Wrath of Iron Read online

  Rauth paused for a moment before responding. From behind him, the noises of battle began to diminish as the remaining daemons were destroyed.

  ‘Every mortal who dies frees up a Space Marine to kill,’ he said. ‘We cannot shepherd them all. Do you object?’

  Telach felt sick, and knew exactly why that was. He had overexerted himself already, and knew that the greater challenge was still to come. He was in no condition to think clearly or cogently about the tactical situation. He was in no condition to think clearly about anything.

  ‘No,’ he said out loud, wincing as the flesh of his lips cracked. ‘Forgive me. I need just a little time, to recover.’

  Rauth continued looking at him. As ever, the clan commander gave nothing away, sealed inside his massive sarcophagus of sable armour. Only the low grind of his power generators gave away the fact that he was alive at all.

  ‘They were acceptable losses, Telach,’ Rauth said. ‘Do not lose your nerve. The final assault will come soon, and I will need you.’

  Telach bowed stiffly.

  ‘By your command,’ he said.

  Acceptable losses.

  ‘Do you require an Apothecary? An Iron Father?’

  Tens of thousands.

  ‘An Apothecary?’ asked Telach. He looked up, high into the vaults where the last of the daemons were pinned down by bolter fire. Their sweet stink lingered in the air, hanging alongside the reek of blood and charred metal.

  The nausea in the back of his throat intensified. He couldn’t shake the blurriness of his vision, nor the resonance of screaming in his ears.

  It would be good to be rid of such things. It would be good to lose the organs and the glands that made him feel that way. It would be good, perhaps, to see the world as Rauth did – lines of force, resistance, possibility – and nothing else.

  ‘No, not an Apothecary,’ said Telach, and his words slurred from mortal exhaustion. The battle for the tunnels was over, and they had won it, but he took no pleasure in it.

  ‘For what I have become,’ he said, ‘for what we have become, what good would that be?’

  III

  The Machine-Spirit

  Chapter Sixteen

  The ash clouds over the Iron Hands’ Helatine command complex buckled and glowed, quickly moving from black to a dull ember-red. Warning lights flickered on across the landing stages, tracing out a hexagonal figure on the wind-blasted rockcrete. Automated defence turrets swung into position, extending their barrels and activating a shimmering level of void shields twenty metres above the ebony walls of the facility.

  Nearly as soon as the defensive measures had taken effect, the systems shut down. The gun barrels slumped into dormancy. The void shields rippled away, leaving the landing stages exposed and unprotected.

  The clouds continued to boil and churn. The ember-red glow turned a deep crimson, then orange. A whole swathe of ash was blown free, exposing a thundering column of flame dropping down slowly through the atmosphere. Seven circles of fire hove into view, each one a thruster for a descending lander.

  Master of Thralls Gerod Siirt watched the vessel’s approach from behind several layers of blastproof plexiglass. A steady stream of runes told him that his systems had been breached and that something subtle and difficult was preventing his servitors getting them back up again. Fearful aides hovered close by him, all dressed in sheer black robes and sporting esoteric bionics across their pale faces, none of them daring to pass on any further bad news.

  None of them, to be fair, could have told him anything he didn’t already know. Siirt’s own internal systems, including a hard-plugged auspex array that was finer than that possessed by most non-military starships, gave him better information than all of them put together.

  From this, he knew several things.

  First, that the lander had come down from high orbit, above the level where the Medusan strike cruiser Kalach and its scorts held anchor. For this to have been possible, it must have been capable of concealing its presence with considerable guile – the instruments on board the Iron Hands capital ship were a match for almost anything else in the Imperium.

  Second, that the lander did not belong to the Imperial Navy, which had maintained its presence further out. Nothing possessed by Admiral Malfia would have been capable of making planetfall so stealthily, nor of shutting down the base’s automated turrets.

  Third, that Siirt’s defensive systems would not become operational fast enough to prevent the landing. The craft would touch down unopposed with its weapons at full pitch and its own shields intact. Such actions were not those of a friendly power.

  Fourth, that the energy signature of the lander’s engines was of a distinctive type. Siirt had seen similar patterns before on previous campaigns, and so recognised the vessel as being of the Mechanicus. A quick check on his internal cogitator’s memory banks run against three pict-shot profiles of the vessel confirmed its identity: lander UJ-I8 (Spectre class, heavily modified), listed as complement on special liaison vessel 778, designation Factor Balance.

  Siirt knew enough then to guess that something serious had taken place, and had time to regret the fact that the entire Adeptus Astartes capability of Clan Raukaan was deployed in theatre. The clan’s seven Dreadnoughts in hibernation aboard the Kalach would take days to summon, as they had never been intended for on-world deployment. The command complex was full of Medusan auxiliaria, many of whom had bio-enhancements and augmetics on a parallel with skitarii, though if the Mechanicus vessel were powerful enough to interfere with the defence grid remotely there was no telling whether that force would be nearly enough to hold the complex.

  Such were the thoughts running through Siirt’s mind as he watched the lander touch down in the centre of the landing stage. He made no move to restore power to the autocannons mounted on the walls surrounding it, nor did he attempt to open a channel for comms.

  ‘Two squads,’ he voxed to his resident troop contingent, turning away from the viewport and walking towards the reception chambers below. ‘Station all available others overlooking the vessel. Make them obvious.’

  As he moved down to the reception levels, the two squads of thralls he’d requested fell in behind him. They were all dressed in matt-black carapace armour with blank visors and angular shoulder guards. Each trooper carried a heavy-gauge lasgun and had steel augmetic traces littered across their battle-plate.

  They were all Medusan, all battle-hardened, and all heavily altered by the tech-chirurgeons. In normal circumstances, such soldiers would have been capable of taking on virtually anything. In normal circumstances, Siirt would have trusted them to keep him alive for a very long time.

  ‘Any signal from the front?’ he voxed back to the command chamber as he walked.

  ‘Negative, master,’ came the reply. ‘Clan Commander Rauth remains out of range.’

  ‘Keep trying.’

  Siirt strode down the short corridor to the blast doors, watching diagnostic readings from the complex’s sensoria scroll down his retinal display. The defence grid was still dormant.

  Just days earlier, he’d overseen the preparations for the arrival of Lord Telach on the same landing stage. Then, of course, Siirt, had stayed very much out of sight, and it had been Rauth and his retinue who had walked out onto the apron to meet him. Siirt didn’t like being out of the shadows. He was a Medusan mortal; like all his race, he disdained the harsh light of exposure. His home world was too dark, too cold, to relish anything other than concealment.

  He paused before the doors, collecting himself. From the far side, he could hear the dull thud of a landing ramp hitting the ground and the slow whine of engines running down.

  ‘So,’ he said to himself. ‘Let us see what we will see.’

  He gestured, and the doors slid open. The foul air of Shardenus gusted in, spreading ash across the low-lit corridor floor.

 
; Twenty-five figures waited for him, clustered under the slowly cooling bulk of the lander. Twenty-four of them were skitarii. As usual with the servants of the Mechanicus, their appearance was heterodox – collections of artificial limbs, implanted weaponry, metal faceplates or tank-tracks in place of legs.

  The twenty-fifth was different – a human female, average height, slim build, clad in a long russet cloak with a theatrical cowl draped over her face.

  Siirt bowed. As he did so, his men silently fanned out on either side of him. Their positions, weapon-states and armour integrity all registered on his retinal display as tiny red sigil-clusters. He had no doubt that the woman in front of him commanded similar data on her own pet warriors.

  ‘Magos Ys,’ said Siirte. ‘This is unexpected.’

  ‘It should not be,’ replied Ys. Her voice was smooth and unruffled, though an undertow of quiet anger marked it. ‘Where is Commander Rauth?’

  ‘He is engaged in operations.’

  ‘Summon him.’

  ‘I cannot. Contact cannot be established at this time.’

  ‘You must have some means.’

  ‘The clan has undertaken operations deep underground. We have not been able to send or receive comm-traffic for two standard days.’

  The magos didn’t respond immediately. Siirt thought he heard a low clicking from under the woman’s cowl, then she walked towards him. He detected the trace sounds of his men priming their weapons, and issued a mental pulse warning them to remain calm.

  ‘Do you know what has happened to my war engines, Medusan?’ asked Ys. Her voice had lost any pretence of civility.

  ‘I do not, magos.’

  ‘Then you are blind as well as stupid,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you do not appreciate how precious such things are to us.’

  Siirt remained perfectly still. He could almost taste the tension on the air. The magos gave off subtle signal traces of aggression, some of which he could pick up with his inbuilt instruments.

  She was extremely angry.

  ‘I have not seen this data,’ he said.

  ‘I have spoken to my princeps,’ said Ys. ‘He has been in touch with Lord General Nethata, who has his own reasons for doubting your commander’s judgement. For a long time I have urged restraint, but all tolerances have their limits.’

  ‘I know nothing of this,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, so you say. Are you capable of saying anything else?’

  ‘The sensor impressions we have confirm that the current action is over,’ Siirt said, keeping his tone neutral. ‘I expect a full report from the front within the next few hours. After that, according to the schedule I have, the assault on the Capitolis spire will commence, and full comms may be re-established.’

  ‘The next few hours.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am troubled that you think that is, in any sense, satisfactory.’

  The magos reached up and pulled her cowl back. It revealed a slender, elegant face entirely composed of interlocking plates of metal. Her eyes glowed red, just like the lenses of an Iron Hand’s battle-plate. The sigil of the Mechanicus was embossed on one cheek and the winged griffon emblem of her forge-guild on the other.

  Somehow, the effect was more troubling than the mix of flesh and metal that Siirt was used to seeing. Ys was the complete article.

  ‘My skitarii will deploy here before setting out,’ she said. ‘I shall resolve this situation myself, since those in the field have proved so woefully incapable of doing so. If he will not come to me, I shall come to him. I do not care where he is, nor how busy his duties make him – we shall talk.’

  Siirt swallowed.

  ‘That is not permitted, magos,’ he said. ‘The combat zone is proscribed to non-military personnel. We can accommodate you here until communications are re-established, after which a hololith transmission can be routed directly to your private chambers.’

  Ys looked at him frostily. Her red eyes blazed through the smog of drifting ash, glinting from the metal plates around them.

  ‘Is that your final word?’ she asked.

  Siirt tried to hold her gaze. From somewhere, he could sense a power build-up, and blink-commed a warning to his men.

  ‘It is.’

  The burst came too suddenly. Siirt felt massive, acute pain in his temples, and clapped his hands to his head. He could hear the terse grunts of his men as their neural implants crackled and they fell to the floor. He staggered, stumbling forwards, gagging from the pain. The world seemed to reel, and he reached out to break his fall.

  Then it was over. Ys reached out, catching him before he collapsed. He looked up groggily and found his face a hand’s breadth from hers. He was sweating, his heart racing. Something very powerful had been unleashed, something that, just as before, was capable of reaching right into their systems and rendering them helpless.

  If it hadn’t made him feel so bad, he might have admired the artifice of it. How much did the Mechanicus know of Medusan machine-protocols?

  ‘I recommend a more helpful attitude,’ said Ys, holding his arm firmly in her metal fingers. ‘More skitarii will be landing shortly, and I do not expect them to be impeded.’

  Siirt looked up at her red eyes, unable to speak. He was close enough to smell ritual incense on her robes. In the background, he could hear the sounds of his men struggling to breathe.

  Ys brought her face even closer to his, leaning forwards as if she wanted to whisper some intimate conspiracy between them.

  ‘I shall speak to him,’ she said, her voice low. ‘Even if all the forces of the Annihilator stand between us, I shall speak to him. And when I do, as the Omnissiah guides my hand, he will listen.’

  The gates to the Capitolis were shut. Their ornate, gilded surfaces still swam with witchlight, flickering out into the darkness of the tunnels in slowly ebbing swirls.

  With the banishment of the daemons and the destruction of the remaining enemy troops, the cavernous space before the portal had slumped into darkness once more. The stench of cordite and blood still lay heavy in the air. The cries of the dying and the wounded echoed eerily in the vast spaces, rebounding from the rockcrete walls like the forlorn wails of spectres.

  Rauth looked up at the immense baroque doors, ignoring the clangs and booms of activity around him. Every instinct within him urged him to break them down and surge on up into the spires beyond. That, for the time being, was impossible, even for him. Telach’s closing of the gates had given them the breathing space they needed to regroup. The claves, freed from battling the last of the daemons, had already stalked back down the length of the tunnels, slaughtering any residual traitors they came across and corralling the surviving mortals into fresh columns for renewed assault.

  The respite would only be brief. They consolidated, just for the moment, gathering their strength again, rounding up those mortals who could still march and giving the Emperor’s Mercy to those who could not.

  Rauth no longer felt much at all for those who suffered. He certainly didn’t despise them. The itch, as Telach referred to it, that loathing of human frailty, had ceased to have much purchase on him since the last vestiges of his own mortal frame had been flensed away. In truth, he had little idea how much organic matter remained, locked away in pockets within his giant mechanical skeleton. A brain, perhaps some spinal matter, progenoids; not much else.

  For all their weakness, though, the mortal troops were necessary. Nethata had not answered the summons. Rauth didn’t know why. Perhaps fighting out on the surface had been heavier than expected; in any case, it was not good enough. The Guard under the Lord General’s command would be needed for the final push if the Iron Hands were not to be bogged down by the sheer volume of enemy troops within the Capitolis. Just as before, the human contingents would be needed to tie up the enemy assaults, freeing the real warriors to strike up at the pinnacle.


  The summit was where the nightmares lay. Telach had divined that much, at least – whatever he’d sensed was there, growing in power with every passing heartbeat.

  As if summoned by Rauth’s thoughts, the Chief Librarian lumbered up then. Rauth turned to face him. Telach’s shoulders looked slumped even under his heavy battle-plate, and he radiated fatigue. His armour still snaked with curls of opalescent energy, but the dazzling radiance that had blazed earlier had, for the time being, gone out.

  ‘When will you be ready to fight again?’ asked Rauth.

  Telach straightened.

  ‘Whenever required, lord,’ he said.

  ‘That will be soon,’ said Rauth. ‘You know it must be. Tell me, what waits for us in there?’

  ‘I do not know. The spires are shielded from me.’

  ‘Then guess.’

  Telach hesitated. He drew in a deep breath, and Rauth heard his damaged vox-grille rattle.

  ‘The neverborn,’ said Telach at last. ‘They used a proscribed name: a fallen primarch, now lost to the Eye. Perhaps they do so to mislead us, or perhaps they taunt us with the truth. Sometimes they speak the truth even when they would be wiser not to – they have strange natures.’

  Rauth nodded.

  ‘I heard the same name,’ he said. ‘But it is not him that waits for us. If it were, we would be dead already.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Telach. ‘Perhaps a creature in his power, though, one who nurses a special hatred for us. When we enter the spire I will know more. Beyond that, I will only say this: it is not yet manifest. Time is against us, lord. This pause must be a short one.’

  ‘You do not have to tell me that,’ growled Rauth, gazing hungrily back up at the sealed doors. ‘I long for nothing else but to get in there.’

  Telach let slip a grim laugh then. Perhaps, out of all of the senior Iron Hands in Raukaan, he was the only one still capable of such a thing – a residual, infinitesimal, sense of irony.

  ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ he said.