25 For 25

by Various

  Namogh looked at him as if he were mad.

  ‘You think we’ll hold them? You really think we stand any kind of chance? What’s different this time?’

  Khamed shook his head grimly.

  ‘Nothing’s different, Orfen,’ he said. ‘Nothing. Except, perhaps, for one thing.’

  He looked away, past the stinking morass of the beast’s carcass and down the tunnels beyond. He could feel the tide of unreasoning madness building down there. He knew it would not respect defiance. It respected nothing. It would just keep on coming.

  Can you fight?

  ‘I now know how the universe operates, my friend,’ he said bleakly. ‘For a while, I had dared to hope otherwise. I believed that this place might have some significance for them. That we might.’

  He laughed bitterly.

  ‘Better to die knowing the truth, do you not think?’

  VI

  The probe made a 98-percent efficient descent from orbital platform 785699 to the receiving station in sector 56-788-DE of Forge 34 Xanthe manufactorium-schola-astartes. The statistics were logged on the grid and interpreted by the usual team of lexmechanics, after which three anomalies were corrected and allowed for, resulting in a two percentage point increment, to the satisfaction of all involved.

  From the docking claw, the contents of the probe were conveyed by servitor nineteen levels down, past the major foundry zones and into the dense ganglia of shrines known colloquially in the sector as 1EF54A.

  The cargo was transferred to Tech-Priests after a soak-test for data contagion and wrapped in three layers of soft dust-repelling cloth. The mark of the Machine God had been embroidered on the material in gold thread.

  Thus clad, it went through six further pairs of hands, only two of which had any organic flesh left on the bones. More tests were performed, and ledgers filled out, and records made for the core lists.

  Then, finally, the cargo reached its destination. It came to rest on an obsidian tabletop in a room lit by dark red tubes. For a long time, it lay there alone, untroubled and untouched.

  Several local days later, Magos Technicus Yi-Me, once called Severina Mavola, entered the chamber and carefully unwrapped it. A tube lay at the centre of the cloth, its glossy surface reflecting the light of the lumens.

  Yi-Me studied it for a long time. She use her basic optical replacements, as well as seventeen additional sensors built into her plasteel cranium.

  Deep within her, in a part of her body that had remained relatively unchanged throughout all the years of biosurgery, a sensation of deep pleasure blossomed. If she’d still had lips, she would have smiled.

  The artefact was powerful. Powerful, if the initial readings were confirmed, beyond even her expectations. It would certainly suffice for the task she had in mind, and perhaps for many more in the years ahead. Lucky, that it had been discovered. Lucky, also, that it had proved possible to retrieve.

  She bowed her head, silently acknowledging the service rendered by the one who had once been her pupil.

  +Debt paid,+ she canted, knowing he couldn’t hear her, but enjoying the irony of addressing him nonetheless. Such tropes were a staple of the Jho school, something she still appreciated. +Naim Morvox, Iron Father: debt is paid in full.+

  A hundred worlds. All different, all the same.

  As I bring the light of the Emperor to each of them, knowing that every foe I face could me the one that ends me, a single encounter remains prominent in my thoughts.

  Helaj V, the Ghorgonspire. I remember the mortal there, the one named Raef Khamed. Even in sleep, sometimes, I see his face.

  He expected much of us, once he had forgotten to fear. We could never match that expectation, not if we had eternity to accomplish the task and infinite resources to bring to bear.

  Even so, I left the planet troubled. I never discussed it with Morvox. He would not have tolerated dispute from me, and that was before he was Iron Father. It seemed to me that our task was not finished, even though the objective was secured and our goals satisfied.

  I remember how the mortals fought. I remember how they rose up when we were with them. Back in the warp, where dreams are ever vivid, I heard them plead for us to return. Or perhaps I heard their screams.

  We never went back. I do not know what fate befell them. Maybe they prevailed. Maybe they were lost.

  For many years, that troubled me.

  Now, it does not. I understand what Morvox was doing. He had been purged of sentiment by then, just as I will be. He saw the greater pattern, and followed it. Such is the galaxy we inhabit. Resolve will preserve us; sentiment will see the light of humanity extinguished.

  And so we allow ourselves to become this thing. We allow ourselves to become the machine. We are the result of a necessity, of the process.

  The alternative is weakness.

  I see this now. I see the truth of what I have been told by Morvox. Perhaps Helaj was the last time that I doubted. I am stronger now. I feel the imperfection within me, and long to purge it. In time, Emperor willing, I will go to Mars and learn the mysteries, just as he did.

  Not yet. For now, there is too much of my old self, my old corruption. The flesh remains, impeding the progress of the machine.

  I still feel the ghost of my old hand, the one they took away to mark my ascension into Raukaan. Far less, it is true, but I feel it nonetheless.

  I wish never to feel it again. I wish to forget the face of Raef Khamed, to forget that there is hope and disappointment in the universe.

  This is my task, the reason for my existence, and nothing else will suffice. I will work at it. I will persevere. I will purge the weakness of the flesh.

  I will be Ralech Grond, Iron Hand, or I will be nothing.

  EVEN UNTO DEATH

  Mike Lee

  The Wolf Scouts flew like spectres down the dark, tangled paths of the forest, their heightened senses keen as a razor’s edge. Red moonlight shone along the edges of their blades, and death followed in their wake.

  Guttural howls and roaring bursts of gunfire rent the night air all around them, echoing off the boles of the huge trees. The orks were everywhere, boiling up from hidden tunnels like a swarm of ants and crashing through the undergrowth in search of the Space Wolves. With every passing moment the cacophony of noise seemed to draw more tightly around the small pack of Space Marines, like a shrinking noose. Skaflock Sightblinder tightened his grip on his power sword and led the Wolf Scouts onward, racing for the landing zone some fifteen kilometres to the east.

  Ork raiders had been terrorizing the worlds of the Volturna sector since the end of the Second Battle of Armageddon, slaughtering tens of thousands of the Emperor’s faithful and putting entire continents to the torch. Their leader, a warlord known as Skargutz the Render, was as cunning as he was cruel. He never lingered too long on any world, pulling back his forces and retreating into the void before help could arrive. The Imperial Navy was left to chase shadows, and with every successful raid the warlord’s reputation – and his warband – grew in stature. When the orks struck three systems in as many years, the sector governor appealed to the Space Wolves for aid. A rapid strike team was assembled and slipped stealthily into the sector. Fast escorts patrolled likely targets, waiting for the call to action. Skaflock and his men had been on one such frigate, the Blood Eagle, when astropaths on the forge world of Cambion reported that they were under attack. They and nearly a dozen other small packs of scouts had been unleashed onto the world via drop pods, to pinpoint enemy positions for the lightning assault to come. The scouts had slipped close to scores of landing sites and ork firebases, leaving behind remote-activated designator beacons that would allow the fleet to unleash a devastating initial bombardment within moments of arrival.

  The operation had gone according to plan, right up to the point the fleet reached orbit and the initial assault wave began its drop. Then everything went to hell.

  The night air trembled beneath the roar of huge turbojets as a Thunderhawk guns
hip made a low-altitude pass over the forest, but the assault craft held its fire, unable to tell friend from foe in the darkness below. Skaflock bit back a savage curse and tried his vox-caster again, but every channel was blanketed in a searing screech of manufactured noise. He had little doubt that the fleet couldn’t pick up the designator beacons through the intense vox jamming, it was even possible that their surveyors were blind as well. He couldn’t reach the fleet, much less the assault force his team was supposed to link up with; everyone had been cut off. Instead of catching the ork raiders unawares, they had stepped into a trap.

  How, Skaflock’s thoughts raged? How could we have been so blind?

  The game trail the Wolf Scouts were following angled downwards into a narrow, twisting gully split by a shallow stream. With the wind at their backs and the thunder of the gunship passing overhead, the Space Wolves had no warning as they leapt into the gully and found themselves in the midst of an ork hunting party.

  For a moment the orks didn’t realize who had fallen in amongst them in the darkness. The hesitation was fatal. Skaflock’s nerves sang with bloodlust and adrenaline – to him and the rest of the Wolves it was as though the greenskin raiders were moving in slow motion. Without breaking his stride the Space Wolf decapitated two orks with a single sweep of his blade and buried his armoured shoulder into the chest of a third with bone-crushing force. The air was filled with startled cries and shrieks of pain as the rest of the pack joined the fray, and suddenly the panicked orks were shooting and chopping at anything that moved.

  Two heavy ork rounds flattened against Skaflock’s power armour. As a member of the great company’s Wolf Guard he was better protected than the scouts under his command, and the impacts barely fazed him. Blood sizzled off the power sword’s energy field as he leapt at a cluster of orks further down the gully. The first of the greenskins raised a crude axe, aiming a blow at Skaflock’s head, but the Space Marine ducked beneath the swing and cut the raider in two. Before the body had hit the ground Skaflock was upon the second ork, smashing his bolt pistol across the raider’s knobbly skull and stabbing it through the chest. The ork pitched forward with a moan – doubling up on the searing blade and trapping it with its death throes.

  Skaflock leant against the ork, trying to push it off the blade and narrowly avoided the third greenskin’s swing. The crude axe glanced off his right shoulder plate and opened a long, ragged cut on the back of his unprotected neck. A second blow bit into his side, driving the axe’s chisel point through the breastplate and into the flesh beneath. Baring his teeth at the pain, Skaflock spun on his heel, tearing his sword free and bringing the blade around in a glowing arc that separated the ork’s head from its shoulders. For a few heartbeats the body remained upright, steam rising from the cauterized stump of its neck, then the axe tumbled from nerveless fingers and the corpse pitched over onto the ground.

  Within moments, the battle was over. The six Wolf Scouts under Skaflock’s command were veterans of more than a dozen campaigns, as skilled with sword and axe as they were with stealth and guile. Nearly two dozen orks lay dead or dying in the gully, staining the stream with their blood. As Skaflock watched, Gunnar Dragonbane, a giant of a man even by Space Marine standards, sent the last of the orks sprawling with a mighty sweep of his axe.

  The greenskin landed in a heap, then rolled over onto its back, a grenade clenched in each bloodstained hand. Without thinking, Gunnar brought up his bolt pistol and shot the ork through the head.

  Skaflock snarled as the distinctive crack of the bolt pistol echoed through the trees. ‘I said no shooting!’ he cried. As if in answer, the forest erupted in eager cries as the orks sought out the source of the gunshot.

  Gunnar let out a rumbling growl, spitting a pair of shiny black pits into the crimson-tinged stream. The huge scout had a habit of chewing lich-berries; how he kept himself supplied on the long missions off Fenris was a mystery to everyone in the pack. A single berry was poisonous enough to kill a normal human in ten agony-filled seconds. Gunnar claimed the taste improved his disposition. ‘Let them come,’ he snarled, hefting his axe. ‘We’ve plenty of cover and darkness on our side. We should be hunting them, not the other way around.’

  ‘We’re not here to hunt orks, Gunnar!’ Skaflock snapped. ‘We’ve got to link up with the assault team and guide them off the landing zone to a more defensible position – provided we aren’t overrun by ork patrols in the meantime. Now, move out.’ Without waiting for an answer, the Wolf Guard leader broke into a run, leaving the scouts to fall in as he sped on.

  The orks were right on their heels. Skaflock heard the greenskins stumble into the gully moments behind them, and then the chase was on. Bursts of wild gunfire tore through the forest around them, kicking up plumes of dirt or blowing branches apart in showers of splinters. The Wolf Guard increased his speed, pushing his augmented muscles to the limit. Only his enhanced eyesight and agility allowed him to dodge the treacherous roots and low-hanging branches that lay in his path. Slowly but surely, the Wolf Scouts began to pull away from their pursuers, melting into the darkness like shadows.

  The sounds of battle called to the Space Wolves like a siren song, growing in intensity. Every few moments Skaflock closed his eyes and focused all of his concentration on the maelstrom of noise, picking out the distinctive notes of different weapons with a practiced ear: storm bolters, boltguns, plasma weapons and the distinctive hammering of crude ork guns.

  After fifteen minutes the sounds of the Imperial weapons began to falter; Skaflock bared his fangs in a soundless snarl and drove himself on. Two minutes later he could no longer hear any plasma weapons being fired. Four minutes after that all he could hear were bolters pounding in rapid-fire mode. Then slowly, minute by minute, the bolter fire dwindled away to nothing.

  Not long afterwards the wind shifted, blowing from the north-east, and they could smell the blood on the air. The woods had grown silent. Skaflock abandoned all pretence of stealth for the last two kilometres, breaking into a sprint and praying to Russ that his senses had somehow deceived him.

  The Wolf Scouts charged headlong into the broad meadow they’d designated as the assault team’s drop zone. The gently sloping, grassy field was now a wasteland of mud, ravaged flesh and spilled blood. The black silhouettes of the drop pods reared like tilted gravestones in the crimson moonlight, wreathed in plumes of greasy smoke from the blazing hulls of ork battlewagons.

  The dead lay everywhere. Skaflock’s mind reeled at the slaughter. The orks had struck from three sides, charging right into the exhaust flames of the drop pods as they settled to the ground. The Space Wolf packs had been cut off from one another even before the drop ramps opened.

  The rest of the pack gathered around their leader, staring bleakly at the scene of carnage. Hogun stepped forward, shaking his head mournfully. ‘It’s a disaster,’ he whispered, his voice bleak.

  ‘It’s a defeat,’ Skaflock said flatly. ‘The orks have turned the tables on us for now, but that’s the way of war. We’ve seen worse, Hogun. All of us have.’

  ‘Skaflock’s right,’ Gunnar said. The expression on his face was bitter, but he nodded solemnly. ‘We’ve been through harder scrapes than this one and won out in the end. We’ll just fade back to the mountains and wait for the rest of the company–’

  Before the Wolf Guard could finish, the night air trembled with a distant howl of rage and pain that echoed among the derelict drop pods.

  As one, the veteran scouts looked to their leader. Skaflock flashed a rapid set of hand signals and the pack fanned out into skirmish order, sweeping silently towards the source of the noise.

  The howl came from the far side of the drop zone. As the scouts crept closer, Skaflock caught sight of a dozen Space Wolves – Blood Claws, judging by their youthful features and the markings on their bloodstained armour. They stumbled and staggered through the piled corpses, flinging green-skinned bodies left and right as they searched frantically among the dead. Many of the young Marines
had removed their helmets, and their faces were twisted with grief.

  Skaflock waved the scouts to a halt and stepped forward. ‘Well met, wolf brothers,’ he called out. ‘We feared there were no survivors.’

  Heads darted in Skaflock’s direction. Several growled, showing their teeth. One Blood Claw in particular, who had been crouched beside a pile of corpses, rose to his feet. He was tall, and pale with rage, a still-healing gash running from high on his right temple diagonally down into his blood-matted beard. His bolt pistol was holstered, but the deactivated power fist covering his right hand clenched threateningly as he glared at Skaflock and his pack.

  The Blood Claw took a step towards the Wolf Scouts. ‘All too few,’ he snarled, ‘thanks to the likes of you!’ The words dissolved into a bestial roar as the Space Wolf lunged at Skaflock, his eyes burning with hate. The sudden attack caught the scout leader unawares. Before he could react the Blood Claw closed the distance between them and smote Skaflock on the breastplate of his armour with a sound like a hammer against a bell. The Wolf Scout went sprawling, stunned by the impact. Had the power fist’s field been active his chest would have been crushed like an egg.

  The red-haired Space Wolf pounced on Skaflock in an instant, knocking him back against the ground. ‘Cowards!’ he roared, nearly berserk with fury.

  Pinned beneath the Blood Claw’s bulk, Skaflock barely rolled aside as the Marine’s huge fist smashed into the mud mere centimetres from his head. ‘Did you slink out of the woods to view your handiwork, or to pick over the bodies of the dead like carrion crows?’

  Skaflock felt the Blood Claw’s left hand close around his throat. Surprise gave way to a killing rage, rising like a black tide in his chest. Unbidden, his hand tightened on the hilt of his power sword, thumb reaching for the activation switch.

  ‘Remember your oaths, men of Fenris! Russ cannot abide a kinslayer, and the Emperor’s eyes are upon you!’

  The shout came from the shadow of one of the drop pods, ringed with the bodies of huge, armoured orks. Recognition struck Skaflock like a hammer blow, but it was the Blood Claw who spoke the name first.