Warriors of the Imperium - Andy Hoare & S P Cawkwell

by Warhammer 40K

  Ryarus considered this now. He and Correlan had worked slavishly for the past two days. The Techmarine had closed himself off for hours on end in his workshop where he became swiftly buried in the many schematics and plans that he had spent months drawing up. At this stage, a single error in judgement would spell disaster. His mood degenerated rapidly and eventually he was left to his own devices with only a number of servitors to aid him. Fortunate, Ryarus thought, that the mindless near-automatons had no emotions that could be laid bare under the Techmarine’s lashing tongue. They would have been reduced to quivering wrecks within minutes.

  For his part, the Silver Skulls Apothecary had spent time with Volker and had been satisfied that the boy was ready in both body and mind for the commencement of his new role. He had been absorbed, fascinated in the measure of his own success in terms of witnessing the precision of the augmetic enhancements. The replacement limbs were, in a sense, a practice ground; a way in which Volker could adjust to his body being grafted with technology. It was why the decision had been taken at the start to amputate at all. Replacement limbs hadn’t been an entirely altruistic thing. Getting used to controlling the augmetics trained up the dormant sections of Volker’s brain, which would be vital come the inauguration of the neural network.

  The Resurgent Project itself had been in stasis for a long time. A former Master of the Fleet had introduced the project to the Prognosticatum some four hundred years previously. He had been full of countless ideas and the concepts necessary to achieve the goal. He had even provided crude blueprints painstakingly drawn in his own hand.

  He had been denied.

  ‘The time is not right,’ Vashiro had said, on consultation with the inner circle. ‘We see merit in the idea, but until the omens are aligned, we cannot give you our approval.’

  So the Resurgent Project had been effectively forgotten. With the inauguration of a new Master of the Fleet came the responsibility of knowing that they may be called upon to take the reins of the nascent prototype. Daerys Arrun’s reaction on discovering this was going to fall into his remit had not been a positive one. Devoutly traditional, Arrun saw the Resurgent as an abominable thing, an effort on the part of the Silver Skulls to interfere with the status quo. He had obeyed only because he had to, not because he had any choice. He had assembled as perfect a team as he could muster. Thus, Correlan had taken over the mechanical part of the workload whilst Ryarus had taken responsibility for the biological.

  Everywhere Volker went, even here on the training levels, a small retinue of tech-priests were not far behind, their voices as low and incomprehensible as ever as they chanted repeated litanies and blessings over the one they called the Great Honoured. Ryarus had drawn the line at the full contingent that attended him in the main chamber and had, extremely reluctantly, negotiated a party of four adepts.

  Ryarus watched Volker carefully as the youth performed his daily exercises in the half-light of the training cages. The lighting in the area was intentionally dull, the lumen-sconces embedded in the walls giving off little more than a perfunctory glow. It was a habit of the Silver Skulls to train at various levels of light. Such practice better prepared them for combat in any conditions and helped maintain their ability to control their enhanced eyesight.

  Volker had little need to consider his self-defence in the long term, of course, but Ryarus was acutely conscious that the exercise staved off the depression that the youth might otherwise have fallen into given his extended state of limbo.

  During physical training, Volker could engage his mind on everything he had been bred for. It also meant that he was more self-sufficient than if he had been placed into an artificial coma and needed constant monitoring. This way, at least, the boy could maintain some sense of independence from the project that would ultimately consume all that he was.

  The gloomy light cast eerie shadows of battling giants on the utilitarian walls of the ringed training tier. Along with Volker, there were a number of other Silver Skulls presently engaged in drills and training, barely more than indistinguishable silhouettes. Ryarus, though, would have known any of them at a glance. As ranking Apothecary in Fourth Company, all of them had passed through his care at one time or another. The sounds of blade against blade rang out, caught and funnelled upwards through the interior ziggurat of the Dread Argent.

  Ryarus watched Volker’s performance through half-closed eyes, his Apothecary’s skills granting him the ability to assess everything about the youth’s exertions in the training cage. He had coped well with his augmetic implants and had full control over them. It had been difficult for him, at first. Never granted the Emperor’s Ward, or his own suit of power armour, the ability to interface himself with machinery on the level that the Resurgent Project demanded was always going to be a challenge. But it had been a challenge that Volker had adapted to with ease and satisfying proficiency.

  Bare from the waist up, light combat fatigues covering his artificial legs, Volker fought with the skill and prowess of any of his peers. The muscles rippled across his back as he threw himself at the artificial enemy and he laid into the training servitor with great energy and enthusiasm. Given that he spent much of his time held motionless in the feed-tank, it must be liberating to be freed from his constraints, even if it was only for a few hours.

  In a few short weeks, he would never move freely again. After the bonding took place, he would become as one with the Dread Argent. There was something sorrowing, even a little sinister about such a fate and yet the boy had never once tried to refute his destiny. The Prognosticators had laid out his future as dictated by the Emperor himself. No loyal member of the Imperium of Man would deny such an honour. Volker had always been more saddened by his denial to the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes than his ultimate sacrifice. Even with the loss of his arms and legs to the necessary augmetics that would serve as conduits to the ship’s systems, Volker had remained upbeat and determined, optimistic beyond reckoning.

  The Apothecary was fiercely proud of the success he had achieved during his time with Fourth Company. For the better part of two hundred years, his role had always focused far more on reducing the suffering of mortally wounded brothers by sending them to the arms of the Emperor swiftly and cleanly. He recovered the Chapter’s legacy from the fallen so that future generations may strengthen their numbers.

  There was a need for emotional detachment of course, yet the loss of each of his battle-brothers cut him keenly. His own honour tattoos were simple and deeply reflective of the soul beneath the skin, listing the name of every Silver Skulls warrior whose Quintessence Sacred he had reclaimed with his reductor. They would not be forgotten, not by him. Now, with the work he had undertaken with Volker, he had been given the chance to nurture, to create.

  His own blood brother, Prognosticator Chaereus, had always claimed the ability to read the auras of others. Long since taken to the halls of the ancients, the psyker had always maintained that Ryarus’s aura was that of a protector. ‘Shield of the Emperor,’ had been what he had actually said.

  Fifty years dead.

  Had it been so very long?

  Ryarus rarely felt the weight of his years upon him, but when he did, they made themselves known heavily. The sorrowful and ignoble end his brother had met, torn to shreds by rampaging orks, had fuelled his own battle rage. Ryarus had cut down dozens of the greenskin menace single-handedly before a near-fatal shot to the chest had incapacitated him. Even then, his fading fury had kept him struggling to bring his bolt pistol to bear on the xenos. It was only the fact that his body had battled him down into unconsciousness that he had stopped at all.

  Apothecary Malus himself had overseen his subordinate’s recovery, an honour which even now remained unsurpassed in Ryarus’s experiences. The Chief Apothecary of the Silver Skulls took personal pride and interest in all those who had followed his own calling, an ethic that Ryarus himself had unconsciously cascaded further down to
his own juniors. He was greatly respected and admired amongst not only Fourth Company, but throughout the entire Chapter for his forthright nature and, of course, that legendary display of fearless tenacity against the orks – a story that was told over and over again.

  Briefly caught up in his own memories, his humours tipped to decidedly melancholic. With a physical shake, Ryarus pulled his thoughts out of the past and focused instead on the future. He idly tweaked the plaited beard of white hair at his chin and considered the future made flesh in the training cage before him.

  From the shadows, another figure watched Volker Straub. There was no pride emanating from him, though. It was a skinny, dirty little creature who knew he was already pushing the very borders of his luck by being anywhere near the training decks. But he had heard so many rumours about this ‘Resurgent’ that he had decided to take a look for himself.

  The young man who guided the Dread Argent through the warp had been brought to the employ of the Silver Skulls by way of a hive-world where he had been running the streets, fighting for his own survival. Born into a family of the Navis Nobilite that had fallen far from grace, his parents had effectively sold him to the employ of the Imperium in an attempt to regain some sort of standing. They had sold him as a commodity and the insult to his person still smarted.

  His name was Jeremiah, and he was jealous. He was jealous of the muscled, healthy youth fighting in the training cages before him. He was jealous of the encroachment on the only thing that he had ever felt truly belonged to him. The Dread Argent was Jeremiah’s ship. At least, that was the way he saw it.

  He was the one who had to soothe its troubled soul when it travelled through the warp. He was the one who had struggled for an acceptance that he still was not sure he had achieved.

  He watched, winding a lock of lank hair around one finger. His eyes flicked over Volker and then shifted briefly to the Space Marine who was with him. He knew Ryarus. The Apothecary was one of the few Silver Skulls who had made an effort to display overtures of friendship. Jeremiah had shied away from it, not trusting the giants who now owned him. Besides, from what he knew of the Emperor’s Angels, he could not shake the overwhelming feeling that the Silver Skulls were wrong somehow.

  For all his flaws and his dubious sense of personal hygiene, the Navigator was astute. He had listened to the various conversations amongst the human serfs about the project and he had gathered the facts to him. He had learned that there was some division amongst the crew – Adeptus Astartes and human alike – as to whether the Resurgent was a good idea or not.

  His sharp little eyes darted nervously as Ryarus got to his feet and moved towards him. He shrank backwards, willing the shadows to swallow him up. The Apothecary’s eyes met his and there was the barest shake of the head and a faintly amused quirk of the lips.

  ‘Come out, Jeremiah.’ When the Navigator didn’t move, Ryarus softened his tone a little. ‘I am not angry with you.’

  He could have run away, fled back to his private chambers where very few people ever bothered him. But the command in Ryarus’s tone did not invite disobedience. Jeremiah took a step out of the gloom. In the flickering light of the lumen-sconces and lumen-strips he cut a pathetically scrawny figure. He barely came up to the Apothecary’s waist, but he still held himself taller anyway. He waited for his inevitable scolding.

  At twenty, maybe twenty-one years old at the most, he was the sort of gangly youth who gave the impression that he was constructed mostly of limbs. Coppery-coloured hair hung in lank, greasy strands around a pale face that boasted a straggly, unkempt goatee beard. He was thin and undernourished and his watery eyes stared up at the Apothecary with a peculiar mixture of awe and defiance. His third eye was kept hidden beneath a grubby silk scarf he wore tied around his head.

  ‘I am pleased you are here,’ the Apothecary said, throwing Jeremiah off balance. He hadn’t been expecting that.

  ‘You… are?’

  ‘Of course. There is someone I would like you to meet.’

  Jeremiah’s eyes narrowed and he moved slightly to look around Ryarus’s leg at Volker. ‘What if I don’t want to meet him?’ He spoke with a slight stammer that was more to do with his anxiety than any particular speech defect.

  ‘I am taking a guess that you came here specifically with the purpose of seeing for yourself what the talk is all about. Yes, I pay attention as well, Navigator.’ The Apothecary added the last on seeing the guilty look that slid onto the Navigator’s face. ‘Let me explain what we are trying to achieve.’

  In the simplest terms he could find, Ryarus briefly outlined the essence of the Resurgent Project and the boy’s face grew more and more expressionless as he talked. The Apothecary felt a surge of exasperation, suspecting that the grubby young man was largely filtering out the important elements and hearing only what he wanted to. When he had finished, a silence settled between them, broken only by the sound of Volker’s grunts of effort as he trained.

  Jeremiah blinked a few times and worried at his lower lip with his teeth. ‘Took me ages to settle this ship down,’ he said and there was possessiveness in his eyes. ‘Don’t like the idea of someone else interfering with that.’ He swung his gaze upwards. What was it he had heard the officers say when he’d listened to them?

  ‘Permission to speak freely, my lord?’

  ‘Always, Jeremiah. Honesty is encouraged on board the Dread Argent.’

  Jeremiah took a deep breath. ‘I reckon as you’re all mad,’ he asserted.

  ‘I see.’ There was silence and then Ryarus spoke again. If Jeremiah had been anywhere near as wise as he liked to think he was, he would have detected the edge in Ryarus’s tone. ‘Would you care to elaborate on that interesting point of view?’

  The Apothecary’s expression hadn’t changed at all, so Jeremiah clung on to the little wave of confidence that had made him say that. ‘Yes. What you’re talking about doing sounds to me like it’ll be dangerous. What if he…’ He waved a hand dismissively in Volker’s direction. ‘What if he can’t bond with the ship? That can kill anybody who doesn’t know how to do it.’

  ‘Volker’s skills are superlative.’

  ‘You never touched the machine-spirit at the heart of a ship, did you? It isn’t something you can teach or train. It’s just something you can do. Or can’t do.’

  ‘Our Prognosticators have decreed that this young man is the perfect choice for the task. Do you dare to presume that you can go against the most powerful divinations provided to our Chapter by the Emperor himself?’

  ‘I’m not challenging nothing,’ retorted Jeremiah, sullenly folding his arms across his thin chest. ‘I’m just speaking freely. You said I could. But if you aren’t interested in what I have to say, then I’ll just shut up.’ Ryarus sighed inwardly. Jeremiah was difficult to handle at the best of times. He forced a smile onto his face, although after the Navigator’s direct insult against the Chapter, the urge to crush the little worm’s head in his fist was rising.

  ‘No… no, Jeremiah, I am sorry. You are quite right to have your say. Perhaps, when the time is right, you will offer your aid. We would appreciate it.’

  ‘Maybe.’ The Navigator sniffed haughtily. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  With that, the rodenty little man turned away and strutted from the training decks as though he owned them. Perhaps, Ryarus thought, in a strange way he did own them.

  He was troubled by the Navigator’s words far more than he cared to admit. It was not the first time that the Apothecary had heard the suggestion that what the Silver Skulls were attempting was bordering on the insane. Was that true? Had they deviated so far off course? Had they become so removed from the Codex Astartes that even other Space Marines thought the same?

  The two ships were still moving slowly in their plotted course towards Gildar Secundus. Within minutes, they would be detectable by long-range auguries, but for now, at least, they rema
ined unnoticed and hidden.

  The stolen, warp-tainted technology they harboured on board, however, allowed them to scan the Dread Argent fully. Data was received, reconfigured and transmitted down the chain to those who had requested it. Within scant seconds, there was virtually nothing about the operating capacity of Captain Daerys Arrun’s pride and joy that the intruders didn’t know.

  They held position awaiting word from their leaders. Too soon and the entire plan would fall to pieces.

  Timing. It was all about the perfect timing.

  For endless minutes they waited, poised and ready to strike or run as ordered. They could not move further forward without falling out of range of the vox-relay that would send them their orders. The relay had been painstakingly set up over a long period of time and was innocent and innocuous enough that it had never raised suspicion. The Imperium was always doing whatever they could to enhance communications, particularly in a zone like this where interference was common.

  A few more pressure-suited drudges working on a distant moon raised no eyebrows with anyone.

  When the message reached them, transmitted simultaneously to the two vessels, the voice that gave the command was distorted and cracked.

  It was a single word.

  ‘Engage.’

  With a burn of their thrusters, the two ships, both designated as Infidel-class vessels, pressed forward and began their final approach.

  The bridge deck of the Dread Argent was a whirl of activity. A slew of tech-priests were engaged in rites to consecrate the control lecterns in readiness for the Resurgent and their chanting voices cut through every other noise. The rumble of the far-distant engines maintained its omnipresence.

  There was a sense of great optimism pervading everything. After months of abortive attempts to commence the project, Captain Arrun’s sense of relief at the imminent execution of the project bolstered his mood and that in turn was infectious. Apart from the servitors who bustled around in their usual way, the Chapter serfs who performed the menial duties on the Dread Argent found themselves in a similarly enthusiastic state of mind.