Prospero Burns
The prayer boxes had kept faith alive in this cindered part of Terra through the Age of Strife. There was very little chance they contained any data of actual, practical value. But a study of their nature and the way they had been crafted and preserved could reveal a great deal about human thought, and human codes, and the way man thought about his place in a cosmos where science was increasingly proving to be inimical.
There was a noise outside in the street, and Vasiliy stepped in out of the sunlight.
‘Ah, captain,’ said Murza. ‘We were about to send for you.’
‘Ready to advance?’ Vasiliy asked.
‘Yes, up through Old Town to a rendezvous point,’ said Hawser.
‘Our contact has come up with the goods,’ Murza added.
The captain looked reluctant. ‘I’m concerned about your welfare. In the last hour, this whole region has become very active. I’m getting reports of actions with N Brigade forces all down the valley as far as Hive-Roznyka. Moving through Old Town will make you very exposed.’
‘My dear Captain Vasiliy, Kas and I have absolute faith in you and your troops.’
Vasiliy grinned and shrugged. She was a good looking woman in her mid-thirties, and the plating and ballistic padding of the Lombardi Hort battlegear did not entirely disguise the more feminine highlights of her form. Her right elbow was leaning on the chrome ’chetter strap hung from her shoulder. Sunlight glinted off the armoured links of the ammo feed that ran between weapon and backpack. A giant slide-visor of tinted yellow plastek came down over her eyes like an aviator’s headcan. Hawser knew its inner surface was flickering with eyeline displays and target graphics. He knew it because he’d asked her to let him try it on once. She’d grinned, and buckled the strap tight under his chin, and explained what all the cursors and tags meant. In truth, he’d only done it so he could see her whole face. She had great eyes.
In the street, the Hort forces were moving up. Vox officers scurried like beetles with their heavy carapace sets and long, swaying antennae. Troopers prepped ’chetters and melters, and set off in fire-teams. The sunlight winked off their yellow slide-visors.
A modest sub-hive dominated the hill’s summit, punctured and dilapidated by fighting. In its foothills, the outskirts known as Old Town, much more ancient street patterns and urban growths fanned out like root mass from a tree trunk. Hawser could hear shelling away to the south, and rockets occasionally whooped and squealed as they spat off overhead.
Hawser and Murza had spent three months in the region, tracking down the prayer boxes through a long and complex series of contacts and intermediaries. The boxes were said to contain the relics of venerated individuals from the Pre-Strife Era, part of a local tradition of Proto-Cruxic worship. Some contained old packets of scripture on paper or old-format disk too. Murza was especially excited about the translation possibilities.
So far, they’d recovered two boxes. Today, they hoped, they’d get the third and best example before the brutal inter-hive warfare finally forced them to quit the region. The item was owned and guarded by a small, underground coven of believers, who had kept it safe for six centuries, but picture records made by an antiquarian ninety years earlier attested to its outstanding significance. The antiquarian’s records also spoke of considerable scriptural material.
‘You do as I say,’ Vasiliy told them, as she did every morning when she led them out into the open.
They moved through the town under escort.
‘Can you hear music?’ Hawser asked.
‘No, but I do hear it’s your birthday,’ said Vasiliy, by way of reply.
Hawser blushed. ‘I don’t have a birthday. I mean, I only have a rough idea what day I was born on.’
‘It says it’s your birthday on your bio-file.’
‘You looked me up,’ said Hawser.
She feigned disinterest. ‘I’m in charge. I need to know these things.’
‘Well, captain, the date on my bio-file is the birthday I was given by the man who raised me. I was a foundling. It’s as good a birthday as any.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘So why do you need to know?’ he asked.
‘It just occurred to me that tonight, when this business is done, we could raise a glass to celebrate.’
‘What a fine idea,’ said Hawser.
‘I thought so,’ she agreed. ‘Forty, huh?’
‘Happy birthday me.’
‘You don’t look a day over thirty-nine.’
Hawser laughed.
‘When you two have stopped flirting,’ said Murza. His link had just received a pict-message from their contact. It was another image of the prayer box, its lid open. The image was of better quality than the previous one.
‘It’s as though he’s teasing us, tempting us,’ said Hawser.
‘He says the box is safe in the basement of a public hall about half a kilometre from here. It’s waiting for us. He’s agreed terms and a fee with the cult elders. They’re just glad the box can be removed to safety before war tears the city down.’
‘But they still want a fee,’ said Vasiliy.
‘That’s really for the contact, not the elders,’ said Hawser. ‘One hand washes the other.’
‘Can we move ahead?’ asked Murza sharply. ‘If we’re not outside in twenty minutes, they’re going to call the whole thing off.’
Vasiliy signalled the troop forwards again.
‘He’s impatient, isn’t he?’ she said to Hawser quietly, nodding at Murza up ahead.
‘He can be. He worries about missed opportunities.’
‘You don’t?’
‘That’s the difference between us,’ said Hawser. ‘I want to preserve knowledge – any knowledge – because any knowledge is better than none. Navid, well I think he’s hungry to find the knowledge that matters. The knowledge that will change the world.’
‘Change the world? How?’
‘I don’t know… by revealing some scientific truth we’d forgotten. By showing us some technological art we’d lost. By telling us the name of god.’
‘I’ll tell you how you change the world,’ she said. She fetched a creased pict-print out of her thigh pouch. A sunny day, a grinning teenager.
‘That’s my sister’s boy. Isak. Every male in my family gets the name Isak. It’s a tradition. She got to marry, and raise the kids. I got to have a career. Apart from living expenses, every penny I earn goes back to her, to the family. To Isak.’
Hawser looked at the picture and then handed it back to her.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like your way more.’
They came around a street corner and saw the clavier.
It was sitting in the middle of the street, an upright model, missing its side panel. Someone had wheeled it out of one of the bombed-out buildings for no readily apparent reason other than that it had survived. An old man was standing at its keyboard, playing it. He had to hunch slightly to accommodate the length of his limbs and the lack of a stool. He’d been good once. His fingers were still nimble. Hawser tried to recognise the tune.
‘I told you I could hear music,’ he said.
‘Clear the street,’ Vasiliy voxed to her men.
‘Is that necessary?’ asked Hawser. ‘He’s not doing any harm.’
‘N Brigade members strap toxin bombs to children,’ she snapped back. ‘I am not going to take chances with an old man and a wooden box large enough to take a mini-nuke.’
‘Fair enough.’
The old man looked up and smiled as the troops approached him. He called out a greeting, and changed what he was playing mid-bar. The tune became, unmistakably, the March of Unity.
‘Cheeky old bastard,’ muttered Murza. Vasiliy’s men surrounded the old man and began to gently persuade him away from his music-making. The march missed a few notes, added a few dud ones. The old man was laughing. The March of Unity became a jaunty music hall melody
‘So, your birthday,’ said Murza, turning to Hawser.
‘You’ve
never remembered before.’
‘You’ve never been forty before,’ said Murza. He reached into his coat. ‘I got you this. It’s just a trinket.’
The music stopped. The Hort troopers had finally got the old man to step away from the clavier. His foot came off the forte pedal. There was a metallic whir, like the counterweight wind of a clock movement, as the firing plate of the nano-mine inside the clavier engaged.
In less time than it takes a man’s heart to beat its final beat, the clavier vanished, and the old man disappeared, and the troopers surrounding him puffed into vapour like cotton seed heads, and the surface of the street peeled away in a blizzard of cobblestones, and the buildings on either side of the road shredded, and Murza left the ground in the arms of the shockwave, and his blood got in Hawser’s eyes, and Hawser started to fly too, and all the secrets of the cosmos were illuminated for one brief moment as life and death converged.
OGVAI SENT THE Upplander away while he thought about his decision. Eventually, after what the Upplander calculated to be about forty or fifty hours, during which time he saw no one except the thrall who brought him a bowl of food, the warrior called Aeska appeared in his doorway, sent by the jarl.
‘Og says you can stay,’ he remarked, casually.
‘Will I… I mean, how does this work? Are there formalities? Are their patterns or style conventions for the stories I record?’
Aeska shrugged. ‘You’ve got eyes, haven’t you? Eyes, and a voice, and a memory? Then you’ve got everything you need.’
PART TWO
WOLF TALES
FIVE
At the Gates of the Olamic Quietude
HE ASKED THEM if, under the circumstances, he ought to be armed. The thralls and grooms who were preparing and anointing the company for drop cackled behind their skull masks and animal faces.
Bear said it wouldn’t be necessary.
THE QUIETUDE HAD placed a division of their robusts on the principal levels of the graving dock. The dock was an immense spherical structure comparable to a small lunar mass. It consisted of a void-armoured shell encasing a massive honeycomb of alloy girderwork in which the almost completed Instrument sat, embedded at the core, like a stone in a soft fruit.
Deep range scanning had revealed very little about the Instrument, except that it was a toroid two kilometres in diameter. There were no significant cavity echoes, so it was not designed to be crewed. An unmanned vehicle could only be a kill vehicle in the opinion of the commander of the 40th Imperial Expedition Fleet, and Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot tended to agree.
Tra made entry via the polar cap of the graving dock megastructure. The company then moved down into the dock interior, descending via the colossal lattice of girderwork that cradled the Instrument. The Wolves came down, hand over hand, swinging from fingertips and toe holds, gripping struts with their knees, sliding, dropping, leaping from one support to another beneath. Hawser imagined that this process would look crude and ape-like; that the Astartes, bulked out even more than usual in their wargear, would appear clumsy and primitive, like primates swinging down through the canopy of a metal forest.
They did not. There was nothing remotely simian about their motion or their advance. They poured down through the interlocking ribs and spans like a fluid, something dark and glossy, like mjod, or blood. Something that ran and dripped, swelled and flowed again, a dark something that found in every angle, strut and spar the quickest unbroken route by which to follow gravity’s bidding.
LATER, THIS OBSERVATION was the first to earn Hawser any compliments as a skjald.
THE WOLVES DESCENDED and they did so silently. Not a grunt of effort, not a gasp of labour, not a click or crackle from a vox device, not a clink or chime from an uncased weapon or an unlagged armour piece. Hair was tied back and lacquered or braided. Gloves and boot-treads were dusted with ground hrosshvalur scales for grip. The hard edges of armour sections were blunted with pelts and fur wrappings. Behind tight leather masks, mouths were shut.
The Quietude’s robusts matched the Astartes in bulk and strength. They had been engineered that way. Each one was hardwired with remarkable sensitivity to motion, to light, to heat and to pheromonal scent. Somehow, they still didn’t see the Wolves coming.
Why don’t the men of Tra draw their weapons, Hawser wondered? His panic began to escalate. Great Terra above, they’ve all forgotten to draw their weapons! The words almost flew out of him as the Wolves began to drop out of the girderwork and onto the heads of the robusts patrolling below them.
Most went for the neck. A robust was big, but the weight of a fully armoured Astartes dropping on it from above was enough to bring it down onto the deck, hard. With open hands, unencumbered by weapons, the Astartes gripped their targets’ heads, and twisted them against the direction of fall, snapping the cervical process.
It was an economical and ruthless execution. The Wolves were using their own bodies as counterweights to clean-break steelweave spinal columns. The first audible traces of the fight were the rapid-fire cracks of fifty or more necks breaking. The sounds overlapped, almost simultaneous, like firecrackers kicking off across the vast, polished deckspace. Like knuckles cracking.
Distress and medical attention signals began to bleat and shrill. Few of the robusts who had been brought down were actually dead, as they did not enjoy life in the same way that conventional humans did. The robusts were simply disabled, helpless, the command transmissions between their brains and their combat-wired bodies broken. An odd chorus of information alerts began to sound throughout the dock’s megastructure. Layer added upon layer incrementally, as different bands of the Quietude’s social networks became aware of what was happening.
Stealth ceased to be a commodity of any value.
Having made their first kills, the Wolves rose to their feet. They were all, very suddenly, aiming guns. The fastest way to arm themselves had been to appropriate the weapons that were ready-drawn and clutched in the paralysed hands of their robust victims. The Wolves came up raising streamlined chrome heat-beamers and gravity rifles. It was really not Hawser’s place, then or later, to remark how sleek and unlikely these weapons looked in the hands of Rout members. It was like seeing pieces of glass sculpture or stainless surgical tools gripped in the mouths of wild dogs.
Instead, Hawser’s account reflected the following point. It is, the Wolf King teaches, good practice to use an enemy’s weapon against him. An enemy may fabricate wonderful armour, but the Wolves of Fenris have learned through experience that the effectiveness of an enemy’s protection is proportionate to the efficacy of his weapons. This may be a deliberate design philosophy, but it is more usually a simple, instinctive consequence. An enemy may think ‘I know it is possible for armour to be strong to X degree, because I am able to forge armour that strong; therefore I need to develop a weapon that can split armour of X degree, in case I ever encounter an opponent as well-armoured as I know I can be.’
The heat-beamers emitted thin streaks of sizzling white light that hurt the eyes. They made no dramatic noises except for the sharp explosions that occurred when the beams struck a target.
The gravity rifles launched pellets of ultra-dense metal that laced the dock’s warm air with quick smudges like greasy finger marks on glass. These weapons were louder. They made noises like whips cracking, underscored by oddly modulated burps of power. Unlike the heat beams, which split robust armour open in messy eruptions of cooking innards and superhot plate fragments, the gravity rifle pellets were penetrators that made tiny, pin-prick entry marks and extravagantly gigantic exit wounds. Stricken robusts faltered as their chests caved in under scorching heat-beam assault, or lurched as their backs blew out in sprays of spalling, shattered plastics, liquidised internals and bone shards.
It was almost pathetic. The Quietude had a martial reputation that was measured in centuries and light years, and the robusts were their battlefield elite. Here, they were falling down like clumsy idiots on an icy day, like clowns in a pantomime,
a dozen of them, two dozen, three, smack on their faces or slam on their backs, legs out from under them, not a single one of them even managing to return fire, not a single one.
When the robusts finally began to rally, the Wolves played the next card in their hand. They tossed away the captured guns and switched to their own weapons, principally their bolters. The Quietude’s social networks had frantically analysed the nature of the threat, and processed an immediate response. This took the networks less than eight seconds. The robusts were armoured with interlocking, overlapping skins of woven steel as their principal layer of protection, but each one also possessed a variable force field as an outer defensive sheath. After only eight seconds of shooting, the social networks of the Olamic Quietude successfully and precisely identified the nature of the weapons being used against its robusts. They instantly adjusted the composition of the individual force fields to compensate.
As a result, the robusts were effectively proofed against heat-beams and gravitic pellets at exactly the same moment as they started to take Imperial bolter fire.
Further humiliation was heaped upon the Quietude’s reputation. The men of Tra spread out, firing from the chest, mowing down the robusts as they attempted to compose themselves.
For this, thought Hawser, for this work, for these deeds: this is why the companies of Wolves are kept.
He had never seen a boltgun live-fired before. All his eight-and-the-rest decades of experience, all the conflict he’d witnessed, and he’d never seen a boltgun shot. Boltguns were the symbol of Imperial superiority and Terran unification, emphatically potent and reductively simple. They were Astartes weapons, not exclusively, but as a hallmark thing. Few men had the build to heft one. They were the crude, mechanical arms of a previous age, durable and reliable, with few sophisticated parts that could malfunction or jam. They were brute technology that, instead of being superseded and replaced by complex modern weapon systems, had simply been perfected and scaled up. An Astartes with a boltgun was a man with a carbine, nightmarishly exaggerated.