Tallarn: Ironclad

by John French

  Something was calling him, something within him, something that perhaps had always been there.

  Iron within.

  He could feel it gripping, pulling him in with a relentless strength. With his own strength. It felt like the promise of air when drowning. It felt like life.

  Iron without.

  And he wanted to let go. He wanted to let it become. He wanted to feel alive again. He wanted to be more than a corpse clad in iron.

  He felt his limbs start to move.

  The Stormlord broke from the curtain of flame.

  Hrend twisted aside as the machine rammed through the wreck of the machine he had just killed. The hull hit Hrend with armour-cracking force. He fell, his senses filling with blinking warning runes. He hit the ground, gouging a track across the earth. He stopped and began to rise.

  The barrels of the Stormlord’s megabolter were turning faster and faster. One of Hrend’s Predators on the valley side was dead ahead of the spinning barrels.

  Hrend pulled a leg beneath him. There was oil on the ground, dribbling from his iron frame, black flecks pattering on dirty snow.

  The muzzles of the Stormlord’s guns were a blur. The Predators were breaking, scattering across the slope, their guns turning to point at the Stormlord.

  Hrend stood. Amber warning runes painted his sight. His shields were gone. He felt pistons twist and gears snap. They felt like broken bones, and shredding muscle. He charged.

  The megabolter fired. Shells breathed from the spinning barrels. The side of the valley vanished. Rock, dust and shrapnel spread in a roaring cloud. Shell casings sprayed from the Stormlord, raining on its hull as they fell. The Predators struggled on for a second, their armour distorting as round after round chewed into their hulls. Hrend saw the status runes of the three Predators pulse to amber and then blink to red. He began to run towards the Stormlord. Hrend had shut off his audio sensors when the first shot was fired, but he could still hear the megabolter. It shook the fluid-filled dark of his coffin and into his skull, like the roar of an iron dragon.

  He raised his hands to fire. At the edge of his sight he saw two of his Venators moving, trying to outrun the storm of gunfire which churned the slope. They would fail. The megabolter was simply cutting Hrend’s force to pieces.

  The Stormlord twisted back, tracks screaming and shattering stone. A sponson gun swivelled to point at Hrend. He fire–

  The shells slammed into his torso. Fire swallowed his sight. He staggered, his charge faltering. Shell impacts slammed through him. Blood seeped into the amnion around his body. More rounds struck, ringing his world to shrill silence. Part of him – the part which had been forged and trained to war – felt everything and catalogued it dispassionately.

  The Stormlord’s main gun was not firing at him; if it was he would already be dead. It was a heavy bolter. Its shells were substantial but not potent enough to crack his armour. Yet they could batter him down, hammer him to kneeling, shatter his sensors and leave him blind. They were not firing to kill him, they were firing to hold him until the main gun could turn and reduce him to shards and blood slime. That moment was coming, winding down into certainty with each second he was not moving.

  He began to stand, fists raised, forearm plates reverberating as the bolter shells exploded against them. His sensors were blurring with threat markers and damage readings. The fire ceased. He took a step forward. His sight cleared. The Stormlord was pivoting its spinning barrels, glowing cherry red as they dragged fire down the slope, down towards him.

  He took another step, damaged servos wailing as he began to level his guns. He willed the missile free from his carapace. Nothing, just a sparking blank feeling of blown connections.

  A wedge-shaped hull broke from the screen of fire behind the Stormlord. Scorches marked the brushed metal of its plating. Hrend saw a trio of targeting lasers glimmer in the ash-thickened air.

  ‘Master,’ called Jarvak’s voice, across the vox, and – as though the word were a command – the Sicaran fired all of its weapons.

  The back of the Stormlord exploded in a gout of black smoke. The vast machine lurched, its tracks still turning for an instant before becoming still. Promethium flames spread up its back, as it rocked to stillness. It was not dead though, not yet. It fired all of its guns, panning them across the ground around it, like a half-blind warrior trying to fend off attackers. Hrend ran, feeling the damage to his frame dig deeper. This was foolishness, it was not optimal, and it was nowhere near rational. But he was no longer seeing the world through those eyes. He was the iron within, and he could feel more than he ever had, more than he had in life. He was a weapon, and a weapon could only live by killing.

  He hit the front of the Stormlord, and bounded up the sloped front, fist rising. A spear of heat struck the cannon. A sphere of molten metal sprayed outwards. It hurt him. The plates of his armour cratered and blistered. He punched into the wounded Stormlord’s hull, gripped onto sagging metal and fired his meltagun.

  And the world became silent whiteness.

  Frost flashed over Taldak. Argonis felt his own teeth clamp shut as the air became like tar. The Iron Warrior juddered where he stood. Pale mist rose from him. Argonis thought he could see faces and open mouths in the vapour. Taldak’s helm was shaking in its socket. A smell of burning hair and honey flooded Argonis’s mouth and nose. He gagged. Taldak’s arms began to rise, straining as though against a great weight. Prophesius’s fingers were glowing where they touched the Iron Warrior’s helm. Argonis saw the shadows of bones and blood vessels within the astropath’s hand. Taldak began to turn, slow heavy fingers reaching for Prophesius’s arm, boltgun rising. Argonis stepped forward and clamped his own hands around Taldak’s arms.

  It was like touching lightning.

  He blanked out. When he came to he was kneeling on the lift platform. The motionless shape of Taldak lay before him, fuming oily smoke.

  He pulled his helm off and sucked a deep breath of air. It tasted of bitter iron.

  ‘That was foolish,’ said Sota-Nul to him. She was bent over an open panel on the platform. Prehensile cables snaked from her robes and buried themselves inside the opening. The platform jolted to a halt.

  Prophesius was standing three paces away, utterly still, as though he had not moved. The iron-masked astropath raised his wax tablet as Argonis looked at him. A silver-spiked finger flickered across the tablet.

  he lives, wrote Prophesius, scraping the words clean as he finished. he dreams in the cradle of sharpness and delight. he will wake, and he will remember nothing.

  i will stay.

  i will watch him in his dreams.

  Argonis nodded. Relief and revulsion washed through him. He reflexively reached for the key to Prophesius’s mask, and found it still there, hanging within the gorget of his armour.

  Sota-Nul gave a low hiss, which sounded strangely like pleasure, and doors set into the wall of the shaft opened. Argonis stood. The space beyond was dark, but he could taste charge on the air. The hum of power conduits and machines pressed upon the exposed skin of his face. He slid his gladius free, thumb hovering over the activation stud.

  ‘You predicted guards,’ he said.

  ‘Most certainly,’ said Sota-Nul, disconnecting herself from the platform and gliding over to his side. ‘They will be here.’

  ‘If you are wrong and there are legionaries–’

  ‘There will not be. This is not their domain. Even Perturabo respects that.’

  ‘So they will be tech-priests, your kind?’

  ‘Not my kind. Weaklings, creatures of a lower dominion, fools that happen to follow at the side of our allies. I am of the future, they still are of the past.’

  Argonis did not know what she was talking about, and he was certain that he did not want to have that ignorance corrected.

  He stepped through the door. The darkness be
yond spread out in every direction. He paused as his eyes gathered the scraps of light from the gloom. A narrow walkway extended from where he stood. Beneath it empty space dropped down to a distant floor. Vast shapes rose to either side of the walkway. Sparks flashed occasionally across their surfaces, illuminating patches of metal and tangles of cable. These were the datastacks of the Sightless Warren. In the previous life of the shelter they would have held the data records of troops, supplies and shipping movements of crusade forces that had mustered and shipped out from the planet. The Priests of Mars had laid the core of these great machines in the early decades of the planet’s compliance. They had grown since that time, so that now they spread through the charged gloom like mountains.

  Sota-Nul slid past him, hissing with anticipation.

  ‘Where do–’

  ‘So new, so untouched,’ said Sota-Nul. ‘Ah, you have dreamed so long, but not known how to dream, my children.’

  She shivered, her robes rustling in the charged air.

  Argonis followed, feeling the weight of his blade in the cradle of his fingers. Worms of charge squirmed and vanished across his armour. He could hear a deep, throbbing buzz vibrating through the air and walkway. They kept moving.

  The tech-priest appeared without warning.

  Stepping from the shadow of one of the machine stacks, he must have been standing utterly still. Umbilical cables still linked him to the great machine. He blurted a stream of machine code. Weapons, or fingers, or fingers that were weapons, glinted at the end of his arms. Argonis began to move. Sota-Nul moved faster. She flew forwards. The air shimmered around her, oily slicks of light spiralled in her wake. A halo of silver arms spread from beneath her robes. Argonis saw turning blades and injector spikes beneath her robe. Wet flesh glistened with the rainbow sheen of oil. Eyelids blinked over clusters of crystal eyes inside nests of sinew and clockwork. She had no legs, just a column of tangled cables.

  The tech-priest tried to twist aside, lightning building on his fingers. Sota-Nul hissed. The electricity arced from the tech-priest’s hand. Sota-Nul rattled a stream of scratching machine code as she struck. She folded around the tech-priest. Her halo of tentacles punched down, and the tech-priest stopped moving.

  Sota-Nul hung in the air, the twitching body of the tech-priest hugged closed, cables and articulated arms pulsing and squirming. Dark liquid siphoned down lengths of transparent tubes. Argonis thought he saw arcs of electricity running through the liquid. The tech-priest’s body began to crumble, its shape seeming to lose structure and substance. Sota-Nul gathered the shrinking ball of its mass into her chest. A wet pulsing sound washed through the air for a long moment. Then she withdrew her array of machine limbs, and the black robes fell back into place. She turned on the spot, the shadowed hole beneath her hood pointing at Argonis.

  ‘I said–’ he began, but the tech-witch spoke over him.

  ‘The eightfold wheel must be given its due. It is their work that we do.’ She turned away, and drifted further down the platform. Argonis felt anger flair inside his thoughts, and then quickly crushed the instinct. Events were rolling now, blinking from instant to instant as time became a pressure wave of momentum. He began to run in Sota-Nul’s wake. The tech-witch was singing, a low brittle noise, which ground against the throb of the datastacks. She turned as she moved, head tilted as though listening. Argonis kept his eyes moving across the shadows. Amber threat markers danced and dissolved into nothing.

  Sota-Nul stopped at last. She floated in place, her sharp-edged song growing, and then she too rose into the air. A pair of silvered tentacles slipped out of her. They squirmed through the air, reaching blindly into space. At last she stopped and drifted to a panel set high in the cliff-face of a machine. Argonis had no idea how she had selected the location or how she had known it was there. The twin tentacles slid out, slithering over the machine’s surface, and then into sockets.

  Sota-Nul jerked, and became rigid. She began to shake. The datastack began to rumble. Argonis felt his hair rise inside the shell of his helm. He sheathed his blade. His bolter was in his hand. His helmet system was pinging warnings into his ears.

  ‘It… is…’ called Sota-Nul, her voice rolling higher and higher within each word. ‘So innocent.’

  Amber threat runes were moving across his sight as he turned his head. Out there in the gloom between the stacks things were moving.

  ‘Come on!’ he called, the need for silence banished by the need for haste. Sota-Nul’s whole body was pulsing, swelling and contracting, as though she were breathing in, as though she were swallowing something larger than herself. Argonis could see the shapes of the things moving amongst the stacks, the glitter of machine eyes staring at him. Lines of targeting light began to flicker out through the dark. He raised his bolter. Target runes began to flash between red and amber.

  ‘We go now!’ he called.

  Sota-Nul shivered, and then pulled away, silver tentacles yanking from the stack. She trembled in the air for a second and then began to spiral downwards towards him. Machine voices were rising from the dark. Sota-Nul landed and began to glide back towards the lift platform. He followed at a run.

  ‘What did you see?’ he called as the metal grating shook beneath his feet. ‘What did you find?’

  ‘A nothing,’ she hissed, her voice dreamlike.

  ‘Nothing?’

  The lift shaft opened to greet them. Prophesius stood above the still supine form of Taldak. The doors began to close behind them.

  ‘Not nothing,’ said Sota-Nul. ‘A nothing.’

  Prophesius was scratching words onto his wax tablet.

  do you wish the iron one to wake?

  ‘A nothing?’ Argonis called.

  Sota-Nul nodded slowly.

  ‘An absence,’ she said, ‘a void, a thing that is not there.’

  do you wish to wake?

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They have lied to you.’

  to wake?

  He stood and stared at her for a second. He had known it, had been all but certain ever since he looked in Perturabo’s eyes, but he had hoped that he would not find a reason to bring fresh news of treachery to his father. He had hoped that in this war of broken vows some bonds stayed true.

  Lights set into the shaft walls were flashing past as they descended. He turned to Prophesius, and thought of the key to the iron mask, cold against his neck. Then he looked back to Sota-Nul.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she replied, her metal snakes working inside the platform’s control panels. The platform began to move even faster, sinking into the shaft beneath. ‘We must see it.’

  The platform came to a halt two full minutes later. Quietness settled into the air. Argonis found it almost unsettling. His hearts were beating adrenaline-spiced blood through his limbs. Tactical markers were spinning in his sight, telling him that the air was cool here, but tinged with exotic chemicals. Ambient sound was almost nothing, just the distant noise of machinery stirring air. Sota-Nul extended a set of metal snakes into the controls beside the door. Sparks and smoke puffed into the air, and the doors opened. The corridor beyond was smooth rockcrete. Bare lumen-strips ran down its centre. Another small door of reinforced plasteel lay in the distance. Chipped hazard stripes marked its edges.

  ‘You are sure?’ he asked, keeping his eyes on the corridor.

  Sota-Nul glided up beside him, metal tentacles slithering back beneath her robe.

  ‘Yes, this is it. Not the main means of entrance-exit, but it should take us to it. The likelihood of detection is high.’ She rotated her head towards him. He found himself imagining a grin hidden beneath the hood. ‘You might even have to get your weapons dirty.’

  ‘The records gave no indication of what they are keeping here?’

  ‘None, just the name-signifier buried under three cipher layers. They
called it Black Oculus.’

  ‘Black Oculus…’ he let the phrase hang in the air.

  He glanced back at the still unconscious form of Taldak, and then at Prophesius. He nodded and stepped into the passage. The tech-witch and the astropath followed. They moved fast. The next door opened to Sota-Nul’s touch, as she fed it the codes she had culled from the datastacks.

  More corridors followed, all bare, all quiet. He did not like that, not at all. The air and light changed the further they went. A haze hung on the edge of sight, blurring the edges of walls and the details of distant objects. Shadows clung to recesses like folds of black cloth, while the lumen-strips shone brighter, but gave less light. The rhythm and regularity of deserted chambers and silent corridors began to press into his mind. He caught his concentration wandering several times. He would blink and realise he had walked several steps, and was not even aware of taking them. Every time he would pull himself back to focused awareness, only for it to drain away. It was difficult to tell if the tech-witch was affected, but Prophesius’s hands clasped and twitched the further they went. The silence deepened, and the fog in their awareness thickened.

  It almost killed them.

  Another hatch door had swung open, and Argonis had been stepping through, gun pointing by habit as much as intent. The Iron Warrior standing on the other side of the hatch turned, bolter rising. A slowed sensation of shock ran up Argonis’s spine. His senses cleared in a cold rush. He kicked the Iron Warrior’s gun. The casing slammed back into the warrior’s chestplate. Two rounds roared from the muzzle and hit the wall. Gunshot echoes, dust and smoke flooded the passage.