First and Only Read online

  and who nevertheless regard the vast power at their disposal with caution. Give any man the power of a god, and you better hope he's got the wisdom and morals of a god to match. There's nothing feeble about my moral line. I value life. That is why I fight to protect it. I mourn every man I lose and every sacrifice I make. One life or a billion, they're all lives.'

  'One life or a billion?' Fereyd echoed. 'It's just a matter of proportion, of scale. Why slog in the mud with your men for months to win a world I can take with Iron Men… and not spill a drop of blood?'

  'Not a drop? Not ours, maybe. There is no greater heresy than the thinking machines of the Iron Age. Would you unleash such a heresy again? Would you trust these… things not to turn on us as they did before? It is the oldest of laws. Mankind must never again place his fate in the hands of his creations, no matter how clever. I trust flesh and blood, not iron.'

  Gaunt found himself almost hypnotised by the row of dark eye-sockets behind the grille. These things were the future? He didn't think so. The past, perhaps, a past better forgotten and denied. How could any one wake them? How could anyone even think of making more and unleashing them against…

  Against who? The enemy? Warmaster Macaroth and his retinue? This was how Dravere planned to usurp control of the Crusade? This was what it had all been about?

  'You've really taken your poor orphan Ghosts into your heart, haven't you, Bram? The concern doesn't suit you.'

  'Maybe I sympathise. Orphans stick with orphans.'

  Fereyd walked away a few paces. You're not the man I knew, Ibram Gaunt. The Ghosts have softened you with their wailing and melancholy. You're blind to the truly momentous possibilities here.'

  'You're not, obviously. You said 'I'.'

  Fereyd stopped in his tracks and turned around. 'What?'

  ' ''A world I can take without spilling a drop of blood''. Your words. You would use this, wouldn't you? You'd use them.' He gestured to the sleeping iron figures.

  'Better I than no one.'

  'Better no one. That's why I came here. It's why I thought you had come here too, or why you'd sent me.'

  Fereyd's face turned dark and ugly. 'What are you blathering about?'

  'I'm here to destroy this thing so that no one can use it,' said Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt.

  He turned away from Fereyd's frozen face and called to Caffran and Mkoll. 'Unpack the tube charges,' he instructed. 'Put them where they count. Rawne knows demolition better than any. That's why I brought him along. Get him to supervise. And signal Corbec, or whoever's left up top. Tell them to pull out of the necropolis right now. I dare not imagine what will happen when we do this.'

  In the isolation sphere, Heldane froze and clenched the mirror so tightly that it cracked. Thin blood oozed out from under his hooked thumb. He had entirely underestimated this Gaunt, this blunt fool. Such power, such scope; if only he had been given the chance to work on Gaunt and make him the pawn.

  Heldane swallowed. There was no time to waste now. The prize was in his grasp. No Imperial Guard nobody would thwart him now. Discretion and subterfuge went to the winds. He lanced his mind down into the blunt skull of his pawn, urging him to act and throw off the deceit. To kill them all, before this madman Gaunt could damage the holy relic and kill the Iron Men.

  Sat at the edge of the Edicule chamber, checking his barb-lance with his back resting against the silver wall, Rawne shuddered and blood seeped down out of his nose, thick in his mouth. He felt the touch of the bastard monster Heldane more strongly than ever now, clawing at his skull, digging in his eyes like scorpion claws. His guts churned and trembling filled his limbs.

  Major Rawne stumbled to his feet, sliding a barb-round into the lance-launcher and swinging it to bear.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  With the sudden reinforcement of Zoren's Vitrians, Corbec's platoons pushed the Chaos elements back into the ruins of the necropolis, slaughtering as they went. The misshapen forces of madness were in rout.

  Leaning on a boulder and wheezing at the pain flooding through his ribs, Corbec thought to order up a vox-caster and signal command that the victory was theirs, but Milo was suddenly at his side, holding a foil-print out from a vox-caster.

  'It's the commissar,' he said, 'We have to get clear of the Target Primaris. Well clear.'

  Corbec studied the film slip. 'Feth! We spend all day getting in here…'

  He waved Raglon over and pulled the speaker horn from the caster set on the man's back.

  This is Corbec of the Tanith First and Only to all Tanith and Vitrian officers. Word from Gaunt: pull back and out! I repeat, clear the necropolis area!'

  Colonel Zoren's voice floated across the speaker channel. 'Has he done it, Corbec? Has he achieved the goal?'

  'He didn't say, colonel,' Corbec snapped in reply. 'We've done this much on his word, let's do the rest. Withdrawal plan five-ninety! We'll cover and support your Dragoons in a layered fall back.'

  'Acknowledged.'

  Replacing the horn, Corbec shuddered. The pain was almost more than he could bear and he had taken his last painkiller tab an hour before. He returned to his men.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Bragg cried out in sudden shock, his voice dwarfed by the vastness of the Edicule. Gaunt, walking towards Dorden and Domor by the doorway, spun around in surprise, to find Fereyd and his bodyguard raising their lasrifles to bear on the Ghosts.

  For a split second, as Fereyd swung his gun to aim. Gaunt locked eyes with him. He saw nothing in those deep, black irises he recognised of old. Only hate and murder.

  In a heartbeat…

  Gaunt flung himself down as Fereyd's first las-bolt cut through the air where his head had been.

  Fereyd's elite troopers began firing, winging Bragg and scattering the other Ghosts. Dorden threw himself flat over Domor's yelling body.

  Rawne sighted and fired the barb-lance.

  The buzzing, horribly slow round crossed the bright space of the Edicule and hit Fereyd's face on the bridge of the nose. Everything of Imperial Tactician Wheyland above the sternum explosively evaporated in a mist of blood and bone chips.

  Larkin howled as he fell, shot through the forearm by a las-round from one of the elite troopers flanking the Tactidan.

  Caffran and Mkoll, both sprawling, whipped around to return fire with their lasguns, toppling one of the bodyguards with a double hit neither could truly claim.

  Gaunt rolled as he dived, pulling out his laspistol and bellowing curses as he swung and fired. Another of Fereyd's troopers fell, blasted backwards by a trio of shots to his chest. He jerked back, arms and legs extended, and died.

  Gaunt squeezed the trigger again, but his lasgun just retched and fizzed. The energy draining effect of the catacombs, which had sapped their lamp packs, had wasted ammo charges too. His weapon was spent.

  The remaining bodyguard lurched forward to blast Gaunt, helpless on the floor – and dropped with a laser-blasted hole burnt clean through his skull. His body smashed back hard against the side of the STC machine and slid down, leaving a streak of blood down the chased silver facing. Gaunt scrambled around to look.

  Clutching the bawling Domor to him, Dorden sat half-raised with Domor's laspistol in his hand.

  'Needs must,' the doctor said quietly, suddenly tossing the weapon aside like it was an insect which had stung him.

  'Great shot, doc,' Larkin said, getting up, clutching his seared arm.

  'Only said I wouldn't shoot, not that I couldn't,' Dorden said.

  The Ghosts got back to their feet. Dorden hurried to treat the wounds Bragg and Larkin had received.

  'What's that sound?' Domor asked sharply. They all froze.

  Gaunt looked at the great machine. Amber lights were flicking to life on a panel on its flank. In death, the last Crusader had been blown back against the main activation grid. Old technologies were grinding into life. Smoke, steam perhaps, vented from cowlings near the floor. Processes moved and turned and murmured in the de
vice.

  There was another noise too. A shuffling.

  Gaunt turned slowly. Behind the dark grilles in the alcoves, metal limbs were beginning to flex and uncurl. As he watched, eyes lit up in dead sockets. Blue. Their light was blue, cold, eternal. Somehow, it was the most appalling colour Gaunt had ever seen. They were waking. As their creator awoke, they awoke too.

  Gaunt stared at them for a long, breathless moment, his heart pounding. He looked at them until he had lost count of the igniting blue eyes. Some began to jerk forward and slam against the grilles, rattling and shaking them. Metal hands clawed at metal bars. There were voices now too. Chattering, just at the edge of hearing. Codes and protocols and streams of binary numbers. The Iron Men hummed as they woke.

  Gaunt looked back at the STC. 'Rawne!'

  'Sir?'

  'Destroy it! Now!'

  Rawne looked at him, wiping the blood from his lip.

  'With respect, colonel-commissar… is this right? I mean – this thing could change the course of everything.'

  Gaunt turned to look at Major Rawne, his eyes fiercely dark, his brow furrowed. 'Do you want to see another world die, Rawne?'

  The major shook his head.

  'Neither do I. This is the right thing to do. I… I have my reasons. And are you blind? Do you want to greet these sleepers as they awake?'

  Rawne looked round. The cold blue stares seemed to stab into him too. He shuddered.

  'I'm on it!' he said with sudden decisiveness and moved off, calling to Mkoll and Caffran to bring up the explosives.

  Gaunt yelled after him. These things are heresies, Rawne! Foul heresies! And if that wasn't enough, they've been sleeping here on a Chaos-polluted world for thousands of years! Do any of us really want to find out how that's altered their thinking?'

  'Feth!' Dorden said, from nearby. 'You mean this whole thing could be corrupted?'

  'You'd have to be the blindest fool in creation to want to find out, wouldn't you?' Gaunt replied.

  He stared down at the remains of his friend Fereyd. 'It wasn't me who changed, was it?' he murmured.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Heldane was totally unprepared for the death of his pawn. It had been such a victory to identify and capture Macaroth's little spy, and then such a privilege to work on him. It had taken a long time to turn Fereyd, a long time and lot of painful cutting. But the conceit had been so delicious: to take the greatest of the warmaster's agents and turn him into a tool. Heldane had learned so much more through Fereyd then he would have through a lesser being. Duplicity, deceit, motive. To use one of the men the warmaster had been channelling to undermine him? It had been beautiful, perfect, daring.

  In his final moments, Heldane wished he could have had time to finish with Rawne. There had been a likely mind, however blunt. But the Ghosts Corbec and Larkin had cheated him of that, and left Rawne merely aware of his influence rather than controlled by it.

  It mattered little. Heldane had miscalculated. Impending death had slackened his judgement. He had put too much of himself into his pawn. The backlash when the pawn died was too much. He should have shielded his mind to the possible onrush of death-trauma. He had not.

  Fereyd suffered the most painful, hideous death imaginable. All of it crackled down the psychic link to Heldane. He felt every moment of Fereyd's death. In it, he felt his own.

  Heldane spasmed, burst asunder. Untameable psychic energies erupted out of his dead form, lashing outwards indiscriminately. Impart resounded on impart. Above in his command seat, Hechtor Dravere noticed the shuddering of the deck, and began to look around for the cause.

  In a mushroom of light, the unleashed psychic energies of the dying inquisitor blew the entire Leviathan apart, atom from atom.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  'We're clear!' Rawne yelled as he sprinted across the chamber with Caffran next to him. Gaunt had marshalled the others at the doorway. By now, the huge machine was rumbling and the gas-venting was continuous.

  'Mkoll! Come on!' Gaunt shouted.

  On the far side of the chamber, a section of the ancient grille finally gave way. Iron Men stumbled forward out of their alcove, their metal feet crunching over the fallen grille sheet. All around, their companions rattled and shook at their pens, eyes burning like the blue-hot backwash of missile tubes, murmuring their sonorous hum.

  The metal skeletons spilling out of the cage began to advance across the chamber, bleary and undirected. Mkoll, fixing the last set of charges to the side of the vibrating STC, looked round in horror at their jerking advance.

  There was a sudden rush of noise beside him and a hatch aperture slid open in the side of the STC maker, voiding a great gout of steam. Caught in it, Mkoll fell to his knees, choking and gagging.

  'Mkoll!'

  Kneeling with his back turned to the hot steam, the coughing Mkoll couldn't see what was looming out of the swirling gas behind him.

  A new-born Man of Iron. The first to be produced by the STC after its long slumber. As soon as it appeared, the others, those loosed and those still caged, began keening, in a long, continuous, piteous wail that was at once a human shriek and a rapid broadcast of machine code sequences.

  There was something wrong with the new-born. It was malformed, grotesque compared to the perfect anatomical symmetry of the other Iron Men. A good head taller, it was hunched, blackened, one arm far longer than the over, draped and massive, the other hideously vestigial and twisted. Corrupt horns sprouted from its over-long skull and its eyes shone a deadened yellow. Oil like stringy pus wept from the eye sockets. It shambled, unsteady. Its exposed teeth and jaws clacked and mashed idiotically.

  Dorden howled out something about Gaunt being right, but Gaunt was already moving and not listening. He dove across the chamber at full stretch and tackled the coughing Mkoll onto the floor a second before the new-born's larger arm sliced through the space the stealther had previously occupied.

  The respite was brief. Rolling off Mkoll and trying to pull him up, Gaunt saw the new-born turn to address them again, its jaw champing mindlessly. Behind it, in the reeking smoke of the hatchway, a second new-born was already emerging.

  Two las-rounds punched into the new-born and made it stagger backwards. Caffran was trying his best, but the dully reflective carapace of the new-born shrugged off all but the kinetic force of the shots.

  It struck at Gaunt and Mkoll again, but the commissar managed to roll himself and the scout out of the way. Its great metal claw sparked against the algorithm-inscribed floor, incising an alteration to the calculations that was permanent and insane.

  Gaunt struggled to drag Mkoll away from the shambling metal thing, cursing out loud. In a second, Dorden and Bragg were with him, easing his efforts, pulling Mkoll upright.

  The unexpected blow smashed Gaunt off his feet. The newborn had reached out a glancing blow and taken a chunk of cloth and flesh out of his back. How could it-Gaunt rolled and looked up. The new-born's massive fore-limb had grown, articulating out on extending metallic callipers, forming new pistons and extruded pulleys as it mor-phed its mechanical structure.

  The monstrous thing struck at him again. The commissar flopped left to dodge and then right to dodge again. The metal claw cracked into the floor on either side of him.

  Rawne, Larkin and Cafrran sprang in. Caffran tried to shoot at close range but Larkin got in his way, capering and shouting to distract the machine. A second later, Larkin was also sent flying by a backhanded swipe.

  Rawne hadn't had time to load another barbed round into his lance, so he used it like an axe, swinging the bayonet blade so that it reverberated against the creature's iron skull. Cable-sinews sheared and the new-born's head was knocked crooked.

  The machine-being swung round with its massive fighting limb and smacked Rawne away, extending its reach to at least five metres. Gaunt dived across the floor and came up holding Rawne's barb-lance. He scythed down with it and smashed the Iron Man's limb off at the second elbow, cutting through the incre
asingly diminished girth of the extending limb.

  Then Gaunt plunged the weapon, point first, into the new-born's face. The blade came free in an explosion of oil and ichor-like milky fluid.

  The monstrosity fell back, cold and stiff, the light dying in its eyes.

  By then, six new demented new-borns had spilled from the STC's hatch. Behind them, forty or more of the Iron Men had burst from their cages and were thumping forward. The others rattled their pens and began to howl.

  'Now! Now we're fething leaving!' Gaunt yelled.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  It had taken them close on four hours to find and fight their way in; four hours from the bottom of the chimney shaft on the hillside to the doors of the Edicule. Now they had closed the doors on the shuffling blue-eyed metal nightmares and were ready to run. But even with the simple confidence of retracing their steps, Gaunt knew he had to factor in more time, so in the end he had Rawne set the tube-charge relays for four and three-quarter standard hours.

  Already their progress back to the surface was flagging. Domor was getting weaker with each step, and though able-bodied, both Bragg and Larkin were slowing with the dull pain of their wounds from the firefight. Most of their weapons had been dumped, as the power cells were now dead. There was no point carrying the excess weight. Rawne's barb-lance was still functioning and he led the way with Mkoll, whose lasrifle had about a dozen gradually dissipating shots left in its dying dip. Dorden, Domor, and Larkin were unarmed except for blades. Larkin's carbine, still functioning thanks to its mechanical function, was of no use to him with his wounded arm, so Gaunt had turned it over to Caffran to guard the rear. Bragg insisted on keeping his autocannon, but there was barely a drum left to it, and Gaunt wasn't sure how well the injured trooper would manage it if it came to a fight.

  Then there was the darkness of the tunnels, which Gaunt cursed himself for forgetting. All of their lamp packs were now dead, and as they moved away from the Edicule chambers into the darker sections of the labyrinth, they had to halt while Mkoll and Caffran scouted ahead to salvage doth and wood from the bodies of the dead foe in the cistern approach. They fashioned two dozen makeshift torches, with doth wadded around wooden staves and lance-poles, moistened with the pungent contents of Bragg's last precious bottle of sacra liquor. Lit by the flickering flames, they moved on, passing gingerly through the cistern and beyond.