by John French
How did I allow this to happen? thought Iaeo.
‘Because to err is human,’ said Jalen, ‘and no matter what your clade gave to you, that is still all you are.’
No, she thought. No, that is not right.
Projections exploded in her head from memory, uncoiling into awareness from where she had buried them in hidden parts of her brain. They were vast, beautiful chains of probability, and possibility, of data inputted and data changed and pushed back into the world to do its work.
Jalen was frowning now, tattooed scales twisting and shimmering. She could feel the fingers of his mind in her thoughts now, cold fingers scrabbling to follow the exploding network of the full termination projection that she had created.
She allowed a smile onto her face. It was not natural, she had to imitate it from memory, but it fitted the moment well enough.
Thank you, she thought, and saw in his eyes that he heard. Thank you for being so predictable.
And she showed him what she had done, the manipulations she had hidden from him in her mind. There was just enough time for his pupils to bloom wide before the Iron Warriors security detail blasted onto the gantry and the first shots split the air.
The machines of war came from across the northern reaches of Tallarn. First hundreds, then thousands, then more than a mortal mind could count. They poured out of the buried shelters, long rivers of tanks, flowing down broken roads, across hills and plains. Knights, Dreadnoughts and Titans walked with them, striding amongst the flow of armour like men wading through a deep river. All flowed down into the plateau which spread across the heart of Tallarn’s northern continent. Bound by mountains, the Khedive was a great, flat dish of land which had swallowed the blood of many since the battle for Tallarn had begun. Now the full strength of the loyalists poured into it without cease.
The Crescent City shelter emptied every machine which could move onto the plain, surging to meet the transporters which dropped from orbit to spill more and more machines onto the fog-veiled dust. More and more began to arrive, as the vanguards of forces which had ridden for days began to converge. Many stretched for hundreds of kilometres back across the continent. On the plain of Khedive the gathering forces marshalled, ordering themselves and pushing outwards as more arrived. Vanguard forces of skimmers took the mountain passes above the plateau unopposed, and within hours the first formations of heavier machines were grinding towards them.
The rising sea of iron did not go unopposed.
At the edge of the northern polar cap three Iron Warriors strike flights hit a convoy heading south from the Cobalack Shelter. The front five kilometres of the convoy became a burning grave of machines. Minutes later three Iron Warriors war groups hit the paralysed line of tanks from the side. Their convoy was annihilated, its fate screamed across the sky in an orange curtain.
To the south, a scratch force of Iron Warriors, Cassidnal Armour, and Cyberneticae maniples met a column coming from Essina Shelter advancing down the remains of the Northern Arterial Highway. The two forces met front on. The long snakes of machines broke apart, spreading across the land to either side of the highway as they each sought to encircle their enemies.
An hour after the first loyalists took the passes above the Khedive, the Iron Warriors struck back. Bombers and gunships poured explosives down on the mountain tops. Rock shattered under the rolling drum of explosions and the heat of the firestorm. Avalanches of cooling rock slid from the peaks, and roared down their flanks. Thunderhawks and Storm Birds skimmed the detonation wave to drop armoured units into the passes. Those few of the loyalist vanguard units remaining fought on but it was not enough. The Iron Warriors held the passes between the rising sea of loyalists and the Sightless Warren.
In the strategiums of the Sightless Warren, the Iron Warriors watched their enemy gather and saw the greatest opportunity for victory and defeat unfold before them. If they thought which of the two possibilities was more likely, none of them voiced their opinion. They waited for word from Perturabo, still in the void aboard the Iron Blood. When that word came it was as direct as it was brutally simple.
‘Strike now with all strength. Hold them to the plains. Choke them in dead iron.’
His sons heard their primarch and obeyed.
The god-machines walk…
Thirteen
Storm centre
Cursus
Sickle Blade
Kord stared down the sight. The oil-black shape of the Iron Hands Predator was to his left. Both it and War Anvil had come to a halt as soon as they had crested the last line of hills and seen what waited for them on the plains of Khedive.
The storm was a pale band across the dying land. Dark smudges rolled within it, like bruises forming then fading in minutes. Lightning speckled its height. He could see the winds whipping its edges into blurred gauze. It was a great beast of a storm. He could feel the hairs on his neck and arms rising. Sparks of static were pinging off the hull. And there was something else, something that clung to the colours, and even to the stale taste of the air in his breath mask.
He had never believed in gods or supernatural forces. He had seen psykers and the impossibility they could make possible, but that was nothing more than something he did not understand, a subset of the many things which made the stars burn and time pass. The universe was a cold, uncaring machine, and humanity had only the place it could carve out for itself. Goodness, evil, kindness and cruelty, it was simply a matter of selecting belief. That was it. There was nothing more.
But as he looked into the storm he felt as if he were looking at something that he could only express in words that came from the language of myths.
It felt like looking into the face of a god.
‘A vortex you said,’ said Menoetius, his voice seeming to harmonise with the static of the vox. ‘I thought you were intending your words to be metaphorical.’
‘The storm is spreading outwards and increasing in strength,’ said Kord. ‘This is an eater, bigger than I have ever heard tell of. Anything that goes in is unlikely to come out.’
‘You spent the lives of almost all those under your command to come this far,’ said Menoetius. ‘You had the strength to spend their lives but not your own?’
Kord kept his eye on the wall of rolling dust. Sweat was stinging his eyes.
‘Colonel, I saw something,’ it was Origo, from the position just in front of Kord, his voice breaking through his thoughts. Kord felt the fear recede, and become an itch at the back of his skull. The gunner had turned to look back at him, eyes wide and bright behind the lenses of his suit. ‘Had it on the infra-sight for a second then it went. But it was there. A machine.’
‘For certain?’ Kord asked.
‘For certain.’
‘We are going in,’ he said into the vox then switched to speak to the rest of War Anvil’s crew. ‘All positions stand by to advance. Weapons ready.’
‘Colonel, the storm…’ called one of the crew, but he was not listening enough to even recognise their voice.
‘Advance,’ he said, and a second later War Anvil obeyed his will.
The winds closed over them with fingers of air which slammed against the hull and rattled grit on the hatches. Within a minute they could not see anything with their normal eyes except a swirling layer of dust the colour of bruises. Images danced and collapsed on the auspex screen. The infra-sights showed nothing. Every few moments lightning would split the view through the sight. War Anvil rocked as it ground onwards. Kord was breathing slowly, feeling his heart hammer as he waited for something to appear on the scope.
The drill went silent. Hrend felt the ground beneath his feet become still. He turned, suddenly aware that he had been drifting. Time had passed as the storm pulled at them. They were at its centre, he was certain, but even here they felt its touch. The shapes of the other machines were unmoving, with billowing dust shrouding them
and then revealing their shapes again. The heat signatures of each were a low murmur of brightness in his heat-sight. The breath of the air was muted, hushed, waiting.
Hrend turned towards the excavator the great machine was awake, its engines still turning. Cables connecting it to its drill head disappeared down a wide hole angled into the ground. They looked slack, as though cut while under tension.
‘What is the drill status?’ asked Hrend.
‘It is no longer functioning,’ said the monotone servitor. ‘Cause unknown.’
Hrend walked to the opening in the ground. The drill had cut down at an angle, creating a sloped passage, which slid to a cold darkness. The sides of the hole were rough glass, fused solid by fusion torches. The lights mounted on Hrend’s shoulders lit with a thought. The hard, white light spilled down the glistening shaft. Far down something glinted, a hard edge of something reflective catching the light. The cables and feeds for the drill head lay on the floor, two lines plunging down, beckoning.
Hrend was about to turn when he heard something. He went still, and turned slowly back to the hole. The black disc of the shaft’s depths filled his sight, its edges fraying the light he shone at it. He heard the sound again, distant but distinct: a whisper of a voice, a voice that should not be here. Inside the coffin of his body he felt his true body shiver. The wind gusted around him, dust scraping across his frame. The blank disc before him seemed to swell and push against the light. It did not look like dark pooling at the end of a tunnel now. It looked like a black sun.
He took a step down the tunnel. The glass layer crunched under his foot. He felt calm, cold even. The wind was spilling a gauze of dust down the tunnel. He took another step.
His footing slipped, and suddenly he was falling, glass screaming as metal scored into its surface. He tried to turn, but his sight was a crazed mass of warning runes.
He slammed to a halt. His sight fizzed for a second, then steadied.
He rose, the light from his carapace touching the rainbow sheen of the walls. He looked back up the shaft. The sky was a distant circle high above. He turned his gaze back to what had stopped his descent.
The drill head, or what remained of it, lay across the tunnel. A neat slice ended the blunt mass of the machine after a metre. It simply stopped after that, as if something had cleaved the front portion away. Hrend shifted and watched as the stab-light caught the bright edges of precisely cut metal. Hrend looked up at what lay just beyond the truncated drill.
A wall of black stone met the beams of light. It was part of a larger structure. Hrend could see that at a glance, the slight curvature of the stone told him that he was looking at a small part of a great, curved wall, perhaps even a circle, hidden beneath the ground like a buried crown. Its substance looked like no stone or crystal Hrend had ever seen. At first it seemed opaque, but as Hrend watched the light slid beneath the surface and kindled reflections within its depths.
It was then that he saw the carving on the surface. A face was looking out at him. It was not human. Wide eyes looked out from a slim face above a mouth filled with needle teeth. It might have been snarling. It might have been grinning. It might have been screaming.
He heard something behind him, a low sound, somewhere between a hiss and a laugh. He turned, and the light found only the glass of the passage walls. Hrend turned back to the wall of black stone. He froze. In his capsule of amniotic fluid his true body shivered uncontrollably.
The carved face had moved. Its lips had closed over its shark smile, and its head had turned, its gaze seeming to focus on a point just…
‘Iron,’ said a voice behind him. He twisted, arming his weapons.
A figure stepped from the blackness. Its presence seemed to strain at the boundaries of the machine that encased it. Black pit eyes looked at Hrend as it halted.
‘Do you still wish to be iron?’ asked the face of Perturabo.
The skies of Tallarn danced with light. Re-entry fires streaked the dark, hundreds of them, thousands of them. The stars hid behind the blink of low-orbit explosions. Iron was pouring out of the sky, landers, drop pods, gunships and attack craft falling from the heavens. Beneath them the nightside of Tallarn bubbled with explosions, sparkling as though scattered with liquid gold.
Argonis climbed, running the engines red, listening to warning chimes ring in his ears but not listening. He was hauling the Sickle Blade on a corkscrew path towards the point of light that was the Iron Blood.
Thinning atmosphere streamed past the Sickle Blade. Feathers of heat edged its wings. Space bloomed above Argonis, and the roar of passing air dropped away.
Alert chimes screamed from his helm. Threat warnings flashed at the edge of his eyes. He slammed the Sickle Blade into a tumble as lines of las-light scored the void behind it.
‘Brother,’ Volk’s voice fizzed across the vox. ‘Cut your engines.’
Argonis glanced at the auspex. A trio of runes was closing on him, fast. Weapon lock warnings chimed in his ears. Ahead of him the marker of the Iron Blood was swelling in his sight. Screens of ships and shoals of fighter craft blistered the void around it.
‘You fire on me, you fire on the Warmaster,’ said Argonis.
‘You have drawn our blood, you have broken our trust.’
‘There is no trust left in this war, brother.’
‘You will not escape.’
‘I do not intend to escape.’
‘Whatever you intend, you will die here.’
‘You did know your limitations, brother,’ said Argonis, and cut the connection. Hostile weapon lock alerts screamed in his ear. He spun the Sickle Blade, shedding countermeasures in a fire-burst cloak. Bursts of las-fire licked the void. He was breathing hard, gravity slamming into him like hammer blows. He fired his thrusters, and the Sickle Blade tumbled.
‘Missiles loose, and locked onto us,’ said Sota-Nul’s voice.
‘I am aware,’ he said. An explosion bloomed in the spinning night as a missile hit a decoy pod. He waited, feeling the G-force smear his flesh against the inside of his armour. The Iron Blood and its escorts were closing fast. There were a lot of ships in the spheres around Tallarn, the war in the void mirroring the escalating battle on the ground.
‘Incoming ordnance,’ called Sota-Nul, and building-sized torpedoes were suddenly burning past him. He spun through their thrust wake. The Iron Warriors were close behind, lacing the void with las-fire. Everything was getting very tight. Flying directly into a battle-sphere was not ideal, but did give Argonis certain advantages. A pursuing missile cluster hit one of the warheads and detonated. The torpedo corkscrewed off course, hit another warhead, and the void became a bright layer of boiling light.
The Sickle Blade rode ahead of the blast wave. Warships loomed ahead of them. Stitched planes of cannon fire spread from their flanks. Challenges and warnings filled Argonis’s ears.
The trio of strike fighters broke from the inferno behind him, dragging banners of burning gas.
‘Those ships have seen us.’
Argonis ignored the tech-witch, and flicked the vox to a multiple band, maximum power transmission.
‘Iron Blood and escorts, this is Argonis, emissary of Warmaster Horus and bearer of his will. You will prepare for us to come aboard.’
A clod of burning debris spun in front of the Sickle Blade. Argonis rolled under it. Behind him the three strike fighters hugged close. Las-bolts streaked past.
‘Cut your engines now,’ said Volk over the vox.
Argonis flipped the Sickle Blade over, watched a target rune lock green on a strike fighter, and squeezed a firing trigger. The closest fighter became a burst of blue and white light. The Sickle Blade flipped back over and rolled away from its kill.
‘Fall back, Volk,’ said Argonis. ‘You were never good enough to take me, and mercy does not suit me.’
A scattering of las-bolts answ
ered.
Argonis switch back to the broad transmission, and spoke again.
‘Iron Blood, this is the emissary of the Warmaster. I demand immediate audience with your primarch.’
Identification ciphers travelled with his words. No reply came. Behind him the two remaining strike fighters were closing and firing. The Iron Blood was a growing splinter of light against the stars, its shields fizzing as it ploughed through battle debris.
‘In the name of Horus, you will comply.’
He could see the great gun batteries of both the flagship and its escorts, building-sized barrels yawning at him with the promise of certain obliteration.
So far to come, he thought, and the dance of light and explosions seemed to fade into a background. So far from the tunnels of Cthonia. So far from a near-starved youth with a mirror knife and a false smile. He was not sure if he would have chosen the decades of life he had lived. But then it seemed there was little choice in this life, and the first lesson of the gang wars he had learned was the only thing that still held true: we are born alone, and if we live it is alone, and in the end we die alone. His hands went still on the controls, and the Sickle Blade’s dance became a simple, straight line drawn towards its future.
Fire and darkness slid past him. He heard voices, but did not listen to them. He did not want this, he had never wanted any of it, but there had never been an alternative besides the swift, endless fall to oblivion. He thought of those he had grown up with, the gang warriors who had bled out into the dark. He thought of the brothers he had watched go down to Isstvan III not realising it was the last thing they would ever do. He thought of Horus, the warrior king who was his master, his primarch, but not his father. And he waited for the fire, and the silence beyond.
‘Emissary,’ the voice filled his head and grated down his spine. The las-fire had vanished from the void around him. The markers of the two remaining strike fighters moved into positions just beyond his wing tips. ‘You wish my presence. So come to me,’ said the voice of Perturabo. In front of Argonis the guns of the Iron Blood turned away, and he saw doors open on a black and waiting space within, like teeth around a mouth.