Chapter 40: A Broken Man of Iron
Duvette led the unit through the dark, moving quietly.
The tactical helmet's night vision rendered everything in that particular shade of eerie green. The outlines of metal walls. Twisted conduit. Unidentifiable debris piles. The dust-covered floor beneath each step.
He kept two paces behind Juno.
The Inquisitor walked without hesitation or variation, her black coat's hem invisible in the dark, her presence confirmed only by the soft sound her boots made on the floor.
Duvette watched her back and held a question he hadn't decided to ask yet.
No light. Complete dark. How was she navigating? He ran it against what he knew about her — psyker — and let the question go.
The corridor gradually widened and became more chaotic in its geometry, the walls beginning to show damage that had a different quality from the general deterioration of the hull.
Duvette slowed and looked.
These marks were not structural decay. The metal surfaces were covered in bolt impacts, burn channels, plasma splash craters, and — along one section — jagged-edged gaps with the specific serrated quality of a chainsword's work. He leaned in and examined one bolt impact. He pressed his finger to the edge of it.
The deformation was recent. Not recent as in this decade, but recent enough that the oxidization around the entry point had not had time to fully develop.
He looked further along the wall. Laser burns left their carbonized traces in the metal. Plasma craters had left the wall surface around each impact point vitrified. He had spent enough time in combat to read the specific weapons behind each signature without having to think about it.
Imperial standard issue. All of them. Every type.
He straightened and looked at the full picture of the corridor. The damage was dense — nearly every surface carried some mark. And the distribution of it was not random, not the product of a chaotic engagement in a confined space. The angles of impact, the direction of the advance, the concentration along the line of movement: this had been a deliberate clearing action. An organized push through this corridor.
Imperial forces had been here. And not long ago.
His eyes went to Juno's back ahead of him.
And she had navigated without any hesitation since they entered this section. Every junction, she had turned immediately, without pausing to consider direction or check any reference. A space hulk's interior shifted constantly, but her movements carried the quality of someone working from a known map. Not guesswork. Certainty.
She had sent people here before. More than once, probably. And they had failed. Which was why she had come herself, and why she had needed what she had told him she needed when she described him as a variable.
If the thing she was after was important enough to drive a Lord Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus to come personally — and to come with borrowed soldiers who could be discarded — then important was no longer the right scale of word for it.
The unit moved into a new corridor. Wider than anything they had passed through since the gravity anomaly zone, this one had data terminals and operation panels running along both walls, most of them dark, some displaying nothing but persistent error states in faint amber. Metal fragments and looped cable on the floor. Thick dust across everything.
The dust was very thick.
Juno stopped.
"Enemy," she said.
Threat Sense detonated in his nerves simultaneously.
The sensation was nothing like the warning in the cathedral. That had been a cold along the spine. This was ice needles driven directly into the base of the skull, the immediate full-body response of every sense firing at once with a single shared message.
"SPREAD OUT!"
Duvette's shout had not finished when the corridor lit.
A white beam came from the far end, moving at a speed that no reflex could have engaged in response, accompanied by a sound so faint it was barely a sound at all — a soft, almost inaudible hiss.
He threw himself behind a stack of fallen metal panels to the right. In the fraction of a second before he hit the ground, his peripheral vision registered two soldiers on the formation's left side who had not moved in time.
The white light swept across them.
They were gone.
Not down. Not wounded. Gone entirely — carapace armour, weapons, everything they carried, reduced to the most basic constituent particles of matter in the fraction of a second the beam took to pass through them. The floor beneath where they had been was clean. Not a trace of residue. Not a fragment of metal. Nothing.
The corridor went dark again.
Duvette pressed himself against the panels, his heart running too fast. On the helmet display, two blue contacts had disappeared.
Forty-eight.
"What in the hell was that?" He pushed the words through the channel. "Juno! Where are you?"
No response. If she was dead, this mission had just become its own problem.
He thought through what the beam had done and where it had come from and arrived at a name.
He came up from behind the panels far enough to see down the corridor.
At its far end, something crouched in the dark.
Six slender metal limbs, multi-jointed, supporting a body of roughly spherical form. Every surface of it covered in battle damage — impacts, cuts, damage to the limb joints that had visibly compromised its movement. The construction of it expressed a cold and utterly inhuman logic. No part of it resembled anything the Mechanicus built. The optimization behind its design had left no room for anything that was not function, and the function it had been optimized for was nothing a human being had designed with human beings in mind.
His mind produced the word before he consciously decided it.
Man of Iron.
A construct of the Dark Age of Technology. Created by humanity in the Golden Age. The Abominable Intelligences that had turned on their makers and come within reach of ending the human species before they were put down.
"Return fire!" He went onto the command channel at full volume. "The enemy can't move freely — its limbs are damaged! That is an Abominable Intelligence! Suppress it! Now!"
He raised his bolt pistol and fired at the construct.
The rounds hit the spherical body and accomplished nothing. The armoring wasn't something a bolt pistol was going to address.
Another white beam. Silent. Absolute. Three soldiers and the cover they had pressed against became ash simultaneously — not the nothing of the first two, but ash, the residue of partial exposure, their cover having absorbed part of the beam's effect. Duvette looked at the grey layer on the floor and understood, with a clarity that was not comfortable, where all of it had come from. Every expedition that had come through this corridor before them.
"Meltagun! Get him forward! Cover the advance! Point-blank shot!"
Anderson confirmed over the channel. He pulled the meltagun from a nearby soldier's hands and began reading the geometry of the corridor for an approach line.
The Man of Iron's central emitter began its recharge cycle. Blue light condensed in the housing at the center of the spherical body, brightening with each second.
A figure appeared at the far end of the corridor.
Juno. The Inquisitor came forward at a run, threw out her right hand, and a psychic barrier expanded from it — a shimmering field that caught the white beam an instant after it fired.
No sound. But the barrier buckled violently under the impact, light cascading across its surface in rapid waves, and behind it Juno's body absorbed the force and drove one knee into the floor. Blood came from the corner of her mouth.
"Now!" The word came out of her barely intact.
Anderson did not hesitate.
He roared and charged. The enormous frame covered the distance to the Man of Iron in a dead run, his boots striking the floor in a rhythm that shook the corridor with each impact. His augmentations made the weight of the meltagun irrelevant to his speed. He came across the open ground under a second beam that struck the remnants of the psychic barrier, shattered it completely, and drove Juno to both hands on the floor with blood coming from her nose and mouth both.
Anderson was inside the effective range of the beam.
He raised the meltagun to the point of contact with the Man of Iron's damaged body and pulled the trigger.
"Die."
The melta discharge at that range was not a shot. It was consumption. Superheated plasma at point-blank range against a spherical construct the size of a large furnace — the metal of the housing went from solid to molten in the time it took to exhale. The six slender limbs pulled inward in the thermal column and became red iron flowing across the floor. From somewhere inside the body, before the heat reached whatever processed its decisions, there was a sound that was sharp and high and entirely without biological origin. Then that too was gone.
The shockwave from the melta discharge launched Anderson backward and put him into the wall at the corridor's side with a substantial impact.
Silence.
Duvette got up from the floor and looked at Anderson's readout. The big man was already pushing himself off the wall. No serious damage. He gave the display one more second to confirm and then moved to Juno.
The Inquisitor was pressing one arm to the floor and getting herself upright with visible effort. She wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of her wrist. Her face was a color that was close to white, and her body was shaking in the involuntary way that came from a nervous system pushed past its sustainable limits. The cost of the sustained psychic use across the past several hours had been accumulating, and the barrier had drawn from whatever remained.
Duvette came to stand in front of her. He pushed the tactical helmet's visor up, letting his face show.
"So," he said. His voice was quiet and had no warmth in it. "What you came here to find — is it an Abominable Intelligence from the Dark Age of Technology?"
Juno looked up at him.
She did not deny it. She did not confirm it.
She reached up with a trembling hand and straightened her coat's collar. She turned away from him.
"Keep moving, Commissar," she said, her voice barely recognizable as the one she had started the mission with. "If I die, none of you find the way out of here."
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