Prospero Burns Read online

  ‘It was certainly hubristic,’ said Vasiliy.

  Hawser let a thin smile cross his lips. His leg ached, as it always did in times of stress. He put the wooden horse back on a side shelf. He didn’t need it.

  ‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘It’s been too long since I did any field work, far too long. I’m sick to the eye teeth of this bean-counting and political fancywork. I’m not made for it. There is no part of me that ever wanted to be a bureaucrat – you understand that, Vasiliy? No part. It disagrees with me. I need to work in a marked trench, or a library, with a trowel or a notebook or a picter. I’ll only be gone a short while. A few years at most. Enough time to clear my head and refresh my perspective.’

  Vasiliy shook his head.

  ‘I know I’m not going to talk you out of this,’ he said. ‘I know that look, the one you’ve got in your eye. It says stay away from the crazy man.’

  Hawser smiled.

  ‘There, you see? You know the omens to look for. You’ve been warned.’

  The Quietude’s home world, that neon orange ball, was actually skinned with ice in the parts that mattered. The Quietude, it appeared, had artificially extended its ice caps like an armoured sheath.

  A message was sent to Ogvai asking for further expertise.

  ‘We’re going to the surface,’ Fith Godsmote said to Hawser. ‘You’ll come. Make an account.’

  It almost sounded like a question, but it was really a statement of the imminent.

  Stormbirds had been brought into the graving dock’s extravagant facilities. As the men of Tra readied their weapons and kit, and lined up to board, Hawser saw that some of them were engaged in half-joking arguments.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked Godsmote.

  ‘They are debating which bird you should ride on,’ said Godsmote. ‘When you came to Fenris, you were a bad star and you fell out of the sky. No one wants to ride down the sky with a bad star.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Hawser.

  He looked at the Astartes, and called out, ‘Which craft is Bear travelling on?’

  Some of the men pointed.

  ‘That one, then,’ said Hawser, walking towards the vehicle. ‘Bear won’t let me fall out of the sky twice.’

  The men of Tra laughed, all except Bear. The laughter was edged with wet leopard-growls.

  Hawser had to wear a plastek rebreather over his nose and mouth, because there was something in the atmosphere that didn’t agree with standard human biology. The Astartes had no need of support. Many went bare-headed.

  The view was extraordinary. The sky, only faintly bruised by vapour, was an oceanic amber canopy that had such bright clarity it looked like blown glass. Everything had a slightly yellow cast to it, an orange tinge. It reminded Hawser of something, and it took him a little while to pull up the memory.

  When he finally did, it was surprisingly sharp. Ossetia, a few days before his fortieth birthday; Captain Vasiliy sniggering as she allowed him to try on her heavyweight headgear, him blinking as he peered out through the giant slide-visor at a world tinted orange.

  Then he heard, in his head, the March of Unity being played on an old clavier, and tried to think about something else.

  They had set down on a great ice field. Under the orange sky, the landscape was flat but dimpled, like a textured flooring fabricated and rolled out from a machine. It was ice, though. The dimples were where small liquid ripples had flash-frozen, and punch samples had been taken by the engineer corps of the advancing Imperial Army brigades. The chemical composition matched those derived from orbital scanning. Stupendous towers the size of hive city spire caps, but of a design ethic that matched the graving dock far above, protruded from the ice field at regular intervals of approximately six hundred and seventy kilometres like cloves studding a pomander.

  Almost the first thing the Wolf beside Hawser said was, ‘There’s no hunting here.’

  He meant the ice was sterile. Hawser could sense it too. This was not the absolute white wilderness of Asaheim. This was an engineered landscape. The towers were generators, in his estimation. In the face of a massive extraplanetary invasion, the Olamic Quietude had used its appreciable technology to extend its natural ice caps to form shields. The thickness and composition were such that great parts of the orbital bombardment had been reflected or resisted.

  There were cities under the ice where the Quietude was preparing its counter-attack.

  The Imperial Army had targeted some of the towers, and were attacking them in vast numbers. Hawser saw tides of men and armoured fighting machines washing in across the ice towards one, pouring in across pylon bridges and support struts. Mass gunfire had stippled the ice field, and the crust around the tower’s structure was beginning to melt, suggesting that damage had been done to parts of its mechanism.

  There were fires burning everywhere. Thousands of threads of dirty smoke rose into the ochre sky across the giant vista, each one spewing from a destroyed machine, just dots on the ice in the general mass of attackers. It was a scale that he could not really comprehend, like the scenic backdrop of some painting of a general or warmaster with a raised sword and his boot on a fallen helm. Hawser had always presumed the apocalyptic battle scenes rendered behind them were somewhat over-enthusiastic and largely intended to fluff the sitter’s importance.

  But this was bigger than anything he had ever seen: a battlefield the size of a continent, an armed host that numbered millions, and that host only one of hundreds of thousands that the Imperium had birthed upon the awakening cosmos. In one repellant moment, he saw the contradictory scales of mankind: the giant stature that allowed the species pre-eminence in the galaxy, and the individual stature of a great-coated trooper, one of scores, falling and lost under the charging boots of his comrades as they stormed the alien gates.

  Quietude defences lashed the advancing lines with withering disdain. Along the leading edge of the attack, the air seemed to distort as the Quietude’s weapon effects impacted and mangled armour, ice and human bodies. High on the ominous tower, massive lamp-like turrets rotated slowly and projected down beams of annihilating energy, washing them slowly as they turned like the beacons of fatal lighthouses. The beams left black, steaming, sticky scars gouged through the densely packed hosts of advancing Imperials.

  Super-heavy tanks in deep formation braced for ice-firing and began to devastate the lower flanks of the tower. Parts of it blew out, ejecting huge sprays of debris. The explosions looked small from a distance, and the clouds of debris little more than exhalations of dust, but Hawser knew it was simply scale at work again. The tower was immense. The cloudbursts of debris were akin to those that might rain down after the destruction of a city block.

  As he watched, a whole bridge section collapsed, spilling Imperial soldiers into the gulf between the tower and the ice shelf it was plugging. Hundreds of soldiers fell, tumbling, tiny, the sunlight catching braid and armour. Several armoured vehicles plunged with them, sliding off the bridge section as it caved, tracks snapping and lashing. They had been assaulting one of the main exterior gates, which had remained shut and unyielding throughout. Another bridge section collapsed about five minutes later when one of the tower’s subturrets succumbed to bombardment from the superheavy tanks and slumped like a landslip, its form unforming, its structure blurring, its weight ripping down off the face of the main tower and exploding the massive bridge into the gulf.

  How many thousand Imperial lives went in that second, Hawser wondered? In that flash? In that senseless roar?

  What am I doing here?

  ‘Come on. You, skjald, come on.’

  He turned from his ringside view of armageddon and saw the flame-lit face of Bear. There was no smile or expression of regard to be found there. Hawser had learned this to be a character mark of the sullen Wolf. He presumed that Bear was particularly sullen with him because he, a human, had caused Bear, an Astartes, embarrassing problems in the eyes of his company, and the Vlka Fenryka as a whole.

/>   ‘Where?’ Hawser asked.

  Bear bristled slightly.

  ‘Where I tell you,’ he said. He turned, and tilted his head to indicate that Hawser should follow.

  They left the powdery, yellow lip of an ice ridge where most of Tra had settled to observe the assault. Behind them, an expanding column of thick cream dust was slowly filling the amber sky. It was emerging from the tumult surrounding the tower assault, climbing into the sky like a stained glacier, ponderous and threatening. The upper parts, where it broadened, were already seventy kilometres across, and the formations of Army gunships and ground-attack craft lining up on the tower were having to fly instruments-only as they penetrated the sulphurous pall.

  Hawser followed Bear up the slope. The fine yellow powder-ice was adhering to the Wolf’s dark, almost matt-grey armour. Sometimes Hawser stumbled or slipped a little as the soft slope trickled or subsided under him, but every single step Bear took was sure: deep strides, planting his massive, armour-shod feet, not once having to steady himself with a hand. He began to leave Hawser behind.

  Hawser fixated on the black leather braids and runic totems tied to the Wolf’s belt and carapace, imagined himself grabbing hold of them and clinging on, and tried to catch up.

  They wound up the cliff slope, through groups of lounging Wolves, past the brooding Terminator monsters, their gross armour burnished and glinting in the sun, past teams of thralls making adjustments and spot repairs to seams and joints as their masters waited impatiently to go back and view the battle. The Terminators were as immobile and sinister as cast bronze sculptures, all arranged to face the nearby conflagration.

  Away from the unmarked but defined perimeter of Tra’s vantage point, the rear echelon and supply encampments of the Imperial Army group were spread out like a souk. There was a dead space, a fringe of about two kilometres, between Tra’s position and the closest Army post, indicating the intense reluctance of any soldier, officer or even mediary of the Imperial Army to come within sight of a Fenrisian Wolf.

  If only they knew, Hawser thought. There are no wolves on Fenris.

  ‘Keep up!’ Bear said, turning to glance back. Now at last there was an expression on his face. It was annoyance. His black hair made a ragged curtain that threw his eyes into shadow and made them shine with nocturnal malevolence.

  Hawser was dripping with sweat under his body-suit and the pelt draped over his shoulders. He was out of breath, and the sun was burning his neck.

  ‘I’m coming,’ he said. He wiped perspiration off his face, and took a long suck from the water-straw that fed into his rebreather mask. He stopped deliberately to catch his breath. He was interested to see how far he could push Bear. He was interested to see what Bear would do.

  He hoped it wouldn’t be hit him.

  Bear watched. He’d braided his jet-black hair around his brow and temples before the attack on the graving dock to afford and cushion the fit of his Mark-IV helm. One of the braids had worked loose, and was causing the curtain across his eyes. Bear began to plait it back into place, waiting for Hawser.

  Hawser took another deep breath, flexed his neck in the prickling heat, and caught up.

  They entered the Army encampment. It had only been there a few hours, but it was already the size of a large colony town. Arvus- and Aves-pattern transatmospheric lifters were still coming in and out to make drops in a haze of ice vapour on the far edge. The vapour was catching the sun and creating partial rainbows. The encampment, a patchwork of prefab tents and enviro-modules mixed with pods, containers, payload crates and vehicles: some beige, some gold, some khaki, some russet, some grey, looked to Hawser like a patch of mould or lichen, spreading out across the clean surface of the ice field. When he mentioned it later, this description also won him some approval from the Wolves.

  No one challenged their entry into the encampment. Around the edges of the mobile base were pickets of Savarene Harriers with their shakos and gold-topped staves, and G9K Division Kill eliters wearing long dusters over semi-powered combat suits. Not a single gun twitched in their direction. As the Wolf approached with the human bumbling along behind him, the soldiers found other, far more important things to look at. In the ‘streets’ of the tent town, the bustling military personnel gave them a wide berth.

  It was like a souk, a busy market, except all the traders were provisioners of military service and all the produce was munitions and materiel.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Hawser asked.

  Bear didn’t reply. He just kept striding on through the camp.

  ‘Hey!’ Hawser shouted, and ran to catch up. He reached out, and pulled at the thick, blunt edge of Bear’s left armour cuff. The ceramite was numbingly cold.

  Bear stopped, and very slowly turned. He looked at Hawser. Then he looked down at the vulnerable human hand touching his arm.

  ‘That was a bad idea, wasn’t it?’ said Hawser, removing his hand warily.

  ‘Why don’t you like me?’ he asked.

  Bear turned away and started walking again.

  ‘I have no opinion either way,’ said Bear. ‘But I do not think you should be here.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘With the Rout.’

  Bear stopped again and looked back at him.

  ‘Why did you come to Fenris?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s a good question,’ said Hawser.

  ‘What’s the answer?’

  Hawser shrugged.

  Bear turned and started walking again.

  ‘The jarl wants you to see something,’ he said.

  Close to the centre of the vast encampment, which was feeling more and more like a carnival ground to Hawser, a large command shelter had been erected. There were tented shades overhead to screen off the harshest of the ice desert’s hard sunlight, and walls of reinforced shockboarding to baffle any stray or lucky munition strike. Nearby, a crew of polished silver servitors laboured to install and activate a portable void shield generator that would, by nightfall, be protecting the high-value section of the encampment under a fizzling blue parasol. The tent shades and shockboarding distorted the travelling roar of the conflict on the other side of the ridge, and somehow made it louder and more intrusive than it had been on the slope where the Wolves had gathered.

  A crowd of perhaps two hundred had gathered under the central awning. They were surrounding a mobile strategium desk, the top of which was alight with active and moving hololithic displays.

  The crowd, all Imperial Army officers, parted to let Hawser and his towering Astartes escort through. As he stepped up on to the self-levelling interlock staging, Hawser felt a pop in his ears and a chill on his face that announced he had just entered an artificial environment bubble. He unclasped his rebreather, and let the mask dangle around his neck. He smelled clean air, and the body sweat of hot, agitated, tired men.

  Ogvai was at the centre of the crowd beside the strategium desk. He was not escorted by any of Tra, and he had removed his helm and some of the significant parts of his arm, shoulder and torso plating. Hugely armoured from the gut down, he stood with his long, white arms emerging from the rubberised black of his sleeveless underlayer with its feeder pipes and heat soaks like necrotised capillaries, and his long, black centre-parted hair, resembling a wager-bout pit fighter ringed by an audience at a country fair.

  As a child at the commune, Hawser had seen men of that kind many times. Rector Uwe had sometimes taken the children to the festivals at the work camps of Ur where, in sight of the slowly forming, monolithic plan of the city-dream, the labour force would halt to celebrate the periodic feasts of Cathermas, Radmastide and the Divine Architect, as well as the observances of the builder-lodges. These holidays were basically excuses for spirited fairs and jubilees. Some of the larger labourers would strip to the waist and invite all-comers to bouts of sparring for beer, coins and the crowd’s entertainment. They would tower head and shoulders above the onlookers too.

  Except here, the onlookers were Army service personnel, m
any of them large and imposing men. Ogvai was a raw-boned monster in their midst. With his skin so white, he looked like he was carved out of ice and immune to the merciless heat, where they were all ruddy and sweating. The fat silver piercing in his lower lip made him look like he was taunting them all.

  Why has he stripped back his armour, Hawser wondered? He looks… informal. Why does he want me here?

  Bear stopped at the edge of the ring of onlookers with Hawser beside him. Ogvai saw them. He was in discussion with three senior Army officers around the desk. He leaned forwards, resting his palms on the edge of the desk and his weight straight-armed on his hands. It was casual and rather scornful. The officers looked uncomfortable. One was a field marshal of the Outremars, obediently holding up the holographic visage of his telepresent khedive master like a waiter holding a grox’s head on a platter. Beside him was a thick-set, choleric G9K Division Kill combat master in a flak coat and a quilted tank driver’s cap. The third was a freckled, pale-blond man in the austere uniform of the Jaggedpanzor Regiments. It was curious to hear Ogvai speaking in Low Gothic: curious to know that he could, curious to hear his jaw and dentition manage the brittle human noises.

  ‘We are wasting time,’ he was saying. ‘This assault is not punching hard enough.’

  The hololithic image of the Outremar khedive squealed in outrage, a sound distorted by the digital relay.

  ‘That is a frank and open insult to the architects of this planetary attack,’ the image declared. ‘You exceed yourself, jarl.’

  ‘I do not,’ Ogvai corrected pleasantly.

  ‘Your comment was certainly critical of the competency of this assault,’ said the Jaggedpanzor officer, in a tone rather more conciliatory than the one the khedive had adopted, probably because he was actually standing in Ogvai’s presence.

  ‘It was,’ Ogvai agreed.

  ‘This is not “punching hard” enough for you?’ asked the G9K commander, making a general gesture at the display in front of them.

  ‘No,’ said Ogvai. ‘It’s all very well as mass surface drops go. I guess one of you planned it?’