by David Guymer
Zerberyn met the ruby glare of the warsmith’s gaze without fear.
The Iron Warrior grunted with frustration and lowered his weapon. Even for a near-immortal, transhuman monster like Kalkator, time was finite and precious – as rare as an ally.
‘The gods curse you, you and the stubbornness of your stock. Very well, we will go with you one step further. Apothecary,’ he barked at Reoch. ‘You may keep your cargo aboard my gunship for safekeeping.’
Zerberyn’s triumphant smile faded.
Through the dust sent rolling out from underneath the Thunderhawk’s idling turbofans, there came the rolling snarl of engines. Headlamps pierced the cloud, and for a heart-stilling moment Zerberyn thought that the orks’ relief force was on them already, but then the slab-sided gunmetal shapes of a squadron of Iron Warriors bikers drove snarling through the murk. Wide rubber tyres with deep, spiked treads chewed the loose ground as they took position by the wind turbines.
Behind them marched a second ten-man squad, who fanned out, adopting a staggered firing line of bolters and siege weaponry, shielding the ponderous advance of a final three Iron Warriors behind them. They were huge, armoured like tanks, and bound in razor wire. Terminators. The colossi stomped into position behind the Traitor Space Marines, Tactical Dreadnought suits purring and belching black smoke as they redressed the aim of their combi-bolters towards the Militarum Tempestus men.
Zerberyn’s smile returned as he found himself oddly pleased by this restoration of a cosmic truth.
‘One squad each, is it?’
‘As your precious Codex tells you, little cousin: if your enemy has one squad, bring two.’
Sixteen
Mars – Pavonis Mons
Nictitating membranes flickered across the empty, machined eyes of Zeta-One Prime. It was the cold, infinitely patient stare of a reptile, a chamaeleonidae watching a fly. Urquidex tried to abstract her from his consciousness, but the cold sense of her silver presence on the back of his neck was an order of magnitude worse. He shivered and pulled up the collar of his robe. Presumably, the skitarius’ build had been designed to elicit exactly that kind of biological response. Cold-blooded to warm. Predator, prey.
He glanced up from the half-translated cartogenetic instructional he had been reading line by line from storage wafers into the data reliquary. At least, that was mostly what he had been doing.
Genetic readers rumbled as they worked at their endless task, laser diffraction painting the eddying smoke with hazy lines of rainbow colours. The thudding steps of laboratorium servitors and the lilt of chanting hung with the dry fumes. A pair of initiate adepts drifted through it, there but, in some crucially contextual way, elsewhere, red-robed ghosts of flesh and cabling.
Zeta-One Prime was the only thing that was still. She stood while Urquidex sat, watching, her arc pistol holstered under her hand.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked suddenly.
‘I am instructing the cognis units to equivalate sequence and textual data with galactic grid references.’
‘Again?’
‘It must be done each time. The repetition is important.’
The skitarius fell silent a moment.
‘The first time you performed this task it required fifteen minutes and eleven seconds. You have been at this terminal for sixteen minutes, magos.’
With an effort, Urquidex suppressed the anxious tic of his digitools. They made him look guilty. The skitarius’ membranes flickered, some kind of sub-binaric code familiar to the deep biologics of his hindbrain.
I know.
He swallowed, tasted acid.
‘How much longer will this task require?’
‘I…’ He glanced at the reliquary’s scratchy, chrome-edged rune display, the lines of machine code that, though he could comprehend barely one symbol in five, he still knew betrayed a lot more than a cartogenetic instructional. He was resting a great deal on the faith that no mere skitarius, however elevated, would have been initiated into the First Circle of Information. ‘Two minutes.’
‘You have one.’
‘But–’
‘The artisan trajectorae apprised me of your sub-optimal performance in your prior duty designation. I will not tolerate the same here.’
‘But–’
‘Fifty-two seconds, magos.’
Biting his tongue and begging the machine’s clemency for such discourteous haste, he recited the final lines of the instructional via the data reliquary’s stiff ivory keys. As he worked, his digitools slid indepently over the tiers of keys.
‘I am close.’
The runes hovered in the machine’s active buffer, the noospheric equivalent of short term memory, for about five seconds before the detailed instructional he was inputting with his other hand swept them away.
‘How close?’
The question illuminated the electronic firmament. The data-strings were inelegantly composed, the syntax of quantum bits crude and, though the final form was legible, evidence of an inexpert hand.
But Clementina Yendl was no adept.
It had only taken a few days after his transfer from Noctis Labyrinth for her to locate him once more, and though Van Auken’s laboratorium was too well isolated for them to meet in person, they communicated. From her he had learned of the orks over Terra and more, sensed the urgency of her cause in the haste with which she ‘spoke’. He had not asked who she really was or whom she really served. Perhaps because the experience of trusting another person, of believing in their cause, was too precious to risk with such questions.
‘Three days,’ he sent back. ‘Two days if I do not purge the prognosticators of scrapcode, but the accuracy of our results will suffer.’
‘If you had to leave Mars now, could you finish?’
‘Now?’
‘Magos?’ said Zeta-One Prime, making him start.
He had not intended to speak aloud.
‘Stand by,’ he said, trying to make a dry mouth sound confident.
Disconnecting from the data reliquary, he hurried through the whirring stacks of cogitators. The kick of his robes disturbed ankle-deep engine smoke. His heart was pounding though he wasn’t sure why. A fly being watched by a chamaeleonidae.
Surrounded by trembling apparatus, a quiescent hololith table gave off a stilted glow. Urquidex connected himself through a series of peripheral nervous plugs. His fingers were sweating and it took several tries.
He was aware of Zeta-One Prime watching. For now, just watching. This action was abnormal, and the abnormal made her wary.
With a sympathetic impulse, he bade the hololith to awaken.
A three-dimensional map of the Imperium of Man shimmered into being. To his telescopic optics it was a heat map, data-dense regions showing through as yellows and reds, spiral arms separated by dark bands of nothing. Urquidex willed the data-vision to change. Hotspots and stellar landmarks dispersed, to be replaced by the branching lines of a phylogenetic tree. Except that ‘tree’ was too fleshbound a metaphor. Two-dimensional. It was more like the growth of a bacterial colony on a nutrient plate or the filamentous spread of a fungus. Offshoots extended into every segmentum of Imperial space, expanding outwards in three dimensions from a common root somewhere in the galactic core. The data represented it as an amorphous zone, grey and ill-defined, unpleasing on the diligent eye. The uncertainties were being continually smoothed away as the sequence mapping progressed, but it still covered hundreds of light years of congested space, thousands of worlds. His own cortex might be capable of processing it. He shook his head.
It was too complex.
‘Install a high capacity cable-link between the hololith and the data reliquary.’
‘To what purpose?’
‘Because I require it,’ Urquidex snapped, heart fumbling, and then with what he prayed was proper urgency rather than pan
ic, ‘Please. Every second increases the likelihood of data degradation.’
He was aware of the interlink the instant that it was made. It was an erupting singularity of blinding connectivity, light and sound, thought and sensation, that even through the remove of a peripheral plug-in was almost overwhelming. He shunted the upload to a cortical machine sub-consciousness and did his best to disregard it.
‘The orks originate somewhere in the galactic core. It is a dense area. It will take time to isolate the exact world.’
Silence from the machine. The data galaxy spiralled, spiralled.
‘Yendl?’
Nothing.
‘This deviates, magos,’ said Zeta-One Prime, overcoming a pre-programmed fear of these machines and their workings with obvious reluctance. ‘If there is a problem then I am obligated to inform the artisan trajectorae.’
‘No. There is no need for that.’
He looked up.
The skitarius was up close: not angry, she was incapable of that, but as anxious as her emotional clamps allowed her to be. She radiated an artifical cold that needled around Urquidex’s implants and into the bone. Behind her, a woman in plain red robes approached. An initiate adept with a data-slate for inspection.
Odd.
The initiates worked on independent projects. They had never reported to him before.
The crack of a las discharge rang out like a hammer striking a nail. Zeta-One Prime jerked forward. There was another shot and she stumbled into the hololith, making the image shake. Ionised smoke uncoiling from the las-burns to her silvery exoskeleton, she began to turn.
The initiate struck her across the face with the data-slate. The slate bent in two in an eruption of sparks and knocked the skitarius back into the projector. A sharp kick into the shin dropped her onto her knees. A laspistol came up in the initate’s other hand and pushed up against the back of Zeta-One Prime’s skull. With laser clarity, Urquidex noted that the selector had been switched to full auto.
The skitarius’ head lit up like a soldering iron and she slumped to the ground, head slagged and fused to her shoulders.
A blurt of interrogative binaric came from behind the cogitator stacks and the second initiate came running.
The first was already dropping, minimising her profile even as she cast aside her emptied laspistol and with mercuric grace drew Zeta-One Prime’s arc pistol. The running initate was armed with basic digital weaponry and spat low-powered laser bolts from his extended arm as soon as he spotted the fallen skitarius. They all missed.
The female took her moment, aimed and then fired. A crackling fist of electricity punched the initiate from his feet and slammed him into the brass cladding of a codifier.
Urquidex gaped.
‘Not later,’ said Clementina Yendl, manually tearing his plug-ins from the hololith projector. The abrupt separation was as extraordinary as the connection had been, and almost wiped him out with pain.
‘Now.’
Seventeen
Prax
The orbital command substation was an immense agglomeration of cylindrical towers dish arrays and landing platforms that in better days would have serviced light jurisdictional compliance craft responsible for inspection and enforcement of orbital traffic. The facility was surrounded by a crumpled wire fence, and was all just within sight of Princus Praxa’s outer walls. The city was a thumb’s-width smudge on the horizon, a coppery pall of particulate pollution that glimmered like living crystal from the final-stage escape boosters of orbital lifters.
The orks, as Major Bryce had explained it, utilised the substation’s communication nets to complement their own orbital operations.
Zerberyn could have inferred that much for himself from the sheer concentration of firepower that the orks had embedded there in its defence.
Pot-bellied howitzers thrust out of sandbagged redoubts. For such large, crude-looking artillery pieces they had a tremendous rate of fire, thumping out explosive shells and sending up rockets of dusty topsoil amidst the Fists Exemplar advance. Machine cannons screamed as they ripped up new trenchlines.
Scrap metal drizzled over Zerberyn’s armour. Dust clogged the glowing lenses of his helm.
The bombardment was a variable that, having already plotted the optimal angle of attack at the onset, he could no longer influence and so spared no further thought to.
A combat squad comprising one-half of Veteran Squad Anatoq moved with him over the broken ground in a line, their even spacing the resultant practical of Brother Donbuss’ best theoretical of the howitzer shells’ blast radius. The five Space Marines were flickering gold auspex traces in Zerberyn’s faceplate display, periodically broken up by dust diffraction and blast compression fronts. They fired sporadically, conserving ammunition, the soundless flashes of muzzle-flare in the cacophony primarily to give the orks something to aim at other than the true source of the attack.
With their genhanced low-light vision and complementary auspex overlays bolstering their awareness, the Fists Exemplar guided the lighter Tempestus Scions in. Patched in to the humans’ platoon frequency, Zerberyn listened in on their chatter as he picked a path through the stick bombs, tube-charges and tripwires that his auto-senses’ threat-recogition protocols called out from the general detritus.
Even had these men been Space Marines, Zerberyn would have been impressed by their vox-discipline. There was none of the braggadocio and backchat that he was accustomed to hearing on mortal units’ channels. Just target advisories, calm requests for recharge packs or medicae assistance, and mapping updates that were followed immediately and without question. Zerberyn had not yet seen the Scions truly tested, but if they achieved nothing else today then they had already accomplished a feat that was practically unheard of.
They had impressed an Exemplar.
‘Unidentified heat source on your eleven,’ voxed one, their system clear as a bell.
The heat source saw Zerberyn the moment that Zerberyn saw it, and fired a moment later. A Devil Dog flame tank, hull down and scarred enough by battle-damage to justify Zerberyn’s initial appraisal that it had been derelict. An ork in an ill-fitting flak jacket and a red bandana lifted its head above the hatch and shouted.
He would submit himself for proper penance when the battle was done.
A melta beam lanced from its turret gun in a howl of deconstituted atmosphere and passed a foot over Zerberyn’s shoulder, incinerating half of the following Scions in an instant. Heat washed over him. He hit the ground, rolling into the cover formed by the scrap and craters surrounding the substation as the tank’s glacis-mounted heavy bolter opened up.
‘Mine, cousin.’
An Iron Warriors Terminator strode directly into the firing line. His monstrous battleplate soaked up the glacis-mount’s magazine as mass-reactive rounds from his own combi-bolter spanked across the Devil Dog’s gunner slit. A disruption field thrummed into life around the clenched fingers of his power fist as the Cataphractii disappeared again into the fog of war.
‘Tarsus, Galen – pincer left,’ voxed Zerberyn, rising and clapping dust from his bolt pistol. ‘Tosque, Nalis, Borhune: right.’
His squad knew their duties, but it always paid to keep their wiser-than-thou individualism in check.
‘Jaskólska,’ he went on, switching to the Scions’ channel, addressing the female trooper he had spoken with briefly at the agri-plex. ‘We have you covered.’
‘Our gratitude, lord captain.’
The surviving Scions, no grief, no complaint, took off at a full sprint. They were bug-eyed by the full covering and rebreather apparatus of their omnishield helms. The greenish glow of visual augmenter beams from their hellgun scopes webbed the air like a haywired security grid.
Zerberyn followed, finding the troopers spread out in a semicircular firebase formation, Sergeant Jaskólska and the unit sapper in the process of mag
-locking the final melta bombs to the substation’s Dreadnought-sized main doors.
‘Clear!’ yelled the sapper with considerable, long pent-up satisfaction, and then activated the det-charges via his slate monitorum.
White fire rolled out from the doors with a searing roar. Zerberyn felt a passing discomfort in his eyes before his auto-senses adapted to the supernova glare and filtered out the more damaging wavelengths. He was stepping into the breach with weapons ready while the Scions still had their arms over their helms’ visors.
The gunmetal floor tiles glittered like a starfield, littered with flakes of glass that a moment ago had been dust. Opposite, a security desk sat behind a reinforced shatterglass screen, the window turned almost completely white with cracks. On various walls, the torn corner scraps of instructional posters fluttered as the vestibule breathed in, exchanging the oxygen that the melta bombs had consumed for smoke from outside.
He shot and killed an ork that pushed its way in through an interior door, then another, and another. Shot, kill; shot kill. Purity through utility.
More were coming, discernably different from the savage fighters he had encountered on Prax thus far. Another greenskin sub-type, perhaps. Another clan. Their alien features were encased in horned helms, obscene musculature clad in thick body armour decorated with an optically striking black-and-white checker pattern. There were too many, and the number of entrance corridors was too great, for even transhuman reflexes and Space Marine armament to hold them at bay.
Zerberyn swung his thunder hammer as he charged headlong into the pack. The timed-release detonation vaporised the first ork’s torso, pasted its legs in two long red streaks back the way it had come, and lifted the half-tonne brute behind it off its feet, sending it crashing through the shatterglass screen. Another, hard and green and slabbed in armour, came in across his swing. It roared, all aggression. He roared back, vox-amplified to a crippling pitch, as the ork slammed into his turned shoulder and bulldozed him into the wall.
Nalis and Borhune arrived in a storm of bolter fire that shredded the ork. Following in their wake came Jaskólska and her Scions, lighting up the room with full-auto bursts of hot-shot las. Powerful though the Scions’ hellguns were compared to the standard Guardsman’s lasrifle, each monstrous greenskin took several point-blank blasts to put down, and several more to finish off.