by Various
He knows he can’t kill it. He knows he doesn’t need to. Sigismund didn’t send him here to kill this thing.
He drops the bolter the instant his retinal display chimes that his magazine is empty. His power sword flares to life in both hands before the gun has even hit the ground.
The hunting machine could circle around him if its cognitive processes choose to do so, but threat sensors flicker with suggestions of caution. This prey has thwarted it once already, and time is short. The kill must be now, or it will be never.
It charges, janky legs clanking. Spear-limb joints bunch up, driving back into their piston housings. It leaps, emitting a scrapcode shriek for want of a true battle cry.
Nicanor hurls himself to the side, rolling in the dust and dirt, defacing his damaged armour further by occluding the proud symbols that have stood upon the ceramite for over three decades. His injuries leave him slow, slower than he has ever been. He comes to his knees in a sense-lost haze of disorientation, thrusting upwards with the blade.
It bites. It bites deep, with the snarling kiss of an aggravated power field knifing into sensitive mechanics. Sparks fly in place of blood’s spray. He feels the machine buckle above him, its thwarted core straining, the sword buried in the underside of its hip joint threatening to plunge the beast-machine to the ground.
He must live, Nicanor thinks, tasting blood in his mouth. And he will.
He pulls the blade free from the crippled war machine in exalted silence, stoic to the last, leaving the bellowing of war shouts for the warriors of lesser Legions that require such pageantry. The sword snaps near the hilt as the machine whines and staggers back.
Nicanor is rising, turning, just in time for the stalker-killer’s primary limb to emit a peal of crunching thunder as it pounds through the Space Marine’s plastron. It shatters the reinforced casing of his fused ribs, kills the motive force of his Mark II battle armour as it lances through the suit’s back-mounted power pack. It annihilates both of his hearts, two of his three lungs, the progenoid gland in his chest.
He coughs blood as the crippled machine drags him up before its alien face. He is grinning when he hears the engine cacophony from the transport lifting off.
‘He lives,’ he tells his killer. These will be his last words. ‘You have failed.’
5
They are almost to the landing site when Arkhan Land realises the severity of the Space Marine’s wounds. The warrior’s limp becomes a stagger, his stride arrested as he seeks to pull his helmet clear and breathe without the filtration grille. It comes free to reveal a dark face with a typical Terran equatorial skin shade, blood riming the gritted teeth. It is the first time Land has seen the warrior’s features. He makes no comment on this because he doesn’t care.
Since emerging from the underground complex, there has been no sign of their pursuer. Ahead across the rusty desert, the orbital lander sits with its gang-ramps down, accepting evacuees and materiel in a shuffling and stumbling trickle.
It is not the ship that Land would have chosen for himself. Nor would he associate with the scavengers and dregs now boarding it, had he any other choice. But it is said that beggars cannot be choosers. The same can be said for refugees.
Without even realising he is doing it, Land shields Sapien from the gathering wind, holding the psyber-monkey in the folds of his magisterial, crimson robe. Sapien accepts this treatment, displaying a fanged maw no natural simian had ever possessed. The expression may possibly be a smile.
‘Space Marine,’ Land calls over the wind.
‘All is well,’ the towering warrior calls back. Plainly, it is a lie. All is anything but well. Nicanor touches a gauntleted hand to the shattered ceramite at his side. The armoured fingers come away red.
‘Your kind do not bleed this much,’ Land accuses him with lazy vehemence. ‘I have read the physiological data myself. In detail.’
‘We bleed this much,’ the Imperial Fist replies, ‘when we are dying.’ He gestures to the segmented evacuation craft being slowly abraded by the rising wind. ‘Keep moving, Technoarchaeologist Land.’
But Land doesn’t keep moving. He fixes his multilens goggles over his eyes, looking back the way they came. Not for the first time, he wishes he was armed. His collection of antiquities boasts many archeotech weapons, the pinnacle of his hoard being a deliciously beautiful sidearm with humming aural dampeners, rotating magnetic vanes, and the capacity to fire micro-atomic rounds. But it – along with many of his possessions – is elsewhere. A significant portion of his priceless finds are safely secured and await him once he reaches the Ring of Iron that surrounds Mars in a sacred dockyard halo.
Even so, he is already cataloguing the innumerable precious items he has been forced to abandon on the planet today.
Evacuation is such a dirty word.
Sapien hisses in his cradle of robes. Land nods as if the sound holds some kind of sense, adjusting his goggles’ visual range with a clicking twist of a side dial.
‘Space Marine,’ he says, looking over the dusty plain behind them. ‘Something is approaching from the southern ridge.’
It has followed them through the complex, after all. All of those byzantine twists and turns, hoping to put distance between themselves and their foe, have been nothing more than wasted meandering.
The wounded warrior clutches his weapons tighter as he turns. Land hears the click of Nicanor’s eye lenses resetting, cancelling their zoomed view.
This ends now, Land thinks. One way or another, this ends now.
‘Get to the ship,’ the Space Marine says. And when Land moves at a slow, exhausted jog instead of a sprint, Nicanor’s temper finally flares. ‘Run!’ he says, his voice a crack of breaking arctic ice. ‘Run, damn you!’
4
They walk through tunnels of flickering light, the power systems feeding the Mesatan Complex failing one by one, falling to abandonment or treachery. Their passage is sung in the sound of their footsteps – the technoarchaeologist’s ragged, tired tread, and the Fist’s own fading gait.
Nicanor no longer disguises his limp. Fluid leaks from where the robot’s withering storm of solid slug gunfire savaged his armour plating. It’s worst in several medial and inferolateral locations that he doesn’t need his retinal display to describe. He can feel the grind of abused metal against – and inside – injured flesh, without the aggressive chime of warnings across his visor display.
He can smell his own wounds, smell their coppery openness from a refusal to heal with the expected speed. That isn’t a good sign.
‘You said there was a ship,’ Arkhan Land says without looking back at the warrior.
‘A sub-orbital,’ Nicanor confirms.
‘Already it sounds like some grotesque last gasp for refugees.’
That is exactly what it is, Nicanor thinks. ‘The arrangements were made with whatever resources were available.’
‘Arranged by whom?’ The technoarchaeologist, a wheezing shape of rippling crimson robes, radiates an aura of disapproval. ‘By you?’
‘First Captain Sigismund,’ Nicanor replies, ‘and Fabricator Locum Zagreus Kane.’
Still he doesn’t turn, yet Nicanor hears the smirk in Land’s tone. ‘Fabricator General Zagreus Kane now, I’ll wager? Omnissiah preserve us from that punishingly dull creature and his limited vision.’
Nicanor casts back a sweat-stinging gaze into the flickering depths of the corridor behind. He sees nothing. No new warning chimes pulse on his retinal feed beyond the ones screaming of his injuries. His auspex scanner remains silent.
Corridor by corridor, they rise through the complex. Nicanor feels his limbs growing leaden as his body assimilates the adrenal sting of the medicae narcotics flooding his system. The strength they granted over the last hours deserts him by increments, inviting back the weary burn of his wounds.
‘I’ve never encount
ered one of those automata before,’ Nicanor says.
Arkhan Land turns his sharp features back upon his armoured companion. Amusement gleams in the scholar’s half-lidded eyes. ‘A Space Marine with a passion for idle chatter? My, my, my. The surprises never cease.’
Nicanor bridles. ‘I seek answers, not conversation.’
Land gives an unpleasant smile before turning to the tunnel ahead. The psyber-monkey on his shoulder noisily crunches on a steel ingot.
‘It is a Vorax,’ the technoarchaeologist says in an arch tone. ‘This one has been modified by a forge-noble to suit his or her own purposes, I’ve no doubt, but the chassis is that of a Vorax automaton. They rarely see use in the hosts of the Great Crusade anymore. We release them into the forge cities when overpopulation becomes a concern. They are,’ he adds with a refined air, ‘occasionally tasked for assassination protocols. But only against targets of sufficiently high priority.’
Nicanor reads the pride in the scholar’s voice. The man’s arrogance knows no bounds.
‘Who would want you dead, Technoarchaeologist Land? The men and women you were keen to remain and face alone?’
The robed man scratches his hairless crown – for no reason Nicanor can discern the psyber-monkey mimics the gesture, scratching its own head. ‘There you’ve asked a question of staggering ignorance, Space Marine. A great many of my contemporaries would enjoy the notion of me breathing my last. Not all, of course. But enough. On both sides of this new war.’
Nicanor grunts at the pain in his side. Land takes it as a question.
‘And why, you ask?’ the technoarchaeologist carries on, though Nicanor has asked no such thing. ‘Because I am Arkhan Land. Jealousy motivates them. Jealousy forged in their own insecurities. I suspect that says it all.’
The Imperial Fist says nothing. He’s seen unmodified humans do this before – the propensity that even overconfident souls have for fear-babble in times of duress.
When they emerge at last into the dubious light of the Martian dawn, the Zetek alkali plains stretch out before them.
Nicanor gestures to a rise in the landscape. ‘The ship waits over that ridge.’
3
It’s difficult not to be insulted, really. A single Space Marine.
The Mesatan Complex unlocks and unfolds before them via a series of grinding, whirring doors resembling void-sealed bulkheads – a design choice that Arkhan Land attributes to radiation shielding and disaster containment rather than a consideration of security. Given what’s happening across Mars – the insanity so poorly draped in the rags of revolution – he’s unsurprised that the complex has been automatically locked down.
‘We are being followed,’ the Space Marine says at one point.
Land, who has heard nothing at all, gives a tired grunt. The pace is punishing. He has no augmentations. His throat is raw. His legs are burning.
The technoarchaeologist and his companion move swiftly, their boots striking echoes through the empty colonnades. It’s a disappointment, to be sure. Despite using the deserted complex as nothing more than a subterranean avenue for the sake of convenience, Land can’t help but feel an irritated melancholy at what he’s seeing. The emptiness reminds him of the underground mantle-cities he so keenly explores, where his only companions in the Search for Knowledge are the dungeon-slaved defence systems of a forgotten age, and the serenity of his own thoughts.
Will he ever know that peace again?
And how long will the power last here in Mesatan? Without the complex’s thrall workers, the air filtration gargoyles mounted within each chamber will cease to breathe sooner rather than later. Anyone still down here within a few days will likely expire from asphyxiation.
And this, Land reflects, would be a truly pointless place to die.
On the run from his own contemporaries, no less. Omnissiah have mercy, it is almost maddening enough to be amusing.
The Imperial Fist leads the way across a bridge stretching over a storage repository, where thousands of crates and containers make up a township below.
A single Space Marine…
Land draws breath to ask why the Imperial Fist is alone, why it was deemed appropriate for a mere lone warrior to defend and escort him… when their pursuer makes itself known.
The Vorax strikes when they’re halfway across the span with nowhere to go, its nasty and near-feral cognition aware that they can hardly leap from the high bridge to safety.
The first sign of its presence is when the walkway judders on its support beams, and both Land and the Fist break into a run. Land’s frantic stride takes him forward in flight – not for a deluded second does he believe that the machine is here to save him – and the legionary immediately turns back the way they came.
The Imperial Fist is a blur of grinding armour as he passes Land, while the technoarchaeologist is a flapping silhouette of austere robes and simian howling, the latter from Sapien rather than Land himself. Even as he’s fleeing for his life, Land feels a tickle of embarrassed dread for believing that they had lost their pursuer for good.
‘Get behind me,’ the Fist demands.
Land obeys without thinking. The Vorax leans into its awkwardly graceful sprint, its bulbous sensoria-domes locked in a cold, animal glare. Its rotor cannons cycle to life, spear-limbs retracting in something akin to bestial eagerness, ready to launch forth.
The Imperial Fist stands between Land and the automaton. The Space Marine fires first.
Land has never seen the Legiones Astartes fight before. Not outside of visual recordings, with his own eyes. Despite all the ways in which his work has aided – revolutionised may not be too strong a word, really – the armouries of the Legions, the warriors themselves and their various capabilities have never particularly interested him, beyond the extent of the Omnissiah’s genius in creating them. He studied their physiology insofar as he was able, but a great deal of it was sealed away behind Imperial edict, and much of what he could access was bland propaganda.
He left it at that. Frankly, he didn’t care.
War, to Arkhan Land, has always been a notion of excruciating boredom.
Land’s passion is for how the rediscovered secrets of the past may brighten the future, rather than the tedious brutalities of the present. Space Marines are tools and they fulfil their role with uninspired aplomb.
This one is nevertheless an impressive specimen of the battling art. He opens up with a tremendous crash of bolter-fire, every shot impacting against the Vorax’s armour plating, not a single shell going wide. All the while he backs away, keeping his bulk between the machine and its kill-target, twitching and buckling under the rattling slug-fire from its rotor cannons and yet refusing to fall.
Sparks fly from the Imperial Fist’s armour. Scraps of ceramite clatter in steaming shards to the walkway gantry. He is being drilled. No other words sum up the destruction inflicted upon the towering warrior. He is being drilled by gunfire.
Bullets whine and buzz past where Land cowers in the warrior’s shadow. They spank and clang off the walkway’s railings, inches from where he stands.
Still the boltgun booms.
‘Nicanor–’ Land says. It is the first and last time he will speak the Imperial Fist’s name.
Nicanor fires one-handed, grunting as his blood mists in the air. His free gauntlet reaches for the melta bomb bound to his back.
‘Run,’ the Space Marine orders, and pulls the device.
‘That will not–’
‘For the bridge.’ Nicanor keeps his armoured pauldron facing the advancing, reloading foe, with his helmet half-masked behind it. ‘Not for the machine. Run.’
He’s going to blow the br–
Land runs.
2
‘You are the technoarchaeologist Arkhan Land,’ says Nicanor.
It isn’t a question. The man he addresses is s
light of build, sparse of hair, wears multilens wide-spectrum visualiser goggles lifted high up on his forehead, is clad in the layered robes of a senior adept over the more practical travelling bodysuit and rugged armour of a mendicant Martian, and is in the company of an artificimian – a psyber-monkey – that watches Nicanor with clicking picter-eyes.
Additionally, the man’s facial features exactly resemble the image files that Nicanor has stored in his retinal display. This is unquestionably Arkhan Land.
Nicanor can see that the man is afraid, betrayed by an accelerated heart rate and the sheen of fear-sweat on his brow. But there is pride here; Arkhan Land may be a non-combatant and in fear for his life – and, indeed, his entire way of life – but he stands tall and defiant even with a tremble in his limbs.
This is good, Nicanor thinks in his dispassionately amused way. It is good to admire someone that you may have to die for.
‘I am he,’ the sharp-eyed human replies. ‘And, dare I ask, which side you are on, Space Marine?’
Nicanor stiffens at the insult of the man’s words, though given the circumstances they are understandable enough. ‘I am Sergeant Nicanor Tullus of the Seventh Legion.’
Land sneers, rejecting the answer. ‘That tells me nothing but your name and your lineage, Space Marine.’
‘I am loyal to the Emperor.’
At that, the technoarchaeologist exhales something between a sigh of relief and a breath of irritation. ‘I trust you are here to “save” me, then. Well, I commend you for your efforts in locating me, but those efforts have been in vain. I am not leaving my home world. Sacred Mars is aflame with heathenism, true enough, but it is my home.’
Nicanor expected this. He commits precious seconds looking around the laboratory, seeking any sign of weaponry capable of causing him harm. There appears to be precious little in the way of threat amongst the near-preternatural degrees of clutter. Arkhan Land is hailed as a genius, but if his mind is as disordered as the space he inhabits, then it is a chaotic genius indeed that resides behind those unhappy features.