The Eye of Medusa Page 6

A sprawling warehouse unit blocked the most direct route to the uplink tower. Entrance was via a vast set of industrial shutters that had fortunately already been rolled back, a mammoth Hellhammer superheavy tank parked askew in the opening. Either it had been reversing in for warehousing when the Iron Hands had struck or it had been rolled out to aid in the defence. The evidence pointed to the former. There was no indication that its power plant was operational, and as Stronos moved closer he saw the winch lines that stretched into the warehouse interior. The storage bay was unpowered and unlit however, and the cables inked into blackness.

  ‘The uplink tower shares passageway connections to several storage facilities in this area,’ Burr advised.

  ‘Inside,’ Stronos ordered, and led the right hand pincer as the clave peeled into two to stream around the enormous tank. Jalenghaal took the other. The ordnance specialist, Vand, simply walked up the sloped glacis, the rigid suspension rods built through his shoulders and pauldron plates keeping his plasma cannon stable as he mounted the cupola and squatted down to cover the approach into the warehouse.

  Stronos and Jalenghaal’s demi-claves fanned out into the storage bay, intuitively overlapping one another’s angles, a metaliminal understanding of each other’s orientation and intent. Stronos marvelled at the power of the interlink manifold. It was efficient, but there was something intrusive, something he couldn’t quantify or rationalise in so many words that he simply didn’t like.

  The Hellhammer loomed over their backs, massive and still. The warehouse was equally dark. Eerily quiet. The rumble of gunfire was muted. From the way the sound of their bootfalls came back at them, he could tell it was cavernous. He estimated fourteen million cubic metres. He shared his conclusion via interlink and the groupmind of the clave concurred.

  Phantom playback and scrap patterns in the screed snowed Stronos’ display as he looked around. The clave interlink did its best to sketch out absent details but the results put forward by the networked sub-intelligences were garbled and nonsensical – the lash of tentacles where empty pallets hung from the ceiling on chains, machines in sybaritic embrace where access terminals fed cable connections to the walls.

  With a twitch of the oculi muscle, Stronos switched his bionic eye to preysight. The low temperature continued to conjure false reports from anything with the faintest heat to emit, but the differentials were less pronounced now than they had been at the drop site. It was superior to his own low-light-enhanced vision, and tactically more astute than helmet lights.

  The first thing he saw was a trio of Atlas recovery tanks. Residual engine warmth, and the places where friction had heated the treads and winch lines, appeared as a flush of green. The eye clicked as it optimised its filter sets, scores of tarp-covered mounds coming haltingly into view.

  The vehicles were parked in staggered lines, wide enough to pass a moderately sized vehicle like an Atlas between them. There was even a space marked out with a folded tarp and a stack of tool cases, which were presumably intended for the Hellhammer.

  Kardaanus approached the nearest bay and lifted the tarpaulin on the long neck of his lascannon. The vehicle underneath was sleek, swept back fins and flared lift jets giving a palpable aura of speed. All colour had been scrubbed from the armour. The material thus exposed was unusual, not metal insofar as Stronos understood it, and was neither comprised of sectioned plates nor held together with bolts. Rather, it seemed to have been cast, poured molten, whatever it was, into the shape it now filled.

  ‘Xenos,’ muttered Kardaanus.

  ‘Devilfish,’ said Stronos. ‘A tau vehicle.’

  ‘You recognise it?’

  ‘They are a tenacious species. I have fought them most of my life.’

  Kardaanus withdrew his lascannon and let the tarp cloak the vehicle once more. ‘You speak as though you miss them.’

  ‘I would rather kill xenos than my own. I see no flaw in that.’

  ‘You do not?’ Jalenghaal grunted.

  ‘What is it doing on Thennos?’ Kardaanus cut in.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Stronos.

  It was a secret, and he despised secrets. He looked into the darkness. An instinct for completeness – the lesser cousin of perfection – had him commence a tally of the tarped vehicles, but he stopped himself. Irrelevant. ‘Three units – left, centre, right.’ Chopping motions of his bionic left hand reinforced the command. ‘Confirm this area clear and converge on the destination. Do not wait. First to the uplink tower is to establish a stable connection to Draevark or to the Alloyed. Confirm.’

  ‘Compliance.’

  ‘If you locate one or more of the Kastelan units then do not engage.’

  ‘And if they are active?’ asked Lurrgol.

  ‘The Kastelans are irreplaceable,’ said Jalenghaal, coldly. ‘We are not.’

  ‘Disengage,’ Stronos confirmed.

  ‘At your order, brother-sergeant,’ grunted Lurrgol. He took the right, Jalenghaal centre, Stronos left, their battle-brothers assorting themselves into three groups without the need for spoken commands.

  Garbled reports hissed through Stronos’ vox. He aimed into the drapery of slumbering tanks. Tarp rippled where the sheets caught the rad-winds let in through the open door and voided windows. Lumen heatfade glared on his screen and produced a sub-audible pop-pop in his vox equipment. At the same time, he became conscious of a faint itch in his bionic eye, somewhere in the connecting fibres that junctioned the optic to his helm display. It was a phantom sensation he’d never felt before and he had gone several metres into the dark before realising what the sensation was.

  Another consciousness rode on his optics. Iron Captain Draevark wondered what he was doing in a proscribed zone.

  ‘Sergeant,’ came the choppy word-noise. His vox bead sifted it like dust from a clogged rebreather. ‘Explain yourself.’

  ‘Entering one-nine/seven-two/eta. No sign of Kastelan units or occupancy of any kind. It is safe to conclude that they are no longer present.’

  ‘Something you could not have known before you entered. That decision was not yours to make.’

  ‘I understand.’

  The channel was silent a moment, or near enough to it, bolter-fire and Hellstrike detonations twinning themselves with tangential bursts of static. ‘Continue to the uplink tower and provide fire support. I command two claves assaulting Habitation J from east and south, but their positional advantage is considerable and they retain sufficient numbers to execute firing protocols. Ranged support from a significant elevation to the north west will commute both advantages.’ Stronos blink-sent his understanding. Any lord of the Space Marines could achieve victory. Anything less than a crushing one, however, was a failure of logic.

  ‘Your actions produced a favourable outcome,’ said Draevark, darkly.

  ‘They did.’

  ‘But they were errant.’

  ‘They were.’

  ‘An example will have to be made.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘What is the iron captain’s decree?’ said Jalenghaal, unexpectedly. He must have been alerted to the active channel through their interlink connection, and inferred the identity of the instigator.

  Stronos tried not to feel as though his second-in-command had been eavesdropping.

  ‘We proceed.’

  Chapter Four

  ‘Sarokk survived, by the way. In case you were concerned.’

  – Sergeant Tartrak

  I

  Arven Rauth could hear the rattle of stowage lockers, the clink of glassware behind their bolted doors. Packed instrumentation shifted and breathed with motion. Blinking away the mucranoid gum that had gelled shut his eyes while he’d been unconscious, Rauth tried to focus on the object that sawed back and forth directly above him.

  It was a surgical arm that had been folded along its articulation planes, and swayed loos
ely from the ceiling. Plastek feed lines clotted with air bubbles bobbed underneath it. Dim light glinted from the hooked tips of excoriation blades. He focused on the streaks of light caught on their razored edges, transfixed.

  The metal pallet he lay on trembled with a nervy, restless energy. It was the distant roar of power plants, the rumble of kilometres of track on rocky desert. Some of it too he recognised as Medusa’s howl, blowing her fury against walls of adamantine metres-thick and causing the chamber to noticeably lurch from side to side. The understanding of where he was began to burn through the fog that engulfed his brain.

  He was on the land crawler, the Broken Hand, the mammoth superheavy fortress-monastery of Clan Borrgos. And with that horrific revelation came pain.

  A lot of pain.

  He felt dizzy, but not exactly, as that was a sensation his genhancements no longer allowed. More, it was a low swirling queasiness in the pit of his gut, a weakness that refused to disappear even if his physiology had rendered it mute. He was finding it difficult to catch his breath. Gasps came quick and shallow, a burn of oxygen hunger in his chest that was spreading. His heart beat shakily with what little it had. It took a few uneven beats for him to recognise the rhythm of his secondary heart. A Space Marine could function at close to optimal for an extended duration on his secondary heart alone, but his was not yet fully mature and it was struggling. Pins and needles prickled his fingers and toes and the tip of his nose. His legs trembled.

  Horror, cold, stripped of physiological context by psyk-conditioning and reductive surgery, eked away at the strain in his chest.

  This is the apothecarion.

  He tried to rise from the pallet and found he couldn’t. He lifted his head weakly and looked down the length of his naked body. Iron bands secured his ankles and thighs firmly to the bed. His toes were already turning blue. Another clasp bound his right arm at wrist and bicep. Then he noticed the ruin of his left side, and hissed.

  The arm was gone entirely, the shoulder a wreckage of bone and gristle flecked with the pulp of internal organs. The sight of his own soft, weakly glistening tissue made him feel more ruined than the injury itself. He felt embarrassed by it. Compared to the lactic burn in his chest, the damage was oddly painless. It was just numb.

  A noise from outside his bay, further into the apothecarion, made him look up.

  Past the end of his pallet was a partition wall, an equipment trolley loaded with saws and vials labelled with mysterious runes wedged into the precious bit of space in front of it. A mechanical door stood off centre, half ajar where some undiagnosed glitch in the mechanism prevented it from being properly closed. Through that vertical slit, Rauth could see the hesitant blink of crudely maintained lumen fittings. Correctional messages in subliminally coded binharic grizzled into the corridor from rusty augmitter pipes. The characteristic thump then drag of moving servitors rang from bare metal. But he saw no one. Even after straining his heightened powers of hearing until he almost blacked out, he heard no voices, no sounds at all beyond the background rumble of the crawler and the labours of servitors.

  Determining that he would take the annihilation of his left shoulder – and thus the lack of anything bolting that side of him to the bed – as an advantage, he tensed his stomach and lifted his upper body across his unbound left side. He peered again through the door.

  He swallowed hard, then rolled back onto his back. He closed his eyes.

  Primarch, give me strength.

  Across the corridor was another bay, as cluttered and claustrophobic as his own. The stuck doors had shown him only a glimpse, but it was the worst possible glimpse he could have had. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Apothecary Dumaar had left the doors deliberately unrepaired, the pallets arranged just so in order to evoke the very nerve-shred of anticipation that Rauth felt now.

  Such a level of care was Dumaar’s hallmark.

  In the chamber opposite, another neophyte lay on a pallet. Not one of his clave. Rauth didn’t recognise him. From their relative positions he had seen only one arm, unbound, hung limp over the side of the bed, and a head. The head was slack and turned away. The scalp was shaved, puckered with exploratory drill sites and hatched into phrenological zones with a thick black marker.

  Prepared for mindwipe.

  He cursed again, a tremor of desperation to it, slipping into his mortal Medusan. He had heard from Iron Chaplain Huygens that other Chapters found ways for their failed aspirants to serve. Rauth could imagine there being such a serf-caste on Fenris or Macragge, but not on Medusa. Not in Clan Borrgos, certainly. Servitors were efficient. They ensured that the cost of failure was high.

  He stiffened at the sound of footsteps in the hall space beyond the partition. They were heavy and deliberate. Methodical. Too precise for a servitor.

  He tugged vainly on his restraints as the doors ground apart, his bed groaning on its wheel breaks but otherwise refusing to yield. He clenched his teeth to suppress a groan as Apothecary Dumaar entered, an engineered kill-or-be-killed instinct delivering a spike of adrenaline that Rauth’s broken body couldn’t handle.

  ‘Subject exhibits extensive biological damage. Presentation consistent with mass-reactive explosion within the thoracic cavity.’ The Apothecary’s voice was deep and unmodulated, as relentlessly precise as his walk. Ignoring Rauth’s struggles, he circled the pallet. Servos whirred and armour hummed; scanning optics clicked and refocused. ‘Left arm absent. Unsalvageable. Left lung and primary heart destroyed. Unsalvageable.’ He emitted a blurt of content-dense binharic, then slipped through various strands of Medusan as he circled back around. ‘Peripherally cyanotic. Inadequate blood pressure consistent with fluid loss. Corrective measures.’ Another squeal of binharic, and the Apothecary reached across Rauth’s body to operate the surgical arm. It gave a restive purr and emitted a flicker of greenish light from its control board to demonstrate that it was awake.

  ‘What are you doing?’ said Rauth, but it was as though the Apothecary didn’t know he was there.

  ‘Blood groups not on file. Unacceptable. Subject’s biology is inefficient. Complete haematic transfer is recommended.’

  Amongst the neophytes of Clan Borrgos, Dumaar was notorious. The shape of power armour predicated an essentially human form, but there was precious little of the Apothecary that was still human. His battleplate was bristled and vaned and in places fully supplanted with additive features: a telescopic objective in place of his right-side helmet lens, a battery of devices and sensors that extended his narthecium gauntlet to the elbow and incorporated two additional joints, a complex intercalation of mechanisms both exposed and hidden that clicked and whirred with clockwork precision. Somewhere underneath that cracked ceramite shell a few ganglia of the man that had been Dumaar remained. That that remnant brain was now irreversibly insane was beyond question.

  Rauth felt the same drive towards self-improvement as did the Apothecary and despised himself for it, but Dumaar was a compulsive with all barriers removed. His key opened all of the apothecarion lockers; his hand wielded the saw.

  ‘Pre-operative step – re-profusion of tissue with synthetic haematocytes. Immediate follow-up with excoriation of necrotised tissue. Calculate twenty-three per cent possibility of system shock resulting in death.’ The ceiling-mounted servo arm came awake with a sudden squeal, whirring full circle around its ceiling attachment and working out its stiffened joints. Air snorted through the tubes to be replaced with a turgid blood-like something that smeared the inner walls purple-red. ‘Risk acceptable.’

  I’m right here!

  Rauth made another impulsive effort to break free that made the Apothecary look down. One arm was fully engaged with the ceiling servo-arm. His optical objective visibly narrowed its aperture to contain Rauth. ‘Give thanks, neophyte. Such pain as you are about to experience you will, on the balance of probability, never feel again.’

  Raut
h ground his teeth. Lobotomy might be preferable. His muscles tensed as if to strike out, but even unbound and whole he knew that he would have been less of a match for the ancient Apothecary than he had been for Sergeant Tartrak. And for better or worse he was an Iron Hand: logical to a fault. Dumaar gave no reaction. The Apothecary moved behind Rauth, dragging the ceiling arm behind him like a truculent initiate. It was only then, with the iron mass of the Apothecary removed, that Rauth noticed the frail thing that had slipped into the apothecarion bay after him.

  The enginseer approached his bedside as though dragged. Eyes down, he telescoped a slide rule from the depths of his robes and unspooled a ream of tape, his bionic eye audibly taking picts as he measured Rauth’s arm. Rauth glared at him. The specialisation sigils woven into his robes in golden thread he recognised as those of the enginseer biologis.

  Then Rauth looked away, uninterested.

  ‘Continue, adept.’ Sergeant Tartrak stood under the doorway with crossed arms, the exo-augmetic folded over the armoured organic. His helmet was maglocked to his belt, baring the scarified network of rivets and ridges that made up his face. Puckered attachment sites for his helmet stuck from his face and head like needle probes, and intermittently gave off little puffs of air. Tartrak didn’t look at the adept once. ‘The adept is here to furnish you with bionic replacements, neophyte. It is a matter of days now to the Iron Moon and the conclusion of your indoctrination. If you prevail, you may yet call me brother.’

  ‘I thought…’ The force of relief was crushing. That I have no great wish for lobotomisation after all. I’m pathetic. Rauth closed his eyes as if to conduct an internal purge, then re-opened them, hard again as ironglass. Tartrak’s approval was tacit, but there. ‘When will I be able to leave?’

  ‘Immediately.’

  ‘You mean after my repair.’

  Tartrak snorted, a scrunch of audio from his tarnished throat. ‘Who do you think you are, neophyte? When we are damaged we repair. When we find weakness in ourselves we remove and replace it. When we are defeated in battle we return, stronger than we were before. We are good at it. But you return to no war. You are as yet no asset to Clan Borrgos. You are a defective spare for a part that still functions. You are not worth repairing.’