Scorched Earth

by Nick Kyme

Letting my dying brother go, I nodded slowly and together we walked on without incident. I kept my eyes in front of me all the way to the back of the cargo bay, not wanting another encounter like the one with Brother Ik'rad.

  Arriving at the rear of the hold, where the ranks of bunks and slumped warriors finally ended, we were confronted by a pressure panel set into the wall. It was a simple enough metal plate next to another, smaller, door.

  I punched it.

  Grinding metal assaulted our ears as the armoury opened up to us, but only partially. The door halted halfway, shrieking on protesting servos that were long past misuse. Through the gap I could see a deeper shadow, illuminated even more poorly than the infirmary, and a lone figure toiling within his workshop.

  'Enter,' said the figure in a hollow, resonating voice that had more in common with steel and gears than flesh and blood. But then Erasmus Ruuman was more machine than man.

  I smacked the pressure panel again, this time with greater force. A low, mechanical churning followed but the door opened.

  We went inside.

  'It's seizing again.'

  'It is, Ironwrought,' I answered.

  'You mistake a statement for a question, Brother Ra'stan.' Ruuman paused in his labours. He was stripping and fixing a cache of weapons. I saw six bolters and the partially dismantled remains of a Rapier mount, but it was a broken conversion beamer that had the Ironwrought's attention. 'A patrol found it,' he explained, 'I am confident it can be repaired to sixty-three per cent effectiveness. You are having trouble with the brace,' he added, leaving the beamer and facing us.

  The entire lower half of Ruuman's face was bionic, so too much of his torso. It was blended expertly with his armour and gave the Ironwrought a formidable, unbreakable appearance.

  I nodded. 'Another statement, Ironwrought?'

  'Yes.' He knelt down to inspect my leg brace. Ruuman delved into a tool kit mag-locked to his belt and went to work, selecting the instruments he needed by touch and memory, not looking once. There was a brief but manageable flare of pain as he tweaked the armature he had fashioned.

  After a few minutes he asked, 'Does that improve its efficiency?'

  I tested it. Smiled.

  'Much better.'

  'I gauge an eighteen per cent improvement, but its maximum efficacy as a substitute limb will cap at sixty-seven per cent.

  'Miracles, unfortunately,' he added, 'are beyond me.'

  I put my hand on his shoulder. 'At any rate, thank you, brother.'

  He rose without acknowledging my gratitude.

  Erasmus Ruuman was not an Iron Father and he did not possess the technical ability of that august council, but he knew weapons and had applied that knowledge to the other machines in need of repair. As well as my leg, he had kept the drop-ship going and maintained the majority of its damaged systems, including light, heat and oxygen-scrubbing, despite the catastrophic damage it had suffered when we crashed in the mountains. The only thing he could not do was make it fly again.

  The deathblow had been delivered by one of our own. When the attack at the dropsite came, we had been brutally unprepared. In what felt like seconds, Ferrus Manus was slain, his vaunted Avernii clan all but wiped out and the Raven Guard and Salamanders crippled without knowledge of whether their liege lords were alive or dead.

  We still did not know.

  I remember the explosion of noise across the vox when it happened. At first I had thought it was static, caused by some kind of electromagnetism, but now I know it was screaming. A thousand different orders broke all at once. The result was utter chaos. Consolidation and retaliation was our first response. The earth became muddy with our spilled blood soon after, so retreat was the only viable contingency left to us when that happened. I remember falling back to the drop-site, streamers of missiles and bursts of tracer fire spitting overhead, but have no memory of getting into a ship. Yet somehow we all did; a few survivors who made it through the gauntlet and escaped the first wave of culling. Thrown together by chaos, Salamander, Iron Hand and Raven Guard scrambled for life. Order was abandoned. No fighting retreat, but a rout, a massacre.

  We got into the air, thrusters boosting, flames washing our hull and wings, prow nosing through banks of smoke. A few seconds later and something hit us. I felt it through the cargo bay where I hunkered down with forty-three of my brothers and several more who were not of my Legion. A couple of Rhinos we had in reserve slid from their moorings and across the deck. Two legionaries were crushed as the vehicles scraped the cargo bay wall. Gravity dragged them out through the gaping ramp, sweeping another half-dozen warriors with them into the hell outside. Some scrambled but we did not have time to reach the ventral corridor and our cages in the troop hold, so I just held on.

  The deck… rippled - I can still see the mark where Ruuman stitched it back together with solder and industrial staples - and began to come apart. Through a ragged gash in our fuselage, through the sparking wires and venting pipes built into the drop-ship's armour, I saw Isstvan.

  It was like a dark ocean, studded with islands of fire and undulating with thousands of warriors trying to kill one another. Entire armoured companies went up in chained explosions as the weapons of Titans were unleashed, phalanxes of legionaries were wiped out, heavy incendiaries tore wounds in the very earth itself. My mind could scarcely comprehend the horror I was bearing witness to.

  My gaze went skywards as the shadow of another drop-ship crept across my flame-seared face. Looming over me it was massive, blotting out the sun we had striven so hard to reach above the belt of cloud. We sustained a glancing hit, I think - its prow raked our flank, but it was enough to put us down. The other drop-ship was a ball of fire. I saw bodies wreathed in flame, hazed by the heat, trapped in its confines. Some jumped, even though the drop was fatal. A few legionaries had jump packs. Most went up in secondary explosions as their overheated turbines cooked off. Ravens went down, feathers aflame. Iron plummeted from the sky. Drakes burned. The rest were cut apart by streamers of flak from the entrenched cannons below, sawn in half before they had even gotten clear of the destruction.

  I saw a group, a mix of Salamanders and Raven Guard, setting up line launchers as they readied to evacuate across to our ship. I could not hear them through the roar of bloody salvoes and the detonation of explosions, but their urgency was clear enough, as were their gestures to us.

  The plan was stillborn, however. A fusillade of missiles from some unseen battery below tore up their lander amidships, pushing a firestorm through its belly that blew the would-be commandos from the hold and into oblivion.

  I turned, tried to drag one of my brothers with me, but the conflagration gushed out of the dying ship faster than I realised, burning me in my armour and incinerating my slower brother. He was gone when I looked back, the claw marks of his fingertips etched into steel the only evidence of his fate.

  We lurched. The hull groaned and split again, micro-fractures webbing the metal.

  I grabbed a bulkhead and held on, feeling gravity leave me for a moment as a perverted sense of tranquillity took over.

  Like a comet, our Stormbird fell from the sky but dropped well wide of the Urgall Depression. Gravity violently reasserted itself, slamming my body hard into the deck and shattering my leg. We struck the mountain, rupturing entire cliffs and sending them into the abyssal chasm below us. Our structural integrity held and we lay there, a wounded predator ready to be put out of its misery.

  Almost ready, but not quite.

  'HOW MANY STAVES did you plant this time?' Ruuman asked, bringing my mind back to the present.

  'Six,' Usabius replied.

  The Ironwrought nodded, and almost looked impressed.

  'That was a great risk to do that.'

  'Let us hope a fruitful one then,' I interjected. 'For we would risk everything for this.'

  'We?' asked the Ironwrought. 'Your Legion?'

  Although I knew I was vehement, I'm not sure I conveyed the ardency of my belief to Ruuman,
but the Ironwrought was largely divorced from emotion.

  'Yes,' I answered, 'all of us who are still alive.'

  Ruuman held my gaze for a moment, then, showing us his back, he switched on a small scanner sitting on a bench behind him and squared away from the weapons. It was a cluttered space with room enough for three, but only three. As the pict screen came to life in an ugly flare of green neon, a voice from behind us said, 'You're late.'

  Ishmal Sulnar waited in the doorway to the armoury, arms folded. The Iron Hand was a brute and filled the width of the space easily with his imposing silhouette, but not its height. Sulnar's head barely came two-thirds up the door frame. For the proud Iron Hand was enthroned in a makeshift wheelchair, part gun carriage, part gurney, with wheels stripped from the broken chassis of an ammo hopper.

  Pieces of his armour had been destroyed during the fighting and the crash. He only wore a single pauldron, his left, and both his arms were bare of vambrace or gauntlet. The right arm was entirely bionic, as were his left hand and his right eye. The red retina flickered, on account of its damaged focusing rings. It made Sulnar squint and sometimes pulled up one side of his mouth in a disapproving scowl.

  Much of his armoured greaves were missing from just above the knee, so too were his legs.

  'What happened out there?' he asked.

  Usabius failed to rein in his anger.

  'Carnage happened, Sulnar!'

  'Brother turned on brother and thousands died. We lived through that, if you remember it.'

  Perhaps it was guilt talking. We never got a chance to discuss it later.

  Sulnar unfolded his arms and I tensed for a fraction of a second as I thought he might strike my brother, though he kept his eyes on me. Perhaps he could not meet Usabius's gaze for fear of what he might do if he did. The Iron Hand might no longer walk but his fists had lost none of their potency.

  Sulnar kept his composure, and held up a placating hand.

  'I remember it,' he answered quietly. 'We have all lost, brother. Our fathers are missing and we are besieged by enemies we once called allies… even friends.'

  'Your father is—'

  I warned Usabius off with a look. Sulnar had deluded himself into believing that Ferrus Manus was not dead. None of us had seen the Gorgon fall, but the reports we had heard left little doubt. Even still, there was nothing to gain in arguing about it.

  'Nothing,' Usabius relented. 'I am sorry, brother. My temperance is being sorely tested this night.'

  'You take on too much,' said Sulnar. He bowed his head fractionally, but I detected the tremor of involuntary motion in his bionic eye and realised he was hanging by a tender thread. He bore the chair stoically, but it was demeaning. Any contribution he could make now would be minimal and not in the front line of a last stand, as I suspect he would have preferred. We were, all of us, warriors. And as such we would not get to choose the manner in which we died. Cut apart by a dozen blades, beheaded by a sworn friend turned enemy, crushed beneath the treads of a heavy battle engine - during the drop-site massacre I had witnessed all of these deaths and many others. I believe, deep down, that Sulnar would have accepted any of them above the fate that awaited him. He waved my brother's contrition away.

  'And no apology is needed,' he added. 'These are trying times for all of us. Impossible, even. I ask again then, what happened?'

  I told him, leaving out the part where Usabius crushed the Raven Guard's neck to maintain our concealment. Sulnar seemed particularly interested in the enemy patrols and their dispositions.

  'Did you encounter any other resistance groups? Any other ships, either grounded or lying in low anchor that we can join up with?'

  'There are none, brother,' I answered.

  Sulnar looked down, thinking. 'We will try again tomorrow. Only by forging some kind of battle order can we hope to strike back at the traitors. If we could make contact with one of the primarchs…'

  Usabius lost his temper again, the objects on Ruuman's workbench trembling with psycho-kinetic anger. 'Are you blind in both eyes, Sulnar? There is no resistance. We are not fighting a guerrilla war. This is survival for as long as we can hold out, no more than that.'

  Except, he and I knew that was not entirely true. We had not been running the gauntlet with Ruuman's staves these last days for something to occupy our minds. Our purpose was much greater than that.

  Usabius stalked out of the armoury, moving past Sulnar who seemed not to notice or care, and carried on as if nothing had happened.

  'Were you followed?' he asked.

  I shook my head. 'Though their patrols are widening by the hour. It won't be long before they decide to venture into the mountains and after that… Well, we all know what happens after that. There is a bottom line to all of this,' I added.

  Sulnar's studied silence bade me continue.

  'Our time is almost up. We can't stay here any more. If we do, they will find us and destroy us. We have to move on.'

  Sulnar was emphatically blunt. 'We cannot.' He rolled back on his wheels so he could gesture to the infirmary behind him. 'There is no moving on. Most of these legionaries won't make the journey.' In a quieter voice, he added, 'I won't make the journey. This is it for most of these warriors, Ra'stan. Our crusade ends on the black sands of Isstvan, curtailed by treachery and deceit. I do not think it is fitting, but I am pragmatic enough to realise it is irrefutable as our fate.'

  'And the fate of Lord Manus? Why do you refute that?'

  Sulnar looked down. 'Because I have to believe in something. I am half the legionary I was. I cannot be rebuilt, not in these conditions with these resources, so I must sit when I would rather stand. I must wait when I would rather forge out with you. These things I cannot deny, and their weight upon me is a heavy one. The death of my father? That I can deny. Until I see it with my own eyes, until I see his headless corpse and not in my nightmares, I choose hope over despair. You have, why not I?'

  It was hard to argue, and I could not bring myself to do so anyway. But it did not change some universal truths.

  'They are coming,' I reasserted. 'It will be soon. You need to be ready.'

  'Make no mistake,' Sulnar declared, leaning forwards in his chair to emphasise his words, 'we will all meet these traitorous bastards on our feet, Ra'stan, one way or another. We are ready because there is nothing left to us but retribution.'

  I was about to continue, but realised it was futile to argue further. Sulnar would stay, so would the others, and in so doing meet their deaths as heroes. What right did I have to deny them that? I nodded.

  Sulnar reciprocated the gesture and after a few moments went back to his debrief. 'Did you penetrate any farther into enemy-held territory?'

  'We made significant inroads towards the Urgall Depression. Most of the enemy's forces are still concentrated there but beginning to branch. There will be gaps in their pickets that a small commando force could exploit.' I licked my lips, mouth suddenly dry. 'I also think we got close to his ship. Another deep infiltration and I believe we will find it.'

  Sulnar rolled forwards on his wheels so he could put his hand on my forearm.

  'You don't have to do this, Ra'stan.'

  But of course I did.

  'I would rather die out there, in search of hope, than trapped in here with our despair and fatalism as my companions.'

  I looked at Ruuman, who was busily recording the seismic data from our staves and mapping out the region beyond it.

  'The sensors have a five-kilometre range in all directions,' he explained to the screen where a rough topography of Isstvan was slowly being sketched out. Data was streaming along one side of the image, too rapidly for my eye to follow but not for the Ironwrought.

  A second later and the image collapsed, the screen blanking out into a flat field of green neon.

  'What happened?' I asked.

  'Signal interrupt.'

  One or more of the staves had been destroyed.

  'Did you get anything?' I sounded more urg
ent than I intended.

  'Yes,' Ruuman replied. He appeared almost reluctant to continue.

  My tone was deliberately impatient. Well?'

  'It is his drop-ship, yes.'

  My heart leapt, but I held it fast in a fist of my own pragmatism.

  'Intact?'

  'It crashed several kilometres from the Urgall Depression, north of your last recorded position, Brother Ra'stan.'

  I struggled to maintain my composure, masking my hope with sudden, direct action.

  'I must go at once,' I said.

  Usabius would want to hear this news.

  'This matter should be discussed first,' said Sulnar as I pushed past him. 'Strategy will be needed. Equipment gathered. Even a legionary does not wander into territory overrun by this kind of enemy without first pausing to consider tactics. We must plan our next move.'

  I regarded him incredulously. 'Our next move?' I said, pausing in front of his hulking plastron but looking down on the crippled warrior. 'There is but one course. We go and find the primarch. We rescue Vulkan.'

  I TRIED HARD not to hope. On Isstvan it was a cruel, capricious thing. It crept into the heart, the soul, expanding silently but filling the body with warmth and vigour. But it was not real. What the hopeful did not realise was that hope was a flame that burned you from within, turning your spirit and your will to ash so that when it inevitably faded there was nothing left behind but a hollow shell.

  If Vulkan was dead like Ferrus Manus, I vowed I would not submit to the same denial as Sulnar. I would bear it; do so stoically as every Fire-born son of Nocturne had been taught to shoulder adversity.

  If my father was slain, I would mourn, expressing my grief in a final, violent, red act against my enemies.

  But if he lived…

  Hope was kindled and then I knew I was its willing slave.

  I found Usabius up at the prow. He was not difficult to track down. Drop-ships are sizeable craft but most of ours was uninhabitable. Aside from Haukspeer's infirmary, the armoury and the ''strategium'', as Sulnar mistakenly referred to it, there was only one place left to go.

  It was ripped out and ragged, the roof long gone and now part of the battle debris littering Isstvan. The drop-ship had a long neck to the cockpit and I walked the entire length like it was some bleak processional. Either side were the twin troop holds, their cages wrecked and torn out. When I was about halfway down, I saw the sniper. Armoured in iron-black, the white hand emblazoned proudly, the son of Medusa looked strangely at ease with his posting.