by David Guymer
‘Something miraculous has occurred here. Wondrous.’ The prophet-alpha leapt through splinters, feinted once, twice, again, forced Rauth onto the back foot and into a lunging parry, then followed up with his nanolayer blade. Rauth caught it on the thick housing of his augmetic arm, snarled in fury, and hurled the skitarius off him with hydraulic force. The alpha ran backwards, as easily as he would go forwards, bleeding off momentum. ‘I waited for you, iron princeling, both of you, not because you are special but because all are special. All are potentially perfect in the eyes of the Omnissiah.’
‘You are an abomination.’
‘I am equilibrium. Even the Cog Mechanicus is half human – did you never wonder at that? You have been shown the first steps on a road that will lead you nowhere. Your chance at perfection everlasting is still ahead of you.’
Rauth looked around for another weapon, but there was only his knife. If he could have gunned i down from afar then he would have done so. Honour killed more men than traitors’ blades.
Across the auditorium, Khrysaar had run out of bolt-rounds and was locked in a desperate dance with the Kastelan. From above, the crunching sound of auto rounds and rad-fire spoke of the discovery and execution of the remainder of his clave. No matter. They were weak.
Tearing his mask fully off, he spat on the ground. ‘You were skitarii. How did you manage to turn against your masters?’
‘Curious?’
Rauth snarled, and the prophet-alpha laughed.
‘I was not skitarii. I was lead diagnostician assigned to cache zero-seven-seven-four-obscura, the so-called Dawnbreak Technologies. How prophetic that name proved to be.’ He closed his eyes in remembered rapture and touched his monofilament edge to his chest. ‘My heart beats again. Does yours? I am not skitarii, child, I am my own perfect form, as only the Omnissiah had seen it before now. You too can be remade, perfect, naught but your own ambition and the favour of the Omnissiah to set you limits.’
Rauth felt the power in his bionic arm as the urge to batter the creature to death drew on the tendon attachers in his shoulders. Then he remembered how Tartrak and Dumaar had forced him, crippled, practically begging, to prove his worth of the iron before it had been bestowed.
‘You see the truth. I see it in your eyes.’
With a roar, Rauth surged forwards, throwing a punch at the alpha’s ecstatic masque. A blur of gold and it scissored his bionic wrist between its arms. Its strength was as incredible as its speed. The transuranic saw screamed centimetres from Rauth’s jaw, super-fast, radioactive blades causing his skin to blister and slough. He bent his neck back and groaned. ‘Do you know what the first people called Dawnbreak?’
‘First… people?’
‘They called it Ayoashar’Azyr. It means Bluestone.’ Rauth screamed as the saw ripped into his cheek. Optic lenses clicked and reshuffled as blood sprayed i’s golden masque, the eyes taking on a darkling red hue. ‘But the eldar recognise the universe’s duality. Materium versus immaterium, matter versus antimatter, man versus machine – all in opposition and balance. Their language is replete with double meaning. Do you know what Ayoashar’Azyr really means?’ Blood and air frothed from the new hole in Rauth’s face; the alpha gurgled with laughter. ‘It means Sapphire King.’
Over the juddering shriek of transuranium teeth on bone Rauth heard a tinkling on the flagstone by his feet. Eyes filmed with red mist rolled down to see an asymmetric metal cylinder bounce and clatter to a halt between the alpha’s legs.
Khrysaar. You bastard.
The frag grenade gave the prophet-alpha full force, gold, then steel, then bone shredding from the skitarius’ legs. Its body sheltered Rauth from the worst of the detonation and the resultant frag storm, but the force of the blast hurled him off his feet and smacked him down onto his back.
He groaned, his multi-lung and augmetic stubbornly holding onto the air that had been driven out of his human original. Half his face hung off his jaw like an open flap. His skin and what was left of his armour was bristled with bent nails and thumb-sized bits of metal from Khrysaar’s frag grenade. The grabbing pain in his gut told him that the blast, the fall, or something in between had re-opened the stab wound. He felt dead.
I will be remade. Better than I was before. The mantra gave him the strength to get up again, despite the full knowledge that movement of any kind just then would be haemorrhaging blood into his insides. Stay still and his enhanced clotting factors might just stabilise him enough to be recovered, but try to fight… Better than I was before. He could still hear gunfire from the galleries above, pounding on the superstructure from without, the stomping movements of the Kastelan, and he ignored it all, staggered instead towards the shattered alpha.
The prophet’s legs had been obliterated, its arms spasmodically functional. The monofilament blade had been snapped. The transuranic saw remained fixed in place but unpowered, whining slowly down. Rauth stood on it. The skitarius’ eyes flicked up to him. Iron was not so easily killed.
‘Erasure is imperfect. Ideas are not so easy to destroy.’ The alpha’s voice was weak, but unbroken, none of the gasping or rattling that Rauth would have expected of a mortal in its condition. ‘It is a contagion in the base code. How do you think it was passed to me?’ The skitarius laughed, the same short burst caught and looped over and over. ‘I was waiting for you, iron prince.’
Feeling his spirit darken at the alpha’s words, Rauth drove his knife into its masque and kept on stabbing until there was nothing left.
V
For the longest time there was little to do but watch the apocalypse fall. After the shock of the initial bombardment, Pax Medusan had not taken her punishment lightly. Disgraced and degraded she may have been, but the god-machine retained an iota of pride. Heavy weapons fire the equal of everything else on Thennos combined burned back and forth between the Imperator Titan and the Rule of One. A massive explosion lifted the roof off a power module, an unoccupied section of the superheavy vehicle train crewed by servitors and the Rule of One’s own ancient spirit, and Stronos winced to see her burn. Less than a kilometre from his position, he could feel the planet itself shake under the onslaught. No one spoke. Nothing passed through vox or permeated the clave link except a sense of awe magnified eight-fold.
‘Incredible,’ said Vand, saying what they were all thinking.
Lurrgol grunted acknowledgement.
Jalenghaal crunched through the debris field surrounding the bunker with the enginseer slung over one shoulder. Stronos turned towards him while the rest of his brothers continued to stare up at the warring behemoths. The adept’s robes flapped in the overpressure thrown down by overlapping, successively mightier explosions. Electoos glimmered mutely under a bronzing of blood and sand; blood trickled from his ears. Stronos examined him, then turned angrily to Jalenghaal.
‘He is damaged.’
‘What did you expect? Mortals are fragile.’
‘You should have demanded more than one,’ Lurrgol muttered, darkly.
The enginseer stirred under Stronos’ prodding, groaned.
‘Are you well, adept?’
The enginseer did not even look up, and with a scowl Stronos realised that he must have been deafened by the god-war going on above his head. Iron Hands had no body language to interpret, no lips to read – the adept had no way of knowing he was being addressed at all.
‘Give him to me,’ Stronos said to Jalenghaal, extending his arms. His brother draped the adept across them. He was practically weightless. ‘As you were,’ he said to the warriors who had escorted Jalenghaal out, then turned back to Jalenghaal. ‘I need you to manage the vox on my behalf – Vand and I must concentrate on what we are doing here.’
‘Agreed,’ said Jalenghaal.
‘Attempt to assert authority over the loyalist skitarii remnants. And now that the Rule of One is here, try to re-establish contact with Verrox, Draev
ark, Drath and Raan.’
‘Agreed,’ said Jalenghaal. Stronos turned away, only for Jalenghaal to summon him back with a scratch of audio code. ‘Bringing the Rule of One into a combat zone was a great risk, one I should have been told of before you took it. If it should suffer permanent damage…’
Stronos dismissed his brother’s concerns, turned his back, and passed under the bunker’s rockcrete lintel. The rippling cracks and booms of the battlefield were muted by the thick walls, but dust rained from the ceiling girders in a near-constant stream. He sat the adept into one of the intact workstation chairs as if he were lowering an infant in its crib. Not that he had ever, nor would ever, have the opportunity to do any such thing. As he did so, Vand moved to the operations bank, his heavy gauntlets hovering over dials and sliders, plotting a sequence in his mind. The adept gazed gormlessly up at the blinking diodes and twinkling controls, eyes glazed with shock. Stronos took a long, considered breath, and mentally braced himself for what he was about to do.
He unclasped his helmet seals, the burn in his mouth immediate, even as cranial bionics were still being reluctantly detached and the helmet drawn from his head. His throat tightened, chest constricting as his lungs equalised to the lower pressure and were forcibly deflated. His multi-lung took over, but Thennos did not have a liveable atmosphere in any sense, and the gene-engineered organ was barely able to scavenge enough of what the skitarii and servitors had exhaled to keep him conscious.
He began to speak, purposefully exaggerating the shape of his words.
‘Bless us. Adept.’
Just that left him light-headed, and Vand had to assist him in lifting his helmet back over his head. He sucked on air as his helmet seals re-pressurised and the hiss of renewed oxygen circulation filled his ears. He gave his brother a silent stare of gratitude.
Vand did so, turning back to the operations bank, as the enginseer, uncertainly at first, began to chant. Stronos was somewhat surprised. His experience of the Cult Mechanicus thus far had been of wizened clergy telling him things that he or they, or someone else, could not do. The enginseer, however, was again cut off from Stronos’ reactions by his helmet and continued his verse.
‘We are ready,’ said Vand, stepping back from the operations bank. Stronos error-checked his brother’s work, the lingua-technis of the adept’s mask-muffled chant working through him as he dialled down a power gauge here, altered a targeting solution there. An Iron Hands Space Marine might not readily acknowledge his capacity for honest error, but he could certainly harbour a difference of opinion. Then Stronos too stepped back, satisfied, nodded to the enginseer, who hesitated for a moment before continuing to sing, then to Vand.
‘Give the Pax Medusan something else to think about, brother.’
‘The honour should be yours,’ said Vand.
‘Iron brings victory alone, not honour,’ said Stronos, firmly, struggling with a hidden grin as his gauntlet nevertheless moved to the trigger rune for the pulse ordnance multi-driver, positioned serendipitously at the beginning of the fire sequence.
He had always wanted to get his hands on one of these.
The adept lifted his hands in the air as his song climbed the scales.
He flicked the array of safety catches, surety against all but the most improbable of accidental firings. The rune blinked under the spread fingers of his gauntlet.
‘Sergeant!’
Stronos gritted his teeth against his frustration as Jalenghaal strode through the entryway. He straightened and turned to him, new data splurging across his overlays as he did so. Hostiles, lots of them, markerless red blips spilling from the underground access tunnels he had flagged on his approach as well as several score more he had failed to spot. He felt his hearts quicken, his breathing deepen, his physiology responding to the second-hand threat level he experienced through the interlink. Tactical runes showed the Devastators he had marked to watch those locations returning fire. It was satisfaction that he felt then, watching red icons obliterated by the ticking ammo counters of heavy bolter and plasma as quickly as they could appear on his screen. Every clan had their strengths, that was what Verrox always preached, and as the Iron Father typified, indiscriminate slaughter was certainly that of the Vurgaan.
Perhaps he had not severed all ties when he had joined Clan Garrsak.
Perhaps that was no bad thing.
‘Traitor skitarii and a horde of augmented facility workers assault our forces from an unspecified number of underground sally holes,’ Jalenghaal explained, judgement in the chill dispassion of his delivery. ‘The attack of Pax Medusan allowed us to become fragmented. We are vulnerable. The Adeptus Mechanicus retreat rather than engage. They are broken and reject your authorisations.’
Stronos heard a rumble from somewhere within the walls. He glanced up, expecting another deposit of powdered rockcrete, but got none.
‘I see it, brother.’
‘Ankaran is dead. With the arrival of the Rule of One he drew his command from the fire zone, towards the primary facility access. His mortis log was exloaded prior to his armour’s shutdown. It should be of interest to you.’
Stronos felt a squirming itch of disgust as the helmet pict-capture of a defiled battle automata stampeded towards the helmet wearer, lit up by field discharge and mass-reactive explosion. He let the feeling work itself out, then when it was done cast it aside. ‘This, then, is the fate of the logi-legatus’ precious Kastelan robots. I doubt that he still wants them returned.’
‘You do not know that,’ said Jalenghaal. ‘The robots are irreplaceable relics. Perhaps the skills of the Mechanicus can see them restored? I remind you that with regards to the Kastelans we have strict no-fire orders that have not been rescinded.’
‘Did Ankaran fire?’
Jalenghaal hesitated. ‘He did not.’
Another disturbance from deeper inside the bunker, a scuffle of stone on stone, reminded Stronos of the widened tunnel within the bunker complex itself. Giving the chilling vid-capture of the heinously graffitied Kastelan one last look before permanently expunging it, he called in Lurrgol and Ruuvax.
‘Cover Sergeant Maarvuk’s tunnel – ensure nothing comes back through it,’ he said, his helmet vox-synthesisers code-stamping the command for Lurrgol. And then for Ruuvax, ‘Ensure there are no others they did not find. The Scouts are not as experienced as you, brother.’ He turned his attention back to Jalenghaal as the two Iron Hands departed.
‘I have also managed to raise Draevark,’ his second reported.
‘And you leave this until last?’
‘Expediency. The traitors are upon us. The iron captain’s battlegroup is still thirty minutes away.’
‘And?’
Another hesitation. ‘He wants to know what you have done with half his clan.’ It sounded like something Draevark would say, but with Jalenghaal’s fierce monotone it sounded wrong, less embittered badinage, more implicit threat.
‘Is he coming?’
‘He is coming.’
‘And the others?’
‘Drath appears to be the nearest – I could not raise him without the interlink, and forward only what Draevark could tell me. Verrox and Raan are further away, maybe over an hour behind.’
Stronos indicated the cloud of hostiles building up around the unattended sally holes. ‘There may still be a fight for them when they arrive. I would not wish to face Iron Father Verrox if there is not.’ Jalenghaal regarded him blankly. ‘Instruct the Rule of One to engage the main force at the gate, deploy praetorian servitors and prepare to receive Sergeant Artex and his survivors. I will send them and Artex a field override to the logi-legatus’ no-fire order myself. Tell them that we will finish Pax Medusan from here.’
‘I have tried to raise them, but they are no longer responding. They are breaking off.’
‘On whose orders?’ asked Stronos, taking a step towards Jalenghaal.
‘As I said,’ Jalenghaal replied, unflinching. ‘They are no longer responding.’
Stronos intended to press the point further when a hard bang rang out from Lurrgol’s bolter, followed shortly after by the muffled burst of a smoke bomb. The inside of the bunker filled up with smoke. Stronos’ augurs quickly redrew the bunker in spectral lines, his enhanced hearing isolating the rapid burst of Lurrgol’s bolter and the sound of tissue exploding in a confined space from the muffling effect. Explosions became deadened bursts as bolter-rounds stopped blowing apart human bodies and started slapping into a plug of annihilated parts.
‘I have found some use for flesh after all,’ Lurrgol muttered, drily, continuing to pump unnecessary rounds into the semi-solid wall of viscera he had made across the tunnel.
His brother’s black humour left as bad a taste in Stronos’ mouth as the massacre itself. They were civilians, once loyal men and women of the Omnissiah. What could have driven them to this level of insanity? Confusion threatened to overwhelm him, to an extent that it took him several moments to realise that the sensation emanated from the interlink manifold. He turned to Vand through the lingering smoke, his brother delineated in augur-drawn white.
‘Hold fire on my order. I am going to see what is happening out there.’
Vand nodded, and Stronos stepped outside.
The wreckage field was bathed in a sickly yellow-red light, the Titan burning like a dying star. The creaks, groans and pops of battered metals echoed out over the skyline; molten adamantine dribbled from battlements to hang like stalactites. And yet there it stood, towering, haloed in guttering flame, as defiantly immortal as the God-Emperor himself. A titanic groan emanated from somewhere within the Imperator’s power plants and a feeble tendril of plasma flashed across the battlefield, instigating a new stellar birth several kilometres distant, the last known position of the shattered Ordo Reductor. Stronos shielded his eyes from the flash and looked up, above the Pax Medusan’s blazing turrets, his vision readjusting from the various sources of glare to the near-black of the Thennosian sky and the source of the interlink’s uncertainty.