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  One old woman pressed her grimy hands to the bronze surface of his augmented temple and eyebrow.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ she smiled, exposing rotten teeth in her otherwise kindly, lined face.

  ‘I’m getting used to it.’

  ‘The surgery took you from us for too long. Weeks! We worried!’

  ‘I thank you for your concern, Shaya.’

  ‘Nale’s gang was killed close to the enginarium decks.’ She dropped her voice. ‘None of the others are claiming responsibility. There’s talk it’s another beast, come from the deepest dark.’

  Septimus felt a grim mood settling firmly on his shoulders. He had been part of the hunting party to slay the last warp-creature that spawned in the bowels of the ship.

  ‘I will speak with the masters. I promise.’

  ‘Bless you, Septimus,’ she said. ‘Bless you.’

  ‘I… heard Octavia was here?’

  ‘Ah, yes. The new girl.’ The old woman smiled again, gesturing to a market stall with a small group of people stood around. ‘She is with the void-born.’

  With the…? Why?

  ‘My thanks,’ he said, and moved on.

  Octavia was indeed with the void-born. The little girl, her pupils eternally huge in the gloom into which she was born, was showing Octavia a selection of articulated string puppets. Octavia stood at the stall, run by the void-born’s ageing mother and father. She smiled and nodded down at the girl’s presentation.

  Septimus came alongside the Navigator and bowed to the void-born’s parents. They greeted him and remarked on how his wounds were healing.

  ‘I had to get away from Etrigius,’ Octavia said in Gothic. ‘I have the medallion now,’ she added almost defensively. ‘So I went for a walk.’

  ‘The ship is still dangerous, medallion or not.’

  ‘I know,’ she replied, not looking at him.

  ‘Do you understand anything she’s said?’ Septimus nodded to the little girl.

  ‘Not a word. Her parents have been translating some. I just wanted to meet her. The respect she receives is incredible. People keep coming over, just to speak with her. Someone paid for a tiny lock of her hair.’

  ‘She is revered,’ Septimus said. He looked down at the void-born, who was staring up through her ratty and snarled mop of long black hair.

  ‘Athasavis te corunai tol shathen sha’shian?’ he asked.

  ‘Kosh, kosh’eth tay,’ she smiled back. A beaming smile on her face, she held up the silver Legion medallion, holed through and strung on a leather thong cord. She wore it like a medal of honour. ‘Ama sho’shalnath mirsa tota. Ithis jasha. Ithis jasha nereoss.’

  Septimus offered her a little bow, smiling despite his black mood.

  ‘What did she say?’ Octavia asked, trying to hide her disappointment at the Nostraman conversation.

  ‘She thanked me for the gift, and said she thinks my new eye is a very nice colour.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The void-born started babbling, pointing up at Octavia. Septimus smiled again.

  ‘She says you are very pretty, and asks if you are ever going to learn Nostraman, so you can talk to her properly.’

  Octavia nodded. ‘Jasca,’ she said, then in a quieter voice to Septimus, ‘That’s “yes”, isn’t it?’

  ‘Jasca,’ he replied. ‘It is. Come, we need to talk. I’m sorry I’ve been away since your surgery. It has been an interesting day since we last spoke.’

  He should never have been awakened.

  Had he not served with heart and courage and loyalty? Had he not slain the primarch’s enemies? Had he not obeyed the orders of the First Warmaster? What more did life demand of him?

  Now he walked once more, striding through the waking world. And for what? To witness the degeneration of everything the Legion had once been. To stand defiant against Vandred while 10th Company crumbled in the final moments of its decay.

  This was not life. This was an extension of an existence he had rightfully left behind.

  He was two bodies. A mind divided between two physical forms. On one level, through his most immediate perceptions, he felt what was now: the vehicular strength of his tank-like body. The massive arms jointed by grinding servos. The claw capable of mangling adamantium and ceramite. The cannon capable of annihilating entire platoons of men.

  An unbreathing, tireless avatar of the Mechanicum’s unity between flesh and machine.

  All of that could be dissolved within a single moment’s lapse in concentration. These immediate sensations were an effort to maintain. In the moments when the ancient warrior let his focus waver, he would feel himself, his mortal husk, encased within the sarcophagus and suspended in cold, cold, cold amniotic fluid.

  These truer sensations were sickening to dwell upon, but Malcharion’s attention tore back to them time and again. His legless, one-armed husk of a body, gently cradled in icy, gritty fluid. The back of his head and spine was a vertical splash of jagged, awkward pain as machine tendrils and MIU brain spikes needled his ravaged body, forcing his thoughts into junction with the Dreadnought body.

  Sometimes, when he tried to move his left arm – the claw-like power fist – he felt his true limb, the wasted fleshly limb, thumping weakly against the side of the amniotic coffin that housed his corpse. The first time he had tried to speak to Vandred, instead of the piercing tendrils within his mind carrying his thoughts into vox-voice, he had felt his true mouth open. Only then had he realised he breathed the freezing fluid now. It was how he stayed alive. Oil-thick and numbingly cold, the amniotics circulated through his respiratory system. The ooze caked his lungs, a dead weight within a helpless, strengthless body.

  A long time ago, he had battled alongside his brothers of the Iron Hands Legion. After those wars had ended, he battled against those same brothers. Malcharion knew their beliefs well. It was unconscionable to him that such stoic, resilient warriors found this eternal entombment to be some kind of glorious afterlife.

  ‘I will lead the next surface assault,’ he’d boomed at the gathered Night Lords. The warriors of his Legion bowed their heads or thumped fists to breastplates in respect. In pride! Incredible. They saw only what was on the outside. They had no conception of the withered corpse within as its starved face pressed against the front of its coffin.

  ‘We are the Lords of the Night. We are the sons of the VIII Legion. And we will take Seventeen-Seventeen, so that for a thousand years the Imperium will lament the hour of our coming to Crythe.’

  The cheers had been loud and long.

  ‘Prepare a drop-pod,’ the Dreadnought demanded. ‘I stand in midnight clad once more, and my claws thirst for Imperial blood.’

  The cheers roared louder.

  An eyeless, tongueless, one-armed corpse floated within the god-like machine, knowing it would soon taste war for the first time in ten thousand years.

  XVI

  SEVENTEEN-SEVENTEEN

  ‘I have noticed an anomaly.

  Many Imperial records have come to deal very kindly with the Crythe Cluster Insurrection, but praise is most often levelled at the saviour fleet led by the arriving Astartes of the Blood Angels Chapter, rather than the initial defence of any individual world. Critical eyes were most often cast at the ‘dubious resistance’ put up by the Adeptus Mechanicus in the defence of its principal bastion in the northern hemisphere, Site 017-017.

  Indeed, that site’s survival is often entirely attributed to the instability of the Archenemy’s forces upon Crythe Prime and the well-noted tendency of the Traitor Legions to fall upon one another at the slightest provocation.

  Entire mountains were hollowed out to make room for the blessed Titan foundries of the Legio Maledictis. Had the Despoiler’s war been successful, these would have been a resource of overwhelming value: used, plundered and stripped of their worth before the arriving Imperial fleet bestowed its infinite vengeance upon the accursed forces of the Warmaster.

  Those rugged mountainsides were thick with elite M
echanicus skitarii, like lice in a beggar’s hair. Arranging thousands of individual landings across the entire mountain range would have taken a great deal of time that remained unavailable to the Despoiler.

  At this stage, the Warmaster believed only weeks remained before the first Blood Angel battle-barge would soar into the system to bring the God-Emperor’s justice. Abaddon, a thousand curses upon his name, knew this from his own astropathic sources. Prisoners captured after the war confirmed this to us.

  Such foreknowledge is the only conceivable explanation for a massed surface landing on the plains before Site 017-017’s foothills. In essence, Abaddon cast his hordes planetside and hurled them ‘at the front gates’, as it were.

  I have heard it said that our greatest weapon against the Archenemy is the foe’s own nature. That may indeed be so. Fate was most certainly on the side of righteousness the day the Night Lords and Black Legion within the Crythe offensive turned against one another.

  No Imperial record I have been able to trace details exactly why Abaddon’s command over portions of his army broke so completely, nor does it explain what – if anything! – the forces of the Archenemy sought to gain from their untimely division.

  If such internal conflict is down to anything more than the maddened behaviour of tainted, once-human beasts, it is unlikely to ever come to light.’

  – Interrogator Reshlan Darrow

  Annotation in his pivotal work:

  Faces of the Despoiler

  First Claw shuddered as one.

  ‘Breaching atmosphere,’ Adhemar said to the others within the confines of the drop-pod. ‘One minute.’

  ‘Why the rough deployment?’ Cyrion asked.

  ‘Anti-air fire,’ Mercutian grumbled.

  ‘This high? Not a chance.’

  ‘It’s just a rough ride down,’ said Adhemar. ‘Weather patterns, rising heat, high pressure. Stay focused, brothers.’

  ‘Blood,’ Uzas was mumbling. ‘Blood and skulls and souls for the Red King.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Adhemar growled. ‘Shut up or I’ll tear your head off, stuff it with frag grenades, and use it as the ugliest explosive ever made.’

  ‘He can’t hear you,’ said Cyrion. ‘Ignore him. He always does this.’

  ‘Blood for the Blood God,’ Uzas’s voice was thick and wet. He was salivating again, venomous drool coating his chin. ‘Skulls for the–’

  Talos slammed the palm of his hand on Uzas’s helm, crashing the side of the helmet against the headrest of his brother’s restraint throne.

  ‘Shut up,’ he snapped. ‘Every mission. Every battle. Enough.’

  Uzas didn’t react at all.

  ‘See?’ Cyrion said to Adhemar.

  Adhemar just nodded, his thoughts his own. ‘Thirty seconds.’

  ‘This is not going to be easy,’ Mercutian said. ‘Are we going in with the Violators and the Scourges of Quintus?’

  ‘They’re to the east,’ Talos answered, ‘between us and the Black Legion. Just remember your targets. We break in, we kill the unit commanders as ordered, and we break out to our own lines.’

  ‘Twenty seconds,’ Adhemar noted.

  ‘This is not about attrition,’ Talos said, repeating Malcharion’s words at the briefing, ‘and we’re dead if anyone tries to turn it into a fair fight.

  ‘Ten seconds.’

  ‘Kill, and break away. Let Abaddon’s mortal followers bleed for him.’ Talos couldn’t resist the grin that coloured his words. ‘That’s not our job.’

  It was a decent plan on the surface, but with obvious risks.

  The squads that volunteered for this, across all of the Traitor Legions and renegade Chapters, were given poor odds of survival.

  In front of the Exalted and Malcharion, Talos had demanded First Claw be part of the assault.

  Like all troops, the Mechanicus’s skitarii, despite their training and augmentations, had proved time and again they suffered when severed from their battlefield leadership. The Warmaster’s forces, seeking to capitalise on that potential weakness, hurled elite squads of Astartes into the warzones below – each unit tasked with the assassination of several tech-adept commanders.

  First Claw’s pod crashed to the earth, throwing soil skyward from its landing crater. With timed bursts, the walls slammed down to form ramps, and First Claw charged from their restraint thrones, bolters up and blazing as they ran out onto the plainsland – a vast plateau before the foothills of Seventeen-Seventeen’s crag fortresses.

  Their pod had come down onto a battlefield, in the middle of an enemy regiment.

  An ocean of foes writhed beyond the clearing dust of their downed pod. The distant figures of Titans, a host of classes and patterns, duelled in the distance.

  The closest of the god-machines was at least two thousand metres away – a towering, enraged Reaver spraying the ground with immense firepower – and still it was huge beyond reckoning compared to the surrounding enemy. Instinctively, it drew the eyes.

  As the Astartes disembarked, weapons opening up, their vox calls to each other immediately took on a tone of amused desperation.

  ‘Try not to die here, brothers,’ Mercutian muttered. ‘I’m in no spirits to look for another squad.’

  Cyrion laid waste to three heavily-augmented tech-guard, bolts detonating in the flesh-parts of their bodies and blowing them apart.

  ‘This looked much easier on the holo-maps!’ A brute with four mechanical extra arms rumbled towards him, waving a bizarre array of mining tools formed into weapons of war. Cyrion dodged a drill the size of his leg as it powered past his head, and rammed his gladius into the skitarii’s bawling mouth. The blade bit, sank in, and impaled the skitarii’s altered brain.

  ‘I’ve got zero confirmation of the first target,’ he said, holding back several more tech-guard with full-auto bolter fire. His aim was off. Shaky and loose. Hard to align his bolter with his targeting reticule.

  The new arm. A hasty surgery and a simple augmetic. It would need a great deal more reconstructive work before he was satisfied with its performance. Still, with these odds, it was impossible to miss.

  The ground was treacherous underfoot, rendered uneven by the bodies layering the plain. Their drop-pod had killed a fair few of the enhanced Mechanicus soldiers when it hammered down into the heart of the regiment’s formation. Those around the impact zone were still scattered and fighting to form a decent resistance to the enemy in their midst.

  ‘Landing is never an exact science, eh?’ Adhemar ended a brief duel with a skitarii possessing treads instead of legs. He wrenched his combat blade from the creature’s eye socket, launching at the next closest. ‘Zero sighting of the main target.’

  Talos’s attention kept flicking to his retinal display, keeping track of the squad’s increasing spatial division.

  ‘Xarl?’ he voxed. No answer. He spun as he lashed out with Aurum. The distance was bad. The blade’s tip snicked through the throat of a looming tech-guard behind him, instead of taking the head clean off.

  ‘Xarl, answer me.’ Talos kicked the staggering skitarii with the severed jugular away. Cycling through sight modes, he tried to get a clear view of his brothers through the mass melee.

  ‘North,’ came Xarl’s voice. ‘Closer to the front line. I can’t confirm. The fighting is densest there.’

  ‘I’m too far away for confirmation,’ Adhemar voxed back.

  ‘As am I,’ Talos cursed. ‘Cyrion? Mercutian?’

  ‘Little… busy…’ Mercutian replied.

  ‘Too far,’ breathed Cyrion. ‘Can’t see. Fighting.’

  ‘Souls for the Soul Eater!’ Uzas screamed. ‘Skulls for the Skull Throne!’

  ‘No one asked you.’

  Through a sea of stabbing drills, slashing blades, punching fists and cutting las-fire, Talos carved and gunned his way forward.

  Something impacted on the side of his helm. Anathema barked in that direction, ending whatever threat had been there. Aurum twisted to deflect a skitarii’
s two lashing machine arms. Talos thudded his ceramite boot into the chest of a tech-guard to the right, caving in the warrior’s armour and puncturing his lungs with broken ribs. Aurum flashed again in a vicious arc, cleaving through another tech-guard’s torso as Anathema roared three shells into the heads of three other skitarii.

  The downed tech-guard, carved in two, flailed at Talos’s legs with its remaining functional arm. The Night Lord stamped on the howling saw blade to smash it into uselessness and crushed the soldier’s head a moment later.

  ‘I’m having a wonderful time,’ Cyrion voxed to him, breathless and sarcastic.

  ‘You and I both,’ Talos said, his teeth clenched. He spared a half-second’s glance in the direction of the monstrous Reaver. It was closer now, but only barely, siren horns wailing above the battlefield – a challenge or a warning to those underfoot. It dwarfed the defeated Warhound by no small degree.

  ‘Traitors!’ one of the attacking skitarii yelled. ‘Kill the Chaos Marines!’

  Talos gunned him down with a bolt in the face, and waded on.

  Uzas made the kill.

  The tech-adept was called Rollumos, a name he’d chosen himself, and any name he’d been born with was forgotten long, long ago. He was, by the calculations of his own internal chronometers, one hundred and sixteen years of age. At least, the few remaining flesh parts were. Close, so very close, was his ascension to perfection. Only seventeen per cent of his flawed mortal form remained. A glorious and worshipful eighty-three per cent was iron, steel, bronze and titanium, all consecrated and ritually thrice-blessed daily in the name of the Machine-God.

  He hesitated to call himself a Master of Skitarii, not out of modesty but out of private shame. His role was a vital one, certainly, and not without its honour. Yet a grim, too-human ache remained within his cranial cogitators. A master of what? Slave soldiers?

  He deserved better. He deserved more.

  Solace lay in deception, and shame could be quelled by the same deceit. Outwardly he embraced his role, endlessly modifying his physical form so that he might wage war alongside his augmented warriors. He lied to his peers and fellow adepts. How they believed him! How they processed and chattered confirmation for his apparent scholarly focus within the physicality of front-line tactical/battle immersion.