by David Guymer
'Six, ready,' Moses confirmed.
'Descent speed.' voxed Paliolinus.
The early Catherics of DuCaine's homeland had thought hell a frozen wasteland of eternal winter. It was only later iterations of the superstition that had filled it with flames, and it was the earlier interpretation of mankind's primordial dread that hit DuCaine as he hauled himself onto the thick rockcrete-block wall.
The X Legion had dug in in the basin of an extinct caldera, part of a range of mountains composed of frozen ethane that circled the southern lunar pole, near to where the warriors of the Emperor's Children were believed to have established a base of operations.
Heaving bodies of men and machines surged down the rust-coloured, semi-transparent slopes. Over a certain distance, in the dark, in tire sublimation of hydrocarbon ice to phantasmal gases, man and machine became largely indistinguishable, blobs of drab metal and void-armoured flesh, imbued by aerial flares with the colours of blood and fire. The condemned wail of the Tarantula positions was the sound to which the harrowing was played out, their screams overloading even the fine discrimination of Space Marine hearing. Denuded of that sensation, he could only feel the stride of the Legio Decimare as the Titans walked towards his lines. Like the beasts of Hellenic legend from which they drew their name, marching to war on the gods that had made them.
A steel plate covered the wound in the right side of DuCaine's face, but with his remaining eye he took in the state of the X Legion forces.
To his right, an aegis defence line was engaged in a blistering fire duel with a bloc of Plutonic Janissars in high-spec ice-world combat gear. To the left, a column of main-line fighting vehicles, including the precursor-pattern Sicaran battle tank Beast of Manus, crumbled before the weight of enemy Leman Russ Conquerors. Immediately in front of him, across the iced-up sentry lines, a horrendously outclassed formation of the Afrik Demi-Mechanised held their lines against waves of encroachment by III Legion breacher squads.
'They're coming, all right.'
He lifted his cloak in one hand to display the glittering device of Clan Sorrgol for all to see, just as a barrage of sonic claps took their shot at his punished eardrums and drew his gaze upwards. An arrowhead of Xiphon Interceptors flashed across his vantage, causing his cloak to balloon up around his fist, and gunned through a loose hail of flak towards the steaming crags that encircled their position.
The Emperor's Children were about to learn the cost of challenging the Iron Hands in battle.
The storm had been raised.
It was time to bring down the hammer.
The drop pod's hatches blew out on impact, shattering the steeply inclined ice like docking claw and assault ramp crowbarred into one utilitarian lump of metal. Entry heat steamed off the pod's thermal shielding, anointing the Avernii Clan veterans of the First Order within with a noxious libation of aerosolised copper and gaseous hydrocarbons.
Gabriel Santar broke through the murk, down the ramp and out onto the rapidly sublimating permafrost of Vesta.
Melt vapour enveloped him. The ground beneath his armoured boots literally boiled with the infinitesimal heat that escaped their seals. His helmet display struggled to declutter, shedding icons, redrawing the concealed topography from augur inloads. All the while, irresistible forward momentum drove him down the slope towards the sounds of combat. The primarch had seen fit to honour Order Primus with the first century of prototype Cataphractii battle suits. 'We're living in a golden age,' Harik Morn had said, a wetness in his eye, as he broke open the consignment from Mars. Santar clenched one immense, crackling glove, atmosphere steaming from his grip.
It felt like he was wearing a Land Raider.
The removal and rationalisation of squad and hazard icons left two sets of runes that his authorisations could not touch. The first were the mission imperatives uploaded and installed by the primarch himself. The second was the commencement order from Lord Commander DuCaine: codephrase 'hammer'.
Typically unimaginative.
DuCaine was the last of the Terran old guard to occupy a position of high command. From the first days, the primarch had chosen to promote from his own, but DuCaine simply refused to die. Santar thought the Lord Commander a relic better suited to a position on the Clan Council lecturing neophytes on ancient histories. DuCaine thought Santar an over-promoted pup with a voice too close to the primarch's ear. Mutual antagonism made them both better warriors.
'Terminators front and centre,' he voxed. 'Breacher units to flank. Tactical squads, at a distance, overwatching the advance. Continual auspex sweeps for enemy rearguards.'
This face of the caldera had a relatively shallow grade with an aspect that shaded it from the meagre warmth of the most proximate stars. That was enough to give it the thickest and most stable ice layer in the vicinity, and so the bulk of DuCaine's 'hammer' had been deployed here. Santar's visor display continued to update and apprise on the smaller troop and armour drops that had been deposited around the caldera basin in an encirclement position, even if he did not wish to see it. He was fiddling with the complexity of the rune display when the murmur of distant combat was broken by the crack of a solitary shot.
For the count of about three seconds, the Terminators continued to plod forwards as if nothing had happened. Then the Order auspex trooper, Joraan, marked out from his brethren by the twanging sensor pole, dropped with a helmet splattered with red. Damn. A count of about three seconds more and the Terminators were still grinding downhill. They were too bulky to stop. Damn.'
Bolter-fire echoed from the ice ridge above the drop pods, and suddenly Santar's carefully ordered rune display was awash with auspex hits.
The more mobile tactical and breacher squads turned to face the threat and were methodically picked off, all while Santar and a hundred of the X Legion's best stomped and slipped down the slope.
'Back,' he bellowed, into the vox and through his voice augmitter grilles. 'Back up to the drop pods. We'll use their cover to make a stand.' His armour's mission imperatives registered non-penetrating hits to back and arm. Trembling with fury, he aimed behind him and shredded the melt fog with fire from his combi-bolter.
Defeat he could bear. Humiliation he refused to tolerate.
The ground beneath his feet hissed and bubbled, fissuring beneath his weight and spewing boiling ethane over his boots as he finally managed to arrest his forward charge.
The high-powered whine of at least twenty cold-stressed suspensor/repulsor drives drew Santar's ire before he could give it a target of his own choosing. A squadron of jetbikes pierced the ice haze like throwing knives. Their purple cowlings were decorated with chipped ice and stylised equidae, the brilliant palatine aquila on their front fairings proudly displayed in gold. Two Cataphractii were gunned down in the process of turning towards the initial ambush, the jetbikes naught but the rumour of engine noise, before Santar and the remainder of his warriors could bring their heavier guns to bear.
'I thought that you were the heroes in this conflict, brother!' Santar spat after them. He scanned the melt vapours with his full suite of instruments, but could still detect nothing but ghosts and static echoes. He cursed the loss of his auspex trooper. 'What manner of hero fights with such cowardice?'
'The one that wins, captain.' The disembodied reply came from the mist. 'The one that always wins.'
Another blizzard of gunfire dropped a handful of his Terminators, but for the most part the new-pattern armour held up to the punishment, the warriors adopting a defensive ring with red paint splattered all over their ebon war-plate.
As the echoes of the volley faded, the III Legion crystallised from the mist to take its place.
Their war-plate was highly elaborate, gilded with ebru and hagiography, their softseals cloaked with fine silks that rippled under the gentlest motion. They wore long red cloaks buckled with elaborate clasps, and came armed with a variety of melee weapons, many with one in each hand. To Santar's chagrin he saw that there were Iron Hands amongst their
number. He saw Veneratii Urien, built like a bull grox, an enormous power-axe in each chain-wrapped fist. And there, Harik Morn, charging at his former brethren with a chainsword held in a two-handed butcher's grip. Santar emptied a full magazine into Morn's plastron as the mingled-blade brotherhood of the III Legion slammed into a wall of iron plate.
Or rather, it didn't. It hit the wall the way a fog would. Swordsmen ducked under blows, around guards, slipped through gaps to assail their larger and more ponderous adversaries from all sides. Urien and Morn were the best warriors in the clan, and Santar had little doubt that the bladesmen attacking him now were drawn from the finest of the III Legion's Second Company.
There was some satisfaction at the fact that they had come for him rather than for DuCaine.
'You are dead, captain.'
Santar turned his head towards the voice, the awesome bulk of his armour following a second after.
Captain Akurduana's armour was more gold than purple, the fine etching of his signature tughra flowing around the left side of the chest plastron and down his arm. The palatine aquila spread across the width of his chest-plate looked bright enough to take wing. A horsehair plume trailed from his helmet, red cloak fluttering as the bolters on the crags took shots at anything that came within six metres of their captain. Except for Santar. Akurduana clearly wanted him for himself. The captain bore two long swords, but had only seen fit to draw one. The other remained as pure statement unrequited, sheathed in yellow silk at his hip. Rumour had it he was good, best in the Legion.
Santar wasn't in his Legion.
'Not yet, I'm not. You're splitting hairs.' Akurduana shrugged and leapt into the attack.
Santar took a step back, but his armour was too cumbersome, too slow, and he instead let it take the blade across the chest plating before lashing out with his lightning claw. With a weapon like that he only needed to hit his enemy once. The air burned as the energised gauntlet passed through it, but Akurduana evaded as though Santar's intent had been inscribed on the face of his helmet.
A dragged sidestep, a pivot, and then a strike so glancing it was almost casual, and Santar's gauntlet smashed into the permafrost.
A geyser of fast-thawed ethane magma smote his faceplate, bent his neck hard back against his gorget bundles, and punched him onto his back.
He gave an impotent howl as the sublimation of the ground from under him stymied his attempt to rise. With what sounded like a sigh, Akurduana brought his blade to Santar's throat seals.
Up close Santar could appreciate the craftsmanship. One warrior to another. As fine as anything made by the hands of Ferrus Manus.
He had a moment to think of something biting to utter in defeat before the primarch's mission imperatives blinked in his display, expanding to flush his visor with red light and his non-critical armour systems with disabling code. He saw Harik Morn stagger towards him, cradling a section of plastron that had been pummelled so hard with noospherically active red pigment that the plate had actually been breached.
'Damn, brother. You're taking this seriously.'
Santar could only admire Ferrus Manus' foresight. Without the disablement protocols he would have torn Akurduana's head off about now. Exercise or no exercise.
'I'm sorry, captain,' said Akurduana, and appeared to mean it. 'But this time you really are dead.'
'Everyone asks me about the hands, but they were not what struck me when I first met Ferrus Manus. It was the eyes. To look into them is to look into a mirror too dark and vast to reflect anything but that which it wishes. There is beauty in that, after a fashion…'
- The Remembrances of Akurduana, Vol. CCLXVII,
The Fall of the Lords of Gardinaal
TWO
With a little over forty years out of Luna drydock, the Fist of Iron was young and headstrong. If she could appear, at times, intemperate, then Adept Xanthus, Mechanicum representative to the 52nd Expedition Fleet, was swift to point out that such bellicosity was only to be expected in a fiery spirit still unsure of her strength. Beams of nanoposited plasteel groaned under the weight of titanic real-space engines, life-support systems of the most advanced and adaptive design to have emerged from the laboria of Terra since the Dark Age of Technology cycled the atmosphere with the vehemence of a fire-breathing drake. An outsider might have mistaken the carbonaceous dust on uncommonly stiff breezes as a symptom of deterioration, but that was how the Medusans liked it And to her bones, of basalt quarried from the Felgarrthi plains, the Fist of Iron was a Medusan ship.
She would be the first of many.
From her bristling, fully automated gun decks to her ablative hull armour, from her interplexed auspex and augur systems to her Geller generators and every aspect of her interiors, the loosed genius of Ferrus Manus had been poured into her design. As Medusa was dark, so too was Fist of Iron, lit only by the glow of consoles and of luminescent stones quarried from the seabeds of Medusa and inset into the ceiling fixtures. As Medusa was frigid and hostile, so too then was Fist of Iron, hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres of corridors and crawlways sheathed in ironglass and stone, every wheel hatch as magnificently austere as the frozen tundra of Karaashi. Better to carry the distemper of the primarch's adoptive home world to the stars and to take pride in it than to let comfort moderate their warrior spirit.
And as with Medusa herself, the surface cold was a front for a broiling inner fire.
Moses Trurakk remained plugged into the Xiphon's slumbering spirit long after the deckhands had completed post-flight checks and logged off-shift. The glow strips were dimmed, his eyes closed, but his mind was alive with sensation. Copper-brown clouds. The roar of engines. A glimpse of black, the wing of an aircraft as it rolled out of his crosshairs.
You need a lighter touch on the ailerons. Without opening his eyes, he brushed the flap levers with his fingers, then moved to the flight stick. Not so belligerent with the stick. She wants to fly, brother. Let her. He bit back the urge to answer the memory, nudging the unpowered stick left, right. Even in her sleep, the Xiphon longed to be airborne.
A Terran would have been hesitant about describing such experiences as dreams. The aircraft's flight cogitator had been powered down, shut off from external stimuli, allowing its combat logs to be decompiled for exload. But he was Medusan. Reverence of the machine came as naturally as turning his face from the wind. He knew that it dreamed.
Do you love her, brother? I know that you talk to her when you're alone in there.
The black-hulled Primaris-lightning came into view. Its appearance spiked his bloodstream with adrenal compounds, enough to make him forget that this was not his dream. He triggered the lascannons. In the deserted hangar, nothing happened, but in the dream shared between Moses and the Xiphon, bolts of ultra high-energy las streaked across the jinking strike fighter.
Combat is more than numbers and angles. It is a joust.
As a mortal he had grown up with machines. Life on Medusa depended on their protection and their favour. They demanded respect, not love, and each of the Legion's machines had their own character, their own favourites. The Xiphon chafed against its pairing as vociferously as Moses had at first. He could hardly blame it for fighting him.
My brother doth protest too much.
Moses shook his head. The last thing he needed was his wing-brother's words looping around the Xiphon's already truculent spirit as it slept.
'After the Lightning,' he murmured, pulling lightly on the stick. 'We will do it right this time.'
'Trurakk?'
It took Moses a moment to register that Ortan Vertanus' voice had not arisen from the exload dream. He tried to focus. The Lightning. It was moving off, about to thrust out.
'I know you're in there - I can see your carapace lights from here.'
'I am practising,' he snapped back through gritted teeth, trying to hold on to the dream.
'We all know you need the practice, but enough is enough. You smother her with your affections.'
Moses b
ecame aware of chuckles. But not, this time, from the dashboard vox.
'I recognise every word you use, but put together they make no sense to me.'
'Disconnect yourself, Trurakk.' This voice belonged to Wing Commander Paliolinus. The tone it used sternly discouraged further argument.
Reluctantly, Moses reached behind his neck and detached the neural shunt. It came away from his skull with a crunch of metal. Immediately the simulus glitched, then died. He took a deep breath of Fist of Iron's cold, caustic air, blinking quickly to reacquaint himself to this version of reality. He was still in the Xiphon's cockpit, but the canopy was up and it was dark, illuminated only, as Vertanus had pointed out, by the point lights of his flight carapace.
Still blinking, he leaned from his cockpit, carapace creaking, and saw the Emperor's Children of Scythe squadron were all down there. Edoran. Dour, impossible-to-please Edoran. His wing-brother, Thyro, holding a glass and wearing a stretched grin. Paliolinus' laconic wing-brother, Sekka, standing with crossed arms and peering into the darkened hangar with professional interest.
'Did you hear?' said Edoran, his expression characteristically heavy and joyless. Plug-in sites and noospheric tethers showed like chunky jewellery under the collar of his carapace. 'The next time we fly together it won't be a game. It's not just Kama with whom you need to develop an understanding. Men, too, have their singular natures.'
The Xiphon's name meant something like 'stiletto' or 'blade' in Captain Akurduana's ancestral tongue. Moses hated it.
'Hurry up and get down,' said Thyro wearily. 'Before he really starts.'
'I do not understand how fraternising will facilitate an understanding of relevance.'
'They're not all like that, are they?' Vertanus asked.
'The Captain introduced me to Lord Commander DuCaine,' said Paliolinus. 'So I can say not.' The wing commander looked up at Moses. 'You are about to fraternise and you are going to enjoy it. That's an order.'