by Ian Watson
As would Valence be, and Tundrish.
Lexandro directed his grin at them. All three “brothers” had earned their rapid elevation from the Scouts.
Tundrish leered back – a smirk generally twisted his spider tattoo into a predatory posture. Clenching his fist to deliver an imaginary uppercut, he sketched the very blow he had used to crush the Warlord’s face.
Valence also smiled, though his was a pensive smile, a smile of reverie. He regarded Lexandro musingly as a brother might a sister whose honour he must protect – a sentiment which Lexandro had purged from his own soul, though he recognised the symptoms. Aye, in warped guise.
Briefly, the image of Lexandro’s own two indulged foolish siblings, Andria and Phoeba, flitted through his consciousness for what seemed the first time in years. He had rightly abandoned them, since the only way that honour could be restored was the path he had chosen; or rather, the path on to which he had been propelled. The path of the Adeptus Astartes, the star warriors. In the intricate weave of the universe, his was the golden strand, and his sisters’ was dross, part of the vast lumpen knot of the ordinary, the confined mortal mass that bred and died on a million worlds like some foetid yeast in order to ferment a spirit such as his, a spirit which a God-Emperor could sip.
Marines defended that yeast from pollution and corruption…
They defended with fire and explosive bolts.
Was this the “higher justice” that Valence sometimes babbled about? Aye, babbled sanctimoniously! When, for its sake, Valence himself had abandoned his own tech kin! Brother Yeremi must be a hypocrite.
In that pensive pucker of Brother Yeremi’s lips Lexandro sensed that he himself was now becoming a focus for Valence’s hypocrisy…
Phoeba and Andria… A comely pair, resembling Lexandro himself in countenance… Refined…
Even now that he was so brawny with musculature, rooted over ceramically reinforced bones, Lexandro remained personable.
Andria and Phoeba… Faces… Names… Yet not whole bodies, in the way that his own was whole – enhanced and complete. In his mind’s eyes Lexandro could no longer quite capture nor comprehend the essentially alien anatomy of his quondam sisters. The anatomy of… woman…
Sister… Mother… high-hab whores whom the Lordly Phantasms had amused themselves with… those were mere spectres now, white ghosts.
Abandoned ghosts.
Lexandro stared at Valence, and it was as if their minds conjoined for an instant – Valence would never abandon Lexandro. He would haunt him, so as to complete some aberrant equation within his own brain which allowed Brother Yeremi to pursue his exalted, disingenuous ideal.
The Chaplain processed to a lectern. From an aumbry cupboard beside it, repository for sacred vessels, he removed a gilded holo-projector into which he slipped a data-cube.
In the looming vacancy above the tables appeared the tableau of Lord Sagramoso’s palace… erupting, throwing upward once again that black ship.
The very next scene must have been recorded from an Imperial battleship in orbit. The view was distant and distorted. A large ship climbed from the orb of Karkason. A ship erupted. Wreckage flew afar, diminishing out of sight.
This scene segued into the smoking wreckage of a fallen Warlord in Sagramoso City – now renamed Fidelis – up which an armoured Fist was climbing to plant a charred torn victory banner…
Battle-brothers sang a psalm, hundreds of bass voices throbbing with emotion. Tears trickled down the cheeks of some stout veterans.
And then Lord Pugh distributed the hands of the dead to those who had most distinguished themselves – to be wrought upon patiently over many years in their cells with scrimshaw designs.
Sergeant Juron received one such hand, which he placed tenderly inside a velvet-lined brazen case presented to him by an Apothecary for the purpose.
The three Scouts could not, of course, be so honoured since they were not quite yet full brothers. Nor was the itch yet in them to engrave finger bones – though that would come with the passage of time. Very likely it would come. The pastime was contagious, as itches often are… that yearning to honour by meticulous craftsmanship – and in a very real sense to shake hands with – the glorious dead…
AFTERWARDS, LEXANDRO – STILL thinking fitfully of the bodies of women and of Brother Yeremi’s ambivalent attitude towards him – said to his fellow Scout, “Shall we see how part of a person thrives?”
Valence understood Lexandro’s meaning well enough.
So they turned their footsteps in the direction of the drop-shaft which led down to the Solitorium.
Tundrish caught up with the two of them before they descended – whether filled with an excess of comradeship, or leery of why they should seemingly wish to seclude themselves together, who could say?
Down, down the trio dropped, to step out into that long starlit gallery at the base of the fortress-monastery where brothers would cloister themselves to meditate.
Oriel windows projected over a void which fell away forever to the very edge of the universe itself, if such an edge existed. Perhaps, in some unimaginably distant region, the cosmos simply melted away into Chaos without sane dimensions – so that all the immensity of physical reality, all the billions of light years of stars and galaxies without number, amounted to no more than a tiny archipelago within a dire and senseless ocean of absurdity.
Plasteel mullions divided the narrow, high lancet windows of stained armour-glass. Those panes lent spurious colours to the drifts of stars and lakes of nebulae. Here, a wash of azure suns. Further along, a pool of bilious gas pricked by glittering young luminaries. Necklaces of florid carbuncles… Cyanotic tiaras… An emerald zodiac… The dagger-shaped trefoils in the parabolic arches above were uniformly of blood hue.
Steadfastly beholding one jaundiced sector of the cosmos, there lolled Kroff Tezla, Lieutenant of the Blood Drinkers.
That heroic total-amputee had been rescued at the same time as the sculpts of the Sagramoso dynasty were all reduced to dust. The limbless barrel of a man had been removed from his bronze flowerpot, freed from the loam of lead. Now his torso rested in a cup-shaped cart adorned with valour tassels and therapeutic seals. Two speechless simian servitors attended him, one to ingest his waste and cleanse him, the other to nourish him with its own enriched blood and shift his cart from window to window – from which he gazed out, praying for an exploration vessel of his Chapter to pass this way.
An astropath in the Librarium had messaged to Tezla’s own fortress-monastery on San Guisuga, a jungle world five thousand light years away, though it might be some years yet till that cousinly Chapter retrieved their Lieutenant. Meanwhile he remained a guest of the Fists, whose Chirurgeons deemed his scapular and hip scars too thoroughly cauterised to allow them to cyborg him. His vampiric metabolism – the gene flaw of his Chapter – was somewhat peculiar, besides. The Lieutenant had opted for seclusion in the Solitorium.
“Greetings,” Lexandro addressed Tezla as one of the apish customised servitors licked the Blood Drinker with its long tongue.
Melancholy rheumy eyes regard the trio. The chalices on Tezla’s cheeks wept tattooed gore. A double line of cicatrices along his lips marked where the whip-thong had been laced.
His long sharp canines jutted as he replied, “You have some enquiry…?” He blinked. “Ah, I recognise you. You were my discoverers.”
“Do you regret your survival?” asked Valence curiously.
“There’s no shame, while I still have my teeth. If Sagramoso’s lackeys had pulled out my teeth, though! They did not think of that…”
“We’re glad you endured,” said Valence. “We’re all in your debt.”
“Go ahead,” Lexandro invited. “Why don’t you offer him your arm to bite? Let him suck you.”
“I would not,” the Lieutenant said with cold courtesy, “wish to feast on a battle-brother who was not of my Chapter.”
This remark intrigued Lexandro. “So do you sup each other’s b
lood?”
“Did you come here to taunt me politely? But really like children at a freak fair mocking mutants?”
“I do wonder,” interrupted Tundrish, “how the Karks got hold of those Titans? What manner of clever techs reconditioned those Warlords?”
“I have already been asked that question several times under druggings of Veritas. I had no opportunity to learn, and none of Fulgor Sagramoso’s excruciators teased me by telling. I don’t know. Our galaxy is vast and filled with mystery.”
Tundrish nodded. “And no informants survived, to question.”
Numerous senior rebels and injured Moderati had committed suicide to avoid just such an outcome…
“Do you want for anything, Sir?” asked Valence.
“Do I want for anything?” echoed Tezla gloomily. “Arms?” he suggested. “Legs?”
AT LAST CAME the joyful day when the holes were carefully bored into the three Scouts’ dorsal flesh in the Apothecarion, and through their subcutaneous carapaces which were now fully fledged…
Armour! Power armour!
Lexandro waited patiently within the suit which made him so much more awesome a giant while armiger techs and bio-medics, uttering incantations, completed their checks on the trio of warriors in a rib-vaulted barbican giving access to the practice deck. The plasteel door of the airlock was a grim grin of great interlocking teeth, surrounded by tubular lips from which ducts ran to pressure gauges.
Vacuum pumps sweated chilly condensation. Compressors attached to rune-stippled air tanks thumped with the beat of a hyperactive heart. Vent valves along serpentine pipes hissed.
He waited in his armour? Nay, he was his battle suit. Through the interface of the black carapace the suit plugged into his spine with nerve electrodes and into his motor nervous system.
As soon as Lexandro flexed a finger, his power gauntlet twitched in rapport. He shifted his foot a fraction; immediately electronic signals through fibre bundles amplified his motion so that the weight of his boot and the flared greave obeyed effortlessly. He blinked, and projected before himself a readout monitoring his life-support systems.
He was not viewing his snout-visored companions with his actual eyes, though. The optic sensors in his visor transmitted the scene through the suit’s calculator directly to his brain. Thus no flash, however bright, should blind him. Thus, using infra-red, he would be able to stare through smoke or darkness.
In the Titan he had only been a partial paladin – merely part of a vaster amplified body which also comprised Tundrish and Valence and Zed Juron and, oh yes, Akbar too. Now Lexandro was complete in himself.
“Fists of Dorn, about turn!” a voice ordered over the radio. A voice that grated mechanically. Faust Stossen, their new Squad Sergeant, had once been lasered through the throat and wore a damascened silver voice box in place of his Adam’s apple.
The gargantuan teeth of the airlock unclenched.
STARS BURNED UNBLINKINGLY in the inky void like tiny hostile eyes. A nearby nebula, orange and pink, was the lurid gaseous residue of an explosion. The towers of the home-base soared, pennants and banners glittering in the light from illuminated galleries. Those metal flags never stirred, nor ever would. Perhaps a single atom of interstellar hydrogen might strike each once a year; such was the only breeze here between the stars. The trio spread out across the acres of plasteel, holding their lasguns ready – three hunters awaiting the flushing of birds that could fly through the void. “Targets incoming any time from now—”
Now the faint hint of an energy shield encompassed towers and galleries, in case any laser fire flew astray. The initiate Marines would not of course practise with boltguns here, where shells could speed onward unimpeded by atmosphere or gravity, perhaps striking some incoming ship. Nor did one put shrapnel into orbit around the base. Thus, too, no target drones could be destroyed. The lasguns were at their lowest setting; though mistakes might still occur.
Lexandro and his companions were simply about to test their reflexes, their accuracy, their control of the power suits. Many weeks of such training must follow, in the target ranges beside the foundries, and in cleverly designed menacing environments, using live ammunition.
A speck of light caught Lexandro’s attention. He pivoted, aimed, fired. Fired again.
“Drone hit,” reported his calculator, assessing the reflected light.
The target swooped overhead, twisting and turning. Other little drones were rushing by, some of which were only decoys. Faint pencils of light rose from Valence and Tundrish.
Lexandro’s drone returned, corkscrewing above him. He twisted to track it. Unexpectedly light leapt from the drone itself. A searching spot snaked across the deck towards him.
This, he hadn’t expected. Not that the drones would fire back. He ran aside, firing upward on the run. The beam from the drone didn’t heat the deck, consequently it was low-powered too. If it touched him presumably he would be registered as hit. A black mark against him!
“Drone hit.” The target veered away; spiralled back.
It fired. The deck glowed between his feet. Lexandro leapt aside.
He leapt so easily, so mightily in the minimal gravity prevailing outside the fortress-monastery. He leapt with both feet. And left the deck behind.
He drifted on upwards at an angle. He had lost his magnetic grapple on the deck. His exhaust pipes were pushing him away too.
He increased the magnetism of his boots to maximum so as to draw himself down. Ach, the deck was already metres below! His method would fail. Use the stabilising jets, of course!
“We are hit. Jets deactivated.” Fury filled Lexandro; and he stilled that fury. He fired at the drone. Again, again.
“Drone hit. Drone hit. Drone hit.” His robot attacker fled away, and seemed to lose interest in Lexandro. Perhaps he had “killed” it. But perhaps it classified him as out of action, impotent despite his puissant armour. Neutralised. There was no way back to the deck. On the contrary, he was slowly drifting higher, and sternwards. Given his rate of drift, within ten or fifteen minutes the home-base would pass onward beneath him. He would seem a fool.
The two other mock-combatants were still tilting with lances of light at the quintains of other drones.
One of them fired, fired, fired… and presently trotted towards Lexandro, to keep pace beneath him, peering up facelessly – while Lexandro floated, vulnerable. Inspecting Lexandro speculatively, so it seemed.
Which of the two was it? Valence – or Tundrish?
The figure held his lasgun upright, the nozzle against the tip of his visor, as if sniffing or kissing the weapon.
Surely his fraternal rival couldn’t be contemplating shooting Lexandro? Not while scrutineers watched, and calculators assessed?
Yet the yawning emptiness out here upon the vast deck already seemed to be swallowing any sense of connection with the interior of the fortress-monastery…
As covertly as he could, Lexandro adjusted the setting on his own lasgun to maximum. Just in case. A lucky lasgun shot at max could shear through a flexible joint in armour.
Was Lexandro being tempted – taunted – to do exactly that? To menace, and even to fire on a comrade? Was a malicious trap being laid for him, to discredit and disgrace him? The figure might wait till a drone swooped nearby and fire up at it – just as if shooting at Lexandro. Lexandro would fire back at the figure mistakenly… He’d be lucky if he was merely broken back into the Scouts for ten or twenty years. More likely he’d be executed – or left to drift till he died…
No, the Chapter would never abandon the armour.
Lexandro imagined his whole skeleton being presented to his enemy so that execrations could be carved upon Lexandro’s bones, anathemas and runes of excommunication whereby his spirit would writhe forever – if a spirit there be – eternally separated from Rogal Dorn…
With its free power glove, the figure below made a sign as of a leaping spider.
That must be Tundrish! The scumnik had reverted
to vengeful type.
Stabilising jets pulsed. The figure jumped gently, rising up alongside Lexandro, and gripped him with one metalled hand. Both knights hung, stabilised.
The vibration of the other’s voice communicated itself to Lexandro’s Lyman’s Ear.
Valence’s voice. Valence must have tongued his radio off.
“You almost shot me, didn’t you? Such restraint… Unlike your impulsive blundering leap. I see that I need to be your shadow. Yes indeed, by the Emperor’s blood! ‘Look’, other Marines will say, ‘how that son of Trazior protects his rash brother, yet how his brother scorns him’!”
“I ken your perversity already,” retorted Lexandro. “Your cursed amorodium fixation. Yet how typical of a tech to spell this all out so literally. Have you no finesse?”
“Shall I leave you… alone… brother? Alone, now?”
Lexandro considered.
“Oh you’re really flying right now. You’re hovering like some void-bird… Transcendent!” Had Valence trespassed on Lexandro’s visionary dream? Had he invaded his very mind?
“But what use is it to you right now? Shall I leave you all alone?”
How haughty it would seem to refuse the aid of a Brother… so that others must inconvenience themselves by fishing him from the void.
“Shall I leave you alone… brother?”
“No,” Lexandro said quietly. “Damn you.” Gently, Valence jetted the two suits back down to the training deck.
“Exercise completed,” radioed Sergeant Stossen. “Double around the perimeter and return.”
Valence promptly set off… However, for several seconds Lexandro’s boots clamped him inflexibly to the plasteel surface like two puppies clinging to their bitch mother’s teats – till he remembered to lower the magnetism.
Already some distance away by now, Valence looked back and rotated his power gauntlet, making a mocking spidersign.
The myriad of tiny far stars regarded the scene unflinchingly. Compared with those, the whole mighty base was but a jagged grain of crystal dust…
ONLY WEEKS AFTER they had been initiated in prima grado by the Reclusiarch during a ceremony forbidden to describe, a message of alarm from Fidelis City reverberated through the fortress-monastery.