Prospero Burns

Five

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.

The sight of it reminded Hawser of how un-human the Wolves were. He had been amongst them for long enough to have become used to the look of them and the way they towered over him.

Still, they were positively reassuring compared to the forces of the Quietude.

Skull measurements and other biological data taken from captured Quietude specimens had confirmed their Terran ancestry. At some point long before the fall of Old Night, a branch of Terran expansion had brought the Quietude’s gene pool into this out-flung, unremembered corner of the galaxy. The commander of the 40th Imperial Expedition Fleet, along with his technical advisors and savants, believed that this exodus had taken place during the First Great Age of Technology, perhaps as long as fifteen thousand years earlier. The Quietude possessed a level of technological aptitude that was extremely sophisticated, and so divergent from Terran or even Martian standards as to suggest a long incubation and, possibly, the influence of a xenobiological culture.

At some early stage in their post-Terran life, the humans of the Quietude had given up their humanity. They operated in social networks, cohered by communications webs neurally spliced into them at birth. They sacrificed most of their flesh anatomy to ritualised surgical procedures during childhood that prepared them to inhabit artificial bodies. Pretty much all that remained of a Quietude adult, organically speaking, were the brain, skull and spinal cord. These rested in the neck socket of an elegantly engineered humanoid chassis, which contained the machine-analogue organs that fed the brain and kept it alive.

That explained why the shot-up robusts were pooling almost purple fluids around their carcasses instead of blood.

The citizens of the Quietude wore hoods of silver circuitry over their skulls, and hologram masks instead of faces. As the boltguns killed them, the masks flickered out and failed, and revealed the self-inflicted inhumanity beneath.

Aeska had carried Hawser down with Tra, instructing Hawser to hold onto his neck. He’d clung on like a pelt, and Aeska had carried him as if his weight had no significance to the Astartes, and even when they’d been going hand-over-hand down through the dock’s girder lattice, even when the only thing preventing Hawser from plunging to his death was the grip of his fingers around Aeska’s neck, he’d kept his eyes open. He had not done this because he’d jumped down enough flues in the Aett to develop a head for heights. He’d done it because he’d known he had to. It was expected of him.

On the principal deck level, as the assault began, Aeska had set Hawser on the ground behind him and told him to walk in his shadow. The vast, polished deck yawned away on either side of them, curved like the surface of a world seen from orbit, and the lattice above was like the branches of a dense thorn thicket. The air was laced with bolter fire.

Hawser needed very little encouragement.

Five minutes into the fight, the Quietude finally began to claw back. The first Rout blood they spilled was from a warrior called Galeg, who was hit by a gravity pellet. The shot turned his left arm, from the elbow down, into a bloody twig, rattling with bracelets of shattered armour. Galeg shut the pain down and advanced on his attacker, swinging out a chain axe. Steam and blood-smoke sizzled from his injured limb.

The shot had not come from one of the robust warrior units. Three graciles, the lighter weight technical versions, had retrieved the weapon of a fallen robust and set it up on a lattice walkway. Galeg bounded up onto the walkway as they missed him with two more desperate shots, and dismembered them with his wailing axe. He did this with relish, and let out wet growls as their fracturing chassis shattered under his axe-blows and emitted strangulated electronic shrieks.

When Galeg had finished his kill, he signalled his ability to continue with a casual air-punch of his bloody, ruined fist, a gesture that Hawser found chilling.

Several robusts had defended the entrance to a major engineering underspace with what looked like a heavier, perhaps crew-served, version of the gravity rifle. The colossal bursts of fire, ripping up the underspace approach from an unseen source, vaporised Hjad, the first Wolf to come into view. Bear wheeled the rest of his pack aside. There was no point in providing further targets. Hawser saw Bear take out a small hand axe, a one-piece steel cast, and mark the bulkhead beside the underspace slope. He did it quickly and deftly. It was evidently a mark he’d made many times: four hard cuts to form a crude diamond shape, then a fifth notch bisecting the diamond. Hawser considered the mark gouged into the bulkhead metal, and realised what it was.

It was an incredibly simplified symbol for an eye. It was a mark of aversion.

The Olamic Quietude had been hostile from the very point of contact. Suspicious and unwilling to formalise any kind of convergence, they had engaged the 40th Fleet in two separate ship actions in an attempt to drive the expedition out of Quietude space. During the second of these skirmishes, the Quietude managed to capture the crew of an Imperial warship.

The commander of the 40th Imperial Expedition Fleet sent a warning to the Quietude, explaining that peaceful contact and exchange was the primary goal of the Imperium of Terra, and the Quietude’s aggressive stance would not be tolerated. The warship and its crew would be returned. Negotiations would begin. Dialogue with Imperial iterators would begin and understanding reached. The Quietude made its first direct response. It explained, as if to a child, or perhaps to a pet dog or bird that it was trying to train, that it was the true and sole heir of the Terran legacy. As its name suggested, it was resting in an everlasting state of readiness to resume contact with its birthworld. It had waited patiently through the apocalyptic ages of storm and tempest.

The Imperials who now approached its borders were pretenders. They were not what they claimed to be. Any fool could see that they were the crude artifice of some alien race trying to mock-up what it thought would pass for human.

The Quietude supported this verdict with copious annotated evidence from its interrogation of the Imperial prisoners. Each prisoner, the Quietude stated, displayed over fifteen thousand points of differential that revealed them to be non-human impostors, as the vivisections clearly demonstrated.

The commander of the 40th Expedition Fleet sent for the nearest Astartes.

The longer Hawser lived amongst the Rout, the more the Astartes had to do with him. Warriors he did not know, from companies he had not encountered, would come and seek him out, and regard him suspiciously with their abhuman gold eyes.

They hadn’t learned to trust him. It wasn’t trust. It was as though they had got used to his alien scent being in the Aett.

Either that, or someone, someone or something with the authority to call off a pack of the wildest killers on Fenris, had ordered them to accept him.

It seemed, as it had with Bitur Bercaw, that the telling of stories mattered to them.

‘Why do the stories matter?’ Hawser asked one night when he was permitted to eat with Skarssen and his game-circle. Board games like hneftafl were for sharpening strategy.

Skarssen shrugged. He was too busy scooping meat into his mouth in a manner that wasn’t a human gesture. It wasn’t even the gesture of a ravenous human being. It was the action of an animal fuelling itself, not knowing when it would feed again.

Hawser sat with a meagre bowl of fish broth and some dried fruit. The Astartes of Fyf had mjod, and haunches of raw meat so red and gamey it stank of cold copper and carbolic.

‘Is it because you don’t write things down?’ Hawser pressed.

Lord Skarssen wiped blood from his lips.

‘Remembering is all that counts. If you remember something, you can do it again. Or not do it again.’

‘You learn?’

‘It’s learning,’ Skarssen nodded. ‘If you can tell something as an account, you know it.’

‘And accounts are how we don’t forget the dead,’ put in Varangr.

‘That too,’ said Skarssen.

‘The dead?’ asked Hawser.

‘They get lonely if we forget them. No man should be lonely and forgotten by his comrades, even if he’s a wight and gone away to the dark and the Underverse.’

Hawser watched Varangr’s face in the lamplight. There was no way to read it except as the dull-eyed mask of an apex predator.

‘When I was sleeping,’ Hawser said. It was the start of a sentence, but he hadn’t thought it through to the end, and nothing else came out.

‘What?’ asked Skarssen, annoyed.

Hawser shook himself, coming out of a brief trance. ‘When I was sleeping. In cold sleep, where you kept me. I heard a voice then. It said it didn’t like it in the darkness. It missed the firelight and the sunlight. It said it had dreamed all of its dreams a hundred times over, a thousand times. It said it hadn’t chosen the dark.’

He looked up and realised that Skarssen, Varangr and the other members of Fyf around him had stopped eating and were staring at him, listening intently. A couple had blood on their chins that they hadn’t wiped away.

‘It told me that the dark chooses us,’ Hawser said. The Wolves murmured assent, though their throats made the murmur into a leopard-growl.

Hawser stared at them. The twitching firelight caught golden eyes and gleaming teeth in shadow shapes.

‘Was it a wight?’ he asked. ‘Was I hearing a voice from the Underverse?’

‘Did it have a name?’ asked Varangr.

‘Cormek Dod,’ said Hawser.

‘Not a wight, then,’ said Skarssen. He sagged, as if disappointed. ‘Almost but not.’

‘Worse, probably,’ grumbled Trunc.

‘Don’t say that!’ Skarssen snapped.

Trunc bowed his head. ‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ he said.

Hawser asked what they meant, but they wouldn’t be drawn. His story had briefly piqued their interest, but now they were deflated. The jarl turned back to the subject of death.

‘We burn our dead,’ said Skarssen. ‘It’s our practice. There’s no soil on Fenris for burial. No ground that isn’t iron hard in the long winter, and no ground with any permanence in summer. We don’t leave markers or tombs, no graves for the worm-wed like other men. Why would a dead man want that? Why would he want his wight weighed down and anchored to one place? His thread’s cut and he can finally roam as he pleases. Doesn’t want a stone pinning him down.’

‘A story is better than a stone,’ said Varangr. ‘Better for remembering the dead. Do you know how to remember the dead, skjald?’

The medicae who tended him in the field station at Ost-Roznyka spent some time explaining that they’d nearly been able to save his leg.

‘The shrapnel damage would have been repairable,’ he said, as if discussing the re-liming of a wall. ‘What cost you was the crush damage. The blast carried you into a building, and brought a lintel down on you.’

Hawser felt nothing. His senses had been entirely fogged by opiates, he presumed. The Lombardi Hort field station was grubby and painfully under-provided, and the medicae’s scrub-smock, mask and cap were soiled so deeply it was clear he didn’t change them between patients, but there were several freshly used opiate injectors in a chrome instrument tray by his cot. They’d used precious pharm supplies on him. He warranted special attention. He was high status, a visiting specialist.

It was likely several regular soldiers would die or at least suffer terrible and avoidable pain because of him.

He felt nothing.

‘I think an augmetic will be viable,’ the medicae said, encouragingly. He looked tired. His eyes looked tired. All Hawser could see of the medicae above his soiled mask were his tired eyes.

‘I can’t do a proper assessment here,’ the medicae said. ‘I really don’t have the resources.’

Eyes, without a nose or mouth. Hawser felt nothing, but a current stirred deep down in his drugged torpor. Eyes without a nose or mouth, eyes above a soiled mask. That was wrong. He was used to seeing it the other way around. A mouth and no eyes. A mouth, smiling, and eyes hidden.

Really great eyes, hidden behind a tinted yellow slide-visor.

‘Vasiliy,’ Hawser said.

‘Hmh?’ replied the medicae. Someone was shouting outside. Cybernetica portage units were arriving with fresh casualties loaded onto their stretcher racks.

‘Vasiliy. Captain Vasiliy.’

‘Ahhh,’ said the medicae. ‘She didn’t make it. We worked on her, but there was too much organ damage.’

Hawser felt nothing. It was a state of mind that was not destined to last.

‘Murza,’ he said. His lips felt like dough. His voice flowed like glue.

‘Who?’

‘The other inspector. The other specialist.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said the medicae. ‘The blast killed him outright. There were barely any remains to recover.’

Hawser remembered the names of the dead whose threads were cut taking the Quietude’s graving dock. Five Astartes, five of Tra: Hjad, Adthung Greychin, Stormeye, Tjurl-On-The-Ice and Fultag Redknife.

He witnessed two of the deaths personally, and learned particulars of the others afterwards, so that he had at least one specific detail for each one, a piece that would make a proper end for each account.

For example, just before the robusts’crew-served weapon had turned him into bloodsmoke and a rattling drizzle of armour fragments, Hjad had carried over two of the Quietude’s big fighting units by rushing them bodily. One had been too crippled to pick itself up again. The other had attempted to claw at Hjad, its face hologram blinking as it tried to reload into something more threatening. Hjad had punched his right fist through its torso and pulled out its spine. That was Hjad, the men of Tra agreed. Unflagging, unsentimental. A good account.

Hawser felt confident he had an idea of the desired form.

Adthung Greychin had cleared an entire deck level of the graving dock structure with his chainsword after a lucky shot damaged his bolter. He went through robusts and graciles alike, making them scatter. No one actually saw him take the two gravity penetrators that killed him, but Thel saw his body on the ground just after it dropped, and told Hawser that Adthung’s famous grey beard had been dyed almost indigo by the spatter of the enemy’s pseudo-blood. He had died well. He had left a litter of dead and a field of cut threads behind him. Hawser added a quip about sleeping on purple snow to the finish of Adthung’s tale, and that earned appreciative rumbles from Tra.

Stormeye went to the Underverse destroyed by beam weapons. Blinded, his face all but scorched off by damage, his mouth fused shut, he had still managed to split a robust from the shoulder to the waist with his axe before falling. Hawser had seen this feat for himself. A dead man pulling another down in death with him. This account’s ending was greeted by a grim but admiring silence.

Erthung Redhand told Hawser about Tjurl. Tjurl was known as Tjurl-On-The-Ice because he liked to hunt, even in the alabaster silence of Helwinter on Fenris. He would leave the mountain with his spear or his axe, and go out into the high wastes of Asaheim. His blood never froze, that’s what they said about him. Because of all that mjod he had drunk, Erthung liked to add.

Tjurl went hunting that day in the graving dock. He took many trophies. That was how Hawser told it. Not once did Tjurl’s fury grow cold. Not once did he freeze.

Last to fall was Fultag Redknife. Last story to learn and last to tell before the account of the taking of the graving dock could be finished. Fultag led the assault that took the dock control centre and slashed the throat of the Quietude’s social network system so that all the data drained out as useless noise.

The assault was not the act of vandalism that Hawser had expected. Fultag’s team did not smash the systems indiscriminately with a heathen lust to defile the artefacts of a more sophisticated culture. They disabled specific parts of the control centre using magnetic mines, gunfire and blunt force, but spared enough of the primary network architecture for the Mechanicum to later examine and, if necessary, operate.

The higher beings of the Quietude were clearly concerned about accidental weapons discharge in the control centre. None of the robusts there were armed. Instead, the area – a geodesic dome structure in the central dock space directly beneath the caged Instrument – was defended by squads of super-robusts. These were titans, reinforced heavyweights armed with concussion maces and accelerator hammers. Some of them had double sets of upper limbs, like the blue-skinned gods of the ancient Induz. Some even sported two heads, twin side-by-side mountings for vestigial organic components, each with its own silver-circuit hood and holomask.

Fultag’s team gave them a lesson in axe work. Ullste, moving in to support, witnessed the fight. Each blow shook the deck, such was the strength in those limbs, he said. Super-robusts and Wolves alike were knocked down by bone-crushing blows. It was a clubbing, battering fight that churned through the split levels of the centre, smashing the gleaming window ports, fracturing console desks as bodies reeled into them. The matt fabric of the floor was quickly covered with chips of glass and fragments of plastic and spots of purple pseudo-blood.

Fultag knocked down his first super-robust on the centre’s entry ramp. He ducked the mace it swung at his head. If it had connected, the blow would have pulverised even Fenrisian anatomy. The thwarted weapon made a woof through the air instead, a woof like a winded fjorulalli, the great seal-mother.

Fultag was wrong-footed by having to duck, and there was no time to plant his feet better to swing the smile of his axe in before the mace came back at him. He managed a half-swing instead, and connected with the poll of the axe-head. The blunt back of the head fractured the super-robust’s shoulder armour and impaired its limb function on one side. It compensated.

Fultag had already rotated his axe, reset his stance, and brought the axe through in a downsweep that severed one of the super-robust’s arms at the elbow and the other at the wrist. The detached pieces, still gripping the energy-sheathed mace, thumped onto the deck. Purple pseudo-blood jetted from the ruptured hydraulic tubes in the limb stumps.

The super-robust seemed to hesitate, as if it wasn’t sure how it should proceed.

‘Oh, fall down!’ Fultag growled, and kicked it over the way he’d kick a door in.

Several members of his team were by then engaging enemy units in the mouth of the hatchway at the top of the ramp. The hatch was effectively blocked by the savage melee. Fultag vaulted the ramp’s guardrail and edged along a parapet that ran around the dome’s outer surface. When he got to the first window, he stove it in with his axe and jumped inside.

The graciles manning the consoles had begun to disconnect and flee the moment the window exploded in at them and showered the control area with glass shards. Fultag managed to kick one over and chop it in half. A super-robust came at him, and he used his axe-haft to deflect its hammer. Like a staff fighter, he brought the knob of the axe-haft up across his body, two-handed, and smacked the Quietude warrior in the sternum. Then the smile of his axe went into the super-robust’s right shoulder.

It stuck fast, wedged. The thing wasn’t dead. It lashed at him. Fultag pulled out his long knife, the knife he had cut so many threads with, the knife that had earned him his name, and propelled himself forwards into it. He crashed it backwards against a console. The combined weight of them partially dislodged the console from its floor socket and snapped underfloor cables. The super-robust got its hand to his throat, but Fultag stabbed his knife into the middle of its face.

It died under him and went limp, arms, head and legs slack over the console like a sacrificial victim on an altar slab.

Before he could slide back off his kill and regain his feet, Fultag was hit across the back by another super-robust. The blow was delivered with an accelerator hammer. It cracked Fultag’s armour and broke his left hip.

He uttered a growl as he came around at his tormentor, his black-pinned golden eyes wide with rage. His transhuman Astartes biology had already shut the pain off, diverted ruptured blood vessels, and shunted adrenaline to keep Fultag moving on a half-shattered pelvis.

The super-robust was one of the quad-armed, two-headed monsters. Its upper torso and shoulder mount were wider than the driving cage of a Typhoon-pattern land speeder. It carried the concussion hammer with its upper limbs like a ceremonial sceptre-bearer. Fultag managed to evade its next blow, which folded and crushed the damaged console and the dead super-robust draped over it. The follow-up caught him across the right shoulder guard and hurled him sideways into another bank of consoles. Fultag growled, his teeth bared, and droplets of blood spraying from his lips, a wounded wolf now, hurt and deadly.

He went in at the super-robust and grappled to clamp its upper limbs and stop the hammer blows. The Quietude warrior actually found itself pushed back a few steps. It couldn’t wrench its arms free. It dug in with its secondary upper limbs, ripping low at Fultag to break his grip. It clenched hard on the broken armour and mashed hip, and managed to get a yowl of pain out of him. He butted its left side head, making its holomask short out. The real face behind was a flayed human skull wired into a plastic cup of circuits. The lidless eyeballs stared back. The impact of the headbutt had caused one to fill almost instantly with pseudo-blood.

Fultag guttered out an ultrasonic purr and butted again. As the super-robust recoiled, he yanked the hammer from its upper set of limbs, but its haft was slick with purple sap and it flew out of his hands.

He tore the super-robust’s left head implant out instead. He ripped it clean out of its shoulder socket – skull, neck mount and spinal cord. It came out in a spray like afterbirth. Fultag spat. He gripped the wrenched-out piece of anatomy in his right fist by the base of the spine and began to spin it like a slingshot. Then he swung it repeatedly at the super-robust in the manner of a ball and chain, and didn’t stop until its other head was caved in.

The men of Tra approved of this.

More of the enemy came at Fultag after that, and the only weapon in reach was the accelerator hammer. This was his downfall. Stung by the use of its own weapons against it, the Quietude had adjusted its operational settings. When Fultag attempted to defend himself with the hammer, it fired a massive charge of power through the grip that cooked and killed him where he stood.

Around the circle, men nodded gravely. A trick, a trap, an enemy deception, these were all the hazards of war. They would all have made the same choice as Fultag. He’d gone with honour, and he’d held the super-robusts long enough for Tra to take the centre.

The wolf priests attended the dead. Hawser saw some of the dark figures he’d glimpsed in the kitchen-come-hospital-come-morgue on the day he woke up. The priest who served Tra was called Najot Threader.

The death of Fultag troubled Tra most of all. His organics had broiled and burned. There was, Hawser learned, nothing for Najot Threader to recover.

Hawser didn’t know what that meant.

A warship closed in as soon as Tra signalled that the graving dock was taken. They felt the megastructure shudder as it took disabling hits from the warship’s massive batteries. The shots were annihilating secondary docks and support vessels, and crippling the graving dock’s principal launch faculty.

The deck vibrated. There was a dull, dead sound like a giant gong striking arrhythmically in a distant palace of echoing marble. The air began to smell quite different: drier, as if there was ash or soot flowing into its intermix. Hawser felt afraid, more afraid than when he’d been in the thick of the close fighting with Tra. In his imagination, the warship’s complement of monastically-hooded calculus bombardi, ranked in steeply-tiered golden stalls around the warship’s gunnery station, were intoning their vast and complex targeting algorithms into the hard-wired sentiences of the gun batteries too rapidly. Mistakes were being made, or just one tiny mistake perhaps, a digit out of place, enough to place the delivery of a mega-watt laser or an accelerator beam a metre or two to the left or right over a range of sixty thousand kilometres. The graving dock would rupture and burst like a paper lantern lit and swollen from within by combusting gas.

Hawser realised it was because he trusted the men of Tra to keep him safe, safe from even the deadliest super-robust. He was only afraid of the things they couldn’t control.

The next phase of the war unfolded. Word came that the Expedition Fleet’s principal assaults on the Quietude’s home world had begun. The men of Tra took themselves to the graving dock’s polar bays to observe.

The polar bays had been opened to allow access for the shoals of Mechanicum and Army vessels ferrying personnel onto the dock structure. Hawser joined the Wolves looking down through networks of docking gibbets and anchored voidboats. Below, vast cantilevered hatches and payload doors were spread open like the wings of mythical rocs.

Beneath that, the planet filled the view like a giant orange. The sharp airless clarity of the view made the reflected sunlight almost neon in intensity.

The men of Tra took themselves out along the latticework of girders and struts to get the best view of the operations far below. They were oblivious to the precipitous drop. Hawser tried to seem as matter of fact, but he fought the urge to hold on to any and every guardrail or handgrip.

He edged onto a docking girder after Aeska Brokenlip, Godsmote and Oje. Other Wolves crowded onto the gantries around them.

A formation of bulk capacity deployment vessels was moving into line of sight about three kilometres below them, and the men were keen to watch. Some pointed, indicating certain technical aspects. What struck Hawser most was the way the three men of Tra with him comported themselves. They dropped down onto the gantry like eager animals watching prey from a clifftop, Oje crouching and the other two sprawled. Like dogs in the sun, Hawser thought, panting after exertion, alert, ready to bound up again at a moment’s notice. The vast armour that cased them didn’t appear to offer the slightest encumbrance.

A flurry of small but searing flashes across the neon-orange view below announced the start of the surface bombardment. Dark patterns immediately began to disfigure the atmosphere of the Quietude’s world, as vast quantities of smoke and particulate product began to spill into it. The skin of the orange bruised. The slow-moving deployment vessels began to sow their drop vehicles: clouds of seed cases or chaff tumbling out behind the monolithic carriers.

The Wolves made remarks. Oje dripped a little scorn on the commander of the 40th Expedition Fleet and his council of tacticians for not synchronising the surface assault with the advancing nightside terminator, as he would have done, and thus maximise the psychological and tactical advantages of nightfall. Aeska agreed, but added he’d have run the whole attack on the nightside, except that the Army didn’t like to fight at night.

‘Poor eyes,’ he said, as though talking of invalids or unremarkable animals. ‘Sorry,’ he added. He cast the last comment over his shoulder to Hawser, who was perched behind them, holding on to a spar with white knuckles.

‘For what?’ asked Hawser.

‘He’s apologising to your human eye,’ said Godsmote.

‘Maybe someone should do you a favour and poke that out too,’ said Oje.

The three Wolves laughed. Hawser laughed to show he understood it was meant to be a joke.

The Wolves turned their attention back to the invasion below.

‘Of course, if I’d been in charge,’ said Aeska, ‘I’d have just dropped Ogvai into their main habitation, and then come back a week later to collect him and hose him down.’

The three Wolves laughed again, teeth bared. They laughed so hard the gantry vibrated slightly under Hawser.

A cry went up. They all turned to investigate.

Bear, and another of Tra named Orcir, had finally dislodged the crew of robusts who had earlier vaporised Hjad on the underspace slope. They dragged them out into the open, where a gang of Tra members gathered and slaughtered them in a manner that seemed both ritualistic and unnecessarily gruesome. Despite the inhumanity of the Quietude creatures, Hawser found himself glancing away uncomfortably, unwilling to let his eyes record the scene. The two warriors saved the worst of their ministrations for the gracile commander of the weapon crew. The men of Tra watching yelled out encouragement. There was glee in the dismemberment.

‘They are chasing out the maleficarum,’ said Ogvai. Hawser looked up. He had not heard the massive, battle-black jarl come up to him.

‘What?’

‘They are casting it out,’ said Ogvai. ‘They are hurting it so badly it will know not to come back. They are punishing it, and explaining pain to it, so it will not be eager to return and bother us.’

‘I see,’ said Hawser.

‘Make sure you do,’ said Ogvai.

The gracile was dead. The Wolves left all the bodies where they had fallen.

Bear walked across to the top of the underspace slope and, as Hawser watched, used his axe to excise the mark of aversion he had made earlier.