‘By your leave, then,’ he said. ‘Objective secured.’
Khatir mag-locked his thunder hammer and held the mutant’s head by its hair.
‘Leave given,’ he replied.
Khatir looked at Morvox then, switching the vox to a private channel.
‘And, brother-sergeant,’ he added, ‘I trust you now see why this task was not judged fit for mortals.’
Morvox felt a spike of self-reproach. Khatir spoke, as always, with almost zero inflection, though the admonishment in his voice was clearly detectable.
‘I do, Iron Father,’ Morvox said, returning Khatir’s unreadable gaze. ‘Be assured, I will not question again.’
Chapter Four
They called it sky sickness. Khadi suffered from it, and hated it.
She clenched her jaw tight, trying to press out the squirm of nausea and keep her feet. She felt sweat prick at her temples and hoped it didn’t show.
It usually passed. It was at its worst during the first few minutes, when a lifetime of being cooped up inside the claustrophobic interior of a hive suddenly gave way to the horrible, unnatural sight of sky above one’s head.
She forced herself not to look down, where she knew the man-made canyon of terraced buttresses dropping swiftly over hundreds of levels would give her vertigo, nor to look up, where the arching vision of boiling ash clouds would make her feel even sicker. Khadi stared straight out, all the way across the yawning divide between Melamar Secundus and the target defence tower on the walls.
Marivo didn’t seem to have noticed. He leaned against the iron railing, magnoculars clamped to his face, moving the lenses slowly up and down, left and right.
Just the two of them were there, stuck halfway up the precipitous southern flank of the hive spire on a forgotten service balcony. The wind clutched at them, moaning and whining around the smoggy heights. Pinprick lights from the cluster shone out into the gloom, above them, below them, far off in the distance, all of them weak and indistinct.
‘I can see what he means,’ said Marivo. ‘This can be done.’
He handed her the magnoculars.
‘I pinned the location,’ he said. ‘Take a look, and tell me what you think.’
Khadi unclenched one hand from the railing and snatched the magnoculars. Moving stiffly, she looked into them, following the marker Marivo had left on the display.
Her eyes were drawn to the defence tower. It stood high up on the outer walls of the hive cluster, over five hundred metres away. Looking down on it from such a height afforded her a view of its transit tubes snaking out across the poisonous, filmy expanse of industrial wasteland between the spires.
‘What am I looking for?’ she asked.
‘A way across,’ said Marivo. ‘Valien showed me schematics. We can’t get through the transit tubes to the tower – they’ll be guarded too heavily. We move across the wasteland at ground level.’
Khadi felt her gorge rising as she moved the magnocular view down by a fraction. The defence tower looked very small through the scopes, though she knew that it was anything but. It housed massive batteries of defensive weaponry – lascannons, plasma cannons, heavy bolters, missile launchers. At the heart of it all were six volcano cannons, truly gigantic las-weapons designed for the express purpose of taking down super-heavy targets.
Shardenus Prime possessed many such defence towers, all spaced out along the hundreds of kilometres of perimeter wall, fully manned and bristling with ordnance. To the best of her knowledge the guns in those towers had never been fired in warfare, though the deafening monthly practice barrages launched by Guard commanders assured her that they were in fine working order.
‘The wasteland,’ she said, dryly. ‘We’ll last a few minutes, no more.’
‘Valien’s got us breathing gear,’ said Marivo. ‘He’s got us environment suits, weapons, auspexes, the lot. It’s not that far.’
Khadi put the magnoculars down and looked away from the dizzying view. As she turned her head she caught a brief glimpse of the smog-wreathed heights of the Axis Primus hive, and it made her feel worse.
‘You ever been down there?’ she asked, glaring at Marivo in challenge. ‘Rebreathers? They’ll clog before we get halfway. That’s why they built the transit tubes. It’s why they insulate the hives – if that stuff ever got inside…’
Marivo snatched back the magnoculars.
‘Throne, do you ever lose your mood?’ he asked, flipping the lens-caps closed and stowing the device away.
‘Not when I’m stuck with you.’
‘You don’t have a choice about that.’
‘Don’t remind me.’
Khadi pushed herself away from the railing and pressed her body back against the nearside wall of the balcony. Marivo remained perched out on the edge, sticking his head out into the void and swaying against the wind.
‘That’s what he has in mind,’ he said, speaking to himself as he worked through the plans. ‘We travel through the wasteland – they won’t expect us to be able to. Break in, place the charges, get back.’
Khadi listened to him speak. His voice carried an almost boyish enthusiasm. He looked so clean cut, with his cropped military hair and clean-shaved chin.
‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘Simple.’
Marivo shot her an irritated look.
‘Yes, it is,’ he snapped. ‘I can see a way to make this work.’
She fumbled her way towards the balcony doors, trying to keep the shaking in her hands from view.
‘We will all die down there,’ she added, not wanting to meet his eyes. ‘They’re all trained killers, and some of them are… worse.’
Marivo reached out and grabbed the edge of the door, preventing her from opening it.
‘Some of us are trained killers too,’ he said quietly. ‘I thought you were comfortable with that.’
‘Just open the door,’ said Khadi.
Marivo held his ground for a few seconds longer, then released it, shaking his head briefly in disappointment.
Khadi almost said something else then. She almost apologised, and almost tried to explain how bad the open sky made her feel, and almost explained how conflicted the coming war made her, and almost admitted how scared she was of it despite all her surface bluster.
Marivo wasn’t listening. He went back to the railing and started making calculations for the coming raid.
Khadi left him there and went through the open doorway, back into the close, stinking warmth of the hive tunnels.
Telach bent low over the apothecarion table, gently pulling apart the mutant’s flesh with a silver flenser. His helm-display, overlaid with medicae feedback runes, zoomed in on different areas, automatically panning for significant phenomena.
For a moment longer he kept looking, observing the way the mutant’s bloated cells had fused together into straggling ganglia. Even now, many hours after the creature had died, low-level metabolic activity still existed amid the swamp of semi-dried body fluids and membranes.
Telach felt his concentration begin to slip. He withdrew his flenser and stood up straight. He rolled his shoulders, feeling the resistance from his armour as he did so. At times his battle-plate felt like a second skin; at others, it felt like a monstrous burden.
He pondered removing it. That would free up his arms to act without the interference of the suit’s nerve-muscle interface, but the procedure would take time and distract him further from the task at hand.
Telach remembered when he’d first donned power armour. Back then, more than two hundred years ago, he’d been a raw neophyte with only a standard stint in Raukaan’s Scout detachment behind him. The honour had been overwhelming.
Then, as the long years had passed, more and more of his flesh had been cut away and replaced. The itch, he called it – that nagging, persistent desire to strip away the weakness of orga
nic matter and replace it with mechanical components.
Such augmentation had made him better. It had made him faster, stronger, less prone to fatigue, more capable of endurance.
It had also eroded the distinction between his body and the armour that encased it. Some sections of his torso-cladding were now difficult to remove without the supervision of an Iron Father, so he rarely did so.
He could imagine a time when he and his armour would never part. He could imagine a time when the idea of removing his plate would be as ludicrous as taking off the skin he’d been born into. Already his bodily functions were almost perfectly discrete, locked within the complex embrace of ceramics, metals and plastics.
Telach suspected that Rauth was locked inside his Terminator plate, fused into it as perfectly as a heart lodged within a circulatory system. The clan’s Iron Fathers certainly were, as were many of its sergeants.
Was that a bad thing? Was it not simply the logical outcome of everything his Chapter believed in?
Perhaps one day he would think so. But just then, standing alone in the apothecarion of the command complex on Shardenus with the dissected head of a dead mutant in front of him, Telach couldn’t quite imagine himself ever truly believing it.
You embrace your corrupted flesh, he mused, looking at the eyeless slab of cold meat on the table. We shun it. Which of us, I wonder, has the worse affliction?
‘Lord Telach.’
Telach snapped back into the present, immediately aware of the impropriety of his thoughts. He might have been more tired than he’d admitted to himself.
He took a moment to compose himself before turning to face Rauth. The commander was accompanied by Iron Father Khatir, the one who’d brought the disembodied head in for study.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Rauth.
‘Perfectly, lord,’ said Telach, feeling his muscles pinch as he moved. ‘I was contemplating the nature of the mutant.’
Khatir looked down at the mutant’s flayed face. His helm-mask was disfigured with streaks of discolouration, as if acid had been thrown across it.
‘Mutation has but one nature,’ he said.
Telach felt a flash of irritation. Iron Fathers had the luxury of looking at the galaxy through an invariant lens. Librarians, who cast their souls adrift on the warp and witnessed the depths of changefulness there, could have no such comforting illusions.
‘The change is advanced,’ said Telach, addressing Rauth. ‘Tissue corruption is near-absolute. Morphic functions are well established. The specimen has been corrupted for many months.’
‘Can you be more precise?’ asked Rauth.
Telach had expected the question. Always, always, the quest for precision; it was pathological with Rauth, just like the itch.
‘Not with certainty,’ said Telach. ‘I will say this: if the specimen is typical, then mutation will be endemic in the spires.’
‘The bunker’s other defenders showed no signs,’ said Khatir.
‘To be expected,’ said Telach. ‘Plague spreads from the head down. We will encounter more mutants the closer we get to the Capitolis. The troops sent to defend the Helat and the Gorgas Maleon are the least tainted, the ones the traitors were happiest to see eliminated.’
‘So what was this thing doing outside the walls?’ Rauth asked.
‘I do not know,’ said Telach. ‘Perhaps stranded when the barrage began.’
‘No,’ said Khatir.
Both Rauth and Telach turned to look at the Iron Father.
‘It was a warning,’ he said. ‘To intimidate the mortals – the enemy wishes to show them what awaits them, what can happen to them if they are taken alive.’
Rauth thought about that, then nodded.
‘Accepted,’ he said. ‘We must prevent the Guard storming the remaining Gorgas bunkers – prepare kill-teams from Raukaan to eliminate any that still exist.’
‘What purpose would that serve?’ asked Telach. ‘We cannot shield them from this – once the mortals are inside the Capitolis they will see horror in plenty.’
‘By which time it will be too late to retreat,’ said Rauth. ‘I do not want them losing their nerve before the walls are taken.’
‘Nethata isn’t stupid,’ said Telach. ‘He has psykers on his staff and agents inside the hives – he knows almost as much as we do.’
‘I do not care what Nethata thinks he knows,’ said Rauth, as impassively as ever. ‘The attack on the walls is imminent, and I want the mortals kept out of kill missions until then. I will tell him so myself, just to be sure.’
Rauth looked down at the remnants of the mutant’s face. The contrast between the commander’s helm-mask – heavy, dark, synthetic – and the fleshy remains on the table could hardly have been more marked.
‘These things will terrify them,’ he said. ‘For as long as possible, I wish them to fear nothing but us.’
Valien paused for breath, hugging the shadows. He could feel his heart beating, and let his mind dwell on that for a while. He enjoyed the sensation of it. In moments of stillness he could imagine it throbbing within his ribcage.
Casket of blood, he thought. Sacred, essential. Made in the image of the Emperor’s immortal heart which bleeds for all Mankind.
He crept a little further along the deserted corridor until he reached a bulkhead. The lights were sparse and dim, barring the metal in shadows. Somewhere up ahead, a circulation fan turned slowly within its wire cage, dragging stinking air out of the snaking corridor network and into vehicle-sized purifiers.
Purifiers. The term has no meaning in here. Everything was corrupt even before the traitors turned.
He shuffled behind the bulkhead and sank to his haunches. Even his stimm-enhanced muscles needed rest, and he had been on his feet for several days.
He wore the uniform of a Shardenus arbitrator, one of the many thousands charged with maintaining order in the bulk of the cavernous hive structure. In normal circumstances he might have needed to work on the disguise a little, but with the spires under imminent attack and the interior in a state of fevered mobilisation, he stood little chance of being discovered.
He unbuttoned the top button of his synthleather jacket and breathed a little more freely. The air in Melamar Secundus’s upper levels was marginally less nauseating than the faecal stink of the bowels, but it still made his throat ache. Shardenus had a problem with its air supply, something he’d reported back on many times to his superiors since penetrating the outer limits. Some of the filtration towers were vulnerable, and he’d fed the coordinates of those he knew about to Heriat. If they could somehow be destroyed, then the incoming rush of toxic gases from the wasteland zones would kill more of the defenders than lasguns would.
Heriat hadn’t responded. Perhaps he wasn’t interested in conquering a poisonous hellhole; perhaps he actually wanted to take Shardenus intact.
Valien withdrew a tube from under his suit and took a frugal sip of nutrient-rich liquid. He felt the familiar cocktail of relaxants, restoratives and clarifiers swim into his blood. He pulled his helmet off and let his head fall back against the warm metal of the bulkhead. For a moment he remained perfectly still, propped up against the walls, just another piece of detritus lodged in the crannies of the vast, creaking hive structure.
Words from the Talica creed crept into his consciousness.
From blood we came;
In blood we persist;
To blood we shall return.
Valien found it increasingly hard to reconstruct what his life had been like before Talica had taken him. He’d always had a peculiar gift for killing, as well as a fascination for the mechanics of the human body that had long drifted into the macabre even as a teenager.
He’d heard it said that the mark of a psychopath was a taste for tormenting animals. Valien found that notion interesting, seeing as how he’d started with pe
ople. Animals were wary and had no concept of despair; humans, on the other hand, were overly confident and had almost infinite capacity for anguish. They could be tricked so easily – a promise of food, or sex, or simply a kind word whispered in the shadows. Once snared, they were far more fragile than any animal, since they could imagine more. Valien had always used that against them first, conjuring up careful horrors while they still had use of their eyes and fingers, telling them in exacting detail what was going to happen before he went to fetch the gadgets.
Only now that the truth had been revealed to him did he see quite how empty such a life had been. Evil, according to the well-worn trope, was a banality, the mark of something lacking rather than something to be proud of. He’d needed better direction back then, a channel through which to apply his boundless thirst for secret suffering.
Talica had given that to him. Talica had taught him the mysteries of the divine, and Talica had snatched him away from the futility of indulgent violence.
After that he’d killed for a higher purpose, schooled in the arts of the Cult and beholden to its precepts. He’d carved a bloody path across a dozen worlds, assuming whatever subtle form was needed and bringing the Emperor’s silent vengeance to a thousand heretics. He’d still killed, but for a purpose.
Every so often he’d taste blood on his chin and remember the old days. When that happened he would reach out, palms sweaty, for the chins of his victims, lifting them up so they could see the eyes of their killer and hear the words he’d hiss into their ears. The smell of their bodies, mingled with the sharp stench of their fear and the machine-oil tang of spilled blood, would take him right back to where he’d started. In such a state he was capable of doing terrible things.
No mortal man was perfect. If he occasionally strayed from the path of righteousness then he was always sure to pay the appropriate penance once back at the temple. The Emperor had walked in human flesh once, and Valien felt sure that He understood the temptations placed in a man’s way.
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