Horus Rising (20 page)

As he told the story, she sat back, occasionally blink-clicking to store his image. He was concentrating on the preparation of his armour, but she could see sadness behind that concern. The overseers, he explained, were a machine race and, as artificial sentients, quite beyond the limits of Imperial law. Machine life untempered by organic components had long been outlawed by both the Imperial Council and the Mechanicum. The overseers, commanded by a senior machine called the Archdroid, inhabited a series of derelict, crumbling cities on the world of Dahinta. These were cities of fine mosaics, which had once been very beautiful indeed, but extreme age and decay had faded them. The overseers scuttled amongst the mouldering piles, fighting a losing battle of repair and refurbishment in a single-minded obsession to keep the neglected cities intact.

The machines had eventually been destroyed after a lasting and brutal war in which the skills of the Mechanicum had proved invaluable. Only then was the sad secret found.

‘The overseers were the product of human ingenuity,’ Loken said.

‘Humans made them?’

‘Yes, thousands of years ago, perhaps even during the last Age of Technology. Dahinta had been a human colony, home to a lost branch of our race, where they had raised a great and marvellous culture of magnificent cities, with thinking machines to serve them. At some time, and in a manner unknown to us, the humans had become extinct. They left behind their ancient cities, empty but for the deathless guardians they had made. It was most melancholy, and passing strange.’

‘Did the machines not recognise men?’ she asked.

‘All they saw was the Astartes, lady, and we did not look like the men they had called master.’

She hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘I wonder if I shall witness so many marvels as we make this expedition.’

‘I trust you will, and I hope that many will fill you with joy and amazement rather than distress. I should tell you sometime of the Great Triumph after Ullanor. That was an event that should be remembered.’

‘I look forward to hearing it.’

‘There is no time now. I have duties to attend to.’

‘One last story, then? A short one, perhaps? Something that filled you with awe.’

He sat back and thought. There was a thing. ‘No more than ten years ago. We found a dead world where life had once been. A species had lived there once, and either died out or moved to another world. They had left behind them a honeycomb of subterranean habitats, dry and dead. We searched them carefully, every last cave and tunnel, and found just one thing of note. It was buried deepest of all, in a stone bunker ten kilometres under the planet’s crust. A map. A great chart, in fact, fully twenty metres in diameter, showing the geophysical relief of an entire world in extraordinary detail. We did not at first recognise it, but the Emperor, beloved of all, knew what it was.’

‘What?’ she asked.

‘It was Terra. It was a complete and full map of Terra, perfect in every detail. But it was a map of Terra from an age long gone, before the rise of the hives or the molestation of war, with coastlines and oceans and mountains of an aspect long since erased or covered over.’

‘That is… amazing,’ she said. He nodded. ‘So many unanswerable questions, locked into one forgotten chamber. Who had made the map, and why? What business had brought them to Terra so long ago? What had caused them to carry the chart across half the galaxy, and then hide it away, like their most precious treasure, in the depths of their world? It was unthinkable. I cannot feel fear, Mistress Oliton, but if I could I would have felt it then. I cannot imagine anything ever unsettling my soul the way that thing did.’

U
NTHINKABLE
.

Time had slowed to a pinprick point on which it seemed all the gravity in the cosmos was pressing. Loken felt lead-heavy, slow, out of joint, unable to frame a lucid response, or even begin to deal with what he was seeing.

Was this fear? Was he tasting it now, after all? Was this how terror cowed a mortal man?

Sergeant Udon, his helm a deformed ring of bloody ceramite, lay dead at his feet. Beside him sprawled two other battle-brothers, shot point-blank through the hearts, if not dead then fatally damaged.

Before him stood Jubal, the bolter in his hand.

This was madness. This could not be. Astartes had turned upon Astartes. A Luna Wolf had murdered his own kind. Every law of fraternity and honour that Loken understood and trusted had just been torn as easily as a cobweb. The insanity of this crime would echo forever.

‘Jubal? What have you done?’

‘Not Jubal. Samus. I am Samus. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you.’

Jubal’s voice had a catch to it, a dry giggle. Loken knew he was about to fire again. The rest of Udon’s squad, quite as aghast as Loken, stumbled forward, but none raised their bolters. Even in the stark light of what Jubal had just done, not one of them could break the sworn code of the Astartes and fire upon one of their own.

Loken knew he certainly couldn’t. He threw his bolter aside and leapt at Jubal.

Xavyer Jubal, commander of Hellebore squad and one of the finest file officers in the company, had already begun to fire. Bolt rounds screeched out across the chamber and struck into the hesitating squad. Another helmet exploded in a welter of blood, bone chips and armour fragments, and another battle-brother crashed to the cave floor. Two more were knocked down beside him as bolt rounds detonated against their torso armour.

Loken smashed into Jubal, and staggered him backwards, trying to pin his arms. Jubal thrashed, sudden fury in his limbs.

‘Samus!’ he yelled. ‘It means the end and the death! Samus will gnaw upon your bones!’

They crashed against a rock wall together with numbing force, splintering stone. Jubal would not relinquish his grip on the murder weapon. Loken drove him backwards against the rock, the drizzle of meltwater spraying down across them both.

‘Jubal!’

Loken threw a punch that would have decapitated a mortal man. His fist cracked against Jubal’s helm and he repeated the action, driving his fist four or five times against the other’s face and chest. The ceramite visor chipped. Another punch, his full weight behind it, and Jubal stumbled. Each stroke of Loken’s fist resounded like a smith’s hammer in the echoing chamber, steel against steel.

As Jubal stumbled, Loken grabbed his bolter and tore it out of his hand. He hurled it away across the deep stone well.

But Jubal was not yet done. He seized Loken and slammed him sideways into the rock wall. Lumps of stone flew out from the jarring impact. Jubal slammed him again, swinging Loken bodily into the rock, like a man swinging a heavy sack. Pain flared through Loken’s head and he tasted blood in his mouth. He tried to pull away, but Jubal was throwing punches that ploughed into Loken’s visor and bounced the back of his head off the wall repeatedly.

The other men were upon them, shouting and grappling to separate them.

‘Hold him!’ Loken yelled. ‘Hold him down!’

They were Astartes, as strong as young gods in their power armour, but they could not do as Loken ordered. Jubal lashed out with a free fist and knocked one of them clean off his feet. Two of the remaining three clung to his back like wrestlers, like human cloaks, trying to pull him down, but he hoisted them up and twisted, throwing them off him.

Such strength. Such unthinkable strength that could shrug off Astartes like target dummies in a practice cage.

Jubal turned on the remaining brother, who launched himself forward to tackle the madman.

‘Look out!’ Jubal screamed with a cackle. ‘Samus is here!’

His lancing right hand met the brother head on. Jubal struck with an open hand, fingers extended, and those fingers drove clean in through the battle-brother’s gorget as surely as any speartip. Blood squirted out from the man’s throat, through the puncture in the armour. Jubal ripped his hand out, and the brother fell to his knees, choking and gurgling, blood pumping in profuse, pulsing surges from his ruptured throat.

Beyond any thought of reason now, Loken hurled himself at Jubal, but the berserker turned and smacked him away with a mighty back-hand slap.

The power of the blow was stupendous, far beyond anything even an Astartes should have been able to wield. The force was so great that the armour of Jubal’s gauntlet fractured, as did the plating of Loken’s shoulder, which took the brunt. Loken blacked out for a split-second, then was aware that he was flying. Jubal had struck him so hard that he was sailing across the stone well and out over the abyssal fault.

Loken struck the arching pier of stone steps. He almost bounced off it, but he managed to grab on, his fingers gouging the ancient stone, his feet swinging above the drop. Meltwater poured down in a thin rain across him, making the steps slick and oily with mineral wash. Loken’s fingers began to slide. He remembered dangling in a similar fashion over the tower lip in the ‘Emperor’s’ palace, and snarled in frustrated rage.

Fury pulled him up. Fury, and an intense passion that he would not fail the Warmaster. Not in this. Not in the face of this terrible wrong.

He hauled himself upright on to the pier. It was narrow, no wider than a single path where men could not pass if they met. The gulf, black as the outer void, yawned below him. His limbs were shaking with effort.

He saw Jubal. He was charging forward across the cavern to the foot of the steps, drawing his combat blade. The sword glowed as it powered into life.

Loken wrenched out his own sword. Falling meltwater hissed and sparked as it touched the active metal of the short, stabbing blade.

Jubal bounded up the steps to meet him, slashing with his sword. He was raving still, in a voice that was in no way his own any longer. He struck wildly at Loken, who hopped back up the steps, and then began to deflect the strikes with his own weapon. Sparks flashed, and the blades struck one another like the tolling of a discordant bell. Height was not an advantage in this fight, as Loken had to hunch low to maintain his guard.

Combat swords were not duelling weapons. Short and double-edged, they were made for stabbing, for battlefield onslaught. They had no reach or subtlety. Jubal hacked with his like an axe, forcing Loken to defend. Their blades cut falling water as they scythed, sizzling and billowing steam into the air.

Loken prided himself on maintaining a masterful discipline and practice of all weapons. He regularly clocked six or eight hours at a time in the flagship’s practice cages. He expected all of the men in his command to do likewise. Xavyer Jubal, he knew, was foremost a master with daggers and sparring axes, but no slouch with the sword.

Except today. Jubal had discarded all his skill, or had forgotten it in the flush of madness that had engulfed his mind. He attacked Loken like a maniac, in a frenzy of savage cuts and blows. Loken was likewise forced to dispense with much of his skill in an effort to block and parry. Three times, Loken managed to drive Jubal back down the pier a few steps, but always the other man retaliated and forced Loken higher up the arch. Once, Loken had to leap to avoid a low slice, and barely regained his footing as he landed. In the silver downpour, the steps were treacherous, and it was as much a fight to keep balance as to resist Jubal’s constant assault.

It ended suddenly, like a jolt. Jubal passed Loken’s guard and sunk the full edge of his blade into Loken’s left shoulder plate.

‘Samus is here!’ he cried in delight, but his blade, flaring with power, was wedged fast.

‘Samus is done,’ Loken replied, and drove the tip of his sword into Jubal’s exposed chest. The sword punched clean through, and the tip emerged through Jubal’s back.

Jubal wavered, letting go of his own weapon, which remained transfixed through Loken’s shoulder guard. With half-open, shuddering hands, he reached at Loken’s face, not violently, but gently as if imploring some mercy or even aid. Water splashed off them and streamed down their white plating.

‘Samus…’ he gasped. Loken wrenched his sword out.

Jubal staggered and swayed, the blood leaking out of the gash in his chest plate, diluting as soon as it appeared and mixing with the drizzle, covering his belly plate and thigh armour with a pink stain.

He toppled backwards, crashing over and over down the steps in a windmill of heavy, loose limbs. Five metres from the base of the pier, his headlong careen bounced him half-off the steps, and he came to a halt, legs dangling, partly hanging over the chasm, gradually sliding backwards under his own weight. Loken heard the slow squeal of armour scraping against slick stone.

He leapt down the flight to reach Jubal’s side. He got there just moments before Jubal slid away into oblivion. Loken grabbed Jubal by the edge of his left shoulder plate and slowly began to heave him back onto the pier. It was almost impossible. Jubal seemed to weigh a billion tonnes.

The three surviving members of Brakespur squad stood at the foot of the steps, watching him struggle.

‘Help me!’ Loken yelled.

‘To save him?’ one asked.

‘Why?’ asked another. ‘Why would you want to?’

‘Help me!’ Loken snarled again. They didn’t move. In desperation, Loken raised his sword and stabbed it down, spearing Jubal’s right shoulder to the steps. So pinned, his slide was arrested. Loken hauled his body back onto the pier.

Panting, Loken dragged off his battered helm and spat out a mouthful of blood.

‘Get Vipus,’ he ordered. ‘Get him now.’

B
Y THE TIME
they were conducted up to the plateau, there wasn’t much to see and the light was failing. Euphrati took a few random picts of the parked storm-birds and the cone of smoke lifting off the broken crag, but she didn’t expect much from any of them. It all seemed drab and lifeless up there. Even the vista of the mountains around them was insipid.

‘Can we see the combat area?’ she asked Sindermann.

‘We’ve been told to wait.’

‘Is there a problem?’

He shook his head. It was an ‘I don’t know’ kind of shake. Like all of them, he was strapped into his rebreather, but he looked frail and tired.