. Iron Hands were cold, in all aspects, and little of Stronos’ meagre body heat lingered on the bone. Only what Phi and her bone saw had inflicted on it. He picked it up in both hands, as if preparing to crown a grisly monarch, taking a moment to correct its orientation before slotting it back onto his skull. He grimaced. Bone did not move comfortably over bone; the cap did not slip, but friction was currently the only force holding his head together. He looked around for something to secure it.
His gaze fixed on Jeil’s manual driver. A smudge of colour brushed the tip, fading handprints forming a phantom grip about the handle. With a reluctant sigh he picked it up between thumb and forefinger, using it to loosen a screw from the clamp hinges on the operating slab.
The screw was ten centimetres long, one centimetre wide, and with a thick thread.
With only a brief hesitation he positioned it at an angle to his head. The thread pinched his skin as the tip of the driver slotted into the head of the screw. He winced as he began slowly to torque his wrist.
This was going to hurt.
III
Fifteen minutes later, Stronos staggered from the reclusiam, boots clumping loudly in the dark on the corridor’s metal flooring. Blood dribbled down his face, clotting factors gluing gauntlet ceramite to his pate where animal illogic maintained it would slide off if he did not hold it down. The seventeen points of agony spaced around the roof of his skull said otherwise. He held out a hand to the wall and forced himself to concentrate. Power was out across the base, so whatever was happening it clearly went beyond one deranged menial. Even the scholam spirit had been banished to its host cores. Its absence explained the failure of the emergency lumens, the utter, utter quiet. Stronos wondered how long it would take before the air became unbreathable. He could function without oxygen for hours, but if Jeil’s surviving confederates could not physically restore the oxygen pumps then this would be a conveniently self-terminating rebellion.
‘Thecian, report,’ he murmured, manually depressing the transmission switch on the inside of his gorget ring. Static washed back. ‘Sigart, report.’ He tried to raise Barras and Baraquiel to similar effect.
He turned around.
The servitor waited in the doorway.
With far-red having proven inadequate to the conditions, Stronos had reverted to the standard spectrum and activated suit lights. A flood of multi-source lighting drenched his equerry’s every slough and bolt and threw long, multi-pronged shadows from each.
‘Return to my cell and retrieve my helmet. Kill anything you find there that is not Thecian.’
‘Compliance.’
‘If you should find my brother there then tell him I am heading to Operations.’
‘Compliance.’
The servitor started off down the corridor with a lurching stride. In the dark, it would also serve the additional purpose of drawing any hostility before it found Stronos. He was not sentimental. It was a long way to Operations, and without the scholam spirit any sealed door might hold him for hours. He deactivated his lights and followed.
The servitor made it to a ‘T’ in the corridor without confrontation.
It turned left.
A flurry of las-bolts seared across its back, flesh cooking off, lighting up the shooter in the right-hand corridor like an exploding lumen.
Coming in behind the servitor Stronos was as good as invisible, but even over the sizzle and crack of las-fire the shooter would have heard the scrape of his armour against the walls from a kilometre off. Las-bolts stubbed against his armour as the attacker abruptly switched targets, a brief spate of shots before the mortal ducked into a recessed service crawlway.
Half a metre too broad to follow, Stronos lunged in with an arm, drawing back sharply as a torrent of max-power las bracketed the narrow opening and scorched the red brickwork facing. Laughter echoed from inside the passage. Stronos scowled.
The las-burn that had glanced his outstretched hand was more insulting than injurious.
A fresh crackle of las-fire made him turn.
The servitor was still going, trudging down the left branch, soaking up fire, making it another few strides before it lost too much musculoskeletal function to keep moving. It staggered onto one knee, still striving to complete its last imperative. Stronos shouldered it aside, ripping sparks from the wall’s metal banding as he forced his bulk down the corridor.
The robed human at the other end of the corridor hurriedly ejected his pistol’s charge cell and slotted in another. He thumbed the power dial to maximum.
‘I do not fear you, Space Marine!’ he shrilled, face contorted by an ecstasy of hate. ‘In the eyes of the true Omnissiah we are all equal.’ Las-fire splashed off Stronos’ armour in a furious tirade, draining the charge in the seconds it took for realisation to dawn that men were not made equal.
Stronos was an arm’s length away, face a horror mask of brute iron, las-scatter and friction sparks running from his battered plate as if he had stepped straight off the anvil of his making.
Backing off, the man punched a control panel in the wall behind him and dived bodily through as the hatch it operated slid open.
His epiphany came too late.
Stronos caught him by the foot and dragged him back into the main corridor. The human tried to hold on to the joins in the floor plates by his fingernails, but he would have done no worse trying to resist being pulled along by a Leman Russ.
Stronos held him upside down by the ankle.
‘You were sworn to the scholam’s spirit. What have you done here?’
The man laughed hysterically. ‘You have no idea! I would sooner–’
Stronos let go, the man dropping a metre to land hard on his shoulder.
‘You give up so easily. This is what comes of ir–’
The word became a scream as Stronos’ boot crushed his spine, burst his heart, went through his ribs and shoulder blades and ground it all to meal with the pulp of his lungs. The heretek’s fingers twitched for a dozen seconds of oxygen-starved existence as the clump of Stronos’ bloodied boot disappeared down the corridor.
IV
With a whine of over-stressed servos, Stronos forced the doors apart.
The corridors had widened not long after he had left Magos Phi’s living areas, but it had still taken him seven hours and forty-three minutes to cross the scholam and reach Operations. His skin was cooked and blackened. His exposed bionics looked little better, the same charcoal-black as his maltreated plate. Armed insurgents – and as per his initial judgement, the uprising seemed widespread amongst the menial population – started appearing with rebreather kits and crimson greatcoats, but they never stopped appearing. Although they did not let him get close again. Whether the same group of attackers had been harrying him all the way or he had been ploughing through fresh pockets of menial insurgency as he went, he had no idea.
He pushed himself between the doors and stumbled through. They bit behind him with a resounding metal clang. Muted gunfire pattered on the other side. He turned and hammered his fist into the airtight vertical seam, buckling it.
Nothing less than a Space Marine would be opening that door now.
Operations had only one way in or out. For once, Stronos would have the layout of the scholam working to his advantage.
A single shot rang out.
Stronos’ armour was already pitted like a rogue asteroid and it took another hit as the auto-round ricocheted off and thumped into the metal wall panelling. Taking one step onto the companionway that ran the outer tier of control stations, he tore the outer cover from the nearest runebank housing – logically enough, it was door control – and hurled it in the same unbroken motion. There were no sparks. The unit did not suffer.
The moulded plastek sheet moaned as it cut the air, ripped open the shooter’s neck and thudded into the wall.
The decapitated heretek loosed off one more shot as his body wobbled to the decking.
Operations had a rotating staff of twenty-five, but it looked as though about three times that complement were crammed into the server pits and companionways now, transforming it into something between a house of defilement and a narcotic squat. Bedding rolls and blankets filled the crosswalks. Clothing fluttered from handrails in the thermals coming off the arc heaters and crank-operated carbon dioxide splitters. Spare oxygen canisters were stacked up like sandbags.
Stronos realised that he had no idea how many hundreds, or thousands, of mortal menials worked below his notice in the service of Scholam NL-7, but he had the sense that he was going to be unpleasantly surprised.
They had, at least, been taught to keep their heads down.
Shrugging off only the occasional snapshot, Stronos worked his way around the upper companionway, one eye on the operations cradle that hung over the chamber like a husk. Whatever was being done to the scholam, he would be able to see it from there. Provided he could revive its systems.
Passing through the grilled metal walls and dulled lights of the radiation manifold, the station that Baraquiel had occupied scant days before, he noticed bodies tangled up in the bedding. They scattered before his approach, clutching blankets. Stronos felt an almost overpowering urge to go after them. There was a perversion to the lather of their bionics, the oiliness of their bare flesh, that bypassed his systems entirely and riled his flesh. He suppressed it with the most shuddering of efforts, almost relieved by the distraction of bullets riddling his side.
He held up his iron hand, deflecting most of the fire aimed for his face, then picked up an oxygen canister and hurled it like a grenade. Its seal broke, flattening an autopistol-wielding woman with an eruption of compressed gas as it corkscrewed off through the tight confines of the medial tier pits.
Stronos’ weary cogitator compiled a morbidity estimate and he gave a grunt of satisfaction.
He was about to move on, work his way around the gangway to the oversight cradle, when he felt something.
It was a brush against his mind, and it pulled him up short, staring at the blank terminals of the radiation manifold, ignoring the furious pot-shots blasting the Martian redbrick behind him. It was a noosphere. A haunting of residual charge in the runebank, the lingering potential between cathode and anode. The whisper of a territorial snarl wormed between Stronos’ thoughts, but it was shorn of authority, something that a great beast would growl in its slumber.
Stronos felt the abortive twitch of a smile.
Scholam NL-7 yet lived. He could work with that.
A colossal bang against the doors forced his attention back to the physical realm.
He looked up just as a fist-sized bulge of metal grew from the blast doors, effectively reversing Stronos’ crude attempt at bracing it. Half-finished analytics spilled hurriedly over his screens.
Nothing human was capable of that.
The doors shrieked apart a second time, and Stronos clenched his fists and turned to meet whatever it was trying to force its way through. He caught a glimpse of bone-and-brown power armour between the widening doors and reflexively loosened his fists.
Barras.
His unhelmed face riven by a murderous frown, the Knight of Dorn held the doors open as first Sigart and then Baraquiel ran through. The two Space Marines were still in their liveried smocks and aspirant tabards, but had at least managed to pick up weapons. Despite Operations offering barely enough space to wield a gladius, Baraquiel charged down the spinal walkway wielding a two-handed power sword the way a warship wielded a ramming prow. Sigart braced his feet and brought a full-size bolter to rest against the upper companionway rail. Omnissiah alone knew where he had got it as they had all had to surrender any ranged weapons upon their secondment to Mars. Another legacy of the Horus Heresy. The Black Templar opened fire with a roar, shredding cold machinery and living flesh with equal abandon.
Thecian was last in.
The Exsanguinator’s face and the front of his robes were bloody, as if he had just plunged his face into a pail of fresh offal. He was unarmed and unarmoured, yet leapt two-footed over the companionway rail onto the medial bank, punched his fist through a panicked heretek’s chest, then caught another by the hair and bit the back of her head off while she screamed. Stronos watched, aghast, as Thecian hurled the woman off him, sinking his teeth into his own wrist to visibly regain some kind of control. He turned, his fine features made haggard by bloodlust and self-hatred, to look up at Stronos.
Stronos did not ask.
They all had their daemons to fight.
Barras eased the doors shut behind him, but they stopped at about a fist’s width apart and refused to close a millimetre further. The Knight of Dorn swore, freeing his combat blade.
‘What is out there?’ Stronos asked.
Barras glanced over his shoulder, performing a double-take that might have been comical under other circumstances. ‘You will have to learn how to use cover.’
‘I am inclined to agree,’ said Stronos, gingerly touching one of the screws in his skull.
Barras grunted, backing away from the door and settling into a ready stance. Stronos had learned to respect that look. ‘We fought through a cohort of a skitarii vanguards to get here. They have brought in some heavy firepower on Magos Phi’s watch. At least one Kataphron unit that Baraquiel saw.’
There was a break in the explosive cacophony as Sigart reluctantly paused to reload.
The operations hub looked like the victim of a mauling. Bar
aquiel was searching through the wreckage for something unspoiled enough to clean his enormous blade on, settling finally for scraping it on the handrail. Thecian meanwhile had backed into a dead-end pit and was hunched over his bleeding arm, digging his fingernails into the bite wound to keep the hypercoagulants in his blood from clotting. Stronos could see numerous old scars up and down the Exsanguinator’s arm. He was muttering an incantation that was, presumably, intended to be calming, breaking every so often to headbutt the wall.
If these were the control methods that Thecian had been extolling to him, then Stronos was unimpressed.
‘Kardan.’
Stronos looked up as Barras tossed him a spare knife, and caught it from the air by the grip.
‘You’re useless with your fists.’
Stronos snorted, surprised to find that he was actually amused by that. An uncertain sensation of warmth prickled through his insides.
‘This is Thennos all over again,’ he muttered.
‘What happened on Thennos?’ said Barras.
‘Rebellion.’ Stronos shook his head. ‘Unimportant. Except that it will take vastly more than the strength of one Chapter to purge Mars unless we can put a stop to it here.’
‘Purge Mars? Are you not overreacting, just a little?’
‘I have seen this before.’ Stronos looked around, lingering on the mortal dead. ‘It starts low, amongst the menial population, before spreading to corrupt others. I do not know how, but as I say I have witnessed the consequences of inaction.’
‘Then what is our course, brother?’
‘Find the source of the contagion and destroy it.’
‘It?’
Stronos nodded, but said nothing.
‘Where?’ Barras grunted.
Stronos furrowed his brow, but behind it he felt an answer form.
