The Eye of Medusa Read online

  A monolithic shape stamped into view between the rocks, polished and black, as though a column of diorite had torn away from the ground and was coming to finish the three neophytes.

  The storm broke across him. The hum of powered armour systems was audible over the wind. Rauth could not understand how he had not heard it before. Bionics whined as the Iron Hands sergeant lowered his bolter, the massive weapon held loose in one coldly artificial hand. The limb was external to, but fully integrated with, the warrior’s armour, pistons and cabling in proxy of tendons and veins.

  ‘Your recall of the Scriptorum is beyond reprimand, neophyte,’ said Sergeant Tartrak. His voice echoed from his bleak helm, as though his suit were a hollow shell, a golem for a vox relay and a distant, bitter rage. Those words were perhaps the kindest that Rauth had ever heard him utter. ‘But in war there are no rules.’

  Anger swelled Rauth’s chest. The Oraanus Rocks were never intended as a trial that we might pass. It was a ritual humiliation with Tartrak the ultimate insurance. He flashed his blade, but some embedded instinct forced him to lower it. ‘You don’t trust us even to kill each other without guidance? You were to judge us from the crawler.’

  ‘Your preparedness to condemn others for your failings is admirable and noted. It is efficient. A warrior must always remain effective. It will be reflected in your punishment.’

  Rauth took a step forward, fighting to bring his knife up. I will have respect. He had taken the Black Carapace, the iron hand; he was a Space Marine in all but the final rites, and if Tartrak thought him that far beneath his prowess then he was mistaken.

  ‘I’m not a child like Sarokk or Khrysaar. I will not go down as easily.’

  ‘Your failure is one of calculus, neophyte. An Iron Hand never enters a fight unless he is certain he will win it.’

  Tartrak’s armoured frame betrayed no indication of emotion or intent. He simply transitioned from a state of inaction to one of action. His bionic arm whirred, the heavy muzzle of his bolter bludgeoning forwards. It was not a swing. It was a calculated-to-the-millimetre minimal path from Tartrak’s hip to Rauth’s jaw, and Rauth recognised before it struck that this was not going to be like Sarokk’s effort.

  Tartrak was as far beyond Rauth as Rauth was his fellow initiate.

  The blow was unexpectedly painless. The dim sense of contact disappeared into the emptiness of unconsciousness almost as soon as he felt it against the side of his head. In some half-felt way, Rauth was aware he was smiling. He’d made Tartrak work for his submission. And there was some pleasure in that.

  >>> SIMULUS INLOAD

  >>> SOURCE >>> DAWNBREAK

  >>> ORIGIN >>> PSYCHIC IMPRINT > ACCESS RESTRICTED > AUTHORITY MAGENTA

  >>> DATESTAMP >>> 563100.M41

  >>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>

  The world was called Ayoashar’Azyr. It meant bluestone, jewel of Gea, or at least that had been one of the word’s two meanings. No longer. The virile young race that had colonised the jewel a thousand years ago had given her another name, not inelegant by the species’ conventions: Dawnbreak. Over the millennia these mon-keigh had culled its ancient flora to plant their shrinegardens, raised city-spires over the ruins of elegance, and carved the glyph art of their un-nuanced faith upon psycho-sculpted ranges. Terror of that which lay beyond was the common birthright that all intelligences shared. And say what one would of mankind, they were intelligent.

  After a fashion.

  Yeldrian touched the ribbed inner wall of the Falcon grav-tank. His gauntlet sang to the wraithbone and the psycho-plastic shimmered before him, its opacity parting like the veils of Isha to create a window in the armour.

  It was more than just a viewing portal. It was a psychic channel. Through it, he could feel the anti-graviton hum of the Falcon’s lift generators on his skin as though he stood unarmoured. The ground streaked past at speed. The wind whistled past his ears and he could hear the shriek of shuriken from the grav-tank’s main armament. He shared the Falcon’s fleeting blindness as a mortar shell showered him with dirt as though man and wraithbone rode as one soul. His mind was an infinite well. It consumed the flood of expanded stimuli without limit, but his thoughts were flighty, agile, and even as his mind revelled in the immediacy of the experience, it had already abandoned it in search of more.

  A hill.

  No, a ridge, an artificial barrier of packed earth and blended stone, cleared spoil from an excavation. Yeldrian tracked the tinkling descent of every loosened stone and hot shell casing in scintillating detail.

  A snaggled line of sandbag walls and razorwire cleft the top of the ridge. The temporary fortifications meandered in jarring disorder around embedded heavy weapons teams. Heavy bolters. Autocannon. Lascannon. Yeldrian was well versed with the crude armaments of the mon-keigh Imperium. A pair of siege tanks mounting heavy mortars hunkered hull-down behind the barricades. Trench wire crawled across their armour as though it had grown over them. Primitive weapons all, but potent. Hubris became the eldar, but the Path of Command taught those that walked it respect. Yeldrian had battled these mon-keigh many times, alongside them on occasion when the fates had been thus aligned, and he knew that in the right hands an obsidian axe could cut as deeply as the god-blade, Anaris.

  With the Falcon’s eyes he saw the crude ordnance streak past him. Most were confounded by the Falcon’s holofield and tremendous speed. A few did strike, but without conviction, and the wraithbone, though light, was harder than the strongest of human metals, attuned over centuries of war to Yeldrian’s adamant psychic will.

  The Falcon arrowed through the weapons’ fire, the tip of a closed formation of Wave Serpent transports and Vyper jetbikes. Yeldrian sensed the other vehicles through his own transport’s peripheral senses. As they flashed into close weapon range, a tessellation of las-fire opened up from the top of the ridge. It was low-powered, but dense, and a jetbike went up in a high-velocity spread of shredded moulding. The formation scattered. The Vypers split left and right, drawing fire, strafing the gun line with shuriken and scatterlasers while the transports drove in.

  The humans maintained fire. They had fought Farseer Elmath’s first wave for several turns of the heavens and knew that the high ground offered them little protection.

  Dawnbreak was of no strategic significance, but it was beautiful.

  It was no surprise then that the illustrious and the powerful had transformed this ancient paradise into a retreat, and provided it with a sizeable garrison. Soul-scrying from beyond the webway horizon had descried a force of over a hundred thousand, but Yeldrian had seen immediately that less than a tenth were what he would call warriors. Those men were from a jungle world called Catachan, which Yeldrian was familiar with only by its reputation, and only then out of the completeness of his calling. He respected their tenacity, but for all their firepower and the good fight they showed, the resolve to win had left them.

  Their angels had forsaken them.

  Yeldrian blinked once. The thought-pulse passed through the Falcon’s closed infinity circuit to the pilot’s sanctuary.

  Ascend the ridge and deploy the Aspect Warriors. As the Khaela Mensha brought vengeance unto Eldanesh.+

  They are crowded in too thickly, Autarch,+ came the thought-reply. +There is no space to set down, and their fire is too heavy for an aerial descent.+

  With a nod, Yeldrian turned to his companions. Four warlocks, sigil-heavy cloaks draped over slender armoured shoulders, occupied the narrow benches that ran along the sidewalls of the compartment. They sat motionless despite the buffeting of the grav-tank’s manoeuvres. Despite the bulk of their wargear and wraithbone devices, Yeldrian did not feel cramped. They were eldar. Their existence was of the mind, the body but an extension of the will, an expression of the way.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said to them. ‘The worst may yet be averted.’

  Removing his hand from the bulkhe
ad caused the psycho-plastic to shimmer solid. He held the tonality of the experience in his mind, the sounds, the smells, then thought-activated the warp jump generator melded to his shoulder mesh. The generator’s power output built to an altissimo as a silvered web of unreality arced up and down his armour. A pressure built against his forehead as though he were being compressed. His ears popped. He felt his heart stop, pause, and then slur into a running beat as the energy web tightened like a net and dragged him into the warp.

  >>ERROR>>

  The jump was short, metres rather than light years, the transition momentary.

  His aspect armour’s aethero-plasticity drew him back, and he burst into the materium amidst a squad of entrenched Catachan on the ridge, silvery wires of energy cracking from his armour’s edges. They yelled in dismay. They had been kneeling in firing lines behind their barricades. Only the squad leader, a brawny bandana-wearing mon-keigh with a crude bionic fist in which he held a chainsword, was standing. The human took a stumbling step back, eyes bulging. What he was seeing was the manifestation of his innermost dread as Yeldrian’s psycho-reactive masque mirrored it forcibly back at his soul.

  They died quickly.

  The gunners of an autocannon directly in his path pivoted their weapon. Its heavy barrel kicked out shells, too fast even for eldar eyes to follow. He grimaced, running towards the incoming fire, and pulsed his jump pack.

  >>ERROR>>

  He burst from the warp mid-stride. The autocannon team spun around and gawped as he leapt up the stacked ammunition crates behind them, then vaulted onto the roof of the siege tank, front down under a wall of sandbags at the crest of the ridge. The artillery piece was open-topped and the gunnery crew had seen Yeldrian’s approach all the way.

  The four Catachans abandoned their siege mortar and laced the air around him with las. He danced through their fire. His aspect armour was heavy, but psychically responsive to his intent to move. He whipped his humming blade clear and cartwheeled over the safety rail onto the roof of the tank. When he was as close to the mon-keigh’s guns as he could get, he jumped once more, >>ERROR>>, translating through the empyrean’s grasping fingers directly behind the loader’s muscular frame. Yeldrian’s blade pierced the human’s sweat-stained shirt.

  The dead man’s comrades mobbed him. He dropped his shoulder. A wrench sailed past and smashed the mortar housing. A guttural voice cursed him. He threw himself under the mon-keigh’s arm and into his chest. The crewman’s arms milled and he fell off the back of the tank and rolled down the slope. A las-bolt sizzled past Yeldrian’s masque. He ignored it, focusing instead on the machete swooping for his gut. He parried it on the psychoplas of his kneeguard and hacked off the man’s arm at the elbow, then returned to the shooter and shot him through the mouth. It beamed through the back of the human’s skull and a welter of cooked flesh and the last of the four-man crew thumped to the deck. The tank commander clutched at the stump of his arm and roared. Yeldrian let him.

  He vaulted onto the angle of the heavy mortar’s barrel and squatted there, one hand over the bore of the gun, foot wedged securely against a bracing ring near the loading breech, and looked down over the embankment.

  Elegant ruins had been sectioned off from the rest of the site with plastek hoardings and fluttering tape. Huge earthmovers with solid rubber tyres as high as a Falcon were lying dormant amidst secondary mountains of spoil. Semi-permanent tracks scuffed with tyre marks and gun casings wound between them. Bodies lay partially buried, in massed pits for those in the yellow and blue of the Alaitoc, in dressed rows for the Catachan and the Dawnbreak militia, awaiting a burial detail that was never going to come. Here and there, left where they had fallen, colossal, transhuman warriors in heavy armour dotted the site. Yeldrian counted no more than nine or ten, their carcasses savaged antemortem by crude augmetic surgeries. These were unlike the Blood Angels that Yeldrian had fought beside in the past. Those warriors had been primitive, but noble.

  These Iron Hands however…

  His gaze turned to the ruins, and that which the mon-keigh had unearthed.

  >>ACCESS DENIED > AUTHORITY MAGENTA>>

  ‘Barbarians,’ he murmured.

  The buzzing crack of discharged las scarred the air and punched across his lower back – his right side; the left was pressed against the mortar barrel. He hissed in pain as the psychoplas mesh stiffened under the blow. Feeling the soreness of what would in time become a vicious bruise, he turned his head. The tank commander stood on the decking at the rear of the tank. The laspistol in his hand smoked in the garden world’s dying chill. Blood drenched his torn sleeve. He started at the touch of Yeldrian’s probing masque but, uncommonly for a mon-keigh, held his nerve.

  ‘The Seventeenth don’t die so easy,’ he said, and sealed his doom.

  He should have just fired.

  Yeldrian was on the man before he had a chance and slapped the pistol from his hand. The human threw a punch, which Yeldrian neatly sidestepped, then the Autarch hooked his trailing heel through the human’s legs to crash him to the deck. The Catachan pawed at the cross-hatched metal with his bloody stump until he could roll himself over. He found Yeldrian standing over him, a slender pistol a whisper away from his eye.

  ‘The metal-clad that slew Farseer Elmath and defiled our land,’ said Yeldrian, the clumsy mon-keigh Gothic sticking like liquid armour mesh in his mouth. ‘You will tell me his name.’

  ‘Is that right?’ The Catachan drew his elbow under to prop himself up and pushed his face against Yeldrian’s pistol as though daring him to fire.

  ‘Your destiny is trivial. Tell me this one thing and you will live.’

  The human’s near eye rolled, as if to gaze down the pistol’s barrel to the crystal at its end. He appeared to think. Then he sighed, angry, and said a name.

  >>ACCESS DENIED > AUTHORITY MAGENTA>>

  ‘He’ll rip you apart,’ warned the mon-keigh.

  ‘He is a child.’

  Yeldrian’s awareness was such that he could have related the number of times the human had blinked his eyes, or described in detail the smell of his breath – by contrast his efforts to draw a weapon from the webbing around his chest without Yeldrian noticing might as well have been heralded in prophecy. The human displayed a string of metal pins between his fingers, sparks dribbling from the pouch full of primed grenades that he was lying on. He grinned like a fool.

  Yeldrian almost admired his hatred.

  ‘Get fragged.’

  Fire the colour of human blood tore at the warp space liminal as Yeldrian flicker-jumped. >>ERROR>>. He reappeared within the confines of the Falcon in a puff of flame and a blizzard of fragmentation shards before the empyreal tear was sealed. A burnt odour and the thumping of Yeldrian’s heart was all that remained. He let out a relieved breath and closed his eyes to the soothing throb of the vehicle’s infinity circuit. The sound of metal shrapnel breaking underfoot drew his attention.

  ‘That was a great risk, so soon after the loss of Elmath.’

  Imladrielle Darkshroud had risen from her bench, buffered against the grav-tank’s sudden shifts in vector by a witch staff set firmly to the floor and one hand, beringed with black stones, braced to the wall. Her void-blue cloak brushed bladed metal shards before her. The osseous pattern of her wraithbone armour glowed with an inner light, the structure already beginning to re-grow to heal the fragmentation grazes.

  ‘I underestimated the mon-keigh’s capacity for self-destruction.’

  ‘But you saw what you wished to?’ returned the spiritseer.

  ‘What I wished? No. The site has been picked bare, and that which must never be spoken of has been plundered.’

  The spiritseer bowed her head. ‘What then is our next step? Without Farseer Elmath to guide us?’

  ‘We are the hounds of Kurnous,’ said Yeldrian darkly. ‘I have the scent, and now the hunt resumes.’

>   >>> TERMINATING SIMULUS.

  Chapter Three

  ‘The arm remembers.’

  – Sergeant Kardan Stronos

  I

  Thennos was a small world with a thin skin of atmosphere and drop pod Alloyed One-Seven was barely ten thousand metres above the surface when the first flicker of re-entry burn ignited its heat shields. Stronos and his clave shook against the over-shoulder restraint bars of their harnesses. Hazard systems painted the pod’s cramped interior a slick black and red, and the flames that licked the viewing block shifted to a rancorous yellow-brown. Stronos ignored it. The radiation levels were within the tolerance of Mark VII power armour. Borderline perhaps, but the nature of binary distinction rendered nuance irrelevant. It was within the tolerance limits.

  He looked through the radiative burn-off at the planet he was here to kill.

  Storm bands cloaked the majority of the surface in an ochre pall of radioactive dust and electromagnetic lightning, the half-shrouded topography of impact scarring appearing to shake as forces beyond either body’s control hurled Thennos and One-Seven on their path to collision. Blast craters were arranged like mountainous inversions, easily visible from orbit, the rims of some high enough to breach the storm layer, ice-capped with the crystalline fallout of thousands of years of atomic upheaval.

  Dust swept up to pummel the viewing block as One-Seven hit the storm layer. The added stress of the crosswinds caused the pod’s hull to creak. Automated lateral guidance thrusters fired correctional bursts to push them back over the target, interior supports groaning. After a few seconds of white-out blindness, Stronos’ organic hearts pounding with the exhilaration of the descent, the dust cleared enough for the drop site to hiss into view.

  Port Amadeus was sunk into the cratered wastelands like a plugsocket, surrounded by rigid square walls, set to a deflection gradient that a determined attacker could walk up if they weren’t discouraged by the macro turrets and plasma culverins inside. The rad-wastes themselves had always been the installation’s first line of defence, that and the proximity of Medusa. An atmospheric retention field fizzled over the base, lighting up like a snowstorm under floodlights as the angle of the blast walls turned a particularly dust-laden gust onto the field.