The scribe had worked hard to keep her panic sealed tight, drawing on her own inner strength, but it was challenging. She was so far outside her experience in this that it was beyond reason. Katanoh Tallery had been trained to be a calculator of numbers, a hand to compute figures and settle accounts. She was no spy, no agent of war, and yet Garro’s single-minded determination had made her into that for the duration of this desperate mission. All at once she resented him for it, even as she knew that he was the only thing keeping her alive. So she did her best to keep pace.
Following the circumference of the citadel tower, they came to a huge elevator at the foot of the fortress. Cylindrical conveyor platforms as big as the monorail carriage they had ridden were moving up and down the length of the tower, carrying equipment and supplies to the upper levels. She watched them passing each other as they rose and fell in a complex ballet. Their motion reminded Tallery of the pneumatic vacuum tubes in the offices on Riga, where capsules containing sealed papers would jet away to the curator’s chambers.
‘Why are we here?’ she asked.
‘Look up,’ said Garro. He indicated a circular landing stage halfway up the great length of the unfinished fortress. Growing out from the sheer rock of the tower like a disc of fungus from a tree trunk, the platform seemed small and insignificant. It was easily half a kilometre above ground level. ‘That is our way out,’ he explained.
Tallery’s throat was dry. ‘Shouldn’t we be moving away from the centre of activity? I am not a tactician but what you suggest seems contrary to good sense.’
He smiled to himself. ‘Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have a choice, scribe.’
Garro almost seemed to be enjoying their dire circumstances, but Tallery could only feel bitter about them. ‘Yes. It seems my life is doomed to follow a path determined by everything but my will.’ She pulled her robes close, shaking off the oily rainfall. ‘Believing in the Lectitio, that is the only choice I have ever made for myself. And see where it has led me.’
A shadow passed over the warrior’s face, and strangely, Tallery felt an unbidden pang of sorrow for him. ‘That is the way of fate,’ he told her. ‘It takes us, makes us into what the universe needs us to be. Not what we want to be.’ Then he shook off his own grim words with a turn of the head, returning to the matter at hand. ‘We need to take control of a conveyor to reach the landing platform, without attracting attention. And for that, I require a distraction.’
He studied her intently, and fear crawled along the length of Tallery’s spine as she realised what he was asking of her.
The scribe walked slowly towards one of the static conveyors, her hands raised, and her robe open to show that she concealed no weapons and posed no threat. She cleared her throat and managed a few words. ‘Uh, hello?’
At the embarkation ramp, a number of skitarii, the heavily augmented foot soldiers of the Mechanicum, paused in their patrol pattern and turned their cold gaze upon her. With their bionic implants, cyber-weapons and dermal armour, the skitarii were formidable. Each had a steely limb with a built-in lasgun, and as she came closer they moved to put her in their sights.
‘Halt,’ came the demand. ‘Identify yourself.’
Beneath their crimson hoods, what Tallery had first thought to be breather masks like her own were revealed, on closer inspection, to be surgically altered human flesh. Eyes had been replaced with bulbous optical sensors and twitching antennae, mouths and noses permanently sealed behind featureless grilles fed by throbbing oxygen pipes. Unlike the servitors she knew from Riga, these man-machine hybrids moved with a quick economy of motion, exuding a sense of threat.
She began her performance. ‘I… uh… require your assistance.’
‘This site is restricted,’ responded a second guardian. ‘You are an intruder.’
‘Quite so, yes.’ Tallery made a point of being as affable in tone and as harmless in aspect as possible. ‘That’s why I’m surrendering, of course.’
‘Restrain her,’ said the other skitarii, and the two cyborgs closest to her approached. Steel talons extended to clamp around Tallery’s arm and she was shoved towards the waiting conveyor car, the humming muzzle of a charged lasgun pressed into her back. She cast around desperately, her heart thudding in her chest. The scribe saw no sign of Garro in any direction, and for a terrible moment she was afraid that he had abandoned her.
The skitarii released its grip and pushed her over the lip of the ramp, into the cavernous space of the carriage. As the soldier kept a bead on her, the second skitarii yanked the heavy control lever. Rising on a thick chain-drive, each link as tall as a man, the conveyor slowly climbed away from the loading deck.
Peering out over the open edge of the platform, Tallery watched the ground fall away and she experienced a flash of sickly recollection, remembering the heart-stopping instant that she fell from the ledge on Riga. ‘Not again…’
‘Do not speak,’ growled the cyborg.
Tallery looked away, and glimpsed movement from the corner of her eye. A hunter. A shadow. ‘I’m afraid I must,’ she continued, digging deep to draw on her courage. ‘How else would I be able to distract you?’
The skitarii began to demand that she explain herself. Light rippled behind the cyborg soldier, and with a flourish the Falsehood snapped off, revealing the towering form of the legionary beneath the metallic camo-cloak.
What came next happened almost too fast for Tallery to follow.
Garro surged forwards and grabbed the two skitarii about their throats. With a violent jerk, he slammed them together, cracking their augmented skulls against one another with enough force to break bone and splinter steel. They rebounded to the deck in broken heaps. One had perished instantly, but the other still possessed some animation and crawled away, jetting sparks and leaking vital fluids. She called out to Garro as the machine buzzed a warning to its comrades, but the warrior was already upon it for the killing blow, and he smashed it into the deck with the weight of his heavy boot. ‘More resilient than they look,’ he muttered.
The skitarii were dead, then, but already a distant bell sounded an alert. Tallery gasped. Their escape attempt had only just begun and it was in danger of ending prematurely. Garro accepted this new challenge with dour stoicism that was almost frustrating. ‘So much for stealth,’ he told her. ‘It never was my strong suit.’
He reached down and snapped off one of the dead skitarii’s cyber-limbs as easily as the scribe might have broken a twig, ripping the implanted lasgun free from its mounting. He offered it to Tallery.
‘Take this.’
The weapon sat uneasily in her hands, wet with processor fluids. Her fingers found a trigger matrix and tentatively probed it. ‘I have n-not been trained for use of firearms,’ she stuttered.
‘Then learn quickly,’ said Garro. ‘The Emperor protects those who protect themselves.’
Tallery dared to steal a glance over the edge and saw a dozen more skitarii soldiers staring back up at her. A second conveyor carriage was rising up from the lower levels, moving to match the climb of their own. Las-bolts cut at the air around her and she recoiled. ‘They’re coming after us… And a lot more of them than I would wish!’
‘Good.’ Garro’s sword glittered as he drew it. ‘I have had my fill of skulking in shadows.’ Tallery did not share his hunger for battle, and told him so in no uncertain terms. He cocked his head. ‘Fortunate for you, then, that one legionary is worth a thousand common soldiers.’
The second platform pulled level with their ascent and as one the skitarii troops leapt across the gap, hydraulic pistons in their legs propelling them up and over. Garro snarled and raised his bolt pistol, killing three of them with centre-mass shots before they passed the apex of their leaps.
The rest landed hard upon the deck and came up with claws and weapons deployed. Tallery found cover behind a control panel, las-beams slicing through
the air around her. Hot droplets of superheated metal seared her robes as near hits gouged scars in the platform.
She fired back blindly, pointing her salvaged lasgun towards the sounds of battle, too afraid to raise her head above the console for fear of losing it.
Garro waded into the engagement with his weapons high. Libertas sang as it cut down any attacker who came within reach of the sword’s edge, cold power flashing down the length of the blade. The legionary’s bolt pistol barked, mass-reactive shells finding their targets and blasting them apart.
Slow to anger but strong in his fury, the warrior fell easily into the familiar mindset of battle. This was where he was at his best, engaged in death-dealing with a perfect, lethal precision. He fought without fanfare or great displays of martial flourish. It was his way, and the manner in which he had been trained. Once a Death Guard, always a Death Guard, Garro took to combat as the necessary means through which right was maintained. There was no glory in this, merely duty. Glory was something he had left behind, burned away in the ashes of his forgotten brotherhood. He was only a defender now, a crusader no more.
Shots deflecting off the ceramite of his battleplate, Garro spun away as a concentrated salvo of beam fire burned across the platform. Stray las-bolts ripped through the conveyor’s drive mechanism and, with a sickening jolt, the carriage shuddered on its supports.
He felt more than heard the metallic shriek that ran through the deck. ‘Tallery! The chain-drive has been hit.’
The scribe burst from cover as the platform canted sharply beneath their feet. ‘We’re going to fall!’ she cried.
He shook his head. ‘No. To me, now!’ With a backhand blow, Garro knocked a skitarii gunman aside and bounded across the deck to Tallery, even as his boots began to lose their grip. Holstering his weapons, he swept the scribe off her feet, and before she could protest, he hurled her across the gap between the moving conveyors and to relative safety.
Her scream streaming through the air, Tallery landed in a heap on the other platform. Then, Garro broke into a headlong sprint to follow her across, but the angle of the deck was already tilted too far, the gap widening with every second. A bulky, three-limbed skitarii tried and failed to grab at him as it slipped past and fell away into the smoky air.
The legionary sprinted and leapt, his arms extended towards the lip of the far platform. Encumbered by the weight of his armour and his weapons, it was almost too far for him to reach, but Garro’s gauntlets barely caught the edge and he held fast. Behind him, the other carriage broke away and surrendered itself to gravity’s embrace.
‘Intruder!’ grated a crackling vocoder. ‘Intruder detected!’ Garro was still in the process of dragging himself up when another skitarii came out of nowhere across the platform, training its implanted lasgun on Garro’s head. One shot would blast him off the edge and send him spiralling down into the wreckage far below.
Crimson light flashed close and bright, air crackled along the path of a las-bolt, but the killing shot was not for Garro. With a grunt of effort, he hauled himself up, and found the scribe standing over the dead soldier, a smoking weapon in her trembling hands.
‘D-did I kill it?’ she breathed.
He turned her away from the dead cyborg. ‘We live. That is all that matters.’
The chill breeze that pulled at Tallery’s robes at ground level was a howling gale atop the landing stage, and the scribe gathered in her ragged hood to capture any warmth she could retain. Despite whatever attempts there had been to terraform the environment of this desolate planetoid, the noxious atmosphere, the deep cold and the poison snow were all hostile to anyone without a heavily augmented physiology. It was getting harder to breathe here, even with the mask clasped over her nose and mouth.
Following Garro off the elevator ramp, she could not stop herself from throwing a last look back at the corpse of the skitarii she had shot. An ugly burn-wound in the warrior’s back showed where the bolt from the lasgun had hit, melting flesh and plasteel into a blackened slurry. What struck her was how swift the death had been. Alive one instant, ended the next.
Was that how Curator Lonnd had perished? she wondered. Had there been time to see the end coming, time to understand and make peace with it?
Tallery had dealt in life and death many times, through records of births in Riga’s sprawling habitat blocks, to lists of casualties on battlefields across the Imperium. But those had always been abstract things. Numbers on a chart. Ones and zeroes. From this day on, she knew that she would never see them that way again.
‘Scribe,’ Garro called to her. She turned away and went to the warrior’s side. A winged combat drop-ship stood before him, crouched on one of the landing pads like a sleeping hawk. ‘This Stormbird is fully fuelled,’ he explained. ‘We will take it.’
‘You do know how to fly this craft?’
He gave a worryingly vague shrug. ‘I can get us into the void. From there, we will have to send a distress call on fleet channels and–’
Garro’s words died in his throat and Tallery saw him tense. ‘My lord, what’s wrong?’
His eyes narrowed and his next words were so softly spoken she almost didn’t hear. ‘Damn them.’
Unbidden, the Stormbird’s drop ramp fell open, revealing a dozen shadowy forms within. Too late, Tallery realised what the legionary already had – that they had delivered themselves into the jaws of a trap.
A cohort of heavily armoured Mechanicum Praetorians advanced from the drop-ship’s cargo bay. The machine-hybrids bristled with heavy weapons, each of them moving on a caterpillar-drive chassis that resembled the hull of a battle tank. They were more than a match for a lone Space Marine, and the maws of their plasma cannons and hellguns targeted the pair of them, never wavering.
Tallery sensed movement behind them and spun about. From out of the shadows came more soldiers, blocking off any escape route. But these new arrivals were not of the Mechanicum’s red-cloaked tech-guard. Tallery felt a chilling sense of recognition run through her as she saw the colour of the carapace armour worn by the troopers. It was a stormy shade of grey, bereft of any symbols denoting unit, command or allegiance.
Garro saw it too, a question flickering behind those kind eyes of his before he locked it away. He raised his sword into a guard stance, his open hand dropping to the grip of his pistol. ‘I am sorry, Katanoh. But it seems I will not be able to keep my vow… To you or to myself. I did not wish to bring you to such an end.’
A terrible inevitability settled upon her. ‘We are going to die here.’
‘That seems a likely outcome,’ said Garro, and he stepped forwards and stared into the guns arrayed against him, glaring with defiance. ‘Take your shot, if you will,’ he bellowed. ‘We shall see how many of you follow me into darkness!’
Tallery tensed, waiting for the first shriek of a las-blast, the first thunder of bolt-fire. She heard nothing but the howl of the wind.
Then the soldiers put up their guns and a grating voice issued out of the chest of the leading Praetorian. ‘Battle-Captain Garro. Put up your weapons. You and the scribe will come with us.’
He faced the lethal machine-slave without fear. ‘Why should we obey?’
‘Our master would speak with you,’ it told him.
Flanked by the human troopers and the Praetorians, Garro and Tallery were escorted in silence to the uppermost level of the unfinished citadel. They emerged into a wide circular chamber that resembled the duelling arenas of a Legion training ground. Above them, the roof was a dome made from huge, triangular pieces of glass. The churning amber sky rolled over it, propelled by the constant winds.
Ahead of them, in the centre of the chamber, a raised dais of black marble glittered with reflected light. Garro spied an ill-defined shape beneath a dark cloak standing atop it, a hooded figure turned away from them. An aura of cold fury seemed to emanate from the figure, chilling the legio
nary even through his power armour. The air around him felt waxy and full of static, as though it were being held in check by some powerful force.
A creeping sense of foreboding gripped Garro’s heart, and he chanced a look towards Tallery. The scribe had removed her breather mask and her eyes were wide with fear, but she held her terror under control. He gave her a nod that he hoped she would find reassuring, but in truth, the warrior’s own mind was in turmoil as a sinister and potent possibility rose to the fore.
He knew then what he would see beneath that dark mantle. The figure turned slowly, its face lost in shadow. Gripped in one gnarled hand, a long staff of black iron came out of the dimness and sent an echoing crack of noise as it tapped the marble. Firelight from plasmatic flames illuminated the space around the dais, spilling from a narrow steel basket atop the staff. In those flames sat a golden eagle, and inscribed links hung in chains about its talons.
Garro knew the staff as he knew the man who wielded it. The hood dropped back and the old-but-ageless face of Malcador the Sigillite stared down at them, displeasure written clearly upon it.
Unable to resist the indoctrination that had been bred into her since birth, the scribe dropped to her knees in supplication. She bowed her head, and the skitarii did the same, showing fealty to the man who stood second only to the Emperor of Mankind. The First Lord of the Council and Regent of Terra, and the master that Nathaniel Garro had sworn to obey.
But despite every impulse in his flesh to do so, the legionary did not kneel. The question that burned in his breast overshadowed all other compulsions. ‘How are you here?’
‘I am everywhere and nowhere, Garro,’ Malcador intoned. ‘This place belongs to me.’ His words were low and weighty with reproach. ‘You should not have come. You are not ready to see this. The preparations are incomplete.’
‘Are you a traitor?’ Garro blurted out the demand, desperately trying to square what he had learned from Tallery with the reality now before him.
Garro Page 25