Meduson Page 5

  They ran across the sand, eyes upon the cliffs and scree around them. As they rounded the corner, Jo'phor's hearts sank.

  There was no gunship.

  The locator beacon was genuine, but there was no sign of the Stormbird that once housed it. The apparatus was propped up against the rock face. Above it three words were scraped onto the rock, almost luminously white in the dark: WELCOME TO PURGATORY.

  The air cracked gently the characteristic report of a legionary sniper rifle. Jo'phor spun around. Go'sol collapsed, shot cleanly through the head.

  A second shot caught Donak in the arm. He fell sideways, sprawling for cover.

  Jo'phor threw himself to the side as a third shot spacked into the ground exactly where he had been standing. The Emperor's gifts came alive, supercharging his metabolism. Time slowed. Conscious thought receded. What little was left of his humanity was submerged.

  The alterations to his mind bypassed his frontal lobe, reaching under for the more primitive, efficient systems it overlaid. Before he knew it, he was running, his body and armour working in tandem, he functioned optimally despite his weariness. He was a weapon, forged to the Emperor's design. His helm's autosenses switched to thermal and highlighted three heated paths through the cold night, still coherent though warped by air currents.

  A lasweapon's discharge track.

  Another round flared across his lenses. He had his bolter up to his shoulder, laying down a suppressive burst as a figure moved to engage him from behind another boulder. The warrior was forced to duck back.

  He could see them now five traitors betrayed by plumes of hot air vented by their armour's cooling plants. They were visible to him as writhing columns that flattened themselves out sixpointfour metres up against a cap of cooler air, their tops dragged into cirrus shapes by sluggish laminar flow at the thermal boundary. His racing mind tracked them all. He fired on fully automatic the moment he saw a cooling vent protrude over a rock.

  His infravision flared as the nozzle was caught and detonated, the blasts of other shells bursting all around it. The traitor was flung around by the hit, and his hand appeared bright in the falsecolour image as he steadied himself. This Jo'phor missed, but by then he was bounding up the slope, using the talus that sheltered the traitors as stepping stones.

  Donak had gained cover and was firing from behind Jo'phor, keeping the enemy pinned down.

  So be it. If they were to die, let them take a few more of their treacherous kin with them.

  Bolt fire blasted the fragile rock into pinging shards all around him, the rest of his foes abandoning caution as he closed.

  He reached the rock sheltering the first Space Marine and scrambled over the top, slaying him with three fast shots, gun pointed down as he leapt across the gap to the next boulder.

  The vox clicked. 'Stop! Stop!' came a frantic voice.

  Jo'phor detected cowardice. His hatred for those who had slain his father, betraying the great dream, howled in his mind and blotted out all else. Let them beg for mercy. He had none to give.

  The next traitor was ready for him. Bolter shots raked across his breastplate. Two were deflected, but two more penetrated the cabling on his front. Gas hissed. Power was abruptly cut to his left leg. He sagged, off balance. The foul taste of Isstvan's unfiltered air filled his mouth. The fifth blasted through the joint at his shoulder, embedding itself deep inside his chest. The bolt blew, shredding both his hearts and his lungs.

  His armour contained the explosion. Somehow he survived, but his time was ending. He fell forward, coughing blood into his visor.

  A figure appeared from behind a rock twelve metres away. Jo'phor's eyes widened.

  A Salamanders unit identification rune pulsed in his viewplate.

  The legionary threw down his sniper rifle and broke into a run. 'No… No!' He reached Jo'phor and caught his arm.

  'Brother! What have we done? Cease fire! Cease fire all of you they are ours!'

  Other identrunes blinked into life, smeared out by Jo'phor's fluids.

  Iron Hands.

  The Salamander wrestled Jo'phor's helmet off the world was world was dimming as it clanged off the rocks. The Salamander held up Jo'phor's limp head with cold metal gauntlets.

  'Brother! Brother!' The warrior's voice was anguished. Such pain.

  It was no terrible thing to be leaving all this behind, Jo'phor realised 'No, stay with us! Stay with us! What have we done?'

  Jo'phor could no longer see. A fearful roaring filled his ears. Through it, Jo'phor heard Donak bellowing wordlessly into the desolate night.

  He felt a sense of vague disappointment, but his war was over.

  IMMORTAL DUTY

  NICK KYME

  I have erred, and so I must atone.

  I lived when I should have died, and so I must become Immortal.

  Oath of the Immortals

  On MY KNEES, I faced the ship's deck. The contorted faces of my brothers stared back, frozen in their last tormented moments.

  My name is Ahrem Gallikus and I am Immortal, but this was the day that I was supposed to die.

  It was my right. My destiny, one that I alone set in motion long before the fields of our greatest ignominy. Long before Isstvan.

  A chill pricked the skin at the nape of my neck, between the black adamantium gorget and a closely shorn scalp of coaldark hair. At first I thought it was the starship's atmospheric recirculation lacing the air with frigidity, until I realised it was the axe blade poised in judgement. Mercifully, the edge remained enervated or I would surely have been dead already. But then why imbue it with an actinic sharpness when a simple heft and cleave will do the job just as well?

  Logic. Efficiency. Temperance.

  Forged together, these words were our creed. A bond of iron, I always believed. Where was this alloy in our father when he needed it most? Again, as they often did in those days of bereavement and grief, my thoughts turned to melancholy.

  'Ahrem,' uttered a voice from the shadows surrounding me, as sharp as the naked blade against my flesh. 'Tell us.'

  He used my given name, the one afforded to me by the chieftain of Clan Gaarsak, and it grated in my ears. He had no right to use that name.

  'I am Legionary Gallikus, Order Primii,' I replied with minimum respect. Back then I saw it as needless theatre, all of this. 'Gallikus, then,' uttered the voice a second time, the irritation in its timbre unmasked. 'We have questions. You will answer them.'

  The axe blade descended incrementally, nicking my skin to draw a bead of blood. I saw my breath fog in the cold, stagnant air; felt the thrum of the Obstinate's impulse engines resonating from the lower decks; heard every minute adjustment of my interrogator's posture in the low, predatory growl of his armour.

  I was at peace, ready for my duty to end. My immortal duty. I lowered my head a fraction in gentle supplication.

  My interrogator took that as an indication to proceed, which it was. In a way.

  'Tell us of the Retiarius.'

  The name of that vessel put fire in my veins, banishing the cold of the hangar deck as my mind was cast back to hot halls, crimson and black. Sweat, blood, death… it all collided in a moment of searing recollection. It did nothing to warm the frozen flesh of the battlebrothers who stared back at me, dead eyes fixed wide in their decapitated heads.

  I wondered briefly if the method of execution was meant to be symbolic, ironic or inadvertently in bad taste.

  'Tell us what you remember.'

  I remembered fire in the upper atmosphere of Isstvan, and hell reigning across the heavens. But this was amorphous, an impression only. An emotional response.

  I considered the possibility of sanction if I had admitted that. Emoting is supposed to be anathema to the Iron Tenth.

  I am sometimes led to wonder if life itself is, too. Instead, the first memory hit me. It felt like a mailed fist, but sang with the thunder of a battlebarge's opening broadside…

  'BLOOD OF MEDUSA!'

  Mordan was seldom given
to such outward expression, but our path to the Retiarius was proving volatile.

  Harnessed in the assault ram's dual prows, my brothers were giving off the same, albeit unspoken, sentiment.

  Katus gripped his breaching shield doublefisted and held it across his chest like a totem. The bionic eye he wore in his right socket flared with nerveinduced autocalibration.

  Sombrak ground his teeth. He was my shieldbrother and did it before every battle. It was loud and discordant because his jaw was cybernetic. Most of us were patched up thusly, our broken bodies rebuilt so that we could wage war one final time.

  This was my eighth ''final time''. Fate could be cruel like that.

  Azoth was the last brother I knew well, though in all there were ten souls armoured in Medusan black in the hold.

  The rate of attrition was grievous amongst our ranks, and I soon found little need to learn names.

  Of all my brothers, those known and unknown, Azoth was the most prone towards rhetoric. When we were made Immortal, our father stripped us of rank and title. Reforged, our new calling was a badge of shame to all in our Legion, and we lost our old identities.

  I believe that Azoth had been a Frater Ferrum an Iron Father before he fell from grace. He still had the gaps in his armour where they had unbolted his servoarm. Whatever he had been before, now he was our sergeant.

  He called out to us, bellowing against the tumult within the hold. 'Forlorn hope! Our ranks have never been breached. Be steadfast.' I could hear the servogrind of his gauntlet as he gripped the haft of his thunder hammer. 'Be resolute. Our dishonour demands it of us. Death awaits. We do not fear it! For what is death…?'

  'To those who are dead already!' I roared in unison with my brothers.

  He had a way with words, old Azoth. I think I will miss him the most.

  Warning klaxons sounded, coinciding with a rush of crimson light flooding the low ceiling above us. We were close, but that was no guarantee of us reaching the Retiarius intact.

  Over thirty assault rams were cast out into the void, all ridden by Medusan Immortals. I doubted that even half would make it through.

  A Caestus was a durable vessel, fashioned specifically for this purpose. It was fast too, but the sheer amount of weapons fire erupting between the two larger vessels across the gulf of space was intense.

  Great tracts of the void separated the Gorgonesque and the Retiarius, littered with silent explosions like scarred nebulae, and immense clouds of rapidly dispersing shrapnel. To us, aboard our diminutive assault ram, it was a long and perilous journey. To those two great behemoths, it would be regarded as close range.

  As our hull shuddered with every close impact, the inertial suppression clamps held us steady. I closed my eyes and imagined our destination.

  I had seen the Retiarius before, during the Great Crusade. Back then it had been an ugly, hulking vessel, wellsuited to its brutish occupants. Its flanks were stained azure and dirty white, the echo of legionary warplate. Slabnosed and upscaled with muscular fighter bays and ablative armour plating, it was reminiscent of a pugilist in the form of a starship.

  I felt our punch resonate through the Caestus's hull, a glass fist striking a jaw of steel. Were it not for the magnameltas burning furiously to soften the Retiarius's formidable hide then we would have been dashed to wreckage in an eyeblink.

  As it was, we bit deep. Our glass fist had shards, and these had cut the outer flesh of the much larger vessel.

  We broke through amidst an evaporating cloud of ferric smoke, our small assault ram having bored through the starship's hull and clamped securely in place. Disgorged onto a dark, semilit hangar we had little time to get our bearings before counterboarding troops arrived to try and repel us.

  'Lock shields!'

  Azoth bellowed out the command, but we had already begun to form up.

  It was an archaic tactic, reminiscent of the Romanii or Grekans of Old Earth, but it was effective. Much about war endures, fraternal conflict being foremost in my mind as we breached a vessel that we had once considered to belong to our allies.

  But it was mortal armsmen and not our erstwhile brothers in arms, the World Eaters, that we faced upon that deck.

  A strong, determined fusillade hit us first, hot las raining in from hastily erected weapon teams and broken firing lines. We held, soaking up their fire, taking everything they threw at us without flinching. Then we pushed on, moving as one, the aegis of our breacher shields impenetrable to the brave men and women who had come to stop us.

  Despite their obvious disadvantage, the Retiarius's mortal troops went in close. Three further assault rams had struck this section of the ship and all four squads came together before the armsmen hit us. Their solid shot weapons and mauls proved fatally ineffective.

  The feeble momentum of their attack was dispersed when they shattered against our shield wall, and we absorbed the impact before returning it tenfold. Medusan waroaths cut the air as cleanly as any blade.

  And almost as deadly.

  The mortals quailed before our seeming inviolability and fury.

  I battered my first opponent, letting the blood from his broken skull spray against my shield before I finished him.

  The stomp of my foot was all it took, and suddenly I was pushing forwards with my immortal brothers. I shot a second through the cheekbone, his face erupting into mist as the massreactive shell exploded. I barged a third, splitting ribs. A fourth fell back in front of me against our advance and I severed his neck with the edge of my breacher shield, barely noticing the blood wash against my armoured boot.

  Our purpose made us ruthless. A blockade around Isstvan's upper atmosphere was preventing the X Legion from reaching its father, with the Retiarius just one of the vessels impeding our path. Our mission was simple. Our Iron Fathers had been clear. Destroy the ship by any means possible. If that meant our deaths, so be it.

  Inexorable, inevitable, we crushed the counterassault forces from the Retiarius. Then we cut down the weapons teams, then the deckhands, until every crewmen in sight was slain. It was an honourless but necessary act.

  After this, we broke ranks to quickly neutralise the rest. The deck was slick with enemy blood, but it was hard to discern in the dull light.

  'Where are we?' asked Mordan.

  'Aft of the enginarium, I think,' I replied. I knew a little of the vessel's layout, in so far as it would adhere to extant expeditionary fleet schemata. 'In one of the smaller hangar bays, near the ship's outer skin.'

  A relatively small chamber with a low ceiling and bare deck plate underfoot, the hangar would have been used to cloister the Retiarius's various smaller interdiction craft. For now, it was empty of starfighters and assault craft, the World Eaters having disgorged their entire complement to duel with the Iron Hands vessels attempting to break through the blockade. Instead, ammo hoppers and riggers crowded the narrow space. Rigging chains hung down from overhead pulleys, gently swaying in the aftermath of the battle. Steam plumed from vents in the walls, and it was sweltering. A pervasive, animal heat lathered every surface in a fine veneer of sweat. It stank.

  The voxfeed in my ear crackled. Communal channel. As expected, the voice of BrotherCaptain Udris of the Gorgonesque came through the voidstatic.

  Azoth told him that we had successfully made ingress and were moving deeper into the vessel. Resistance had been minimal.

  We all knew that would change.

  'The blockade?' asked Sombrak, when Azoth had finished receiving his orders from the Gorgonesque.

  'Still intact,' Azoth replied. 'We'll know if it isn't. These halls will be filled with fire, the walls will shatter and we'll be cast to the void. For now, they stand. So we must sunder them. The Avernii are dying below us, brothers.'

  'I would have liked to stand with the Gorgon one last time,' said Katus, his head bowed.

  Azoth clapped a gauntleted hand on his shoulder. There was an underlying anger in the former Frater's tone. At the betrayal unfolding on Isstvan or the stri
pping of his rank, it could be either or both.

  'Aye, Katus. So would I, but we have our lot and it is here aboard the Retiarius.'

  We moved out, leaving the dead to fester in the heat.

  As SOON AS our breach had been detected by the bridge crew, the Retiarius locked down its bulkheads and sealed all blast doors, seeking to contain us in a nonvital part of the ship.

  While two of my brothers with lascutters went to work cleaving open the blast door to the hangar, the rest of us adopted a defensive posture. Azoth took me aside. His mood was grim.

  'No word from the other squads,' he told me. 'Cunaeda, Vorrus, Hakkar…' he shook his head. 'Thirtythree assault rams went out. Currently, I only know of four that reached the Retiarius and they stand in this hangar. How far is the enginarium?'

  'It's relatively close,' I said, recalling the schematics eidetically, 'but there are warrens of tunnels and chambers beyond those doors before we reach it.'

  Azoth nodded, looking to my side rather than at me, as if I had just confirmed what he already knew in his gut. He spoke with some resignation. 'This was always a suicide mission…'

  Of all the Immortals I had known and fought beside, Azoth seemed the least sanguine about dying to restore his impugned honour. Or perhaps it was dying with what he felt was his honour still impugned. Azoth was brave, the equal of any Iron Hands legionary including the noble Avernii but I suspected his fervent wish was to return to the order of Iron Fathers before he fell in battle.

  But we were ghosts now, all of us, our honour as incorporeal to us as smoke. We had erred, and so we had to atone, or so the oath went.

  The blast door from the hangar went down, heralded by a resounding clang as it hit the deck on the other side.

  More gloom, more visceral darkness. Sweltering heat struck us like a fist, even more palpably than before. Impulse droning from the nearby enginarium was deafening. The thunderous report of broadsides trembled the deck underfoot and the walls shook with vibrational recoil. Petrochemical stink merged with the actinic aftertaste of recently discharged laser batteries wafting upwards from the lower decks.

  A starship at war was as brutal a battlefield as any, but the Retiarius deserved infamous acclaim for its severity.