The Voice of Mars

by David Guymer

  Omnissiah. Emperor.

  Please, no.

  Rauth felt his body go numb, as if he had been touched by a Medusan stone elemental and flash-petrified. He stared with mineralised horror, the bolt pistol forgotten in his hand. Dumaar. The Apothecary looked him over and appeared to perform a visual dissection, telescoptics wittering and whirring.

  ‘Navicular and cuneiform bones destroyed. First degree laser burn to the right deltoid. Cutaneous perforations indicative of gunshot wounds, incompletely treated. Loyalties… compromised.’ Rauth felt his mouth hanging open. Emotions he had no idea how to contend with had paralysed the muscles in his face. ‘Unsalvageable.’

  He snapped out of his haze, dragging his aim from the Helfather to deliver a four-shot squeeze into Dumaar’s plastron. The first bolt incinerated on contact with some kind of energy field, the next three blasting messy chunks out of the Apothecary’s armour.

  Unfazed, Dumaar’s pistol swung up as though operated by remote.

  The air exploded with bolt-rounds. Rauth flung himself out of the way, mass-reactive explosions chasing him into the one piece of cover he could find.

  Khrysaar’s grav-bed.

  The Apothecary’s bolt spray obliterated Darkshroud’s medicae equipment, producing a string of muffled detonations that rippled through the unit like shots fired into an oily liquid.

  Drawing a breath, Rauth ejected his pistol’s spent magazine and slammed in another, shuffling to the far side of the alien machine and stealing a glance around.

  The Helfather and the two eldar ghost warriors were tearing chunks out of each other’s armour, seemingly content to dish out firepower until one or all were destroyed. The witch, Darkshroud, made an intricate sequence of phrases and gestures, the plastek armour of the warrior melting before her words, extruding auto-rounds and spitting them to the deck plates as the damage was undone. Then her head exploded. Rauth swore as alien gore showered him and the eldar witch slumped over the grav-pallet beside him.

  Muttering to himself in a hash of mutually exclusive lingua-forms, Dumaar reloaded.

  The Apothecary circumvented the crush that was closing around Yeldrian like a fist, walking slowly towards Rauth.

  Rauth furiously loosed another round. It burned up on the Apothecary’s energy field, the disparate metals that clad his skull colouring under the flames. I won’t go back to lie on Dumaar’s table. I won’t. He emptied the entire magazine into the Apothecary, pushing past the four-shot limiter with repeated pulls on the trigger. Dumaar just kept walking. With a howl, Rauth ejected the spent magazine and hurled it. It bounced off the Apothecary’s cheek.

  A second reality implosion disgorged a fresh Iron Hands Terminator.

  This one I know.

  Countless ironglass engravings depicted his likeness throughout the Broken Hand, the Clan Borrgos monastery, and they had met once, when Arven Rauth had submitted to the final tortures and become Clan Dorrvok.

  Kristos.

  The Iron Father’s helmet lenses flashed in sequence, a towering beacon of rugged ceramite and darkened plasteel. He and Yeldrian saw one another at the same time.

  The autarch leapt clear of the floundering assault clave with a battle cry and folded into the air, re-emerging in a blizzard of colour to rake his blade down the Iron Father’s back. The eldar darted away, spun, folded into the immaterium and returned from a fresh angle. Kristos’ arm dislocated and rejointed, turning his power axe back to beat the autarch’s blade aside. Yeldrian angled his sword, let the cog-toothed axe-blade run off its length, then delivered a shriek through his mask that knocked the Clan Raukaan assault clave to the deck and made Rauth, several metres further back, clutch his ears in pain. Kristos re-ordered his limbs and slammed a bolt through the autarch’s chest, only to find the eldar already tearing from the ether behind him. Sparks hung in the air as they fought, the Universal Laws locally suspended, the explosive grace of the eldar meeting the Iron Father’s indomitable power.

  Perhaps we can win this yet.

  Rauth dragged his attention away as Dumaar coolly shoved Darkshroud’s corpse off the grav-pallet, optics affixing on the geode affixed to Khrysaar’s forehead.

  ‘Theorise, hypnotic inducer.’ The Apothecary emitted a code blurt as his lenses scanned over Khrysaar’s body. ‘Lacerations. Bruising. Physical damage minimal. Mental damage possible. Irrelevant. Reclamation by Clan Borrgos is justified.’ There was a wittering exchange as he and a number of the discrete systems of his armour conferred. ‘Reclamation approved. Proceeding.’

  Rauth’s breath came out hot.

  No.

  He dragged his knife from its boot sheath and plunged it into the Apothecary’s arm while his attention was on Khrysaar.

  The long blade severed the soft flex-metal between vambrace and rerebrace. Gases whistled from the elbow joint, swiftly cutting off as the flows were redirected. Rauth dragged his knife out and back­pedalled, keeping his distance, sending another scything knife stroke towards the hip, though Dumaar brushed it aside with his gauntlet. Pain thumped down Rauth’s arm and he bit down a moan, circling around the Apothecary, criss-crossing his knife before him.

  ‘We aren’t going back.’

  ‘It is a common misconception that anger increases a body’s unit strength. It does not.’

  Dumaar’s hand clamped over Rauth’s fist, breaking the blade in half and crushing the bionics of his hand up to the radial and ulnal stress rods. With a cry of pain, Rauth allowed himself to be driven to his knees. The Apothecary stared down at him, a chirurgeon assessing a gangrenous limb. Dumaar was the oldest Iron Hand in the Chapter, and the strongest. He was legendary. Rauth could only scream as the ligaments and flexrods melding the augmetic limb to his organic shoulder wrenched slowly apart and colour spots burst across his eyes.

  ‘Variant of the Mark twenty-five-delta forelimb augment. Plasteel-nickel alloy with aluminium gearing. Apothecary Geraint’s favoured specification. Lightweight. As is Clan Dorrvok’s preference.’ He tightened his grip, the metallic forearm squealing under the Apothecary’s crushing grip. Rauth’s vision swam as stimulants flooded his blood-brain barrier in a bid to keep him from passing out. ‘Flawed. Highly flawed.’

  Rauth tried to pull away, but Dumaar held him by his own useless bionic. The fight was leaking out of him, droplets of red splashing onto the deck. Even Space Marine clotting factors and pain suppressors could only push a body so far.

  ‘Flesh is weak,’ he muttered.

  ‘Your statement is non-revelatory,’ said Dumaar.

  Rauth bared bloody teeth as Dumaar raised his bolt pistol. Take it then. Take the Dawnbreak Technology and be damned. He laughed suddenly as he stared along the Apothecary’s pistol muzzle. ‘I’m laughing at you,’ Rauth spat. ‘And you’ll never understand why.’

  ‘I don’t care to,’ replied Dumaar, shooting him in the face.

  II

  Autarch Yeldrian saw Darkshroud fall, Rauth following the spiritseer swiftly into Ynnead’s embrace. In the heartbeat he had, he mourned them both. Imladrielle had walked with him along the Warrior Path when the Alaitoc were young and still in mourning. And Rauth, for all that he had been condemned to die, had not deserved his death.

  There was a crash as one of Imladrielle’s wraithguard hit the floor, its legs carved from under it by the ghost Terminator’s cannon hose.

  ‘You outdo even yourself,’ Yeldrian snarled, launching into a blistering combination of blade routines and random warp jumps that Kristos parried with methodical efficiency. ‘Losing yourself in the webway simply to claim that which will damn you.’ Yeldrian found an additional burst of speed, flickering in and out of the warp with such reckless abandon that at times he could see four or five reflections of himself duelling with Kristos’ rotating limbs.

  ‘Navigating the webway is not impossible,’ said Kristos, speaking evenly as his torso blurred w
ith speed. ‘Only supremely improbable. Improbability is simply inevitability viewed over too short a time frame.’

  A sudden shift in fighting styles bulldozed Yeldrian’s intricate sequence of guards and drove him onto his back foot. He skipped back, danced, blade flicking out to create an opening, but Kristos yielded nothing. The Iron Father’s systems had assessed him and found his measure. This fight was already over. Yeldrian scowled.

  He refused to see his life end like this, fighting to protect the mon-keigh from themselves.

  ‘The Sapphire King will have your soul, Kristos,’ he panted, giving ground until his back was to the stacked crates. His hands felt numb, as if they reached halfway across the veil to be grasped by Ynnead’s own two hands. ‘We may have built the artefact, but it is his now. You cannot hope to use it without first allowing him to use you.’

  ‘You think me ignorant.’

  ‘You know?’

  Kristos’ axe broke through Yeldrian’s enfeebled guard, striking the powerblade from his hand, and then the Iron Father kicked him in the chest, crushing him between the Iron Hand’s enhanced strength and the wall of crates behind him. Bones cracked. Carapace tore. Yeldrian slithered to the ground. Kristos towered over him. What he saw when he looked upon Yeldrian’s Banshee masque, no creature of sanity could guess. ‘Daemons are a product of mortal fears and mortal emotions. They are a mirror manifestation of flawed souls. How better to protect oneself than to shed one’s soul? We will become iron to our core, impervious to weakness from within as we are from without. The Dawnbreak Technology will help me do this.’

  Yeldrian shook his head, too weak to stand. ‘I thought you naive, but I did you a discourtesy. You are a madman.’

  Kristos levelled his storm bolter. Yeldrian stared down the barrels.

  He considered flight. One leap and he could be gone from this place. He could seek out Ymir, rouse Harsid, whoever else still lived, and continue the fight another day. But he had been profligate already, reckless, and he would offer only so much to this cause.

  He drew the line at his soul.

  ‘Eldanesh too sought parity with the gods,’ he said, looking up, lowering his hands to the ground. ‘It ended poorly for him.’

  III

  Jalenghaal looked down on the ostentatiously armoured corpse of the eldar general, its body ripped apart and strewn over the neighbouring surfaces. The movement caused him considerable pain. A mass-reactive through the spine tended to produce that effect. Karrth­ had suffered more greatly, if briefly. The surviving members of his clave, Burr, Hugon and Thorrn stood behind him like zombies. The eldar’s psyk-out weapons had left them beaten, bludgeoned, baffled, but they still stood strong. Jalenghaal felt proud. The hallucinogens must have overloaded his cognitive inhibitors.

  ‘I cannot raise any of the warriors deployed to the aft sections,’ said Kristos, without turning. The Iron Father’s storm bolter was still trained upon the alien mess, as if some logic error denied that the eldar could be dead.

  ‘It is dead,’ said Jalenghaal.

  Kristos lowered his weapon slowly and turned. ‘The Brazen Claw and the Death Spectre are confirmed dead. The Wolf remains unaccounted for.’

  ‘Clave Jalenghaal is ready to obey,’ said Jalenghaal.

  ‘Holo-defences remain in effect over several areas of the ship. Hunting down a single Wolf would be an inefficient use of resources and time.’

  Jalenghaal had not been invited to contribute and so maintained his silence.

  ‘Commence transfer of the Lady Grey’s cargo to the Omnipotence, then cast her into the warp. The Wolf will soon discover what happens when one defies the calculus.’

  ‘Compliance,’ said Jalenghaal.

  This part of the cargo hold looked like a battleground, after the scavenger servitors had picked over the scraps and left the residue to the bacterial fauna.

  The boxcrate stacks that formed the walls had been torn apart by heavy fire, packing materials – wire wool and reconditioned plastek – and auto-casings lay over the bodies like fungal growths. Some of the bodies were still moving, the Iron Hands of Assault Clave Tarik attempting various permutations of ‘standing’ despite the lack of three or more limbs. Their robotic persistence, the sheer logical incontinence of it, was unnerving in the extreme.

  Again, Jalenghaal chose to put it down to the eldar’s psyk-out effects.

  A Helfather stood motionless in the far corner.

  The ancient looked like a plastek explosive that had failed to detonate. The warrior stared at the wall, lenses dark, but the echosounding ping of Jalenghaal’s auspex assured him that the giant was alive and aware. Stronos had been possessed of the irrational fear that to draw a Helfather’s gaze was to draw bad luck, but Jalenghaal believed it then. He looked away, moving with an awesome lack of fine motor control towards the grav-pallet that still hovered over the carnage.

  A Scout lay on it. He had come through miraculously unscathed, discounting the mess of older injuries and chirurgical scars that were unremarkable on any Iron Hand of a given age. Half the youth’s face had been swallowed by a conch of metal, a nacreous optic sunk into the middle of it. His left hand was metal. He was slowly coming around, murmuring what sounded like a name.

  ‘Arven… Rauth… Arven.’

  ‘Is that your name?’ said Jalenghaal.

  ‘Brother? Is that you?’

  From the floor, Dumaar looked up. The Apothecary was wrist-deep in gore, rooting through the neck gristle of the second Scout. It seemed unlikely that the Scout’s progenoids would have been fully matured, but Iron Hands Scouts tended to be older than their counter­parts in other Chapters. It was impossible to know for certain until they were out. The Apothecary regarded him in silence for several seconds, optics lensing in and out, as if considering whether to divulge something of import, only to decide not to and return his attention to his corpse.

  ‘Rauth…’ the Scout muttered, sinking back into heavy unconsciousness.

  Appearing by Jalenghaal’s side, Kristos placed a gauntlet onto the head of the pallet. ‘I have lost many warriors today. Almost as many as my predecessor at Skarvus, and more will be lost yet before Qarismi can map a course back to our galaxy. Transfer the neophyte to the Omnipotence along with the contents of the hold. See him to Niholos for cerebro-reconditioning.’

  ‘Compliance,’ said Jalenghaal.

  ‘Rauth will be joining Clan Raukaan.’

  Chapter Twenty

  ‘Who are you?’

  – Kardan Stronos

  I

  The doors slammed behind Stronos, entombing him in darkness. It pressed on him like a weight, as though centuries without breathing had caused it to curdle and become thick. His armour’s struggling olfactors reported trace aromatics of rust, dead insects and advanced cadaverisation. Despite lacking a genuine sense of smell, or taste, his face wrinkled in response to his armour’s senses. He crunched his cheek muscle into his eye socket, switching the optic to heat vision. A diorama of yellows and greens smeared into view, running like wet paint as the broken selection rings slowly slipped down the spectral range.

  The containment chamber was as spherical on the inside as it had appeared from the outside, but smaller, the thick ferrocrete walls layered with adamantium and lead. A loosely panelled walkway extended into the dark’s gaping mouth.

  Stronos slid his boot forwards. The rig groaned, echoing, eliciting a small cry from the iron corbels bolted to the ferrocrete. Nothing here had seen a priest or received a blessing in years, possibly in over a century. He emptied his lungs slowly. It was not a fall that worried him. He estimated the chamber to have an inner radius of about five point four metres, a drop that he could endure even in his current damaged state. It was the climb back up. There were no imperfections in the ferrocrete, no handholds, or rungs machined into the wall.

  If he fell down, he would be
staying down.

  With abiding caution, he moved his back foot forwards. The walkway trembled, but it looked as though it would hold. Looking up from his feet he crunched his optic a second time, forcing his vision back to the far-red.

  An ichthyic bulge of wire flax and smooth carapace podules rose out of the nightmare of colours like a leviathan of the Oblitor tarn. It was a runny turquoise to his eyes, dribbling zones of cooler shades that resembled gemstones. Stronos recognised the heat signature and the material properties. Wraithbone. Stronos’ one hundred and fifty years of service had been given almost exclusively to countering tau expansion in the Western Veil, but he knew the work of the eldar when he saw it. Wraithbone was a psychically grown plastek analogue, harder than plasteel; it did not rust with exposure or warp with age. The Rhino-sized assemblage before him looked now as it must have looked when it was made, yet age cloaked it like the mantle of a neutron star. Before the Emperor had sent His Great Crusade to reclaim the stars for mankind and to found the Imperium, this machine had performed to alien whims. Ten thousand years. An inconceivable span of time.

  It looked dead, but it was not dead. It was choosing to lie dormant. Waiting.

  He knew that he was not alone in this chamber.

  He lifted Barras’ knife towards a clot in the smear of heat-bleed half a metre to his right. Tension racked into his augmuscles like metal rods. He forced his hand to lower the knife, letting his breath out with a sigh. It was only a servitor. With his free hand he manually clicked his optic rings back to the far-red and held them in place.

  There were four servitors. They stood in a line before the Dawnbreak engine, effectively barring his approach, heads sunk to their chests. They looked mummified, their dried skin and hollowed bones held together by the bars and braces of the heavy lift augments they still bore. These must have been the units that had brought the machine here after Dawnbreak, sealed in, left to rot alongside the alien machine.