The Beast Arises

Zerberyn panted in release. His eyes blurred. His skin tingled with the effects of pain-suppressants. The Apothecary kicked Zerberyn’s severed foot out from between the jammed doors. They slammed together, just as something huge bent them out of shape from the other side.

Reoch dropped down beside him and bent immediately to work, using his narthecium’s plasma cutter to cauterise the amputation. Zerberyn grunted. His physiology was adjusted to the higher pain threshold now, and he barely felt it.

Brother Antille and the handful of Scions crowded around them. That was all.

‘Sergeant Columba, and the others?’

‘Through the back wall, following Penitence’s locater beacon,’ said Antille. ‘We were cut off from them, and so intended to follow…’ he glanced sideways at Bryce, ‘our cousins.’

Zerberyn nodded. He would have come to the same conclusion in his brother’s place. It was reassuring.

The door shuddered as something hit it. The discharging power of a disruption field caused it to fold in.

Zerberyn reached for his bolt pistol before remembering that it was empty.

‘Faster, Apothecary.’

Twenty-One

Prax — Princus Praxa

Zerberyn limped down the unlit manufactorum hallway, leaning into Brother Antille’s shoulder to support himself on his remaining foot. The darkness was near absolute, leavened only by the green beams of the Scions’ visual augmenters. It was enough to make out the old blood and las-burns on the walls. The Praxians here had fought. Bestial cries and gunfire echoed through the abandoned rooms. He tried to inject some haste into his stride, but he had yet to adapt to his altered anatomy. A human would have been killed by blood loss or systemic shock by now, but his superiority over human norms was scant consolation.

After several minutes, the rattle of orkish fire growing nearer, the corridor took a ninety-degree turn.

In place of the wall that should have been in front of them, however, was a brick pile. There had been a false wall here. Behind it, illuminated now by the six Scions’ targeting beams, was a blast door that clearly had no due place in an agri-processing facility, large enough to admit a Space Marine in Tactical Dreadnought Armour. It looked like solid adamantium.

And the Iron Warriors had left it locked behind them. Reoch stepped forward and laid his gauntlets on the door. He turned back. His augmeticised face was a glowing skull in the gloom. He shook his head.

Unbreakable.

‘What now?’ Antille murmured.

Swallowing a curse that he could not afford to let the Scions hear, Zerberyn looked away from the door, manoeuvering himself towards the rune-numeric console mounted just inside the frame. Set into the terminal alongside the keypad was a palm scanner.

Kalkator had said that the base’s concealed entrances were secured by a genetic lock. There was genetic variation enough between the IV and their hated cousins of the VII to differentiate them with a fine enough scan, but Kalkator had also said that this fortress was built early in the Great Crusade. And that had been a different time, a time when his gene-ancestors and Kalkator might without rancour have called one another friend and brother.

For long seconds he hesitated, then removed his gauntlet and pushed his palm to the reader.

A red bar backlit the panel and scanned upwards. The light disappeared. Zerberyn tensed. There was a rumble of magnetic seals decoupling and the metal-on-metal scrape of disengaging locks. Zerberyn let out a breath as the blast door slid open.

‘From honour cometh iron. Have admittance, son of my brother.’

The voice was a scratchy, ancient recording, but retained some of the power it must once have held in flesh. It was strength, indomitable iron, something that time and worse than time could never fully corrupt. Zerberyn shivered, uncertain whether he had just been given a rare gift or the darkest curse.

‘Was that…?’

‘To what circle of damnation has he led us?’ said Reoch, his voice a whispered, almost reverential growl.

Visual augmenter beams painted the wall behind the blast door with green bands. It was a circular chamber about the same size as the interior of a drop pod, large enough to accommodate twelve Space Marines in full battleplate. Controls blinked in a variety of different colours. Diodes indicated up and down. Only the ‘down’ was illuminated, a soft white. It was an elevator.

With a nod to Antille, Zerberyn led them in.

Bryce and the Scions flowed in behind him, with Reoch entering last. The Apothecary examined the selector panel. The different levels of the complex were each indicated by an ivory button marked, from top to bottom, with an incrementally decreasing numeral. Reoch shrugged and punched the lowest button.

Zerberyn would have made the same choice.

Exemplars in action and in intent. Exemplars in forethought.