Praetorian of Dorn

by John French

  ‘What you were paid to help us find,’ she replied. ‘Shouldn’t you be watching for wolves?’

  ‘They don’t come when the light comes back to the sky,’ said Nis. He moved to where the metal cubes and caskets lay on the ground.

  ‘I am wondering something,’ he said, his voice soft. ‘These things are big. Serious heft to them. But we ain’t got a crawler to haul this weight and the rest of us, and the gear.’ He stopped beside one of the casket-like blocks. ‘So I am guessing that the boxes are just to keep it safe. Must be real valuable to be kept so safe.’ He reached out and laid his hand on the metal. Brass digits whirred as they tapped the surface lightly. ‘Open it.’

  ‘The agreement–’ began Myzmadra. Incarnus was motionless next to one of the caskets. Ashul had faded away out of sight.

  ‘Open it!’ The rotor cannon spun up. Around them rock drills whined to life, and melta-torches lit as the scavs closed the circle around them.

  Myzmadra nodded slowly. Inside, under her stillness, she began to tense and relax muscles in sequence. She turned her head to Incarnus and flicked a hand at the casket he stood next to. The extra movements of her fingers were unnoticeable to any who were not watching for them.

  ‘All right,’ she said, and moved towards the casket. She picked up a driver and began to pull the bolts from the top of the block. It took a few moments. Nis watched her all the while, the lenses of his eyes altering their focus as he tracked her movements. His tongue was resting between his teeth.

  The last bolt came free, and she put the tool down and heaved at the lid. It did not shift. She tried again.

  Nis’ face twitched with impatience.

  ‘Grol,’ he said, and flicked his head at the casket. Grol came forwards, machine arms unfolding from his shoulders with a hiss of pistons. Myzmadra took a step back as Grol locked the machine arms onto the top of the block and pulled the lid free. Nis stepped forwards and looked down at what they had dug from beneath the soil of Terra.

  A figure lay within. The light from the melta-torches and stab lights fell across scarred muscle and a broad face. Tubes led from sockets in its skin.

  ‘What–’ Nis had time to begin the question before the flechette round hit him in the jaw and ripped half of his face off. The needle pistol and hand cannon were in Myzmadra’s hands before the gang boss hit the ground.

  Grol twisted, the lid of the casket still clasped in his machine arms. She shot him three times. The first needle hit him in the cheek, the second in the throat, and the last passed between his open teeth as he began to scream. His muscles spasmed as the venom in the needles did its work. He managed to stumble forwards, swinging the casket lid like a club. Myzmadra ducked the blow, came up and put a hand cannon round through his left eye. Meat and torn chrome spun through the air as he slumped into a heap of metal and flesh. She leapt over his corpse, a gun in each hand.

  The rest of the scavs were halfway between fighting and dying. She saw one with a melta-torch and a face of iron take a cluster of flechettes in the spine. He fell, body suddenly a red rag doll with cut strings. She fired as she moved, dodging jets of melta-torches and wild lunges. Her needles and bullets drummed out a steady rhythm of death in reply. Incarnus was standing beside the caskets, hands raised. Sparks coiled through the air around his arm, and there was frost on his fingers. One of the scavs swung at him with a piston hammer, froze in place and began to judder. Blood poured from under the ganger’s mask. Incarnus tensed. The frost around his fingers thickened. The ganger turned, legs dragging, and sank his hammer into the chest of his nearest comrade. Blood and bones exploded from the impact.

  It was over in three more heartbeats. The quiet was as sudden as a gunshot.

  Myzmadra moved amongst the bodies, checking if any of the scavs were still alive. She ended any doubts with her hand cannon.

  Ashul appeared from the night, his flechette rifle cradled in his arms. He looked like he had just been out for a stroll.

  ‘Good timing on the first shot,’ Myzmadra said, as she glanced at him. ‘Hit a little low, though.’

  ‘Didn’t have time to get my aim set. You know I work best when I’m not rushed.’

  ‘Well get used to not having the luxury,’ she said, and moved back to the open casket. ‘Get the others open,’ she said. She looked down at the figure in the casket Nis had made her open. Its skin was so pale and still that she would have thought it dead, if she had not known better. She leant in, eyes tracing the old surgical scars and sculpted muscle.

  A hand clamped around her neck, so fast that she did not have time to realise what was happening. Pain exploded through her. Part of her, the part that had been trained to observe and reason even when the rest of her thoughts were broken, knew that the hand on her throat could cut off air or blood with the slightest pressure. It could break her neck before she could blink. The hand pulled her face down as the figure in the casket opened his eyes.

  ‘Code phrase,’ rasped a voice. The pressure on her eased a fraction.

  ‘Cal...’ she breathed. ‘Calisto.’

  The hand around her neck opened. She fell backwards, steadied herself and almost vomited into her rebreather. The figure rose from the casket, snapping tubes from the sockets in his flesh. He was a demigod sculpted in imitation of humanity. Muscles flowed under his skin.

  ‘Mission parameter?’ he asked, as he moved to one of the five metal cubes and pulled its lid off.

  ‘Orpheus,’ said Myzmadra. ‘The mission parameter is Orpheus.’

  The demigod paused for a second, then nodded and began to retrieve objects from the cube in front of him, hands working fast. Sections of war-plate emerged and were locked over his body one at a time. Then the weapons, ammunition and equipment.

  ‘Time until strike?’ he asked.

  ‘Two hours, twenty-three minutes.’

  He glanced up to the brightening arc of light on the horizon, and nodded. The figures in the other caskets were stirring too now. Incarnus was moving between them, speaking the code phrases to each of them.

  ‘What do I call you?’ she asked the demigod.

  ‘You will call me Phocron,’ he said.

  Bhab Bastion

  The Imperial Palace, Terra

  A sculpture of the Solar System, carved in cold light, filled Archamus’ eyes as he stepped into the command chamber.

  A vast holo-projection filled the centre of the room. Within a cone of light the system rotated: its planets spheres, its moons dots, and the reefs and debris fields washes of light. The projection crackled and flickered as it turned. Tech-priests moved around the large holo-projector, their red robes dragging on the stone floor as they made adjustments and clicked to each other in machine cant. Smaller holo-projectors and pict screen stacks filled the rest of the chamber, each a cluster of quiet activity. Men and women in the uniforms of Solar Auxilia officers talked in low voices, occasionally calling out an order and receiving a reply. Beside them, servitors twitched in their cradles as they performed their functions. Images of orbital defences glowed in the air above them. The room ached with static.

  The chamber was the heart of the Bhab Bastion, a place of counsel and refuge for warlords and tyrants since before the Age of Strife. Now it had become the seat from which the last protectors of truth and humanity looked out across their defences. Whether from here, or the strategium on the Phalanx, the guardians of Terra had been watching for the first attacker to appear on the horizon since word had come of Horus’ treachery. They had been waiting a long time.

  Archamus noted the position of each of the Imperial Fists watching over the room. All of them were Huscarls, Rogal Dorn’s personal bodyguards, their duty marked by the black cloaks hanging from their shoulders. Each was utterly still, but he knew they would have missed no detail of movement in the chamber.

  ‘Saturnalia,’ he said into his vox. A click was the only reply
to say that he had spoken that hour’s watch word correctly and so would live to take his next step. The word changed at random every hour. It was an old method, but effective. To those who called such measures unnecessary, or awkward, he gave no reply. He did not need to. He had one duty: to protect and serve the lord who stood in an open space beneath the turning holo ghost of the Solar System.

  Rogal Dorn did not look around as Archamus approached. The pale light of the projection stole the lustre from Dorn’s armour, and had set shadows in his eyes and the hollows of his cheeks. Quiet radiated from the Imperial Fists’ primarch, like the stillness at the heart of a storm.

  Archamus bowed his head and brought his right fist to his chest. Dorn’s eyes flicked to him, and then back to the display.

  Whenever Dorn was not concerned with other matters, he came here. Years ago, when the war had first started, the primarch had a habit of walking the battlements, looking out as his will remade the Palace, then Terra, and then the Solar System into a fortress. That time had passed. The fortress was long complete, and Dorn no longer walked its towers and walls. There was no respite. Not for the Praetorian of Terra.

  The Solar System was a battlefield within a greater war. While the galaxy burned and the warp shrieked with storms, the heart of the Imperium smouldered with conflict like a fire teetering on the edge of becoming a blaze. The old divisions in the Unity of Terra creaked under the pressure of fear and ignorance. The rebellion on Triton had been put down and its horrors kept secret, but there had been others, waves of panic sweeping through populations who had been unified for centuries, but alone for much longer.

  Mars was a cauldron of war. Fire wreathed its orbits as the Imperial Fists tried to keep their fingers clamped over the wound next to their heart. The rebel forges hurled rockets and mountain-sized shells at Terra. Ships tried to break orbit, sometimes alone, sometimes in swarms that rose from the polluted skies like iron locusts. Only the efforts of Camba Diaz and his blockade fleet had kept the anger of the Red Planet’s spite at bay.

  Then there were the incursions on the outer sphere. They came without coordination, but without cease: wild fleets of warships, crewed by men and women who bore jagged marks on their flesh, and who screamed with madness as they went to their deaths. They had begun at the edge of the system in the early months of the war – first a few and then more and more, until they were striking the outer sphere of defences like rain ringing from a roof. But dangerous though they were, the incursions were claws scrabbling at the gate. The Solar System was a fortress waiting for its final battle.

  Every night was the eve of invasion, every dawn the beginning of another cycle of waiting.

  It would come. One night a new star would appear beside the old, and that star would be the light that said Horus has come. It was certain – the only question was when.

  ‘Terra is a fortress with two walls,’ Dorn had once said to Archamus. ‘The Emperor, my father, stands on the inner wall that is the war of the paths beyond the golden gates. We stand on the outer wall that is the Solar System. If either wall falls, humanity falls. That is what is at stake. Not honour or rightness, but existence. If we fail for an instant, all is lost.’

  The realm of Sol burned, and bled, and waited. And between it and ruin stood the Imperial Fists, and the will of their primarch.

  Archamus felt a phantom shiver run through his bionic leg and arm as he watched the fortress of the Solar System rotate in the dark. His eye went to where runes marking void battles blinked beyond the orbit of Pluto. With the time it took for signals to travel from the edge of the system to Terra, the ships represented by those splashes of light would have died hours before. Bodies would already be freezing in the void, fires cooling in the wreckage. Archamus’ gaze moved to the count of hostile ships that had tried to breach the Solar System’s outer sphere.

  ‘Twenty,’ said Archamus. ‘Fewer than yesterday.’

  ‘Too many,’ said Dorn, softly, eyes still on the light above.

  ‘Did any of them breach the First Sphere?’

  Dorn gave the slightest shake of his head. Archamus turned his gaze back to the display.

  ‘Move the Tenth Eagle and Imperial Mercy back from the outer sphere. Best speed for Mars. Command transfers to Camba Diaz.’

  ‘Yes, lord,’ replied one of the human officers, a veteran Jovian admiral called Su-Kassen. Scars ran up her neck, above the collar of her blue uniform. She had commanded hundreds and thousands in her time, and was used to exercising authority. She hesitated. ‘First Captain Sigismund’s forces in the outer sphere will be–’

  ‘They will be adequate to his task,’ said Dorn, his voice falling like a hammer on stone. Then his features shifted. When he spoke again his voice had softened. ‘Another surge will come from Mars soon. It will come in the next twenty days, when the solar storm is predicted to break. Camba Diaz will need both the ships and the men, Kassen.’

  ‘Of course, lord,’ said Kassen, and saluted.

  Dorn nodded, gave a last glance up at the system map, and then walked to the chamber’s doors. Another duty waited for him, and even if Terra slept, its Praetorian never did. Five of the Huscarls fell in behind him. Dorn turned as he reached the door and looked back at Archamus.

  ‘The vigil is yours, captain,’ he said.

  Damocles Starport

  Terra

  ‘What now?’ Nessegas rubbed his eyes as he keyed the vox.

  ‘Outer doors have jammed shut,’ came the voice of one of his sub-prefects.

  The man was reliable, but at that moment Nessegas would have cheerfully seen him flogged. The temperature in the Southern Transport Arterial Lock had dropped to the point that ice frosted the crystal of his cupola. Down on the cavern floor, the militia were still searching the huge ground hauler. Behind that, the bulk of the Hysen Cartel crawler sat going nowhere. He had twenty-three loads backed up, and the flow through the lock was now eighty-six minutes behind schedule. That meant he was almost certainly facing exile, most likely to one of the Albion sink hives.

  He closed his eyes and put all the control he could into his next words.

  ‘Then... unjam them,’ he said.

  ‘Can’t, honoured prefect. Whole mechanisms have locked. Nothing is responding.’

  ‘Keep trying until they do respond,’ he snapped, and cut the vox. He shivered. The cold was starting to get inside the cupola. He would have to try to summon the tech-priests again. His first plea had gone unanswered. Behind him Sucreen hovered, her silence and presence making it difficult to think.

  He almost missed the first shots. A stutter of flat cracks sounded from the cavern floor. He frowned and leaned forwards to look down, the frost blurring his view. Another stream of cracking noises, then another, and then shouts. Behind him he heard Sucreen swear.

  What was happening? He could not...

  Figures were moving amongst the vehicles. He saw one of them pause, bring something up to his shoulder and...

  There was blood spraying from the back of a militiaman’s head as he fell. And now he could see the guns in the hands of the figures, and hear the shouts of the militia, and see the flash of las-fire.

  He felt his mouth opening. Sucreen was shouting into her vox-link. He saw a masked figure drop from the open cab door of the Hysen Cartel crawler. Other figures were moving around the vehicle, working controls and turning wheels. They were wearing cartel overalls, but breather masks covered their heads.

  Cracks appeared down the centre of the five cargo sections.

  His eye caught a figure raising what looked like a section of pipe onto his shoulder.

  Nessegas had enough time to realise what was about to happen, before the missile stuck the cupola and ripped it from the cavern roof in a ball of flame. Debris and fire fell through the freezing air. Smoke billowed up into the air vents leading to the rest of the starport.

  On the
cavern floor, the five sections of the Hysen Cartel crawler split open like flowers unfurling to greet the sun. Gas poured from each container, shimmering with warmth as it rose to follow the smoke up and out of the cavern.

  Northern Reaches

  The Imperial Palace, Terra

  The infiltrator moved up through the Palace from the door into the underworld. He moved quickly but with care, passing through the derelict layers, and then up through seldom-trod paths. He wove past patrol servitors and sensor nodes, following a route held in his mind. The eyes of patrol servitors touched him, but did not see him.

  In a dank tunnel running between water cisterns, the ghost met the second of his kind. Both of them paused, weapons and eyes steady on each other.

  ‘Calisto,’ he whispered.

  ‘Hecate,’ the other replied.

  The first nodded once, his weapon unwavering.

  ‘Mission parameter?’

  ‘Eurydice.’

  The first infiltrator nodded and lowered his weapon.

  The two moved together in silence, flowing up through the Palace’s shadows. In a machine shaft, two became three. None of them spoke after exchanging code phrases. How each of them had entered the Palace was irrelevant. They had their mission parameter, and that was all the understanding they needed.

  They flowed on like a breath of wind. Their armour hid the heat of their bodies, and the cameleoline bonded to the plates drank light and blurred colours. The armour was slight compared to the type normally worn by their kind, but their greatest protection was their skill in remaining unseen. That skill was sharp enough to see them through the Palace’s lower levels at speed.

  Only when they reached the middle levels did matters become more complicated. Patrols of kill-servitors increased, but they only slowed the infiltrators. The true danger would come when they were close to their target. Then they would be in the domain of the Imperial Fists, and the Custodian Guards. When they entered that realm they would have to use every ounce of skill and planning to succeed. But succeed they would. Of that there was no question.