The Eye Of Medusa

fragments of thought and emotion that fell on his cortices only to melt away likeflakes of snow. The given components were not offered at random. Eachincorporated a data-tether twinned to the giver’s system core.When it was completed, Stronos heard the territorial growl that emanatedfrom his armour’s intelligence core, a surly welcome to a quorum of ten.He had studied the customs of Clan Garrsak in preparation for his transfer andswift elevation, his fascination genuine, but the power of their bonding took hisbreath away. It was as though the individual identities of ten battle-brothershad been subsumed into a gestalt being, its mind noospheric, its view from aplane above its constituent sum. This being had a name.Clave Stronos.‘It is done.’ Jalenghaal stood tall against the wall, an autopsy in monochromeof dull black ceramite and sleek plasteel bionic. For all his machinedetachment, his impatience was as audible as the power hum of his systems.‘Almost,’ said Sabeq. ‘I need only add rank insignia and ident wafers that theOmnissiah might know it.’‘The Alloyed approaches Thennos’ orbit,’ said Jalenghaal. ‘Brothers muster.’‘A fact to which I am cogent.’‘Then give me a time frame, adept.’A ripple of mechadendrites, a shrug. ‘The armour’s spirit demands its due,and yours must recognise clan-brother and commander.’It was in the nature of the Iron Hands to challenge their superiors, for in suchchallenges were weaknesses exposed, but at that Jalenghaal fell silent. Thebonds of clan went deeper than Chapter, deeper even than the shared gene-linkto the primarch.In times like these, it was the one bond of brotherhood that remained strongerthan iron.With the ritual essentially over, Stronos allowed his muscles to relax; hishands parted from the book in his lap.The Canticle of Travels was the only surviving text describing Ferrus Manus’early life on Medusa. This volume, written and annotated by the paramountVoice of Mars some time in the early centuries of M33, was the oldest versionof the collected stories still in existence. The forgotten adept’s anonymousopus, bringing the Omnissiah’s enlightenment to the old legends, was thecornerstone of doctrinal thought from Medusa to Mars, and anywhere else thattwo Iron Hands collided. This copy had seen more action than most Imperial

Guardsmen, and was better read. The pages were dog-eared, the las scorchacross the lower spine earned on Furios Minor when he had still borne thebook with him into battle.It had been a gift from a friend, and Stronos had few enough of those.He closed his flesh eye and massaged his forehead with the knuckles of hisgauntlet until the dizziness receded. ‘Iron Captain Draevark has apprised me ofthe situation on Thennos. The ships of my former clan are uplink-capable.’The stereotype of the thuggish warrior of Vurgaan was as old as that of therobotic butcher of Clan Garrsak; Stronos found the cultural idiosyncrasiesfascinating, but the allusion to the caricature raised a death-rattle chuckle fromLurrgol.Stronos glanced up to address the whipping tendrils of Artisan Rawl.‘Perhaps we might dispense with the abjuration of rejection and the ancillaryrites of inscription until after the initial deployment.’‘Your forgechain shows me that you have undergone the rite more than oncebefore. I see you have learned from the experience.’ Rawl bowed hismechitinous head-section. ‘Very well. The machine-spirit would welcome alate arrival to your first battle even less than it would a rushed blessing. Oh,for the purity of a warrior’s calling.’‘Iron is not dug pure from the ground,’ growled Jalenghaal. ‘It is made pure.’Lurrgol and Burr nodded in agreement.The artisan hooked a bloodied extensor over Stronos’ shoulder and gesturedfor the servitor, hidden in somnolence behind the fog of counterseptic andbone. At the artisan’s unspoken override, the lobotomised bio-construct startedtowards the cot. Its necrotised room temperature biology had hidden it fromStronos’ infravision until then. A neat square of blood vessels and bone hadbeen dug out of its brow. The flesh there had borne a binharic ident-brandcontaining Stronos’ clan, clave, and personal authentications. All now former.It too would eventually require re-baptism that the Omnissiah might know it.The servitor presented the adept a tray of implements, which he selectedfrom, replacing drill bits and nozzle heads as he dutifully blessed the currentlynameless servitor. Then he returned his attentions to Stronos’ armour, hyperfine laser sculptors erasing rank and squad insignia and replacing them withnew ones. Stronos felt the artisan’s sculpting tools hover uncertainly over hisbattleplate’s more glaring imperfections.Scratch marks in Juuket, the barbaric dialect of Clan Vurgaan, recorded the

many worlds on which he had fought. Strings of spent shells and power casingsrecalled particularly impressive kills, the trophies hanging from his armourlike threaded beads.He nodded reluctantly. When one joined a clan, one joined absolutely.Lurrgol appeared amused by Stronos’ hesitation. ‘Kardaanus and Vand lookforward to fighting under you, brother-sergeant.’Stronos had never met the clave’s two heavy-weapon specialists, butsomehow he found he knew them well. They had a shared appreciation offirepower. ‘I look forward to fighting alongside them as well. With all of myclan.’ He glanced at Jalenghaal’s brooding form as, with a serried click,Artisan Rawl’s lasers snapped back into folding sheaths.It is done,’ said the artisan. ‘May the Omnissiah watch over this instrument ofholy war. May the Motive Force move it. May the Machine God see it unmakethe impure works of the heretic, the abomination and the alien.’ He made acomplex concatenation of gestures.‘Ave Omnissiah,’ the four Iron Hands legionaries rumbled in unison.Stronos rose. The cot creaked with the removal of his immense weight. Herisked a turn of the neck. Stiff, but the pain was bearable.‘How does it feel?’ said Burr.‘Weak.’Stronos grunted as he pushed the softseals of arm and neck joints to run hisfingers down the forgechain. The augmetic vertebrae symbolised acceptanceinto his new clan. The first that every new Scout received was the plain steelof Clan Dorrvok. Next down his chain was the opalxanthine of the ClanVurgaan, followed now by the acid-etched gold rosarium of Clan Garrsak. Hefelt a frisson of connection to his prior, lesser selves, an unbroken chain thatran back, through his initiation, to his long-discarded humanity.‘With this link we bind you to our clan,’ Jalenghaal intoned. There was asingle century cog-stud bolted into his helm. He clasped Stronos’ wrist in agrip that was stronger than superhuman and harder than plasteel. Stronosreturned it with equal stiffness.‘You are fully connected?’ asked Burr.Through the constant feed of inload/exload from individual to clave to clan,Stronos found that he could see the ident-runes of every battle-brother aboardthe cruiser, the Alloyed. Recognised by the interlink manifold as a sergeant, hewas able to pinpoint their approximate location, determine their combat status,

listen in on private vox loops, and even see through a brother’s eyes bysiphoning input from his visual feeds.It felt godlike.‘I am.’‘What is the calculus of battle?’Stronos quickly read the runes. ‘Full-scale deployment. An example must bemade.’

CHAPTER TWO‘Your failure is one of calculus.’– Sergeant TartrakThe wind was biting, dark with Medusa’s dust. The temperature hovered justabove freezing, average for the season; day or night made little difference,visibility was in the tens of metres. Weird columns of rock dotted the plain,wind-carved over millions of years into flutes and coils, rugged stacks thatlooked from the corner of the eye like giant men and lopsided plinths thatdefied gale and gravity simply by enduring. Backing under one of the twistedformations, Arven Rauth crouched into a crevasse on its leeward side. Dustcrunched and swirled around his boots. The Oraanus Rocks extended severalhundred kilometres north to south; the ultra-hard lumps of diorite, ametamorphic crystal found only on Medusa, were all that remained of anancient mountain range. Granite, limestone, soil, all of it dust now, pulverisedby erosion and the winds thrown down by Medusa’s ferocious spin.Appreciating the brief respite from the storm, Rauth broke his rebreather’srubberised seal and forced up a cough of blood-phlegm and debris. He peeledoff one glove, partially exposing the wrist, and carefully scraped his lips ofdust on the underside. Then he did his best to blow and brush clean the insideof the mask and reaffixed it over his mouth and nose. He scowled as he

replaced his glove and hugged the action of his shotgun to his chest carapace.It got everywhere. His armour had been scoured to a mottled eggshell patternof raw armaplas and black metallic paint. It clogged the joints of his knees,hips and neck. The bare skin of his arms and face had been abraded beyondmere redness, to the point where the as-yet unestablished grafts of blackcarapace became as prominent as second degree burns. Birth marks. Herubbed his burning eyes, gritted his teeth and turned out from cover. The windstruck his sore cheeks with all the kindness it knew. Laying his shotgun overbent knee, stock up by his shoulder, muzzle in the dirt, he held up a hand toshield his face.If all worlds were Medusa there would be no war. That was what they haddrilled into him. If all worlds were Medusa then what would be the point?Raising battered magnoculars to his eyes he glared into the wind and spite.He panned across, the sameness blurring, cardinal runes checking left and righton the viewer’s sliders. He stowed the instrument in its belt pouch with agrimace. The storm was too heavy. As he considered that, a spasm of selfloathing brought the realisation that he’d allowed himself to be taken in by theshelter of the rocks and remained stationary too long. His spine prickled as heturned and looked over his shoulder.Dust over carved rock. Wind.He still remembered how it had felt to be hunted, when it had been his turn toface the rocks. He had been the only survivor that day, and that included theelder neophyte who had then been tasked to hunt him and his ‘brothers’ down.There will be no such upset today.It took him a second to distinguish the crackle of his vox-bead from the gale.‘You are immobile, neophyte,’ came a voice. Sergeant Tartrak of ClanBorrgos. It was more than just distance and a distorted connection that robbedhis machined tones of heart. Rauth scowled. The distance was an improvement.‘Have the Oraanus Rocks defeated you? Are you dead or do you simplysurrender?’Rauth ground his teeth. Anger beat against his breast and beat hard, giving hismuscles a fizz of energy. It hurt. His rib plate was fully formed, his chestenclosed in a slab of bone, but the new growth was yet to harden and he felt thefull-powered thump of both hearts like a slow fracture in the bone. He grippedthe shotgun’s muzzle with his ugly bionic left hand and rose.‘The clan could always use another servitor,’ Tartrak growled. ‘More than

it needs another neophyte without the strength to endure his initiation.’Rauth bit his tongue and sighted into the swirling dust. From what little hismentors deigned to teach, he knew that the technical capabilities of the IronHands were superior to most other Space Marine Chapters, with the possiblegrudging exception of their immediate genetic successors.They could have managed a two-way vox if they’d really wanted to. ‘I’m theeldest,’ Rauth muttered to himself, spoken with an emotionlessness that he mostcertainly did not feel. ‘I should be on Thennos with Clan Dorrvok by now.’‘The Iron Fathers say that Medusa’s spin slows year by year.’ Tartrak’svoice was a belittling bluster in his ear as Rauth pushed into the gale. ‘Thestorm had twice its power when I was given the Trial of Rocks.’Rauth forced himself to concentrate.With an application of will, his Lyman’s ear tuned out the bile from the vox.Even the wind dropped to a whisper as the audial implant belatedlyresponded, allowing him to disregard his environment and focus on that whichmoved within it. With similarly enhanced powers of vision, smell, and eventaste, he scanned the rocks.He was a killer, a hunter, biologically rooted to his birthworld in a way bothoverly familiar and not in the least bit pleasant. It disconcerted him, hisgenhanced prowess, so fundamental to what he had become, and yet socontrary to his conditioning to the Creed of Iron.He paused, shotgun trained between two darkly glittering stacks three timeshis height. The wind brushed the gun barrel, scraped the side of his face.Something lay on the ground there.It was dark and at first he’d taken the dark lump to be another rock, one of themany smaller fragments of old stacks or more altitudinous veins that nowlittered the floor of the plain, but now he looked directly at it, it did not glitterlike diorite. He parted his lips just enough to expose his tongue and tasted theair. The wind left little of the original spoor except a trace, but it was enoughfor him to taste. Gun oil. Fyceline. Blood. A body. He turned his facedownwind to spit grains of dust from his lips.One down. He thought back to his first Trial of Rocks, when he had been theneophytes’ age. We fought amongst ourselves too. Somehow, Tartrak hadneglected to mention that we were all being hunted.Senses straining, gun loose, he zigzagged towards the body. It took him a fullminute to cross the thirty or so metres and crunch down beside the dead man.

Rauth recognised Sarokk, the youngest of the neophytes.The armour he wore was the same as Rauth’s, weather-ravaged blackcarapace, moulded plates over chest and back and the lengths of arms and legs,ballistic thread covering the exposed joints. Blood splashed the chest plate andleft arm. Shot to the back. Pathetic. Rauth could see no obvious wound to hischest. He looked thirteen or fourteen years old – Terran standard; Medusanyears were desperately brief – but already packed more heft than a fully-grownmortal man. There was little augmentation. A surgical scar that ran down thethroat, another under the orbit of each eye, a steel plate bolted across the rightside of his forehead where a power maul had shattered the skull and destroyedhis frontal lobe, subsequently reconstructed once Apothecary Dumaar haddeemed him sufficiently chastened. He’d not spoken out of turn a second time.He felt little remorse for his brother.Whatever tenuous bond of empathy might once have existed between them,their brutal indoctrination had beaten it out of them. He had been hardened, ashis instructors had desired him hardened. If he had thought for one moment thata show of weakness on his part would spite them sufficiently to make themcare then he would have shown it, but he knew that it would not. He was rawmaterial, as easily replaced as a jammed magazine or a frontal lobe if judgeddefective.The powerful crack of a bolter rang from the looming columns at the sameinstant Rauth spotted the shooter – belly down, on a rock shelf about threemetres up. He observed the muzzle flare with split-second disdain. In that timehe’d seen three additional vantages, all of which offered superior cover andconcealment.Already on one knee, Rauth dropped through his supporting leg and rolled.In perfect conditions the bolt-round would have punched him through theskull, but the wind bent its trajectory, and it whistled past his head into the rockformation behind him. The mass-reactive blasted out lumps of diorite as thoughit were a mining charge. He turned his roll into a rise, using his escapemomentum to sidestep into cover.The second bolt-round boomed out, the echoes of the first still ringing fromthe rocks, and tore open the rock plinth that Rauth sheltered behind at headheight. He ducked and kept moving. A rain of metamorphic debris chinked offrock and carapace, finer dust finding its way into the filter pads of hisrebreather, clogging his airways with the smell of cordite and burned crystal.

Coughing, trying to force his breathing to heel, he scraped and shuffled aroundthe formation. He heard a third bolt-round punch into the other side of the rock,but the structure at that point was too thick and the mineral too hard to presentany danger, and Rauth didn’t flinch. Guided by biology, psyk-conditioning, andhard, hard practice he subconsciously calculated ranges and trajectories.The shooter hadn’t moved from his initial vantage. Rauth’s disdain for hisbrother grew. There would be some small pleasure in forcibly instructing himon his inferiority.He pulled up with a skid, intending to double back rather than attempt tocircle about his ambusher’s vantage as his brother had clearly anticipated. Ashe swung round, he saw another figure charging towards him from the way hehad come.Deviance from the anticipated caused Rauth to momentarily stall.Impossible. I missed no one.There was no time to react. The newcomer was big, blood splashed acrosshis arm and torso, war shout muffled by a rubber mask as he dropped hisshoulder and tackled Rauth through the waist. Rauth gave a grunt as the air waspushed from his chest, then a tortured wheeze as his multi-lung autonomouslydragged that air back in. His vision swam, and he landed hard with the otherman on top of him. They rolled a way, blocking each other’s knees and elbowswith their own before spraying to a stop in a dust dune with Rauth underneath.A ruse. Idiot. You mistook the bait for the hunter.With a grunt of annoyance, he got a bent knee under Sarokk’s chest piece andkicked him off.Bigger than an unimproved mortal the neophyte might have been, but he wasat the beginning of a process of enhancement that Rauth was soon to conclude.Sarokk flew back six metres before smacking into a tall rock. The back of hishead cracked on a projecting spur, and he cried out in pain as he dropped backto earth in a heap. Rauth found the display of weakness unconscionable. Hedrew up his shotgun.He could have willed the imbecile dead from that distance, but he had time tobe precise. He aimed down the barrel, square to the chest, and tightened hisgrip on the trigger at the same instant that a bolt-round thudded into the dustyunderfoot half a metre to his left and blew out a geyser of coal-black chips. Heglanced aside.The shooter had appeared from behind the column, signalled by Sarokk’s

initial shout. He came through the storm with the unwavering stride of anautomaton, the heavy stock of his bolter pressed between shoulder and jaw. Atthis range, Rauth had little difficulty picking out the iron jaw replacement, themother-of-pearl bionic eye that shone through the dark like a

DRAMATIS PERSONAE LORDS OF THE IRON HANDS KRISTOS, Clan Raukaan Iron Father TUBRIIK ARES, Clan Garrsak Iron Father VERROX, Clan Vurgaan Iron Father, and iron captain CLAN AVERNII DRATH, Third sergeant CLAN GARRSAK DRAEVARK, Iron captain BRAAVOS, Iron Chaplain NAAVOR, Techmarine ARTEX, Second sergeant ANKARAN, Eighth sergeant STRONOS, Tenth sergeant