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A Lesson in Iron – David Guymer

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

A Lesson in Iron

David Guymer

The ork kill-kroozer shook hard, shuddering off vast quantities of its ramshackle superstructure as it boosted for the malformed abscess of an event horizon.

The anomalous region was a smear of abused reality a million kilometres across, compressed by hideous internal forces to a fraction of that in height and a depth that auspex read, impossibly, as zero. Sensor readings terminated there. The universe ceased to exist at that point. There were half a dozen known warp rifts in the growing Imperium. In a region of space containing ten billion stars, that made them about a million times less abundant than black holes. The standing edict of the Navis Nobilite and the Naval academies of Terra was to give them a wide berth and, a handful of apocryphal tales from rogue traders aside, no one had ever dared venture this close.

The Venom-class destroyer Strontium Wave broke off pursuit almost immediately as ether distortions began to smoke her void shields.

The kill-kroozer plunged on, heedless, chasing after the two equally massive junk ships that were already dissolving into the bent reality at the eye of the anomaly, its drive stacks sun-hot, its crude shields spasming under the unnatural onslaught.

It was not the Strontium Wave they fled.

Darkening the void to their stern came the Fist of Iron. A Gloriana-class battleship. The most advanced ship of the line to be launched from the yards of Luna since the death of Old Night. Flagship of the Gorgon.

For her to be committed with only a single escort was not uncommon, for Ferrus Manus understood war and its instruments in a way that the wolves of Russ and Horus never would. The Fist of Iron, unique amongst the warships of the recently warranted 52nd Expedition Fleet and the newfound primarch’s command, had the firepower to win this alone.

It was an efficient use of his resources.

The primarch sat upon a throne of black iron and Karaashi basalt, following the flicker-flash of the bridge’s main oculus as metal debris from the kill-kroozer burned up on the navigational shields or before the fury of the point-defence guns. He was a rugged, brutal giant, carved in stone, slabbed in plates of blackened ceramite and hung with heavy mail. His eyes glittered like empty silver vessels as they beheld the pyrotechnics.

‘That’s more than far enough,’ said Harik Morn, veteran sergeant of the Avernii Clan’s First Order, eyeing the stained oculus view as though it left a sour taste in his mouth.

‘The orks seem to think it can be done,’ said Santar, grinning across at the tanned old Terran from the left hand of Ferrus’ throne. Ferrus’ gene-seed imparted little beauty, and joviality still less, and none in the Legion typified the absence of those traits like Sergeant Gabriel Santar. His grin was like a tectonic fracture.

With the first captain that Ferrus had inherited from Amadeus DuCaine and the era of the Storm Walkers falling in battle to the alien gorge, it would be one of Morn or Santar who bore the mantle next. Both of them knew it, but Ferrus was in no hurry to make that decision.

He wanted to see them prove their worth, knowing there was another ready to claim the honour should they fail.

‘Well-known thinkers, orks,’ said Morn, dryly, arms folded over the elaborate design of his antique breastplate. ‘Never an edge they wouldn’t leap off. You want to follow them in…?’ He inclined his head towards the oculus.

There was a devil in them, Ferrus’ children: they were independent, prone to rash action, ruled by emotion and pride. It was Medusans like Santar in whom the flaw was most pronounced, but they strove to control that fire with the same objectivity and logic that Ferrus had learned on the same harsh parent world.

A parallel spectrum of colours bled through the oculus as the lead ork cruiser vanished into the rift. The mortal crew groaned in dismay and averted their faces from the vivisected rainbow that radiated off the event horizon. Even Santar stuck out his lower lip.

The display glinted off Ferrus’ eyes, impermeable as mirrors.

‘Warning,’ Xanthus chittered. The Mechanicum representative to the 52nd was a bent figure in a frayed scarlet cloak, standing with the aid of a copper-inlaid metal staff in a specifically modified operations pulpit. One metal-scaled hand was clamped to a hub augur display. A febrile mass of manipulator arms whipped from slits in his robes to attack a myriad of haptic controls even as he turned towards Ferrus and his legionaries. ‘I have no data with which to predict conditions within a warp anomaly.’

‘Then we will be the first,’ said Ferrus.

‘Lords!’

The battleship’s mortal commander, Laeric, was a thickset man, already balding in his thirties. The sweat on his scalp was stained purple and green by the distortions in the oculus, as if by oil, his hands gripping the safety rail that surrounded the five unequal figures on the bridge’s command platform, eyes filled with terror.

But Ferrus did not know terror. He feared neither death nor failure.

Only being outshone.

‘Dismantling the Rust empire was our responsibility. Even if the Seraphina Offensive was waged before my leadership I will not have my Legion’s most famous victory tarnished by the existence of survivors. After them, shipmaster. Ahead full.’

Liquescent tendrils of energy burned across the Fist of Iron’s bows, an aurora of pinks and blues that ignited her navigational shields as though she plunged headlong into the atmosphere of an as-yet unrealised world. Eerie harmonics looped through the internal comms grids, mangled, distorted sounds that emerged from the ship’s augmitters as pleas for mercy, cries of anguish, the begging whispers of familiar voices. A resonant effect from the voids. An onslaught of some kind. But Ferrus was accustomed to terrain that could kill, an instinctual understanding that he had poured into the design of his flagship.

He considered informing Laeric and his crew of the sound’s origin, but decided against it.

On Medusa, he had battled the giant elementals that dwelled within its mountains, conversed with ancient spirits that spoke in magmic eructation and the shaking of the earth, aided an Iron Father in the exorcism of an enraged machine, and he knew the Emperor’s ‘Truth’ for a useful lie.

Let the mortals be afraid.

Let them face their nightmares, endure and emerge the stronger, or else fail and strengthen the collective by their expulsion, for Ferrus’ Legion had no place for the frail of spirit.

‘Augur sweeps of the interior,’ said Ferrus. ‘I want them now.’

‘Aye, sir,’ said Laeric, holding tight to the rattling handrail and shouting the instruction down to his junior officers.

‘There is a tremendous degree of signal distortion,’ said Xanthus calmly, a moment later, plugged directly into the battleship’s abrasive spirit. ‘False reads. Sensor echoes. The effect worsens progressively with distance from the Fist of Iron, but not to any mathematical corollary. Interesting.’

Still gripping the handrail in both hands, Laeric took his juniors’ reports and relayed them to the primarch. ‘We’ve a reliable augur radius of a few hundred metres at best.’

‘They are in here somewhere,’ scowled Santar.

‘Maybe we can look through a window?’ suggested Morn.

‘Maybe you should.’

‘I am programming the augurs to scan for particle traces from the orks’…’ The Mechanicum adept hesitated for a moment, his thought processes marked by a clockwork tick as he struggled for an acceptable terminology. ‘…engines. Our entry vectors were identical. Their drive emissions should be traceable.’

‘And?’ said Ferrus.

‘Plotting.’

Ferrus grunted. ‘Weapons are functioning, at least?’

‘Lances at full charge, lord.’ Laeric read from a fitfully glowing screen. ‘Macro-batteries loaded and locked. Targeting matrices… Well, they’re online, lord. We’ll see how well they function when the time comes.’

The curl of a smile threatened Ferrus’ lips. If there was one thing he admired, it was candour.

‘At least we know the shields are working,’ added Morn, frowning as another squeal of feedback harrowed through the bridge’s comms.

‘Contacts!’

The female voice yelled up from the sensorium pits – no formality of chain of command here and Ferrus expected none. He nodded an acknowledgement, ignoring the hammer-thump of his hearts, the urge to beat his fist on his armrest that Horus or Russ would undoubtedly have indulged had they been in his place, and presented his bridge with iron.

‘Real-views on the source. Now.’

‘Aye, lord. Working.’

‘Mass signatures,’ the woman continued, speaking over the other officers, a screed of consciousness direct from the augur reports as they spilled onto her screens. ‘Two thousand kilometres off the port bow. I think. Distance is… elastic. Mass equivalent to four capital-sized xenos vessels.’

‘Four?’ Ferrus frowned down at her. ‘We pursued only three.’ The woman paled under his direct regard. ‘A fourth vessel already within the anomaly perhaps?’

‘They were not fleeing us,’ said Morn. His gaze dragged from Ferrus to Santar, lingering a pointed moment, then on to encompass Laeric and his mortal crew. ‘They were luring us into a trap.’

‘The Fist of Iron can still best four ork cruisers,’ said Santar.

Laeric nodded, but kept his obvious doubts for himself.

‘And if there are more beyond our detection range? We are barely a dozen light years from the old Krooked Klaw Empire. If their remnants have begun to rebuild here–’

‘Improbable.’ Xanthus interjected.

‘If they have begun to rebuild inside this anomaly,’ Morn repeated, more forcibly, ‘if they have adapted their systems to its effects.’

Ferrus forestalled the Terran’s counsel with one raised cold metal finger. He welcomed it, but his decision, once made, was absolute. ‘It is equally likely that the mass readings are “elastic” as well.’

Santar grunted agreement.

‘Real-view established,’ announced Xanthus, cutting further argument short as all eyes turned to the oculus.

The large oval screen was plagued by static, untranslatable energetic features assuming physical shapes as one viewed them, like images in a cloud. If any man could be so degenerate as to see naught but contorted faces and grasping hands in a cloud. Xanthus’ beetling industry and the efforts of the crew succeeded in smoothing out the bulk of the audio, leaving only sporadic bursts of static as the real-view centred on the mass of four capital-sized vessels, becalmed on a storm of elemental colour…

…their wreckage strewn over several thousand kilometres of tormented space.

‘What did I say?’ muttered Morn. ‘Edge. Leap.’

‘What happened?’ Ferrus asked of the bridge at large.

‘Analysing,’ said Xanthus.

Laeric leaned over the handrail, the curved bar rattling up against his gut with the shearing forces currently flexing and bowing the ship’s hull, as a gaggle of decorated under-officers whispered urgently up at him from the main deck. Ferrus could not make out what they were saying, but he heard Laeric dismiss them angrily, going so far as to raise a hand to strike a young lieutenant who did not withdraw speedily enough to his station.

‘A problem, shipmaster?’ Ferrus asked.

‘Nothing, lord. Another sensor ghost.’

‘I will be the judge of that.’

Laeric cleared his throat nervously, evidently wishing he had not dismissed his juniors so hastily. ‘My crew are certain that these are indeed the ships we pursued into the anomaly, but thermal decay and material analysis would appear to suggest they were destroyed years ago. Decades.’

‘Impossible,’ said Xanthus.

‘Lord.’ Santar pointed to a shard of darkness within the oculus’ clearing view-frame.

A ship.

Its ram-like stem bowed under the caress of evanescent flames, its dorsal spine shorn messily in half. Its hull armour was monstrously thick, but pitted as the surface of an asteroid. A few shavings of black paint remained in harder-to-attack spots – between armour plates, beneath the cupolae of macro-batteries. The weathered shadow of an aquila was just visible on the slab keel of its fortress bow.

A Legiones Astartes strike cruiser.

‘It is one of mine,’ Ferrus breathed.

‘Impossible,’ Xanthus said again.

‘Most definitely impossible, lord,’ said Laeric, even more rattled, if anything, by the presence of the Imperial derelict than he had been by the penetration of the rift itself. ‘I know every ship in the Fifty-Second Expedition.’

‘I have other children. Those still fighting under the Emperor in the First Expedition Fleet. Those in the Eighteenth, or the Thirty-Third?’

‘No, lord!’ Laeric bit back something he would have later regretted. He rubbed the back of his head. ‘I’m not even confident I recognise the class.’

Ferrus returned his silvered gaze to the oculus, the derelict growing incidentally more massive as the Fist of Iron moved relative to it. Close enough to see chunks of orkish debris bounce soundlessly from its broken shell, coils of unnatural flame, self-igniting somehow despite the empty vacuum of the anomaly, gyrating down its length.

‘Prepare boarding parties and ready my gunship. Santar, Morn, Xanthus, you will accompany me.’

It was a mystery. A challenge.

And Ferrus never could dismiss a challenge.

Arkal Metrician tapped the side of his helmet, the square section of welded plasteel and micro-rivets that contained his armour’s vox-antennae. Pathetic. The warzones he had fought over. Afrik. Ionus. Rust. All without the benefit of Mk II. How quickly one came to depend on it.

Pathetic.

‘Still no contact with Sergeant Boros?’

Ruugal’s lean face was white in the beam from Metrician’s lamp, dark eyes narrowing to pins, a plastek breath mask strapped over his nose and mouth. His helmet was open, a glossy piece of black carapace, but fitted with tracking systems and short-range vox capability that those legionaries who had battled on through the intermittent communication blackouts of Mk I power armour would have envied.

‘Don’t worry yet, boy. During the Ooranian uprising, my squad and I went three entire days without vox contact.’

Ruugal frowned, in no way enlivened by yet another anecdote from the Unification Wars of Greater Sol, and turned to pad up the unlit corridor from the blown access hatch.

The stressed metal creaked: with the Scouts’ tread; with the impacts of what was left of the ork ships; even with the barely perceptible gravitic shifts as the Fist of Iron fought to hold at anchor in the storm. It groaned.

It struck Metrician as odd, now he thought about it, that this lifeless wreck did not have to fight as hard as the primarch’s flagship to remain still.

The light beams of the other Scouts, spearing from lumens clipped to the stocks of shotcannons and autoguns, painted the bulkheads. Bare metal glittered like silver in the after dark, and Metrician suppressed a shiver.

Exposed to the void, but sheltered from the worst effects of the rift by a labyrinth of internal corridors and doorways, everything was exactly as it must have been when the ship had been lost. There were exterior maintenance tools in hatches. Danger notices inscribed in Imperial Gothic. Atmosphere suits sized for mortal wear hung in glass-fronted lockers. One was open. The black fabric erupted with returned light as Metrician’s helmet beam panned across.

Everything was familiar and yet… different.

The sound of something metallic clattering on a deckplate echoed up from the distant halls of the listing ship, and six lumen beams converged on the far end of the corridor. They wavered. The sounds of breathing laboured through the squad link.

Deeply pathetic.

‘It’ll be Lagethar,’ he grunted. ‘Two decks down.’

The Scouts relaxed, a loose clatter as grips un-tensed and gunstocks dropped to sit tight against chest-plates, light beams scattering as if for cover.

The rawest and the eldest: that was who the primarch always threw in first. Prove the former. Purge the latter. Metrician couldn’t complain. He would probably do the same.

‘Could there be orks still alive over here?’ whispered Ruugal.

‘Not a chance,’ he said, before adding, in the hermetic privacy of his Mk II powered helm. ‘Answer me, Boros. In the Emperor’s name, answer me.’

Sharik Borrgan was driving into the pumping chamber the second that Hemtaal had the door forced. The shorn-off muzzle of his combat shotgun led, lumen beam scoring glancing hits off steel jackets and vent covers. Everything was greased and shiny, as though it had been tended that very day. That very hour. The huge pistons bracketed to the walls were for cycling air through the deck, but they were still now, quiet. The great bellows lay empty.

‘Sergeant?’ he called out as he pushed deeper into the cave of inert iron.

The gunfire he had heard had definitely come from this chamber, but it was empty. No sign of the Scout Sergeant. No sign of orks. Sharik’s query echoed out through the gaps in the metal as he manually dialled the frequencies of his helmet vox-attachment. Nothing there but faint giggles of static.

He waved for the rest of the squad to spread out.

‘Sergeant Boros?’

A sudden creak and pop of metal spun him around, shotgun thrust out at neck height, as a crippling wave of distortion ran through the port bulkhead. Hemtaal shouted something in warning. Steel buckled and split, and Sharik cried out, squeezing himself into the scant cover of a piston jacket as bolts shot out from the crumpled section. One thudded head first into his rerebrace, leaving a meaty bruise over the bicep. Another drove point-first into his unarmoured throat.

He gargled, blood spewing between his fingers as he groped for it, the idea careening through his skull of yanking it out. He found it, couldn’t get purchase, fingers slipping in blood from metal to flesh and over again. He was still breathing though. Still breathing. And he was a Space Marine of the Iron Tenth: he would come back from worse.

Swallowing on pain, he staggered from cover, pointed his shotgun at the bulkhead and tried to concentrate.

There was something there. Difficult to define. A corposant in the metal.

The wound in his neck bubbled as he tried to make words. ‘What. In Old Night?’

A cry from the chamber’s entrance called on his attention. Hemtaal. There was a gunshot, the hard thud-thud-thud of auto-fire, the whoosh of Zaegerr’s flamer.

Sharik stumbled around a half-circle to see something rip Jerek in two from left shoulder to right hip. His body emptied, enhanced transhuman viscera slapping the deckplates as though someone had upended a slop bucket, and then, for no reason at all, catching fire. The eviscerated Scout burned pink and hot, throwing off an oily smoke that left Sharik gagging despite his breath mask, pain stabbing him through his throat.

Zaegerr let rip with his flamer again, howling as he sprayed burning promethium across the chamber and set walls and piston jackets alight.

It distressed the creature – the thing – but little more. Its suprasonic shriek was raw fury, punishing the bulkheads with wave after wave of manifest violence, tearing the delicate system of bellows to shreds. Enough of an opening, however, for Sergeant Salem Hektur to drag Zaegerr back into the corridor and thrust his bolt pistol into the entity’s ‘mouth’.

The Terran veteran was immense in his power armour and battle honours, an awe-inspiring presence.

His bolter’s report was deafening.

The beast was an uncertain blur of nightmarish configurations, as though it were spinning through an infinite bestiary of surreal and impossible forms, uncertain which to adopt, but Sharik thought he glimpsed something in the heart of it. It was emotion rather than form, and yet the impression it evoked in him was of long limbs, sweeping horns, heavy claws – although none in any ratio that would correspond to a naturally proportioned creature, nor anything that corresponded even to itself from moment to moment.

The volley of shells passed through it without contacting anything with a mass before detonating in the burning wall behind it.

And yet it could touch. It could lift a Space Marine and it could kill.

What breed of xenos strain was this?

A chainsword revved to full speed with a terrific shriek as Sergeant Hektur set such questions firmly to one side.

The whirring adamantium teeth of the veteran’s blade battered the surrounding metal as he hacked through the chimeric apparition. It retaliated in kind, as if feeding off the Iron Hand’s own passions, claws solidifying from thin air to rake the sergeant’s armour, drawing particular relish from shredding the victory laurels and oaths papers affixed to his plate. Air whistled from broken seals. Liquid sealant gurgled up from the wounded ceramite.

With a snarl, Sharik turned his shotgun towards the fight. It was slippery with blood, his forearms slick with it. He managed a roar, trusting that Hektur’s power armour could shrug off his grapeshot for they had practised such melee tactics many times, and fired.

The shot whizzed through the ethereal beast, tearing through it like a hand waving through thick mist. He pumped the action, shells spitting from the breech, raised the gun and fired again. The thing gave a shriek that was felt in the heart and in the gut, rather than heard through the ears and processed by the brain. Sharik worked his pump action a second time, but the alien was already beginning to dissipate, leaving a lingering trace of anger and the murder-shriek of Hektur’s chainsword.

This was no ork.

How did all the weapons and physical enhancements available to the Legiones Astartes avail them against an alien that could not be touched?

‘Behind you.’

The sound of Sergeant Boros’ voice pulled him short.

He turned around, and immediately gasped as he felt something strike through his chest carapace, through his chest, carving his primary and secondary hearts, and erupt from his back plate. He looked down, growing dizzy, to see himself impaled by a bone-spear of sputtering energy. He felt cold, as though opened to the void.

He could still hear the roar of Hektur’s chainsword, but it was dimming, changing, becoming the roar of something else altogether.

In the narrow antechamber adjoining the main bridge they found the first evidence of a crew.

The servitor was enshrined within a hub nexus of carbonised steel beneath a wire halo, most of which fed into the huge set of doors that blocked access to the bridge proper. Ferrus was familiar with the control setup, but had never seen it assembled with such exaggerated occultism, not even in the cabalistic tech-shrines that persisted still in some of Medusa’s most isolated and challenged regions. Harik Morn tilted the lobotomised unit’s head back. It was vacuum-desiccated, eyes staring at the ceiling more blankly even than usual through a rimy cataract of void frost. The Terran checked it over for signs of life – or causes of death – while Santar and the rest of the veteran squad moved ahead to manhandle the doors.

Ferrus watched them, the heavy doors thunking as the power-assisted strength of seven legionaries tested the locks, listening to the sporadic reports of combat that trickled from his helmet vox. He had seen nothing, but an ill-feeling followed him regardless. As if he had been led here. Toyed with.

Metal hands heated the haft of Forgebreaker, the great warhammer of his brother’s making, until it glowed red, spitting like a melta-torch in his grip.

‘I had assumed the vessel abandoned, the crew taken or killed,’ he said. ‘Everyone has heard the stories of ghost ships adrift in the warp.’

‘We’ve seen no real crew member yet,’ said Morn.

‘And yet this is here.’ Ferrus indicated the dead servitor.

Morn shrugged. ‘You can’t run a ship with just a servitor. Or servitors.’

‘If you have concluded your… analysis, Sergeant Morn.’ Adept Xanthus appeared much the same as he had aboard the Fist of Iron, but for a flex-plastek tube that emerged from the dark of his hood, looped over his shoulder and disappeared again under the folds of his robes. ‘If this is indeed a Tenth Legion vessel then I should be able to overrule the servitor’s codewalls and open the bridge doors.’

‘Then do it,’ said Ferrus.

A clutch of mechadendrites emerged through the tattered layers of robe covering the magos’ chest, suckering onto interface ports across the servitor’s mortal husk with an audible slurp of suction. The servitor gave an involuntary twitch. Morn swore and struggled to bring his bolter up.

‘An autonomic reaction,’ said Xanthus. ‘A response to code inputs. Do not be alarmed.’

‘You could have said that before you started,’ muttered Morn.

Bolter up, the Terran moved to join Santar and his Avernii Clan brothers at the doors, crouching into fire positions or readying grips on power weapons.

Ferrus forced his grip to relax, his hands to cool to a simmer.

‘What is taking so long?’

‘Either the codes are subtly dissimilar from the standard protocols or the servitor’s command algorithms have suffered degradation over time. It may take– correction: inputs accepted. Doors opening.’ There was an ascending sequence of clunks as the locks disengaged and the goliath doors ground apart.

Spot lamps mounted on helmets, pauldrons and the barrels of boltguns stabbed into the gloom of the bridge. Metal plates and a mess of ceiling ductwork glinted back, the massive outline of an Icon Mechanicus. For a second even Ferrus held his breath, but there was nothing, just the faintest scent, like anodised steel, that carried despite his armour’s hermetic seals and the utter absence of an atmosphere.

Santar and Morn were first in, youngest and eldest, each taking two warriors with them and leading them left and right respectively onto the gangwalks that circled the primary command platform. Ferrus followed in with the last two Avernii Clan veterans in tow and Xanthus scuttling to keep pace, driving straight towards the command hub.

‘More servitors,’ came Santar’s vox-growl. ‘You were right, lord. No sign of crew. Or anything else.’

‘Same.’ Morn. ‘But these rune inscriptions on the bulkheads – they’re not Gothic, nor any form of Medusan I’ve seen.’

‘Lingua Technis,’ said Xanthus quietly.

‘This is no Mechanicum warship,’ said Ferrus.

‘It is not.’

Enthroned upon the command platform they found an answer, and several more questions.

It was clearly a legionary of the Iron Hands, the Clan Raukaan and Legion markings on his armour confirmed it – but he had been butchered, pulled apart and put back together in the crudest way imaginable, the base mechanics of what made a legionary maintained at the expense of the perfection that the Emperor had crafted into His children’s flesh. It reminded Ferrus of greenskin work: powerful, functional, ugly. The runaway reconstructive surgery had left little of the wearer’s original armour intact, but what remained was unusually baroque in design, engraved with unfamiliar symbols and of a pattern that did not conform to any iteration of Legiones Astartes armour.

‘If I might tender an extrapolation,’ Xanthus muttered. ‘The warp is known to render space and even time mutable. Is it possible, under such a conjecture, that a Tenth Legion vessel could have become snared in this warp anomaly at some indeterminate point in the future, only to emerge – for want of a more appropriate immetereological nomenclature – now?’

Ferrus looked down at the bionically abused corpse.

An ugly future.

‘Not while I live.’

A cry split through the vox-unit, and Ferrus turned to see an immense xenos creature manifesting over Gabriel Santar. The legionary’s left arm was already gone, the evidence of a bite mark left in the bubbling ceramite of the screaming warrior’s shoulder. The creature roared and the whole ship seemed to vibrate to it, as though it served as nothing more than the vox-piece for something even larger, even deeper in the warp.

The burnt electrical stench was powerful enough to taste.

Answering cries retook the Legion vox-bands, the sudden eruption of bolter-fire lighting the abandoned bridge in flashes.

In bursts of muzzle flare, Ferrus saw more of the xenoforms come. They crawled out of the bulkheads, running together, burning with pinkish flame, as if they had been drawn in from the outer hull and given gibbering, capering independence.

Morn shredded one with bolter fire. It wobbled and cackled. Like shooting into a fire. Ferrus took two giant strides off the central dais and obliterated it with a single thunderclap-blow from Forgebreaker that simultaneously demolished a square metre of deck. It did not laugh at that. ‘Absurd life forms,’ he heard Xanthus mutter, as the two veterans assigned to their protection took defensive postures and began methodically carving the bridge into halves with bolter fire.

On the other side of the platform, to Ferrus’ left, Santar was being dragged to his feet, the second legionary blazing into the inconstant behemoth that had taken his sergeant’s arm. Shrugging off the helping hands, Santar deactivated his gladius’ mag-sheath and hurled himself at the beast with a roar.

The creature recoiled from the blade, suffering under its edge even as the concomitant bursts of bolter fire passed straight through it.

But Ferrus had the prickling feeling that it was not the blade doing the damage. It was the man. Perhaps it was the unnatural conditions inside the rift, but even from afar Ferrus could feel Santar’s pummelling fury. It was like Medusan galefrost, and the relentless battering chill of it was slowly tearing the abomination apart.

Morn, however, was being swamped. The Terran was positively incandescent, and it drew the creatures to him like a targeting hex.

Ferrus bludgeoned another streaming entity midair. It blasted apart, soupy spatters of corrosive matter glowing as they rained over him, hissing as they ignited on his armour. Gripping the weapon tightly in both fists, he gave a clangourous cry. He was a god of war, born to fight, bred to win, and every superhuman sinew in him strained to do so now. But to what end? Santar had delivered a potent lesson in iron.

Passion was a weapon borne by all who took the Gorgon’s blood, but it was logic and reason that could make it a tool.

‘Ferrus Manus,’ he said, activating the Legion frequency that would be heard by every legionary aboard the cursed derelict, and on the Fist of Iron too. ‘Fighting withdrawal. Back to the gunships.’

‘No!’ Morn panted, laying into the maelstrom of hungering xenos with bolter and power axe. ‘This… is a Legion… vessel. I will not… leave it… in the hands of these… things.’

‘This vessel is a wreck,’ Ferrus replied, remaining on the wider frequency so that all could hear. ‘Honour be damned.’

Xanthus looked up, barely two-thirds of Ferrus’ stupendous height. The backwards tilt caused the adept’s hood to slip, exposing for a moment the metal plates and writhing inner workings concealed within. ‘Disregard honour, lord primarch. Be logical. Think of the technological advances that a vessel from two, three, four thousand years into sidereal future could confer. Think of the disasters that foreknowledge may avert.’

The two veterans shepherded the adept and the primarch back towards the blast doors, constricting the kill-zone of relative safety between them. Santar had cut his way through to Morn, practically dragging him off while their brothers continued firing. If Ferrus had one lesson for his children it would be that there was no such thing as defeat, provided there were lessons to be learned.

If nothing else, he had found his new first captain today.

He afforded the wretched refuse of an Iron Hands legionary on the command platform one final look.

‘Whatever this future has to offer, magos, I will have no part of it.’

About the Author

David Guymer wrote the Primarchs novel Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa, and for Warhammer 40,000 The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two The Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he wrote the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned and the Gotrek audio drama Realmslayer. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

An extract from Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa.

Amadeus DuCaine thumped shoulder-first into the rockcrete wall. He dropped to one knee, turned his back, calmly ejected the spent magazine from his bolter and snapped home another of the specially tagged sickle-mags. As he did so he noticed the las-burn on his vambrace, cursed aloud, and took a moment to buff it out using the wrist of the opposite gauntlet. He’d been taught to go into battle looking as he’d want the Apothecaries to find him. Today was no different.

The thick harness of his Mk I Thunder Armour was so polished a black that it shone under the inconstant light and creeping ice like volcanic glass, covered in company and campaign citations, most of which the Legion no longer officially recognised. Of them all, his pride was the Seal of the Eye of Vigilance, etched in platinum into the cheek guard of his tall helm. He had earned it in the latter years of the Seraphina offensive, campaigning alongside Lord Horus after the X Legion’s annihilation of the ork forces on Rust. Good years. A curtain of chainmail, alternating rings of black iron and silver, hung from his shoulder guards. A collar of iron spikes traced the rear of his gorget ring and rose behind the back of his head. He carried a Clan Sorrgol banner as a cloak. It was heavy velvet, reinforced with a metal weave, weighted with onyx, black spinel and star sapphire, and glazed with ice. The clan device was picked out in silver.

With a series of heavy thumps, his command squad joined him in cover. Techmarine Rab Tannen. Apothecary Aled Glassius. Half a dozen age-raw, hoarfrosted, brutally decorated veterans almost as hard-bitten as their Lord Commander. Storm Walkers all and proud of it. The boy, Caphen, was last.

The lacquered purple of the youngster’s armour was scuffed and bullet-grazed, the palatine aquila that stood proud of his chest plastron burnished with coppery hygroscopic ice. Breathless sounds emerged from his helm augmitter as he crashed into the wall at the far end of the line.

‘They coming?’ DuCaine asked, and checked his vambrace for damage under the passing alchemical light of an aerial flare.

Caphen nodded. ‘They’re coming.’

The boy had been attached to the command squad strictly as an observer, but the old hands all looked at him as they would a stressed bulkhead, something that might give at any second and void the entire proverbial section.

‘The lad’s one of us now,’ said DuCaine, raising his voice to contend with the shrieking fire of the Tarantula batteries dug in on the other side of the wall. ‘That’s the last I want to say on it.’

The lad nodded his thanks. Even if he did flinch at being called ‘lad’, ‘boy’, or any variation thereof.

Satisfied, DuCaine looked up, as if he could discern the progress of the battle from the flicker trace of fire and dying flares. Vesta was a sunless moonlet, adrift in the void, cast off by its parent system at some point or other over the last five billion years under circumstances that didn’t interest him, and dark as hell. It was cold enough to flash-kill a primarch. Until a few days ago, it hadn’t had a name. That was why the enemy had chosen it.

Who would miss an orphan moon that no Imperial cartographer had yet bothered to stick a number to?

He turned away to see that Gaius Caphen had worked his way up the line towards him.

‘I am uncertain about this tactic, Lord Commander.’

DuCaine laughed. An inbred respect for the proper chain of command and an innate disapproval of so single-minded an approach to warfare were clearly tying the boy’s head in knots.

‘This tactic is a classic. Did I not tell you of the time that Lord Horus assigned his own First Captain as my equerry after Rust, to see it first-hand?’

‘I think you may have,’ muttered Tannen.

The Techmarine had been amongst the last cohort to learn his craft in the Ural forges. He was among the last to have retained a Terran sense of humour. DuCaine threw him an ironic ‘thank you’ wave.

‘It won’t work against the Emperor’s Children,’ said Caphen.

That single statement soured the mood more than all the artillery of the III Legion ever could.

DuCaine had been trying not to think about it.

But if the lad had any qualms about facing his own brothers in battle, then he wasn’t showing it. DuCaine was impressed. Even if it had been Fulgrim himself who had given the boy his orders. The rest of the command squad picked up on his resolve; their attitudes of suspicion noticeably relaxed.

‘The warlord clans of old Albia have been perfecting this way of war on each other for hundreds of years,’ DuCaine explained. ‘The trick of it is to deploy only the exact amount of strength you need to draw your enemy into a straight fight.’

‘And in ensuring the men so deployed have the nerve to stand before the storm,’ said Glassius, in characteristically portentous language. The Apothecary liked to project an air of gravitas onto the suckling neophytes he had to call brother. ‘And in increasing numbers, sir.’

DuCaine nodded in agreement. He’d become aware of the custom that had developed amongst the mortal auxilia of the 52nd Expedition, of scribing their own condolence letters prior to deployment. DuCaine heartily approved.

The clans of old Albia had observed similar traditions.

‘This phase is called Raising the Storm. It’s a template we followed on the Central Afrik, and in the Panpacific Campaigns.’

Caphen’s look, even through the frosted amethyst of his helmet lenses, was one that DuCaine had come to recognise all too well over the last century and a half. It wondered just how hard Unification could have been. How it could possibly have taken the Master of Mankind and his twenty Legions so long to achieve.

‘You heard of Rust?’

‘I think he may have,’ said Tannen.

‘It won’t work,’ Caphen repeated. ‘The Third Legion don’t fight in that way.’

‘I know the boy we’re fighting here well, and he’s not nearly as good as he thinks he is. In my experience a battle can be controlled right up to the point where it begins. After that I don’t care if you’re a technobarbarian from the Afrik, an ork, or aye, even Legiones Astartes, you do what everyone does in a battle.’

Caphen shook his head, but did not protest further.

DuCaine shrugged, turned back to the wall, slung his bolter strap over his shoulder, then set his boot against the frozen rockcrete surface as if about to pull himself up over the top.

‘We just have to sweeten the lure a little bit.’

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First published in Black Library Events Anthology 2017/2018 in Great Britain in 2017.
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