by David Guymer
This, then, was what Caphen would have them hunt. The head. One of the Lords of the Gardinaal.
In a rattle of hydraulics and a squeal of rubber belts, the walker turned its guns towards the Iron Hands, tripod legs smashing the walkway to blocks of rubble. DuCaine shivered as he felt its gaze, as if he had just been singled out by a dead thing. An enraged roar snapped him out of it.
Breaking free of his command squad, Ulan Cicerus slashed at the machine monstrosity's hind leg with his power sword.
In biradial symmetry to its tripod legs, the war machine was similarly possessed of three upper arms, each one heavily weaponised and apparently independent of central coordination. As the Chapter Master's blade hissed towards its knee joint, a blade punched from an underslung sleeve on a trailing arm and speared the Ultramarine through the shoulder. Cicerus howled his pain as his full armoured weight was hooked from the ground by the meat of his arm, cloak trailing under him like a flag from a toppling pole.
'What are you waiting for, an invitation?' DuCaine opened up with his bolt pistol, and bid brothers swiftly backed up its fire with the hauler bangs of bolters.
Shield flares enveloped the morbid machine, but DuCaine could not tell if it had been damaged. Hashing tocsins mounted on a shoulder gantry whooped, carving the deep shadows on the floor of the habwalk with slashes of amber, even as thick black smoke billowed from vents in its armour. In a few seconds the blind cloud had enveloped the construct, the plasterbag stockade and the Ultramarines; even the wail of the tocsins became muted. 'Cease firing!' DuCaine lowered his pistol. 'You don't want to risk hitting the—' A large, flailing shape, cobalt blue and gold, emerged from the blind cloud and flew through the air like a catapult stone towards him.
Swearing loudly, DuCaine ducked behind the Land Raider's sponson armour. The Iron Hands squads dropped out of harm's way and took aim on the projectile, only holding their fire when they saw what it was.
The Chapter Master struck the quad launcher mounted in the Achilles-Alpha's glacis section, crushing one of the launch tubes and splitting the housing. DuCaine cursed again.
'After it!' someone yelled. Caphen. It was the sort of thing he'd do. 'Keep firing.'
DuCaine squinted into the blind cloud and waved at everyone to stand down. 'It's gone, lad. You'll only get into a firefight with the Ultramarines, and trust me, you don't want that. Go find Cicerus' second. We'll consolidate here, wait for the gas to clear, and bring our vehicles up to the branch line Slow and steady wins the race.'
'Children,' Glassius muttered as the young legionary sprinted off through the Gardinaal's broken stockade to where the XIII Legion tended to their dead.
'We were all young once.'
The Apothecary squatted down beside Cicerus.
'The Ultramarine lay sprawled over the slope of the Land Raider's glacis. His helmet was split from the jaw to the nose. Blood trickled from his mouth and nose to pool in the crack in his gorget. He was still breathing, but with obvious difficulty, great heaving rasps as if the waning force of his lungs were all that kept his ornamented breast-plate from crushing his chest. A great fracture ran up the middle of it. Garlands and rosaries lay over him, tattered and hanging, for all the world as if they had been tossed into the open casket of a hero by passing mourners.
'He will live,' Glassius announced. 'But he will need extraction to the Fist of Iron if he is to fight again.'
DuCaine grunted. 'I can't spare the warriors it'd take to carry him back. Move him into the back of the Land Raider and make him comfortable. We'll take him with—'
Cicerus caught his arm by the wrist. DuCaine hissed in surprise.
'I'll be a burden to no one.' The Chapter Master's voice was bubbly and wet, but his grip was adamant. 'I will find my own way back.'
'You won't make it off the front of my tank, lad.'
The Chapter Master emitted a groan that sounded as though it had been made by his muscles tearing as he slid off the slope of the tank and onto his feet. His knees almost buckled, but with the help of the Land Raider behind him, they held. 'You underestimate the resolve of the Thirteenth. I will make it. The Fifth Galilean are still outside the city. Colonel Riordan has unfortunately seen his share of Space Marine biology - I am sure he will be able to bind me sufficiently to return to the fray.'
DuCaine blinked, as though he'd been slapped in the face from a most unexpected quarter. 'A whole regiment? How many men is that?'
'Less than you think.' Cicerus held the crack in his breast-plate in one hand as he looked up to the larger Lord Commander. 'Mortal men fare less well under atomic attack even than the Legiones Astartes.'
DuCaine would have shoved the Ultramarine back against the tank if he thought he'd have been able to get back up again. Even so it was an effort. 'I'm bleeding warriors here.'
'It is what the Emperor created us to do, so others do not have to.'
'Spare me the rhetoric. I'm not expecting them to lead the damn charge.'
'You are talking about walking wounded, and they're the ones passed fit enough to leave the Executor. They are not ready for the front line.'
'They'd better get ready.'
DuCaine was already moving off to find a vox officer. Cicerus dragged himself a step after him, still holding his chest in one hand. 'I understand that you were lord of the Iron Hands once. Would you be so callous now, in your primarch's place?'
DuCaine looked back over his shoulder and shook his head. 'You heard wrong, son. I commanded the Storm Walkers. The Iron Hands will only ever have one master.'
Cicerus appeared to weaken as he spoke. 'Then allow me to give the order. I still command the 413th Expedition. It should come from me.'
An honourable gesture DuCaine dipped his head to it. 'No.' War was where honourable men were sent by the Stormlord-full to die. 'I insist!'
'Do you now?' He paused to reflect. 'Still no. I'll vox Akurduana and have him do it. He's closer. And he's always had a way with the mortals.'
'As I am greater than you, so the primarchs are exponentially greater again than I.' The Imperial stated it matter-of-factly, no hint of boastfulness or exaggeration. They are the leaders of the Great Crusade, crafted from the Emperor's own genetic stock to embody a different facet of his personality and the demands of war. Their powers are unfathomable, rivalling those of the Emperor himself.'
'Is the Emperor here?'
The warrior laughed coldly. 'You would know if he were.'
'And how many primarchs are there?'
'Fifteen. Would you like me to name them?'
Good. He was becoming biddable. 'How many are in the Gardinaal system?'
'One.'
'What is his name?'
'Ferrus Manus.'
Dekka's brow arched. 'Iron Hands. How very… subtle. And what facet of your Emperor or demand of war does he represent?'
No answer.
Dekka increased the pressure on what he believed to be the appropriate regions of the warrior's mind and repeated the question. A minor aneurism in the giant's remaining eye burst, splotching it red, but still he gave no answer. Either his brain was more cunningly engineered than even a high consul of the Gardinaal could comprehend or he genuinely did not know. He suspected the latter. All leaders had their secrets.
A nearby explosion, the closest yet, brought rust down from the ceiling.
'We have to leave.' The pacifier had his baton pistol and repression mace out again, head cocked to listen to the chatter in his comm-bud. 'The plant won't hold out much longer and there's a larger force heading right here from the rail nexus in one-one-two.' He looked up, face wan as though he had just had a gun pointed at his head. 'High Lord Strachaan withdraws to a more secure location and we have orders to pull back to provide escort. With the captive,' Dekka frowned down at the mumbling superhuman.
'What does Ferrus Manus want?'
'To conquer you.'
'Why?'
'He is a conqueror.'
'And yet he negotiated. Why? A plo
y?'
'That was not the primarch. That was Ulan Cicerus, Chapter Master of the Ultramarines.'
'Ultramarines?'
'Another Legion, born of another primarch.'
Dekka felt he understood. It did not seem dissimilar from the gene-lines of the Gardinaal caste system. He himself had been coupled with females of similarly desirable attributes and status and had, he presumed, sired many offspring. He felt a slight pang of regret. Odd, that he had not considered the fate of his progeny, the continuance of his gene-line, until now.
'The Emperor desires Gardinaal to be taken intact,' the warrior added unasked, filling the silence. 'He desires your industry, your military, your technology.'
'And Ferrus Manus answers to the Emperor?'
'All men must answer to the Emperor.'
'Sir.'
The pacifier was definitely anxious now, edging towards the rim of the assembler and the release clamps to free the prisoner. Dekka could hear the detachments outside powering up an armoured carrier to bear them away. Half the corporal's men had already left to delay the Imperial attack on the district power plant. He could sense their unease They were losing, and on some level they were not mentally geared to comprehend they knew it.
Dekka nodded and withdrew his mind. The warrior listed in his restraints.
'I never asked your name.'
'Moses,' he breathed. 'Trurakk.' He answered even without Dekka's presence in his brain. His mental pathways were conditioned to do so now.
'We thought we had won, you know,' Dekka said. 'We hadn't believed that the Imperium could be as vast as your emissaries claimed, that it could muster another force as great as that which we destroyed.'
'There are over a thousand Expedition Fleets that I know of. Some are large. Some are small. The Fifty-second is large and but a fraction of it is over Gardinaal, for we were engaged elsewhere.' Dekka did not ask where, or with what. Without the ability to travel beyond the system's edge such information was meaningless. 'The rest are en route, but the full might of Roboute Guilliman's Twelfth will arrive before they do.' He appeared to smile, though it was hard to tell in the dark. 'You never stood a chance.'
'Propaganda and lies,' Venn hissed.
'No. It isn't.' Dekka nodded over to the pacifier corporal. 'Leave him. Let his comrades find him here.'
'But, sir, we have—'
'He has told us all he can. But he might be of some further help.' Venn offered up his arm and this time Dekka allowed himself to be helped. He had a long walk ahead, and his aide wouldn't be much help in that capacity in a minute. Best to make full use of him while he was able. 'Take your units back to High Lord Straschaan as instructed,' he told the pacifier. 'Inform him that Venn and I mean to make contact with the Imperials. I assure you that no blame will fall upon you.' Probably. 'But Ferrus Manus is the one in charge. He is the one we must get to.'
'I would advise against presenting yourself to these Legiones Astartes.' The pacifier sneered down on their captive. 'They are indiscriminate killers.'
'Indeed they are, corporal. But if I might borrow your sidearm for one moment I believe I know how an old man and his wounded young assistant might get one step closer…'
Being brushed off was clearly a new experience for the legendary Captain Akurduana. The brilliantly armoured warrior traipsed after him through tent after tent, each one crowded with screaming medicae, bleeping instruments and clattering trolleys, like a mute guardian from the Somnus Citadel. Or Tull Riordan assumed he did. He didn't exactly have time to look over his shoulder to check for Space Marines. Holding up a hand, he grunted, 'Stop,' just in case, as a motley cavalcade of merciful sisters charged through, lilac habits fluttering, then limped on without breaking stride. A tent flap burst open. Blood-red of the Jupiter Storms. An almsman with thin-framed spectacles and a look of drained befuddlement flailed through and stumbled towards Tull, which rather settled the Space Marine question, as Akurduana was the sort of thing a man needed to look at twice.
'Treat him for the pain, then find a space for him in the hospicer tent.' Riordan triaged the particulars from what the almsman gabbled at him without, it felt, consciously taking on what he was talking about.
He pointed out the big pavilion, set up amidst twisted rubble, broken glass, buckled shelters, the occasional skeleton and one incongruously upright corner of an atomically scorched twelve-storey structure. It was picketed with parked tanks and boxed kit, men with leaking bandages and loosened fatigues sitting on them, smoking, dicing, as if a spell of medical leave to an atomic wasteland was what dreams were made of.
A splash of red canvas and the almsman vanished.
'Colonel?' said Akurduana.
Tull bit back a curse. 'You're still there? I thought you'd gone back to the front.'
'We still need to talk.'
'Then let's talk.' Even as he said it, he was striking off in a new direction.
Everything shook. Tents quivered. Trolleys rattled. Teeth ached. The pound of artillery was so loud, so incessant, that no one heard it anymore. Medicae addressed one another through pats on the shoulder, weighted looks, shakes of the head.
The air was smoke, a hundred thousand malignant carcinomas booked in for the decades ahead. Portable field generators, like upright heat lamps, generated bubbles of positive pressure to keep the worst of the atmospheric radiation out, but it was in the ground, in their clothes, on their skin. Men brought it with them in their lungs.
Immense spinal structures of melted and partially congealed metal stippled the haze of the outer capitolis like sutures in a world that had turned bad, the seeping abscesses of those parts of the city stubborn enough and flammable enough still to be aflame poisoning it with oranges and yellows. The moribund Titans of the Legio Atarus brooded silently over the wastage, like the legal witnesses of hell. And over the booms of the artillery, as if war was the sort of contest that produced winners, came the wail of shuttles, Rhinos and Chimeras being loaded for the front, mechanised divisions shepherding them away, superheavy divisions ready to go, the war-horns of the Reaver Titan, the screams of the dying and the men and women desperate to save them.
Crusade.
It had been the Legiones Astartes who had first used the word to describe the Emperor's war of reconquest. Imperial Truth may have crushed the faiths that had once shed blood over the battlefields of Antioch, Hattin and Jaffa, but even so it was a word to inspire the secular with the zeal of the righteous. It was a bloody word. Putting the word 'Great' in front didn't automatically make it so, but Tull had always believed in the cause. The suffering was for a reason, even if the unrecorded Space Marine who had coined the term was incapable of understanding what human suffering was.
He ducked under a half-rolled canvas flap and into an open-sided tent filled with bright lights and pain.
The tent was crammed with the injured, concertinaed into gurneys and foldaway beds, medicated to the eyeballs or otherwise mercifully unconscious. One man alone was screaming, with zeal enough for a dozen Crusades.
He was a young-looking man encased in ribbed grey carapace, a horrendous red slash across the belly. A sister was already in the process of hacking through the soldier's straps and webbing, the two muscular corpsmen that had brought him in pinning him to the trolley. Armour plates began to fall away under the precise incisions of the sister's knife, and black-coloured blood oozed through the boy's split belly. A few centimetres of creased, rope-like viscera squeezed through the tear. It stank like a mix of offal and soured milk.
'We'll need dressings, counterseptic pads and plenty of them, needle and thread, forceps, and a set of cochleari to return the intestines.' Tull rolled up his sleeves. An almsman sprayed his tattooed forearms with counterseptic. The boy whimpered as Tull's fingers explored his abdomen. 'And an analgesist if you can find one.' Tull touched the wound itself and brought an explosive scream, just as the almsman disappeared through the flap. 'Or a gag if you can't!' he yelled after. 'You.' He turned to Akurduana and look
ed up. 'Apply pressure here.'
The legionary held his hand uncertainly over the boy's belly. 'I should really—'
'Quickly now.' Tull hooked his cane over the trolley's handrail. His bare arms were fluffed with counterseptic powder, the long-handled spoon and hook-tipped forceps he had been handed glinting under the overhead lamps. 'I work. You talk.'
'Very well,' Akurduana mumbled, his elaborately worked gauntlet swallowing the wound and most of the boy's midriff besides. The soldier arched and sobbed and struggled, but between the Space Marine and the two burly corpsmen at either end he was going nowhere.
'Good. But a little less. A little less. There. Hold it like that.' Akurduana's face was rapt as Tull eased his cochlearum between the man's torn belly and the metal of the legionary's gauntlet and located the extruded intestine.
'Fascinating.'
'I would've thought you'd be used to this,' said Tull, locating the loop of intestine with the bowl of his spoon.
'This is rather the opposite of that for which I am best known.'
'Ease off now, just a little.' Akurduana did as he was bidden, and almsmen and sisters bearing counterseptic pads swept in to cleanse the wound. 'No sign of that analgesist then?' He sighed. 'Brace yourself, son.' With a sharp levering of the spoon handle, he popped the loose intestine back into the boy's belly. The soldier squealed as if he'd been knifed. The trolley rattled on its wheels. One of the corpsmen grunted.
'He is in pain,' said Akurduana.
'No kidding.'
He glanced up. The legionary was looking over the tent's wounded, eyes trembling with a force of compassion that even Cicerus had never shown for his mortal soldiers. 'So much pain. The Great Crusade was supposed to free mankind from the tyranny of the alien, not to replace it with… this.'
'Hold it. Just a little longer.'