by John French
He glanced upwards. The swarm of machines was still rising and rising. He looked down again. A voice was speaking in his helm, telling him to power his machine down.
‘We are ready,’ said Sota-Nul’s voice in his ear. He nodded, keyed a control, and squeezed the firing trigger on the control column.
The Sickle Blade was a Storm Eagle. Tens of thousands of its breed served in the Great Crusade, and now in the civil war which had replaced it. But the Sickle Blade was more than a machine of war. She, and her ten sisters, had been born in the forges of Mars and given to the Sons of Horus as an honour gift. Masters had crafted each part of her. The gold feathers traced across her back and wings had been the work of one of the most gifted artisans, and the hand of the Fabricator General himself had woken her machine-spirit. She was a queen of her kind, and a queen made to fly through winds of fire and destruction.
The twinned heavy bolters in her chin spat fire. Explosions swallowed the Iron Warriors as Argonis untethered Sickle Blade’s thrusters. She lifted off the launch pad, still breathing fire. A beam of light flicked out from across the platform, skimming her left wing. Argonis pivoted the gunship in mid-air. The line of fire traced across the platform edge and sawed through the shooter. Brass casings cascaded from the gunship’s cheeks.
Argonis’s senses were a wall of target runes. The cavern floor was alive with frantic movement: more troops, more guns, less and less chance of survival. As soon as he had seen the Iron Warriors move to stop them, he had known that there was only one way out: havoc.
He turned his gaze on a fuel bowser, and blinked the target rune. The line of shells flicked sideways and touched the fuel canister. A sheet of flame spilled out in every direction, burning white, and rage-red. Argonis felt the Sickle Blade rock. His eyes flicked across the cavern floor, blinking between grounded gunships, munition stacks and fuel cells. Rockets loosened from Sickle Blade’s back. Fire clouds thumped into the air, racing upwards to brush the craft hovering above. One column of fire slammed into the belly of a strike fighter. The craft rose, twisted, flipped over and struck the cavern wall.
Argonis pushed power into the engines, and the Sickle Blade rose through the inferno. Beams of light and lines of shells cut the air beneath her. He paused for a second, holding the breath in his lungs as the power in the engines became a shackled scream. The Sickle Blade tilted its nose up, still floating above the sea of fire and smoke. Argonis saw the stacked aircraft above; some had halted while others still rose to the dark beyond. He unchained the engine’s power and they shot upwards. G-force punched him in the gut. Inside his helm, he smiled. Iron Warriors craft were streaming past, and he was an arrow spinning through them, spiralling higher and higher. The atmospheric shield was around them and then past them, and they were shooting high into Tallarn’s night.
Clones, thought Iaeo, as she stared up at Jalen.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, and shook his head. ‘The hydra has many heads.’
She blinked, and facts came together in her pain-streaked thoughts.
‘Yes,’ he said again, as though in reply. ‘I am in your thoughts.’
‘One…’ she fought the word from her lips, ‘One… less head… now.’
Jalen’s eyes hardened, and tattoos unfolded across his skin.
‘I thought your kind was created not to feel emotional pleasure at anything but a completed kill.’
‘You have no idea what I am.’
‘You are an assassin of the Vanus Temple, an infocyte operating under an Unbound Condition.’ He smiled, a pleased and cruel smile. ‘You did not think that the temples were unknown to the Twentieth, did you? We are the Alpha. We were there while your masters were still killing for coin.’
Data: Pride, the need for the defeated to acknowledge their superiority, a compulsive need for complexity and showmanship, all qualities of the Alpha Legion psychological pattern.
‘But you have been out here and active for quite a while, haven’t you?’ he asked. ‘You’re not really built for that are you? The conditioning is probably fraying by now. You probably have started making mistakes.’
You have made an error, Iaeo.
You have made an error, Iaeo.
You have made an error, Iaeo.
‘Of course you have made an error…’ Jalen’s eyes narrowed...‘…Iaeo, the current situation is that error manifested.’
She closed her eyes, and tried to will her limbs to move. Fresh pain was the only answer. She managed to roll onto her side. Blood began to dribble from the right-hand side of her mouth. She could see her visor lying on the metal grating just an arm-reach away. She also saw the two other people she had heard. They were Alpha Legionnaires, but they wore compact recon armour. One held a fat-barrelled needle rifle, the other a block-framed assault shotgun. Both had near identical faces. They were not looking at her, but holding guard with the relaxed carelessness of poised predators.
She tried to move her hand towards her visor. It moved a few centimetres, and then the ice needles hardened in her nerves and her hand froze.
‘That’s far enough,’ said Jalen.
How did I allow this to happen? thought Iaeo.
‘Because to err is human,’ said Jalen, ‘and no matter what your clade gave to you, that is still all you are.’
No, she thought. No, that is not right.
Projections exploded in her head from memory, uncoiling into awareness from where she had buried them in hidden parts of her brain. They were vast, beautiful chains of probability, and possibility, of data inputted and data changed and pushed back into the world to do its work.
Jalen was frowning now, tattooed scales twisting and shimmering. She could feel the fingers of his mind in her thoughts now, cold fingers scrabbling to follow the exploding network of the full termination projection that she had created.
She allowed a smile onto her face. It was not natural, she had to imitate it from memory, but it fitted the moment well enough.
Thank you, she thought, and saw in his eyes that he heard. Thank you for being so predictable.
And she showed him what she had done, the manipulations she had hidden from him in her mind. There was just enough time for his pupils to bloom wide before the Iron Warriors security detail blasted onto the gantry and the first shots split the air.
The machines of war came from across the northern reaches of Tallarn. First hundreds, then thousands, then more than a mortal mind could count. They poured out of the buried shelters, long rivers of tanks, flowing down broken roads, across hills and plains. Knights, Dreadnoughts and Titans walked with them, striding amongst the flow of armour like men wading through a deep river. All flowed down into the plateau which spread across the heart of Tallarn’s northern continent. Bound by mountains, the Khedive was a great, flat dish of land which had swallowed the blood of many since the battle for Tallarn had begun. Now the full strength of the loyalists poured into it without cease.
The Crescent City shelter emptied every machine which could move onto the plain, surging to meet the transporters which dropped from orbit to spill more and more machines onto the fog-veiled dust. More and more began to arrive, as the vanguards of forces which had ridden for days began to converge. Many stretched for hundreds of kilometres back across the continent. On the plain of Khedive the gathering forces marshalled, ordering themselves and pushing outwards as more arrived. Vanguard forces of skimmers took the mountain passes above the plateau unopposed, and within hours the first formations of heavier machines were grinding towards them.
The rising sea of iron did not go unopposed.
At the edge of the northern polar cap three Iron Warriors strike flights hit a convoy heading south from the Cobalack Shelter. The front five kilometres of the convoy became a burning grave of machines. Minutes later three Iron Warriors war groups hit the paralysed line of tanks from the side. Their convoy was annihilated, its fate
screamed across the sky in an orange curtain.
To the south, a scratch force of Iron Warriors, Cassidnal Armour, and Cyberneticae maniples met a column coming from Essina Shelter advancing down the remains of the Northern Arterial Highway. The two forces met front on. The long snakes of machines broke apart, spreading across the land to either side of the highway as they each sought to encircle their enemies.
An hour after the first loyalists took the passes above the Khedive, the Iron Warriors struck back. Bombers and gunships poured explosives down on the mountain tops. Rock shattered under the rolling drum of explosions and the heat of the firestorm. Avalanches of cooling rock slid from the peaks, and roared down their flanks. Thunderhawks and Storm Birds skimmed the detonation wave to drop armoured units into the passes. Those few of the loyalist vanguard units remaining fought on but it was not enough. The Iron Warriors held the passes between the rising sea of loyalists and the Sightless Warren.
In the strategiums of the Sightless Warren, the Iron Warriors watched their enemy gather and saw the greatest opportunity for victory and defeat unfold before them. If they thought which of the two possibilities was more likely, none of them voiced their opinion. They waited for word from Perturabo, still in the void aboard the Iron Blood. When that word came it was as direct as it was brutally simple.
‘Strike now with all strength. Hold them to the plains. Choke them in dead iron.’
His sons heard their primarch and obeyed.
THIRTEEN
Storm centre
Cursus
Sickle Blade
Kord stared down the sight. The oil-black shape of the Iron Hands Predator was to his left. Both it and War Anvil had come to a halt as soon as they had crested the last line of hills and seen what waited for them on the plains of Khedive.
The storm was a pale band across the dying land. Dark smudges rolled within it, like bruises forming then fading in minutes. Lightning speckled its height. He could see the winds whipping its edges into blurred gauze. It was a great beast of a storm. He could feel the hairs on his neck and arms rising. Sparks of static were pinging off the hull. And there was something else, something that clung to the colours, and even to the stale taste of the air in his breath mask.
He had never believed in gods or supernatural forces. He had seen psykers and the impossibility they could make possible, but that was nothing more than something he did not understand, a subset of the many things which made the stars burn and time pass. The universe was a cold, uncaring machine, and humanity had only the place it could carve out for itself. Goodness, evil, kindness and cruelty, it was simply a matter of selecting belief. That was it. There was nothing more.
But as he looked into the storm he felt as if he were looking at something that he could only express in words that came from the language of myths.
It felt like looking into the face of a god.
‘A vortex you said,’ said Menoetius, his voice seeming to harmonise with the static of the vox. ‘I thought you were intending your words to be metaphorical.’
‘The storm is spreading outwards and increasing in strength,’ said Kord. ‘This is an eater, bigger than I have ever heard tell of. Anything that goes in is unlikely to come out.’
‘You spent the lives of almost all those under your command to come this far,’ said Menoetius. ‘You had the strength to spend their lives but not your own?’
Kord kept his eye on the wall of rolling dust. Sweat was stinging his eyes.
‘Colonel, I saw something,’ it was Origo, from the position just in front of Kord, his voice breaking through his thoughts. Kord felt the fear recede, and become an itch at the back of his skull. The gunner had turned to look back at him, eyes wide and bright behind the lenses of his suit. ‘Had it on the infra-sight for a second then it went. But it was there. A machine.’
‘For certain?’ Kord asked.
‘For certain.’
‘We are going in,’ he said into the vox then switched to speak to the rest of War Anvil’s crew. ‘All positions stand by to advance. Weapons ready.’
‘Colonel, the storm…’ called one of the crew, but he was not listening enough to even recognise their voice.
‘Advance,’ he said, and a second later War Anvil obeyed his will.
The winds closed over them with fingers of air which slammed against the hull and rattled grit on the hatches. Within a minute they could not see anything with their normal eyes except a swirling layer of dust the colour of bruises. Images danced and collapsed on the auspex screen. The infra-sights showed nothing. Every few moments lightning would split the view through the sight. War Anvil rocked as it ground onwards. Kord was breathing slowly, feeling his heart hammer as he waited for something to appear on the scope.
The drill went silent. Hrend felt the ground beneath his feet become still. He turned, suddenly aware that he had been drifting. Time had passed as the storm pulled at them. They were at its centre, he was certain, but even here they felt its touch. The shapes of the other machines were unmoving, with billowing dust shrouding them and then revealing their shapes again. The heat signatures of each were a low murmur of brightness in his heat-sight. The breath of the air was muted, hushed, waiting.
Hrend turned towards the excavator the great machine was awake, its engines still turning. Cables connecting it to its drill head disappeared down a wide hole angled into the ground. They looked slack, as though cut while under tension.
‘What is the drill status?’ asked Hrend.
‘It is no longer functioning,’ said the monotone servitor. ‘Cause unknown.’
Hrend walked to the opening in the ground. The drill had cut down at an angle, creating a sloped passage, which slid to a cold darkness. The sides of the hole were rough glass, fused solid by fusion torches. The lights mounted on Hrend’s shoulders lit with a thought. The hard, white light spilled down the glistening shaft. Far down something glinted, a hard edge of something reflective catching the light. The cables and feeds for the drill head lay on the floor, two lines plunging down, beckoning.
Hrend was about to turn when he heard something. He went still, and turned slowly back to the hole. The black disc of the shaft’s depths filled his sight, its edges fraying the light he shone at it. He heard the sound again, distant but distinct: a whisper of a voice, a voice that should not be here. Inside the coffin of his body he felt his true body shiver. The wind gusted around him, dust scraping across his frame. The blank disc before him seemed to swell and push against the light. It did not look like dark pooling at the end of a tunnel now. It looked like a black sun.
He took a step down the tunnel. The glass layer crunched under his foot. He felt calm, cold even. The wind was spilling a gauze of dust down the tunnel. He took another step.
His footing slipped, and suddenly he was falling, glass screaming as metal scored into its surface. He tried to turn, but his sight was a crazed mass of warning runes.
He slammed to a halt. His sight fizzed for a second, then steadied.
He rose, the light from his carapace touching the rainbow sheen of the walls. He looked back up the shaft. The sky was a distant circle high above. He turned his gaze back to what had stopped his descent.
The drill head, or what remained of it, lay across the tunnel. A neat slice ended the blunt mass of the machine after a metre. It simply stopped after that, as if something had cleaved the front portion away. Hrend shifted and watched as the stab-light caught the bright edges of precisely cut metal. Hrend looked up at what lay just beyond the truncated drill.
A wall of black stone met the beams of light. It was part of a larger structure. Hrend could see that at a glance, the slight curvature of the stone told him that he was looking at a small part of a great, curved wall, perhaps even a circle, hidden beneath the ground like a buried crown. Its substance looked like no stone or crystal Hrend had ever seen. At first it seemed opaque,
but as Hrend watched the light slid beneath the surface and kindled reflections within its depths.
It was then that he saw the carving on the surface. A face was looking out at him. It was not human. Wide eyes looked out from a slim face above a mouth filled with needle teeth. It might have been snarling. It might have been grinning. It might have been screaming.
He heard something behind him, a low sound, somewhere between a hiss and a laugh. He turned, and the light found only the glass of the passage walls. Hrend turned back to the wall of black stone. He froze. In his capsule of amniotic fluid his true body shivered uncontrollably.
The carved face had moved. Its lips had closed over its shark smile, and its head had turned, its gaze seeming to focus on a point just…
‘Iron,’ said a voice behind him. He twisted, arming his weapons.
A figure stepped from the blackness. Its presence seemed to strain at the boundaries of the machine that encased it. Black pit eyes looked at Hrend as it halted.
‘Do you still wish to be iron?’ asked the face of Perturabo.
The skies of Tallarn danced with light. Re-entry fires streaked the dark, hundreds of them, thousands of them. The stars hid behind the blink of low-orbit explosions. Iron was pouring out of the sky, landers, drop pods, gunships and attack craft falling from the heavens. Beneath them the nightside of Tallarn bubbled with explosions, sparkling as though scattered with liquid gold.
Argonis climbed, running the engines red, listening to warning chimes ring in his ears but not listening. He was hauling the Sickle Blade on a corkscrew path towards the point of light that was the Iron Blood.