The Eye of Medusa Read online

  Backlist

  More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

  The Beast Arises

  1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

  11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

  12: THE BEHEADING

  Space Marine Battles

  WAR OF THE FANG

  A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  An Astral Knights novel

  DAMNOS

  An Ultramarines collection

  DAMOCLES

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

  OVERFIEND

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

  ARMAGEDDON

  Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

  Legends of the Dark Millennium

  ASTRA MILITARUM

  An Astra Militarum collection

  ULTRAMARINES

  An Ultramarines collection

  FARSIGHT

  A Tau Empire novella

  SONS OF CORAX

  A Raven Guard collection

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Space Wolves collection

  Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Shattered Legions’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  LORDS OF THE IRON HANDS

  Kristos, Clan Raukaan Iron Father

  Tubriik Ares, Clan Garrsak Iron Father

  Verrox, Clan Vurgaan Iron Father, and iron captain

  CLAN AVERNII

  Drath, Third sergeant

  CLAN GARRSAK

  Draevark, Iron captain

  Braavos, Iron Chaplain

  Naavor, Techmarine

  Artex, Second sergeant

  Ankaran, Eighth sergeant

  Stronos, Tenth sergeant

  Jalenghaal, Battle-brother of Clave Stronos

  Kardaanus, Battle-brother of Clave Stronos

  Vand, Battle-brother of Clave Stronos

  Lurrgol, Battle-brother of Clave Stronos

  Burr, Battle-brother of Clave Stronos

  Morthol, Battle-brother of Clave Stronos

  Govall, Battle-brother of Clave Stronos

  Ruuvax, Battle-brother of Clave Stronos

  Trellok, Battle-brother of Clave Stronos

  CLAN BORRGOS

  Raan, Iron captain

  Huygens, Iron Chaplain

  Dumaar, Apothecary

  Tartrak, Sixth sergeant

  CLAN DORRVOK

  Maarvuk, Second sergeant

  Gorgorus, Scout of Clave Maarvuk

  Suforr, Scout of Clave Maarvuk

  Sarrk, Scout of Clave Maarvuk

  NOVITIATES OF THE IRON HANDS

  Arven Rauth

  Khrysaar

  Ehrlach

  Juraa

  Borrg

  ADEPTUS MECHANICUS

  Nicco Palpus, Logi-legatus, Fabricator General of Thennos, and Paramount Voice of Mars

  Talos Epsili, Metachirurgeon and Secondary Voice of Mars

  Chiralias Tarl, Tertiary Voice of Mars

  Hyproxius Velt, Fabricator-locum of Thennos and dominus of the Thennosian Macroclades

  Theol Quoros, Technologian, adjutant-spiritual to the fabricator-locum of Thennos

  Melitan Yolanis, Enginseer

  Callun Darvo, Enginseer

  IMPERIAL OTHER

  Talala Yazir, Inquisition, Ordo Xenos

  Harsid, Deathwatch captain, originally of the Death Spectres

  Lydriik, Deathwatch, Epistolary of the Iron Hands, Clan Borrgos

  Ymir, Deathwatch, originally of the Space Wolves

  NON-IMPERIAL OTHER

  Yeldrian, Autarch of Craftworld Alaitoc

  Imladrielle Darkshroud, Spiritseer of Craftworld Alaitoc

  >>> SIMULUS INLOAD

  >>> SOURCE >>> UNKNOWN

  >>> ORIGIN >>> UNKNOWN

  >>> DATESTAMP >>> UNKNOWN

  >>> MULTIVARIATE STREAM > PROBABILITY OF EXPERIENTIAL ERROR 18.21 %

  >>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>

  Chapter One

  ‘May the Omnissiah watch over this instrument of holy war.’

  – Artisan Adept Sabeq Rawl

  ‘With this link, I bind you to my clan.’

  ‘To my clan.’ Echoes of gears and metal.

  Kardan Stronos barely heard the words of the litany. They had become inseparable from the shriek of bone planes and laser scalpels. Every tiny bone vibrated to its own share of the agony, and only his fundamental genetic hardening kept him conscious of the process at all.

  ‘Is there pain?’ The voice of th
e tech-priest, Artisan Adept Sabeq Rawl, was perfectly level. Stronos was equally fastidious in answering, the question as much a component of the ritual as the pain.

  ‘Pain is of the flesh. From this day onward, I am iron.’

  The words they spoke were Reket, the dialect of the mortal Garrsaki clansmen and the ritual tongue of their iron overlords. It was a language of few words and constraining syntax, colourless and harsh, enforcing the terse, inexpressive speech of its wielders. The differences between it and other Medusan forms were sufficient to make its usage under the present circumstances a challenge. As was the intent.

  ‘The flesh cannot speak with the clarity of machine to machine,’ said Sabeq. ‘It communicates its needs through the code-language of pain.’ Stronos felt the ceramite outer casing of his upper backplate adeptly unscrewed and detached, servomuscular bundles shrinking from their first taste of the Alloyed’s meagre atmosphere. ‘What about…’ Then came the sharp jab of a spinal probe between the mechanisms and into the marrow. ‘Now?’

  Stronos’ gasp perished midway up his throat, and he swallowed his cry with an effort. ‘Barely.’

  ‘Good.’ Impossible to be certain, but the priest sounded impressed. ‘The sensation you are feeling now is your spine passing instruction to your pain centres that the graft has been integrated successfully. Congratulations, Lord Stronos – you are of the clan.’

  ‘Of the clan.’

  There was a chittering whir as hook limbs passed over the back of his neck, anointing the new implant with oils, machining them into the gloss with an array of rotable scrubbers.

  Stronos winced, the area still raw, and fixed his gaze firmly forward.

  The cell was small, iron grey, the minimum necessary for the physical existence of a transhuman being. Elevation to the rank of sergeant brought the privilege of single quarters, an archaic custom for his needs were few, but tradition was tradition, and the single cot was the one on which he sat. The occasional spasm of his muscles, and the artisan’s insect-quick shifts in position, brought sympathetic creaks and groans from its frame. The current placement of his hands, laid one atop the other over an ironbound incunabulum in his lap, played a large part in his outward stoicism. Not the hands so much as the book itself, his iron core, all his body’s weaknesses pouring into its worn binding and creased parchment.

  ‘With this link,’ said Sabeq, withdrawing his implements, then gimballing in close enough to Stronos’ neck to physically blow on the polished surface, a ritual benediction to fortune. ‘I bind you to my clan.’

  ‘To my clan.’

  Unconsciously, Stronos dialled through his bionic eye’s spectral bands, the muscles of his cheek clenching and releasing to an ingrained rhythm, matching the acuity of his organic eye to the augmetic as he flicked from wavelength to wavelength. Iron Father Verrox had laughed it off as a tick, one that often manifested under duress or in the build up to a deployment, but to Stronos it was the very definition of physical deficiency. That it arose from a desire to expunge his body’s weaknesses did not repudiate it. Realising what he was doing, he stopped, the final transition from red to infrared leaving his flesh eye behind, staring into a pall of excavated bone as three heat wraiths materialised from the corners of the cell. They were hulking, black, visible only by the dim yellow corona that outlined their armoured frames, patches of fiery white around power packs and partially disengaged armour seals.

  They bore witness.

  One amongst their number stepped forward. His name was Jalenghaal. Stronos did not know him except by name and honour roll. He stopped half a metre before Stronos’ cot, and there triggered the manual release of a sectional plate from his power armour’s girdle band. For any Iron Hands battle-brother of a certain age, the removal of armour that they had long ago ceased to consider distinct from their own increasingly augmetised frames was a labour of hours, if not days, one that demanded use of a forge and a team of servitors. Jalenghaal and his brothers would have devoted many days prior to Stronos’ arrival in preparation for this ritual. Sabeq’s dendrites flicked expertly around Stronos’ front, swifter than either eye could track, to strip him of the corresponding piece.

  ‘With this link,’ Jalenghaal intoned, flat and without cadence as he presented the slab of black armour. Corpuscular attachments and tentacled bio-circuitry probed the air for the ligand sites of a Space Marine’s black carapace. ‘I bind you to my clan.’ The emphatic use of ‘my’ sounded an uneven note in the otherwise monotone purr of the Iron Hands brother’s words.

  It was instantly forgotten as the armour plate slotted into Stronos’ prepared harness perfectly, his armour’s systems snarling at the influx of foreign data. He gasped, overwhelmed, as command protocols, tactical runes, and much, much more exloaded from the other Iron Hands brother and splayed across Stronos’ bionic eye. They hovered in view, like dripping steel, and in the blink of an eye Stronos knew Brother Jalenghaal.

  ‘By your iron, am I bound,’ Stronos managed to utter, and remembered to blink-click the ritual confirmation to Jalenghaal’s helm display.

  In silence, the Iron Hand stepped back, and the second presented himself. his armour told him. Then the third. Both came bearing parts of themselves, and further bindings from battle-brothers, ten in all, unable to attend. To each new addition, his armour’s spirit responded with snarls and whines, and Stronos felt his mind whirl with the influx of information, fragments of thought and emotion that fell on his cortices only to melt away like flakes of snow. The given components were not offered at random. Each incorporated a data-tether twinned to the giver’s system core.

  When it was completed, Stronos heard the territorial growl that emanated from his armour’s intelligence core, a surly welcome to a quorum of ten.

  He had studied the customs of Clan Garrsak in preparation for his transfer and swift elevation, his fascination genuine, but the power of their bonding took his breath away. It was as though the individual identities of ten battle-brothers had been subsumed into a gestalt being, its mind noospheric, its view from a plane above its constituent sum. This being had a name.

  Clave Stronos.

  ‘It is done.’ Jalenghaal stood tall against the wall, an autopsy in monochrome of dull black ceramite and sleek plasteel bionic. For all his machine detachment, his impatience was as audible as the power hum of his systems.

  ‘Almost,’ said Sabeq. ‘I need only add rank insignia and ident wafers that the Omnissiah might know it.’

  ‘The Alloyed approaches Thennos’ orbit,’ said Jalenghaal. ‘Brothers muster.’

  ‘A fact to which I am cogent.’

  ‘Then give me a time frame, adept.’

  A ripple of mechadendrites, a shrug. ‘The armour’s spirit demands its due, and yours must recognise clan-brother and commander.’

  It was in the nature of the Iron Hands to challenge their superiors, for in such challenges were weaknesses exposed, but at that Jalenghaal fell silent. The bonds of clan went deeper than Chapter, deeper even than the shared gene-link to the primarch.

  In times like these, it was the one bond of brotherhood that remained stronger than iron.

  With the ritual essentially over, Stronos allowed his muscles to relax; his hands parted from the book in his lap.

  The Canticle of Travels was the only surviving text describing Ferrus Manus’ early life on Medusa. This volume, written and annotated by the paramount Voice of Mars some time in the early centuries of M33, was the oldest version of the collected stories still in existence. The forgotten adept’s anonymous opus, bringing the Omnissiah’s enlightenment to the old legends, was the cornerstone of doctrinal thought from Medusa to Mars, and anywhere else that two Iron Hands collided. This copy had seen more action than most Imperial Guardsmen, and was better read. The pages were dog-eared, the las scorch across the lower spine earned on Furios Minor when he had still borne the book with him in
to battle.

  It had been a gift from a friend, and Stronos had few enough of those.

  He closed his flesh eye and massaged his forehead with the knuckles of his gauntlet until the dizziness receded. ‘Iron Captain Draevark has apprised me of the situation on Thennos. The ships of my former clan are uplink-capable.’

  The stereotype of the thuggish warrior of Vurgaan was as old as that of the robotic butcher of Clan Garrsak; Stronos found the cultural idiosyncrasies fascinating, but the allusion to the caricature raised a death-rattle chuckle from Lurrgol.

  Stronos glanced up to address the whipping tendrils of Artisan Rawl. ‘Perhaps we might dispense with the abjuration of rejection and the ancillary rites of inscription until after the initial deployment.’

  ‘Your forgechain shows me that you have undergone the rite more than once before. I see you have learned from the experience.’ Rawl bowed his mechitinous head-section. ‘Very well. The machine-spirit would welcome a late arrival to your first battle even less than it would a rushed blessing. Oh, for the purity of a warrior’s calling.’

  ‘Iron is not dug pure from the ground,’ growled Jalenghaal. ‘It is made pure.’

  Lurrgol and Burr nodded in agreement.

  The artisan hooked a bloodied extensor over Stronos’ shoulder and gestured for the servitor, hidden in somnolence behind the fog of counterseptic and bone. At the artisan’s unspoken override, the lobotomised bio-construct started towards the cot. Its necrotised room temperature biology had hidden it from Stronos’ infravision until then. A neat square of blood vessels and bone had been dug out of its brow. The flesh there had borne a binharic ident-brand containing Stronos’ clan, clave, and personal authentications. All now former. It too would eventually require re-baptism that the Omnissiah might know it.

  The servitor presented the adept a tray of implements, which he selected from, replacing drill bits and nozzle heads as he dutifully blessed the currently nameless servitor. Then he returned his attentions to Stronos’ armour, hyper-fine laser sculptors erasing rank and squad insignia and replacing them with new ones. Stronos felt the artisan’s sculpting tools hover uncertainly over his battleplate’s more glaring imperfections.

  Scratch marks in Juuket, the barbaric dialect of Clan Vurgaan, recorded the many worlds on which he had fought. Strings of spent shells and power casings recalled particularly impressive kills, the trophies hanging from his armour like threaded beads.