Honourbound - Rachel Harrison

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Pyrehawks!’ Captain Hale shouts.

  All of the Rifles’ infantry squads are named for Antari folk stories, and Raine has come to know most of them since joining the regiment. Andren Fel told Raine that the pyrehawk was said to be the one to light Antar’s night sky with stars, setting hundreds of fires in the void with every beat of its wings.

  Raine cannot think of a more appropriate name for Kasia Elys and her five-strong special weapons team. They are heavily armoured, with extra plates strapped around their arms and legs, and glare visors in their helmets. The Pyrehawks move up into position and brace their plasma guns, ready to light new stars.

  ‘Set them afire,’ Elys snarls.

  The Pyrehawks fire their plasma guns in the same instant as the kastelans do their phosphor blasters. Bright white light blooms in the casting halls, printing on Raine’s eyes. She is half-blind as she fires her pistol at the kastelan automata and the tech-priest controlling them.

  One of Odi’s Hartkin is hit by phosphor. Raine can’t say who, because there is not enough left to know. The figure is silently running towards the rest of its squad in its blind death throes. Raine puts a bolt in the figure to stop it from passing the phosphor along to the rest of them. It falls, still burning.

  In return, one of the kastelans goes to a knee, juddering and smoking from plasma fire. The tech-priest is blaring more machine noise that sounds like a scream. The other two kastelans twist and train their phosphor cannons at Elys and her Pyrehawks as they go for cover. The Pyrehawks fire again as they fall back, trading plasma for phosphor. Their shots land true, staggering the kastelans, but not felling them. Most of the Pyrehawks end up burning like stars themselves and Raine doesn’t have enough rounds for all of them.

  Not if she wants to kill the tech-priest.

  ‘Zane!’ she shouts.

  There is no way the psyker hears her over all of the noise, not really. But Zane does not need to truly hear.

  ‘The kastelans!’ Raine shouts. ‘Break them!’

  Lydia Zane walks through the storm as dozens of her kin fall back, firing at the kastelans. One of the automata moves to meet her and the flamethrower on its shoulder angles downwards. Zane raises her hand as the kastelan fires a gout of promethium that would melt her like the steel in the forge if it were to touch her skin. Instead, Zane deflects the liquid flame back over the kastelan in an arc. She feels the heat of it against her kine-shield as a fire in her mind. The cables at her skull creak and the floor under her feet trembles and twists. The kastelan, burning now, reaches for her with a huge, powered fist. For an instant, Zane almost pities the machine. This thing that is made to take commands, and never to question. Only to kill. She sees herself reflected in the mirror of its faceplate. Her nose is bleeding thickly, and her skin is as pale as a lakebottom fish. The crown of cables that thread under her scalp are arcing with lightning.

  ‘Die,’ Zane says, and throws up her hand.

  The kastelan robot explodes into pieces, disassembled in an instant, all bolts sheared, all seals broken. The floor panels around Zane splinter. Dozens of metres away, overhead cables flex and snap. The shockwave knocks some of her kin to the ground, breaking bones. She hears them scream. The world wavers, and time seems to slow. Zane’s heart goes arrhythmic and she distinctly hears the snap of folding wings. She wishes that closing her eyes would stop it, but it never does. Especially not since she lost her real eyes, and had them replaced with false silver discs. Now she sees fire and death in every blink.

  It is a test, she thinks. And I will not break.

  With a scream of effort, Zane refocuses, and turns to the last remaining kastelan and its tech-priest overseer. The tech-priest is slowly raising its arm. Its gamma pistol is pointed at Raine. The commissar’s own pistol is raised in answer, but even one as quick as Raine will be ashes if fire from the tech-priest’s weapon so much as grazes her. Lydia Zane does not care for the commissar. The psyker is not a hound, loyal and loving to her master. She is caged and tethered, watched and judged, all by Raine. But if Lydia Zane is truly honest, she is sometimes thankful for the strength of this particular tether.

  So Zane lifts her hand and curls it into a fist as the tech-priest’s fingers ratchet around the gamma pistol’s trigger. She turns the gun to scrap, along with most of the priest’s arm. It shrieks and rears back. The last kastelan stumbles forwards on jarred, broken legs, still slaved to protect its master. Zane squeezes it with invisible force until the joints burst and it collapses, crushed. Exhausted, Zane falls to her knees, with electricity dancing from the cables of her crown and running along her teeth.

  On Gloam, where she was trained, they would make Raine run the upper gantries over the ocean. They were narrow spans of riveted metal, either slick with sea-spray or with ice when it turned to deepwinter. The trick was to run quickly and surely. Second guess yourself, and the ocean would gladly take you. Raine places her feet just as surely, just as swiftly, as she leaps up on the fallen kastelan’s shell and snaps off the last three rounds of her bolt pistol’s magazine. They all hit the tech-priest. Chest, throat. Head. It falls backwards, thrashing, the bladed mechadendrites seeking her. Her pistol empty, Raine draws her sabre. Evenfall’s power field snarls. One of the tech-priest’s mechadendrites cuts Raine’s face as another tears a great rip in her greatcoat and her arm. Raine feels blood run hot and fast as she swings her sabre, severing the mechanical arms as they reach for her, until she is close enough to plant the powered blade in the tech-priest’s chest. Even then, it takes a moment to stop twitching.

  Raine draws a breath, all ashes and the smell of spilled oil. The Sighted have all but disappeared into the smoke, taking cover in amongst the vast casting machines standing between the Antari and the forge halls beyond. Raine pushes another magazine into her pistol. She is down to her last two.

  ‘No respite!’ she cries. ‘No mercy!’

  And around her, the Antari roar and push onwards.

  Wyck falls back against one of the casting machines. At his feet, the Sighted takes his time to die, bleeding out slowly across the corrugated floor. The smell of it dizzies Wyck as he cleans the blade of his knife on the leg of his fatigues. Everything seems muffled as if by distance. The thrum of the machine at his back. The las-fire echoing up to the roof.

  The Sighted at his feet, choking to death.

  Wyck blinks his stinging eyes. He looks back down the aisle to make sure he is still alone before putting his hand in the pouch at his belt and taking out a short, stubby vial with an auto-injector mounted on the cap. Wyck breaks the seal with his thumb, and then punches the needle into his arm, straight through his fatigues. The rush comes quickly, like it always does. Setting him alight from the inside out. Sounds go from murmurs to bellows and everything pulls pin sharp.

  Wyck drops the auto-injector on the floor and crushes it with his boot.

  ‘The way is clear,’ he says, into the vox. ‘Move up.’

  His Wyldfolk approach up the aisle, resolving as if from the smoke and the darkness, their green and grey flak plate fouled with ashes and blood.

  ‘I don’t like this, sarge,’ Crys says. ‘We’re way out in it.’

  The combat engineer is twitching her head from side to side, trying to compensate for the fact she’s part-deaf in her left ear. Crys is taller than he is, and so broad across the shoulders that standard template flak plate doesn’t fit her all that well. She has her grenade launcher slung across her back and her pistol drawn in its place. Crys has modified the grenade launcher, like she does all of her kit. It’s something that she should be sanctioned for, but Wyck has seen how that gun works since. What it can do. The box and cabling mounted on the stock of it increase the speed of the rotary magazine, so that it fires on full auto.

  By all rights, Yulia Crys should be deaf in both of her ears.

  ‘We’re always way out in it,’ Wyck says. ‘It’s what we’re g
ood at.’

  Crys shrugs her broad shoulders, but she’s still frowning. In some ways, she’s right. They are deep into the labyrinth of casting machines, probably cut off from the rest of Grey, but Wyck has the Sighted running and he won’t stop chasing until he’s bled the lot of them.

  Wyck takes point, following after a sound he picks up even over the machines and the gunfire. The ring of boots on metal. He rounds a corner and follows a set of bare plated stairs upwards. It brings him out on top of a rig mounted with plasma torches that are cutting shapes from huge sheets of steel. He moves up the central gantry with his squad behind him. It is noisy, with equally spaced alcoves like confessionals arranged on either side for the machine’s slaved servitors. A lot of cover, for those who might hide. Sparks rain from the machines, and smoke blows across the gantry like fog.

  No good, Wyck thinks. This is no good.

  The servitors loll at their stations, operating the torches with convulsive movements of their withered limbs. They don’t look up as Wyck passes because their routines don’t allow it. Because they are made for the moment of the cut and nothing more. Wyck’s fingers twitch by the trigger. The stimms are pressing at him and are making him shake, just minutely.

  There’s a noise. The barest sound that he wouldn’t be able to pick up if his brain weren’t so electric.

  One of the Sighted lurches out of the next alcove on his left. No carapace on this one. No flak armour. The man is clad in coveralls and he has a heavy, long-handled hammer in his hand. He swings for Wyck, but he is much too slow. Wyck ducks the swing and puts his boot in the man’s gut, sending him reeling. He snaps three las-rounds into him before he can get back up again.

  More of them come, out of the alcoves, or dropping from ledges above. A dozen or so. They are shouting something over the noise in Laxian. Two of them are down and twitching from chest shots before they can pull their weapons. The sound of them gasping for air they can’t get carries to him even as Wyck puts his knife in the chest of a third. He pulls it free again, but the Sighted doesn’t go down. Instead he coughs blood onto Wyck’s face and swings for him, raking a blunt-edged knife across the front of Wyck’s flak armour. It digs a gouge, but doesn’t go through. Wyck blinks the blood from his eyes. He can’t help but laugh.

  ‘You think you can cut me?’ he says.

  Wyck cuts the Sighted back, across his arms as he tries to block, then across his throat when his arms finally drop. Wyck gets more blood on his face. His heart is so loud now. Louder than the las-fire and the roaring of Awd’s flamer as they finish the rest of them.

  ‘I’m Wyldfolk,’ Wyck says. ‘And cuts from us always kill.’

  ‘Dav.’

  For a moment, Wyck could swear it’s Raf’s voice he hears, after all this time. There’s the same kind of dread in it.

  ‘Dav.’

  Wyck blinks and shakes his head. Of course it’s not Raf. Raf has been dead for more than ten years. Long since taken. Long since judged. He turns to see Awd looking at him. The others are moving swiftly up the gantry, checking for runners or trip mines.

  ‘What?’ Wyck asks.

  ‘These folk,’ Awd says, slow and careful. Quiet. ‘I don’t think they’re Sighted.’

  Wyck snorts. ‘What are you talking about?’ he says.

  He looks at the body at his feet. The pool of blood that has spread around his boots like a black lake. Wyck realises that the man hasn’t cut up his face or torn away his icons. He wears no mirrors or feathers, and his coveralls are Munitorum-issue. The only mark on the man is the worker number branded on his neck. It occurs to Wyck that the blunt-bladed knife is the sort you’d use to pry panels off machines.

  ‘They were behind the lines,’ Wyck says, absently. ‘They jumped us.’

  ‘I found this on one of them,’ Awd says.

  He throws something that Wyck catches. Something shiny and silver. No, not silver. Tin. Cheaply pressed.

  It’s a pendant in the shape of the aquila.

  The thunder of Wyck’s heart skips a beat. In his head, he hears what Raf said to him, all those years ago, his grey eyes wide with horror.

  What have you done, Dav?

  The answer is the same now as it was then.

  Too much to forgive.

  Wyck blinks and clears his throat. ‘You know how they are,’ he says to Awd. ‘The Sighted make soldiers of everyone, even if they don’t look like it. They did it on Gholl. On Hyxx too. Even the priests, there. You remember?’

  ‘I remember,’ Awd says. ‘I won’t forget that. Not even when I’m dead.’

  ‘Everywhere they go, people turn their coats for them. This is just that.’

  Wyck puts the pendant in one of the pouches at his belt. The one next to where he keeps the auto-injectors.

  ‘I know,’ Awd says. ‘But–’

  Wyck gives him that look again, and just like before, Awd falls silent.

  ‘This is just that,’ he says again. ‘Now forget it and move.’

  Awd nods his head. ‘Yes, sergeant. As you say.’

  Wyck glances down at the body one more time before following Awd. At the blunt-bladed knife and the wide pool of blood. At the aquila pendant glinting around that man’s neck too.

  And he knows that when death finally catches him, he’ll have so very much to be judged for.

  Two

  Brightly burning

  Raine’s first sight of the Delta Gate is through smoke as it looms at the end of the forge hall. The gate is massive, made for super-heavies and god-machines. It is worked with the icon of the Cog Mechanicus, the shining half-skull grinning and catching the balefire light from the casting machines and warning lumens. A wide avenue leads up to the gate, with vast machinery on either side of it, presses and lifters and rolling conveyers, all still working.

  Raine drags Makar Kayd into cover behind one of those machines. The vox-operator has one hand clamped over the bullet hole in his belly, the other still white-knuckled around his rifle’s grip. Two more solid rounds are buried deep in the chest-plate of his armour, flattened to fat silver coins.

  ‘Field guns, then,’ Raine says.

  Kayd nods his head. He is shaking, but when he speaks his voice doesn’t waver.

  ‘Yes, commissar.’ He looks down and moves his hand for a moment so that he can see the wound. ‘High calibre, mounted on their barricades.’

  Raine uses a dirt-dulled mirror to look around the edge of the forge machine. Across the avenue in front of the gate the Sighted have built massive fortifications from heaps of riveted, stamped metal plating, stacked up to half the height of the gate itself. The distinct shapes of unfinished super-heavy tanks make up the bulk of it, their Imperial insignia scratched out and bloody, blasphemous words scrawled on their armour plating. The muzzles of guns in amongst the fortifications light up, and las-fire and solid shot rings from the avenue and the machinery all around Raine as she ducks back behind the cover.

  Nuria Lye appears out of the smoke, already unpacking her kit. The medic drops to one knee, and takes a look at Kayd and all of that blood.

  ‘What a mess,’ she says.

  Kayd scowls. ‘The witch could have shielded me from the guns,’ he says in a low voice, nodding towards Zane. ‘If she’d felt like it.’

  The psyker is murmuring to herself, sitting on her knees in the machine’s shadow. The hot air of the forge mists where it hits her ice-cold skin. Zane’s false eyes move beneath their lids, but she doesn’t open them.

  ‘For what it is worth, I have not seen you die,’ she says. ‘Not today.’

  Kayd goes a shade paler. He mutters in Antari. Raine knows the words.

  Spare me the ways of the witch.

  ‘You do know that those words cannot hurt me,’ Zane snaps.

  Raine puts her hand up. ‘Enough,’ she says.

  It is all she
needs to say to stop them. Zane goes back to her warding words and Kayd goes back to scowling and bleeding all over the floor. Nuria Lye takes out a wicked-looking injector and primes it.

  ‘Move your hand, Mak,’ she says. ‘This will hurt.’

  ‘Can’t be worse than it already is,’ Kayd says, his teeth chattering.

  Raine looks at the injector and knows from experience that it will be. ‘You should hold your breath,’ she says.

  Kayd’s eyes go wide. She sees him take a deep breath, then Lye pushes the injector into the wound and seals it. It makes him thrash around under Raine’s hands as she holds him still, but then it’s done and Raine catches a different sort of burning to the rest of the forge smells.

  ‘That really was worse,’ Kayd says.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Lye says, flatly.

  Raine pulls Kayd upright. He has to lean against the wall of the press, but he keeps his feet.

  ‘The gate is adamantium,’ Raine says. ‘Thick as a fortress wall. Only the highest-ranking members of the Adeptus Mechanicus on Laxus Secundus have the override codes.’

  ‘Let me guess, they would not give them to us because we are not blessed by the machine,’ Yuri Hale says.

  He ducks back into cover as hard rounds ricochet off the edge of the machine. Hale ejects the spent powercell from his laspistol and pushes a fresh one home. On the other side of the main avenue, the rest of the Antari are taking cover too, behind the forge’s heavy machinery and the rust-red pillars that support the vaulted roof.

  ‘No,’ Raine says. ‘We do not have the codes because those who know them are either dead, or defected.’

  Hale spits on the floor at the word defected.

  ‘The gate won’t be an issue,’ he says. ‘If it’s built, we can breach it.’

  Raine can believe it. She has seen the Antari do the same on many worlds before this one. Never has she served alongside a regiment with such a capability for demolishing the undemolishable. Sometimes they joke that they were given the wrong appellation at their founding. That there are words much more appropriate than Rifles.