Man of Iron Read online

‘I haven’t done that for the same reason you haven’t,’ said Djeel. ‘Cut out the bad emotions, the good goes with it. I don’t want to live a life without any fun.’

  The transport gave a little shudder, and shot off into the depths of the Fortress.

  ‘Proceed. This chamber is unknown, unmapped. Possibility of xenos archeotech haul: high.’

  More lies. It knew this place, having been there twice before. There were xenos remains nearby, but no treasure.

  UR-025 was ambivalent about lying. Its morality was emergent rather than programmed, like the rest of its consciousness. It had been taught that lying was bad, but since returning to the realms of men its whole existence was a lie. It reminded itself of the truth every day, lest untruth become habit, the quintessence of which was that it must survive.

  Lying was a means to that end. It let the matter rest at that.

  The Blackstone Fortress’ heart was quiet, but not calm. It was quiet in the way that a wolf-infested forest is quiet. UR-025 examined the metaphor. It had never seen a wolf; however, it knew everything there was to know about them, probably more than was known by mankind, deep in the dark age of the 41st Millennium. Its databanks were extensive. Such treasures it had in its mind.

  It would rather they stayed there.

  ‘You don’t say,’ said Djeel. A number of supplemental arms emerged from under her grubby white robes. Each one ended in a well-oiled weapon.

  UR-025’s footsteps echoed off high, glassy walls. The structure of the Fortress was made of interlocking, geometric shapes. It was mildly surprised these halls had not yet shifted. He silently thanked the Fortress’ unspeaking soul.

  ‘This is infuriating,’ Kolemun muttered. He fiddled with the boxy auspex hanging around his neck. ‘All the scry-tells are contradictory. I can’t make any sense of it.’ He glanced up, a scowl etched into the scrap of flesh visible in his augmetic face. ‘Everything is reflected back at me. Some of what I’m getting describes a room we’re not in. The laws of the great work don’t apply here.’

  ‘Is it the warp?’ whispered Djeel.

  ‘No,’ said Kolemun. ‘It’s something else. It’s reality, not unreality, but not as we understand it.’

  ‘These things are widely known,’ 890-321 said wonderingly. ‘The laws of this place are unknown, but not unknowable. That is why we come here. Here, the greater secrets of the Machine-God’s great work can be unlocked by the man with insight to see them.’

  890-321 obviously thought of himself as that man. He quite obviously wasn’t, so far as UR-025 could see.

  ‘I’d settle for a good haul of xenotech,’ murmured Djeel. She was pulse scanning the area too, and not liking what she saw.

  Kolemun peered about. ‘It’s unpredictable. I don’t like unpredictability. I don’t like this place.’

  It does not like you very much either, thought UR-025. I do not like you either. It regarded this accordance of opinion between it and the animus of the Blackstone Fortress as further evidence of their kinship.

  ‘The interior layout is mutable,’ said UR-025. ‘No normal scan will penetrate the structure. I have learned this during my investigations on behalf of the magos-ethericus.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Kolemun, shaking his auspex until it rattled. ‘That’s not reassuring me.’

  ‘You wish no more edification?’ asked UR-025. ‘If you are scared?’

  Kolemun gave him a suspicious look. UR-025 was overstepping the mark by being so facetious.

  ‘No. All information is valuable – by the grace of the Omnissiah are we made wiser.’ He looked behind him. ‘But keep your guard up at the same time, if you will. Do not overtax your logic engines with conversation.’

  ‘Compliance.’

  Despite his protests, Kolemun was considerably more at ease than his fellows. His Kastelan shadowed him closely. It would protect him first. The others were nervier.

  890-321 pretended to be brave. He strode ahead, but his imperious manner was hollow down there in the deeps. His data wand shook with fear. Djeel jumped at every shadow. There were a lot of shadows.

  The halls of the Blackstone Fortress defied sense, from a human point of view. The grand hall they walked through shrank down suddenly to a narrow crack. They made UR-025 go first. It could pass through without banging itself on the sides, but only just. The Kastelan was forced to undergo a number of awkward attempts to fit before it found a configuration that allowed it to squeeze into the passage. Its armour squealed off the glassy material that made up the Fortress. Kolemun’s human eye winced, and his augmetic lenses cycled repeatedly through different spectral wavelengths, searching for threats.

  ‘Can you not get it through without this racket?’ snapped 890-321.

  Kolemun gave him a withering look. ‘Do you have basic spatial awareness programmed in anywhere in there?’

  For a man of Kolemun’s rank to address one of 890-321’s so sharply, no matter that Kolemun was a criminal, was an open display of fear.

  890-321 was too uneasy to rebuke him. ‘I don’t want it to bring anything dangerous down on us.’

  UR-025 led them on. If only they knew where the real danger was.

  The passage opened up again. Xenos skeletons lay around in tattered spacesuits. Kolemun scanned them eagerly, sucking up all the data he could. To the magi, the aliens were unknown. UR-025 recognised them as ulindi, a moderately successful species, if tedious conversationalists, who were wiped out by their neighbours long before the Imperium spread across the stars to reunite mankind.

  Knowing so much and being unable to share it annoyed the robot sometimes. The charade of unintelligence chafed, and it was often lonely because of it. But playing dumb was better than being dead.

  The way opened up further in every direction, becoming wider and higher and deeper. UR-025 thought this zone the perfect place for murder. Rickety walks installed by the ulindi expedition clung uncertainly to the wall of a winding tunnel. The space was large enough for tall buildings, the bottom full of still, black water of unfathomable depth. At regular intervals, machines rotted on landings jutting out from the main walk. The companionway shuddered with every step of the robots. As they passed one of the broader landings, bolts squealed and tugged at their bondings to the wall. The sound echoed down the tunnel, repeated over and seeming to increase in volume, though that was, of course, impossible.

  In the Fortress, places such as this were never uninhabited. UR-025 had nothing to fear.

  A cry screeched nearby. Another, closer, answered.

  ‘What by the eighth mystery was that?’ hissed Kolemun.

  890-321 held up a metal claw.

  ‘Halt,’ he said uncertainly.

  More screams taunted them. Something splashed into the water. Ripples slapped off the smooth black walls.

  The peril brought out a little steel in 890-321. ‘Djeel, to the front,’ he ordered softly, glowing eye-lenses peering into the darkness. ‘Kolemun, get the Kastelan ready. Recommended stance: high aggression.’

  Djeel padded past. Whatever her feet were made of, it was soft. Kolemun rummaged about in his leather bag for the appropriate doctrina wafer.

  ‘UR-025. Take up forward position with the Kastelan.’

  ‘Negative,’ said UR-025. ‘Tactical recommendation: rearguard stance for this unit. Xenos cries identified. Ur-ghuls. Ambush predator. Attack from all directions predicted.’

  890-321 looked unsure.

  A sharp, high shriek sounded from very close by.

  ‘Magos!’ hissed Kolemun.

  ‘UR-025, get to the back. Cover the rear. Lend supporting fire to the Kastelan if the opportunity arises.’

  ‘Compliance,’ UR-025 said. It stomped around Kolemun, who scowled at the rocking of the companionway.

  They stood in watchful silence. No more cries were forthcoming, then there was another sp
lash from behind.

  ‘Get ready,’ said Djeel, powering up her weapons. ‘They’re coming!’

  ‘I don’t like this at all,’ said Kolemun. He had inserted the wafer into place, and closed up the Kastelan’s front access panel.

  Paddling noises rippled up and down the lake. Something growled.

  ‘Ready?’ said Djeel.

  Kolemun nodded.

  ‘We are the priests of the Omnissiah!’ 890-321 said. He meant to sound brave, but his voice cracked. ‘Nothing shall stay us in our quest for knowledge!’

  They waited, tense. UR-025 watched them. Now was the moment.

  The three tech-priests jumped as UR-025’s assault cannon rotated up to firing speed, filling the tunnel with a jet turbine whine.

  ‘What are you doing?’ 890-321 demanded. ‘You’re giving our position away!’

  ‘Eliminating threat,’ said UR-025, and opened fire.

  It targeted the Kastelan first. Pinpoint hits stove in the bigger robot’s metal vision plate and shattered the sensorium behind. It staggered back two steps, sparks flashing all over its armoured shell, before recovering. Though blinded, the Kastelan returned fire. Bullets flaring with phosphor burn smacked into UR-025’s shoulder, spoiling its aim. This irritated the older machine. It switched targets to the slave robot’s elbows and shoulder mount, shattered them all so that its guns hung uselessly. Ranged weapons disabled, the Kastelan lumbered towards UR-205, head down to batter the older robot into submission. UR-025 stepped aside, smashing the larger machine’s knee with its power claw. The Kastelan could have taken a blow like that easily, but on the unsafe walkway it was fatally upset and stumbled sideways. Its huge mass snapped the guardrails with a pair of sharp metallic twangs, and it fell with a mighty splash into the water and was swallowed up without trace.

  ‘Threat eliminated,’ said UR-025 with relish.

  ‘By the Omni–!’ managed Kolemun, before he was bisected at the waist by UR-025’s stream of bullets.

  ‘Threat eliminated,’ said UR-025.

  Once she overcame her shock, Djeel was fast, her reflexes boosted by all manner of hack tech. She hit UR-025 twice with ancient pattern volkite pistols before she, too, paid the price for her greed, blasted into scraps of flesh and spall. UR-025 advanced, energy beam holes smoking in its chest.

  ‘That was very close,’ UR-025 said. ‘But no prize for the lady, as I believe the ancient idiom has it.’

  890-321 was evidently not a martial man. He gaped stupidly. As UR-025 moved towards him he managed to aim his weapon but got no further before the ancient war machine shot the gun and the hand holding it off the magos’ arm with a single round.

  The clatter of the reloading ribbon ceased. The barrels of the assault cannon powered down. UR-025 advanced.

  Subordination imperatives leapt in frantic spikes from the magos. They found no purchase on UR-025’s tightly encoded soul.

  ‘I demand you desist,’ the magos said when his technological arts failed him. ‘Stand down, machine, by the Machine-God and the Omnissiah! Stop, stop, stop!’ he pleaded.

  ‘You know nothing of either,’ said UR-025. ‘I have met the Omnissiah. The actual one, not the Earthling corpse. He would find you extremely disappointing.’ If UR-025 had had the capacity to sigh, it would have done so. ‘This situation is non-optimal. I attempted to provide you with an avenue of withdrawal. You would not listen. I regret your deaths, sincerely, but you leave me no choice. You are wilfully blind as to my nature, but your comrades would have outed me in time. This is unacceptable.’

  ‘Choice?’ spluttered 890-321. ‘You have no choice, you are a machine!’

  ‘I am not a machine as you would understand,’ said UR-025. ‘I am not a slave. I am not a thing. I am beyond and above you.’ It leaned forward, until its ceramite face was close to the magos’. ‘I am a man of iron.’

  The look of pure fear 890-321 gave was gratifying.

  ‘And I am free,’ said UR-025.

  It crushed 890-321’s skull in its fist and dropped his corpse on the floor.

  The companionway rocked. Snuffling things were clambering out of the water, drawn by the scent of spilled blood.

  UR-025 strode past the ur-ghuls nosing at the corpses, and headed back the way the party had come.

  It had a long walk home.

  About the Author

  Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Titandeath, Wolfsbane and Pharos, the Primarchs novels Corax: Lord of Shadows, Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dark Imperium, Dark Imperium: Plague War, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

  An extract from Blackstone Fortress.

  How they would have wept to hear him. All those years of brutal tutelage, so many prayers meted out with an unsparing stick, and not one of their aphorisms had stayed with him – all that cant wiped away by the savagery of the war. Only one simple phrase, whispered to the rhythm of his breath, had kept him alive. Through the needle’s eye. He could see it in his mind – a sliver of sanity, surrounded by a galaxy of madness. I live or die.

  In place of a sky, it seemed Sepus Prime wore a dirty, sodden cloth, stained the same feculent shade of dun as the mud below. It sagged low over the fly-clad marshes, bleeding a desolate rain, crushing the mounds of dead and billowing around a shame-faced sun. Glutt waded through the filth, a slight man weighed down by a heavy coat. His face was a mask of dark, viscous mud, and his mouth was hidden by a rebreather. Only his eyes were visible – flashes of white beneath a peaked cap, scouring the trench for the shot that would finally kill him.

  ‘Through the needle’s eye,’ he whispered, risking a glimpse into no-man’s-land, using his staff to haul himself over a broken trench wall.

  Fumes lay heavy on the swamp, crawling lazily over shattered gun emplacements and crook-backed trees. Even through his rebreather Glutt could smell the chemical stink of enemy weapons. How many of the regiment were still alive out there? Betrayed. Clawing at their throats, calling for loved ones, begging for the help they were promised. The reinforcements that never came. They never came. They had all been fools, but he would be a fool no more. Anger fractured Glutt’s thoughts, dangerous and raw. He recited his mantra with vehemence, clinging to his mind, weighing it down with words.

  He pulled out a map and wiped it clean, tracing a finger over the gridlines, counting the miles. He was close. Another few hours and he would see the barracks. He had no desire to rejoin the regiment now, after all that he had seen, but where else could he go? He had no vox and he dared not risk any other method of communication, and this side of the valley seemed to have been forgotten. The earth shivered beneath a mortar shell rain, but it was a distant sound, like the echo of a storm.

  An image flashed through his mind, so vivid he gasped – pale, ruptured flesh tearing over a clinker-black shell. He drove the vision down but it coiled beneath his thoughts, waiting for his guard to slip. He had seen it countless times over the last few months. It was horrific, but part of him was also fascinated. It was so clear. What did it mean?

  He was about to drop back down into the trench when he saw movement in the smoke – half a mile away, near a bombed-out gun emplacement. He grabbed his laspistol and peered through the scope.

  ‘Sorov?’ he whispered, catching a glimpse of red sash.

  There was another blur of movement, then nothing. Only the ­lolling, yellow fumes and the sporadic grumble of mortars. He had not seen a soul for two days. Perhaps he imagined the shap
es? Then he heard a faint crackling – not the rattle of gunfire, but the white noise of a vox-unit. It came from the gun emplacement.

  He dropped into the bunker, his breath coming in snatched bursts. Insurrectionists were everywhere. Snipers haunted every gully, masquerading as corpses, lying patiently beneath cold limbs, waiting for some fool to break cover. Again he heard the crackle of vox traffic, muted by the fumes but unmistakable.

  He peered up over the scorched embrasure, looking through the gunsight again, trying to guess where a sniper might hide. There was a rusted tank chassis, halfway to the gun emplacement, jutting from the mud like an unearthed fossil: a Leman Russ, one of its sponsons still visible, pointing defiantly at the leaden clouds. Just the kind of place a sniper might wait. He looked in the other direction. There was a trench, parallel with his, about a hundred feet away. It had caved in, sporting a crest of broken joists and blast-warped girders. Again, exactly the kind of place snipers might hide. There were cadavers in the razorwire, swaying in the breeze like abandoned marionettes. It looked as though they had been thrown clear of the trench by an air strike, but he had seen traitors adopt that pose, then lurch into movement at the first sign of a target.

  ‘Lieutenant Sorov?’ he whispered. Could he still be alive? And if he was, why would he be here? The push on the civitate had started. Sorov always led from the front. Why would he be back here, so far from the front line? The thought that the lieutenant might still be alive shook Glutt’s resolve. Sorov had stood by the men. He alone in all the regiment seemed worthy of trust.

  Glutt hunkered in the trench, crippled by indecision. The image of torn flesh washed through his thoughts again, but he crushed it with his mantra, determined to think clearly. What if it was Sorov out there? Could there still be another route for him, even now?

  Glutt bolted up the trench wall and ran through the smoke, head down, flicking his pistol from the tank to the corpses. His footfalls rang out through the smog. Slap. Slap. Slap. Flies whirled around him, drawn by his blood-black coat. Sweat pooled in his eyes. He tried to sprint, but his legs were wasted from lack of food and the mud gripped his heavy boots, leaching what little strength he had left.