Malodrax

by Ben Counter

  This was a place built to withstand a siege. The stairways were too narrow for more than one Space Marine abreast, the doorways had gun ports and the floorboards could be pulled up to reveal a grid through which spears could be thrust into attackers on the floor below. No Imperial Fist was blind to such things, for Rogal Dorn had been a master of siegecraft and the brothers who called him their primarch all learned how a fortress could kill anyone trying to force their way in. While Dorn was a builder of fortresses, the Iron Warriors primarch, Perturabo, had been a besieger, to whom the mightiest fortification was just a puzzle to be unlocked. This fortress was a product of siegecraft at the same level as Dorn’s own, a vast and brutal deathtrap.

  The Imperial Fists were dragged down through the layers of the fortress. Lysander glimpsed Brother Skelpis, his face pale and bloody, trailing the gory stump of his leg, each arm held by an Iron Warrior dragging him along. He saw Brother Halaestus spattered with Drevyn’s blood, struggling against the Iron Warriors holding him, and Lysander knew Halaestus would tear himself apart rather than submit willingly to his Chapter’s enemies.

  Beneath the fortress, beneath the walls and the forges they encompassed, was another structure entirely, the seat of the Iron Warriors on this world protected by the fortifications above. It was shadowy and infernally hot, what light there was coming from yet more forges fed, it seemed, by the heart of the planet itself. Great shapes loomed in the vast underground hangars, half seen in the darkness, some still glowing from the heat of their forging, others moving like giants stretching their limbs after waking.

  At the very heart of it was a crucible, a great spherical chamber half filled with molten fire bubbling up from beneath the planet’s crust, hot enough to scorch the lungs of an unaugmented man. It was accessed through a huge gate of iron, its two halves meeting at an enormous lock. A circular platform suspended over the fire held up a great anvil and from the domed ceiling hung countless weapons and segments of armour.

  Lysander’s senses had come back to him a little. His head still whirled but he could tell, even from here, that the pieces suspended over this great forge were masterpieces. They were sized for Space Marines, and among them were sections of rebuilt armour from marks long lost to the Imperium, power weapons matching size with balance, pieces inlaid with precious stones and metals as well as brutal machines created for industrialised killing.

  ‘Lord Thul!’ cried the Iron Warriors leader, removing his helmet. Beneath was revealed a pale and pocked face with jet-black eyes and a cruel twist of a mouth. Black hair clung to the scalp. ‘We have returned! The scryers told the truth. We found the dogs of Terra, and praise the pantheon, they are destroyed! And more than that. For the continuation of our Legion, we bring these ones to you alive!’

  Over the anvil stood a figure taller than any Space Marine. It was encased in armour so gnarled and jagged it looked like it had accrued over thousands of years rather than being forged by any hand. Beneath it somewhere was an ancient mark of armour, but Lysander could not recognise it from any of the illustrations he recalled depicting the days of the Horus Heresy. The shoulder guards were masses of grinding cogs and pistons and its weight was supported by pneumatic rams that hissed as the figure turned towards the crucible entrance.

  ‘Your return was well omened, Captain Hexal,’ said the creature that had been called Thul. Its voice was thick and deep, welling up from inside the armour like the crucible’s fires welled up below. Its face was a mass of corroded steel with two large clouded lenses for eyes. A single air hose ran down the centre of the face and spurts of greasy smoke surrounded Thul in a filthy halo. ‘And you.’ The lenses turned to Lysander. ‘Would that I could make you understand why you are here. That you could see through our eyes, we who were abandoned by the same Terra you swear by. But I can see by your face, by the hate in it, that no words of mine can ever sway you. I can see that honour is not for you as it is for us.’

  ‘Do not speak of honour,’ spat Lysander.

  ‘As I said,’ replied Thul. ‘Hexal, this one’s weapon.’

  Hexal motioned forward one of the Iron Warriors, who handed Lysander’s hammer to Thul. ‘This is the Fist of Dorn,’ said Thul weighing the weapon in his hands, feeling its weight. ‘A relic from the age of the primarchs, no less. Then you are Captain Darnath Lysander of the First Company. A man much feted by the lords of his Chapter. A future Chapter Master, some say. How distant that fate looks now. You and this hammer have much in common, captain. They are both in my possession, and they will both serve in my armouries one way or another. Hexal, you have brought a corpse with you, I see?’

  ‘But one,’ said Hexal. ‘I knew we would value prisoners over the dead.’ Lysander knew they were referring to Brother Drevyn and the mention of his battle-brother on their lips made his skin crawl.

  ‘Good. Bring it to the observatory. Isolate the others. Bring the captain to the sanatorium. He is the greatest risk. Best he is processed immediately.’

  Hexal’s Iron Warriors hauled Lysander off his feet again.

  ‘I will see you at Dorn’s side!’ cried out Brother Skelpis. ‘At the end of time! At the final battle! I will see you there, my brothers! My captain! At Dorn’s side!’

  ‘Still they understand so little,’ said Thul. ‘They think they are to die.’

  The great doors of the crucible were hauled shut behind Lysander as he was dragged off into the depths of the fortress.

  Lysander’s senses had returned to him by the time he was wheeled into the sanatorium’s anatomy theatre. He had been stripped of his armour and chained to an operating slab, which had been pushed into the observatory by a gaggle of hooded, hunchbacked creatures that stank of corrosive chemicals and machine oil. Their faces, half-glimpsed, were of grainy grey skin wrapped around elongated snouts, like animal skulls inexpertly covered in spare flesh. Their fingers ended in hypodermic needles and medical saws.

  Lysander was looking up at a glazed blister rising above him, the glass dome clouded as if by cataracts. Half-glimpsed shapes were assembled in audience beyond him like students awaiting an anatomy lecture. Perhaps, Lysander thought, that was exactly what they were.

  Lysander fought against his restraints. He knew they would not give, but the principle of it forced him to move. A Space Marine was a prideful creature, Lysander could not deny that, and his pride was inflamed. He had been unarmed, unmanned, his armour stripped away. Mutant hands had clawed at him as they pulled the armour’s segments away. The uncleanness clung to him, and the eyes looking at him beyond the glass were unclean, too, as if whatever they saw became defiled.

  He could see cracked tiles, stained and filthy, hung with cabinets of deformed bones and shelves of rusted medical implements. The hunched creatures shuffled around him.

  The audience were not Iron Warriors, or at least Lysander could see none of them among the indistinct shapes. Lanky, huge-eyed things watched there, long grey fingers touching the glass. Mutants, or aliens, perhaps. Unholy things, gathered to learn at the feet of the Iron Warriors.

  Lysander was aware of a door opening somewhere behind his head. An elongated shadow fell over him. A greyish figure hovered indistinctly above him. Its eyes were large and without whites, watery black lenses set into grey skin. Its nose was a vertical slit and its mouth without lips, and its head was framed by a frond of tattered tendrils that looked like they were rotting in place. Discolouration ran down its skin, weeping from sores and pits in its flesh. A hand reached over Lysander, with three very long fingers.

  ‘The subject is human and yet not human,’ someone said. It was not the alien surgeon, Lysander thought. The voice was level and soulless, as if sleep-taught to someone who was not a native speaker. He thought it was coming from somewhere in the gallery.

  ‘Witness the external signs,’ continued the voice. ‘The surgical scars around the ribcage and abdomen. These are indicative of a systematic series of opera
tions performed in strict sequence. Note the subcutaneous panels concealing the topography of the ribs. The Black Carapace, the final implant of the Space Marine, both armour plating for the central organ tree and a seat for the interfaces that connect the nerve-fibre bundles of the power armour to the subject’s own nervous system.’

  Lysander could make out the speaker, he thought. It wore elaborate armour, scalloped and bladed, its silhouette distinct among the shapes in the audience gallery. Its shoulder guards rose like the horns of a half-moon around its plumed helmet and its shape was obscured by the cloak that hung from one shoulder. A clawed gauntlet gestured as the speaker continued. ‘The Black Carapace lies outermost of the enhancements of a Space Marine, and is the final to be added. Thus the means of his creation can be observed by paring away the layers, as with an ancient ruin where the passing of the ages can be seen the deeper one digs.’

  Lysander did not care about the pain. He had suffered pain before. A Space Marine learned to set it aside, to recognise it as a signal from the body that could be interpreted and understood like anything else. It was the humiliation that dug deep, the knowledge that he would be a curiosity for these creatures, as if he were an animal dissected by some student in the schola progenium.

  That was not how a Space Marine should die. Not just unarmed, not just helpless, but being used as an aid to the enemy. Whatever these allies of the Iron Warriors were, they would learn a little more about their enemy in the Space Marines of the Imperium, and they would learn it from Captain Darnath Lysander.

  Lysander could not have ceased fighting his restraints if he had wanted to. His teeth gritted and the muscles of his neck and torso stood out like coils of rope as he tried to bend his back, fold the operating slab in two underneath him, spring up and tear this place apart.

  ‘Note the muscular development,’ the speaker continued. ‘The result of the operation of the progenoid organ, the gene-seed, which we shall see in good time.’

  The gene-seed organ, the organ cultured from the flesh of Rogal Dorn himself, implanted in Lysander’s throat, that sacred flesh which made a Space Marine more than a man. Lysander’s bile rose to think the alien even knew of it. For one of them to hold it in his hands would be a blasphemy, the desecration of a relic, the despoiling of holy ground. But worse than that – if Lysander’s gene-seed was not harvested and returned to the Chapter on his death, it would not be implanted into an initiate to take his place. That speck of light, that part of the primarch, would be snuffed out forever, and the galaxy would be a little darker.

  If it was in his power, he would not let them. He would fight them to the end. Even if he merely blunted their needles or forced their blades to slip, if his every effort was nothing more than an inconvenience to them as they cut him apart, he would fight. It was his duty, and he would not die with his duty undone.

  A surgical saw whined and its circular blade descended over him, towards the scar that bisected his chest. Lysander’s joints cracked as he strained against the shackles holding him, and the audience leaned closer to watch as the first blood flowed.

  3

  ‘Upon landing, I instituted a strict moral quarantine over my acolytes lest this world have a baleful influence on them. In the days to come I would regret permitting some of them to join the landing party at all, for Malodrax erodes the principles of the mind as the shrieking gales erode its rocks.’

  – Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan

  Lysander’s skin crawled as the smell of Malodrax hit him. Rust and smoke, and dried blood, heavy and metallic. It was a taste in his mouth, and he knew he would not get rid of it until he left this place again. Perhaps even then it would stay, the taste of metal and blood always on his tongue.

  He jumped down from the shuttle’s embarkation ramp onto the parched, cracked earth. Waves of heat washed off it from the shuttle’s landing jets. First Sergeant Kaderic’s squad jumped down around him, bolters scanning in every direction.

  The sky was the colour of copper. The clouds were a dark murky green. The earth was red-brown, dry and cracked, broken up into ridges and valleys from one horizon to the other. In the distance were shapes something like buildings, but lopsided and decrepit. Flocks of airborne predators wheeled in the distance.

  And it stank. It stank like old blood. Lysander lifted the faceplate of his helmet and spat on the ground, like a ritual.

  ‘Secure, by sections!’ ordered Kaderic. The strike force had trained for the landing on the shuttle decks of the Breaker, and each Space Marine had his section of the perimeter to scan and secure. In seconds it was done, and within half a minute the shuttle doors were being hauled shut behind the strike force. Thirty-four Space Marines – Squads Kaderic and Gorvetz, and Chaplain Lycaon’s command squad, plus Brother Halaestus, Lysander, and Techmarine Kho and the Imperial Fist who served as Kho’s pilot. A pair of Land Speeders, rapid scouting skimmers under Kho’s command, had been dropped off by the gunships that accompanied the two personnel shuttles. The gunships had low enough orbital signatures that the chances were, no one on Malodrax was aware the strike force had landed.

  The gunships, compact and sturdy Stormtalons, had fuel requirements too costly to guarantee they could function for long on Malodrax. The Imperial Fists had no friendly supply lines to count on and Lysander’s information on the planet suggested there was no abundance of fuel sources to capture. The gunships would be easy to spot, too, larger and less nimble than the Land Speeders that could cling to the terrain. The Stormtalons took off back for their berths in orbit – the strike force would have to walk.

  Lysander spotted Halaestus. He was at his part of the perimeter, and looked back from his bolter sights once satisfied that his angle was clear. There was nothing that could be said, not with what had happened the last time Lysander and Halaestus had been on this world, not with Brother Skelpis not being there. Halaestus glanced at Lysander, but said nothing either.

  ‘Good choice, Lysander,’ said Chaplain Lycaon, looking around the valley. ‘Defensible and sheltered. When the gunships clear we will leave no silhouettes.’

  ‘We cannot stay long,’ said Lysander.

  ‘Indeed not. We move out once the Land Speeders are on the move.’

  ‘Keep a watch on the skies,’ said Lysander. ‘Most of the predators are just animals, but the powers of Malodrax have airborne spies. Daemons.’

  ‘Kho’s guns will keep us hidden,’ said Lycaon. ‘How keen is your sense of direction, now you are down here?’

  ‘We head north-west,’ said Lysander. ‘Two days’ fast march. The ground levels out closer to the fortress but we should still be hidden well enough. We may have to leave the Land Speeders once we get closer.’

  ‘The sergeants have misgivings about your plan once we get there.’

  Lysander did not rise to the comment. Lycaon was testing him. That was why he led this strike force – for Lysander was the captain, the position was still honorary in practice. Lycaon was in charge down here. ‘There is no other way,’ said Lysander. ‘Either we take this path, or we leave Malodrax alone and our brothers unavenged.’

  ‘Then our duty is clear,’ said Lycaon. He spoke into the strike force’s vox-net. ‘Brothers! Brother Kho has the point, he will range ahead with our Land Speeders. The rest, keep good pace and keep our profile to a minimum. This world has eyes everywhere. Move out!’

  The strike force came across the first war machine within the half-hour. They made good time even over the broken earth and through narrow crevasses, with Techmarine Kho always just around the next bend. The drone of the Land Speeders’ engines mingled with the thin whistling of the wind that hissed across the shattered landscape.

  Lysander rounded the rock forming the next bend to see the Land Speeders hovering, the mounted guns trained on the hulk of rusting metal that towered just ahead.

  Each Land Speeder was a large enough vehicle to carry a crew of two Spac
e Marines and an array of weaponry, with a nose-mounted assault cannon as well as the mounted guns, but each looked like an insect next to the enormous bulk of the structure in front of them. It resembled a siege tower, its sides clad in bands of rusting iron and hung with the threadbare remains of war banners. The desiccated remains of countless corpses were hung around the tower’s battlements like a shrivelled necklace, and many more had fallen into a drift of skin and bones around the enormous spiked wheels at the tower’s base. The tower leaned heavily to one side where it had apparently toppled into the valley, and its ramp hung open like a jaw studded with spikes resembling needle teeth.

  A flock of airborne predators, something like winged lizards, shrieked as they flew from rusted holes near the top of the tower, alarmed by the approaching drone of the Land Speeders. They hacked and spat as they dissolved off towards the horizon, spiralling around the guns mounted on the top of the tower.

  ‘Do we go around, Chaplain?’ voxed Techmarine Kho. He was sat in the gunner’s seat of one of the Land Speeders, the articulated manipulator arms mounted on his backpack visible outside the lines of the cockpit.

  ‘We go through,’ replied Lycaon. ‘Watch our backs, Techmarine.’

  The strike force approached the many openings around the base of the tower. It had sunk into the earth so there was no way under, but the partial collapse of the structure had forced open great rents in the steel, exposing the metal beams and darkness within.

  ‘What do you know, Lysander?’ voxed Lycaon.

  ‘These are proving grounds,’ replied Lysander. ‘The Iron Warriors make war machines. They pit them against one another across these lands, and those that survive are sent to join Black Crusades across the galaxy. This machine did not survive.’

  ‘These are plasma blastguns,’ voxed Kho from his Land Speeder, which was ascending the slope up near the guns that crowned the siege tower. ‘Would that I could get a better look at the induction coils.’