He hauled open the door to the operator’s cabin and growled at the hunched figure hard-wired into the control mechanism. A hybrid thing of machine parts and bruised flesh, it had once been an Iron Warrior whose mortal remains had been housed in the sarcophagus of a Dreadnought.
‘Brother Lacuna,’ said Bronn, his voice muffled behind the fire-blackened visor he had taken from the pulped remains of his former captain on Hydra Cordatus. ‘You are too far forwards. Pull back ten metres.’
‘I will not,’ answered the operator, his voice a wet, rasping thing of droning vox-scraps stitched together to form a stunted vocabulary. ‘To raise the first block, I must be ahead of the pack.’
Bronn sighed. No Iron Warrior who could stand, wield a weapon or entrenching tool wished to demean himself by operating one of these machines, yet they were an integral part of the Iron Warriors modus operandi. Just another of the many contradictions inherent to the Iron Warriors. Only those plucked from wrecked Dreadnoughts or too badly injured to survive were deemed fit for such duties, and even then they weren’t the most suitable candidates.
‘You must pull back,’ insisted Bronn. ‘The first layer of foundation needs to be dug simultaneously. The rock at this depth is layered with staggered bands of loose soil and will collapse inwards if it is not strengthened at the same time. You understand?’
Lacuna stared at Bronn, though it was impossible to tell what was going on in his ravaged brain. The similar urge to wreak harm and inflict mayhem that saw many Dreadnoughts reduced to blood-crazed madness afflicted the machine operators, though their madness was of an altogether more dangerous kind.
The kind that could cause a fortress to fall.
‘I understand,’ said Lacuna in his chopped-up language. A hash of binary blurted from his vox-grille, and Bronn was glad the visor hid his grin as he caught the gist of Lacuna’s insult.
‘Just get it done,’ said Bronn. ‘And if you call me a fabricator of wooden walls again, I’ll have what’s left of you wired into a mine-clearance drone.’
Even with half his face gone and the remainder replaced by cannibalised servitor parts, Lacuna was able to register surprise at Bronn’s understanding of binaric cant. A frothed grate of machine laughter bubbled up from Lacuna’s rebuilt throat, as the bulldozer’s engine fired up and the gears clattered into reverse.
Bronn withdrew from the cab and slammed the door shut, riding along on the running boards until he was satisfied the machine was where it was supposed to be. He banged a hand on the door and dropped to the hard floor of the cavern. Its surface had been planed smooth by melta fire in readiness for the earth-moving machines and the Black Basilica, and Bronn felt its strength as he knelt and placed his palm upon it.
‘Is the rock strong?’ asked the harsh, guttural bark of this host’s war leader.
Bronn stood and gave a curt nod. ‘It is good rock, Warsmith Honsou, old rock,’ he said. ‘The kind of rock that can stand against everything the universe has to throw at it. The kind of rock that once formed the heart of Olympia.’
Honsou shook his head at such ill-placed nostalgia. ‘Olympia’s rock failed in the end, didn’t it?’
Bronn’s jawline clenched. ‘Its people failed,’ he said. ‘Not its rock.’
Honsou never missed a chance to remind his Legion that they had destroyed their own homeworld after its populace rebelled against their lawful rulers. It seemed wilfully perverse to twist such a knife in the guts of his men, but Bronn had long-since learned to let such barbs pass without comment.
‘But the rock of Calth will fall?’ asked Honsou.
‘It will not stand before the inevitability of Perturabo’s true sons,’ Bronn assured him, meeting Honsou’s barb with one of his own.
‘I never thought it would,’ said Honsou with a lopsided grin. The upper quadrant of the Warsmith’s face was a mangled, knotted mass of scar tissue, mortician-grafted augmetics and raw flesh, the result of a close encounter with a bolter shell and a collapsing tunnel. What might once have been considered roguish was now pulled into a permanently sardonic leer. One arm was encased in Mark IV plate pulled from the body of a dead Iron Warrior, the other a perfect replica of an arm fashioned from silver mercury.
Honsou saw Bronn’s attention and lifted the arm up before him.
‘This whole cave could fall and this arm wouldn’t have a scratch on it if you dug it out.’
‘The rest of us would be crushed, though,’ pointed out Bronn.
Honsou grinned. ‘Always so literal,’ he said. ‘I think that’s the real reason the Iron Warriors followed the Warmaster into rebellion. Horus probably said it as a joke and Perturabo took him at his word.’
‘Then that just shows how little you know,’ snapped Dassadra.
Bronn held up a fist to prevent Dassadra speaking again, but Honsou appeared to be amused rather than angered at his aide’s outburst.
‘He has spark, this one,’ said Honsou.
‘One of Berossus’s men,’ answered Bronn.
‘Ah.’
Before Honsou could provoke Dassadra again, Bronn said, ‘Is there something you needed, Warsmith?’
Honsou nodded, acquiescing to Bronn’s authority here. ‘You are ready to begin the advance?’
‘I am,’ confirmed Bronn. ‘Just give the word and I’ll have a wall built across that ridge inside a day.’
‘Good. Who’s leading the first push?’
‘Jaegoth Ghent.’
Honsou nodded. Ghent was a good man under fire. Lord Toramino had had most of his nervous system stripped out by adepts of the Dark Mechanicus and replaced with artificial receptors. It made him a dour battle-brother, but a warrior who wouldn’t flinch if an artillery shell landed right next to him. Ghent had directed the approach saps to Khalan-Ghol, and Honsou had been careful to spare his life in the wake of the carnage surrounding the last days of his former abode.
‘Tell him to stand down,’ said Honsou.
‘What? Why?’
‘You and I are going lead the push from the cavern,’ said Honsou.
‘Are you insane?’ demanded Bronn. ‘Why would you order such a thing?’
‘It’s been too long since I got my hands dirty with a pick and broke the earth of an enemy world,’ said Honsou. ‘I need to get back to what I do best, building walls for big guns. And if I’m going to do that, I need someone who knows the rock better than anyone else at my side.’
‘If the half-breed wants to die, let him,’ said Dassadra. ‘No-one will mourn him.’
Bronn expected Honsou to kill Dassadra for his temerity, but Honsou just laughed.
‘Maybe not,’ said Honsou. ‘The daemon lord may command the Bloodborn, but I lead this host, and one of the benefits of that is being able to do what I damn well please. Bronn, get this little bastard away from me before he spoils my good mood and I kill him.’
Bronn ordered Dassadra away with a curt nod, and stared at Honsou.
‘Why are you really doing this?’ he asked once Dassadra was out of earshot.
‘Do I need a reason?’ countered Honsou.
‘If you’re going to lead my machines out there, I need to know you’re doing it for the right reasons. I’m not going to let you get them destroyed just to prove a point to the daemon lord or the Legion.’
‘And what point would I be proving?’
‘That you’re an Iron Warrior,’ said Bronn. ‘A true son of Perturabo.’
‘Do I need to prove that? Look at where we are. Not even Perturabo brought the iron and the stone to Ultramar.’
Bronn shook his head and lowered his voice so that no-one but Honsou would hear him.
‘No matter how many escalades you make, no matter how many breaches you storm or fortresses you raze, they will never respect you as an Iron Warrior. This will make no difference to how these warriors see you. To them you will always be the half-breed.’
Honsou put a hand on Bronn’s shoulder and turned him towards the light at the cavern mouth. Rippli
ng shafts of sunlight danced in the blue-hazed fumes of the grumbling bulldozers and lifter rigs.
‘Beyond that opening are my enemies,’ said Honsou. ‘Behind me are warriors who would happily turn their weapons on me if they thought they could get away with it. Do you really think I’m doing this to try and impress anyone? I know who I am, and I don’t give a greenskin’s fart what anyone thinks of me.’
‘Then what do you hope to achieve?’
‘I need them to see me make war like an Iron Warrior,’ said Honsou, leaning in close and baring his teeth in sudden anger. ‘Even if they never accept me as one, I need them to know that I fight like one. I need them to understand that if anything happens to me, if any of them make a move against me, then they’re all going to die on this forsaken rock. I’m the only one who can win the war on Calth, and I want them to know that. Without me, this invasion is over.’
‘And if we die out there?’ asked Bronn as Honsou walked away. ‘What happens then?’
‘We’ll be dead,’ said Honsou. ‘What does it matter what happens after that?’
Leaving Soltarn Vull Bronn to oversee the last preparations for the assault, Honsou made his way back through the cavern, relishing the sudden sense of excitement that filled him. It had been a spur of the moment decision to lead the assault into the great underground cavern, but it felt right. It felt good. Every word he had said to Bronn was true, but there was more to it than that.
Honsou cared little for the esteem of his fellow Iron Warriors, but the voices that harped at him from the darkest recesses of his mind demanded he prove his worth every moment of every day.
They are right to hate you…
The Clonelord should never have wrought you…
You are nothing but an aborted experiment that escaped the furnace…
Most of these voices made no sense to Honsou, for he remembered nothing but disjointed scraps of his birth as an Iron Warrior. Nor could he recall the life he had lived before being transformed into a thing reviled by those he had been crafted from and those he had been created for. No, the drive – the obsession – he had to place himself in harm’s way came from the need to prove those voices wrong.
He was as good as any Iron Warrior.
He could fight as hard and with as much cunning and dogged determination as any of those crafted from Perturabo’s gene-seed. And if he had to set the galaxy afire from one spiral arm to the other to prove it, then so be it.
Honsou had long ago come to this realisation, but had never voiced it to another soul. Let them think he wanted to be like them. Let them think he wanted to be one of them. Their hate only spurred him on, and their sneering condescension only made him stronger.
His fists clenched and he unsheathed the monstrous, night-bladed axe from its leather harness at his shoulder. The weapon had belonged to a warrior of the Black Legion, but like most of the accoutrements of war Honsou now sported, it had been taken as a trophy of murder. His augmetic eye had been plucked from the ruined skull of a Savage Mortician, and the impervious, silver-steel arm had been sawn from the body of a captive Ultramarine.
Further back in the long tunnel that led to the irradiated surface of Calth, a series of armoured blockhouses had been built in staggered chevrons. The Iron Warriors never paused on the march without constructing solid walls to protect their fighters. M’kar might have an inexhaustible army of daemons to call upon, but Honsou needed to husband his resources.
Warriors in burnished plate ran mock assaults with tiny clockwork armies thrown against miniature fortresses, cleaned weapons that had been cleaned a thousand times already or simply stood like ageless statues and waited for the order to attack. Honsou saw Cadaras Grendel and the Newborn working through a series of combat drills before a blockhouse at the centre of the ugly constructions of steel and stone.
Grendel had taken over the Newborn’s training since Ardaric Vaanes’ capture, but his methods were far from subtle, and he did not have the fluid panache of the former Raven Guard. Where Vaanes had sought to teach the Newborn from a standpoint of making it a better warrior, all Grendel wanted was to make it a better killer.
A subtle difference, and one that mattered little in the crucible of combat, but a difference nonetheless. Honsou had often watched the Newborn train with Vaanes, grudgingly enjoying the ballet of limbs and blades, the lethal choreography of death and the bouts that were more like dances than brutal combats. The Newborn had tried to learn more than just battle skills from Vaanes; it wanted to learn of its soul and how it could rise above its nature to become something more. No such teachings were to be found in Grendel’s sparring, only bloody, bruising lessons in killing. If the Newborn sought any higher truths to its existence in Grendel’s tutelage, it was having those desires beaten out of it.
Honsou found it hard to look upon the creature, seeing the face of his nemesis in its lopsided features and dead skin mask.
Hot-housed in the nightmarish Daemonculaba womb-slaves, the Newborn was a dark mirror of Uriel Ventris, a hybrid by-blow of warp spawned genetics. No-one had expected it to survive, but it had lived and become stronger than anyone could have foreseen. Better to harness and mould such a creature in the ways of its masters before allowing it to become something of its own.
Honsou paused to watch Grendel and the Newborn fight.
It wasn’t pretty, a brawl of superhumans who fought without the drag of honour, rules or the need to play fair. Knowing the skill of Grendel and the Newborn, it was likely the bout had been going on for quite some time. Elbows, knees and heads were weapons, a moment of weakness an opening. Their fight was not about who was the best, but about who was left standing. Grendel sent a vicious right cross at the Newborn’s jaw, the fist driving with enough force to pulp rock. The Newborn swayed aside, but Grendel’s elbow jabbed, cracking it in the jaw and hurling it from its feet.
Grendel followed up with a crushing knee to the groin and a thundering series of rabbit punches to the Newborn’s throat. Honsou grimaced as he heard bone break and flesh rupture. The bout was over, but Grendel kept up his furious assault without pause.
‘I think you beat him,’ called Honsou, and Grendel turned to look at him with a grin of triumph. The mohawked warrior’s chest heaved with the adrenaline of battle as the Newborn spat a geyser of brackish fluid and rolled onto its side.
‘Remind me never to get into a fight with you, Grendel,’ said Honsou, holding a hand out to his lieutenant. Grendel looked up, his malignantly scarred features a clenched fist of venomous anger.
Honsou saw the look and said, ‘Don’t even think about it.’
Grendel shrugged and took Honsou’s silver hand. His fists were coated in blood that vanished into the depths of the alien limb as Honsou pulled him to his feet.
‘After we’re done here, you and I need to get in the ring,’ said Grendel. ‘Ever since Khalan-Ghol I’ve wanted to beat you bloody.’
‘Trust me,’ said Honsou. ‘The feeling’s mutual, but I need you alive.’
Grendel twisted his neck and spat a mouthful of crimson spittle as the Newborn climbed to its feet. A faint luminosity shimmered beneath its skin, as though its heart were a lumen globe buried beneath its armour instead of a beating organ. The bones Grendel had broken were already healing, and the cuts his mailed fists had opened on the Newborn’s face were sealing even as Honsou watched. He’d long been aware of the Newborn’s ability to undo the most horrific damage, but it never failed to unsettle him.
‘Is it time to launch the attack?’ it asked.
Honsou nodded, but kept his eyes on Grendel.
Though its skin hung loosely on the bone beneath with a mannequin’s artificiality, there was no mistaking the patrician cast of its inherited features. He didn’t know what the creature had looked like before its transformation in the Daemonculaba, but it bore the unmistakable gene-cast of Uriel Ventris.
‘Bronn has everything in place, and we’re ready to move,’ said Honsou.
‘I don�
�t like Bronn,’ said Grendel.
‘You don’t like anyone,’ pointed out Honsou.
‘True,’ admitted Grendel. ‘But he really gets under my skin.’
‘Why?’ asked the Newborn. ‘From what I have seen, Soltarn Vull Bronn is a highly competent warrior. His geophysical knowledge is second to none. Better even than yours, Warsmith.’
Honsou wanted to feel slighted, but he knew the Newborn was right.
‘There’s a trace of the witch to him,’ said Grendel, swinging his shoulders to loosen the muscles and twisting his neck from side to side. ‘I don’t care how many sieges a man’s fought, you can’t know the heart of a planet’s rock just by touching it and looking at it.’
‘I don’t care how he does it,’ said Honsou. ‘He’s never wrong.’
‘There’s truth in that,’ nodded Grendel with customary capriciousness. ‘How long before he gets a practicable wall up?’
‘It won’t be long, no more than a day,’ said Honsou.
‘We will lose a great deal of men to complete a wall in so short a time,’ said the Newborn.
‘We stand to lose a lot more than just men if we don’t get this done quickly.’
The Newborn nodded, accepting Honsou’s logic, but its head cocked to one side as it read a hidden truth behind his expression.
‘What are you not telling us?’ it asked.
The attack began, as all Iron Warrior attacks began, with a punishing artillery barrage. The guns at the tunnel mouth boomed and roared, filling the cavern with choking banks of acrid propellant smoke. Vast, ceiling-mounted extraction units sucked great lungfuls of the smoke and pumped it back through the rock to the surface of Calth, though no amount of machinery could totally eliminate the chemical reek of explosives fashioned in the heart of a daemon world. No sooner had the first barrage been launched than the second was away. Mutants and adrenal-boosted mecha-slaves fed the voracious appetite of the guns, hauling heavy flatbeds of shells to the artillery line.
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