Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero

by Graham McNeill

  He looked to Ahriman's immobile body. Could the legionary be lifted or would that break whatever trance he was in?

  Forrix had no way of knowing, but bent to sling Ahriman onto his shoulder. The warrior was a dead weight across him, loose-limbed like a casualty.

  Forrix set off at a jog through the kneeling multitudes towards the tanks. He held Ahriman tight over one shoulder, his bolter held low beside his leg. The soldiers working on the tanks saw him coming and their reaction told Forrix everything he needed to know about their intent.

  'Legionary Forrix to all Iron Warrior units. Enemy in the wire. I repeat, enemy in the wire. Until further notice, treat all local Red Dragon and Army forces as enemy combatants.'

  He couldn't know for sure that every Morningstar soldier was hostile, but the Iron Warriors operated a zero-uncertainty policy within their perimeters.

  'Enemy anti-aircraft units are in position to attack the Lux Ferem. Heavy support to my location immediately!'

  A Praetor tank slowly turned on grinding tracks, bringing its heavy bolters to bear. Its crew formed a disciplined fireline.

  Battle protocols. Think and move.

  A flurry of las-bolts slashed towards Forrix. Paltry impacts blistered his armour. He ignored them; his Mark IV plate had been forged to withstand the worst the galaxy could throw at him.

  A few shots hit Ahriman. More flayed the kneeling refugees. They screamed in tenor and pressed themselves flat to the ground. Others died as they fled, cut down without mercy by the indiscriminate fire.

  His anger built, inferno-hot.

  Use it. Direct it.

  Forrix raised his bolter. Targeting reticules centred on five soldiers. Five dead men.

  He fired one-handed, squeezing the trigger in smooth intervals.

  Genhanced flesh worked with his armour's servo-assisted muscles to dissipate recoil. Mass-reactive bolts blasted every target to blossoming sprays of pulped flesh and blood.

  Now they'll run.

  But in defiance of all Forrix had learned of transhuman dread, the others soldiers rushed him. They fired from the hip, screaming obscenities as they charged.

  'You crave death?' he said. 'I am happy to oblige.'

  He fired a stream of shells, cutting his attackers down in a blitzing storm of bolter fire. Not one survived to reach him.

  Keep moving. Find cover before those tanks engage.

  The unmistakable clatter of cycling auto-loaders sounded.

  Too late.

  Forrix dropped to one knee as the Praetor opened fire.

  Heavy bolter. High-calibre mass-reactives.

  Explosions ripped up the honeycombed structure of the landing platform in a line towards him, bolt shells chewing through screaming civilians. Plumes of metal-laced plascrete flew. Blood misted the air as bodies detonated. Forrix jinked right. Two shells clipped his left shoulder. Another hit him dead centre on his breastplate. The explosion rocked him back onto his haunches.

  Find cover. Feel the iron within.

  Forrix leaned into the fire, keeping his own bulk between the gunfire and Ahriman's supine body.

  Another two shells detonated against his shoulder guard.

  Warning icons bloomed to life on his visor.

  Find cover!

  Forrix surged to his feet and ran towards the largest concentration of bloodied bodies. He mag-locked his bolter to his thigh and scooped up four limp corpses, holding them close as the tank's gunner fired another salvo.

  Shells ripped into his meat shields and the bodies convulsed under the impacts, acting as ablatives to detonate the mass-reactive warheads before they struck him. Blood sheeted his war-plate and bone fragments lodged in the cracks in his ceramite.

  A Hydra tank moved into an enfilading position, its long-barrelled guns slowly rising to their engagement angle.

  Burdened as he was, Forrix knew he wouldn't reach the Hydra before its guns opened up. He made another quarter-tum to shield Ahriman from the incoming fire as its cupola-mounted heavy stubber opened fire. Its shells raked him, shredding what remained of the corpses and pounding his armour. His war-plate cracked and split at the weaker flex-joints. Blood drizzled the spaces within his armour.

  Forrix staggered as a mass-reactive round shattered his left knee. A spike of white-hot pain shot through his leg as shrapnel ricocheted down his shin bone and blew out his ankle. Pain suppressors flooded his system, numbing the flesh around his wound as adrenal stimms surged. He kept going, feeling cracked bone grinding within the shredded meat of his foot.

  He roared and blasted the gunner from the turret mount of the Hydra. His visor was awash with target icons, spiking vitals and damage indicators. More shells followed him, but the angle was too sharp now for the gunners.

  A flurry of rockets streaked from the other Praetors.

  'Throne, no!' yelled Forrix as they slashed towards the Lux Ferem.

  Ahriman soared into the sky, a comet unleashed from its earthly prison. His subtle body blazed with light, all the potential of his being coalesced into a glittering shooting star that craved the heavens once more.

  The ground fell away, a terrestrial prison for corporeal form. The lightness of being was intoxicating, a sense of freedom beyond compare. As always, he fought the desire to never return to flesh, to exist in this perfect form of expression for all time.

  This was the trap of the subtle body, a rush of sensation that some neophytes failed to master. They would soar on psychic zephyrs, freed from the banal necessities of existence and heedless of their body's disintegration. Only its eventual death severed the silver cord and dissipated their essence.

  Ahriman flew in a curving arc around the gargantuan form of the Lux Ferem. Its structure was barely visible as a shadowed skeleton, like a vast void-swimming colossus whose belly was filled with wriggling prey. Tens of thousands of souls glimmered within the ship: frightened souls, grateful souls, spiteful souls and every other emotion running the gamut of human experience.

  But chief among the emotions he felt was hope.

  Humanity's greatest virtue, and its greatest weakness…

  The heavy gravitic tugs were smudges of blunted emotion, cauterised wells of life without thoughts or feelings. The frontal lobes of their servitor pilots had been burned out, and Ahriman was revolted by such crude surgeries.

  A ferocious spike of emotion drew his attention from the tugs, and he arced over in time to see the tower of the space port's orbital command centre vanish in a sheeting fireball. He felt echoes of horror, anger and righteous zeal bloom from the detonation.

  Rapture…

  Forrix was correct. Betrayals of this magnitude stretched beyond lone madmen or a few crazed adherents of a suppressed cult. This treachery ran deep.

  Ahriman flinched as he felt a surge of that same rapture he had experienced in his vision below. He rolled in the air, soaring over the back of the iron leviathan struggling to reach the safety of the void, a journey that now seemed all but impossible.

  One of lifter-tugs exploded in a cherry-red fireball, the detonation of its gravitic engine sending out an expanding wave of force. Another followed swiftly, falling onto the back of the Lux Ferem and smashing to pieces.

  Ahriman saw the source of the destruction.

  A flight of eight Thunderbolt fighters streaked towards the mass-conveyer with lethal intent. Streaks of fire blazed from underslung nose-cannons, while white contrails followed skystrike missiles as they leapt from wing pylons. Four more tugs exploded, easy prey for the heavy fighters.

  The flight broke up, four peeling off to starboard, four to port. Guns chattering, they raked the flanks of the Lux Ferem. Alternating punches of autocannon and lascannon fire chewed up hull plates and tore away plasma thrusters and warp vanes.

  Ahriman followed the starboard flight down. He rammed his consciousness into the mind of the trailing pilot. He felt the man's exhilaration, his desire to bring death to the thousands of people aboard the Lux Ferem. Ahriman vaporised his brain w
ith a thought and the aircraft dropped out of formation, spinning out of control to the ground.

  The remaining three craft scattered, believing they were under conventional attack. Ahriman stretched out his kine powers and slammed two aircraft together. They exploded as their unexpended ordnance detonated at the ferocious impact. The final aircraft spun in ever more desperate evasive manoeuvres, its pilot trying in vain to pinpoint the source of his comrades' demise.

  Ahriman swooped low over the back of the corkscrewing aircraft and thrust his consciousness into the pilot's mind. He pressed the man's screaming thoughts hard against the lid of his skull, knowing in an instant every aspect of commanding this aerial steed.

  He threw the plane into a steep climb, angling the winds to catch the thermals lifting off the back of the mass-conveyor. A fierce exhilaration filled him, and he understood a measure of the arrogance he saw in the swagger of every aviator he had ever met. Like the cavalrymen of Old Earth, the pilot of a combat aircraft was a god of the battlefield.

  Ahriman rolled the Thunderbolt around, seeing the other four fighters looping back around for another strafing run. The air above the vast starship was smudged with explosions and drifting smoke from the downed tugs. The wreckage of at least a dozen burned on the Lux Ferem's dorsal surfaces. Another salvo of missiles leapt from the wing hardpoints of the attacking fighters. They raced towards their targets, but at the last second, Ahriman twisted their course and turned them back upon their source.

  There was something the Emperor had said on the day of His departure from Prospero. It seemed appropriate now.

  The hawk always returns to the hand that loosed it…

  Two Thunderbolts exploded as their own missiles flew into their engine intakes. A third dropped out of the sky as Ahriman extended his powers and ripped its wings off like a child tormenting a trapped insect.

  The final aircraft turned into him, its prow guns blazing. Ahriman vacated the pilot's mind as a hurricane of autocannon rounds shredded his Thunderbolt. The shock wave of its demise chased Ahriman, and his Pyrae powers ignited the air within the last Thunderbolt's cockpit.

  He relished the pilot's agonised screams as he was burned alive in the raging firestorm within his aircraft. The fighter spun out and crashed in a tumbling fireball along the Lux Ferem's upper surfaces.

  Ahriman twisted in the air, his subtle body resonating with the power of the Great Ocean and the impunity with which he had destroyed these men. He searched for other aircraft, almost wishing there were more.

  Then he saw it wouldn't matter.

  As fast as he had killed the attacking fighters, it hadn't been fast enough.

  More than half of the lifter-tugs had been destroyed.

  The Lux Ferem was going down.

  Forrix roared in anger as yet more blossoming explosions marched along the belly of the mass-conveyor. One of its repulsor generators blew out with a thunderous detonation. The shock wave buckled the air and drove anyone below who wasn't already there onto the ground.

  More explosions erupted on the mass-conveyor's flanks, and shattered plating fell in a burning rain from the breached hull of the enormous vessel. An explosion mushroomed a few hundred metres away. Wreckage spun away from whatever had smashed into the ground.

  Forrix saw a pair of raptor-winged interceptors streak overhead. One vanished in a tumbling fireball as the pursuing aircraft's guns blew out its engines. He didn't have time to wonder what was going on overhead.

  Get up. Keep moving.

  'From iron cometh strength,' said Forrix through gritted teeth. 'From strength cometh will.'

  Pushing past the agony of his shattered knee, he surged to his feet and limped towards the nearest Hydra. Every step brought pain, but he had to keep going. Another crewman climbed to the Hydra's cupola mount and threw his dead comrade from the vehicle. Forrix blasted him from the vehicle's topside with a single shot. The slide racked back empty.

  No time to reload.

  'From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour.'

  Another salvo of missiles leapt from the Praetors' launchers, detonating moments later against the Lux Ferem's hull. More wreckage tumbled downwards as the explosions blew out the bulkheads of cargo holds, and Forrix saw flailing bodies tumbling from the ruptured starship. Even over the bellow of gunfire and the bone-shaking bass note of the Lux Ferem's struggling repulsors, Forrix heard their terrified screams.

  He reached the forward hull of the Hydra and bent his one good leg before pistoning upwards. He landed on the tank's topside. His ruined knee shrieked and a veil of blinding agony fell across his vision. A crewman emerged from the cupola, holding a crackling volkite caliver. Forrix smashed his bolter down on the soldier's skull, crushing bone and helmet to shards.

  'From honour cometh iron.'

  The Hydra's guns were angled up towards the Lux Ferem, the turret rotated to the side. The two gunners looked around in surprise at the sight of this blood-soaked giant lumbering towards them. Their surprise did not last long. Forrix killed both with sweeps of his bolter, using the weapon like a dub. He kicked their bodies from the crew platform and laid Ahriman down as gently as possible against the rear handrail.

  A flurry of shots spanked from the blast shield around the wide barrels of the upraised autocannons. He ducked into cover as a searing-hot beam of plasma exploded against the shield, turning its upper quadrant to molten slag.

  The workings of a Hydra were no mystery to Forrix; an Iron Warrior could operate any artillery piece in the Imperial armoury. He pressed himself into the contoured shoulder grips, squatting to fit his armoured bulk in a space designed for mortal frames. He stamped the pivot pedal and swung the quad-barrelled weapon around as more gunfire impacted the hissing blast shield: las-fire and plasma bolts, along with heavy slugs and missiles from bipod-mounted launchers.

  Red-hot fragments ricocheted around him, perforating his shoulder and neck.

  He ignored them and centred the Praetor in the Hydra's sights.

  'This is my Unbreakable Litany. May it forever be so,' said Forrix, squeezing the palm-triggers.

  The Hydra bucked like a wild bull-grox. The noise was deafening like the very fabric of the world being ripped asunder. All four barrels unleashed a blizzard of high-explosive shells into the nearest Praetor's flank. The vehicle vanished in a blinding fireball as the rockets inside cooked off in a series of booming detonations.

  But his triumph was short-lived as he saw it had come too late, that Ahriman's apocalyptic vision was coming to pass.

  The Lux Ferem was going down.

  It fell back to Morningstar with infinite grace, but Forrix knew that something of such titanic mass would cause untold devastation upon impact.

  He turned from the slowly falling starship, seeing a hundred or more red-armoured soldiers advancing on his captured Hydra. Many were armed with weapons easily capable of taking out his newly acquired tank. Not that it mattered now.

  He swung the turret around, lowering the quad-mounted autocannons as far as they could go.

  'Iron within, iron without,' he said.

  Seven

  EVEN IN DEATH • MATTERS THEOSOPHICAL • A GOD FALLS

  Returning to flesh was never easy.

  Like a slave freed of its fetters and then forced back into servitude by a trusted friend, the spirit felt betrayal as its cage of meat and bone enfolded it once more. Its vengeance was repercussive pain, a bone-deep ache and weariness that took longer to fade the farther and freer the soul had flown.

  Ahriman awoke in an acrid, chemical-rich fog.

  He blinked away after-images of exploding fighter jets and reached up to run a hand over his face His palm came away bloody.

  When had he removed his helmet?

  It lay beside him, scorched and torn by impacts.

  Where was he?

  A rush of sensory information came to him. Metal railings, the stench of blood and the acrid reek of propellant gases. Fyceline and lapping powder. He heard thou
sands of screaming voices and a deep, rumbling vibration that felt like the beginnings of a world-shattering earthquake.

  He was propped up against the crew barrier of a mobile artillery piece, a Hydra by the looks of it, its barrels bleeding heat and drooling smoke, its breech buckled and spewing fumes both toxic and flammable.

  Slumped before him was a figure he only recognised as Forrix due to the configuration of his aura. The Iron Warrior's armour was all but gone, the ceramite plates fused with his flesh and running like wax across his body. His skin was roasted black with vapour flash and what looked like plasma burns or melta flare. His breathing was the ragged, embattled hikes of collapsing lungs.

  Forrix lifted his head, and Ahriman saw one eye was a fused, milky-white of burn tissue. The other swam with incomprehension before recognition set in.

  'Ahriman…' wheezed Forrix. 'Apologies. I swore no harm would come to you while I watched over you.'

  Ahriman pushed himself to his feet and swept his gaze around him. The Hydra was a steel island amid a sea of corpses. At least two hundred bodies surrounded it, each one clad in the red livery of Morningstar. He read the scene in an instant, knowing Forrix had killed them all in defence of him and this solitary bastion.

  'You kept me alive, my friend,' said Ahriman, kneeling by Forrix and placing a palm on his ruined chest. The Iron Warrior flinched, his every nerve on fire. Ahriman reached deep inside himself and used his Pavoni arts to blunt Forrix's pain. It was the least he could do to ease the man's passage into death.

  Forrix shook his head and clamped a fused fist around Ahriman's gauntlet.

  'No,' he said. 'A legionary of the Fourth… never… turns from pain.'

  'Not even in death?'

  'Especially not… then,' said Forrix, tilting his head to look into the sky. 'Anyway, you would be… wasting… your powers.'

  Ahriman looked up just as the drifting clouds of propellant parted, pushed aside by dashing gravitic waves to reveal the blasted underside of the Lux Ferem. A drizzle of torn metal fell from the mass-conveyor's belly as it sank back to the ground.

  A sick sense of inevitability settled in Ahriman's gut.