by David Guymer
So autopistols it had to be.
Stronos shuddered towards a fork in the corridor, shells battering his armour from both sides as the retreating legionaries split into two.
‘Which way?’ he asked
‘Right,’ Thecian slurred.
The Exsanguinator had been able to glean a generalised layout of Zero Tier and the probable location of the Dawnbreak cache from one of the infocytes in the access wards. Thecian had an exquisitely potent omophagea organ. A characteristic of his gene-seed, so he said. Dried blood coated his teeth and speckled his face. His eyes were glazed, only barely keeping some rabid frenzy locked away.
Stronos was beginning to understand how that felt.
His body had become a single vermillion glyph. It pulsed angrily, wantonly throwing out warning sigils and pain. His augmented vision spun wildly, unable to stick to a wavelength. One of the selection rings must have taken a hit, broken off the locking teeth. His flesh eye locked on to the ever-distant block of skitarii legionaries with bloody intent.
‘You can’t keep on like this,’ Barras roared. The Knight of Dorn’s unpowered plastron showed scars of its own, but it was still recognisably a piece from a Corvus Pattern Mk VI powered suit, unlike the irradiated moonscape of Stronos’ battleplate. ‘If we had somehow brought the Rhino in it would have surrendered by now.’
‘On Medusa, we make things to last.’
A door burst open. A maniple of vanguard skitarii armed with spasming close assault weaponry crowded the prayer chamber inside. Stronos blocked them with his body, crushing the alpha to the ground and buckling the door frame. They hacked at his armour. Something bitter and repressed wriggled against the blocks in his mind. Ignoring the damage, he ripped the door off its hinges and hurled it. Something in his mind came crashing down, that feeling of anger intensifying as it sensed freedom. The door bounced and scraped down the corridor, careening over the front, crouching, rank of skitarii and ploughing into the standing legionaries behind.
Hearts pounded. Stim-glands spiked. Red bled into his split vision. From some deep reserve, he drew power enough to build speed.
The rage was a flood now. The barriers were broken. It spilled over them, crashed through, tore out what was left of his defences in a spiteful wave.
With a roar, he thundered into the stunned legionaries.
He ripped, punched and gored, tore limbs from bodies, pulverised exoskeletons and crushed bodies to soupy pulp. He killed, killed, killed until there was no longer an interval between. Hydraulic fluids stained his boots as he drove through the shattered maniple. The corridor became an antechamber, a heavy airlock door leading to a ribbed isolation corridor, but Stronos barely differentiated. He elbowed, headbutted, maimed and trampled. He killed until he could no longer see for the blood in his eye, and then he killed some more. He heard raised voices behind him. Barras. But Stronos could no longer reason an answer.
He felt a change in the atmosphere, enough to pierce the red fog and make him look. He wiped his eye on an iron thumb.
He had passed through the plastek corridor and entered a circular chamber. The walls were baffled, concealed pipework running beneath the surface. The floor plates were riveted. The ceiling was high, too high to reach, scanning lasers blinking from the tangle of ducts and cabling. His armour’s auspex glitched and seized, scattering the chamber with low-level hazard markers in response to several masked augur sources. Priority threat tags filled the gaps. Thirty-one heavily armed skitarii swung carbines that had previously been trained on the airlock door opposite, onto him. A single kataphron breacher pivoted on its caterpillars. Its arc claw spasmed with power, deepening the creases in the battle-servitor’s haunted rictus of a face.
There was a shout, Thecian this time, quickly dulled by heavy steel as the airlock began to roll shut. And Stronos lunged for the kataphron with a yell.
III
Melitan heard the hiss of normalising air pressures as the hermetic seals broke and the airlock door ground slowly open. Her ears popped. Kitha Seleston hopped from foot to foot, nervous, eager to get moving, clad in carapace half-armour reminiscent of a stripped-down skitarius exoskeleton, a pair of gamma pistols clutched to her padded chest. The rank and file of priests and tech menials were strung out behind her, the corridor bristling with taser goads and electrostaves, ripe with human terror.
‘Can you make it open any faster?’ asked Seleston.
‘No one can alter the tempo.’ Fall drew her hands apart from her face to throw Melitan a cockeyed smile. ‘Not even Pride.’
The giant cog-toothed door continued to roll, the sound of gunfire and machinic screams whistling in over the rushing of air.
Abandoning the sec-suite was suddenly not the idea it had seemed at the time.
The airlock had moved far enough to allow a body to squeeze through. Seleston needed no second urging, breathing out and wriggling through sideways, spraying the clean room with violet-soaked ray-bursts from her leading pistol. The Harlequin followed daintily behind, spinning into the fray like a carnival assassin. Once the parting had widened enough to allow the mustered magi to cross two by two, the will of the crowd forced Melitan through at the crest of a wave.
Stumbling out of the rush and looking for a wall to stand beside, she swept her pistol into her eye line, sighting down it as she jerked it right, left.
Numb, she lowered it again.
The skitarii were already dead. They lay strewn over the quarantine chamber, bodies ripped apart, helmets staved in. That mechanical squeal was louder now, coming from the kataphron breacher that occupied the centre of the chamber. It stood taller than two men, but was better described as a servitor-operated light tank. The organic crew-component was encased in heavy armour, machined into a tracked chassis that was itself layered with thick skirts of plate. Stronos, or some wrathful incarnation of the Iron Hand she had known, stood on the sloped front, grappling with the servitor’s weapon grafts. His iron prosthetic had forced its torsion cannon up, his gun-chewed gauntlet holding its arc claw down. Stronos emitted a motorised growl from his funnelled mouth. The kataphron was starting to give off an oily smoke from its joints.
Seleston, Fall and the rest watched, hesitant to intervene.
Without thinking about it, Melitan aimed her pistol at the broad power rack mounted on the kataphron’s back and fired.
A split-second connection linked her weapon’s flared nozzle to the battle-servitor, then plasma ignited and a blue sun the size of her clenched fist blew a hole in the kataphron’s back. Power fled almost immediately. The servitor’s limbs fell slack; Stronos grunted in surprise as he found himself wrestling with a pair of lifeless weapon-arms. The Iron Hand battled the dead limbs for a second longer, the servitor continuing to make aggressive eye-movements and sounds even though it no longer had the strength to wield its heavy combat mounts. He let go of the torsion cannon, then the arc claw, backing slowly off, looking around the chamber wild eyed. He was breathing hard, face greased with sweat.
Threshold-level kill-frenzy.
The diagnosis entered her brain before she thought to look for it. She had no idea where the information came from, but she was starting to get used to that now. Another symptom of the meme-proxy’s burn-out, most likely.
Whatever the source, she saw it now – the flaw in the Iron Hands’ condition.
At first glance, the solution to such failures of inhibition was further reduction in the organic component and concomitant increase in the mechanical. But there was a recursive imbalance in the formula that was painfully obvious to her now, an error that carried over with every reiteration of the equation. The answer, ironically, was for even more drastic reductions in the organic. At zero the errors would cancel out, and the Iron Hands’ emotional flaws would be eliminated.
Remembering the fate of Tubriik Ares, memory-failure, madness and ultimately, death, she felt suddenly g
uilty and pushed the thoughts away.
Her pistol was still too hot to holster but, not wanting to approach Stronos in his current mind armed, she palmed the weapon into the hand of a gawping magos.
For one petrifying moment the Iron Hand tensed like a chronogladiator, overloaded with stimms and driven into a ring. Servos ground together. Fibre-bundles and exposed cords of augmusculature bunched, ready to explode, crush the half-machine child that stood there before him. But he didn’t. Recognition came, dulling the insanity in his eye. His optic whirred to focus, slipped, whirred, an endless cycle of fail and repeat.
‘Enginseer Yolanis?’ he breathed.
‘Is he… talking to you, sir?’ said Seleston, looking over her shoulder.
Melitan ignored her. Her saviour status would likely withstand the revelation of her true identity now. And if not… Well now she had Kardan Stronos as back up.
‘You have changed,’ said Stronos.
Melitan laughed, surprised, but then she regarded the Iron Hand and her eyes narrowed. Something seethed under the warrior’s metal skin, a passenger in his systems, the ghost of something that did not quite belong. ‘So have you, I think.’
The Iron Hand’s expression darkened. A trickle of blood oozed from a poorly closed wound around his scalp.
Melitan reached up as if to touch the hollow tube that had replaced his nose and mouth, but held her hand halfway. Mirroring her, Stronos ran his finger along its lower curve.
‘I never had the opportunity to thank you before you were reassigned,’ he said.
‘How many times did you do something similar for me?’
‘None.’
Melitan chuckled.
‘Sir?’ said Selaston.
‘Enginseer Yolanis saved my life. She shared her rebreather with me when my helmet was damaged, risked her own life. If not for her intervention, then Kristos would have killed me on Thennos.’
The secutor regarded Melitan with open mouth.
‘About my reassignment,’ said Melitan. There was something she had been wanting to confess to Stronos for some time, and who knew when they would have another chance? ‘About Ares’ death–’
‘The Ancient is gone. His death is irrelevant now. I would know what are you doing on Mars?’
Melitan shrugged. ‘I was going to ask the same question.’
‘I have come for the Dawnbreak Technology.’
‘To remove it?’
‘To destroy it.’
Melitan studied the Iron Hand for a moment. ‘Good. That’s good.’
‘You judge me now?’ Stronos grunted, straightening in a growl of tortured gears. Like a great tree about to fall. ‘You have changed more than I realised.’ His gaze wandered, taking in the ragtag militia that Melitan had assembled. The Harlequin, Fall, returned his regard with an angling of the chin and a bow. He studied the alien for a long time before coming to the unspoken conclusion that they all had an overriding common enemy for the time being.
Melitan found herself assessing him in turn, and approving. He was abandoning dogma in favour of pragmatism, becoming a consensus-seeker, a calculus-former. An Iron Father. He had come a long way from the insular idealist that she had left on Medusa. A smile that did not yet fully fit her proportions spread uncomfortably across her face.
‘You still have not told me what you are doing here,’ said Stronos
‘The same reason as you, I think. After my duties with Ares came to an end, the Voice of Mars sent me here.’
It was Stronos’ turn to think, to nod approvingly. ‘Good.’
She raised an eyebrow and smiled. ‘Do you judge me, Kardan?’
‘Is it Kardan to you now?’
A thump on the outer airlock door interrupted them.
Two more Space Marines, one unarmoured, the other partially, peered through the armourglass between the solid metal spokes. Melitan recognised them both from the live feed on the elevator. The part-armoured warrior, a slab-muscled giant with a murderer’s eyes and a zealot’s frown, glared at Fall who replied with a theatrical bow. Stronos held up a hand to bid the other warriors calm.
‘Can you open the door to my brothers?’ he asked.
‘Do you trust them?’ said Melitan. The warrior in the airlock looked in no way appeased by Stronos’ entreaty, or the Harlequin’s antics.
‘They are my brothers,’ said Stronos.
Melitan thought about it, then shook her head. ‘We would need to return to the sec-suite. There are still a hundred or more skitarii and thousands of indentured workers locked in with us in here. If we’re going to do this then we should do it, go straight for the containment chamber. I can show you the way.’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No.’
Melitan glanced at Seleston, who looked sharply away. There was no mistaking who was in charge now. Given that she had spent her entire life at the lower end of the chain, the sudden reversal made her angrier than she would have expected.
‘You bring an alien. They are my brothers,’ Stronos said again. ‘They are coming with me.’
IV
Stronos was exhausted beyond imagination, numb, his power pack spitting power into his systems like attacks of cramp. He felt sick, spiritually and mentally, his last fight with the skitarii drawing on something more than mere electrical power. Every so often, Thecian glanced his way, but Stronos ignored him. He was not ready to discuss what had happened.
There had been some fighting at the doors to what Yolanis declared to be the observation derrick, but it was almost all over by the time Stronos dragged himself into pistol range. Yolanis’ priests milled amongst the dead, congratulating each other on another great triumph, though to Stronos’ eye it had been Barras and the enginseer’s unsettling ally, Fall, that had done most of the killing. The pair eyed each other suspiciously from opposite sides of the battlefield. For now, they were allies, but Stronos was unsure what was to be done about the alien once the mission was over. It was a decision that went beyond the sort he was accustomed to making as a sergeant.
Yolanis went to examine the doors. They were sealed tight, the various panels and status lights dark. The panelling had been pried from the walls, cavity spaces spilling coils of springy cabling that ran into a series of portable generators. Their noisy thrumming was quite audible now the fighting was done, the smell of combusted promethium filling the corridor. Stronos watched the enginseer as she fussed over the assembly.
She had changed. Physically, she was much as she had been when they had last parted on the rad-deserts of Thennos. Her skin was dark, the marks of malnourishment and childhood illness like an old fingerprint on her skin. Her bald head spasmed with the same electoos, her teeth were the same greyish plastek. She had acquired a few augmetics since he had seen her last, her robes were finer, but there was something new to her that went beyond the sigils she wore and the metal in her dermis. The hunch she had always walked under was gone. She stood straight now, her stride was long and confident, all trace of timidity purged from her manner and her speech. There was a set to her face now that was commanding, almost cruel.
Hard to believe it had been less than a year.
‘Stand clear,’ said Yolanis, and set her hands to the door.
There was a judder that made Stronos’ heart lurch, and the great door began to rise. He signed the cog across his chest as Melitan turned towards him, a half-smile on her face as though something had just been settled between them.
There were no more enemies on the other side.
A few bodies littered the walkway, which, by the cleanliness and the variety of the kills, he judged to be the Harlequin’s handiwork. Yolanis was either lucky or blessed. Stronos was not sure he would have tolerated the alien’s assistance had he been in her place. But then Yolanis was weak and he was strong. Perhaps therein lay the adva
ntage of weakness. He trod on corpses, too weary to avoid them, the gantry creaking under his weight and that of his brothers, reminding them of the abyss they walked over. He looked down, struggling to sound out the depth before realising his auspexes were down.
‘Only one way left now,’ said Yolanis, moving to take the lead.
Stronos did not stop her. She had more than earned her place.
Lumen sources blinkered on where she walked, winked out as she passed, a guttering arch of illumination that followed the former enginseer like a halo. Screaming wretches beat at the glass walls of their hanging cells, eyes closed against the sudden brightness, screaming even louder as Yolanis walked by and plunged them back into darkness. Each was a fleeting glimpse into madness and the horrors kept coming.
The barriers across the end of the walkway, when at last it arrived, were massive.
Five metres broad, fifteen high, runes of noospheric dampening and spiritual containment hammered into the rolled adamantium. The symbols glowed faintly with the light residual of their own power. The chamber they were built in was a black sphere hung over an abyss, held in place by the derrick itself and by numerous struts and guys that in the dark were all but invisible but for Stronos’ augmented sight, unstable though it currently was.
‘Can it be opened?’ he said.
Melitan nodded once. The sheer stature of the barrier had subdued her, or perhaps it was the knowledge of what lay beyond.
‘I will go with you,’ said Thecian.
‘And I,’ said Barras, proudly, his loud voice echoing in the dark.
‘That would be unwise,’ said Yolanis.
‘Why?’ Barras glowered down at her.
The former enginseer turned to Stronos. There was a sadness hidden behind the cool mask she seemed to wear now, and he understood. Behind those doors lay a corruption that had almost overwhelmed NL-Primus.
It was possible that someone was going to have to kill him when he returned.
He glanced at each of his brothers in turn, wondering which of them would do the deed, and knowing that either would do it gladly if asked. The thought warmed him.