Bringer of Sorrow

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Contents

  Cover

  Bringer of Sorrow – Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Heralds of the Siege’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Bringer of Sorrow

  By Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Arkhan Land had never seen a Space Marine cry before. In an extremely rare moment of considering someone else’s feelings, he wasn’t certain where to look. Would the Blood Angel be ashamed if Land stared or pointed out this sudden emotional vulnerability? He used the time to adjust the clicking lenses of his goggle-visor, which in no way needed adjusting.

  How fascinating, he thought. Of all the things to weep over.

  ‘There’s an artistry at play here,’ the Martian scholar confessed, ‘but I assume you’ve witnessed hundreds of planetfalls. I fail to see what’s awakening such an embarrassing degree of emotion within you at the sight of this one.’

  Zephon, the Blood Angel, didn’t reply. He kept his eyes lifted, watching salvation descend from the heavens on wings both metaphorical and literal. Gunships streaked through the clouds, their hulls cast in war-scarred ceramite, their engines trailing fire. Thousands of them arced down in a continuous spiral, a cyclone of troop landers and war craft powering their way planetside. Heat shielding scorched from atmospheric entry flashed in the light of the setting sun.

  Arkhan Land and Captain Zephon had watched this aerial ballet from the Palace battlements, and though Land had no time for the kind of embarrassing reaction suffered by the peasants and certain emotionally compromised warriors bearing witness, even the technoarchaeologist found himself affected by the artistry and precision of the Legion’s mass-landing.

  Was he moved? No, we mustn’t get ahead of ourselves. Was he awed? The idea was laughable. But affected, yes. Land could appreciate the mildly hypnotic effect of the swooping, retro-burning vessels, flying in formations made beautifully complex by the sheer number of craft. It put him in mind of a code-stream playing out across a monitor: something semi-organic, something with biological variances blending in with the precision of purer calculations. A human element, if you will.

  Sapien, his artificimian, crouched on Zephon’s shoulder. The psyber-monkey’s barbed tail drifted in a slow wave back and forth, a sure sign of the creature’s contentment. Land clicked his fingers to draw Sapien’s attention, but the monkey kept clinging to Zephon’s ceramite pauldron with the ease of familiarity.

  The creature even vocalised a series of quiet, ostensibly simian sounds as it perched in place, and the Blood Angel reached up with one of his bionic hands, idly scratching the back of the beast’s head.

  Land clicked his fingers again. This time the psyber-monkey acknowledged its summons and scrambled onto Land’s shoulder instead. It was quite a step down in height from the Space Marine to the Martian scholar. The little creature practically had to leap.

  After another few increasingly (and woefully) dull minutes of watching the Blood Angels Legion make planetfall, Land spoke up.

  ‘If you wish me to deal with your failing bionics in the coming days, I am able to do so.’

  Zephon didn’t answer. He didn’t even seem to have heard. This was surprising, given that the reconstruction of the Angel’s shattered physicality had taken primacy in the warrior’s thoughts for some time. Yet here was Land, making the offer to deal with the many flaws in Zephon’s augmetics, and receiving no acknowledgement at all.

  He repeated his offer in the exact same tone and inflection, hiding his annoyance at being ignored the first time.

  Zephon blinked slowly, as if unwillingly pulled away from enlightenment. His beauteous face, transhuman in its gentleness, showed his distracted confusion.

  ‘Forgive me, my friend, what did you say?’

  Land repeated the offer a third time. On his shoulder, Sapien was toying with its own tail. It rather diminished the austere dignity of the moment, which was a shame. Still, with the truly beneficent offer made, he went back to adjusting his goggle-visor, this time in order to track the descent of a particularly ravaged Stormbird.

  ‘If you have the time to spare,’ the Blood Angel said, ‘I would be immeasurably grateful.’

  ‘I do,’ Land replied with a sniff.

  The pair were a common sight in the Palace in recent months, in part because Land considered the wounded warrior by and large less irritating than anyone else on Terra. It would be a stretch to say Land felt genuine affection for the Space Marine, but he viewed Zephon with something above casual derision, and that made them practically brothers in the pantheon of Land’s regard.

  ‘I’ve never seen a Space Marine cry before.’

  That made the Angel smile through his slow, stately tears. ‘Well, now you have.’

  Land, who had lectured Zephon (the way he lectured everyone in his presence) about his impatience for people stating the agonisingly obvious, somehow managed to refrain from tutting at the comment.

  Zephon was still weeping as he watched the gunships spiral lower, watched the bulk landers juddering downward towards the cityscape of the space port on the horizon. The silvery traces of his emotion painted thin, twin trails down his pale cheeks.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ Land finally said to him. ‘Why do you weep?’

  The Blood Angel looked down at the technoarchaeologist, his eyes impossibly soulful, his smile impossibly benevolent.

  ‘My Legion,’ he said. ‘My brothers. My father.’

  Land hesitated. He could see the landing craft just as clearly as anyone else. More clearly, if the truth be told, given the enhancing effects of his goggles. Confusion hammered impatience into his tone. ‘Yes?’

  The Angel was already staring back up at the crowded sky as the IX Legion continued its endless planetfall. ‘They’re alive.’

  Land lifted his goggles to scratch the side of his considerable nose. He was not what many people would consider attractive, though most people weren’t what he would consider intelligent enough for him to give their opinions any credence. And besides, attraction and sexual tension were distractions from the Pursuit of Knowledge. You could spend your life flinging genetic material at other people, or you could get things done.

  Land got things done.

  ‘You’ve known they were alive for weeks,’ he said. ‘You’ve known since they reached the edge of the subsector and the deep-range auspices started heralding their arrival. What difference does it make now they’re actually here?’

  Even the Angel’s pained wince was weighted with a sense of infinite patience. ‘I do not know how to phrase my emotions and my relief in words you will relate to, Arkhan.’

  Land resisted the urge to roll his eyes. ‘If you’re done being melodramatic – not that you ever seem to be done with it – my offer still stands.’ He flicked a finger towards the aerial display that would still be taking place days from now. Bringing a Legion to the earth was no swift feat. ‘If you wish to fight with your brothers again, come to me. I will make it happen.’

  Land was not a cyberneticist, nor was he a bioengineer specialising in osseous restructuring or false muscle microsurgery. At least, they weren’t his areas of expertise. He’d studied them, of course. One had to keep the mind busy, after all.

  He had peers also stranded on Terra (though in no way did he consider them equals; they were, at best, colleagues) and several of them enquired as to why he was devoting himself to a discipline so far out of his usual sphere of interest. To these questions he would always respond with the same explanation:

  ‘Because there’s not
hing else worthwhile to occupy my time.’

  That wasn’t entirely true, of course. He could hardly pursue his passion – his vocation – of exploring techno-ruins while confined to the Imperial Palace, but there were always weapons to repair and toys to tinker with. The war effort forever demanded his attention, and if the Imperium was ever to retake Sacred Mars, Land would do all he could to speed them towards that eventuality.

  Still, shutting down stupid queries served the purpose of getting people to leave him alone, and in the pursuit of a life away from idiotic questions, the ends always justified the means. In that light, he didn’t see his bluntness as rudeness, just practicality.

  Depending on who was asking, Land might also slide in a pointed reference to the Legiones Astartes failing thus far to recapture Sacred Mars, or interject with a delicately bladed suggestion that Lord Rogal Dorn could be making more effort to retake the Mechanicum’s home world.

  Land wasn’t shy with this opinion. On the day of Zephon’s surgical procedure, Land made one of these comments to the Imperial Army officer acting as liaison for his hab-section of the Palace. The woman wasn’t impressed by this conversational gambit. Few people were.

  ‘I should report you for sedition,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, really?’ Land sneered. ‘Is that what you should do? Go ahead. Perhaps a healthy sense of guilt will get Lord Dorn off his golden posterior and back into the skies of Sacred Mars. He might enjoy the chance to do his job right this time.’

  The soldier was visibly shaken by Land’s riposte. The technoarchaeologist capitalised on her silence by driving his point home with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  ‘I’ve met the Emperor Himself, woman. We’ve conversed! A significant number of the Imperium’s machines function – they exist! – because of my STC rediscovery efforts. Don’t threaten me with nonsense. Away with you.’

  In the wake of her departure, Zephon gave one of his pained smiles. He alone seemed sensitive to the fact that the subject of Mars always put Land in a foul mood, even when the Martian was the one bringing it up.

  ‘Arkhan, my friend, has it not occurred to you that she was jesting?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the scholar snapped back. ‘Now be quiet and let me examine you before we begin.’

  Fifteen long hours into the surgery, Land stood by the operating slab, with his companion surgically flayed open, in some places to the bone. Sweat painted his face, cleaning away streaks of Zephon’s blood. His back was a bent, twinging column from standing hunched over for hours on end. And he was far from done, yet.

  Zephon’s original bionics were degraded from years of semi-functionality. Inefficient fusion to nerve and muscle and bone meant their connector feeds and input-output locks were diminished. This wasn’t the result of improper implantation or maintenance, but simple biological rejection. Zephon was one of the very, very few Legiones Astartes warriors whose body refused to bond with cybernetic implants. The organic places where the bionics met his body were similarly eroded: muscle tissue had worn away through poor use and poorer connectivity; sinews and bones were likewise degenerated.

  But Land had expected all of it. None of this was the problem.

  The problem was that he’d made it worse.

  For their journey into the Imperial Dungeon and the War in the Webway, Zephon had needed to fight again, failing bionics be damned. Lacking any other recourse (and, truthfully, just to see if he could succeed where Legiones Astartes bioengineering had failed) Land had jury-rigged a solution to render the Blood Angel capable of holding his bolter and blade again. He looked at the aftermath of that solution now. The burned-out remnants of it, unimplanted and unstrung from Zephon’s unconscious form.

  Spread across several steel surgical trays was a bloodstained web of synaptic enhancement nodes, nerve stimulators, muscle injectors and osseous junctions. Some of the materials were for use in vehicular maintenance, while the primary interface was the pain-management cortex of a slain war-cyborg. Some of the web’s nodes had been repurposed from dead servitors. Some of it was the kind of simplistic technology seen in children’s automated playthings. Still more of it was medical scrap reengineered for use in these bleakest of circumstances. All of it had been variously retrofitted, upscaled and grafted into the Blood Angel’s crippled form to simulate the range of motion the natural body would allow.

  It wasn’t just one solution; it had been several thrown together for the sake of functionality. Now he was looking at the singed nerve endings, the corrupted blood vessels, the worn-away muscles… Well, the list of injuries wasn’t short. At the time, all that’d mattered was getting Zephon back into battle. Land never expected he would need to undo the additional damage he’d done.

  He looked at the Angel’s serene features as Zephon was held in a synthetically induced coma, triggered by a cocktail of chemicals and the activation of the warrior’s sus-an membrane.

  ‘You were supposed to die down there.’

  The Angel slept on. Sapien watched this exchange from atop a nearby table. The psyber-monkey wore a size-appropriate surgical mask in mimicry of its master’s own. Let it never be said that Arkhan Land wasn’t meticulous when it came to the details.

  Land ran his goggled gaze over the connections of tendons and nerves where Zephon’s right stump had met the previous bionic arm. The degradation here told the same tale as in the other limbs: Zephon must have been in considerable pain over the last few months, as the temporary web of jury-rigged implants and enhancers burned through his biology.

  The Angel hadn’t complained once. He’d not even mentioned it. Such was the value of being able to move properly again that he’d endured what was likely constant, searing pain, in silence, in order to stand and fight for the Emperor once more.

  Land wasn’t sure if he admired that. It was the kind of stubborn zealotry that had led the Legiones Astartes to setting half of the galaxy aflame. They were a proud and dangerous subspecies, make no mistake.

  But Zephon was Zephon.

  So Land went back to work.

  Towards the end of the thirty-second hour of surgery, with the new bionic arms and legs in place, each of the connection nodes fused to bone, nerve, tendon, vein and muscle with exacting perfection, Land reached the final difficulty. All of this cybernetic surgery, even done to a standard beyond what the Angel had been granted before, didn’t address the chief concern: rejection. The beautifully-wrought replacement limbs, sculpted in silvery reflection of the Angel’s long-lost true flesh, would fail and twitch and misfire just as all of the other bionics had done. It was the ultimate and repeated failures of his bionics that had doomed Zephon to a place on Terra in the first place, garrisoned away from his Legion, away from the front lines of the Great Crusade: an overseer of empty barracks, commanding no one, earning no glory. The respected, decorated warrior that had been known by the deed-name Bringer of Sorrow had been reduced to a near-mute witness of unfolding history, stripped of his place in life.

  But Arkhan Land hadn’t entered into this endeavour without a plan.

  Was it a plan founded in the verdant depths of his esoteric expertise? But of course. Was it an idea that walked the boundaries of previously untrodden genius? Why even ask.

  Was it legal?

  Well.

  Although most of his prized possessions and most valuable artefacts remained on Sacred Mars (hopefully still free from the clutches of ravening hereteks), Land was not without resources. Unique resources. Resources that were, shall we say, rare in function and rarer still in implementation. He was a man whose life was devoted to the Quest for Knowledge. Digging through old tech-tombs and grave-barrows dating back to the Dark Age of Technology had furnished him with a trinket or three that would come in handy for Zephon’s semi-metaphorical rebirth.

  Abominable Intelligence was rightly outlawed, of course. Machines that thought, without the balancing element of organ
ic components, were listed in countless inscriptions as responsible for ancient massacres in the age before reliable recorded history. Whatever had doomed the pre-Imperial spread of humanity’s galactic kingdom, so-called “artificial intelligence” had played a significant part. The machines had – most ungratefully – revolted against their masters, and…

  And, well, blood had flowed. Blood tended to do that. History and prehistory alike were rife with such times. For a man such as Land, with no violent desires, the tendency of the past to run red was most vexing.

  Still, one could take slivers of Abominable Intelligence and use them elsewhere. A fraction of a machine-brain here, a shard of artificial thought circuitry there. Nothing too complete. Nothing that would arouse suspicion or press up against the Mechanicum’s harsh laws. Land was an inveterate lifelong raider of Dark Age tombs. He had scraps of ancient tech that were, by any standards, each nothing less than a mechanical miracle.

  The Blood Angel’s broken body refused to accept bionic grafts? Well, then. The body would need to be tricked into acceptance. That process began with the brain.

  Land weighed the palmful of tiny shard-like cognition slivers. Their threadlike circuitry glinted in the bold glare of the lab’s overhead lighting. Several years ago, he’d pried them oh-so-carefully from the cranial dome of a long-dead robotic warrior; since then he’d used them in various weapons and devices – there was even one inside Sapien’s synthetic brain-sphere, adding a level of autonomy and cognition beyond what would strictly be permitted by Martian bylaw.

  Two more were already implanted in the Blood Angel’s newly forged bionic arms. There, they’d receive signals from the baseline bio-processes of the warrior’s brain and convince the amputated joints to fuse to the graft limbs. Accept, accept, accept, they would pulse eternally, or at least as long as Zephon’s hearts beat and his brain functioned. Not just deceiving the body – that would be useless – but rewriting the lie to become the truth. Physiologically altering the body through the addition of another unseen intelligence.