Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa Read online

  THE HORUS HERESY®

  The Primarchs

  FERRUS MANUS: GORGON OF MEDUSA

  David Guymer

  FULGRIM: THE PALATINE PHOENIX

  Josh Reynolds

  LORGAR: BEARER OF THE WORD

  Gav Thorpe

  PERTURABO: HAMMER OF OLYMPIA

  Guy Haley

  MAGNUS THE RED: MASTER OF PROSPERO

  Graham McNeill

  LEMAN RUSS: THE GREAT WOLF

  Chris Wraight

  ROBOUTE GUILLIMAN: LORD OF ULTRAMAR

  David Annandale

  More Iron Hands from Black Library

  THE PRIMARCHS

  edited by Christian Dunn

  THE DAMNATION OF PYTHOS

  David Annandale

  SHATTERED LEGIONS

  edited by Laurie Goulding

  THE EYE OF MEDUSA

  David Guymer

  WRATH OF IRON

  Chris Wraight

  MEDUSAN WINGS

  Matt Westbrook

  THE EITHER

  Graham McNeill (audio drama)

  CHAMPIONS OF THE ETERNAL WAR

  Various authors (audio drama)

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  The Horus Heresy

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  About the Author

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Taken from us too soon, who knows what might have been.

  A Black Library Publication

  First published in Great Britain in 2018

  This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,

  Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Cover illustration by Mikhail Savier.

  Ferrus Mannus: Gorgon of Medusa © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Ferrus Mannus: Gorgon of Medusa, The Horus Heresy Primarchs, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.

  All Rights Reserved.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 13: 978 1 78496 599 0

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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  The Horus Heresy

  It is a time of legend.

  Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Mankind conquer the stars in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races are to be smashed by his elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

  The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor, as system after system is brought back under his control. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful champions.

  First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superhuman beings who have led the Space Marine Legions in campaign after campaign. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation, while the Space Marines themselves are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

  Many are the tales told of these legendary beings. From the halls of the Imperial Palace on Terra to the outermost reaches of Ultima Segmentum, their deeds are known to be shaping the very future of the galaxy. But can such souls remain free of doubt and corruption forever? Or will the temptation of greater power prove too much for even the most loyal sons of the Emperor?

  The seeds of heresy have already been sown, and the start of the greatest war in the history of mankind is but a few years away...

  'Ulan Cicerus was a passionate rhetorician, and he described the Gardinaal to me in a rhetorician's terms - they were "big fish in a shrinking pond".

  The Chapter Master's ability to turn a phrase, coupled to an apparent inability to recognise that few amongst his audience had the cultural reference frame for an ecological metaphor, never failed to endear him to the regiments of the doomed 413th.

  'It is a continuing failing of mortals to be unsettled by perfection.

  'What little I thence learned of the Gardinaal would have been familiar to any child of Sol, but none of us could have been prepared for the degradation practised on those eleven worlds in the name of efficiency, or necessity. "Why would humans choose to live like this?" Cicerus once demanded of us, as if we, without the blinkers of Ultramarian descent, could better answer.

  'The truth, as one of Terran descent would say, is that such men are seldom given choices.

  'We were not.

  'Our orders came from the offices of the Emperor himself, beloved by all. The Imperium desired the industrial power of the Gardinaal for the Great Crusade. The Gardinaal desired effective sovereignty, and had the military muscle to ensure that the 413th gave fair hearing to their demands. Nobody wanted a war.

  'But then, nobody gave us a choice.'

  - The Remembrances of Akurduana, Vol. CCLXVII,

  The Fall of the Lords of Gardinaal

  ONE

  Amadeus DuCaine thumped shoulder-first into the rockcrete wall.

  He dropped to one knee, turned his back, calmly ejected the spent magazine from his bolter and snapped home another of the specially tagged sickle-mags. As he did so he noticed the las-burn on his vambrace, cursed aloud, and took a moment to buff it out using the wrist of the opposite gauntlet. He'd been taught to go into battle looking as he'd want the Apothecaries to find him. Today was no different.

  The thick harness of his Mk I Thunder Armour was so polished a black that it shone under the inconstant light and creeping ice like volcanic glass, covered in company and campaign citations, most of which the Legion no longer officially recognised. Of them all, his pride was the Seal of the Eye of Vigilance, etched in platinum into the cheek guard of his tall helm. He had earned it in the latter years of the Seraphina offensive, campaigning alongside Lord Horus after the X Legion's annihilation of the ork forces on Rust. Good years. A curtain of chainmail, alternating rings of black iron and silver, hung from his shoulder guards. A collar of iron spikes traced the rear of his gorget ring and rose behind the back of his head. He carried a Clan Sorrgol banner as a cloak. It was heavy velvet, reinforced with a metal weave, weighted with onyx, black spinel and star sapphire, and glazed with ice. The clan device was picked out
in silver.

  With a series of heavy thumps, his command squad joined him in cover. Techmarine Rab Tannen. Apothecary Aled Glassius. Half a dozen age-raw, hoarfrosted, brutally decorated veterans almost as hard-bitten as their Lord Commander. Storm Walkers all and proud of it. The boy, Caphen, was last.

  The lacquered purple of the youngster's armour was scuffed and bullet-grazed, the palatine aquila that stood proud of his chest plastron burnished with coppery hygroscopic ice. Breathless sounds emerged from his helm augmitter as he crashed into the wall at the far end of the line.

  'They coming?' DuCaine asked, and checked his vambrace for damage under the passing alchemical light of an aerial flare.

  Caphen nodded. 'They're coming.'

  The boy had been attached to the command squad strictly as an observer, but the old hands all looked at him as they would a stressed bulkhead, something that might give at any second and void the entire proverbial section.

  'The lad's one of us now,' said DuCaine, raising his voice to contend with the shrieking fire of the Tarantula batteries dug in on the other side of the wall. 'That's the last I want to say on it.'

  The lad nodded his thanks. Even if he did flinch at being called 'lad', 'boy,' or any variation thereof.

  Satisfied, DuCaine looked up, as if he could discern the progress of the battle from the flicker trace of fire and dying flares. Vesta was a sunless moonlet, adrift in the void, cast off by its parent system at some point or other over the last five billion years under circumstances that didn't interest him, and dark as hell. It was cold enough to flash-kill a primarch. Until a few days ago, it hadn't had a name. That was why the enemy had chosen it.

  Who would miss an orphan moon that no Imperial cartographer had yet bothered to stick a number to?

  He turned away to see that Gaius Caphen had worked his way up the line towards him.

  'I am uncertain about this tactic, Lord Commander.'

  DuCaine laughed. An inbred respect for the proper chain of command and an innate disapproval of so single-minded an approach to warfare were clearly tying the boy's head in knots.

  'This tactic is a classic. Did I not tell you of the time that Lord Horus assigned his own First Captain as my equerry after Rust, to see it first-hand?'

  'I think you may have,' muttered Tannen.

  The Techmarine had been amongst the last cohort to learn his craft in the Ural forges. He was among the last to have retained a Terran sense of humour. DuCaine threw him an ironic 'thank you' wave.

  'It won't work against the Emperor's Children,' said Caphen.

  That single statement soured the mood more than all the artillery of the III Legion ever could.

  DuCaine had been trying not to think about it.

  But if the lad had any qualms about facing his own brothers in battle, then he wasn't showing it. DuCaine was impressed. Even if it had been Fulgrim himself who had given the boy his orders. The rest of the command squad picked up on his resolve; their attitudes of suspicion noticeably relaxed.

  'The warlord clans of old Albia have been perfecting this way of war on each other for hundreds of years,' DuCaine explained. 'The trick of it is to deploy only the exact amount of strength you need to draw your enemy into a straight fight.'

  'And in ensuring the men so deployed have the nerve to stand before the storm,' said Glassius, in characteristically portentous language. The Apothecary liked to project an air of gravitas onto the suckling neophytes he had to call brother. 'And in increasing numbers, sir.'

  DuCaine nodded in Agreement. He'd become aware of the custom that had developed amongst the mortal auxilia of the 52nd Expedition, of scribing their own condolence letters prior to deployment. DuCaine heartily approved.

  The clans of old Albia had observed similar traditions.

  'This phase is called Raising the Storm. It's a template we followed on the Central Afrik and in the Panpacific Campaigns.'

  Caphen's look, even through the frosted amethyst of his helmet lenses was one that DuCaine had come to recognise all too writ over the last century and a half. It wondered just how hard Unification could have been. How it could possibly have taken the Master of Mankind and his twenty Legions so long to achieve.

  'You heard of Rust?'

  'I think he may have,' said Tannen.

  'It won't work.' Caphen repealed. 'The Third Legion don't fight in that way.'

  'I know tire boy we're lighting here well, and he's not nearly as good as he thinks he is. In my experience a battle can be controlled right up to the point where it begins. After that I don't care if you're not technobarbarian from the Afrik, an ork, or aye, even Legiones Astartes, you do what everyone does in a battle.'

  Caphen shook his head, but did not protest further.

  DuCaine shrugged, turned back to the wall, slung his bolter strap over his shoulder, then set his boot against the frozen rockerete surface as if about to pull himself up over the top.

  'We just have to sweeten the lure a little bit.'

  Moses Trurakk pulled the control stick hard to the left, intending to jink but instead dragging the hyper-responsive Xiphon Interceptor into a hard break to port lie cursed in consonant-heavy Medusan as snap shots scotched his canopy and clipped the roll of his starboard wing. G-force crushed him into his flight harness as the unfamiliar machine dumped forward momentum into the turn. Pushing his engineered biology to the limits of its tolerance, he levered himself up from his harness and craned forward, catching sight of the heavily armed wedge of black as the enemy aircraft overshot.

  'Didn't see that coming,' he muttered sarcastically.

  Conjuring mental formularics of encouragement and common purpose, he directed them towards the Xiphon's rebellious spirit via the interface shunt plugged into his upper spine He dragged his augmented left hand from the dashboard to grapple the stick two-handed, the interceptor's wing flaps juddering violently as it began to level out. A groan forced its way through his teeth. It felt like he was lifting the aircraft by hand. 'You're sensitive enough when you want to be.' Just as he felt the wobble along his midline that told him he was about to pitch into another roll in the opposite direction, he pushed his hand through a hard gauntlet of gees to open up the throttle. At the same time his boot eased off the rudder pedal and the interceptor slammed him back into his harness and shot into a climb, scissoring over and under the enemy strike fighter as each sought to get in behind the other.

  Unable to break the stalemate after half a dozen turns, the more powerful Primaris-Lightning broke off with a massive burn of thrust.

  Moses had no option but to let it go.

  The Xiphon was a ludicrously high-performance machine. It boasted phenomenal corner speeds, touch-responsiveness, and was as agile in atmosphere as it was in the void. But for all its aeronautical capabilities it hadn't a scratch on a Primaris-Lightning for raw manoeuvring power.

  He took advantage of the temporary lull to silence a string of alarms demanding his attention, and to correct a potentially serious fuel imbalance in his starboard nacelle.

  The Xiphon was too complicated for its own good. It was lightweight and underpowered, and the design compromises inherent in a propulsion system that could operate in a range of atmosphere types, even one as inhospitable as Vesta's, or in a vacuum made her a nuisance of micromanagement in a fight.

  He didn't even like the colour.

  'You need a lighter touch on the ailerons,' said Ortan Vertanus. Moses scanned the coppery belts of cloud that strangled his aircraft, but saw no sign of his wing-brother. 'And not so belligerent with the stick. She wants to fly, brother. Let her.'

  'I have a solid grounding in all Imperial aeronautical.'

  'But do you love her, brother?'

  'My feelings are inconsequential. And my aircraft is agendered.'

  'I know that you talk to her when you're alone in there.'

  'I assure you I do not.'

  Light laughter crackled through the augmitter pad in Moses' control board.

  '
I believe it was the Shakespire that said - my brother doth protest too much. Combat is more than numbers and angles. It is a joust.'

  A shudder passed through Moses' canopy armourglass as Vertanus' purple Xiphon roared overhead. Its wings were anhedral with a downward-cranked tip, like a Felgarrthi vulture tucking in its pinions to swoop on rotting meat. Its two stripped-down engines frothed the thick clouds with white, its pilot making expert use of Vesta's gravity to fire the aircraft across Moses' nose and into an overshoot.

  'Show off,' Moses muttered.

  'Are you even trying, Iron Hand?' voxed Paliolinus, wing commander. 'I was told that you had more confirmed kills than any combat pilot in Clan Vurgaan.'

  'You were informed correctly,' Moses replied tersely. The joint exercises between the III and X Legions had been Lord Manus' proposal, to challenge ingrained approaches and provoke competitive spirit across both sides. Legion honour mattered. But clan honour mattered more, and personal honour more again. He would rely on any man of the Iron Tenth to say the same. 'Give me time,' he said. And an aircraft that does not handle like a parchment aeroplane, he wished to add but did not. A gifted artificer did not impugn his implements.

  'I apologise if I sound harsh,' said Paliolinus, sensing his defensiveness. 'I do not know if I could perform to my fullest in your place.'

  'You have not seen my fullest. But you will. I will not fail my primarch.'

  'Well said, brother.'

  A string of icons, symbols and unit-level organisational motifs flowed from the wing-commander's flight cogitator through to the marker recognition algorithms of Moses' ventral auspex. He scowled at the implication that he might need a reminder.

  'The immediate airspace is presently clear,' said Paliolinus. 'We proceed as parameterized.'

  Affirmatives clicked through the squadron vox. Moses cut his thrust. Gravity would soon be enough to prevent an engine stall. He angled the flaps in his tailplane to turn his nose into the clouds. A fuel alarm pinged across his neural shunt. He tapped the brass trim of the fuel gauge, but otherwise ignored it. The Xiphon was a short-range interceptor and reduced fuel capacity kept it light. The levels remained within the III Legion's expected parameters, despite the dogfight.