‘Forge-Master! My lord, I trust you do not feel the cold too keenly.’
A pause, and then there was what might have been termed a metallic grunt, echoing deep in the massive sarcophagus that was the chest of the Dreadnought.
‘The last time I felt cold, whelp, the Imperium was a lot younger, and full of better men than you.’
‘I’m sure it still is full of better men than me,’ Fornix grinned. ‘But I have yet to meet them.’
Again, the massive snort from the machine, like a backfiring engine. The Dreadnought raised one huge clawed arm and playfully set it down on Fornix’s shoulder for just a second, raising it as the Space Marine’s legs began to buckle.
Fornix rubbed his shoulder. ‘Your touch is as light as ever, Breughal.’
‘And your mouth never sleeps, Fornix.’ This time the lightness of something like a chuckle echoed from the towering figure, cold and strange out of that metallic heart.
They stared together at the endless convoys passing over the ramps before them, and Fornix raised his head to catch the distant lights among the night clouds that looked like stars, and yet were not.
‘It is about time,’ he breathed. ‘Nigh on two years it has been, since my bolter was aimed at anything more than a target drone.’
‘In those two years we have brought forty-six more battle-brothers into the Chapter, refitted the frigate Temujin, and restored the Land Raider Mindarion to holy function,’ Breughal said. ‘You must think of the long game, brother, as your captain and the Kharne do. What are two years, when we have the millennia-old war to fight?
‘We cannot all undergo symbiosis, brother,’ Fornix said, his grin fading. ‘For some of us there is a window of years during which we must have our strength set to use. I am no longer young, even by the standards of our Adept. I would not live my life in endless training for wars that pass us by. I thank the Emperor, our bright lord, that we have this chance now once more to seek redemption in battle.’
The Dreadnought whirred and wheezed above him. ‘Well said, brother,’ Breughal told him. ‘You sound almost like Jonah,’ he added.
‘Well don’t ever tell him that, for Phobos’s sake. He’ll think I’m becoming sane and sensible at last.’
‘Sanity comes to us all in the end.’
Fornix thumped the ceramite kneecap of the Dreadnought. ‘What think you, Breughal; is this just a raid, or are the Punishers set on conquest? The Cloisters are high with speculation.’
‘And envy, Fornix, that Mortai has been chosen for this mission. The Chapter’s captains say that the Kharne indulges his protégé. Jonah Kerne takes the spearhead once again, when by rights it should be Thuraman.’
‘Jonah is the best we have, Breughal – you know that.’
‘Apart from you?’
‘Apart from me,’ Fornix grinned.
‘They say that when Kerne itches, you scratch, Fornix.’
‘Let them say that to my face, just once, and we shall see who does the scratching.’
There was a moment of almost silence about them, a sudden emptiness to the air itself. Then directly overhead it seemed, a roar exploded about the landing fields, so loud that Fornix’s eardrums felt it as a pressure on the reinforced membranes within his skull. He looked up, to see a bright, blaring light. His eyes, organic and mechanical, adjusted almost instantly, resolving it into the fiery circles of afterburners.
The angular shadow of a heavy shuttle grew around them, and the pad lights flickered as a thousand-ton spacecraft settled down three hundred metres away with a low, sonorous boom, sinking on its landing gear like some immense, tired animal easing its weight upon the earth.
The silence again, almost a kind of reverence. Then ramps whined and creaked open from the shuttle sides, each tall enough to admit a Dreadnought.
Light spilled out, illuminating the falling snow in staircases of bright blizzard. There was a revving and snorting of powerful engines, a few shouted commands from the senior servitors and auxiliaries, and the assorted vehicles gathered around the rim of the landing-pad began to inch forward in sequence, while from the sides of the shuttle crane-arms extended from their niches, each thirty or forty metres long, and began to reach out for cargo-loads like the grasping legs of a bulbous spider.
Fornix heard the muttering datastream of the servitors as it was run through Breughal’s interior vox-channels. The Forge-Master shifted slightly on his gargantuan chassis and issued orders in binaric – a tongue that only a very few in the Chapter still understood. A carmine gleam came and went in what passed for the Dreadnought’s eyes.
‘Very good,’ he said at last, as the loading operation went on.
‘When shall Mortai embark?’ Fornix asked him.
‘Not until tomorrow. What is to be disembarked last must go on first. Space Marines are always the final element.’
‘It will give me a chance to beg and borrow some more wargear. Who knows what we’ll need when we finally make planetfall?’
‘You were ever profligate with equipment, Fornix. I recall with regret some of the holy instruments of destruction my servitors laboured over for years, only to see them reduced to battered scrap in your hands in the space of a day.’
‘Ah, but what a day,’ Fornix said. ‘How better for a sacred weapon to end its days than–’
‘Buried in the forehead of an ork?’
‘Needs must, my lord Forge-Master. I had no time to change magazines, and the ork was Grazmach Ghar of the Long Bleed. A worthy opponent in many ways. He fought on for a full minute after I had battered his skull into pieces.’
‘Your advancing years have not dimmed your recklessness, Fornix.’
‘I am reckless with everything except my brothers’ lives. ‘Twas always thus.’
‘Indeed. I have heard it said that the Emperor smiles on certain fools who amuse him – but only for a time.’
‘You think my time is running out, Breughal?’
The Dreadnought clenched and unclenched one immense fist. In the heart of its mechanical palm the pilot-light of the flamer buried therein leapt up blue and bright, and then sank down again.
‘Nothing burns forever.’
‘Except faith, and glory,’ Fornix said. ‘Better to burn bright for a day than live a long life in twilight. Here on Phobian the Hunters have been husbanding their strength for a century and a half. Our name has been forgotten, brother. And in other sectors of the galaxy our brethren of other Chapters have won imperishable renown.’
‘We serve,’ Breughal Paine said. ‘That is our duty and our honour. I have seen a millennium come and go, Fornix, and watched the birth and death of legends. I have been alive and awake for all that time – unlike our brethren inside the other Dreadnoughts, I have never slept. It is because of that I believe I have held on to my…’ An instant’s hesitation.
‘My humanity, if you will. With great age comes wisdom, of a sort, or at least the endless cataloguing of experience. I have seen untold follies and disasters, and great victories also, all of them won with blood. The blood of those like ourselves, and that of lesser men. I have seen rivers of it.
‘And through it all, like the Chapter which I serve and love, the Imperium endures. And our task is to see it does so. No more.
‘I watched Lukullus die. I have battled Titans. I have seen the Great Enemy erupt from the warp in numbers almost impossible to grasp – as have you. We cannot afford glory if it diminishes our ability to protect the Imperium we serve. To seek individual renown at the expense of that ultimate mission – that way Chaos lies.’
‘And yet the sword grows dull in the scabbard,’ Fornix muttered, all humour fled from his face.