by Various
‘What are we afraid of?’ he muttered, getting up and retrieving his helmet.
‘You heard of Contqual?’ asked Namogh, wiping his mouth and following Khamed out of the hab. ‘You heard what they did there?’
Khamed brushed his uniform down and put his helmet on, twisting the seal as he walked.
‘You shouldn’t believe what you read, Orfen,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of crap on the grids.’
‘One in three. That’s how many they killed. Punitive measures, they called them. And those poor bastards were on our side.’
Khamed opened the blast doors from the officers’ quarters and strode out into the antechamber of the command node. He kept his shoulders back, head straight. The little things were important.
‘Like I said. There’s a lot of crap out there.’
He opened the doors. Morvox was waiting on the far side of them, vast and mordant.
‘We have what we need,’ said the Iron Father. ‘Now we go in.’
Out of the Excelsion, moving at a clip, and into the long bunkers of Securum, lit by gloomy strip-lumens. Administratum was amusing, with scholiasts looking terrified at the sight of the black giants striding through the lexchambers. Then down into the vaults of the Cordex. Some of the priests had tried to perform some kind of benediction on the Space Marines there, but had been simply brushed aside, just like everyone else.
After that, the dirt got bad. The air got hot. The floor got sticky, and the aircon wheezed like a phenexodrol junkie. There were men waiting at Station Lyris, arranged in ranks of a hundred. They looked pretty good, kitted out in full staff grey and assault armour. There wasn’t much blood to be seen. The floors must have been swabbed.
‘Will you address them?’ asked Khamed, not really knowing whether that would be good or bad for morale.
‘No,’ said Morvox, and kept moving.
He never stopped moving. He just kept going.
Then you think: I was right the first time. It is a machine, a nightmare machine.
It was the implacability that was so unsettling. They looked almost invulnerable, to be sure, and their armour-hum was eerily threatening. But it was the sense you got, the sense that they would just keep on going, that got to you.
A mortal would know when to quit, even a dogged one like Namogh.
They wouldn’t. Ever.
‘How do you want the Lostari deployed?’
‘You have orders on the tac. For now, just try to keep up.’
Then down again, past the station bulwarks and along service runners towards the core hab clusters. The light got worse. The shafts got smaller and less well repaired. Loops of cables hung down from the roof, and moisture pooled in dark corners. Defective lumens guttered behind panels of iron mesh.
They were getting to the heart of it. Half a kilometre down in Ghorgonspire was like being a long way underground. The nearest patch of sky was buried under a lot of rockcrete. The air that coughed through the circulation systems was humid and smelled of human excreta. Major power grids had gone down early on in the difficulties, and battlefield gen-units struggled to keep the lumens in operation.
Khamed switched on vision-aug in his helmet. The men in his lead unit, twenty of them, did the same. They were all practically running in the wake of the Iron Hands, none of whom had broken their striding rhythm.
‘This is Node 4R,’ announced Morvox, coming up to a massive, closed siege gate at the end of the corridor. On either side of it, teams of greyshirt sentries waited warily, weapons hoisted. ‘We will cleanse it. Consolidate in our wake. Are you prepared?’
Khamed was already out of breath. He shot a quick glance back down the crowded corridor. His lead unit was in readiness. Behind it, stretched out in the gloom of the long tunnel, were more squads coming into position. He could see some of them ramming energy packs into their lasguns and strapping helmets securely. They were as prepared as they would ever be.
‘On your command,’ he said, nodding to Morvox.
‘We do not need your fire support. Do not join the assault. Secure the ground we clear. You will be given new orders on completion.’
Something was exchanged over a private channel, and the Space Marines unlocked their sidearms. Four of them, Morvox included, carried huge, boxy guns with blunt barrels and a chunky protruding magazine. They looked more like grenade launchers than regular firearms.
The fifth hoisted a truly massive weapon – an artillery piece with a core housing the size of a man’s torso. It took both hands to hold it and there was a grip over the main carriage. A loop of ammunition hung underneath, stiff and chain-linked.
That wasn’t all. They had blades. Some of them were like the short stabbing swords Khamed’s own men used, albeit twice as big. Others weren’t. Two of the giants carried massive rotary saws in their free hands, each one shaped like a gigantic broadsword.
Those weapons were ludicrous. Outsized, industrial-scale killing implements, dreamed up by some crazed enginseer and borne by superhumans. Khamed knew that he would have barely been able to lift one of those guns, and yet they hefted them lightly, one-handed.
He swallowed dryly. He also knew what was on the other side of the barrier.
‘Open the gate,’ he voxed.
And so the doors opened, grinding against metal, punishing old and arthritic gears, gradually exposing the chamber beyond and framing a window on to a nightmare.
II
Land Engine. Long for its class – a kilometre from sensorium fronds at the head to waste grinders at the arse. Vast, swaying, crowned with parapets of dusty smog that rolled down the side armour. Faint yellow lights studded weathered plate, tiny in the howling storm.
It rocked against the wind. Gigantic suspension coils flexed with the movement, supporting the thousands of tonnes of superstructure and its long, long train of drive mechanics, processing tracks, forges, crew habs and weapon banks.
All the time, the engines growled. On and on. They never stopped.
It was making good speed: 0.3 kilometres an hour, Medusan measures. The drives were operating noisily, making the floors tremble and shaking the black dust from the intakes.
Outside, it was blowing a gale, thick and black and grimy. There were voices on the wind, wailing.
On Medusa, it was always blowing a gale, thick and black and grimy. On Medusa, there were always voices on the wind.
Ahead of the Land Engine, the plain stretched away in a morass of cracks and sharp-stepped rock. On the far horizon, red lightning jumped down from the smogline.
Haak Rejn sat back in his metal lattice chair and rubbed his eyes. He felt the metal of his right optical implant snag on his skin.
There were picts around him in the sensorium chamber – a narrow control unit perched right out at the fore-left corner of the lead crawler unit. The screens were close-packed and flickering orange. Runes burned dimly, summarising feedback from the Mordecai’s seven thousand augur pinpoints. His implant helped him make sense of them.
It also gave him headaches. The implant burned the whole time, dull and hot. The damn thing was like a chunk of molten metal in his skull. But he didn’t complain. It had never occurred to him to complain. Neither had it occurred to him to complain when they’d flank-wired him into the lattice chair, nor when the flesh of his thighs had withered away to straws from lack of movement, nor when he’d found he could no longer sleep except after a double shot of dousers and a course of binreflex exercises.
Very few people on Medusa saw the point in complaining. It wasn’t that kind of place.
Something flickered on one of the picts. Rejn blinked blearily and reached over to it. He turned the gain up and calibrated his implant with it.
‘Throne,’ he swore, and ramped up the feed. ‘Traak, you getting that?’
A thousand metres away, on the far side of the Mordecai’s lead u
nit, a commlink crackled into life.
‘Yeah.’ Traak’s voice was sluggish, like he’d been trying to snatch a nap. ‘I know what I’d like to think. Put a crawler down?’
‘Good. I’m on it.’
Rejn’s right hand, the one that could still move, worked the input vectors. His left, the one that terminated in a bunch of steel cables, twitched as his neural link communicated with the Mordecai’s Soul. It took a few moments for the protocols to clear.
Acknowledgement came back over the grid. From somewhere a long way down, he heard metal grind back against metal. There was a shuddering movement, and then a heavy crash. He switched to another pict, one that watched the port flank of the Land Engine’s lead unit.
A hatch had opened near the base of the unit between two tread housings. A ramp extended from it, gouging a slow furrow in the rock below as it made contact.
A four-tracked crawler rolled down. Its angular, ugly frame rocked as it hit the plain. Exhaust columns belched black soot, and then it was off, lurching across the uneven surface.
Rejn switched to the crawler feed. Static rushed across the pict before clarifying. He saw the shape of a man resolve out of the blinding duststorm. The figure was still on his feet, leaning into the wind, limping badly. His ragged clothing was covered in plains-dust, making him look like so much charred meat.
The crawler reached his position and ground to a halt. The man staggered up to the back of it and hauled himself in. The crawler swung round and headed back to the ramp.
Rejn switched to an interior cam. The man was slumped in the corner of the crawler’s load bay.
‘Life signs,’ ordered Rejn.
A series of indicators ran down his nearside pict. All low, all borderline viable.
Tough bastard. He’d make it, if they got him up to the medicae in time. Rejn punched the order into the grid and heard the click as the Soul registered.
‘Any markings?’ asked Traak, no doubt looking at the same feed.
‘Not yet,’ said Rejn, zooming in and scanning across the dirt-streaked face. Whatever the man had been doing, it had nearly killed him. Half his storm armour had been ripped away. ‘He’s not one of ours.’
‘Can you patch an ident?’
‘Yeah, just give me a second, dammit.’
Rejn watched as the crawler came back onboard. He ran a request and got clearance for a deep scan. The augurs calibrated, and a line of laser red ran down the man’s body in a long sweep. The temple-stud got picked up and a fresh burst of data loaded on to the grid. Rejn looked at it carefully.
‘Anything?’
Traak was getting annoying.
‘Nothing to get excited about,’ replied Rejn, preparing to shunt the data up to medicae and close the crawler hatch. ‘Gramen clan, long way from home. Manus only knows what he’s doing out here.’
‘And a name?’
‘Morvox. Doesn’t mean much to me. You? Naim Kadaan Morvox.’
Land Engine. Smaller than the Mordecai but taller and more heavily armoured. It had no clan markings on the hull and its flanks were black. No lights blinked across the carapace, and the steep sided flanks were free of ore intake ramps.
As it inched its way across the desolate plain, the storm hammered uselessly against it. It didn’t sway.
Deep within the core, far into the sarcophagus of metal and rockcrete and machinery, there was a half-lit chamber, perfectly square. The floor was black stone. The walls were lined with an organic mass of piping. The roof was vaulted, crowned with an iron boss and studded with weak downlights.
A man knelt in the centre of the chamber. He was naked, and the light glistened from the sweat on his skin. His shaven head was lowered in submission. Around him were robed figures, tall and broad-shouldered. They wore metal masks.
The grind of engines made the walls tremble.
One of the robed figures stepped out. He looked down at the kneeling figure for a long time, saying nothing.
When he spoke at last, the voice did not match his huge frame. It was thin and flat, as if run through overzealous audio filters.
‘Of all the aspirants from Gramen, only you survived the trial of the plains. What lesson is there in this?’
The kneeling figure neither responded nor moved.
‘Well?’
‘I do not know, lord.’
‘There is no lesson. You are not chosen. You are not unique. Some years, none come back. Some years, many do.’
The kneeling figure kept his head down. His muscles trembled slightly from holding position. His physique was impressive – tight, lean flesh over a tall frame. There were many scars on that flesh. Fresh wounds too.
‘You may prosper in the trials to come. You may die from them. In all this, do not look for fate. Do not look for significance. There is only what functions and what does not.’
‘Yes, lord.’
The robed giant withdrew a long steel blade. It was not a fighting blade – too clean, too fragile. It had a look of a surgical instrument, albeit one with a ceremonial purpose.
‘You will learn this. You will learn that the path of your life is not unique. It has purpose only as part of a whole. You are an element within a system. You are a piece within a mechanism.’
The blade came closer. The kneeling man extended his left arm, holding it rigid before him, fist clenched. His head stayed bowed.
‘As time passes, you will see the truth of this. You will wish to discard those things that remind you of how you are now. You will forget that you were the only survivor of the trial. You will only remember the trial itself. You will remember the process. You will be the process.’
The giant kneeled in front of the naked man, and placed the blade against the flesh of the forearm, halfway between wrist and elbow. The cutting edge rested on the sweat-sheened skin.
‘This is the first mark of that process. Do you wish it to continue?’
The question was incongruous. The journey had already been started, and there were no choices left. Perhaps the question was a hangover from some older rite, a rite where personal determination had mattered more than it did now.
‘I wish it,’ came the response.
The blade pressed into the skin, carving deep. It slid to the right, leaving a clean cut in the muscle before slipping out. The man emitted the faintest intake of breath at the pain. Blood welled up quickly, thick and hot.
He was still mortal. His control was not yet perfect.
The giant stood up, letting the blood run down the blade, and withdrew.
‘That is the mark,’ he said. ‘That is where the greater cut will be made.’
The blade passed from view.
‘Rise, Aspirant Morvox. You are no longer what you were. From this point on, you will be a battle-brother of the Iron Hands Clan Raukaan, or you will be nothing.’
III
The siege gates opened.
They exposed a long, wide hall beyond. It was almost totally dark, lit only by flares of orange gas from a broken supply conduit. The ceiling was lost in a writhing morass of gloomy mechanics. Bracing pillars, heavy columns of black iron, studded the rust-streaked floor.
They came out of the shadows, as if released by some soundless command. Dozens of them, bloated and chattering. Some hauled their distended stomachs along the ground, leaving trails of glittering pus in their wake. Others were emaciated, nothing more than sacks of leathery skin and splintered bone. Some of the bodies had fused together, creating sickening amalgams of men with multiple limbs, suppurating flesh and weeping organs hanging in chains. Some had talons, or bone outgrowths, or dull black teeth, or wickedly spiked spine ridges.
Only the eyes were the same on all of them. They glowed in the dark, lime green and as bright as stars. No pupils studded those eyes, just blank screens of eerie witchlight. As the gates opened to
the full, the eyes narrowed. Faces, marked with fangs and hanging jaws and long lines of clumsy sutures, contorted into a mix of hatred and joy.
They scuttled into combat like spiders. They wanted it. What debased existence they possessed hungered for it in a way that they would hunger for nothing else ever again.
Khamed, still in the relative safety of the corridor outside the hall, watched them come, a weary sickness in his stomach. He’d been fighting those monsters for months. Every week, he’d fallen back a little further. Every week, a few dozen more of his men hadn’t got back to the rally points in time.
And back then he’d always known that the next time he saw them the shambling horde would have more tattered grey uniforms hanging from hunched shoulders, and there would be more remnants of faces he recognised.
He gripped his sidearm with sweaty hands, keeping it in position, ready to go in again when the order came.
Then the Iron Hands got to work.
They didn’t move fast. Khamed had heard that the Emperor’s Angels could fight like daemons, hacking and whirling and tearing their foe apart in an orgy of destruction. These ones didn’t. They walked out calmly, spreading out in front of the siege gates, opening fire from their massive weapons in long, perfectly controlled torrents.
Khamed just watched. The more he watched, the more he appreciated the truth of the legends he’d heard. For the first time in months, he dared to hope that the Spire would be saved. It was then that he realised just how strange that emotion – hope – had become to him.
The giants’ firearms were neither las-tech nor solid ammunition. Khamed realised what they were as soon as the first volley went off. The Iron Hands used explosive charges, primed to ignite on impact. The noise of their discharge was phenomenal. They maintained a withering wall of fire, tearing apart the oncoming ranks of walking dead in an orgy of slime and fluid. The muzzle flashes lit up the hall in a riot of sharp electric light, exposing the tortured faces of their victims in brief, snatched freeze-frames.
The heavy weapon that one giant carried two-handed thundered like nothing Khamed had heard before. Its operator, placed right in the centre of the squad formation, wielded it calmly, drawing the devastating column of destruction across the enemy in a slow, deliberate sweep.
