There was, however, one more step. The fragments of robotic brain-stems couldn’t just nestle in the artificial limbs. There needed to be one more implanted, to close the circuit…
Land tapped his fingertip against the black dot he’d drawn on Zephon’s temple, and reached for the laser drill.
Zephon opened his eyes. He was alone. Alone in Arkhan Land’s ad hoc laboratory, which resembled a madman’s storage hoard more than a surgery chamber.
Each time he’d undergone augmetic limb replacement surgery in the past, Zephon had woken in a Legion Apothecarion, ringed by medicae servitors and in the presence of his brothers. Then it would begin anew: the cycle of hope, the slow testing of his limbs, the exploration of their function… and the rediscovery, yet again, that they would spasm and twitch and tense and joint-lock, interfacing too poorly with his body to allow him to rejoin his brethren on the front lines.
Today he rose not from a standard surgery table but from Arkhan Land’s sterilised workbench. The first thing he felt was pain – expected and natural – in his reattached limbs. The second thing he felt was a dull throb, reminiscent of infection, in his temple. That was expected, though not natural: Land’s solution, only vaguely explained, had required the rerouting of neural pathways. Maybe the notion of Arkhan Land – scholarly adventurer and raider of tombs – tunnelling around in his brain should have awakened the Blood Angel’s sense of unease, but Zephon was far past worrying. It was this operation as a last resort, or a life of uselessness at the mercy of his own pain and flawed bionics. He took his one chance without looking back.
Zephon’s senses took several moments to coalesce. Blinking cleared his sight; opening and closing his jaw cleared his ears with muffled pops. He heard breathing nearby, recognising it as the slow rhythm of a sleeping mortal, and sure enough, there was Technoarchaeologist Land, his goggles crooked on his bald head, sat hunched in the corner of the room, deeply asleep. Exhaustion must have gripped him at the procedure’s end, and he slept right where he sat down. Sapien mirrored his master, likewise asleep, curled around Land’s shoulders like an odd and exotic bestial scarf.
Zephon moved slowly at first, holding his hand before his face. Rotating his wrist. Closing his fingers in a slow curl. Opening them just as gently. He could feel the motion, the minute flexion of false processes and the rolling of tiny gears in his knuckles. His hand was beautifully-wrought, a specially forged piece far removed from the standardised Legion bionics usually awarded to wounded warriors.
He made another fist. He opened it once more. The movements were precise. No twitches. No hesitations or micro-spasms. And no pain; no throb creeping its way up his forearm to lodge in his elbow joint like a pooling spillage of molten glass. When he stood and began rolling his shoulders, Land stirred in the corner.
‘Hmnph,’ the Martian scholar said by way of greeting. Land blinked bleary eyes as he watched the Angel testing the new limbs.
‘All is well so far,’ Zephon ventured.
‘Of course it is.’ Even ruined by weariness, Land snapped his response. ‘And you’ll find that there’s no decay of motion over time. I can guarantee that. You are, for want of a better word, cured.’
The Angel turned hope-haunted eyes to the crouching, balding, irritable human slumped in the corner.
‘Oh, spare me,’ Land replied to that expression. ‘Do you have to look so soulful with everything you do? You look like someone painted a fresco of artistic earnestness. It’s deeply annoying.’
Zephon didn’t rise to the bait. He never did.
‘How did you do this?’ he asked. He was daring to believe the crippling damage was, at last and against all odds, undone. His Legion had landed on Terra, and Zephon dared to hope he would stand with them once again.
‘The details are irrelevant and entirely dull,’ said Land archly, scratching his hairless head. ‘You’ll still need time to adapt to the new limbs, but you’ll be capable of a light training regime within the week.’
Zephon laughed. To most people it would be a musical sound, though it rang tunelessly against Land’s ears.
‘Do my words amuse you?’ the Martian asked, raising a bushy eyebrow.
‘Arkhan, you are granting me a second chance at life and giving me the only thing I have dreamed of for decades. I do not mock you, my friend. This is just… joy.’
‘Well. Yes. That makes sense,’ Land replied, in a tone that implied it didn’t matter whether it made sense or not. ‘Now will your Legion restore your captaincy?’
‘I do not know.’ Even the prospect of returning to his brethren as a rankless battle-brother didn’t diminish the Angel’s rapture. ‘I do not care. Fighting alongside my brothers once more will be enough.’
‘Hmm.’ Land clicked his tongue. ‘Then you’ll be reporting to the Ninth soon, won’t you?’
Zephon finally tore his gaze from his new hands and arms, meeting the scholar’s keen stare.
‘If the implants take–’
‘Of course they’ll take. Answer me, damn you.’
‘Then, yes, I will meet with my father. Lord Sanguinius will share my elation and welcome me back to the Legion, of that I have no doubt.’
‘So you will be in the presence of the Ninth very soon,’ Land pressed. ‘Yes?’
Zephon’s grin began to fade. The half-smile that remained on his sculpted features wasn’t without humour, but possessed none of the joy shown only moments before.
‘Ah,’ the Angel said softly.
Land narrowed his eyes. ‘“Ah”,’ he mimicked. ‘Have you just had a revelation?’
Zephon’s voice remained kind, but his eyes were colder. Angelic, always angelic, but they were eyes of an icier breed of angel.
‘Perhaps. You wish to meet with my father, then?’
There was a starvation in Land’s eyes. A deep, fierce need. ‘I want nothing more. You’ll take me to him, yes?’
Zephon looked at the beautiful silver bribe of his new hands. It took him a moment to speak, and his voice was coloured by a gentle hurt Land had never heard before.
‘You did not need to bribe me with this surgery, Arkhan. If you wished to speak with my father, I would have taken you to him regardless of your aid.’ The Angel hesitated. ‘I had thought we were something akin to friends.’
‘Yes, yes, we’re quite the wondrous pair, and chronicles of our adventures will be laid out in sacred texts to dazzle future generations.’ His eyes were fever-bright. ‘Will you please answer me? Will you get me into the Ninth primarch’s presence, or not?’
Zephon nodded and the smile faded for good. ‘I’ll do so at my father’s earliest convenience. But, Arkhan, I wish to warn you – Lord Sanguinius is unlikely to commit the Legion to retaking Mars.’
Land said nothing. His glare said it all, mixing raw hope and naked avarice into an ugly, ugly sneer.
‘Very well,’ Zephon relented. ‘Whatever you wish. And what should I say to my Legion’s Apothecaries if they ask about the process you performed?’
‘Tell them my methods are my own. I suggest you enjoy your rebirth, Blood Angel, instead of fretting over the hows, howevers, whys and wherefores.’
Zephon watched him in silence for a moment. ‘I will do that. And… thank you, Arkhan.’
The technoarchaeologist snorted. ‘I didn’t do this for your thanks.’
‘That,’ the Angel replied, ‘has been made perfectly clear.’
Nine days later, Arkhan Land stood before the great white wooden gates of the Aphelion Suites, dwarfed by the portal that was five times his height, and jostled by a continual stream of scribes, Army officers and Blood Angels that poured through the open doors in both directions. He even saw a Custodian in the crowd; it wasn’t Diocletian, however, and Land hadn’t bothered learning any of the others’ names. He considered approaching the Custodian and asking after Diocletian’s health, but
he didn’t bother because he didn’t really care.
One of the gate guards singled him out of the teeming tide of humanity. The golden Blood Angel striding towards him wore a great winged jump pack, the iron pinions of which went some way to clearing space around the warrior. The purposeful stride and scale of the man did the rest.
‘Arkhan Land,’ the Blood Angel said. ‘Hold here.’
His helm was a death-mask of Terran antiquity, marked with red tears: rubies, fused to the golden cheek. His chest-plate was sculpted into a muscled reflection of masculine perfection, cast in the same gold as the rest of his armour. On any other world, the warrior would resemble a king. On Terra, among the Blood Angels elite, he was just a warrior.
‘I am expected,’ the Martian replied. ‘I–’
‘I am aware of your situation,’ the officer cut in. He didn’t remove his helm to converse. ‘You will proceed to the fourth Arclight Chamber within the Aphelion Suites. Lord Sanguinius awaits you there. You will have ten minutes of his time, no more.’
Land blinked. ‘Zephon?’
‘Do you understand the instructions I have given you?’
‘Yes, yes, of course I understand. I’m not an idiot. Zephon, is that you? So they let you rejoin the Legion, eh?’
The Blood Angels captain stepped back, allowing Land space to rejoin the busy thoroughfare.
‘You may enter,’ the officer allowed.
‘Zephon,’ said the technoarchaeologist. ‘I wanted to say–’
But the Blood Angel was already moving away, his gold-wrought winged form scattering the crowd in a slow tide before him. He rejoined his brethren at their posts by the white gates.
Land approached in a horde of supplicants and emissaries, making sure his path led him close to the warrior he’d spoken to. As he passed, Sapien leapt from his shoulder. The psyber-monkey landed sprightly on the Blood Angel’s golden pauldron, immediately and entirely comfortable in its new perch.
The winged warrior reached up to run a gold-gauntleted hand carefully through the artificimian’s fur.
Grinning to himself, Land entered the expansive, densely-populated suites, preparing himself to face one of the Omnissiah’s unpredictable, mutated, frequently irrational demigod sons.
About the Author
Aaron Dembski-Bowden is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The Master of Mankind, Betrayer and The First Heretic, as well as the novella Aurelian and the audio drama Butcher’s Nails, for the same series. He has also written the Warhammer 40,000 novel Spear of the Emperor, the popular Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Armageddon, the novels The Talon of Horus and Black Legion, the Grey Knights novel The Emperor’s Gift and numerous short stories. He lives and works in Northern Ireland.
An extract from Heralds of the Siege.
The Martian soil trembled. Beneath the Temple-Tarantyne assembly yards, something was rising.
Once a glorious spectacle of magna-machinery and Titan production, the southern installation had produced the mighty god-machines of the Legio Excruciata. Now its great production temples glowed with the unholy light of corruption. Chittering constructs went to work on towering perversions – looming monstrosities that should have been Warlord Titans but instead were metal monsters of daemonic infestation and heretek weaponry.
Row upon row of such beasts stood silent in the storage precincts, waiting for the orbital mass conveyers that would take them to bulk freighters destined for the Warmaster’s forces.
But those mass conveyors would not come.
With the Forge World Principal blockaded by the VII Legion, nothing was leaving Mars. Like the monstrous tanks, fevered warrior-constructs and ranks of empty battleplate sitting in storage bays across the surface, the Chaos Titans gathered Martian dust.
Dust that now rained down about the towering abominations as the bedrock quaked beneath them.
A Warlord Titan was a walking fortress of thick plate and powerful shielding. As any who had ever faced such an apocalyptic foe understood, it had few weaknesses. As a former princeps of the Collegia Titanica, Kallistra Lennox had the distinction of both piloting and felling such god-machines. She knew that one of the few vulnerabilities the Mars Alpha-pattern Warlord had was a weak point on its command deck, but the deck was almost impossible to reach for ground troops.
Standing in the gyroscopic interior compartment of the Mole burrowing transport Archimedex, Lennox felt the adamantium prow drilling a phase-fielded tunnel through the Martian bedrock and soil, then finally breaking the surface into the assembly yards. While the large tunnelling vehicle emerged upright, like a rising tower, the crowded troop compartment maintained its rolling orientation within, which would make disembarkation a smooth affair. The princeps had directed the translithope to rise up next to a Warlord Titan identified as Ajax Abominata. Loyal constructs had been watching the installation for weeks from the scrap-littered sides of the surrounding mountains. The construction of Ajax Abominata was all but complete, although its armoured shell was still covered in a scaffold, complete with mobile gantries.
It was a target ripe for sabotage – and the princeps knew exactly how to do it.
Not that she looked very much like an officer of the Collegia Titanica any more. While she still wore her uniform amid scraps of flak and carapace, it was tattered and stained with oil. The black leather of her boots was scuffed and her gloves crudely cut to fingerlessness. She wore an eyepatch where her ocular bionic had been torn out, and a short chainblade sat heavy upon her belt where a ceremonial sabre used to hang. Grenades and hydrogen flasks dangled from a bandolier while in her hands the princeps clutched the chunky shape of a plasma caliver.
‘Stand by,’ she said, sternly.
The loyalist Mechanicum cell to which Lennox belonged had been dubbed the Omnissian Faithful. Like all its adherents, Lennox was a Martian survivor. Left behind in the exodus to Terra, she had become a rebel on her own world. While the scrapcode tore through the Forge World Principal, corrupting everything it touched, there had been some Martians and constructs who had followed their instincts. As part of a disgust response – like a person making themselves sick after ingesting a toxin or poison – some true servants of the Omnissiah had had the strength to mutilate themselves. They tore bionics from their bodies, severed hardlinks and burned out wireless receivers. Ports and interfaces were gouged out, their bodies and minds cut off from the code-streams of the Martian networks. They had saved themselves from the infected data that brought madness, spiritual pollution and the warping of flesh and form.
It was a corruption that had claimed nearly all who had not escaped the Red Planet, even the Fabricator General himself: Kelbor-Hal, now no more than a withered bundle of polluted workings. Like the magi below him and the constructs below them, he had become a slave to darkness. A puppet controlled by the renegade Warmaster Horus, light years distant.
In the Mole’s troop compartment stood a motley collection of blank-faced adepts, battle-smashed skitarii, liberated tech-thralls, indentured menials, gun-servitors saved by their masters, vat-engineered work-hulks, harnessed ferals and bastardised battle-automata. All were pledged to the Omnissian Faithful but had needed a leader in the field. Someone of a tactical mind and destructive disposition to help the rebels in a campaign of sabotage and subversion.
When Lennox had joined them, they had found just such a leader.
‘Ten seconds,’ the princeps told the rebel constructs about her. Her seconds, Omnek-70 and Galahax Zarco, waited either side of the bulkhead. Omnek-70 was skitarii – a Ranger who carried the length of a transuranic arquebus. Zarco, meanwhile, was a hulking enginseer who hefted a power axe in the shape of an Omnissian cog. Lennox listened for the sound of the drill and phase fields on different materials. She stamped on the deck.
‘Ratchek,’ she called to her former moderatii and the Mole’s goggled operator. ‘Kill the main dr
ive. Open outer doors.’
The layered bulkheads sighed hydraulically, and slipped aside to reveal the shadowy interior of the scaffold complex.
Lennox nodded. ‘Go.’
The structure was swarming with afflicted constructs going about their duties, and before long Lennox and her rebels found themselves fighting up through the blind spots and gauntlets of the scaffold interior. Meanwhile, heavily armed security forces – drawn from their perimeter posts by the Mole’s emergence – were running across the assembly yards and converging upon the Titan.
The compartments and ladderwells of the towering complex were filled with the cacophony of gunfire. The Omnissian Faithful had to make use of whatever untainted weaponry they could scavenge and could not afford god-pleasing uniformity. Laslocks blasted bolts across the darkness of the decks. Shells from stub-carbines tore up through catwalks. Arc rifles threw streams of lightning along gantries. Lennox anticipated the arrival of the rebels by tearing grenades from her bandolier and throwing them up through the ladderwells and into the levels above.
Ajax Abominata, even in the final stages of its dread assembly, was what she had come to expect from a corrupted god-machine, swarming with twisted artisans prattling scrapcode and insanity.
The rebels moved up at speed and with merciless gunfire delivered at point-blank range. The corrupted army of constructs tending the monstrous Titan were ill-equipped to repel such a direct attack. The assembly yard’s security forces and shock troops hadn’t entertained the possibility of an assault on Temple-Tarantyne coming up through the installation’s foundations. While they babbled and ran towards the towering scaffold, Lennox and her rebels hauled themselves up through the structure. Heavy servitors and cyborg corruptions shrieked as they were blasted aside. Chainblades opened up the traitor constructs in fountains of blood and oil before sending them flailing off the scaffold’s edge.
The rapid advance was not met without resistance. About them the very metal of the Titan’s outer hull and the surrounding scaffolding warped with daemonic presence. Infernal eyes opened in the walls. Hatches opened explosively to vomit acidic ichor or shoot grasping tentacles at the rebels. Deck openings became fang-lined mouths that cut insurgents in half. The fighting got close and tangled on a platform crowded with strapped-down stores and cargo nets. They were rushed by servitors with black filth bubbling from their mouth-grilles and a fell light behind their eyes. Lennox ordered her expendable ferals with their limb-fused weaponry into the fray, supported by engineered hulks who tore the traitor servitors limb from corrupted limb.
Bringer of Sorrow Page 2
