The Voice of Mars Page 5

He drew both pistols from their holsters, shuriken and vibro-beams adding to the withering storm engulfing the iron mon-keigh.

  Screaming a war cry of her own, Laurelei gathered a charge of the bridge’s guardians to meet the massive warrior on the stairs. Even with the spirit of war thumping through his veins, Elrusiad resisted the impulse to join them.

  To go hand-to-hand with such things was to court not Khaine but Ynnead.

  The guardians engaged with master-wrought swords and shuriken, but the first warrior did not break stride. Nor did he accelerate. He simply strode through them as though assaulted by high grass. A guardian screamed as he went down under the giant’s boot. Another broke against an elbow. A third blew apart from the inside out. The precious blood of an ancient race decorated the barbarian’s armour. A sound burst, something like laughter, grated through his facial speakers.

  Laurelei danced aside, as graceful with a blade as a Harlequin performing the Dance of Death. The Space Marine could not hit her and did not try. He strode on, leaving the warrior following to obliterate her with an automatic burst.

  What fell of her could barely be described as meat.

  Elrusiad felt no grief, for he was War now, and war made only corpses.

  With a cry, he held his weapons’ psychic triggers down, until his mind screamed. Tears of blood rolled down the psychoplastic of his warrior mask.

  He staggered back from the steps, diving under a jewel display as a retaliatory blaze of bolt-fire burned the tiles where he had been standing. He slithered behind the wraithbone housing as bolt-fire chewed into it from the other side. He looked up. Plaster dust and lightweight plasteks drizzled from the wounded galleries, ripped banners flapping, abandoned weapon platforms lying like corpses. At least a dozen guardians were still firing, largely ignored now as the intruders pushed on the central nexus.

  War did not know fear.

  Psychically replenishing his weapons’ charge, he rose from cover and fired.

  Fight, Ishanshar,+ he pulsed. +Arouse the ghost legions. Drive the mon-keigh into Ynnead’s embrace.+

  The enemy commander too was distributing orders. Gunfire blazed from behind the curve of stairs and scraps of curtain. The leader directed his warriors onto secondary staircases to attend the galleries with garbled blurts of sound.

  Elrusiad read the crude Imperial glyph-markers on his armour.

  His name was Tartrak.

  War knew War.

  The geawood steps creaked under his titanic weight. For the first time since he had donned the face of the Bloody-Handed God, it dawned on Elrusiad that the Ryen Ishanshar was lost.

  The only victory left to him was to warn Autarch Yeldrian.

  He backed out of his cover, ignoring the bolt-fire that burst around him to return a volley that would at least slow the brute down. Shuriken rattled off the Space Marine’s armour as though Elrusiad had emptied a pail of gemstones over his helmet. His fusion pistol proved more effective. The beam of vibrating particles sliced through the warrior’s shoulder on a rising angle, front to back, the weapon sagging in a suddenly dead arm.

  The Space Marine lifted it one-handed and resumed firing without missing a beat.

  Elrusiad spun aside, the prismatic trail of afterimages left by his crystal cloak leaving Tartrak blazing through phantoms as he ran for the farspeaker circuits.

  His fingers brushed jewel displays, laying hands on quiescent terminals, rousing them to a nervous flutter of illumination. Only the dead held their stations now, and their wraithsight had seen their doom long before Elrusiad had acknowledged its inevitability.

  They were afraid.

  ‘You are adept at fleeing, xenos.’ Tartrak’s voice was like an anvil being dragged across a bed of nails. He hammered a bolt shell into a neighbouring jewel display. The ensuing detonation showered Elrusiad with nacre. The ghost mariner bound within the farspeaking circuits issued a plaintive song, a glimmer of gem lights that spoke to the permanence of death. ‘And when you run out of galaxy, what then will you do?’

  Elrusiad did not lower himself to arguing with the primitive. He set his shuriken on the slope of the console, slid his fusion pistol into its holster and lay both hands to the mind interface.

  He could do this by will alone, but he needed to be swift.

  Yeldrian.+

  Barely had his mind formed the word when he felt a tingle walk across his skin. Like invisible ants. He looked at his hand and saw that the fine hairs were drawing tall. He looked up sharply to see a horrendous stain on the air. Several more were taking shape across the central nexus dais. His mind offered up another word.

  Surrounded.+

  With lightning reflexes, he snatched the shuriken from the table.

  Thunder detonated, and bruised reality split to disgorge another giant in encasing black armour directly onto Elrusiad’s dais.

  The adornments to his armour were different. The enormous shoulder plate displayed a triplet of pentagons within a tooth-wheel. Layers of chainmail fell from it, down the arm, the uppermost layer studded with onyx and black agate, silver ringlets interspersed with black iron to form a repeating mathematical pattern. His hand was acid-etched steel and gripped a shuddering chainblade almost half his own great height in length. At the chest, he stood wider than three Elrusiads, the spread-winged idol that men called ‘aquila’ overlaying the machined plate. It was white, brushed with silver highlighting, one avian half replaced with a clawed, skeletal machine likeness. His helm was scored and antennaed, a string of heavy studs, long-service markers of some kind, drilled into the forehead. Elrusiad counted five.

  It took the warrior a moment to process his new surroundings, lenses flickering and the occasional arc of empyreal wychlight streaming across his ornate warplate.

  Elrusiad drew his fusion pistol and fired.

  The vibro-beam melted through the warrior’s breastplate and erupted bloodlessly from the back. The warrior looked down at the melted aquila, then lifted his gaze, bolt pistol rising with it, and returned fire.

  The volley of shells went straight through Elrusiad’s holo-cloak and into the farspeaker circuits. The Navarch gasped, spinning instinctively from the source of the fire, only to catch the ensuing detonation in the face.

  The blast screwed him twice around before dropping him to the floor several lengths from where he had been standing. His right leg buckled under him and went dead. Broken. His aspect mask cracked as it smacked side-on into the tiles. Blood of no vein pooled under the break, and his heart tremored as he drew his fingertips through it, tracking the psychoplasmic vitae over the floor mosaics.

  His focus wavered as the destructive emotions the mask had been holding at bay welled up and bled out. Anger. Terror. Laurelei! Real tears stung his eyes, but he clenched his jaw against the flood and forced himself onto his back.

  The warrior towered over him, staring in confusion at the twinkling holo-lights that fell with exquisite slowness from the air, optical echoes of the scale pieces that rained from Elrusiad’s torn cloak.

  Gripping it with both hands to stay its shaking, Elrusiad aimed his fusion pistol up.

  ‘Deliver this to She Who Thirsts, mon-keigh.’

  The excitation beam carved a straight line of distortion from the nozzle of his weapon to the underside of the warrior’s chin. The Space Marine’s helmet simply evaporated, the roof bursting in a splatter of oily liquid and foul smoke. His knee guards slammed with bone-breaking weight to the floor, either side of Elrusiad.

  Then he began to topple forwards.

  Weapons forgotten, Elrusiad folded his arms protectively over his face, scrunched his eyes, and with desperation rather than defiance, he threw his thoughts at what was left of the farspeaking circuits. There was no time to compose a message. What had already been thought-sent would need to suffice.

  Eldanesh falls.+

  His mind was
mercifully absent as a tonne of ceramite pulverised his mortal remains.

  V

  Jalenghaal waited for Kristos with his brother-sergeants. One hour and eleven minutes after Jalenghaal had reached the bridge, the Iron Father entered.

  The tech-adepts that Magos Qarismi had despatched to pick over the bridge’s technological wealth hastened from his path. Many would have served the Iron Tenth all their lives. They would have experienced the unquiet whispers of machine-spirits slaved to a transhuman shell. They would have known the raw physicality, the powered whine, the thumping presence of the Adeptus Astartes. Some may even have followed the example of their lords, flensing their neural pathways so that emotions such as fear or abhorrence travelled slowly if at all.

  Kristos gave them pause.

  Solid metal boots clanked on the alien mosaics as Kristos strode between the unsettled adepts.

  A pair of lightly built skitarii sentinels stood guard by the steps, upright grasshoppers in bio-augmented carapace and compound visors. Their robes were red. The energy-damping weave absorbed the already low levels of incident light, making them appear unnaturally dark. Sigils of the Adeptus Prognosticae and the Iron Council winked amidst the stygian folds. They lowered their arc rifles and saluted as the Iron Father mounted the steps, maintaining that rigid pose long after he had passed as though their joint servos had been frozen.

  Jalenghaal was still waiting when the Iron Father reached the top. As was Sixth Sergeant Coloddin. As was Tartrak of Clan Borrgos.

  ‘Never trust,’ the Scriptorum read, and flawed though Ferrus Manus had proven, the Iron Hands and their successors had learned the lessons of his betrayal well. The eldar were all dead. The skitarii had been deployed to watch the adepts, the Iron Hands to watch the skitarii.

  Vibrantly coloured transparent shards exploded under the weight of up-modified Terminator armour as Kristos ascended to the central platform.

  The sergeants did not salute – they were Iron Hands – but their wargear emitted a blizzard of welcome and submission phrases. Jalenghaal resented his systems’ complaisance, and manually modulated the auto-exloads with a micro-second delay and subtextual antagonism signifiers. Kristos did not appear to notice, but he noticed. Kristos saw all. Narrow slits for ten optic lenses glowed icily around the black iron of the Iron Father’s helm. That, coupled with the free rotation of his helmet about the neck socket and the reversible pointedness of his shoulders, elbows and knees rendered concepts of orientation obsolete.

  Disregarding the three sergeants, at least from active senses, the Iron Father looked down at Telarrch with a squeal of angling optic slits. An unstable stasis field covered the Clan Raukaan First Sergeant and the fragile remains of the eldar he had fallen upon in an on-off buzz of blue static, cast from an array of portable projectors. A pair of Apothecaries attended.

  Niholos did not bother to look up. A variety of replacement parts, bionic and organic, hung off belts and hooks riveted to the Apothecary’s armour, battlefield spares released from the Omnipotence’s cryostores, as well as high-value components repatriated from the fallen during his egress. Most dripped fluid of some description. He was bent over Telarrch’s body, emitting click-pulses as he prodded the first sergeant with the elongated probe-talons of one hand. He was attempting to raise Telarrch’s armour spirit, but it made him look even more like a vulture cawing over fresh carrion.

  The second Apothecary did look up. Scanning telescoptics backlit by their own deranged glow whirred and whirred as if struggling for a point of focus, sense vanes ticking and purring like corroded clockwork. His armour displayed no deliberate record of age, which many Iron Hands, who obsessed over such metrics, took as further evidence of the Apothecary’s instability.

  Jalenghaal was two hundred and one years old. Kristos was six hundred and ninety-eight years old. Dumaar was said to have been ancient when the Iron Father had been mortal.

  Kristos was not the first to have sought to pry the Apothecary from Clan Borrgos over the centuries. His skills as an Apothecary and durability in battle were without compare in the Chapter. The depth of his lore was second to none. But he was also thoroughly devoid of ambition except where it pertained to his own physical correction.

  And he was mad.

  Lobotomisation or death was what befell the weak; Dumaar was what became of those who thought they had the solution.

  ‘He lives.’ Dumaar’s voice emerged from his helmet grilles like radiation from a cold transuranic shell. Jalenghaal knew he would have announced ‘he dies’ in the same tone, as subject to nuance or circumstance as the Universal Laws.

  ‘Barely,’ Niholos returned. The servo-arm built into his power plant whined and clanked as it modulated the field output from the stasis emitters. It continued to operate, even without the Apothecary’s direction. ‘Remove the stasis field and Brother Telarrch will die.’

  Jalenghaal watched the exchange in silence. He had heard of the cerebro-reconditioning that the warriors of Clan Raukaan endured, barely one full step from lobotomisation, in his opinion. Clearly, his position within the Chapter apothecarion spared Niholos such treatment.

  Dumaar emitted a savage burst of audio, his own bastardisation of binaric and, as far as Jalenghaal could discern, another two archaic machine forms.

  ‘Then do not remove the field.’

  ‘You were first on the bridge?’ Kristos asked him.

  Dumaar’s external optics clicked as they cycled, but he said nothing.

  Niholos shook his head, exasperated. ‘Let him go, warleader. His augments will rebuild many damaged brothers. The surviving elements of his clave have already submitted their intentions regarding certain components.’ The cannibalisation of fallen brothers for parts to be shared among kinship groups was a ritual that promoted intense loyalties and rivalries both. Jalenghaal thought of Lurrgol, before brutally purging the mental pathway. ‘They may need to fight again soon,’ the Raukaan clan’s Apothecary continued. ‘If your intentions for this ship proceed as prognosed.’

  ‘They do thus far.’

  ‘Irrelevant,’ Dumaar announced. His optical objective visibly widened its aperture to encompass both the Iron Father and his rival Apothecary. ‘Your ultimate intent was not to capture this ship, but to capture the individual it was dispatched here to engage.’ It was not a question. Kristos’ silence was not an answer. ‘You possess adequate strength without recourse to…’ Dumaar’s vocabuliser emitted a blurt of content-dense binaric before slipping into an entirely new strand of Medusan. Jalenghaal’s heuristics managed to identify it as Rokahn, the (he had thought extinct) dialect of Clan Felg ‘… ill-advised corrective surgery.’

  ‘Interesting advice,’ said Niholos. ‘Especially from you, Dumaar. The paragon of ill-advised surgeries.’

  Dumaar looked down at the body under the stasis field. ‘Seventy-two per cent of brain matter destroyed. Unsalvageable. Injuries consistent with a melta-type weapon discharged into the cranial space. Irrelevant. Amniotic transfer to permanent cyborganic support functions can be achieved with less than ten per cent of subject brain function remaining.’ He turned back to Kristos. ‘Calculate thirty-six per cent probability of irreparable insanity resulting in brain death.’

  ‘Interesting advice,’ Niholos said again. ‘Coming from you, Dumaar.’

  ‘Can he be interred?’ Kristos asked, an optical flicker indicating that his full attention was now on his clan’s Apothecary.

  ‘It is not impossible, but the recommendation is baseless. Clan Raukaan has no sarcophagi to spare. Let him perish, warleader.’

  ‘And Clan Borrgos?’

  ‘Negative,’ said Dumaar.

  In a whir of servomuscular bundles and a crunch of reorienting joints, Kristos redeployed his monstrous frame to face Jalenghaal.

  ‘What of the Garrsak Clan?’

  The sergeant hesitated. Dislike bled from his tethers
and into the noosphere. It was not even a conscious act now. The Iron Father had been responsible for the deaths of Vand and Ruuvax on Thennos, and had cost Burr and their former sergeant, Stronos, highly in flesh. If Kristos had been involved in the uprising as Stronos believed, however indirectly, then he was culpable for a great deal more. His thoughts turned to Lurrgol again, and he frowned. Thennos would not be the last time that two clans of the Iron Hands settled a dispute with arms, but Jalenghaal did not even know why the Iron Father had been so determined to crush the skitarii revolt without Clan Garrsak’s involvement.

  The discrepancy rankled.

  ‘The Ares sarcophagus remains unclaimed,’ he said, carefully. ‘But a nine thousand year-old relic is not something we will willingly barter away.’

  To you, were the words left prominently unsaid.

  ‘Your sentiment is unworthy of you, tenth sergeant. Look around.’

  Jalenghaal did as he was bidden, noticing an enginseer in the indenture brands of the Borrgos clan as she snapped picts of a toppled statue.

  ‘One being’s relic is another’s scrap tech,’ Kristos continued. ‘Clan Garrsak has been crippled by the need to recruit and resupply. I will instruct the Alloyed’s astropathic choir to petition the Iron Council. Your Iron Fathers will see the benefit of a trade that will lift you back into contention with the other middling clans.’

  ‘Stronos would never–’

  ‘Kardan Stronos is not an Iron Father.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Dumaar echoed.

  ‘Have Telarrch stripped and placed in permanent stasis until the sarcophagus arrives,’ Kristos ordered the two Apothecaries.

  ‘Compliance,’ said Dumaar.

  Jalenghaal averted his gaze. Garrsak obeyed.

  ‘There is no such thing as a permanent stasis,’ said Niholos. ‘Even the most perfect systems will degrade eventually. If the first sergeant is not interred soon then he will perish.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Impossible to say.’

  There was a sharp click of metal on tiles, and Jalenghaal turned his bolter to the stairs, silently angered that he had been distracted enough to be approached unawares.