A Lesson in Iron

by David Guymer

  He gargled, blood spewing between his fingers as he groped for it, the idea careening through his skull of yanking it out. He found it, couldn’t get purchase, fingers slipping in blood from metal to flesh and over again. He was still breathing though. Still breathing. And he was a Space Marine of the Iron Tenth: he would come back from worse.

  Swallowing on pain, he staggered from cover, pointed his shotgun at the bulkhead and tried to concentrate.

  There was something there. Difficult to define. A corposant in the metal.

  The wound in his neck bubbled as he tried to make words. ‘What. In Old Night?’

  A cry from the chamber’s entrance called on his attention. Hemtaal. There was a gunshot, the hard thud-thud-thud of auto-fire, the whoosh of Zaegerr’s flamer.

  Sharik stumbled around a half-circle to see something rip Jerek in two from left shoulder to right hip. His body emptied, enhanced transhuman viscera slapping the deckplates as though someone had upended a slop bucket, and then, for no reason at all, catching fire. The eviscerated Scout burned pink and hot, throwing off an oily smoke that left Sharik gagging despite his breath mask, pain stabbing him through his throat.

  Zaegerr let rip with his flamer again, howling as he sprayed burning promethium across the chamber and set walls and piston jackets alight.

  It distressed the creature – the thing – but little more. Its suprasonic shriek was raw fury, punishing the bulkheads with wave after wave of manifest violence, tearing the delicate system of bellows to shreds. Enough of an opening, however, for Sergeant Salem Hektur to drag Zaegerr back into the corridor and thrust his bolt pistol into the entity’s ‘mouth’.

  The Terran veteran was immense in his power armour and battle honours, an awe-inspiring presence.

  His bolter’s report was deafening.

  The beast was an uncertain blur of nightmarish configurations, as though it were spinning through an infinite bestiary of surreal and impossible forms, uncertain which to adopt, but Sharik thought he glimpsed something in the heart of it. It was emotion rather than form, and yet the impression it evoked in him was of long limbs, sweeping horns, heavy claws – although none in any ratio that would correspond to a naturally proportioned creature, nor anything that corresponded even to itself from moment to moment.

  The volley of shells passed through it without contacting anything with a mass before detonating in the burning wall behind it.

  And yet it could touch. It could lift a Space Marine and it could kill.

  What breed of xenos strain was this?

  A chainsword revved to full speed with a terrific shriek as Sergeant Hektur set such questions firmly to one side.

  The whirring adamantium teeth of the veteran’s blade battered the surrounding metal as he hacked through the chimeric apparition. It retaliated in kind, as if feeding off the Iron Hand’s own passions, claws solidifying from thin air to rake the sergeant’s armour, drawing particular relish from shredding the victory laurels and oaths papers affixed to his plate. Air whistled from broken seals. Liquid sealant gurgled up from the wounded ceramite.

  With a snarl, Sharik turned his shotgun towards the fight. It was slippery with blood, his forearms slick with it. He managed a roar, trusting that Hektur’s power armour could shrug off his grapeshot for they had practised such melee tactics many times, and fired.

  The shot whizzed through the ethereal beast, tearing through it like a hand waving through thick mist. He pumped the action, shells spitting from the breech, raised the gun and fired again. The thing gave a shriek that was felt in the heart and in the gut, rather than heard through the ears and processed by the brain. Sharik worked his pump action a second time, but the alien was already beginning to dissipate, leaving a lingering trace of anger and the murder-shriek of Hektur’s chainsword.

  This was no ork.

  How did all the weapons and physical enhancements available to the Legiones Astartes avail them against an alien that could not be touched?

  ‘Behind you.’

  The sound of Sergeant Boros’ voice pulled him short.

  He turned around, and immediately gasped as he felt something strike through his chest carapace, through his chest, carving his primary and secondary hearts, and erupt from his back plate. He looked down, growing dizzy, to see himself impaled by a bone-spear of sputtering energy. He felt cold, as though opened to the void.

  He could still hear the roar of Hektur’s chainsword, but it was dimming, changing, becoming the roar of something else altogether.

  In the narrow antechamber adjoining the main bridge they found the first evidence of a crew.

  The servitor was enshrined within a hub nexus of carbonised steel beneath a wire halo, most of which fed into the huge set of doors that blocked access to the bridge proper. Ferrus was familiar with the control setup, but had never seen it assembled with such exaggerated occultism, not even in the cabalistic tech-shrines that persisted still in some of Medusa’s most isolated and challenged regions. Harik Morn tilted the lobotomised unit’s head back. It was vacuum-desiccated, eyes staring at the ceiling more blankly even than usual through a rimy cataract of void frost. The Terran checked it over for signs of life – or causes of death – while Santar and the rest of the veteran squad moved ahead to manhandle the doors.

  Ferrus watched them, the heavy doors thunking as the power-assisted strength of seven legionaries tested the locks, listening to the sporadic reports of combat that trickled from his helmet vox. He had seen nothing, but an ill-feeling followed him regardless. As if he had been led here. Toyed with.

  Metal hands heated the haft of Forgebreaker, the great warhammer of his brother’s making, until it glowed red, spitting like a melta-torch in his grip.

  ‘I had assumed the vessel abandoned, the crew taken or killed,’ he said. ‘Everyone has heard the stories of ghost ships adrift in the warp.’

  ‘We’ve seen no real crew member yet,’ said Morn.

  ‘And yet this is here.’ Ferrus indicated the dead servitor.

  Morn shrugged. ‘You can’t run a ship with just a servitor. Or servitors.’

  ‘If you have concluded your… analysis, Sergeant Morn.’ Adept Xanthus appeared much the same as he had aboard the Fist of Iron, but for a flex-plastek tube that emerged from the dark of his hood, looped over his shoulder and disappeared again under the folds of his robes. ‘If this is indeed a Tenth Legion vessel then I should be able to overrule the servitor’s codewalls and open the bridge doors.’

  ‘Then do it,’ said Ferrus.

  A clutch of mechadendrites emerged through the tattered layers of robe covering the magos’ chest, suckering onto interface ports across the servitor’s mortal husk with an audible slurp of suction. The servitor gave an involuntary twitch. Morn swore and struggled to bring his bolter up.

  ‘An autonomic reaction,’ said Xanthus. ‘A response to code inputs. Do not be alarmed.’

  ‘You could have said that before you started,’ muttered Morn.

  Bolter up, the Terran moved to join Santar and his Avernii Clan brothers at the doors, crouching into fire positions or readying grips on power weapons.

  Ferrus forced his grip to relax, his hands to cool to a simmer.

  ‘What is taking so long?’

  ‘Either the codes are subtly dissimilar from the standard protocols or the servitor’s command algorithms have suffered degradation over time. It may take– correction: inputs accepted. Doors opening.’ There was an ascending sequence of clunks as the locks disengaged and the goliath doors ground apart.

  Spot lamps mounted on helmets, pauldrons and the barrels of boltguns stabbed into the gloom of the bridge. Metal plates and a mess of ceiling ductwork glinted back, the massive outline of an Icon Mechanicus. For a second even Ferrus held his breath, but there was nothing, just the faintest scent, like anodised steel, that carried despite his armour’s hermetic seals
and the utter absence of an atmosphere.

  Santar and Morn were first in, youngest and eldest, each taking two warriors with them and leading them left and right respectively onto the gangwalks that circled the primary command platform. Ferrus followed in with the last two Avernii Clan veterans in tow and Xanthus scuttling to keep pace, driving straight towards the command hub.

  ‘More servitors,’ came Santar’s vox-growl. ‘You were right, lord. No sign of crew. Or anything else.’

  ‘Same.’ Morn. ‘But these rune inscriptions on the bulkheads – they’re not Gothic, nor any form of Medusan I’ve seen.’

  ‘Lingua Technis,’ said Xanthus quietly.

  ‘This is no Mechanicum warship,’ said Ferrus.

  ‘It is not.’

  Enthroned upon the command platform they found an answer, and several more questions.

  It was clearly a legionary of the Iron Hands, the Clan Raukaan and Legion markings on his armour confirmed it – but he had been butchered, pulled apart and put back together in the crudest way imaginable, the base mechanics of what made a legionary maintained at the expense of the perfection that the Emperor had crafted into His children’s flesh. It reminded Ferrus of greenskin work: powerful, functional, ugly. The runaway reconstructive surgery had left little of the wearer’s original armour intact, but what remained was unusually baroque in design, engraved with unfamiliar symbols and of a pattern that did not conform to any iteration of Legiones Astartes armour.

  ‘If I might tender an extrapolation,’ Xanthus muttered. ‘The warp is known to render space and even time mutable. Is it possible, under such a conjecture, that a Tenth Legion vessel could have become snared in this warp anomaly at some indeterminate point in the future, only to emerge – for want of a more appropriate immetereological nomenclature – now?’

  Ferrus looked down at the bionically abused corpse.

  An ugly future.

  ‘Not while I live.’

  A cry split through the vox-unit, and Ferrus turned to see an immense xenos creature manifesting over Gabriel Santar. The legionary’s left arm was already gone, the evidence of a bite mark left in the bubbling ceramite of the screaming warrior’s shoulder. The creature roared and the whole ship seemed to vibrate to it, as though it served as nothing more than the vox-piece for something even larger, even deeper in the warp.

  The burnt electrical stench was powerful enough to taste.

  Answering cries retook the Legion vox-bands, the sudden eruption of bolter-fire lighting the abandoned bridge in flashes.

  In bursts of muzzle flare, Ferrus saw more of the xenoforms come. They crawled out of the bulkheads, running together, burning with pinkish flame, as if they had been drawn in from the outer hull and given gibbering, capering independence.

  Morn shredded one with bolter fire. It wobbled and cackled. Like shooting into a fire. Ferrus took two giant strides off the central dais and obliterated it with a single thunderclap-blow from Forgebreaker that simultaneously demolished a square metre of deck. It did not laugh at that. ‘Absurd life forms,’ he heard Xanthus mutter, as the two veterans assigned to their protection took defensive postures and began methodically carving the bridge into halves with bolter fire.

  On the other side of the platform, to Ferrus’ left, Santar was being dragged to his feet, the second legionary blazing into the inconstant behemoth that had taken his sergeant’s arm. Shrugging off the helping hands, Santar deactivated his gladius’ mag-sheath and hurled himself at the beast with a roar.

  The creature recoiled from the blade, suffering under its edge even as the concomitant bursts of bolter fire passed straight through it.

  But Ferrus had the prickling feeling that it was not the blade doing the damage. It was the man. Perhaps it was the unnatural conditions inside the rift, but even from afar Ferrus could feel Santar’s pummelling fury. It was like Medusan galefrost, and the relentless battering chill of it was slowly tearing the abomination apart.

  Morn, however, was being swamped. The Terran was positively incandescent, and it drew the creatures to him like a targeting hex.

  Ferrus bludgeoned another streaming entity midair. It blasted apart, soupy spatters of corrosive matter glowing as they rained over him, hissing as they ignited on his armour. Gripping the weapon tightly in both fists, he gave a clangourous cry. He was a god of war, born to fight, bred to win, and every superhuman sinew in him strained to do so now. But to what end? Santar had delivered a potent lesson in iron.

  Passion was a weapon borne by all who took the Gorgon’s blood, but it was logic and reason that could make it a tool.

  ‘Ferrus Manus,’ he said, activating the Legion frequency that would be heard by every legionary aboard the cursed derelict, and on the Fist of Iron too. ‘Fighting withdrawal. Back to the gunships.’

  ‘No!’ Morn panted, laying into the maelstrom of hungering xenos with bolter and power axe. ‘This… is a Legion… vessel. I will not… leave it… in the hands of these… things.’

  ‘This vessel is a wreck,’ Ferrus replied, remaining on the wider frequency so that all could hear. ‘Honour be damned.’

  Xanthus looked up, barely two-thirds of Ferrus’ stupendous height. The backwards tilt caused the adept’s hood to slip, exposing for a moment the metal plates and writhing inner workings concealed within. ‘Disregard honour, lord primarch. Be logical. Think of the technological advances that a vessel from two, three, four thousand years into sidereal future could confer. Think of the disasters that foreknowledge may avert.’

  The two veterans shepherded the adept and the primarch­ back towards the blast doors, constricting the kill-zone of relative safety between them. Santar had cut his way through to Morn, practically dragging him off while their brothers continued firing. If Ferrus had one lesson for his children it would be that there was no such thing as defeat, provided there were lessons to be learned.

  If nothing else, he had found his new first captain today.

  He afforded the wretched refuse of an Iron Hands legionary on the command platform one final look.

  ‘Whatever this future has to offer, magos, I will have no part of it.’

  About the Author

  David Guymer wrote the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two The Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he wrote the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned and the Gotrek audio drama Realmslayer. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

  An extract from Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa.

  Amadeus DuCaine thumped shoulder-first into the rockcrete wall. He dropped to one knee, turned his back, calmly ejected the spent magazine from his bolter and snapped home another of the specially tagged sickle-mags. As he did so he noticed the las-burn on his vambrace, cursed aloud, and took a moment to buff it out using the wrist of the opposite gauntlet. He’d been taught to go into battle looking as he’d want the Apothecaries to find him. Today was no different.

  The thick harness of his Mk I Thunder Armour was so polished a black that it shone under the inconstant light and creeping ice like volcanic glass, covered in company and campaign citations, most of which the Legion no longer officially recognised. Of them all, his pride was the Seal of the Eye of Vigilance, etched in platinum into the cheek guard of his tall helm. He had earned it in the latter years of the Seraphina offensive, campaigning alongside Lord Horus after the X Legion’s annihilation of the ork forces on Rust. Good years. A curtain of chainmail, alternating rings of black iron and silver, hung from his shoulder guards. A collar of iron spikes traced the rear of his gorget ring and rose behi
nd the back of his head. He carried a Clan Sorrgol banner as a cloak. It was heavy velvet, reinforced with a metal weave, weighted with onyx, black spinel and star sapphire, and glazed with ice. The clan device was picked out in silver.

  With a series of heavy thumps, his command squad joined him in cover. Techmarine Rab Tannen. Apothecary Aled Glassius. Half a dozen age-raw, hoarfrosted, brutally decorated veterans almost as hard-bitten as their Lord Commander. Storm Walkers all and proud of it. The boy, Caphen, was last.

  The lacquered purple of the youngster’s armour was scuffed and bullet-grazed, the palatine aquila that stood proud of his chest plastron burnished with coppery hygroscopic ice. Breathless sounds emerged from his helm augmitter as he crashed into the wall at the far end of the line.

  ‘They coming?’ DuCaine asked, and checked his vambrace for damage under the passing alchemical light of an aerial flare.

  Caphen nodded. ‘They’re coming.’

  The boy had been attached to the command squad strictly as an observer, but the old hands all looked at him as they would a stressed bulkhead, something that might give at any second and void the entire proverbial section.

  ‘The lad’s one of us now,’ said DuCaine, raising his voice to contend with the shrieking fire of the Tarantula batteries dug in on the other side of the wall. ‘That’s the last I want to say on it.’

  The lad nodded his thanks. Even if he did flinch at being called ‘lad’, ‘boy’, or any variation thereof.

  Satisfied, DuCaine looked up, as if he could discern the progress of the battle from the flicker trace of fire and dying flares. Vesta was a sunless moonlet, adrift in the void, cast off by its ­parent system at some point or other over the last five billion years under circumstances that didn’t interest him, and dark as hell. It was cold enough to flash-kill a primarch. Until a few days ago, it hadn’t had a name. That was why the enemy had chosen it.