reached down and caught hold of his head. ‘The machine will endure.’
Then, with a single, sharp motion, she snapped his neck. It was a small mercy, but one she was only too happy to provide. Sooj had served faithfully, and well, after all.
The alarms fell silent. She looked towards the doors and shivered as the neural strand connecting her to her combat-maniple shuddered. 6-Friest felt 9-Jud’s death through its quivering filaments. She felt the heat that washed over him, consuming his organic components and cooking his brain within its shell of bone and metal. His last thought pulsed across the surface of her mind before flickering into static. ‘Like the breath of Mars,’ she murmured.
He’d always been a bit of a poet, she thought, as she turned towards the heavy bay doors. Something slammed against the metal, causing it to distend and bulge.
She turned and darted up the steps to the top of the platform, robes swirling about her legs. The side of the lander opened like a blossom of metal, accompanied by the hiss of unseen pneumatics. A cloud of incense issued forth, heralding the figure which stepped out to meet her as she reached the lander.
The servitor was rad-hardened, and its head ended at the top of its lower jaw. The rest of its head was taken up by a holographic projector, surrounded by censer-exhausts, which spewed caustic, sterilising incense into the air around the servitor. The inhuman features of the technomagos in charge of her operation flickered into view as the servitor stepped down out of the transport.
‘Report,’ he said.
Wordlessly, 6-Friest held up the cipher, in its protective case. The technomagos’ holographic eyepieces whirred and clicked, focusing in on the cipher. A burble of sound squawked through the servitor’s speakers and it held out a bulky claw. She deposited the cipher into its care, and the servitor slid it into a specially prepared node on its armoured chassis. Safe within that node, the cipher would remain inviolate even if the servitor were jettisoned into the vacuum of space.
‘At last,’ the technomagos rasped. ‘The final cipher of Magos Arcturus Zheng, devised before his disappearance beyond the Ghoul Stars. What knowledge it must contain, what secrets…’ The eyepieces whirred and clicked again, focusing on her rad-scarred features. ‘You have done well,
Alpha 6-Friest.’
‘Acknowledged, Archmagos Vule,’ she said. She glanced at the transport. It was small, albeit bulky, but it could hold herself and several of her remaining skitarii. She looked up, through the open bay. The skies were full of tyranid aero-forms, the clouds choked and stricken through with purple, sickly veins of crackling bioluminescence. ‘Probability of priority evacuation?’
‘Nil,’ Vule said.
6-Freist closed her eyes, but only for a moment. ‘Understood,’ she said, tonelessly.
‘Your rad-output is unacceptable, Alpha 6-Friest. It might damage the cipher if proximity continues,’ Vule said.
‘Explanations are unnecessary, archmagos,’ 6-Friest said. She raised her helmet and slid it on, locking it into place with a twitch of her fingers. ‘Cogs do not question. They merely turn. I only ask that prayers be said on our behalf.’
Vule was silent, for long moments. Then, the servitor reached up, as if its puppeteer, so many millions of miles above the dying world, had inadvertently tugged on a string. The claw twitched, mere millimetres shy of her arm, before falling back. ‘Omnissiah bless you, daughter of the machine,’
Vule said. The hologram flickered and faded. The servitor turned and trundled back up into the flyer. 6-Friest turned away.
The doors at the end of the bay exploded inwards, skidding across the floor, trailing sparks. A tide of alien filth flooded into the loading bay, led by the roaring, monstrous shape of a carnifex, its carapace scarred by rad-burns. The bay shuddered as it screeched in rage.
‘Omnissiah guide and keep you all,’ 6-Friest said, as she hefted her weapon.
‘And pray for our brothers, whose task is not yet done. Our burden is soon to be set aside, our service to the Machine-God complete, but theirs must continue.’
‘We pray,’ her maniple murmured, as one.
The carnifex surged up the steps of the dais, plasma belching from its distended maw. Hormagaunts swarmed up the steps alongside it, and behind them came worse things. A crawling tide of filthy creation, a wave of flesh.
When metal met flesh, flesh failed. But in failing, it could tangle and swallow. But it could not, would not, consume. She stroked her carbine, wondering how long it would be forced to sit and wait for the servants of the
Machine-God to come and take it away. I am sorry, old friend, she thought, as she and her skitarii opened fire. Be patient, for they will come for you, and you will sing the death-song of Mars anew, on other battlefields. The radium carbine shivered in her grip as she fired, as if in melancholy response.
The carnifex reached the top of the platform. A skitarius died, rent asunder by snapping claws. Another was incinerated by a boiling gout of plasma. 6-Friest lifted her arc maul and stepped past the burning remains to confront the monstrous flesh. Behind her, she heard the roar of thrusters. Her mission was done. Her purpose was served, all subroutines completed.
The carnifex rose up over her, pale flesh already blackening and blistering from its proximity to she and the others. Its jaw sagged, and she could see the incandescent mass growing within its gullet. She smiled as she felt the wash of its heat roll over her, consuming what little flesh was left to her, even as she swung the arc maul towards its skull. 9-Jud had been right.
It was just like the soothing breath of Mars.
THE EYE OF MEDUSA
by David Guymer
When the Adeptus Mechanicus world of Thennos falls into
insurrection, the Iron Hands bring retribution upon the traitors.
But the taint on the world threatens to destroy the purity of the
machine and introduce something dark to the Iron Hands’
universe…
Find this title, and many others, on blacklibrary.com
A SANCTUARY OF WYRMS
PETER FEHERVARI
- BEGIN RECORDING -
We walk blindly along a knife-edge slicing into oblivion. If we misstep we fall from our path. If we walk true we fall with our path. Perhaps there is a difference, but I have come to doubt it. Nevertheless, I will honour the Greater Good and allow you to draw your own conclusions from the facts.
I have little time, but even in extremis one must observe the correct protocols. That is what it means to be a t’au amongst savages. Whatever else I have lost to this diseased planet, I will not lose that. Therefore know that I am Por’ui Vior’la Asharil, third-stream daughter of Clan Kherai. Though I hail from a sept of worlds where the wisdom of the water caste is eclipsed by the ferocity of the fire caste, my family has served the T’au Empire with grace since the dawn of the first colonies. As I serve with this, my final account.
And so I shall offer you a beginning. Let it be the grey-green murk that is the perennial stuff of Fi’draah, my new world. As I stepped from my shuttle the planet seized me in a stinking, sweltering embrace and wouldn’t let go.
Blinking and choking in the smog, I heard harsh voices and harsher laughter; then someone thrust a filtrator mask over my face and I could breathe again.
‘The first time is like drowning,’ my saviour said. ‘It gets better.’
I don’t recall who the speaker was, but he lied: breathing this world never got any better.
‘You have evidently made powerful enemies for one so young, Asharil,’ the ambassador said without preamble, peering down from the cushioned pulpit of his hovering throne drone. His voice was soft, yet vibrant. It filled the
spacious audience chamber like liquid silk, the weapon of a master orator.
His summons had followed directly upon my arrival and I was mortified by my dishevelled state.
‘I do not understand, honoured one,’ I blustered, stumbling between respect and revulsion for the ancient who presi
ded over our forces on this remote planet. O’Seishin’s authority was a testament to the excellence of our caste, but he reeked of years beyond the natural span of the t’au race. His flesh had aged to deep cobalt leather, barely concealing the harsh planes of his skull, but his eyes were bright.
‘This is a terminal world,’ he continued, ‘a graveyard for broken warriors and forgotten relics like myself, not a proving ground for the hot blood of youth. Who did you offend to get yourself posted here, Asharil?’ He smiled, but his eyes belied it.
‘I walk the water path,’ I answered, seeking the natural poise of our caste.
‘My blood runs cool and silent, so that my voice may weave–’ O’Seishin’s snort cut me short like a physical blow.
‘I am too old for wordplay, girl!’ He leaned forwards and a strand of spittle escaped his lips. ‘Why have you come to Fi’draah? Who sent you?’
‘Honoured one…’ I stammered, struggling to avert my gaze from the lethargic descent of his drool. ‘Your pardon, but I requested this posting. I have made a study of the language and customs of the humans, ’ – I deliberately used the gue’la word for themselves – ‘and Fi’draah offers most excellent opportunities to deepen my insight.’
He appraised me with a distrust so candid it was almost conspiratorial, as if we were both willing players in a game of lies. A game that he was used to winning…
‘So you wish to test yourself in the field, Asharil?’ He smiled again and this time I saw humour there, though no humour I cared to share. ‘Then I shall not deny you. Indeed, I believe I have a most suitable commission for you.’
I will never know why O’Seishin became my enemy in that one brief meeting, but he proved to be the least of the blights awaiting me on this world.
Of the long conflict between the T’au Empire and the gue’la Imperium for mastery of Fi’draah, I shall not speak. Mysteries shroud the war like whispering smoke, but I learned little of them before O’Seishin dispatched
me to oblivion. Of the planet itself I could say much, for I travelled its wilderness for almost five months, but I will content myself with a single truth: whatever you are told in your orientation, it will not prepare you for the reality of this place. To classify Fi’draah as a ‘jungle world’ or a ‘water world’ is to garb a corpse in finery and call it beautiful. Eighty per cent of its surface is drowned in viscid, lethargic oceans that blend into the sky in a perpetual cycle of evaporation and drizzle, wreathing everything in a grey-green miasma that seeps into the flesh and spirit. The continents are ragged tangles of mega-coral choked with vegetation that looks – and smells – like it has been dredged up from the depths. Stunted trees with fleshy trunks and bladder-like fronds vie with drooping tenements of fungi and titanic anemone clusters, everything strangling or straddling or simply growing upon everything else – fecundity racing decay so fast you can almost see it.
Whether Sector O-31 is the worst of Fi’draah’s territories I cannot say, but it must surely rank amongst them. The gue’la call it ‘the Coil’, a name infinitely more fitting than our own sober designation, for there is nothing remotely sober about that malign wilderness. A serpentine spiral of waterlogged jungles, it is the dark heartland of Fi’draah’s largest, most untamed continent. The war has left it almost untouched, but rumours haunt it like bad memories: of regiments swallowed whole before they could clash…
Of lost patrols still fighting older wars than ours… And of ancient things sleeping beneath the waters…
Naturally, I dismissed such nonsense. My task was to cast the light of reason across this enigma and ‘unravel the Coil’ (as O’Seishin so artfully sold it). I was to accompany Fio’vre Mutekh, a distinguished cartographer of the earth caste on his quest to map the region. Fool that I was, I believed myself honoured! It was only later, when I saw how the Coil twisted in upon itself, that I realised the absurdity of our endeavour. I have often wondered whether O’Seishin is still laughing at me.
It says much about the nature of the earth caste that Mutekh approached his impossible assignment without rancour. A robust t’au in his autumn cycle, he had a pompous manner that exasperated me, but he was utterly rigorous in his work. His assistant, Xanti, was a placid autaku (or data tech) who spoke rarely and never met my gaze. I believe he preferred the company of his neo-sentient data drone to his fellow t’au.
The fourth and final person of note was our protector and guide, Shas’ui Jhi’kaara. A fire warrior and veteran of Fi’draah, she regarded the jungle with the tender distrust of a predator who knows it is also prey, and like many alpha predators she commanded her own pack: a dozen gue’la janissaries equipped with flak-plate and pulse carbines. They were all Imperial deserters, lured from the enemy by the promise of better rations rather than ideology, and despite the trappings of our civilisation they remained barbarians. Every night they gambled, quarrelled and brawled amongst themselves, but never in Jhi’kaara’s presence. Had they known I spoke their native tongue they would have guarded their words more closely. Listening in on their crude passions and superstitions, I marvelled that their stunted species had ever reached the stars.
Together we entered the Coil: earth, water, fire… and mud, travelling its strange waterways in a pair of aging Devilfish hover transports. Every few days Mutekh would spot a ‘notable feature’ and call a halt. Then we would spend an eternity recording some obscure geological phenomenon or ancient indigene ruin. As the cartographer updated his maps and the janissaries patrolled, the jungle would press in, watching us with a thousand hungry eyes that belonged to a single beast.
‘It hates us,’ Jhi’kaara said once, surprising me as I stared back at the beast.
‘But it welcomes us in the expectation that we will grow careless.’
‘It is just a jungle, shas’ui,’ I said, squaring up to the warrior. ‘It has no thoughts.’
‘You are lying, waterkin,’ Jhi’kaara said. ‘You see the truth, but like all your kind, you fear it.’
‘My kind?’ I was shocked. ‘We are the same kind. We are both t’au.’
Her face was hidden behind the impassive, lens-studded mask of her combat helmet, but I sensed her sneer.
As our expedition stretched from weeks into months I came to detest every one of my companions, but Jhi’kaara most of all. While I recognised the place of the fire caste in the Tau’va, there was a coiled violence about her that disturbed me. Perhaps it was her hideous facial scarring or her playful contempt… But no… I believe it was something deeper. Like O’Seishin, she had become tainted by this world.
Taint. Such an irrational term for a t’au to use; surely one better suited to the
Imperial fanatics who condemn otherness for otherness’ sake? Perhaps, but lately I have come to wonder whether the fanatics may have it right.
It is time I told you of the Sanctuary of Wyrms.
‘What is it?’ I asked, trying to decipher the dark shape through its veil of vegetation. Squat yet vast, it rose from the centre of the island ahead, evidently a structure of some kind, but unlike any other we had encountered in the Coil. Despite the obscuring vegetation, its harsh, angular lineaments were unmistakable, suggesting an architectural brutality at odds with the flowing contours of our own aesthetics. Even at a distance it filled me with foreboding.
‘The Nirrhoda did not lie,’ Mutekh said, lowering his scope.
The Nirrhoda? I recalled the feral, mud-caked indigenes we had encountered some weeks back. Technically ‘indigene’ was a misnomer since the native Phaedrans were descended from gue’la colonists who had conquered this world millennia ago and then, in turn, been conquered by it.
Squat and bow-legged, with huge glassy eyes and yawning mouths, they were primitive degenerates who wandered the wilderness in loose tribes. All were unpredictable, but the Nirrhoda clan, who followed the chaotic arrhythmia of the Coil, were notoriously belligerent. Yet Jhi’kaara had known their ways and won a parley for Mutekh, who had traded trinkets for shreds of truth about their
deceitful land. One such shred had led us here.
‘They certainly did not lie about the wyrmtrees,’ the fire warrior observed sourly. ‘That island is infested with them.’
I had taken the gentle undulation of the towering anemone-like growths encrusting the island to be a product of the wind… Yet there was no wind…
Now I watched their swaying tendrils with fresh eyes: at the base, each was thicker than my waist, tapering to a sinuous violet tip that tilted towards us, as if tasting us on the air.
‘Are they dangerous?’ I asked.
‘Their sting is lethal,’ Jhi’kaara said fondly, ‘but they grow slowly. These must be over a century old. That structure–’
‘Evidently predates the war,’ Mutekh interrupted with relish. ‘We must evaluate this discovery thoroughly.’ Something like avarice swept across his broad face, revealing another shade of taint: the hunger to know. ‘You will clear a path, please, fire warrior.’
Jhi’kaara turned the rotary cannons of our Devilfish upon the forest, shredding the rubbery growths into steaming slabs that seemed more meat than vegetable. The trees shrieked as they died, their warble sounding insidiously sentient.
‘It proved a poor sanctuary,’ Xanti said with peculiar sadness. I glanced at Mutekh’s assistant in surprise. He shrugged, embarrassed by my attention.
‘That is what the savages called this place – the Sanctuary of Wyrms.’
Then the janissaries went amongst the detritus with flamethrowers, laughing as they incinerated the flailing, orphan tendrils. One brute grew careless and a whip-like frond lashed his face as it flipped about in its death spasms.
Moments later the man joined it in his own dance of death. It was the first time I saw violent death, but I was unmoved. Fi’draah had already changed me.
Unveiled, the building was almost profound in its ugliness. It was a squat, octagonal block assembled from prefabricated grey slabs that were as hard as rock. The walls tilted inwards to a flat roof that looked strong enough to withstand an aerial bombardment, suggesting the place might be a bunker of some kind. Circling it, we found no apertures or ornamentation save for a deeply recessed entrance wide enough to accommodate a tank. A metal bulkhead blocked the path, its corroded surface embossed with a stark ‘I’
Crusade & Other Stories - Dan Abnett Et Al. Page 28
