The Voice of Mars Read online

  They came in dribs and drabs.

  Commanders better than Rauth would struggle to deploy a large number of ships through the warp with anything approaching coordination, but the lack of forethought on display was typical of the xenos breed.

  Despite the efforts of the Hospitallers and Warfleet Obscurus, the aliens held swathes of territory, spread across the boundaries of three sectors. Fabris Callivant’s first line of defence against such incursions had always been isolation. It had no resources of any kind. It was a stepping stone to nowhere. Easier pickings and choicer targets lay well within reach of their territorial sprawl, and the actions of the Golden Ratio and her escort flotilla had always been calibrated to divert such threats onto the defences of such targets of opportunity. And yet every chance occurrence, fifty-fifty fall, freak convergence, oddity in the warp and act of God had come together to lead the xenos step by step to the gates of Fabris Callivant.

  The light delay between Fabris Callivant and the heliopause was a little under seventeen hours.

  Given the volume of alien shipping translating in-system, it was almost certain that the Hospitallers were already in retreat, the aliens securing their bridgehead and despatching spoiling raids of their own.

  How long before the first salvos were fired over Fabris Callivant?

  A day? Two?

  He watched through a plate of armourglass thirty centimetres thick. A reflection looked back at him through the window. A bulbous helm, tall and narrow, fluted like an ivory drinking vessel with aquamarines gracing its elongated neck, a tinted visor, blacker than the void outside. A shiver passed through him as the reflection morphed. The blank helmet became a cold face, weathered hard and pale with scars. It was his face. But with a milky white augmetic staring blindly from where his eye should be.

  No. That was Khrysaar.

  A sound like snapped fingers rang suddenly in his ears, and he blinked, staring now through his own reflection at a battle that seemed altogether further away than it had been moments before. Disquiet pressed him from all sides. He touched his hand to the glass, as if to fix himself on a point in space. Iron Hands’ body temperature was naturally low, and the interiors of the Lady Grey were marginally warmer than he was. The heat on his palm made him shiver, the hand touching his in reflection momentarily long-fingered and yellow-gloved.

  Rauth had no memory of how he had come here.

  II

  ‘Rauth.’ The voice echoed around his consciousness. ‘Rauth.’ Fingers snapped again, this time right by his ear. He turned, unease curdling in his stomach, to find Cullas Mohr frowning at him, the Apothecary’s face right in his. He jerked sharply away.

  Trust an Apothecary to be involved somehow. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You faded on me,’ said Cullas, shifting his head in an attempt to catch a look at Rauth’s eyes. ‘Does this happen often?’

  When did I leave the planet? ‘No.’

  The Apothecary’s frown deepened. Grim preoccupation was its default repose. ‘We should continue your debrief in the medicae ward. I will arrange for samples of blood and brain lymph to be drawn–’

  ‘No. No more samples.’

  ‘The inquisitor will insist.’

  ‘Then call her down here. Wherever she is.’

  Cullas sighed, his breath as harsh as the north wind on the Ooranus crags, and turned to peer through the armourglass viewing panel. His armour was the matt-black of the Deathwatch, his right pauldron bearing the red on blue heraldry of the Brazen Claws. His left hand had been retooled with a narthecium augmetic. A patterned shimmer obscured his eyes, not true bionics, but rather a nanomolecular film overlay that sat across the organic originals. He looked like an Iron Hand, but he was no Iron Hand. He smiled occasionally, laughed at Ymir’s stories and wore his exasperation with Rauth plainly on his sleeve.

  This, presumably, was the product of attempting to work Ferrus Manus’ seed without the cold-furnace of Medusa to smelt it. Hard, but filled with impurity. Brittle.

  ‘Shall we continue then?’ said Mohr.

  Rauth grunted. He turned back to the glass. A reflection of the Apothecary loomed large over the shoulder of his. The skin of his nape crawled. What Dumaar and his subordinates left of my brain I’d prefer to keep away from your narthecium, if it’s all the same to you. ‘If we must.’

  ‘Have you noticed any alterations in sensation? Brightening of colours, tinnitus, synaesthesia? Anything of that kind?’

  Rauth peered through his reflection. ‘No.’

  ‘And mentally. Any disturbing or recurring dreams?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anything you’d describe as unsettled emotions? Anger, depression, paranoia?’

  Funny you should ask. ‘No.’

  Cullas shrugged. His massive shoulder armour responded with a grind of servos. ‘You are the only surviving subject to have been in proximity to the Dawnbreak Technologies.’ And Khrysaar. ‘Except, perhaps, Iron Father Kristos. That we know of. The inquisitor is justified in wishing to know its effects on you.’

  She wants to know if I need to be destroyed along with the population of Thennos.

  ‘Even if you were not affected, that is valuable information. So answer the question. Without the belligerence.’

  I’ve been trained to survive at any cost. I have murdered brothers, betrayed others, lived through hell and been remade stronger. Do you think my conscience will even feel the weight if I lie to you? ‘No unsettled emotions.’

  ‘Are you certain?’ Cullas’ eyebrow pushed up into the deep worry lines of his brow.

  ‘If you don’t trust my answers then why ask the questions?’

  ‘Perhaps it is the answer you choose to give that interests me most.’

  Frowning, Rauth turned from the glass.

  There was something about the Lady Grey’s port observation chamber today that left him dizzy. As if the floor were turning, but the walls and ceiling weren’t. Only his genhanced physiology, impervious to motion sickness, and a vomit reflex that had been completely redesigned, let him ride it without betraying his unease.

  The Lady Grey’s official launch date was 009102.M41, a near-light cargo schooner constructed as grace-and-favour for one of the horrendously wealthy trade magnates that controlled the shipping lanes under the Hospitallers’ sphere of influence. In the last five and a half decades – still on Administratum lists as being under the licence of Epicurate Hypurr Maltozia XCIII, fifty-five years deceased – she had been up-armed and retrofitted. Grown powerful off the semi-legitimate trade in xenos weaponry, she could match guns with an Imperial light cruiser if she needed to. But there were few circumstances in which she should, given that there was no standard class of Imperial warship even remotely as fast. At less than three hundred metres in length, she was dense on power and light on space. The wainscoting of the observation chamber walls, in style and aroma a recreation of the gentlemen’s lounges of ancient Terra, pressed uncomfortably close.

  ‘Look me in the eye, neophyte.’ The authority in the Brazen Claw’s voice was irresistible, and Rauth threw the Apothecary a sharp look. Cullas’ eyes narrowed, as if pinching his in place. ‘Have you noticed any change in your condition at all?’

  ‘No.’

  Cullas held Rauth a moment longer, then released him with a slow dip of the head. ‘I shall forward the inquisitor my appraisal.’ With that he turned and strode towards the two teardrop-shaped wooden tables.

  The growls of Ymir and Harsid came from the square of floor beyond it. The two Space Marines wore training fatigues, their torsos bare. Muscles rolled like cables, plates of transhuman brawn swelling across their broad backs as they wrestled. Intent on their locks and throws, neither one of them seemed to have noticed Cullas, or Rauth.

  Rubbing his head under the palm of his hand, Rauth turned to the nearer of the two tables.

 
A row of reinforced chairs faced towards the armourglass. Laana Valorrn sat in one of them, stiffly upright, her attention split between the starry vista and some imagined smirch on the table’s lacquering. She buffed idly at the surface with a black kerchief, the sort of low-tech face protection that every Medusan carried as a last resort.

  Rauth grunted, arms crossed for a moment, deciding whether he would rather be alone, then moved to join her.

  ‘What?’ she asked, looking up through stiletto-thin lashes, still polishing.

  How long have I been back? How did we get here? How do I even ask these sorts of questions without making myself servitor-fodder?

  ‘Where is Khrysaar?’

  ‘Fort Callivant,’ she said. ‘Yazir was able to find the location you extracted from the augmentician. The emblem you described was the key. The Frateris Aequalis. Yazir has been aware of them for some time and they do not appear to have taken any great effort to conceal their activities.’

  ‘House Callivant is decrepit and weak.’ Rauth shrugged.

  ‘I had Khrysaar warehoused with the cyber-ghouls for the next tournament. The adept you saw in the augmentician’s remembrance is not just another official with a taste for blood sports. He is with the Aequalis cult.’ She drew back her kerchief and frowned at the pristine surface. ‘We should have suspected.’

  ‘Are they connected to the Dawnbreak Technology somehow?’ Rauth asked.

  Laana stopped working at the tabletop and looked up. She said nothing.

  You should be polishing my bionics, not deciding what I can and cannot know. Rauth glanced up as Ymir slammed onto his back, his arm twisted back in a lock, Harsid on top of him.

  ‘You don’t like me, do you?’ he said to her.

  ‘Gods disappoint.’

  Rauth was uncertain whether to laugh aloud or just snap the human’s neck with his fingers.

  Belief in the divinity of the primarch, and of his second coming, was as old as the Codex Astartes. Bettered only by its theological offshoot – that Ferrus had not died at all, or that he had given his life away not out of impetuosity but as a lesson to his children. It pervaded amongst the nervous and the weak, the older warriors of the more barbaric clans, the Vurgaan in particular, and, he supposed, the mortals.

  But nothing felt quite certain to him at that moment, and even the ludicrous he found difficult to dismiss out of hand.

  I wish Khrysaar were here. He felt the need to talk to his brother, though he was unsure why. Nothing specific, only that everything would click back into some kind of natural logic if his brother were there with him. What else am I still doing here, conversing with a woman I loathe on a topic I think risible, and for whom all feelings of disgust are as mutual as they are confused? She was a part of something familiar.

  A world I despise, but you take solace where you find it.

  Rauth turned his back without saying anything further. He looked through the armourglass, that narrow window of fire-flicker on the stellar horizon. ‘If we can’t find the Dawnbreak Technology in time, will we help defend this world? Or will we let the xenotech burn with the planet and call it a task well done?’

  He could feel Laana’s eyes on his back. ‘It depends on whether Yazir deems the risks worth the costs. You should be familiar with that calculus, Iron Hand.’

  Rauth nodded. His mind was starting to spin again. Without another face to focus on, it was almost as if he were talking to himself.

  ‘Where is Yazir?’ he asked

  ‘Look at that,’ muttered Ymir, before Laana could answer, palming the Death Spectre off with a playful growl and padding towards the observation plate. His grey pony tail looped over his shoulder and fell down his immense, fur-matted chest. Rauth could see the tremors of his reserve heart beating under his lined, tattooed flesh.

  The sight of the burly Wolf’s untampered physique made Rauth squirm in his own skin, at once impressed by such magnificent physicality and repelled by its unaugmented form.

  ‘Another ship coming in.’ Ymir pressed his palms to the armourglass and sniffed at it. ‘Imperial. A large one.’

  Harsid had picked up a towel and was mopping his hairless brow. He joined the Wolf at the observation plate. His red eyes peered into the dark, though it was clear he did not see nearly as keenly as Ymir.

  ‘I will inform the inquisitor,’ he said.

  III

  Draevark ignored the alarms. Unmanned screens flashed up with enemy contacts. Proximity alerts blared from the ship-wide augmitter grids. Updates and notifications from allied vessels chirped and screamed, faster than the Alloyed’s skeleton crew could respond.

  Through the main forward oculus, a flattened hexagon of steel girders haloed with heavy cables and a brooding Cog Mechanicus, he watched an ork kroozer patterned in blue-and-white jags come apart under fire. Its shields burned out. The Brutus unloaded another punishing broadside into its aft section. The escorts Strength Eternum and Mount Volpurrn battled with half a dozen similarly sized ork ships, but could not get close to the strike cruiser. Fightas spat fire and wound the capital ships in chemical tails. Hatches in the Brutus’ stomach opened up and disgorged swarms of servitor-piloted Stormtalon gunships, their contrails knotting with the dirtier tails of the orks. Shield discharge strobed.

  If Draevark had turned one hundred and eighty degrees to face the bulkhead behind him then he would still have been able to form a decent understanding of what was happening from the flashes on the metal.

  The ork kroozer continued to break up, overcoming its own internal gravity as the Brutus unloaded another salvo, annihilating what was left.

  Through the expanding nebula of atomised atmosphere and scrap metal, another half a dozen lighter ork destroyers came into view. They surrounded a single dagger of sharp, serrated white.

  A Space Marine strike cruiser.

  ‘The Final Duty,’ announced one of the mortal crew-slaves. Despite the alarms, peals, bleeps and demands for the small bridge crew’s attention, there was no panic. The menial’s big hands, one a crude two-pronged augmetic attachment, played over the tacticae runebank. ‘More transponder signatures coming in. Nine warships of the Hospitallers Chapter. Under the flag of the battle-barge Shield of the God-Emperor.’

  ‘Input the data,’ ordered Draevark.

  ‘Thirty-two ork ships confirmed,’ called another man.

  The ork ships were arriving and being destroyed faster than the Alloyed could track, but his crew knew better than admit to fallibility.

  ‘Orks,’ Draevark spoke after a moment’s analysis, his ability to parse the Alloyed’s information streams surpassing that of his entire bridge crew by several orders of magnitude. ‘Quantitatively my favourite xenos breed. They always behave as you would expect.’ Spirit-guided weaponry lit up the main visual feed, shredding a squadron of overpowered ork bommers as they pulled out of an attack run. Torpedoes looped under a slowly rolling frigate, burned across the ventral beam of a kroozer’s shields. ‘There is nothing like a palette cleanser after eighteen sidereal months hounding eldar.’

  ‘Lord.’ Another man (no, a woman – gender differentiation among mortals continued to baffle him) turned to him between tasks. ‘Auto-responders detect hull breaches on decks two and ten. Boarders.’

  ‘I am aware,’ Draevark replied. He drove a thought-pulse through the clan interlink, temporarily overriding the higher thought functions of Sergeants Artex and Coloddin. ‘Second and ninth sergeants already moving to deny,’ he added.

  He turned his attention towards the Alloyed.

  The aged warship had her own overlapping thought-algorithms and instincts when it came to battle. She was more than capable of fighting alone if she had to. The humans and servitors aboard were maintained for the performance of manual tasks. They fed her engines, cleared jams in the macrocannons’ autoloaders, pushed buttons, exchanged code wafers and reminded Dra
evark of his superiority over the rest of mankind. As of the present moment, the Alloyed was coming abeam of an ork kroozer half again her tonnage, just a few hundred kilometres of angry space between their blistering shield bubbles. Draevark felt the mechanical fury of her spirit, and spread it evenly amongst his brothers through the clan interlink. Claves Artex and Coloddin would be better served by a bitter taste of emotion than he.

  With a nudge of thought, Draevark urged her to draw aport of the Brutus, using her sister ship for cover to divert reserve strength to port void banks.

  As she began to move, a colossal detonation brighted out the main oculus. The crew grunted and shielded their eyes. Draevark watched, unmoving, auto-apertures and polarity filters in his twin optics mitigating the input spike.

  The kroozer was gone. A fireball in its place. Flaming tendrils shot out from it, like some tormented kraken of the deep void. A massive wedge of black partially eclipsed it, the occasional glint of silver as the fires choked and shrank back.

  ‘The Omnipotence,’ announced another nameless serf. ‘The Shield of the God-Emperor is hailing them.’

  Draevark turned his vulturine helm, and the crewman flinched before the sudden anger that surged through his binoptics.

  ‘Splice me into that frequency.’

  ‘But… lord?’

  ‘Kristos has Clan Garrsak’s allegiance. He does not yet command its vassalage. You will do as Iron Captain Draevark commands you, mortal.’

  ‘Aye, lord. It is just… it is the Raukaan Clan ironbarque. Its spirit is more ancient than the Alloyed and more powerful.’

  ‘Is that an admission of inadequacy?’

  ‘No, lord!’ the mortal cried, bolt upright like a prey beast in a headlight, then spun away to attack his runebank’s ciphers without the need for further command.