by David Guymer
A hundred years he had worked on this. There was no spring that had not been tightened, no moveable part that had not been oiled, cleansed, or replaced. It had become a ritual, a meditative act of communion with the machine that he could touch-navigate by rote memory alone. Stronos had always found difficulty in controlling his thoughts without such external aids. They were erratic, organic, less worthy of his Chapter. If anything the inner voice had become more strident as the flesh was detached from it piece by piece, its echoes amplified by the enclosing iron shell.
Whether or not he was alone in his difficulties he did not know. To look at an Iron Hands brother was to look upon pitiless dispassion; to listen to him was to hear words of such calibration as to be made empty. Who could say what embittered husks dwelled behind the iron masks?
The labour, at least, allowed Stronos to avoid those kinds of thoughts. His doubts he could process more efficiently with his brain thus disengaged.
‘You have performed a feat of great rarity,’ remarked Iron Captain Draevark. ‘You have gripped the brothers of Clan Garrsak with curiosity.’
Stronos was surprised that the hulking transhuman construct had managed to approach without his hearing, but he had long ago cut away the nervous pathway that would have made him show it. He looked up slowly.
Draevark’s slab-black Terminator plate was as broad across as the front armour of a Rhino. His helmet was beaked like a vulture’s, a cutaway section underneath grilled like the flayed snarl of an ork. Dual optics glowered, ruby red, inconstant, integrated directly into the helmet lenses and cross-connected by exterior cabling to a pair of wrist-mounted storm bolters. The silver tips of his lightning claws hung, pincered, a centimetre off the ground, a menace offered even with the power disengaged. A wrist cradle held an underslung flamer. The hum of his armour’s power plant was constant, every minor movement announced in advance by a hiss of hydraulics.
If there existed such a thing as an intermediate form between Dreadnought and man then Iron Captain Draevark was it.
Uncertain whether the iron captain’s comment required a response, Stronos remained quiet, and for a long while Draevark added nothing further. Without facial clues or body language to cue their conversation, verbal encounters between brothers would often peter out that way.
‘What is in the boxes?’ asked Draevark, a vulturine cawing of throat hydraulics. Nothing to connote the genuine curiosity he ascribed to his brothers, just a blunt demand for information.
Stronos’ lip performed an involuntary downward curl as he picked up a winding bar from the selection of tools on the trestle beside him. He inserted it into a long coil and, as though he were an artificer working with chisel and ironglass, began to tighten.
‘A thunderfire cannon. In my inexperience – my intemperance – I attempted to assume its control when my brother Techmarine fell to enemy drone-fire.’
‘It resisted.’
‘My first shot annihilated the xenos encroachment and saved my squad from death, but it jammed immediately thereafter and has never been fired again since. The Techmarines could find no fault, and the magi to whom it was brought declared it irreparably offended by my handling.’ He removed the winding bar and assessed the spring’s tautness with one critically lensing eye. ‘As an act of penance, Iron Father Verrox tasked me with its repair.’
‘An impossible task.’
‘I know.’
‘You seem to be accruing penitence duties, Kardan.’
For the second time in two minutes, Stronos failed to show the surprise he felt. It wasn’t that the iron captain knew his first name, but that its use implied a familiarity that was unexpected. Perhaps the clan interlink had given Draevark a deeper bond with Stronos’ mind than he had realised. He met Draevark’s eyes with his one and a half.
Again, he wondered what manner of thoughts were being processed behind that pulsing red glare. How much of a brain was left in there? Did it rail against its mutilation and diminishment as Stronos’ did?
Unspeaking, he lowered his tools and watched for a moment as his battle-brothers erected their fort in the crater that nobody had yet cared to name. Their strength was awesome, their endurance inspiring. Stronos observed as a warrior of Clave Ankaran lifted an armaplas sheet three times the weight of an armoured Space Marine without assistance and then drove it into the ground to begin a new stretch of defensive wall. One hundred and one transhuman warriors had just committed the last fifteen hours, Terran standard, to the slaughter of a quarter million without a single irreparable loss in return, and still they worked themselves harder than any enginseer would ever demand of a machine.
And yet Stronos felt neither inspiration nor awe.
A decagonal redoubt was already beginning to take shape, surrounding a central bailey studded with transceiver vanes where a cabal of transmechanics and their servitors worked to set up an interlink module to Rule of One. Armaplas was a tough metal-plastic composite, resilient and easy to produce, but its atomic density gave it the less useful propensity to emit breaking radiation under the specific conditions prevalent on a nuclear wasteland like Thennos. These waves were more damaging even than the initial radiation they blocked – not to a Space Marine, but their equipment was susceptible – and so the armour sheeting had been specially coated in a crystalflex-paint that made them shimmer like volcanic glass.
Servitors and enginseers unpacked static guns from the shipping crates that had been delivered by the last sortie of the Alloyed’s Thunderhawks. Autocannon. Multilaser. Missile launcher. They came disassembled for efficiency of transit, but every component was colour-coded and rune-tagged to match it to its neighbour for ease of assembly.
The position of break barriers and a replacement retention field had yet to be plotted. There was no immediate need. The handful of Mechanicus specialists currently planetside had lethal incentive to finish their work expeditiously and would not be in situ for long. Clan Garrsak counted its serfs in the tens rather than the thousands, none of whom were present, and had no servitors that it could not, or would not, sacrifice. As for the Iron Hands themselves, most would never remove their armour except in the case of injury, when an Apothecary would remove it for them, and so the radiation storms that blew in off the wastes came as no hardship.
In two or three days when the reinforcing clans were embedded and the fortress completed, the Iron Hands would have to push compliance into those wastes. Then, clan serfs and loyal skitarii would be compelled to take charge of the fort, but its subsequent habitability would be their concern, not Clan Garrsak’s.
‘Does something trouble my Brother Stronos?’ said Draevark.
Stronos looked down at the winding rod and hammer in his hands, every outward indication of his inarticulate frame being of singular focus on his work. It was a lie. The peace he had sought was broken.
On Virgos VI he had marched thirty thousand Guardsmen of the Scillian LXIV onto the tau’s guns so that Clan Vurgaan could engage the alien hand-to-hand with their strength undepleted by enemy firepower. He had watched Kullodinus Sept and its millions wasted from orbit when it might, at great cost in blood and materiel, have been saved. On Sceptica Maxis, when the world’s first glimpse of a Space Marine had induced a mass surrender of traitor militias on a planetary scale, Stronos had relayed Verrox’s order for them to relinquish their arms and kneel, and then followed his own order to shoot them with their heads still bowed.
He was the monster that humanity had clad in iron to protect it from those monsters it otherwise dared not face. He had no illusions about that. But through all the necessary purges of human fallibility to which he had been party, he had felt something. It might not always have been empathy or regret, but it had been an emotion and it had been his.
Through the purge of Port Amadeus he had felt little, until now. The manifold link to his brothers, their common bond of strength, had blunted his weakness. Alone now,
limited once again, he found he craved the spartan utility of unity.
He gave long consideration to giving Draevark an honest answer.
‘No,’ he said.
‘No matter. Clan Garrsak has a Chaplain and his name is not Draevark.’ The iron captain rotated his gauntlet, palm up towards the yellow streamers of tattered rad-clouds. With a single claw-blade, he gestured for Stronos to rise. He did so, abandoning the equipment for his servitor to pack away. ‘I am your captain. And this captain has little patience for the impossible.’
‘Does that mean you have decided on my penance?’
‘I have not, but Ares may have.’
In the flesh-spare human softness of his gut, Stronos felt a flutter of trepidation. ‘The Iron Father is here?’
Draevark pointed a claw across the rising fort to where the wastes shone glassily under the storms. Once the magos calculi had satisfied himself that the lost Kastelan units had indeed been removed from Port Amadeus prior to the invasion and authorised rescindment of the interdiction order, the Alloyed had wasted little time in levelling a thousand square kilometres of previously cratered wasteland. A landing zone big enough for a crawler.
‘The Iron Father has received simulus inload of every feed from the battle, mine included, and is ready to receive the clan commanders in conclave aboard the Rule of One. And he has asked for you.’
III
Melitan Yolanis abased herself before the mordant altar of Clan Garrsak. A handful of ancient sources – a partial transcript in a library on Kelpis, an oral history in one of a thousand small tribes of Mundus Planus, to name but two – purported to tell of how the Emperor had gifted the anvils to the mortal clans of Medusa in recognition of their allegiance to his son, the primarch. The Canticle, however, which along with the even grimmer Scriptorum of Iron had been required reading amongst the Fabris Callivant initiates bound for Medusa, told a different story.
It described how a master adept – whose name, for reasons that escaped Yolanis, had been stricken from the tales – an artificer beyond compare even by the measure of that greater age, had devoted five decades of his priceless labour to the creation of the original mordant altar, an anvil of his own glorious design upon which a suit of armour worthy of the primarch of the Iron Tenth might be forged. In the years that followed entire hives had turned dark and forge-temples rang silent as the near-limitless reserves of Mars fed instead to the mordant altar. Only the word of such a master was mighty enough to demand so much as a moment’s cessation in the Omnissiah’s labours, and as it was given so was it done. Such was the power that went into the armour’s making, such was the ambition of the master adept’s craft, that the great anvil was said to have split into ten immediately as the finishing blow was placed.
Legend held that any machine ailment could be remedied by the prayers of a worthy servant, spoken over one of the mordant altars. Melitan had never seen its power invoked, nor known of it to have happened in the lifetime of anyone she could ask. The peril with such contingent miracles, she supposed, was in proving oneself unworthy.
‘If you mean to rise, then rise,’ came a deep voice, hard-edged and blunt as the crozius that lay across the altar.
Melitan scraped herself immediately off the ground.
Iron Chaplain Braavos’ helmet was a skull of gunmetal ceramite that had been darkened with polish, the depths of the eyes and mouth cast into deep shade by the single candle that flickered on the altar top. The bladed edge of a serrated iron halo pricked the wavering light, as high above her own head as that of an angel. His powerful augmetic left hand was highly stylised and shone like platinum, left like an offering to whomever might claim it where it rested on the altar’s edge. The black of his armour blended into the dark of the chapel, but the silver scrollwork and ironglass scriptoria that embellished his wargear, like no other of the Iron Hands Melitan had yet seen, seemed to anchor his solidity where it was. The vast pectoral emblem spread across his chest plastron was a glyph in two parts: one half of a silver aquila conjoined with one half of the dark machine skull of the Cog Mechanicus.
Even a tech-priest would have asked after the comfort of Melitan’s transit from Medusa, or made polite enquiry as to how she and her team had settled into their accommodations aboard the Rule of One.
But not an Iron Hand.
‘What do you want?’ said Braavos. The Cult Mechanicus and the Adeptus Astartes seldom mingled, even in their professional duties, and the Chaplain seemed nonplussed by her intrusion into this sanctum of the Iron Creed.
Without waiting for her to respond, he clamped a heavy gauntlet to the altar and passed his silvered left hand in blessing over the boltgun and gladius that lay upon it. The particular needs of the Iron Hands meant that the duties of Apothecary, Techmarine and Chaplain shared considerable overlap. Standing above them all were the Iron Fathers.
Melitan clasped her hands into the holy cog against her breast, and forced herself to meet his gaze. ‘I am concerned about the Ancient, lord.’
‘As am I.’
‘Lord?’
‘The great Ares warrants an attendant with centuries of experience in his making.’ Melitan ground her plastek teeth. The idle assumption that she was male was the least of the daily slights she suffered. ‘How the Iron Council has seen fit to grant a duty that would be the crowning glory in the career of a celebrated magos ten times your age to one so profoundly ordinary mystifies me. But we are Clan Garrsak. We do not query. Once more the universal machine humbles me with ignorance of its designs.’
‘I am worthy, lord.’
‘Supposition. Unproven.’
Melitan bit her lip before she could argue.
She deserved this, she knew she did. The Voice of Mars, in his omnissiance, had seen in her the ability that she had always known she had, and eventually even the Iron Hands would come to see it too. But she was worried. It had taken her the better part of an hour to rouse Tubriik Ares from his simulus dreams, and the entirety of the night-cycle just to get him to repeat back his name. The spirit that inhabited Tubriik Ares’ sarcophagus was ancient and powerful, second only, she could tell, to that of the Rule of One itself. But he had problems, problems that Melitan, for all her natural talents, hadn’t the slightest idea how to resolve.
While she stood in silence, the Iron Chaplain returned wordlessly to his labour. The only sounds beyond those made by her own difficult breathing were the hum of Braavos’ armour and the burn of the votive candle. The scent it gave off was soothing to the machine, but harsh on her nose, like cinnamon blended with turpentine.
There was a long scrape of metal along metal as Braavos drew the newly re-sanctified weapon from the altar. Melitan flinched as the Iron Chaplain strode past her. With a blessing-blurt of binharic cant, Braavos thrust the bolter into the gauntlets of the Iron Hands battle-brother that had been waiting in the shadows by the wall. He had been there when Melitan had entered, and if he had harboured any opinion of his own on what she had come to say then he had kept it to himself. He said nothing now either, expressing his gratitude by drawing the bolter to his chest and stalking silently away.
Melitan watched him head for the chapel doors. For all their casual cruelty, that was what appalled her most. The silence.
‘Lord,’ she whispered. ‘I implore you. At least allow me to contact the logi-legatus about expanding my team.’
‘You will work with the tools given. That is the way. There is no other.’ Empty-handed, Braavos strode back to the dais, ironglazed parchment sheaves fluttering with the servo-assisted whir of his steps. He spread his hands across the altar as though deciding which of his many duties should next be served, then pivoted to bring his silvery hand over the crozius. He lifted it up, the fingers of the augmetic locking as the device passed into the light. The shadow of the solid iron staff and its cog-skull mace-head wavered over Braavos’ pectoral emblem. The weapon was anythi
ng but ceremonial. ‘Techmarine Naavor bears ultimate responsibility for the Iron Father’s rites and maintenance. Your duties, though vital, are few. The power I hold to commute them still further is clearly less than you believe, though the fault of that is not mine.’
‘Forgive me, lord.’
‘I am not here to provide forgiveness.’
She bowed her head.
‘We are at war, adept. This world is hostile. However limited your importance, you are a part of the great working. You will be proven or you will be replaced.’ On the word replaced, the Chaplain set down his crozius with a clank of steel.
‘Will you at least speak a prayer for me, lord?’ she asked.
‘Pray for yourself.’
IV
‘Stronos,’ Iron Father Verrox grunted. His unhelmed face was a scar-field of surgery and war, his grimace the moment that two warring chainblades bit. Stronos had expected no warmth in his former captain and mentor’s welcome.
When one left a clan, one left it absolutely.
Iron Father Verrox resembled an ageing volcano in his old Indomitus harness of black iron and ceramite. Kill marks and the scratch-representations of a hundred worlds conquered or destroyed with his boot upon them marred every surface. The tradition harked back to the human colonists who had first called themselves Vurgaan, who had fashioned weapons of artifice and power to hunt the beasts of the Medusan plains and inked their valour onto their flesh. Pride was the final and most pernicious of the Iron Hands’ flaws, and it was in Clan Vurgaan more than most.
‘He did not ask after the Thunderfire cannon,’ Draevark observed drily as Verrox withdrew to take his place around the hefty table that stood in the centre of the Rule of One’s Hall of Audiences. Loosely fastened armour plates clattered as the Iron Father walked, a long cloak of chainmail dragging along the metal ground.