by John French
Argonis came forward fast, slamming his fist into the Iron Warrior three times before he was halfway to the floor. His mind was a sudden focused line, all hot fury and bared teeth. The lenses in the Iron Warrior’s helm shattered. Blood misted from the broken sockets with his first and second blow. The Iron Warrior was falling, most likely blinded, but he was far from dead and brought his gun up as he fell.
The decision occurred so fast in Argonis’s mind that he was barely aware of its passing. He fired his bolter. The round hit the Iron Warrior in the chest, exploded and punched the warrior back into the wall. Argonis fired three times more: once into the throat joint, once into each eyepiece, each shot a sliver of time apart. The Iron Warrior’s head and neck exploded.
Argonis moved forward, gun ready, tracking the space beyond the headless corpse. Nothing, just a section of corridor with another small door in the wall opposite, and a large, circular hatch to his left. His helmet display fizzed as he stepped closer to the circular hatch, and then dissolved into a blur. Squawks of distortion rose from his vox. He pulled the helm off, and looked back at his two companions.
Sota-Nul was already gliding close.
‘Very clean,’ she said, the slight twitch of her hood indicating the dead Iron Warrior. ‘Apart from the first instant when he nearly killed you. But the three kill shots, one to ensure the throat and mouth could not call an alarm, the other two to ensure fatality. Impressive.’
Argonis did not respond. Part of his mind had simply shut off all of his thoughts about what he had just done. He had not wanted to kill the Iron Warrior, but the only other option would have been to die and to fail in his mission.
‘He may still have sent an alert,’ he said without looking at Sota-Nul. ‘He had time to speak before I fired.’
‘No,’ said the tech-witch. ‘He sent nothing. His vox was disabled, as were most of his auto-senses.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of this.’ She touched the circular hatch as she spoke. ‘You will have to open it,’ she said, and he could hear a tremor in her voice. ‘I…’ she began to say, but the word did not finish and she drifted to the floor.
He noticed Prophesius then. The astropath was still by the door they had entered through. He was trembling. His hand was jumping across his wax tablet, writing the same thing again and again.
…black star, black star, black star, black star, black star…
Argonis turned back to the hatch. A wheel sat at its centre. He could see no other lock, just the blank space and loose cables where an access system had been. He reached out and gripped the wheel. His armour was moving with slow creaks and groans of resistance, as though its system were failing. He began to turn the wheel. It spun until he heard a heavy clank from within. Then he pulled the hatch, his protesting armour grinding as he heaved it wide.
The space beyond was dark, and the light coming from behind Argonis halted at the door as though a barrier prevented its passing. He stepped across the threshold. The dark closed over him. For a heartbeat he could see nothing, then his eyes adjusted, and a scene in stark monochrome formed in front of him.
Thin human figures hung from frames of metal. Chains hooked into loops bonded to their arms and scalps. Some bore mutations: additional limbs of shrivelled muscle and stark bone, translucent scales, back-jointed legs, fingers grown to crescents of pale bone. A thick metal band circled each of their heads. Needle-tipped tubes connected their bare skin to bottles of liquid. A turn of his head told Argonis that there were dozens of them in the chamber. His eyes ached as he looked at them, and a dull crackle hummed in his ears.
He knew what they were, or at least what they had been. They were Navigators, dozens of Navigators chained in the dark and sedated. He stepped closer. His armour was a dead weight pulling against his muscles. The first figure he reached was a starvation-thin woman. Slowly he pulled the needles from her flesh. He waited, feeling the instincts in his spine and limbs telling him to get back into the light.
He waited, and time waited with time.
The Navigator’s head came up. She gasped air to scream.
Then she went still, then tilted her head, first one way and then another. Argonis did not move or speak.
‘I see you,’ she said, and her voice was a cold shiver of sound. ‘I see you, son of the moon-wolf.’
‘What are you?’ he asked.
‘What are we? We are those who have looked into the light of eternity. We are the ones who have seen the black star.’
…black star… black star… black star… The words repeated in his thoughts, trailing down to silence.
‘The black star?’ he asked, and found that his lips were dry.
‘The dark heart of all things. It was there, and we passed into it and through it, our eyes wide. And we saw…’ The Navigator’s voice caught, and for a second terror trembled her words. ‘We saw all things. The black star… the circle beneath… the Gateway to the Gods… the Eye of Terror sees all.’ She turned her head and looked at Argonis. He felt the look. It felt like ice, like falling, and falling without ever finding the release of the ground. ‘It is here. It is within. And…’ she was trembling again, limbs shaking the frame that bound her. ‘And it is looking back at us.’
He left the chamber, and closed the hatch on the darkness and the sleeping Navigators within.
Sota-Nul had withdrawn to the hatch they had entered by. Her shape was swelling and deflating as he watched her, and there was no sign of either the corpse or the blood which had spattered the floor and walls. Argonis walked towards them, his armour moving more freely with each step he took from the door.
‘We have to reach the Iron Blood,’ he said, as he ducked into the passage that led back the way they had come. ‘We have to reach Perturabo.’
Iaeo was listening to Argonis when her awareness snapped away from the emissary. The part of her mind watching the rest of her feeds had noticed something. This was not supposed to happen. She was in a deep focus meditation. Only something that could be an immediate personal threat could trigger a switch.
The image of a corridor filled her eyes. It was deserted except for a lone man, standing still, looking up into the eyes of her net-fly. Looking into her eyes. The man wore grey overalls marked with the numbers of the Iron Warriors labour cadres. His scalp was clean-shaven, his stare blank and unblinking. He smiled, lips moving as though pulled at the corners by wires. A swirl of colour tattoos bloomed on his face, and then faded as the smile slid down his face again.
‘Be careful, assassin,’ he said. ‘There are only so many places to hide, and what might appear safe, might be otherwise.’ He smiled again, reached up, and the image became static. She felt the net-fly die. Shock flooded her. It took several seconds for the conditioned routines to kick in.
Data: Net-fly presence compromised.
She performed a blink-fast inventory of her swarm and found all the rest in place and functioning.
Projection: Subject who made approach wished to invoke psychological intimidation.
She began to flick through the net-flies that watched over her boltholes within the Sightless Warren. After three she began to find the messages. Scratched, daubed or chalked within sight of her net-flies was a symbol: the first letter of the alphabet in a dialect of Old Terra, an Alpha.
She had to pause before she began to process these facts. She had kept subconscious watch on each of the bolthole locations that had been marked, and she had not seen anything.
Projection: The enemy is not trying to intimidate. The enemy is trying to communicate sophistication and superiority.
She was aware of her own breathing; aware of the narrowness of the vent she had folded into, aware of everything, and aware that she was shivering.
‘You are making an error.’ Iaeo started at the sound, and then realised she had spoken aloud.
No, no, not now, she thought, and su
ddenly her mind was tumbling out of her control. She had been warned about it, they all had. Even a Vanus mind could only take in so much data for so long before it began to clog, and misfire. Extended mission conditions, and overly complex problem spaces, could induce a chaotic state in which the mind walked down its own compulsive paths. Iaeo had been living within a supremely complex problem space for months.
‘Demand: List known psychological qualities of the Twentieth Legiones Astartes, designation Alpha.’
She was speaking out loud. She could not help it. The old face of her mentor was grinning at her from her memory, and she catapulted through a loop of question and response that she had not begun and could not stop.
‘Response: Known psychological qualities include superiority/inferiority complexes, sublimated into complex psychopathic behaviour requiring the acknowledgement of superiority by an enemy and/or ally.’
‘Demand: Project data of recent confrontation in line with this data, and previous mission data.’
‘Projection: The Alpha Legion know I am here. They want me to know who they are. They want me to know how good they are. They want me to know before they kill me.’
The memory of her mentor’s cruel smile was there again, just inside her eyelids.
She was shaking, her contorted muscles aching. But her mind was clearing.
She was out of the fugue. Crucial time had passed, but she was still whole, still alive, still functioning.
She began to touch the strings of her computations again, tentatively at first, then hauling them back into her awareness. She had lost time, and time was a deadly factor in a problem space.
She looked again through her eyes, and blinked back to the net-flies following Argonis and Sota-Nul. They were moving to the lift. She was still uncertain exactly what Argonis’s discovery meant. The implications were vast in their potential, and the projected possibilities were equally vast. She needed time, and for that she needed to cut away the agency of some of the actors. She performed a quick mental check, assured herself that her action would not have fatal consequences, and decided to change what she was seeing.
Carefully she fed a message into the Iron Warriors security systems. It was a tiny thing, just a seed that would grow into something greater.
The first security alarms began to ring out three minutes later.
The greatest defence is being beyond the reach of your enemy. The loyalists had understood this ancient wisdom since the first reinforcements had come to Tallarn’s aid. While hundreds of thousands of war machines rested in the vaults of buried shelters, as many remained in the void, kept in the bellies of warships and transports. The reasoning behind this was simple: strongholds could fall. The loss of the Sapphire City Shelter had proved that point beyond doubt, and when it had fallen the loyalists had lost tens of thousands of machines. Ground-based fortresses were also static. The dominance they exerted over the surrounding areas was a weakness. Forces bound to one location on one side of Tallarn could not easily be deployed to an engagement on the opposite side of the planet.
Forces held in ships were not so vulnerable. They could run beyond the reach of an attack, and could be deployed across the planet’s surface. The ships might have to fight through enemy forces to reach Tallarn, but while they were there, the loyalists could never be defeated. It also meant that the full strength of the forces arrayed against Perturabo could never be brought to bear at once.
It was a trade: survival at the cost of strength on the ground. It had remained a central pillar of the loyalists strategy for months and it showed no sign of being overturned. For that to happen something fundamental would need to change.
NINE
Rachab
Unbroken
Ambush
War Anvil travelled north, leaving the fires of the dead as a smear of red light in the thickening fog. They travelled through days and nights without noticing the boundaries between each. The surviving crew of War Anvil woke. Sacha did not regain consciousness, and her body remained slumped over the gun breech.
The flats seemed to go on forever. Kord had a suspicion that Origo had made more than one navigation error. He did not say anything, nor did he blame the scout. How could he blame any of them any more? They saw no other living thing. From his position back in War Anvil’s turret, Kord watched the two green runes of his remaining command glide over a featureless plate of drying earth.
Sometimes the fog outside the hull thickened, sometimes it thinned to almost nothing and the light of sun, stars, or moon fell down on them. The wind brought dust as well, great rolling banks which enveloped them in seconds. The first time the dust had come, Kord had ordered a complete stop, and they had waited while the hull had whispered with the swishing voice of the dust. When the dust had cleared it left them half buried beneath a black glass sky. As Kord had looked towards the promise of distant mountains, a great light had risen into the dark, strobing between blue and white, before vanishing, and leaving glowing skeins of light that had scudded across the sky. Shornal had sworn that she had felt the earth shake through the hull. Kord had felt nothing.
They had pressed on after that, the two tanks heaving themselves free of their shrouds of dust, and the desolation of days that were nights, and nights that were days, took them again.
In the dark hours Kord would sit and think of the reason why he had begun this journey into folly. His thoughts circled the images of the burning tanks, and he heard again all the warnings that he had not listened to.
But even then the old thought surfaced. There had to be a reason: a reason why this had all happened, a reason why the present was as it was, a reason that explained it all. To admit anything else felt like a surrender.
Time became difficult to measure, even with the numbers clicking over on War Anvil’s auspex. It was not that they could not measure the passing of days, or weeks, but the information lacked meaning. Fuel, water, air and nutrient fluid, and the status of the recycling systems became the true measure of everything, the slow countdown to nothing the only clock which mattered.
Then, with an abruptness of a gunshot, the journey ended.
The rocket exploded ten metres in front of War Anvil. Earth fountained up. War Anvil rolled on, the debris falling on its hull. The order to arm weapons began to form in his mouth, but he already knew they were dead. Saul and Kogetsu were in the side sponsons, but the main guns were cold and empty.
‘Multiple heat signatures,’ called Origo over the vox.
‘Where the hell did they come from?’ shouted Saul.
‘I can’t see them!’ Kogetsu yelled.
‘I count six,’ said Origo. ‘But their signal identifiers say they are–’
‘Unknown units, halt now and power down,’ the voice cut across the vox. ‘We have clear shots, and I will not warn you again before I fire.’
Kord recognised something in its low tones, something that rolled cold down his spine. He cut the drive power, and War Anvil came to a juddering halt.
‘Comply,’ he said into the command vox. ‘Stop and power down.’
‘We are still,’ said Origo a second later.
‘This is Colonel Kord of the Tallarn Seventy-First, we have complied.’ He took a breath and tried to make his voice reflect the title he had just invoked rather than the reality he felt. ‘Now identify yourselves.’
‘Your weapons are still charged and ready, colonel. You have ten seconds to undo that.’
‘All weapons cold, now!’ Kord roared.
‘Colonel…’ began Saul.
‘Now!’ Kord waited. He had not counted, but after what seemed like a long time, the cold voice growled across the vox again.
‘You will give reasons for your presence.’
‘Who are you?’
Kord closed his eyes and let out a breath.
‘Colonel,’ it was Shornal. ‘Their identifier s
ignals are green. They are with us.’
‘Allies who open a conversation by shooting,’ said Saul.
‘Silence,’ said Kord. They all caught the sharpness in his voice. A leaden silence waited for him as he opened his eyes.
‘We are seeking sanctuary,’ he said into the external vox. ‘We have taken casualties, are undercrewed, underarmed and running low on water, food and air.’
‘You do not know where you are?’ asked the voice.
‘Not precisely.’ Kord let out a slow breath, considered not asking the question which had been rolling over in his mind ever since he had first heard the challenge come across the vox. ‘What Legion are you from?’
A pause. A long ringing pause.
‘The Tenth.’
Tenth Legion, he thought, one of the sons of the dead primarch, one of the Iron Hands.
‘My name is Menoetius,’ said the Iron Hand, ‘and I give you greetings.’ As if to accompany the words a low dark metal shape slid into Kord’s field of view. It was a Predator, its oil-black lines rubbed with dust. Lascannons hung from its flanks. Kord recognised the focusing plates of a conversion beamer running down the barrel of its main gun. ‘You will follow,’ said Menoetius.
‘Where to?’
‘You have found what you seek, at least in part. You are come to the Rachab, colonel. You will have safety there. Though, if you will leave again is another question.’
He woke first to the memory of his father’s voice.
‘Do you know our creed?’ Perturabo had turned to look into the distance of the machine-filled cavern. Hrend had hesitated, the words coming in halting bites from his speaker grilles.
‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron.’
‘Those are the words, but what do they mean?’ asked Perturabo, his chin dipping into the collar of his armour, the skin of his face contracting around his stare.
‘That we never break.’
‘That we never break…’ The primarch nodded, and then looked back to Hrend. ‘But what if we have already broken?’
