He saw an opening then, two armour plates parting for an instant to expose wires and tubes beneath. He cut, knowing that the blow would not land, knowing that Appius had shown him the possibility. The Dreadnought twisted as the point of Sigismund's sword sliced into the exposed cables. Piston fluid and oil gushed out. The arm holding the Dreadnought's shield froze and locked. But even as the thrust drove home, the pivoting force of Appius' turn snapped the armour plates back together on Sigismund's sword. The blade broke.
Sigismund jerked back just in time as the Dreadnought's hammer drove into the space he had been occupying. Appius came forwards, striking again and again, and Sigismund was going backwards, the haft of his broken sword in his hand. He was going to—
The hammer caught him on the left shoulder. Armour cracked. Bones broke. He was falling. Now, at the end of this path, he would fail. He would not become the Master of the Templars. That honour would go to another. And down in the slow unfolding slices of his thought, he realised that it did not matter. Honour and rank were not prizes that had pulled him on. It was just a consequence of standing, of fighting of facing fate. It was not a matter of pride. If he was not strong enough to stand, to lead, to be a champion of his brother's oaths, then he should fail.
But who if not you? The thought sounded in the slowed time of his fall, and its voice might have been his own, or Appius', or Thera's. Who will stand if you will not? Who will you let die in your place?
He hit the floor. The Dreadnought was above him, hammer poised to strike down, and Sigismund could feel the haft of the broken sword in his hand. He came to his feet, broken armour grinding, his muscles driving him forwards in a blur. Within was stillness, the beats of his hearts caught between rising and falling. He struck, slicing the broken blade between armour plates, cutting and cutting oil scattering as joints froze.
He stopped, standing before Appius, the shattered tip of his sword almost touching the glowing slot in the Dreadnought's sarcophagus. Appius' machine body creaked but did not move, its bulk now a statue of armour.
'I yield,' came Appius' voice from the Dreadnought's speaker grilles.
Sigismund lowered his sword.
'The oaths of our Legion have their champion.' The voice was low but it rolled through the temple. Every legionary knelt instantly. Sigismund felt his blood pattering on the broken stone floor as he fell to his knee. Only Archamus remained standing as Rogal Dorn, primarch of the Imperial Fists, walked through the circle of kneeling warriors. He stopped within a pace of Sigismund.
'Rise, my son,' said Dorn. Sigismund stood. Silence radiated from the primarch like the hush that came before a storm. Sigismund looked up and met his gene-father's eyes. They held each other's gaze for a long moment, and then Dorn gestured. 'Archamus, the sword.'
Archamus stepped forward and held up a sheathed sword to Dorn, who grasped and drew it in a single movement. The light of the fire bowls flowed down the blade's edge and the words etched into the fuller: 'Imperator Rex,' they read. Dorn reversed the blade and then held it out pommel first. Sigismund waited a heartbeat and then took it. He knelt again, resting the sword point down, hands gripping the haft above the cross guard. The rest of the warriors in the temple rose to their feet.
'Do you give yourself to the guarding of this place of oaths?' asked Rogal Dorn.
'I give myself to that duty,' replied Sigismund. Inside, in the place of calm he had known in battle, he felt his thoughts tumble over and over through the steps of the past, carrying him forwards into a future of war and sacrifice.
'Do you give your life and your sword to those that have passed through here, and those that will come?'
'I give myself to the brotherhood of the Legion.'
'Do you make your vow again, in sight of all who share it?'
'I am the oaths sworn and they are my bond and blood.' A pause, silence in the flame-lit shadow.
'The sword and oath are yours,' said Rogal Dorn. Sigismund raised his head. The light from the torches and fire bowls fell across the faces of his brothers, and in his mind he thought for a second he could taste the dust on the wind as it blew across the Ionus plateau.
Slowly, he closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the metal of the sword in his hands.
SAVAGE
GUY HALEY
Gollph lay still, resolutely trying to wring the maximum amount of sleep out of his limited rest period. There were two factors working against his efforts. The lesser was the deep, rasping snore of First Gunner Meggen, who occupied the camp cot on the other side of the tent. The greater was the blue, pervasive light of the Omdurman predawn already warming the planet to an uncomfortable broil. Gollph was from a hot land, but even he had his limits.
He grabbed his thin pillow and clamped it to his face. It shut out most of the light, but not Meggen's infernal snoring.
There was no way he was getting more sleep. He groaned and sat up carefully so as not to upset his flimsy bed. The tent canvas flapped listlessly in the damp wind. The days and nights were so short, nine hours apiece. No time to acclimatise to light or dark before it was over.
'Better get up,' he sighed. 'Make the most of the cool.' He tugged his boots over holed socks and went to lift the tent flap.
Heat dropped on him with the weight of a blanket soaked in boiling water. His physiology was more suited to the conditions than that of the other men who made up the majority of the force, and he coped better than most, but even so, sweat sprang up on his pink skin. There were a lot of listless men in camp, and a lot of officers too listless themselves to force them to work. The sun, yet to crest the horizon, reflected from the orange sky. Gollph stood with the flap open a moment, spitefully hoping the brightening morning and the heat would wake Meggen, but nothing stirred the big man.
'Snores like a Throne-damned grox,' he muttered. After several years of service, little trace of Gollph's feral world accent remained; he sounded more Paragonian than Bosovar now. He let the flap drop, and stepped out into the camp.
It was not long after dawn, the coolest part of the day, but already the temperature was up at thirty grades and climbing.
Omdurman's tropics were dominated by a roll of plains wrinkled by small hills and scarps, dotted with lakes fringed by lush miniature forests. There was a scarcity of flat ground in the area, and all there was available was occupied by the taskforce landing field, forcing the army to camp on whatever scraps of level ground it could find. The Seventh Paragonian Super-Heavy Tank Company were stationed on one such scrap, alone.
Gollph headed to the hill to the west overlooking the Seventh's camp. The planet had a reverse spin, and the sun would be climbing the far side. If he hurried, he could catch the sunrise.
In the shadow of the hill, Gollph walked between the company's four tanks. Ostrakhan's Rebirth, the command Hellhammer, sat out front. Behind the Hellhammer in a loose laager were the Shadowsword Lux Imperator and the Baneblades Artemen Ultrus and Cortein's Honour, the last two huddled together like herd animals.
Cortein's Honour was Gollph's posting, and he could think of it in no other way than his tank. He didn't command it - even the thought was a ridiculous presumption - but his position as senior loader made him feel proprietary towards it. Honoured Captain Bannick said he had a clear run at a gunnery position. Gollph wasn't sure he had the ability for the role, and suspected Bannick was making a point about the skill of the Bosovar. That would be like him.
Artemen Ultrus was four hundred years older than Cortein's Honour. Gollph's Baneblade was barely a decade old. But even so young a tank was drenched in history. It was named for an officer who died before Gollph had been drafted from his primitive home world. Its decks were bloodied by the lives lost serving aboard. Its metal interior hid terrible secrets, some of which he shared, and all the guilt that went with it.
On impulse, he reached up and stroked the metal, still warm from yesterday, soon to be heated to untouchable temperature again by the Omdurman sun. Camouflage of dull yellow, green
and dark orange had been applied months ago, but the lack of action they'd seen on Omdurman and the regular washes the tanks received from the region's torrential downpours meant it looked factory fresh. From a few feet away, the armoured panels looked smooth, identical, but up close you could see that the armour was rough with old paint, corrosion and bad casting. At that distance, the tanks' individuality was obvious, each one as different to the next as one human being to another.
He let his hand drop. Currently, the Seventh didn't seem like much. The company crews had abandoned their house-sized vehicles to the heat. Their weapons were covered over with protective tarpaulins. Hatches were dogged closed. Engine panels had been removed to prevent heat damage and shielded with mesh to keep out Omdurman's multiplicity of insects. Access ladders and grab handles provided anchor points for awnings to shade the ground where men lolled. The tank park looked dishevelled, arranged as it was according to the uneven terrain. The super-heavies were drawn up as level as possible so as not to stress their suspension sets while resting. If he'd seen the tanks like this when he was a hunter on Bosovar, and still ignorant of the real world, he'd have thought them strange, but harmless. Back then he had no conception of the sheer destructive power of technology.
He smiled. He remembered that first moment when he'd seen the tanks fight, their engines roaring, guns booming, spear-straight rods of lightning belting from their lascannons. Gollph was far from a coward, but in that second he was terrified. He was also entranced, and elated.
Now the tanks were so quiet they wouldn't scare a bovid. He felt sorry for them.
Behind the tanks were stacks of Munitorum containers, and past those, maintenance vehicles. All that part of the camp was untidy - a fact that had been commented on by more than one officer in the taskforce. Each time it was brought up, Honoured Captain Bannick had to call out his tech-priest to explain the necessity of their arrangement. If they stayed there much longer, earth-moving equipment would be brought in to resculpt the ground. The Astra Militarum could tolerate untidiness only for so long.
'There we go,' Gollph said, patting Cortein's Honour. The Paragonians, Atraxians and the rest - all these strange men of the stars - said that their machines had their own souls.
Gollph couldn't quite believe it. He had once worshipped an oddly shaped rock, so felt he had something of a unique perspective. Having his own world view blown apart by reality, and roundly ridiculed to boot, made everyone else's cherished beliefs seem equally improbable.
Even so, he walked quietly away so as not to wake their sleeping spirits, just in case.
In the maintenance yard, men were working in the cool of the morning. Machine tools whined as they bit into metal plating. That was another thing that had frightened him when he'd been drafted. Any kind of machine had filled him with fear. The spacecraft that came to collect him, the troop transport, the ablutorials in the ship - the doors, even.
Some of the other Bosovar never got over their culture shock. Several of those incapacitated by terror had been shot as examples, but the executions could not shake the rest of the afflicted out of their catatonia. Never knowingly wasteful, the Departmento Munitorum found other uses for those Bosovar that could not adjust. Gollph still saw their cyborgised remains mindlessly trudging around, from time to time.
A shower of sparks curved off an angle grinder. More spat from an arc welder at the opposite corner of the yard. The tech-adepts attached to the Seventh had requisitioned the largest flat stretch of the terrain there for themselves. An area of beaten earth stained by oil made up the centre. This space, where they serviced the tanks, was empty, and had been for a long time.
Gollph sauntered across the yard towards the slope. In the shadow of the hill it was pleasantly cool, and dew dampened his boots.
'Hey! Hey, Gollph!' The quiet hiss of the arc torch cut out.
Gollph stopped and turned to face the welder, a Paragonian man.
'Morning, Fulken,' Gollph said.
'Morning, yourself, little savage.' Fulken meant that affectionately; many men didn't. He stood with one hand on his visor, ready to flip it back down. 'Shoam's looking for you.'
'At this hour?'
Fulken grinned. 'You know that Savlar, never sleeps. Where you headed?'
'For a walk,' said Gollph. 'If Shoam needs me, he'll find me.'
'Fair enough. See you around.'
Gollph waved and headed on.
A few minutes later, he slipped past the picket patrols. He still had his hunter's skill. Nobody saw him.
As he mounted the slope, the cares of the world slipped from him. He allowed himself to be, just for a while, and put the soldier the Imperium had made him out of his mind. Halfway up the hill, he looked back at the camp. There was such a small amount of activity there. A few shouts and reveille calls sounded, thinned by distance; as insubstantial as the blue wood smoke that threaded the sky over the galley tents. Nobody else was about on the hill.
Quickly, he leant down, unlaced his boots and took off his socks. A slow smile of contentment spread across his face as his feet sank into the damp grass.
'This is the way man should walk and run,' he murmured to himself in his own language. He rarely got to speak Bosovar these days. The regiments he had been recruited alongside had been sent elsewhere, so there were only a few of his countrymen left in the taskforce. Those that were on Omdurman were either oddities like himself, fulfilling roles no one expected feral worlders could, or more usually they worked as servants to the higher officers.
With his boots off, Gollph moved fast. He resisted the desire to remove his shirt. There was only so much savagery the commissariat would tolerate.
In no time at all, he broke the line of shadow on the hill's ridge, and was into the first of the true daylight. The sun was heading rapidly up from the horizon, and its heat hit him hard. He slowed, panting lightly, and laughed.
Even after years and years away from home, they called him a savage still. He worked their machines, he knew their languages, he understood their customs; it didn't stop them looking down on him. When they saw him, they saw a spear-waving child-man in woven grass clothes. Let them underestimate me, he thought, glorying in the view. They miss so much, these civilised, off-world men.
Trilling his tongue in the old day-greeting of his people, he went to a boulder he favoured, and sat upon it to watch the swift sunrise.
'Basdack oil, wrong Throne-cursed formulation!' Meggen tilted the massive battle cannon shell around on its base, rolling it about to inspect it from all angles. 'For the love of the Emperor!' he swore, throwing the shell down.
Gollph winced. He had another one of the shells between his legs, a synthetic fibre brush in his hand, and a bucket of soapy, oily water to his left. A pallet of more shells stood outside the edge of the awning shading Meggen and Gollph. The shell's brass casings hid large charges of fyceline and a compact rocket motor, and the copper-jacketed projectiles nosed arrogantly skyward, each as tall as Gollph's waist. Yellow plastek snap-tags threaded the bright red fuses of their tips. They were potent munitions, capable of blasting apart a battle tank, or slaying a unit of men in a single shot. Meggen was treating his as if it were as inert as a stone.
'Careful, Meggen!' he said. 'We don't want the bloody thing to go off.'
Meggen made a frustrated noise around his cheroot, ran his hands over his face and through his hair, pulling his forage cap off in the process. His torso was stripped to his vest, the arms of his tanker's jumpsuit tied about his waist
He manoeuvred his cigar to the side of his mouth and chewed it. 'This oil is the wrong kind for this environment. Goes all sticky in the heat. It doesn't matter how many times I tell them, they don't listen.' He toed the brass casing, which was now stuck all over with grains of soil. 'It's not those basdack pen-pushers who have to clean the things, is it?
'No,' said Gollph, scrubbing pointedly at his shell. 'But if we don't get it done...'
'It won't get done,' said Meggen, joining Go
llph in mimicking Humigen, Lux Imperator's commander. 'I've had it I'm going to speak to Brasslock.'
'You know what he'll say.'
'Yes, I know what he'll say,' grumbled Meggen. 'I'm still going to speak to him.' Meggen pulled his forage cap on. He untied the sleeves of his jumpsuit, shoved his arms into them, and did up the zip on the front with a scowl. 'Why is it so hot on this planet all the damn time?' He set off grumbling and continued until he was out of earshot.
'Hot, hot, hot,' Gollph said. 'Better hot than being shot at. Nobody ever says that.'
'I do,' a voice hissed at his side.
'For the love of the Emperor of Terra and the sainted nine primarchs!' Gollph shouted, jumping sideways. His upset bucket hadn't even hit the floor before he had his knife out and at the throat of the speaker, Karlock Shoam, the driver of Cortein's Honour.
'Look what you've done!' Gollph shook his head, sheathed his knife and bent down to pick up his bucket before all the water was gone. He was too late, the last of it was being sucked away by the thirsty soil. 'They'll take that out of my rations.'
'Did I scare you, little warrior?' chuckled Karlock Shoam. 'You are a quick one. Never want to fight you.' Despite the heat of noon, Shoam kept his filthy greatcoat on, though even he'd removed the shirt beneath. 'Only old Shoam can spook you, eh?'
'You must have been to the cleansing block, or I'd have smelled you coming.'
'Downwind, my friend.'
Gollph wrinkled his nose as Shoam came around his front. 'Throne, you're right. You stink. Get a wash.'
Shoam upended the bucket and sat upon it. His respirator mask swung from its straps at one side of his neck. He was never without the mask or the small tank on his back that fed it, although from the clear look in his eyes and the relatively good condition of his skin, he'd not been partaking of the nitrochem it delivered for a while.
Black Library Events Anthology 2018-19 Page 4
