by John French
‘You believe that, sir? I mean really?’
‘Yes…’ he began, and he heard the truth come wearily out of his mouth. ‘Because there has to be a reason doesn’t there? A reason for why this all happened, a reason why Horus is fighting the Emperor, a reason why the Iron Warriors came here, a reason why we are here, a reason for where we are going.’
‘Where are we going?’
He looked down at where the glass of the auspex screen blinked with runes.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Sometimes… sometimes, knowing the answers does not help.’
‘No… perhaps… but we have to believe they exist.’
‘Who are you trying to convince, sir? Me, or yourself?’
‘Both.’
‘Well I–’
‘Colonel,’ Abbas’s voice cut through Origo’s. Kord felt the tiredness slide back behind a layer of adrenaline. ‘I am getting a signal. Very faint, but it’s there. Seventy-five degrees from north.’
Kord began to work the vox set. He could hear the signal now, a shift in the tone of the static. There was something there all right. It sounded like a voice.
‘All units, this is War Anvil. Engines and weapons live. Heading seventy-five degrees from north. Crescent formation. Slow and careful.’
They moved out, tracks clattering through slow revolutions. Muttered signals snapped between the machines.
‘I see something!’ Abbas’s voice came across after they had gone five kilometres.
‘Steady,’ said Kord.
‘Visual contact,’ called Abbas. ‘It’s a tank. Can’t identify class.’
They moved closer. Kord could almost feel the eyes of every member of the regiment scanning their sights and screens.
The faint sound in the static suddenly became a voice.
‘…please help, can anyone hear…’
‘I don’t like it,’ Zekenilla’s voice cut in. ‘Why did we not hear their call until now?’
‘Powered down perhaps, until they saw us,’ said Origo.
‘Keep on heading,’ said Kord.
‘…Please, oh golden gates of Terra,’ came the distorted voice. ‘Please, I can see you, please…’
And then Kord saw it. Sitting beneath a low rise was a Vanquisher, its turret rotated to the side, the tip of its long barrel touching the ground. Dust and corrosion had rubbed the red-and-black of its heraldic colours into a series of pocked patches.
‘Acassian Line Breakers,’ said Sacha. ‘Been out here for a while. Can’t see any damage.’
She was right. The machine looked intact, but it was slumped to one side, its right track submerged beneath the grey crust.
‘Please,’ said the voice again. ‘Please. I know you’re there. We don’t have much power left…’
‘Sir, what are we going to do?’ asked Sacha.
Kord was staring at the Vanquisher’s hull.
‘Sir?’
‘All units full stop. Origo move the scouts close. Get your eyeball pressed against its hull. All other units hold position. Stay sharp.’
Kord switch his vox to the frequency the pleading voice was speaking on.
‘Unknown unit, this is Colonel Kord of the Tallarn Seventy-First, please identify.’
‘Thank goodness,’ the voice sobbed back. Male, thought Kord. ‘Thank goodness…’ The words crumbled wetly, so that Kord could almost hear the tears.
‘Identify,’ he said again, turning his head to nod at Sacha. She returned the nod and pressed her eyes to her gunsight. The main gun was already loaded.
‘Gunner Tolson…’ the voice gasped, ‘Acassian Eight Hundred and Seventh.’
‘What is your situation?’
‘My situation… can’t you see?’
‘Listen to me, Tolson. What happened?’ asked Kord. A sob sucked over the vox, but then he heard the man take a series of breaths. When the voice came back it was steadier.
‘We ran into an enemy unit running to the east,’ said the voice. Kord felt the words shiver over his skin; he was aware that he was holding his breath. ‘We lost two. We ran. Then the track sunk, and we could not get out.’
‘Where is your commander, Tolson?’
‘We…’ the man’s words caught. ‘We started to run low on air…’
Kord blinked, suddenly aware of the air as it passed over his tongue.
‘You are alone?’
‘Yes, but I can drive it, the machine, I mean. I think it could move if it was shunted out.’
Kord nodded. The machine looked like it could be pushed out of the soft ground that had caught its track. He keyed the vox onto another channel.
‘Origo, tell me what you see.’
‘It’s jammed, but could come free.’
‘Anything else out there?’
Kord flicked his view to a straight magnified display down War Anvil’s gunsight. Just beyond the stranded tank and the three scattered scout machines, the fog swirled in uneven cliffs and curtains.
‘Not that I can see, sir,’ came Origo’s reply.
Kord nodded to himself.
‘Abbas,’ he said, ‘Get Grave Call and her dozer blade up here. Shunt the machine out.’
‘Sir,’ came the curt reply.
‘Tolson, we are going to shunt you out of there and get you moving. Then you are coming with us.’
He cut the man’s tears and thanks off as they started.
A second later Abbas’s squadron swept into sight. The dozer-equipped Executioner Grave Call was in the lead, its three siblings spread around and behind it in a V. Kord zoomed his view closer, tracking the machines. Getting the stranded tank free, that was one thing, but he was not thinking about that. All that he could think of was the enemy force that the surviving crew member had mentioned. If they could get the man calm enough to work the tank’s auspex he might be able to backtrack to the enemy’s last position. There could not be many Iron Warriors patrols out in this isolated reach of Tallarn, and that might mean that they had just stumbled on a lead.
Something caught his eye in the fog as he pulled his view back to the stranded tank. He did not know what he had seen, it had been so brief, an image caught as it vanished behind a curtain.
He swept the gunsight back. The fog beyond the low dirt ridge had thickened again. His mouth opened.
What had it been?
Cold on his skin.
Had it been… a figure…
Grave Call was within ten metres of the stranded tank now.
No, that could not be. Except…
His hand found the vox.
‘Tolson,’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady. The vox crackled. ‘How long did it take the air to fail?’
‘Sir…?’ Tolson’s voice was ragged with relief.
The Grave Call, had rotated its turret so that its gun pointed to its rear. The pistons holding its dozer blade extended, dropping it to the ground.
‘How long?’
The fog parted along the ridge behind the stranded tank.
A figure was standing there; still, graphite black, the dust of the drying earth falling from its joints and armour plates. It was not human, it was not even trans-human. It was a cyborg. A Thallaxi. And it was looking directly down at Kord.
‘All units!’ the shout roared from his throat.
The stranded tank exploded. Jets of molten metal blasted from each face of its hull. The Grave Call blew apart as the jet cut through its hull. A sphere of plasma flew out from the dead machine, struck another tank, and flipped it onto its side like a toy slammed by a child.
The cyborg brought its thick-barrelled meltagun up and fired. A red neon line split the fog, touched Abbas’s tank, and a second, brilliant white sphere blinked into being.
Kord jerked his head back from the sight as w
hite-bright light bored into his retina. War Anvil shook as overlapping blast waves broke over it. There were voices shouting all around him, shouting across the vox, through the pressed tight space of the tank. He tried to blink away the bright smudges burned into his sight. Beyond them he could see shapes moving on the auspex screen, red threat marks rising from the dead dust of the ground to close on him.
The memory of Perturabo’s voice came to Hrend as he dreamed.
‘What are we?’ Perturabo asked.
The question surprised Hrend, but the answer came without him thinking.
‘We are iron.’
‘And what is the purpose of iron?’
‘To endure. To cut.’
‘To be weapons of war.’ Perturabo nodded, and turned half away, the plates of his augmented frame flowing over each other. He raised an arm, and turned it over seeming to examine the weapon bonded to its back. Hrend did not know the exact design, but recognised volkite charge discs and energy feeds. ‘But we are fighting a war that is not like the wars of old. The edge has been taken from our blades, the strength from our shield. The universe we thought existed was a lie.’
The dream ended, the lingering image of Perturabo crumbling into the static swirl of fog in his sensors.
For a second the feeling of fading dreams and memory lingered, more real than unreal, even as they vanished. He shivered and his Dreadnought frame creaked in sympathy. He turned his head and looked around him, trying to remember where he was and what he was doing.
A line of black jagged rocks rose through the thinning fog to his left, biting up into the air, and marching down a slope to a valley floor which waited somewhere out of sight. The assault group were lined up beside him, stationary on the crusted earth slope. The brick slab shape of Spartan 4171 loomed to his left. Orun and Gortun stood a short distance behind him, and the rest of the group’s war machines formed a diamond around them. All of them had their engines and systems wound down to minimum power. He remembered where they were now.
A voice was talking, the last word it had spoken sliced off at his wakening.
‘–h out a specific target. We could meet resistance in either direction.’
He still did not feel fully part of what was going on around him. Reflexively he checked the time lag since he had last been conscious. Less than a second had passed. He looked at the seconds click past, and felt his recent memories return.
He and his group were halted in the lower foothills close to an area the humans of Tallarn had called Nedden. They had stopped to make the decision on the direction in which they should proceed.
‘East…’ A new voice trembled across the vox, draining down into a panting breath. The voice trailed off, and Hrend could feel the silence on the vox thicken uneasily.
‘You tell us to go east, Navigator?’ he asked.
‘Yes…’ said the rustling voice. The fingers of both Hrend’s fists clamped shut at the sound. Even from the vox it was like sand grating over glass. ‘The rift opens. Its scent calls. The taste of night is like sugar. East runs the water though there is no stream, only the eyes… eyes like the dark-bright moon…’
‘Silence,’ he growled, and the Navigator went quiet.
Hrend had only seen the creature once as it was being loaded onto Spartan 4171. It was not an experience he wished to repeat. It had moved with an irregular grace, gliding, twitching and veering without discernible pattern. The exposed flesh of its head and hands was grey, and crazed with black veins which stood proud of the skin. A metal plate covered its forehead, keeping its third eye locked behind closed, plasteel leaves. The eyes beneath were blood-red from edge to edge, the irises a broken swirl at the heart of each. Hrend knew its name: Hes-Thal. He, for it had been a male, was one of the Navigators who had been at the tillers of Perturabo’s fleet as it had plunged into the black star at the heart of the Eye of Terror. They had still had their third eyes open when the ships fell into that other space. It had killed many of them, and altered the ones who remained. ‘Black Oculus Navigators’ was what the primarch had called them. Hrend had become one of the few that knew of their existence when he had accepted this quest. It was an honour he did not relish.
Whenever he had to interact with the altered Navigator, he felt a hunger to be ignorant of their existence again. But without Hes-Thal their task was impossible; the Navigator could see, or sense what they sought, though that sense seemed as erratic as the creature himself.
‘We turn east,’ said Hrend, into the waiting vox. He began to walk. The tracks of the tanks began to turn.
‘Ironclad…’ the Navigator’s voice slid into his ear.
‘Yes.’
‘I see you, Ironclad…’ Hrend heard the words, and suddenly was sure he could feel something inside his sarcophagus, something delicate tracing lines across the chewed remains of his skin, something with long, thin fingers. The Navigator’s voice returned. ‘I… see… you… a morsel of flesh pulled from the death father’s mouth… I see you curled in your tomb… I see you dream…’
Hrend saw the land around him, but suddenly everything was different. The fog stripped back as if burned away by sunlight. Everything was brilliant and clear and bright. Everything was burning. His feet were moving, and beside him the block shapes of Sicarans, Predators and Venator hulls shimmered in pools of shadow. Sounds came to him as he looked at them, sounds like the snicker of blade edges and the rattle song of bullets feeding into a gun.
‘What?’ he began, but the word hung on its own because the Navigator’s voice came again.
‘I… see… you… I see the whole… I see the seed… and I…’ The voice trailed away. Hrend’s sight suddenly cleared, and the sensation of fingers stirring the fluid around his body vanished. He was striding over the ground, his sensors peeling back the fog not with light but with the stark stream of scrolling data. He knew without knowing why the Navigator within the Spartan had turned its gaze from him.
‘What?’ he said again, as though clearing it from a jammed thought.
‘I see you, and I…’ whispered Hes-Thal as though falling asleep. ‘…and I am sorry.’
Hrend marched on, following a line into the east, trying not to hear the Navigator’s words scratch at the back of his thoughts.
The Master of Core Reach I came to Argonis in his chamber complex.
The rooms were three levels down, in a region of the Sightless Warren that had been the first to be assimilated into the buried fortress. The Sapphire City Shelter had been its name before, but the Iron Warriors had stripped it of that name when they had remade it. Core Reach I was its new title, and the blunt efficiency of the IV Legion now pervaded its every corner. Work details moved through its corridors in tight groups, hauling loads of shells, armour plates and provisions to the areas that would need them. Harsh light and fresh air billowed through the passages and chambers from repaired and carefully maintained lighting and ventilation systems. Every door and lift shaft had a guard. Most were from the human regiments bound to the Legion. The iron skull and bonded unit numbers marked their armour and skin. Legionaries watched over more vital areas, flanking doors or looking out into chambers, like worn steel statues.
Argonis and his entourage had been given a cluster of sparse chambers close to the central command areas. They had been permitted to go wherever they pleased, and no one had questioned their presence anywhere. The Eye of Horus opened all doors. Even so they had learned nothing besides the manifest truth that Tallarn was a battlefield, which gave up victories sparingly and drank the blood of all who trod her surface. Argonis had walked the miles of the Sightless Warren, had reviewed battle plans, and seen caverns filled with troops and machines. None of it had told him anything besides the fact that the IV Legion were trying to win Tallarn the way they always won wars, by battering their enemies to ruin. He had found nothing: no suspicious facts, no concealment, nothing.
&n
bsp; Had his instinct been wrong? Was the truth they were hunting a ghost?
It had been the tech-witch who had suggested that they change their approach. Argonis had resisted, but as the days became weeks, and the weeks clustered into months he had agreed that there was no alternative. If there was something hidden then looking at the surface of things was going to tell them nothing. They had to peel the skin off and look beneath, and that meant that they were about to do something that brought a taste of bile to his tongue when he thought about it.
He turned when the chamber doors opened. The Iron Warrior who entered was a little shorter than most Space Marines, and the face was a flattened lump of scars and stitch marks. A blank silver ball stared out from where his left eye should have been, while the right met Argonis’s with pale green coldness. A crimson-and-yellow centurion plume rose from the plough-fronted helm held under the newcomer’s left arm, and his right rested on the pommel of a sheathed short sword. Bronze lightning bolts split the dirty iron of his breastplate and shoulder guard. Behind him stood two warriors in the chevroned bronze of the Legion elite. The Iron Warrior’s name was Volk, and he held command over much of the Sightless Warren, and he was there because Argonis had summoned him.
Argonis waited.
After a long second Volk spoke.
‘The Commander of Core Reach One gives honour and greetings to the emissary of the Warmaster of Mankind.’ Volk bowed his head, just enough to show respect, but not enough to imply deference.
‘The honour is ours, and we give you thanks for the efforts you have made to aid our mission.’ Argonis bowed his helmeted head, careful to make sure the gesture was not as deep as Volk’s. The relative depth of his bow told everyone present where the higher authority lay. Most importantly it told Volk. Behind him he heard a rustle as Sota-Nul bowed in turn. ‘It is pleasing to see that you have come in person to ensure that our latest request is met.’
Volk’s expression flickered, his scarred features rippling.
‘We deny you nothing, emissary, but I do not understand how this request is relevant?’
