Belisarius Cawl- the Great Work - Guy Haley Read online

  ‘How sure of their power these tyranids are, not to slight our fortresses when they are done,’ said Gathein. ‘This place could stand for a million years more.’

  ‘All things have weaknesses. Hubris is common to many species, even those that are the most alien,’ said Felix. ‘Help me, brother. We must realign the array. It is time to speak with our ships.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  A reckless cut

  Sebastion and Esau descended further. Several doors stood in their way. All required opening, and that took time. A journey of minutes stretched into an hour, then longer. Finally, they reached the bottom.

  Beyond the final door was a circular chamber. From it several heavily shielded doors led to various other chambers of strategic import. Bodies preserved by the vacuum lay about, all of them showing the signs of violent death. Lasguns and boltguns, not claws and acid, had felled these warriors. Chapter serfs lay among warriors dressed in the uniforms of Sotha’s modest defence forces.

  ‘Treachery,’ said Sebastion. ‘Our own kind turned against us.’ He pushed over the frozen remains of a three-armed abomination. ‘No other race is so foul.’

  ‘These two doors are still sealed,’ said Esau. ‘No sign of enemy presence.’

  Sebastion approached one of the doors and rested his hand upon the metal. ‘Here is the place our Chapter fell – not on the walls, but here.’

  A few minutes’ work saw the door mechanisms hooked up to Sebastion’s power unit and unlocked with Chapter cypher codes.

  ‘Open,’ Sebastion commanded the door-spirit.

  The instant the door cracked, a rush of stale air blasted from inside. They walked down an access corridor guarded by dormant guns. Nothing had been touched. The tyranid swarm had never made it into that part of the monastery.

  Then they passed through another door into battery command, and witnessed there the results of betrayal. Though the swarm had been kept outside, the subverted warriors of Sotha had broken in.

  ‘The xenos slaves came in through the wall from the cavern,’ said Sebastion. He pointed out a square melta-cut through the side of the room. ‘This is how we fell. Emperor alone knows how they got through the mountain.’

  He strode forwards into a scene of battle preserved by the airless dark. Mummified corpses lay everywhere. Many were mortal servants of the Chapter, their uniforms discoloured by spilled fluids and covered with frost. Many more were others dressed in the uniforms of the Sotharan defence force. There were more misshapen creatures among them.

  ‘The twisted progeny of man and alien,’ said Sebastion.

  At the centre of the room there was a single transhuman figure slumped over the command station, a lasgun wound to the back of his head, placed exactly where it would kill him. An empty bolt pistol lay on the console near his open hand. Sebastion stopped when he saw him.

  ‘Brother Balthazar,’ said Sebastion. ‘Commander of the Batteries. Look, Esau, upon a hero of the Imperium. His body was ruined in battle. Still he served. I crafted these augmetics myself. No legs, one arm, his spine destroyed. He could have taken the Emperor’s mercy. He could have requested a Dreadnought’s tomb, but he opted to retire here where he might serve more. He always loved the biggest guns.’ Sebastion looked around at the corpses in the room. All had died violently. A couple of skeletal figures not far from the battery commander lay savagely embraced, hands locked about each other’s throats. ‘Three hundred years of loyal service,’ said Sebastion. ‘Treachery was his reward. They shut down the guns and the void shields. We thought we were safe. We were wrong.’

  Sebastion stood in silent contemplation a moment, surveying the room as if it were a shrine. Then with a sudden growl of active motors, he began to move briskly, the arms of his servoharness picking up the corpses and moving them aside. Frozen limbs broke from torsos. Skulls wearing cracked masks of skin bounced along the floor. ‘Esau, aid me. Remove the dead from here. I must access the control panels.’

  As they worked, the room thrummed to the surge of returning power. Screens came on under corpses welded to them by blood and ice.

  ‘The archmagos has done his part,’ said Sebastion. ‘Time for us to do ours.’ He went to the desk and blew frozen blood out of a primary input port with a jet of hot, compressed air. A mechadendrite emerged from his backpack and extended, a dataspike emerging from its spinning end.

  The spike plunged home.

  ‘Curious,’ said Sebastion. ‘I am not getting any response from the fortress-monastery datanet.’

  ‘Forgemaster,’ said Esau. ‘Is this the cause?’

  Sebastion looked to where Esau was pointing, his mechadendrite extracting itself and retracting as he turned.

  Not far from the xeno-slaves’ ingress the room was breached a second time, by a silver spear of metal which split into smaller threads and wormed their way into the casings of machines. Invisible in the dark, they glinted malevolently under the revived lumens.

  ‘Xenos subversion tendrils, same as on the parapets. More blasphemy.’

  Scanning beams played over the tendrils from Sebastion’s armour as he approached.

  ‘By Mars, it’s in everything.’ He went closer to the main root of silvery metal. ‘I dare not sever this.’ He walked alongside the spread of filaments, following one thread as it split and split again.

  ‘Here is the defence laser matrix,’ he said, reaching a boxy cogitator casing.

  An arm lifted upon his back. The plasma cutter ignited.

  ‘Forgive me, spirit of this mechanism, for what I must do,’ he intoned. ‘This will not be an elegant repair,’ Sebastion said to Esau. ‘If I sever these linkages, it should remove the xenos influence from the main battery. Once it is expunged, we will remotely spike the guns, and the fleet will be able to draw near. We have no hope of saving them, not without risking their use against our own ships.’ He ran his hands along the path of the silver thread, not quite touching it. ‘Cutting this will provoke a response from the mountain. You must watch over me. Do not trust what you see.’

  Sebastion opened a vox-channel to all the expedition members.

  ‘Brothers, archmagos. I have reached battery command and am about to commence excision of xenos infiltration. Destruction of orbital defences will follow. Prepare yourselves.’

  He lowered the plasma cutter towards the thread.

  The mountain began to shake before the flame touched the metal.

  Esau raised his storm bolter, and stood guard.

  Felix cut connection with the fleet.

  ‘It is done,’ he said. ‘The transport is prepared to come. The fleet is on standby for extraction. We shall go within.’

  Gathein and he went inside the turret, descending metal steps towards the top level of the citadel.

  ‘I wish you to perform another psychic scan of the mountain, Epistolary,’ said Felix when they were halfway down. ‘I want to know if the increased activity has any effect on the etheric readability of the–’

  He stopped on a short landing. Gathein was nowhere to be seen. There was nowhere he could have gone. The inside of the turret was a hollow circle. The access stairs to the roof ran in a dull red circuit around the walls. Cables were neatly pinned to the ancient rockcrete, broken by a junction box decorated with a jawless steel skull. The room was completely featureless besides these few details. There was a single way in, and a single way out. Gathein had vanished.

  ‘Gathein!’ Felix brought his weaponry online with a thought. Powerfields crackled in the quiet.

  He went back up the stairs to the armoured hatch leading to the roof. It was shut tight. He slammed his shoulder into the hatch, causing it to boom, but it would not budge.

  ‘Gathein,’ he voxed.

  Soft static replied.

  ‘Decimus!’

  A soft voice called to him from the ground, impossible in the vacuu
m, and yet he distinctly heard it. The door into the main body of the tower was closing. Felix caught a glimpse of movement before it swung closed.

  ‘Gathein? Gathein, I have a contact, I am in pursuit, tower upper level. Follow me if you can.’

  He carried on down the stairs and went out cautiously, his boltstorm gauntlet held out in front of him. There was another stair down, a short flight that led into a hall in the centre of the tower. Several rooms occupied the level, all empty cells. Felix didn’t know much of the Scythes’ cult, but they looked like isolation rooms or meditation cells. They were all lockable from the outside only, each one having a hard cot and a single water spout.

  He searched them one at a time. Nothing was in any of them. They must have been unoccupied at the time of the invasion, because they were undamaged. No real attack had come against the tower. The tyranids always went where there was prey.

  Still, he was careful, pushing open the door with his closed power fist, the machine-spirit of his twinned guns ready to fire.

  Atmospheric mix was pouring into the tower. The hiss of it grew in volume as the air thickened.

  He’d checked five cells when he heard a burst of musical laughter from the end of the corridor. He backed out of the cell he was in quickly, banging the wall hard with his bulky armour. The door in the last cell was closing. Again there was a flash of movement.

  ‘Wait!’ called Felix.

  The door closed. He heard it now. Sound was filling the tower along with the air.

  He ran down the corridor. The door was locked and would not open. The lock was a simple slide bar, sturdy enough to shut a Space Marine inside, but not sophisticated. No matter how hard he tugged on it, it would not move. He felt a terrible urge to get inside the room.

  ‘Thracian, Cawl, Cominus, respond.’

  The vox hissed in his ear.

  ‘Gathein!’ he shouted. His amplified voice killed the silence. The tower closed in on him. It seemed aware.

  ‘Decimus?’

  The soft voice came from the other side of the door, and he knew it.

  ‘Nonus?’

  ‘Come on, Decimus!’

  ‘Nonus!’ he shouted. His head swam. He couldn’t focus, couldn’t think. Nonus was dead. A period of time large enough to swallow the birth and death of an empire separated them. He knew this. Why then did he raise his fist with a cry and slam it into the bolt?

  The door exploded off its hinges into the room, clanging off the wall. Felix plunged in.

  The moist fronds of ferns slapped him in the face.

  ‘Decimus!’

  He was running. His feet were bare. Turf gave beneath his toes.

  ‘Decimus, come find me!’

  ‘Nonus!’ he shouted.

  He burst into a familiar clearing. Nonus was kneeling on the grass, an array of toys laid out in front of him.

  ‘Nonus,’ Felix said.

  Nonus looked up from his playthings.

  ‘You came! I’m so glad. I miss you. Come play with me.’

  Felix held up his hands in amazement. They were human, unmodified. More than that, they were a boy’s hands. He went over to his brother. He was the age he had been when Felix was taken, millennia ago, the day he was supposed to go to the Fortress of Hera, but was taken off the lighter moments before it launched.

  ‘Is this a memory?’

  Nonus shook his head.

  Felix walked forwards cautiously, taking everything in with a Space Marine’s attentiveness. It was comical in a small boy and his brother laughed.

  ‘It’s exactly as I remember it. The forest dome of Pembria park. The arboretum.’ He looked through a tangle of trees. High above them the crystalflex of an agri dome glinted in the sunlight. Laphis was too dry and sunburned to support natural forests. Grassland predominated. The only forests were in the parks. ‘I remember it all.’

  He picked up a small toy, a mass-produced spacecraft bearing the iconography of the XIII Legion. ‘This was mine. I wanted to join them so badly.’

  Nonus smiled. He had been three years younger than Felix, and looked upon him as if Felix were the centre of his universe. The future tetrarch felt a stab of pain in his single heart.

  ‘I know.’

  He patted his brother’s knee and took the toy from his hand.

  ‘Where did you go? You were supposed to go to Macragge, but you vanished.’

  Felix made a noise halfway between a laugh and a sob.

  ‘Where didn’t I go? It wasn’t my fault. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘We didn’t expect to see you again, but we never got to hear that you arrived. We never got news like the others. When we found out you were gone we were so sad. Mother cried every day for years. Father never smiled. People talked about you. They thought you’d done something wrong. Some of them said so, to mother, and that made her cry more. I tried to be happy for them, but I couldn’t. I tried and tried, but she cried and he never smiled. I missed you. We never knew what happened to you. Father never gave up. Never. Petitions to the enforcers, to the arbitrators when that didn’t work, then to the Ultramarines. He got into trouble. An arbitrator came to tell him off. But he never gave up. He was sad. So was I. Right until the day I died.’

  ‘Did you have a good life?’ asked Felix, half-dreading the answer.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I am sorry I was not there to share it.’

  ‘It’s all right. You’re here now.’ Nonus smiled at him. ‘Nine and ten, together again.’

  Felix ruffled his brother’s hair. ‘She wanted ten children.’

  ‘He only two.’

  ‘She counted down.’

  They giggled at the joke in their names.

  ‘Father let her after, you know,’ he said. ‘She had four more, my brothers and sisters. But we never forgot you, my biggest and best brother.’ He smiled up at Felix in a way that crushed his heart.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you’re here now. Hey!’ said Nonus, suddenly cheerful, pointing up. ‘Let’s climb the big tree.’

  ‘Which one?’ said Felix. All the trees in the arboretum were big, huge Macraggian oaks and silverpine.

  ‘The very biggest,’ said Nonus.

  Gas hissed through vents into the apothecarion. Repressurisation to tolerable levels took only a few minutes. Yansar set to work on Tullio as soon as he was able.

  He salvaged what materials he could from the Scythes’ medical centre. Everything was in disarray, but he was able to put together a kit for the procedure that was far more versatile than his battlefield equipment. While he was waiting for atmosphere, he brought the apothecarion’s medicae units into operation, including cleansing and sterilisation cabinets that he used upon the equipment. When the air pressure was high enough, he began cutting Tullio’s armour away with a power saw. Dull metallic flakes of ceramite were gathered up and sucked away by a vacuum tube attached to the saw. When the plate was cut, he took out spray bottles of solvent and doused the area, softening the hardened gels that held the broken plate together.

  This took several minutes. While he waited, he removed his helmet. Retinal displays made certain procedures easier, but he preferred to see what he was doing with his naked eyes, and removing the helmet gave his head a greater range of movement, important in a tricky operation such as this.

  He checked the screens of the machine he had hooked up to the medical ports in Tullio’s armour. The device constantly sampled the Space Marine’s blood. Yansar was particularly attentive to the levels of pseudo hormones that governed the Belisarian furnace housed in Tullio’s chest cavity. He frowned at the data, and adjusted the amount of counteragent the machine was pumping into him.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said to himself. ‘Let’s have a good look in there first.’

  Yansar had removed Tullio’s power plant to get h
im into the cot. Power was being supplied to his suit by a large battery pack under the table. Now he took Tullio’s helmet off, easing it from his head. Tullio was in chemical sleep, and his head lolled. Yansar laid it carefully against his armour neck ring.

  Next he busied himself with the bolts locking Tullio’s wargear together. He selected the appropriate head for the power driver mounted in his gauntlet. The blow that had wounded Tullio had been hard but not brutally so, so the chestplate was shredded but not badly distorted. All except one of the bolts came out as they should. The last was bent and had him clucking his tongue in annoyance. He retracted his driver and picked up the powersaw. Cutting lockbolts was difficult and made him feel more like a Techmarine than an Apothecary.

  By the time the bolts were dealt with, the sealant gels were sufficiently softened. A shallow scan showed bonding between the foam and Tullio’s clotted blood, gluing his mangled breastplate, under-armour and his bodyglove into his wounds.

  ‘I’ll be as gentle as I can, brother,’ said Yansar. ‘Because this will be painful.’

  He eased the breastplate off. The under-plating was badly buckled and came away with the chest plate. A large section of Tullio’s bodyglove lifted, tearing scabs away from wounds. Dark blood welled.

  Yansar scowled. The wounds were worse than he thought.

  Tullio’s eyes flickered. His head rolled.

  ‘Steady, brother.’ Yansar worked quickly to cut away the bodyglove. A surgical laser mounted on his backpack arm vaporised fragments of plastek in the wound. The blood slowed. Larraman cells clotted it quickly.

  Yansar extruded an array of lenses from his collar. They separated, and one flipped down in front of his right eye, magnifying the trauma site and highlighting flecks of ceramite and plastek in green. Yansar plucked them out with a tweezer, and pulled away the last of the torn bodyglove. After that, he took away Tullio’s belly plating, cutting out the bodyglove from there as well.

  Tullio’s torso was naked from his belt to his neck. The wound was fully exposed – two long furrows that cut diagonally down from left to right.