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An Extract from Crimson Fist

About the Author

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AN EXTRACT FROM CRIMSON FIST

A Horus Heresy novella by John French

Tyr came with me. Perhaps I wanted him to see it and so answer his own questions. But perhaps there was another, less worthy motivation.

Our steps clanged dully as we approached the dead machine at the centre of the gloom-filled chamber. I glanced at Tyr, but his eyes stayed fixed on the isolated circle of bright light. The chamber had been an ordnance magazine. Its walls were three metres thick, and its triple-layered blast doors sealed by stratified layers of cipher codes. The machine sat alone under a buzzing stasis field, a specimen pinned out for display and then locked away from sight. Automated gun turrets twitched at our approach, and then cycled to stillness. It was as if we had passed into a shadow world that had formed like a cyst around a secret.

We stopped and looked at what the search teams had pulled from the ocean of Phall II. The machine glistened under the stab lights, water beading its bare metal body, the stasis field tinting the drops to sapphires. It had suffered severe damage, but its form was still clear: a blunt-edged cube of metal, studded with thruster vents and ugly protrusions. Its shell had been cracked open, first by jagged wounds that to my eyes looked like impact hits, and then by the smooth cuts of a melta torch. The tech priests had dissected it and left with its innards exposed. I could see a jumble of cables and clusters of glass blisters like lidless eyes. Dribbles of yellow fluid hung unmoving from severed tubes. Shattered crystals had spilled over the stained floor. At its heart was something grey and soft, like a corpse bloated in lightless water. I could see a spine under pale skin, and above that a nest of cables haloing a head, its eyes and mouth stapled shut. There were no arms or legs, just stumps. A thick smell of ionised air filled my nose, and my teeth ached in time with the field’s hum.

I had seen countless servitors created by the Mechanicum, and had waded knee-deep through mutilated bodies, but there was something about the machine and the amputated torso that was utterly repellent. I had examined it before, when the search teams first brought it aboard, but without the crowding tech-priests and labour servitors it felt different. It felt like going to a grave’s edge to look down at the remains of a secret atrocity.

Tyr let out a carefully controlled breath beside me. ‘What is it?’ he said, his voice echoing in the empty chamber.

‘We don’t know, at least not with certainty,’ I said. Tyr was moving around the edge of the stasis dome. ‘The search units I sent to Phall II found it floating in the oceans, but it has clearly been exposed to the void. The adepts tell me that the machine components have several purposes.’ Tyr gave a small nod, but was silent as I pointed to different portions of the wreckage. ‘Most of it is made up of high-gain augur arrays and broad-spectrum sensors effective over a relatively short range. Then there is the human component. Apparently it would have been in a state of hibernation, kept alive with minimal power usage. Their assessment is that it was in orbit around Phall II, suffered damage and fell to the planet’s surface.’ Tyr was still staring at the grey remains of the human in the machine. I glanced at it then away; it made me want to shiver.

‘Some form of servitor-controlled sensor vehicle? An asteroid survey unit, perhaps?’

‘The adepts think it unlikely. In addition to the sensor equipment some of the systems seem to be a form of psy-amplifier.’

Tyr looked up. ‘This created the psy-attack?’

‘This and others like them. There were hundreds of energy signatures detected. There are most likely many more.’

‘We need to find and destroy them; they could trigger again at any moment.’

‘This one fell through the ocean planet’s atmosphere as its orbit decayed. Our search teams would never have found it without the flare light of its re-entry.’ I looked back at the broken machine and its pitiful occupant. ‘It sustained damage but the adepts say that most of its system had already burnt out. Its occupant was already dead.’

Tyr shook his head, his face taut with an emotion I could not read. ‘They were killed once they had been activated,’ he breathed. There was a note of disbelief and rage in his voice. ‘Objects this size, now dead and without power; we could sift this system for a decade and find nothing. With no population on the planets there is no way of knowing who put them here or why they attacked us.’

‘You are correct, but it was no attack.’

‘You say that now?’ I could see the months of dispute and controlled animosity straining at his will. After the psychic attack Tyr had not dropped his calls for the fleet to try and break the storms. If anything his attitude became more unyielding. As had mine. I had hoped that he would have seen the full implication of the recovered machine, and that my decisions had been correct. It was a weakness, and like everything built on weakness it was doomed.

‘Look at it, brother.’ Tyr’s eyes flicked back to the machine, skimming over its broken form. ‘The sensors, the augur and communication sifters. The psychic screams we all felt were not attacks. They were a message.’ He looked up at me and I saw that he understood at last. ‘It was no attack, brother. It was a prelude to one.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John French is a writer and freelance games designer from Nottingham. His work can be seen in the Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader and Deathwatch roleplay games and scattered through a number of other books including the award nominated Disciples of the Dark Gods. When he is not thinking of ways that dark and corrupting beings can destroy reality and space, John enjoys talking about why it would be a good idea, and making it so with his own traitor legions on the gaming table…that and drinking good wine.

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