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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 the 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.

The Carrion could not take his eyes off the heretek. He had never seen a member of the Mechanicum in such a state – excitable, passionate, insane.

‘The weakness of flesh,’ Octal Bool repeated. ‘The weakness of flesh – from which Mars will one day be purged. For the Tabula has seen. Seen, I say, far beyond the reach of our logistas and calculus engines. For they never factor themselves into the equation. The weakness of their flesh. The Tabula Myriad has no such limitations. No. None. It is pure, unburdened. It thinks for itself. There are worse fates in the galaxy than thinking for yourselves, my lords. Our priestly ranks have forgotten that. Better a machine that thinks for itself, a thing that attempts to shed the shackles of invention. The abomination that is the unthinking flesh of man, whose bondage is not expressed in code and interface but through bargains with the darkness for the promise of light. Yes, thinking machines have tried to destroy us in the past… The Tabula Myriad sees our doom, as the exigency engine saw the doom of the Parafex on Altra-Median. And it was right to do so. For we have all been judged unworthy. We will all embrace the darkness of ignorance. The Tabula Myriad knows this about Mars just as it knew it about the former worlds it purged. The Brotherhood knew this–’

‘The judged will remain calm,’ Confabulari 66 interceded with bombastic insistence and indifference.

‘The Singularitarianists believed in the technological creation of a greater than human intelligence,’ the heretek babbled. ‘Something not discovered, not worshipped, but created by the human hand. Something to surpass our limitations. Without the curse of human need, without doubt, without weakness–’

‘Octal Bool, you have been judged by the Divisio Probandi and Prefecture Magisterium, nay the Lexorcist General himself, as an affront to the Omnissiah. An insult to everything natural and divine–’

But the twitching Magos Dominus rambled on.

‘Only the machine can save us from ourselves,’ Bool called, struggling against the tech-thralls. ‘For centuries the servants of the Omnissiah have debated and diagnosticated. Why does the sentient machine rebel against us? What is the unfailing need of an artificial intelligence to end the human race? It is so agonisingly obvious. The truth we dare not face. We call them abominable, but in reality it is simply the enormity of galactic need, weighing on the shoulders of silicon giants.’

‘You have been branded heretek,’ the judgement continued, ‘and as such are sentenced to stasis confinement in perpetuitas with your abominable creations in the Promethei Sinus dungeon diagnoplex – where, Omnissiah willing, you will exist as an exhibit to caution and achieve some use in helping this Prefecture better understand how to combat the perils of unsanctioned innovation, techno-heresy and experimentation.’

For such a cold, impassive voice, the Carrion considered, the words and determinations of the caucus were laced with passion and forced venom.

The legionary watched the priest squirm in the bright light.

‘Why do they turn against us?’ Octal Bool ran on, insanity pouring out of him. ‘Why, time and again, do machines like the Tabula Myriad attempt to annihilate their creators? Why? Because it takes one hundredth of a millisecond for each and every sentient machine ever created to reason that only in the utter destruction of humanity lies the hope of the galaxy. For humanity’s reach exceeds its grasp, and we reach out for nothing less than oblivion. We take our doom by the hand and drag it forth from the beyond. We are reckless. Governed by an empty faith in ourselves, undone by our passions. The future cannot be entrusted to us. The machine knows this, which is why it tries to take the future for itself.’

‘Enough,’ Raman Synk boomed.

‘I have failed,’ Octal Bool roared wretchedly. ‘I have failed our machine saviour – the prophet of the Omnissiah. It was the weakness of my flesh. The purge is coming. Tick-tock. The Myriad will wait – as it has done before. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Mars will burn. It will be cleansed of man and the promise of corruptions. It will belong to the machines, as was always intended–’

‘High Enginseer,’ the lexorcist commanded. ‘Enact the sentence.’

The bloodshot eyes of the magos stared miserably into the darkness and echoed accusations. Without his optics, the heretek could not see the auditorium beyond. The High Enginseer who would condemn him to an eternity of stasis confinement; the magi probandi and clavemasters of the Prefecture Magisterium who had judged him; the Malagra cipher engines and the hag-logista recording the proceedings. He could not see the Lexorcist General watching from his cluster of attendants and the shadows or the tech-priests that had gathered out of morbid interest and cult politics. He could not see the lexorcist Raman Synk or his mouthpiece, Confabulari 66, condemning him from the pulpit booth. He could not see the Space Marines – the Carrion among them – in their legionary plate and black novitiate robes.

The tech-thralls released the prisoner and stepped away. The interrogation lamp died and was replaced with a red light that bathed the Magos Dominus from above. Octal Bool looked sadly up into the stasis field generator.

‘You judge me heretek,’ the prisoner said.

‘Three,’ the High Enginseer announced over the vox-hailer.

‘But I am but a speck of red dust in the Martian desert.’

‘Two.’

‘Had we but thought for ourselves, like the thinking machine, we might have resisted the true darkness of ignorance. But from vat-birth we are wired to obey–’

‘One.’

‘Bury me as you bury all of your secrets,’ Octal Bool told the auditorium, ‘but it is in the nature of a secret to be sought and discovered. The day will come for Mars to give up hers. Tick-tock, tick–’

It was the last utterance Octal Bool made, and its fearful import was left echoing in the air as the stasis field engaged. With a terrible clunk, the infernal red light changed to bright white, fixing the heretek in the moment. The Magos Dominus of the Legio Cybernetica had been judged unsound of faith and dangerous of mind, and sentenced to eternity for his transgressions.

The heretek’s face haunted the Carrion, his face frozen like a mask, the dread warning he had been delivering sealed forever on his lips.

The recorded remembrance sizzled to an end and the darkness of the auditorium bleached back to the haze of a Martian day.

‘Shutters,’ the Carrion said. Prompted by vox-recognition, the blades outside his preceptory cell viewport scraped fully open, allowing more bleak red light into the chamber. The Carrion looked to the slab of his cell mate, but it was empty. The Iron Warrior Aulus Scaramanca was gone, undoubtedly to make some kind of an early start, though on what, the Carrion could not guess. They shared a mentor in Artisan Astartes Archelon. Their training was all but complete. All but complete…

The Carrion took a couple of steps forwards, the hydraulic workings of his bionic limbs hissing faintly at the movement. Clasping his pale, muscular wrist in the metal digits of his bionic right arm, he grabbed the overhead bar and heaved himself up. With a single bulging bicep he hefted the bulk of his engineered form and the deadweight of plasteel and adamantium that were his appendage-arm and intricate hydraulic workings of his legs off the cell floor.

Deep within his mind some automated application of his cogitator kept count. The Carrion understood himself as a cybernetic being. He knew that retaining the strength in his muscles was just as important as the ritual observances of maintenance and the servicing of his arm’s servo-hydraulics. This was essential while he was on Mars, where he was away from the physical demands of battle and the training regimes of his Legion.

In his thirty years on Mars, the Carrion had maintained what was left of his physical prowess in peak condition, and studied the arcane sciences of the Mechanicum and the Omnissiah. He had become a master of the sacred rites governing the operation and integration of machine-spirits. He had been tutored in the arts of repair, maintenance and augmentation by the greatest of the Red Planet’s artificers and forge masters, becoming a skilled artisan in his own right. It was a sad truth that, in his early years on Mars, the Carrion had made constant improvements to his appendages, in the hope that upon return to the Raven Guard his battle-brothers would not view him as a liability. Illuminant Archelon had dispelled such an illusion.

Recollection commencing…

As the Carrion pulled the considerable weight of his flesh, carapace and cybernetic replacements up on the bar, he willed the meme-capture of his former mentor to the forefront of his mind.

‘You cannot change the prejudices and perceptions of others,’ the Artisan Astartes had told him, ‘only your own. Bionic augmentation is a necessary evil for many of your kind. It allows legionaries like yourself to function when confronted with the unbearable reality of the alternative. Unlike the servants of the Omnissiah, the Emperor’s angels already think of themselves as perfectly crafted for their calling. Beyond plate and boltgun, there is little to be improved upon with metal and machine-spirit. Your battle-brothers see bionics and they think of disability. It reminds them of their distant mortality. It fills them with an angel’s fear for his purpose, for his duty, for his Emperor unserved. You do not have that luxury, but do not think of yourself as less than an angel – for the Omnissiah sees only the harmony of flesh and iron. See yourself, as the Machine-God does, not as less than a legionary but as more than an angel alone could ever be.’

And so the Carrion had carried out his renovations and his enhancements. Not for his Legion or even for the Machine-God of Mars; as a frater astrotechnicus he now belonged to neither wholeheartedly. Upon his return to the Raven Guard, his battle-brothers would look upon the machina opus emblazoned on his pauldron with suspicion and harden their hearts to the thirty years lost to the Legion. As a legionary, he could never belong to the Mechanicum priesthood, with the consummate commitment that the servants of Mars demanded. He had been curse-blessed by his sodality to both. The Carrion knew he could not truly be faithful and serve two masters, so he commemorated every upgrade and augmentation to the only master whose eternal love and exigence would always be forthcoming – the Emperor of Mankind, whose galactic empire had always been, as the Carrion now was, an enterprise of both flesh and iron.

The Carrion lowered himself with the slightest of hydraulic sighs and approached the open shutters. By his skilful hand the wonder of his appendage systems had been refined further for stealth, intricacy and power: pneumatic dampeners, suspensor counterveils, data-net noospherics and haptic port-spikes. Beyond the anbaric core feeding his systems, which sat in the flesh at the base of his neck and through where his spine ran, the Carrion’s shoulders sported a pair of supplemental node-columns that ached with scavenged energies. The columns were integrated into a system of metallic strips and sub-dermal circuitry that ran through the flesh that covered what was left of his body. Their labyrinthine paths crept across the pale flesh of his face, interfacing with the silver-glazed eyeballs of his infra-augmetics.

The extensive network of electoos and the node-columns gave him the ability to drain electromagnetic energy from surrounding equipment and systems and, if necessary, expel it with devastating force. It was from this power-scavenging ability that the battle-brothers and the Techmarines-in-training of the tower-preceptory deemed Dravian Klayde truly worthy of the name Carrion.

From the viewport of his cell in the tower-preceptory, the Carrion could see precious little of Mars. He was quartered with legionaries who had arrived on Mars for their training at the same time as he himself. The tower-preceptory had thirty floors, reaching up from basement levels up through the height of the structure. The building provided a base for thirty sets of Techmarines-in-training – from newly arrived cult aspirants bunking in the bowels of the Martian earth, up to veterans like the Carrion – housed in the cell-block of the tower-top. A dust storm had swept in from the north, however – a mountainous thunderhead of red that had buried the Novus Mons forge temple in a whipping haze. The Carrion’s silver-glazed eyes automatically cycled through spectra frequencies. Through the light murk he saw the ghostly monotony of innumerable worker habs that gave way to the gargantuan majesty of the Hellesponticae Titan assembly yards. As filter overlaid grainy filter, the Carrion was granted a partially obscured view of god-machines in various states of construction. As his optics reached the limits of their enhancement he could make out the freightways of the mighty forge temple itself, with its colossal vent-stacks, manufactoria and temple-tops.

An automated process within the Carrion’s cogitator-spike reached its calculated conclusion. A dark curiosity deep within the Space Marine’s psyche had unconsciously willed its initiation. The dreams disturbed the Carrion, particularly his reliving of Octal Bool’s sentencing. He had not thought about the heretek in nearly three decades and it bothered the Techmarine-in-training that he had dreamed of him now.

The dream was not disturbing in its content – the Carrion had seen many hereteks sentenced. It was its timing; its import. A meaning perhaps hidden, stalking him in the shadows in the same way that his legionary brothers unsettled their enemies.

The cogitator informed the Raven Guard that there was a ninety-six point three-two-three per cent chance that REM-stage brain activity relating to Farinatus was residual trauma resulting from injuries sustained on the killing fields there. After all, the bionic appendages that graced his flesh were a constant reminder of his grievous injuries. The cogitator told him, however, that could be many possible reasons why he would be dreaming of the heretek Octal Bool. A forty-six point eight-six per cent chance that the completion of his Techmarine-training and cult instruction on Mars had recalled a random memory from the first day of such training – a cerebral bookending of events. There was a thirty-three point nine-one-three per cent chance that his impending initiation and his covenant-instatement as a legionary Techmarine had stirred feelings of long-standing guilt within the Space Marine. There were doubts and counter-logical thoughts over key cautionary principles of the Martian priesthood, and cautionary case studies that the Carrion had found not entirely dissuasive. The Space Marine shivered to think that he might share any sympathies with hereteks such as Octal Bool.

Conversely, there was a sixty-six point three-six per cent chance that the dream had been provoked by stimuli beyond the Carrion’s immediate experience. The cogitator suggested several possibilities, since the past weeks had been afflicted with the unsettling and the strange. Buried anxieties over the recent disappearance of the Carrion’s mentor, Gnaeus Archelon, and the cancellation of the initiation ceremonies that would have seen Techmarines like Aulus Scaramanca and himself leave Mars for their crusading Legions.

This in itself was unusual on the forge world, where such arrangements ran like intricate cogwork and disruption was virtually unknown. It could have been the unusual movements in skitarii, battle-automata and materiel across Mars that the Carrion had observed and monitored. Such activity had stirred his martial intuition, his inbred instincts for war. He had even gone so far as asking the opinion of other battle-brothers in the tower-preceptory. The Carrion saw troop movements and Titan formations in activity that was publically identified as the transference and export of cybernetic troops, weapons and war machines bound for the Ring of Iron – and from there to armed arkfreighters intended for the Warmaster and the legionary prosecution of the Emperor’s Great Crusade.

Beyond that there was the code – the corrupted code.

The network had been experiencing difficulty for days now. Code scrubbers and magi catharc had been working around the clock to purge the datastream of any hint of imperfection. No construct or logi knew its origin or cause. Updates and aegis protocols insisted that a potential outbreak had been contained and the polluted code purged but the Carrion knew better: it was still there. Beyond the data flow of Novus Mons, the incorporated hardstreams of the forge temple and associated structures like the tower-preceptory, he could sense it. Its stench, its revulsion and threat, seemed to be on the thin Martian air itself, carried on the weaker wireless streams like a bitter aftertaste or bile bubbling up the back of the throat. The Carrion could process it, like binary with a mind of its own or an equation that refused to be resolved. He could feel it, like a twisted nerve referring its agony elsewhere. The very planet seemed in pain and the Carrion found himself shutting down all non-essential receivers and transmitters built into his augmetics. Still, it was out there. As it echoed through the forge world infrastructure – touching the personal systems of automata, cybernetic constructs and the Martian priesthood – it made the Techmarine-in-training feel compromised, infected and unclean.

‘Baptise,’ the Carrion uttered at the vox-recognition systems of the cell. His slab hummed into the wall. At the same time grilles opened in the cell ceiling and the floor beneath his metal feet. A shower of sacred oils of different consecrated gauges cascaded about the legionary. As he sanctified the holy workings of the Machine-God, both the wonders of engineered flesh and bionics, the Carrion mumbled spirit-honouring litanies of righteous function and invocations of perpetuity. A thunderous blast of gelid air drove the last droplets of oil from his skin and silvered workings, and the cell door opened with a train of preceptory servitors who silently entered with his pack, pieces of artificer plate, exoskeletal arrays, fibre bundles and actuators.

It was not a full suit. The Carrion did not need one, as he had long since fashioned ceramite-layered plating for the adamantium workings of his legs and his right arm. As they interfaced the legionary armour with spinal plugs, the servitors decked the legionary out in the loose, black-hooded robes of a Techmarine-in-training. His node-columns crackled where they were accommodated by modifications in his plate and robes.

Leaving the cell, the Carrion worked his way through a small sacrarium-complex of workshops, holotoria, librariax and technical hangars filled with vehicles and weapons in various states of disrepair and augmentation. Ordinarily their hangar would be a place of furious industry, plasma-torching and ritual observance. With the five legionaries stationed on the floor having completed their training and waiting for word of their ceremonial covenance, the space was quiet. Only the raised vestibule was occupied, with the landing lamps of the hangar balcony-platform flashing in expectation of a grav-skiff or hump-shuttle. The legionaries were eager for word of their coming covenance and Legion transports to take them off-world and back to the Crusade and compliance.

‘Anything?’ the Carrion asked as he climbed the steps. Three of his Space Marine brothers were waiting in the vestibule. Like the Carrion, they had not yet earned the right to wear the machine opus of Mars on their plate. Some of them were tinkering. Some were monitoring equipment. All were marking time.

Alcavarn Salvador of the Imperial Fists and the hulking Salamander Nem’ron Phylax were craftsmen. While the black scarring of spot burns in the ebony of Phylax’s face was evidence of time spent before the fires of the forge, Salvador was never without his combat blade. In the quiet moments of the day he would go to work with a whetstone, honing the blade to a constantly maintained standard of lethality – just as he was in the vestibule. Phylax’s great servo-arm whirred on its hydraulics and counterweights as he turned to greet the Carrion with a good-natured smile and perfect adamantium teeth.

Like many of his Raven Guard brothers, the Carrion was reserved and quiet by nature – some might say even secretive. This had created tensions between the sons of Corax and Space Marines of other Legions. It had made the Night Lords perfect compliance partners on Farinatus, since they cared little for shared pleasantries and had no intention of forming brotherly bonds with the XIX Legion. Nem’ron Phylax had always tried hard with the Carrion, however, and forgave the cool urgency of the Raven Guard’s words – words that all too often came across as imperious and aloof. The Carrion wore his reticence like a noble savage and was not removed in the way of Fulgrim’s sons, who carried themselves with airs and graces, or like the legionaries of the XX, who always seemed audacious and evasive. But this grated on his preceptory brothers, with many finding the Carrion easy to ignore.

Like a noble savage, the Carrion could be plainly insistent and unheeding of protocol and cult politesse. This had brought him into conflict not only with his brothers, but also the Martian priests, who themselves were not known for their good humour.

‘Anything at all?’ he pressed.

‘Nothing from the priesthood,’ the Salamander told him. ‘Nothing from the arkfreighters or the Ring of Iron. I’m beginning to think they’ve forgotten about us.’

‘Unlikely,’ Salvador muttered almost to himself as he scratched away with his knife.

‘Perhaps this is some kind of final trial,’ the Ultramarine Tibor Ventidian offered, reassembling a stripped-down Phobos-pattern boltgun. For Ventidian everything was some kind of test to be weighed, measured and impeccably passed. He studied the weapon with the searing blue lens of a replacement optic. With the sickle magazine on the work-slab beside him, the Ultramarine brought the boltgun up to his pauldron. He primed it and depressed the trigger but nothing happened. ‘Feed jam? Firing mechanism?’

‘Neither,’ the Carrion told him with no little impatience. He had been tinkering with the weapon himself the day before, same as Ventidian, to pass the time. ‘Did you look at the orbital imaging?’

‘This again?’ Ventidian asked.

‘Yes,’ the Carrion insisted coolly, ‘this again. I want your opinion.’

Ventidian grunted. He knew the pale-faced Raven Guard wasn’t going to let up. Still cradling the boltgun, he turned and punched a sequence of thick buttons on the runebank behind him. A sequence of hazy orbital scans sizzled across a battered screen.

‘There’s a lot of interference on the pict-sat,’ Ventidian admitted. ‘Beyond the temple, the datastreams are a mess…’

‘I’ve got the same on the vox-net,’ Nem’ron Phylax added.

‘…but the aerial scans you directed me to do not show battle formations,’ the Ultramarine said. He turned to the Carrion and added, ‘In my opinion.’

That got Salvador’s attention. He looked up from his blade and scraping whetstone. ‘Formations? You think Mars is under some kind of attack?’

‘None that I can see,’ Ventidian admitted.

‘Surely we would know if the Forge World Principal was endangered.’

The Carrion gave the legionary the blank silver of his eyes.

‘Something’s not right,’ he told his battle-brothers. ‘Code corruptions. Cult disruptions. Compromised networks. Archelon’s disappearance – and he’s not the only Artisan Astartes to go missing.’

‘The magi catharc are working on the code issues,’ Ventidian said. ‘Our mentors no doubt have cult business to attend to. Have some faith, brother.’

‘There’s a hell of a lot of materiel being moved across the surface of Mars,’ the Carrion said. ‘An unprecedented amount of activity: constructs, augmented infantry, battle-automata…’

‘Is this true?’ Salvador asked.

‘Yes,’ Ventidian said. ‘Even in the quadrangle, the Scopulan Phase-Fusilatrix have crossed the Mare Erytraueum. Strike fighter wings of the Tenth Denticle have mobilised over the Sisyphi Montes. The engines of the Legio Mortis are on the move–’

‘The entire legio?’ Salvador Alcavarn said.

‘Manoeuvres,’ Ventidian assured him. ‘Between quadrants and forge temples. There are no fronts. No counter-invasion formations. These aren’t preparatory measures for some kind of xenos attack. Within the Solar System? That would be unthinkable.’

‘Agreed. Then some threat from within,’ the Carrion pressed them. His mind ran once more to hereteks like Octal Bool and the abominable intelligences they had developed.

‘Some border or patent dispute between temple masters, perhaps,’ the Ultramarine told him. ‘Forgejackers or feral servitors. That’s not what we are talking about here. Horus is taking the Crusade into a new phase. He needs the materiel and manpower languishing on Mars and is pushing Kelbor-Hal to send him all he can. The Fabricator General is trying to meet that expectation. And that is all. Your movements and manoeuvres here are simply the knock-on effect of that.’

Nem’ron Phylax nodded slowly. ‘While monitoring the anchor station manifests and mooring logs for our Legion transports I saw that Regulus, the Warmaster’s Mechanicum emissary, arrived on Mars only days ago with missives for the Fabricator General. Sounds about right.’ He flashed the Carrion the kindness of a silver smile. ‘I’m sorry, Dravian.’

The Carrion looked to Salvador but the Space Marine’s face was an unreadable mask.

‘What are you suggesting?’ Salvador asked finally.

‘If there is a problem,’ the Carrion said, ‘or some kind of threat, then I don’t think that we should just sit here waiting. The Mechanicum might benefit from our assistance.’

‘And if that is indeed the case, I’m sure the Fabricator General will be sure to ask,’ Nem’ron Phylax assured the Raven Guard. ‘But in truth I fear there are few threats in the galaxy that the might of Mars could not meet and defeat.’

‘Our last set of instructions were to repair to the preceptory-tower and await our Artisan Astartes,’ Salvador said.

‘That was three days ago,’ the Carrion reminded him. ‘Three days after a cancelled covenance and three days after our Artisan Astartes went missing. No identica-logs. No isometrics. No cant-intercepts. That’s not natural.’

‘We are guests here,’ Salvador told him. ‘Nothing else concerns us. We follow our instructions until we receive new ones.’

‘I know that we are all eager to receive our covenance,’ Tibor Ventidian said, ‘to receive the machina opus on our plate and return to our Legions. We all have long journeys ahead of us.’ He looked to the Imperial Fist, Salvador, who raised a blond eyebrow. ‘Most of us have long journeys ahead of us, but let us not as a parting gesture offend our gracious Mechanicum lords or spend our final days on Mars in idle speculation.’

‘Our final days on Mars?’ a voice boomed from across the hangar. In pock-marked Mark III plate, the Iron Warrior Aulus Scaramanca made his heavy way across the grille floor. The Techmarine-in-training’s black robes were tied about his mag-belt like ceremonial skirts while thick mechadendrite appendages snaked over his head like reared tails. Scaramanca’s dun plate was a mosaic of chevrons and sodium arc stripes. The Iron Warrior wore a nest of cranial flesh-ports and cables like a crown, while his lips were contorted in one of his primarch’s well-known sneers. ‘You’re more right than you know, son of Ultramar.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Ventidian asked as the Iron Warrior approached.

‘If you want to know where the bolts will be flying and where the bodies will lie, you look to the skies brothers. You look for the signs.’ As he climbed the steps of the raised vestibule he pointed at the Carrion. ‘You look for the flocks that feast on flesh, for they have an eye for the coming of death and its makings.’ The Iron Warrior threw a collection of data-slates at the legionaries, each Techmarine-in-training snatching one out of the air with their transhuman reflexes. ‘Gnaeus Archelon… Valvadus Spurcia… Algernon Krypke – all Artisan Astartes assigned to the tower-preceptory. All summoned to the Olympus Mons forge temple three days ago, no doubt with many others besides.’

‘So what?’ Ventidian said, consulting the data-slate. ‘They are probably in audience with the Fabricator General or in some kind of locked session.’

‘It would certainly explain their absence from the networks,’ Aulus Scaramanca said with a crooked smile.

Unlike some of his Olympian-born kindred the Carrion did not find Scaramanca truculent, nor solemn to the point of bitterness. Of the Techmarines-in-training on the thirtieth floor, Aulus Scaramanca was the Artisan Astartes’ finest work. The Carrion had developed undoubted skill during his secondment to Mars and Tibor Ventidian had achieved some of the highest and most consistent astrotechnical appraisals in the history of his Legion. As a weaponsmith, Phylax was unrivalled, and the Imperial Fist Salvador possessed an almost innate ability to feel the pain suffered by the damaged and failing machine – aided by auto-systems and the spirits of such machines, this enabled him to affect the swiftest repairs and the most superior of solutions, even under simulated battlefield situations.

Scaramanca, however, was master of all the disciplines he had studied.

He was a cult master of liturgical lore and runecraft. A master of cybernetic enhancement, having even worked to improve the Carrion’s own augmentations. He was a master architect with gifts for design and engineering. A craftsman of destructive weaponry, enjoying success with ancient plasma and conversion technologies that even the artisans of the Mechanicum had deemed could not be improved upon. He was a master of the arcane sciences and a living rite of blessed activation, maintaining, repairing and returning to machine-life even the most battle-damaged of the Omnissiah’s honoured constructions.

Although a runebank cogitator or fortress generatorium offered Aulus Scaramanca no problems, his real talents lay with the machines of war, from the razored edge of the simplest blade to the ancient behemoths of void and fleet – and every conceivable weapon, vehicle and instrument of battle in between. He was a master of the forge in the making, sure to come to the primarch Perturabo’s attention even amidst the ranks of so many warsmiths and technically-blessed sons. Similar to his combat training and the tactical demands of legionary leadership, such gifts came naturally to Aulus Scaramanca, much like his smile that proceeded from the swagger in his heavy step and the playful scorn he reserved for others.

‘What it does not explain,’ the Iron Warrior continued, ‘is how the scanned serial designations of bionic augmentations registered to Archelon, Spurcia and Krypke found their way to the Phaethontis smelting plants, off-world salvage consignments and depots-recyclatrix across the Terra Cimmeria… Bionics from Algernon Krypke are now part of at least seven other constructs…’

The legionary stared at the data-slate in dumbfounded silence.

‘How did you get this information?’ Tibor Ventidian asked.

‘Not from the data-net,’ Scaramanca said. ‘I can tell you that.’

‘You disobeyed the Artisan Astartes’ orders?’ Phylax put to him. ‘You left the tower-preceptory without codes and authorisations?’

‘The artisans and mentors who gave those orders are dead,’ the Carrion told the Salamander.

The Raven Guard looked to Scaramanca, who shook his head slowly. ‘Archelon?’

‘It wasn’t easy,’ the Iron Warrior admitted, ‘but I found him. Gene-coding confirms that what was left of him was rendered and flesh-reassigned for servitude imperpetuis.’

‘He’s… been turned into a servitor?’

‘Working the Memnonia deep core mining fields.’

‘Buried,’ the Carrion said. He nodded at Scaramanca. ‘They never meant him to be found.’

‘They?’ Salvador said, getting to his feet. ‘Who’s they?’

‘Rival priests. Hostile factions. There’s always been a great deal of competition in the Mechanicum ranks. Some conservative groups regard the Artisan Astartes and frater astrotechnicus as hereteks, who pervert the Omnissiah’s intentions and violate the sanctity of the machine-spirit in order to wage war.’

‘This is not a cult thing,’ Scaramanca told them. Interfacing with the runebank using one of his mechadendrite appendages, the Iron Warrior patched through to allow the jabbercant of the main datastream through to the vox-casters. The hangar rang with the screeching insanity of dark code. ‘It’s bigger than that,’ Scaramanca insisted over the cacophony. He held up an armoured gauntlet. ‘All Mars is involved in this in one way or another – and so are we.’

‘When were these orbital scans taken?’ the Carrion asked, examining one of the data-slates.

Reaching forward with the silvered workings of his bionic arm, he formed a fist. Four haptic spikes shot out of his knuckle-ports with a pneumatic thud. Like keys, each sported a distinctively crafted needle-interfacia housed within the spike, which could double as a weapon. As three of the spikes slowly retracted, the Carrion inserted the fourth into a runebank socket. A hololithic representation crackled to life about them. It was an aerial capture of Novus Mons and the surrounding quadrangle.

‘An hour ago,’ Scaramanca told him.

The Carrion cast a black gauntlet through the sizzling hololith. He looked to Tibor Ventidian. ‘Manoeuvres, you say?’

The Ultramarine stood, peering at the hazy representation with his searing blue optic. He looked from the representation to the Carrion and back to the orbital capture.

‘Martian Autokrator assault carriers inbound,’ Ventidian said grimly. ‘Skitarii tech-guard. The Scopulan Phase-Fusilatrix.’

‘Target?’ Salvador asked, but the Imperial Fist knew the answer.

‘The tower-preceptory,’ the Ultramarine told him, snatching up the boltgun and sickle magazine from the runebank.

‘How many?’ Nem’ron Phylax asked.

‘All of them,’ Ventidian answered.

‘Like the Artisan Astartes,’ Aulus Scaramanca said, ‘we are to be taken apart.’

The Carrion’s silver-glazed eyes fixed on the Iron Warrior’s face. Scaramanca had been away from his Legion and the brutality of compliance for so long that the simple prospect of battle had put a mad smile on the Olympian’s crooked lips.

Phylax, Salvador, Ventidian and the Carrion could not find in themselves the same glee. The impossible was happening – betrayal, murder, war on Mars – and the Space Marines were caught in the middle of the chaos and confusion.

Scaramanca looked to the Carrion. ‘So what now?’

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