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The Seventh Serpent – Extract

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Ulrach Branthan had called his cyber-eagle Garuda. The name was that of a mythical devourer of the silver serpents said to dwell in the Land of Shadow – a noble hunter whose birth fires consumed the ancient gods of Medusa.

The Iron Hands aboard the Sisypheum knew it simply as ‘the Bird’ and, since its resurrection, hope had spread that their fallen captain might also rise from his icy sepulchre.

The eagle’s golden body was wrought from exquisite clockwork mechanisms and lost ingenuity, more a work of art than engineering. One wing was gold, the other silver, and where one leg was articulated ivory and brass, the other was pressed steel and polycarbonate resin.

A scar-faced bladesman of the Emperor’s Children had shot Garuda from the air on Iydris, but Sabik Wayland and Frater Thamatica had worked on the cyber-eagle with all the care and attention an Apothecary would bestow upon a wounded Iron Lord.

They had restored its broken wing and twisted leg, somehow managing to restart the arcane mechanism within its heart – though neither could quite settle on how they had done it.

Thamatica claimed Garuda was an artefact crafted by the first settlers of Medusa, but Wayland disagreed, believing the avian automaton to be a relic from an even earlier epoch. Long would they debate the provenance of their fallen lord’s golden eagle.

While Ulrach Branthan hovered near death in his frosted casket, Cadmus Tyro was Garuda’s current master, and he cared nothing for its origins.

All he cared about was killing traitors.

Garuda flew through the ruin of the strike cruiser’s starboard embarkation deck, alighting on the wreckage of a blazing Stormbird. Warning lumens painted bulkheads crimson. Klaxons filled the air with mechanised screeching. Violated integrity fields sought to keep out the frozen vacuum of space.

The Zeta Morgeld howled in fury at its attackers.

They marched from the belly of a screaming Thunderhawk, shields locked and weapons blazing, thirty giants in black battleplate. They pushed into the smoke of their explosive entry like obsidian ghosts, ice-white gauntlets glittering on every shoulder guard.

Ship-to-ship boarding actions. Brutal, bloody affairs. Merciless killing in confined spaces. Firefights waged at arm’s length. No room to manoeuvre. Hammering shields, barging body work.

Fighting that only the Legiones Astartes could endure.

The kind of fighting at which the Iron Hands excelled.

Bearing a heavy shield and clad in void-hardened plate of scarred black, Cadmus Tyro was first onto the deck of the enemy ship – a pitiless veteran of the infamy at Isstvan with a flint-hard soul.

His warriors followed him onto the stricken Morgeld.

They slammed into the deck’s defenders – ravager packs of weaponised servitors armed with energised piston-hammers and hook-halberds. Behind these monstrosities, dark-robed adepts fled for transit arches leading into the heart of the ship.

The combatants slammed together with a thunderous clamour of metal on metal. Shields bludgeoned, blades stabbed. Explosive shells punched into flesh and armour at point-blank range. The Iron Hands leaned into the advance, pushing the foe back with inexorable force.

Bolters fired with metronomic regularity. Legion swords cut like the threshing blades of an industrial harvester. Tyro shot a pallid-fleshed combat-servitor in the throat then barged it to the deck with a blow from his shield.

Septus Thoic had refused a boarding shield in favour of a heavy bolter. The veteran braced himself at the head of the Thunderhawk’s assault ramp and swept the deck with heavy-calibre mass-reactives. Combat-servitors were pitched back, reduced to scraps of meat and reinforced bone.

Beside Thoic, Ignatius Numen hefted the volkite he had acquired on Iydris, and leaping beams of searing heat cut down the fleeing adepts with cold efficiency.

‘Secure those transit arches,’ said Tyro, and the column of Iron Hands split to capture the flanking routes.

Speed was paramount in a boarding action.

Secure a bridgehead, push out and keep moving. Always moving.

Tyro’s bolter slammed hard against his grip with each squeeze of the trigger. Each shot fired in time with his relentless lockstep. His shield took the battering impact of three explosive shells.

‘Bolter fire,’ he said, recognising the power of heavier shells. He turned in time to see a warrior launch himself through the smoke. Rich indigo-blue armour edged in silver. A hydra-glyph on the left shoulder guard.

Alpha Legion.

A gladius thrust for his gorget.

Tyro gave a quarter turn and pistoned his shield forwards. The incoming blade shattered. He snapped his bolter from the firing slot and rammed it through the faceplate of the traitor’s helm. No need to pull the trigger, but he did anyway.

‘Reckless fool,’ said Tyro, stamping over the headless corpse.

Hardened blast shutters were coming down in the transit arches, but ground to a halt less than halfway into their descent.

Tyro grunted with grim amusement.

‘Well done, Thamatica, well done indeed,’ he said.

From its perch atop the burning Stormbird, Garuda watched the killing impassively. The flames of war reflected from its compound eyes, chips of sapphire limned with hazy winter’s light.

That same light shimmered beneath Frater Thamatica’s eyelids as he sat in a specially constructed vault deep in the Sisypheum. His eyes darted back and forth as he watched the fighting on the enemy ship’s embarkation deck via an MIU cable slotted into the socket drilled at the nape of his neck.

The Bird sat on the remains of a Stormbird that Tyro’s Thunderhawk had gutted with its dorsal battle cannon upon breaching the embarkation deck’s integrity field. Then the Bird cocked its head to the side, and Thamatica fought the urge to alter his own posture. It was no proxy cyber-creature, and Wayland was not in control of this experience.

‘Hold still, you wretched thing,’ said Thamatica, but the Bird paid him no mind. It did what it wanted, lending – as far as Wayland had been concerned – further credence to his belief in its pre-Medusan origins.

Through its eyes, Thamatica watched Cadmus Tyro’s warriors eliminate the defenders of the embarkation deck and push deeper into the Morgeld. He blinked his visual feed over to the link with the Sisypheum’s main cogitator engine. The view through the Bird’s eyes vanished, replaced by a glowing schematic of the Morgeld’s interior structure. Obsessive attention to detail, an eidetic memory and the decades he’d spent training on Mars had allowed Thamatica to stock the Sisypheum’s cogitators with accurate schematics of every currently listed traitor vessel.

According to Martian launch dockets, the Zeta Morgeld departed Mars twelve years ago, making it one of the newest ships in the Imperial fleet registry.

The Iron Hands aboard the vessel were picked out with golden skulls enclosed in toothed cogs. Where their positions were known, Alpha Legionnaires were hydran green.

Cadmus Tyro was advancing deep into the guts of the Morgeld from the starboard embarkation deck, a knife thrust to capture the bridge. To keep the Alpha Legion from escaping, Vermana Cybus fought his way towards the engine spaces.

‘Captain Tyro,’ said Thamatica. ‘A choke point approaches fifty metres to your fore. Advise you take the lateral companionway ten metres perpendicular to the axis of your advance to reach an upper transit.’

‘Understood,’ came Tyro’s clipped response. He was a man of few words, and even more so in a combat situation. Bolter fire echoed over the vox, together with the clanging impacts of mass-reactives on boarding shields. The Alpha Legion fought hard to defend their vessel with a ferocity that surprised Thamatica.

It shouldn’t have, of course.

With their love of indirect means of war, it was all too easy to forget that the sons of Alpharius were still a Legion of transhuman fighters.

Thamatica monitored the battle through the feeds of Iron Hands’ strike teams and remote telemetry from the Bird. It kept pace with Cadmus Tyro, affording Thamatica a scouting view ahead of the boarders. He issued real-time warnings of Alpha Legion counter-attacks and alternate routes to target.

As the attack progressed, the engine spaces fell swiftly and Tyro’s warriors swept up the vessel towards the bridge. With the fall of the main axial route a sharp screech, like a nail down a slate, dragged Thamatica from his battle-management.

Veils of informational light fell away from his sight and the stolid weight of the chamber re-established itself around him. Fresh-cut walls of bare iron, newly built and many-layered.

Banks of humming machinery surrounded the Ironwrought, and a host of heavily insulated cables were connected to the room’s only other occupant.

It – Thamatica couldn’t bring himself to think of it as a he – sat opposite him, bound to a bare iron throne with fetters of adamantium at its wrists and ankles.

Thamatica knew there was little need. The Kryptos wasn’t going anywhere, but ever since Sabik Wayland and Nykona Sharrowkyn had captured the code-breaking cypher creature on Cavor Sarta, Cadmus Tyro had insisted it be kept immobile.

The flesh of its horrific face was corpse-pale, its jaw an obscene arrangement of articulated parts, augmitters, vox-grilles and sound-producing elements that made a mockery of anatomy. The creature’s skull was a grotesque amalgam of a cogitator’s punch-interface and biological specimen jar: a brass-and-flesh arrangement of xenos-formed anatomy suspended within a crackling glass compartment.

Its eyes were unblinking orbs – dull and insensate for the most part, but now filled with desperate need and pain. A wet stream of garbled machine noise brayed from the clicking, chewing, spitting mouth, meaningless to anyone without the correct augments or a form of wetware that violently resisted any attempt to duplicate it.

Thamatica glanced at the data-slate implanted on a lectern bolted to the floor in front of the Kryptos. Streams of information cascaded across it.

Gibberish and nonsense code for now.

‘Wayland,’ said Thamatica.

‘I see it, Frater,’ said Sabik Wayland from somewhere aboard the Morgeld. ‘An encrypted transmission.’

‘You are closer to the source, can you jam it?’

‘I already am,’ said Wayland. ‘I wasn’t made Iron Father yesterday, you know.’

‘Ah, but when measured next to my experience, you might as well have been,’ said Thamatica, as the enemy transmission washed through the blasphemous mechanisms engineered and gene-spliced into the Kryptos.

‘Have no fear,’ said Wayland. ‘Their cry for help has been strangled at birth.’

‘Good work, lad…’ said Thamatica, his words trailing off as he read the words on the data-slate.

‘Frater? What is it?’

Thamatica shut off the link to Wayland, calling up the glowing schematic of the Morgeld’s interior.

‘Cadmus!’ he said, fighting to keep the excitement from his voice. ‘You need to get onto the bridge and seize it right now! Do whatever it takes, but get in there.’

‘What in the name of Ferrus do you think I’m doing, Frater?’ snapped Tyro.

‘Whatever it is, do it faster,’ said Thamatica. ‘They’ll be trying to delete the log and astrogation data.’

‘So? Why do I care where this ship has been?’

‘You don’t understand, young Tyro, it’s where it’s going that matters,’ said Thamatica. ‘By the looks of it, the Morgeld is en route to rendezvous with Alpharius himself!’

Access to the bridge of a warship was intentionally difficult, and the Zeta Morgeld was no exception, a long and narrow approach that began at a cramped Y-junction.

‘No projecting stanchions, bulkheads or places to hide,’ said Cadmus Tyro, ducking back as a hail of autocannon fire from the emplaced door turrets filled the approach with searing traceries of shells.

‘You expected any different?’ grunted Septus Thoic from the opposite side of the junction.

‘I hoped different,’ he shrugged. ‘It’s Alpha Legion.’

‘Going to have to run the full gauntlet,’ shouted Ignatius Numen, finally reading Tyro’s words on his helm visor. ‘Shields locked tight, shoulders down and take the pain.’

A plasma grenade on Isstvan had given Numen an artificial sheen to his skin and taken his eyes. It had also partially deafened him, a wounding that one of Fulgrim’s debased followers had finished.

Tyro nodded. No time to do this any way other than directly.

‘Only wide enough for three abreast,’ said Thoic.

‘Then you and Numen are with me,’ said Tyro, bringing his shield about. He mag-locked his bolter to his thigh. He’d need both arms to keep the shield steady. ‘Ready? Upon the anvil.’

‘And by the Iron,’ finished Thoic. Numen nodded a second later. Both had handed off their heavy weapons and hefted borrowed shields – monstrous sheets of Avernii blacksteel emblazoned with the argent gauntlet of the Legion.

Tyro moved first, stepping brazenly from cover and planting his shield down hard on the deck. Shellfire from the twin turrets immediately slammed into the metal, percussive impacts like hammerblows an inch from his visor. Thoic and Numen took station either side an instant later, shields vibrating with clangs of detonation.

‘Go!’ shouted Tyro, and the three of them pushed into the hurricane of fire.

He gritted his teeth as the relentless impacts numbed his arm in seconds. Step by step they pushed down the approach, the noise deafening. Heads and shoulders down, legs braced and wide, bodies angled towards the streams of fire.

‘Like walking into the teeth of a Medusan ash storm,’ roared Numen as though he were enjoying the experience.

‘Keep going, don’t slacken the pace!’ yelled Tyro. ‘Momentum is everything.’

Thoic stumbled as a ricochet clipped the side of his helm. A gap opened. Tyro grunted as sudden fire roared up his arm. A hit. He ground his teeth, blocking the pain.

No weakness, not now.

Thoic hauled himself upright with a bellow of self-reproach. He thrust his shield back into line, pushing even harder. Tyro saw a gouge just to the right of Thoic’s eye lens. A millimetre to the left and his helm would be a sloshing vault of bone and pulped brain matter.

A booming impact behind him made Tyro turn.

A heavy blast shield, like something he’d expect to see on a gunnery deck, now filled the corridor, cutting them off from the rest of the assault force.

And that wasn’t the only unwelcome surprise.

Portions of the coffered wall panels were moving on either side of the corridor, veils of gunsmoke drawn towards areas of negative pressure. Gaping voids instead of pressed and riveted steel. A pair of indigo-armoured warriors stepped into view with heavy, thudding footfalls.

Vast, vaguely humanoid shapes that filled the passageway.

Tyro’s heart sank as he recognised the deadly silhouettes.

‘Terminators!’ he shouted. ‘Plant your shields! Turn and engage.’

All three slammed their shields down again as Tyro freed his arm. He spun and dropped to his haunches, his own shield locking tight to his back as he thrust his arms to the side. He gripped the handles of his brothers’ shields in support as repeated impacts forced him down. Heat enveloped his shoulders as the armour’s servo muscles fought against the storm of shells.

Thoic and Numen snapped their bolters free and opened fire on the Terminators, full auto. Shells blazed down the corridor, detonating against their impossibly thick armour.

It didn’t even slow the titanic killers.

They might as well have been shooting a Land Raider.

The jade hydra icons glittered in the half-light of the corridor, the ruby eyes of their serpentine heads alive with wicked intent. Each warrior’s helm was grotesquely horned, their shoulder guards mockingly draped with scraps of war-banners torn from the standards of their former kinsmen.

‘For the Emperor,’ the Terminators said in unison, and their combi-bolters filled the corridor with mass-reactive shells.

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First published in Great Britain in 2014. Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover by Neil Roberts.

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