“We are ready to begin,” said Mohl.
“Do so,” Rafen told him, before finally giving his attention to the adept.
“I believed we had built up a measure of trust!” Beslian grated. “Instead I find my code strings severed, and intruder data impinging on the function of my ship’s systems! This will not stand!”
“No?” Rafen took a heavy step towards him. “Is it necessary for me to remind you how it is you came to be wearing this icon?” The Blood Angel prodded him in the chest with an armoured finger, pressing the master’s sigil around Beslian’s neck into the folds of his rust-coloured robes. “Know this, my esteemed logis. You command the Archeohort in name only. This vessel belonged to the Sons of Sanguinius the moment we declared it so.”
“Mohl is a Techmarine!” The priest blurted out the title with mild disgust. “And a Flesh Tearer into the bargain. You understand! He is not fit to take mastery of a fine craft like this, even in your primarch’s name… The Techmarines come to Mars to be trained, but they do not truly excel! They never know the perfection of the machine as a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus does!”
“And yet, despite my apparent lesser status, I was able to lock you from your own codex-system,” said Mohl, with deceptive mildness.
Beslian ignored the jibe. “Techmarines are brutish, crude and unsophisticated! And Mohl is all the more so for his Chapter and breeding!”
The Flesh Tearer’s plain face suddenly twisted in annoyance, but Rafen stepped up before he could move towards the adept. “What do you say to me?” the Blood Angel said coldly. “That you are more loyal to my mission than a battle-brother from a kindred Chapter? Do you take me for a fool?” His fist unclenched and he backhanded the adept to the deck. The blow was as light as he could make it—he did not wish to kill the man—but still Beslian went stumbling down in a clatter of metal. “If I learn that you again speak ill of an Astartes, of any Son of Sanguinius, I’ll have you cut up for servitor spares. You will obey Mohl as you would the word of the God-Emperor of Mankind!”
Beslian made a wounded, sobbing noise, but his head bobbed and he tried to right himself with whatever scraps of dignity he still possessed. “I… I only wish to know why! What have I done to displease you?”
Rafen eyed him. “You think yourself superior to us, and you think us so inferior that we would not know it. That is enough.”
The iris hatch to the command deck rattled open, and Beslian saw the figure framed in the open doorway. Immediately, his words with the Space Marine were forgotten and he threw up his arms, organic and mechanical alike, in a gesture of self-protection. “No!” he cried, his implanted vocoder resonating with static-filled feedback. “Why is he here? No! Take him away!”
With Brother Sove to his right, a bolter held at his silver skull, and an ever-watchful Brother Ceris to his left, the former Magos Matthun Zellik shambled into the chamber, dripping with restraint cables and detention cuffs. The machine eyes in his scarred metal face were hard with hate as they found Beslian. “Turncoat!” snarled Zellik. Immediately he began a chattering hymnal of harsh binary code, but before he could speak more than a few phrases, Ceris yanked on his tethers, and the magos was choked into silence.
“What was that noise?” said Rafen.
“Meme code,” said Mohl, with a grimace. “Clogs the mental functions of those who absorb it.”
“If he does that again, kill him,” the sergeant told the other Flesh Tearer. Sove nodded and as an afterthought, tore a length of cloth from the prisoner’s garb, quickly fashioning a gag from it.
Beslian followed Rafen, deliberately keeping the Blood Angel between him and his former master. “Why have you brought him here?” he bleated. “He should be on the dungeon decks, or executed!”
“Zellik will perform a final duty for the Imperium,” said Ceris. “As a lesson for the weak.” He shoved the ex-magos towards the helm podium that overlooked the command pit. A largely ceremonial construction, the podium was used by Mechanicus rune priests to awaken the engines of a vessel at the start of a voyage or before a mission of great import. There, they would appease the machine-spirit of the craft in the Emperor’s name, all the better to see it perform its function. It was the helm in ritual only; in actuality, the steering of the Archeohort was done by mindless servitor drones down in the lower levels of the pit.
Ceris took Zellik’s tethers and secured him to the podium. The cables keened as they tightened and became rigid. Zellik rebelled against this new indignity, but Sove held him down with no visible effort. The ex-magos roared behind his gag, froth escaping his bound lips to trickle off his tarnished metal chin.
Rafen studied the prisoner for a long moment. “All those who turn their backs upon the God-Emperor, through the embrace of the alien, the mutant or the traitor… For greed. For their own glory. In ignorance. In fear… All of them must pay for that crime.” He shot a glare at Beslian. “All, adept.”
“It’s done,” said Sove. “The rest of the squads are boarding the Neimos. We’re ready, Brother-Sergeant.”
Beslian balked at the mention of the submersible’s name. “What… are you doing with that craft? It’s just a relic! An engineering novelty…”
Ceris turned a penetrating stare on the tech-priest. “For your sake, you had best be wrong about that.”
“Take the logis below,” said Rafen. “Tell Sergeant Noxx to start the count.”
Beslian went towards the hatch, his iron hooves scraping as he moved with reluctance. “I don’t understand…”
“You will, soon enough,” Ceris noted. The psyker paused and threw his commander a nod. “Don’t fear, sir. We won’t go without you.” He showed something like a smile, but Rafen felt chilled at the sight of it.
He turned away and found Mohl watching him. The Techmarine had extended a length of mechadendrites into brass sockets along the command console. “Ready,” said the Flesh Tearer.
“You’re certain you have full control of the Archeohort?”
Mohl nodded jerkily, as if he was distracted. “Aye.” Rafen could only imagine the torrent of machine code filtering into the warrior’s mind through the cables, the flood of binary babble from hundreds of chattering functionaries and cogitators.
Zellik howled something unintelligible behind his gag, straining at his tether. Rafen ignored the traitor’s protests, shoving him back to the deck. “There can be no errors. A single hesitation, any act of rebellion by one of the crew—”
“There will be none,” Mohl said, with finality. “The commands are hard-coded. It would take a millennium to unlock them. This helot crew will do as they are ordered to, and they will not be permitted to question. I will not allow it.” With care, the Techmarine set down his bolter on the deck and dropped to one knee, as if he were about to pray.
Rafen felt a moment of confusion. “Mohl, what are you doing? We must away.”
The Flesh Tearer shook his head. “Not I,” he replied. “I must remain to steward the Archeohort.” Mohl smiled ruefully. “I did say this would require sacrifice.”
For a long moment, the Blood Angel weighed the words of the other Astartes, the full understanding of Mohl’s choice becoming clear. At last he spoke. “There is no other way?”
“None, lord, and it is to my regret. I would like to be there when you find the renegade. To see him pay.” He frowned in concentration. “Time draws short. The engines are coming to power, sir. You must go.”
Rafen nodded, and placed a hand on Mohl’s shoulder. “You will be remembered, cousin.”
Mohl did not look up. “That is all I ask.”
On rods of blazing fusion fire, the massive bulk of the Archeohort rose over the surface of the primary moon, the derrick-limbs pulled in tight. Torpedo turrets and weapon batteries spun up to full power, turning to bear on the looming disc of Dynikas V. With the mirror-shield folded away and the drives open to full, the inferno of energy returns lit the scrying sensors of the orbiting gunskulls like dawn breaking the nigh
t.
The satellites turned on manoeuvring thrusters, puffs of gas orienting them towards the intruder, even as quick sensor engines examined the silhouette of the vessel. They compared it to ships of all known types within their knowledge banks, and the answers they found brought only a mass of confusion to the chained organic minds at the heart of each orbiter. The whole process took only fractions of a second, and garbled machine speech back and forth via low-power laser beams swiftly led to a consensus. The web of gunskulls sent a vox code down through the turbulent, wind-swept atmosphere of Dynikas V—a question demanding an immediate answer, to kill or not to kill.
Any ship intending to slow into a parking orbit over the ocean world would have required a scheme of careful thrust-gravity-mass formulae to avoid overshooting or unwarranted atmospheric interface. The Archeohort reached the point of transition and did not lose pace; if anything, with the pull of Dynikas V now upon it, the massive Mechanicus construct was accelerating.
Aboard the vessel, the first querulous, frightened messages began to trickle in to the command centre’s vox buffer from the minor adepts and more sentient of the ship’s servitors. Each one was snubbed by Mohl’s firm denials and hard, uncompromising orders.
The Archeohort continued to close on the planet.
The Neimos was already moving as Rafen sprinted into the cavernous departure bay. Now upon a long, low cradle that rode on steel rails, the full shape of the craft was visible to him. A childhood spent on a world of deserts meant that oceans and the beasts that dwelled within them were alien to him, but on some level he understood the aspects of hunter cetaceans, with their fins and streamlined bodies. The Neimos resembled them, but in Rafen’s eyes it was easier for him to equate the craft with the shape of a weapon. The submersible reminded him of a cudgel, heavy and dangerous—a brute-force device ready to bludgeon an enemy into submission.
In swift, loping steps, he mounted the cradle, scattering crew-serfs too slow to get out of his way, and clambered to the hatch on the dorsal fin. Rafen’s boots clicked over a layer of curved lamellar tiles, the extra ablative armour that would be the ship’s heat shield through atmospheric interface. He glanced back down towards the stern, past the X-planes to the ring where the thrusters would be; for now, they were folded into the submarine’s hull, only to be deployed once they were in the sea.
Rafen squeezed into the open hatch and pulled it closed behind him. New weld marks and gobs of sealant marked the places where the airlock had been widened to accommodate the bulk of armoured Space Marines. As the lock cycled, he spoke the litany to weapons with brisk intention.
Inside, the dimensions of the Neimos were close and confined. Built for men of normal stature, the corridors and chambers of the vessel would have been cramped even for them; for an Adeptus Astartes, and one in full power armour at that, it made the coffinlike space of a drop-pod seem roomy by comparison.
“Watch your head, sir,” said Turcio, beckoning him down an accessway. “It’s a snug fit, that’s for certain.”
The sergeant followed, noting the places where bright metal showed, indicating the spots where panels had been cut away or decks removed to accommodate the girth of a Space Marine. They were quick and dirty fixes, but if this mission had revealed anything to Rafen, it was that the most expedient course of action was rarely the cleanest.
He entered the control room and found a crew of servitors at the stations, with the rest of the Astartes crowded around a raised island in the middle of the chamber. He spied Kayne watching the two helots at the helm station; nothing but a wall of blank screens and inert dials lay before them. The whole vessel rocked as the transport cradle shifted over points and swung wide.
“Where’s Brother Mohl?” said Sove, his bearded face tightening.
Noxx shared a look with Rafen. The other sergeant must have known the intentions of his squad-mate from the outset, but said nothing of it. “Mohl has his work to do. We have ours.”
Sove glared at Rafen, as if the Techmarine’s absence was his fault, and then looked away.
“The ship is sealed,” said Ajir. “For better or worse, this antique will be our saviour or our coffin.”
“Status?” Rafen put the question to Noxx.
The Flesh Tearer’s dead eyes met his. “We have twenty helots aboard, the best of Zellik’s bunch, at all the crew stations. I’m afraid the honourable Logis Beslian became hysterical when he figured out what our gambit was.”
Rafen looked around; there was no sign of the Mechanicus adept. “And how did you deal with that?”
“He’s in one of the descent racks,” said Noxx. “Gast put him out with a sedative from the Neimos’ infirmary. I thought better there than running about the boat like a panicked grox.” Off Rafen’s nod, he gestured around. “The prize crew have returned to the Tycho. We’re all that’s left.” He frowned. “Not counting Mohl, of course…”
The Blood Angel took in the faces of the warriors before him; there, a knot of crimson and gold, Battle-Brothers Kayne, Turcio and Ajir, and the Devastator Space Marine Puluo, the psyker Ceris standing out in his indigo wargear. To the other side, in their black-chased, wine-dark armour, Sergeant Noxx and the remainder of his squad, Brothers Eigen and Sove, and the cleric Gast. Ten warriors, ten Sons of Sanguinius ranged against a world teeming with rapacious xenos beasts and a heartless scion of Chaos Undivided.
A smile crossed his lips, and Rafen’s fangs flashed. “Our victory is down there, brothers. We have only to reach out and take it.”
Another shock rumbled up through the deck of the Neimos.
“It’s starting,” said Ceris.
Zellik was screaming behind his gag, his augmetic eyes wide and rolling. His entire body vibrated with furious shock, and he pulled at his restraints with all the strength of madness and desperation. His implanted antennae—the ones deep in his muscle tissue and bone marrow, the ones the clumsy Astartes had not discovered and excised—picked up the short-range radio wave speech bursts between the minor servitors working the closest console ranges.
What Zellik heard there he quickly pieced together with the behaviour of the Blood Angel and the blighted Flesh Tearer Techmarine; the sum of that datum was enough to cause a spike of actual, genuine emotion deep inside the tech-lord’s mind. It had been a long time since he felt true, real fear. Other emotional states, ones like greed or desire, hate and envy, those he indulged in with frequency. Matthun Zellik had never been one to eschew the whole emotive experience, unlike many of his Mars-born kindred; where they held to the belief that only in cold logic could perfection be found, Zellik believed that emotions, just like any abstract system, could be reduced to knowable equations if only one had the time and the intellect to find them. He used emotions as toys, turned them on and off to enhance his pleasure at every acquisition he made, used them to sharpen his mind when he was in conflict.
Already, he had almost been swamped in loathing after discovering that Beslian had betrayed him to the Astartes; but that had faded quickly with the realisation that, had circumstances been reversed, he would have done the same to that irritating little null unit. That had been replaced, first by hot, blazing anger. The rage at being forced to do nothing while these ham-fisted fools smashed about his precious Archeohort and laid waste to it. But he had not regretted his decision to surrender to them, at least not at first. On some level, he understood—he had always understood—that the collection down in the holds was more important than any individual life, more important than his life, even. Zellik made his peace with that; he would happily let himself perish if the collection survived. There would be others to take on his great task of gathering the tech-relics of the past. Each find had taken him closer to the Machine-God, and he regretted nothing.
But now that was taken from him, and there was such great and transcendent woe in his clockwork heart. He listened with his antennae and he heard the orders, he understood the horrible thing that the Astartes were doing. He pulled at his tethers, screami
ng and screaming, but the Techmarine Mohl, only a few spans away from him there on the deck, ignored him utterly.
It was then a new voice joined the others. A vox signal, filtering up from the planet below, bearing ciphers that labelled it for Zellik’s attention. Broadcast in the clear, the voice of Haran Serpens issued out from bell-mouthed speaker horns.
“My dear Matthun,” it boomed. “You’ve impressed me. How you managed to venture so close without being detected… I always knew you were a man of great cleverness.” There came a metered sigh, and as he listened to it, Zellik was wondering after the words of the Blood Angel, the mad claim the warrior Rafen had made.
Haran Serpens could not be dead, it was impossible! And more so, that someone like Zellik could be duped by an agent of Chaos into thinking him still alive. He would have scoffed had his mouth not been stuffed with a ragged cloth. Fabius Bile, indeed! The very idea was the pinnacle of idiocy!
“Will you not answer me, Matthun?” asked the voice. “No? Your ship comes closer, and you do not announce yourself to me. What am I to think? Have we not had a mutually beneficial relationship? Or is it that the seeds of covetousness I always saw in you are now bearing fruit? Yes. I think that is what it is.”
“No! No!” With effort, Zellik forced the tiny manipulator arrays in his mouth cavity to finally cut through his gag and allow him to shout. He projected the bellowed cry on every frequency he could, but static jamming rebounded in on him. The tech-lord glared at Mohl, who still had not moved, not reacted one single iota as the Archeohort drove in towards the planet at greater and greater velocity. “Haran!” cried Zellik. “This is not my doing! Hear me!” His words went no further than the walls around him.
Then the greatest insult of all came to pass. Zellik detected machine code streaming out from the Archeohort’s transmitters, directed down at the planet. The data strings were mimics of the tech-lord’s own proprietary vox protocols, hyper-complex packets of information that flashed past in split-second bursts. They were perfect emulations of Zellik’s own coding patterns, the digital renditions of a gifted imitator. He glared at Mohl, affronted by this intrusion. Then the fear returned to him as he parsed the content of the faked signals; they were brusque, sneering strings of code, demands for surrender and declarations of combat, all directed at Haran Serpens.
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