by John French
Iaeo was listening to Argonis when her awareness snapped away from the emissary. The part of her mind watching the rest of her feeds had noticed something. This was not supposed to happen. She was in a deep focus meditation. Only something that could be an immediate personal threat could trigger a switch.
The image of a corridor filled her eyes. It was deserted except for a lone man, standing still, looking up into the eyes of her net-fly. Looking into her eyes. The man wore grey overalls marked with the numbers of the Iron Warriors labour cadres. His scalp was clean-shaven, his stare blank and unblinking. He smiled, lips moving as though pulled at the corners by wires. A swirl of colour tattoos bloomed on his face, and then faded as the smile slid down his face again.
‘Be careful, assassin,’ he said. ‘There are only so many places to hide, and what might appear safe, might be otherwise.’ He smiled again, reached up, and the image became static. She felt the net-fly die. Shock flooded her. It took several seconds for the conditioned routines to kick in.
Data: Net-fly presence compromised.
She performed a blink-fast inventory of her swarm and found all the rest in place and functioning.
Projection: Subject who made approach wished to invoke psychological intimidation.
She began to flick through the net-flies that watched over her boltholes within the Sightless Warren. After three she began to find the messages. Scratched, daubed or chalked within sight of her net-flies was a symbol: the first letter of the alphabet in a dialect of Old Terra, an Alpha.
She had to pause before she began to process these facts. She had kept subconscious watch on each of the bolthole locations that had been marked, and she had not seen anything.
Projection: The enemy is not trying to intimidate. The enemy is trying to communicate sophistication and superiority.
She was aware of her own breathing; aware of the narrowness of the vent she had folded into, aware of everything, and aware that she was shivering.
‘You are making an error.’ Iaeo started at the sound, and then realised she had spoken aloud.
No, no, not now, she thought, and suddenly her mind was tumbling out of her control. She had been warned about it, they all had. Even a Vanus mind could only take in so much data for so long before it began to clog, and misfire. Extended mission conditions, and overly complex problem spaces, could induce a chaotic state in which the mind walked down its own compulsive paths. Iaeo had been living within a supremely complex problem space for months.
‘Demand: List known psychological qualities of the Twentieth Legiones Astartes, designation Alpha.’
She was speaking out loud. She could not help it. The old face of her mentor was grinning at her from her memory, and she catapulted through a loop of question and response that she had not begun and could not stop.
‘Response: Known psychological qualities include superiority/inferiority complexes, sublimated into complex psychopathic behaviour requiring the acknowledgement of superiority by an enemy and/or ally.’
‘Demand: Project data of recent confrontation in line with this data, and previous mission data.’
‘Projection: The Alpha Legion know I am here. They want me to know who they are. They want me to know how good they are. They want me to know before they kill me.’
The memory of her mentor’s cruel smile was there again, just inside her eyelids.
She was shaking, her contorted muscles aching. But her mind was clearing.
She was out of the fugue. Crucial time had passed, but she was still whole, still alive, still functioning.
She began to touch the strings of her computations again, tentatively at first, then hauling them back into her awareness. She had lost time, and time was a deadly factor in a problem space.
She looked again through her eyes, and blinked back to the net-flies following Argonis and Sota-Nul. They were moving to the lift. She was still uncertain exactly what Argonis’s discovery meant. The implications were vast in their potential, and the projected possibilities were equally vast. She needed time, and for that she needed to cut away the agency of some of the actors. She performed a quick mental check, assured herself that her action would not have fatal consequences, and decided to change what she was seeing.
Carefully she fed a message into the Iron Warriors security systems. It was a tiny thing, just a seed that would grow into something greater.
The first security alarms began to ring out three minutes later.
The greatest defence is being beyond the reach of your enemy. The loyalists had understood this ancient wisdom since the first reinforcements had come to Tallarn’s aid. While hundreds of thousands of war machines rested in the vaults of buried shelters, as many remained in the void, kept in the bellies of warships and transports. The reasoning behind this was simple: strongholds could fall. The loss of the Sapphire City Shelter had proved that point beyond doubt, and when it had fallen the loyalists had lost tens of thousands of machines. Ground-based fortresses were also static. The dominance they exerted over the surrounding areas was a weakness. Forces bound to one location on one side of Tallarn could not easily be deployed to an engagement on the opposite side of the planet.
Forces held in ships were not so vulnerable. They could run beyond the reach of an attack, and could be deployed across the planet’s surface. The ships might have to fight through enemy forces to reach Tallarn, but while they were there, the loyalists could never be defeated. It also meant that the full strength of the forces arrayed against Perturabo could never be brought to bear at once.
It was a trade: survival at the cost of strength on the ground. It had remained a central pillar of the loyalists strategy for months and it showed no sign of being overturned. For that to happen something fundamental would need to change.
Nine
Rachab
Unbroken
Ambush
War Anvil travelled north, leaving the fires of the dead as a smear of red light in the thickening fog. They travelled through days and nights without noticing the boundaries between each. The surviving crew of War Anvil woke. Sacha did not regain consciousness, and her body remained slumped over the gun breech.
The flats seemed to go on forever. Kord had a suspicion that Origo had made more than one navigation error. He did not say anything, nor did he blame the scout. How could he blame any of them any more? They saw no other living thing. From his position back in War Anvil’s turret, Kord watched the two green runes of his remaining command glide over a featureless plate of drying earth.
Sometimes the fog outside the hull thickened, sometimes it thinned to almost nothing and the light of sun, stars, or moon fell down on them. The wind brought dust as well, great rolling banks which enveloped them in seconds. The first time the dust had come, Kord had ordered a complete stop, and they had waited while the hull had whispered with the swishing voice of the dust. When the dust had cleared it left them half buried beneath a black glass sky. As Kord had looked towards the promise of distant mountains, a great light had risen into the dark, strobing between blue and white, before vanishing, and leaving glowing skeins of light that had scudded across the sky. Shornal had sworn that she had felt the earth shake through the hull. Kord had felt nothing.
They had pressed on after that, the two tanks heaving themselves free of their shrouds of dust, and the desolation of days that were nights, and nights that were days, took them again.
In the dark hours Kord would sit and think of the reason why he had begun this journey into folly. His thoughts circled the images of the burning tanks, and he heard again all the warnings that he had not listened to.
But even then the old thought surfaced. There had to be a reason: a reason why this had all happened, a reason why the present was as it was, a reason that explained it all. To admit anything else felt like a surrender.
Time became difficult to measure, even with the numbers
clicking over on War Anvil’s auspex. It was not that they could not measure the passing of days, or weeks, but the information lacked meaning. Fuel, water, air and nutrient fluid, and the status of the recycling systems became the true measure of everything, the slow countdown to nothing the only clock which mattered.
Then, with an abruptness of a gunshot, the journey ended.
The rocket exploded ten metres in front of War Anvil. Earth fountained up. War Anvil rolled on, the debris falling on its hull. The order to arm weapons began to form in his mouth, but he already knew they were dead. Saul and Kogetsu were in the side sponsons, but the main guns were cold and empty.
‘Multiple heat signatures,’ called Origo over the vox.
‘Where the hell did they come from?’ shouted Saul.
‘I can’t see them!’ Kogetsu yelled.
‘I count six,’ said Origo. ‘But their signal identifiers say they are–’
‘Unknown units, halt now and power down,’ the voice cut across the vox. ‘We have clear shots, and I will not warn you again before I fire.’
Kord recognised something in its low tones, something that rolled cold down his spine. He cut the drive power, and War Anvil came to a juddering halt.
‘Comply,’ he said into the command vox. ‘Stop and power down.’
‘We are still,’ said Origo a second later.
‘This is Colonel Kord of the Tallarn Seventy-First, we have complied.’ He took a breath and tried to make his voice reflect the title he had just invoked rather than the reality he felt. ‘Now identify yourselves.’
‘Your weapons are still charged and ready, colonel. You have ten seconds to undo that.’
‘All weapons cold, now!’ Kord roared.
‘Colonel…’ began Saul.
‘Now!’ Kord waited. He had not counted, but after what seemed like a long time, the cold voice growled across the vox again.
‘You will give reasons for your presence.’
‘Who are you?’
Kord closed his eyes and let out a breath.
‘Colonel,’ it was Shornal. ‘Their identifier signals are green. They are with us.’
‘Allies who open a conversation by shooting,’ said Saul.
‘Silence,’ said Kord. They all caught the sharpness in his voice. A leaden silence waited for him as he opened his eyes.
‘We are seeking sanctuary,’ he said into the external vox. ‘We have taken casualties, are undercrewed, underarmed and running low on water, food and air.’
‘You do not know where you are?’ asked the voice.
‘Not precisely.’ Kord let out a slow breath, considered not asking the question which had been rolling over in his mind ever since he had first heard the challenge come across the vox. ‘What Legion are you from?’
A pause. A long ringing pause.
‘The Tenth.’
Tenth Legion, he thought, one of the sons of the dead primarch, one of the Iron Hands.
‘My name is Menoetius,’ said the Iron Hand, ‘and I give you greetings.’ As if to accompany the words a low dark metal shape slid into Kord’s field of view. It was a Predator, its oil-black lines rubbed with dust. Lascannons hung from its flanks. Kord recognised the focusing plates of a conversion beamer running down the barrel of its main gun. ‘You will follow,’ said Menoetius.
‘Where to?’
‘You have found what you seek, at least in part. You are come to the Rachab, colonel. You will have safety there. Though, if you will leave again is another question.’
He woke first to the memory of his father’s voice.
‘Do you know our creed?’ Perturabo had turned to look into the distance of the machine-filled cavern. Hrend had hesitated, the words coming in halting bites from his speaker grilles.
‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron.’
‘Those are the words, but what do they mean?’ asked Perturabo, his chin dipping into the collar of his armour, the skin of his face contracting around his stare.
‘That we never break.’
‘That we never break…’ The primarch nodded, and then looked back to Hrend. ‘But what if we have already broken?’
For a second he could not believe that he had heard those words. Then they began to seep in. They felt like poison. Perturabo watched Hrend, black eyes unblinking.
‘Master,’ Hrend began. ‘We–’
‘What if we were broken long ago? What if the choices we made, and the trust we gave made our iron rust, our strength weakness, our honour false? What do those words mean then?’
‘They become a lie,’ he said.
Perturabo nodded slowly.
‘They become a lie,’ echoed the primarch.
‘But we have never broken.’
‘Our word, our trust, our chains, our dreams…’ A flicker passed through the depths of his eyes. ‘Which of these remains unbroken?’
And Hrend woke a second time to the voices of his brothers.
‘He endures yet.’ The voice was Jarvak, hard-edged, neither pleased nor disappointed, a blunt statement stamping the truth on reality.
He lay beneath a ceiling of red and orange clouds. It was not a kind waking. There was pain, true pain crawling up his nerves from damaged systems, the sharp feeling of broken bones and seeping wounds. Both his machine frames and his true flesh were hurt. The sensations overlapped, contradicted, chimed against one another, pulling his existence between two realities.
Bit by bit his senses cleared. He became aware of the others, their presence blotches of signals and heat encircling him: four war machines and a single Dreadnought, all arranged in a circle with him at the centre. They had taken four casualties then: the three Predators, and one of his Dreadnought brothers. More important than this tally was what had survived: Spartan 4171 was still intact, as was the drill machine. They still had Hes-Thal. They still had a guide to lead them through the lost land.
He began to test his motive system, and then to stand. They were still in the valley. The fires had contracted back to individual wrecks, each one a white stain on his heat vision. He switched to standard sight. The image jumped, scattered into fragments, and then settled. The black bones of heat-distorted hulls flickered at the heart of the fires. His targeting array remained off-line, but he counted the fires with a glance. The count matched the enemy strength. No survivors. As it should be.
He turned where he stood, and looked at the surviving machines of the Cyllaros. None of them were unmarked by battle. Jarvak’s Sicaran had been washed by flame, and soot skinned its hull. He noted Gortun’s absence, and deduced that one of the heaps of wreckage must be his brother in iron. It was unfortunate, but merely one factor in their reduced strength. They would be low on ammunition, and this far from the Sightless Warren there was no way to resupply. No matter, they had to continue. He wondered if the other search groups sent by the primarch had begun to die like this, not in one moment, but eaten away bit by bit.
The Cyllaros waited, silent, measuring his strength, judging if he had weakened enough to let the damage drag him into failure.
‘Navigator,’ he said.
‘I see and hear,’ said Hes-Thal.
‘Does the path lead as it did?’
‘The path leads where it has always led.’
Hrend cut the vox without reply, and took a step forward, then another and another. Pain followed each movement, but he did not stumble. After three paces the pain was a simple fact. The rest of the war machines opened their circle, and followed him as he walked through the fires and towards the pass across the mountains.
The alarms began to shout as the platform rose up the shaft. Argonis snapped around to look at Sota-Nul.
‘What–’
‘Full security alert in progress.
Cause unknown.’
‘We are blown.’
‘Possibly. That is not a certainty.’
The platform clanged to a halt. The strips illuminating the shaft cut out.
‘And now?’ growled Argonis, pulling back to a corner, gun up, head twisting to track entry points.
‘Our detection is looking more probable.’
Taldak stirred on the floor. Argonis glanced at him, and up at Prophesius. He began to form a command.
Hatches blew out in the shaft above. Smoke billowed in. Heavy figures dropped onto the platform. Argonis’s eyes lit with target markers. His finger held still on the trigger, will overriding instinct. Sota-Nul whirled, hissing, arcs of blue power spitting from her.
‘No!’ shouted Argonis.
The deck rang under the impact of armoured boots. He saw the shapes of slab shields and the smear of red light from the eyes behind them. A buzzing fizz filled the air, and Sota-Nul slammed to the floor, sparks and cords of electricity flickering over her as she tried to rise. Argonis recognised the sound and effect of a graviton gun. He did not lower his weapon, but he did not move either. At his back Prophesius was scratching out words on his tablet, but Argonis did not turn his gaze to see what the astropath was writing.
Armoured figures and a wall of shields surrounded him, the muzzles of the guns slotted through each held steady on his chest. Sudden silence filled the lift shaft, broken only by the buzz of active power armour. The low light and still clinging smoke hid the details of the encircling warriors, but the way they had moved and the details of their posture spoke to who and what they were; the elite shield troops of the Iron Warriors.
‘Lower the weapon, emissary,’ said a heavy voice from behind the ring of Iron Warriors. It was Volk. Argonis could hear the flatness in the words. Some called the Iron Warriors callous, and he supposed that from a point of view they were, but he had fought with them, and seen the root of that quality. It was not pride, or because of stunted self-worth, it was simply that they would not let anything stand between them and what they needed to do.
