Ferrus Manus: The Gorgon of Medusa

by David Guymer

  Tannen briefly powered up something he'd deliberately opted to power down and squirted a packet of coded binary towards DuCaine's receivers. The rudimentary systems of his Mk I armour decrypted and assembled it, a map of the city splaying across his visor to overlay with his antiquated battleplate's limited auspectoria.

  'There's a branch line. Just on the other side of this building.' As DuCaine looked up, a withering volley of bullets and particle beams drove the Iron Hands back behind their tanks. He scowled up at the building in question from behind his sponson. 'I'm taking an irrational dislike to this building, Tannen.'

  The Techmarine's lenses hovered over the damage that DuCaine had managed to inflict on the walls. 'Some kind of loose conglomerate. Low-grade rockcrete analogue. I think we can take it.'

  'Good enough for me.' DuCaine banged on the Land Raider's battered hull and pointed its driver towards the building.

  Understanding, the legionary threw his left gear forward and the right into reverse, pivoting the battle-scarred behemoth on the spot until the incoming fire spanked off its sloped glacis. The Land Raider revved its engines and then heaved forward.

  Rockcrete was rugged and cheap. Walls made of it could be built high and built thick, but DuCaine's Land Raider was an Achilles-Alpha. It was the most durable vehicle in the armoury of the Legiones Astartes, tougher than most superheavies and almost preternaturally indestructible. It was held in almost mystical awe by the Iron Tenth, its mythic status only enforced by the fact that Ferrus Manus himself would permit no lesser vehicle to bear him to war. No one would ever hear DuCaine say it, but sometimes it was as if the vehicle simply refused to be stopped.

  The Land Raider dismissed the rockcrete wall like a sledgehammer would have, plunging through the cataract of dust and rubble. Percussive flashes burned away some of the pall, sponson volkite culverins systematically deflagrating the interior, then there was a slow, sheeting crash as a salvo from the hull-mounted quad launcher brought down the inner walls.

  The building noticeably sagged.

  'For Clan Sorrgol!' DuCaine rose from cover, silver-inlaid cloak billowing in the Land Raider's dusty wake, and fired a bolt-round into the air. 'For the primarch!'

  Weapons flashes lit the murk inside. It wasn't the Land Raider anymore. Its awesome firepower had done all it could without bringing the building down upon their heads.

  A torrent of hammer-blow particle beams lashed through the roiling grey, as though a blind and furious god sought to smite the insects at its feet with thunder. A legionary went down as he ran, skidding heavily across the rubble-strewn tiles. Another appeared to dance as the recessed window he used for cover was eviscerated by beam-fire The air was bitty and grey. It pattered on DuCaine's face shield like rain. Debris burst under his boots as he charged through, dropped to his knees and slid the last few metres to thump into the back of the Land Raider. It was waiting for its infantry to catch up. A Rhino climbed the rubbled wall of the breach and ground in after them, its pintle-mounted combi-bolter chattering like a servo-skull with a gift for prophecy.

  Wincing, DuCaine flexed gauntlet fingers around the grip of his power axe, then rolled out the seized rotator in his shoulder guard. He looked over at it and saw the black trails across the plate indicative of beamer hits. He hadn't felt a thing. 'Bloody Gardinaal.' He risked a look up. Some kind of heavy particle cannon had been set up on a tripod on an upper floor that had been transformed into a mezzanine by the collapse of the foyer ceiling. The sound of yelling and the clatter of armoured boots pulled his gaze back down.

  A bloc of men in padded grey stab armour and visored helms, wielding urban assault weapons, charged into the foyer behind a wall of heavy plastek shields. More poured in through torn walls, splintered archways and the partially demolished stair that led up to the habitation floors, dozens across and hundreds deep.

  'Bloody Gardinaal!'

  DuCaine wheezed with his armour as he made it rise. His bolt pistol punched through shields, through visor guards, obliterated human skulls. Tannen knocked down an entire rank with a swing of his servo-arm, then crushed two under one boot and decapitated three with a crimson stroke of his axe Caius Caphen peeled off from DuCaine's flank with a half-dozen old Storm Walkers to meet a second flood of men head on. The III legionary plunged through the remnants of the wall as they came through, his lacquered power armour cloaked in grey, his red lacerna stiff and plastered to his side, like the dusty tabard of an Imperial Knight. The stock of his bolter broke through a helmed head and smote the wall behind. A crack of his elbow near beheaded another. Just by standing amongst them he killed them, a god amongst men crushed to the walls or pushed flailing through the tear in the wall and into a long drop to the floor.

  'For the primarch!' DuCaine roared. 'Every last one dies!'

  The Gardinaal's position and strategy were sound. They had overwhelming numbers, a confined enemy and a defended position they knew inside and out. But they were no Legiones Astartes, and they had no chance whatsoever.

  There was a part of DuCaine that revelled in the slaughter, in his infinite superiority over the fighting men of Gardinaal. There were some who felt the isolation of their altered biologies keenly, the loneliness that only severance from the entirety of mankind could bring, but not the Iron Hands and not DuCaine. He basked in it. As he knew that Ferrus Manus basked in his superiority over all.

  The Land Raider gave a throaty growl, and in a pop of rubble began to roll forwards once again. DuCaine scraped along behind it, taking pot shots at the levels above as the tank passed underneath.

  Gaius Caphen drew in beside him.

  Breath rasped from his augmitters, his armour having transitioned from purple to grey and now to black, striped by beamer traces and human gore. He was no longer a man, but some chameleonic avatar of pure war, something feline and perfect in the way he took position beside DuCaine and added his fire to his Lord Commander's.

  'Wading through enemies until none remains is a most unsubtle approach to war, one I would more readily associate with the Legions of Perturabo or Mortarion the Reaper than the Iron Tenth.'

  'That so?'

  'We can't go on this way, lord. I would find the head and remove it. As Akurduana did to your forces on Vesta.'

  'And as the Ultramarines already tried, as I recall.' DuCaine was surprised by the warm sting of paternal pride he felt in being challenged by the young legionary. They'd make an Iron Hand of him yet 'It was in the Afrik, I think, that Akurduana told me that madness was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That thing happened to cost a lot of lives, but I always won, which is the reason I kept on doing it. And why Akurduana's always trying to do it differently? He frowned over the bodies and the death, the brute force of a galvanic traction drive half a metre from his ear. That's its own kind of madness, if you ask me.

  'But he who's without sin, eh? No, lad. If the Gardinaal have a head then it's buried good and deep in their shoulders right now.'

  'If we kill ten thousand for every one of ours then we still lose,' said Caphen. 'The Emperor's Children are better accustomed to counting the cost than you are.'

  'Look at you, lad.' DuCaine stopped firing a moment to grasp the roof of the legionary's helmet as if to ruffle his hair. 'All grown up.'

  Caphen shook off the hand as the Land Raider bulldozed the outer wall.

  Bracing his boot in an articulation frame, the pacifier corporal clambered up onto the raised platform of the assembler line where the Imperial pilot had been restrained. The corporal was muscular and thickset, bred to hold a pacification shield or intimidate a crowd, but he was almost ridiculously small beside the captive Imperial.

  His head was as broad as the pacifier's torso. One eye had been replaced with an augmetic as big as a man's fist. An additional set of large and complicated mechanical systems protruded from the back of his head where skull met spine. It looked distinctly uncomfortable. His skin was pale Blood loss perhaps, but Dekka thought it was pr
obably just the way he looked; the warrior's biology showed a remarkable tolerance to wounding and capacity to heal. The injuries from the crash were already beginning to re-knit, and despite having both arms crushed under industrial clamps he somehow managed to look haler even than the hour-old picts Dekka had received from Central Command.

  As the pacifier took up a position by the Imperial's head, Dekka took the ladder to the regulator platform. Pulling out his sleeves, he walked to the overseer's parapet overlooking the assembler, and in the bright under-lighting of gem diodes and flat-lined radium-painted gauges, squinted down.

  The pacifier slapped the Imperial across the face. Again. Left. Right. A harsh clap that rang through the emptied manufactory.

  Another strike and the prisoner's eye snapped open. He grunted, pulling instinctively on his arms to smack the pacifier down. And then the pain came. Dekka saw the moment. His face went ashen, his eye quivered, throat tensed as if considering the worth of crying out, but then, just as quickly, the moment was gone, the pain crushed. Remarkable.

  'Could it really be possible?' he murmured. 'A perfect gene-crafted warrior.' Venn, realising as he was designed to realise that the question was rhetorical, did not answer.

  Dekka thought of the testosterone-fuelled hyper-rages of the warrior castes, the emotional deficiencies of the enforcement castes, allelically linked to the desired traits of obedience and dispassion, and, even, the myriad congenital defects that had been deemed acceptable compromises to his own gene-line's mental powers. He peered down as the pacifier withdrew to the shadows at the edge of the platform, hand hovering over his sidearm. The captive stared coldly up.

  Remarkable.

  'I am sorry about the restraints.' The stare didn't waver. 'And your legs. I am told they had to cut them from you to remove you from the wreckage.'

  The pacifier unbuckled the hip holster that held his repression mace, but Dekka urged him to stand down with a thought. He smiled briefly. It felt good, to be powerful again. It was almost worth destroying a world for.

  The Imperial watched the pacifier backpedal, then turned his eye to fix on Dekka. 'I will tell you nothing.' His voice was deep with a faintly metallic resonance. Not even a residue of pain.

  'I think you will.'

  He sneered. 'You mean to torture me?'

  'I hope not. As you see, I am an old man, and time is pressing.'

  'I am not like you. I do not feel pain as you feel pain.'

  'Let us begin with that.'

  Spreading his hands along the flaking metal of the parapet, Dekka leaned over, as if it were the weight of his mind that pulled him forwards. Subliminal keys turned in phrenic locks, and with conscious permission his mind opened. His thoughts expanded.

  As a glittering energetic plasma he perceived them, violet-hued and electric, unconstrained by ageing biology or arbitrary physics and eager to touch everything, feel everything, know everything. He gathered in his thoughts and focused. Susceptibility to the subtle temptations of the universal other had been bred from his line over thousands of years.

  He felt a singularity of purpose as the full weight of his thoughts fell upon the Imperial warrior's mind. They hit an iron wall. Along trembling umbilicals of pure thought he felt his mortal body respond.

  Remarkable.

  The warrior's mind had been structured, deliberately, one would have to conclude, to be resistant to just this form of incursion, its layered defences hardened further by a startling, superhuman instinct simply to resist.

  Lips pursed in concentration, Dekka bade his mind press down.

  'Let us begin with that,' he repeated, his voice a purr of sub-hypnotic insinuations. 'What are you?'

  Of all the Emperor's Children, Solomon Demeter was one that Gabriel Santar might have been proud to call a friend.

  'We can do this, captain.' The sergeant leaned over the parapet of the enforcer fortress to get a better look at their target, unhelmed on account of the baton round that had fractured the lens and made it impossible for him to see with it on. In his dark complexion and the wilful set to his jaw, it wasn't hard to see a kindred spirit. 'We're already well ahead of the other battle groups.' He drew back and turned his dark eyes towards Santar. 'I'll not be shamed in the primarch's eyes by falling off the pace now.'

  Santar nodded approvingly. As bitterly as he'd protested this command, with time to reflect he'd come to see it as an opportunity. One that had been given to him and no other. Ferrus' bond with Lord Fulgrim was already legendary, and now he alone of the Iron Tenth had been gifted the chance to share something of that brotherhood.

  'Captain?'

  'I'm thinking.'

  Their target was the enormous rockcrete-dad dome of the fission reactor.

  It stood behind a chain-link fence in the centre of a large manufactory zone. That, and its encirclement by a string of shielded AA-towers, accounted for its continued existence now that the skies were firmly under III Legion control. A garrison of infantrymen in grey carapace several thousand strong were in the process of digging in, and in the time it had taken to clear the overlooking building, the compound had been reinforced with heavier units and vehicles, including some kind of armoured walker that looked to stand somewhere between a Legion Dreadnought and an Imperial Knight.

  Its armour was skeletal in design, the pistons that powered it black, its ornamented outer carapace silver-white. Banners bearing morbid symbols of oppression and death fluttered from a crown of poles. Power weapons sputtered stormily in the cryonic mists that its vents and fans generated. With shuddering strides it patrolled the infantry divisions, the lighter-than-air miasma clinging to noses and mouths. The sudden bulging of veins and tensing of muscles, not to mention the occasional tension-induced snap shot, were apparent even from afar.

  'Combat drags,' said Demeter distastefully.

  'One of their High Lords?'

  Demeter nodded, lip curled in disapproval of what he saw.

  Of the one hundred and fifty-five legionaries under Santar's command, only sixty were with him now. A handful had taken injuries and been withdrawn to the city limits, but the majority were spread out and engaged throughout the surrounding blocks. It wasn't Santar's way, but he had grudgingly conceded to Akurduana's advice that Demeter might have something to teach him after all.

  Ten- and five-man squads stirred up trouble over a kilometre radius of dense urban sprawl. Swordsmen and snipers, alone or in pairs, scoured the habs for high-value targets. It might not have been Santar's way, but something felt very right about it. It seemed to mirror the semi-autonomous structures of the Legion, albeit on a micro scale. And it seemed to be effective. With warriors everywhere, the Gardinaal did not know where to turn, and had not been able to stall his main force as they had others.

  And now he was one large fission reactor from a return to the primarch's graces.

  'If only there was some way to get in behind them.' Demeter pointed across to the thinner lines of infantry on the opposite side of the compound. The depleted Legions hadn't the manpower to assault the capitolis from all angles simultaneously, and so the Gardinaal knew full well from which direction the hammer would fall. Several Emperor's Children offered grumbling assent.

  Santar could not say he was entirely displeased by Second Company not having everything fall their own way for a change. The buildings were too high and the streets too narrow for the jetbikes they so favoured, and the riders had never once ceased complaining about having to fight room to room on foot.

  Perhaps they all had something to learn from each other.

  'I agree,' he said at last. 'We can do it.'

  'Does that mean you have a plan?'

  'We go straight up the middle.'

  Demeter looked as though he might protest, but then gave a nod. 'Straight up the middle. It could catch on.'

  * * *

  'What are you?'

  At the fifth time of asking the giant answered, not the slightest hitch in his voice to imply he had been asked be
fore or that he divulged anything he did not wish to.

  'Legiones Astartes.'

  A tingle of excitement ran down Dekka's spine. The back of his skull tingled. 'And what is that?'

  'A superhuman being.' The captive stared through the regulator platform, answering by rote from the pages of a dream. 'As distinct from man as steel is from iron. We are the product of surgical, genetic and psychological engineering, developed by the immortal Emperor from the lore of lost ages, distilled from the perfected being of the primarchs.'

  Venn leaned in. 'Primarch. That's a word heard often in intercepts.'

  'Some kind of rank, one presumes.'

  'An august one.'

  Dekka nodded his agreement.

  'Sirs—'

  The pacifier corporal held half an eye on the doors, a look of mild anxiety evident in the visible portion of his face. The sounds of battle were now decidedly encroaching. Every minute or so an explosion rattled the bound machinery, stirring the gritty air like workers' gruel.

  Dekka turned the force of his attention back to his captive.

  'Tell me about the primarchs.'

  The Gardinaal filled the backstreet behind the hab and in numbers. Sheer wall to sheer wall, soldiers in slab jackets with compact rifles flooded it, packed several dozen deep behind a plasterbag barricade cutting the habwalk in two. A pair of tripod-mounted particle shredders provided enfilade. And they were all turned towards the opposite end of the walk to that which DuCaine and the Iron Hands of Clan Sorrgol burst onto, fully engaged with the Ultramarines under Ulan Cicerus who were coming at them from the other direction. Giving the order to gun them down from behind gave DuCaine a moment's pause, but only a moment's.

  As the last of the Gardinaal jerked down with mass-reactive craters opening their backs, he saw why it was that cobalt blue and gold littered the habwalk in such numbers.

  A goliath of field-hazed adamantium bones and blood-soaked power weaponry emerged as the last thing standing when the men around it fell away, sheathed in a great bruise of field distortion as bolt-rounds disintegrated against multilayered force fields. The core of the war machine was human, or once had been. A dead face without eyes or mouth stared out from deep within a grilled helm. The rest of the construct, however, was too large to be inhabited by anything human. It towered even over the Ultramarines, half again the size of a Deredeo-pattern Dreadnought, and with three times the firepower.