The Eye of Medusa

by David Guymer

  Maarvuk had gathered them on a strike platform on the roof of the Rule of One. It didn’t look like much of anything, no antennae or vanes or anything that could be ripped off in a gale.

  The coarse brush of wind Rauth felt against his cheeks was nothing compared to a calm day on the plains of Medusa. He felt his skin begin to warm, slow radiation burn, but it was in large part psychosomatic. The temperature was eighty degrees below freezing, the surface pressure so low that water would have boiled at his own body temperature had his augmented metabolism not run on a more reduced core temperature than a standard warrior of the Adeptus Astartes. But in every measurable sense Medusa was worse and he wore the mantle of his birthworld like a skin of iron: he was proof against the universe, and his blood almost did boil as he contemplated the prospect of grinding this small part of it under his boot. He didn’t know where the anger came from. He didn’t care. With both hands, he gripped his shotgun.

  He could see signs of activity from the sandy outline of Amadeus bastion, but could not make out anything in detail. His visor was blank. Maarvuk had yet to link them.

  ‘Do not falter. Do not waver. Be as iron. For some this is your first mission, others have waited years for acceptance by the battle clans. Know that I care not. The first five brothers to achieve two hundred kills will receive demi-clave command and priority placement in the ascension lists. Two hundred thousand confirmed killed by Clan Garrsak in Port Amadeus. An estimated civilian population of two million remains in Locis Primus.’ The sergeant turned towards the waiting Land Speeders.

  ‘Two hundred should be easy.’

  III

  A leaden pall hung over locis-theta, dense enough to hold its own against the worst of the wind. One of the bunkers still burned: the shell that had cracked it protruded from its roof, pumping a heavier-than-air toxic smog into the network of service trenches like water into a channel. Efficient. At first and even second glance the trench system resembled any long-held line in Imperial sand, the shelled-out demarcation between order and annihilation. It was only on closer inspection – or with the hindsight of a mission inload packet – that one noticed the lines of defensive spikes were in fact data-harvesters, weatherproofed cable bundles running through heaped sand towards the bunkers.

  The Land Speeders of Clan Dorrvok set the Scouts down about fifty metres from the access trench. The vehicles whined like dray beasts driven uphill as they disabled grav-plates and alternated to landing thrusters, lowering towards the ground and allowing the Scouts to safely disembark. Rauth took a last draw on the speeder’s oxygen pipe before switching to his own tank as heavier and more determined men pushed past him to get out.

  They mustered up in a mature crater as the Land Speeders powered back up, listing crazily as they lifted and turned back for the Amadeus bastion. The Scout detachment numbered twenty-five in all and they fell neatly, by some unconscious rationale, into five demi-claves of five. Letting his shotgun hang in one hand, Rauth brought up the other to acknowledge the rad-warning in his visor display.

  ‘Eight kilo-rads. Do you read the same?’

  The Scout beside him performed a mirror action with his own visor controls. ‘Eight kilo-rads. Confirmed. The crater provides some protection from wind-borne particulates. Levels will be higher in the wastes.’

  Glorious.

  Rauth had only been an initiate of Clan Dorrvok for a matter of hours before he had first been let into the pool as to whether Gorgorus would receive his first century cog-stud before or after attaining full battle-brother status. He hadn’t yet mustered the courage to ask his new supposed brother how old he was, and as ever with the near-immortal Space Marines it was impossible to make a guess by visual clues alone. The absence of power armour aside, Gorgorus was certainly big enough, and remodelled sufficiently, to be called an Iron Hand. His customised stalker-pattern bolter looked well used, and was carried with a confidence that suggested its looks told no lies. A metal plate replaced one cheek and the opposite eye was a low-powered bionic. Both arms were huge, almost industrial, replacements that looked powerful enough to tie his bolter into a knot should he so desire.

  Rauth flexed the fingers of his own virgin augmetic, torn somewhere between hatred and envy. Sergeant Maarvuk stalked towards the access trench where another Iron Hands commander was waiting.

  He was ancient. A long row of cog studs ran across the fusion of helmet and bionics that served function as a face. The centuries they commemorated had seen the colonisation and near total conquest of his armour with gunmetal bionics. That which was still black fluttered with oath papers, bonded to the ceramite with black-petalled rosaries bearing the clenched fist of Ferrus Manus at their centre. They wafted in the poisonous breeze that blew in over the trench behind him. As Maarvuk approached, the two veterans engaged one another in wordless communion.

  Rauth couldn’t draw his eyes away.

  ‘Sergeant Drath of Clan Avernii,’ Gorgorus grunted. ‘He must be in charge here.’

  ‘Only sergeant?’ said Khrysaar, also in Rauth and Gorgorus’ demi-clave. He ran his hand admiringly, apparently unconsciously, over the rivets of his new bionic hand. His pearl white optic purred as it focused on the sergeant’s studs. ‘He’s five hundred years old.’

  ‘Almost six hundred,’ Gorgorus corrected.

  Leaving his clave for a moment, Rauth climbed the wall of the crater until he had gone far enough to satisfy his curiosity. He looked over the crater’s lip, and shielding his exposed eye with one hand allowed his gaze to pan.

  It was too much to take in at one glance.

  Cyborgised remains in varying states of intactness littered the trench’s plastek parapet. It was impossible to distinguish those that had been blown to pieces by bolter-fire from those that had been ripped apart in the hand-to-hand fighting that had followed. A skitarii legionary jerked spasmodically amidst a tangle of wires strung between the data-harvester spikes, electrochemical residual in his spinal implants causing him to wriggle like a moth in a spider’s web despite the loss of his limbs. Another piece of the enemy hung from an overhead line and dripped. But he felt nothing, just a numb awareness of where an emotion he could no longer identify might once have been kept.

  And anger.

  This, here, was how the Iron Hands made war.

  There were no adepts amongst the dead. Rauth presumed they had been gassed in the trenches or butchered elsewhere once Clan Avernii had fought through to their bunkers. The occasional bang of bolter-fire rang from farther flung redoubts to inform that the purge remained ongoing. Drath’s battle group could not have made this position long before the Scouts had caught up to them. The massacre of a few hundred priests and their garrison did not strike Rauth as work the veteran-sergeant would find taxing.

  A plume of dust coughed skyward as Rauth watched, followed by a faraway explosion. Another article of unexploded ordnance uncovered by the minesweeper servitors. With a grumble of annoyance at Drath’s obvious efficiency, he turned his face from the wind to look back the way they had come.

  The faintest thickening in the haze of dust on the horizon was all the evidence he could make out of the road that the Adeptus Mechanicus were digging this way from the Amadeus bastion. Rauth snorted. I hope they enjoy disposing of corpses. That’s all that’ll be left by the time they get here. Another glorious addition to the honour rolls of the Thennosian macroclades.

  A blinked summons from Khrysaar lit up his half-visor display, and he looked back to see Drath return to his trenches while Maarvuk marched stolidly towards his Scouts.

  Half walking, half skidding on bright yellow sand, Rauth hurried down the crater wall to rejoin his clave.

  ‘Drath and his battle group push north and east towards Locis Primus.’ The sergeant blinked a topographical overlay onto the Scouts’ visors. Rauth noted the inexplicable, zigzagging route and then subconsciously expelled the thought from his mind. ‘Th
is is a Mechanicus world, so the position of traitor skitarii installations is known to us. Your function is to determine which of these bases, if any, still harbour traitor skitarii. If they are weak then we will cleanse them. If they are not then we will call in Sergeant Drath or whomever is nearest to deliver them, and you, an object lesson on the true nature of strength.’

  Priority ident runes scrolled across Rauth’s display. Iron Fathers Ares and Verrox, Captains Draevark and Raan, Sergeant Drath, Fabricator-Locum Hyproxius Velt: all commanded independent battle groups, as if in competition for the prize of being first to reach Locis Primus’ walls. The fabricator-locum was going to be the winner. Only his skitarii pushed for it directly whilst the Iron Hands took their convoluted paths around the red-hatched interdiction zones.

  Odd.

  Again something bade him hold his tongue and in reward the uneasy feeling subsided.

  ‘You have oxygen for twenty hours of operation, but do not concern yourselves with that. The radiation will kill you in ten. Slowly.’ Maarvuk’s vastly augmented frame wheezed like an iron lung. A radiation proofed iron lung. The sergeant’s thin red eyes found Borrg. He pointed. ‘This one will perish first. Let that encourage the rest of you to move swiftly.’

  IV

  Stronos could not help but think about it.

  He studied his cartographic overlay as though expecting the underlying mathematics to expand into epiphany if he could only stare at it for a sufficient length of time. Static washed intermittently through the display like a continually aborted system reset, increasing in energy and frustration as the battle group pulled further ahead of the Rule of One. The Razorback rocked from time to time. Something pelleted its armour. Stronos’ initial gut response to such episodes was always the same: the column had come under fire. Only the steady stream of inload/exload to the Predator vanguard, bike outriders and Tubriik Ares’ command Land Raider assured his flesh it was not so. Ten millennia of proxy war had engineered a terrain as hostile as any real battlefield, steep radioactive dunes, deep craters and vast debris fields through which the battle group’s vehicles clattered as if through hail.

  Ignoring the distortion to his inload signal, he studied their route to Locis Primus for the thousandth time. It was highlighted, an oblique angled triangle absent its hypotenuse. He frowned at that unfilled direct line, thinking again of what Epistolary Lydriik, and in his own way, Ares, had said to him about the motives of the Adeptus Mechanicus in this matter. And Kristos. What was his stake in this? With a thought, he called up the position of Hyproxius Velt and his forces. The fabricator-locum’s twenty thousand and ordo reductor heavy support gave him the primarch’s share of the force that had been committed against Locis Primus. Despite that, they were well ahead. The skitarii cohorts were already slowing down and spreading out as they neared the facility’s walls and adopted siege protocols.

  Stronos knew there were more efficient uses for his spare mental processivity, but he could not help but think about it.

  ‘What concerns you, brother-sergeant?’ Lurrgol was plugged into the cleft in the spall lining immediately opposite Stronos’. Despite the motions of the tank he barely moved, perched rigidly on a metal shelf and secured by spinal plug-ins directly to the Razorback’s systems. Their knees touched.

  ‘Nothing of consequence,’ he answered.

  ‘Inefficient.’ Lurrgol produced a small, self-consciously errant smile.

  Stronos frowned back, unsure why, but feeling better. He glanced to the others. None of them had noticed the exchange.

  Kardaanus, Trellok and Burr were plugged into their slots, Kardaanus’ lascannon stowed in the underfloor compartment, each in their own noospheric space. They would be collating engagement reports, trawling Clan Garrsak’s vast data tranches for similar encounters against similar adversaries, collating that information amongst their networked minds to assemble a prefabricated common strategy. It was… efficient. Stronos frowned. For all that his synapsis had craved the surety of the manifold link during his absence on Medusa, the thought of linking his mind to the clan disturbed him now. He thought of his experience in the Commandment’s stimulus chamber. It had been as far beyond what his brothers were going through now as closing one’s eyes and imagining a firefight would be to an unaugmented mortal, transcendental and yet at the same time coldly reductive, in ways that he still did not fully understand.

  Nerves itched where metal touched, and he found himself scratching the oculus of his augmetic eye as he regarded his brothers’ near-comatose compliance to the spirit of the machine. The Razorback was a noble fighting beast, much prized for its mobile firepower by Verrox and Clan Vurgaan, who had spent several millennia converting their Rhino pool to Razorbacks, and yet.

  ‘Simulus breeds reliance,’ Ares had told him.

  Was efficiency worth the price? Did they even know what the price was? Stronos didn’t, but he felt he was only just beginning to realise that there was a price to be paid.

  ‘Nothing of consequence,’ he said again, and the tank rumbled on.

  V

  Gorgorus hauled back the bunker doors, metre-thick plasteel squealing as the Scout’s industrial strength limbs peeled them apart and, with one final pull, dislocated them from their hinges. One grip at a time, he released the handles. The metal groaned, ready to confess, and the other Scouts shunted the doors aside and charged inside.

  Rauth swept the vestibule chamber with his shotgun, then peeled left, sprinting on ahead while Khrysaar and the other members of his demi-clave found walls to hug and covered his advance with bolters. He dropped to one knee and brought his shotgun to his cheek. He activated his beacon pack and light speared the emergency-lit gloom. The demi-clave’s multiple beams strayed over the walls and ceiling. Rauth saw decontamination showers. Life support pipes. Storage lockers. One of them hung open. It contained an environment suit. The door winked across his beam as it banged shut, then squeaked open, the glittering fabric inside ruffling in the gale that blew in through the forced outer entrance. Rauth blink-sent an action rune to the demi-clave and a Scout called Sarrk walked towards it, bolter locked, and tore the locker out of the wall. Rauth grimaced, and swung his beam back ahead.

  An airlock, plastered with arcane hazard sigils, a black fan on a yellow background. Warning lights were inert. The intercom panel was unpowered. Khrysaar advanced ahead of Rauth’s overwatch to tap at the keypad that hung from the panel on a handful of wires, but nothing happened. Rauth kept his breathing slow, even, but breathing through a pipe was dehydrating, and his throat was desert dry. He tried to work some saliva into it and swallow, but could do neither particularly well with the air pipe in his mouth.

  Come on, brother. Let me kill something.

  ‘Clear,’ said Khrysaar, face pressed to the airlock glass, hands spread out from his temples like a dish to blot out the demi-clave’s light.

  The same call came back from the demi-clave that had gone right.

  Rauth buried his frustration.

  Gorgorus called it in.

  ‘Understood,’ Maarvuk voxed back. ‘One demi-clave to sweep armoury and data processing. The other, habitation. Muster in ten.’

  ‘Compliance.’ Gorgorus deactivated his vox and waved them forward.

  Khrysaar and Sarrk forced the airlock and Rauth led them through. The others bore bolters, powerful weapons, but his short-ranged combat shotgun made him the unspoken choice to take point through the narrow, sparsely lit corridors of the Mechanicus’ test bunker. This part of the facility was unpowered too. Presumably the entire complex had been shut down. Emergency lighting cast long, bruising shadows, elongated stretch marks on the cold metal walls that never wavered, even as the Iron Hands walked through. The wind groaned through the doors left open behind them.

  ‘Beacons off,’ said Gorgorus. ‘Light levels are adequate.’

  Rauth, with his flesh eyes, was rotated from point
, while Sarrk unholstered a bolt pistol and moved to take his place. It was a logical move, but the demotion stung. His shotgun drifted across Gorgorus’ back as the clave senior pushed ahead of him. He frowned, imagining. For a moment the weapon refused to move, then Gorgorus loudly shouldered open a side door and cleared whatever mental block had caused his aim to seize.

  ‘Clear.’

  With Sarrk now in the lead, the demi-clave passed through chambers that looked more like the workshops of artisanal scriveners than shrines to data collection, great scaffolds of brass from which servo-quills sketched squiggled lines onto parchment reams. Or had done. The arms were still now, silent; parchment scrolled over the floor, the rollers empty. Other chambers were indecipherable in their function, vast spaces in which tanks of water stood, suspended from floor and ceiling on collimated coils. The water remained uncannily still even as the Iron Hands walked past and caused the tank’s spring mounts to creak. The body of water deadened the sound. But they saw nothing.

  Beyond the harvesting shrines they came to a long, hemispherical chamber where broken formations of workstation chairs were scattered amongst several banks of slumbering consoles. They flickered green, standby script filling half of one line ready for their reawakening. Every screen gave the same message. Rauth couldn’t read it. He gave the back of a workstation chair a push with his shotgun and it squeaked on stiff wheels for a few centimetres until it bumped another. Then it was quiet again.

  ‘Indications are that the last recording was made three months ago,’ said Gorgorus.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Khrysaar. The others nodded.

  ‘Was it abandoned?’ said Rauth, tracking his shotgun warily over the unquiet terminals. Dry air rasped in and out of his breather pipe. ‘Or did they simply cease work?’