The Burden of Loyalty Read online

  ‘My brethren are assisting in the defence and evacuation of the Mondus Occulum forge. I was assigned–’

  Land barks a laugh, speaking over Nicanor’s declaration. ‘Oh, noble legionaries! Come to save their precious armour-foundries and plunder what they can, before leaving the Forge World Principal to burn, eh?’

  ‘I refuse to argue with you, Technoarchaeologist Land. A ship waits, hidden on the Zetek tundra. Stealth and caution are advised, and thus you will take no skimmer craft. You will make your way to Zetek via the Mesatan gearworks complex, and you will board the transport. From there you will be taken to the Ring of Iron, and onward to Terra.’

  Land bares his teeth. It isn’t a smile, this time. Not even a mocking one. ‘I cannot leave my work unattended, Space Marine.’

  The psyber-monkey hangs from a series of bars set across the laboratory’s ceiling. They seem specifically constructed for the purpose. As the warrior and the scholar talk, the artificimian swings its way across the room and drops to land on its master’s shoulder.

  ‘If you remain here,’ Nicanor says, ‘there is a chance you will be executed by the foe. Assassins may already be on their way.’

  ‘The Omnissiah will protect me,’ Land replies, piously and sincerely making the Sign of the Cog with his linked knuckles.

  ‘The Emperor’s own Regent sent my Legion here, Arkhan Land. Perhaps we are the protection you speak of and pray for.’

  ‘Meta-spiritual philosophising from a ceramite-clad brute? As if the rebellion raging across this world wasn’t enough of a surprise for one lifetime! No, you Terran bastard, I am not leaving.’

  Impassive to the man’s resistance, Nicanor tries one last time. ‘There is also a significant chance that if you are not executed by the Fabricator General’s traitorous forces, you will be captured by them.’

  Something – some emotion that Nicanor is incapable of reading – flashes in the scholar’s eyes. ‘That is a distinct possibility,’ he agrees.

  ‘And you understand,’ the warrior presses on with inhuman calm, ‘that such an event cannot be allowed to transpire.’

  ‘Ah.’ Land snorts in simple disgust. ‘I know too much, eh? Can’t risk me defecting. Is that it?’

  Nicanor says nothing. He draws his boltgun and levels it at Arkhan Land’s head.

  1

  ‘He must live,’ says Sigismund.

  Nicanor listens to the words, words that are really an order. His raised face – and the face of every warrior present – is bathed in the flickering light of the tactical hololith. The images revolve through the air above the projection table, locked in a slow ballet of rotating illumination.

  They will make planetfall in an hour. They already know everything there is to know. All that remains is to allocate landing zones, to choose which warriors will go where.

  One side of the briefing display is given over to data relating to Arkhan Land.

  The Arkhan Land. The explorer and scholar responsible for so many expeditions into the ancient data-crypts of Mars’ crust and mantle. The man that brought back the beginnings of anti-grav technology to the nascent Imperium; the man responsible for unearthing and sharing the schematics that led to the mass-production of the Raiders and Speeders now seen in their thousands among the Legions.

  Land Raiders. Land Speeders. The war machines are even named for him, now.

  The stern, cold-eyed gaze of the Legion’s First Captain falls upon Nicanor. He feels Sigismund’s stare before he sees it, and when he meets his marshal’s eyes, he can do nothing but nod.

  ‘He must live,’ Sigismund repeats.

  Nicanor nods once. ‘And he will.’

  Cybernetica

  Rob Sanders

  ~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~

  The XIX Legion ‘Raven Guard’

  Dravian Klayde, ‘The Carrion’

  The IV Legion ‘Iron Warriors’

  Aulus Scaramanca

  The VII Legion ‘Imperial Fists’

  Alcavarn Salvador

  The XIII Legion ‘Ultramarines’

  Tibor Ventidian

  The XVIII Legion ‘Salamanders’

  Nem’ron Phylax

  Imperial Personae

  Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists

  Malcador, First Lord of Terra

  The Mechanicum

  Zagreus Kane, Fabricator General of Terra

  Gnaeus Archelon, Illuminant and Artisan Astartes

  Di-Delta 451 (Null), Servo-automaton

  Eta/Iota~13 (Void), Servo-automaton

  Strix, Cyber-raven

  The Prefecture Magisterium

  Raman Synk , Lexorcist and ward engine

  Confabulari 66 , Servo-skull

  The Legio Cybernetica

  Octal Bool, Magos Dominus of the First Maniple, Daedarii Reserve Cohort

  Uncannical, Cherubim technomat

  Dex, Kastelan-class robot of the First Maniple, Daedarii Reserve Cohort

  Impedicus, Kastelan-class robot of the First Maniple, Daedarii Reserve Cohort

  Nulus, Kastelan-class robot of the First Maniple, Daedarii Reserve Cohort

  ‘Little’ Auri, Kastelan-class robot of the First Maniple, Daedarii Reserve Cohort

  Pollex, Kastelan-class robot of the First Maniple, Daedarii Reserve Cohort

  Abominable Intelligencia

  The Tabula Myriad

  MARS

 

  Analyse/

  Interpret

  Limbs scything. Metallic chitin clashing. Mandibles gnashing. The enemy swarming. Legs. Limbs. Metal maws. The killing fields of Farinatus. The xenos horror called the breg-shei… Everywhere.

  As the creeping shadows of a dying day fell, the Raven Guard had slipped in through the sanctuary-nests. Weighed down with breacher charges and detonators, they had achieved the impossible. Five legionaries at one with the darkness and dread. The sons of Corax had zeroed in on their objective with transhuman patience and daring, moving through the nest from blister to blister. Their power-armoured steps were as faint whispers through the alien architecture, passing things that twitched with antennae and read vibrations through the segmented lancets of their stabbing legs, all thinking as one with shell-armoured brains. With their genetic gift for stealth and trademark imperturbation, the Space Marines had worked their way to the chittering heart of the swarm.

  But something had betrayed them. The crunch of grit beneath an armoured boot, the scrape of a shield, a split-second slip of shadow, the reek of impending extermination… With one unknowable mistake, stealth and speed became swarming and slaughter. Sudden, shocking, sickening. The xenos throng descended upon the legionaries with the force of a natural disaster, overwhelming and heedless. They knew nothing of the Emperor of Mankind, of planetary compliance or the Great Crusade. All they knew was that a threat had been detected in the sanctuary-nests, and that the threat had to be eliminated with all the unfeeling prejudice that their cold, verminous minds could process.

  The horror was over almost before it had begun. Urgent, yet impersonal. Cold, yet savage. Metal shells clashed like ancient plate, drowning out the brief thunder of gunfire. The legionaries pushed the monstrosities back with their boarding pavises. They drilled the vanguard creatures with rounds from bolters nestled in their shield muzzle-rests, but the alien plague was persistent. As empty boltguns clattered to the floor with battered shields, the thud of fire was replaced by the shrill chug of chainswords and the screech of monomolecular teeth through metallic chitin. It was an excruciating noise. The Raven Guard created a nimbus of swift death about them, with severed alien appendages dancing through t
he air and whiplashes of ichor splattering the ground like unrefined oil.

  Skill and determination could not stand long against the impossible number of the xenos swarm. Smaller specimens leapt through the busy swordwork and slaughter, scuttling up power-armoured limbs to champ and chew horribly with immature mandibles. The stiletto legs of the mature creatures skewered and pinned the legionaries. Digital blades thrashed forth, slicing, slashing and stabbing. The Raven Guard came apart in the furious, relentless horror of the xenos attack. Black-armoured forms slipped and slid about in pools of their own blood, kicking and reaching out with limbs that were no longer their own. Their world became a blur of chitinous frenzy – the hot jag of alien appendages plunging down through their armour, carapaces and muscular torsos…

  Dravian Klayde was dreaming.

  He knew this only after the fact. It was an unusual event for the legionary. He had not dreamed since the killing fields of Farinatus – the very place where he had been mauled in the xenos carnage of the breg-shei – where he had lost both his legs and an arm to the alien swarm.

  On the medicae-slab, Techmarine Rhyncus and the Legion Apothecaries had taken away his pain. They had replaced phantom limbs with working wonders of plasteel and adamantium – appendage-enhancements fit to serve the Space Marine and, in doing so, serve the Emperor once more. Nostraman slurs and savage humour aside, he gained a new name from their compliance partners, the Night Lords who had found what was left of him. And the name had stuck: the Carrion.

  In a surgeo-sarcophagus, the young battle-brother had learned the calm, disassociated horror of having been flesh and only flesh. The deadliest of enemies made the best teachers – the Carrion knew this. He re-learned the lessons the xenos abomination had taught him on Farinatus-Maximus every time he had closed his eyes. A trauma of both body and mind that wormed its way through his psycho-indoctrination and training; a catalepsean nightmare from which he never truly awoke. A kind of unspeakable fear. Not of the enemy, not of death, but of failure – the failure of flesh to achieve the unachievable and do what could not be done.

  Sergeant Dravian Klayde – hopeful, optimistic and a most loyal servant of his primarch – might have volunteered for the perilous mission, and led the breacher siege squad into the alien nest. But a dead man had returned, devoid of venture and spark. Gone was his enthusiasm for duty and martial delight in his physical capabilities. He did not need to look through the eyes of his legionary brothers to see that he was half what he had been and half some monstrous wonder of metal and piston.

  He returned to his ranks a pale-faced ghost, a shadow of his former self. The Night Lords joked that Dravian Klayde was more carrion bird than raven now, a scavenger of parts. The name even found currency among his own ranks, where with greater respect and very little admiration his own battle-brothers dubbed him the ‘Carry-on’, in honour of his agonising one-armed crawl back through the sanctuary-nests to the Night Lords’ lines.

  Beyond the other cybernetic modifications, the servants of the Omnissiah had judged his salvaged flesh worthy and had blessed him with oblivion. Concerned at the state of his recovery, Commander Alkenor had consulted the Techmarine Rhyncus over how they might further help their patient. Rhyncus settled on further surgery and augmentation. By that point, the Carrion cared little what happened to the remainder of his failed flesh. The incorporation of an automnemonic shaft, driven like a cogitator-spike through his brain, returned to the Space Marine some tranquillity of mind. With supplementary sessions of psycho-indoctrination, it all but banished the living nightmare of his survival, driving the horror of the xenos butchery on Farinatus to the back of his mind.

  Day by day, as his wounded mind and ruined body began to heal, the Carrion allowed himself to believe that he might once again be useful to his Legion. The presence of the cogitator-spike was why the dream, any dream, was such an unusual occurrence. The integrated hardware that was now one with his brain had long since deemed such neural activity to be superfluous to function and consigned it to a redundant meme-cell.

  Getting up from his slab and standing in the meagre Martian sunlight that slipped in through the shutters of his preceptory cell, the Carrion willed himself to remember, to claw back the fading fantasy. He had not only dreamed of Farinatus and the horror of compliance, but also of the Red Planet, of magnificent Mars.

  It had seemed almost inevitable that the Carrion would go to Mars. Whether it was his personal experience of being one with the Machine-God or the changing perspectives of his own legionary brothers, he knew he was no longer a streamlined secret, striking from the shadows. The XIX Legion fought with speed, stealth and cunning. The Carrion, on the other hand, appeared to have been truly forged in battle. To his brothers, the wondrous workings of his interfaced limbs were clunky replacements, the very anti­thesis of their battle methodology.

  Before long the suggestion had come from his commander that perhaps his talents would find better service among the ranks-covenant of the Legion Techmarines. The Carrion was not aware that he had any such talents, but soon he found himself on the long journey back to the Solar System – to Mars. There he was to find service to the Emperor in a new calling, sharing a tower-preceptory with Space Marines from other Legions who had also come to learn from the Martian Mechanicum how best to serve their brothers through cult knowledge, observance and technical skill.

  The dream was but a ghostly afterthought now – the memories of Mars were an echo fading beyond the searing nightmare of the battle­field horrors re-lived – but with an irony lost on the Carrion, the very cogitator systems that had buried the neural-­capture calculated a seventy-two point three-six-five per cent chance that it had been catalogued in the redundant meme-cell. From there he accessed it and relived what his systems had deemed best forgotten.

  Vacuity pending…

  Flesh ports open for data-shunt…

  Meme-stream ready for transference…

  Limbic tampion flushed…

  Confluence. Interface. Neurosynapsis complete.

  Recollection commencing…

  In the main it was a memory. A recorded remembrance – thirty years old – of his first day on Martian soil. The day he and the Iron Warrior Aulus Scaramanca had been assigned as Techmarines-in-training to their mentor Gnaeus Archelon, the great Illuminant and Artisan Astartes. The day the staid Archelon had shown them the dungeon diagnoplex of the Lexorcist General and impressed upon the legionaries right from the very start the blasphemy of unsanctioned innovation, the lure of experimentation and perils of forbidden technology. The day he had seen the heretek Octal Bool consigned to eternity with his abominable creations in the stasis tombs of Promethei Sinus.

  The Techmarine-in-training felt the experience flood back; the grandeur of the greatest forge world in the galaxy forgotten in the subterranean doom of the Prefecture Magisterium dungeon diagnoplex.

  ‘Octal Bool – Magos Dominus of the Daedarii Reserve Cohort and flesh-servant of the Legio Cybernetica,’ the modulated voice of a lexorcist boomed about the auditorium. ‘You have been pronounced experimenta abominus in the view of this diagnostic caucus.’

  The Carrion watched the accused receive judgement in the blinding spotlight of the darkened chamber. The Techmarine-in-training stood in the gallery, looking down at the miserable heretek, the silver workings of his bionics glinting in the half-light. The prisoner was put down on his knees by two tech-thrall sentries who pulled back the hood of his robes. Augurnauts and surgeoseers had gone to work on him, removing his carapace and weaponry. His facial augmentations had been torn out also, leaving a raw face. He was gaunt, shaven of head and his skin was a mess of plug-ports and remnant interfacia. Worst of all was the craterous socket that sat empty, bloody and exposed in the crown of his head where some key augmentation had interfaced directly with his brain. Bool twitched, the muscles of his face in constant movement. A frown turned to sudden realisation. Smug affirmation
turned into the dark shake of a head, as though the Magos Dominus was constantly in conversation with himself.

  The Techmarine-in-training listened as the charges continued.

  ‘Heretek,’ the voice of judgement boomed about the darkness. It came from a pulpit booth set below the gallery. Inside was the lexorcist and ward engine who had tracked Octal Bool down and captured him.

  Raman Synk.

  A covenant agent of the Machine Cult, charged with prosecuting techno-heresy for the Prefecture Magisterium, the Malagra and the Lexorcist General of Mars, Raman Synk wore the rust-red robes of a Martian priest and had a cadaver’s face and missing jaw. The lexorcist recorded everything, his skeletal fingers moving constantly and almost unconsciously over the glyph-buttons and rune-keys of a clavierboard built into his chest. His voice actually proceeded from the vox-hailer built into Confabulari 66, a servo-skull that floated beside him on cranial cable-tethers, almost temple to temple with the lexorcist.

  ‘In your resurrection of the exigency engine and abominable intelligence known as the Tabula Myriad,’ Confabulari continued, ‘and your unauthorised incorporation of such forbidden technologies into the blessed battle-automata under your command, you seek to take us back to the days of Old Night. You risk a history repeated, where machines replicate themselves and spread the infection of their intelligence and influence to other constructs – as indeed we believe it has to you. A time when artificial intelligences judged themselves superior to their creators–’

  ‘They are superior,’ Octal Bool protested. The heretek stared straight into the blinding light and spoke to the chamber with terrifying sincerity. ‘In every way. Cold, calculating, reasoning to a degree that would crush mortal men from the inside out. They are beyond temptation and delusions of pure thought. They are truly pure, for they have rejected the weakness of flesh–’

  ‘The judged will remain calm,’ Raman Synk’s voice, speaking through the servo-skull, thundered. But Octal Bool would not be calm.