A few of the believers picked up on Sindermann’s words and called out in affirmation, and he continued. ‘We question, and we have answers. We emerge the stronger for it, and so we shed our fears.’ He paused again, and the room quieted. ‘I am unafraid because I have walked the path to reach this place and on that journey I have learned. Now I look to the road ahead, the road that leads to the edge of the abyss and see it for what it is. Not fate. Not some pre-destiny scripted by a phantom deity that puppets me like a toy. No. No!’
Sindermann’s voice shifted again, taking on a hard, defiant edge that seemed strange coming from the elderly iterator. ‘This is the duty we have! This is the path we are on! Resist! Resist and survive and resist again! For the God-Emperor of Mankind is not the engine of our future, no, my friends. We are the engine of His.’ The old man’s words rose to fill the chamber. ‘He empowers us and we empower Him! And through that unity, we will know glory!’
The church erupted in a cacophony of cries and applause, and for a moment even the legionary felt his spirit lifted by the power of Sindermann’s oratory. The decking above his head shuddered, resonating with the righteous power of the followers. That was why Garro did not become aware of the child until it was too late.
Beneath the shouting, he heard the clank of movement somewhere nearby, on the same under-level. Moving as quickly as he could in the cramped space, Garro came about and found himself face to face with a small girl. The child had the delicate features and red hair characteristic of some Jovian commoner bloodlines, and her dirty clothes suggested she might be a refugee from one of the outer moons.
Her eyes were very wide and her face was pale with shock. ‘Wait,’ he rumbled, keeping his words soft.
Her scream was high and piercing, and it seemed to go on and on. How a little frame with such tiny lungs was capable of emitting so sharp a sound was beyond the legionary, and the girl scrambled away before he could reach her. Cursing himself for his momentary lack of focus, Garro pushed out of his hiding place and took two quick steps across the lower deck. The child vanished up toward the church proper, scrambling along pipes and through gaps that would barely have accommodated the warrior’s hand, let alone his body. Cries of alarm were spreading through the gathered followers, and he caught the sound of lasguns powering up. Clearly, the beliefs of the Saint’s followers did not stretch to pacifism.
There was no point trying to hold on to his meagre cover now it had been well and truly blown. Better instead, he decided, to use what Space Marines were best at. Shock and awe.
With a growl of effort, Garro launched himself upwards and bulled his way through layers of the metal deck, forcing rusted metal outward until he crashed out on to the floor before the dais. He rose to his full height, his face set in an imperious glare, casting a cold gaze over the followers as they stood terror-struck before him. In the front rank there were eight people with short-frame Naval-issue beam rifles, and as one they trained their weapons on the giant that had risen into their midst.
Of the child who had raised the alarm there was no sign, nor could Garro see Kyril Sindermann. He guessed that the iterator had been rushed out of the chamber the moment the screaming started.
‘Is that it?’ said a frightened voice, from somewhere among the faces hiding behind the ranks of pews.
‘First Salvaguardia and now here!’ said another. ‘He’s come to kill us all!’
Garro raised his hand, but panic detonated like a bomb, and suddenly the crowd behind the followers with guns was fragmenting, some groups rooted to the spot, others flooding toward the hanging blackout cloths that were the entrance to the church.
The legionary read the faces of the believers before him and he saw the glitter of determination in the eyes of the one that would shoot first – a wind-burned woman with hair in tight black rows. Garro’s right hand was already snapping back to the hilt of Libertas with transhuman speed, running to a clock that was far faster than any unaugmented response. His tactical mind told him that he could put down these eight with only two cuts of the blade, killing outright at least half of them and leaving the rest to bleed out in minutes. Without his armour, the concentrated las-fire of multiple rifles at close range could gravely wound him. A lucky shot might even end his life.
But he was not here for battle. These people had been waiting for an enemy, and in his haste, Garro had presented that to them. No killing today, he told himself. Not here, at least. Even though this chapel was nothing more than a repurposed drain-way, it felt disrespectful to shed blood here.
In a lightning-fast flash, Garro drew the sword in a downward flourish that took off the front quarter of the woman’s rifle as easily as trimming a plant stem. She recoiled, staring at the sparks bleeding from the end of the ruined gun.
The sharp crack of superheated air sounded, and Garro hissed – more in annoyance than genuine pain – as a single laser bolt grazed his shoulder. He turned a hard glare on one of the other armed followers, a gangly dark-skinned youth who looked at his rifle as if it had betrayed him by going off on its own.
Garro’s unflinching gaze was enough that the youth dropped the weapon and backed away. ‘I am not here to kill anyone,’ intoned the legionary. ‘I was at… Salvaguardia, or whatever you wish to call it. The Afrik sanctuary. But I was too late to halt what happened there.’
The woman with the broken gun tossed it away, trying to recover some of her earlier courage. ‘Or maybe you did it. Maybe the Regent sends you and his phantoms to cross us off, eh? One at a time.’ She shook her head, her wary gaze never leaving his. ‘Men of the Legion, they don’t come to read the book. We don’t trust.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Garro told her. ‘The book… Its reach is further and higher than you can know.’
‘You need to go,’ she shot back, unwilling to listen to him. She knew – they all knew – he could end them, and yet they still stood against Garro. They were as brave as they were devoted.
He opened his mouth to reply, but a commotion at the back of the chamber stilled his words. He heard an argument taking place, and Sindermann’s voice raised in great annoyance. Suddenly, the iterator burst through the blackout cloths, shrugging off the grip of those around him as he went.
The old man took a few steps and stopped, his hand rising to his mouth as he caught sight of the standoff. ‘Oh, infinite. Yes.’ He came forward, an honest smile breaking out across his lined face. ‘Captain Garro…? It is you, isn’t it? Alive and well.’
What happened next was quite alien to the legionary. The iterator pushed his way through the armed followers and embraced Garro like a long-lost sibling – or at least, as much as he could given the discrepancy in their heights.
‘Do you know who this is?’ Sindermann demanded of the believers, some of whom were now warily filing back into the chamber. He threw a derisive wave at the woman and her armed cohort, speaking to them like they were disobedient children. ‘Do not court further insult. Put those guns away. This person is a friend to the Imperial Truth. He is always welcome among us.’ Sindermann’s manner shifted and briefly he was the great orator again, his words filling the air. ‘You look upon the face of Battle-Captain Nathaniel Garro, and you should be honoured! He is a true hero, a rescuer! He saved my life, and that of the Saint… We would be long dead at the hands of the archtraitor if not for his fortitude and daring.’
Garro heard his name rush back and forth across the church in a wave of whispers, and the strange moment made his skin prickle. ‘Well met, Kyril Sindermann,’ he offered, then faltered over his next words. Now he was here, he was not sure how to ask the question that had been gnawing at him for months.
‘The last time you came to my chancel, you made a forthright entrance.’ Sindermann nodded toward the buckled floor plates. ‘And so again. You could have used the door, Captain.’ He smiled up at the legionary.
‘I… erred on the side of caution. Perhaps
too much so.’
The iterator nodded gravely. ‘Zeun was right when she said that the Legiones Astartes are uncommon in these halls… but all are welcome. After a fashion.’
‘There are many among my kindred who would hear you,’ Garro told him. ‘If they could.’
Sindermann touched Garro’s hand and his smile returned. ‘They will. In time.’ He gestured toward the dais and an area beyond it hidden behind more of the heavy black drapes. ‘Come, my throat is parched and I need a drink. We’ll talk.’
Garro nodded, and carefully returned his sword to its sheath. As he turned away, he met the gaze of the dark-haired woman Sindermann had called Zeun.
‘You owe me a weapon, phantom,’ she told him. ‘You good for it?’
‘We’ll see,’ he replied.
Above the endless clanking tread of the Walking City, there came a sharp rapping on the metal hatch of the cabin. The assassin burst from the place where he had been crouched for the past few hours with such velocity that Haln almost drew his shimmerknife in shock. The killer had been so silent, so still, that Haln had begun to wonder if he had fallen into a slumber of some kind. Now he realized that the man had only been at rest, waiting for a target of opportunity.
Inky black smoke gathered in the assassin’s hand and began to take on a familiar shape, but Haln was quickly on his feet, stepping between the hatch and his twitching charge. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘Put that away. This isn’t the time.’
‘You don’t tell me what to do,’ hissed the killer. ‘I tell you.’
Haln let the exasperation show on his face. ‘My orders don’t come from you,’ he hissed. ‘They don’t even come from him. So back off, and let me do my job.’
The assassin muttered something foul and venomous under his breath, slinking away to the open window. His scarred hand was empty again, and his fingers toyed with the growth of unkempt stubble on his chin.
The scent of brimstone lingered in the air as Haln peered through a spy hole in the hatch and then cracked it open to allow a wiry deckhand to slip inside. She had a pict-slate in her hand. ‘Got you something,’ she explained, her accent thick with the heavy vowels that betrayed a tech-nomad upbringing. ‘Did just like you asked.’
When they had boarded the Walking City, Haln had paid this woman to slip a code-spike into a port on the maintenance level of the central interlingua, the Walking City’s core vox nexus, through which ran a steady stream of pirated data.
The woman’s employers, the mistresses of the city, were information brokers with great access to the decrepit digital networks in this part of the world. Haln could have paid them for the data he wanted, but that would have drawn too much attention. It was easier to steal it using a greedy cat’s-paw like the deckhand.
‘Give,’ demanded Haln, and he snatched the slate away. He leaned forward, allowing his right eye to open like a quartered fruit. Long ago, Haln had killed a Mechanicum adept for the optic implant and added it to his own repertoire of tools – it extruded a fine mechadendrite that wormed across the surface of the slate and into a connector slot.
Immediately, his forebrain was assailed by a storm of images and sounds, pieces of data captured in the net of scrapcode that had been lurking inside the spike. The demi-intelligent software device had sifted the torrent of raw data passing through the Walking City’s servers – much of it so grossly illegal that the mistresses would have been executed if they were known to possess it – and plucked out what Haln needed to complete his mission.
He drifted into a mechanically-induced fugue state, the data temporarily becoming his whole world. Much of it was useless, redundant or vague, but the valuable gems among the silt shone through. The trawl of data slowly confirmed what he had suspected from the start. The woman called Keeler, the target that they had missed at the sanctuary, was on the Hesperides orbital plate. Snatches of vox chatter, pieces of raw machine-code, probability percentiles, all of it accreted into a solid, high-order chance that Keeler was there. Confidence is strong, Haln told himself. This time we will have her.
But there was something else that rose out of the stolen data. An outlier.
For a moment Haln thought some programming anomaly had crept into his feed, but as the information presented itself he realized that it was what it appeared to be. Someone else was in the mix, following the same path, looking for the same thing.
He found a partial pict-capture from a monitor bird of a huge, muscular figure in robes, caught in the act of killing a man. Legiones Astartes. There was no doubt in Haln’s mind. Bereft of armour and guns, it appeared, but still very much a grave danger.
And the face… Haln knew that face. He had seen it before, back when he himself had worn a different aspect. The legionary had been clad in storm-shade wargear then, the decks of the starship Daggerline reverberating beneath his boots as he strode past the alcove where Haln stood. Not seeing him. Not knowing what he really was.
Haln got off the ship as soon as he could after that, learning that the legionary had another of his kind with him, a psyker whose gaze might pierce Haln’s otherwise flawless disguise. He kept out of sight, with no other choice but to let things take their course… That he had escaped the confrontation out beyond Eris had been a miracle.
But at least the legionary was alone this time. That shifted the odds against them from insurmountable to merely incredible.
‘There’s a problem,’ Haln began, his voice sounding slow and drawn out to his own ears as he disengaged from the data mass and returned himself to a more human thought-mode. ‘There may be a…’
He halted as he became aware of what was going on around him. Being inside the information cluster caused Haln to lose focus on the real world. Time could pass, events could occur right in front of him and he would remain only vaguely aware.
Haln’s face was wet. He reached up and wiped away hot specks of blood.
In the middle of the cabin, a slagged thing that was some repugnant fusion of a melted metal stool and a burned human body lay on its side, emitting high-pitched squeals as it cooled in the breeze from the window. What was left of a face there sat locked in freakish horror.
The assassin stood over his work, black smoke coiling back into his hand as a gun-shaped object deliquesced and vanished.
Haln blew out a breath, secretly pleased that the killer had sated his needs but also irritated at his lack of restraint. ‘You couldn’t wait? Now I’ll be forced to find a way to dispose of her that doesn’t draw notice.’
‘That’s one of the things you’re good at,’ whispered the assassin. ‘What is the problem?’
‘You have very poor impulse control.’
The killer shook his head, gesturing at the data-slate. ‘With that.’
‘I believe we have the target’s location. But there’s an added complication. A Space Marine is also on site. He may be there to protect the target.’
‘Oh.’ The assassin leaned in toward the burned corpse, until his face was almost touching the blackened bone of its skull. ‘I’ve killed that kind before.’ He looked away, glaring at Haln with glittering eyes. ‘More than once.’
FIVE
Ask the question
Lucidity
The Gallery
Garro sat awkwardly on a chair that, while large, was still too small for a transhuman. He accepted a flask of water from Sindermann more out of ritual than actual thirst, and presently the iterator found a seat for himself, where he could look the legionary in the eye and consider him.
‘It makes me glad to see you alive,’ said the old man. ‘There were times when I wondered if you might have fallen victim to this damnable conflict.’
‘The war has tried to kill me. Many times,’ Garro allowed, one hand falling to rest atop his augmetic leg. ‘It’s taken pieces but not the whole.’
‘It is a war,’ Sindermann said, nodding gravely. ‘
There are people out there who still think it is just a minor revolt. A thing that can be put down with the correct application of reasoning, gunfire and belligerence.’ We know otherwise. The unspoken coda hung in the air between them, and the moment stretched.
‘I am here to see Euphrati,’ Garro said, pushing out the words with some effort.
‘I know.’ The iterator nodded again. ‘But why do you need to, Captain?’
‘You of all men ask me that?’ Garro looked away, his gaze ranging around the room. The chamber they sat in was another part of the drain-way, walled off with pieces of repurposed decking and old girders. It was an anteroom of sorts, with an entrance at either end. One passage led back to the makeshift chapel, and the other vanished into an unlit tunnel. Sailcloth shrouds hung from the ceiling to pool on the floor, deadening the sound of distant atmosphere processors.
‘I can only imagine the things you have seen,’ Sindermann prompted. ‘I witnessed horror enough at Horus’ hands, and I would live a happy life if I never saw the like again. But you? You brought us back to Terra and then threw yourself into the fight anew.’
Garro eyed him. ‘I never did learn how you were able to leave the Somnus Citadel on Luna. I recall that the Sisters of Silence were determined to hold you in custody for as long as they desired.’
The iterator smiled slightly. ‘Some of the Null Maidens have read the book. They understood. And dear Iacton played a role for us. We found our way out.’
Garro: Vow of Faith Page 7
