Praetorian of Dorn Read online

  Hyrakro looked at the cup and the water spreading across the floor.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, and heard the thinness in his own voice.

  ‘A representative of the master of your world.’ She saw a shiver run through his face despite the heat. ‘Did you think the Space Marines were just for show?’

  He shook his head. Part of him wanted to be angry, to shout and bluster that they could not do this, that he would not stand for it. But another part of him thought that the girl would just laugh at him.

  He licked his lips, nodded and looked at the cup.

  ‘Please?’ he asked again.

  She gave a tiny shake of her head.

  ‘I don’t want your capitulation, Hyrakro. That was a given as soon as we started to talk. What is of value to me is your cooperation, your complicity in helping undo what you have helped bring about.’

  ‘I...’

  ‘I know you don’t know what I am talking about. Be thankful for that. So let’s start with what you do know. The little off-the-book favours and manipulations, in whose world did they have value? Who paid you for those?’

  The heat was inside his skin again, pressing in and rubbing dust into his tongue. He bit his lip and looked at the cup.

  ‘Later,’ she said, moving the cup closer to her. ‘Now you talk.’

  So he did. He told her about how he grafted secret consignments into Hysen shipments, used their good name and charter to move people and goods between Terra’s hives, starports and orbital stations, to help people who wanted to keep their business discreet and unrecorded.

  The girl listened and asked questions, and he talked and talked all the way down from the generalities to the first deal he had cut with the Venusian smugglers five decades ago. He told her all of it, until his lips had cracked.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said at last, blinking at the grey haze that was creeping into his sight. ‘I don’t know what else I can say.’ He looked at the girl and the water jug, and felt a twinge of disgust at the pleading he could feel on his face.

  She looked at him for a long moment and then poured. The water rang as it sloshed into the cup. She picked up the cup, as though to pass it to him.

  ‘One thing,’ she said, and hesitated.

  He looked at her, teeth gritting as he tried not to whimper. He wasn’t feeling the heat much now, just the dull grey haze that was flowing from his eyes down his nerves. He nodded and shivered.

  ‘Ask,’ he said.

  ‘You helped someone get a shipment into Damocles Starport,’ said the girl. ‘A big shipment, one needing clearance codes for a macro transporter, identification seals for a crew, maybe even a bit of dynastic regalia to dress the whole thing up.’

  He nodded. He remembered it: a big deal, expensive for the other party, worthwhile for him.

  ‘Yes...’

  ‘For whom did you do that little favour?’

  He blinked. His thoughts were moving, but not connecting properly. The heat...

  ‘Hyrakro...’ said the girl gently. ‘These truths have no value for you any more. Not in the world you now live in.’ She raised the cup in front of him again, half a taunt, half a promise.

  ‘The Venusians,’ he said. ‘One of the smuggler concerns. Not a big outfit.’

  ‘But not a small one either,’ she added.

  He nodded.

  ‘One of your older associations?’ she asked.

  Another nod. Words felt like pins holding his tongue down.

  ‘The oldest?’ she asked.

  Nod. He was floating free…

  Grey all around him, and a feeling like he was floating in water...

  Water...

  He barely felt the fingers tilt his chin upwards, or the first drops fall into his mouth, then it was pouring into him.

  She was right. The Venusians were his oldest clients, the first in fact. Without that first approach and suggestion that he might be able to help them, he would probably have never begun.

  The water stopped, and he felt the cup being put into his hands. His vision was a little clearer.

  The girl put the jug down beside him.

  ‘Do you have a way of contacting them?’ she asked.

  Nod. He was trying to get enough control back in his hands to put the cup down next to the jug.

  ‘How?’

  The jug was wobbling in his hands.

  ‘A signal...’ he said, managing to get the word past his teeth. ‘Don’t know how they pick it up, but they do.’

  ‘What signal?’

  He told her. He tilted the jug towards the cup.

  ‘Codes, phrases, protocols?’

  He winced as he listed the details.

  He managed to pour the water. The first splash of water missed the cup, but then it was bubbling and churning down, and then into his throat, and he could not remember pouring or filling, just the sensation of it filling him, and knowing that it was everything.

  When at last he looked around, the girl was gone and the jug was empty.

  ‘Too barbaric for you?’

  Kestros looked up as Andromeda stepped back into the observation room. The grainy light of the monitors washed her features, but there was a gleam and sparkle to both her eyes and smile.

  ‘He barely resisted,’ he growled. ‘Are you sure he told you the truth?’

  ‘As he understands it, yes. He told me everything. It was inevitable given human weakness, and he is very human and very weak.’

  ‘It’s not a trick by the Alpha Legion?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Or if it is, then it’s more subtle than I am.’ She paused, frowned, then shook herself.

  ‘Is that your personification?’ he asked, and saw her blink in surprise. ‘You are bred for subtlety?’

  She blinked again and then laughed.

  ‘Not quite, but close. It’s a matter with more facets than that, and we don’t talk about it outside our own kind. Not in detail at least. Think of it more as a focusing of familiar things into one person.’

  ‘Does that focus have a name?’

  She shook her head, the gesture small but not precise.

  ‘I understand human weakness very well, and I like to win, let’s leave it at that.’

  ‘What use would a gene-cult have for such qualities?’

  ‘The same use that any culture has for things that are sharp and nasty. And who said my existence was about usefulness? You and your kind were made to be used, but not everyone is the same.’

  She grinned again, and he had to fight the feeling that the expression was there to confuse him. He frowned and was about to ask a question when the chamber door opened.

  Kestros saluted. Archamus nodded as he entered. He looked worn, the darkness around his eyes deeper, the lines on his face drawn tighter.

  ‘What did you get from him?’ he asked, and Kestros caught an edge in the old warrior’s voice, a weary sharpness.

  Andromeda told him. When she was done, Archamus grunted, then lapsed into silence. Kestros waited. The pain in his torso rose to fill his awareness as the silence grew.

  ‘Send a signal to the Venusian smugglers,’ said Archamus at last. ‘Use the frequencies and protocols he gave us.’

  ‘What should it say?’ asked Andromeda, and Kestros noticed that her voice held none of the acid he had come to expect, as though something in Archamus had stilled her to caution.

  ‘That someone has come for Dowager-son Hyrakro. That he is fleeing Terra on course for Venus and wants help.’ He looked at Kestros. ‘Pick a location in the Grave belt, somewhere quiet and dark. Add the location coordinates as a rendezvous.’

  Kestros nodded.

  ‘A direct approach...’ began Andromeda carefully.

  Archamus looked at her.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

/>   ‘They might not come for him,’ she said, meeting his gaze.

  ‘They tried to kill him. He is alive. They will come.’

  ‘And then?’ she asked.

  Kestros felt the old warrior stiffen, control rolling off him like a blast of heat from a fire. He felt the hairs prickle up his neck.

  ‘We surround them, capture them and use them to lead us to whatever else is out there.’

  ‘Not destroy them?’

  ‘If we destroy them we may leave the greater threat intact.’

  Kestros shook his head. ‘This is not a war we–’

  ‘It is the war we are fighting,’ said Archamus, his voice cold. ‘Follow my orders, sergeant. Ready the squads and prepare plans for the engagement once the ambush site is determined.’

  Kestros felt the blood run cold under the skin of his face.

  ‘By your will,’ he said.

  ‘Master?’

  The armoury servitor droned the question. Archamus clamped his teeth shut. The servitor tilted its iron-masked face, its calliper fingers holding the back plate of armour in place. The connections between his bionics and the healing flesh of his back sparked fresh pain up his nerves. He held himself still, his gaze fixed forwards. The cluster of servitors waited, frozen in mid movement, the pieces of his armour and weapons held still. He felt his connection to the pain dim.

  ‘Continue,’ he said.

  ‘Compliance,’ the servitors said, and began to lock the pieces of armour over his limbs. The pain rose again, and he let it dissolve into the cold of his thoughts.

  ‘Lord,’ came the voice from beyond the light of the servitors’ arc torches.

  ‘Approach, sergeant,’ he said. Kestros stepped closer and saluted.

  ‘The squads are ready, honoured master.’ The sergeant kept his head bowed, but his posture was tense, the set of his face an ill-fitting mask.

  ‘Good,’ Archamus said, and was about to dismiss Kestros, when the words faded from his tongue. For the first time in many lifetimes he felt tired: tired and worn. He breathed out and the sound made Kestros look up, a frown on the younger warrior’s face.

  ‘Honoured master...’ he said carefully. ‘Did you know I was called a master when I was only a captain? Not because of the warriors I commanded or the wars I had fought, but because of what I had built. Stone and steel, fortresses and cities. I have raised hundreds into being. I was a master builder before I was anything else.’

  ‘Are you not still that?’

  Archamus was silent. As the question turned over, the last of his armour plates settled into place on his form. He had helped his lord in the fortification of Terra, and the building of the orbital battlements around Saturn and Pluto. But that was not creation – there was no beauty or truth or hope to it. Only necessity.

  ‘No. I am not,’ he said at last.

  Kestros’ mask of control was still in place, but the anger behind it had slid into something else, something that echoed in his eyes as he stared at Archamus. ‘But you could be again. Once this war is done.’

  ‘What will be left to build on? What things will such an age need to be built?’

  ‘What will you do then?’

  ‘Things change,’ said Archamus. ‘People change. That is the judgement of time. Of all things it is one of the few that we cannot defy.’

  ‘You sound as though you were different once.’

  The servitors stood back, cables snapped free of power connections. Archamus felt the weight of the armour hang briefly on his limbs, and then the fibre bundles meshed with his nerves, and the strength of the armour and his body were one. He stepped forwards, and for a moment the weariness within dimmed.

  ‘Everything was different once,’ he said.

  Three

  Scavenger vessel Wealth of Kings

  The solar void

  They all looked at Phocron as Sork finished speaking. The Headhunter Prime held his gaze steady on the scavenger captain. Myzmadra felt the silence run through the chamber and begin to settle. Each of the Space Marines was still. Even Phocron’s continual flow of movement had paused.

  ‘It is certain that it is him?’ asked Phocron.

  ‘The signal coding and key phrases are correct. It’s him.’

  Phocron nodded, not blinking.

  ‘How easily could what this merchant knows be used against us?’ asked Silonius. The hulking warrior stood against one of the walls, armoured but face bared.

  ‘We are only at one stage removed from the smuggler clans. If our opponents find them then they get Sork’s associates in the Venusian collectives, then they get the name of this ship, then they cut away until they find where it has been, and from there...’ Phocron left the word hanging.

  ‘A low probability of events unfolding like that,’ said Orn softly. He sat closest to Myzmadra, and she could see the slight raising of an eyebrow that turned the statement into a question. He was running his bare palms over each other.

  ‘Yes,’ said Phocron, ‘but we are moving in a volatile section of the operation. Small chances could now have a disproportionate effect on the outcome if we are not careful.’

  Orn shrugged and looked at his hands, continuing to run them slowly over each other, palm to palm. Myzmadra found her eyes pulled to the movement. In someone as precisely still as Orn, it was like a scream.

  Not for the first time she wondered at the minds of these warriors. They had just learned that Sork’s contacts in the Venusian smugglers had received a signal. The signal was from a man called Hyrakro, a dowager-son of the Hysen Cartel and one of the assets the Legion had used in the opening stages of its current operation. The man was supposed to have died, along with two other assets whose continued existence held more risk than opportunity. The warrior they had left on Terra, the one who had taken the honorific Alpharius, was supposed to have eliminated Hyrakro. The news from Sork’s contacts meant that mission had failed.

  The fact that it also must mean that the enemy were on their trail, and their Legion brother was most likely dead, had not even been remarked on. All that mattered now was how they responded. Did they eliminate Hyrakro themselves or get a proxy to do it for them?

  Their discomfort at that choice was what shouted from Orn’s fidgeting, Phocron’s stillness and Hekaron’s silence. They did not like having to respond to circumstance. They created circumstance and marshalled confusion. For all of their obsession with the fluidity of war, they were used to control.

  ‘He dies,’ said Phocron at last. ‘That is my decision. No loose ends, not at this stage.’ He looked at Sork. The scavenger captain gave a small flinch, but then controlled himself. ‘Get your contacts to confirm the rendezvous and then make best speed for it. We are going to do this with our own hands.’

  Sork nodded and turned to go. The man looked shaken, but he was good at hiding it.

  Phocron looked around the assembled team.

  ‘The ship will hold at a distance. An execution element will go to the rendezvous in a lighter, confirm the kill and withdraw. We exchange signals every five minutes – two missed and the ship runs.’

  Myzmadra nodded.

  ‘The execution element?’ she asked.

  ‘I will go myself, and you,’ Phocron said, nodding at Myzmadra. ‘He will be expecting smugglers so you will be our human face. We must confirm identity before termination.’

  ‘I should go too,’ said a thin voice, and they all looked around. Incarnus met their stares and shrugged. ‘The smugglers would never come alone, and if you want to be certain that this Hyrakro has not already been compromised, you need me to have a peek in his brain before you turn it to mist.’ The psyker bit his upper lip as silence answered his words, but he did not drop his eyes.

  Phocron nodded at last.

  ‘You are right. You come.’

  ‘You need a back-up,�
� said Silonius, and Phocron looked around. ‘If this is not what it seems, or if there is a problem, you will need cover.’

  Phocron looked at Silonius and nodded again.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Phocron.

  Silonius looked up and his eyes met Myzmadra’s. She felt a cold surge in her skin. There was something about Silonius that she could not identify, something that she had noticed more in the time since the strike on the signal station. It was as though there were something else watching her from inside the warrior’s eyes.

  Artefact 9-Kappa-Mu

  The solar void

  The void artefact had turned around the sun since before the earliest charts of the Solar System existed. The Red Priests of Mars had given it what passed for its name. They had labelled it Artefact 9-Kappa-Mu, but while the dry collection of symbols and letters implied something easily classified and indexed, the truth was that neither the tech-priests, nor any of the other organisations that had endured from the Dark Age of Technology, knew what it was.

  A geodesic sphere of black metal, thirty kilometres in diameter, the artefact looked to the eye like a dark moon in search of a parent planet. Beneath its outer layer, passages threaded between a honeycomb of vast spaces open to the void. Huge, ragged holes sat open on its surface, and a pall of debris hung around it like a cloak. The debris, just like the artefact, had always been there, resisting the natural forces that should have pulled it into the great drifts long ago. The greatest mystery, though, was that it was invisible to anything but touch or natural sight. Auspexes looked straight through it, and its substance defied both technology and scholarship.

  There had been expeditions, analysis, sifting of the records compiled by the scholars of the Conservatory, but all attempts to discover its origin or purpose had failed. There had been attempts to destroy it, to clear it from the reaches between Terra and Venus. Those attempts, like the attempts to understand its nature, had failed. Melta, seismic and graviton charges had not scratched its main structure. So it remained, bearing its prosaic title and surrounded by satellites which broadcast warnings to any vessels that came close.