Old Earth

by Nick Kyme

  It had been late in the Crusade, and the mission of compliance had fallen to the Iron Hands. Even then the Gorgon had no taste for diplomacy. The Carthanonites courted none. They responded with force. When their warships returned to them as broken husks, burning up in the hostile atmosphere of their worlds, the largest spearing continents and decimating populations with the furious violence of their re-entry, the Carthanonites realised victory laid far beyond their grasp.

  Pride would not allow them to submit and fall upon bended knee to a potentate they had never met, and a black-armoured general whose authority they did not recognise. They sacrificed their own culture, choosing death over servitude to a distant and foreign power.

  An atomic reaction, from warheads long stockpiled by a pan-planetary civilisation too afraid to unleash them and too belligerent to decommission them, tore apart the Carthanon worlds and left radioactive debris in its wake.

  Meduson had been part of that campaign, brief as it was. He had witnessed the end of the Carthanons too, and the silent nuclear sunrises that dawned at the moment of their destruction, and then set swiftly afterwards.

  ‘Futile,’ the Gorgon had said afterwards. ‘Utterly futile.’

  The profligacy of it all had offended him, the stupid and vain­glorious pride of a culture too stubborn to admit when it was beaten.

  Only now could Meduson properly understand why they had chosen annihilation over capitulation. He briefly wondered if he would embrace the equivalent of that nuclear fire rather than submit. He told himself this was different. Being in the Aragna Chain brought back these memories. This and the prospect of the largest void battle he had every taken part in, let alone commanded, had kept him awake. Meetings with honoured lieutenants, battle-captains and, of course, the Iron Fathers had been ceaseless.

  ‘I need only endure a little longer, Goran,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll sleep. You have my word.’

  ‘In answer to your question, Shadrak, I don’t know precisely how many ships are in this armada, but I know you have responsibility for them, and for the souls aboard in their millions. A Warleader must sleep as well as strategise. Lean on Lumak or Mechosa. Hells, even bloody Dalcoth. But rest, or risk everything you have come so far to achieve.’

  ‘I do nothing but weigh risk, brother. Aug is a risk, the other Fraters are a risk. I am willing to take every one, because I am freighting everything I have on this. Everything. I have ships to consider, troop dispositions, tactics, deployment. The Aragna Chain is immense, but even it can’t hide a force of the size I command. Do you not think I realise what he’s doing?’

  ‘He’s waiting for you.’

  ‘He’s waiting for me. Exactly. And that means he’s confident. It means he has resources. I have what I have. It’s a well-worn sword, I suppose. The blade is chipped in places, its edge is blunter than I would like but I will swing it anyway, and I will rain blow after blow down upon Marr’s defence until either it or the sword breaks. One way or another, this ends. I’m willing to die for this – is he?’

  ‘His death does not concern me,’ said Gorgonson, irritated. ‘Though your rhetoric is fine indeed. You should commit that to memory and give it in a speech to your captains when the time comes. But if you do not rest, if your judgement becomes impaired, you may not live to see who breaks first. And that is what I know.’

  Meduson got to his feet, tired of the conversation now. ‘I’ll expect you with my command when the call to arms is made.’

  Gorgonson nodded. ‘Of course. Will you at least try to rest?’

  ‘If it will cease your hectoring, yes.’

  ‘It won’t, but I appreciate it.’

  ‘And Aug, your thoughts?’

  Gorgonson shrugged. ‘He is different.’

  ‘Different? How?’

  ‘Colder, like a machine.’

  ‘We are all machine in part, brother,’ Meduson replied. He turned his bionic hand, watching the gears and servos work as the fingers curled and uncurled.

  ‘Yes, the flesh is weak,’ said Gorgonson, deliberately trite, and gestured to the main apothecarion beyond the archive room. Several Iron Hands lay in state on the numerous medi-slabs, yet to rise, perhaps never to rise. ‘No one knows that better than I. The Martians did something to him. I can’t find it. I’ve tried but nothing comes up in any examination I’ve made. It’s his mind that concerns me, not his flesh. Something happened to him.’

  ‘Could it be grief? For our fallen father?’

  ‘Perhaps. It takes something aberrant to fashion an effigy of a dead primarch and imbue it with false animus. They believed it was alive.’

  ‘They believed it was him. It gave me pause when I saw it, enthroned but concealed by its cloak and shadows.’

  ‘You wanted it to be true, but your rational mind rejected it as false.’

  Meduson shook his head. ‘It wasn’t rationality. I felt it was wrong, by instinct. Metal is stronger than flesh, but it cannot replace it entirely. It cannot revivify the dead. It is hubris to believe otherwise. The Fraters succumbed to it.’

  ‘Then how do you explain the living, breathing primarch on board our ship?’

  ‘Vulkan? How so?’

  ‘He died, Shadrak. If you believe the rumours, he died more than once. The Salamanders left Macragge with a corpse.’

  Meduson’s eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t trust he is what he claims to be?’

  ‘Oh, it’s him. You can’t fake something like that. It can’t be fashioned, not perfectly. I only ask how is he alive.’

  ‘I think Vulkan is more concerned with why.’

  Gorgonson chuckled at that. ‘Do you know of any Salamander without existential concerns?’

  ‘Nuros?’

  Gorgonson laughed loudly. ‘He has been on the Iron Heart too long.’

  ‘He’ll be here a while longer yet.’

  ‘Vulkan isn’t taking the Drakes with him?

  ‘Just his companions.’

  Gorgonson didn’t question it, but it clearly surprised him.

  ‘I know neither why nor how Vulkan came back from the dead, or if he was ever dead at all,’ said Meduson. ‘I saw him destroy one of father’s arms. I saw that hammer fly into his grasp and indestructible silver turn to nothing with one blow.’

  ‘They scavenged it?’

  ‘From Isstvan – they had to have done.’

  Gorgonson looked horrified at the idea of such sacrilege, however nobly intended.

  ‘How long did they have it?’

  ‘Long enough to fashion it a body, to raise a cult in its honour. I suspect it began as a relic at first, a means of keeping our father alive in some necrotic way. Have you heard of the Keys of Hel?’

  ‘“They are the fires from the mountain. They are what should not and must not be,”’ said Gorgonson, reciting an old verse. ‘“Only in the last days of humanity, when law has no meaning, should any think to break the locks placed upon them.” It is the province of madmen,’ he added.

  ‘Cybernetic resurrection.’

  ‘You think Aug and the Fraters were trying to turn the Keys of Hel and use them to raise our father from the dead?’

  ‘At the root of it, perhaps. But rather than a body, they only had an arm, his hand.’

  Gorgonson exhaled a shuddering breath, rubbing at his chin. His eyes briefly roamed somewhere faraway. ‘Have we become so desperate to turn to such things for answers? Duty ends in death.’

  ‘It failed, whatever it was. Vulkan ended it. I saw the realisation in Aug’s eyes afterwards at what they had done. Or tried to do. Desperation drives desperate acts. I believe he is contrite.’

  ‘I did not see it, so cannot judge. That, like so much else, falls to you, Shadrak.’ He pursed his lips. ‘He has changed, that’s all I can say for certain.’

  ‘The war has changed all of us, Goran. I can’t hold Aug
to account for that.’

  ‘Then you have your answer.’

  ‘It seems I do.’

  Meduson left the apothecarion to prepare for the battle. Sleep would have to wait. Aug would not.

  The Iron Heart felt still despite the slow-burning engines vibrating through its hull. Its crew went about their duties with quiet diligence. Even its flesh-spare warriors kept to their quarters, leaving practice cages empty. Sword-halls filled with deafening silence.

  Lumens flickered in the corridors, weak, stuttering.

  The ship held its breath.

  Only the servitors seemed unperturbed.

  Meduson crossed one in a long ventral corridor, aft of the workshops – male, hairless, its skin bled of colour. It did not speak as it passed the Warleader, staring dully, slaved to its task. Belt-fed tracks had replaced its legs, grinding noisily against the deck, and it had industrial-grade clamps for arms. It carried cargo, a heavy-munitions crate bound for the mass-drivers below.

  A premonition lingered in those soulless eyes, hard to deny. Meduson saw his own cold, dead visage reflected back at him.

  Darkness fell as the lights went down for a few seconds, the ship’s generators struggling to reignite them. A grey half-light returned in its stead, gritty and unclean. It painted Meduson’s armour, stiff and heavy.

  In the shadow light he saw Lumak, his skull clove in two, grimly lumbering towards him. Mechosa followed in his wake, burned half to hell, one foot scraping behind the other, dragging on broken servos. Then came Nuros and Dalcoth, horrifically transformed with pistons and bionic grafts. Dead and yet not dead, revenants both.

  And finally he saw Aug, attended by a skeletal coven of his fellow Fraters, his jerky movements more akin to a machine than a man. Fate beckoned.

  This is the will of iron, a voice uttered, mechanised and without emotion. Aug’s and yet not Aug’s.

  He had become a machine, his blood turned to oil, his sinews to wire, his bones to steel, his eyes to burning diodes, his mind… his mind… Aug had none, only a logic engine, ever calculating, inured and unresponsive to the concepts of honour and brotherhood.

  Cold metal fingers coiled slowly around Meduson’s wrist, his arms, his torso, digging at his flesh, tearing and tearing, his skin stretching and splitting like rubber, until bloody steel gleamed underneath…

  Meduson awoke, heart thundering, breath sawing asthmatically through his lungs. The servitor had moved on. He heard its metal-plated tracks rolling inexorably in the distance. The corridor remained, grim and only half-lit.

  The lumens flared brightly again, scaring off the shadows. It hurt Meduson’s eyes and he blinked, feeling the dry sting.

  ‘Bio-scan,’ he rasped, surprised at the hoarseness in his voice.

  His armour complied, a data-screed unspooling on the slate built into his vambrace. Physiology within acceptable parameters, it said.

  ‘Neurological.’

  A second data-screed overlaid the first, the analysis cerebral/chemical. Beyond acceptable parameters, diagnosis suboptimal. Meduson shut it off. His heart and breathing had normalised. The internal chrono chimed on, measuring his sleep deprivation. He shut that off too.

  He did not meet another soul after that, fictional or actual. The ship echoed like an empty tomb. Ahead, the workshops. Aug would be there.

  The doors parted, offering no resistance, but they ground open slowly on protesting gears. Darkness reigned over light within, the latter provided by a sodium lantern suspended from the ceiling by a trail of thick wire. An entry corridor widened into an expansive work space, barren apart from a full-body armature holding up a largely unscathed suit of Legion war-plate. Aug’s armour. The black lacquer shone where the light hit painted ceramite, and the white gauntlet icon across the left shoulder guard was unsullied. Aug had returned from Lliax pristine, strong. He cut an incongruous figure amongst the rest of the Tenth, battered and patched up as they were.

  Present company included, Meduson thought.

  ‘You look weary, Warleader,’ a voice called from above.

  Meduson looked up to a broad gantry, and the figure he hadn’t noticed upon first entering the room. He pushed down a sense of disquiet at the uncanny timing of the question, and instead greeted his old friend.

  ‘Hand Elect,’ he nodded, smiling. ‘Jebez. My brother.’

  ‘I am glad to be thought of as such,’ said Aug, partly obscured by the gantry mesh that separated them. ‘Join me, Shadrak.’

  Meduson took the metal stairway that led to the upper level gantry and Aug’s actual workshop. His eyes widened as he reached the top of the stairs and saw what had become of his Hand Elect.

  ‘Blood of Medusa…’ Meduson could not help himself. He had not seen Aug without his armour since before Oqueth.

  Scars ravaged much of Aug’s body, the flesh that remained anyway. Metal dominated over skin. Most of his torso had been replaced, synthetic and augmetic organs visible through hardened, transparent plasteel. Both his right leg and arm articulated via gears, servos and pistons. Wires and tubing routed electrical impulses and fabricated machine-blood through a nervous system that had long lacked actual nerves.

  ‘Gorgonson told me that the Martians had to rebuild from the core up, but I had not expected the grafts to be so extensive,’ Meduson confessed.

  Aug flexed his bionic arm, and its mechanisms growled, powerful, durable.

  ‘As I said when I returned aboard the Dannang, Shadrak, I have been remade. Stronger than before, than I ever was in fact.’

  ‘It is… a little disquieting.’

  ‘Gruesome, I’ll admit,’ said Aug, and donned a robe to hide the worst of his patchwork body. ‘What else did Goran tell you?’

  ‘That I need more sleep.’ Meduson examined a few of the pieces Aug had been working on. A finely wrought boltgun lay in pieces on his work bench, as well as a depowered axe, two monomolecular blades with one haft and several krak grenades.

  Aug touched his bionic hand to Meduson’s neck, who recoiled as he felt a tiny mechandendrite pierce his tough skin.

  ‘Apologies, I should have asked first,’ said Aug. ‘I forget sometimes. The implants diminish social inhibition.’

  Meduson rubbed at his neck. The pain was inconsequential. The act had surprised him.

  ‘That might be wise.’

  ‘So would be taking Goran’s advice. I read increased levels of norepinephrine, serotonin and histamine. Allied to your obvious sleep deprivation, it could indicate a transient decrease in maximal cognitive performance, impaired executive and autonomic function, and pressure on both thalamus and prefrontal cortex.’

  ‘You did all that just now?’

  Aug nodded. ‘It’s not just my body that is stronger, Shadrak. My mind is too.’

  ‘And I suppose this is to help occupy it?’ Meduson gestured to the stripped down materiel on the bench.

  Aug took the bolter as if to appraise it. ‘A few modifications to improve damage, fire rate, efficiency.’

  ‘And what of your other labour?’

  Aug turned, eyes narrowed.

  Meduson elaborated. ‘The one Vulkan destroyed. What did you seek to improve with that?’

  Aug’s expression darkened.

  ‘I honestly do not know. Kernag came to me at Lliax. He told me of the cult.’

  Meduson’s jaw clenched at the word, uttered without thought of its import.

  ‘He said he could raise our father from the dead.’

  ‘Such practices are forbidden, Aug. Not to mention impossible in the Gorgon’s case.’

  Aug nodded, contrite. ‘I am aware. I refuted him at first, dis­believing of his rhetoric and wary of rumours I had heard spoken amongst some Iron Fathers.’

  ‘The so-called “Keys of Hel”?’

  Aug nodded again. ‘Perhaps my instincts had been dulle
d by whatever procedure I underwent at Lliax. It made me curious. Kernag showed me the silver hand. Something changed as I saw it. It is difficult to describe. It had animus, influence.’

  ‘Are you saying it was alive?’ asked Meduson, sceptical.

  ‘In a manner of speaking. It had a vital spark.’

  ‘You must have known it could never be our father. What Kernag did… Desecration does not even begin to describe it.’

  ‘And yet, as we fashioned a body, the lie became harder to deny.’

  ‘Had I refused to bend my knee to the reforged Iron Council, to acknowledge the golem you created in our father’s image, what then?’

  Aug lowered his gaze. ‘I hoped it would not come to that. I hoped you would see reason.’

  ‘Reason prevailed, greatly because of Vulkan’s hammer. Had it not, you would have had to kill me, Aug. I will not yield, not now, not after all of this.’

  Aug raised his eyes, so Meduson could measure them in his own. ‘And are you here to kill me, Shadrak? As one old friend to another?’

  Meduson slowly exhaled as if weighing the decision, though it had been made weeks ago in the ruined auditorium.

  ‘No, never that. You swore to serve – you swore on my sword. I needed to be sure. I actually think I wanted to know why.’

  ‘Something came back with the arm,’ said Aug, that is all I can think of to explain it. ‘Something beyond my understanding. I thought it to be the Gorgon’s life essence, somehow alloyed to the metal, but now I know it was something other.’

  ‘I don’t pretend to know the secrets of the galaxy,’ said Meduson. ‘I am just a soldier. I had little to do with the Librarius before Nikaea, and even less now, though I have known some psykers. I believe in the existence of the uncanny. After the massacre, after we scattered, much later, I met a veteran who had been on Isstvan in the long aftermath. His name was Erasmus Ruuman, an Ironwrought. He spoke of things done on that cursed soil that defied reason, of totems of skulls, of crucifixions and the beseeching of elder gods in tongues that had no place in the mouths of men. Worse, he said the gods answered.