Feat of Iron - Nick Kyme Read online

  Santar raised the Ironwrought on the comm-feed.

  ‘Ruuman, we are clearing this area in short order. I want it thoroughly sanitised, above and below the surface.’

  ‘Nothing lives.’ It was not a question, but Santar answered it anyway.

  ‘Nothing lives, brother.’

  Behind the forward line, the first captain could already see the Ironwrought bringing divisions of mole mortars and unmanned Termite incendiary drones into position.

  ‘Dig them deep,’ he added.

  ‘Nothing lives,’ repeated Ruuman in grating confirmation.

  Santar signalled for Captain Desaan to follow, leaving the preparations for regroup and advance to Captain Meduson.

  ‘You are with me, Morlock.’

  They strode up the sand bank in silence, barring the hard whine of the servos in their Terminator armour as it struggled to cope with the incline. Together they passed lines of foundered Army tanks and minor Ordinatus of the Mechanicum. Most of the vehicles were weatherbeaten and in need of serious repair and maintenance. Neither warrior spared the struggling troopers a glance. Cresting the rise, they were met by Ruuman who was organising the heavy divisions for their punitive salvo. His mouth was set into a tight line, in part due to his characteristic dourness but also because the lower half of his face was augmetic. Much of his body was cybernetic and Ruuman displayed it proudly in concert with his battle-plate. Far behind the heavies, marching on weary legs, the belated Army divisions came into sight through the heat haze.

  Desaan did not wear a war-helm and his head jutted above the high rim of his gorget, sitting between the barrel-shaped curves of his pauldrons like a little nub of steel. But the disdain was evident in his tone without the need to see it on his face.

  ‘The Army arrives at last,’ Santar said to him.

  ‘We are better off without them.’

  Ruuman agreed, cutting in to address the first captain. ‘I have some serious concerns regarding the efficacy of both the human mechanised and foot contingents. Our progress is being slowed irrevocably.’

  ‘They are vulnerable to the conditions out here, brother. Sand and heat cause havoc with track-beds, engines. It’s stultifying our advance but I can see no immediate solution.’

  The first captain’s reply was meant to be mollifying, even partly an invitation, but only caused further concern in the Ironwrought.

  ‘I will look into it,’ Santar added finally, walking on.

  Ruuman nodded as mole mortar teams and batteries of missile launchers ran through their final launch preparations.

  The Ironwrought’s disregard for mortal flesh came from the fact he was now more machine than man. Several close encounters with the Deuthrite in the spike-forests on Kwang had seen to the necessity of his extensive cybernetics. But he had not once complained and accepted his bionics stoically.

  Desaan held his tongue until they had passed the line and were advancing into open desert.

  ‘And do what, Gabriel? Some theatres of war are not meant for mere men.’

  Santar removed his helm with a hiss of released pressure. The face beneath was dappled with sweat. He raised an eyebrow.

  Behind them the foom of expelled ordnance punctuated the first captain’s words in a staggered crescendo of multiple rocket bursts.

  ‘Are we not men, then, Vaakal?’

  Desaan was a staunch adherent to the Creed of Iron, that which espoused Flesh is Weak. His ostensible elitism and lack of human empathy often spilled over into disdain, sometimes worse.

  The other captain frowned as a rumble of deep subterranean detonations shook the sand beneath their feet and the Ironwrought’s explosive payload did its work.

  ‘I know you understand my meaning, brother,’ Santar pressed, undaunted. ‘We are familiar enough, are we not? Your earlier tone would suggest so.’ There was a rebuke in the first captain’s words that Desaan discerned at once.

  ‘If I have been disrespectful…’

  ‘I agree with you, captain. Flesh is weak. The Creed has been borne out in this desert, in the fatigue of our Army divisions and their failing resolve. But isn’t our purpose to shoulder this burden and promote strength through the demonstration of strength?’

  Desaan opened his mouth to respond but thought better of it when he realised the first captain wasn’t finished.

  ‘I am still a man, flesh in part. My heart pumps blood, my lungs draw air. They are not machine, unlike this,’ said Santar, brandishing his left arm, the bionics within whirring in simpatico with the first captain. ‘And these,’ he said, tapping a claw blade against his armoured thigh. ‘Does my flesh make me weak, brother?’

  Desaan was careful to be deferential. True, Gabriel Santar did not possess the phenomenal temper of his primarch but he was as harsh and unyielding as the bionics in his limbs.

  ‘You are much more than a mere man, my captain,’ he ventured. After a silent pause, he decided to go on. ‘We all are. We, the Emperor’s sons, are the true inheritors of the galaxy.’

  Santar stared at the ninth captain, showing some of the flint for which he was so renowned.

  ‘Bold talk, but wrong.’ Santar turned away again and the tension ebbed. ‘We are warriors and when the war is done, we’ll need to find new vocations or be put to use as praetorian statues adorning the Palace on Terra. Perhaps we’ll form ceremonial honour guards for our defunct warlords.’ More than a little rancour coloured the first captain’s words. He had thought on it often. ‘A warrior without a war to fight is like a machine without function,’ he added in quiet introspection. ‘Do you know what this means, Vaakal? Do you know what we face?’

  Desaan nodded slowly, at least as much as his high gorget would allow.

  ‘Becoming obsolete.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  The implication of that hung in the air for a while before Desaan attempted to banish the awkward tension.

  ‘An entire galaxy to bring to heel, untold billions of weak and fragile men to reforge. I suspect it will be long before the Crusade is done.’

  A shadow fell across them, echoing the sudden dip in mood; or, rather, they strayed into its massive penumbra. Santar craned his neck to regard the cyclopean landship, Eye of Medusa, engulfing the Iron Hands with its sheer oppressive majesty.

  ‘Perhaps…’ he muttered, taking in the hard, sweeping hull of the leviathan. The iconic sigil of a mailed fist dominated one flank. Below it an access ramp angled down from the lowest level of the landship, spanning its gargantuan tracks.

  The Father was within, in concert with two of his brothers. When last they had spoken, his mood had been far from sanguine. Failure to precisely locate the node had vexed the Father greatly, to the point where his rage had grown incandescent. Swift progress was demanded. As with most things, Lord Manus did not have the time or inclination for patience.

  Santar was fashioning his report as he ascended the access ramp with Desaan.

  ‘I am not sure Father would match your hope, brother. If we do not find the node soon, his wrath will be volatile, of that I am certain.’ There was no trepidation in Santar’s voice, no concern of reproach – it was merely a stating of the facts.

  ‘It is…’ Desaan chose his words carefully as they paused at the edge of the landship’s access hatch, ‘…curious that none of the Mechanicum adepts have located the node. Is it such an arduous task?’

  ‘The sand and heat,’ said Santar. ‘What our deep-space sensoria pict-captured, we have been unable to match to the surface. It is a different set of environmental conditions to which we must adapt.’

  Desaan looked the first captain in the eye. ‘Are you so certain it is merely the adverse weather that is foiling our efforts?’

  ‘No, I am not, but I would like to see you suggest something more… arcane to the Father. I believe he would be less than accepting.’

  ‘Putting it mildly, brother,’ Desaan replied as they entered the landship.

  Darkness reigned within the Eye of Medusa. A s
eries of churning vertical-lifters and horizontal-conveyers had brought the two Morlocks to a gallery leading to the primarch’s strategium. The method of their transportation was not so dissimilar from the way the great internal ore processors funnelled rock into the immense pressure-hammers and furnaces of the Medusan mine-trains. It amused Santar to make the correlation with the vast, tracked mining stations, but he dismissed any further simile quickly as something the sons of Vulkan might find diverting. Serving no useful function, it held only passing interest for him.

  Venting pneumatic pressure heralded the opening of the strategium blast door. Half a metre thick and bound with adamantium rebars, it could double up as a bunker if ever the landship was attacked. Not that its sole occupant required such a refuge.

  The interior was as stark and chill as an ice cavern. Lacquered black walls absorbed the light and panes of glass crafted into the obsidian-like panels were frosted and glacial-thick. It was Medusa in all but its geographical disposition.

  Entering as one, Santar and Desaan caught the end of Lord Manus’s mission briefing with the primarchs Vulkan and Mortarion.

  ‘…cannot afford to have our purpose divided. Be mindful, brother, but let the humans look to their own protection. That is all.’

  Ferrus Manus cut the link with a curt slash of his hand. The grainy light from the hololith was still dying as he turned to his first captain. A pale glow settled about his mountainous shoulders, like a mantle of hoarfrost melting against his barely fettered anger.

  He exhaled, and his displeasure lessened like a storm cloud passing across his features. His face was a rugged cliff, colonised by scars and framed by a jet-black skullcap of close-cropped hair. The primarch was, for all intents and purposes, Santar’s father but his demeanour was anything but paternal.

  ‘I love my brother,’ rumbled Ferrus, apropos of nothing, ‘but he drives me to distraction with his desire to nurture and coddle. It is a weak predilection and can only breed weakness in return.’ He raised an eyebrow, forming a crease across his slab-like forehead. ‘Not like the Tenth, isn’t that right, first captain?’

  Ferrus Manus was a huge and imposing figure. Clad in coal-black armour, he looked hewn from granite. His unyielding skin was scraped and oiled and his eyes were like two pieces of knapped flint. Of his many names, his favourite was the Gorgon. It seemed an apt honorific for one whose glare was hard enough to petrify. Cold fury radiated from his every pore, telegraphed in the way he moved, the tone of his voice and the language he chose to express his thoughts. At that moment they fashioned a challenge, which Gabriel Santar had little choice but to accept.

  ‘We vanquished the eldar raiding party but are no closer to locating the node at this time, my primarch.’ He bowed his head in a gesture of fealty but Ferrus rebuked him for what he took as capitulation.

  ‘Raise your eyes and meet my gaze,’ he said, temper smouldering like a volcano on the verge of eruption. ‘Are you not my equerry, in whom I place my trust and respect?’

  It was pointless to protest, so Santar held those two pieces of icy flint in his eye line and did not flinch. To do so would be unwise.

  ‘I am, primarch. As ever.’

  Simmering now, the glow of the lambent lumen-lamps reflecting from the unfathomable living metal of his silver arms, Ferrus Manus began to pace. His ire was far from spent.

  ‘At this time, is it? All we have had is time. Answer this for me,’ said Ferrus Manus, his glare shifting to the warrior standing beside his equerry. ‘Captain Desaan, unless your tongue is too leaden, how is it that both my brothers are able to find the nodes and we cannot?’

  There was a mighty hammer affixed to the primarch’s broad, armoured back. It was called Forgebreaker and it had been fashioned beneath Mount Narodnya by his brother Fulgrim, whose presence he was clearly missing. Santar wondered if Desaan was trying not to imagine his lord ripping the weapon free of its strappings and laying about the strategium and his ineffective officer cadre.

  Ferrus Manus glared, impatient for an answer.

  Santar had seldom seen him this enraged and wondered at the cause.

  Desaan’s grizzled face, a patchwork of scars itself, was reflected in the Gorgon’s armour. His visored eyes appeared distorted. The primarch was close enough to strike him, but the captain did not flinch, though he did make an effort to keep the clearing of his throat surreptitious. Even masked behind his gorget it sounded louder than a clarion horn to his ears. He was a Morlock, one of the primarch’s elite, but it was rare to be questioned by him directly. Even for a veteran legionary, the effect was disconcerting.

  ‘Our human cohorts are suffering in the heat,’ he answered simply, and Santar was glad that Desaan hadn’t mentioned his earlier suspicion that he thought something other than the adverse weather was causing the delay.

  The few remembrancers that had accompanied the war host had long since fallen behind, and though a small detachment of Saavan Masonites had been tasked with their protection it wasn’t to these civilians that Desaan referred. Citizens and non-combatants were expected to falter. It was part of the reason the primarch hadn’t objected to the presence of iterators and imagists in the first place; he knew they would fail and cease to be a problem. No, Desaan meant soldiers. Such men and women were expected to endure and meet the rigours placed upon them by the march.

  ‘And do my brothers not suffer in similar adverse conditions or are they somehow able to overcome such debilitations?’ Ferrus pressed.

  ‘I do not know, my lord.’

  The primarch grunted and addressed Santar.

  ‘Do you concur with your fellow captain?’

  ‘I am as frustrated as you, my primarch.’

  Ferrus’s eyes narrowed to silvered slits before he turned his back to regard a broad strategium table that had manifested in the wake of the hololith.

  ‘I doubt that,’ he muttered.

  He passed a shimmering silver hand across a geographical representation of the desert continent to magnify the view projected across the glass slate. Several potential node locations were identified by flashing beacons as well as two further markings, a red and a green dotted line.

  ‘But it fails to answer why we are so far behind,’ said Ferrus, glaring at the red line as if doing so would will it further across the map. Unsurprisingly, it did not.

  ‘My lord, if I may…’ Desaan began, and Santar groaned inwardly, for he knew the mistake his fellow captain had made even before he’d made it. ‘Perhaps there is more retarding our efforts than merely sun and sand.’

  ‘Speak plainly, brother-captain.’

  ‘Sorcery, my lord. I can put it no plainer than that,’ said Desaan. ‘Our efforts are thwarted by eldar witches.’

  Ferrus laughed, a hollow, cracking sound.

  ‘Is that your best excuse for failure?’ His silvered fists clenched the edge of the strategium table, birthing a web of cracks that would have riven the landscape with catastrophic earthquakes had they been real. Desaan felt the imagined tectonic ruptures all the way up his spine.

  ‘It would explain why our efforts have thus far–’

  Ferrus Manus’s fist slammed against the map, arresting the floundering captain’s words. The resultant split almost broke it in two.

  ‘I am not interested,’ he said, and it was as if the air in the stark chamber grew colder, cold enough to burn.

  The primarch folded his arms. Fathomless silver pooled across his immense biceps, shimmering and refulgent.

  Desaan, who had seldom been this close to his lord and for so long, found his sight drawn to them.

  ‘Do you know how I came by this magnificent aberration?’ asked Ferrus, noting the captain’s interest.

  Desaan hid his confusion at the line of questioning well. Like most exceptional beings, primarchs were occasionally inscrutable.

  ‘Have you heard of my deeds?’ Ferrus continued when an answer was not immediate. ‘Of how I bested a storm giant in a feat of strength or how I scaled Karaas
hi, the Ice Pinnacle, with my bare hands? Or perhaps you are familiar with the day when I swam deeper than the Horned Behemoth of the Suphuron Sea? Do you know these stories?’

  Desaan’s reply was not much louder than a whisper.

  ‘I have heard the great sagas, sire.’

  Ferrus wagged a finger, lost in monologue and nodding sagely as if he’d just come upon the answer to his own conundrum. ‘No… it was Asirnoth, he who was called Silver Wyrm and the greatest of the ancient drakes. No blade could pierce his metal skin, no spear or lance that I possessed.’

  He paused, as if reminiscing. ‘I burned it, held its writhing body beneath the lava flows of Medusa until it was dead, and when I withdrew my hands they were…’ he held out both his arms, ‘like this. Or so the saga speakers would say.’

  ‘I… my lord?’

  Santar wanted to intervene but a lesson was being imparted. The tale was simply that, a story crafted by bards and the tribal orators of the clans as related in the Canticle of Travels. It was told differently every time the first captain had heard it. No Iron Hand could claim its veracity, for none had been present during the lightless days of the primarch’s arrival on Medusa. Only Ferrus Manus himself knew the truth and he kept that inside the locked cage of his memories.

  ‘Do you believe such a warrior would allow himself to be undone by witchcraft? Do you believe he could be so weak?’ he asked.

  Desaan was shaking his head, trying to atone for a transgression he did not fully understand.

  ‘No, sire.’

  ‘Get out.’ The words escaped Ferrus’s lips in a rasp. ‘Before I throw you out.’

  Desaan saluted and turned on his heel.

  Santar was about to join him when Ferrus stopped him.

  ‘Not you, first captain.’

  Santar stood his ground and straightened his back.