by Guy Haley
‘Whatever did this was powerful.’ Jehani Jehan looked around. ‘Do you have confirmation of identification?’
Kalis Nen frowned. ‘There is weak activity from the Titan’s infospheric links. I am attempting to boost it.’
Her hands moved over her station’s manual control deck. Electronic screeching puttered out of the speakers, grew in volume and resolved itself into a tortured harmony of binharic.
Cursor Ferro’s systems translated the sounds into words that lit themselves in trails of phosphor all over the czella’s internal screens.
Profound sorrow overtook the crew as they listened to the machine’s lament. Cursor Ferro shifted on its great pistons. It stood erect, and scanned its hound’s head across the desolate surroundings. There was not a living thing to be seen.
Jehani stared down at the wreck a moment longer, then returned to her throne.
‘We have found what we came for. We will return to base.’
‘There is no sign of the crew, Jehani,’ said Kalis Nen. ‘Should we look?’
‘We will not find any,’ she said. ‘If they were not dead when the Titan fell, they will be now. Look at this place – it is a maze. The water is toxic. The air is barely breathable. There are no further signals. It would be unwise to linger here. Magos Perontius.’ She depressed a manual vox switch in her throne, connecting her with the Titan’s reactor chamber. ‘Have you seen what Cursor Ferro sees?’
‘I have.’
‘Is the Alacrity of Thought salvageable?’
‘Regrettably not,’ the magos sighed. ‘Do not let his remains and machine-spirit fall into the hands of our foe.’
‘I agree.’ She clicked the voxlink off and settled back into her throne. ‘Natandi, take us back and target the wreck. Ophira, Demonsany, fire at will.’
Cursor Ferro took a few paces backwards, knocking down the remnants of walls and walkways as it lined itself up on the dead Titan.
Jehani snapped the locks of her restraints closed and settled back into her throne.
‘Fire,’ she said.
A gout of flame gushed from the Titan’s inferno cannon, heating Alacrity of Thought’s broken bones to a cherry red. The cabin vibrated as Cursor Ferro’s vulcan megabolters rotated up to firing speed.
Thousands of rounds slammed into the broken Titan, punching bright holes into its glowing hide. The lament died along with the last flickers of life in the machine.
‘It’s gone,’ said Jehani. ‘Turn us about. We depart.’
Cursor Ferro sang a dirge through its war-horns as it waded back into the sea of corpses.
Fifteen
Friends and Foes
Etan Boq came out of drugged sleep into a close, warm darkness without a single photon of light. His uniform stank of chemicals that made him want to retch.
‘Hello?’ he said. There was no reply. He reached about him in the pitch dark. His hands patted the warm bodies of other men. He felt down his front. He was still dressed in his uniform and webbing, but his gun was gone. They had even taken his bayonet, leaving him an empty sheath.
He shook the bodies. They had pulses, but they slept.
‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Hello, can you hear me?’
‘Quiet!’ hissed a voice somewhere off to the left. In the dark it sounded closer than it was. ‘They’ll hear you,’ the man whispered frantically. ‘You don’t want them to hear you.’
Etan Boq groped his way to the source of the voice. His foot rolled on the shin of an unconscious man and he fell onto more prone bodies. Wherever he was, it was packed full of men.
‘Where are we?’ he said.
‘In the hold of the Warding.’
‘We haven’t even left the ship?’
His hand touched an ankle. ‘Get off,’ said the owner. The ankle withdrew itself quickly.
Etan turned to face the voice. ‘Found you.’
‘Leave me alone!’
‘Not until you tell me what’s going on.’
‘Go away! I don’t want them to take me.’
‘Who are you?’
The man made a reluctant sound. ‘First Watcher Suruq Reming, fourth battalion.’
‘I don’t know you,’ said Etan Boq. ‘I’m Etan Boq.’
‘Well I don’t know you either. Now go away!’
‘Listen you, I’m a lieutenant.’ This was a lie. Etan was as lowly as you could get. ‘So I outrank you. Who are they? What do they want?’ Etan asked the dark.
‘Don’t you remember?’
Etan shook his head, then realised the man could not see. ‘Nothing. We were en route to Beta-Garmon II. It fell, we were diverted to Beta-Garmon III,’ he said as he pieced together the information from his foggy mind. ‘To join with other regiments from the home world.’
‘And the home world is?’
Etan screwed up his face. ‘Fasadia? Fasadia!’ he said. The name provoked a gush of memory, like he’d pulled a little stone from a dam and been rewarded with a stream of clear water.
‘Well done. You haven’t lost your mind,’ said Reming. Boots dragged on metal. The man was sitting up. ‘You’re not an officer. I’ve not called you “sir” once, and you haven’t mentioned it.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Etan Boq. ‘I’m a line gunner.’
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s all.’
‘Then you should call me sir!’ said Reming.
‘Sir,’ said Etan.
Suruq Reming’s tone changed. A vestige of authority returned to his voice. ‘Do you remember the attack?’
‘What attack?’
‘No, then.’ Reming scrambled forwards. Etan felt breath against his face. It was sour with dehydration. ‘They came quickly, took the transports unawares. They must have got into the atmospheric systems, because they gassed us all.’
‘That awful smell on my clothes?’
‘That awful smell. Now please be quiet. They only come when there’s noise. When you’re awake is when they take you away.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to find out.’
Etan sat down and pulled his knees up to his chest. More was coming back to him. He remembered the alarm, and the sound of assault craft hitting the hull and locking on. He remembered being shouted out of his bunk, grabbing his lasgun and running, running towards…
A couple of other men were groaning. One began to shout in panic.
‘Oh no, oh no,’ said Reming. ‘Shut up!’ he hissed. ‘Shut up!’
His plea was quiet and desperate, and went unheeded. Booming footsteps rang outside the darkness, then stopped. A door unlocked and slid open.
Three Space Marines stood in the illumination of the space outside the hold. Etan Boq’s eyes were dazzled a moment, but recovered enough to let him see his surroundings. He saw a space far bigger than he had expected. There were men like Etan everywhere, crammed into a hold that stretched away into dimness well beyond the touch of the light. Some of the men were quite clearly dead.
He could not see what livery the Space Marines wore. All he could focus on were their glowing red eye lenses. He had a terrible fear of them. These were killers of men. Foolishly, he scrambled back, instantly drawing their attention.
‘That one,’ said the Space Marine. His voice was inhuman through his voxmitter. ‘That one, that one.’ He pointed with every word. He looked upon Etan. ‘And those two,’ he said, his finger held unwaveringly in Etan’s direction. ‘Begin waking the rest. These are the last of the test subjects. Magos Protos wants to begin full-scale processing as soon as his final calibrations are finished.’
The Space Marines stamped carelessly through their prisoners, bre
aking bones and crushing the hands of those still unconscious. One stopped by Etan, and reached out, down, down, his hand descending from such a great height, like a monster coming to steal him from his childhood bed. But the transhuman reached past Etan and grabbed a struggling man. It took a moment in his addled state to realise the man was Suruq Reming.
‘Now look what you’ve done!’ said Reming. ‘This is all your fault!’
Another Space Marine grabbed Etan Boq, and his troubles began in earnest.
The Space Marines hauled Etan, Reming and a score of others into the corridor. There they arranged them into pairs – Etan next to Reming – manacled their hands together and marched them off into parts of the Warding he had never been in before. The colours of their captors were clear now: sea green, marked with eyes of brass – the Sons of Horus themselves.
The legionaries were giants beyond Etan’s ability to tolerate. They towered over him, their massive suits of growling armour amplifying the terror he felt. He had to run to keep up with their stride. When the captives slowed, the Space Marines responded with ungentle handling. Armoured, transhuman grips broke human limbs. Fear of bodily harm kept him moving as they headed down from the cargo hold. He had no idea which direction they were going in, or what part of the ship they had entered, but the air grew hotter, and echoing up the way came the sound of machinery, and screaming. He glanced at Reming. He was staring wide with terror, skin white, eyes bulging, his crotch dampened by his fear-loosened bladder.
‘Don’t look at me!’ Reming said from the corner of his mouth. They were the last words the two ever exchanged, for shortly after they were herded into a chamber full of smoke and fire, and separated. Hundreds of improvised medical tables lined the room in neat ranks, tended to by terrified menials and blank-eyed servitors. The tables had been cut from iron plating and equipped with cargo straps refashioned as restraints. All save a handful at the centre of the room were unoccupied. It was from there that the screaming came, and it was to them that Etan and the others were inevitably taken.
The legionaries drove them with fists and curses into a circle of light surrounded by machines. Blood spotted the rusty floor. Despite the medical appearance of the equipment, it was filthy. Whatever horror awaited Etan, he did not expect to survive it.
A lone tech-adept in black robes oversaw procedures. Five men lay strapped to nearby tables, small devices fashioned from silvery metal clamped to their left temples. Servitors and frightened serfs stood over them. Four were either dead or unconscious; the other strained against his restraints, motionless and arch-backed as a fiddle bow, screaming endlessly.
‘The last batch of test subjects,’ said the legionaries’ leader disdainfully. He clearly thought the duty beneath him. His two men shoved the prisoners into one line that curved around the circle.
The adept pulled back his hood, revealing a face of such advanced age that Etan was reminded of the caricatured marionettes from the theatres back home. He remembered the smell of the street outside. He remembered holding his father’s hand.
‘Hup hip! Here’s old father time!’ sang the story master, stalking around the small, round stage with his puppets dancing. ‘Down, nown, the Aged King.’
Young Etan enjoyed the story, but the old puppets gave him night terrors. The memory impinged upon him with such immediacy he forgot for a second where he was. When he blinked and returned to the awful present his limbs were weak as jelly. He feared he was going mad.
The adept who looked like the fears of his childhood rose up, and up, much taller than a man of his age and build should be. It was then Ethan saw he had no legs but long robes that swept down to the floor, tight around a circular bulge where his feet had once been, then loose past that to hang to the ground beneath.
‘Oh well, the last, eh? Thank you so very much,’ said the magos, with a spirit of such contrived geniality Etan was suddenly, totally terrified of him. The adept rose up higher until there was clear ground beneath the trailing hem of his habit and the deck. He floated along the line of twenty men, dipping down when he saw one that caught his eye, nodding and muttering as he appraised each, gripping faces and turning heads from side to side. He stopped before Etan, who could not avoid flinching as the magos sank down to admire him with eyes like black buttons.
‘I think, I think, oh I cannot think!’ the magos said. He held up his arm. The cloth fell back, revealing a silver augmetic hand. ‘I think I cannot think with that racket! Please make it stop.’
One of his serfs bowed hastily, plucked up a surgical saw from a bench of similar instruments, and with great, deliberate, entirely unskilled care cut the screaming man’s throat with four unsteady slices. The teeth on the saw rasped through flesh, gristle, then bone, each layer of tissue providing its own sickening sound. The man went slack in his restraints. His screams became gurgles became silence.
Blood sheeted onto the floor.
‘You’ll do first,’ said the magos, and pointed at Etan.
Etan stared back, frozen.
‘Yes, you, that’s right. Come on.’ The magos hovered up and away, his silver hand beckoning Etan to follow. ‘Come on, don’t be shy. I don’t intend to hurt you. I’m not a monster. We only cut the throats of the ones that don’t work, do you see?’ he said, still affecting the tones of a friendly medicae. ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’
A pair of menials took Etan’s trembling arms. He allowed them to lead him to a gurney. One of the serfs, only slightly less terrorised than he, gestured at the table. Etan sat on it.
‘That’s the spirit, better not to resist. It will hurt a lot less that way.’ The magos chuckled. ‘Lie down.’ He fussed over a tray of devices like tiny silver kidneys whose undersides sprouted wires finer than hair. In his fear-addled state, it took Etan a moment to recognise them as the devices embedded in the dead men’s skin. The magos glanced over his shoulder.
‘I said lie down, man! Come on now, we haven’t got all day.’
Etan looked at the three Space Marines. Their eye lenses stared back at him with naked hostility. Hesitantly, Etan lay back. The magos gestured sharply to his serfs, and they strapped him into place tightly. ‘I am magos Ardim Protos, a tech-priest of a most high rank. I am, or should I say I was, prime hermeticon of Sarum,’ said the priest, ‘before I found common cause with more enlightened practitioners of the ars technologica, and abandoned such stale titles. Now, do you understand why you are here?’ He picked up one of the bean-sized devices from the tray and looked at Etan.
‘No,’ said Etan. The strap across his forehead crushed his head into the table. He struggled to see what the magos was doing.
‘Sometimes I feel the same,’ Protos chuckled. ‘Go here, go there, do this, do that! Still, all done soon. You, my friend, should feel honoured. You are to fight for the Warmaster!’
‘Yes, yes of course!’ said Etan. ‘Anything!’ The words turned his stomach, but his fear was greater than his shame.
‘Traitor!’ hissed one of the other soldiers. A Space Marine cuffed him hard across the face. Bone broke, and he fell unconscious, dragging at the man chained to him. Reming whimpered.
‘You might say that, but you would. I understand this is frightening for you. All this strange equipment and a magos of my rank about to perform who knows what terrible science upon you, eh? Eh?’ He chuckled as if they were sharing a joke.
‘You are of the Dark Mechanicum.’
‘Dark, is it? Dark,’ he chuckled again. He stared at the silver device and sighed. ‘Dark is what our enemies call us. Ignorant is what we call them. New Mechanicum is the name we have for ourselves, and we are new, free of all those fussy little rules imposed on us by the Synod of Mars and the meddling Emperor of Terra. We have cast off tradition for the sake of enlightenment.’ He spread his arms and looked upwards. ‘Now you are going to join our quest for knowledge, become part of the great work! You are privileged, you know
, I wasn’t lying.’
Etan tensed as the magos brought his hideous young-old face close to Etan’s. His breath was unpleasantly sugary, with a hint of rot, the halitosis of a man with a penchant for sweets. He brought the silver device close to Etan’s head.
‘What is it?’ asked Etan.
‘I do respect a man who asks questions. It is good to be aware of everything, especially when it concerns oneself.’ He leaned closer. ‘It’s nothing very much, something of a side project of mine. In fact, I’ve done very little, if I am honest, beyond a few modifications. This is a skitarii interface system.’ He looked affectionately at the device. ‘We implant them in our cyborg warriors, you see. It enables them to access the Mechanicum infosphere, and that makes them far more responsive during battle than unmodified humans like you. But what is relevant here, for our purposes,’ he smiled again, exposing black teeth, ‘yours and my purposes, I mean, is that they allow us to control our warriors. Sadly, we’re running out of warriors. This war is taking far too long, and that rogue Rogal Dorn keeps sending more and more and more men to fight here. We’re short of reinforcements, and that gives us all a dilemma. We don’t have time to upgrade the likes of you, which we could, of course – then you would fight for us without a care, mostly because you wouldn’t be capable of caring. There’s no time for that, but we do have time to implant this little, tiny piece of technology. With this, a warrior loyal to the Emperor, and a meagre measure of time, we can create a soldier who will die for the cause. The right cause.’
He pressed metal against Etan’s temple. The wires tickled against his skin, and then they bit.
Etan gritted his teeth against the pain. The wires threaded past blood cells, nerves and muscle. Tiny needles scraped against bone.
‘I’ve modified them to modify you. Just an iota. An adjustment of loyalty, that is all.’
The wires squirmed, and plunged into the bone of Etan’s skull. The pain was sudden and intense. No man could have stifled his screams.