Angel Exterminatus

by Graham McNeill

  Branthan called it Garuda, and it had gone into battle many times atop the war standards of the Iron Hands. The crew of the Sisypheum simply knew it as ‘the Bird’, and it had survived the Isstvan massacre without so much as a scratch on its golden body. Some said its ancient technologies were beyond the reach of contemporary weapon tech to harm, others that it was simply lucky. More desperate whispers even claimed it was a sign of the Emperor watching over the Legion in these troubled times.

  Frater Thamatica knelt with his four servo-arms repairing a chugging coolant unit, as a dozen probes simultaneously worked on multiple components at once. His red cloak was pulled to one side, and the heaviest of his mechanised servo-arms turned a heavy fuel cylinder around, as if looking for a leak or other imperfection that was causing it to function at less than optimal efficiency. Thamatica looked up briefly from his labour and gave Wayland a curt nod, a gesture of respect between Iron Fathers.

  Beside the Frater was a warrior in the muted jade of the Salamanders, the ivory heraldry on his shoulder blurred by the accumulation of frost. Atesh Tarsa’s black skin and coal-red eyes were in stark contrast to the monochromatic chamber, almost alien, yet Wayland had found the Salamanders Apothecary to be among the most human of them all.

  It had already been decreed that, upon Tarsa’s death, his name should be carved on an iron plaque and hurled into the magma-filled caldera of Mount Karaashi. There it would become part of Medusa itself and the molten metal that flowed beneath its shifting lands.

  No greater honour could be conferred upon a warrior not of the Legion, and Tarsa had accepted the accolade with quiet solemnity. It was an honour well deserved, for the care the Salamanders Apothecary had given the final occupant of the chamber had earned him the undying respect of every Iron Hand aboard.

  Encased in a silver casket with a frosted canopy of ice-cold glass lay Ulrach Branthan, Captain of the 65th Company, iron-blooded son of the Nirankar Clan. His body was unmoving, shrouded in motionless streams of freezing vapour. Even through the white mist and frost-webbed glass, Wayland could see the mortal wounds done to Branthan. Both his legs were horribly mutilated, one little more than stringy sinews of ruptured meat and heat-fused bone, the other severed just above the knee.

  One arm was held to the body by a splintered nub of bone and tattered scraps of skin. His arm was missing much of its mechanical structure and all but one of the fingers had been broken off in the flight from Isstvan. Branthan’s chest was a ruin of four bolter impact craters that ran in a ragged line from hip to sternum.

  Under anything approaching normal circumstances, the captain would have been accorded the honour of being interred in a Dreadnought sarcophagus, but such an option was unavailable with their severely limited resources. Brother Bombastus had already demanded the Iron Fathers remove him from his sarcophagus, surrendering his own existence to allow the captain to live again as their only functional Dreadnought. Branthan had graciously declined the offer, knowing that he would never be as fearsome as ‘Karaashi’ Bombastus, the Iron Thunder of Medusa.

  Clamped across the captain’s torso like a mechanised arachnid parasite was a glittering device of coiled silver and bronze. Its central mass squatted on his chest, while its segmented appendages encircled his body. Monofilament wires extruded from its multiple limbs wormed their way into the captain’s flesh all across his torso, and though it looked painful, Wayland knew the Heart of Iron was all that was keeping Branthan alive.

  That and the stasis field generated within his casket.

  Tyro turned as Wayland and Sharrowkyn entered, his grim face somehow managing to look grimmer than usual. The cyber-eagle fixed whirring optics on them both, passing their biometric information to him in a series of binaric squawks.

  ‘This had better be worth it, Sabik,’ the captain said.

  ‘You know it is,’ answered Wayland. Tyro and the other senior officers had already heard the recording Wayland and Sharrowkyn had made on Hydra Cordatus.

  ‘It sounds like they’re chasing blind superstition,’ said Tyro. ‘And I don’t like basing a mission on the words of a traitor.’

  ‘You don’t have to like it,’ said Wayland, tiring of Tyro’s sniping. ‘That they believe it is enough, and if there’s any substance to what the Phoenician said, then do you want to risk being wrong? If those weapons exist, we can’t risk Horus getting his hands on them.’

  ‘He doesn’t have long, you know,’ sighed Tyro, as if Wayland hadn’t spoken. ‘The Heart’s keeping him alive, but it’s killing him too. We’re taking a great risk in bringing him out like this. For all sorts of reasons.’

  ‘I know that, Cadmus,’ said Wayland. ‘But he needs to hear this.’

  ‘So you saw Fulgrim and Perturabo?’ boomed Thamatica, finally standing from his work and sweeping his cloak back around him. ‘Shame you didn’t kill them. I’m cooking up a little something that might have helped with that, a thermic displacement beamer. Deadly little thing. Works on the entropic quantum theory of all things existing at all times. If I can get it to work properly, you could swap elements in the heart of a star with a corresponding element of a person. I imagine that would ruin anyone’s day, even a primarch’s.’

  ‘Sharrowkyn took a shot at Fulgrim,’ said Wayland.

  ‘Did he now?’ said Thamatica with an appreciative grunt. ‘Didn’t kill him though, I expect.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘We had to leave in a hurry.’

  ‘Aye, we’re aware of that,’ snapped Tyro. ‘The Sisypheum had to make dozens of manoeuvres to avoid detection by the traitor fleet, and you don’t need me to tell you how much fuel that cost us.’

  ‘You’re right,’ agreed Wayland. ‘I don’t need that. So we should get started.’

  Tyro conceded the point and nodded to Thamatica and Atesh Tarsa. ‘How long?’

  Apothecary Tarsa consulted a data-slate and said, ‘I would not recommend removing the stasis field for more than a minute. Captain Branthan’s life is limited, even with the Heart of Iron attached.’

  ‘It’s supposed to heal him, but you say it’s killing him?’ said Sharrowkyn.

  ‘I understand little of what it is doing to him,’ confessed Tarsa, his voice cultured and precise. ‘It appears to be attempting to regrow some of his major organs, but with each iteration of renewal, his vitals go down across the board. If we were to let time take its course, the captain would be dead before it had repaired him enough to live.’

  ‘None of us truly understand its workings,’ said Thamatica. ‘It’s old tech, one of the few pieces left intact after Old Night, much like Branthan’s eagle there. The primarch himself found it during one of his travels into the Land of Shadows.’ Thamatica laughed warily. ‘Said one of the ghost clansmen gave it to him while he hunted the great silver wyrm.’

  ‘Enough,’ said Tyro. ‘We don’t need another history lesson, Frater.’

  ‘Ah, youth,’ said Thamatica, addressing Sharrowkyn and unimpressed by Tyro’s brusqueness. ‘They forget that history is the great constant of our species. So much changes, yet so much, sadly, remains the same.’

  ‘Frater?’ said Tarsa. ‘We’re ready. Brothers Sharrowkyn and Wayland, are you ready?’

  Wayland nodded and unclipped the vox-thief from his belt. He plugged the trailing copper wires running from its internal memory coil into a pair of sockets on the side of Captain Branthan’s casket.

  ‘I’ve compressed the vox-recording into a data blurt,’ he said. ‘Everything we heard will be transferred to Captain Branthan in less than a second. Give the word when his cortical functions are high enough for cognition.’

  Tarsa bent to the console controlling the cryo-suspension as Thamatica busied himself with the stasis field. Both men faced each other like mortuary attendants.

  ‘Raising internal temperatures,’ said Tarsa. ‘Zero point five degrees to one point five on a ten-second gradient.’

  ‘Disengaging stasis field in five, four, three, two, one. Mark.
’

  A digital chronometer began counting down the seconds as the mirage-like shimmer enveloping the medicae casket flickered out of existence. A wave of cold spread from it, freezing air kept at bay by a tiny bubble of time taken out of the universe. Wayland alternated his glances between Branthan’s hollowed-out face and the readouts on the monitors. Slow-arcing waves were growing in amplitude as brain activity magnified with the steadily increasing temperature.

  Branthan’s eyelids flickered, and the blood oozing from his many wounds flowed sluggishly onto the absorbent mat upon which he lay. The Heart of Iron tightened its grip on his chest, its serpentine arms constricting around his body as though seeking to crush him. More of the monofilament hairs whipped from its glistening limbs and pushed through his hard skin to the organs below.

  The captain’s head arched back and a tortured breath escaped him, as though the pain that had been kept at bay renewed its attack with interest. The eagle let out a plaintive squawk at the captain’s renewed signs of life.

  ‘Now,’ said Tarsa, and Wayland pressed the transmit button on the vox-thief. There was no outward sign that anything had changed, but the panel on the front of the device indicated that the data had been successfully transmitted. All they could do now was wait.

  The seconds ticked by and Wayland watched the count reach thirty. The captain’s breath came in short, pain-filled hikes, the flow of blood from his ruined body becoming steadier as his body thawed. Each revivification was taking longer to rouse the captain from his deep hibernation, and it was only a matter of time before he would simply slip away rather than awaken.

  ‘It’s not working,’ said Cadmus Tyro. ‘Shut it down.’

  ‘Give it time,’ said Thamatica. ‘Brain activity is increasing.’

  ‘Temperature at optimal levels,’ said Tarsa, modulating the admixture of stimulants and larraman coagulants being pumped into the captain’s bloodstream.

  ‘I said shut it down,’ ordered Tyro. ‘He’ll be dead before he reaches consciousness.’

  ‘We have time,’ said Thamatica.

  ‘No. You don’t. Re-engage stasis. Now.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ulrach?’ said Cadmus Tyro, and Wayland saw the equerry’s bitter countenance soften at the sound of his friend’s voice. Even artificially rendered through the casket’s augmitters, there was no mistaking the power and authority of the Iron Hands captain. Garuda flapped its metallic wings and perched on the edge of the casket, cawing in welcome. Branthan’s eyes opened, and Wayland’s heart went out to this wounded brother as he saw the sheer effort of will it was taking to maintain his composure in the face of such agony.

  ‘Wayland’s recording inloaded. No choice. We go after them. We stop them.’

  Blood flowed freely from Branthan’s wounds. That he was still alive, let alone able to communicate and process information, was a miracle of endurance and fortitude.

  ‘We don’t even know if there’s any truth to what they were talking about,’ said Tyro.

  ‘Irrelevant. Something is there. The traitors want it, so we deny it to them.’

  ‘This is your order?’

  ‘It is. Make it happen. Upon the anvil.’

  ‘And by the Iron,’ finished Tyro. ‘It will be so.’

  ‘One minute,’ said Tarsa, and a mist of cold air billowed around the casket.

  ‘Re-engaging stasis field,’ said Thamatica.

  ‘Until the next time, broth–’

  Branthan’s words were cut short as he was shut off from the passage of time by the shimmer-haze of the stasis field. The captain’s eagle loosed a cry of machine sorrow and the silence that followed was that shared emptiness at a beloved’s deathbed, leaving each of the Iron Hands wrapped in their own thoughts of mortality, grief and anger.

  ‘We have our orders,’ said Wayland, as much to break the silence as to say anything of use.

  Cadmus Tyro nodded, struggling to mask his emotions and setting his jaw. He exhaled deeply and Wayland was reminded of the decades of friendship that bonded Tyro and Branthan. No easy thing to see a friend in torment, worse if that torment was maintained by your own hand.

  ‘A damned thing,’ said Thamatica, placing an iron gauntlet on the frozen glass of the casket.

  Wayland stepped towards the casket and placed his mechanised hand next to Thamatica’s.

  ‘We’ll see it done, my captain,’ he said.

  Tyro nodded and placed his iron fist next to the silent mech-eagle. ‘Sleep, friend, and know peace while we shoulder your burden.’

  The moment passed and, respects paid, the Iron Hands stepped away from their mortally wounded captain.

  ‘The word is given,’ said Cadmus Tyro at last. ‘We need to keep ahead of the traitors if we’re to stop them, is that understood?’

  ‘It will be done,’ assured Wayland.

  ‘And when we get to the warp storm?’ asked Thamatica, addressing Wayland. ‘Can that guide of yours get us through it?’

  ‘I believe so,’ said Wayland.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Tyro. ‘I spent a lifetime fighting his kind. Can’t trust them.’

  ‘He knows a way through,’ said Wayland. ‘A secret way known as the Paths Below.’

  Once again the Legion captains gathered in the Heliopolis. Fulgrim was to hold court and word was that it would be rapturous. Wounded starlight from the churning warp storm beyond the system’s edge fell in a column through the coffered dome of blood-splashed gold. Lucius had often wondered what secret debauches had taken place here to have splashed blood so high, and why he had not been part of them.

  He contented himself with the delicious images his imagination conjured to fill that lacuna. Reality would only disappoint, so where was the value in knowing the truth? Lucius’s twin swords were sheathed at his narrow hips, one a blade Fulgrim had given him in the wake of Isstvan, the other a fractal blade taken from the corpse of a skitarii suzerain on Prismatica.

  They were itching to be held, though Lucius told himself that was simply his need to match himself against an opponent of worth. Something sadly lacking within his own Legion. He’d hoped to goad one of the Iron Warriors into a challenge, but even the hulking brute with the temper had looked like poor sport.

  The pale, bull-headed statues arranged around the walls were sticky with a fresh layer of death fluids. Blood trails arced in long teardrop sprays that spoke of severed arteries and great violence. The scorched banners were no less defaced, the reminders of the Legion’s heritage virtually illegible now and telling nothing of its former allegiance. Lucius wanted to rip them down, to burn them and dance in the flames.

  He circled Fulgrim’s black throne upon its garish and vulgar plinth of broken stone, remembering a time when he had thought to test his blades against the Phoenician himself. The thought of how he had nearly fallen into the primarch’s trap gave him a delicious frisson that few things could in these bland days. His mouth went dry at the memory of watching the captains of the Legion in battle against Fulgrim in the Gallery of Swords aboard the Andronicus.

  They had believed Fulgrim to be something other than he appeared and had captured him, intending to inflict the most sublime pain to drive out whatever had infested their primarch’s body. It had been a ruse, of course, the Phoenician’s perverse way of testing their devotion; self-indulgent theatre to flaunt his power and reveal his true purpose to his devoted warriors.

  Those warriors were gathered around him, arranged without heed for old ranks or former position. All that now mattered to the Emperor’s Children was that sensation be indulged, that every experience be wrung dry of indulgent excess. The archaic terminology of rank was slowly becoming a thing of the past. Lucius regarded each one in turn, imagining them coming at him with weapons unsheathed and picturing how he might despatch each one with a single blow.

  Julius Kaesoron circled in opposition to him. The Favoured Son, as he was now known, avoided his gaze with a fixedness that made Lucius smile. His face was cu
t with fresh recasting, moulding his features into a nightmarish pastiche of humanity, a mask of flesh transfigured beyond all sanity by bone grafts, horn implants and ocular components that had reshaped his eyes into too-wide orbs of utter blackness.

  Marius Vairosean and his Kakophoni basked in the shrieking discordia blaring from the ceiling mounted vox-casters. The screams of Isstvan V had been replaced with the music composed by Bequa Kynska for her great Maraviglia, suitably amplified, distorted and reworked by the primarch himself. Its shrieking cadence was a rare note of stimulation, and Lucius paused a moment to listen to the jagged spikes of music that jangled and tore at his senses. Its violence was diverting, but the armoured bodies of the Kakophoni jerked and danced like the marionettes of a demented puppeteer, their bizarre sonic weaponry crackling and throbbing as they absorbed the potency of the diabolical sounds.

  Krysander of the Blades stood immobile, his pouting expression hardened at having been summoned from his chamber of terror and flesh brutalising. His hooked tongue licked cracked lips, putting Lucius in mind of a basking lizard too far from water. The daggers thrust through the flesh sheaths of his bare chest and thighs made him look like some pre-Unity techno-barbarian warlord, an impression only enhanced by the cloak of razor thorns tearing at his back.

  The hooks and rings piercing the face of Kalimos were linked by taut chains that would prick and tear the flesh in new and exotic ways with each word he spoke. Idly, Lucius wondered which words would cause Kalimos the most pain, and resolved never to say anything that would give him cause to voice them. To deny Kalimos his desired pain gave Lucius a moment of pleasure, but it vanished a heartbeat later, as ephemeral and fleeting as most such petty amusements.

  Lonomia Ruen and Bastarnae Abranxe stood together, the latter having transferred his blood affections from the dead Heliton to the venom-master. Ruen’s armour was festooned with daggers and razor spikes, each coated in one of his many amusingly lethal toxins. Abranxe wore his twin swords in imitation of Lucius, and the idea that his skill with a blade was even close to matching his was laughable. The scar Lucius had given him as a reminder of that fact was now hidden beneath a tattoo.