by David Guymer
Jalenghaal blinked back to his own senses, taking a moment to absorb the break in inputs, then summoned Lurrgol.
Without speaking, Jalenghaal mag-clamped a melta bomb to his brother’s back. Wordlessly following his example, Borrg, Thorrn, Burr and the others grimly copied the routine until the Iron Hand was covered in bulky charges.
‘Stronger together,’ Burr said, putting rare words to the unspoken idiom of the Garrsak Clan.
Lurrgol seemed to deflate. ‘I understand.’
Lurrgol. Burr. Jalenghaal. The three of them had been closer than brothers since their elevation into Clan Garrsak to cover the losses suffered on Dorloth II. One hundred and forty years together.
Jalenghaal would not miss his brother.
Lurrgol started walking.
Clave Jalenghaal fell in behind him.
V
Rauth lost track of the number of orks he had watched Princeps Fabris annihilate, the number of bikes, trucks and buggies left smouldering in their wake. More than Khrysaar and I could have handled. His own magazine ran dry after about half an hour. He chided himself for that. Compared to the Knight’s firepower, his own contribution was entirely unnecessary. He hadn’t expected the search for a clear route through to the forge sacrarium to take so long. Fabris too seemed equally frustrated. His Knight’s loping stride extended to devour the kilometres. Rubbled habs and open highway vanished beneath him with equal haste. No quantity of foe seemed capable even of slowing him down, and Rauth and Khrysaar endured the better part of an hour in a scrambling, muscle-sapping sprint through devastated terrain before they found their way in.
It will be the only one.
Rauth was sure of it. He held up a hand to warn Princeps Fabris from venturing any further.
Judging from the small size of the road, its lack of companionway and the overhead sigils warning vehicles to turn back or be fired upon, it had been an access road preserved for senior magi. Perhaps even for the fabricator-locum himself. A gauntlet of impacted civilian vehicles turned the narrow strait into a nightmarish zigzag of tank traps, stinger matts and anti-personnel weapons. Ork bodies littered the gauntlet, every one of them dropped by a single explosive shot to the head. That immediately struck Rauth as off. Iron Hands are not so discriminate, or precise. Not at that range. The ziggurat of the forge sacrarium rose in stepped tiers on the other side of the kill-zone. It was surrounded by a high wall stamped with runes of repulsion, abjuration and electrocution, and topped by coiled barbs that hummed with bound charge.
‘I do not see you, neophyte!’
The voice bounced over the crushed vehicles from somewhere on those walls. It would be referring to the tactica displays of the speaker’s helmet, to which Rauth and Khrysaar would be appearing as perverse blanks. After so much time in the company of outsiders, it felt strange to hear the voice of one of his brothers again, the abstract ways in which they chose to perceive the universe.
‘You are not Garrsak. Are you one of Sergeant Tartrak’s strays?’
Rauth and Khrysaar shared a look. Tartrak. Being recognised would be the quickest way to derail this mission. Khrysaar opened his mouth to call back across, but Rauth stayed him with a touch to his arm, lips pursed in thought.
‘Yes,’ he yelled. ‘Tartrak demands you admit us immediately.’
The pattering of rain on metal filled the silence, presumably while the voice on the other side conferred with a superior officer. Rauth comforted himself with that. There were blacker names than Tartrak amongst the thousand of the Iron Hands, but not many.
Kristos, for instance.
He pushed the stray thought aside with a scowl.
‘You’ve changed, brother.’ Khrysaar leant in to regard him suspiciously. ‘You’ve become more like Harsid. Like Yeldrian.’
The blast of a war-horn prevented Rauth from telling his brother just what he thought of that.
‘This then is my part done, friends.’ The bow wave of Fabris’ speakers flattened Rauth’s face to his skull. ‘Go with honour. Seek out my palace when the day is carried and regale me with the tale of your success.’
The possibility that anyone with a righteous cause could fail doesn’t even penetrate, does it? We should all wear armour like yours. Nevertheless, he could not deny a pinch of regret at seeing the back of the Knight princeps.
Khrysaar tugged on his shoulder.
A servitor shambled from the gauntlet, dragging its swollen feet through the ground litter of debris. The battle between rot and the arcane preservative sciences of the magos biologis was a stalemate of conflicting odours. Sloughing flesh clung to age-stiffened bionics, and the unit appeared to emit a gasp of corpse gas as it stopped. The two Iron Hands waited for it to do something, and almost immediately it began walking backwards, the trailing umbilical cable slotted into the back of its head pulled taut.
‘Follow its footsteps closely!’
Without a word shared between them, Rauth and Khrysaar followed.
After what felt like ten or fifteen minutes but could only have been one or two, the scouts emerged from the gauntlet. A pristine kill-zone extended about two hundred metres further to the sacrarium walls. Rauth’s skin prickled, sensing, in that crude yet remarkably prescient organic way, the heavy weaponry trained upon him. The servitor continued its retreat into the casket that held a winching mechanism and the other end of its umbilical, iron shutters slamming down to seal it in.
The sacrarium gates opened.
A pair of Tarantula sentry guns greeted the two scouts on the other side. The pieces were uncrewed, operating solely on the guidance of their machine-spirits. They twitched, and Rauth stiffened as he passed between them. What mere warrior could say how such a mind divined friend from foe? They took the conscious decision to not rip him to shreds, however, and with that implied favour on his objective, Rauth felt himself smile.
Perhaps the Omnissiah looks kindly on me after all.
Whirlwind and Predator tanks were parked around the compound. The Predators were hull down, surrounded by sandbags and razor wire, turret-mounted lascannons trained on the now-closing gate. The Whirlwinds had been situated less precisely, but just as deliberately, closer to the ziggurat, missile racks angled up at the pregnant sky. An Iron Hands tactical clave stood around them, utterly immobile, armour dark with rain. Two demi-claves of Devastators stood on the walls, equally absolute in their patience.
The only moving figure that Rauth could see was a Chaplain, identifiable by his skull helm and the Cog Mechanicus on his armour, and the crozius in his hand as he descended from the walls. Rauth estimated twenty to twenty-five warriors. Even Yeldrian was never going to get in here by force.
‘I am Braavos.’ The Iron Chaplain was a colossus of corded cable-bundles and skeletal plate, criss-crossed with fibres like the taut augmusculature of a gladiator. His lenses glowed with the bitter light of the knowingly damned. Sensor and communications apparatus protruded from his helmet like horns. He could not have appeared more chillingly daemonic if that had been his stated intent. ‘What do you want, neophytes?’
Rauth worked his dry lips. Perhaps he had been apart from his own for too long, but the Iron Chaplain gave him shivers.
‘Sergeant Tartrak requires access to your vox-net,’ he said. ‘Ours was damaged in the hive quake, and we can no longer receive from the Omnipotence.’
‘Typical Borrgos trash.’ No Iron Hand is buried so deep in iron that they can resist a reminder of their superiority. ‘I will summon a warrior to show you the way.’
‘That will be unnecessary,’ said Khrysaar, quickly.
Too quickly.
Braavos glared at him, suspiciously.
‘You will soon need every warrior on the walls,’ said Rauth.
The red glow turned on Rauth. ‘Yes. I saw how you had Princeps Fabris handhold you through Fort Callivant. Impressive.’ The Chapl
ain dismissed the two scouts by the simple expediency of walking away.
Khrysaar looked up at the arc-lit ziggurat with thinly masked anticipation. Rauth understood all too well. The Dawnbreak Technology is in there. It’s all been for this. He touched his brother inconspicuously on the arm and gestured for the steps.
VI
A pair of quad autocannons would shred even an Iron Hand and Lurrgol had been biologically dead for seven point two seconds by the time his armour made it to the blast door. The melta charges that the clave had clamped deliberately to his back activated the moment that he did.
The blast ripped through the heavily reinforced door, crumpled down the corridor and tore the two sentry turrets to metal filings.
It took another half-second for the blast heat to diminish to within the upper tolerances of Mk VII power armour. And then, in three ranks of three, the battle automata of the Iron Hands, the Garrsak Clan marched into the inferno.
Jalenghaal remembered the layout of the Shield of the God-Emperor’s bridge from the simulus chamber. The frescoed dome soared overhead, the Emperor staring down in impotent judgement from His Golden Throne. The brass pipes of a vast organ crawled up the high walls. Gold glittered everywhere. Votive candles burned on plinths, tables and sconces, borne by serfs, hanging from candelabra. Skulls and holy weapons gleamed from within stasis-fielded reliquaries. Even the metal of the bulkheads had been shaped, millions of man-hours going into crafting the illusion that this was a ship not of plasteel and adamantium but the bones of some golden behemoth. Thousands of serfs filled myriad stations, from the ceremonial to the critical. Hundreds of armsmen stood around command lecterns, armed with short-barrelled shotguns, automatic pistols and heavy broadswords.
They were still recoiling from the blast as Clave Jalenghaal came in firing, mowing through defenceless serfs and mortal soldiers alike. The Iron Hands glowed like metal from the forge, painful even to look upon, lethal to the touch, as they methodically dismembered the Shield of the God-Emperor’s bridge functions and crew.
Over the solid hammering of his bolter Jalenghaal heard a whine, like a starting engine, and Strontius simply dissolved where he had been standing.
The deck trembled. Bells tolled for vengeance.
And Venerable Galvarro reloaded.
VII
‘Have you disabled the hyperios batteries?’ Rauth shouted.
‘I think so,’ Khrysaar yelled back, spitting out rain. His pale skin was blueing, carapace dripping. His optic gleamed like a pearl under water.
The forge sacrarium’s vox-grids were controlled from a master suite inside the ziggurat’s upper levels, which would have mattered more if Rauth had ever actually needed to reach a ship in orbit. Several landing platforms petalled off from the ziggurat’s rain-beaten crown and it was to those that the two scouts had headed. Visibility was in the low tens of metres. Against the relentless murder of raindrops on weathered rockrete, the war for Fabris Callivant was an unconfirmed rumour of engine noise and gunfire.
‘Unless you wish to see Little Grey punched out of the sky in the next thirty seconds you’d better be more certain than that.’
‘I’m no Techmarine,’ Khrysaar scowled.
Rauth grunted an acknowledgement, shrugging rainwater from the hunch in his shoulders, and returned his attention to the communication panes.
The tension was getting to him.
Braavos and his warriors were several hundred metres below, but the sacrarium ziggurat still teemed with tech-priests and their indentured labour. Despite the Iron Chaplain’s colossal disinterest in the scouts’ business, it couldn’t be long before it dawned on him that they had not gone to vox-control.
We should have gone straight for the quarantine silos. This could all be over already.
‘Is the shuttle definitely inbound?’ called Khrysaar. ‘I can’t hear it.’
‘I can’t hear anything!’ Rauth smeared the layer of wetness that was diffracting the pictorial display on his runescreen. He squinted over the inscrutable icons. ‘I think so.’
Khrysaar gave a wet snort of laughter.
The dulled whine of a rotary engine hovering in a storm drew Rauth’s attention skywards.
Rain beat harmlessly off the mucranoid gel coating his eyes, and the smudge of a hooded lumen glanced the light-harvesting cells of his retinas. Little Grey. The meteorology of Fabris Callivant was enough to shield it from a visual identification from the Iron Hands garrison. The technical modifications installed by Yeldrian and Harsid’s expert handling did the rest. Rauth watched it take position over the platform, hearing the minor shift in pitch and volume as the shuttle’s vectored engines switched to vertical lift. When the lumen smear did not blossom into a fireball, he turned to throw a brief nod in Khrysaar’s direction. It looks like we’ve both picked up a little more Martian lore from Tartrak than we realised. A length of heavy duty rope thumped to the platform, superfluous length piling up into an anchor, weighted by the sheer mass of absorbed moisture.
Harsid slid down, water spraying from his gauntlets, bolter mag-clamped to his backplate, landing on tiptoes with less of a sound than a single drop of rain amidst the downpour.
The Death Spectre was moving before his heels touched down, bolter in hand, black armour dissolving into the rain like oxygen into dark alien blood. Even as Rauth’s eyes tried to track the Deathwatch captain, he felt the now-familiar twisting sensation in his gut as Yeldrian stepped out of nothing to appear on the platform beside him. Rauth swallowed several times clearing the clench in his throat.
‘Why did you need to do this in person?’ Rauth asked. ‘My brother and I could have located the device and met you with it here?’
‘You have done all you can.’ Yeldrian’s distorted voice rebounded off the raindrops, as though the eldar were everywhere. His armour shimmered, wet, somehow making the alien appear even taller than he was. ‘The Dawnbreak device will be well guarded, but there are other reasons why it can only be me that claims it.’
‘Reasons?’ Rauth’s patience for half-answers and evasions was starting to run thin. ‘What r–’
A sound reminiscent of a forge power hammer stamping the side armour of a tank rang over the platform.
Harsid crashed out of the rain and screeched across the rockrete, sparks doused at source, dragging to a stop a metre or so from Yeldrian’s boots. The Death Spectre groaned, but failed to get up. A massive hole had been blown out of his plastron.
Lightning wreathed the rain where the Deathwatch captain had been.
Yeldrian calmly drew his sword as a Terminator-armoured Iron Hand emerged from the rain.
‘I was hoping you would say that,’ said Iron Captain Draevark.
VIII
A thousand years ago, Chaplain Fenecha had taken Galvarro’s face in his hands, stared into his eyes and told the young Space Marine of the death he foresaw.
It was not now. It was not like this.
Ignoring the prattle of small-arms he locked his splayed feet to the deck and pivoted. The first of his kills had wielded a lascannon. A tank killer. Without framing his thought processes in such prosaic terms he assessed the remaining seven targets. Bolters. A flamer. He fixed his vid-captors on a warrior hefting a plasma cannon, angled his arm-mounted weapon for the renegade Space Marine’s movement, locked and fired again.
One hundred mid-calibre rounds per second obliterated the Iron Hand and cast the ash of his soul to the wind.
He pivoted, still firing, spraying rounds through a forty-five degree cone that punched down another Iron Hand and indiscriminately murdered dozens of his own crew.
Better to deny their deaths to the heretic.
‘What are you, Kristos, but a latter day Horus?’ he raged. The muffled pop of bolt-rounds hitting his armour, unable to penetrate and so failing to explode, echoed through his uterine tank. ‘A Huron. An Abaddon. Y
ou have felt the Emperor’s light and turned from it. Come now. Embrace His forgiveness.’ The Iron Hand he had injured dragged himself behind a lectern, which Galvarro duly shredded with a prolonged burst, tearing the warrior’s armour with shards of splintered ceramic.
Strangely reluctant to receive his arm cannon’s absolution, an unhelmed warrior approached from outside his fire arc and bathed his leg in fire.
He felt nothing.
They could not hurt him and they knew it.
With a sharp twist of his upper body he thumped his power fist into the flamer warrior’s plastron, pinched its teeth to grip the ceramite, then raised him off the deck.
There was a time when he too had possessed the death sight. Not with the refinement of Chaplain Fenecha, but he had been able to read a man’s soul. He had lost the gift along with his mortal eyes, and he saw nothing in the Iron Hand’s spirit but madness and rage.
Concentric rings of adamantium teeth spun in opposing directions like propellers, blending the Space Marine in his armour and spraying his vaporised remains like a libation to the God-Emperor.
What did that leave now?
Five?
‘What do you hope to gain from this betrayal, Kristos? I will free the souls of your warriors, and then I will come to free yours.’
‘I do not believe he has one.’
A heavily augmeticised warrior with a cog-toothed, century-service stud machined into his helmet rose from cover and tossed a grenade underarm towards Galvarro.
IX
The ground shook as Draevark gathered momentum. A pistol materialised in Yeldrian’s hand, bolts of laser energy scattering off Terminator armour like baptismal oils flung at the hull of a battle tank. Flinging himself out of the iron captain’s path, Rauth drew his knife, cursing himself yet again for expending so much ammunition on the orks. Yeldrian butterflied his blade. He won’t even slow Draevark down. The absolute certainty of a violent death drew Rauth’s eye like a collapsing star. He watched, still pushing himself along the rain-slicked platform on his back, as Draevark’s lightning claw hacked through Yeldrian. The autarch’s image shimmered to nothing. Draevark emitted a grunt of confusion, then the autarch’s blued sword erupted in a bloodless explosion from his chest.
