Wolfsbane

by Guy Haley

  'Leman of the Russ, my barbarian brother,' said Horus. He lifted his claw and pointed a scythe-taloned finger. 'You disappoint me. This action of yours is suicide. How foolish you must feel, to throw your life away for the sake of loyalty to our abominable father.'

  For the briefest span of time, Leman of the Russ' careful, contrived mask slipped. 'Horus, what have done to yourself?'

  'I have become what I always have been.' Horus grinned. It was too wide and leering, not a human expression, but the smile of something else pushed out through a mortal face. It shrank back into his features, and his expression became sorrowful. 'Stop this now, Russ. Listen to me. I have learned the truth. I have seen the future. I know what disaster our father will inflict upon our species.'

  'You have been lied to, my brother. Look around you, and your ship. These are not the trappings of civilisation you surround yourself with. It is madness! These items are worthy of Curze, not you.'

  'They accurately reflect the truth of the universe as it is. To improve, you must embrace it. You will see, if you join me.'

  Russ laughed in despair. 'You have lost all sense. You are a traitor, you are a tyrant. You are a monster.'

  'I am the loyal one, loyal to humanity! You still follow the wicked despot who forged us, eating His lies so eagerly. Do you not see, the Emperor cares for nothing but Himself. He would burn our species upon the pyre to fuel His own ascension to godhood. You are blind to it. He blinded you the moment He came to your world. Do not blame yourself, Leman. You cannot help it. I do not blame you. Join with me, and I will forgive you.'

  'Forgive me?' Russ' laughter grew wild, and blended with disbelieving tears. 'I cannot join you! Brother, brother look around you. Please. Look with honest eyes upon what you have wrought.'

  Horus' princely face took on an ugly aspect. 'I thought you would spurn me. You are a dog. You come when our father whistles, the brave hound that will attack whatever his oppressor commands, too stupid to know his master's quarry will kill you. On Old Earth, in the ancient days, there were dogs like you, set loose in packs to hunt wild swine. They would attack without hesitation, though many died, for they were bred without fear. Their natural form perverted to suit the whims of their creators. Like you. Like all of us.' He swept his burning gaze over the hall. 'But here I see no pack of fearless dogs, only a confused cur and his pups. You are the one who has lost his senses, my brother. Even if you were to come against me with all our so-called loyal brothers, you would be outmatched. Alone you have no chance of victory. Within hours your Legion will be extinct and your tiresome, primitive culture will follow, for, my brother, I will see Fenris burn.'

  If Horus' words were meant to provoke, they were unsuccessful. A look of calm certainty took hold of the Wolf King. Russ rose up from his fighting stance, and let the tip of the Emperor's Spear lower itself to the ground. He walked purposefully towards Horus, and the crowds of warriors parted to let him pass. 'You are not yourself, I can see that,' said Russ. 'You have been overtaken. Stop this madness. Come back with me. Let the Emperor heal you.'

  Horus laughed. It was the throaty growl of a monster in a hidden cave that comes out at night to devour the young.

  'He cannot heal when there is nothing to mend! Do you not see?' Horus held his arms wide, and moved down the steps. 'I am not wounded, I have been made whole. Before, I was but a pawn, now I am the master of my destiny. I will overthrow our father, and bring a new era of power to mankind.'

  'An era of cruelty,' said Russ. 'Look at your warriors. They have become monsters, though not so much as their father.'

  'Monsters?' roared Horus. 'I have seen the black future the Emperor will bring upon us. He cares nothing for humanity. The Great Crusade was a lie, Russ. He cares only for His own apotheosis. You and I, we are tools to be cast aside. He will let the souls of a trillion human beings burn to sate His eternal hunger. I know.'

  'These things you say are not true. Listen to yourself!' pleaded Russ. 'There is still time. Stop.'

  Horus pointed his maul at Russ. 'I name you a dupe worthy of nothing but death. However, you are my brother, there are others of us who fight with me, so I shall offer you the choice one last time. The Emperor told me, the day we first met, that together we could perform such marvellous things. He is a liar, but He was right about that. With you at my side, we can reshape the galaxy. We were the first to stand together - let us do so again, for the profit of all humanity.'

  'A tempting offer,' said Russ insincerely. He gave a half-smile. 'Save your breath. You know what my reply is. Look at the things with you. You commanded me to strike Magnus down when you dabble with far worse.'

  'You did strike him down, so very eagerly. You always were easily led. A hot-headed fool, desperate to please as any hound. For a scrap of affection you would sell your own life.' Horus grinned. A thousand boltguns were brought to readiness. He gestured at the strangely armoured warriors. They moved forwards, and it became clear their strangeness was not down to artifice. They had changed into things that could not be called men. 'These are my Luperci. They are a foretaste of what is to come. You look upon the true power of the galaxy.'

  'I'm looking at a monster,' said Russ. 'I have slain my share of them. You will be next.' He readied his spear.

  Horus gmnted thickly.

  'So be it. I expected nothing else but your loyalist yapping, little wolf, but I was willing to give you a chance to embrace change. Very well. You will die by my hand. I take no pleasure in this.'

  'As the monsters always say,' said Russ. 'And they say that because they cannot face the truth.'

  'Do you think you can beat me now, brother?' roared Horus. 'Witness the power I command. Witness what our father kept away from us!'

  Horus charged, propelling the many tonnes of his adapted Terminator plate into a thunderous run with ease. His giant maul he held high overhead, ready to strike.

  Russ met the blow with a double-handed block, taking the mauls head on the blade of his spear. A shock wave of empyrical energy blasted outwards, knocking Space Marines over and tumbling them head over heels.

  Horus struck again, and Russ staggered back.

  Boltguns roared a thunder to match the lightning of their clash, and battle was joined once more.

  Bjorn blinked away after-images. Alarms screamed from all over his battleplate. Uncanny energies burned around the two primarchs. They were heroes of myth, battling for the soul of mankind. In Bjorn's blurred vision their forms were uncertain, becoming something else - warriors in ancient armour, wielding bronze spears, or savage men from the dawn of time hefting giant stone axes, or two brothers grappling in the dirt of some forgotten village when men were few and the world vast. He blinked again, and the mirage was gone. Post-human deities duelled with weapons of unspeakable power.

  A great saga was in the making or else a great silence. Should Horus win, there would be no more histories to be told of the Vlka Fenryka.

  And then Bjorn was attacked by a gibbering inconstant thing only held in the shape of a man by its power armour, and he had his own battle to fight.

  The power of Horus unleashed...

  Twenty-Three

  The Binary Of Loyalty

  Cawl marched into the command centre right past Aspertia's guards. The domina was enmeshed in a cocoon of input feeds linking her directly to the cybernetic forces of Trisolian. Only half the subsidiary stations were occupied by adepts Cawl knew. The rest were attended to by members of the so-called true Mechanicum. A stink of spoiling meat came off them. He could see none of the newcomers' faces.

  The room was totally silent. None of the holoscreens or pict displays were active. All of the occupants were connected to their commands by hardline manifold. The infosphere seethed with aggressive data cant. Strange sub code lurked beneath in hidden strata that made Cawl's implants prickle.

  Fear roosted in Aspertia's domain. Cawl fought it back and walked in confidently, Friedisch following timidly.

  A flexible arm bearing a
n electronic eye rose from Aspertia's robes to glare at Cawl.

  'What are you doing here, Cawl? Why aren't you at your post?'

  'I abandoned it,' said Cawl.

  Immediately, the dormant skitarii guarding the door came online. 'There had better be a good reason,' said Aspertia. 'I have little patience to spare for you today.'

  The skitarii raised their weapons at Cawl.

  'There is,' said Cawl.

  Cawl pulled an orbicular device from his belt: his masterwork. He flicked the sole switch at the top, and dropped it to the ground.

  It landed with a metallic thunk. A burst of carefully crafted subversion codes blasted out from the cogitator inside. Immediately the adepts screamed and thrashed in their command chairs and fell limp. The skitarii lost their stiffness as Cawl's data-bursts brought their autonomous functions back online. Hesitantly, they lowered their guns.

  'Query status,' asked one. 'Immediate input required.'

  Cawl pointed at the domina.

  'Domina Magos Hester Aspertia Sigma-Sigma is a traitor,' said Cawl.

  Hissing pipes detached themselves from the domina's sockets as Aspertia shucked off her command harness.

  'I should never have trusted you,' she said. 'Guards, kill him.'

  The skitarii hesitated.

  'Check the infosphere,' said Cawl. 'You will see. The Space Wolves make war on the Warmaster around this very station. The grand traitor Horus came here at her invite.'

  'Domina?' asked one of the guards in confusion.

  'She turned on the Viceroy,' continued Cawl, 'and gave him to the traitors.'

  'Lies!' said Aspertia. 'Kill him!'

  'I shall give you the truth. Exloading,' said Cawl.

  He sent a data-squirt ripe with evidence of the domina's betrayal into the skitarii's minds. It took a fraction of a second for them to process. They raised their guns again. This time, they pointed them at the domina.

  'Are these records true?' asked the skitarii.

  'Absolutely. You can verify them yourself,' said Cawl.

  Cawl heard the data-wheels whirring in the skitarii's head as he ran the check.

  'Wait!' said Aspertia on all frequencies.

  Cawl pulled out his volkite serpenta.

  The skitarii opened fire on their mistress. Radium bullets smacked into armour plating. She reared up, and cut one of her erstwhile bodyguards in half with a focused particle beam that sliced through metal and flesh as if they were air.

  A round caught her in the face, denting the mirror-metal and snapping her elongated head back. Cawl shot out the cybernetic link nexus revealed at the base of her throat and she fell down in a tangle of metal and cloth, leaking fumes from her joints.

  The skitarii looked at Cawl. The tech-priest caught a little of the data traffic incoming to the warrior's cognis array. Sudden confusion had gripped the entirety of the Taghmata of Trisolian. Calls for aid and clarification went out from skitarii and thalaxii clades all over the Heptaligon. Without a word the skitarii departed, the curved prosthesis they had for feet loud on the deck.

  Cawl smiled to himself. 'There, that wasn't so hard,' he said.

  Friedisch had drawn his gun. He looked at the laspistol as if he had no idea how it came to be in his hand.

  'How did you override their neurosync? How did you do all this?' Friedisch said, looking at the dead adepts. The smell of cooked flesh rose from their heads. 'And where did you get that?' He pointed at the orb on the floor, which lay there innocuously, activity light blinking.

  'The code patterner? Like everything I possess, my friend, I made it. I've been working on it for some time actually, out of interest,' he stressed. 'I never thought I would have to use it, but I was concerned by weaknesses in the Trisolian data-net and I wished to demonstrate how it could be compromised from within In the end, they proved useful to me. That is how I burned out Aspertia's command suite, set her skitarii free and slew these aberrant techno-mancers. The warriors of Mars will be able to choose who to fight for now. I imagine it won't be the Warmaster.'

  'To what design was the patterner made? I've never heard of anything like it.'

  'My own,' Cawl said defiantly.

  Friedisch blinked at him. He lowered his gun to his side.

  'Invention is against the lore for the likes of us.'

  'Are you going to name me heretek?' said Cawl. 'I do not claim to be godly, Friedisch, but I am loyal to our deity.' He stowed his pistol in its holster. 'And I am going to save your life.'

  'You killed her.'

  'Do you think she was going to give us her barque if we asked nicely?' said Cawl. 'Now help me. Tez-Lar, roll her over.'

  Tez-Lar stamped into the room and gripped the dead body of Aspertia. He heaved her upper torso onto its back; she flopped over like a dead fish, mechanical limbs clashing together.

  'What are you doing?' said Friedisch. 'I don't like this, Belisarius.' He glanced out of the door nervously. The station had ceased shaking. The bombardment had stopped. That could only mean loyalist troops were on their way.

  'We need her ship, so we need her, in a manner of speaking.' Cawl flipped aside the domina's robes, revealing the array of cylinders attached to her chest. Lights had come on the bases of all. A few were red, signifying the death of the contents. Most were green. Cycling lights ran around their midlines as cryogen cycles went into action to preserve the contents. He picked one of the green-lit flasks and unscrewed it from its ceramic mount. Milky liquid dribbled from the connector.

  He wiped it away and took out a miniature suspension jar from under his robes with his free hand. He deposited the flask within the containment unit, and sealed the lid. Methalon gas swirled around the flask. He fiddled with the controls until the indicator lights blinked out an all clear. He breathed a sigh of relief, then he held up the unit to his face and regarded it avariciously.

  'It's alive! Aspertia was right about one thing, Friedisch. Knowledge is holy, and she knew a lot, my friend. In here is a homunculus encoded with everything she ever learned. Centuries of data. Not all of it combat related, but a lot. She intended it to recreate her if she died, though I won't let that happen.'

  'What are you going to do with it?'

  'I can't let her knowledge die with her, that would be a sin. And if I assimilate this, I will be quite the general.'

  'But how are you going to access it?' said Friedisch.

  'How indeed?' said Cawl. 'Engrammitic exload? Neuronal scan?' He peered closely into the glass jar encasing Aspertia Sigma-Sigma's clone flask. 'I think perhaps there is a better way.'

  'Cawl, what are you talking about?'

  Cawl declined to answer and pushed the flask inside a holster within his robes, then drew his pistol again. For a moment, Friedisch looked terrified, as though he thought Cawl was going to shoot him to cover up his tech-heresy.

  He pointed his gun at Aspertia's corpse.

  'We don't want two Hester Aspertia Sigma-Sigmas in the world,' he explained. The serpenta flashed. The flasks burned with actinic light as he ruthlessly shot them all out, dead or alive.

  Metal smoke and corpse fumes choked the room.

  'Now, we have a chance to survive,' he said. 'We had best seize it.'

  Bror lost count of how many cyborgs he had killed. They were the tech thralls and the skitarii of Trisolian, according to their badges. Horus was keeping bark his own legion, throwing inferior Mechanicum troops at the Rout. Bror snarled at the tactic. It was cowardly, no matter how strategically justifiable.

  The pack fell back from the magazines towards the embarkation deck, cutting their way directly through the first units sent against them Alter that they took to the narrow ways, denying the Mechanicum's warriors the opportunity to bring their heavier long-ranged weaponry to bear. The Trisolian troops were augmented to the point of inhumanity. The few vulnerable parts of their anatomy were protected by internal and external armour. Their weapons were bizarre but effective, and there were thousands of them.

  At c
lose quarters they were no match for the Vlka Fenryka. The six of them kept the distance close, where their chainswords and axes cut metal limbs from bodies as readily as flesh.

  'They are metal, but it makes no difference to my chainsword!' said Enrir joyfully, slightly delirious from the pain suppressants and combat enhancers his pharmacopeia pumped into him. His wound no longer troubled him, but he was going to be sore later, thought Bror.

  'Do you not think they are behaving a little sluggishly?' said Ragner. He blasted a skitarii in the face with his bolt pistol, spraying a mixture of brain matter and dreuitry out of the back of its head.

  'They are being puppeted by their masters, not just these tech thralls, but the skitarii too,' said Bror. 'Direct control.'

  'Tchah! That's a poor wyrd,' said Enrir, as he broke the skull of another thrall with his spiked knuckle guard.

  'I hear the poor bastards welcome it,' said Bror.

  'It makes them lousy warriors,' said Flokr.

  'Feeling chatty today, are we?' said Himmlik.

  Flokr had said barely three words throughout the whole mission.

  'Just because I don't think it worth speaking, it doesn't mean I can't talk,' he said, hollowing out the chest cavity of a skitarii with an upstroke of his sword.

  I 'I sometimes wonder,' said Ragner. He shot down two more foes, Bror grinned. He missed the combat banter of the wolf pack, The Knights Errant squabbled as much as the Rout, but without the humour, or the friendliness, come to think of it. The gulfs between the Legions, and the pain of betrayal many of them suffered, made them bitter. He missed this comradeship.

  They reached a crossway that was not on Broils map, and their I problems began in earnest.

  A group of tech thralls milled about on the far side. The thralls were I not as dangerous as the skitarii, being not so highly augmented and I stripped entirely of free will. On each, one arm had been replaced I with a laslock that the thrall cradled with its remaining hand.