by David Guymer
A squadron of Rhino armoured transports were moving up the road in convoy. Their hulls were low to the ground and growling, their armour black, shiny with the wet. The white hand and cog-symbol of Clan Raukaan shone faintly against the surrounding black like a deliberate anti-adornment. Spearheading the convoy was the unmistakeably vast outline of a Land Raider battle tank.
‘Right in alongside the bastard.’
‘Sir?’
‘Nobody leaves Cal Dortmund with his arse hanging out. You heard me.’
Kerrick smiled a little, then looked away as if to peer out the opposite window. Rank had done a fine job of smoothing Dortmund out over the years, but he still had a rough edge or two stashed away for a rainy day.
The truck tipped slightly as its right side wheels banked up onto the road, its left axle continuing to work furiously on the embankment. The enormous black wall of the Land Raider’s own left side was near enough to touch. The sheer noise of its power plant was phenomenal, a roar that surpassed even the flapping grind of wet tracks on the road. Compared to the tarp-roofed truck, the Land Raider was a beast. Rain splashed off the heavy sponson lascannons, just a few metres from Dortmund’s face.
‘Keep it steady.’ Dortmund leaned out of the window of the speeding truck and hammered on the Land Raider’s hull. ‘Afraid to tell me to my face? Is that it? I’ve found tougher than you wriggling in my ration tins.’ He beat the black armour plating once more. ‘Get out here and stand in front of me like a man.’
The Land Raider’s engine stacks belched out a ribbon of grey smoke, and it began to slow as it growled down through its gears.
‘Bastard.’ Leaning half out of the window, Dortmund pumped his arm forward to signal the driver to overtake. ‘Stop the truck in front of it.’
‘Sir. Are you absolutely–’
‘Stop the fragging truck!’
The boy hit the brake as though command had just voxed in a report of a phalanx of eldar superheavies inbound, and the truck slewed. It tilted onto its leading wheels, then rocked back, and was still. The rain drummed on the roof. The wipers continued to swipe back and forth with an incongruously mundane little noise, like sponging down a window. Dortmund and Kerrick cracked their doors and swung out simultaneously. Dortmund holstered his laspistol and straightened up, adjusting his beret cap in spite of the downpour that flattened it to his head. The wind slapped his face, the cold rain making a decent hash of shaving the thickening stubble from his jaw. He heard Kerrick tramping through puddles in the ankle-deep potholes, just behind, and the dampened clunk of the sergeant’s cocked shotgun.
Better safe than dinner, as his mother used to say.
A powerful phosphorous lamp suddenly ignited in the road ahead. Dortmund swore and covered his eyes with the back of his hand. He heard the heavy clump of footsteps moving down the Land Raider’s deployment ramp and then off the metal, onto the road. Taking a step back, Dortmund removed his hand from his face to hover over his pistol holster, squinting into the glare. Terminators. Four of them, spreading out. Dortmund was big, as men went, but these were goliaths, three times his size and heavier than the truck. Dortmund swallowed.
The main eldar force had been crushed two days ago. Somehow he’d imagined that the Iron Hands would have shed their armour now they were mustering out.
While not cussing or yelling at Vane to put his foot down, he’d had the – in hindsight stupid – idea of thumping some honest Throne-loving virtue into the Clan Raukaan commander. His anger was well frazzled now, like a match in the rain, and he was beginning to realise what a swine of a drill sergeant anger could be. He straightened up. He still had a backbone and he meant to use it.
‘Iron Father, are you in there? You all look alike.’
A lie, of course. Some didn’t look nearly alike.
The Iron Father strode down the Land Raider’s ramp, a colossus of raven black against the white burn of the spotlamp on his back.
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‘Warp echo has the eldar reinforcements two days off,’ said Dortmund. ‘You don’t need to run so damned quick.’ The Iron Father stared through him. You didn’t goad a machine. ‘Why even come here if not to hold this world? Why even waste your time?’ He tilted his face to the rain to glare into the giant’s cold dead eyes, just as he would have had a red-mawed thrasher that wandered into his encampment at night. It was like staring off against a rock that could stare back. ‘What were the eldar protecting in that old dig site? Why did they come here?’
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‘If you are strong you will survive,’ said the Iron Father, his flat, emotionless tones under-run with the beetling click of machine cant. ‘If you are weak you will not. Fight hard, general. Prove yourself worthy of living.’
‘Frag you.’
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Dortmund dragged his pistol from its holster, so bloody furious that it caught on one of the buckles and he had to rip it to get it out. He aimed it at the back of the Iron Father’s helmet as the Terminators turned and tramped back up the ramp into their transport. ‘You get back in that tank. Fine. Then you turn it round and follow us back to base. You hear me? You hear me!’ Dortmund yelled as the ramp emitted a clunk and started to rise. ‘I’ll have your ships shot down before you break orbit!’
The Land Raider, idling, gave a roar and heaved forwards.
Dortmund swore and flung himself out of the road, Kerrick rolling onto the embankment a second later, belly down over his shotgun and watching as the enormous line tank surged forwards at full speed.
Frightening acceleration, a Land Raider had, for something so huge.
Dortmund heard his truck give a panicked snarl, choked between gears. The boy at the wheel screamed, and then the Land Raider smashed it full broadside. For a second, the truck’s headlamps beamed skyward as the tank crushed the middle, made into a V with bullbar and tailbar bent up in the air. A pop of crushed glass and the lights went out, the truck effectively flattened under the Land Raider’s tracks. The Rhinos riding convoy smashed up anything larger than a rivet that was still in the road. By the time the last vehicle went by, a Razorback with its turret reversed, Dortmund had ceased flinching every time something crunched. The remnants of the truck and its driver were spread out under the rain, like pieces collected up after some mid-air disaster.
‘Orders, sir?’ said Kerrick, quietly.
Dortmund shook his head.
He didn’t have the fragging words.
>>> TERMINATING SIMULUS.
III
Lucidity returned to Tubriik Ares in a rush of code, like cold water over their nerves.
Emerging from a dream when one had not strictly been sleeping was a disorienting sensation, akin to finding oneself wet with no memory of having been in water. They were aware of the ganglia bundles in their amnioesis chamber in the same way that truly living men were aware of their brain when it ached. Torpor had made their systems sluggish. They concentrated as they sought to isolate their memories from the fog of simulus.
They were a general of the Catachan XVII, walking along a road in the rain.
They were a Techmarine of Clan Garrsak, flying a combat sortie.
They were a pure warrior of an alien world.
Their last memory was…
Was…
They felt suddenly, bitterly cold, as if this void in their soul was something old. They felt empty. Despite the long centuries of their hibernation, the burden of eternity was already beginning to weigh again on their shoulders. Wearily, they opened their eyes.
It was not instantaneous; it took several seconds for them to recall the proper pathways, and several more for the depleted bioelectrochemistry to respond.
Their view of th
e outside world was black and white, grainy, horizontal bars of bad capture oscillating up and down. Blocks of start-up screed burned into their vision in purples and greens like sun-glare as their view of a decaying chamber resolved out of the static. Faces of familiar men, long dead and forgotten by their descendants, looked back at them through eyes of marble and diorite. Audio capture blinked online. They could hear the infinite series of diagnosticae engines. Targeting reticules for weapons systems as yet unloaded tracked back, forth, back.
They had the overpowering sense that they were not alone. ‘Who are you?’ they said, their voice loud, but so distant it might have come from the walls.
Then they saw. There was a woman knelt on the cold ground before them. Her stiff robes were a red that pleased and soothed, ritually cleansed, but the chemical signature of grease and oils clung to them like the restive spirits of lost machines. Electoos on her bald head and bare arms flooded the icy chamber with noospheric code, grounding the individual, Ares, with golden cataracts of logical confirmations. A spindly medicae-dendrite swayed above her bowed head, as painfully delicate as she was. She was praying.
To them.
Then they moved, one hard adamantine fist entering their visual feed and being swarmed by icons. Their spirit sank into the cold void that filled them.
‘Who are we?’
Chapter Five
‘Clan Garrsak has a Chaplain and his name is not Draevark.’
– Iron Captain Draevark
I
The Adeptus Mechanicus capital tugs were two hundred metres of baroque crimson and brass, and when twelve of them began their descent into the Thennosian atmosphere it was with the scorching glory of a nuclear dawn. Their monstrous engine stacks were angled into the planet, pumping out bilious smoke, the concerted roar of a cosmic torch directed with relish onto the world’s ragged thermosphere. The voidcraft sank in formation, two half-circles separated by a wide space that was filled by a burnt yellow smog. Within that ascerbic haze, the awesome rusted weight of the Clan Garrsak land crawler, the Rule of One, hung on an immense suspension of chains.
The vehicle itself was several hundred metres long. A super superheavy. A fortress-monastery on tracks.
Towering adamanticlad modules housing the clan’s armoury, apothecarion, halls of rigour and more were connected through a chain of tracked units, inseparably interlinked by aether-tether and cable as well as by flexible iron couplers. They wobbled like ships upon a metallic ocean as they were lowered into the atmosphere. The crawler’s formidable defensive armaments had been locked down. Its many hatches were sealed. Some modules boasted quad rows of steel tracks, others vulcanised rubber or flaking iron, but all continued to churn. Not since the lost ages, long before Ferrus Manus’ fall from the heavens had flattened the Ice Pinnacle of Karaashi, had the fortress’ motive units been powered down, and the knowledge of how to do so had been lost with the passing of that age.
Massive belts of orthotropic plastek looped under the coupler bars between the running tracks. Inset grav plates burned like flattened suns. Single-shot boosters fired adjustment bursts as the impossible was given life and a god of the Medusan plain was brought in to land. The tugs’ engines increased their output to hold altitude, and the roar became planet shaking, the weight of their load drawing the two formations together as the land crawler sank between them. It touched down. Radioactive dust stormed up in the downwash, the crawler’s tracks finding traction and adding to the drag on the straining lifters.
A series of small explosions dotted the tugs’ hulls and the lift belts were detached, the tremendous lengths of sheeted plastek crashing to the ground like felled city spires. The crawler began to gain ground. The tugs increased burn to stabilise.
On the ground, three-score near-end-of-life servitors that had been waiting by the landing zone began to climb the moving crawler’s high sides to cut loose its shackles. Several of the units were ripped apart by lashing chains, but to the Iron Hands these were acceptable losses. Subjects for lobotomisation were there for the picking on every contested world and Thennos had an eight-figure population to be pacified. The tallymen of the Adeptus Mechanicus would catalogue every armed encounter and then duly fail to care if a few thousand were slaughtered here on Thennos or hauled back to the apothecarion for a more functional pogrom of butchery.
The wind by this point was a force of vengeance, the sky around the tugs boiling as though giving birth to a star. Scavenger expeditions would later unearth servitor remains from craters several kilometres from the landing zone, many of them still holding listlessly to lengths of chain. The tugs fired their engines to full burn and began to lift out, wrecking the planet’s established storm systems for decades to come.
It was a cataclysm of rare precision.
One that no one on Thennos thought it necessary to look up at and witness.
II
The razing of Port Amadeus had taken the entirety of the day and continued on into the night. For a planet as distant from its parent star as Thennos, of course, the diurnal cycle meant little, but the next rising of the Medusan sun, Sthenelus, would be over a world redrawn. Nothing had been allowed to stand. The destruction of a city was all about method, and the Iron Hands were singularly ruthless in their application of method.
Their object was extermination.
Krak charges had been set under every structure still standing. The precise position of each charge and its timing within the detonation sequence had been calculated meticulously for the most efficient eradication of a nine thousand year old installation from the face of the galaxy. Those caste labourers and skitarii that had survived the initial onslaught and fled into the wards to escape the detonations were herded into pens, tightly packed to allow for the highest achievable bolt-round to casualty ratio. Iron Hands on penitence duty took that thankless duty while draught-servitors dragged away the mess for nutrient recycling. Even Iron Hands needed to eat, albeit little and rarely. No particular effort was given to hunting down the escaped citizenry thus far unaccounted for. Those that the demolitions themselves did not crush would perish shortly thereafter from hypoxia or, if they were truly unfortunate, radiation toxicity. Thennos would have them, as Medusa, harsh mother to them all, had always taken the sick and the frail since time immemorial.
The thought would nevertheless have occurred to many – for though the Iron Hands were heartless, they were rational to a fault – that the overwhelming majority of the slaughtered would have been ignorant of why it had to be so, loyal subjects of the Corpus Machina and the God-Emperor unto death. That was also irrelevant: a canker had found life in their flesh, and in failing to excise the sore they were guilty by inaction. Eradication of the weak was all that would prevent humanity’s backslide towards heresy and extinction. And the people of Thennos had been weak.
What was being conducted here was an amputation, the chainblade of the Iron Hands applied to the dead tissue of just one more of the Imperium’s necrotised extraneous parts. And who knew better than one of the Iron Hands how few of those parts a body really needed in order to function?
While Stronos’ brothers tirelessly and silently conducted the extermination of the city and its remaining inhabitants, a handful of Techmarines and Adeptus Mechanicus logicians simultaneously oversaw the construction of a new redoubt in a neighbouring crater.
From that beachhead, the second phase of the Thennosian compliance would be launched. With the levelling of the planet’s only port and the disablement of its linking capability to its orbital facilities, reinforcements from Clans Vurgaan, Borrgos, and Avernii were already inbound to finish the task. Through breaks in the storm cover Stronos could see the iron glint of ship lights as the clan fleets tightened their blockade around Thennos.
The Iron Council had been explicit: nothing was to get in and nothing was to get out.
The first half of that instruction had puzzled Stronos.
His belongings had been transferred from the Alloyed, his newly re-coded equerry-servitor amongst them, part of a bulk consignment of material supplies for the new fortification. Stronos’ boxes sat in no particular order around the bench on heaps of plastek planking. Nails lay in the yellowed ground where Stronos had broken open the lids. Packing straw had been stuffed in between sectioned pieces of heavy machinery and frilled the tops, bristling in the rad-winds that came in off the wastes like plant roots with the topsoil stripped away. Occasionally a group of tech-priests would drift through, but the adepts had their own duties and Stronos had his, with the effect that both voluntarily filtered the other from their minds.
With great care Stronos withdrew a steel rod from the washers and springs through which it had been threaded, and then dipped it in a ewer of oil. He removed the rod and blew on it to speed it dry. The springs he spread out on the trestle in the order in which he had removed them. They were part of the firing mechanism, the fiendish complexity of which was still in mostly one piece in a tubular block of impenetrable machinery laid out lengthways across the trestle.
Allowing his mind to wander, the muscles around his bionic eye indulged and dialled through the spectra, hyperscopic magnification in the far-UV range picking up torsion fractures and material weaknesses in the rod that his organic sight never could. He thought of Jalenghaal and his twin optics. An itch in his remaining eye of flesh, he took the end of the newly oiled rod in the gauntleted finger and thumb of the other hand and, with remarkable dexterity for one so armoured, began to re-thread it with springs. Then he fed it back into the firing mechanism until it clicked.