The Voice of Mars by David Guymer

Author:David Guymer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2018-03-05T14:07:26+00:00

Chapter Twelve

‘The worst kept secret on Medusa, since the uprising. The entire Iron Council knows there is something there.’

– Iron Father Verrox

I

‘I knew you would come crawling. Sooner or later.’

Iron Father Verrox stood framed by the access hatch of the rumbling Land Behemoth Ruination, lit from behind like an angel of annihilation despatched by the Emperor of Mankind. Although divinities and miracles were seldom proximate to the Clan Vurgaan Iron Father. Lydriik tramped up the ramp, head bowed, battered by the wind, his Rhino lost to the dust and howl of the ever-moving Behemoth.

Verrox glowered over the high rim of his gorget, a glint of tooth showing.

‘I thought it would be sooner.’

‘It is good to see you too,’ said Lydriik, dust screaming past his visor.

Verrox went proudly unhelmed. Long grey hair clad in iron ringlets whipped about him like the medusae of Grekan myth, banging on the hull plating and on the vast breadth of his Indomitus plate. The armour hung heavily on him, like a pelt, the rattling war-harness scored in old Juuket signifying the worlds he had laid to waste and the xeno races he had consigned to extinction. Totems and trophies of the same hung from battered lengths of chain. There were shell casings, traitor insignia, the mummified anatomies of alien monstrosities bested in single combat, all of them butting and twirling as the Tactical Dreadnought suit breathed. Lydriik’s armour had once been similarly adorned, before it and he had been ushered into Clan Borrgos.

The Iron Father grinned, simian lips drawing over serried rows of chain-driven teeth. ‘The Vurgaan are the lions of Medusa. The Borrgos are jackals. I knew you would never be content on the ­Broken Hand.’

Lydriik nodded, without acknowledging the truth of what the Iron Father said. Verrox was terrifying, somehow embodying both the epitome and the antithesis of what it was to be an Iron Hand, but there was something intoxicating about him as well. Like hovering one’s finger over a mega-weapon’s trigger switch.

‘I have a favour to call in, old friend.’

‘Of course you do.’

With that, the Iron Father turned ponderously and strode inside.

The temperature soared by about fifty degrees as the wind fell away and the hatch was sealed. Lydriik removed his helmet, sweating in spite of his environment seals, and wiped sweat from his brow. The air aboard Ruination hovered around freezing, but everything was relative. It was a peculiarity of Iron Hands physiology that favoured the cold. Securing his helmet to the magnetic lock-strip that ran alongside his pistol holster, he followed after the Iron Father.

A hundred years he had been of the Vurgaan clan, in the wake of a battlefield initiation from Verrox himself on the feudal world of Battakkan. That century had been spent entirely on campaign, battling to remove the tau and their proxies from worlds across the Western Veil. This was his first time aboard the mobile monastery of his former clan.

Rusted weapons had been nailed to the bulkheads, so many they overlapped and made a wall of blades.

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