Meduson

by Dan Abnett

  'Can we afford the greater loss ahead?' Cruax asked, as if reading his mind.

  'If there is a way of avoiding it, I will take it,' Khalybus said.

  The Bane of Asirnoth shuddered again. Tocsins wailed.

  'There will not be,' Cruax said.

  'The Emperor's Children will suffer worse,' Khalybus promised.

  But only if the Asirnoth escaped this system.

  'Helmsman Kiriktas, make course for the Mandeville point. Brother Seterikus, what are the positions of the foe?'

  'Still on the outer edges of the system. The ships on the far side are closing. The ones closest to the Mandeville point are not advancing.'

  'They know we have to come to them. Then let us do so. Full speed. All forward batteries fire.'

  This was the hardest gamble he would make in the Czysicus System. It was also the one move that was open to him.

  The Iron Hands could not evade the net being drawn around them, and they could not fight an entire fleet. There was a tremble in the Asirnoth's vibrations now. Khalybus doubted his vessel could fight a single enemy with any expectation of survival. There only flight or death now. And so the strike cruiser ran in the teeth of the trap.

  'Brothercaptain,' Seterikus reported, 'we are making for the battlebarge Urthona.'

  'Then let us give them cause to worry,' Khalybus said.

  'This is desperate,' Cruax muttered.

  'So is this mission. So is our war.'

  'I understand, captain. But is the desperation one that is true to us?'

  'It is,' Khalybus said. 'We knew this was a trap. The risk is a calculated one. That the odds are against us makes it no less calculated.'

  'Good,' said the Iron Father.

  The Bane of Asirnoth ran straight for the Urthona, cannon shells and torpedoes racing ahead, as if they might clear the void of incoming fire. The Asirnoth's profile would be reduced from the perspective of the battlebarge. Khalybus saw the irony in using the same tactic against the enemy that had done so little for the Tharmas. But the Iron Hands had speed.

  That, and the faint hope of luck, was all they had to see them through to escape.

  Calculated, Khalybus thought. The word was all the more bitter for being true. He and his brothers had been pushed to this extremity by treachery. All the Iron Hands had now was the calculated risk in its most dire form.

  The guns of the battlebarge and its escorts flashed.

  ARISTON SMILED AS he turned from the tactical screens to observe the display in the oculus. The clockwork toys of the X Legion were behaving with perfect predictability. They did as he expected, when he expected. He could mark time with the beats of their manoeuvres. There was no art to their warfare. It was mechanistic. He had never understood their commitment to that approach. When they had fought side by side, he had appreciated the pulverizing victories they achieved, but found their methods uninspiring. Now he had a different perspective. Now he would use their plodding dullness as a medium for his art. He had the canvas prepared, and they would travel across it, marking it according to his will. A creation on this scale would be a source of delicious sensation, he was sure, especially at its moment of fruition, when the Iron Hands took a great leap towards final extinction.

  'Annihilation,' he said to Enion, 'has a piquancy that should be tasted more often, don't you agree?'

  'Quite so, lord commander.'

  Did Enion agree because he felt he should, or because he truly did understand what Ariston meant? The equerry was an intelligent officer. He had been demonstrating a growing aptitude for the intricacies of sensation, and the nuances of pain. Hooks and wires linked the corners of his eyes to his shoulder plates. Every time he turned his head, he opened his flesh again. He appeared to be eternally weeping tears of blood, though he had slit the corners of his mouth into a fixed grin. Perhaps he did have some conception of the exquisite nature of Ariston's plan.

  'Hurt them,' Ariston ordered his officers. 'Make them believe their moment has come. But do not kill them.'

  'AT LEAST WE made one of them move,' Raud said.

  A frigate to port of the Urthona was engaging in evasive action, rising above the plane of the battle. The battlebarge did not deviate in its course. Its ranks upon ranks of guns blazed, shaking the void with silent thunder. The Urthona was twice the size of the Bane of Asirnoth, but there was still arrogance in its unwavering slow approach. It was not invulnerable to the strike cruiser's attacks.

  They know how badly we've been hurt, Khalybus thought. He saw mockery in the Urthona's indomitability. The Emperor's Children were holding up a mirror to the Iron Hands. Look, they were saying. This is how you once went to war, and we have taken this from you.

  The Ariston shuddered again as the enemy shells struck its prow. The shields bled off the worst of the impacts, but the kinetic force of projectiles a dozen metres long was such that heavy blows ran along the spine of the vessel. The armour on the prow crumpled.

  A torpedo flashed across the top of the hull and struck the base of the superstructure. The impact shook the bridge with the force of an earthquake. It knocked the mortal crewmembers off their feet. The legionaries remained standing, though Khalybus knew they were bracing for the inevitable. It would not take many more barrages of that scale to doom the Asirnoth. If the rest of the fleet started hitting them, the end would come in seconds.

  'Helmsman,' Khalybus said, 'our need to escape grows pressing.'

  Kiriktas summoned more power from the engines. The background hum of the Bane of Asirnoth became a snarl. And beneath it was the deeper, coiling tension of the warp drive building up for the jump. The juddering and the stuttering spikes in the vibrations became stronger too. Khalybus spared a thought for the stability of the warp drive, the integrity of the hull, and the strength of the Geller field. Then he put the concerns to one side. The Asirnoth would survive the jump, or it would not.

  First it had to survive until the jump.

  'Ten seconds,' Krikitas announded.

  Another barrage from the Urthona hit. Somewhere, iron shrieked. A chain of explosions, building on each other, rattled down the spine of the ship.

  It seemed to Khalybus that he was holding his vessel together through willpower alone.

  Well enough, then. He had plenty to spare.

  Reality shuddered and tore. The Bane of Asirnoth jumped into the warp.

  THE WOUNDED SHIP vanished from the physical realm. It left behind dissipating energies some from its own injuries, some the whispers of insanity that bled in from the warp. Ariston saw perfection in the damage done to the strike cruiser. The Iron Hands would, he judged, survive the journey through the empyrean, though they would be tested. It would be a much more difficult one for them than for the Emperor's Children, even if they weren't limping.

  He opened a communications channel to the entire fleet. 'All ships, follow behind the Urthona', he said. 'We shall let our quarry guide us through the immaterium.'

  The battlebarge made its jump minutes after the Asirnoth. Its drives had been powering up during the entire confrontation. The length of the Iron Hands' lead meant little, though, in the warp. There, space collapsed and time contorted. Neither had any objective meaning. Dark simulacra took their place, alongside the illusion of matter, the insistent presence of dreams, and the being of dark intelligences.

  The warp was a storm. It convulsed with a fusion of delight and fury. Waves of nonbeing rose to infinity and crashed upon the mad creatures who thought they could navigate the domain of the gods without their leave.

  For the chosen few, however, the way was made clear. The Urthona passed between the vortices of destruction. The Emperor's Children would travel the seas of unreality without hindrance. Enlightenment had taken them to the wisdom hidden in the furthest extremes of sensation, and that light shone on their paths through the immaterium. The powers that ruled in the warp were one with Horus's war against the Emperor.

  The Bane of Asirnoth was caught in a tempest. Their Navigator
would be all but blind. Where was the Emperor's light to guide them?

  Nowhere. Occluded. Swamped by the great ruinstorm.

  'The enemy will be lucky to make short jumps,' Enion commented.

  'Luck has little to do with it,' said Ariston.

  'I don't understand.'

  'We are here to follow. We want them to reach their destination. Our masters wish it too.' He smiled. 'Their journey won't be easy, but they will reach safe harbour.' His smile became broader yet. 'Which we will then burn.'

  THE SHUDDERING OF the Asirnoth grew worse after the translation to the warp. The stresses of the immaterium were less direct than a bombardment, but they were more insidious. The death of the real surrounded the vessel, and sought to erode its existence.

  'Are we being followed?' Khalybus asked Seterikus.

  The legionary shook his head in frustration. 'I can't tell, brothercaptain.' He turned from the auspex display. 'They could be right on top of us and we wouldn't know.'

  'They are here,' Levannas said. 'Depend upon it.'

  'I am.' If they weren't, the Iron Hands would have won a tiny victory, one hardly worth the sacrifice. He addressed the entire bridge. 'We cannot see the enemy, but we must assume that they can see us. All efforts must now be put toward evasion.'

  'The longer we stay in the warp...' Raud began.

  'I know, brother. I wish we had a choice.'

  'If we manage to lose them,' Seterikus asked, 'what have we accomplished?'

  'We won't lose them. But we can't underestimate them. If our evasions are a facade, they'll know. We must try everything in our power to shake them.' He paused, waiting. There was a question his brothers would be asking themselves. He wanted one of them to articulate it. Speaking it aloud, and having it answered, was important. Not for the success of his strategy, but for the morale of his clancompany.

  Raud spoke first. 'Brothercaptain, it would appear that our strategy is predicated on the assumption of our own failure.'

  'It is,' Khalybus told him, still speaking to them all. 'This is our weakest moment. We know this. So do the traitors.

  Knowing exactly what our relative strengths are is crucial to the prosecution of war. We will be rigorous in all things.

  Even in this necessary failure. It is from this precision that our victory will come. Do any of you think we can deceive the Emperor's Children? No? I swear to you, brothers, that we can. But we will deceive them with the truth.'

  He looked back at Cruax. The Iron Father nodded.

  'Perfection,' Khalybus said. He faced the bridge again. 'Perfection. The Emperor's Children believe the concept is theirs. But recall the weapons that Ferrus Manus and Fulgrim forged on their first encounter. They were both perfect. Our route is not theirs, and our perfection will smash theirs.'

  He paused for a moment.

  'After all,' he added, 'they failed to stop us from entering the warp in the first place.'

  TRACKING THE BANE OF ASIRNOTH was a pleasure in and of itself. It was, Ariston thought, like watching the scurrying of an insect across a sheet of parchment. The insect could change direction all it wanted, but it remained as visible at the end of its efforts as it had been at the beginning.

  The warp was not parchment. It was obscurity and madness. The strike cruiser made sudden course corrections, taking advantage of the very storms that threatened the ship with destruction. Ariston pictured how the manoeuvres must appear to the Iron Hands. They sailed down current after current of insanity, making ever more random choices, risking with every decision the dissolution of coherence. They must, he thought, find it impossible to believe that they could be detected in this raging insanity of nonspace.

  The Urthona had no difficulty tracking its quarry. If the chase had been through the Czysicus System, and the Asirnoth had been leaking radiation, the pursuit could hardly have been simpler. The art lay in keeping back. 'I will personally execute the captain of any vessel that is detected by the enemy,' he announced to the fleet. They were all eager for the blood of the Iron Hands. So was he. But there must be enough blood. There must be all of it.

  So the fleet followed. The distance between it and the X Legion ship was a fiction where space was a lie. But the vessels were all real. They had presence, an intensity that affected the warp and was detectable by the other ships.

  Ariston held his force back. He reduced to zero the intensity of the fleet's presence with respect to the Bane of Asirnoth.

  The strike cruiser faded to a dim perception. It could still be tracked, but it hovered on the edge of disappear ance. To the Iron Hands, beset by the full force of the warp storm, the Emperor's Children would be invisible.

  Enion said, 'We run the risk of losing them.' The Asirnoth was travelling down yet another turbulent current.

  'We do not,' Ariston replied.

  'But if they should...'

  Ariston cut him off. 'What they do is irrelevant. They have been lost from the moment they took the bait. Our actions are what matters. I will not sully the perfection of our art by rushing forwards in blind eagerness. That is the risk. When we mar the work by accident instead of purpose is when we fail. That was Theotormon's crime.'

  And he had been punished.

  Hours of shiptime passed before the Bane of Asirnoth at last translated from the warp. Ariston was surprised its captain had risked a jump this long and turbulent. His ship was badly damaged. It must be on the verge of losing structural integrity.

  The Urthona followed. The fleet reemerged in real space.

  The system was another dead one.

  'Delium,' Enion said. Ariston liked the symmetry with Czysicus. Chance had reinforced the aesthetics of the trap.

  They were running their prey to ground in a corner of the galaxy as empty and hopeless as the one where the chase had begun.

  Good.

  The Bane of Asirnoth was leaking plasma. It left a trail so easy to follow it was almost insulting. If Khalybus was trying to hide, Ariston really would take offence.

  He wasn't. They found the strike cruiser at low anchor over Galeras.

  Observing the auspex readings, Bromion called out, 'Strong energy readings from the moon. The enemy has established a base.'

  'So they've chosen their gravesite,' Ariston said.

  In the oculus, the Bane of Asirnoth became more clear. Its injuries were extensive. Fires shone through the fissures in the hull. The cruiser's silhouette was deformed, sunken. It was a chewed bone.

  Ariston pointed at it. 'We will march on the base. But first, rid my sight of that sad wreck.'

  The Iron Hands fired back. Once. Ariston was surprised they managed even that.

  The Urthona's void shields shrugged off the single broadside. It responded with a devastating barrage of torpedoes and cannon fire. It was joined by every ship in the fleet. They surrounded the Asirnoth and seared the void with the power of the Emperor's Children. The cruiser vanished, the explosion of its ruptured warp drive indistinguishable from the firestorm that caused it.

  The fire of the Asirnoth's death still burned, a miniature sun, when the drop pods began their descent on Galeras. The near orbit of the moon was crowded with ships. Their hulls disgorged a metal hail that pummelled the surface. The plains below the Iron Hands base filled with legionaries in armour the colour of luxury and violence.

  Ariston stood at the base of the hill as the host gathered before him. He turned to Enion at his side. 'The point is not just the victory,' he said. 'There is a lesson to be taught as well.'

  The Emperor's Children would roll over the Iron Hands with an unstoppable wave. They would smash the foe with an echo of their own machinic war, and in the irony of that gesture would be the excess of true art.

  The rows of Space Marines disappeared into the murk of the atmosphere. The drop pods were vague silhouettes.

  Further out came the snarl of the tanks brought down by dropships. Ariston could not see them, but their strength was at his command. Their shells would hammer the walls of the
base while the legionaries marched on it.

  ,

  'Brothers,' he voxed to them all, 'the Iron Hands have fled, and now they cower. Shall we complete their humiliation?'

  He was answered, exulted in the clamour of his warriors. This was war converted to sensation, and sensation weaponised.

  The march began.

  The Iron Hands base was barely visible at the crest of the hill. At first, it was a smudge, a blurred mass of black. It wasn't until Ariston was halfway up the slope that the details began to resolve themselves. The lines of the wall sharpened even as they were battered by the Demolisher shells of the Vindicator tanks. It was only then that the cannons on the walls answered back. That surprised Ariston. The Iron Hands had given the Emperor's Children all the time they needed to land and assemble. Ariston's army was beyond any numbers that Khalybus could possibly have behind the walls, but to wait this long to return fire was a compounding of errors.

  At his side, Enion frowned. 'Are they really this stupid?'

  'I find that hard to believe.'

  'A trap of their own?'

  'Likely.'

  'But how? What could they hope to do?'

  Ariston didn't know. For the first time since the arrival of the Bane of Asirnoth in Czysicus, he felt a flicker of unease.

  He tried to imagine what the broken, depleted Iron Hands could possibly use to counter his advance. He failed, and that failure disturbed him, because the abject collapse of the X Legion was even harder to imagine.

  Ariston watched for a mine field or an ambush. Both would have been possible. The volcanic smog of the atmosphere was so thick, that even with his preysight he would not have seen an attack until it was too late.

  But even a successful ambush would barely have slowed the advance. And there was nothing. Just the cannons on the wall.