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Riven - John French

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Riven

John French

‘It is not the dead I pity but the living. Those left at the threshold of ending are the ones who bear the burden of death. They are the ones who have to learn to live, knowing that nothing can be as it was.’

– from Lament for the Phoenix,
penned by the Primarch Fulgrim in 831.M30

‘When do we free him?’

The voice was the first that Crius had heard since he had woken in the prison of his armour. It was low and deep, like the sea surging against a cliff. Static cracked and popped as the vox-system came to life in his helmet. The darkness remained, pressing against his eyes.

‘When we reach the edge of the sun’s light, Boreas,’ said a second voice, further away but still close.

‘Is he awake in there?’ asked the first voice, the one called Boreas.

‘Perhaps.’

Small jolts of electricity ran up Crius’s spine. Power was slowly seeping into his armour systems – enough for him to feel, but not enough for him to move. That was the point, of course. In this state his armour was as complete a prison as any cell, its fibre bundles paralysed, its servos locked.

This is not Khangba Marwu, he thought, and the months of silence in Terra’s great gaol rose and drained away as the realisation hardened. I am no longer chained beneath the mountain. His armour was vibrating against his skin, steady and slow, like an electric pulse.

I am on a ship, he realised.

He had spent most of his life on ships, journeying between wars across the scattered stars, and the sensations of a vessel under power were as familiar to him as the beat of his own hearts. At least they had been, before he was returned to Terra, before Crius, Lord of the Kadoran and veteran of nearly two centuries of war, had become an Iron Hands legionary of the Crusader Host.

Before he had been forgotten.

Light touched his eyes. Ice-blue numerals ran across his sight. He tried to focus on the scrolling data but found that he could not. The connections between his flesh and augmetics itched; the scrambler that the Custodians had used to subdue him had shorted out half of the connections.

He began to inventory the details of his situation. He had no weaponry beyond his own body. Not normally the greatest of problems, but he had no control of his armour, and it was likely to be power starved. His augmetics were functioning far below optimal parameters. Even if he could get control of his armour, his combat effectiveness was fifty-nine per cent of optimal. That, of course, was based on the presumption that there were no other bindings holding him in place.

Not forgetting that you were too old for the warfront before you were sent to Terra, said a voice at the back of his thoughts. Not forgetting that factor.

Then there was the question of what enemy he would face. He recalled the voices he had heard, rolling their pitch and tones through a mental analysis. No auditory markers of the Custodians, but the vocal range was outside a human norm – deeper, textured by muscles and structures that mortals lacked. The conclusion formed in his mind with the smallest possibility of error: Space Marines.

He had new gaolers then, but why?

Irrelevant. That they were Space Marines was enough to skew the combat outcome. Even if I could move I would likely still lose, he thought.

Hatred rose through him then – hatred for those who had betrayed the Emperor, hatred for those who had imprisoned him, but most of all hatred for his own weakness. He should not have become weak enough that his only use was as a figurehead; he should not have allowed himself to be imprisoned; he should have been with the rest of his clan and Legion as they struck down the traitor Horus. He should…

He shut down the chain of thoughts, containing them and allowing their heat to flood him but not dull his logic.

‘The truth of iron,’ he muttered to himself, ‘guide me.’

Something scratched on the outside of his helm. He froze, muscles tensed and poised. Gas hissed around his neck. Seals clunked open and his helmet lifted away. His eyes dimmed as light poured into them, and his sight fizzed briefly before resolving to clarity.

A broad face looked back at him. Tanned and scar-knotted skin covered flat and muscle-thickened features; it was the face of one of the Emperor’s finest, the face of a Space Marine. A close-cropped strip of hair ran down the centre of the warrior’s skull, and a pair of dark eyes watched Crius without blinking. Crius stared back, his indigo lenses set into a face divided between scarred flesh and chromed ceramite.

He sat in a throne at the centre of a chamber of tiered stone. Chains wound across his body, linking to manacles at his wrists and fixed to cleats in the floor. The walls of the chamber were black, smooth and flecked with crystal that sparkled in the light of dimmed glow-globes. Banners hung from the walls, their gold, black and crimson thread tattered by bullet holes and charred by fire. The domed ceiling above was a mosaic of white and black tiles forming the emblem of a clenched fist.

The Space Marine who had removed Crius’s helm wore yellow armour with a black-on-white cruciform device on his shoulder. There was a stillness about him that reminded Crius of the memorial statues that guarded the graves of the honoured dead.

Imperial Fists, he thought. The praetorians of Terra. Of course.

The Imperial Fists legionary stepped back, and Crius saw a second figure standing further back, watching in silence, his armour swathed in a white tabard crossed with black, his hand resting upon the pommel of a sheathed sword. He looked into the figure’s hard, cold sapphire eyes. Crius’s gaze did not waver.

‘His armour, my lord?’ said the Imperial Fists legionary standing over him. ‘Should I activate it?’

Boreas, Crius thought. That was what the other voice had called him.

‘I would not do that,’ he said and looked up. Boreas met his gaze, the hint of a frown forming on his brow. ‘And if I were you, I would also not release these chains.’

‘What?’

‘Because if you do,’ Crius continued, calmly, ‘I will kill you both.’

Boreas glanced at his silent comrade, then back to Crius. ‘Do you–’

‘Yes, I know who he is,’ growled Crius.

‘I would not wish to believe you a traitor, Iron Hand,’ said the second Imperial Fists legionary.

‘Treachery…’ Crius said the word slowly. ‘Tell me, if you had been buried beneath a mountain, chained beside those with the blood of true traitors, then what thoughts would you have nursed in the dark? What would you wish on those who bound you there?’ The focusing rings of his eyes twitched. ‘If Sigismund, First Captain of the Imperial Fists, were sitting here in my place, what would he be thinking?’

Sigismund narrowed his eyes. ‘I would be considering how I might best serve the Imperium.’

‘Truly?’ sneered Crius.

Sigismund carried on as if he had not heard. ‘Now that we have passed beyond the bounds of the Solar System, I am charged by Lord Dorn to give you his orders.’

Crius shook his head slowly, not breaking Sigismund’s gaze. ‘My sword is my primarch’s to order, and the Emperor’s to command. You are neither, and nor is Rogal Dorn.’

Boreas surged forward, anger cracking his stony features. His hand was already bunched into a fist. ‘You dare–’

Fast, registered Crius. Very fast.

But Sigismund moved faster and put a hand on Boreas’s shoulder.

‘Peace, Boreas,’ said the Lord of Templars. Boreas glanced at his commander, and something passed between them in that glance.

Crius opened his mouth to speak. Sigismund spoke first.

‘Ferrus Manus is dead.’

Crius heard the words. He felt his brain process them. He felt their meaning spread through him. He felt… nothing.

The instant stretched out, and still there was nothing. Not the feeling of his armour against his skin, not the ache of his shorted augmetics, not the pulse of blood in his limbs. There was just the rush of silence and a sense of falling, as though a hole had opened up in the universe and swallowed him. He was falling, and there was just emptiness above and below.

Ferrus Manus is dead. The words rang in his mind.

Somewhere in his memory, a grim face turned to look at him, unsmiling.

‘And who are you?’

‘I am Crius. First Vexilla of the Tenth Legion,’ he had swallowed in a dry throat. ‘I am your son.’

‘So you are,’ Ferrus Manus had said.

‘How?’ he heard himself say.

Sigismund was watching him as he had before, with not a flicker of emotion in his eyes. ‘He fell in the counter-strike on Isstvan.’

‘When?’

‘It’s unclear,’ said Boreas.

‘When?’ asked Crius, feeling his lips pull back from his teeth.

‘It has been two hundred and fourteen days since we heard the news,’ said Sigismund.

Crius processed the number. Half of his mind dealt with it as cold data, while the other half howled. Muscles tensed across his body. His armour creaked and the chains rattled.

All this time, they knew. They knew, and yet they said nothing until now.

He breathed out, fighting down the fire that crawled through him, feeling a measure of control returning. The Imperial Fists just watched him.

Ferrus Manus is dead. No. No, it was impossible.

They knew, and yet they said nothing.

Crius’s thoughts tumbled through the widening void of his mind even as his mouth formed words. ‘What of the rest of the counter-strike?’

‘We do not know, not for certain.’ Sigismund blinked and for the first time broke Crius’s gaze. ‘The Alpha Legion, Night Lords, Iron Warriors and Word Bearers went to Horus. Vulkan is missing. Corax has made himself known to us, and he reports that the Raven Guard are gone, save for the few thousand he brought with him.’

Crius gave a small nod. A few moments before, this new information would have shocked him. Now his numb mind simply absorbed it and processed it. A high-pitched buzz rang in his ears. He swallowed but found that his mouth was paper dry.

Ferrus Manus is dead…

There will be a way for him to return. He is the Gorgon, he is iron, he cannot die.

‘My Legion?

‘We do not know. Some may have survived the massacre. Some may not have reached the Isstvan system. There may be many of them still out there.’ Sigismund paused and moved a step closer. ‘That is what Lord Dorn wishes of you – that you find any of your brothers that you can.’

Ferrus Manus is dead…

He failed us. He broke the bond of iron. He fell and left us to live on without him.

‘And then?’

‘Bring them back to Terra.’

‘For a last stand.’ Crius heard the hollowness in his own laughter. ‘The few against the coming storm?’

‘Yes,’ said Sigismund, and Crius saw something in the Imperial Fists legionary’s blue eyes – a flash of something dark and empty, like a shadow in a hole. ‘Do you consent to this endeavour?’

Crius looked away. His eyes clicked as they studied the chains that held him, taking in every mark left by their forging. The air tasted of cold stone, weapon oil and armour plate.

Ferrus Manus is dead…

Crius looked back to Sigismund and nodded.

Sigismund drew his sword. Crius noticed then the chains that circled the templar’s wrist, linking arm and weapon. Lightning crackled up the blade, and for a second he watched it dance in Sigismund’s eyes. Then the sword cut down, and the chains holding Crius sheared with a ringing sigh.

Boreas keyed a control on his wrist, and Crius felt full connection to his armour tingle up his spine. He stood slowly, the movements of armour and body stiff. He looked down at the manacles on his wrist. Boreas came closer, a brass key in his hand, but Crius considered what he had glimpsed in Sigismund’s eyes. He waved Boreas away, the severed links of chain clinking against his armour.

‘No,’ he said, and turned to Sigismund again. ‘Leave them.’

‘As you wish,’ said Sigismund with a small nod. ‘This ship is the Oathbound – she will carry you on your search. Boreas here will go with you.’ He clenched his fist and brought it up to his chest. ‘I hope we meet again, Crius of the Kadoran.’

Crius returned the salute and watched as Sigismund turned and walked from the chamber.

Data scrolled across Crius’s eyes as he watched the stars, the binaric runes blending with their pale light. Around him, the bridge crew moved and whispered, passing spools of parchment and data-slates, mind-interface cables trailing behind them. He did not sit upon the command throne – this was not his ship after all, nor was it truly his command. Instead, he stood before the bridge’s main viewports, listening, watching, waiting, just as he had a dozen times before.

Here I stand, he thought, waiting for the dead to speak from the night.

His eyes clicked without him willing it, as though blinking.

Ferrus Manus is dead.

It had been months since he had heard those words, yet still they spun through his waking thoughts and dreams. Crius had remained awake since they had left the Solar System, standing here on the bridge of the Oathbound when she emerged from the warp, listening to the song of the ship when they passed through the realm beyond. He had tried to find calm in the Cant of Iron and the Calculations of Purpose, but every time he had reached out for peace it had slipped away from him. He had waited for the storm within him to end, for the cold process of logic to assert itself and leave him as he was before, with fury in his hand but iron in his heart. Instead, with every passing day, and then every passing month, he had felt the hollowness growing in his hearts.

We were not made for this, he thought. What we needed to survive this sorrow was cut away in our forging.

‘The machine is strong, and logic can lay open any realm of understanding.’ The words of Ferrus Manus spoke to him from the shadows of a distant memory. ‘But without the hands and minds of the living they are nothing. We live and bend iron to our will, but iron can break, machines fail and logic can become corrupted. Life is the only true machine. Cut too much away, and we lose ourselves. Remember that, Crius.’

Crius’s eyes clicked as they refocused, and the memory faded. At his back he heard the click and hum of Boreas’s approach.

‘Twelve jumps,’ said Crius, without turning. ‘Twelve times we have sat dead in the void while the astropaths sift the aether for any trace of my kin. Twelve cycles of silence.’

‘We must succeed, no matter how long it takes. That is our oath.’

Crius nodded but did not reply. Boreas stepped closer. Crius could feel the warrior’s eyes upon him, but did not turn away from his view of the stars.

‘Terra must have every blade to defend it when Horus comes,’ said Boreas.

‘You are certain that he will?’

‘Lord Dorn believes so.’

‘Why?’

‘How else could Horus hope to win this war?’

Crius shrugged and turned to look at Boreas. Dark eyes looked back: sharp, unyielding and utterly without emotion.

‘You are so certain this is about winning?’ asked Crius.

‘What else could it be about?’

Crius looked back at the stars.

‘Oblivion,’ he said. The moment stretched in silence.

Another amplified voice rang across the bridge. ‘Lord Crius.’

Crius turned to see the shipmaster of the Oathbound. Casterra was an old man, his eyes bright green in a face scarred by time and the ice-winds of Inwit. Though human, Casterra had served the Imperial Fists in war for nearly seventeen decades, and the Empire of the Inwit Cluster for a decade before that. Strong and steady, the old captain was like a pillar shaped to support great weight.

‘Lord,’ said Casterra with the slightest pause, ‘the astropaths have something.’

‘What was the essence of the sending?’ asked Boreas. Casterra looked from Crius to Boreas and back.

‘The image of a mountain,’ said Casterra. ‘A great crater descends from its pinnacle into its heart. The mountain’s heart is dark, its fire long cold. The astropaths say that the dream of the mountain’s heart presses on them still. They say it tastes of flint and lead.’ The man paused. ‘Secondary imagery is standard code metaphor for a system in the Arinath Cluster.’

Crius nodded his thanks and turned away. Boreas waited, watching.

‘Ignarak,’ said Crius at last. ‘That is what the Medusan-born call it – the silence of mountains that once burned, and will burn again.’

‘What does it mean?’ said Boreas.

‘It is a summons,’ said Crius. ‘A summons to a gathering of war.’

Folded in the light of a dying sun, the Thetis lay in the silence of the void. The Oathbound hung at a distance, the power of her reactor held in check for fight or flight. Crius watched the vast, black bulk of the other vessel as the Storm Eagle crossed the distance between the two ships.

The Thetis had been born in the skies of Mars. Black stone and unpolished iron skinned her bulk from engines to hammerhead prow. She was like a forge-city set to float among the stars, her bloated body filled with workshops, furnaces and storage facilities. The last time Crius had seen her, she had been the queen at the centre of a fleet of lesser craft, the lights of lifters and bulk transports darting around her docking bays like fireflies. Now great wounds marked her iron skin, and scorches darkened her hull. Her docking bays were lightless caves. The fortress of her spine was a tangled ruin of broken architecture. Blank holes of gun barrels, sensor arrays and viewports looked out upon the stars from beside ragged craters. Projected across the inside of Crius’s machine eyes, she looked like a corpse floating in black water.

She is alone, thought Crius, the couplings of data and probability in his mind reaching uncertain conclusions. He cancelled the image but kept his eyes dark to the inside of the Storm Eagle. Petals of polished metal had closed over the lenses of his eyes, and only the glowing cascade of constant data broke the blackness of his world. Somewhere to his left, he heard the scrape of Boreas’s armour as he shifted in his mag-harness. The growling purr of the engines ached through Crius’s limbs and armour.

He preferred it this way, preferred the inside of his own thoughts. It reminded him of a time before he knew of his father’s death, when the world was made of straight lines of logic and strength.

What happens to a Legion when its primarch dies? His thoughts spiralled on as the Storm Eagle slid through emptiness towards the Thetis. What happens to his sons without his hand to guide them? What will become of us?

‘Crius.’

Boreas’s voice broke the spiral of his thoughts, and he shook himself and opened his eyes. They had reached the Thetis, he realised.

The Storm Eagle’s hull creaked as she settled, the engines and systems sighing as they cycled to sleep. Boreas was standing, looking down at Crius with that carved-stone expression that only ever broke to show anger. The light gleamed from the templar’s armour, catching the eagle wings etched into the golden yellow plate. A cloak of black and red hung down Boreas’s back, and the skull upon the pommel of his sheathed sword winked at Crius with eyes of jet.

‘Are you ready for this, Crius?’ he asked, and for a second Crius thought he saw a flicker of emotion in the warrior’s dark eyes.

Pity? he wondered. Is that all that remains for us?

He nodded to Boreas, unclamped the mag-harness, and rose. The servos in his leg stuttered. Error-data and pain stabbed through his body. He cursed silently but did not let it show upon his face. The malfunctions in his augmetics had become worse since they had left the Solar System, as though the metal added to his flesh echoed the fractures in his soul.

Or rejects the weakness growing in me, he thought, as he checked the thunder hammer at his back and the bolt pistol locked to his thigh.

‘I am ready,’ said Crius at last, and they turned to face the ramp of the Storm Eagle as it lowered. For a second his eyes dimmed at the brightness of the light, then rebalanced. Their gunship sat at the centre of a floodlit circle in an otherwise gloomy cavern. He turned his head, taking in the echoing space that extended to darkness on either side. Assault craft covered the deck, silent and cold, their hulls marked by damage. Stormbirds, Thunderhawks and assault rams crowded together with craft of a dozen other configurations. He recognised the colours of Salamanders, Night Lords, Raven Guard, Imperial Army regiments and the Adeptus Mechanicum, all jumbled together like the store of a scavenger. The air was like the breath from an open furnace door.

Twelve figures waited for them. Crius’s eyes flicked over them, noting the scratched and dented black battleplate and the markings of five different clans of the Iron Hands. Each of them wore armour that looked as though it had been repaired many times over, growing in bulk each time. Crius recognised none of these legionaries, but it had been almost a decade since he had been sent to Terra, and the hundred thousand faces of a Legion could change much in that time.

‘I am Crius,’ he said, and heard his voice echo. ‘One-time chief of the Kadoran, and Solar Emissary of Ferrus Manus.’ He paused, turning to indicate Boreas. ‘Beside me stands Boreas, Templar of the Seventh Legion. I come with tidings and orders from Rogal Dorn, Praetorian of Terra.’

The Iron Hands did not move or respond. Crius frowned.

‘To whom do I speak, brothers?’

‘I am Athanatos,’ said a static-laden voice. The speaker’s face was a black iron skull, with a pierced grill for a mouth. Blue light burned cold in the skull’s eye sockets. Cables punctured Athanatos’s scalp, trailing back into the gorget of his armour. The plate itself was a mixture of patterns and designs fused together around its wearer. Crius registered the details of the hunched shoulders, weapon-tipped arms and secondary pistons visible through gaps in the arm and leg plating. Droplets of moisture clung to the dented plates, as though they had been scattered with rain. ‘I know your name, Crius of the Kadoran,’ added Athanatos. ‘I stood under your command on Yerronex. Few still thought you among the living.’

Crius sorted through legionary records and images in his memory, until he found the face of a line sergeant with grey-steel eyes. If it had not been for the name, he might never have thought it to be the same warrior.

‘Of what clan-companies are you?’ asked Crius.

‘Of what we were, nothing remains.’ Athanatos paused, static scratching at the edge of the words. ‘Brother.’

Crius swept his gaze over the circle of Iron Hands. ‘These who stand beside you?’ He noticed their stillness again. Like Athanatos, their armour was sheened with moisture. Why is the air so hot? he wondered.

‘The few that came from the fields of slaughter,’ said Athanatos. ‘We are of the Thetis now.’

‘You were on Isstvan Five?’

The pause lasted for several long heartbeats.

‘Yes, Crius of the Kadoran. We were there,’ said Athanatos, his speaker grill popping and crackling. ‘And on Gagia, and Sacrissan, and Agromis.’

‘These places are not known to me,’ said Crius.

‘They are places of battle, places of vengeance and death to the betrayers,’ said another of the Iron Hands, standing near Athanatos.

Crius looked at him. His face was bare, without the mark of augmetics, but the iron was in his eyes. Interface sockets dotted his layered armour, and cables hung from the base of his skull like a cloak of snakes. His lips pursed and a frown etched its lines between the service studs on his skull.

‘I am Phidias,’ he said, as if in answer to the question Crius was about to ask. ‘I am commander and keeper of the Thetis.’ Crius thought he caught a flicker within Phidias’s stare, perhaps a brief flare of emotion. ‘It is good to see another of our kind amongst the living.’

‘How many of your Legion are with you?’ demanded Boreas. Athanatos turned his head slowly to look at the Imperial Fists legionary.

‘Our strength stands before you, son of Dorn.’

So few… Crius felt the leaden weight in his stomach swell. When he had last seen the Thetis, she had carried three thousand warriors under arms. An image of corpses scattered under fire-soaked skies filled his mind before he could control it. How many are lost and dead at our father’s side?

‘Rogal Dorn asks that you return to Terra,’ said Crius. ‘To stand there with our brother Legions.’

‘Asks?’ said Athanatos.

‘Or demands?’ added Phidias.

‘The strength of all Legions must be gathered to defend Terra,’ said Boreas, taking a step forward. Crius could see the lines of the templar’s face harden. ‘You must return with us, as Lord Crius says.’

‘Lord Crius…’ Athanatos purred the words, as he nodded to the severed chains still hanging from Crius’s wrists. ‘What is he lord of?’

Boreas was moving to reply, but Athanatos spoke again.

‘Your strength failed long ago, Crius of the Kadoran. We will not return with you. We will not turn away from what lies before us.’

‘What of the signal you sent into the void?’ demanded Boreas. ‘The gathering of war?’

‘We are here,’ said Phidias.

‘And the other survivors, the rest of the Legion?’

‘We have not seen any others of the Legion since the massacre,’ said Athanatos.

‘Not until now,’ Phidias muttered.

Details clicked into place in Crius’s mind, completing patterns and closing off possibilities. He let out a long breath as the realisation formed. He felt a sudden need to shiver despite the heat crawling in the air.

‘The signal is not a summons,’ he said. Boreas turned to look at him. ‘It is bait.’

‘We draw our enemies to us,’ nodded Phidias.

‘There are hunters amongst the stars,’ said Athanatos. ‘They seek us now as they have ever since we escaped Isstvan. They will have heard our summons. They know enough of us to understand its meaning. They will come, and we will face them.’

‘With a handful?’ asked Boreas.

‘With every weapon we have,’ replied Athanatos.

‘If you had a hundred times the numbers…’ said Crius, then shook his head. ‘You will perish here, brothers.’

‘Perish…’ Athanatos echoed, rolling the word through the hot air.

‘How can you hope to do anything other than die here?’

Athanatos laughed then, a crackling growl of noise that clattered in the silence like grinding gears.

‘This is no longer a war of hope, brother – this is a war of vengeance and extermination.’ He shook his head. ‘The primarch is gone, the Great Crusade is done and soon the Imperium will follow. All that matters is that those who brought us to this end will share our graves.’

Boreas snarled. Crius heard the blade begin to scrape from the templar’s scabbard. He turned and fastened his hand on the grip of the half-drawn sword and met the Imperial Fists legionary’s burning eyes. Around them, he could hear the high-pitched whine of charged focusing rings and the clunk of firing catches as volkite and bolt weapons armed.

‘No,’ said Crius. ‘Your death or theirs will serve no purpose here.’

Boreas stared back, his face a blank setting for the rage in his eyes. Crius felt the servos in his hands whine as they strained to hold the sword still. Slowly, Crius released his grip and turned back to Athanatos.

‘Forgive our kinsman of the Seventh. Your words…’ Crius paused, his tongue still behind his open teeth. His eyes clicked and refocused. ‘Your words surprised him.’

‘You are wrong when you say that death serves no purpose,’ said Athanatos. ‘Death is all there is now.’

What has become of these brothers? wondered Crius as Athanatos turned away, armour creaking and hissing. Phidias and the rest of the Iron Hands turned to follow.

‘We will remain with you,’ Crius called out. Boreas caught his eye but said nothing. ‘For now.’

‘You speak as though there were any other choice,’ said Athanatos as he walked away.

‘Madness,’ breathed Boreas.

Crius did not reply. He and Boreas stood on the bridge of the Thetis, on the peninsular of shaped granite that lay beneath her command throne and above the servitor-filled canyons of the control systems. The whole chamber was five hundred metres long and half as wide. Pillars reached up to a vaulted ceiling a hundred metres above the deck. Black iron braziers hung from chains, adding their coal-glow to the cold green and blue of hololith-screens. Silent crew sat at their consoles, heads bowed, cables snaking from the folds in their charcoal robes to link to the banks of machinery. Tech-priests in white and red robes moved between the machines like ghosts.

Raw heat filled the air even here, which smelled of worn metal and electrical charge. To Crius, it felt both familiar and unsettling, like a friend’s face subtly scarred.

Phidias sat in the command throne above and behind them. A host of cables swarmed over him, linking him to the ship’s systems. Athanatos and the other Iron Hands had vanished after they had left the hangar deck – they had not appeared again.

Crius turned his eyes back to the display showing the empty void around the Thetis. The display was a polyhedron of blue light revolving above a dais of black crystal. Data runes swam through the holo-projection, tracking the position of void debris with the Thetis at its centre. The Oathbound was out of sight in the shadow of a planetoid which rolled slowly through the near reaches of space. Phidias had told Boreas to order his ship away, and that she was to remain silent, no matter what occurred. No threat had needed to be spoken for all to understand that if the Oathbound did not obey then she would be destroyed. Boreas had given the order.

Crius turned slowly to look at the templar. A charge of restrained control and focused rage surrounded Boreas, like hard and soft steel forged together to make a blade.

‘What strength they have will end here, wasted for spite,’ said Boreas.

‘They do not intend to die here,’ Crius said after a long moment of silence. ‘That is not our way.’

‘They are not like you. They are like no Iron Hands I have ever met.’

Yes, thought Crius. They are like another Legion, or a shadow cast by the past…

They had not been allowed to leave the bridge, and on their journey from the hangar decks he had seen no sign of any other Iron Hands – just servitors, and serfs hooded in tattered grey. He took a deep breath, and wondered again why it was so hot.

‘A ship with a carcass-house of assault craft, but only a “handful” of warriors…’ said Boreas, letting the words hang. ‘And now Athanatos is nowhere to be seen.’ He looked at Crius, his face grim. ‘Secrets,’ he muttered softly, as though following the thread of his suspicion.

‘No, reasons,’ said Crius. Boreas held his gaze. ‘They are still my brothers. Even if they have changed. We are still kin. We are still…’

…the sons of a dead father. The thought caught in his mind and he felt the tide of emptiness rise inside him again.

‘Look.’ The word echoed from vox speakers across the bridge. Crius’s mind snapped clear as he looked up at the command throne. Phidias’s voice rumbled through the air again. ‘They come.’

Crius turned his eyes back to the hololith display. At the edge of the projection, red marker runes of enemy ships blinked into existence. Names began to form beside the spreading clutch of ships.

‘Sons of Horus,’ Boreas breathed. ‘They do not even hide their allegiance.’

‘They want us to know who they are,’ said Phidias. ‘They want us to know it is them when they destroy us. In that, they have not changed.’

Crius read the data spilling from the enemy vessels. He recognised them all. Three of the ships were spear-hulled, skinned in sea-green adamantium and bronze. They had been born in the forges of Armatura and gifted to Horus by Guilliman – the Lord of the Ultramarines had named his gifts, Spear Strike, Wolf of Cthonia and Dawnstar, and there were few to match them for speed and ferocity.

The fourth ship, larger and blunter than the rest, had a history that stretched back to the first wars beyond the light of Terra’s sun. The Emperor had christened her the Death’s Child, and she still bore that name in treachery.

‘Two thousand legionaries,’ muttered Crius, calculating the likely numbers. ‘If we are fortunate then they will be under strength.’

‘They are firing!’ shouted Boreas.

Crius saw a spread of markers break away from the four ships. The torpedo clusters sped towards them.

‘Twelve seconds to impact,’ called a grey-robed crewman.

‘Why do you not return fire?’ called Crius. Phidias said nothing. The clatter of machines swelled through the bridge, the crew bent over a thousand tasks, but the Thetis’s guns remained silent. ‘You must–’

The bridge pitched with the first detonations. Crius staggered and caught his balance. Alarm after alarm began to sound. Red fire leapt up. The reek of charring meat filled the air; crewmen were burning at their stations, their screams lost in the din. White gas vented into the bridge space.

Phidias did not move in his throne. Crius wondered if he was even aware of what was happening in front of him, or if his interfaced mind now saw only the darkness beyond the hull.

Another blow ran through the ship. The deck pitched and for a second the gravity failed. Mortal bodies flew into the air. Cables ripped free of flesh. Blood sprayed out, the droplets breaking into hanging globules.

Crius rose from the deck with the rest of them, tumbling end over end. Then the gravity cut back in and he crashed back down, rolling and coming up in a crouch. Boreas was next to him, already on his feet.

Around them, mayhem reigned in the smoke and flame.

‘We have to find Athanatos,’ shouted Crius. ‘If Phidias will not listen, he must. They have to run, before they are overwhelmed.’

Boreas glanced at the chaos around them and nodded. As one they pulled themselves from the deck and made for the door. Behind them, the alarms screamed on.

In the Thetis’s command throne, Phidias felt his ship shudder with anger. The Thetis was bleeding across her hull. Gas, plasma and machine fluid sprayed from fresh holes in her scarred skin. He felt each wave of damage as a stab of pain through what remained of his flesh. It was a small price to pay. An irrelevance.

The hololithic projection hanging in front of him swam with the red markers of enemy craft, closing fast.

‘Turn to face them,’ he said. ‘Power to the engines.’ A second later he felt the ship begin to obey. The crew and adepts on the bridge cancelled new warning alarms as they triggered. They knew better than to question the order.

This will be a great father of firestorms, he thought. Perhaps this will be our last. He shivered in his armour. No, we are not done with this war yet. While we still have strength, we will never be done.

‘Enemy targets, thirty seconds from battery weapons range,’ called out a battered signal officer. Phidias did not even nod; he knew already and could see the range to the three Sons of Horus ships draining down to nothing.

‘Begin the rites,’ said Phidias, over the noise of the bridge. ‘Waken them.’

Crius had stopped at the sight of the doors, his flesh prickling, his breath stopped in his throat. Behind him Boreas halted, his eyes going up to trace the doors’ height into the darkness above. Condensation covered the pitted adamantium. The air was very hot, as though they stood beside a fire. A steaming pool had gathered upon the threshold, its surface a black mirror disturbed only by the tremors of the void battle that wracked the ship. Crius had the overwhelming feeling that this place had been waiting for him to find it.

They had found it by accident. Running through the empty corridors of the Thetis, they had felt the tremors of battle, and seen the lighting dim and flicker, but found no sign of Athanatos. Then the doors had just been there, looming above them.

‘A weapons cache,’ said Boreas.

Crius shook his head but said nothing as he moved forwards. The pool on the threshold rippled around his boots. The chamber beyond had been a weapons cache once, he remembered. ‘But a weapons cache does not sweat condensation,’ he said. ‘Nor does it flood an entire ship with heat.’ Slowly he raised his metal hand, reached out, then paused just before he touched the door’s surface.

‘We should keep searching,’ said Boreas.

Crius shook his head. Logic whirred in his mind, faster and more clearly than at any time since he had left Terra. Conclusions danced just beyond his reach, waiting for data to close off possibilities.

And at the core of all his thoughts was the certainty that all the answers lay on the other side of the doors before him…

He edged forwards. Boreas reached to pull him back.

Crius pressed his hand to the moisture-beaded metal. He felt the connection as a hot tingle that spread through his nerves. Traces of circuitry spread across the doors in luminous lines. Something out of sight released with a clang.

Crius pulled back.

A crack appeared in the surface of the doors and slowly widened. Beyond, the darkness peered back at them.

‘Enemy are firing,’ called the signal officer. Warning sirens blared. Phidias waited, counting slices of time, watching the enemy ships in the projection. They were not coming straight at the Thetis, of course; the Sons of Horus knew the business of war too well for that. Two of the four ships – the Spear Strike and Wolf of Cthonia – were accelerating head on, while the Dawnstar and Death’s Child had looped wide to close the Thetis in a pincer of firepower.

They meant to lace the Thetis with torpedoes and then close to take the ship in a boarding action. Phidias was sure of it. The Sons of Horus were still wolves at heart, for all that time and treachery had changed them. They would behave as wolves now, crippling and pinning their prey as a pack before delivering the killing stroke.

Macro-shells hit the Thetis’s void shields – first one, then another, then a deluge. Phidias watched the shields peel back; vast rainbow smears of energy glittering at the edge of his awareness. A hundred metre-wide globe of plasma struck the Thetis’s prow, and the ship trembled as a glowing scab of armour tumbled away. Phidias kept his gaze fixed upon the heart of the holo-projection, on the markers of the enemy ships. The whole ship shook as she plunged on into the wall of enemy fire.

He felt the wakening protocols begin to leech power from the auxiliary systems. The reactors howled feed-shortage warnings. Even if there had still been enough crew to man the guns, there would not have been enough power to light them.

‘Prepare for launch,’ said Phidias.

The doors hissed shut behind them. Crius stood in the dark, his eyes clicking and whirring as they searched for any scraps of light. Cold began to bite into the exposed skin of his face.

Temperature below life support threshold, clicked into his mind. No immediate threat.

A scrape of steel cut the silence as Boreas drew his sword.

Crius’s eyes cycled to thermal vision. Cold – blue and black. Completely and utterly cold.

Data scrolled across his lenses. He ignored it, trying to make out any recognisable shapes in the smudges of blue in the black.

‘Light projection,’ he whispered, and his eyes lit up like stark lamps. Machines filled the space before him, marching away into the darkness, filling the space that had once swallowed Stormbirds and tank battalions. Stacks of cylinders and slab-like boxes lay amongst a tangle of pipework, and a low dais of polished iron stood in the clear space before the doors.

A sceptre of milled and polished metal floated a finger width above the dais’s surface. The dais and sceptre device were the only things that seemed free of the frost that rimed the rest of the chamber.

‘Artificial temperature control,’ he muttered, panning the beams of his eyes though the dark. ‘This chamber has been adapted, this machinery installed. This is the cause of the high temperatures within the vessel – the heat taken from here has to go somewhere.’

‘Secrets,’ growled Boreas, white mist hissing between clenched teeth.

Crius breathed in, paying attention for the first time to the taste of the still air: traces of machine oil and counter-septic filled his olfactory sensors. The focusing rings of his eyes clicked involuntarily as his logic processes ran to uncertain ends. He stepped forwards, his machine joints and armour creaking in the cold. Carefully, he moved past the dais.

The closest machinery loomed above him, glittering in a skin of ice. It stood slightly apart from the others, like a general at the head of an army. Thick clots of frozen fluids covered the points where tubes and pipes linked to the machine’s top and sides. Crius raised his hand in front of him, splayed his metal fingers and touched the surface. Metal clinked on metal. Tactile sensors itched as they spoke to his cold mind: adamantium structure, with traces of silver and other unknown elements. A low pulse ached through his fingers. He moved his hand, tracing his fingers across the metal surface, until they met frost-covered crystal.

He halted, then flinched back.

He could see something through the tiny window his fingers had cleared in the ice.

‘What is this?’ Boreas’s voice seemed to rise and vanish into the dark.

Computations clicked through Crius’s mind, following paths of inference and possibility, forming conclusions.

‘This is a tomb,’ said Crius, his voice a dry whisper. Slowly he raised his hand again and scraped the frost from the glass. His eyes poured light into the space beyond.

An iron skull looked back at him.

Crius’s mind stopped dead. The data was still scrolling across his eyes but he was no longer paying even the slightest attention to it. A ringing filled his ears.

The frozen form of Athanatos looked back at him from its cocoon of ice.

‘How can you hope to do anything other than die here?’ He heard his own question resonate in his mind, and Athanatos’s reply from the pit of his memory.

‘This is no longer a war of hope brother – this is a war of vengeance and obliteration.’

And with the memory came the inescapable inference of the accumulated data.

Cybernetic resurrection, breathed the logic in his mind. Athanatos is dead. They are all dead. They came from this sleep to greet us when we arrived and then returned to its embrace. They have turned the Keys of Hel.

‘No.’ He heard the word come weakly from his own lips. ‘No, it is forbidden. Our father forbade us to open those gates.’

Ferrus Manus is dead.

Crius could not move. His thoughts were a spinning ruin, his eyes locked upon the caskets marching into the distance under their shrouds of frost. There were hundreds of them.

The deck shook beneath his feet. A spill of cracked ice fell from the ceiling, far above. The Thetis was within the battle sphere.

Death is all there is now, Crius.

The deck shook again. Blue lights were lit along the length of the chamber, and a dull crack echoed as the front of the casket split open. Gas vented from grilles and pipework. Crius stared, his eyes still blazing. Boreas’s sword ignited.

Another crack rang out, and Athanatos stepped free. The deck rang under his tread, pistons surging in place of muscle. His weapons shed their casings of ice as they armed. He stood for a second, his joints breathing steam, his servos clicking.

Then he looked at Crius. His eyepieces glowed blue.

‘You see now, Crius,’ rasped Athanatos in a voice like the shattering of frozen iron. His deactivated power fist reached out and plucked the sceptre from the dais. Crius could see Medusan runes running around it in rings, each one now glowing with faint light. He could almost taste the exotic energies bound within its core. ‘Now, you understand.’

Phidias could feel his flesh quivering in sympathy with the ship as his interface links fed him the Thetis’s pain. There was blood in his mouth and more blood clotting on the inside of his armour.

‘Weakness,’ he growled to himself and forced his mind to focus.

The Spear Strike and Wolf of Cthonia had shot past the Thetis and were turning hard, firing as they came around. Turbolasers began to score her back, cutting deep and burning into her guts. The Dawnstar and Death’s Child were closing, their prow and dorsal weaponry hammering the Thetis’s flanks. Phidias thought he could feel his own flesh cooking around his implant sockets.

Everything was as it should be, but everything was also terribly wrong.

The assault craft were ready, the boarding torpedoes poised to enter their launch tubes, but the wakened dead had yet to fill them. They should already be swarming into the lower decks of the XVI Legion ships. But they had delayed too long, or the wakening processes had failed. Athanatos should have called the rest from their sleep by now.

Phidias tried to signal him, but the only answer was the crackle of static. They needed to launch; they needed to strike at the ships attacking them now. They had no guns – all the power had been drained from them to keep the dead asleep and to push the Thetis into the battle.

Distortion washed across his vision. He fought down a sticky wave of mental fog. They needed time. If they could just survive a little longer…

‘Bring us above them,’ he ordered.

Reports began to cluster into Phidias’s awareness as the engines strained. If they could loop above the enemy’s plane of attack, then they could plunge back into the storm of fire when the wakening had completed. They could still have this moment of vengeance. His mind ran with recalculations. They could still do it. They could–

A synchronised spread of fire from the Dawnstar and Death’s Child hit the Thetis in her spine. The shock wave rippled through the superstructure. Domes across the outer hull shattered. Hundred metre-tall spires tumbled away into the vacuum like splinters from a shattered spear.

Phidias dug his fingers into the arms of the throne, refusing to fall. He could taste burning. Something deep within his body had burst and was cooking in the heat of his machine links. His eyes focused on the holo-projection of the battle sphere, on the pulsing green marker of the Oathbound hiding in the shadow of the planetoid, seemingly forgotten by all.

They needed time, no matter what the cost, or their deaths would serve nothing.

With a grunt of effort, he opened a long range vox-link.

‘Help us,’ he croaked through bloody lips.

For a second nothing changed. Then the Oathbound began to move. Reactor readings flared to full life, pushing it out into the edge of the battle sphere. It accelerated, engines burning like captured suns.

Phidias saw all of this, and yet he knew that it would not be enough. The Oathbound’s guns were still out of range. Even as he thought it, the Spear Strike came around, momentum making her skid across the void as her guns fixed upon the Thetis.

Lances burned into the rear hull. Molten metal wept from the wounds, and the armour plating began to glow as the fire ate deeper and deeper.

‘What have you done?’ Crius’s voice rang clear in the icy air, even over the thunder of the battle beyond.

Athanatos did not answer but turned to look at the rows of ice-covered caskets. Then Crius felt it – a shiver in the air, like a breath edged with static.

He opened his mouth to speak again, but Athanatos spoke first, the bulk of his body clattering with pistons and gears.

‘The logic fails after a while. Have you noticed that? The pure flow of data and reason – after a while it just runs out. You keep trying to understand, to bargain with the reality of what has happened, but there is no understanding to be had, no bargain to be made.’

‘You have–’

‘The way of iron, the logic of the machine – it was meant to make us strong, to raise us above flesh.’ Athanatos paused, and when his voice came again there was rage in the dead, electric drone. ‘But it was a lie. Iron can shatter, logic can be flawed and ideals can fail.’

‘What are you?’ Boreas demanded, and Crius glanced at the templar. He had not moved, but there was a bound fury in his stillness. Slowly Athanatos looked at him.

‘I am the dead of Isstvan. A Word Bearers legionary took half my skull with a claw. I fell, like so many of us. Phidias took me from the battlefield – me and as many more as he could manage. Our flesh had failed, and our gene-seed rotted in our corpses, but enough of me remained.’ Athanatos raised the sceptre and watched the data runes run across its surface. ‘He knew the secrets of the Aegisine Protocols and the Scarcosan Formulae, the devices and processes from Old Night that our father placed out of our reach. Phidias remade me and gave me a second life, a life of ice and iron. For a long while I could not remember who I had been, but eventually some of the past returned. That is rare. Most of those wakened remember little.’ Athanatos looked towards the caskets lining the chamber. ‘But all remember what it is to hate.’

‘The primarch forbade what you are,’ growled Crius. ‘Ferrus Manus–’

‘Fell,’ said Athanatos softly. ‘I saw it, brother. I watched our father die.’

Crius felt cold spill through him. His mind was no longer functioning properly. He could not reason – he could only feel the ice forming splinters in his flesh and augmetics.

Ferrus Manus fell.

He failed.

Blackness rolled through his thoughts, spreading like a thunderhead, boiling with anger.

He left us. What remains of his authority, now?

Athanatos was looking at him, nodding. His eyes were blue suns in his iron skull.

‘Yes,’ Athanatos said. ‘You see it now. That is what our father left to us, then. Not logic, not reason, but hatred. That is the lesson of his death. This will be the last war, fought for vengeance rather than reason. There is nothing else. No orders or oaths mean anything any more. You know this is true, Crius. You cannot deny it.’

‘I call it betrayal!’ roared Boreas. Crius saw a blur of lightning and polished metal as the templar’s sword whirled. The blade struck Athanatos’s hand, bit deep, and scattered blood and oil. The sceptre fell to the deck. Boreas cut again, his blade spinning low to slice into the Iron Hands legionary’s leg.

Athanatos fell, and Boreas raised the blade above his head for a killing blow. Crius moved before he could think, his hands locking around Boreas’s forearms. The Imperial Fists templar did not even pause but turned, whip-fast. The twist of force lifted Crius from his feet, and he was spinning through the air, crashing to the ground, rolling, coming up to meet an armoured boot descending towards his chest.

‘Heretic,’ spat Boreas. Crius heard the word, felt it cut even as Boreas’s boot crashed into his breastplate. The shock rippled through him, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Athanatos rise to his feet, reaching for the sceptre.

Boreas was turning, his sword dragging lightning in his wake.

‘No!’ screamed Crius, and launched himself up. His shoulder stuck Boreas, and they fell together. Crius felt the field of Boreas’s blade char the lacquer from his armour. They hit the deck with a dull crack. Boreas was already twisting beneath him, still holding on to his sword.

The deck was shaking. The whole room was shaking.

Boreas hammered his free hand up into Crius’s face, and the metal socket around his left eye crumpled. Crius’s sight crazed. Boreas struggled free, then rolled and rose up, the edge of his sword alight.

I fall here, thought Crius. Like our father, I fall under the blade of a lost friend. He looked into Boreas’s cold, merciless eyes and felt relief flood his flesh. In his mind, the broken cogs of logic were still.

Boreas’s sword crackled with an executioner’s hunger. It rose high above Crius, shining like a sliver of a storm, and stabbed down.

Athanatos came out of the fog with a scream of pistons, striking Boreas across the left shoulder. The templar spun with the impact.

Crius felt cold spread through him, as though the chamber’s melting ice was reaching into his body. Time seemed to slow to a trickle, to a fading pulse. Crius watched as Athanatos stepped in for a second blow, and realised that – dead or not – his Legion-brother would not survive this.

Athanatos was fast as only a Space Marine could be, but Boreas was faster.

The Imperial Fists legionary turned his stagger into a cut, and the edge of his blade sawed through the cables and pistons under his opponent’s arm. Crius saw liquid glitter black in the blue light. Athanatos began to turn, but Boreas was already pulling his sword back for a kill stroke.

Crius rose to his feet. Pain dragged at his limbs. Blood cascaded from him. Cold was spreading through his chest. He advanced one step, his hand pulling the hammer from his back.

Boreas lunged. The tip of the sword met the already weakened armour under Athanatos’s arm.

Crius felt his hammer activate in his hand. Darkness clouded his vision.

Boreas pulled his blade out through the front of Athanatos’s chest.

Crius roared.

Boreas turned, and their eyes met.

Crius’s hammer blow shattered Boreas’s plastron and lifted him from his feet. The templar hit the deck and did not rise.

Swaying with a hiss of complaining servos, Crius looked at Athanatos. The other Iron Hands legionary lay on the deck, his torso split open to show the metal components clicking amidst the ice-burned meat of his chest. Blood and oil formed a dark mirror sheet around him. Crius heard his own eyes whirring as they tried to focus. The deck trembled, and suddenly the numbing cold in his chest was all around him. He looked down at the dark fluid covering his torso and legs, pulsing from a wide wound in his ribs.

The deck came up to meet him as he fell to his knees. He met Athanatos’s dying gaze. There was no sorrow or pity in those eyes.

‘The dead must walk,’ croaked Athanatos. ‘For vengeance. We remember. The dead remember…’

His voice trailed off, static bubbling in his breath. His eyes dimmed, a final flicker of defiance in their depths, and then they were empty.

Crius turned his head slowly. His vision blurred into pixelated blocks. He could feel the void within him, the void that had been there since he had heard that his father was dead. It opened wide to greet him.

Pain and numbness ground together with each slow movement. The sceptre lay on the deck where it had fallen from Athanatos’s hand, blood smearing the glowing runes. Crius reached for the device, grasped it and lifted it from the floor. It felt like clutching a lightning bolt.

Ferrus Manus is dead.

His eyes would not focus anymore, but his fingers found the runes cut into the sceptre’s length.

And so are we all.

He twisted each ring.

We are wraiths that remain in a dying land.

His fingers found the trigger stud.

And all that is left to us is vengeance.

Behind him, another casket opened with a crack of shattered ice; then another, and another. Figure after shambling figure stepped onto the deck. Crius felt the sceptre pulse, before it slipped from his fingers. The darkness reached up to meet him.

It felt warm and tasted of iron, like metal taken from a fire, like flesh and blood.

The last thing he saw, before night closed over him, were his dead kin marching to war, ice falling from their tread.

The Thetis rolled, her engines clawing the void for control. Close behind her, the enemy vessels closed in upon their prey. The dark mouths of launch bays opened across their hulls, but while their sisters closed into boarding range, the Dawnstar and Death’s Child kept firing. Macro-shells cracked the Thetis’s outer hull, and plasma widened the wounds, preparing the way for the warriors waiting in the Dreadclaw pods and assault craft. They were close now, the whole engagement crammed into a battle sphere no more than a thousand kilometres in diameter. To the Sons of Horus, the Thetis’s death seemed inevitable, but even as they gave the order to board the wounded ship, the situation changed.

The Oathbound plunged in like a thrown dagger. A sheet of light reached from the Imperial Fists ship and struck the Dawnstar. Void shields collapsed, popping like oily water bubbles. The Oathbound fired again, accelerating hard. Plasma relays within the enemy vessel’s hull burst, flooding compartments with sun-hot energy. In her engine spaces, thousands screamed as their skin burned in the heat.

The Dawnstar shook. Smearing fire across the dark, she turned to bring her guns to bear. Half drained of power, the Oathbound had one weapon still to fire.

High in the tower of her bridge, Shipmaster Casterra nodded to a servitor cradled in a knot of cables.

‘Launch torpedoes.’

The missiles slid into the void, their internal thrusters igniting as they met the vacuum, powering them ahead of the Oathbound. Each was the size of a hab-spire, its warhead an artefact gifted to Rogal Dorn by the Adeptus Mechanicum priesthood of Mars.

A wall of interceptor rounds rose from the stricken Dawnstar. Torpedo after torpedo exploded before they could find their target.

Then one slipped through and struck the Dawnstar high on her flank, driving deep into the warship’s guts.

The ship continued to turn, surrounded by a haze of debris and the flicker of failing void shields. Then the torpedo’s vortex warhead detonated in a spiral of neon light and roaring darkness. The Dawnstar practically vanished, her hull fragmenting as unnatural forces pulled her apart from within. In the space where she had been, a glowing wound remained, howling with impossible sound before collapsing to emptiness.

The remaining XVI Legion ships faltered. The Spear Strike broke from her interception course with the Thetis and turned towards the Oathbound. The others cut their speed as they diverted power to shields and weapons.

The respite was enough. The Thetis pushed beyond her attackers, curving above them in a burning loop, and plunged back into the inferno-stained void between her enemies.

From his throne, Phidias watched the enemy ships rise to meet them. The Wolf of Cthonia and the Death’s Child spun as they tried to bring their weapons to bear. The Thetis plunged on. Shards of armour the size of Battle Titans ripped from her flanks, liquid fire and burning gas billowing in her wake. The enemy spun and fired as they came about, peppering the Thetis with explosions.

On the edge of the engagement, the Oathbound turned as the Spear Strike closed. The Imperial Fists ship came around, lining up with her enemy. Both ships fired, their prows blistering with fire as their shields burst. Then they hurtled past each other, raking with rolling volleys. The Spear Strike’s belly was torn open by macro-cannon shells, ripping away gantries and sensor dishes in a ripple of detonations. The Oathbound took the return fire across her unshielded hull – a blaze of plasma found the yawning barrel of a battery cannon, detonating a shell in the breech, and suddenly explosions were ripping down the ship’s entire flank.

She began to spiral, her engines pushing her on even as deck fires ate her from within.

On the Thetis’s bridge, Phidias listened to the Oathbound’s last signals in silence. Around him the servitors and crew bent to their tasks, murmuring in impassive binary and Medusan cant. Deep within the folds of his thoughts, he watched the data from his ship shining clear and bright. Damage indicators were a squall of deep red. Engine output markers flashed insistently.

He knew what it all meant. He could almost feel it in his body. They were on the verge of death, inside and out. It did not matter now.

At the edge of his awareness, the voices of the dead rose – some in monotonous flesh-voices, some in mumbled machine code. The dead marched to war, and that was all that now mattered. Hundreds of them poured from the icy heart of the Thetis to fill the ramshackle assault craft and boarding torpedoes.

Phidias waited, the screams of his ship and the whispers of his brothers washing over him.

The Thetis cut between the Wolf of Cthonia and the Death’s Child. Fresh volleys of energy sliced out from both ships. The Thetis shook, and binaric screams filled the air, thick with the reek of burning metal.

In the cable-tangle of his throne, Phidias felt the ship’s systems pulse with rage. He let the feeling rise in him, shutting out all his other sensations. The enemy vessels were so close that if they fired now they would hit each other.

‘Launch,’ he said, and his ship answered.

The Thetis’s engines cut out. Retro thrusters fired, fighting against the ship’s momentum. Void locks opened along her flanks and gut, scattering craft into space on breaths of launch flame. They swarmed across the gap and found the hulls of their foes. Magma blasts boiled through bulkheads, graviton charges cracked armour, and the assault craft clustered around the breaches like flies on a bloody wound.

The first of the dead Iron Hands met the Sons of Horus on the gun decks of the Wolf of Cthonia. The corpses of gun crew littered the decks beneath the magazines, choked and crushed by explosive decompression. Oily flame-light shivered in the remaining pockets of atmosphere. The Iron Hands advanced, their weapons spitting death. The deck quivered beneath their slow tread.

Blast-doors down the deck opened with a rush of smoke-filled air. The Sons of Horus came through in tight wedges, heavy infantry shields held in a solid wall. They fired as they charged – bolt-rounds cut the air, slammed into armour and detonated. The first Iron Hands legionary fell, his re-forged body torn apart by multiple explosions. Then his brothers answered in kind. Volkite and plasma beams lit the darkness with neon light. Armoured figures vanished in washes of fire and false sunlight. Shields slammed into armour, sparks flew as chain-teeth scraped across ceramite. Iron Hands fell to blades, to hammers, to point blank blasts of energy and explosives. The dead died again in silence, the sounds of their ending stolen by the airless void.

And still the dead poured from the Thetis.

By the time the Iron Hands had taken the gunnery decks, a dozen other beachheads had formed across the Wolf of Cthonia. The Sons of Horus began to dwindle, falling back into close-pressed circles of defiance.

In the void, both the Death’s Child and the Wolf of Cthonia continued to slide through the vacuum on their original trajectories. Within the Death’s Child, the Iron Hands struck the ship’s command citadel, dozens of them breaking into the towers and bastions surrounding the domed bridge. The Sons of Horus met the Iron Hands advance with walls of suppressing fire and ground it to a halt before signalling their counter-attack. Terminators waded through spent shell casings and heaped bodies, muzzle flare and the light of power fields reflected from their sea-green armour. For a while it seemed certain that the Death’s Child would throw the dead back into the void.

Chance ended that hope.

Crawling with Iron Hands boarders and slewing in the void as she turned back towards the Thetis, the Wolf of Cthonia fired her torpedoes. Perhaps it was a mistake – perhaps panic, or a malfunction in a system on a ship that was being ripped apart from within. Launched blindly, the torpedoes streaked between the spinning vessels. One clipped the upper hull of the Thetis and spilled flame across her ruined towers. The rest hit the Death’s Child just fore of her engines and detonated next to a primary plasma trunking.

The explosion almost ripped her in two. She began to spiral, her engines pushing her on even as propagating explosions ate her insides. The Iron Hands pressed on as the ship they had conquered broke apart.

On the Wolf of Cthonia, the Iron Hands finally reached the reactor decks and quenched the warship’s burning heart. The Wolf of Cthonia became dark and silent. Faced with the death of her sisters, the Spear Strike ran for the system’s edge and dived into the warp. Deprived of the total annihilation of her enemies, the Thetis settled to stillness beside the dying vessels like a predator settling to feed upon its kills.

When their task was done, the dead that still walked withdrew to the Thetis and the waiting embrace of cold oblivion.

The voice reached Crius through dreams of ice. ‘Waken.’

The pain came first, as it always did. It began in his chest and spread through his remaining flesh, burning with an acid touch. Then the iron awoke.

More pain came, stabbing through him, shrill and needle-sharp. For a long moment he could feel each piston, servo and fibre of his body but could not move them. He was trapped once more, held by the dead weight of the metal he was bound to. Blood pulsed through his flesh and power through his limbs, beating like a distant drum. Sounds swelled in his ears: the clatter of machines, the scrape of tools, the burbling of servitors as they went about their tasks.

More pain came, and it did not fade. The instinct to thrash, to shout, to break free of the iron rose in him until it took all of his will to remain still. Then the moment passed.

His body became his own again. Sight returned. First came a cloud of static falling from the blackness like snow. Then shapes, then colours, then a face that he recognised.

‘It is time,’ said Phidias.

Crius nodded. A stutter of pain ran up his spine.

Ferrus Manus is dead.

As always the truth rose in his mind as fresh and raw as the moment he had first heard it. First emptiness, then the sucking blackness of sorrow, then anger redder than blood, then at last the hatred came. Cold, limitless and as dark as quenched iron, the hate took shape and became a need, a drive. He cut away all other emotions and thoughts, disconnecting them from his mind like redundant systems. Only the hatred remained, bathing in the light of his pain.

He turned from Phidias to look at the ring of Iron Hands that stood before him, their weapons in their hands, their eyes cold when they met his gaze. He looked back to Phidias.

‘We are close enough to the Solar System,’ said Phidias.

Crius said nothing but began to walk, and in his wake the Iron Hands followed in silence.

Boreas looked up at Crius – the skin over the hard bones of the face was paler and the flesh thinner than when they had left Terra. The templar wore a black robe rather than his ruined armour, and chains linked thick manacles around his wrists and ankles to an adamantium collar which circled his neck. The links of the chains clinked together as he straightened. His wounds clearly pained him, but he would heal and live. Boreas’s face showed no emotion, but Crius caught a flicker in the depths of the eyes. His mind processed possibilities as to what that could signify: anger, pity, resolve, recognition? He dismissed them all as irrelevant.

The hangar was as silent as when they had arrived all those months ago. The looted carcasses of landing craft and gunships still filled the dark cavern, and the hot air still pressed close. The golden and black hull of Boreas’s Storm Eagle sat ready to launch, her lights creating a pool of light before the open embarkation ramp.

‘We are at the edge of the light,’ said Crius. ‘We will send a signal once we have left. Your brothers will find you here.’

‘You are… like them,’ said Boreas, his eyes moving from Crius to the rest of the Iron Hands.

‘They are my brothers,’ replied Crius.

‘There will be no end to this,’ said Boreas quietly. ‘All hope ends down the path you now walk.’

‘Hope was lost long ago, Boreas.’ Crius’s voice was a low rasp. In his chest he felt the beating of the machines that had replaced his hearts. ‘It was lost the moment our primarch fell, when our fathers became mortal in our eyes. This war will not end as you think, Boreas, nor as your lord wishes.’ He paused and lifted his hands. The broken chains clinked where they still hung from his wrists. ‘But I will fulfil my promise even though I do not return with you. If you wish this bond, it is yours. When the time comes, then you may summon us.’

Boreas held Crius’s gaze for a long moment.

‘How?’

‘Ignarak. The silence of mountains that once burned, and will burn again. Send that message with one word bound to it. If we still endure then we will hear you, and we will answer.’

Boreas said nothing. His features had closed and hardened again, his expression unreadable. Crius took a step back, and made to leave the chamber. The two Iron Hands bracketing Boreas led him up the ramp of the Storm Eagle, and Crius heard the pilot servitors burble to their craft in the langue of machines.

At the top of the ramp, Boreas twisted to face Crius again.

‘What word?’ he called back. Crius looked up at the templar. ‘In the summons, what word will bring you?’

The hot air of the hangar billowed as the Storm Eagle’s engines began to keen with power.

‘Waken,’ said Crius.

On the ramp, Boreas stood for a moment in the rising wind and then turned away.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John French is a writer and freelance games designer from Nottingham. His work for Black Library includes a number of short stories, the novellas Fateweaver and The Crimson Fist and the novel Ahriman: Exile. He also works on the Warhammer 40,000 role playing games. When he is not thinking of ways that dark and corrupting beings can destroy reality and space, John enjoys making it so with his own Traitor Legions on the gaming table.

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Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

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