by David Guymer
And what caused a skitarii legion to turn renegade anyway? Why did I not ask myself this until now?
‘Insufficient data,’ said Gorgorus. ‘Supposition.’ The old Scout pushed open the doors at the far end of the console chamber.
Their allotted search path terminated in what the ghost schemata drawn over Rauth’s half-visor lens described as an armoury. But there were no weapons here. The lockers had been emptied. Sweeps of the adjoining chambers failed to turn up a single charge cell. The five Scouts gathered again in the modest vehicle bay at the bunker’s rear. The exterior doors were open, wedged with miniature dunes of blinding yellow dust. A huge-wheeled truck bristling with specialist auspex gear was still parked in the middle of the bay, but the surrounding spaces allotted to the garrison’s half a dozen armoured transports and scout vehicles were all empty. The Scouts converged on the remaining truck, Gorgorus ripping open the cabin door while Rauth pushed his shotgun inside.
Throne curse it!
Empty.
‘The traitor skitarii withdraw their forces from peripheral facilities,’ Rauth observed.
‘They must know by now which way the battle groups approach,’ replied Khrysaar. ‘Why not make us fight for it?’
Rauth shouldered his shotgun and backed up, frowned at the oily promethium slick on the body of the truck and on the floor around the inlet valve. ‘They consolidate their strength.’
‘Then we are wasting our time here,’ said Khrysaar. ‘It will be a fight to take Locis Primus, and we should be there.’
Because the arm of Khrysaar is so mighty. ‘Indeed, brother.’
Gorgorus silenced them with a gesture, and ordered them through the rear doors. Sarrk kicked out the built up sand, and Rauth burst through, sweeping his shotgun side to side through the swirl of luminous yellow. His armour’s rad-counter clicked. He squinted up into the storm. The ionising atmospherics made playthings of augurs and visuals both, and it was difficult to be certain of much, but he thought he spotted the reassuring glint of a servo skull whispering overhead. He reached up one-handed to his visor controls, dialled the frequencies to pick up the drone’s beam back, but got nothing. The atmosphere was too much.
Or it wasn’t one of theirs.
‘…habitation… clear.’ Voices emerged, streamed in static, then sank into others as he played the frequency dial. ‘…perimeter… no contacts… grid two-one/two-seven/phi… interdiction zone… acceptable losses.’
‘Guerrilla strikes,’ grunted Gorgorus.
‘A logical strategy, given their disadvantage,’ Rauth returned.
And one therefore that the Iron Hands battle groups should have been better prepared to counter. Again, the anti-logic of the Iron Hands’ convoluted advance was impossible to ignore, but again, somehow he managed it. He saw the same cognitive dissonance struggle behind Khrysaar’s eyes and resolve itself the same way.
‘It makes no sense, does it?’ Gorgorus muttered, an observation that the younger Scouts pointedly did not hear.
‘Locis-beta confirmed clear.’ Maarvuk’s voice crackled over the group frequency. ‘All claves reconvene in the vestibule chamber for decontamination and resupply. Five minutes, then on to locis-alpha.’
The veteran-sergeant killed the link, and then Gorgorus issued a terse order for them all to get inside.
Rauth crouched down where he was. There was another splash of promethium on the ground here, sand accumulating on its oily surface as though worn as camouflage. He frowned. He was no tracker. It was not a skill that one developed on a world as aggressively changeable as Medusa, but it occurred to him that a spill like this would not have been left exposed for long under these conditions. Not three months. Not three hours. He walked a little way until he felt the wind fall off, blocked by a high dune. He dropped to his haunches again and reactivated his light beacon, turning it to the ground. As I thought. He grunted in satisfaction.
Tyre tracks.
Now that he looked, he felt sure there were the tracks of several vehicles here, driven in convoy and so overlaying one another. How many, he couldn’t tell, which perhaps had been the point. He looked up in the direction the tracks seemed to be heading and covered his eyes. A tangled line of instrumentation splayed from the rockcrete trench lines and their embankments, flattened in a spot where something large and careless – several somethings – had gone through it.
He was about to rise when someone grabbed his arm.
‘We have been ordered back,’ said Gorgorus.
Rauth shook his head and shone his beam over the tracks. ‘Decontaminate and resupply. The skitarii knew they couldn’t hold these bunkers. They’re keeping mobile, using them as strike posts, stepping stones across the wastes, as we do.’
Gorgorus let go of Rauth’s arm and plotted the tracks’ vector onto his visor overlay. He nodded. ‘Heading towards Battlegroup Ares,’ he said, half his face lit up with cart-lines. ‘Calling it in.’
Chapter Eleven
‘1 + 1 = 0’
– Sergeant Kardan Stronos
I
‘Repeat.’
The Razorback’s grinding forward motion rattled him against his shelf, as hard and as far as his various plug-ins would allow. There could have been no outward sign of his alarm, and yet Lurrgol expediently began to file the engagement reports he had been inloading from the other battlegroups. Trellok, Burr and Kardaanus too were coming around, the basal interlink that tied their systems alerting them to his urgency. Stronos spoke levelly into his helmet vox.
‘Iron Father. Repeat.’
His faceplate masked his grimace as the meaningless response came again, verbatim.
‘Ares to all Garrsak. The Sapphire King is here. He comes in force, brothers, eighteen degrees. Stand to repel. The Sapphire King is here!’
For no discernable cause, Stronos felt his skin prickle. For once there could be no faulting the signal. Clan Garrsak’s proven boast of being the best equipped clan of the best equipped Chapter in the Imperium of Man had been given a stiff test by the conditions on Thennos, but they could still punch a signal two hundred metres. It was the Iron Father himself who spoke no sense.
‘What is it?’ said Lurrgol. ‘I can tell that you have a channel open.’
On this one occasion, Stronos was glad of the code-walls that separated his battle-brothers from all but their immediate superior. ‘Hostile force incoming. Numbers unspecified.’
‘Direction?’
Stronos thought a moment. ‘Unspecified.’
Kardaanus pulled the release hatch on the underfloor compartment and fed out his massive lascannon, stock first. It whined hungrily as he plugged it in to his power pack. The others were already prepared. ‘Why are we still moving?’ Kardaanus asked. The barrel of his bulky weapon was still half stowed; there was not room to remove it with the five of them crammed inside. ‘Precedent dictates disembarkation. Defensive posture.’
With a cautious nod, Stronos blink-sent an instruction through his spinal connection to the Razorback’s single mind-slaved operative to reduce speed and free its turret gun. The spirit intermediary fuzzed belligerently back at him, but issued a blurt of what Stronos imagined to be its compliance. Then he sat forward, roughly severing the short interface flexers that connected his armour’s ports to the tank with a string of hisses and pops. There was a moment’s disorientation as his mind adapted to the reduced input. His thighs tensed, the coils in his leg bionics winding to full tension, ready to propel him forwards the instant the rear hatch blew.
‘Contact Jalenghaal.’ He looked across at Lurrgol. ‘Instruct them to do the same.’
Lurrgol’s silence was interrogative. It asked why Stronos did not go to full battle-readiness, tether his systems to the clave and transmit his orders as he thought them.
That would have been efficient.
A clatter of rapid-fire agains
t the side plating made Stronos tighten his grip on his bolter, and the Razorback roared through the crest of a steep dune. There was a moment of quasi-weightlessness, then the g-force as the laden tank slewed full-speed down the windward side. Just more debris. He did not loosen his grip.
When he had been separated from the clave and ordered to Medusa he had wanted nothing more than to lose himself again in the unity of the clave. The discord of the homeworld had added to his yearning.
Now he wondered whether the collective could survive his doubts.
‘We are not slowing,’ Lurrgol observed.
Stronos looked up and frowned as they passed over a hump.
‘Thirteen traitor squads. Confirmed. Light vehicles inbound, attempting to flank. They will fail. For the Primarch, opening fire!’
The muffled but familiar drum of assault-cannon fire beat through the Razorback’s hull and the roar of her power plant. A long burst. Confused bursts of fire echoed it, short, staccato volleys from perhaps half a dozen tanks. The clave sergeants must have been as confused as Stronos, but Garrsak meant unity and Garrsak obeyed.
‘Sergeant?’ Kardaanus looked at him, expectant.
More heavy cannon fire. ‘Swinging to twenty-nine degrees. Deccus, they are yours. I am falling back to your perimeter–’
Stronos gestured his brothers to remain seated, then cut Ares off mid-rant and switched channel. ‘Yolanis, Stronos. Tell me something that I can understand.’
‘Sergeant!’ the enginseer cried out, as though the Omnissiah had reached down and touched her whilst she prayed. Assault-cannon fire hammered in from her end of the line. ‘Praise the Cog. Patch me through to Naavor. Or Braavos. Velt even. Anyone at all, damn it, I need help over here!’
‘Talk to me, adept.’
‘I’m sorry, lord sergeant, I–’
The adept carried on speaking, Stronos was sure, but he heard no more of it.
There was an apocalyptic shriek as something struck the nearside tracks, a metal-on-metal bang loud enough to hoist the Razorback from its treads even without the explosion that followed. Stronos heard a female voice scream as up and down inverted. He crashed into Lurrgol. Trellok half fell behind him. The Razorback continued to roar on one track.
And then with a terrific crash, the five of them all flew forwards.
II
Melitan screamed as the explosion lifted the Razorback from the desert, fire streaming from its tracks, and drove it up the back of the one in front. They skidded apart, the rear hatch of the latter shearing away on the ‘dozer blade of the former, and one of the black-armoured Iron Hands rolled loose down the dune.
‘Sergeant!’ The open channel popped and fizzled, like an electrical fire.
The rest of the column at least began to slow, the tanks bunching together. Those that had turrets – Predators, Razorbacks and the solitary Whirlwind the Garrsak clan armoury had spared – tracked them left. The smoke from that first missile had dispersed quickly in the Thennosian winds, and Melitan saw leggy shapes crest the dune that crossed the boundary of the interdiction zone. She was no Auxilia Myrmidon, but she knew her tools of war.
They were Sydonian Dragoons, heavier fire coming from the Ironstrider Ballistarii that followed in behind, the smaller war-forms of Sicarian Ruststalkers scuttling with ease over the rad-sands ahead of the walkers’ fire. Guided by uncannily perfect protector imperatives, their optimised fire patterns raked the column of tanks with las-flechette and auto-fire. Too empty to scream any more, Melitan sucked urgently on her plastek mask and ducked under the Land Raider Anvilarum’s adamantine sidewall as hard rounds sprayed the command tank.
Her brother and sister adepts cried out in panic, flaps of crimson as they leapt from the crosswalks into the gut cabling of Ancient Ares’ interface stage. A handful spat back at the dunes with sidearms that Melitan had managed to forget they carried, extremis training kicking in for them as it stubbornly failed to do for her. The head of one such scholar dissolved into red mist as autocannon-fire traced through his meat and banged against the hull he’d been standing next to. She saw Callun, blood on his face, fall clumsily into the relative safety of the tank’s innards with a clang, losing his gamma pistol unfired amongst the conduits. Another priest pitched over the side, scream muffled by his rebreather, radium burn blackening his exposed shoulder. Melitan reached for her own flechette blaster, but couldn’t seem to pull it out.
To hell with extremis training anyway.
‘Stop firing and take cover!’
Mouthing a prayer for forgiveness, Melitan hunch-ran around the crosswalk that circled the Anvilarum’s rampart and found shelter behind the adamantine-clad bulk of Ancient Ares.
Bullets spanked harmlessly off the Dreadnought’s thick armour and that of his transport as he rotated his stage to face the loping Sydonian walkers. ‘Take this message to your overlord, spawn of Fulgrim. Flesh. Is. Weak!’ The barrels of his assault cannon howled like jet engines and something far away exploded.
He bellowed in fury. Another roar of cannon fire, and Melitan clapped hands to the sudden pain in her ears and slid to the gantry, screaming. Her eyeballs thumped with the shocking recoil of every spent round as she crawled to the vehicle’s armoured sidewall and pulled herself up.
She could see a ten-man squad of Iron Hands spilling out of the Rhino just ahead of them. They fired loosely into the swirling yellow dust, their tactical protocols asynchronous. She saw others simply stall as they stumbled down the ramps of their transports, small arms sparking harmlessly off their imposing battleplate as they fought to resolve the logic conflict generated by the dissonance between their Iron Father’s orders and their own senses.
Garrsak obeyed, but they weren’t stupid.
Staggering about, she rounded on Ares, resorting to the Last Rite of Compliance, and kicked the Dreadnought below the breast aquila. His armour responded with a hollow clang. She whimpered, then drew her bruised foot back for another attempt when she felt a tug on her sleeve. She turned.
Callun’s bloody mouth moved like a massively slowed-down friendly fire accident, and it was only then she realised that Ares’ assault cannon had burst her eardrums. She looked down at the hands she had tried to protect them with and almost toppled under a wave of dizziness.
Who would have thought so much blood could pass through one set of ears?
The pull on her arm again.
‘He’s trapped in simulus,’ she mumbled, hearing herself via the vibrations her own vocal cords pushed through her skull.
‘He has had these episodes before,’ Callun yelled back at her. He held her face in his hands, the skin slick with blood and slippery with it. They were both shaking, but shaking together made the condition seem less terrifying. She felt her body respond to his, and her lungs pull a proper quantity of air through her mask.
‘Momentary lapses. Nothing like this.’
‘Something must have set him off.’
‘We can’t just wait for him to snap out of it.’ Omnissiah alone knew what sort of orders were being passed down to the Iron Hands. No wonder they couldn’t muster a coherent response. ‘Isolate the Ancient’s vox-caster,’ she yelled down into the interface pits where the surviving adepts hid. ‘Re-route incoming signals to my frequency.’ Little things, insignificant things, but immediately she started to feel better for it. ‘Now!’ Stung, the adepts started to move, and Melitan turned back to Callun.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘We should consider a purge of his meme-core,’ Callun said, and pointed to where the Dreadnought’s lower body was connected to the Land Raider’s innards.
‘No.’
‘It might be the only way.’
‘Never!’
‘Your worlds will be scoured!’ Ares roared. Flexmetal squealed and rivets began to pop loose as the sleepwalking Ancient pulled on the datacords that held him to
the floor of the tank. Something twanged loose. The adepts trapped down there with him wailed in terror as the awesome war machine they had been sworn to blindly trod on one of their number, crushing him instantly.
‘Drop the hatch!’ Melitan screamed.
>>> SIMULUS INLOAD
>>> SOURCE >>> BLAST WASTES, THENNOS
>>> ORIGIN >>> JALENGHAAL, SERGEANT PERFUNCTIS
>>> DATESTAMP >>> 101412.M41
>>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>
Illogical.
Jalenghaal turned his head by increments to shield the vox pickup in his ear from the incoming fire. Multiplex optics returned grizzled reports of green and white, fire pattern tracers visualised by the infinitesimal electromagnetic signature of radium decay and then enhanced. Shrugging off the insignificant patter of radium rounds, he walked around the rear of his vehicle and attempted to refresh his overlays. Contingency code-strings scrolled down his display, switching it, inverting; target icons disappeared while his armour’s spirit instigated a cold restart.
Sapphire King. Illogical. The Iron Father was in error.
‘Brother… respond.’
Morthol, Govall and Ruuvax were clustered around the front and rear corners of the Razorback. Separated by codewall from the Iron Father and thus protected from logic conflict, they fired on the ambushing skitarii. The Razorback’s turret-mounted heavy bolter added its own heavy chatter. In the absence of specific instructions, they acted out default defensive protocols, basic fire drills to which the skitarii adapted swiftly.
The speaker, however, had been Vand.
Jalenghaal looked disdainfully along the gauntlet that held his pauldron mid-shake. He expected better from a dutiful brother of Kristos.
‘Orders?’ Vand said, removing his gauntlet without apology. A bullet screamed a few centimetres past his helmet.
Jalenghaal isolated the Iron Father’s channel and sealed it shut with a blunt code-command. ‘Stand by.’