Meduson

by Dan Abnett

  Or an iron fist.

  'It's entirely the opposite,' said Aximand. 'If Tybalt's right, then they want us to dismiss them, to view them as a negligible threat until it's too late.'

  Grael Noctua had a spread of dataslates fanned out before him, scrolling through multiple informational cascades at once.

  'Or Ezekyle's right and it's all just beating the brush to make noise, to make us think there's a huge force out there working to some unseen plan and forcing the Warmaster to divert resources to fight them.'

  Of all the Moumival, Noctua had thus far asked the most penetrating questions. Aspects Marr himself had not considered, counterpositions and Advocatus diaboli refutations that made him feel like he had entered a courtmartial with nothing more than circumstantial evidence and hearsay to prove his case.

  Abaddon paced the floor, his boundless energies keeping him from sitting in one place for any length of time. Kibre sat opposite Aximand, restraining himself from pacing as Abaddon did with visible effort.

  'If this were true,' said Falkus Kibre, speaking slowly and tapping the nearest dataslate, 'don't you think Horus Lupercal would have seen it?'

  Elevation to the Moumival was evidently suiting Kibre.

  Much to Marr's surprise, it was allowing a maturity he hadn't suspected the Widowmaker was capable of attaining to bloom. He'd asked the one and only question that had given Marr second thoughts about presenting his findings at all.

  Marr hesitated, knowing he was taking a risk in suggesting any lack on the part of the Warmaster.

  'Lupercal's gaze is fixed upon Terra,' he said 'It keeps him from seeing what is behind us.'

  Abaddon stopped his pacing.

  'And you said he didn't have the stomach for this,' said Aximand with a chuckle.

  The First Captain switched his thunderous gaze between Marr and Aximand. 'Another one who thinks he knows war better than the Warmaster,' he said, with a shake of the head. 'There's nothing here, Marr, just a lot of smoke with no fire. You were on Isstvan. You know what we did there. Do you really think Lupercal would have been so careless as to let enough warriors escape who might form any kind of credible threat?'

  Marr knew he was on dangerous ground here. To agree with Abaddon was to openly criticise their primarch, and even Aximand would take a dim view of such open dissent.

  Speculation was dangerous here, so he stuck to facts.

  He leaned over the table and switched the hololith to display scrolling diagrams that looked like genealogical trees, but which were in fact Legion orders of battle.

  'This is a full manifest of the enemy forces deployed at Isstvan as it was divined at the opening of the assault,' said Marr, splitting the holo into three columns, silver, green and black. 'Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard. Watch.'

  One by one, the icons representing enemy squads changed from pale blue to red as Marr fed in casualty reports and recorded exterminations. Like the creeping cellular sickness Marr had once observed Apothecary Vaddon studying in the bloodstream of an infected Scout auxilia, it expanded and increased the speed of its attack.

  'Even though they are our enemies, it still chills the blood to see so much Legion strength lost,' said Noctua.

  'Don't be foolish,' said Abaddon. 'You don't grieve for the enemy when he dies, you give thanks it wasn't you.'

  Eventually the display finished updating, leaving the estimated forces a ragged shadow of their former glory.

  'As best as can be estimated through collated butcher's bills and recovered armour, this is as close to an accurate figure as I can ascribe to the number of warriors who likely escaped Isstvan.'

  The red icons of destroyed Legion formations faded out, and Marr swept the remaining icons together. They didn't fit together nearly as neatly as the original diagram, but then this wasn't an order of battle, just a representation of what had likely survived the massacre.

  'Look at what's left, look at what we can't account for,' said Marr. 'I'll wager it's more than you thought, yes? Perhaps twentytwo thousand warriors all told, give or take a few thousand either side. That's not a force we can just ignore.'

  'So more got off Isstvan that we thought,' said Abaddon. 'It still doesn't prove Shadrak Meduson's behind all these attacks or that he has some overarching plan. He mustered some resistance here at Dwell, but we defeated him. You broke him at Arissak. If he is in command, then he's doing a pretty poor job of fighting us. These attacks, irritating as they might be, are meaningless in the larger scheme of things.'

  'Are they?' asked Marr, skidding a dataslate over the tabletop towards Abaddon. 'Meduson threatened to raise the storm against us, and that's just what he's done. Look at what these meaningless attacks achieved. An entire company of Sons of Horus diverted from the front lines of the war. Months spent securing Isstvan's supply routes, increased security around captured systems and, more crucially, the slowing of the march to Terra.'

  Abaddon slammed his fist down on the table and cracks spread across its mirrorblack surface, reaching out to each member of the Mournival.

  'Enough! You think because Meduson escaped you once before that he is everywhere now. You really expect us to take these guilty delusions of yours to Lupercal? No, Tybalt, go back to your company and get them ready for war.

  Within the week we will leave Dwell for a greater prize.'

  'You won't take this to Lupercal?' asked Marr.

  'No,' said the First Captain. 'We will not.'

  'And the rest of you agree with this?'

  Kibre nodded, as Marr knew he would. Noctua also nodded, but he had at least considered his decision.

  Aximand placed his palms on the table, but any hopes that Little Horus would side with him were quickly dashed.

  'I think there is some merit in this, Tybalt, but I have to agree with my Mournival brothers,' he said. 'If this threat is as dire as you believe, to divert the level of resources you'd need to deal with it would greatly weaken our thrust on Terra.'

  Marr nodded slowly and switched the hololith's display from the combined survivor lists to an image of the galactic spiral. Isstvan shimmered with a faint nimbus of cerulean light, Terra with a pulsing yellow haze, a blister in need of lancing.

  'Ask yourself this, Mournival,' said Marr, pointing to the tenebrous gulfs of space between the blue and the gold.

  'Who knows how much time the remnants of these shattered Legions have bought the Emperor and his warriors to fortify, regroup and prepare? How much closer to Terra would we be now, if not for them?'

  He leaned forwards.

  'And I'll tell you another thing, if Meduson is behind these attacks, then he has a plan, and things are only going to get worse.'

  KYSEN SCYBALE AND Cyon Azedine were waiting for him in the pillared approach vestibule beyond the Mausolytic's inner chambers. He marched past them, helm held in the crook of one arm, his other hand gripping the hilt of his sword.

  He kept up the swift pace until they stood on the scorched granite steps of the Mausolytic, looking out over the Sea of Enna.

  'I'm guessing that didn't go well,' said Scybale.

  'No,' said Marr. 'It didn't.'

  'And there is no word yet from the primarch?' asked Azedine.

  'None.'

  'But I see you're still set on this course,' said Scybale. 'Without sanction or authority?'

  Marr looked up into the burning sky and nodded.

  'Now more than ever,' he said.

  SORTIES OUT TOWARD Dwells Mandeville point were rare, and despite the name such locations were very rarely fixed points in space. The term was equally applied to any point far enough away from the gravity well of a star to allow safe translation into the warp. In essence, any point on a notional sphere surrounding the star could be the Mandeville point, which made a mockery of any attempt to guard it.

  Local system pilots and astropaths, of course, knew points upon that sphere where the angles between the Empyreal realm and real space intersected to a greater degree and allowed for a smooth
er warptranslation.

  Occupying regions of space tens of thousands of kilometres wide, they were haunted voids, where sourceless voices muttered obscenities and ghosts lurked in the shadows.

  And such points could be guarded.

  Three Sons of Horus vessels followed a stately course towards Dwells coreward jump point, known locally as the Azoth Gate. The two destroyers, the Helicanus and the Kashin, and the frigate Lupercal Pursuivant, bristled with vanes and spikes, mailed fists in the face of the void.

  The small flotilla had set out from Dwell six days ago, and were making good time through the asteroid belt spread between the seventh and eighth planets. Marr commanded from the bridge of Lupercal Pursuivant, keeping his vessels in close formation as they navigated between waypoints towards the Azoth Gate.

  The asteroids were the debris of the system's creation millions of years before, left to drift in a captured orbit around the sun. Hundreds of kilometres in diameter, each vast hunk of inert rock drifted through space like an aimless wanderer.

  Thousands of kilometres separated each asteroid from its nearest neighbour, making transit of the belt a relatively simple affair.

  Cosmic dust and micrometeor impacts ablated the hulls of all three vessels, fouling local auspex sectors with false returns and phantom images.

  If there were going to be an attack, this would be an ideal location from which to launch it. Despite that, the three shipmasters were making no attempt at stealth. A constant chatter of vox passed between each vessel and active surveyor sweeps, together with highenergy electromagnetic pulses, lashed the void before them.

  The auspex stations on every bridge revealed no trace of enemy presence.

  Not that Marr expected any.

  Not yet, at least.

  THE FIRST SIGN of trouble came when the engines of the Lupercal Pursuivant stuttered with occlusion flare. The venting systems of a starship's drive systems were necessarily extensive, given the volatile plasmas employed in their reactor cores.

  The fouling of venting systems with voidborne dust was something no captain could afford, carrying as it did the risk of explosive blowback into the reactor cores.

  When the Master of Engines sent word to the bridge of the Lupercal Pursuivant of ejection failures throughout the engineering decks, Marr immediately shut down the reactors.

  A flurry of urgent vox passed between the three shipmasters as the best course of action was deliberated. The Master of Engines estimated thirteen hours for the servitors to scrub the vents clear, and thus Marr gave the order for the Helicanus and the Kashin to continue onwards.

  Two vessels on station was better than none.

  The Lupercal Pursuivant would haul anchor in the shadow of an asteroid and rejoin the flotilla upon the restoration of drive functionality.

  ELEVEN HOURS PASSED before they caught the first hint of another ship on an intercepting parabola. Marr stiffened on the command throne as the Master of Auspex lifted his fist a withered, fused claw of a thing.

  'Captain Marr,' he said in a sopping gestalt of a dozen or more interleaved voices. 'A vessel approaches.'

  'Designation?'

  'By displacement, a rapid strike cruiser. The minds aboard bear the unmistakable touch of Medusa upon them.'

  Marr didn't question this last morsel of information.

  More than just machines were searching the void around the Lupercal Pursuivant. Locked in a pitch black chamber within the vessel's prow, a host of warptouched astropaths were linked to its sensorium via neural spikes driven into their cuneocerebellar tracts.

  As it had been described to Marr, they felt vibrations in the spaces between real space and the warp.

  Darkrobed Mechanicum adepts had modified the Lupercal Pursuivant's auspex systems during the three year hunt for Meduson's fleet, which had given the Sons of Horus a marked advantage against the Iron Hands.

  A ship could go as dark as it was possible to go and still the Lupercal Pursuivant's shuttered astropaths could find it if the minds aboard burned brightly enough.

  And from the look of the phosphorbright image on the viewscreen, the minds on this new ship burned so very brightly.

  The Master of Auspex had once been a warrior of the Sons of Horus, but now he was something both more and less than transhuman. His altered body reclined on a gravcouch, pierced through by scores of bubbling tubes and inload cables. His head was encased in a latticework scaffold and the lid of his skull was crowned by numerous invasive implants. All of which completely remodelled the synaptic architecture of his brain to better process the visions coming from the astropaths and display them in a useable fashion.

  'Looks like you were right,' said Scybale, his slategrey eyes following the glittering track of the incoming starship.

  'They've been watching us. Who knows for how long…'

  Marr nodded.

  'It makes sense,' he said. 'We were the last of the Sons of Horus fleets coming in to Dwell, and such a muster speaks of a greater deployment to come. I can't imagine that Shadrak Meduson wouldn't want to know what Lupercal's next move is.'

  'So he left a vessel lying in wait to watch our movements.'

  'Yes, but whoever is in command of that ship is Iron Hands to the core,' said Marr. 'He couldn't resist a foundering vessel in an asteroid belt.'

  'More fool him.'

  'Who's to say we wouldn't do the same if Lupercal fell? What risks would we take to strike back at those who cut him down?'

  Scybale shrugged, unwilling to concede he might make such an error of judgement. Instead, he changed the subject, gesturing towards the Master of Auspex.

  'As useful as… this has proven, it's no end for a warrior of the Legion,' said Scybale.

  Marr nodded in agreement. 'It sits ill with me also, sergeant, but the results speak for themselves.'

  Scybale's vox chirruped and he placed two fingers to his ear. He nodded at what he was hearing.

  'Enemy vessel five thousand kilometres and closing on our ventral rear quarter,' said the Master of Auspex.

  'Coming in behind and below,' said Marr. 'Classic breaching tactics. They mean to cripple us then board us.'

  'Azedine has his warriors ready on your word,' said Scybale, unable to mask his own urge to be locked in a gunship assault pattern.

  Marr grinned.

  'Don't worry, Kysen, you'll get your chance to fight,' said Marr. 'You and I both.'

  THE PERFECT KILL. Executed flawlessly. The enemy's demise would be welcome in and of itself, but to deliver a deathblow with such machinelike precision against the Warmaster's own Legion just made this manoeuvre all the sweeter.

  The Gorgorex was a rapid strike cruiser of the Vurgaan Clan, old and hoary even before the treachery of Horus. It had fought its way clear of Isstvan with a shellshocked cadre of survivors; mainly Iron Hands, but with a solid proportion of Salamanders and a handful of Raven Guard.

  The Vurgaan were a proud and isolated clan, and thus the crew of the Gorgorex were well suited to the new way of war forced upon them after Isstvan.

  Its commander was an Iron Father of the X Legion named Octar Uldin, and he swung the Gorgorex in below the stricken Lupercal Pursuivant using only the smallest bursts of thrust to manoeuvre. They were operating purely on external visual feeds; the risk of the enemy ship detecting any auspex sweeps were too great to countenance.

  Uldin had watched the three vessels surging towards the Azoth Gate and logged them in the ship's database, assaying their speed, armaments and quirks as they went.

  Any and all information on enemy vessels was invaluable, for just as warriors had their foibles, strengths and weaknesses that could be exploited, so too did starships.

  Legion registries identified the frigate as Lupercal Pursuivant, the destroyers as Helicanus and Kashin. All were known to the Iron Hands after news of the disastrous engagement at Arissak had trickled down through the necessarily compartmentalised network of attack cells.

  The Helicanus, the larger of the two destroyer
s, was slightly slower adjusting course to port. Its armour looked to have been repaired numerous times on its starboard flank, layered plate over layered plate, making it heavy on the turn.

  The Kashin had a few seconds latency on its manoeuvring igniters, a weakness that a foe with greater agility could turn to its advantage.

  And, it now transpired, the Lupercal Pursuivant had issues with its vent cowlings. Its reactors were burning hot, far beyond any recommended tolerances. If those vents weren't cleared soon, the ship would blow itself to pieces without any help from the Gorgorex.

  At full magnification, the servitor crews struggling to clear the vents were like swarms of ants moving around the armoured haunches of a plainsdwelling leviathan.

  Under normal circumstances, Uldin would not have engaged. His orders, passed down through secretive relays and encoded with the highest priorities, were to watch and wait. To observe and report.

  That wasn't the Vurgaan way, especially when intercepted voxtraffic between the enemy ships appeared to confirm that the Lupercal Pursuivant was the flagship of a XVI Legion captain named Tybalt Marr.

  That this was undoubtedly the same Tybalt Marr whose head Shadrak Meduson had sworn to take, made the danger of exposure worth any risk.

  The dorsal launch tubes were loaded and ready.

  They would kill the crew of this vessel, render it dark and then ram it out of the Dwell system with a single, highintensity burst of acceleration. The ship would never be seen again, its disappearance a celestial mystery that would never be explained.

  'On my mark, light them up,' said Uldin.

  'THEY'RE MAKING READY to launch,' said Scybale.

  'Counterspread on my command.'

  'It's a risk letting them fire first.'

  Marr shook his head.

  'No, it was the only way to get them in close enough,' he said. 'Once we stir the void with enough blood, the sharks will come to feed. And you know the first rule of voidwar?'

  Scybale grinned and said, 'Be the shark.'

  THE FIRST WAVE of boarding torpedoes raced from the Gorgorex at almost the same instant as a spread of countermeasures launched from the ventral guns of the Lupercal Pursuivant.