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  MEDUSON

  DAN ABNETT

  HERE WERE NO surgical lasers available.

  A clustered missile strike over Isstvan V had blown out the Ionside' s flank from the lateral exchangers aft, voiding eight deployment bays and the portside apothecarion chambers. The smaller medicae annex on the ship's starboard side was overwhelmed with lifecritical cases. Dying legionaries on stretcher boards were lined up along the hallway.

  Shadrak had only lost a hand. He reported instead to a makeshift triage station set up in the forward hold. Most of the staff there were frightened serfs drummed up from the ship's crew. Gorgonson of the Lokopt Clan was the only Apothecary present, the only one that could be spared from the chaos of the medicae annex. He looked at the hand.

  'Excise,' he instructed the human attendant waiting nearby. 'Clean down to the forearm bones. Leave some tissue for conjunction and graft. I'll be back to fit the augmetic.'

  Gorgonson didn't say anything to Shadrak. There was nothing to say.

  No. There was a great deal to say just no words with which to say it.

  He treated Shadrak like a piece of broken machinery presented for repair, not as a brother, an old friend or a fellow son of Terra. He didn't even make eye contact. He just moved on to the next case, a battlebrother whose helm had been fused to his cheek by a melta burst.

  The human was a young ensign, frecklefaced and redheaded. His anxiety made him seem like a small boy compared to Shadrak's bulk. 'Seat yourself, lord,' he stammered, gesturing to a commandeered suitroom rediner that had a metal service trolley positioned beside it.

  Shadrak didn't much care for the term ' lord' . He was a captain, and that word alone was more than sufficient. But he was too tired to correct the serf, too empty. He felt like the tombs of Albia that he had visited as a child: vast and enduring, but long since robbed of the precious things they had once contained.

  Using his good hand, he took off his helm and placed it on the deck. Then he unstrapped his weapon belt, so that the harnessed gladius and bolt pistol would not encumber him when he sat. The belt had loops for reload clips. They were empty.

  The recliner creaked under his armoured weight. He set his boots on the foot rest, leaned back and placed his ruined left arm on the trolley. It would have been palm up, if he had still had a palm.

  The attendant stared at the wound. The hand was missing most of the fingers. It was a bloody mitten of blackened meat, with broken knucklebones protruding like twigs. The wrist was misaligned. The composite ceramite sleeve of Shadrak's ironblack armour was mangled at the cuff, the torn ends stabbing into his flesh.

  'Is there pain?'

  Truth be told, Shadrak hadn't been aware of any pain not physical pain, anyway. The other pain was too immense, too entire.

  Surprised, he answered, 'No.'

  'I have no anaesthetic,' the man added reluctantly. 'I have some numbing agents, but resources are so—'

  'Just do it,' said Shadrak. His body had autonomically shut down a great number of his neural receptors at the moment of injury. His left hand didn't feel much of anything anymore. It was just a dead weight, like a piece of kit he couldn't unbuckle and remove.

  'There are no surgical lasers either,' the serf apologised. Shadrak saw he was wiping a manual bonesaw with a sterile swab. The man's hands were shaking.

  Under other circumstances, in other wars, Shadrak would have been amused by the sheer pathos of the situation.

  But his capacity for amusement was as empty as the tombs of Albia too.

  He sighed.

  'You'll never get through the vambrace with that,' he said. The man looked as though he was about to panic. 'Do you have medical training?'

  'I am a junior gunnery officer, lord,' the man replied. 'But I have my corpsman certificate.'

  Again, the ''lord''…

  Shadrak reached over with his right hand, unclasped the elbow guard and let it fall to the deck. Then he unfastened the clamps in the crook of his elbow and midforearm, and tugged the composite plasteelandceramite sleeve off. Parts of the gauntlet were still attached, flapping loose. The buckled wrist seal was impacted into his flesh, and it took a little more effort to wrench it clear. Fluid and flecks of meat spattered the deck.

  He stripped away the undersleeve, tearing the fabric. His exposed skin looked as pale as bone, in stark contrast to the mauled mess of his hand.

  'How did this happen?' the man asked, eyes wide at the fully exposed damage.

  'Horus happened,' said Shadrak.

  He rested his arm back on the trolley. The man approached, gingerly, puffing counterseptic onto the wound from a flask, his hands still shaking. He took a grip on the bone saw, and consulted an anatomical diagram he had called up on the display of his dataslate. Shadrak knew that the man was dying to ask what he had meant, but didn't dare.

  He rested the saw's serrated edge against Shadrak's flesh just below his torn wrist. The skin was covered in spots of fastdotted blood. The serf swabbed them away, and then made the first draw.

  There was pain, of course, but it seemed minor and distant. Shadrak sat back and let it pass over him. He stared at the hold's gloomy roof, into the darkness beyond the hanging lumens. He let his mind fill with memories memories from before the pain. He tried to recollect something as far from it as possible. Before this minor discomfort, before the greater injury of the dropsite, before Medusa, before the Gorgon, before the Great Crusade…

  He thought of Terra, and the last years of the Unification Wars. He thought of his first days as a Storm Walker, serving under Lord Commander Amadeus DuCaine in the theatres of Afrik and the Panpacific. Back then, justly proud of their fresh, geneherited might, none of them had known what the Storm Walkers would become, or what revision of structure and loyalty they would have to undergo. And even once they had known, they had embraced it wholeheart edly. It had not been a matter of reformation or repair, though fates knew that the X Legion were especially resilient when it came to repair.

  It had been a matter of ascendancy.

  It had been a blessing. To be called to your primarch's side, to become one of his. Shadrak had cast off his Terran surname, a mortal vestige that had fallen into disuse anyway, and taken the name Meduson to demonstrate and affirm his allegiance to his in home world.

  He had become Shadrak Meduson of Clan Sorrgol, Captain of the Tenth Company. The Storm Walkers of Unification had become the Iron Hands. They had expected nothing but glory in their future.

  Even if calamity chanced to overtake the Iron Tenth on the field of war, it would be a glorious calamity in the Emperor's service.

  None of them had ever anticipated this inglorious ruin. None of them could ever have imagined such a measure of raw treachery.

  None of them could ever have expected this scale of loss and pain.

  'I'm sorry,' the man said.

  Shadrak opened his eyes.

  Despite his clotting factors and vascular shunts, the top of the nolley was running with blood. It was dripping off the edges and making a rectangular, splatterpattern halo on the deck. The flesh of his wrist was marked with several bloody hesitation wounds. When the young serf had finally found some confidence and purpose, he had opened a gash like a gasping mouth, but the bone was barely nicked.

  The man's hands were shaking more than ever. 'Your bones are very… very strong, lord.'

  Shadrak saw that he was sweating.

  'They were made that way,' he replied, sitting up. 'Give me that slate.'

  The serf handed him the dataslate, and Shadrak reviewed the anatomical graphic as dispassionately as he might check a mechanical diagram. He made a note of the bone formation, compared it with what remained of his wrist, took note of blood vessels and tendon assembly and paid heed to the rec
ommended link points for structural and neural grafting.

  'I'll do it,' he said, handing the slate back. 'It'll be quicker.'

  The man slowly offered him the bloody saw, but Shadrak had already leaned over the side of the recliner and drawn his gladius. He set the edge of the blade along the clumsy guide cut that the bone saw had scored, paused, and struck his ruined hand off with a single, swift blow. It bounced off the side of the trolley and landed in the pool of blood on the deck. The serf hesitated, as though he felt it would be polite to pick the severed hand up and return it to Shadrak. Then he remembered himself, dropped the saw, and hurried forward to attend with clamps and wadding.

  'If it's going to hurt anyway,' said Shadrak as the man worked, binding the stump tightly, 'it's better that it doesn't linger too.'

  Good advice, he thought. Applies to so damned much.

  GORGONSON RETURNED AN hour later and inspected the wound.

  'Do this yourself?'

  'It seemed for the best,' Shadrak replied.

  'You're no surgeon,' said Gorgonson.

  'Never claimed to be. But your man there was intent on whittling me down until I was nothing but a spinal column and a rictus.'

  Gorgonson frowned. 'We're doing the best we can, given the circumstances.'

  'Well, he made more of a mess of me in ten minutes than the damned Sons of Horus could manage in a week.'

  Gorgonson glared at him. 'Don't even joke,' he hissed. 'Damn you, Shadrak. Don't even say the words aloud.'

  'You don't think I'm angry?' asked Shadrak. 'I'm beyond rage. I'm in another place entirely. White heat and boiling blood. I'm going to butcher and burn every one of the bastards. Give me my new hand so I can get on with it.'

  Gorgonson hesitated. They had known each other for twentyfour decades. Like Shadrak, Goran Gorgonson had been a Storm Walker, a son of Terra. They had fought through the Unification Wars side by side. At their ascendancy, Goran had elected to join Lokopt, the clan that most remembered and celebrated the Terran aspect of the founding. But he had changed his name to Gorgonson in honour of the primarch.

  'Anger's not going to get us anywhere, earthbrother,' Shadrak said quietly, 'except deader than we are already.

  Anger's a blindfold, a fool's motivation. I reserve it only for killing blows. We need cool heads and clear minds. This is survival, repair, rebuilding. Terra only knows, we're good at repair we excel at it, so this should play to our strengths.'

  'They're calling a council,' said Gorgonson.

  'Who's they?'

  'The clanfathers.'

  'A clan council?' Shadrak asked. 'What in Terra's name for? This isn't a matter of bloodline and heritage.'

  'Isn't it?'

  'The clanfathers are proposing to assume command? Collective command?'

  'I suppose so. In the absence of…' Gorgonson paused. There were words that were going to be too hard to say, names that were going to be too hard to utter. 'The clanfathers take control, for now. Isn't there comfort and assurance in that? They are veterans who understand—'

  'A clan council is the last thing we need,' said Shadrak. 'Command by committee? Pointless. We need positive, singular leadership.'

  'I didn't know you had aspirations of command,' Gorgonson remarked.

  Shadrak thought about that for a moment. The notion came as a surprise.

  'I don't,' he replied. 'I've never considered it. I just know we need something now. Someone. We're dead without it.

  Just a shattered rabble.'

  Gorgonson sighed. 'Any Apothecary, even the best of us, will tell you that you can graft on a new hand, but you can't graft on a new head.'

  'Then we'll have to learn how,' said Shadrak.

  A servitor beside Gorgonson was holding the augmetic on a tray.

  'Nothing fancy,' said the Apothecary, reaching for a scraper and a neurofuser. 'I have no juvenat packing left either, so you'll have to let it bond by itself. Don't test it. It'll be weak. For months, probably. Let it bed in and heal.'

  Shadrak nodded.

  'Just fix me up,' he said. 'I'm sure I'll have many weeks of calm and leisure to get the healing done.'

  Gorgonson started working. 'Is he dead?' he asked quietly.

  'Yes.'

  'You know this?'

  'Amadeus told me,' said Shadrak. 'It was confirmed from the surface.'

  'Lord Commander Amadeus is dead too,' murmured the Apothecary.

  'Yes. I saw it. But his word lives. The Gorgon is dead, and our stepfather Amadeus is gone too. So we can lie down and die with them, or we can learn to graft heads.'

  IT TOOK EIGHT weeks for the Council to assemble. That meant eight more weeks of running. The Gorgon's martial policy had always been to fight and move on, but this was not the sort of moving on that Shadrak approved of.

  They gathered at Aeteria, a lonely rock of sulphurous waste and tainted pink skies on the edge of the Oqueth Sector.

  Twentynine ships hung low in the heavens, including two Salamanders vessels and three Raven Guard. They seemed ghostly, like dark thunderheads behind the wispy banks of cloud. They were survivors of Isstvan, all of them.

  It wasn't much of a council. Only five clanfathers were present. The fate of the others was unknown, though intelligence data reported that the forces of the Iron Tenth had scattered after the massacre, put to rout. Many of the Raven Guard and Salamanders had fled too. Purgefleets of the Sons of Horus and the Emperor's Children were reported to be razing system after system in an effort to obliterate any survivors before they could regroup. No reliable figures were available, but it was possible that all three Legions had been reduced to mere thousands.

  'We have been… shattered,' said Lech Vircule, ClanFather of Atraxii, rising to his feet. They had gathered in the courtyard of a ruined monastic structure, built in the Age of Strife and abandoned, like Aeteria, generations before. The lonely walls echoed his words.

  'But not broken,' answered the ClanFather of Felg, Loreson Unfleshed. 'There will be others, like us, meeting in secret as we do now. We are disconnected, but not lost.'

  Vircule shrugged.

  'We cannot regroup or coordinate,' he said. 'Lines of communication are cut or disadvantaged. No one dares show himself or attempt an open signal. With the traitors abroad in force, any glimpse of us will result in unstinting prosecution.'

  'Our structure allows for this, lord father,' said Augos Lumak, a captain of Clan Avernii. He was one of the few members of the genesire's favoured to have made it out of the massacre alive. 'Our clan structure, as ordained by the Gorgon, will serve us well. Independent units of command, interlocking. We can survive, by dint of our individual commands, and reassemble.'

  The Atraxii clanfather nodded. 'That is to be hoped. Only when unified can we turn and fight back.'

  'Then we will never fight back,' said Shadrak Meduson.

  There was a silence, filled only by the moan of the wind across the lagoon.

  'You spoke, captain?' said the fleshspare Loreson.

  'Quite clearly, lord father,' said Shadrak. 'The accursed Warmaster, may fate smite him, will not give us grace to regroup.'

  'We do not need his grace.' The clanfather's voice was a synthetic growl. 'Or his permission.'

  'As he did not need our grace or permission to slaughter us, and to murder our genefather and stepfather alike,'

  said Shadrak. 'We are not alone in this. Salamanders and Raven Guard stand with us.' He gestured to the ranks of the other Legions present. 'Our brothers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth follow different martial philosophies. We could learn, learn mutually. We could learn to fight in new ways, marry the iron force of the Tenth to the stealth of the Nineteenth and—'

  'Our brothers of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth are welcome here,' said Vircule of Atraxii.

  'Our losses match yours in scale and grief,' said a Raven Guard captain named Dalcoth. 'We must combine resources

  —' 'You are welcome here,' Vircule repeated, cutting him short.

 
'But our words are not?' asked Dalcoth. There was a bitter grin on his lips.

  'In time, of course,' said Karel Mach, the ClanFather of Raukaan. 'But this is clan council business and words. Our way of war is not yours, sir. We will not stoop to sly hitandrun tactics.'

  'Stoop?' asked one of the other Raven Guard officers.

  'I meant no insult.'

  'On the flight here, we spent time discussing operational needs with your captains,' said Dalcoth. 'Meduson of Sorrgol agreed with my proposal that a hybridisation of tactics might avail us of—'

  'Captain Meduson should know his place,' said Vircule.

  'He was not the only officer of the Tenth who thought so,' said Dalcoth.

  'But I was the loudest, so I speak for the notion here,' said Shadrak.

  'Eight weeks aboard the survivor ships, crammed in with brothers from other Legions. Of course we talked. It is selfevident that—'

  'Know your place, Meduson,' said the ClanFather of Atraxii more firmly. 'Know your place, Terranborn.'

  'I know my place well enough,' said Shadrak. 'It appears to be somewhere on a sulphurstinking waste at the end of the galaxy. Any delay is going to weaken us further. We are not, and we will never be, what we once were. The Raven Guard are ready to fight. Guerrilla tactics, if necessary.'

  Dalcoth nodded.

  'The Salamanders too,' said Shadrak.

  Nuros, the most senior legionary of the XVIII Legion present, nodded in turn.

  'This is clan council business,' said Loreson Unfleshed.

  'It would seem that the Council does not know its business,' replied Shadrak. 'When we lose in war, we are returned to the enclaves and are rebuilt. We are made better than we were before. But that luxury is not open to us now. When we lose on the field, away from an enclave, what do we do?'

  'We repair as best we may,' said Karel Mach. 'Battlefield fixes. We make the best of the resources available to us.'

  'That is our situation now,' said Shadrak. 'And what is available to us? The good brotherhood of our fellow Legions.

  The chance to learn, to alter ourselves, and to remake ourselves in ways that the traitors are not expecting.'

  'Enough!' barked Jebez Aug. Aug was an Iron Father of the Sorrgol Clan, hailing from Medusa. With his venerable status came great influence. 'You shame our clan with your outspoken remarks, Terranborn.'