Black Library Games Day Celebration 201213 by Various

Author:Various
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-02T15:39:19+00:00

The Memory of Flesh

Matthew Farrer

Three eyes, one green glass in brass, one clear crystal in bright steel. The third, crystal also, wide and bulbous, set high up on the brow in a gunmetal-dark mount. They glittered in the pitiless blue light, bright against the black radiation hood.

The eyes turned. Left, right, up, down. Nothing triggered the alert routines. They adjusted focus, field depth, and spectrum sensitivity. Nothing on infrared but for a little heat from the idling engine behind. Ultraviolet was a uniform glare of such intensity as to be almost useless. A moment’s adjustment damped it out.

Left, right. The beautiful indigo sweep of the desert, stippled with micrometeorite impacts etched in shadows as inky-black as the sky overhead.

Up, to glance at the distant rock ridges. Auspex had put the ridge lines at thirty-eight kilometres away. The Rhino’s ranging lasers had confirmed thirty-eight-point-one-seven.

Left, and moving, tramping across the surface on sturdy metal-sheathed legs. No sound. No air to carry any.

Fifteen degrees around the perimeter, past the train of three ammunition wagons coupled to the rear of the Rhino. They had their own optical feeds, but cruder, best backed up by direct checks.

Left, right, up, down. Silence, emptiness, nothing but purple dust drenched in the murderous radiation of its star.

The sentry moved on. Traverse another fifteen degrees. And halt, listening.

A code-bark had hit the Rhino’s high-gain antenna and bounced to the servitor’s own short-range receptors. A move order under the veteran-sergeant’s transmission seal, a set of coordinates, an adjustment to alertness settings. The Rhino’s hatch came down, kicking up puffs of dust that made tiny, perfect arcs in the vacuum.

Sixty-seven seconds later, with the hatch closed, the servitor anchored into the control hub and its three eyes now channelling the external optical feeds, the Rhino moved silently away across the desert, bound for the ridge line.

The breg-shei were fast, but break their back with a bolt shell and they died just like anything else. Veteran-Sergeant Dolmech had eighteen confirmed kills on the xenos since planetfall on Regnan Drey. Up that to thirty-two since they had begun the pursuit through Regnan Magna’s rings and moons. Up that to a hundred and forty-eight since initial engagement with the ugly little hulk from which the creatures had been terrorising Imperial colonists on Regnan Impri.

Every one of those kills had been at close quarters. Dolmech didn’t trust a breg-shei to stay dead until he had personally put his boot through its thorax.

Even then, this one put up a fight. Its club-like forelegs flickered with that incredible speed they had, and bounced off his chest plate. The blind fist of a head – they still weren’t sure where the sensory organs were, or how they worked – bobbed in its little socket. The sacs that held its viscera distended and shifted its gut back and forth inside its shell.

Dolmech leaned forward and twisted his ceramite boot sharply around and back, in a motion he had perfected aboard the xenos hulk. He felt the alien’s spinal ridges crumple and snap, and its limbs went limp.

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