o ca77aeec6e4cf556

by Unknown

  The Grey Talon was sparsely inhabited a mix of servitors, a skeleton crew of menials from the White Scars, and no doubt some old XVI Legion serfs who had managed to avoid Xa'ven's purge and now kept their heads down in the dingy corners of the bilge levels. In the absence of proper numbers, it was Henricos who kept the whole thing together, stringing automated mechanisms into line, restoring burnedout systems, reviving dormant machinespirits. The furious pace of work was all that kept him from lashing out at living targets, and that was welcome enough.

  Were all Iron Hands the same, Hibou wondered, with that mix of sullen fury and morbid obsession? Impossible to tell. He had never fought alongside them before, and did not expect the current experiment to last long enough for him to form a settled opinion.

  He reached the practice cages, where Teji was already limbering up. Hibou drew one of the blades from the racks, watching his opponent idly.

  He had not known Teji before. The young warrior had been just one of many lodge members across many brotherhoods: each of them seduced by the same words and tiptoeing the precipice of damnation without knowing it.

  The Khan had ruled that killsquads of the sagyar mazan be composed of strangers, lest the bonds of old brotherhood return and kindle fresh insurrection. A sensible precaution, but in truth hardly necessary. They all knew how close they had come, and what they had to do to redeem themselves.

  Teji had been from the Brotherhood of the Red Sun, one of the many under Jemulan's command. He had reached Ascension just before Chondax, joining the fleet in the last reinforcement wave from Chogoris before the veil fell. Not long in which to make a choice that would cripple his future forever.

  Hibou entered the cage, bowing. Teji returned the gesture, and brought his blade into guard. The weapon was as blunt as Hibou's, and wouldn't have hurt even a mortal badly. Damage was not the point of the exercise, though it was balance, speed and reaction.

  'Did he speak to you?' asked Teji.

  Hibou shook his head. 'I made the first move. He will make the next.'

  Teji smiled. 'Maybe.'

  The sagyar mazan had become closer during the voyage, all nine of them, but wariness still remained. They were an artificial unit, pushed together only by a shared culpability, which in itself was a poor foundation for vengeance. Combat would test their weak links, either welding them firm or shattering the whole.

  'Begin, then,' said Hibou, and the two of them swept into movement, parrying, jabbing, using the blades with all the fluidity of their training. In seconds, the cage became an arena of Chogorian art, a crucible of swordsmanship.

  Immersed within that, the divisions seemed trivial. The doubt, the guilt, all of it became invisible, sublimed by the dominant physicality of combat.

  So they fought one another, enjoying the release. They knew, though, that when the blades were lowered again it would all come back, vivid like the shuddered recollection of dreams.

  He was back on Medusa, trudging beneath lightningscored skies, feeling the primordial cold pressing in upon his skin.

  Somewhere up in the gloom, invisible beyond the nightdense clouds, the iron band of the Telstarax hung in orbit, ruined and echoing

  a gravemarker of another age.

  He had never seen it, but it had always been a figure of Medusan myth the ancient torc that marked the world from the void, shackling it in metal. He had never seen the primarch Ferrus Manus either, but knew that he was there too, somewhere. A mortal Telstarax of sorts, both guardian and destroyer, forging the planet's sons into new weapons and purging the last morsels of weakness from their privationhardened bodies.

  He had walked for ten days as the dull Medusan sun had it, drinking little, eating little, his boots kicking up black dust and caking his layered synthfabrics. His breathermask had picked up a fault and clicked when he inhaled, letting in the gritty taste of spoildust. His landengine was just a memory now, grinding its way south with the rest of his clan. The dirty smokeplume had hung on the horizon for a long time before being lost in the smog, but he had never turned to look for it.

  On the eleventh day, the tower rose up before him colossal, clad in plates of inkblack iron. He heard the boom of engines under the earth, and felt the shiver of the solid rock underfoot. Walls loomed away from him in geometric layers, starshaped for siege, crowned with guns as vast as his old tracked home.

  He thought he had reached the Sorrgol citadel then, but he was wrong, because the tower before him was only the smallest of many spires, a mere sentinel over the southern gates. Beyond it stretched forges, burners, smelters and extractors, kilometre after kilometre, linked by webs of iron pipework and covered in a cloak of carbon vapour.

  Before the gate stood Ferrus Manus, a titan in charcoal armour, invincible and eternal in his watch over the citadel. Except that he was wrong about that too the guard was just a legionary of the Tenth, the first he had ever seen, though to a youth's awed eyes it might just as well have been the primarch himself.

  He felt his head go light at last, and struggled to keep his feet. The gatewatcher gazed down at him with eyes that glowed dull red amidst a slopegrilled helm.

  'I come to serve,' he said, proudly, belligerently, daring the warrior above him to refuse.

  He thought he heard a faint whirring, like optical instruments. The legionary might have been considering the words, or was amused or irritated by them, but with the helm in place his emotions were unreadable.

  'So I see,' the legionary eventually replied.

  The gate cracked open, pulled back by immense cylinders. He swayed on his weary legs, catching sight of the furnaces beyond the fields of metal and the boiling, underlit clouds.

  The legionary gestured for him to enter.

  'Have you the spine, child?' he asked, his voice a tinny, machinefiltered snarl. 'Make it to the tower, and they will test you further.'

  He was afraid then. Desperately afraid. His throat was dry, his hands cold with sweat, and it was hard to make his legs move.

  The legionary waited, silent again, as unmoving as the walls around him.

  He wanted to move. He could see the great tower within, a jagged blade at the heart of the foundries, glistening like the slate edges of mountains.

  He wanted to move.

  HENRICOS WOKE WITH a jerk. He had fallen asleep over his station on the bridge, slumped on a scanner console. None of the crew had dared to wake him.

  He lifted his head, wiping a line of drool from the smeared screen. How long had he been out? Seven minutes, by his armour's chronos. That was his sleeppattern now a few moments here and there, islands of unconsciousness between the long work shifts.

  The lapse was shameful. He was on the bridge, surrounded by those who had marked his weakness and would now be wondering how much longer he could last.

  Work harder.

  He tightened his shoulders, feeling the shift of armourplate over tight muscle, the pain of limbs that had been cramped and compressed for too long.

  He looked down at the screen. It was covered with phosphortrails of warpwake projections, overlaid on a cartographic grid of dizzying complexity. He had traced the last two trail patterns over that, marking the passage of the Grey Talon through the maze of the aether.

  He studied the incoming signals, making allowances for the known ghost reflection from the augur array. Blinking to clear the last of his fuzziness, he remembered where he had got to before unconsciousness had crept up on him. He activated a new scansweep and watched the screen fill with data. It had taken five hours to prepare the algorithms, just as it had done for all the other searches. At times he wondered whether he had forgotten how to do it properly.

  It had been Jebez Aug who had hammered the technique into him, drilling the procedures by rote under the shadow of constant discipline. 'Others may be faster,' the Iron Father had been fond of saying to him. 'Others may even be stronger, but none are more methodical.'

  Aug, no doubt, was dead. It was likely now that the entire clan had been wiped
out, either at Isstvan or in the aftermath. All of them, lost in the inferno. The old lessons had not helped them then, but they had all gone into that situation blind, forgetting their own maxims in their haste to reach the enemy.

  Ferrus, too. The blindest of us all.

  The lens before him throbbed with fresh runes, and Henricos snapped back to full attention. He reviewed the multilayered tangle of trajectory markers, twisting away within stylised warpconduits.

  For a moment, he saw nothing.

  Then a glimmer. A faint trace, just visible over the range of possible warppaths.

  He could almost imagine Aug with him again, leaning over him, uttering a rare grunt of satisfaction.

  Henricos checked, to be sure, then opened a channel to Hibou. There was no avoiding the meeting now.

  'Khan,' he said, keeping it to the point. 'Ready your squad and meet me on the bridge. We have our target.'

  HIBOU STARED AT the screen, wondering exactly what he was supposed to be looking at. He was adept at reading tactical displays of a dozen kinds, but Henricos had created a mosaic of overlapping nonsense on the pictfeeds, one that even a Mechanicum magos would have struggled to process.

  'You see it?'

  'I do not,' said Hibou, bracing himself for fresh scorn. 'Please, show me.'

  Henricos snorted in exasperation, then zoomed in on the image. 'Forget three dimensions the warp operates differently. We alter standard scan algorithms and course settings to cover the greatest area in the shortest time. The result is an organic pattern, developed by my clan's Iron Father on Medusa, and takes into account the underlying movement of aether conduits. We are not in physical space, so we do not move as if we are. The equations are…

  complex.'

  Hibou could believe that. The screen was crammed with trajectories, half of which meant nothing to him. 'You mean this,' he said, pointing to a shipmarker set several hours in Grey Talons wake.

  'No. Look at its movements, the same as ours it is a mirror. A ghost. Consider it an artefact of the scanners and ignore. The target is here.'

  Henricos gestured towards a faint blip on the extreme edge of the display. Hibou frowned.

  'That is not a shipmarker,' he said.

  Henricos rewarded that with a sarcastic smile. 'Astute. A shipmarker is not what we seek.' He zoomed in further, increasing the granularity of the sweep. 'This is a warpwake the sign of deep passage. Count yourself lucky, White Scar. None of your Legion could have detected this.'

  Hibou let the insult slide. He was used to them. 'How far?'

  'I can bring us within strike range. But remember this is not physical space. We must track it, using the searchpattern, waiting for them to drop out, then we fall upon them. I can materialise on top of it, in its shadow. They will have only seconds to respond.'

  'They will not see us coming?'

  'Not unless they were schooled to recognise an algorithmic pursuit. That is unlikely.'

  Hibou detected the sullen pride there and let Henricos enjoy the moment. The Iron Hands had had precious little to celebrate, and if their warptracking prowess was grounds for arrogance then they were welcome to it.

  'Which Legion, then?' Hibou asked. 'Can you tell me that?'

  'Look here.' Henricos zoomed in further, exposing the wound in the warp gouged by the preyship's engines. 'Three salients, aggressively pitched, characteristic of Dracoseries drives an old configuration. These were favoured by one Legion only, so either that is a Sons of Horus ship, or you may have my eyes.'

  Hibou felt eagerness stir just at the name. 'Can we take it?'

  'No idea, not until we break the veil. But it cannot be much larger than us, and we will be on it before it knows we are a threat.' He looked up at Hibou, and for the first time there was a crooked grin twitching at his lips. 'You wished to know the plan. Here it is. We are in their colours that will give them a moment's uncertainty. We board before they can raise shields, take the command bridge, disable it. The guns on the Talon can do the rest.'

  Hibou nodded. The schematics were already beginning to untangle in his mind, and he could half see the route that the Iron Hands legionary was proposing.

  'And you will take the Talon's helm,' he said, planning how he would deploy the boarding party.

  'I will not,' growled Henricos, slamming the screen away on its angled mount and resuming the hostility that bubbled just under the surface of his humour. 'I will be with you. We will need all the blades we can muster.'

  That anger was directed now no longer at those he was forced to serve with, but at the real enemy, the ones who had unambiguously chosen treachery.

  'Side by side, then,' said Hibou, smiling dryly.

  'If you insist,' muttered Henricos, turning back to the data. 'As long as we kill and as long as we hurt them, I care not.'

  IT WAS TWELVE more hours before the target ship made signs of dropping from the warp. For most of that time the killteam waited in the holds of the gunship Golden Dagger, primed for rapid hangar exit. Boarding torpedoes had been considered and rejected they would be coming in too fast to guarantee a fireangle so they trusted the manoeuvrability and speed of the Thunderhawk to get them across the void gulf.

  After launch, the Talon's mortal crew, under the command of a stoic Chogorian bridge officer named Omoz, would keep the destroyer as close as possible, drawing any incoming fire while the boarding parties infiltrated the hangars.

  Henricos waited impatiently, locked in the gunship's forward hold, Hibou's White Scars in restraint cages on either side of him. Streams of data scrolled across his visor feed, giving him every detail of the final approach. Both vessels were still in the warp, but the target had now changed course dramatically and was slowing for exit. The Grey Talon pursued it along the twisting lines of the Sorrgol pattern, operating on the automatic guides he had set in place before taking position.

  'Start launch cycle,' he muttered, keeping an eye on the evolving timings.

  The Thunderhawk's thrusters roared into life. Ahead of them, glimpsed through grainy pictfeeds, the hangar door locks slammed open.

  'Warpbubble punctured ahead,' reported Omuoz over the comm. 'It is coming out.'

  'Remain tight on it,' warned Henricos, frustrated that he could not be in two places at once and fly both ships. He had tried to relax the V Legion pilots who steered both the Talon and the gunship were as good as any he'd ever seen but it was still hard to trust outsiders. 'Five kilometres, real space. No more.'

  It was insanely close, a warp exit virtually on top of their enemy's, but it had to be that tight or they would lose the fractional chance.

  Golden Dagger rose from the apron on booming cushions of downdraft, hovering a metre clear. A second later, the Grey Talon ripped free of the aether's clutches. As soon as it had cleared the rift, the hangar's voiddoors ground open amidst a smudge of straggling Geller remnants.

  'Now!' cried Henricos.

  The Thunderhawk hit full speed, hurling him back against his restraint harness, and shot out into the void. The target hung just ahead of them on the augur screens, emerging from the last of its warp rift just as the Talon was cleared, angled away and with its running lights low.

  'Shields?' demanded Henricos.

  'Not yet,' reported Omoz, his voice commendably calm.

  The enemy ship raced towards them. Henricos saw then how big it was a line frigate with a full battlelance and cursed under his breath. It would already be scanning the Grey Talon, sending hails, running checks against fleet ledgers and picking up the incoming gunship. The subterfuge of their XVI Legion livery was painfully slight.

  'Get us in now,' he voxed to the Golden Dagger's crew.

  They sped under the shadow of the frigate's hull. Rows of hangar bays, all of them barred, swam up into the viewers. The Thunderhawk's battlecannon loosed, sending shells screaming into the nearest voiddoors. Hull plates exploded under the impact, disintegrating in a welter of spinning adamantium.

  'Faster!' roared Henricos, knowing tha
t the void shield arrays would now be powering up.

  The gunship swooped for the aperture, blasting through at a steep pitch, scraping the edges of the hangar entrance before shuddering to a fullstop and coming to rest on a violent bloom of downthrust. The sponsonmounted heavy bolters opened up, spraying in twin arcs from the ingress, raking enemy ships locked on the deck rails and shredding any crew caught out on the apron.

  Disengaging his restraint cage, Henricos slammed the ramp release. 'Out, out, out!'

  They spilled from the holds, accompanied by the howl of released atmosphere and the blare of alert klaxons. Behind them, the gauze of atmospheric containment fields finally slid across the shattered hangar entrance, now too late to do anything other than trap the infiltrators within the hull.

  Hibou raced ahead, making for the hangar's inner doors. The Khan had a power sword with a florid dragon carved into its crackling edge. Henricos followed him with his bolter at the ready, scanning for incoming targets.

  The first opposition came from the ship's mortal crew. They reacted quickly, forming up at the intersections of the corridors leading up from the hangars and laying down concentrated fire. All of them were from a hard world and had lived lifetimes of combat, so they performed admirably.

  Yet it didn't help them. The White Scars were astonishingly fast, crashing aside the opposition before it had time to get established, whooping and yelling as they laid about them with their blades. Henricos had never seen them in action as squads before, and he could admire the seamless interaction between them a warrior would sway out of the way to allow another to fire, then dart back into contact, aware the whole time of the flight of bolterrounds and the whirl of steel around him.

  'The flesh is weak!' Henricos roared, watching the enemy die, listening for the wet slap of flesh splitting and the echoing rip of the massreactive shells going off. That gave him pleasure, the first he had taken since the similar slaughter on the Vorkaudar.