by Henry Zou
‘Most of them. But the Ironclad are raiders. Rogue bands have continually harassed Imperial supply lines. At least by sauropod we won’t be immobilised by a destroyed section of track. Since the outbreak of invasion, the Archenemy have detonated twelve hundred kilometres’ worth of locomotive railway.’
Roth nodded grimly. They were dealing with a different sort of enemy. The Ironclad were raiders first and soldiers second. Even when they did not have the advantage of numerical superiority, as was the case on Aridun, they inflicted disproportionate damage on civic and military infrastructure.
‘So, armoured and armed for the trip then?’ Roth asked.
‘I wouldn’t leave the southern belt without anything short of serious firepower,’ Vandus answered flatly.
Roth was about to laugh until he realised that his old friend was very serious.
Chapter Twelve
They descended from off-world in their holding pen, transferred onto a brig-lander and escorted by a squadron of Archenemy interceptors for landfall. On board the brig, they were guarded by a hundred veteran Ironclad – scarred, knotted fighters bedecked in the collected trophies of war. As prisoners went, they were a valued prize indeed.
When their captors herded them off the landing ramp, Silverstein winced at the unaccustomed glare of searing sunlight. He had lost count of how many days he had been caged, and his augmetics reacted badly. Lens shutters flared for low-light reception, and the sudden flood of sun almost blinded him.
When the apertures of his bioptics recalibrated and his vision flickered back, Silverstein almost wished he had been blinded permanently. He found himself in a war camp of the Archenemy.
The scene before him was a vivid nightmare in flesh. A vast gridwork of parked vehicles covered the scorched and salted earth. They had laid waste to a square kilometre of ground, burning the land into a blackened wound. Amongst wheels and tracks of their vehicles, bivouacs and camouflage netting were erected as shelter. It was a muster yard of mechanised machinery – Scavenger light tanks, Chimeras, Hellhounds, FPVs and eight-wheelers, dormant like sleeping predators. They marshalled under the watchful gaze of sentry towers erected on skeleton girders.
A pall of chemical smoke, fuel and burning plastek cut the air. Presiding over the encampment were two crude wooden idols, seven metres in height. Carved with rough, blunt strokes, the idols depicted a leering daemon, its tongue hanging past its waist, carving an infant from the belly of a pregnant woman. In their own crude, supernatural way, the idols were the most deeply disturbing things Silverstein had ever seen.
The prisoners were frog-marched around the perimeter of the camp, a snaking earthen embankment raised to chest height. Soldiers of the Archenemy stared at them. Just the thought of so many tainted eyes boring into his back coated Silverstein in a film of cold sweat. Some of the Ironclad chuckled, in evil, delighted little burbles, running a finger against their throats.
To ignore them would have been impossible. He feigned disinterest, indignantly straightening the gold piping on his filthy, decaying jacket. When he had been a gunbearer for his father’s hunting trips, he had often thought that by closing his eyes and not seeing the prey, then perhaps the prey would not see him. He reverted back to his childhood instincts and squeezed his eyes shut. It wasn’t that Silverstein was a coward, no; he was just trying to keep his sanity intact.
‘Uhup uhup,’ an Ironclad snarled into Silverstein’s ear. He was shoved as his tormentor pointed at the back of an armoured transport truck. Silverstein smoothed his collar and levelled his gaze at the Ironclad. For his defiance, the Ironclad punched him hard in the kidney and hurled him up onto the back of the truck by his lapels. Doubled over in shock, Silverstein felt rather than saw his fellow captives pile onto the truck after him, crushing him with their weight.
The hatch of the panelled truck was shut, eclipsing the light like a closet door. Cloyingly hot, suffocating and pitch-black, Silverstein strained to hear the low rumble of other engines grumbling to life. A convoy escort, he surmised. They were being transported elsewhere, to whatever fate awaited them. Outside, someone pounded the side of their truck with hard, reverberating slaps. It was followed by a peal of muffled laughter as the truck kicked into gear.
There was nothing Silverstein could do but wait and see what became of him.
It was, as expected, a bright, humid dawn as the two inquisitors tramped through the reef-lands. Roth placed a hand to shield his eyes against the suns as he peered at the rather peculiar mode of transport that awaited him. Despite his travels, he had never seen anything like it.
The sauropod train was saddling up on the humid mud flats, beyond the outskirts of Aridun Civic. The reptilian beasts were great and grey, some of the male bulls growing to six metres tall at shoulder height. Down the cabled length of their long swaying necks ran a plume of dull feathery spines.
Roth counted eight of the beasts tethered by harness, seating platforms swaying from their backs. When they brayed, they emitted a sonorous trumpet from the hollows of their cranial crests. Roth found the sound at once both eerie and majestic, like a suite of brass horns resonating from some deep ocean.
Fussing around the stomping pillars of their feet, caravaneers adjusted caparisons of gaudy beaded fabric, tassels and jingling silver discs. Shaded wicker sedans swayed upon their backs, some beasts already carrying a dozen handlers, musterers and guards. On the decorative platform of the lead caravan beast, Roth recognised the distinctive outline of a belt-fed heavy stubber.
‘Vandus, you always did remember to travel with elegance,’ Roth said sarcastically as he plugged the polished boots of his fighting-plate deep into mud.
‘You can always walk if you wish,’ Barq retorted as he hauled himself up a hemp ladder that dangled down a sauropod flank.
Inquisitor Barq, ever the eccentric, was clad in wargear of a sort Roth had never seen before. It was, in a way, typical of the Ordo Xenos. Barq was suited in an olive-drab bodyglove, but from the abdomen up he was shod in a hulking armoured rig. His torso, shoulders and arms flexed with thick, cabled plating. The pugnacious outline was reinforced with sledgehammer fists and piston banks along both arms. Multiple heavy-calibre barrels arrayed in racks of eight lined the back of each armoured fist. Despite its armament, it was the milky green of the enamel and the oddly organic curves of Barq’s rig that caught Roth’s attention.
‘Xenos-tech?’ said Roth as he scaled the ladder.
Barq laughed breezily. ‘Not quite. I procured this suit from a pompous house of a particular upper-tier hive.’
‘Would it be prudent of me not to ask you which noble house this was?’
Barq winked. ‘It would be for the best. I had suspicions that they may have had limited dealings with xenos – but benign enough for me to let it slide. They were very grateful and gifted me this marvellous suit.’
‘You’re getting soft.’
‘And you’re getting stiff in your old age,’ retorted Barq.
Roth shook his head as he settled in the creaking wicker of their sedan. ‘You’re dancing with devils, Vandus. I could have you martialled before the ordos for that act alone.’
‘Not if I silence you first,’ chortled Vandus, flexing his segmented paws.
Roth was poised to riposte but the crack of the musterer’s whip and the resonant bellow of sauropods drowned his words. With a lurching, lolling rhythm the great beasts began to move and the winding rampart of the Fortress Chains receded into the distance.
By steam locomotive, the trip would have taken less than three hours but conflict had forced the decommissioning of locomotive rail. By sauropod it took the better part of a day. But Roth didn’t mind the time spent. After the catastrophes of the preceding weeks, he appreciated the open country.
Everywhere, Roth experienced the new era of a planet in evolution. They plodded through biotic reefs that purportedly sprawled out to the c
oastal basins – endless kilometres of whispering horsetail fern, cycads and clustered conifer. But he saw too the vestiges of a past ecosystem. Monolithic salt flats, once thermal oceans, lined the horizon with bars of crystalline white. Shale rifts, red bed sandstone and calcite plains marked the graves of a former environment.
Most startling of all were the abandoned city-states that kept silent sentry on their trail. When the suns shifted axis, thousands of years ago, Aridun had been besieged by hurricanes, floods and temperatures that had boiled the moisture from the earth. Long since abandoned, these cities crested the horizon as hollow skeletons, black with age and neglect.
At least twice during their trek they encountered packs of dog-sized carnivores. Attracted by the warm musk of humans and the ground tremor of sauropods, the reptiles paralleled the caravan at a cautious distance. Caravan guards fired lasguns over their heads to scatter them.
‘Those are just heel-biting scavengers. It’s the Talon Squalls you should be afraid of,’ said Barq. He handed Roth a gilded telescope with his ponderous hands and gestured to the distance.
Roth had indeed heard of them already. The animals had quite a reputation amongst those inclined to study fauna. Naturally, Roth was a curious and learned individual, although the biological sketches did not invoke the true ferocity of such animals. Peering into the telescope, Roth spied gangs of flightless birds powering across the southern horizon on long loping strides. Even at a distance they appeared large, far larger than any avian had the right to be.
‘And what of the Archenemy?’ Roth enquired.
‘The aerial defences have driven enemy deployment far out beyond the wastelands. Splinter raiding parties, however, are a real threat,’ Barq said.
Roth could understand how Aridun had escaped the worst of the Archenemy attentions, at least for now. The environment was not exactly conducive in supporting the large-scale movement of troops, especially raiders with poor supply lines. It was hot, it was barren and it was open ground.
Roth sat back, wiping his brow. By late afternoon the air was dry and quiet. Even under the shaded pagoda of their sedan the temperature was in the low forties. He was not acclimatised, and what’s more he was beginning to seriously regret wearing his Spathaen fighting-plate. The metal was incubating him in a cocoon of prickling heat.
‘This xeno-archaeologist, what ungodly effort would draw him out here, to a desolate warzone?’ Roth muttered, mostly to himself.
‘Actually, as part of the bargain in aiding us I’ve promised her a secure transport out of the Medina conflict zone. She came to Aridun in order to study the new cycle of history and was trapped by the initial Archenemy offensive.’
‘A she?’
‘Oh yes. Professor Madeline de Medici of the Katon-Rouge Universitariat.’
At the mention of her name, Roth clucked his tongue. He was entirely familiar with the works of Professor de Medici. She was a prominent xeno-archaeologist, a leading scholar in her field within the star system if not the entire subsector. Her works were prolific, including A Treatise on Pre-Imperial Man and Reflective Studies of an Early Eastern Fringe. Roth admired her dedicated approach to field research as much as her eloquence in script.
Had Roth not been a servant of the Imperium, he had often fancied that he would have become a scholar. Indeed, he took his academic fascination past an amateur hobby, and his large estate on Arlona was more of a dedicated library than a manor. To Roth, study was a compulsion. He had been smitten by the concept of the warrior-scholar ever since he read of the Gojoseon Kingdom on ancient Terra, and their caste of Flower Knights or Flower ‘youths’. Such youths were socialised from a young age in the arts of calligraphy, archery, theatre and horsemanship. They were the symbiosis of martial and mental prowess, and a symbol of spiritual balance amongst the ancient Asiatic realms. Roth had long held a romantic fascination for these knights and despite being older now, a part of him continued to extol those virtues.
The petrified forest of Eridu lay eight hundred kilometres from the Archenemy demarcation line. The wilderness was located exactly half-way between the southern savannah of Aridun Civic and the Archenemy amassing beyond the wasteland rim. Roth and Barq dismounted the sauropods at the edge of the woods and proceeded on foot.
The geosite resembled a sculpture garden of melted, wrinkling rock. Pillars of argon cobalt and organic mineral rose like titanic chess pieces. Everywhere Roth looked, he caught fleeting glimpses of frozen time, the fossilised imprint of a leaf on a stone, fronds and whorls against bedrock, the spinal column of some extinct beast surfacing above the sediment.
Overhead, wilting, leafless trees some sixty metres tall created an arterial web with their frail, feathery branches. Some of the trees had been opalised, trailing glistening seams of pearlescent gems. Sun dappled through the bowers, cutting stark patterns on the mosaic floor.
Under the bowers of bearded wood fungus, Roth found Madeline de Medici’s excavation team toiling in a narrow little gorge. The labourers were local, bronzed from constant sun exposure. They must have been desperately poor rural workers, considering most other Aridunians had refused to stray far from the southern belt since the invasion.
As the inquisitors approached the excavation site, half a dozen men rushed to intercept them. Instead of the khaki overalls of the excavation crew, these men wore dark linen morning coats with black three-piece suits. Instead of hauling picks and shovels, gilded hand-las pistolletes were suspended by gold chain from their belts. Pinned to their lapels was the crest of administrative office on Aridun – the Governor’s seal.
‘Halt! Stop where you are!’ they shouted.
It almost made Roth burst out laughing. The armed group were a pompous bunch – svelte, mincing men completely out of their element. They tried to look intimidating and professional, but were far too sunburnt and miserable to be taken seriously. They were little more than technocrats playing soldier.
Putting his hands up in mock surrender, Roth cast a sidelong grin at Barq. His old friend shrugged his power-armoured shoulders with a mechanical whir. They were alike in many ways, in mischief especially.
‘Disarm yourselves. Lay your weapons on the ground and lie face down. Immediately!’ ordered one of the armed men, levelling his pistol at Roth. He appeared to be their leader, a tall man with the long, haughty face of an Administratum clerk. This clerk, however, had obviously chem-nourished the muscles of his arms to be more aesthetically intimidating. Neither of the inquisitors were overly impressed.
‘You’re joking, right?’ snorted Barq. He held up the heavy-gauge bolt-racks on the back of his hands. Roth wasn’t sure whether Barq was indicating the idiocy of their request, or whether it was a subtle threat. Either way, Roth found it immensely entertaining.
‘I don’t know who you think you’re talking to, but I am Lorenzo Miaz Hieron, envoy and security specialist of Madame de Medici,’ he trilled with a measure of shrill indignation.
‘I’ll talk to you however I please,’ Roth goaded, stringing the man along.
‘Do you want to die? Are you stupid? Do you know Aridun is at war? State your purpose or suffer the consequences!’ Hieron cried. His fellows agreed, heads bobbing like token birds.
‘Lorenzo! Laslett, Hamil, Piotr, the rest of you! Mind your manners!’ came a voice from behind Hieron. It was a woman’s voice, imperious and stately without even having to shout.
Roth did not immediately recognise the esteemed Madame de Medici. She was far younger than he had expected. He had envisaged a wizened, perhaps motherly academic; instead the woman before him had the porcelain skin, high cheekbones and delicate figure of a well-bred noble’s daughter.
Madeline de Medici ducked out from the flap of her canvas tent. She balanced a lace parasol delicately in gloved hands. Given the climate, her attire was entirely inappropriate: a modest pencil skirt and double-breasted coat of twill. Her face was blushed with su
btle rouge and her hair curled into loose chestnut ringlets so fashionable amongst the upper-spire aristocrats. Anywhere else but on an archaeological site within the heart of a warzone, Roth would have mistaken her as a spire heiress.
‘Madame de Medici?’ said Roth, still unsure if it were truly she.
‘Madeline Rebequin Louise de Medici. But please, do call me Madeline,’ she said, curtsying.
The inquisitors both bowed graciously.
‘Madame Madeline, I am Obodiah Roth. I must admit I am a great admirer of your works. On the Natural Cycles of War and Conflict was an impeccably researched collection of essays.’
Madeline tilted her nose up. ‘Inquisitors, you flatter me,’ she said.
‘Inquisitors?’ spluttered Hieron, backing away. He ushered his colleagues aside like chastised children.
When the guards were out of earshot, Madeline strolled closer to the inquisitor. ‘Excuse them. I am sincerely embarrassed by their behaviour.’
‘Call this a casual observation, but those men are not fighters,’ Roth said.
‘No indeed they are not. But they claim to be. So let them. The Governor of Aridun provided me with some of his household custodians. The Governor insisted.’
‘Was the Governor trying to get you killed? The Archenemy are held at bay less than a day’s travel from here. You should not come out this far with those fools as protection.’
‘Don’t tie yourself in knots, inquisitor, I can look after myself,’ she sniffed.
She was perhaps correct, thought Roth. Of all her texts, the one which stood out to Roth was her recently documented field study of ancient pylons scattered across rimward planets of the Eastern Fringe. The book was in limited circulation and included woodcut illustrations of an eldar attack on her excavation team. She had evidently escaped, and her resultant accounts of the tale caused quite a stir, even amongst the ordos.
‘Be as it may,’ Barq interjected, ‘it is time for you to send those fops back to the Governor’s estates and come with us. We are pressed for time.’
