Urdesh : The Magister and the Martyr by Matthew Farrer

Author:Matthew Farrer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2021-08-18T13:22:28+00:00

Platonos

Ninepoint Juncture ring road, Oureppan

‘Both.’ Kryakos spat the words, and Iapetos felt an ugly chill in his gut.

‘Both damaged? Neither reparable?’ Iapetos asked, although he knew the answer already. If there had been anything to salvage then Kryakos would be at work now, cracking the armour and cutting out the progenoid glands that had nestled in Kapis’ chest and throat. But the abomination’s chainaxe had ripped their brother apart too completely, the gene-seeds destroyed beyond the Apothecary’s ability to recover. The lifeline the primarch had passed down the generations to him had been severed. There would be no more initiates transformed into full brothers of the Phratry in Kapis’ memory.

Iapetos looked over at the ruin that had once been a warrior of Platonos, now laid out in Herodion’s broken speeder. The speeder’s basic lifters were still working but the thrusters and directional repulsors were gone, and it could no longer move under its own power. Herodion would have to walk behind it pushing it along. It made a fitting catafalque. They could not bear their brother home just yet, but they would not just leave him where he had fallen.

Iapetos opened his vial. There was not much left in it, but enough for a drop of Ithaka’s ocean to fall on the spot where Kapis had died and one to anoint the cloven and bloody helmet. It beggared belief that the creature could have done such butchery in such a short moment as it had had – but then, butchery that defied belief was the blood-and-brass traitors’ stock in trade.

Iapetos opened his vox as Herodion took his gunner’s remains away.

‘Have we found it?’

‘They report no contact,’ said Panagis, who’d moved out to the edge of the ring road to try to keep vox contact with Dardanos as the other speeder went hunting for revenge. Adrastes was covering him with the plasma gun in case the bastard creature had hidden nearby to strike at them again, but Iapetos thought not. He thought it was gone.

‘Hamiskora,’ he said.

‘Went back inside,’ said Herodion.

‘Did he sense resistance?’ Iapetos found himself hoping they would find some living Sons still in the bunker ready to fight them. He knew that was the thinking of some hot-blooded neophyte, not a sergeant, but he had had enough of corpse-choked halls and traps run by machines and carrion. Platonos had been handed a loss that he was keen to hand on in turn.

‘He found machinery,’ Adrastes voxed back, and Iapetos couldn’t stop himself from sneering inside his helmet. Of course he had. ‘Void shielding.’

‘Not a surprise,’ Iapetos growled. ‘This is a strategic target. We know why it would have its own voids. And now we know why the shields weren’t turned on. Archenemy traitors did the work before we got here.’

‘That’s the thing, though,’ Adrastes said. ‘Hamiskora says he thinks it’s not a shield generator any more.’

‘This is about that creation we found under the assembly-house, isn’t it?’

‘Hamiskora can be a little hard to understand when he gets… outside of himself,’ Adrastes said.

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