Nethata stopped talking. He sat motionless, waiting for Lopi’s reaction.
The princeps didn’t respond. His face hung expressionless over the column, shaking and breaking up in the low, filmy light.
Nethata didn’t dare to press him. He waited. Only when he began to wonder if the audio feed had somehow been compromised did he speak again.
‘Princeps?’ he said. ‘Did you hear me correctly?’
Lopi looked back at him. There was no mistaking it this time – trails of tears marked his cheeks, glistening where they had collected on his exposed augmetics.
‘I have heard your words, Lord General, and considered them,’ he said.
Another agonising pause, and then he spoke again.
‘We stand together,’ he said.
Nethata felt a wave of relief flood through him.
‘I am glad to hear it, princeps,’ he said, smiling despite himself. ‘This is the right decision; this is where the tide turns.’
He had to fight to stop himself smiling. Now, all things were possible. Now the battle could be conducted on sensible terms.
‘This is where we remember our dignity,’ he said.
Morvox stalked through the foetid transit tunnels, striding across the scenes of ruin. Smoke rolled lazily across the floor, sinking into wells and blast craters. A faint tang of musk still clung to the blackened and broken landscape, mingling with stronger smells of charring and decay.
Clave Arx had spread out thinly, each warrior heading out into the shadows to hunt down the last of the enemy and retrieve the remaining mortal forces for the renewed assault. In addition to Fierez, two battle-brothers of Arx had been slain before the doors were closed and the combat had ebbed at last. Once their progenoids had been recovered and their armour taken away, none of the surviving members of the clave made any mention of them. They went about their duties just as they always did – silently, efficiently.
Morvox didn’t question that. He felt no grief for the warriors’ passing: they had been weapons, instruments of the Emperor’s vengeance, and death in battle was something that would come for all of them in the end.
Only mortals grieved. Morvox watched them as they trudged along the tunnels around him, lined up in ragged columns, their eyes dull and their expressions slack. Some them had the staring looks of men in shock; others were plainly terrified, as if the deep shadows still held creatures that could harm them. Many had to be threatened with execution before they would get back to their feet. The occasional hard bang of bolters from further down the immense transit corridor indicated that those threats were carried through.
Morvox paused for a moment, watching a line of dishevelled Ferik Guardsmen make their way out of the gloom and towards the gates. He found himself strangely absorbed by them, just as he had been by the fighters in the Melamar hive. Their movements were clumsy. They went slowly. Their killing potential was negligible; only in huge numbers could they hope to turn the course of battles.
Something about them captivated him. The sensation made him uncomfortable.
Once, on Medusa, vanishingly far into his past and long before he’d begun the journey from mortal childhood into superhumanity, Naim Morvox had broken his left arm. He had done it while working in the burning hell of his land engine’s enginarium. The pain had been sudden, eye-watering in intensity, and he’d struggled not to scream.
Then he’d seen the wound. He’d seen his white bone protruding from between torn muscle. He’d watched his blood well up in the gash, hot and thick and nearly black. He’d felt faint, and had slumped back against the drive housing.
After that the crew had come for him. They had given him sedatives and stitched his arm up and strapped up the wound. A week later he’d been back at his station, proud of the scar and proud of the residual pain.
Every so often, even much later, he remembered how he’d felt before they had come for him. He remembered the strange fascination of the broken skin, the meat-red muscle, the oozing fluids. He hadn’t been able to look at it – it had made him feel sick. He hadn’t been able to look away from it either.
That was how he felt then, on Shardenus, looking at the mortal soldiers making their way back to the front. They fascinated him in the same ghoulish, repulsed way that his mangled forearm had fascinated him.
I am going mad, he thought. They are what we live to protect. They are the Imperium. I am going mad.
‘Brother-sergeant.’
Morvox whirled around, startled out of his thoughts.
Iron Father Khatir stood before him. Morvox bowed, ashamed to have been surprised by Khatir’s approach – moving power armour was not the quietest thing in the galaxy.
‘Iron Father,’ he acknowledged. ‘I thought you were with the clan commander.’
‘I was,’ said Khatir. ‘Now I am here.’
As soon as Khatir said those words, Morvox knew what was coming next.
‘Earlier, I was dis–’ Morvox began, attempting to get his penance in early.
‘Twice, you have questioned an order,’ said Khatir. His even tone was no different than it ever was, but somehow the words carried an undertow of menace. That was what the Iron Fathers could do – they could shame, inspire, cow, infuriate, all with words alone.
Morvox saw Khatir’s gauntlets glint in the darkness, ready, as ever, for use. For a second, he imagined them flashing up, bursting with flame, ready to strike at him.
‘I am shamed by it,’ he said, careful to speak only the truth.
‘I see that,’ said Khatir. ‘I have been watching you, brother-sergeant. I have been watching you ever since we fought together in that bunker. Just now, I watched you as you paused in your duty. I saw you stand in these tunnels, and I imagined what thoughts were going through your head.’
Morvox felt a brief stab of resentment, and swallowed it down. It was hard to be talked down to, even by an Iron Father.
‘I will work harder,’ he said. ‘I have been remiss.’
‘You have. But I know what ails you.’
‘You… I…’ Morvox struggled to find the words. ‘What ails me?’
Khatir made no move towards him. He made no gesture of reassurance, nor of condemnation. He stood in the midst of the tunnels, surrounded by the ravages of war, and spoke as quietly as he always did.
‘The beast is most dangerous when closest to death,’ he said. ‘The beast within you is dying, Morvox. It is lashing out. This is a perilous time for you. You are caught between two worlds.’
As the Iron Father spoke, Morvox felt as if something was stirring within him, writhing in his innards like a snake. It indeed felt like some sinuous animal had coiled around his hearts, squeezing against them like a noose.
‘You are changing,’ said Khatir. ‘You are losing the last remnants of your past. You can fail here. I have seen others fail, and it is not something I wish to see again. There is no place within the Iron Hands for failure.’
Khatir lifted his gauntlet and rested it heavily on Morvox’s shoulder guard. The gesture was a bizarre one for a Medusan to make, and Morvox resisted the urge to recoil. He didn’t know whether it was meant to convey reassurance or act as a threat.
‘You still remember pity,’ said Khatir. ‘You look at the cattle who serve alongside us and you mourn their deaths in service. You wish to nurture them, to explain what we are doing, to help them understand. But they will never understand. Even our brothers in other Chapters, those rare ones who are our equal in devotion, even they cannot understand as we do.’
As he listened, Morvox felt the twisting sensation within him grow worse.
‘They have no future,’ said Khatir. ‘The universe holds no place for them. Only the strongest will endure, and nothing is stronger than the machine.’
Morvox had heard such things said many times, but for some reason the words stabbed at him
harder then. He didn’t want to listen to them – they made him feel sick. He didn’t want to stop listening to them either.
‘A time will come,’ said Khatir. ‘It will come for you soon. You will forget pity, and you will see the weakness we carry within us. Then you will understand the need to change, to improve, to excise that weakness.’
Khatir exerted pressure on Morvox’s shoulder.
‘Until that time comes, remember who you are. Do not fail. Never question an order again.’
Morvox looked directly up at the Iron Father’s facemask. He couldn’t decide whether the visage was horrific or benign. He felt the weight of the gauntlet on him, heavy like the bonds of death.
‘I will not, lord,’ he said. ‘Never again.’
Columns of men were moving. They didn’t march with the assurance they had done, back when the Iron Father had roused their spirits with his exhortations of duty and sacrifice. They were hunched, sullen, exhausted, terrified.
Marivo watched them pass before dropping back out of sight. The interior of the tunnels echoed with the thud of their boots. Loudspeakers blared out orders, one after the other, all of them demanding more duty and more sacrifice. He barely listened to them – they had become little more than background noise.
He slumped back against the grav-train track housing – a trench barely a metre deep – pressing himself against the cracked ferrocrete wall. His boots slipped on the viscous slime underfoot. He didn’t look too closely at that; it had a familiar stench.
Khadi squatted beside him, breathing heavily. She had barely made it into the shelter of the wall’s shadow. Her physical strength was recovering, but her resolve had crumbled. On the long trudge back from the front line she’d broken into bouts of random sobbing, interspersed with sudden explosions of rage. He’d seen such things before, but that had been on long, arduous campaigns of warfare. The assault on Shardenus had been going on for a matter of days, but already troops were losing their minds from stress and exhaustion.
The trench gave little shelter – just a slightly deeper shadow against the whole mass of spotlights, tracer beams and moving vehicle headlights. Still, it had given him what he needed: a breathing space, a chance to collect his shattered thoughts about what had happened and put them in some kind of order.
Marivo had seen whole companies of loyalist troops swept away. While the daemons had swooped down on them from above, no effective resistance could be mustered. Only luck had saved him. Somehow he’d kept out of the worst of the massacres, dragging Khadi behind him and firing only when he’d had to. His old injuries had started to play up again, and his shoulder had blazed with pain, hampering his aim and making his eyes water.
Then the Iron Hands had returned, marching back down the tunnels and laying waste to all before them. They had been as terrifying as anything else. They had killed, and killed, and killed. Until then he’d have sworn that nothing could stand against a daemon, but they had. They had never taken a backward step. Even as the unholy monsters had ripped into their sacred armour and plunged glowing claws into their exposed flesh, they’d kept on fighting.
All of this Marivo had watched, staying hidden amid the stink and the corpses, holding on to Khadi and keeping his hand clamped over her helmet’s mouthpiece in case the sobbing started again.
If you could fight those monsters, he’d thought, why were you not by our side when it might have done us some good?
As the worst of the horror and the fear subsided, that question burned in his mind. It made him angrier the more he pondered it.
So it was that he didn’t rush to join the shuffling rows of men making their way along the tunnels and back to war. An instinct deep within him told him that he ought to, that his oaths of office in the Guard bound him to service and that refusal to move when ordered was a betrayal, but he resisted it and stayed hunched in the shadows, his arms around Khadi in an unconscious embrace of protection, his lasgun primed to fire at anyone, from either side, who got too close.
‘What are we going to do?’
Khadi’s voice was little more than a whisper. Marivo glanced down at her. Her tear-stained face looked fragile. Her armour didn’t fit her properly; it never had.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
There was little point in pretending otherwise. He didn’t have a plan, and he hadn’t been able to come up with one on the dangerous and wary flight back down the length of the tunnels. All he had left was anger, fear and fatigue.
Khadi pushed herself away from him and craned her neck up above the lip of the trench wall. Her movements were tentative, but at least she was able to move again.
‘They’re still moving,’ she whispered. ‘I can see Iron Hands. They’re rounding up anyone still on their feet.’
‘I know,’ said Marivo, remaining where he was.
Khadi turned back to him, looking scared.
‘You don’t want to go back to them?’
She wasn’t being sarcastic, but she might as well have been. The words stung Marivo, like a mockery from the past.
Half of him did. The old half of him wanted nothing more than to drag himself back over the wall and report for service, just as he had done in the Melamar spire. His lasgun charge was low, but they would probably find a pack for him, and maybe a replacement helmet. Enough men had died, so there were sure to be spares.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
Khadi slipped back down beside him. Her hands were trembling.
‘I can’t go back there,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Throne, I can’t go back. We’ve done our bit. We’ve done so much.’
Marivo nodded slowly.
‘We have,’ he said.
Khadi leant towards him.
‘Could we get out?’ she asked him, her voice suddenly urgent. ‘This place is still in a mess. We could do it.’
Marivo had thought much the same thing. He didn’t know exactly how far down the tunnels they’d already come. In the dark, the wreckage and the confusion there was no way of telling.
‘Maybe,’ he said, not wanting to give her too much encouragement. ‘If they see us try, they’ll kill us.’
Khadi smiled weakly.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But others must have got out. It can’t be that far. We can get back into Melamar, lie low. There’ll be people alive in there, survivors, waiting it out, just like there were before.’
Marivo stayed silent. The struggle within him intensified.
‘And what then?’ he asked, speaking to himself as much as her. ‘What if we made it? How long do you think it’ll be before they catch us up?’
He looked at his hands, feeling weak and tired.
‘They never stop,’ he said.
Khadi grasped his hands then and held them in hers. The movement was sudden, unexpected. Marivo almost snatched them back, but didn’t.
‘Marivo,’ Khadi said. She looked at him, for the first time, like she was looking into the face of someone she could respect. ‘We’ve done pretty well, I reckon, to get this far. Come with me. Forget about your duty – look where that’s got us. We could make it, the two of us. Shardenus is a big place.’
Marivo looked up at her, startled. He had never heard her speak like that before. For the first time, he heard the strength in her voice.
‘We don’t have much time,’ she said. ‘I’m going. I’ve decided.’
She got to her feet, swaying a little as she found her bearings.
‘What will you do?’ she asked, looking at him anxiously. ‘You have to choose now. Come with me – we can make it.’
Marivo couldn’t take his eyes away from her. His mind cycled through the options, over and over, just as it had been doing for the last half-hour. Just as it had been for the last half-hour, the choice remained impossible.
Khadi looked over her shoulder, itching to go. From
somewhere deep in the tunnels, the sporadic thud of bolter fire could still be heard.
‘Come on,’ she said, getting ready to make her move. ‘What’s it to be?’
Marivo remained still for a fraction longer. Then, finally, he stirred himself. He felt no confidence in his choice, but at least he’d made it.
‘All right,’ he said, hoisting his lasgun into position. ‘Maybe I do have a plan.’
Chapter Eighteen
Valien crept on all fours along the conduit. The tunnel was barely big enough to squeeze down, and it pressed against him tightly. Yielding flesh slid over him, lubricated by a layer of thick, glistening slime. He had to go slowly, pausing often to catch his breath.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He’d used up the last of his suit’s stimm-shots. Whenever he stopped moving for any length of time he’d start shaking from fatigue. He didn’t know where he was exactly, except that there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to keep climbing to. He’d reached the end.
A purple light glowed at the end of the tunnel. He pushed himself towards it. With each push of his legs he got a little closer, and the sensations within him intensified. He felt phlegm rise in his throat, and swallowed it down.
The walls around him began to yield a little. The tunnel opened out as his hands pressed against it, exposing a narrow orifice at the end, just a few metres away. Through the trembling lips of the orifice, Valien could see nothing but a swirling cloud of purple.
He hesitated. The weight of dread in the air had become so heavy that he almost couldn’t move. Every physical action required a huge effort of will.
It is in there. If I go in there, I die. It is in there.
The prospect of his own demise chilled him a little. He’d expected it to be quick – at the end of an arbitrator’s power maul, perhaps, or locked in heroic combat with a similarly skilled agent of the arch-enemy.
You do not deserve any of that. Not for the sins you have committed.
Valien licked his parched lips, and shoved himself forwards. The slick walls of the tunnel slid over him, leaving trails of glistening slime on his armour. His forehead pressed against the trembling lips of the orifice. The gap was barely wider than his shoulders.
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