Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  ‘Radiation levels are increasing,’ T’kell said after a few more seconds. ‘I am having difficulty pinpointing a nexus for it. Readings suggest it’s latent. Possibly atomics – the air is saturated with it. How are your armour seals, brother-sergeant?’

  ‘Functioning, Forgemaster.’

  T’kell didn’t respond. They had arrived at their destination.

  As the squad reached the downed Speeder they fanned out and each took up a sentry position, eyes on the wreck and on the immediate area beyond it. The other two transports had been annihilated and had ditched much farther out. T’kell was content to examine this one.

  Upon close inspection, though, it became obvious that both crew were dead. The pilot’s chest had been blown out, probably by a shell detonation. His rib carapace had split down the middle and any internal organs that remained inside were pulped. The gunner had been scythed in half and his lower body had landed several metres from the crash site, whilst his clenched fists ensured his upper half remained locked to the multi-melta that sagged on its pintle mounting.

  Knowing how resilient his former brothers-in-arms could be, Zandu made sure neither legionary still clung to life.

  ‘Both dead,’ he said, beckoning T’kell forwards, who had waited for the confirmation. ‘What do you hope to find?’ he asked, as the Forgemaster used his mechadendrites to interface with the Land Speeder’s control console. The steering column had been wrecked and the sensor display spat sparks through a broken screen of dark glass.

  ‘It is what I hope not to find,’ T’kell replied and blanked out again as he roamed for data in what was left of the Land Speeder’s rudimentary cogitator.

  As the Forgemaster worked, Zandu could properly survey the landscape. He surmised a city had once stood where the Speeder had come down, before being flattened into oblivion. Vines encroached upon this suburban shell. Moss and lichen shawled its broken ramparts, and colonies of insects had made nests of its stony hollows. Edges of the ruins suggested a district; structures delineated where roads might have been. Tufts of coarse grass intruded through cracks in the sundered highway, and more than once Zandu caught a glimpse of some timid prey-creature skittering through the city. It was as if nature, not man, had risen up and overtaken this place. Grimly, he realised the loose rock underfoot was actually bone, half buried under dirt and wind-borne debris. Femurs, teeth, even the odd partial skull lay scattered across the plain like some horrific mass grave.

  Zandu was a warrior. He knew war. These people had been destroyed… or destroyed themselves. And long ago. His attention was drawn to a line of graffiti scrawled across one of the few walls still standing but begrimed by age. In Low Gothic, it read: These deeds we have wrought.

  It looked like it had been carved into the rock with a knife or some other blade. Scraps of uniform clung to some of the bones, and he could swear that some of them didn’t look Imperial. Was this what Vulkan had been so afraid of, mankind’s capacity to destroy itself? What beautiful and terrible wonders had he fashioned?

  ‘Primarch have mercy,’ he whispered.

  T’kell slammed his fist against the Speeder’s console, breaking into Zandu’s thoughts.

  ‘Nothing,’ he muttered.

  ‘And yet you still seemed troubled.’

  ‘I am. I found nothing to datasift. The cogitator is dead. I cannot exload, so a warning could have been sent but there is no way to be sure.’

  Zandu looked to the horizon. He could hear the distant passage of the gunship prowling above.

  ‘Skies are clear, except for us. If contact was made, we would have seen something by now.’

  T’kell remained pensive, but he was considering something else. Zandu could guess what.

  ‘You didn’t expect anyone else to be here, did you?’

  ‘No. This place was supposed to be barren, of no strategic or military significance.’

  T’kell recalled the gunship, instructing it to land a few hundred metres outside of the crash site. Once the squad was back aboard, Obek met them with news.

  ‘There’s an outpost about twenty kilometres north of this position.’

  ‘In use?’

  ‘Unknown. It came up on the long-range augurs, so it must be large. The Wrought?’

  ‘Perhaps. Thus far, nothing has been as I expected. We should keep the artefacts on board the Chalice of Fire for now, possibly indefinitely if this location has been compromised.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Obek, relaying the order to the pilot and not bothering to ask where that left them if the Wrought were no longer viable. He scowled. ‘It feels as if we have an armed vortex grenade in our hands, ready to detonate.’

  ‘That is not so far from the truth, brother-captain,’ T’kell said. ‘Our father created much with his hammer, miracles of science and invention. I know, I have seen them. Peerless in their capacity to do great good, but also great ill. They are weapons, brother-captain.’

  ‘Weapons have capacity for neither good nor ill. Only their wielders have that.’

  ‘Precisely, brother.’

  FOUR

  Our father’s legacy

  Zau’ull pressed his gauntleted hand against the side of the Armarium in the hopes of feeling closer to Vulkan. T’kell had forged the repository for the sole purpose of transporting the artefacts to the Wrought. Zau’ull had thought he was alone in the Chalice of Fire’s lower depths until Krask came to join him.

  ‘I envy you, Firefather.’

  ‘Why is that, brother?’ Zau’ull asked, abruptly self-conscious as he let his hand fall away. It lingered, suspended a few inches from the metal before it came back to his side and he turned to face the Wyvern. This was Krask’s war-name, self-bestowed in the belief he embodied the fearsome prowess of its namesake. His men carried similar names, wearing them as if they were masks.

  ‘I envy your closeness to our father, his…’ and he struggled for a moment to think of the word, ‘…presence that you alone can feel.’

  It fell just short of suggesting the idea that Vulkan’s spirit, his soul, lived on in some fashion. Such notions, even in an enlightened galaxy rapidly collapsing back into superstition, were still unfavourable.

  ‘Yes, his presence,’ Zau’ull said distantly.

  ‘It is a great honour to stand sentinel at the gate to our father’s legacy.’

  Zau’ull smiled. ‘You have a poetic disposition, brother.’

  Krask blinked once as if he didn’t understand the Chaplain’s meaning. His gaze strayed to the Armarium. It was large, the design nondescript despite what it contained. Five wonders, five miracles of Vulkan’s creation. T’kell had secured them within and only he, Obek and Zau’ull could open the repository’s gene-coded door without using force.

  ‘Beyond his personal war apparel, I have never seen our father’s works. I imagine they are something to behold.’

  ‘This very ship is amongst them, brother,’ Zau’ull said. ‘As is the weapon mounted upon its hull.’

  The air felt stifling and made the chamber seem close despite its size. The metal of the deck beneath and the walls surrounding them were black. Soot and cinder bled unceasingly through the vents, filling the corridors of the vessel with an acerbic odour redolent of the hundreds of forges and foundries below. The Chalice of Fire was no warship; it did not possess the weapons of a battle-barge, but it could create them.

  ‘It is a forge ship like no other,’ said Zau’ull.

  ‘The likes of which will never be seen again,’ uttered Krask, and the wonder in his eyes faded as quickly as it had been born.

  Zau’ull felt it too. ‘No. It will not.’

  ‘And we shall die with it.’

  ‘Yes, we shall.’

  Heavy footfalls echoed down a long corridor of a different ship, announcing the presence of the Salamanders legionary not affiliated with the Unscarred. His name was Saurian, and he wore a suit of draconic war-plate, Mark IV with a torn hide of lizard scale and tusked shoulder guards. A snarling helmet s
at in the crook of his left arm, whilst his right was by his side, one hand on the clawed pommel of his sword.

  As he breached the threshold of a large room, passing through a wide metal archway, he was struck by the scent of machine oil and lapping powder. It was dark within, and the shadows cast by the low-burning lume-globes suggested vastness. They danced across the legionary sitting in a seat of iron. Not a throne, it was not grand enough to be considered such, but a place to brood and seethe in embittered silence. This was the Iron Father, and though he took no throne, he was king in this place.

  Lost to grim thoughts, the Iron Father only looked up when the Salamanders legionary had stopped a few strides from his seat. A whirring of gears and servos accompanied the gesture, emanating like a growl of displeasure from the black-armoured warrior.

  ‘What scraps do you bring me this time, Saurian?’

  The Salamanders legionary bowed and took a knee.

  ‘We have found him, Iron Father.’

  The Iron Father shifted, lifting his head from where it had been resting against his clenched fist. The dark flashed with a pinprick of blood-red light from his right eye. To Saurian, it looked eager and homicidal. The Iron Father smiled, the scars stitching the flesh half of his face to the metal half pulling so taut they looked as if they might break and tear his imperious visage apart.

  ‘Have Brother Gallikus rouse Azoth and the other Revenants.’

  Saurian was about to reply when he realised the Iron Father wasn’t talking to him. A spectre emerged from the shadowy penumbra at the edge of the room, invisible until the moment he had been called upon. The Silent nodded, his avian war-helm dipping like the head of a black crow.

  The Iron Father’s voice cut through Saurian’s thoughts.

  ‘Our quarry won’t escape us this time. Horus’ lapdog will lead us to our enemy and then burn for what he has done.’

  Dismissed, Saurian stood, turned on his heel and walked away. Only when he was sure he was out of earshot and the Iron Father had returned to his machinations did he speak low into his gorget-vox.

  ‘Ahrem, iron-brother, the Raven is on his way.’ Saurian didn’t wait for an answer – he just kept walking, trying to remember how they had come to this.

  He could not.

  Ahrem Gallikus closed off the vox and gave a voiceless debt of gratitude to the Salamanders legionary. His breath ghosted in the chill air of the barracks. He and some of the other, normal, legionaries aboard the Obstinate had taken to calling it the ‘mausoleum’. It seemed perversely fitting.

  ‘This is where I leave you, brother,’ he said to the hulking figure inside the stasis-casket. Most of his body was obscured by the frost against the glass and the internal cryo-mist, but Gallikus could still see Azoth’s face. He had to crane his neck – each casket was set upon a raised dais that provided power – but he could see it well enough. It looked as cold, dead and gelid as when Azoth had been interred into the wretched thing.

  ‘But you’re not dead, are you…’

  As an Iron Hands legionary, Gallikus knew machines. He knew how to tend and repair them and how to sabotage them, even how to affix a bionic, but he was no Ironwrought or Techmarine – the Iron Father’s iron-craft was beyond him. For the moment.

  The Raven would be here soon, and his approach would be undetected. Gallikus needed to return to his quarters. For some reason, the Revenants responded to him better than anyone else aboard ship. Gallikus hoped some old memory prompted it, but in his bones he knew it was just a quirk.

  As he backed away from Azoth, the half-light from the lumens revealed a host of stasis-caskets.

  No, coffins, thought Gallikus, meant for the dead. Our father’s legacy.

  ‘Only, you don’t know you’re dead,’ he muttered aloud. ‘Not yet.’

  He sealed the door behind him and made for his quarters to await the Silent.

  FIVE

  Ave Mechanicum

  The Unscarred reached the edge of the outpost on foot, the gunships having landed far enough away so as not to appear on augur or be spotted by a watch station, not that they had seen any other signs of life on this desolated world. The ruins of the city had masked their approach but meant the Salamanders legionaries were spread out, hunkered down behind walls or the shells of half-destroyed buildings. In the darkness, staying out of the lightning flashes of the storm, the Salamanders legionaries could observe the Mechanicum cohorts without fear of detection. It had proved an unnecessary precaution, as the occupants of the outpost appeared oblivious to anything but their labours, the purpose of which remained unclear.

  The scale of their endeavours was not.

  A red-robed army had descended on this place and were erecting a prefabricated structure of high-sided walls and towers, something more akin to a fortress than a temporary station, the one detected by the gunship’s long-range augur. Menials and bulk-servitors toiled to lift wire-threaded power coils and huge cargo crates, whilst tracked automata wheeled in long tracts of piping. Silos and cogitators warred for space as it was slowly colonised by mechanised beings and their trappings. Red-robed overseers ran the operation, consulting data-slates, making computations and analysing data.

  Zandu observed everything through the green haze of the scopes, his view lit by occasional bright flashes. Deep night had set in, along with the storm that persisted on the horizon but now was closing in.

  ‘Single point of ingress,’ he said, handing the scopes to Obek.

  ‘A gate to a fortress. What are the Mechanicum even doing here? Are there any forge worlds nearby? How did they get here?’

  T’kell shook his head. He was watching too, but with his bionic eye he didn’t need the augmentation of the magnoculars.

  ‘Is it possible the Mechanicum knew about this place?’ asked Obek. ‘About the Wrought?’

  A dread thought occurred to T’kell in that moment, his jaw abruptly clenching as if to try to deny it. ‘Horus may have done. Vulkan confided much in him during the early days of the Crusade.’

  ‘And the Mechanicum? What is their role in this?’

  ‘The Legiones Astartes and the priesthood have fought side by side on many occasions. It’s possible they are still allies of the Warmaster.’

  ‘Mars and Terra are allies, Forgemaster,’ said Obek, setting down the scopes. ‘After the betrayals… surely the Red Planet would have rescinded their support?’

  T’kell’s silence spoke for him.

  The three legionaries lay on their fronts, just behind the cusp of a low rise of earth. They had much to question. No one on Nocturne had heard from Mars, or any of their emissaries, for many months.

  ‘Their presence is unusual, and entirely too coincidental,’ T’kell said at last, considering a less abhorrent question than the previous one. ‘I can draw only one conclusion from it.’

  Zandu didn’t need to be a Techmarine to know what that was.

  ‘They know it’s here and are looking for it.’

  ‘Yes, brother-sergeant,’ T’kell replied. ‘The Wrought is a weapons cache. Vulkan had several, established during the Great Crusade in case the Legion was ever in need of rapid resupply whilst on campaign.’

  Obek grimaced ruefully. ‘The kind of secret he would share with his Warmaster.’

  ‘The Mechanicum are not here alone,’ said Zandu.

  Obek sighed ‘The renegades we burned… But we do not know for sure they are allied together.’ He swore under his breath. ‘Vulkan’s blood.’

  ‘It might not be of their own volition,’ suggested T’kell, ‘but either way, we must know.’ He started to rise. ‘We need to get closer.’

  Zandu turned to look back down the rise to where three squads of Salamanders legionaries were waiting in dispersed formations, weapons primed. A curt battle-sign from the sergeant saw them advance up the hill.

  ‘How close?’ asked Obek.

  ‘Close enough that I can infiltrate one of their data-feeds. Fifty feet, give or take.’

  SIX
<
br />   False memories of the massacre

  T’kell had gone alone, it being easier for a single legionary in power armour to remain hidden in close proximity to the walls than thirty. Obek kept his eye on the Forgemaster, though, hunkering down inside a crater just large enough to conceal his presence from the sentries on the walls. Mercifully, though the labour crews inside the complex were numerous, the sentries were few, and just lightly armed skitarii.

  Zandu had gone back to the squads who had dug in farther up the hill behind the legionaries, so Obek was now alone in protecting the Forgemaster.

  Forgefather, he reminded himself as he watched the Techmarine.

  T’kell had taken another crater, staying low as he tried to get close to a servitor or augmented menial. The Mechanicum labourers were rad-shielded within hermetically sealed suits, not that it would make any difference to T’kell.

  Obek knew little about the Mechanicum or their ways. He had not been inducted into the Martian ranks like T’kell, but knew their machine language was called ‘binaric’ and that T’kell would ‘cant’ an interrogative into the nearest non-biological mind and then siphon off whatever secrets it harboured in its deep programming. He would not even need to touch it.

  Obek observed from the crater. No outward sign of the Techmarine’s success or failure presented itself, and the sense of impotence at having to watch and wait sat poorly with the brother-captain, but he would not risk an interruption.

  ‘I do not like this waiting, brother-captain,’ Zandu said over the vox.

  ‘A Salamander is patient, brother-sergeant,’ Obek replied, but inwardly empathised. ‘He tempers his mood as he tempers metal.’

  ‘You sound like Zau’ull.’

  The tremor of a smile crept onto Obek’s face.

  ‘I’ll consider that a compliment. Any unusual movement?’

  Obek had instructed Zandu to maintain close overwatch on the outpost. From his higher vantage point, the sergeant had a much better view. Obek could see little more than the sloping walls and the gap between them through which the workers passed back and forth. Should any sign, however ostensibly innocuous, suggest they had been discovered, they were to engage immediately.