by David Guymer
‘Perhaps he can serve.’
‘There is a way.’
‘It is possible.’
Stronos backed away as more heads descended towards him. ‘A way to do what? Is what possible?’
‘Very well Kardan Stronos.’
‘Child of Medusa.’
‘Son of Ferrus Manus.’
‘Ally of Mars.’
‘We grant you this boon.’
‘For a price.’
‘What price?’ Stronos’ words were lost as the dust blasted his face, the beast’s lowered necks no longer breaking the wind. He held his arm outstretched, squinting through spread fingers as the scholam’s many eyes watched him in kind. ‘Open the doors,’ he yelled. ‘Open them all.’
‘It is already done.’
The storm rushed in, and the manifold dissolved into blackness and pain.
IV
Thecian had awoken the Rhino. Stronos always knew that he could rely on him; the Exsanguinator simply spoke, softly, and the machines listened. He had backed the scab-red armoured personnel carrier through the opened airlock in case the power should fail and the doors close again, but the scholam had been as good as its promise and they stayed open. Thecian stood in the open roof hatch, elbows out, features pinched by extremes of hypothermia and hypoxia, looking over his shoulder as Stronos and Barras hauled up.
The long walk from Operations had been uneventful. The opening of the entire base to the Martian environment had seen to that. Stronos had walked over hundreds of asphyxiated menials and skitarii to get this far.
Thecian drew his legs out of the hatch and helped drag Barras up onto the roof. The Knight of Dorn had shed most of his armour, keeping only the breast and back plates and his vambraces. They offered protection, if not the power to compensate for their weight. His power pack had been left plugged into the operations cradle. Stronos had insisted. It was the least they could offer the scholam in return. With a scowl in Stronos’ direction, Barras dumped his gear through the hatch, a few scavenged grenades and one large oxygen canister, and dropped in after them.
Stronos walked up the rear of the tank without slowing, his boots’ mag-lock holding him to the metal. His armour was dented and beaten, every rotation of a joint accompanied by a grinding of gears and an ejection of sparks. His spirit was heavy. His only weapon was a knife stamped with the skull emblem of the Knights of Dorn. And yet of the three of them, he was the only one who looked even remotely ready for a battle.
‘Sigart? Baraquiel?’ Thecian asked.
Stronos shook his head. Compared to his manifold avatar it was stiff and unyielding, inched side to side with a creak of cables and sinew. ‘They are too deep.’ He had spoken to the Black Templar on his return from the manifold, and knew that his brothers understood. ‘Their prayers will buy the scholam another hour. If the Omnissiah wills it then we will return for them all.’
Thecian gave a tired shrug. ‘That’s all any of us can ask for.’
‘How far to NL-Primus?’
‘Hard to say. The Rhino is reluctant to disclose any details. Somewhere between two and two and a half thousand kilometres, I think.’
Stronos squatted down with a whine of mechanical effort and fed his legs through the hatch.
‘Are you not going to tell me what you offered the scholam in return for its help?’
Stronos looked up at his brother. ‘Just drive.’
V
[FILE ACCESS DENIED >> INDEX SUPPLEMENTAL: PROSCRIBED REGIONS OF HOLY MARS]
Chapter Sixteen
‘Let the Raukaan clan take the first hit.’
– Jalenghaal
I
The warrior was drowning. His thoughts were mud. Memories floated beneath the surface like the corpses of his past, turned skeletal and horrific by the wear of time and the choices he had made. To no recognisable order they rose and sank. He did not recognise them. Occasionally, a shaft of light would show the way to the surface and he would swim towards it.
Another warrior leaned over him, the dull pain and brief flash of a bionic optic meeting an unlensed optic nerve, and he sank again.
Episodes of consciousness came and went, no sense of the time that had passed between them. One warrior would be there standing over him, then two, arguing without words, then one again, a third that he had not seen before. He realised that he was in the apothecarium. Even though he did not know his own name, he recognised this place. He had spent a great deal of time here. He lay flat, one eyeball staring up at the metal ceiling, what was left of his body – and he had the curiously detached sense that it was precious little – spread out across a slab. Machines chirped and bleeped like anxious angels. Their chorus lulled him back to the mud, and he dreamed for he knew not how long.
‘Subject rejects cyborganic formulation kappa-nine,’ came a voice as if through a layer of foam.
‘There is not enough of him left. It is time to deactivate the stasis field.’
‘Negative. The Iron Father has prepared for this contingency.’
‘No.’
‘Authorisation has been provided.’
‘This is my apothecarium, Dumaar. I will not use the Keys. They are an abomination that should have died with the Legion.’
‘Assistance is not required.’
The voices grew distant, disappearing altogether as the swamp closed over his head. The next time he surfaced it was different.
‘Wake him.’
A new voice, harder than the others.
Ribbons of electrification ran through his butchered nerve ends and brought light directly to his central nervous system. Glistening lumps of flesh and gristle, strung across a humanoid mass of damaged bionics, quivered as the slurry was pumped from his mind, his personality writhing in sludge, the bones of his memories stranded for all who cared to see.
Telarrch.
His name was Telarrch, and he was a warrior.
‘The subject is conscious.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘Delta wave neural oscillations subsiding, alpha waves stabilising, beta waves increasing in amplitude. Electrical activity in the subject’s visual cortex indicative of awareness. And he is looking at you.’
The last stain of unconsciousness slipped from Telarrch’s eyes. He meant to blink, couldn’t. Three figures stood over him, their armour muttering urgently as though their black-and-silver battleplate harboured a coven of twisted dwarves. The first was one of the Apothecaries. Dumaar. Telarrch recognised the armour and the voice. The second was armoured as a Chaplain. He must be Shulgaar of Clan Raukaan. And the third…
‘Let us begin,’ said Kristos.
Behind the giant Iron Father stood a silent rank of Terminators. Their armour was black, unmarked by any icons of allegiance save age. It took Telarrch a moment to recognise that they were empty.
Waiting.
Telarrch felt a sudden, overriding need to scream, though he could not do that either. He was locked in. His body was not even breathing any more, its simple chemical needs going entirely unremarked beneath a screen of mutilated flesh and Medusan iron.
The perfect warrior.
‘Flawlessly has he served the Iron Hands in life,’ Kristos intoned, as the Apothecary and the Iron Chaplain began to chant. ‘May he continue in undeath.’
One of the Terminator suits started moving towards him, winched from its sconce on a mass of chain. The massive relic turned with a creak of iron, feeling some void turbulence that Telarrch no longer could. The lumens picked out raised areas where embossed detailing had since been erased. It would be a relic of the lost clans, destroyed on Isstvan V, hidden from the Imperium, hidden even from the successor Chapters that would have depleted Medusa’s armouries and left her weak. Or perhaps one of many expropriated from loyal and renegade Chapters over the millennia. Tragedy struck oft
en and everywhere, and left few witness. A secret, kept by the Iron Council for ten thousand years.
Kristos and Shulgaar caught the suit between them and guided it down.
Dumaar leaned over him, a scalpel blinking in the light.
‘Preliminary, remove remaining flesh and replace.’
‘Do it,’ said Kristos.
II
‘Which is ours, do you think?’ said Burr.
The vastness of the Omnipotence’s alpha assault deck spread out before the clave like a sea of gleaming metal, the horizon hazed where coherence fields turned the war-torn hell of orbit a wobbly blue. Gigantic cranes criss-crossed the hangar like patrolling Titans. Convoys of trucks rattled along beneath them on rails. With gales of noise, gunships broke the coherence fields, guided in by servitor-operated algorithm onto deck clamps that hissed shut over their landing struts. Servo-arms fitted with drills, hoses, grabbing forks and welding torches unfolded from the ceiling to greet them. Their algorithm wafers triggered by the chain of events, slave robotica lurched into motion, manoeuvring great stacks of materiel from the bay floor to the launch blocks for the gunships to be rearmed and refuelled, sent on their way mere seconds later in another howl of turbofans. No crew hampered the operation’s efficiency, only a handful of servitors rotting at their stations.
It was uncanny, even to Jalenghaal, as if he and his brothers were interlopers within a sorcerer’s automation.
He consciously added an additional layer of codewalling to the barricades that sealed his clave – demi-clave now – within their closed link. He could feel the scrutiny of the malign controller that inhabited the ironbarque and her systems, a self-aware cogitator patiently picking away at a puzzle it could not immediately solve. The Omnipotence could not abide a closed manifold. Jalenghaal was equally determined to keep the spirit out. If it forced his clave deeper into one another’s thoughts, then he reasoned that a cost worth bearing.
‘Just find one unoccupied,’ he said.
‘The ship will take care of the rest,’ said Karrth.
‘I think it will be pleased to be rid of us,’ said Thorrn, with uncommon gloom.
Jalenghaal looked at the veteran sideways. It would be beneficial to be able to limit the invasiveness of the interlink again, as soon they were out of the Omnipotence’s territorial range.
The torpedo launch racks bulged out of the forward end of the bulkhead like a giant’s harmonica laid flat to the deck, the tubes a smeary blue under the spasming of the coherence fields. Most of them were already closed behind hermetic seals, red lights on the accompanying rune displays to indicate occupancy.
‘There is one.’ Jalenghaal shared the locational information through the clave interlink, supplementing the code packet by physically pointing to an empty boarding torpedo.
Thorrn started towards it, eager to be aboard and away, only to be cut off by the emergence of an assault clave from an unseen set of steps.
‘That was ours,’ the veteran snarled.
The warriors ignored him, marching in lockstep, two by two, like base-code servitors set about a task.
‘Clan Raukaan…’ said Jalenghaal. He did not need to go on.
Grumbling still, Thorrn strode down the rack to find another vacant tube. The other warriors made ready. Burr checked over his serially rebuilt old bolter once more. Hugon readjusted the weight distribution of Strontius’ lascannon on his shoulder; he had not been properly rebuilt to carry such a weapon, but it had become something of a clave totem. No one had put it into words, but the disinclination to re-enter combat without it was one they all shared. Hugon’s long hair and steel braids marked him as an old Vurgaan, as Strontius had been before him, and he handled the heavy weapon with a reverence that bordered on genuine affection.
Jalenghaal did not miss Strontius. He did not miss Borrg or Lurrgol.
But five was still less than ten.
‘Here,’ Thorrn called back.
Jalenghaal glanced at the tube beside him just as the doors closed behind the assault clave and the rune display changed colour.
Red for ready.
‘Give them thirty seconds,’ he said. ‘Let the Raukaan Clan take the first hit.’
III
The Lady Grey was over-armed and overpowered, the match for any vessel twice her size. Pursued by the Omnipotence, she ran. The ironbarque consumed the void behind her, star by star, decorating her vicinity with ordnance from goliath prow macro-batteries. Explosions quavered through the cutter’s shields. None so close as to demolish them in one stroke, as was within the Ironbarque’s power, or to risk doing damage to her hull. The Omnipotence was not trying to destroy her. It was shepherding her, baiting her, plotting the lighter vessel’s course for her with shield-shredding high-explosive rounds and several trillion cogitations per second.
The Omnipotence launched torpedoes.
Their burners ignited, driving them ahead of their titanic mothership’s bow like a spray of bullets from a moving gun. Each bore a clave of Iron Hands, enough to take a battleship of ten thousand souls. The torpedoes travelled faster than a Lightning interceptor at full acceleration, but the colossal scales of the void battle made them move as if in slow motion. Time enough for the inhumanly swift minds overseeing the Lady Grey’s helm to see and counter.
The smaller ship abruptly changed course. Led by onboard guidance spirits, the torpedoes pulled hard turns and struck after her.
An ork battle kroozer with a set of jagged teeth painted along its nightshade-blue prow yawned across the Lady Grey’s new vector. The thuggish warship opened up a broadside as soon as she came within their fire arcs. One of the torpedoes went up in flames, but the rest plunged on, jinking and spraying out countermeasures. The ork ship grew massive. Waves of firepower stripped away the Lady Grey’s forward shields until there was nothing between her and the void but a few metres of adamantium and then, with an intricate fire-pattern of manoeuvring thrusters, she went under the kroozer’s keel like a diver hitting the water. The boarding torpedoes slammed into the kroozer before their cogitators could react, driving twenty to thirty Iron Hands into the belly of the ork ship.
Opening her engines to full burn, the Lady Grey swept away.
She was fast, but the turns and evasions had robbed her of that advantage. A straight line was always swifter than a zigzag. Now she had a million tonnes of metal between herself and her pursuer, now she could–
The ork kroozer disintegrated as the Omnipotence ploughed through. Bow and stern fell apart in roughly even chunks, scraps of dark blue metal plating and other debris flying ahead of the ironbarque’s prow.
The Lady Grey’s helm lost a moment to horror at the sacrifice that the Omnipotence had just made of its own warriors.
Blasting the kroozer off its hull with its broadside batteries, the ironbarque launched a second wave of torpedoes.
IV
Mirkal Alfaran leant forwards in the immaculate command throne of the Inviolate Zeal, the Iron Hands vessel growing steadily larger in the gilt-framed viewing oculus.
‘Time to intercept?’
‘Seven minutes.’
The serf answered as he would a heretic’s challenge. His blood was up. The same could be said of the entire crew. Over several gruelling, glorious hours of worshipful combat, they had crippled four ork ships, destroyed several more, fought off nineteen separate boarding actions during which Mirkal Alfaran had personally shed one hundred and three alien lives from the Emperor’s pristine Imperium, and heard a single shriek of distress from the Shield of the God-Emperor.
The greatsword Anointed lay across his lap. The blade was an alloy of titanium-gold, a narrow strip of sharpened adamantium giving it its martyring edge. Ork blood smeared the scriptural inlay. His gauntlets scraped against the cross hilt and around the wide blade, tightening under the grip of a mind-searing, God-given rage.
‘Praise be,’ he muttered to himself. And then louder, shouting. Let the heavens know it. ‘Praise be!’
‘They have not corrected for our heading,’ said the serf. ‘Their auspex seems to be narrowed over another vessel.’
‘Praise be.’
‘Permission to lock weapons.’
‘No, my child. These apostates are sons and daughters of the Emperor, and wholly deserving of His forgiveness.’
Planting his greatsword point down, neatly spearing the slender gap between two deck plates, he rose. His white battleplate was splattered with blood, sticking down the purity seals and pinnis angelus that sought valiantly to flutter. His power plant hummed its will to go forwards. Always forwards. He stared at the flaming aft quarters of the Iron Hands ship in the oculus.
‘Bring us into teleportation range.’
V
‘Hold still.’ Cullas Mohr cursed as his handsaw sketched sideways up Rauth’s leg.
‘I am holding still.’ It’s the ship that’s moving.
As if to prove his point, the Lady Grey trembled, rattling her cramped medicae ward like drawn teeth in a cup. Mohr calmly repositioned his saw halfway up Rauth’s shin. ‘Orks or Iron Hands, do you think?’
I’m hoping for orks. ‘Does it matter?’
The Apothecary looked up, armoured shoulders rocking with the beating to the shields. ‘I hope for orks too.’
‘Cut or don’t cut.’
With a grunt of annoyance and something Rauth didn’t quite catch about Medusan arrogance, Mohr leaned in. The handsaw’s diamantite teeth unpicked the tight armaplas weave with every sawing thrust of the Apothecary’s arm. Rauth stuck out his chin and looked away. Who would have thought a damaged lumen point could be so fascinating? Another ship-shudder tore a consonant-heavy expletive from Mohr’s lips.
Rauth bit his own lip. Don’t tell me to hold still.
The Brazen Claw’s gorget vox-bead fizzled before he could.
‘Boarders aft.’ The panting voice was Ymir’s. ‘Don’t make me fight them all myself, Cullas.’ Forced to monitor events up to now from orbit, like an animal in a box, had made the Wolf eager.
