Horusian Wars: Resurrection

by John French

  ‘Hostile cruiser closing,’ came the cold static voice of the tech-priest. ‘Eighty-six per cent of its weapons have us at firing range.’

  The Dionysia shook as its engines dug into the darkness and pushed it forward.

  ‘But they are not firing,’ said Viola. Cleander caught the edge in her voice, and looked at her in time to see her pale skin drain paler. And in a horrifically stretched second he reached the same realisation. ‘They are not trying to get in range of their guns,’ said Viola. ‘They…’

  Columns of light split the air across the bridge. The shockwave of displaced air ripped out and punched Cleander backwards. The smell of ozone flooded his nose and mouth. Static pinched his skin. Black outlines of figures stood at the core of each growing strand of brilliance. The sound in the bridge flattened and dimmed, as though he were under water. Armsmen were moving, guns starting to rise. The glare of teleportation vanished. Shouts and alarms replaced the silence. Figures in glossy black carapace and grey ballistic cloth were spreading from their manifestation points. Ember-orange light burned in the round eyepieces of their masks. They were already amongst the machine trenches. And at the far end of the bridge, on the platform beneath the great viewport that faced the stars beyond the ship’s prow, another figure flashed into being. Webs of etheric charge wormed over the white and gold of its armour.

  An armsman who was faster than the rest brought his weapon up to fire. A beam of las-fire hissed out from the barrel of one of the black-armoured figures. The armsman pitched back, head burned to ash inside his helm.

  ‘Hold!’ shouted Cleander. ‘Do not fire! No one move!’ The bridge became still. Even the black-armoured figures seemed to become statues in the lights of alerts blinking across consoles and machines. Cleander licked his lips, his eyes steady on the ivory and gold armoured figure. He could calculate odds. His life was a sum of badly- and well-judged chances. He wondered which one this would be, or if he would have the chance to find out.

  ‘If you wanted my ship,’ he said, and let the corner of his mouth hook upwards to show teeth, ‘you should have asked nicely.’

  ‘But it is not your ship I want, Duke von Castellan,’ said Inquisitor Lord Vult, his voice rasping as it came from the mouths of the vox servitors. ‘I want your master.’

  Ten

  Enna stopped on the crest of the wreckage crag. Sweat ran down her cheeks as she lifted her goggles. Sunlight hammered into her eyes. She slung her las-carbine across her back, and pulled a canister of water from her webbing. The water was cool on her dry tongue and she had to stop herself taking more than three gulps. She ran the last sip around her mouth, feeling it take on the taste of iron as it stripped the rust powder from her teeth. She wanted to spit, but you did not waste water like that. Not on this world.

  This was Iago. It had taken weeks to get here, and now they found that it was a desolate wasteland, bare of life, filled only with the rustle of dust and the voice of the wind.

  She squinted out at the heat haze rising from the ingot plateau. The blocks of rusting metal rose like a mountain range from the orange earth. The smallest of them were the size of battle tanks, the largest the size of drop ships. On and on they went, their flaking and streaked sides forming canyons and stepped slopes like the neglected toys of a child-god. The distant silhouettes of vast cranes and the stacks of smelting cities cut into the distant edge of the sky. There was no sun, just a white sheet of light and heat hanging above the world below.

  ‘There is no one here,’ she muttered, as she slotted the water canister back into its pouch and pulled her carbine from around her back. ‘This place has been dead for decades.’

  ‘Dying, not dead,’ said Josef, coming up the slope behind her, breath panting from his red face. ‘It’s been dying for decades, but there will still be people here.’

  ‘Where?’ she gestured at the baked orange landscape.

  ‘They will be here somewhere,’ he said. ‘People cling to ruin when it’s all they have.’

  ‘Temperature is rising,’ said Enna. ‘We are going to have to find some shade and rest up, if we don’t find this entrance soon.’

  They had been moving over the plateau for two hours, spiralling out from the gunship in a laborious search pattern. All of them wore thin enviro-suits under their armour and gear, and glare goggles over their eyes. Enna had elected to leave her burnished plate behind, and wore a set of light flak armour in mismatched green and mottle tan taken from a forgotten store on the Valour’s Flame. They had broken into two groups: Covenant and Severita in one; Josef, Enna and the tech-priest Glavius-4-Rho in the other. Tethered together by vox signals, they crossed and re-crossed the ground, looking for a way into the world beneath.

  She glanced around again as the tech-priest scaled the slope up onto the crag with fluid ease, spider limbs scuttling across the corroded metal like a lizard running to keep its feet from burning on hot sand. He halted beside her, mechadendrites briefly unfurling to fuss at the grey of his robes. For some reason he had forsaken the red of his priesthood for ragged grey.

  ‘Are you sure this is the location?’ asked Enna. Glavius-4-Rho shifted his position minutely.

  ‘I reviewed all available planetary data and the report data supplied by the officers of Judge Orsino. I am no initiate of the calculus logi or the principia axima, but I am satisfied that an entrance to the sub-strata in which the cult designated “the Renewed” were active should be within our immediate vicinity.’ He paused, hooded head clicking as it turned to survey the land around them. ‘That being said, the information supplied on the planet so far does not seem to match current reality.’

  Enna did not even bother to reply; that the planet had changed had become clear as soon as the Valour’s Flame had begun to move in-system. Clouds of etheric light fizzed in the vacuum. Vox-links and speakers chattered with ghost voices even when turned off. The psyker Mylasa had said that she could feel the warp bleeding over its razor boundary with reality. And all the while, the impossible glittering clouds had drifted through the blackness, smudging the light of the stars and tinting the light of Iago’s sun a coppery orange. The crew of the ship had begun to show unease. Enna had noticed bloodshot eyes in the armsmen, and sweat beading clammy skin. Even the captain seemed to be fighting an instinct to run or collapse. Enna had seen it before. It was what happened when weaker minds touched the warp. It would have consequences, she was sure. But they had kept going, moving inwards towards the primary planet with care.

  Debris floated in the void as they had drawn closer to Iago’s orbit, flakes of metal and black dust that scraped the prow of the Valour’s Flame as it pushed through the drifts. No signals had come from it, and long range scans had found no sign of industry or life: no energy bloom, no orbital defence challenges, no light sources on the planet’s surface. That was when it had become clear this was not the world they had been expecting. Iago had been a planet-wide smeltery. Ore ripped from the moons and dead planets of the system had been dragged to the city-sized metal works and fed into the crucibles and blast furnaces. Indentured generations of furnace workers had laboured in the heat and glow of molten metal. Ships had come to fill their hulls with macro-ingots pulled from the stack-plateaus. Adeptus Mechanicus emissaries had haggled and bargained with the furnace masters’ brokers in the courts of black iron palaces that rose above the forge-stacks.

  That was what the reports had said, but the world they described was gone. A carcass remained in its place, its cities scorched, and its iron bones crumbling to rust.

  ‘This was supposed to be an active and stable system,’ said Enna. ‘No reports of rebellion, no cries for help…’

  ‘The degree of rust and metal degradation planet-wide should not have been possible in the time between the last communications from this world and now,’ said Glavius-4-Rho. ‘The last clear contact with the system was four years ago.’ A mechadendrite reached out from his shou
lders and broke a piece of metal from a girder sticking up from the crag. The machine claws tensed and the piece of metal crumbled to brown flakes. ‘This should be the work of decades.’

  ‘This is a cursed place,’ said Enna, pulling her glare goggles back down and hefting her weapon. ‘Let’s get moving.’

  She had just begun to pick her way down the side of the crag when Josef’s hand fell on her shoulder. She dropped to one knee by instinct, gun ready, eyes searching for a threat.

  ‘There,’ said Josef, pointing past her to a bare patch of ground next to a looming macro-ingot. ‘Left arc, base of that slab, two hundred metres.’

  She dropped her eye to the scope of her carbine, and the patch of ground grew in her sight. She blinked; the heat haze was rippling the air. Then she saw it: a figure squatting on the ground, a shadow within a shadow. It was still, but Enna had the sudden sense that it was looking back at her down the gunsight, into her eye. She blinked, and the figure was gone.

  She looked over the top of the sight, but there was no sign of it. Carefully she reached up and clicked the vox mic strapped to her throat.

  ‘Converge base of ingot, grid alpha-two-seven by theta-four-one,’ she said. ‘We have found something.’

  The door to Iago’s underworld was a circle of pipe half choked with red earth and wreckage. Glavius-4-Rho had found the entrance after only a cursory search of the area around where they had seen the crouching figure. A tangle of wreckage framed the entrance, the remnants of sacred machines casually crushed by the weight of the macro-ingot whose side loomed against the white sky above them. Another ingot rose from the ground twenty metres away, so that it felt as though they were in a gulley gouged into a landscape of rusted iron. Strips of sun-bleached cloth hung from broken metal spars. There were hundreds of them. The magos had decided not to count how many; their presence just made the disquiet he had experienced since landing worse.

  He hung back as the woman called Enna shone a stab-light into the dark.

  ‘Clear down to fifty metres,’ she called.

  ‘Go twenty metres in and hold,’ said Covenant. The inquisitor stood before the entrance tunnel, a shotgun held with relaxed care in his hands, the impulse-linked cannon rotating.

  ‘Severita,’ he said.

  ‘My lord.’

  ‘Stay close to Glavius-4-Rho,’ said Covenant.

  The magos shifted his legs at the sound of his name. He wanted to move. Ever since he had stepped onto the surface of Iago he had not wanted to touch it for longer than necessary. This was a place of dead metal, of corrosion that had seeped into the fabric of everything he saw. He began to run damage diagnostics on his systems again. He had been running them almost continually since they had arrived. All had registered no damage to his machine components, but he knew it was there, seeping into him like rot rising through the wood of a dead tree. He very much wanted not to be here.

  This is what remains for me, he thought, and pulled the fabric of his new robe closer around himself. My life will now be lived in the cursed and forgotten edges of the galaxy.

  Josef stood to one side. He had unfastened a long hammer from his back, and was holding it with casual ease.

  ‘Some of these are old,’ he said, looking up at the tatters of fabric hanging from the tangle of girders framing the tunnel. He reached up a hand and ran a trailing strip of rust-red cloth between his fingers. ‘But not all of them.’ He looked at Covenant. The inquisitor nodded.

  ‘Let’s move,’ he said, and motioned Josef forward towards the tunnel mouth.

  ‘What is the purpose of the attachment of these portions of material at this location?’ asked Glavius-4-Rho as he moved forward.

  ‘They are tokens of offering,’ said Covenant without turning to look at Glavius-4-Rho.

  ‘I am not sure I comprehend…’

  ‘People would come here and leave… something,’ said Josef, pausing at the tunnel mouth, ‘in the hope that what lived down beneath the earth would not come for them.’

  ‘There was nothing about that in the reports I reviewed,’ said Glavius-4-Rho.

  ‘There was not,’ said Covenant, and stepped into the dark circle of the opening.

  ‘Then how did you…’

  ‘Because it is what people do when they are afraid of something,’ said Josef, following his master into the tunnel. His voiced echoed down into the dark. ‘They try to buy its kindness.’

  ‘With what?’

  Neither Covenant nor Josef replied. Enna moved up next to him; she had pulled on a set of dark-sight googles. She nodded towards the tunnel.

  ‘Shall we?’ she said.

  They went down into the dark. Step by step, the image through dark-sight goggles became less and less clear as the scraps of light became fewer and fewer. At the head of the loose chain of people, Enna paused at the junction of a length of wide piping and a tangled cave of crushed metal. Her glands had dumped stimms into her system and her senses were stretched and singing. She could hear liquid dripping close by, tapping out a broken rhythm on a sheet of metal somewhere out of sight.

  They had been descending into the warren for an hour. The tech-priest said that they were already over a hundred metres beneath the surface. The pipe they had entered by had given way to a ragged passage bored in crushed rock that had once been buildings. They had passed through half-intact rooms: a vaulted hall, its cracked ceiling still showing the flaking image of the Emperor wreathed in light above a sea of fire; a series of hab rooms, their furniture rotted to rust and sludge; a set of mechanical steps so twisted that they stuck up into the air like shattered teeth in a broken jaw. Apart from the fact of the path they walked, they had seen no sign of another soul. There were not even any vermin, just the caves formed in the dirt and debris, their fabric rotting in the dark.

  Enna stayed still, holding her breath so that her ears could fill with the sound of the space around her. The blind-light attached to the fore-stock of her carbine cut into the grey green image filling her sight as she panned it across the jumble of girders and blocks of stone. The blind-light was invisible to unaugmented eyes, but with her dark-sight goggles it shone like a ray of sun.

  The next member of the team was Covenant, and he was forty paces behind her, out of sight behind a bend in the tunnel. For this moment she was alone.

  But she did not feel alone.

  For the first time since they had gone beneath the earth she was certain that something was close by, watching her. The sound of dripping went on, echoing in the space so that it seemed to come from every direction and no direction.

  She panned the blind-light over the cave again.

  Her eye caught a pinprick flash, and she froze, holding the beam steady. She watched and listened. The flash came again, the telltale glint of the beam catching a falling droplet. Enna moved forwards, keeping the beam steady, letting her other senses filter the environment around her. She reached where she had seen the droplets fall, and dropped to one knee, aiming the light up at the twisted mass of girders and pipework above. The beam of blind-light shattered. Sheets and pieces of brightness scattered out. Enna blinked her eyes closed for a second, then looked again.

  A finger of crystal hung amongst broken pipes and girders. It was smooth but irregular. Moisture glistened on its surface. As she looked, a bead formed at the tip. It grew, shining like a swelling pearl, and then fell. Enna watched it fall and waited for the sound of it hitting a pool of liquid on the floor. The sound did not come. She swept the blind-light’s beam down and saw the hole. It was rough-edged, a ragged wound in the rockcrete formed by collapsing and tearing ground rather than by design. Marks surrounded it, scratched down into the floor: crude birds, and jagged halos. The sound of the droplet striking water echoed through the dark, somehow louder in Enna’s ears than it had been before. She moved to the edge of the hole and shone the blind-light into its mouth. A shaft bore
d straight downwards. Crystals glittered on its walls. Far beneath her, the darkness stretched down and down through the rock and rust.

  She looked up. Another droplet was forming on the end of the crystal stalactite. She stepped back, extending a hand to catch the drop as it fell.

  ‘Do not touch the tears,’ said a voice from above her. Enna snapped to the side, aiming, finger poised. The beam of the blind-light stabbed up into the metal cobweb above her. A face looked down at her, its eyes shining like a feline’s in moonlight. Enna held her aim steady, her nerves and muscles poised to send a trio of las-bolts into the face even if she died. Carefully, she swallowed three times, and heard the click in her ear that said that her throat mic had picked it up and sent the alert burst to the rest of the team.

  The face amongst the girders tilted as though examining her. It was a man’s face, old and deeply wrinkled, the creases in the skin dark with grime. A matted beard covered his jaw, but the crown of his head was smooth, as though scraped clean by the edge of a new razor. She could not see the rest of his body, just an impression of a hunched form squatting amongst the iron branches of the rusted girders.

  ‘The Emperor’s tears are death,’ said the man, ‘and you are not yet shriven.’

  ‘Come down,’ said Enna. ‘Move slowly, one limb at a time. You move faster and you die.’

  ‘We are all dead down here,’ said the man, but he started to move, limbs unfolding to grip the girders as he climbed into view. He wore the remains of an overall, its original colour lost beneath a patina of dirt. His limbs were long and bone-thin, loose skin hanging over muscles like taut cables. Arms and legs splayed across the wrecked ceiling, he looked like a lizard or long-legged spider.

  ‘We are coming up behind you,’ said Josef’s voice across the vox. A second later she heard the sound of boots on the rockcrete floor, and the clicking buzz of the tech-priest’s machine limbs. She kept her aim and her focus on the man. He reached the lowest reach of a length of girder, hung for a moment and then dropped lightly to the ground, landing in a crouch. He stood slowly, as though he were a puppet being pulled to standing by a wire. His head came up last of all.