by David Guymer
He was awake, though. He was always awake.
From behind his eyelids Maecenas watched the command crew prepare for the pilot cadre. They had all done this so many times that well-worn routine had replaced indignance. System-wrights began to power down their stations. Chromed neural cables snaked from their scalps to ducts in the floor. Their skin was almost translucent under the glow of their instruments. Wide, black eyes watched data values change on screens, and long-fingered hands made fine adjustments. All were Jovian bred, and most had never felt the pull of a planet’s surface or breathed unfiltered air.
The Primigenia was a Jovian trading barge, a little over five kilometres from prow to stern. She had been born in the Shoal-cities above Jupiter’s pole, and had swum the solar voids for twenty-eight generations. Her engines and systems were not the products of Mars, but the secrets of the void clans saved from the darkness of Old Night. In times past she had hauled plunder from the edges of the system, and traded with the warlords of Terra. Now she was one link in a chain of ships spooling through the system’s inner and outer reaches. Filled with supplies she passed through controlled corridors of space until she docked at one of the Throneworld’s outer void stations, and unloaded her cargo. Rogal Dorn might have barred its gates, but Terra’s hunger could never be sated. So, the Primigenia and her sisters made their way to and from Terra again and again, like laden mules to the gates of a citadel.
‘We are at dead stop. Monitor craft coming alongside,’ said one of the crew.
Maecenas watched the ship’s master glance at the first attendant and nod.
‘Extend docking gantries,’ called First Attendant Sur Nel Hon-XVII. She was Maecenas’ second cousin by oath, and he made a show of holding both that connection and her rank in contempt. She hated him in return. That was good. It stopped her noticing anything else about him.
‘Pilot cadre on board. Looks like a full inspection force,’ Sur Nel muttered, as data scrolled across her visor.
The shipmaster let out a long breath and shook his head.
‘This is not going to move quickly.’
‘It never does,’ replied Sur Nel.
Behind his closed eyes, Lieutenant Maecenas V Hon-II began to count the seconds, one after another.
Gobi tox-wastes
Terra
They rode ahead of the dawn light, the crawler shaking, the smell in the crew compartment getting worse by the second. It had been eighteen hours since they had left the settlement at the edge of the tox-plateau. Eighteen hours of twelve humans sitting, farting and sweating in a metal box while the night passed by unseen.
Most of the scavenger contingent had started the journey with jokes and attempts at conversation. That had stopped when it became clear that Myzmadra and her two colleagues were not interested in being friendly. The scavs had retreated into silence, fiddling with their weaponry and equipment. They were all big, all vat-graft muscle and crude augmetics. They had a lot of scars too: jagged craters from bullets, pale splashes from acid burns, and furrows from knife cuts. Most of them wore what armour they had over bare skin, as though daring anyone who fought them to give them a new scar. They smelt of gun oil, sump liquor, cauliflower and greed.
Myzmadra looked at the triangulator on her wrist, and frowned. Cogs whirled and bubbles of mercury shifted behind the crystal casing.
‘What is that thing?’ growled the scav sat opposite her. She looked up. He was a big one. The rest of the gang called him Grol. He had a drill hammer instead of a right arm, and a pair of machine claws bonded to his spine. His face was red chrome above his teeth, and he had slots for eyes. She looked back down at the triangulator without replying.
‘It’s a triangulator.’ She looked up again to see who had spoken. The scav boss, who had said his name was Nis, grinned back at her. She caught the glint of the silver inlay in his ceramite teeth. His eyes were cones of focusing lenses, and his hands were spiders of brass. His grin widened. ‘Clever little piece of archeotech. Lets you find somewhere even though the rad is bad out here and the signal storms are worse. Worth its weight...’
He let the word hang on the edge of his grin.
She held his gaze. The rest of her was utterly still, the fingers of her right hand poised above the triangulator. Inside her body glove she tensed muscle groups, and let the breath settle to the bottom of her lungs. She was poised, a single reflex away from movement, while outside of her skin nothing had moved.
She held Nis’ gaze. He raised his brass hands.
‘Just joking,’ he said, grinning wider. ‘After all, you pay the likes of us to come out here and dig, you got to have something worth finding, and a way to find it, right?’
She nodded, and looked back down to the spinning cogs and mercury.
Numbers had started to tick around the edge of the triangulator.
‘Close,’ said Ashul softly from beside her. She hadn’t even realised he was awake. He had folded his hands over his chest and gone to sleep just after they had left the settlement, not moving since. ‘And right on time too,’ he said, pulling his rebreather mask down over his face.
She took a mask from the rack behind her, and gave the figure on the other side of her a nudge.
‘I am quite awake,’ said Incarnus. ‘How I could be thought to be otherwise under the circumstances is to stretch imagination to its outer tolerance.’ He ran his fingers over his scalp, and Myzmadra could see a skim of moisture on his skin. He blinked, grey lids flicking over iris-less eyes. She handed him the mask.
The scav gangers had noticed them getting ready and were already racking weapons, and plugging breath filters into their mouths. Those that had mouths.
She pulled her own mask on and flicked the visor’s outer layer to black. Beside her, Incarnus flicked a hand at the triangulator.
‘On time,’ he said.
Bhab Bastion
The Imperial Palace, Terra
Archamus woke and came off the stone of his bed in a single movement.
‘Threat report...’ The order began in his throat, and died on his tongue. His hearts were hammers inside his ribs.
The cool gloom of his chamber answered him with silence.
He looked around. The night sky looked back at him through a firing slit in the wall above him. Besides that the only light came from the candle which sat in a niche above the bed. Hours and minutes were marked as lines and numbers on the tallow. One hour remained between the flame and the midnight line. He had slept for thirty minutes. Just enough for dreams to begin, but not enough for him to remember them.
His bolter was heavy in his hands, drawn and armed even as he woke. Slowly he tried to let his muscles relax. He could feel his blood fizzing. Behind his eyes he felt the static sensation as his mind caught up with his nerves. The bionics of his right leg clicked and hissed as his weight shifted.
Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes in which the world had turned, and his eyes had been closed. His ears strained for the sound of running feet, of sirens.
Nothing.
Just the beat of blood in his hearts and the distant crackle of dust blowing into the void shields high above the bastion’s walls. The machine rack holding the pieces of his armour sat silent in the space before the door. Its readout lights blinked green. His arming servitors stood at the edges of the room.
He let out a breath and lowered the gun. Aching weariness crawled back into his muscles.
Thirty minutes. It had been the most sleep he had managed in months, a necessity rather than the luxury it felt like. The catalepsean node at the back of his brain let him defer the need to sleep, but he could not outrun fatigue forever. So, he had let himself sleep fully, and tried not to think of it as weakness.
He took a step to the granite bowl of water on a shelf opposite the bed. The servos in his bionic arm clicked as he set the bolter down. A thread of cold air ran across his ski
n. Night stole what little heat clung to the air this high up, and the firing slit held no glass to keep it out. Ice had formed on the surface of the water in the bowl. He plunged his right hand through it, and scooped the liquid onto his face. The cold was reassuring in its sharpness. The water in the bowl settled, ripples stilling, pieces of ice knocking against the bowl’s lip.
For a second he found himself looking down at fragments of his face reflected in the water. Time and service had left their marks on him, both within and without.
Old and worn, he thought, as his eyes traced the tangle of lines and scars on his cheeks. His beard had been the grey of slate for four decades, but now there was a hint of chalk at the edges. He looked at the three studs bonded to the left of the brow. All of them were jet, black as the void, each a half-century of war in an unkind age.
He scooped up another handful of water, and the reflection vanished in fresh ripples. He straightened.
‘Armour,’ he said.
Three servitors stepped from the edge of the room. All were hunched, their backs bent beneath haloes of mechanical arms. Brass visors with cruciform holes for eyes covered their faces. Black robes hung over what remained of their flesh. They lifted the first pieces of armour from the armature, disconnecting power feeds and slotting components together.
They clad him layer by layer, riveting each plate in place, connecting wires, sealing ports. At last they stepped back and he stood, burnished yellow gleaming in the candlelight. The star of Inwit sat on his chest, moulded from silver and gold, its rays clasped in a fist of jet. A black-and-red cloak trimmed with ice lion fur hung from his shoulder. His mono-eyed, Crusade-mark helmet was locked to his waist, leaving his face bare. He felt the usual twinge in his nerves as the connections to his bionic limbs asserted themselves fully.
He took up his weapons from the rack, locking his bolter to one thigh, his bolt pistol to the other, and fastening a broad-bladed seax to his hip. Last of all, he lifted Oathword in his bionic hand, metal fingers clacking on its adamantium haft. Its head was fashioned from black stone that he had mined from the dead world of Stroma, and shaped over the course of a year. The ball of the pommel was half silver and half black iron, etched with the star constellations of Inwit. It was heavy but in his machine grasp its weight was nothing. He looked at it for a second, noting the crystal flecks shimmering beneath the stone’s surface. Unbreakable, almost unworkable: a stone that defied the universe by its existence. He nodded and touched the mace’s head to his scalp, then he locked it to his war-plate with a snap of magnetic force.
He walked from the chamber into the gloom of the corridor outside. A gust of air ran past him and the light of the torches burning in the wall brackets billowed. He began to walk. The signals array in the collar of his armour started chiming, and vox transmissions began to fill his ears. He could hear every military signal in a sphere of space that extended ten kilometres in every direction, and up to the edge of Terra’s atmosphere. His mind sifted the information, building patterns of strength and weakness. The Huscarl squad assigned to the primarch’s person was in place. The second and third security cordons were spread throughout the bastion. Beyond that, forty-six Legion units moved through the Palace on carefully randomised patterns. Other forces were reporting nothing that gave him pause. Everything was as it needed to be.
His eyes moved over the stones of the passages and stairwells as he climbed towards the command chamber. It was an ugly creation, both in intent and in execution. Chisel marks cut the faces of the granite walls, and its crenellations bit the air like bared teeth. It was a brutish, unrepentant creation in Archamus’ eyes. He had wondered, once, if perhaps its makers had not intended it to last, but simply to endure through the trials of some lost age. Endure it had. He could not deny that.
What will endure of what we have made? he wondered, and walked on while a palace waiting for war whispered in his ears.
Click here to buy Praetorian of Dorn.
To my editors, Lindsey and Graeme. Without them, Dorn’s last son would never have made it this far.
A Black Library Publication
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS UK
Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover art by Víctor Manuel Leza Moreno.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-149-6
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