First and Only Page 27

  'A good man, Bram; a true loss,' Fereyd said with import.

  'You'll never know,' Gaunt said, snatching up his las-gun in a sudden turn and advancing into the thicket of enemy dead.

  He turned. 'Mkoll! With me! We'll advance together!'

  Mkoll hustled up to join him.

  'Fereyd, have your men watch our backs,' Gaunt said.

  Fereyd nodded his agreement and pulled his troopers back into the van of the advance. Now it went Gaunt and Mkoll, Bragg, Rawne and Larkin, Dorden with Domor, Caffran, Fereyd and his bodyguard.

  They trod carefully over and between the fallen bodies of the foe and found the tunnel dipped steeply into a wider place. Light, like it was being emitted from the belly of a glowing insect, shone from the gloom ahead, outlining an arched doorway. They advanced, weapons ready, until they stood in its shadows.

  'We're there,' Mkoll said with finality.

  Gaunt slipped his data-slate out of his pocket and thought to consult his portable geo-compass, but Mkoll's instinct was far more reliable than the little purring dial. The commissar looked at the slate, winding the decoded information across the little plate with a touch of the thumb wheel.

  The map calls this the Edicule – a shrine, a resting place. It's the focus of the entire necropolis.'

  'And it's where we'll find this… thing?' Mkoll asked darkly.

  Gaunt nodded, and took a step into the lit archway. Beyond the crumbling black granite of the arch, a great vault stretched away, floor, walls and roof all fashioned from opalescent stone lit up by some unearthly green glow. Gaunt blinked, accustoming his eyes to the lambent sheen. Mkoll edged in behind him, then Rawne. Gaunt noticed how their breaths were steaming in the air. It was many degrees colder in the vault, the atmosphere damp and heavy. Gaunt clicked off his now redundant lamp pack.

  'It looks empty,' Major Rawne said, looking about them. They all heard how small and muffled his voice sounded, distorted by the strange atmospherics of the room. Gaunt gestured at the far end wall, sixty metres away, where the thin scribing of a doorway was marked on the stone wall. A great rectangular door or doors, maybe fifteen metres high, set flush into the wall itself.

  This is the outer approach chamber. The Edicule itself is beyond those doors.'

  Rawne took a pace forward, but pulled up in surprise as Sergeant Mkoll placed an arresting hand on his arm.

  'Not so fast, eh?' Mkoll nodded at the floor ahead of them. 'These vaults have been teeming with the enemy, but the dust on that floor hasn't been disturbed for decades, at least. And you see the patterning in the dust?'

  Both Rawne and Gaunt stooped their heads to get an angle to see what Mkoll described. Catching the light right they could see almost invisible spirals and circles in the thick dust, like droplet ripples frozen in ash.

  'Your data said something about wards and prohibitions on the entrance to the Edicule. This area hasn't been traversed in a long while, and I'd guess those patterns are imprints in the dust made by energies or force screens. Like a storm shield, maybe. We know the enemy here has some serious crap at their disposal.'

  Gaunt scratched his cheek, thinking. Mkoll was right, and had been sharp-witted to remember the data notes at a moment where Gaunt was all for rushing ahead, so close was the prize. Somehow, Gaunt had expected gun emplacements, chain-fences, wire-strands – conventional wards and prohibitions. He caught Rawne's eye, and saw the resentment burning there. Gaunt had still managed to exclude the major from the details he had shared with the other officers, and Rawne remained in the dark as to the nature of this insertion, if not its importance. Gaunt had only brought him along because of his ruthless expertise in tunnel fighting.

  And because, after the business on the Absalom, he wanted to keep Rawne where he could see him. And, of course, there was…

  Gaunt blinked off the thoughts. 'Get me Domor's sweeper set. I'll sweep the room myself

  'I'll do it, sir,' a voice said from behind them. The others had edged into the chamber behind them, with Fereyd's men watching the arch, though even they were clearly more interested in what lay ahead. Domor himself had spoken. He was standing by himself now, a little shaky but upright. Dorden's high-dose pain-killers had given him a brief respite from pain and a temporary renewal of strength.

  'It should be me,' Gaunt said softly, and Domor angled his blind face slightly to direct himself at the sound of the voice.

  'Oh no, sir, begging your pardon.' Domor smiled below the swathe of eye-bandage. He tapped the sweeper set slung from his shoulder. 'You know I'm the best sweeper in the unit… and it's all a matter of listening to the pulse in the headset. I don't need to see. This is my job.'

  There was a long silence in which the dense air of the ancient vault seemed to buzz in their ears. Gaunt knew Domor was right about his skills, and more over, he knew what Domor was really saying: I'm a ghost, sir, expendable.

  Gaunt made his decision, not based on any notion of expendability. Here was a task Domor could do better than any of them, and if Gaunt could still make the man feel a useful part of the team, he would not crush the pride of a soldier already dying.

  'Do it. Maximum coverage, maximum caution. I'll guide you by voice and we'll string a line to you so we can pull you back.'

  The look on what was left of Domor's face was worth more than anything they could find beyond those doors, Gaunt thought.

  Caffran stepped forward to attach a rope to Domor as Mkoll checked the test-settings on the sweeper set, and adjusted the headphones around Domor's ears.

  'Gaunt, you're joking!' Fereyd snapped, pushing forward. His voice dropped to a hiss. 'Are you seriously going to waste time with this charade? This is the most important thing any of us are ever going to do! Let one of my men do the sweep! Hell, I'll do the sweep—'

  'Domor is sweeper officer. He'll do it.'

  'But—'

  'He'll do it, Fereyd.'

  Domor began his crossing, moving in a straight line across the ancient floor, one step at a time. He stopped after each footfall to retune the clicking, pulsing sweeper, listening with experience-attuned ears to every hiss and murmur of the set. Caffran played out the line behind him. After a few yards, he edged to the right, then a little further on, jinked left again. His erratic path was perfectly recorded in the dust.

  'There are… cones of energy radiating from the floor at irregular intervals,' Domor whispered over the microbead intercom. 'Who knows what and for why, but I'm betting it wouldn't be a good idea to interrupt one.'

  Time wound on, achingly slow. Domor slowly, indirectly, approached the far side of the chamber.

  'Gaunt! The line! The fething line!' Dorden said abruptly, pointing.

  Gaunt immediately saw what the doctor was referring to. Domor was safely negotiating the invisible obstacles, but his safety line was trailing behind him in a far more economical course between the sweeper and his team. Any moment, and its dragging weight might intersect with an unseen energy cone.

  'Domor! Freeze!' Gaunt snarled into the intercom. On the far side of the vault, Domor stopped dead. 'Untie your safety line and let it drop,' the commissar instructed him. Wordless, Domor complied, fumbling blindly to undo the slip-knot Caffran had tied. It would not come free. Domor tried to gather some slack from the line to ease the knot, and in jiggling it, shook the strap of the sweeper set off his shoulder. The rope came free and dropped, but the heavy sweeper slipped down his arm and his arm spasmed to hook it on his elbow. Domor caught the set, but the motion had pulled on the cord of his headset and plucked it off. The headset clattered onto the dusty floor about a metre from his feet.

  Everyone on Gaunt's side of the chamber flinched but nothing happened. Domor struggled with the set for a moment and returned it to his shoulder.

  'The headset? Where did it go?' he asked over the microbead.

  'Don't move. Stay still.' Gaunt threw his lasgun to Rawne and as quickly as he dared followed Domor's route in the dust across the chamber. He
came up behind the frozen blind man, spoke low and reassuringly so as not to make Domor turn suddenly, then reached past him, crouching low, to scoop up the headset. He plugged the jack back into its socket and placed the ear-pieces back around Domor's head.

  'Let's finish this,' Gaunt said.

  They moved on, close together, Gaunt letting Domor set the pace and direction. It took another four minutes to reach the doorway.

  Gaunt signalled back at his team and instructed them to follow the pair of them over on the path Domor had made. He noticed that Fereyd was first in line, his face set with an urgent, impatient scowl.

  As they came, Gaunt turned his attention back to the door. It was visible only by its seams in the rock, a marvellously smooth piece of precision engineering. Gaunt did what the data crystal had told him he should: he placed an open palm against the right hand edge of the door and exerted gentle pressure.

  Silently, the twin, fifteen metre tail blocks of stone rolled back and opened. Beyond lay a huge chamber so brightly lit and gleaming it made Gaunt close his eyes and wince.

  'What? What do you see?' Domor asked by his side.

  'I don't know,' Gaunt said, blinking, 'but it's the most incredible thing I've ever seen.'

  The others closed in behind them, looking up in astonishment, crossing the threshold of the Edicule behind Gaunt and the eager Fereyd. Rawne was the last inside.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Inquisitor Heldane allowed himself a gentle shudder of relief. His pawn was now inside the sacred Edicule of the Menazoid necropolis, and with him went Heldane's senses and intellect. After all this time, all this effort, he was right there, channelled through blunt mortal instruments until his mind was engaging first hand with the most precious artefact in space.

  The most precious, the most dangerous, the most limitless of possibilities. A means at last, with all confidence, to overthrow Macaroth and the stagnating Imperial rule he espoused. It would make Dravere warmaster, and Dravere would in turn be his instrument. All the while mankind fought the dark with light, he was doomed to eventual defeat. The grey, thought Heldane, the secret weapons of the grey, those things that the hard-liners of the Imperium were too afraid to use, the devices and possibilities that lay in the blurred moral fogs beyond the simple and the just. That is how he would lead mankind out of the dark and into true ascendancy, crushing the perverse alien menaces of the galaxy and all those loyal to the old ways alike.

  Of course, if Dravere used this weapon and seized control of the Crusade, used it to push the campaign on to undreamed-of victory, then the High Lords of Terra would be bound to castigate him and declare him treasonous. But they wouldn't know until it was done. And then, in the light of those victories, how could they gainsay his decision?

  Some of the orderlies in the isolation bay began to notice the irregularities registering in the inquisitor's bio-monitors and started forward to investigate. He sent them scurrying out of sight with a lash of his psyche.

  Heldane took up the hand mirror again and gazed into it until his mind loosed once more and he was able to psychically dive into its reflective skin like a swimmer into a still pool.

  Invisible, he surfaced amongst Gaunt's wondering team in the Edicule. He turned the eyes of his pawn to take it all in: a cylindrical chamber a thousand metres high and five hundred in diameter, the walls fibrous and knotted with pipes and flutes and tubes of silver and chromium. Brilliant white light shafted down from far above. The floor underfoot was chased with silver, richly inscribed with impossibly complex algorithmic paradoxes, a thousand to a square metre. Heldane expanded his mind in a heartbeat and read them all… solved them all.

  Bounding eagerly beyond this trifle, he looked around and focussed on the great structure which dominated the centre of the chamber. A machine, a vast device made of brilliant white ceramics, silver piping, chromium chambers.

  A Standard Template Constructor. Intact.

  The secrets of originating technology had been lost to mankind for so long. Since the Dark Ages, the Imperium, even the Adeptus Mechanicus could only manufacture things they had learned by recovering the processes of the ancient STC systems. From scraps and remnants of shattered STC systems on a thousand dead worlds, the Imperium had slowly relearned the secrets of construction, of tanks and machines and laser weapons. Every last fragment was priceless.

  To find a dedicated Constructor intact was a find made once a generation, a find from which the entire Imperium benefited.

  But to find one like this intact was surely without precedent. All of the speculation had been correct. Long ago, thousands of years before Chaos had overwhelmed it, Menazoid Epsilon had been an arsenal world, manufacturing the ultimate weapon known to those lost ages. The secrets of its process and purpose were contained within those million and half algorithms etched into the wide floor.

  The Men of Iron. A rumour so old it was a myth, and myth from the oldest times, before the Age of Strife, from the Dark Age of Technology, when mankind had reached a state of glory as the masters of a techno-automatic Empire, the race that had perfected the Standard Template Construct. They created the Men of Iron, mechanical beings of power and sentience but no human soul. Heretical devices in the eyes of the Imperium. War with the self-aware Men of Iron had led to the fall of that distant Empire and, if the old, deeply arcane records Heldane had been privy to were correct, that was why the Imperium had outlawed any soulless mechanical intelligence. But as servants, implacable warriors – what could not be achieved with Men of Iron at your side?

  And here, at the untouched heart of the ancient arsenal world, was the STC system to make such Men of Iron.

  There was more! Heldane broadened his focus and took in the walls of the chamber for the first time. At floor level, all around, were alcoves screened by metal grilles. Behind them, as still and silent as terracotta statues guarding a royal tomb, stood phalanxes of Iron Men. Hundreds, hundreds of hundreds, ranked back in symmetrical rows into the shadows of the alcove. Each stood far taller than a man, faces like sightless skulls of burnished steel, the sinews and arteries of their bodies formed from cable and wire encased in anatomical plate-sections of lustreless alloy. They slept, waiting the command to awaken, waiting to receive orders, waiting to ignite the great device once more and multiply their forces again.

  Heldane breathed hard to quell his excitement. He wound his senses back into his pawn and surveyed the gathered men.

  Gaunt gazed in solemn wonder; the Ghosts were transfixed with awe and bafflement, the Crusade staff alert and eager to investigate. Gaunt turned to Dorden and ordered him to take Domor aside and let him rest. He told the other Ghosts to stand down and relax. Then he crossed to Fereyd, who was standing before the vast STC device, his helmet dangling by its chin-strap from his hand.

  'The prize, old friend,' Fereyd said, without turning.

  The prize. I hope it was worth it.'

  Now Fereyd turned to look. 'Do you have any idea what this is?'

  'Ever since I unlocked that crystal, you know that I have. I don't pretend to understand the technology, but I know that's an intact Standard Template weapons maker. And I know that's as unheard of as a well-manicured ork.'

  Fereyd laughed. 'Sixty years ago on Geyluss Auspix, a rat-water world a long way from nothing in Pleigo Sutarnus, a team of Imperial scouts found an intact STC in the ruins of a pyramid city in a jungle basin. Intact. You know what it made? It was the Standard Template Constructor for a type of steel blade, an alloy of folded steel composite that was sharper and lighter and tougher than anything we've had before. Thirty whole Chapters of the great Astartes are now using blades of the new pattern. The scouts became heroes. I believe each was given a world of his own. It was regarded as the greatest technological advance of the century, the greatest discovery, the most perfect and valuable STC recovery in living memory.'

  That made knives, Bram… knives, daggers, bayonets, swords. It made blades and it was the greatest discovery in memory. Compared to
this… it's less than nothing. Take one of those wonderful new blades and face me with the weapon this thing can make.'

  'I read the crystal before you did, Fereyd. I know what it can do. Iron Men; the old myth, one of the tales of the Great Old Wars.'

  Fereyd grinned. Then breathe in this moment, my friend. We've found the impossible here. A device to guarantee the ascendancy of man. What's a stronger, lighter, sharper, better blade when you can overrun the homeworld of the man wielding it with a legion of deathless warriors? This is history, you know, alive in the air around us. This makes us the greatest of men. Don't you feel it?'

  Gaunt and Fereyd both turned slowly, surveying the silent ranks of metal beings waiting behind the grilles.

  Gaunt hesitated. 'I feel… only horror. To have fought and killed and sacrificed just to win a device that will do more of the same a thousandfold. This isn't a prize, Fereyd. It is a curse.'

  'But you came looking for it? You knew what it was.'

  'I know my responsibilities, Fereyd. I dedicate my life to the service of the Imperium, and if a device like this exists then it's my duty to secure it in the name of our beloved Emperor. And you gave me the job of finding it, after all.'

  Fereyd set his helmet on the silver floor and began to unlace his gloves, shaking his head. 'I love you like a brother, old friend, but sometimes you worry me. We share a discovery like this and you trot out some feeble moral line about lives? That's called hypocrisy, you know. You're a killer, slaved to the greatest killing engine in the known galaxy. That's your work, your life, to end others. To destroy. And you do it with relish. Now we find something that will do it a billion times better than you, and you start to have qualms? What is it? Professional jealousy?'

  Gaunt scratched his cheek, thoughtful. You know me better. Don't mock me. I'm surprised at your glee. I've known the Princeps of Imperial Titans who delight in their bloodshed,