by David Guymer
‘It is!’ Melitan blurted, unguarded, then quickly marshalled herself again, gripping the rests of the workstation chair as if to physically keep from being drawn into Palpus’ rhetorical manoeuvrings a third time. ‘It is. A tremendous honour. And one I pray with every scintilla of my being to prove worthy of. But I need help, legatus.’ She shrugged, a gesture of defeat that Palpus’ optics zeroed in on. ‘I request the addition of a more experienced adept to my team. I would… humbly… accept subordination to such an adept. For the sake of Ancient Ares. And the Omnissiah.’
Palpus smiled at her, kindly. ‘You care profoundly for the Ancient.’
‘Of course.’
‘And for the Omnissiah.’
Melitan stared across the table, open-mouthed, shocked beyond words that her faith could even be called into question.
‘Your dedication is noted – your pursuit of knowledge at the risk of your hard-earned standing within the eleventh grade will be similarly recorded. You will rise high, Yolanis. Your chirurgical aptitude has been remarked upon within the highest spheres. Know that Talos Epsili has already recommended you for a position within the tenth grade on Holy Mars. Subject to current performance, of course.’
Melitan could tell that her mouth was moving, but none of the swirl of thoughts in her head seemed to be making the crucial transformation into words. She could not tell whether the near-realisation of all she had ever wished for since she had been old enough for her own dreams filled her with elation or dread.
‘In truth, the revivification of Ancient Ares was an error, an unforeseen consequence of the mobilisation order to pacify Thennos. He is a relic of a less enlightened era, an object of reverence that should have been left in state. I am responsible for the deployment of some eleven hundred Iron Hands, their ships, labour, recruits, and hundreds of thousands of skitarii detachments, all of them dispersed over dozens of sectors, and yes, mistakes will sometimes be made. It falls on you to ensure correction.’ Melitan nodded, uncertainly. Palpus gestured to the datasplays built into his armrests, myriad action requests, all of which blinked furiously for his attention. ‘I will of course look into your request, but it will take time to identify an individual of requisite talent that can be spared. The demands on my time conspire against a swift resolution. The situation is unlikely to change before the conclusion of the Thennosian compliance. In the meantime, turn your thoughts to the Omnissiah. He will guide you to the function you crave.’
Melitan almost forgot to thank the legatus for his efforts, assuming she was supposed to. In all honesty, she had forgotten whose side she was on.
‘I know that you will not disappoint me,’ he said, apparently recalling the skitarii by subvocal command, for the door opened and the cyborg soldiers entered a moment later. He smiled benignly, and again, Melitan felt a creeping itch under her electoos. ‘In light of your commitment to the Empire of Mars, I have decided to commute Callun Darvo’s mark of censure. You may keep him on your staff.’
‘Th-thank you.’
‘Talos Epsili will not be around forever,’ said Nicco Palpus, stacking his data slates with a pedant’s good order. ‘Continue to please me, Melitan. You might find yourself sitting in the Eye of Medusa sooner than you think.’
Chapter Nine
‘Power worth having is never free. Ask Fulgrim this.’
– Ancient Tubriik Ares
I
Kardan Stronos could feel his eyeball burning, retina bleaching, pupil tightening, but Space Marine physiology held mastery over the pain and kept the eyelid open. With a recalcitrant squeal, the chirurgical arm was drawn aside, glimmering after-colours chasing it out of sight. Stronos blinked rapidly.
‘Your eye is minimally functional, clearly defective – it is a wonder you have persisted with it for as long as you have.’ Apothecary Haas forced the reluctant chirurgical arm into its overhead cradle, then moved across the apothecarion to interface with a requisition terminal. ‘You are due to rejoin your clave on Thennos. I will provision for an augment without delay.’ After a few minutes of communion in which both the Apothecary and his terminal emitted a series of sharp clicks at one another, he disconnected and turned back. The lumens were typically dull – the chirurgeons required light no more than any of the Iron Hands – but Haas’ battleplate and augments gleamed with an abrasive shine. ‘Wait here.’
Stronos settled into his pallet. For want of a more pressing stimulus he stared at the bulkhead above his cot, his bionic optic moving mechanically through the frequency ranges. His enhanced positional awareness and the augmetic gyroscope implanted in his thalamus let him feel the movements of the ironbarque Commandment, as Clan Garrsak’s monstrous flagship hove into formation with the Thennos blockade fleet. The frigate Onslaught’s return journey had been uneventful, but Stronos’ thoughts remained in turmoil.
It wasn’t good enough. His body was weak.
He had always known, but attachment to flesh had made him resistant to the action required. His encounter with Lydriik had provided the final push he needed.
He assumed that his friend had returned to his own ship, possibly sharing an orbit somewhere on the other side of the blockade, but in a way that no longer mattered.
In the photo-bleached colour blotches that floated out of reach above his flesh eye he saw the red eyes of Captain Harsid. Closer to him than the ceiling lumens were now. Part of him recoiled from the memory, but he made himself face it. The son of Corax – a Death Spectre, he had later learned, having made enquiries of the crossed-scythes emblem with the Commandment’s imager archives – had come upon him completely unawares. If he had been hostile then Stronos would be dead. Add to that his humbling before the Iron Council and his wayward actions on Thennos and it showed a pattern of behaviour that demonstrated his fault.
The eye was an obvious target. It had nagged him for decades, and its replacement was an important step on his drive towards perfection. That it simultaneously deferred action on the aspersions Lydriik had cast against the Adeptus Mechanicus he had noted and deemed incidental. Any action he might take now would be suspect in any event. For all that he had been discomforted at first, he found that he craved the surety of the clan interlink now. He desired the strength of his brothers’ wills to brace his own.
The flesh was weak.
The bright metal cabinets fitted against the bulkheads rattled as someone entered. His first thought was that it was Haas, wheeling in a chirurgical trolley, but again his senses fell below expectation. It was Ares.
The Dreadnought towered over the stowed instrumentarium, the restricted space making his heavy armoured frame appear even more massive. His blocky torso pivoted as if to survey the room thoroughly before entering, his optic slits appearing to alight upon Stronos only by chance.
‘Is Stronos injured?’
Stronos considered silence, but decided that he could keep nothing from the ancient. ‘I am defective. I seek to rectify that.’
‘How so?’
‘The Raven’s son proved himself my superior. I must improve and adapt.’
‘Improve and adapt.’ Ares’ vocabularisers rumbled with scorn. ‘We recall a time when Iron Hands were less like Kristos and more like Kardan Stronos. They were ruthless, yes, but adaptable, not slaves to calculus.’
‘You should have said as much before the Eye of Medusa,’ Stronos returned, bitterly, his gaze fixed to the ceiling plating.
‘Garrsak cast our vote as we saw right. Our word would have made no difference.’
‘When you first stood before me you declared the Iron Council would feel your wrath for their failure to hold Thennos. Your fury was sound. What became of it?’
‘Such strength of feeling is difficult to hold to. In time, perhaps, Stronos will know this too.’
Stronos scowled. The facial twitch lengthened his visual wavelength from infrared to microwave. The power conduits buried
within the ceiling above his cot became a shadowy smear of crimson. ‘You believed the decision of the council to be errant, yet you left the argument to Verrox.’
‘From each according to his ability,’ said Ares. It sounded like a quotation. ‘Verrox is passionate and persuasive. Even when Tubriik wore flesh in place of iron, the Vurgaan were thought primitive. Now we wonder if they are not the sole champions of the Iron Creed as once we knew it.’
Stronos turned his head to regard the Dreadnought. The metal roundels of his forgechain bumped against the pallet, and he resisted the urge to touch the augmetic vertebrae, suddenly bitterly angry. ‘Irrelevant. All of it. Irrelevant. The Iron Council has ruled. It is clearly our decision-making that is in error, not theirs. I will not weaken my brothers by standing alongside them in this imperfect state.
‘We feel that we should experience contempt for such self-delusion, yet we find that we cannot care. How far from our Father’s likeness we have both fallen.’
Haas re-entered by another door. He regarded Ares hostilely.
‘You are beyond my skills to restore, venerable,’ said the Apothecary, bluntly, as a headless servitor pushing a medicae trolley and a wispish thing in crimson robes squeezed through into the already cramped quarters. The magos biologis rolled up long sleeves and rubbed his hands with counterseptic jelly while the servitor manoeuvred around Stronos’ bedside, its trolley rattling carelessly over the tension. ‘With respect, Iron Father, your presence here serves no purpose.’ He waited a moment during which Ares offered a blank wall by way of reply, and then added. ‘You take up space. Leave.’
‘The Kristosian question makes all matters subject to doubt,’ Stronos said to Ares, voice low. ‘All will be as it once was once the arguments are resolved.’
Ares turned from the Apothecary to him. His emptiness seemed for a moment… sorrowful. ‘Kardan Stronos speaks of the arguments, but what does he know of the question, for there is only one?’
Stronos made to formulate an answer, only to realise he had none. Often he had railed against the waste of energy that the conclave brought on the Iron Council, but had never found the time to learn for himself what, in effect, it was all for. He shook his head honestly. He had been built to be a war machine. This round voyage to Medusa was the first time since his novitiation that he had not been either in the thick of a warzone or in transit from one to another.
‘Better to leave questions of doctrine to the tech-priests and the Iron Fathers,’ said Haas, moving to Stronos’ pallet and the waiting servitor even as he spoke.
At the mention of his order, the magos looked up, but did not interrupt. Stronos frowned at the mortal. For every Iron Hands warrior on Medusa and scattered across the Imperium there were a thousand servitors, menials and adepts of the Adeptus Mechanicus to service their needs. Noticing his regard, the adept quickly looked away.
Stronos found himself wondering what else the unseen legions on which the Chapter so depended might see and hear.
A non-verbal burst of scorn rang from Ares’ vocabularisers. ‘And you call yourselves men of iron, you who cede all free will to others and call it strength. Do you even know how the conclave began?’
‘I know little of Kristos beyond his roll of honours,’ said Stronos, stung. ‘I know that he was once considered an exemplar of the Iron Creed.’
‘As it is now interpreted for you, perhaps.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ demanded Haas.
Ares did not answer directly. ‘It began on Columnus,’ he said.
‘Everyone knows that,’ Haas said, dismissively, then picked up a spoon-headed implement from his medicae trolley and bent towards Stronos.
‘And what happened there to cause such crisis?’ Ares countered.
Stronos couldn’t answer. He looked to Haas. The Apothecary let out a frustrated sigh and said nothing, focusing instead on Stronos’ eye. He had no answer either.
‘Stow thy leeches, Apothecary – there is to be no bloodletting today.’ Ares backed out of the chirurgical bay and into the main space of the apothecarion. With some reluctance, Stronos sat up on his pallet and pushed Apothecary Haas from him. ‘Come, Kardan. We will show you what happened that day.’
II
Tubriik Ares backed into the alcove, blasts of icy gases enveloping his massively armoured bulk. The alcove was vast, a cutaway section of bulkhead broad enough to house a Dreadnought, and extended up through the decks. Blue-tinged vapours drifted unhurriedly through the tangle of stanchions and piping that filled it, like the brush of clouds over the spires of a cathedral to the Motive Force. The stochastic pulse of conduits was its stained glass. The raw hum of moving data was its chorus. And at its core was Ares, the altar around which all faith and function was derived.
Mechanicus adepts crawled diligently around the Dreadnought, slid beneath his stocky legs, and even clambered onto his sarcophagus to drag up connective cabling and plug him into inload-exload hardpoints set into the alcove’s walls. They looked like red ants, crawling over an animal carcass.
Another labour crew guided the transferral of a stupefyingly thick brass-ribbed data-cable from one plug site to another. They sang hymns and drew sigil-schemata in the mist, the actual lift work performed by a pair of heavy draught servitors, specialist units of vat-grown muscle and power-assisted augments. There was a deep, reverberative clunk as the cable went in. The priests’ chant increased in volume and fervour, and the air modulated its hum, the chorus altering its tenor as the flow of data was diverted. Swarms of whip-limbed servitors swung between the hyper-chilled leaden cylinders of the meme-cores and the labyrinth of serial cogitation cascades to which they were interplexed, establishing and breaking connections with an intuitive speed that would have dizzied even one of the Iron Hands.
Lights blinked their readiness. Klaxons spoke of connection errors that had magi converging behind one servitor or another to hand correct some nanoscale mis-alignment. Trembles spread out through the deckplates like ripples.
It was like watching novitiates perform embarkation drills, before their numbers had been culled and they had been pushed sufficiently beyond panic.
‘This is a simulus chamber,’ said Stronos and looked up, a quiet nudge against his heart that might have been akin to wonder.
Only the largest Clan Vurgaan warships, the battle-barges and its brutish ironbarque, the Hammer of Manus, were equipped with such powerful technologies and only senior officers were permitted onto their decks. Stronos had never seen one.
‘It is,’ said Ares. His voice, bounced by the vertical steel canyon in which he stood, resounded from the decks above. He appeared unperturbed by the insects that clambered over his metal skin. ‘The simulus is ancient technology, and has been exploited by the Iron Hands as far back as Tubriik’s memory goes. But never as much as now.’
‘The ability to inload strategic protocols, or to participate in simulated warfare against xenos species no Iron Hand has ever personally encountered.’ Stronos looked up admiringly into the vast banks of solid-state meme-cores, sweaty with the efforts of the deck’s atmospheric controls to keep them cold. ‘I have heard of its power.’
‘Powerful? Yes. But at a cost. Power worth having is never free. Ask Fulgrim this. No clan embraces the technology as Garrsak does – from where does Stronos think our reputation for blind obedience and inflexibility arises?’
Ares left the question unanswered as, at a blurt of binharic from him, a flurry of hunched adepts converged on Stronos and herded him towards a pod of his own. Where Ares’ mighty armature almost touched the walls, Stronos was swallowed entire, the flock of wittering magi descending with him into the hollow. He spread his arms and allowed them to connect him, the flex in the cabling allowing them to stretch the greater distance between him and the buffers in the wall. He felt stirrings of trepidation, and the first real jolt of pain as rods were inserted through plug-ins un
der the rear rim of his gorget and into his brainstem.
His eyes turned to static, aggressive code spreading through his nervous system like a potent anaesthetic. He gave an involuntary gasp, and a jerk. Except that nothing moved.
>>> SIMULUS INLOAD
>>> SOURCE >>> URDRI FORTRESS FACTORY, COLUMNUS
>>> ORIGIN >>> ENGRAMIC RECONSTRUCTION OF ORVID STENN, SHADOW CAPTAIN, METACHIRURGEON TALOS EPSILI SUPERVISING
>>> DATESTAMP >>> 999100.M41
>>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>
With a spirited roar, the Land Raider, Solanum, crashed through the civilian wrecks and rubble barricades that littered the eastern superhighway, clearing an avenue for the column of fire-blackened Rhinos that followed. A rearguard of Leman Russ variants in charred regimental colours and mismatched urban camouflage charged after the Adeptus Astartes transports. Desperate guardsmen clung to camo netting and crudely fashioned armour of hull-lashed sandbags. The tanks’ turret cannons were pointed backwards, and bounced as the vehicles sped over the broken road. Battle cannon blasted great chunks out of the highway. A single punisher gatling cannon raked the road behind them with such intensity of fire that there was not a single pool of smoke or blackened wreck not further pulverised by solid shot.
The orks ducked under the oversized steering bars of their bikes and powered into the incoming fire. A battle cannon shell immolated a posse of bikers and brought bits of blackened moulding and burning engine housing raining over the buggies and trucks that swerved to avoid the new crater. The following bikers simply went in, then opened the throttle and roared up the other side, revelling in the bellicosity of their brute machines.