The Eye of Medusa Read online

  Critical objective markers blipped from the interlink, interfacing the viewing block to Stronos’ tactical display, ordered by Draevark’s battle calculus into a sequential cascade of priority, proximity and projected outcome of attack. Out of his own need for completeness, he double-checked the iron captain’s calculus and found it to be without flaw.

  Never enter a battle unless it is one that you cannot lose: this was the ultimate expansion of the Iron Creed. Over ten thousand years, the divinations of the magos calculi must have pronounced death by inaction on trillions, and begun feuds that even the great calculus could not have predicted with embittered ‘allies’ that had, at some long ago juncture in history, entered a warzone without the expected support of the Iron Hands beside them. The fault was clearly not in the calculus. It was a simple question of logic.

  And logic dictated that Thennos was a war they could not lose.

  ‘Port Amadeus is defended by the entire Century-Gammic Thennosian macroclade,’ said Stronos. In the interest of expediency, he spoke in his native dialect, allowing his battleplate to translate into binharic for transmission to his clave and re-translation by their own suits into Reket. The ten warriors and their equipment filled the reinforced confines of One-Seven. ‘Four thousand warriors with support weaponry from the Legio Cybernetica and Auxilia Ordinatus support. Civilian population is estimated at two hundred thousand, and can be expected to offer token resistance. Our objective is extermination.’

  The Iron Hands’ relationship with the Adeptus Mechanicus was as close as Stronos’ brothers came to full collaboration. Even their closest genetic descendants, the Brazen Claws and the Red Talons, had been effectively cut off from their forebears and were virtual pariahs by comparison. If a single individual of the clave was troubled by the necessity of slaughtering the quarter million inhabitants of a Martian colony under the Medusan aegis then their impassive silence did not register it.

  ‘Insurrection on our own thrall world will not be tolerated.’ Jalenghaal’s voice was twice-translated, arriving in Stronos’ helm as a synthesised speech-sound. ‘It will be returned to compliance. Iron Father Tubriik Ares has been roused. If this world believed it had suffered before, then it will soon appreciate the magnitude of its error.’

  ‘The Iron Father is here?’

  ‘Full-scale deployment,’ Jalenghaal reminded him. ‘Orders of the Iron Council.’

  ‘You know Ares?’ asked Kardaanus. The ordnance specialist had his arms crossed over his chest plastron to clench his gauntlets around his restraint bars. The compaction only served to emphasise his bulk. His lascannon rattled in an upright bracket beside him.

  ‘Of him. Of course.’

  Stronos was impressed. He hadn’t thought the Iron Council still had it in itself to issue such a far-reaching decree. He turned his attention back to the viewing block.

  Drop pods One through One-Seven were raining over the compound. Fires burned now in the dusty tangle of plasteel, the retention field spluttering to contain the smoke that billowed from the impact sites. Fourteen tonnes of adamantine, plus the not inconsiderable weight of passengers and wargear, hitting a target at terminal velocity were, in the right hands, weapons in their own right. Better than weapons. The planet’s irradiated atmospherics prevented orbital targeting, but the vehicles’ guidance spirits compensated well enough for the Alloyed’s blind flurry.

  A spectacular flash turned the rad-weathered compound momentarily white, and a column of seething plasma mushroomed from the disintegrating shell of the outpost’s primary power plant. Chain surge ripped outwards through the overhead cables of the power distribution grid, setting off secondary detonations wherever the grid reached. Which was everywhere.

  And then the field went down.

  ‘You may need to revise that civilian population estimate,’ said Lurrgol.

  He was that rarest of beasts: an Iron Hand with a sense of humour.

  >>> SIMULUS INLOAD

  >>> SOURCE >>> PORT AMADEUS

  >>> ORIGIN >>> NAAVOR, TECHMARINE

  >>> DATESTAMP >>> 101412.M41

  >>>>> SIMULUS COMMENCING >>>>>

  ‘Disregard thirteen-beta. Signature codes identify it as a barracks for the traitor-skitarii, principal objective for Clave Stronos.’ Naavor gripped both flight sticks, forcing the Thunderhawk’s restive spirit to comply with his command to break off the attack. ‘The calculus states that additional assistance is not required.’

  His co-pilot-cum-navigator didn’t answer. It never answered.

  A human torso, a preserved cadaver parasitised by interface plates and cabling, occupied the second cockpit berth. The lower articulations of the spinal column had been cleansed and polished and extended on past the point at which the subject’s legs had been amputated, feeding in to a net of neural wiring that interfaced directly with the surrounding systems. Similar splays of conductive colouring erupted from the stumps of its wrist to emphasise the appearance of a half-digested corpse in a spider’s web. Its one eye gazed glassily into the smoke and static of the main oculus, absorbing in case pilot death should call on the servitor to intervene.

  Naavor had been inducted into the mysteries of the Machine on Mars, as prospective Techmarines of all Chapters were, and he knew that the aircraft generally required a dedicated gunner, co-pilot and navigator.

  Inefficient.

  ‘A close support fire pattern has been pre-plotted on a decay ellipse, convergent on Habitation J.’

  With a squeeze of his forefinger he fired all four sponson heavy bolters. The torrents of heavy shells converged on a skitarii gun turret sixty metres ahead with a sound like two chains being driven through a metal hoop. A neural twitch then banked the Iron Star over the ensuing fireball, flechette bursts riddling its aerofoil as it pulled away.

  The co-pilot’s emotionless cant arrived directly in Naavor’s speech centres through his cranial plugs. Some hard to touch part of himself felt angry at the servitor’s incapacity for speech.

  ‘Compliance,’ Naavor answered aloud, logging the fiery descent of One-Seven as he pulled the gunship’s nose away from Warehousing and Transit C without question.

  >>>TERMINATING SIMULUS.

  II

  Impact.

  The sudden inversion of forces slammed Stronos’ internals towards his stomach floor. Hard metal squeezed on weak flesh and equally, disgustingly, vice versa. His throat tightened as if to prevent his primary heart from pushing into his mouth.

  Brace alarms continued to scream, seconds after the fact, dissipation buffers built into the walls venting off the impact force as steam. A mortal would have been smeared across the viewing block and pressure-cooked. The restrictor bars over Stronos’ shoulders lifted away and shock responsive charges blew the exterior hatches. Walls, adamantine weighted, crashed into the rubble and deployed locking spikes to become ramps.

  Stronos could see nothing.

  His visor display stalled, jumpy, threatening complete dissolution into static if he moved too suddenly. One-Seven had punched a hole the size of a building into the side of a barrack block. The enormous thermal variances between the vapour cloud expanding out from the drop pod and the unshielded Thennosian environment turned preysight into a meaningless heat map of electric greens and itinerant blacks. His armour growled with data starvation as it sought him targets. The manifold overlay suffered equally, interference patterns producing waves of curiously emergent order in the data-wake of intermittent inload/exload.

  His armour’s haptic systems converted the ripple of displacement waves into the roar of One-Seven’s cradle-mounted storm bolter.

  The spirit-guided suppression weapon punched out bolt-rounds in each of the four available firing solutions, timing variable, a pseudo­random pattern formulated to draw fire. And it did. As target-poor as Stronos’ systems, the
skitarii that had flooded into the ruined barrack block to repel the Iron Hands incursion obligingly returned fire. Stronos’ cogitator growled through its gears, extrapolating trajectories from static-chopped blocks of screed. Targeting possibilities lit up his display. There was not much left for his own mind to do.

  he canted, and aimed his pistol where his armour guided it into the mist. The impact had accounted for fifty-point-one per cent of the structure, and a significant proportion of the Century Gammic Macroclade. The calculus did not allow for error. That still left five hundred hostile skitarii in this block.

  Ten Iron Hands legionaries and a manifold-slaved machine-spirit opened fire, bolt-rounds punching through the vapour cloud in all directions as though a nail bomb had just been detonated underwater.

  The skitarii adjusted their targeting parameters with an equivalent dispassion. It was as though two cogitators waged war.

  Stronos strode down the skitarii guns, radium rounds spanking off his armour as he raked the rubble with bolter-fire. A bullet crunched into his faceplate, hairline fractures and bleaching static radiating from the point of impact. Targeting reticules fizzled out into the background of the massive radiation dump, and he blazed over the shooter’s last position by memory.

  The Imperium could produce warriors that were more ferocious, or that were swifter or deadlier. Somewhere in its vastness there might have even been a brotherhood of champions that were stronger. But there was no one that could lay down punishment and advance into enemy fire as relentlessly as one of the Iron Hands.

  Stronos thumbed his pistol’s release catch to eject the spent magazine, then thumped the grip against his belt holster to insert another. Only a half-second’s delay and he resumed firing, advancing still at the same unwavering pace, still without a word spoken outside of his own clave’s interlink. His vision cleared slowly. Targeting information metrics took longer to reacquire, but the hardened interconnectivity of the clave’s data-tethers cast their runes over the static-walled display with black-on-white clarity.

  His battle-brothers were advancing from the drop pod in a widening circle, a glacial encroachment of rapid-firing bolters. Kardaanus and Vand emerged to contribute their heavier fire. Titanic blasts from the brothers’ lascannon and plasma cannon obliterated structural columns and rock piles that the skitarii sought to use as cover, driving them back under withering hails of debris.

  Stronos’ boot crunched into the arm bionic of a fallen skitarius. He looked down, static drizzling across his display against the ill-advised direction of movement.

  The soldier was encased in dark red bonded carapace, limbs bracketed with piston-fired hydraulics, head an insectile blending of rad-burned flesh with omnispectral lenses and voxtennae stalks. A heavy trench coat spread out to one side like a pool of blood. He looked no different to any other loyal instrument of the Corpus Mechanicus, insofar as Stronos could discern. That observation was neither encouraging nor distressing. It was neutral data, logged accordingly for after-action exload.

  He removed his boot with a splintering of bone and exoskeletal augmetics as he continued, marked a vanguard by the scan-pulse of the skitarius’ visored optics and gunned the soldier down. Traitor. Renegade. The labels were as relevant to him as they were to his bolter, but he felt a cold, code-walled fury as he accelerated into a charge. His powered stride shook loosened masonry from the walls and ceiling. His genhanced frame ate up the ground at an astounding pace.

  The skitarii backed away, in no hurry, fear responses dialled right back, pumping Stronos’ plastron with radium rounds. A number penetrated; inbuilt rad-counters clicked like an empty storm bolter, but Stronos didn’t feel it. He didn’t have the flesh vitals in the area to be hurt.

  His charge scattered the soldiers like body parts after a mass-reactive blast.

  A single skitarius swung back in a whir of hydraulics and cracked the stock of his carbine against Stronos’ elbow guard. He ignored it, insignificant, shot two bolts through the breather mask of another, then traversed to gun down a third as it hunted cover. A visible change in posture overcame the surviving skitarii as they assimilated close combat protocols.

  Stronos thumb-activated his power-axe’s disruption field and carved out one hundred and twenty degrees of the skitarii’s attempts to encircle him. The humming cogblade hacked clean through two cyborgised soldiers and deep into the chest of a third. He puked oil. A properly functioning vanguard skitarius should have fought on, axe or no axe, but the combination of promethium-freezing cold and hyper-radioactivity with an armour breach killed him instantly.

  As Stronos ripped his axe free, the garrison princeps, tall helm edged with gold, reactive armour spitting out directional conversion fields, lashed a transuranic blade across the vulnerable cabling behind Stronos’ knee.

  With a grunt, Stronos stepped back, crushed the princeps’ foot under one five times the weight, and used his enormously superior size to drive the skitarius onto his heels. Showing no glimmer of shock, the princeps tucked his pistol to his chest and emptied it, a torrent of high-amperage arctricity earthing like a thunder hammer into Stronos’ kidneys as he swung back. Discharge crawled over the non-conductive ceramite of his power armour, visor display whited out, and he had to settle for vibrational confirmation alone of his power axe cracking open the princeps’ armoured skull. Vision grizzled back as the skitarius folded to his knees like a drained weapon platform into its cradle.

  Stronos wrenched his axe back.

  The last two skitarii in his immediate field of engagement altered protocols once again and broke off. Stronos shot them each once in the back as they ran.

  The skitarii were good. The empirical rationale underpinning that observation allowed no room for misplaced superiority or faith-based denunciations. Had they been faced with anything other than a Space Marine they would almost certainly have prevailed.

  Strange then, to consider it in those terms; that the Iron Hands’ superiority was rooted in genetics rather than augmetics.

  ‘The brother-sergeant remembers how to use a bolter,’ called Lurrgol. ‘The Devastators have not ruined him beyond all use.’

  ‘The arm remembers,’ Stronos returned, a phrase he’d heard once and found pleasingly ironic.

  Jalenghaal canted. A sustained burst of bolter-fire tore through a rubble barricade and shredded the skitarii behind it. He turned his helm towards Stronos, the beam of his optics piercing the white fog the way flesh equivalents could not. The battle-brother resumed his advance as though the pause had been preset and anticipated, a retaliatory spatter of rad-rounds ricocheting from his armour. A handful of expertly marked shots lodged in joints, but Jalenghaal ignored the damage and drove himself bodily through what was left of the skitarii’s impromptu stockade to conclude the slaughter at close quarters.

  ‘He follows the creed of Iron Father Kristos,’ said Burr, by way of explanation.

  The last skitarii were streaming for a break in the wall as Stronos blink-sent his brother the lingua-techna rune Stronos quickly consulted his briefing inload. The breach led back onto a staircase to the upper levels of the block and what appeared to be prepared fire positions.

  With one thought, Clave Stronos brought up its bolters to mow the routed soldiers down. The very second that mass-reactives began to chew up the wall and the soldiers in front of it, Brother Vand dropped to one knee, his cannon’s vents flared wide. For a second a blue-white ribbon of plasma connected his weapon to the far doorway, before a titanic explosion brought down the entire section of wall. Stronos ceased firing as brickwork burst under the suddenly untenable weight of what was above it, the entire section crashing into itself and blasting a wave of rockcrete dust over Clave Stronos.

  ‘Objective cleared,’ said Stronos as his visual inputs returned.

  ‘We will need an altern
ative route to the secondary objective.’ Jalenghaal locked the elbow joint of his bionic, securing his bolter one-handed in order to service the damage to his armour. ‘Draevark will be driving the renegades towards Amadeus’ central plaza, Habitation J. The calculus demands our contribution.’

  ‘Are you injured?’

  A sneer somehow managed to be incorporated into Jalenghaal’s vox-translation. ‘Flesh wounds.’ A Space Marine, even one unaltered from the Emperor’s base design, was built to withstand the worst excesses of a hostile galaxy. Improved upon by a tradition of replacement and repair, an Iron Hands Space Marine was functionally indestructible.

  A cursory glance at Stronos’ faceplate display revealed a smattering of insignificant damage throughout the clave, nothing critical. He blinked away the display and attempted to call up a structural schematic of the building from the clan manifold. If the use of suit optics had been like facing a blizzard, then accessing the manifold was like walking into an ion storm with both hands in front of his eyes. The tri-dimentional interpretation of their current location was a solvent hiss of white indistinguishable from anything around it. Contact with anyone more than twenty metres away was impossible. Even One-Seven intermittently dropped off the connection.

  ‘And they tell us our equipment is the best outside of the Mechanicus,’ Lurrgol complained.

  ‘Its current malfunction does not render that untrue,’ said Jalenghaal.

  ‘This is a harsh world,’ mused Lurrgol.

  ‘Like home,’ Stronos agreed, and turned to search for a street side exit.