Garro

by James Swallow

  The group were dressed no differently than those around them, but to a warrior’s trained eye they stood out like magnesium flares on a dark night. A trio of earnest-looking men, two keeping watch while the third carefully offered slips of paper to anyone who would take one. Garro saw red ink on the paper, text he could not read from this distance and the shapes of icon-symbols to aid any illiterates to understand the leaflet’s intent.

  He smiled thinly. The followers of the Lectitio Divinitatus were becoming bolder, and that would give him what he needed. Garro planned to wait for them to finish their proselytising and then track the men back to their point of origin. Somewhere amid this hissing, clanking mess of conduits there was a clandestine church, and if he found it…

  A low cry came to him, arresting his train of thought. Four more figures had emerged from the passers-by – rough types with the build of Imperial Army troopers about them, although none of the quartet wore anything approaching a uniform. The new arrivals were haranguing the believers, and Garro speculated on what was happening below him from body language and the snatches of snarled words captured by his augmented hearing.

  The four were members of the group in charge of this part of Hesperides. Garro had not seen a single Arbites officer since he arrived on the orbital plate, not even a monitor drone. He guessed that whichever member of the Tech-Barony was charged with rule of Hesperides had little interest in the people who lived in between the air machines, as long as the processors kept working. In this kind of environment, thugs of a certain stripe flourished where law enforcement was absent and weakness was rife.

  Demands were being made. From his vantage point, Garro glimpsed the flash of silver from Throne coins as the larger of the thugs – a broad barrel of a man with a wild beard – pulled tribute from the hands of one of the believers. It clearly wasn’t enough, because the thug produced a push-sword from under his coat and ran through the man who had been holding the leaflets. It was a basic but efficient kill, up under the ribcage. The victim went down, dead before he hit the platform, the papers he had been clutching scattering like windblown leaves.

  There were shouts and screams, and the two remaining believers exploded into panicked motion, bolting through the crowd, heading towards rat-runs on the western side of the marketplace. One of the thugs stayed behind to pick over the dead man’s corpse, but the bearded killer led the other two on a chase.

  Garro cursed silently. If these fools killed his only leads, he would be stymied. All the members of Keeler’s church would draw back and hide themselves, and the Saint – if she was here – would be spirited away by nightfall.

  Moving as quickly as he could without drawing attention, Garro went after them, leaping from one cluster of conduits to another. The terrain became increasingly difficult, as his elevated path was blocked at random intervals by outcrops of machinery or shrieking steam grilles. Twice he lost sight of the fleeing believers and the men in pursuit, but their shouts allowed him to zero in and keep them from vanishing into the complex root system of brassy tubes.

  The legionary heard the bass cough of a heavy-calibre gunshot and a wail of pain. Away from the crowds, the thugs were happy to start shooting where collateral damage would be minimal. Garro’s enhanced senses smelled fresh blood, and plenty of it. The injured believer was bleeding badly.

  He managed to get ahead of the thugs, closing the distance to the running men below along a high maintenance walkway. Amid the constant background chorus of rattling apparatus and clanking vents, Garro’s heavy footfalls went unnoticed. Forced to a halt as the walkway came to a sudden dead end, he paused to take in the scene.

  Fifty feet beneath him, the uninjured man was struggling to help his wounded comrade stagger forward, but the slick of blood that trailed behind them was enough for Garro to know that one of them would be dead in minutes.

  That estimate fell to zero when the thugs emerged from a side-passage, and the one with the gun put a second round into the bleeding man. The hydrostatic shock of the impact parted the two believers, sending the injured one over a safety rail and into oblivion. Garro glimpsed the body spinning away towards the filthy clouds.

  The one with the beard shouted something about being owed more money, about promises made, and the dimensions of this sordid drama became full and clear to the legionary. The thugs ran this part of Hesperides Plate, and they were letting Keeler’s followers have a safe haven here in return for hard currency. But belief alone was not enough to mint coin, and the greed of men like these had few limits. He imagined that no matter what they had been given, it would not have been enough. They were going to kill all three of the believers to send a message.

  What other reason was there to have committed brutal murder before so many eyes, if not to sow fear? For a brief moment, the Warmaster’s snarling aspect rose and fell in Garro’s thoughts. He shook off the memory.

  Out came the push-sword again, still red with the gore of the man it had killed. The last of the believers was looking back and forth between the killers and a narrow passage ten yards away. Asking himself if he could make it there before a bullet buried itself in his back.

  Garro had seen enough. He stepped up and over the edge of the suspended walkway and dropped the distance to the deck below, hitting with the impact of a demolition hammer. The metal flooring flexed under the force of his arrival, putting the thugs and their would-be victim off their feet. The panicked believer was quick to recover, however, and scrambled away towards the gaping alley.

  Furious at the interruption, the three thugs turned on Garro and fear was not what they showed him. He was so used to seeing that barely-controlled terror on the faces of common humans that it struck him as odd to find it absent. Without his power armour, they must have thought Garro was some kind of mutant affected by gigantism. It never occurred to them that he was a Space Marine; after all, why would one of the Emperor’s Angels of Death ever come to this light-forsaken place, much less so without armour or fanfare?

  ‘What are you?’ spat the one with the pistol, taking aim. ‘Go away, freak.’

  The bearded man hesitated – perhaps he had some clue about Garro’s actual origin – but his rat-faced cohorts were too snappish and blood-hungry to think twice about what they were facing.

  ‘Y’heard him,’ bellowed the third member of the group, whose mouth was full of teeth filed to points and whose flesh was a canvas for dozens of obscene electoos. ‘Piss off!’

  Garro took a step forward and met four bullets fired in quick succession by the gunman. The shots hit him in the chest and belly, breaking the outer layer of his epidermis but penetrating no deeper. He grunted with irritation and reached into each of the wounds with thumb and forefinger, pulling out the flattened heads of the kinetic rounds and flicking them away. Blood, thick with gene-engineered Larraman cells, was already clotting the trivial wounds.

  The one with the gun was clearly an imbecile. Instead of putting distance between himself and Garro, he came closer, aiming the heavy pistol up to target the legionary’s head.

  Garro stepped in to meet him. With a lazy backhand, he smacked away the weapon, shattering the bones in the gunman’s forearm. He could have left it there, but there was a lesson to be taught, and so he put what he considered to be a light punch into the squealing gunman’s chest. The blow caved in the thug’s ribcage, collapsed his lungs and stopped his heart.

  The man covered in phosphor-glowing tattoos cried out the dead man’s name, and turned tail and fled back in the direction of the marketplace.

  The thug with the beard and the push-sword yelled and slashed at the air before Garro, attempting to force the legionary back with a wild, uncontrolled feint. He was trying to put Garro on the back foot, perhaps so he could extend away and flee as well.

  The warrior watched the criminal’s pattern, saw it, and in the next breath he grabbed the razor-sharp blade and yanked it forward. A seasoned swo
rdsman would have let go of the handle, but the thug’s best challengers had only been untrained civilians with no grasp of bladecraft, and he had no more moves to make. Ignoring the distant sting of pain as the push-sword cut into his palm, Garro twisted his wrist and disarmed the bearded thug, the motion breaking fingers in his opponent’s hand.

  The blade fell to the deck and he stamped on it, the steel heel of his bionic leg snapping it in two. Garro reached out and grabbed the thug by the shoulder and squeezed, feeling bone grind on bone.

  ‘You have made several mistakes,’ he told the man, as he listened to him panting. ‘And your path brings you to me.’

  ‘Please…! Don’t…!’

  Garro shook his head. ‘That time has passed.’ He shook back the cuff of his robes and showed the man one of the sigils branded into his flesh, the device of a skull against a six-pointed star. ‘You attacked a legionary. Do you understand that?’

  The bearded man’s eyes were wet and streaming. A patch of dark colour spread on his breeches as he soiled himself in fear.

  ‘I want to know where they are.’ Garro nodded in the direction that the surviving believer had gone. ‘You know. Tell me.’

  ‘Don’t…don’t know!’ gasped the thug. ‘Don’t remember….’

  ‘You do,’ Garro corrected gently. He tapped the thug’s forehead. ‘Memory chains in your brain tissue. Either you access them…or I will.’

  ‘What…?’

  Garro put his other hand around the man’s skull and slowly began to apply pressure. He would need to be careful, to crack the bone without destroying the soft organ inside. The warrior took on a gentle, lecturing tone. ‘When the genesmiths made me what I am, they placed an implant in my belly called a preomnor. A stomach within a stomach, if you will. It allows me to ingest poison and toxics, subsist on edible materials that would kill any other living thing…’

  A wet crackle sounded from beneath Garro’s fingers, and the thug cried out in terrible pain, fruitlessly trying to peel the legionary’s grip apart.

  ‘Moreover,’ he went on, as if this were instruction for some neophyte battle-brother, ‘there is a second implant, the omophagea. Capable of separating genetic memory from ingested matter, if you can conceive of that.’ He leaned close and looked the thug in the eyes. ‘What I eat,’ he said, with cold clarity, ‘I take the memories from. Do you understand?’

  The thug’s cries became whimpers, and Garro knew that he did.

  ‘One way or another,’ said the legionary as he increased the pressure, ‘you will tell me where to find the hidden church.’

  Eighteen

  The mark, and the marked

  Sermon

  A burned figure

  Haln spent an hour or two getting used to the steady rocking motion of the Walking City, but eventually he had taken to it like a local, and now he could move through the mile-long corridors without scuffing his elbows on the iron walls with each gyration. It made spotting other new arrivals very easy. Even the most experienced counterspy would take a time to get in synch with the lurch-drop, lurch-rise rhythm of the great mobile platform.

  That was part of the reason Haln had picked the city as their means of transit down the continental spine, an extra way to help him flush out any potential followers on their trail.

  His caution was yet to be tested, however. Haln always kept to the tenets of his tradecraft, following rules of espionage that had been set down centuries before humans had even left this blighted planet. He took circuitous routes, never used the same vox module twice, varied his pattern, his gait, his appearance. He assumed nothing, distrusted everything, just as he had been trained.

  And yet, in all the time he had been active on Terra, there had never been a moment where he was truly afraid. Never a point where he had glimpsed a flash of an enemy’s blade and known he was close to being discovered. Was it that his opposite numbers in service to the Sigillite were so good that he never saw them? Were they watching and waiting to see where he would lead them? Or was the opposite true, that Malcador’s agents were as ignorant to his like as the people about this platform were to Haln’s real intention?

  He suspected the latter, but he would not allow the opposition’s laxity to infect him. It was acceptable – desirable, even – for one’s enemy to be lazy, but that didn’t mean Haln could slacken off. He had to behave as if those out to stop him were as competent as he was, even if that had never been true.

  Haln halted at the iron door to his rented cabin, and rearranged the cups and plaspaper bags he carried so he could recover the beam-key that opened it. Checking the alcove to make sure he was alone and unseen – he had already disabled the primitive security monitor at the far corner – Haln unlocked the hatch and kicked it open with his boot.

  The room was small and gloomy. It smelled of old metal and sweat. Haln deposited his load on the collapsible table in the middle of the compartment and went to the circular window, pivoting it to open outward. Immediately, the steady crunch and grind of massive gears entered the space, and he stole a glance out. The cabin was above and to the aft of the eighth leg mechanism on the port side of Walking City, a massive iron limb as tall as a hab-tower that ended in a splay-toed foot large enough to crush a city block. Twenty legs on both sides of the gargantuan moving platform provided motive action for the slab-like mobile settlement as it laboured southwards towards the equator, endlessly marching through a dustbowl that stretched from horizon to horizon.

  Rising from a corner, the assassin helped himself to a cup of lukewarm tisane and scowled at the taste. Then, he found a bag with skewers of cooked arthropod meat and set to work devouring them. Haln sat on a stool, took his own meagre portions and ate in silence, observing the killer without directly watching him.

  Haln was only ever honest with himself, and he was so now as he considered how much he disliked the mission he had been given by his handler, his Aleph. What he knew for sure was that the directive had come from outside the legion to which he was oath-sworn. Haln was one of many non-Lords, part of a vast army of commons who toiled for his masters the First and the Last, and he gleaned that his assignment had been handed down from the Sons of Horus… Perhaps even from the Lupercal’s Court itself.

  He had been diverted from the midst of other duties and forced to leave work undone for this, to be the chaperone for a man who woke screaming in the middle of the night, who constantly shifted back and forth between icy lucidity and morose disengagement. At first, Haln wondered what was so special about this particular killer – there were many capable of that act, he reasoned, Haln among them – until the moment he saw the assassin at his work.

  The killings at the sanctuary were unlike anything he had witnessed before. That horrific weapon that seemed to hide away until the assassin called it forth, and the things it did to living flesh… If Haln had still been capable of sleeping, he imagined it would have given him nightmares. As it was, he used chem-shunts to edit his own memories of those scenes, softening his recall of the worst moments. What he could not remember fully, he could not dwell on – that was the idea. In reality, it didn’t work. He had to hold much of it untouched in his mind, for the sake of the operation. And so Haln still recalled enough to be fearful of the assassin and that cursed gun of his.

  He wanted this to be over and done. The work he had come to Terra for, that the Aleph had tasked him to prepare, that would now go on without him. Dozens of operatives, primed to spring a great feint against Rogal Dorn’s defences, an invasion before the invasion that would entice the primarch of the Imperial Fists into tipping his hand. It was an elegant endeavour that Haln had been enthused by. He liked the clockwork of the notion, the sheer game of it.

  By contrast, conveying a murderer – no matter how monstrous his ways might be – seemed like a lesser work. Any bloody fool can pull a trigger, the spy told himself.

  As the thought crossed his mind, the as
sassin stopped chewing and stared directly at him. ‘How do I know I can trust you?’

  Haln arranged his features into a neutral aspect. ‘We’ve already had this conversation. Don’t you recall? Before you… sterilised the settlement.’

  The assassin nodded slowly. ‘What did we learn from them? The killed?’

  ‘There are several possible vectors for the target.’ Haln took another sip of tisane and with patience, gave the same report he had twice already. He reminded the assassin about the half-dead, burned souls who had begged for quick ends while Haln flensed them for intelligence on the target. There were many probable locations, and it was taking time to narrow them down. Haln had contacts he was using to follow up leads, and that data was yet to mature.

  ‘You have told me this,’ snapped the assassin, his hard eyes glittering, his manner becoming stony once again. ‘Is there no more you have? What use are you to me?’ He held out his hand. ‘Show me your mark.’

  ‘I don’t have a–’

  ‘Show me your gods-damned mark, you stinking whoreson!’ The words exploded from the assassin with such venom that Haln actually jerked back, the stool scraping across the metal deck. Before he could get out of reach, the assassin grabbed his arm by the wrist and pulled him over the tiny table. Haln toppled off the stool and his cup emptied its contents over the floor.

  Still, he was quick enough to will his own tattoo into quiescence before the killer could wrench back his sleeve and glare owlishly at his hand, his forearm. Had he been unready, the thin greenish tracery of a many-headed form would have been visible there. Instead, there was only umber-coloured flesh with the texture of worked leather.

  ‘You don’t have it,’ said the assassin, his towering fury smothered in a moment. He released his rigid grip, disgusted. ‘You don’t,’ he repeated. Then the killer pulled off one of the black ballistic-fabric gloves he habitually wore and offered Haln his bare palm.