‘Bring them back aboard Alcazar Remembered, and then destroy those platforms. Send retrieval boats for Issachar’s force. I want helmet feeds compiled and supplied to Asger and Laurentis at once. Discontinue the blanket denial broadcast and begin ordering the fleet for immediate translation out.’
‘Aye, lord.’ The communications liaison serf slid her headphones back over her ears and sat back down, even as her station colleagues continued to celebrate.
‘I was hoping for more,’ Koorland muttered.
‘I will have to confer with Magos Urquidex and analyse the data gathered from the ground forces,’ said Laurentis. ‘Lord Tyris and any surviving members of the insertion will also need to be thoroughly interrogated. The psyker was the smallest and weakest of the three, however. That was why it was selected for a trial detonation. It is possible that further calibration of an admittedly improvised detonation procedure could result in improved blast yields.’
‘That is what I want, magos. It is what I need. More and better. I want to scour worlds. I want to ravage fleets. Do you understand me?’
‘I will commence data inload at once.’
‘I look forward to your preliminary report.’ Koorland turned to the communications turret. ‘Has the denial broadcast dissipated?’
‘Almost, lord.’
‘Then send word to the astropaths to make contact with Bohemond and Euclydeas. It is time for the final test.’
Eleven
The psyker seized, bringing a haze of ferric red from the industrial clamps that held her pallet upright against the stone wall. Her scalp was stapled with adaptor plugs, dark cabling flexing and bowing as she struggled. Foam flecked her lips. Her eyes were wide and staring, though what it was that held her mind’s attention, Zerberyn could not hazard. In the matt of hoops and cabling above her, a lumen filament blinked on and off inside a cracked blue bulb. The witch’s fits were already becoming less frenzied, every abortive jerk against her restraints increasingly synchronised to that grubby flash of blue.
‘The soul is empty. It is dry. The green roar is heard across the stars. Drink deep of it. Drink deep.’
‘It is gibberish,’ said Zerberyn, a ghost-white giant encased in ceramite of unpainted grey.
‘The message doesn’t yet make sense to her,’ whispered the tonsured Librarius serf beside him. ‘Her mind is interpreting the psychic impulse as best as it is able.’
‘So far!’ she screamed, blood trickling from one nostril. ‘Why are you so far from home?’
More serfs in the plain grey habits of the Fists Exemplar Librarius hurried around her, making adjustments to flow regulators in her cranial plugs, tightening straps, or receiving instruction from the clicking instruments to which she was connected by peripheral and lumbar plugs. An overseer in baroque gunmetal-grey robes and bronze trim, a bondsman of sorts, offered sharp words of direction, but was largely content to let the serfs perform the labour. Various parts of his exposed flesh had been dug out and replaced with smooth iron grafts, presumably to excise the early stigmata of mutation. A brand of ownership, like a coal-black tattoo, was cut cleanly in half by one such metal plate on the side of his face.
The woman and her handler were the property of Warsmith Kalkator.
‘Are you even one of us, brother?’ The cage rattled with the violence of her efforts.
The words made Zerberyn’s neck itch, and the Iron Warriors bondsman growled instructions to his Fists Exemplar counterparts. Zerberyn looked up to where the cable bundle fed into a hole in the ceiling. White daylight fell through.
‘Join me,’ the psyker whispered, sinking into her restraints and turning her head sharply from side to side. ‘A red star. A world of fours.’
The overseer took her glistening wet hand, leant through the cage and listened as she whispered something in his ear.
‘We are the Last Wall. The Last Wall. The Last Wall…’
It went on. Zerberyn swore.
‘Find me when she begins to talk sense.’ Zerberyn enclosed the Librarius serf’s shoulder in a gauntleted hand. He towered over the mortal. The barest effort on his part would have broken ribs, torn muscle, crushed a lung, and not a shred of guilt would have haunted him at having done so. The serf swallowed. ‘Tell only me.’
‘Only you, lord. Of course.’
The corridor from what they laughingly now called the astropathicum was a worn-out stretch of ferrocrete blocks with freeze-thaw cracks in the mortar. Stacked building materials littered the floor, runes painted next to gashes in the wall or partial collapses of the ceiling with colours that indicated priority. Doorways without doors led to side chambers where serfs of the two Chapters — Legions? Zerberyn had ceased to worry over how he and his allies described one another — conducted basic repairs. In others, surplus equipment from Guilliman, Excelsior, Paragon, Courageous, Implicit, and from Palimodes had been stockpiled. Paired quartermaster serfs, one from each affiliation, took inventory, assessing how their meagre resources might be most efficiently shared.
From one, the scent of counterseptic hit Zerberyn well before his dully echoing footsteps carried him to the threshold. A dozen muscular youths from the local slave stock were laid on gurneys, stripped down, unconscious. One had been opened up, blood splattering his surgical robes in a perfect line from his throat to his sternum. Apothecary Reoch said nothing as Zerberyn walked past his door, giving him only the sullen flash of binoptics above an expressionless metal grille.
A short set of steps curved downwards forty-five degrees to the left. Zerberyn could not help but admire the design’s innate defensibility, based on the premise that ninety per cent of mortal human assailants would prefer to wield a close-combat weapon in their right hand.
It led to an archway large enough to accommodate a Terminator. The ferrocrete was sanded smooth.
Zerberyn walked through it and a sweeping turret opened out before him, large enough to land a Stormbird or to site heavy artillery. Its two-metre-high ramparts followed three-quarters of the circumference of a circle, until each end cut into the sides of the mountain into which the Iron Warriors had built their old fortress.
Sentinel servitors with low-oxygen enhancements looked out over the feeble atmosphere. Thousands of effluviam stacks broke the thin layer to belch toxic waste gases directly into the void. Behind the swaddling layer, the storm-wracked bulk of the gas giant Immitis VII seethed like a judgemental eye.
From the echoes of hammering, drilling and welding, Zerberyn knew that Forge-Brother Clathrin and his Iron Warriors counterpart would be conducting the serious work of shoring up the outer perimeter, retrofitting the back-up void bank hacked out of Implicit’s systems into the old fort’s age-withered grids. The older men of the manufactory slaves, the women, the younger boys, trimmed wires, sawed timber, shaped stone. The occasional whimper or cracked lash echoed up through the layered fortifications.
Zerberyn found the forced labour distasteful, but it was hardly the worst thing he had done in the name of necessity since becoming de facto lord of the Fists Exemplar. They had been slaves of the Iron Warriors long before his arrival, so what harm had he brought them? None.
He squinted in the dim, but unaccustomed daylight as Epistolary Honorius and Kalkator’s Apothecary, Barban, approached him.
Honorius was wearing Terminator plate without a helmet, his pale face like a pearl in a hard, dark shell of constrictor rings and armoured cabling. The Epistolary was paler even than Zerberyn, which was in itself disconcerting. Zerberyn’s skin was without pigment as he was the child of a world whose sun could kill, but Honorius was more ancient than he, and his recruitment predated the settlement of Eidolica by five centuries. His eyes, by contrast, were as black as the void beyond the Astronomican. He was a pressure on the psyche, a force against Zerberyn’s mind. Flickers of what could otherwise only be sensed steamed from the immensity of his armour plate like the corona of an eclipse.