A Lesson in Iron Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  A Lesson in Iron – David Guymer

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  A Lesson in Iron

  David Guymer

  The ork kill-kroozer shook hard, shuddering off vast quantities of its ramshackle superstructure as it boosted for the malformed abscess of an event horizon.

  The anomalous region was a smear of abused reality a million kilometres across, compressed by hideous internal forces to a fraction of that in height and a depth that auspex read, impossibly, as zero. Sensor readings terminated there. The universe ceased to exist at that point. There were half a dozen known warp rifts in the growing Imperium. In a region of space containing ten billion stars, that made them about a million times less abundant than black holes. The standing edict of the Navis Nobilite and the Naval academies of Terra was to give them a wide berth and, a handful of apocryphal tales from rogue traders aside, no one had ever dared venture this close.

  The Venom-class destroyer Strontium Wave broke off pursuit almost immediately as ether distortions began to smoke her void shields.

  The kill-kroozer plunged on, heedless, chasing after the two equally massive junk ships that were already dissolving into the bent reality at the eye of the anomaly, its drive stacks sun-hot, its crude shields spasming under the unnatural onslaught.

  It was not the Strontium Wave they fled.

  Darkening the void to their stern came the Fist of Iron. A Gloriana-class battleship. The most advanced ship of the line to be launched from the yards of Luna since the death of Old Night. Flagship of the Gorgon.

  For her to be committed with only a single escort was not uncommon, for Ferrus Manus understood war and its instruments in a way that the wolves of Russ and Horus never would. The Fist of Iron, unique amongst the warships of the recently warranted 52nd Expedition Fleet and the newfound primarch’s command, had the firepower to win this alone.

  It was an efficient use of his resources.

  The primarch sat upon a throne of black iron and Karaashi basalt, following the flicker-flash of the bridge’s main oculus as metal debris from the kill-kroozer burned up on the navigational shields or before the fury of the point-defence guns. He was a rugged, brutal giant, carved in stone, slabbed in plates of blackened ceramite and hung with heavy mail. His eyes glittered like empty silver vessels as they beheld the pyrotechnics.

  ‘That’s more than far enough,’ said Harik Morn, veteran sergeant of the Avernii Clan’s First Order, eyeing the stained oculus view as though it left a sour taste in his mouth.

  ‘The orks seem to think it can be done,’ said Santar, grinning across at the tanned old Terran from the left hand of Ferrus’ throne. Ferrus’ gene-seed imparted little beauty, and joviality still less, and none in the Legion typified the absence of those traits like Sergeant Gabriel Santar. His grin was like a tectonic fracture.

  With the first captain that Ferrus had inherited from Amadeus DuCaine and the era of the Storm Walkers falling in battle to the alien gorge, it would be one of Morn or Santar who bore the mantle next. Both of them knew it, but Ferrus was in no hurry to make that decision.

  He wanted to see them prove their worth, knowing there was another ready to claim the honour should they fail.

  ‘Well-known thinkers, orks,’ said Morn, dryly, arms folded over the elaborate design of his antique breastplate. ‘Never an edge they wouldn’t leap off. You want to follow them in…?’ He inclined his head towards the oculus.

  There was a devil in them, Ferrus’ children: they were independent, prone to rash action, ruled by emotion and pride. It was Medusans like Santar in whom the flaw was most pronounced, but they strove to control that fire with the same objectivity and logic that Ferrus had learned on the same harsh parent world.

  A parallel spectrum of colours bled through the oculus as the lead ork cruiser vanished into the rift. The mortal crew groaned in dismay and averted their faces from the vivisected rainbow that radiated off the event horizon. Even Santar stuck out his lower lip.

  The display glinted off Ferrus’ eyes, impermeable as mirrors.

  ‘Warning,’ Xanthus chittered. The Mechanicum representative to the 52nd was a bent figure in a frayed scarlet cloak, standing with the aid of a copper-inlaid metal staff in a specifically modified operations pulpit. One metal-scaled hand was clamped to a hub augur display. A febrile mass of manipulator arms whipped from slits in his robes to attack a myriad of haptic controls even as he turned towards Ferrus and his legionaries. ‘I have no data with which to predict conditions within a warp anomaly.’

  ‘Then we will be the first,’ said Ferrus.

  ‘Lords!’

  The battleship’s mortal commander, Laeric, was a thickset man, already balding in his thirties. The sweat on his scalp was stained purple and green by the distortions in the oculus, as if by oil, his hands gripping the safety rail that surrounded the five unequal figures on the bridge’s command platform, eyes filled with terror.

  But Ferrus did not know terror. He feared neither death nor failure.

  Only being outshone.

  ‘Dismantling the Rust empire was our responsibility. Even if the Seraphina Offensive was waged before my leadership I will not have my Legion’s most famous victory tarnished by the existence of survivors. After them, shipmaster. Ahead full.’

  Liquescent tendrils of energy burned across the Fist of Iron’s bows, an aurora of pinks and blues that ignited her navigational shields as though she plunged headlong into the atmosphere of an as-yet unrealised world. Eerie harmonics looped through the internal comms grids, mangled, distorted sounds that emerged from the ship’s augmitters as pleas for mercy, cries of anguish, the begging whispers of familiar voices. A resonant effect from the voids. An onslaught of some kind. But Ferrus was accustomed to terrain that could kill, an instinctual understanding that he had poured into the design of his flagship.

  He considered informing Laeric and his crew of the sound’s origin, but decided against it.

  On Medusa, he had battled the giant elementals that dwelled within its mountains, conversed with ancient spirits that spoke in magmic eructation and the shaking of the earth, aided an Iron Father in the exorcism of an enraged machine, and he knew the Emperor’s ‘Truth’ for a useful lie.

  Let the mortals be afraid.

  Let them face their nightmares, endure and emerge the stronger, or else fail and strengthen the collective by their expulsion, for Ferrus’ Legion had no place for the frail of spirit.

  ‘Augur sweeps of the interior,’ said Ferrus. ‘I want them now.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ said Laeric, holding tight to the rattling handrail and shouting the instruction down to his junior officers.

  ‘There is a tremendous degree of signal distortion,’ said Xanthus calmly, a moment later, plugged directly into the battleship’s abrasive spirit. ‘False reads. Sensor echoes. The effect worsens progressively with distance from the Fist of Iron, but not to any mathematical corollary. Interesting.’

  Still gripping the handrail in both hands, Laeric took his juniors’ reports and relayed them to the primarch. ‘We’ve a reliable augur radius of a few hundred metres at best.’

  ‘They are in here somewhere,’ scowled Santar.

  ‘Maybe we can look through a window?’ suggested Morn.

  ‘Maybe you should.’

  ‘I am programming the augurs to scan for particle traces from the orks’…’ The Mechanicum adept hesitated for a moment, his thought processes marked by a clockwork tick
as he struggled for an acceptable terminology. ‘…engines. Our entry vectors were identical. Their drive emissions should be traceable.’

  ‘And?’ said Ferrus.

  ‘Plotting.’

  Ferrus grunted. ‘Weapons are functioning, at least?’

  ‘Lances at full charge, lord.’ Laeric read from a fitfully glowing screen. ‘Macro-batteries loaded and locked. Targeting matrices… Well, they’re online, lord. We’ll see how well they function when the time comes.’

  The curl of a smile threatened Ferrus’ lips. If there was one thing he admired, it was candour.

  ‘At least we know the shields are working,’ added Morn, frowning as another squeal of feedback harrowed through the bridge’s comms.

  ‘Contacts!’

  The female voice yelled up from the sensorium pits – no formality of chain of command here and Ferrus expected none. He nodded an acknowledgement, ignoring the hammer-thump of his hearts, the urge to beat his fist on his armrest that Horus or Russ would undoubtedly have indulged had they been in his place, and presented his bridge with iron.

  ‘Real-views on the source. Now.’

  ‘Aye, lord. Working.’

  ‘Mass signatures,’ the woman continued, speaking over the other officers, a screed of consciousness direct from the augur reports as they spilled onto her screens. ‘Two thousand kilometres off the port bow. I think. Distance is… elastic. Mass equivalent to four capital-sized xenos vessels.’

  ‘Four?’ Ferrus frowned down at her. ‘We pursued only three.’ The woman paled under his direct regard. ‘A fourth vessel already within the anomaly perhaps?’

  ‘They were not fleeing us,’ said Morn. His gaze dragged from Ferrus to Santar, lingering a pointed moment, then on to encompass Laeric and his mortal crew. ‘They were luring us into a trap.’

  ‘The Fist of Iron can still best four ork cruisers,’ said Santar.

  Laeric nodded, but kept his obvious doubts for himself.

  ‘And if there are more beyond our detection range? We are barely a dozen light years from the old Krooked Klaw Empire. If their remnants have begun to rebuild here–’

  ‘Improbable.’ Xanthus interjected.

  ‘If they have begun to rebuild inside this anomaly,’ Morn repeated, more forcibly, ‘if they have adapted their systems to its effects.’

  Ferrus forestalled the Terran’s counsel with one raised cold metal finger. He welcomed it, but his decision, once made, was absolute. ‘It is equally likely that the mass readings are “elastic” as well.’

  Santar grunted agreement.

  ‘Real-view established,’ announced Xanthus, cutting further argument short as all eyes turned to the oculus.

  The large oval screen was plagued by static, untranslatable energetic features assuming physical shapes as one viewed them, like images in a cloud. If any man could be so degenerate as to see naught but contorted faces and grasping hands in a cloud. Xanthus’ beetling industry and the efforts of the crew succeeded in smoothing out the bulk of the audio, leaving only sporadic bursts of static as the real-view centred on the mass of four capital-sized vessels, becalmed on a storm of elemental colour…

  …their wreckage strewn over several thousand kilometres of tormented space.

  ‘What did I say?’ muttered Morn. ‘Edge. Leap.’

  ‘What happened?’ Ferrus asked of the bridge at large.

  ‘Analysing,’ said Xanthus.

  Laeric leaned over the handrail, the curved bar rattling up against his gut with the shearing forces currently flexing and bowing the ship’s hull, as a gaggle of decorated under-officers whispered urgently up at him from the main deck. Ferrus could not make out what they were saying, but he heard Laeric dismiss them angrily, going so far as to raise a hand to strike a young lieutenant who did not withdraw speedily enough to his station.

  ‘A problem, shipmaster?’ Ferrus asked.

  ‘Nothing, lord. Another sensor ghost.’

  ‘I will be the judge of that.’

  Laeric cleared his throat nervously, evidently wishing he had not dismissed his juniors so hastily. ‘My crew are certain that these are indeed the ships we pursued into the anomaly, but thermal decay and material ­analysis would appear to suggest they were destroyed years ago. Decades.’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Xanthus.

  ‘Lord.’ Santar pointed to a shard of darkness within the oculus’ clearing view-frame.

  A ship.

  Its ram-like stem bowed under the caress of evanescent flames, its dorsal spine shorn messily in half. Its hull armour was monstrously thick, but pitted as the surface of an asteroid. A few shavings of black paint remained in harder-to-attack spots – between armour plates, beneath the cupolae of macro-batteries. The weathered shadow of an aquila was just visible on the slab keel of its fortress bow.

  A Legiones Astartes strike cruiser.

  ‘It is one of mine,’ Ferrus breathed.

  ‘Impossible,’ Xanthus said again.

  ‘Most definitely impossible, lord,’ said Laeric, even more rattled, if anything, by the presence of the Imperial derelict than he had been by the penetration of the rift itself. ‘I know every ship in the Fifty-Second Expedition.’

  ‘I have other children. Those still fighting under the Emperor in the First Expedition Fleet. Those in the Eighteenth, or the Thirty-Third?’

  ‘No, lord!’ Laeric bit back something he would have later regretted. He rubbed the back of his head. ‘I’m not even confident I recognise the class.’

  Ferrus returned his silvered gaze to the oculus, the derelict growing incidentally more massive as the Fist of Iron moved relative to it. Close enough to see chunks of orkish debris bounce soundlessly from its broken shell, coils of unnatural flame, self-igniting somehow despite the empty vacuum of the anomaly, gyrating down its length.

  ‘Prepare boarding parties and ready my gunship. Santar, Morn, Xanthus, you will accompany me.’

  It was a mystery. A challenge.

  And Ferrus never could dismiss a challenge.

  Arkal Metrician tapped the side of his helmet, the square section of welded plasteel and micro-rivets that contained his armour’s vox-antennae. Pathetic. The warzones he had fought over. Afrik. Ionus. Rust. All without the benefit of Mk II. How quickly one came to depend on it.

  Pathetic.

  ‘Still no contact with Sergeant Boros?’

  Ruugal’s lean face was white in the beam from Metrician’s lamp, dark eyes narrowing to pins, a plastek breath mask strapped over his nose and mouth. His helmet was open, a glossy piece of black carapace, but fitted with tracking systems and short-range vox capability that those legionaries who had battled on through the intermittent communication blackouts of Mk I power armour would have envied.

  ‘Don’t worry yet, boy. During the Ooranian uprising, my squad and I went three entire days without vox contact.’

  Ruugal frowned, in no way enlivened by yet another anecdote from the Unification Wars of Greater Sol, and turned to pad up the unlit corridor from the blown access hatch.

  The stressed metal creaked: with the Scouts’ tread; with the impacts of what was left of the ork ships; even with the barely perceptible gravitic shifts as the Fist of Iron fought to hold at anchor in the storm. It groaned.

  It struck Metrician as odd, now he thought about it, that this lifeless wreck did not have to fight as hard as the ­primarch’s flagship to remain still.

  The light beams of the other Scouts, spearing from lumens clipped to the stocks of shotcannons and autoguns, painted the bulkheads. Bare metal glittered like silver in the after dark, and Metrician suppressed a shiver.

  Exposed to the void, but sheltered from the worst effects of the rift by a labyrinth of internal corridors and doorways, everything was exactly as it must have been when the ship had been lost. There were exterior maintenance tools in h
atches. Danger notices inscribed in Imperial Gothic. Atmosphere suits sized for mortal wear hung in glass-fronted lockers. One was open. The black fabric erupted with returned light as Metrician’s helmet beam panned across.

  Everything was familiar and yet… different.

  The sound of something metallic clattering on a deckplate echoed up from the distant halls of the listing ship, and six lumen beams converged on the far end of the corridor. They wavered. The sounds of breathing laboured through the squad link.

  Deeply pathetic.

  ‘It’ll be Lagethar,’ he grunted. ‘Two decks down.’

  The Scouts relaxed, a loose clatter as grips un-tensed and gunstocks dropped to sit tight against chest-plates, light beams scattering as if for cover.

  The rawest and the eldest: that was who the primarch always threw in first. Prove the former. Purge the latter. Metrician couldn’t complain. He would probably do the same.

  ‘Could there be orks still alive over here?’ whispered Ruugal.

  ‘Not a chance,’ he said, before adding, in the hermetic privacy of his Mk II powered helm. ‘Answer me, Boros. In the Emperor’s name, answer me.’

  Sharik Borrgan was driving into the pumping chamber the second that Hemtaal had the door forced. The shorn-off muzzle of his combat shotgun led, lumen beam scoring glancing hits off steel jackets and vent covers. Everything was greased and shiny, as though it had been tended that very day. That very hour. The huge pistons bracketed to the walls were for cycling air through the deck, but they were still now, quiet. The great bellows lay empty.

  ‘Sergeant?’ he called out as he pushed deeper into the cave of inert iron.

  The gunfire he had heard had definitely come from this chamber, but it was empty. No sign of the Scout Sergeant. No sign of orks. Sharik’s query echoed out through the gaps in the metal as he manually dialled the frequencies of his helmet vox-attachment. Nothing there but faint giggles of static.

  He waved for the rest of the squad to spread out.

  ‘Sergeant Boros?’

  A sudden creak and pop of metal spun him around, shotgun thrust out at neck height, as a crippling wave of distortion ran through the port bulkhead. Hemtaal shouted something in warning. Steel buckled and split, and Sharik cried out, squeezing himself into the scant cover of a piston jacket as bolts shot out from the crumpled section. One thudded head first into his rerebrace, leaving a meaty bruise over the bicep. Another drove point-first into his unarmoured throat.