On Wings of Blood Read online

  Oblexus nodded, the armour of his collar purring with the motion of its fibre bundle musculature. ‘There have been many campaigns. Many have called for the blades of Medusa to aid in their strife. Flesh has been replaced with steel, brothers have departed. Brother Irimas fell seven years ago, Terran standard, in battle against the Archenemy.’

  ‘Interred?’ asked Atraxii, his thoughts lingering upon his deceased squad brother.

  ‘Negative,’ replied Oblexus. ‘He succumbed to the weakness of his flesh, and ended. His progenoids are to be implanted in neophytes within the next cycle.’

  The Iron Father’s grim revelation did not break Atraxii’s stride. Amongst all of his squad kindred, Irimas had most yearned for interment within the hallowed sarcophagus of a Dreadnought, to experience the heightened union with the machine that came with such entombment. It was an aspiration of nearly all Iron Hands to one day commit themselves to the transformation, to join with such a relic of the Chapter.

  That Irimas had lost the battle waged by each of the sons of Manus against the imperfections of the flesh disappointed Atraxii, but the Techmarine cast the thought aside as an irrelevancy.

  The silent squad of Iron Hands parted for Atraxii and Oblexus, forming a ring around the perimeter of the platform as it lowered into the fortress.

  ‘Let us go, now,’ said Oblexus as the wan light of Medusa disappeared from over their heads. ‘The castellan would look upon you.’

  -03.0-

  The lift ground to a halt with a clank of perfectly aligned machinery. The wide plate of a doorway slid ahead and to the side into the wall, revealing the orderly expanse of the fortress’ hypogeum. Space Marines of the Iron Hands sat in silent contemplation, attended to their wargear and duelled in the shallow bowls of practice cages. The squad escorting Oblexus and Atraxii filed from the lift in silence, their duty done as the doorway sealed once again.

  ‘Much of the clan’s strength is here,’ remarked Atraxii.

  ‘Correct,’ replied Oblexus. ‘Patrols and system monitors are deployed, but the rest remain here. Clan Dorrvok arrives in twenty-six cycles to become sentinel, and soon Kaargul will return in full to resume its duties.’

  Atraxii recalled the bustle of the hypogeum, the sense of eager tension like the moments before the breaking of a storm as brothers girded themselves for war. Kaargul was bound by oath to remain sentinel on Medusa while the other clans conducted campaigns across the Imperium.

  ‘Our brothers appear to be readying to depart,’ said Atraxii. ‘At least a portion of them.’

  ‘Keen, as you always were, my protégé,’ said Oblexus with as much warmth as his machine voice could convey. ‘A detachment is in readiness to depart, oath-sworn to aid the forces of the Astra Militarum in the Yandi Veil. I am designated to lead the expedition.’

  The lift rumbled to a halt once more, admitting the Iron Hands into a corridor of dark iron. The bright glow of lumen strips bathed the passage in sterile light as the footfalls of the Space Marines reverberated from the walls.

  ‘Is there not concern that the other clans will learn of this?’ asked Atraxii.

  ‘The scale of the expedition is small, a brief engagement,’ Oblexus replied. ‘The portion of Kaargul remaining on Medusa is sufficient.’

  ‘It is unexpected for the iron captain to accept such hazard. I would expect acting upon such obligations to be delayed in accordance with the pact between the clans.’

  ‘Would that it were so simple.’

  The voice boomed from the blunt boxes of speaker horns spaced at intervals along the corridor. It was a low, bass rumble, as much a physical sensation as an auditory one as it rattled the mesh beneath Atraxii’s boots. It issued from the core of the moving citadel. It was the voice of the fortress itself, its every spinning cog and plate of armour. Its every missile silo and weapons blister. It was the ozone-wreathed thrum of its void shield generators, and the roar of the captive sun harnessed within its reactor. It was the voice of the custodian of Clan Kaargul.

  ‘Brother,’ said Oblexus.

  ‘Come to me,’ commanded the voice.

  ‘Our arrival is imminent,’ replied the Iron Father.

  ‘Good,’ the voice spoke, like the synthesised collapse of a fleeting Medusan mountain. ‘I shall take the measure of this warrior returned from the Martian priesthood.’

  The two Iron Hands stepped down the darkened passage. They stopped at fifty-yard intervals before reinforced bulkheads flanked with slaved weapons pods and tracking augur arrays which played red and green targeting lights over their armour. As they passed through the last of them, the corridor opened to reveal a large sealed gateway, inscribed with the icon of the clan. Servitor-manned autocannons ground smoothly along their housings as they tracked the approaching figures of Atraxii and Oblexus. A pair of hulking guardians stood vigil, resplendent in the imposing protection of Tactical Dreadnought armour. Still as statues, the warriors of Avernii exuded menace, their peerless excellence in combat elevating them to the chosen few of the Chapter’s veteran elite.

  Atraxii understood awe at the sight of them. Terminator armour was desperately rare for the sons of Ferrus Manus. It was a treasure beyond any other, except for what the Iron Hands champions had been tasked to protect.

  Oblexus halted before the gateway and its brooding guardians. An aperture parted within the dense iron of the doorway. The air tingled as a beam of scarlet light swept over the Iron Father, and then Atraxii. The light winked out, and the aperture resealed.

  With the rumble of great oiled cogs, the gateway parted, slowly grinding along tracks within the walls. The Terminators remained silent and unmoving as their kindred passed through the doorway to the space beyond.

  Atraxii stepped down a short series of wide onyx steps into a large decagonal chamber. Banners hung from the walls, borne by Iron Hands of Clan Kaargul in wars across the Imperium. The dense black cloth rippled in the cold air. Many were tattered, singed by fire or dappled with human or xenos blood. Ancient relics of the clan, weapons, fragments of armour and other myriad antiquities hung above plinths of simple black metal, shimmering within stasis fields.

  At the centre of the chamber, blurred by void shielding and flanked by an additional four First Company veterans in Terminator armour, was a rounded shape of pale stone, larger than Atraxii’s helm.

  Atraxii’s step faltered. It faltered. It took him the entirety of point eight six seconds to regulate his respiration and still his secondary heart from beating. Miniscule beads of perspiration glittered from his brow as his brain struggled to process what was before him.

  What lay surrounded by the Chapter’s finest, protected against anything short of orbital bombardment, was not stone. It was a skull.

  It was the skull of Ferrus Manus.

  Atraxii dropped to his knees, his head low in the presence of the remains of the being that had led tens of thousands of Iron Hands in the days when the Emperor of Mankind walked among mortals. The Terminators snapped from their stillness, levelling the barrels of their storm bolters and assault cannons upon him. Oblexus genuflected beside the Techmarine, his movements born more of practised reverence and expectation than by the shock Atraxii displayed.

  ‘I am weak,’ gasped Atraxii. He dared not lift his eyes to the plinth the skull rested upon. Disquieting spikes of awe, anger and shame surfaced, warring with his resolve in the presence of the felled primarch. ‘I am unworthy to stand in the presence of the Gorgon.’

  ‘As are all who seek to expunge the weakness that would see us brought as low,’ a voice rumbled from the back of the chamber. ‘And yet you will stand. Present thyself, Atraxii of Clan Kaargul, and account for the sanction of Mars.’

  Slowly, the Terminators lowered their weapons in snarls of fibre bundles. Atraxii looked up, beyond the sacred remains of his slain primarch. The far wall was dominated by an elaborate bank of whirring machinery.
Cogs ground against one another in smooth order. Lightning flickered between buzzing diodes, and steam shrouded the floor to knee-height.

  Set within the machinery, ensconced and united with the beating heart of the Kaargul fortress, was Venerable Lochaar. The deep sable armour of his Dreadnought sarcophagus was inlaid with a legacy of war in sharp Ekfrasi runes, etched in shining platinum. The chassis was exquisite, a priceless relic of the Iron Hands, millennia old.

  Even without arms, slotted into the core of the fortress, Lochaar exuded threat and domination, his shell bulked with dense layers of armour plating designed to spearhead sieges and withstand incredible fury. The armoured plug of a primary sensorium bundle peered over the lip of a high collar, rendered by artificers into a simulacrum of a Space Marine’s helm. The eye-lenses of the Dreadnought blazed with a furnace’s crimson light, as Atraxii and Oblexus approached to stand before him.

  Atraxii removed his helm with a hiss of air pressure, placing it before him as he lowered to one knee. It was customary within Clan Kaargul that a warrior reveal the flesh of his face when in the presence of the master of his clan, and while Lochaar was not an iron captain, Atraxii conducted the ritual nonetheless in deference. It was a symbolic submission, a presentation made not in disgust or shame for the biological material remaining, but as a solemn acknowledgement of what perfection the warrior had yet to achieve, and a vow that he would seek to remove the weakness from himself as he made war for the clan. Since the formation of the clan company, its commanders had watched as, with the procession of years, their warriors demonstrated the extent of their advancement towards union with the machine through the increasing levels of augmentation that replaced their flesh.

  Oblexus knelt beside Atraxii, but did not remove his helm.

  ‘There is nothing for the Iron Father to remove, brother,’ boomed Lochaar, as if sensing the subject of the Techmarine’s thoughts. ‘That is his true face now.’

  Atraxii processed the information. Oblexus’ augmentations had surpassed even his expectations. The Iron Father’s bionic ratio might be the highest within the Chapter, save for the ensconced Dreadnought looking down upon him.

  ‘Rise.’

  The Iron Hands stood. Atraxii took his helmet, placing it in the crook of his arm as he looked upon Lochaar.

  ‘Brother,’ said Atraxii. ‘Where is the iron captain?’

  ‘Iron Captain Rumann attends to the Eye of Medusa,’ said Lochaar in reply, referring to the subterranean vault that served as the seat of the Chapter’s ruling Iron Council. ‘In his stead I guide the watch of Kaargul over Medusa.

  ‘It is the most sacred of duties performed by the clan who stands sentinel over fair Medusa to safeguard our primarch,’ rumbled the Dreadnought. ‘This is the sixteenth such vigil that I have undertaken among Kaargul, and your first, young Atraxii. I look upon our father during my meditations. I think upon his teachings, joined with the noble spirit of this bastion, and contemplate the primarch from within the tomb that once fought beside him during the Great Crusade.’

  The armoured death mask that served as Lochaar’s head panned on grinding servos to regard Atraxii.

  ‘Much expectation has been placed upon you,’ intoned the Dreadnought. ‘When the name of your flesh was purged and your clan name chosen to take its place alongside the blessed iron, your moniker was indicative of the capacity we recognised within you, even then. Atraxii, in honour of the noble clan lost to the fires of the Great Failing, in the time when we stood as a Legion. You were destined to stand apart from your brothers, and now, returning from sacred Mars garbed in the crimson, you have fulfilled those expectations to my satisfaction.’

  ‘You honour me, Iron One,’ said Atraxii, his modulated flesh-voice seeming thin and fragile in comparison to the Dreadnought’s.

  ‘Let these words be spoken once, and never repeated. While you shall walk all the days until your end in the crimson of Mars, your core is of Medusan iron. Ascension to the mantle of Techmarine did nothing to change this, as nothing ever shall. Never forget that, as you carry your blade for the clan, as you bless and sanctify our machines of war and guide them into battle’s crucible. Your core is of iron, and it shall never be broken.’

  ‘Praise be,’ said Oblexus, making the sign of the cog in a bang of his gauntlets against his armoured chest.

  ‘Praise be,’ echoed Atraxii.

  A low rumble issued from Lochaar, perhaps the mechanical equivalent of a grunt of approval.

  ‘Iron Father,’ said Lochaar to Oblexus. ‘How go your preparations to depart for the Yandi Veil?’

  ‘They are efficient, Iron One,’ replied Oblexus, with a slight inclination of his head. ‘The Medusan Wing stands in readi­ness to–’

  The Iron Father paused. Atraxii flicked his eyes towards his mentor, who stood in silence for the entirety of three seconds.

  ‘There has been an unscheduled translation in-system,’ Oblexus stated.

  ‘I have detected it,’ replied Lochaar.

  ‘It bears the noospheric sigil of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ said the Iron Father. ‘It is the Priori.’

  -04.0-

  The Adeptus Mechanicus frigate Priori translated from the warp like a knife withdrawn from a wound. It was a long, slender ship, its hull in alternating segments of bronze and rust-red. Its blunt, boxy prow angled towards Medusa as its plasma drives lit, the holy cog-and-skull icon it bore illuminated in the dim light of the system’s star.

  The Priori was a slight vessel, small and lightly armed. It was such attributes that saw its class designated for reconnaissance and light escort duties. The bulk of the powerful drives at the rear of the vessel provided it with a nimble aspect and granted it the speed to excel at the swift transmission of emissaries and envoys from Mars.

  As Adept Wyn’s ocular clusters whirred into life, pulsing with sharp emerald light, her limbs stirred from their prolonged inaction. She hung a few feet above the deck, on the command dais of the Priori’s bridge, suspended by dozens of her mechadendrites like a marionette twisted in its strings. The segmented cables slotted into interface nodes and input plugs, allowing her utter control of the starship as it plied the stars.

  A small army of lobotomised servitors laboured around her in recessed pits and consoles built into the walls. A scarce handful of tech-priests prowled the unlit bridge, their crimson robes rendered the hue of dried blood as they shuffled about their tasks. It was silent, but for the muted clacking of runeboard keys and the muffled dialogue that passed between servitors and adepts in clicking bursts of binary.

  Wyn parted the veil of noospheric chatter that encircled Medusa like a buzzing shroud. Defence platforms and system monitors lanced through to her consciousness, demanding that her progress cease and identification be transmitted. An Adeptus Astartes warship, designation Corporeal Lament, came about on an intercept vector. New data washed over Wyn in an urgent tide as she detected the frigate’s weapons acquiring the Priori and priming to fire.

  The faint stirrings of what could have once been amusement whispered through the scant biological remnants of Wyn’s body beneath her voluminous robes. A section of her primary logic engine shivered for an instant. A surge of binary, bright and needle-fine, pierced the oncoming waves of menacing code. It would assail the ears of the uninitiated as nothing more than a blaring outburst of jagged, scraping noise. But to one joined with the noosphere, an elevated being with reverence for knowledge and the ways of the machine, it was something different entirely.

  It was a song.

  It was a magnificent symphonic clarion call, lighting the dark of the void with the history and nobility of hallowed Mars. It sang the praises of the Omnissiah, proclaiming the divinity and power of the Master of Machines who was the keeper of all knowledge. It was a beacon of wisdom amidst the desolate blackness of ignorance. It was a striking declaration of the prowess of the Cult Mechanicus, the equivalent of a
rippling banner on the battlefield, or the godlike roar of the striding god-machines of the Titan Legions.

  Wyn watched the complexion of the noosphere ripple with adaptation and change. The Corporeal Lament cooled its guns, altering its course to bear alongside the Priori and guide it to anchor at high orbit.

  Wyn pulsed another message into the swirling clouds of information, as bright and clear as her proclamation of identity. It was a simple missive, easily translatable by any who wished to do so.

 

  Atraxii stood beside Oblexus upon the landing pad as the Adeptus Mechanicus shuttle approached. A howling gale ripped at the armour of thirty Iron Hands warriors who waited in silent ranks to admit the Martian emissary. Two columns of fourteen Space Marines formed a corridor leading into the fortress of Clan Kaargul, bolters clasped to their chests. At their fore stood Atraxii and Oblexus.

  The newly appointed Techmarine watched as the shuttle broke through the turbulent layers of storm cloud. Atraxii’s attention locked to the pair of dark wedge shapes flanking it on either side.

  The Stormhawk interceptor was a compact fighter craft of roughly avian aspect. Its main fuselage protruded from beneath angular, forward-swept wings, sandwiched between a pair of turbine propulsion drives that gave it the look of a pit hound, with shoulders packed with dense muscle. Twin assault cannons tipped the wings, and Atraxii saw missile tubes built into the fuselage, with a formidable las-talon slung beneath the cockpit. There was no armourglass on the fighter, no transparent canopy for the pilot to see through. In its place, a cluster of sensor nodes packed a narrow slit in the craft’s armoured prow.

  The two Stormhawks peeled away to either side as the shuttle descended, their escort duty done. Atraxii glimpsed a silver icon, a cog with bladed wings, glinting in the wan light from their flanks.