by David Guymer
Artex adjusted his pistol’s selector by nerve-link to full-auto, pointed it at the first Hospitaller to have appeared and opened fire.
The Hospitaller’s sword blurred, batting rounds aside to detonate in walls and consoles. One ricocheted straight back and blasted the pistol from Artex’s hand with an explosion that left the steel ringing. Augmetic tendons clenched and unclenched. His onboard cogitator qualified the occurrence highly improbable. With a mechanised growl, he engaged his power axe. The Hospitaller parried, unerringly still, even as his sword moved about him. A rapid exchange of blows concluded with Artex’s axe buried ten centimetres into his own thigh.
The Hospitaller spun his weapon, two-handed, then one, as though properly concluding a weapon kata, and brought it point down to the deck without so much as a scratch of the metal. He followed it, knee down to the deck plate, bald head bowed.
‘Where is Galvarro?’ he whispered.
Artex tugged bitterly on his axe. It did not move from his thigh plate. ‘The seneschal? What has that to do with me?’
The Hospitaller looked up. His face was powdered white like a human skull, kohl-ringed eyes dark and furious. His armour was a furnace-blasted white, gold inlay and fluttering sacrament thoroughly plastered with gore both human and not. Hand-crafted aquilae turned on strings like bodies from a marble keep. A gold ring strung with bloody white feathers pierced his ear. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he said.
Artex let his hand fall away from his axe. ‘Chapter Master Alfaran.’
The warrior nodded. ‘Where is Galvarro?’
‘Not here.’
‘Yet it is your gunship in my hangar, your warriors that my armsmen report fighting as they took my bridge. Indeed, I recognise the officer from their vid-captors as he was with Kristos on Fabris Callivant. And is it not your captain, furthermore, who in the midst of holy war brokers some arrangement to despoil a shrine of the Adeptus Mechanicus? Kristos told me all. He pursues the defilers even now.’
Artex’s cogitator gave up the task.
‘Are these the deeds of innocent men?’ said Alfaran.
Artex looked up at the Hospitaller. ‘There are no innocent men.’
Alfaran hung his head. ‘We live in a most sinful age, but it is darkest before dawn. One day soon, He will walk among us again.’ Setting his sword reverently upon the deck, the Chapter Master took Artex’s head in his hands, ceramite meeting ceramite with a muted kiss. The Hospitaller’s eyes seemed to widen, the rim of kohl expanding to circumference Artex’s immediate universe.
‘Artex, second sergeant of Clan Garrsak, of the Iron Hands, let me tell you where and how you are going to die.’
IX
The warrior felt different.
He could see again, the world displayed to him upon a hex-grid populated with yellow-green echoes and runic descriptors. In place of his sense of smell there was nothing. Touch, nothing. Taste, nothing. His hearing was a faraway complaint, twinned somehow to his visual sense, sounds manifesting as serpentine coils from their source.
And yet he was apathetic.
All that he had once been was still there. He remembered his recruitment into Clan Raukaan, a violent youth from the Skerathen Plateau. The massacre on Skarvus. The shame. The purges that followed. He remembered being the first to volunteer for cerebro-reconditioning. The torment. Then the peace.
It just did not seem particularly important now.
He was a warrior.
Iron.
The command appeared in binaric lingua-form across his hex-display, at the same time imprinting a dozen vocal signifiers onto his deep mind.
Chapter Seventeen
‘New Plan.’
– Melitan Yolanis
I
Melitan hugged the wall as the skitarii opened fire.
Servitor bullets and arc lashes cut through the lightly armed and robed adepts that went streaming through the security doors ahead. Someone screamed ‘On!’ and a wave of improvised soldiers carrying plates of reinforced glass as similarly improvised breaching shields clambered over the dead and into the enemy fire. Even, here, afoot the throneworld of the technotheocratic imperium of Mars, in this age, sieges were carried by those with enough willing fools to be first into a breach.
An eradication beamer built to charge, then exhaled it like the sigh of the Machine Trinity.
The power of beamer weaponry famously fell off a cliff edge at range, but at anything up to fifteen or twenty metres it would punch a hole in a voidship. The security suite was twenty metres long. When the blast faded there was nothing left of the first wave but hazing heat and a pinkish discolouration of the dormant sec-screens.
An adept screamed as her foot sank to the ankle in the still-molten slurry of the deck plate. The single worst thing for her to do in that circumstance was fall, but if anyone had earned a moment’s panic it was her. The adept thrashed in the pool of boiling steel until enough of her had been sublimated off for the rest to slip under the surface. It rippled, turning pink. Melitan covered her mouth with her hand and tried to swallow the urge to vomit. Fortunately, the contents of her stomach were still on a wall somewhere in the outer ring.
Her adepts massed behind the bubbling pond and hammered the skitarii’s makeshift barricade with stub- and auto-fire.
The legionaries weathered it like soldiers. Nothing improvised about them. Unlike the rabble Melitan had accumulated in her flight through NL-Primus, the skitarii legions were made for war. This wasn’t war, though. This was crowd control. A blizzard of non-verbal command chains ran through their heretekal thought-hierarchy and five vanguard skitarii left the barricade, the remainder of the cohort covering their advance. Their intent was clear, even to Melitan: to drive the herd back into the corridor and slaughter them at close range. If a few hundred priests with stubbers and arc lighters had been the worst they had to deal with, then it almost certainly would have worked.
With a terrifying shriek, Fall somersaulted the front rank of adepts, cleared the hissing pool and landed like a pouncing spider.
There was a split-second lull in which the skitarii registered her presence, then a blur of arms and legs during which two skitarii went down and the Harlequin somehow emerged on her feet. A third turned his gun on her. Fall killed him with it before the fire command had leapt from the instigating neuron to his trigger finger. With an explosion of force, the Harlequin smashed the gun stock through the legionary’s jaw, driving his head back and snapping his neck. Keeping hold of the rad-carbine’s blistered and glowing barrel she cartwheeled over the dead skitarius, torqueing their arms, and then released the tension like the spring of an archaic crossbow, spinning the dead legionary into his comrades and knocking them to the ground.
Melitan just stared.
The eradication beamer hummed as it drew charge. Forcing herself to concentrate, Melitan canted a string of binaric and waved her hand in the direction of the beamer. The weapon overloaded in a hyperthermic death blast that blew a hole in the barricade and threw eleven legionaries to the floor. Most would not be getting up again.
Melitan looked at her hands with a mix of astonishment and glee as her magi regrouped and ran at the shattered barricade with a roar.
The legionaries twitched as their wetware switched to melee protocols. A snap-fire burst gunned down the first wave of screaming adepts, and then they stepped into the cha
rge.
Arc bayonets ran bodies through as they came over the barricade, weapons blazing as waves of energy brutalised the adepts’ nervous systems. A skitarius clubbed a magos to death with his rifle stock, then juddered, spittle filling up his mouth grille as another rammed a hand-taser under his ribcage. Another legionary shot the priest in the head.
Recovering from her shock, Melitan aimed her plasma pistol into the melee and fired, evaporating a skitarius as he drew back a filament knife to strike.
Weight of numbers was slowly driving her ragtag army over the skitarii barricade. Every time a legionary went down a handful of unarmed warriors wielding stolen or improvised weapons got through to fight the skitarii on an increasingly even footing.
Bits of plasma-ionised flesh were still falling out of the air as a young priest, emaciated from half a life chained to a scriptorum bench, rammed a gametic extraction wand through the cohort alpha’s eye. Gargling on pain codes, the alpha kneed the priest in the groin and then stabbed him very precisely in the neck. Then the alpha’s head rolled off his neck and thumped to the ground. Fall spun a pirouette, the ivory runekeys she had taken from the observation derrick fluttering between her long fingers like butterfly knives.
Melitan let her breath out and her pistol fall to her side.
It was done.
Omnissiah, she’d had no idea her heart could beat so hard.
‘The security wing is ours.’
The woman who delivered the unnecessary news was an adept in her mid-thirties, verging ever so slightly towards overweight, hands on her knees and panting. Her name was Kitha Seleston. Until a few hours ago, when Melitan had found her rallying a counter-rebellion in the refectory ward, she had been the most junior secutor of the Zero Tier Myrmidon Auxilia, her principal function being the blessing of the garrison’s servitor weaponry and the tuning of the sentry turrets. Her expertise had already proven invaluable.
Melitan beckoned for the priests lagging in the corridor to move up.
‘Grab a table. Rebuild those barricades.’ Seleston snapped and barked with ill-contained aggression, and the victorious adepts hurried to it. ‘Anyone with a firearm, overwatch on the doors.’
‘Everyone without, find a station,’ Melitan added, trusting the adepts to sort the various operations of the sec-suite amongst themselves.
Robed priests dashed about her, Seleston striding off to harangue the rear guard some more, while Melitan closed her eyes. Faint noospheric threads criss-crossed the suite like the strings of a harpsiclave. With her eyes closed she could see them, and directed her neural implants to lace with the quiescent noosphere. The energy of the transmission itself was enough to drip-feed power into the system. She understood. Like an infant creature suckling at her hand, the spirit gave willingly to her will. She lifted a hand, fingers curled, and plucked the one that felt right, incanting the ‘awaken’ command that appeared in her mind, then reopened her eyes as the dormant displays powered up. Gasps rippled through the chamber. Melitan ignored them.
Adoration had become remarkably old astonishingly fast.
The suite’s long wall was panelled with monitors. They cycled through a sequence of live-feeds from vid-captors situated throughout Zero Tier. While breathless adepts took their seats, Melitan walked to the shorter row of monitors at the end of the suite. The wall was just a few metres long and slightly curved, as if tracing part of a larger circle. Which it was. The monitors displayed views of the quarantine chamber through which Exogenitor Louard Oelur had brought her into the inner tier. She had to actively remind herself that that had been today. It felt like something that belonged in another life. The clean room looked much as she remembered it, albeit now viewed from various elevated angles through vid-captors buried in the ceiling ductwork. Three full maniples of skitarii legionaries had crowded into it since, surrounding a single, massive, kataphron weapons construct.
Melitan frowned at the display wall. She had spent her life in rooms like this one, but there was little comfort in its familiarity. Indeed, there was barely even familiarity, as if the memories were someone else’s, simply stored inside her head.
‘If the skitarii choose to launch a counter-attack, then those priests should hold for a minute at least,’ said Seleston, appearing behind her. ‘I wouldn’t have minded a skitarius or two.’
‘It’s their interconnectedness,’ Melitan answered, without having to think about it. ‘When one goes, they all go.’
‘I see.’
Melitan turned back to the screens.
‘There’s no cover in there,’ Seleston observed.
‘Is that good or bad?’
The secutor shrugged. ‘If we can move something large inside, there’ll be nowhere for them to hide.’
‘I don’t think we have anything that big.’
‘What about her?’
They both turned to look at Fall, the Harlequin sitting cross-legged on a table, watching the bustling adepts through a mask made of her own splayed fingers.
‘Airlock protocols would trap her inside for thirty-three seconds before the outer doors unlock. I think thirty skitarii and a kataphron might be too much even for her.’
The secutor nodded agreement.
It was impossible to pass in or out of the inner ring without holding the sec-suite adjoining quarantine. Of everyone, only Melitan commanded the authority to do that. She knew that, but the idea of remaining here while the others broke out did not exactly fill her with joy. For all the Harlequin’s alien strangeness, there was a part of her that would have done anything to keep Fall at her side. She had proven herself devastatingly effective at close quarters. Melitan sighed. But if the Harlequin had proven anything at all it was that she was the only one who stood a chance of breaking out of the Noctis Labyrinth. Melitan simply had to trust the eldar to care enough to get the warning out without her.
Seleston jabbed her lightly in the ribs with an elbow. ‘We’ll think of something.’
Melitan hoped she would not disappoint. For her own sake as much as the secutor’s. Anything else to suggest, Nicco? It seemed that she and the Palpus meme-proxy had gone beyond first name familiarity and into indiscreet nervous contact. The meme-proxy said nothing. Whatever it had done to save her from Oelur’s guardians she was beginning to think it had resulted in its destruction. Not a pleasant thought, given where it had been implanted, but it was not one she had time to dwell on.
She was on her own.
‘Sir.’
A flustered adept in the robes of a xenoiconographer turned from one of the monitor feeds. There had been some uncertainty amongst the magi about how to address her. Magos did not seem sufficiently respectful. Lady had been used a few times, but never again. Sir had ultimately won out.
The adept called her attention to one of the screens above her.
The jumpy black-and-white feed showed an analytica suite, overturned chairs, bullet-riddled tables, the vid-captor focused on an elevator door. The same elevator by which Melitan Yolanis, under the guise of Magos Biologis Bethania Vale, had accessed Zero Tier not so many days before.
Melitan gasped.
A Space Marine stood in it.
His armour was black, the scratchy greyscale showed the substantive battle damage and trim in varying depths of grey. He was unhelmed, head bald and mutilated. His right eye was a bionic, surrounded by spring-cables and focusing gears. The most striking feature, however, was his jaw. Nose, mouth and chin, all had been cut away, the entire suite of features replaced by what appeared to be a metal funnel. Melitan knew that face well.
She was the one who had saved that Space Marine’s life, after all.
‘Kardan Stronos,’ she whispered.
Heavy weapons fire from off-capture battered the Iron Hand as two more warriors, this time unarmoured, emerged from behind his armour to engage. The weapons’ fire abruptly stopped. For a m
oment, Stronos stood alone in the field, wearied, yet heroically defiant, like the statue of a long-dead martyr. He looked up at the vid-captor, the feed churning with electromagnetic distortion thrown out by his bionic eye. Melitan raised a hand as if to touch him, allowing herself, just for a second, to be the little girl who had looked up at the age-blackened frescos of Fabris Callivant and dreamt of serving the Adeptus Astartes.
‘I had no idea you had followed me to Mars,’ she murmured to herself.
Was this Palpus’ doing? Had he engineered this in case the worst should happen and Zero Tier required the sort of retributive action that only an Iron Hand could provide?
‘Sir?’
Seleston was looking at her with wide eyes. Commanding the base’s quiescent technology by word and gesture was one thing. Personal familiarity with the Emperor’s angels was, it seemed, altogether another.
Melitan drew her plasma pistol. ‘To the quarantine chamber. We have a new plan.’
II
A reverberative grunt rang from Stronos’ mouth as transuranic rounds hammered his plastron, hyperdense armour-piercing heads drilling for meat they would not find. Pistons shuddering, servos grinding, Stronos advanced. The skitarii arqebusiers of Zero Tier were wilier than the crazed menials of Scholam NL-7, and never allowed him to get close. They performed staged withdrawals, set up enfilades and frequently sent ranger maniples to pop up behind them. One of Thecian or Barras would fall back to run them off, the close quarters favouring the size and power of the Space Marines, and Stronos would grind forward, like a locomotive with its front plough on the tracks.
Thecian and Barras took potshots over Stronos’ pauldrons, using his body as a shield. They carried autopistols picked from the corpses of the menials slaughtered by the elevator entrance. The weapons were ridiculous in their hands, their fingers barely fitting inside the trigger guards to fire. The skitarii weaponry was larger, more powerful, and certainly abundant, but without the proper equipment Thecian had deemed it too dangerous.
