FLESH

Chris Wraight

Fifty years ago, they took my left hand.

I watched, conscious, heavy-headed with stimms and pain suppressants. I watched the knives go in, peeling back the skin, picking apart muscle and sinew.

They had trouble with the bones. I had changed by then and the ossmodula had turned my skeleton as hard as plasteel. They used a circular saw with glittering blades to cut through the radius and ulna. I can still hear its screaming whine.

They were simply following protocol. Indeed, they were further along the path than I was and there was something to be learned from the way they operated.

I kept it together. I am told that not everyone does.

It took three weeks for the new mechanism to bed down. The flesh chafed for a long time after that, red-raw against the metal of the implant.

I would wake and see it, an alien presence, bursting from the puffed and swollen stump of my left arm. I flexed iron fingers and watched micropistons and balance-nodes slide smoothly past one another. It looked delicate, though I knew it was stronger than the original had been.

Stronger, and better. Morvox spent a long time with me, explaining the benefits. He cast the issue in terms of pragmatism, of efficiency margins. Even back then I knew there was more to it than that.

This was an aesthetic matter. A matter of form. We were changing ourselves to comply with the dictates of taste.

Do not mistake this for regret. I do not regret what has been done to me. I cannot regret, not in any true sense.

My iron hand functions competently. It serves, just as I serve. It is an implement, just as I am an implement. No praise can be higher.

But my old flesh, the part of me that was immolated in the rite, overseen by those machine faces down in the forges, I do not forget it.

I will, one day. Like Morvox, I will not remember anything but the aesthetic imperative.

Not yet. For now, I still feel it.

I

From the Talex to Majoris, then over to the spine shafts and the turboclimbers. Levels swept by, all black, mottled with grime. Out of Station Lyris, and things got cleaner. Then up past the Ecclesiast Cordex, taking grav-bundles staffed by greyshirts, and into the Administratum quarter. That looked a lot like real grass on the lawns, baking under hololamps, before up again, through Securum and the plexiglass domes of the Excelsion.

Then things were really sparkling. Gleaming ceramics, floor-to-ceiling glass panels. You could forget the rest of the hive, the kilometres of squalid, close-pressed humanity, rammed into the angles between spires and manufactoria.

Right at the top, right where the tip of Ghorgonspire pierced the heavy orange fug of the sky, it felt like you’d never need a gland-deep dermoscrub again. You could imagine that everything on Helaj V was pristine and smooth as a Celestine’s conscience.

Raef Khamed, being a man of the world, was not prone to think that. He stalked up to Governor Tralmo’s offices, still in his Jenummari fatigues, still stinking from what had happened in 45/331/aX and from the journey up. His lasgun banged against his right thigh, loose in its waist-slung holster. It needed a recharge. He needed a recharge. He’d emptied himself out on those bastards, and they just kept coming.

The two greyshirts flanking the doors saw him coming and snapped their heels.

‘Jen,’ they said in rough unison, making the aquila.

‘She’s in there?’ asked Khamed, pushing the door open.

‘She is,’ came a voice from inside the chamber. ‘Shut the doors behind you.’

He went in, and did as he was told.

Khamed stood in a large circular chamber. The floor was veined stone, grey and pink. False windows lined the walls, looking out on to false meadows and false skies. A bonestone statue of Sanguinius Redemptor stood by the walls, pious and gloomy.

There was a desk at the far end, but it was empty. Set off to one side, three low couches had been set around a curved table.

In one of the couches sat Governor Planetary Anatova Tralmo, tight-skinned from a century of rejuvenat and with oil-shimmer hair. Next to her was Astropath Majoris Eridh, milk-eyed and staring.

‘How goes it?’ Tralmo asked as Khamed sat down. She winced a little as his grimy fatigues marked the cream surface of the couch.

‘Awful,’ said Khamed, not noticing. ‘Bloody awful. I’m not even going to try to describe what I saw this time.’

The Governor nodded sympathetically.

‘Then you’ll like this, I hope. Eridh?’

‘A response,’ said the Astropath, looking at Khamed in that eerie, sightless way of his. ‘Two cycles back, just deciphered and verified.’

Khamed’s weary face lit up. He’d begun to doubt there’d be one.

‘Throne,’ he said, letting his relief show. The time for bravado was long gone. ‘At last. Regiment?’

‘It’s not a Guard signal, Jenummari.’

‘Then what? Who?’

Eridh handed him a dataslate with a summary of the transmission, elucidated into verbose Helaj vernac.

Khamed looked at it, and his muscles tensed. He read it again, just to be sure. He discovered he was holding the slate rather too tightly.

If he’d been less tired, he might have hidden his response better. As it was, when he looked up, he knew he’d given everything away. For the first time, he noticed the air of tight expectation on Tralmo’s face.

Khamed had always liked her. Tralmo was tough. She didn’t shake easily and had been good during the difficulties.

Just then, she looked like she was going to throw up.

‘How long have we got?’ he asked, conscious of the sudden hoarseness in his voice.

‘Less than a standard Terran,’ replied Tralmo. ‘I want you to meet them, Raef. It’s protocol. We should keep this military to military.’

Khamed swallowed. He was still holding the slate too tightly.

‘Got you.’

Bitch.

The docking bay doors were a metre thick. They dragged open, grinding along rust-weakened rails. Outside, the platform was open to the elements. On Helaj, the elements were always hateful.

Tracer lights winked in the orange gale. Further out, deeper into the sub-zero atmospheric bilge, more lights whirled. The storm roared, just as it always did, grumbling away like a maddened giant turning in its sleep.

There was another roar over the platform, closer to hand than the storm, and it came from the blurred outline of a ship. The thing was a brute, far larger than the shuttles that normally touched down at the spire summit.

Khamed couldn’t make much out through the muck – his visor was already clouding up – but the engine backwash was huge. As he’d watched it come down on the local augurs he’d seen rows of squat gun barrels along its flanks, gigantic thruster housings and glimpses of a single infamous insignia.

That hadn’t made him feel well. He was on edge. His hands were sweaty even in the thick gloves of his environment suit. His heart hadn’t stopped thumping.

His men, twelve lostari lined up behind him, weren’t any better. They stared into the raging clouds ahead, their weapons clutched tight, held diagonally across their body armour.

We’re all soiling ourselves. Throne of Earth, trooper – get a handle on this.

The roar transmuted into a booming thunderclap, and the ship pulled away, back into the raging cloudscape. Its dark outline faded quickly, though the noise of those engines lingered for much longer.

New shapes emerged from the smog-filth, resolving into clarity like a carcharex out of the acid sea.

Five of them.

The Imperial Guard garrison in Ghorgonspire was over a hundred thousand strong. They’d made no progress against the incursion for six local lunars, which converted into a lot longer if you went with Terran.

Five of them. Five.

‘Formal,’ hissed Khamed over the vox.

His men snapped their ankles together and stared rigidly ahead.

The quintet approached. Khamed swallowed, and looked up.

Their armour was night-black and plainer than he’d expected. There were white markings on the shoulder-guards, but the finish was matt. Blunt, uncomplicated.

There was no getting away from the size of them. He’d been warned what to expect from Namogh, who’d witnessed a squad of Argent Sabres twenty years ago while on an exchange placement off-world.

‘You never get used to it,’ he’d said, his ugly face thoroughly disapproving. ‘You think, that’s a machine. It has to be. But in there, there’s a man. And then it moves, all that plate, tonnes and tonnes of it, and you know it can move quicker than you can, it can kill you quicker than you can blink, and then you think: I was right the first time. It is a machine, a nightmare machine, and if we need to make a thing like this to keep us alive, then the universe is a scary place.’

Their armour hummed. It was barely audible over the roar of the storm, but you knew it was there. Just like the ship Khamed had seen, the power stored up in those black shells was obvious. They didn’t need to hide it. They didn’t want to hide it. They strode – strutted – up to him, every movement soaked in menace and confidence and contempt.

Khamed bowed.

‘Welcome to Helaj V, lords,’ he said, and was disgusted to hear how his voice carried a tremor even over the tinny transmission of his helm vox. ‘We’re grateful to have you.’

‘I think that unlikely,’ came the response. It was machine-clipped. ‘But here we are. I am Brother-Sergeant Naim Morvox of the Iron Hands. Brief me as we descend, then the cleansing will begin.’

‘They come up from the underhive. We isolate the spearheads and respond with contagion-pattern suppression.’

Khamed had to trot beside the stalking figure of Morvox as he tried to explain the situation. The Iron Hands Space Marine made no effort to slow down and kept up a punishing, metronomic stride. Behind him, the other four giants matched pace. Their heavy treads clunked on the polished surface of the transit corridor. Khamed’s own men trailed in their wake.

‘With little success,’ observed Morvox. His voice. It was a strangely muted sound to come out of such a monstrous mouthpiece. Like all the Iron Hands squad, Morvox kept his helm on. The faceplate was a blank, dark mask.

‘We’ve succeeded in keeping them from the upper hive,’ replied Khamed, knowing how weak that sounded.

Morvox was approaching the honour guard: fifty lostari in greyshirt trim, ranked on either side of the corridor, guns hoisted.

‘But you have not eliminated the source.’

‘Not yet, no.’

From somewhere, Khamed heard Namogh’s voice call the troops to attention, and their ankles slammed together. It wasn’t done smoothly. The men were nervous.

‘I need access to your hive schematics,’ said Morvox, ignoring the troops and carrying on down the corridor. ‘When did it happen?’

‘8.2 Standard Terran lunars ago,’ replied Khamed, shrugging an apology as he sailed past Namogh’s position. His deputy looked even more irritated than usual. ‘Insurgents control fifty-five percent, all lower hive. We have no access to the levels below the base forge.’

‘And I’ll need full asset inventory. All troops are under my command. What is your name?’

Only now. Now you ask.

‘Raef Khamed, Jenum–’

‘You will remain with me. We will commence assault as soon as I have the data. Your men will be mobilised by then and I will order their deployment.’

‘Very good. The men stand read–’

‘Warn them they will need to be.’

They passed from the long corridor, through a pair of slide doors and into an octagonal command node. The walls were lined with picts. There were cogitator banks along the near flank, attended to by servitors bearing the cog-skull of the Mechanicus. Hololiths shimmered over projection pillars showing various cross-sections of the Ghorgonspire.

Morvox stopped walking. He said nothing, but his squad immediately fanned out and began to assimilate information from the picts. One of them pushed a servitor aside and extruded a dataclaw from a compartment in his gauntlet. None of them spoke out loud, though Khamed guessed that there was plenty of chat over closed channels.

‘Leave us now,’ ordered Morvox.

Khamed hesitated for a moment. Only minutes had passed since the docking bay doors had opened. This was all happening very quickly and he’d expected... well, he didn’t know what he’d expected.

‘Your will, lord,’ he said, bowing.

He withdrew from the command node and blast doors slid closed behind him. He turned, and saw Namogh waiting for him.

‘So?’ the deputy asked. Orfen Namogh looked out of place in ceremonial armour, and it fitted him badly. Then again, the deputy only looked comfortable with dirt smeared on his face and a lasgun stock wedged against his shoulder.

‘We asked for help,’ said Khamed. He suddenly felt weary. He hadn’t slept for twenty hours. ‘We got it. Get everything together – we’re going in again and they’re in charge now.’

It took longer than he expected. The Iron Hands didn’t emerge from the command node for over seven hours, during which time Khamed snatched some sleep, reviewed tactical readouts from the containment operation, and shared a meal of dried multimeat and tarec with Namogh.

‘We’re going to have to work with them, Orfen,’ said Khamed, chewing through the gristle methodically.

‘No,’ said Namogh bluntly. ‘No, we’re not. You don’t work with them. They order you into shitholes. You go down them. That’s the way it works.’

‘Fine. But stow your attitude. I don’t want it getting down to the grunts.’

Namogh laughed, and took a swig of tarec. He had flecks of meat all over his big, yellow teeth.

‘Don’t worry. They’re all crapping themselves already. And I haven’t said a thing.’

A bead on Khamed’s starched collar blinked red. Despite himself, he felt his stomach lurch.

‘What are we afraid of?’ he muttered, getting up and retrieving his helmet.

‘You heard of Contqual?’ asked Namogh, wiping his mouth and following Khamed out of the hab. ‘You heard what they did there?’

Khamed brushed his uniform down and put his helmet on, twisting the seal as he walked.

‘You shouldn’t believe what you read, Orfen,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of crap on the grids.’

‘One in three. That’s how many they killed. Punitive measures, they called them. And those poor bastards were on our side.’

Khamed opened the blast doors from the officers’ quarters and strode out into the antechamber of the command node. He kept his shoulders back, head straight. The little things were important.

‘Like I said. There’s a lot of crap out there.’

He opened the doors. Morvox was waiting on the far side of them, vast and mordant.

‘We have what we need,’ said the Iron Father. ‘Now we go in.’

Out of the Excelsion, moving at a clip, and into the long bunkers of Securum, lit by gloomy strip-lumens. Administratum was amusing, with scholiasts looking terrified at the sight of the black giants striding through the lexchambers. Then down into the vaults of the Cordex. Some of the priests had tried to perform some kind of benediction on the Space Marines there, but had been simply brushed aside, just like everyone else.

After that, the dirt got bad. The air got hot. The floor got sticky, and the aircon wheezed like a phenexodrol junkie. There were men waiting at Station Lyris, arranged in ranks of a hundred. They looked pretty good, kitted out in full staff grey and assault armour. There wasn’t much blood to be seen. The floors must have been swabbed.

‘Will you address them?’ asked Khamed, not really knowing whether that would be good or bad for morale.

‘No,’ said Morvox, and kept moving.

He never stopped moving. He just kept going.

Then you think: I was right the first time. It is a machine, a nightmare machine.

It was the implacability that was so unsettling. They looked almost invulnerable, to be sure, and their armour-hum was eerily threatening. But it was the sense you got, the sense that they would just keep on going, that got to you.

A mortal would know when to quit, even a dogged one like Namogh.

They wouldn’t. Ever.

‘How do you want the lostari deployed?’

‘You have orders on the tac. For now, just try to keep up.’

Then down again, past the station bulwarks and along service runners towards the core hab clusters. The light got worse. The shafts got smaller and less well repaired. Loops of cables hung down from the roof, and moisture pooled in dark corners. Defective lumens guttered behind panels of iron mesh.

They were getting to the heart of it. Half a kilometre down in Ghorgonspire was like being a long way underground. The nearest patch of sky was buried under a lot of rockcrete. The air that coughed through the circulation systems was humid and smelled of human excreta. Major power grids had gone down early on in the difficulties, and battlefield gen-units struggled to keep the lumens in operation.

Khamed switched on vision-aug in his helmet. The men in his lead unit, twenty of them, did the same. They were all practically running in the wake of the Iron Hands, none of whom had broken their striding rhythm.

‘This is Node 4R,’ announced Morvox, coming up to a massive, closed siege gate at the end of the corridor. On either side of it, teams of greyshirt sentries waited warily, weapons hoisted. ‘We will cleanse it. Consolidate in our wake. Are you prepared?’

Khamed was already out of breath. He shot a quick glance back down the crowded corridor. His lead unit was in readiness. Behind it, stretched out in the gloom of the long tunnel, were more squads coming into position. He could see some of them ramming energy packs into their lasguns and strapping helmets securely. They were as prepared as they would ever be.

‘On your command,’ he said, nodding to Morvox.

‘We do not need your fire support. Do not join the assault. Secure the ground we clear. You will be given new orders on completion.’

Something was exchanged over a private channel, and the Space Marines unlocked their sidearms. Four of them, Morvox included, carried huge, boxy guns with blunt barrels and a chunky protruding magazine. They looked more like grenade launchers than regular firearms.

The fifth hoisted a truly massive weapon – an artillery piece with a core housing the size of a man’s torso. It took both hands to hold it and there was a grip over the main carriage. A loop of ammunition hung underneath, stiff and chain-linked.

That wasn’t all. They had blades. Some of them were like the short stabbing swords Khamed’s own men used, albeit twice as big. Others weren’t. Two of the giants carried massive rotary saws in their free hands, each one shaped like a gigantic broadsword.

Those weapons were ludicrous. Outsized, industrial-scale killing implements, dreamed up by some crazed enginseer and borne by superhumans. Khamed knew that he would have barely been able to lift one of those guns, and yet they hefted them lightly, one-handed.

He swallowed dryly. He also knew what was on the other side of the barrier.

‘Open the gate,’ he voxed.

And so the doors opened, grinding against metal, punishing old and arthritic gears, gradually exposing the chamber beyond and framing a window on to Hell.

II

Land Engine. Long for its class – a kilometre from sensorium fronds at the head to waste grinders at the arse. Vast, swaying, crowned with parapets of dusty smog that rolled down the side armour. Faint yellow lights studded weathered plate, tiny in the howling storm.

It rocked against the wind. Gigantic suspension coils flexed with the movement, supporting the thousands of tonnes of superstructure and its long, long train of drive mechanics, processing tracks, forges, crew habs and weapon banks.

All the time, the engines growled. On and on. They never stopped.

It was making good speed: 0.3 kilometres an hour, Medusan measures. The drives were operating noisily, making the floors tremble and shaking the black dust from the intakes.

Outside, it was blowing a gale, thick and black and grimy. There were voices on the wind, wailing.

On Medusa, it was always blowing a gale, thick and black and grimy. On Medusa, there were always voices on the wind.

Ahead of the Land Engine, the plain stretched away in a morass of cracks and sharp-stepped rock. On the far horizon, red lightning jumped down from the smogline.

Haak Rejn sat back in his metal lattice chair and rubbed his eyes. He felt the metal of his right optical implant snag on his skin.

There were picts around him in the sensorium chamber – a narrow control unit perched right out at the fore-left corner of the lead crawler unit. The screens were close-packed and flickering orange. Runes burned dimly, summarising feedback from the Mordecai’s seven thousand augur pinpoints. His implant helped him make sense of them.

It also gave him headaches. The implant burned the whole time, dull and hot. The damn thing was like a chunk of molten metal in his skull. But he didn’t complain. It had never occurred to him to complain. Neither had it occurred to him to complain when they’d flank-wired him into the lattice chair, nor when the flesh of his thighs had withered away to straws from lack of movement, nor when he’d found he could no longer sleep except after a double shot of dousers and a course of binreflex exercises.

Very few people on Medusa saw the point in complaining. It wasn’t that kind of place.

Something flickered on one of the picts. Rejn blinked blearily and reached over to it. He turned the gain up and calibrated his implant with it.

‘Throne,’ he swore, and ramped up the feed. ‘Traak, you getting that?’

A thousand metres away, on the far side of the Mordecai’s lead unit, a commlink crackled into life.

‘Yeah.’ Traak’s voice was sluggish, like he’d been trying to snatch a nap. ‘I know what I’d like to think. Put a crawler down?’

‘Good. I’m on it.’

Rejn’s right hand, the one that could still move, worked the input vectors. His left, the one that terminated in a bunch of steel cables, twitched as his neural link communicated with the Mordecai’s Soul. It took a few moments for the protocols to clear.

Acknowledgement come back over the grid. From somewhere a long way down, he heard metal grind back against metal. There was a shuddering movement, and then a heavy crash. He switched to another pict, one that watched the port flank of the Land Engine’s lead unit.

A hatch had opened near the base of the unit between two tread housings. A ramp extended from it, gouging a slow furrow in the rock below as it made contact.

A four-tracked crawler rolled down. Its angular, ugly frame rocked as it hit the plain. Exhaust columns belched black soot, and then it was off, lurching across the uneven surface.

Rejn switched to the crawler feed. Static rushed across the pict before clarifying. He saw the shape of a man resolve out of the blinding duststorm. The figure was still on his feet, leaning into the wind, limping badly. His ragged clothing was covered in plains-dust, making him look like so much charred meat.

The crawler reached his position and ground to a halt. The man staggered up to the back of it and hauled himself in. The crawler swung round and headed back to the ramp.

Rejn switched to an interior cam. The man was slumped in the corner of the crawler’s load bay.

‘Life signs,’ ordered Rejn.

A series of indicators ran down his nearside pict. All low, all borderline viable.

Tough bastard. He’d make it, if they got him up to the medicae in time. Rejn punched the order into the grid and heard the click as the Soul registered.

‘Any markings?’ asked Traak, no doubt looking at the same feed.

‘Not yet,’ said Rejn, zooming in and scanning across the dirt-streaked face. Whatever the man had been doing, it had nearly killed him. Half his storm armour had been ripped away. ‘He’s not one of ours.’

‘Can you patch an ident?’

‘Yeah, just give me a second, dammit.’

Rejn watched as the crawler came back onboard. He ran a request and got clearance for a deep scan. The augurs calibrated, and a line of laser red ran down the man’s body in a long sweep. The temple-stud got picked up and a fresh burst of data loaded on to the grid. Rejn looked at it carefully.

‘Anything?’

Traak was getting annoying.

‘Nothing to get excited about,’ replied Rejn, preparing to shunt the data up to medicae and close the crawler hatch. ‘Gramen clan, long way from home. Manus only knows what he’s doing out here.’

‘And a name?’

‘Morvox. Doesn’t mean much to me. You? Naim Kadaan Morvox.’

Land Engine. Smaller than the Mordecai but taller and more heavily armoured. It had no clan markings on the hull and its flanks were black. No lights blinked across the carapace, and the steep sided flanks were free of ore intake ramps.

As it inched its way across the desolate plain, the storm hammered uselessly against it. It didn’t sway.

Deep within the core, far into the sarcophagus of metal and rockcrete and machinery, there was a half-lit chamber, perfectly square. The floor was black stone. The walls were lined with an organic mass of piping. The roof was vaulted, crowned with an iron boss and studded with weak downlights.

A man knelt in the centre of the chamber. He was naked, and the light glistened from the sweat on his skin. His shaven head was lowered in submission. Around him were robed figures, tall and broad-shouldered. They wore metal masks.

The grind of engines made the walls tremble.

One of the robed figures stepped out. He looked down at the kneeling figure for a long time, saying nothing.

When he spoke at last, the voice did not match his huge frame. It was thin and flat, as if run through overzealous audio filters.

‘Of all the aspirants from Gramen, only you survived the trial of the plains. What lesson is there in this?’

The kneeling figure neither responded nor moved.

‘Well?’

‘I do not know, lord.’

‘There is no lesson. You are not chosen. You are not unique. Some years, none come back. Some years, many do.’

The kneeling figure kept his head down. His muscles trembled slightly from holding position. His physique was impressive – tight, lean flesh over a tall frame. There were many scars on that flesh. Fresh wounds too.

‘You may prosper in the trials to come. You may die from them. In all this, do not look for fate. Do not look for significance. There is only what functions and what does not.’

‘Yes, lord.’

The robed giant withdrew a long steel blade. It was not a fighting blade – too clean, too fragile. It had a look of a surgical instrument, albeit one with a ceremonial purpose.

‘You will learn this. You will learn that the path of your life is not unique. It has purpose only as part of a whole. You are an element within a system. You are a piece within a mechanism.’

The blade came closer. The kneeling man extended his left arm, holding it rigid before him, fist clenched. His head stayed bowed.

‘As time passes, you will see the truth of this. You will wish to discard those things that remind you of how you are now. You will forget that you were the only survivor of the trial. You will only remember the trial itself. You will remember the process. You will be the process.’

The giant kneeled in front of the naked man, and placed the blade against the flesh of the forearm, halfway between wrist and elbow. The cutting edge rested on the sweat-sheened skin.

‘This is the first mark of that process. Do you wish it to continue?’

The question was incongruous. The journey had already been started, and there were no choices left. Perhaps the question was a hangover from some older rite, a rite where personal determination had mattered more than it did now.

‘I wish it,’ came the response.

The blade pressed into the skin, carving deep. It slid to the right, leaving a clean cut in the muscle before slipping out. The man emitted the faintest intake of breath at the pain. Blood welled up quickly, thick and hot.

He was still mortal. His control was not yet perfect.

The giant stood up, letting the blood run down the blade, and withdrew.

‘That is the mark,’ he said. ‘That is where the greater cut will be made.’

The blade passed from view.

‘Rise, Aspirant Morvox. You are no longer what you were. From this point on, you will be a battle brother of the Iron Hands Clan Raukaan, or you will be nothing.’

III

The siege gates opened.

They exposed a long, wide hall beyond. It was almost totally dark, lit only by flares of orange gas from a broken supply conduit. The ceiling was lost in a writhing morass of gloomy mechanics. Bracing pillars, heavy columns of black iron, studded the rust-streaked floor.

They came out of the shadows, as if released by some soundless command. Dozens of them, bloated and chattering. Some hauled their distended stomachs along the ground, leaving trails of glittering pus in their wake. Others were emaciated, nothing more than sacks of leathery skin and splintered bone. Some of the bodies had fused together, creating sickening amalgams of men with multiple limbs, suppurating flesh and weeping organs hanging in chains. Some had talons, or bone outgrowths, or dull black teeth, or wickedly spiked spine ridges.

Only the eyes were the same on all of them. They glowed in the dark, lime green and as bright as stars. No pupils studded those eyes, just blank screens of eerie witchlight. As the gates opened to the full, the eyes narrowed. Faces, marked with fangs and hanging jaws and long lines of clumsy sutures, contorted into a mix of hatred and joy.

They scuttled into combat like spiders. They wanted it. What debased existence they possessed hungered for it in a way that they would hunger for nothing else ever again.

Khamed, still in the relative safety of the corridor outside the hall, watched them come, a weary sickness in his stomach. He’d been fighting those monsters for months. Every week, he’d fallen back a little further. Every week, a few dozen more of his men hadn’t got back to the rally points in time.

And back then he’d always known that the next time he saw them the shambling horde would have more tattered grey uniforms hanging from hunched shoulders, and there would be more remnants of faces he recognised.

He gripped his sidearm with sweaty hands, keeping it in position, ready to go in again when the order came.

Then the Iron Hands got to work.

They didn’t move fast. Khamed had heard that the Emperor’s Angels could fight like daemons, hacking and whirling and tearing their foe apart in an orgy of destruction. These ones didn’t. They walked out calmly, spreading out in front of the siege gates, opening fire from their massive weapons in long, perfectly controlled torrents.

Khamed just watched. The more he watched, the more he appreciated the truth of the legends he’d heard. For the first time in months, he dared to hope that the Spire would be saved. It was then that he realised just how strange that emotion – hope – had become to him.

The giants’ firearms were neither las-tech nor solid ammunition. Khamed realised what they were as soon as the first volley went off. The Iron Hands used explosive charges, primed to ignite on impact. The noise of their discharge was phenomenal. They maintained a withering wall of fire, tearing apart the oncoming ranks of walking dead in an orgy of slime and fluid. The muzzle flashes lit up the hall in a riot of sharp electric light, exposing the tortured faces of their victims in brief, snatched freeze-frames.

The heavy weapon that one giant carried two-handed thundered like nothing Khamed had heard before. Its operator, placed right in the centre of the squad formation, wielded it calmly, drawing the devastating column of destruction across the enemy in a slow, deliberate sweep.

The enemy were not just killed. They were obliterated, blasted apart, torn into tatters of flapping skin and powdered bone. Bitter experience had taught Khamed that you couldn’t down them with a flesh wound – you had to take them out with a head-shot or knock their torsos into pulp. That wasn’t a concern for the giants. They walked into the hall, methodically firing the whole time, laying down a maelstrom of destruction, not letting a single mutant get out of the path of their awesome, silent vengeance.

Then, suddenly, the deluge stopped. The echo of the massed volley died away. The hall sunk back into gloom. The Iron Hands remained poised to fire, their weapons held ready. They had advanced halfway across the space. Everything in front of them had been killed.

Khamed stayed where he was for a moment, ears ringing, stunned by what he had just witnessed. Then, cursing himself, he remembered his orders.

‘Follow them in,’ he snapped over the comm to his men. ‘And look like you know what you’re doing.’

He stepped over the threshold, sweeping his lasgun warily up and around. His boot nearly slipped and he looked down. The floor was covered in a thick carpet of bubbling sludge. It was moving. Some of it was bloody; some looked like sewage. An eyeball, swollen and yellow, floated past him, carried down into foaming drainage ducts by the current.

They’d been rendered down into soup. Flesh soup.

Ahead of him, the Iron Hands were calmly reloading. One of them took out what looked like a handheld sensor and tapped on it with a blunt armoured finger.

‘Raef Khamed,’ said Morvox. There was no inflexion there, nothing to indicate the extreme violence the giant had just unleashed. ‘The area is cleansed. We will progress to Nodes 34, 45, 47 and then assess. Immolate this chamber and secure it. Deployment patterns are on the tac.’

‘As you command, lord,’ said Khamed, his voice sounding very quiet after the wall of noise.

The Iron Hands hadn’t waited for the acknowledgement. They pressed on, heading deeper into the dark reaches of the lower hive. Already, from far below, sounds of scratching and screaming were massing.

Namogh’s voice crackled over the comm.

‘You need backup, Jen?’ he asked. His voice sounded worried. ‘We’ve got a lot of static at your position.’

‘No,’ said Khamed, knowing that he sounded distracted and not really caring. ‘No, maintain your position. I think we’re good. Throne, I actually think we’re good.’

It got harder. The lower levels had been dens of disease and corruption for years, and the mutants had had time to turn it into a paradise of pustulation.

The walls were alive with curtains of viscous slime. Growths burst out of air-con ducts, corpulent and luminous. Quasi-human mutants shambled up from the depths, heedless of their losses, jaws wide and ringed with filed-down teeth. They screamed like mockeries of children, stretching warped vocal cords beyond their tolerances. Khamed saw one grotesque long-necked mutant scream itself to a standstill, its throat overflowing with a bubbling cocktail of phlegm and clots. Morvox aimed a single shot and the creature’s head exploded in a shower of sticky, whirling gobbets, silencing the shrill chorus from its owner.

As they descended, the layout of the tunnels changed. Ceilings closed in and walls narrowed. The slurry of excreta was ankle-deep at the best of times, knee-deep at the worst. There was no reliable light – just the sweeping lumen beams from helmets, exposing the breadth of the horror in fragmentary pools of surgical illumination.

Every mutant coming for them had once been a human inhabitant of the hive. Every contorted face had once run the full gamut of human laughs and tears. They had been technicians, lectors, machine operators, arbitrators.

No one knew exactly when it had started. The first signs had been small ones – increased workload at the medicae stations, reports of infection in the scholae, power-loss in the deep hive and rioting across the semi-policed hinterlands running out to the ore-plains.

The authorities hadn’t been slow to act. Tralmo was sharp, and had never been negligent. There had been quarantines, shipments of antibiotics, blockades of crime-controlled sectors and curfews across the Ghorgonspire.

But by the time the 1324th lostari ‘greyshirt’ Imperial Guard had been mobilised to restore order, it was already out of hand. The situation had changed from a public health problem to a fight for survival, and so it had stayed for months.

They never got to the bottom of what had caused it. The originator was, presumably, buried far down in the depths, squatting in the dark places under Ghorgonspire that had long been lost to the contagion. The Holy Emperor alone knew what was down there, pumping bile and energy into the ruined bodies of those it had corrupted.

Such speculation was useless. The Iron Hands moved with purpose. They punched through the ragged columns of mutants like a blade through rusty armour, tearing and burning and hacking and blasting. They never sped up, never slowed down. Step by step, metre by metre, they reclaimed lost ground, operating like silent golems of myth.

In their wake came the mortal troops, reinvigorated by the example they had in front of them. Exhausted lostari found the will to take the fight to the mutants. Volleys of lasfire suddenly found their marks more often. Objectives were isolated, taken and consolidated. With the indomitable example of the Space Marines in front of them, the 1324th lostari of Helaj V stood up, and found they were stronger than their desperation had made them believe.

They descended from level to level in orderly bursts of activity, clearing out connecting chambers of filth and pressing on into the tunnels beyond. Flamers came next, boiling off the stinking layers of slime and acid and charring the metal beneath. Obscene sigils were scored from the walls. Power was restored. The mark of the Imperium was reinstated.

At the forefront, as ever, were the Iron Hands, the Emperor’s holy Angels of Death.

And as they killed in those terrible, industrial quantities, never had a moniker seemed so apt.

The eyes came out of the darkness as if swimming up from the frigid abyss. They swarmed, flocking at the invaders, locked into snarls and yells of utter mindless hatred. As they neared, limbs became visible. Limbs with hooks run through them, or stitches running down them, or iron pins shoved up under the necrotic skin and bulging like parasites.

Khamed shrugged off his tiredness and shouldered his lasgun. He moved smoothly, aping the frictionless methods of the Iron Hands who fought ahead of him, and drew a bead on the lead mutant.

He fired, and his las-beam cracked off, impacting between a pair of staring green eyes and cracking the skull into hemispheres.

Another kill.

And then he was moving again, marshalling his squad and pushing them forward. He swept his muzzle round, looking for mutants crawling across the roof or punching their way through sewer outlets.

They were deep down and the air was hot and seamy. No light existed save for the mess of helmet lumen beams, and every trooper was now on full infrared. The chamber was just like a hundred they’d already cleansed – close, claustrophobic, stuffed with a crawling mass of suppurating terror.

It had ceased to matter. Khamed had begun to forget his life had ever involved anything different. The undead poured towards him, snapping fangs and loping on all fours into contact. He reacted passionlessly, efficiently, optimising his shots and taking time over the targeting. He could rely on the Iron Hands to take out the mass of them – he was there to mop up the stragglers and the outriders.

He swung round just as three skinny mutants, their bulbous heads bobbing on scrawny necks, bolted from cover and out toward the leftmost Space Marine of the Iron Hands squad. Each one was carrying heavy projectile weapons and let off a flurry of lead as they splashed through the ankle-deep lake of effluvium.

Khamed got his aim and fired, missing the lead mutant by a finger’s width. In the time it took him to curse, wipe his eyes and re-aim, it was over.

The Iron Hand didn’t seem to move fast. He seemed to move with the same unearthly, ponderous manner as his brothers. But, somehow, he got his weapon up and fired off a round before the mutants had taken another step. The bolt crashed through the neck of the first, tearing the muscles open and leaving the head lolling on stretched sinews like an amulet. It exploded in the chest of the second, blowing open a ravaged ribcage into splayed splinters.

Then the sword, the mad sword with its insane rotary blades, swept round in a heavy lash, whipping out sticky fluid from previous kills. The surviving mutant tried to dart under it, aiming to get close enough to use a rusty killing blade it held in its left hand.

The Iron Hand adjusted the weapon’s descent and the sword whirred into the mutant’s leading shoulder. It burrowed down, carving its way through diseased muscle bunches and flinging out gouts of boiling, frothing blood. The mutant screamed for a fraction of a second, locked in agony as the juddering blades ate through its bony frame and minced what was left of it into a marrow-flecked broth of body fluids.

The Space Marine hauled the sword free, breaking the ruined body of his prey into two pieces as it was withdrawn. Then he turned, implacable as ever, and kept on fighting.

He’d never said a word. He’d not changed a thing. No hurry, no fuss.

Nightmare machines.

Khamed laughed.

The Jenummari laughed as he brought his own weapon round and splashed through the filth, looking for new targets. It was a laugh of disbelief, a laugh of wonder that killers of such intensity existed in the universe. It was a laugh of fear, and of relief that they were on his side. He had last laughed six months ago, and the noise of it was unfamiliar in his parched throat.

‘Keep up, you dogs!’ he snapped over the comm.

He wasn’t scared anymore. His body pumped with adrenaline. He was beginning to enjoy himself.

That, of course, was his first mistake.

It was fast as well as strong. Its hide was pale brown, like old leather. It had four heavy arms, perhaps grafted on to the torso by some demented chirurgeon. Its face was long, stretched by weights nailed to its distended chin. The skin of its cheeks was ripped and weeping and its clustered eyes bled witchlight.

As it crashed through the slurry, it howled like a dog. Its hands clenched pairs of gouges, each dripping with virulent, glistening fluid. Long, lank hair flailed around it as it came, and trails of livid saliva hung down from a bloodstained jaw.

It veered sharply, crashing its way through a knot of its own warped kin. They were crushed underfoot as it came, trampled into the mix of blood and mucus that bubbled underfoot.

For once, the Space Marines missed the main target. They were all occupied, pinning back the tide of raging, screaming fury that hammered against them. Their guns slammed back into their armoured fists, spitting the surge of reactive rounds that cracked and boomed into the oncoming wall of corrupted flesh.

Khamed saw the mutant come in his direction, and the laughter died in his mouth. One of his men got a shot, and a las-beam whipped across it.

It didn’t drop. It launched itself into the close-packed press of lostari, limbs whirling, roaring a strangled cry of ecstasy and fury.

Khamed tried to swivel round to get an angle, but slipped. He crashed back to the ground, bracing himself with his free arm, only to see three of his men taken out by the mutant. It went for their throats, biting through the neck armour and shaking their limp corpses. Las-beams seared into it, ripping away whole strips of skin, but that didn’t slow it down much. It rampaged through the knot of men, shrugging off anything that hit it, scattering the survivors. Then it turned and saw Khamed.

It smiled.

The mutant leapt at him, all four arms extended. Khamed fired again, hitting it once in its massive chest. Then he was scrabbling back through the scummy fluid, desperately trying to clear some distance.

The mutant stumbled from the las impact, then regained its feet. It lurched down and grabbed Khamed’s trailing boot. Khamed felt the vice close around his ankle and thrashed to escape, kicking wildly.

He stood no chance. The mutant pulled him back savagely, gurgling, readying its blades for the plunge that would rip his stomach open. Khamed was wrenched back, dragged through the liquid and along the chamber floor. Frothy slime splashed across his helmet, running across the visor and clouding it in a film of brown.

Khamed fired again, blindly, and heard the snap of the lasbeam as it shot harmlessly into the roof. Then the gun was knocked from his grasp. He tensed for the bite of the gouges, knowing that they would plunge low, right into his gut.

Then something huge exploded above him, throwing the slime up in waves. The grip on his ankle released. Khamed pulled himself out of the grime and shook the screen of filth from his visor.

The mutant was gone. Its lifeless body was crumpled up against the metal wall, pumping black blood solidly. In front of Khamed loomed an Iron Hand, filling his field of vision, vast, black and indomitable.

‘Can you fight?’ came the voice from behind the visor.

It wasn’t Morvox. The tone wasn’t as metallic, not as heavily filtered. It almost sounded human, albeit far more daunting and resonant than any human Khamed had ever encountered.

‘Yes,’ he said, shaking himself down and bending to retrieve his lasgun. ‘Yes, I can.’

‘Then do so,’ replied the Space Marine, turning away from him and striding back to the main fighting. The chamber was still full of the sounds of combat. Fresh lostari were piling in to replace those felled by the mutant, but there was no sign yet of the horde of bloated horrors relinquishing the chamber. The clamour of bolter detonations, howls and screams just kept on going.

Khamed watched the Iron Hand go, his heart thumping hard. He realised his hands were shaking, and clenched his fists to stop it.

Then do so.

He hefted his lasgun again, checking to see if the fluids had interfered with the mechanism. The simple things helped.

‘Very well,’ he muttered, still trembling. He braced himself and looked for a target. ‘I will.’

The noise of the assault died away. The Iron Hands began to move on, wading their way toward a long access shaft. They maintained the same pace as before, never speeding up, never slowing down.

The same punishing pace wasn’t possible for the mortal troops. They needed rotations, rest periods, resupply and medicae treatment. After hours of fighting, almost without respite, Khamed’s turn had finally come.

Namogh’s force-signal flashed across his helmet display, indicating that he was moving into position to relieve him. Khamed turned to the Space Marine who had rescued him, still the closest to hand of the quintet. For some reason, it felt more natural to address that one than Morvox, who in any case had already stalked off into the dark ahead.

‘My deputy will provide fire support beyond this node,’ Khamed announced. His voice gave away his extreme fatigue. The adrenaline from the last encounter had drained away, leaving him feeling empty. ‘This detachment needs to rotate.’

The Space Marine turned to face him. His facemask was streaked with blood and bile, making him look even more grotesque than normal. There was a pause, possibly due to some internal comms between the squad.

‘We will maintain the assault,’ the Iron Hand replied. ‘Order relief forces to follow us down when they get here.’

The Space Marine turned to move off, then stopped. He looked Khamed up and down.

‘How long have you been on your feet?’

‘Fifteen hours, lord. The same as you.’

The Space Marine nodded slowly.

‘Fifteen hours.’ There was a strange noise from the vox grille. On a human, it might have been a laugh – a strange, attenuated snort. From one of the giants, Khamed wasn’t willing to assume anything.

‘We forget where we come from, sometimes,’ said the Iron Hand. The tone of voice was almost reflective. ‘You fought well, human. Tell the others they fought well.’

Khamed didn’t reply at once, stunned by the unexpected compliment. Then suddenly, from nowhere, encouraged by the unlikely candour from the Angel of Death, he dared to ask for more.

‘I will, lord,’ he said. ‘But I have no name to give them.’

Again, the noise. Perhaps irritation. Perhaps amusement. Perhaps warning.

‘Ralech,’ came the reply, before the Space Marine strode off to join his brother warriors. ‘Ralech Grond, Clan Raukaan, Medusa. Tell them that.’

‘He said that?’

Khamed nodded between gulps of stimm-laced water. He was enjoying Namogh’s expression – a cross between disbelief, horror and disapproval.

‘I don’t believe it.’

Khamed put the canteen down. He was sitting on an old iron crate, shoulders hunched and head low. He could already feel oncoming sleep crowding out his thoughts. The chamber was full of men, exhausted ones from his command being replaced with fresher ones under Namogh’s.

‘He was almost… normal.’

‘Crap.’

‘I’m telling you.’

Khamed watched the survivors of his platoon limp back up toward the transit shafts at the rear end of the chamber. Their armour was caked in filth and blood. Some couldn’t walk unaided and hung like sides of meat from the shoulders of their comrades. He’d be joining them soon.

‘I think they change,’ said Khamed thoughtfully. ‘The leader – Morvox – he’s further down the road than the others. They forget.’

Namogh spat into the floor-slurry, and the spittle spun gently away toward the drain meshing.

‘You’ve taken a hit, Jen,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘They don’t feel nothing. They’d throw us into the grinder without a blink.’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘They ain’t human.’

‘Not now, no.’

‘We’re nothing to them. Just spare parts.’

Khamed looked up at his deputy. Namogh was as adamant as ever. His ugly face was twisted with distaste. There was anger there, to be sure, but also fear. Khamed couldn’t blame him for that. The Iron Hands scared everyone, even the mutants.

‘I don’t want to believe that, Orfen,’ said Khamed quietly. ‘They are sons of the Emperor, just as we are. We fight together.’

‘Crap. You’re delusional.’

‘But what changes them?’ asked Khamed, ignoring Namogh. He remembered the way Grond’s voice had sounded. ‘Why do they change? I’d like to know that.’

IV

The knife went in, moving across the flesh of the arm, tracing a thin line of blood.

Morvox watched it. He had an almost uncontrollable urge to seize the nearest medicae servitor by its desiccated throat and slam it against the walls of the apothecarion.

That had been predicted. He fought the urge down. The hormones in his body, the ones introduced during the changes, made him belligerent in the face of injury.

The servitors carried on, heedless of the turmoil in their patient. They moved on tank tracks around the metal chair Morvox had been clamped into. Their faces were shiny curves of steel, dotted with sensoria. Their limbs were entirely augmetic and terminated in a dozen different surgical devices. They chattered to one another in a basic form of binaric. It was a soft, low clicking backdrop to their grisly work.

The skin was peeled back, exposing raw muscle. The ligatures below the bicep tensed. The knives went in again, parting the muscle mass.

Morvox watched it happen. He watched the rotary saw whine through the bone. It had only just finished growing into its new, improved form. Amputating it seemed wasteful.

They broke the bones. He watched his hand fall away, clutched in the claws of a metal servitor. He watched the blood run out of the wrist, steaming as it cooled in its steel bowl. He watched sutures run across his severed forearm, rebinding the muscles and stabilising them. He watched the drills go in and the pre-augmetic bindings lock on to his broken bones.

There was hours of work to come. Rods would be implanted, running nearly up to his elbow. Braces would encircle the pronator, studding through the skin of his forearm. Neural relays would be dropped into place, and nerve-sockets, and tendon housings. And then, finally, they would drill in the new hand, the mark of his Chapter, the sign of fealty to the primarch and to the ideals of Medusa.

He would watch it all. The procedure was the mark of passage, the signal of his transition from mortal to superhuman. When it was complete, it would make him stronger. He knew this. It was fact, as revealed by Iron Father Arven Rauth, and so could not be doubted.

But, even though he knew it to be true, even as he watched the rods go in, bisecting the muscles that had kept him alive out on the ash plains, he did not yet believe it.

One day, like the Iron Father who had retrieved him from the trials, Morvox would not remember anything but the aesthetic imperative, the desire to purge the machine of the flesh that impeded it. One day, Morvox would no doubt pass on the ways of Manus to another, believing it with both hearts, no longer regretting the loss of a part of himself.

But not yet.

For now, he still felt it.

There were more trials. Long years as a neophyte, learning the ways of the Adeptus Astartes. A hundred worlds, all different, all the same.

He saw them first as a Scout, learning to use his enhanced body without the full protection of power armour. He enjoyed feeling his augmented muscles flex. He revelled in the strength of his new sinews. He could run for hours without fatigue, or lay in wait for days without the need for sustenance. He was a miracle, a scion of demigods.

The disquiet grew slowly. He noticed during an engagement with the greenskin how quickly his iron hand functioned, how elegantly it curled into a punching fist, how efficiently it was able to turn the cutting blade. He moved his close combat weapon to his left hand after that, trusting in its ability more than the natural flesh of the right.

It was after the Valan Campaign when he was elevated into the ranks of the Clan proper. His carapace protection was returned to the foundry and, for the first time, he was bolted into the hallowed shell of power armour. He remembered the cool touch of the interface nodes against his carapace, how the ceramite skin worked in such perfect conjunction with his own.

He remembered the first time the helm was lowered over his face, sealing him off from the universe in a cocoon of dense protection. He remembered how it made him feel. He flexed the gauntlets, watching the ceramic plates move over one another, watching the artificial perfection of the curves.

‘What do you feel?’ came a familiar voice.

Morvox looked at Rauth. His vision was mediated by the datastream of the helm’s lensfeed.

There were a number of answers to the question. He felt powerful. More powerful than he had ever been. He felt honoured, and unworthy, and impatient for the next engagement. He felt all of these things.

‘I feel…’ he began, looking for the right words.

The Iron Father waited patiently, locked behind his own mask.

‘I feel… imperfect,’ said Morvox, landing at last on what he wanted to say. He looked down at his left hand and his emotions clarified. ‘I feel flawed.’

Rauth nodded.

‘Good,’ he said.

Medusa was a planet of scarcity, of wastes, of darkness. Mars was a planet of wonder, of abundance, of dull red light that bled from a horizon of a million foundries.

The translation took several months, during which time Morvox trained incessantly. He read the rites of the Machine over in his mind until the words cycled in his sleep, burning themselves on to his unconscious mind like a brand. He learned the lore given him by the Iron Father perfectly, making full use of the eidetic function he’d possessed since his mind had been transformed. By the time he’d arrived, he felt almost prepared for what awaited him. All that remained was anticipation.

As the drop-ship fell steadily through the thin atmosphere, Morvox watched the landscape resolve into detail beneath him. Every metre of surface was covered in an industrial landscape of dark iron, belching red smoke from soaring towers. Structures ran up against each other like jostling herd beasts, massive and obscure. He could see transit tubes run across the face of gigantic factories like arteries on a flayed corpse.

The drop-ship flew low on its approach vector. It passed huge trenches, alive with glittering light, glowing at their bases from the magma that pooled there. There were clusters of cyclopean refineries, dark and shrouded in boiling walls of smog. Huge areas looked semi-derelict. Fields of tarnished steel ran away toward the horizon, marked by trenches and studded with arcane citadels. There were cages, each the size of a hive spire, within which vast war machines – superheavy vehicles, Titans, even starships – were being slowly assembled.

As the drop-ship slowed its descent ready to be received by its iron docking cradle, Morvox had a final glimpse of the Martian landscape at close quarters. Every surface was covered in a layer of red dust. The metal beneath was near black with age and corrosion. Nothing living was visible. Everything was ostentatiously artificial.

Morvox thought it was beautiful.

The vessel came to rest, and the airlock doors hissed open. Beyond them was a cavernous hall lit by long red strips of subdued neon. The air was dry and tanged with rust. The sound of hammering echoed up from deep vaults.

A single figure waited for him. It was human – of a sort. Deep green robes covered what looked like a skeleton of plasteel. No face was visible under the cowl, just a long iron snout from which wheezing breath issued.

Morvox’s helm feed added extra information. He knew that the figure’s rank was Magos, and that her name had been Severina Mavola on accession to the priesthood in 421.M38. He knew that her body was now 67 percent augmetic and that she hadn’t communicated verbally for nearly a century.

He also knew that she had once written poetry in the manner of Hervel Jho, but doubted that she retained the capacity. Service to the Machine God demanded nothing less than full commitment.

+Naim Morvox,+ she canted in Martian-accented binaric. +Be welcome to Mars. I trust your journey was efficient.+

Few non-Mechanicus personnel could communicate directly with a Magos when they chose to speak natively, instead relying on intermediaries or translating cogitators.

The Iron Hands however, as in so many other ways, were different.

+Most efficient, Magos,+ he replied. +I am eager to learn.+

Mavola motioned for him to join her.

+You wish to become Iron Father,+ she said, walking with him into the colossal hall. Her gait was smooth, giving no trace of the artificial nature of her musculature. +You know the process will be arduous.+

+If it were not, it would not be worth aspiring to.+

+You will be on Mars for ten years. In those years, many of your battle brothers will lose their lives. When you return, Medusa will be a changed place.+

+I know this.+

The Magos stopped walking. Behind her, a vast caldera boiled with molten metal. Servitors, some as large as Sentinel walkers, laboriously tilted it over, ready for the casts below to be filled.

+We will show you mysteries that we show no other Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. We extend this privilege in honour of Manus. Know now that the value of the instruction is almost without price.+

Morvox looked at her carefully.

+Almost?+

Mavola didn’t elaborate. She turned on her heel, and resumed her fluid walk across the hall.

+Come now,+ she said. +To the forges.+

When he returned to Medusa, almost eleven years after he’d left, it was as the Magos had warned him. Clan Raukaan had experienced a decade of near-constant action, and many faces he’d known well had been gathered into the Emperor’s Rest. Iron Father Arven Rauth was now Clan Commander.

To replace losses in the ranks, new aspirants had been inducted from across the planet throughout the decade. Morvox was escorted to his appointment with Rauth by one of them, a raw recruit named Ralech Grond. The youth still had his natural hand intact and almost no sign of augmetics. Morvox couldn’t decide whether he envied that or not.

Once Grond had left them, Morvox and Rauth stood alone in the inner sanctum of the Land Engine Diomedes. Both wore their armour, though the commander’s skull was bare, revealing a pattern of steel markings across the synthetic skin like a circuit board.

‘The training was successful?’ he asked.

‘As I judge it, lord. The Mechanicus reports are on the grid.’

‘Much modification?’

Morvox raised his right arm. The ceramite of his vambrace slid back, exposing a deep well within. It looked like the entire forearm had been hollowed out and lined with nanotronics. Rauth examined it carefully.

‘Unusual,’ he said. ‘What purpose did they have in this?’

Morvox withdrew the arm. As he did so, the covering clicked shut. From the outside, there was no indication that his right limb was anything other than normal.

‘They did not tell me.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘No. I assume it will become apparent.’

Rauth nodded.

‘They do nothing randomly. Anything else?’

‘No. I am ready to serve. It has been too long since I wielded weapons on the field. I’m eager to employ my new aptitudes.’

‘You are not Iron Father yet,’ warned Rauth.

‘I know. On the day I left Mars, I asked for the Magos’s prediction of when that day would come. She gave me a definite answer.’

Rauth’s eyebrow raised. It was a curiously human gesture on a generally expressionless face.

‘She told me I had incurred a debt on Mars,’ said Morvox. ‘They do not give up their secrets for free. A time will come when that debt must repaid. Only then will I earn the rank – at least in their eyes.’

‘Presumptive of them. What kind of debt?’

Morvox looked down at his hands. Both were metal now, as was much of the rest of his limb structure. That ongoing augmentation would only accelerate now. He was beginning to forget his life out on the plains, back when he’d been nothing more than human muscle and blood. All that remained was the process, the long march to perfection, just as he’d been warned.

‘I do not know,’ he said.

V

Time was measured by chrono in the lower hive. There was no daylight to announce the dawn and no nightfall to bring the days to a close – just the endless cycle of artificial light, delivered via grimy lumens and flickering pict screens.

Except that these were all smashed now. In their absence, the deep dark was oppressive and eternal. The troops measured time in shifts, in hours-long assaults on the enemy. Only the chronos, ticking away like heartbeats in the dark, recorded the time they’d been down there.

Four days, Helaj-medium, before they encountered the beast. Four days of back-breaking slog and grind. More men died during those four days than had died in the last month of attritional defence.

The assault was driven by the Iron Hands and there was no respite. They fought their way down the transit shafts, clearing them with flamers before sending grenades down into the squealing hordes. Then the boltguns would open fire, tearing the corroded flesh of the mutant into scraps and strips of bloody pulp. The Iron Hands waded through seas of grasping hands, carving through them with the chainswords. They went in close, using those massive armoured gauntlets to choke the half-life from their prey. They stayed long, using ranged fire to blow out kneecaps or crack open skulls. Whatever the tactic, the result was the same.

In their wake came the lostari, the ragged, exhausted mortal defenders of Helaj, mopping up in the aftermath and killing whatever got around the spearhead. The rotations began to blur and timekeeping slipped, but they kept stumbling onward, deeper and deeper, down toward the heart of the sickness.

Khamed was rarely away from the heart of the action, despite the need for down-periods. The more he fought, the more he watched the Space Marines fight, the more he hated to be away from the front. He could see why myths built up around such warriors. For the first time, the panegyrics on the grid seemed less than ludicrous. All the fear, the terrible fear that he’d suffered since learning that it was to be the Iron Hands responsible for the purging of Ghorgonspire, had gone. It was replaced by a wary awe.

Sure, they looked grim and sounded worse. They fought without pause or pity, but those were the qualities demanded by the task. They spoke rarely and had little patience for mortal weakness, but Khamed couldn’t blame them for that. If he’d been in their position, he’d have felt the same way.

He managed to stay close to Grond. They exchanged few words during the engagements – just enough to keep the linked forces in coordination. Morvox seemed to have delegated responsibility for mortal-liaison to the lower-ranked Space Marine, which suited Khamed fine. Though Grond’s huge presence could never have been mistaken for merely human, at least he sounded slightly like one.

Perhaps that was an illusion. Perhaps what lay under that facemask was nothing but gears and diodes.

But Khamed didn’t believe that. Not entirely.

The purging of a narrow hab-block had been completed and the flames were dying down. The empty doorways of the hab-units gaped like maws. As Khamed and Grond strode toward the far end of the main access corridor, their boots crunched through a floor of powdered bone.

‘My deputy still resents your presence here,’ Khamed said.

Grond didn’t reply. His armour was covered in a thick layer of filth. In proper light, it would have been a dirty brown.

‘He’s heard… stories,’ continued Khamed, knowing he was pushing his luck. ‘He mentioned Contqual.’

Did the Space Marine break stride, just a fraction, then? Maybe not. Hard to tell.

‘He said you killed one in three. After the fighting was over. Is that true?’

Grond kept walking for a while, then stopped. His massive armoured head turned slowly.

‘Suppose it were true,’ said Grond. ‘Would you disapprove, human?’

Khamed looked up at the facemask, guessing he’d pushed things too far.

‘I wasn’t there.’

‘No. You weren’t. You are here. Do not concern yourself with other worlds. They are the Emperor’s concern, and ours.’

The tone was cold. Khamed instantly regretted his question. He felt ashamed and foolish.

‘I’m sorr–’

Grond held his hand up. For a moment, Khamed thought the gesture was something to do with him. Then he realised the Iron Hand was listening to something on his internal comm.

‘Prepare your men,’ ordered Grond, resuming his stride toward the hab-block access corridor.

Khamed scurried to catch up with the Space Marine.

‘What is it?’

‘Objective. Morvox has found it.’

Two levels down, and the air was hot and wet. Rebreathers wheezed against the filmy low-oxygen mix, struggling as particulates clogged the intakes. Slime was everywhere, coating the walls completely and obscuring whatever patterns had once been on the metal. The surface shone pale green where the lumen beams swept across the viscous matter, studded with bleeding sores.

They had to fight all the way down. Mutants had clustered tightly in the narrow access routes, and fought with a redoubled fervour. They hurled themselves on the blades of the Iron Hands, perhaps hoping to bring them down through weight of numbers.

The Space Marines maintained the pace as they always did, striding calmly into the onslaught, firing without pause. Bolters blazed, ripping holes in the torrent of diseased bodies. Screams echoed down the long corridors, throaty and gargled with phlegm. Khamed’s men came in their wake, backing up the main advance and picking out anything that somehow escaped the rage of bolter rounds.

Smaller mutant breeds scampered and darted through the hail of fire, eyes alive with feral hatred and teeth bared. Khamed saw one spring from the bile-cloaked shadows and launch itself at one of his men. He took the shot and watched it slam into the far wall. There was a sickening squelch as the diminutive body plunged into the mucous layer and slid down into the bubbling miasma below.

Khamed tried not to notice the residual pigtails clinging to the otherwise clean-plucked skull, nor the tattered remnants of its dress flap weakly before it was swallowed by the filth.

They kept going. Step by step, they carved their way through the mob. And then, finally, they reached the heart of it.

A huge chamber opened up before them. Khamed knew what it was from the schematics – an old Mechanicus bunker, long disused even when the hive had been functioning normally. It was down in the heart of the underhive, one of the many forgotten relics of a distant past. Once, perhaps, there had been Tech-priests there, doing whatever it was they did in their strange sanctums of industry.

Now it had all been changed. The high roof throbbed with pulsating veins of lurid bile-fluid. The expansive hexagonal floorspace swam with lapping slurry. Lines of what looked like saliva hung down in loops and the air drifted with tiny spinning spores.

Ranks of mutants splashed towards them, all distorted into lumpen, bloated bags of stretched-tight skin. They staggered into combat carrying rusted shards of metal or looted lasguns, howling in a mix of lust and agony, stumbling over one another in their haste to reach their foes.

But that wasn’t what held Khamed’s gaze.

‘Hold your nerve!’ he roared over the comm.

Around him, his men lined up and picked their targets. Las-fire cracked across the chamber, prompting fresh screams and gurgling cries.

The mutants began to tumble into the slime as they were felled. But they weren’t the primary target any more. They were so much chaff, so much fodder. The real reason they were there reared up behind them.

It was massive. It filled the far end of the chamber and its vast, blubbery body ran up against the walls. The skin was translucent. Growths were visible beneath it, pulsing in sacs of pus. It was shaped like some obscene grub, warped and malformed into a veritable mountain of trembling, glistening flesh.

A face, sore-encrusted and sloppily fat, perched atop slick folds of blubber. It was still vaguely human, though its features were distorted horribly – a single eye stared out from a muscle-white face, red-rimmed and weeping. The mouth opened far wider than it should have done, exposing concentric rings of teeth and a huge, lashing tongue.

Many limbs extended from the mass of that expanded torso, some shaped into tentacles with grasping suckers, others twisted into claws. As the Iron Hands advanced towards it, the limbs lashed out, grappling for purchase.

It stank. Even through his helmet’s filters, Khamed nearly choked on the stench. With his eyes streaming, he did his best to direct his troops. The creature screamed like its progeny, though the sound was even more disturbing – high and unearthly in a bizarre mockery of a woman’s voice.

Khamed saw Grond go in, flanked by his battle-brothers. There was no hesitation. The Iron Hands plunged in close, firing the whole time from their bolters, stabbing holes in the vast flank of the obese monster. The translucent skin shook and burst as the bolts went off. Yellow liquid shot out from the wounds, thick and steaming. It cascaded down the black armour of the Space Marines, washing off the patina of days like a deluge of acid.

‘Follow them in!’ bellowed Khamed, feeling his heart beating like a drum.

He was scared. He could feel his muscles tensing up, locked into stiffness. Panic welled up in his gullet, and he fought to keep it down. The monster in front of him radiated such a wave of sickness that it nearly dragged him down into it.

He gritted his teeth, knowing his men would all be feeling the same. This was what the Iron Hands had come to show them. The horror could be fought.

‘For the Emperor!’ he cried, swinging his lasgun round and cracking off another beam. It hit an oncoming mutant in the face and ripped its cheek away, exposing rotten sinews and bone. ‘Fight, you dogs! Fight!’

The Iron Hands had closed in by then, and the swords came out. The blades shone in the darkness, lit up by disruptor fields. For the first time, the Space Marines’ movements broke from uniformity. They span on their ankles, shifting to evade the lash of the tentacles, before chopping through the curtains of flab. They remained silent, working with cool expertise, moving their limbs with exactitude.

The beast was the first opponent capable of truly contesting their will. It raged against them, flailing and whipping. One of the Space Marines was slammed back on to its back by a lightning jab from the claws. It crashed to the floor, rolling across the slime before coming to a halt. The mutants were on it in a second, hacking and chopping.

The Iron Hand powered back to its feet, scattering the corrupted bodies around it as it rose. The bolter juddered as it was drawn around in a tight arc, blasting the mutants to slivers. Then he charged back into contact with the beast, just as silent as before, just as implacable. By then two more of the Iron Hands had been forced on to the defensive, rocked by the furious response from the bloated horror before them.

Khamed advanced cautiously, maintaining a steady rate of fire. His entire platoon was in the chamber, and the flicker of their las-beams lit the walls up. For the first time, it felt like his contribution might make a difference. The horde of lesser mutants began to thin out, exposing the monster at their heart.

‘Aim for… that!’ he roared, striding through the clinging fluid and feeling it slop over the lip of his boots.

The thicket of las-beams concentrated, cracking against the beast’s hide and puncturing the wobbling epidermis. It wailed under the barrage. The las-beams alone would have done little to trouble it, but combined with the fury of the Iron Hands bolter fire and bladework, they had an effect.

The downed Space Marines cut themselves free. One of them – Morvox, perhaps – fought his way up to the folds of neck-flesh, slicing and plunging with his crackling energy weapon. Another took the killing claws off the end of a tentacle with a savage swipe from his sword.

Slowly, purposefully, they were killing it. Barbs snapped out, wrapping around necks and limbs, but they were snapped off. Bile streamed from the beast’s mouth, acidic and searing. It splattered against the hard armour and cascaded to the floor in fizzing lumps. The heavy bolter kept up its drumming, thunderous roar, punctuated by staccato bursts from the sidearms.

The residual mob of lesser mutants was beginning to lose cohesion. They blundered around, no longer advancing with any purpose.

‘Pick your targets!’ shouted Khamed. ‘Headshots! Maintain barrage on the beast! Do not give–’

Then it happened. The skirts of flesh shrunk back, withdrawing into a shivering kernel. The screaming reached a fresh crescendo of hate-laced desperation. The beast thrashed around in its death-agony, jaws splayed and bleeding, tentacles writhing. It bled from a thousand wounds, each of them pouring with jelly-like tumours. The bolts kept punching into it. The blades kept biting, crackling with disruptor energy.

Its face went white. Its eye stared wildly, straining from the single socket. Veins stood out from the white skin in a lattice of purple, throbbing and tight with incipient destruction.

For a second longer, it still burned in agony.

Just a second.

Then it exploded. The beast blew itself apart, rocking the structure above and around it to the core. A tide of rubbery flesh rolled out like a breaking wave, surging across the chamber and rushing up the walls. Greasy, fist-sized hunks of gristle peppered the chamber. Flaps of skin sailed into the air, trailing long lines of sputoid blood and plasma. Semi-formed organs sailed high, falling apart in mid-air and breaking into slabs of quivering muscle.

Khamed was knocked from his feet by the storm, just like the rest of his men. He crashed on his back, felled by a rain of slapping body parts. He hit the filth hard and body-hot fluid ran through the chinks in his armour.

Repelled, he staggered back to his feet, shaking himself down. He wiped his visor and dirty streaks of red ran across it.

Ahead of him was a crater of gelatinous meat, laced with sticky globules of nerve-endings and lymph-nodes. It shivered as the fluid cascaded over it, running over the floor and swaying with the current.

And amid the ruin of the beast, the five Iron Hands stood. Their armour dripped with sludge. Their guns were silent. For the first time in days, the howls of the mutants were gone. The only sound was the echo of the explosion and the slap and gurgle of the gore-tide as it ran against the walls.

Khamed watched them, feeling the weakness in his overtired limbs.

‘Throne,’ he whispered, hardly daring to believe it. ‘Throne of Earth.’

Khamed looked around him. His men – those that had survived – were dead on their feet. All were exhausted. A few had collapsed into the foul water and stayed there. Despite that, despite everything, most of the rest carried themselves with more pride that at any time over the past six months. They knew what they’d achieved.

Khamed let a smile crease across his grimy face.

‘Namogh,’ he voxed, hoisting his lasgun over his shoulder. ‘Get your grunts down here.’

‘Progress?’ came the reply. He sounded worried.

‘Pretty good. Fast as you can.’

Khamed killed the link and limped over to where the Iron Hands were congregating. All five of them were still standing in the centre of the beast’s gigantic cadaver. Four of them, Grond included, were calmly reloading their weapons. The fifth, Morvox by the look of his armour, had waded deeper into the slough of burned flesh and was rummaging around in the heap of entrails and fluid.

‘You have our thanks, lord,’ said Khamed, coming up to Grond and smiling broadly. ‘We could not have done this without you.’

Grond didn’t turn to face him. He was looking intently at Morvox. They all were. Intrigued, Khamed followed their gaze.

After some more searching, the Sergeant seemed to find what he was looking for. He straightened up, clutching something in his left hand.

It was a tube, formed from dark metal. Khamed couldn’t make much out in the dim light – it was less than twenty centimetres long, blunt and rounded at the ends. There were markings on it, but nothing he could make out clearly.

Morvox turned back and strode toward them. As he did so, the armour of his right forearm opened. The vambrace panel came apart in two halves, exposing an empty space where the limb should have been. Morvox stowed the tube inside the receptacle and closed the shell of ceramite over it again.

Khamed frowned. For some reason, he felt suddenly worried. There had been no mention, at any time, of a mission to retrieve an object from the underhive.

‘What is this, Grond?’ he asked.

The Iron Hand didn’t reply. Morvox spoke instead.

‘Our task is complete, mortal,’ came the metallic voice, as eerily thin as ever. ‘Our ship has been summoned from orbit. The cleansing is over.’

For a moment, Khamed didn’t believe what he was hearing. He stumbled over his response.

‘But, with respect, lord–’ he began. As the words left his mouth, his earlier euphoria was replaced with a cold dread. ‘There are hundreds of mutants left alive. We have cleansed less than half of what we came for. There may be more such beasts. We need you.’

Morvox’s dark facemask loomed over him. Khamed suddenly realised that the other Iron Hands were all facing him. They said nothing. They were like images in a cathedral, cold and dead.

‘You make demands on us now, human?’ Morvox asked. There was no emotion in the question, but somehow it conveyed a sense of absolute, utter menace.

Khamed swallowed, and felt his fists clench uselessly. He felt ridiculous, like a child stealing in on some adult affair and demanding attention. Stubbornly, from somewhere, he found the will to protest.

‘No demands,’ he said, disgusted at how timorous his voice sounded. ‘But, lord, we cannot defeat the enemy that still remains. You cannot leave us now.’

‘You speak as if your battle here is the only concern we have. You know nothing of the war that burns across the galaxy. You know nothing of the demands on us. If you wish to be worthy of preservation, then guard this ground. The Emperor protects those who resist.’

Then Morvox pushed past him and began to stalk back the way he’d come, back through the thousands of shafts and chambers and up into the inhabited zones. One by one, his squad turned to follow him.

Khamed watched them go in desperation. He knew, just as they surely did, that for them to leave now was little short of murder. The mutants would rally. Mortal troops alone were no match for the horrors that still squatted in the underhive – something that had been proved time and again over the past six months.

‘Grond!’ he cried, reaching out to clutch at the Iron Hand who had saved his life. ‘You cannot mean this! The Spire can be cleansed! Do not leave us. Mercy of the Emperor, do not leave us!’

Grond looked at him just once. Khamed stared up into the softly reflective surface of the helm’s lenses. He realised then that he had no idea what kind of creature existed behind that mask. No idea at all.

‘Can you fight?’ asked the Space Marine.

The question needed no answer. Khamed knew what the responses were. Perhaps Grond had tried to warn him of this the first time he’d asked it. The Iron Hands only cared about strength.

Namogh had been right. Old, cynical Namogh.

Khamed hung his head, and let his hand slip from the Space Marine’s arm. He could already hear scrabbling from the levels below. The mutants were stirring again.

Grond strode off to join his battle brothers, not giving Khamed another glance. All five of them walked past the lostari in the chamber, ignoring the looks of disbelief from the human troops. Their heavy footfalls gradually receded as they passed through the connecting chambers and headed on up.

Khamed only raised his head when Namogh’s squad burst into the chamber.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ demanded the deputy. ‘We just marched past your beloved Space Marines, and they’re all going the wrong–’

He stopped short. Perhaps something in Khamed’s empty expression told him all he needed to know.

‘We’re on our own,’ said Khamed, and his voice was hollow.

For a moment, Namogh was lost for words. He looked at Khamed, then back at where the Iron Hands had gone, then back at Khamed.

‘Those… bastards,’ he spat. ‘Those damned… bastards.’

The troops in the chamber, all of whom had heard the exchanges with Morvox, began to disintegrate. Some collapsed, empty-eyed and limp. Others started weeping. None of them ran. They knew there was nowhere to go.

Namogh managed to get a lid on his fury, and fixed Khamed with an urgent glare. His indignation made him speak too fast.

‘What are we going to do, Jen?’ he blurted. ‘What are we going to tell Tralmo? What the hell am I going to tell my men? Holy Terra, what are they thinking, running out now? Why the hell come here, if they didn’t intend to finish this thing off? What’re we going to do?’

Khamed only half listened. He had no answers. He could hear the first screams of fury and lust from the tunnels below. The mutants were coming already. Soon they would be in the chamber, rushing through the slime, eyes shining with hatred.

Khamed felt a deep, horrifying weariness suffuse his limbs. His whole body ached. He’d pushed himself to the limit, and there was nothing left to give.

We’re nothing to them. Just spare parts.

‘Gather your men,’ he said, unhoisting his lasgun and checking the charge. ‘We’ll make a stand three levels up. Call in the reserves – if we can get the siege doors closed, we might hold some ground for a while.’

Namogh looked at him as if he were mad.

‘You think we’ll hold them? You really think we stand any kind of chance? What’s different this time?’

Khamed shook his head grimly.

‘Nothing’s different, Orfen,’ he said. ‘Nothing. Except, perhaps, for one thing.’

He looked away, past the stinking morass of the beast’s carcass and down the tunnels beyond. He could feel the tide of unreasoning madness building down there. He knew it would not respect defiance. It respected nothing. It would just keep on coming.

Can you fight?

‘I now know how the universe operates, my friend,’ he said bleakly. ‘For a while, I had dared to hope otherwise. I believed that this place might have some significance for them. That we might.’

He laughed bitterly.

‘Better to die knowing the truth, do you not think?’

VI

The probe made a 98-percent efficient descent from orbital platform 785699 to the receiving station in sector 56-788-DE of Forge 34 Xanthe manufactorium-schola-astartes. The statistics were logged on the grid and interpreted by the usual team of lexmechanics, after which three anomalies were corrected and allowed for, resulting in a two percentage point increment, to the satisfaction of all involved.

From the docking claw, the contents of the probe were conveyed by servitor nineteen levels down, past the major foundry zones and into the dense ganglia of shrines known colloquially in the sector as 1EF54A.

The cargo was transferred to Tech-Priests after a soak-test for data contagion and wrapped in three layers of soft dust-repelling cloth. The mark of the Machine God had been embroidered on the material in gold thread.

Thus clad, it went through six further pairs of hands, only two of which had any organic flesh left on the bones. More tests were performed, and ledgers filled out, and records made for the core lists.

Then, finally, the cargo reached its destination. It came to rest on an obsidian tabletop in a room lit by dark red tubes. For a long time, it lay there alone, untroubled and untouched.

Several local days later, Magos Technicus Yi-Me, once called Severina Mavola, entered the chamber and carefully unwrapped it. A tube lay at the centre of the cloth, its glossy surface reflecting the light of the lumens.

Yi-Me studied it for a long time. She use her basic optical replacements, as well as seventeen additional sensors built into her plasteel cranium.

Deep within her, in a part of her body that had remained relatively unchanged throughout all the years of biosurgery, a sensation of deep pleasure blossomed. If she’d still had lips, she would have smiled.

The artefact was powerful. Powerful, if the initial readings were confirmed, beyond even her expectations. It would certainly suffice for the task she had in mind, and perhaps for many more in the years ahead. Lucky, that it had been discovered. Lucky, also, that it had proved possible to retrieve.

She bowed her head, silently acknowledging the service rendered by the one who had once been her pupil.

+Debt paid,+ she canted, knowing he couldn’t hear her, but enjoying the irony of addressing him nonetheless. Such tropes were a staple of the Jho school, something she still appreciated. +Naim Morvox, Iron Father: debt is paid in full.+

A hundred worlds. All different, all the same.

As I bring the light of the Emperor to each of them, knowing that every foe I face could me the one that ends me, a single encounter remains prominent in my thoughts.

Helaj V, the Ghorgonspire. I remember the mortal there, the one named Raef Khamed. Even in sleep, sometimes, I see his face.

He expected much of us, once he had forgotten to fear. We could never match that expectation, not if we had eternity to accomplish the task and infinite resources to bring to bear.

Even so, I left the planet troubled. I never discussed it with Morvox. He would not have tolerated dispute from me, and that was before he was Iron Father. It seemed to me that our task was not finished, even though the objective was secured and our goals satisfied.

I remember how the mortals fought. I remember how they rose up when we were with them. Back in the warp, where dreams are ever vivid, I heard them plead for us to return. Or perhaps I heard their screams.

We never went back. I do not know what fate befell them. Maybe they prevailed. Maybe they were lost.

For many years, that troubled me.

Now, it does not. I understand what Morvox was doing. He had been purged of sentiment by then, just as I will be. He saw the greater pattern, and followed it. Such is the galaxy we inhabit. Resolve will preserve us; sentiment will see the light of humanity extinguished.

And so we allow ourselves to become this thing. We allow ourselves to become the machine. We are the result of a necessity, of the process.

The alternative is weakness.

I see this now. I see the truth of what I have been told by Morvox. Perhaps Helaj was the last time that I doubted. I am stronger now. I feel the imperfection within me, and long to purge it. In time, Emperor willing, I will go to Mars and learn the mysteries, just as he did.

Not yet. For now, there is too much of my old self, my old corruption. The flesh remains, impeding the progress of the machine.

I still feel the ghost of my old hand, the one they took away to mark my ascension into Raukaan. Far less, it is true, but I feel it nonetheless.

I wish never to feel it again. I wish to forget the face of Raef Khamed, to forget that there is hope and disappointment in the universe.

This is my task, the reason for my existence, and nothing else will suffice. I will work at it. I will persevere. I will purge the weakness of the flesh.

I will be Ralech Grond, Iron Hand, or I will be nothing.