Prospero Burns

by Dan Abnett

  The sight of it reminded Hawser of how un-human the Wolves were. He had been amongst them for long enough to have become used to the look of them and the way they towered over him.

  Still, they were positively reassuring compared to the forces of the Quietude.

  Skull measurements and other biological data taken from captured Quietude specimens had confirmed their Terran ancestry. At some point long before the fall of Old Night, a branch of Terran expansion had brought the Quietude’s gene pool into this out-flung, unremembered corner of the galaxy. The commander of the 40th Imperial Expedition Fleet, along with his technical advisors and savants, believed that this exodus had taken place during the First Great Age of Technology, perhaps as long as fifteen thousand years earlier. The Quietude possessed a level of technological aptitude that was extremely sophisticated, and so divergent from Terran or even Martian standards as to suggest a long incubation and, possibly, the influence of a xenobiological culture.

  At some early stage in their post-Terran life, the humans of the Quietude had given up their humanity. They operated in social networks, cohered by communications webs neurally spliced into them at birth. They sacrificed most of their flesh anatomy to ritualised surgical procedures during childhood that prepared them to inhabit artificial bodies. Pretty much all that remained of a Quietude adult, organically speaking, were the brain, skull and spinal cord. These rested in the neck socket of an elegantly engineered humanoid chassis, which contained the machine-analogue organs that fed the brain and kept it alive.

  That explained why the shot-up robusts were pooling almost purple fluids around their carcasses instead of blood.

  The citizens of the Quietude wore hoods of silver circuitry over their skulls, and hologram masks instead of faces. As the boltguns killed them, the masks flickered out and failed, and revealed the self-inflicted inhumanity beneath.

  Aeska had carried Hawser down with Tra, instructing Hawser to hold onto his neck. He’d clung on like a pelt, and Aeska had carried him as if his weight had no significance to the Astartes, and even when they’d been going hand-over-hand down through the dock’s girder lattice, even when the only thing preventing Hawser from plunging to his death was the grip of his fingers around Aeska’s neck, he’d kept his eyes open. He had not done this because he’d jumped down enough flues in the Aett to develop a head for heights. He’d done it because he’d known he had to. It was expected of him.

  On the principal deck level, as the assault began, Aeska had set Hawser on the ground behind him and told him to walk in his shadow. The vast, polished deck yawned away on either side of them, curved like the surface of a world seen from orbit, and the lattice above was like the branches of a dense thorn thicket. The air was laced with bolter fire.

  Hawser needed very little encouragement.

  Five minutes into the fight, the Quietude finally began to claw back. The first Rout blood they spilled was from a warrior called Galeg, who was hit by a gravity pellet. The shot turned his left arm, from the elbow down, into a bloody twig, rattling with bracelets of shattered armour. Galeg shut the pain down and advanced on his attacker, swinging out a chain axe. Steam and blood-smoke sizzled from his injured limb.

  The shot had not come from one of the robust warrior units. Three graciles, the lighter weight technical versions, had retrieved the weapon of a fallen robust and set it up on a lattice walkway. Galeg bounded up onto the walkway as they missed him with two more desperate shots, and dismembered them with his wailing axe. He did this with relish, and let out wet growls as their fracturing chassis shattered under his axe-blows and emitted strangulated electronic shrieks.

  When Galeg had finished his kill, he signalled his ability to continue with a casual air-punch of his bloody, ruined fist, a gesture that Hawser found chilling.

  Several robusts had defended the entrance to a major engineering underspace with what looked like a heavier, perhaps crew-served, version of the gravity rifle. The colossal bursts of fire, ripping up the underspace approach from an unseen source, vaporised Hjad, the first Wolf to come into view. Bear wheeled the rest of his pack aside. There was no point in providing further targets. Hawser saw Bear take out a small hand axe, a one-piece steel cast, and mark the bulkhead beside the underspace slope. He did it quickly and deftly. It was evidently a mark he’d made many times: four hard cuts to form a crude diamond shape, then a fifth notch bisecting the diamond. Hawser considered the mark gouged into the bulkhead metal, and realised what it was.

  It was an incredibly simplified symbol for an eye. It was a mark of aversion.

  The Olamic Quietude had been hostile from the very point of contact. Suspicious and unwilling to formalise any kind of convergence, they had engaged the 40th Fleet in two separate ship actions in an attempt to drive the expedition out of Quietude space. During the second of these skirmishes, the Quietude managed to capture the crew of an Imperial warship.

  The commander of the 40th Imperial Expedition Fleet sent a warning to the Quietude, explaining that peaceful contact and exchange was the primary goal of the Imperium of Terra, and the Quietude’s aggressive stance would not be tolerated. The warship and its crew would be returned. Negotiations would begin. Dialogue with Imperial iterators would begin and understanding reached. The Quietude made its first direct response. It explained, as if to a child, or perhaps to a pet dog or bird that it was trying to train, that it was the true and sole heir of the Terran legacy. As its name suggested, it was resting in an everlasting state of readiness to resume contact with its birthworld. It had waited patiently through the apocalyptic ages of storm and tempest.

  The Imperials who now approached its borders were pretenders. They were not what they claimed to be. Any fool could see that they were the crude artifice of some alien race trying to mock-up what it thought would pass for human.

  The Quietude supported this verdict with copious annotated evidence from its interrogation of the Imperial prisoners. Each prisoner, the Quietude stated, displayed over fifteen thousand points of differential that revealed them to be non-human impostors, as the vivisections clearly demonstrated.

  The commander of the 40th Expedition Fleet sent for the nearest Astartes.

  The longer Hawser lived amongst the Rout, the more the Astartes had to do with him. Warriors he did not know, from companies he had not encountered, would come and seek him out, and regard him suspiciously with their abhuman gold eyes.

  They hadn’t learned to trust him. It wasn’t trust. It was as though they had got used to his alien scent being in the Aett.

  Either that, or someone, someone or something with the authority to call off a pack of the wildest killers on Fenris, had ordered them to accept him.

  It seemed, as it had with Bitur Bercaw, that the telling of stories mattered to them.

  ‘Why do the stories matter?’ Hawser asked one night when he was permitted to eat with Skarssen and his game-circle. Board games like hneftafl were for sharpening strategy.

  Skarssen shrugged. He was too busy scooping meat into his mouth in a manner that wasn’t a human gesture. It wasn’t even the gesture of a ravenous human being. It was the action of an animal fuelling itself, not knowing when it would feed again.

  Hawser sat with a meagre bowl of fish broth and some dried fruit. The Astartes of Fyf had mjod, and haunches of raw meat so red and gamey it stank of cold copper and carbolic.

  ‘Is it because you don’t write things down?’ Hawser pressed.

  Lord Skarssen wiped blood from his lips.

  ‘Remembering is all that counts. If you remember something, you can do it again. Or not do it again.’

  ‘You learn?’

  ‘It’s learning,’ Skarssen nodded. ‘If you can tell something as an account, you know it.’

  ‘And accounts are how we don’t forget the dead,’ put in Varangr.

  ‘That too,’ said Skarssen.

  ‘The dead?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘They get lonely if we forget them. No man should be lonely and for
gotten by his comrades, even if he’s a wight and gone away to the dark and the Underverse.’

  Hawser watched Varangr’s face in the lamplight. There was no way to read it except as the dull-eyed mask of an apex predator.

  ‘When I was sleeping,’ Hawser said. It was the start of a sentence, but he hadn’t thought it through to the end, and nothing else came out.

  ‘What?’ asked Skarssen, annoyed.

  Hawser shook himself, coming out of a brief trance. ‘When I was sleeping. In cold sleep, where you kept me. I heard a voice then. It said it didn’t like it in the darkness. It missed the firelight and the sunlight. It said it had dreamed all of its dreams a hundred times over, a thousand times. It said it hadn’t chosen the dark.’

  He looked up and realised that Skarssen, Varangr and the other members of Fyf around him had stopped eating and were staring at him, listening intently. A couple had blood on their chins that they hadn’t wiped away.

  ‘It told me that the dark chooses us,’ Hawser said. The Wolves murmured assent, though their throats made the murmur into a leopard-growl.

  Hawser stared at them. The twitching firelight caught golden eyes and gleaming teeth in shadow shapes.

  ‘Was it a wight?’ he asked. ‘Was I hearing a voice from the Underverse?’

  ‘Did it have a name?’ asked Varangr.

  ‘Cormek Dod,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Not a wight, then,’ said Skarssen. He sagged, as if disappointed. ‘Almost but not.’

  ‘Worse, probably,’ grumbled Trunc.

  ‘Don’t say that!’ Skarssen snapped.

  Trunc bowed his head. ‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ he said.

  Hawser asked what they meant, but they wouldn’t be drawn. His story had briefly piqued their interest, but now they were deflated. The jarl turned back to the subject of death.

  ‘We burn our dead,’ said Skarssen. ‘It’s our practice. There’s no soil on Fenris for burial. No ground that isn’t iron hard in the long winter, and no ground with any permanence in summer. We don’t leave markers or tombs, no graves for the worm-wed like other men. Why would a dead man want that? Why would he want his wight weighed down and anchored to one place? His thread’s cut and he can finally roam as he pleases. Doesn’t want a stone pinning him down.’

  ‘A story is better than a stone,’ said Varangr. ‘Better for remembering the dead. Do you know how to remember the dead, skjald?’

  The medicae who tended him in the field station at Ost-Roznyka spent some time explaining that they’d nearly been able to save his leg.

  ‘The shrapnel damage would have been repairable,’ he said, as if discussing the re-liming of a wall. ‘What cost you was the crush damage. The blast carried you into a building, and brought a lintel down on you.’

  Hawser felt nothing. His senses had been entirely fogged by opiates, he presumed. The Lombardi Hort field station was grubby and painfully under-provided, and the medicae’s scrub-smock, mask and cap were soiled so deeply it was clear he didn’t change them between patients, but there were several freshly used opiate injectors in a chrome instrument tray by his cot. They’d used precious pharm supplies on him. He warranted special attention. He was high status, a visiting specialist.

  It was likely several regular soldiers would die or at least suffer terrible and avoidable pain because of him.

  He felt nothing.

  ‘I think an augmetic will be viable,’ the medicae said, encouragingly. He looked tired. His eyes looked tired. All Hawser could see of the medicae above his soiled mask were his tired eyes.

  ‘I can’t do a proper assessment here,’ the medicae said. ‘I really don’t have the resources.’

  Eyes, without a nose or mouth. Hawser felt nothing, but a current stirred deep down in his drugged torpor. Eyes without a nose or mouth, eyes above a soiled mask. That was wrong. He was used to seeing it the other way around. A mouth and no eyes. A mouth, smiling, and eyes hidden.

  Really great eyes, hidden behind a tinted yellow slide-visor.

  ‘Vasiliy,’ Hawser said.

  ‘Hmh?’ replied the medicae. Someone was shouting outside. Cybernetica portage units were arriving with fresh casualties loaded onto their stretcher racks.

  ‘Vasiliy. Captain Vasiliy.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ said the medicae. ‘She didn’t make it. We worked on her, but there was too much organ damage.’

  Hawser felt nothing. It was a state of mind that was not destined to last.

  ‘Murza,’ he said. His lips felt like dough. His voice flowed like glue.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The other inspector. The other specialist.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the medicae. ‘The blast killed him outright. There were barely any remains to recover.’

  Hawser remembered the names of the dead whose threads were cut taking the Quietude’s graving dock. Five Astartes, five of Tra: Hjad, Adthung Greychin, Stormeye, Tjurl-On-The-Ice and Fultag Redknife.

  He witnessed two of the deaths personally, and learned particulars of the others afterwards, so that he had at least one specific detail for each one, a piece that would make a proper end for each account.

  For example, just before the robusts’crew-served weapon had turned him into bloodsmoke and a rattling drizzle of armour fragments, Hjad had carried over two of the Quietude’s big fighting units by rushing them bodily. One had been too crippled to pick itself up again. The other had attempted to claw at Hjad, its face hologram blinking as it tried to reload into something more threatening. Hjad had punched his right fist through its torso and pulled out its spine. That was Hjad, the men of Tra agreed. Unflagging, unsentimental. A good account.

  Hawser felt confident he had an idea of the desired form.

  Adthung Greychin had cleared an entire deck level of the graving dock structure with his chainsword after a lucky shot damaged his bolter. He went through robusts and graciles alike, making them scatter. No one actually saw him take the two gravity penetrators that killed him, but Thel saw his body on the ground just after it dropped, and told Hawser that Adthung’s famous grey beard had been dyed almost indigo by the spatter of the enemy’s pseudo-blood. He had died well. He had left a litter of dead and a field of cut threads behind him. Hawser added a quip about sleeping on purple snow to the finish of Adthung’s tale, and that earned appreciative rumbles from Tra.

  Stormeye went to the Underverse destroyed by beam weapons. Blinded, his face all but scorched off by damage, his mouth fused shut, he had still managed to split a robust from the shoulder to the waist with his axe before falling. Hawser had seen this feat for himself. A dead man pulling another down in death with him. This account’s ending was greeted by a grim but admiring silence.

  Erthung Redhand told Hawser about Tjurl. Tjurl was known as Tjurl-On-The-Ice because he liked to hunt, even in the alabaster silence of Helwinter on Fenris. He would leave the mountain with his spear or his axe, and go out into the high wastes of Asaheim. His blood never froze, that’s what they said about him. Because of all that mjod he had drunk, Erthung liked to add.

  Tjurl went hunting that day in the graving dock. He took many trophies. That was how Hawser told it. Not once did Tjurl’s fury grow cold. Not once did he freeze.

  Last to fall was Fultag Redknife. Last story to learn and last to tell before the account of the taking of the graving dock could be finished. Fultag led the assault that took the dock control centre and slashed the throat of the Quietude’s social network system so that all the data drained out as useless noise.

  The assault was not the act of vandalism that Hawser had expected. Fultag’s team did not smash the systems indiscriminately with a heathen lust to defile the artefacts of a more sophisticated culture. They disabled specific parts of the control centre using magnetic mines, gunfire and blunt force, but spared enough of the primary network architecture for the Mechanicum to later examine and, if necessary, operate.

  The higher beings of the Quietude were clearly concerned
about accidental weapons discharge in the control centre. None of the robusts there were armed. Instead, the area – a geodesic dome structure in the central dock space directly beneath the caged Instrument – was defended by squads of super-robusts. These were titans, reinforced heavyweights armed with concussion maces and accelerator hammers. Some of them had double sets of upper limbs, like the blue-skinned gods of the ancient Induz. Some even sported two heads, twin side-by-side mountings for vestigial organic components, each with its own silver-circuit hood and holomask.

  Fultag’s team gave them a lesson in axe work. Ullste, moving in to support, witnessed the fight. Each blow shook the deck, such was the strength in those limbs, he said. Super-robusts and Wolves alike were knocked down by bone-crushing blows. It was a clubbing, battering fight that churned through the split levels of the centre, smashing the gleaming window ports, fracturing console desks as bodies reeled into them. The matt fabric of the floor was quickly covered with chips of glass and fragments of plastic and spots of purple pseudo-blood.

  Fultag knocked down his first super-robust on the centre’s entry ramp. He ducked the mace it swung at his head. If it had connected, the blow would have pulverised even Fenrisian anatomy. The thwarted weapon made a woof through the air instead, a woof like a winded fjorulalli, the great seal-mother.

  Fultag was wrong-footed by having to duck, and there was no time to plant his feet better to swing the smile of his axe in before the mace came back at him. He managed a half-swing instead, and connected with the poll of the axe-head. The blunt back of the head fractured the super-robust’s shoulder armour and impaired its limb function on one side. It compensated.

  Fultag had already rotated his axe, reset his stance, and brought the axe through in a downsweep that severed one of the super-robust’s arms at the elbow and the other at the wrist. The detached pieces, still gripping the energy-sheathed mace, thumped onto the deck. Purple pseudo-blood jetted from the ruptured hydraulic tubes in the limb stumps.