Larice clambered over the upper fuselage of her cream Thunderbolt, checking the repair job the fitters had done and watching the controlled dance of military might as the Imperium took the fight to the Archenemy. With the defeat of the northern flanking thrust, all assets were being directed to aid the ground war in the west. Confidence was high that the newly established air superiority would soon result in victory.
She knelt beside an opened panel behind the canopy. The damaged armour plates had been replaced and a tangle of cables ran from the exposed mechanisms of the aircraft to a diagnostic calculus-logi servitor. One of the Martian priesthood studied the tickertape clattering from the brass-rimmed slate fitted to its chest, a soft burble of binary spilling from the shadows beneath his hood.
Larice slid over the wing to the crew ladder and swung her leg around to hook the top rung. She climbed down and dropped to the hardstand, slapping her palm on the warmed flank of her plane.
Seven Thunderbolts in the same pristine colour scheme as hers were parked in a neat row, just one of a dozen squadrons being prepped and made ready to fly. Three Lightnings surged from launch rails, powering skywards on blazing plumes of firelit smoke. She watched them go, shielding her eyes from the low sun as they rolled over their port wings to head west.
Her gaze lowered as she saw a young, good-looking pilot in a camo-green uniform approaching her. He cocked his head to one side as he drew near, like he wasn’t sure he had the right person, but was going to ask anyway.
‘Flight Lieutenant Asche?’ he said. ‘Larice Asche?’
‘Yeah, who wants to know?’ she said, walking down the line of her plane’s fuselage.
The young man jogged after her and held out his hand.
‘Flight Officer Layne Schaw,’ he said with a beaming smile. ‘It’s an honour to meet you.’
Larice looked at the proffered hand and Schaw’s earnest smile.
‘Get the frig away from me,’ she hissed. ‘And don’t tell me your name.’
I’ve been a fan of Matt’s work since I first read it, and I think his Enforcer trilogy featuring the Adeptus Arbites Shira Lucina Calpurnia is entirely made out of epic win with a splash of awesome sauce.
For this story, Matt was interested in combining the activities of the Adeptus Mechanicus with the terrible instruments of warfare – the Woe Machines – used by Heritor Asphodel in several Gaunt stories, particularly Necropolis. Forgotten and misapprehended nightmares lurk on one of the worlds the giant Crusade has already rolled past...
Dan Abnett
THE HEADSTONE AND THE HAMMERSTONE KINGS
(Matthew Farrer)
‘It’s coming for Him. It’s carrying a Magos who’ll examine Him.’
An instant after Jopell had said the words, Kovind Shek’s long, wiry fingers gripped his suit-front and yanked him into a humiliating, stumbling fall into the dust between two slumped and broken engines. He lay there on one elbow, eyes closed, feeling the fine, tawny grit he’d stirred up as it drifted back down and coated his sweating skin with muck. The morning was chilly but having to double-time it into the graveyard in his heavy labourer’s jumpsuit had begun it, and a growing brew of fears in his belly – being caught, being caught and his forged papers spotted, not finding Kovind, how Kovind would take the news when he did find him – had done the rest. Jopell was damp and he stank.
His master had already turned his back and was shouting orders again. Jopell didn’t bother to open his eyes to look. It would be another labour-crew accident, one of the careful fatalities that Kovind didn’t trust him enough to let him help organise. Over the clank of metal he could already hear the frightened groans of the men the accident was going to happen to. For some reason they all had to be men. Jopell had wondered aloud about that once and Kovind had kicked him in the gut hard enough to tumble him over backwards.
‘A Magos who’ll examine Him,’ he muttered to himself again as he pushed himself up onto his arse. His legs jutted into a careless V in the dirt and his belly itched as it overhung them. He had delivered the message in the old Asheki dialect, and the pronoun form it used had a very precise set of connotations: the compound suffix showing respect due to a senior whose authority originated outside one’s own lineage and manory, the vowel intonations carrying nuances of standing in the Customs, the Practices and the Traditions, and the accents denoting forge-work and engine-craft. Context did the rest. There was only one thing he could be talking about.
He leaned back, staring up between the crushed and tarnished steel hulls, and fixed on it: the little dark dot hanging high up above them, looking like a tiny splinter embedded in pallid skin. It had been there for two days; for two more before that it hadn’t been visible at all, except at high magnification through the spyblock they’d stolen from the garrison post. It was taking its time, this ‘Headstone’.
Jopell wondered if he should feel greater unease about it. ‘Examine’, after all. Or at least that would be the closest Low Gothic word for the Asheki k’seoshe, a term which referred to something more complex. It meant careful, competent disassembly by a knowing hand and study by a knowing mind, but with a thief’s agenda – learning a device’s lore outside the formal blessing of the Traditions, examining its naked secrets against its builder’s will, an invasive hand and gaze devoid of respect or shame. It was what they were here to protect Him from. But they were weak now, in hiding since the hives had burned. Would they be able to do it?
He dropped his gaze at a shout from before him, in time to see a scrag-bearded victim duck under the reaching arms of one of Kovind’s thugs and break clear. He was a clumsy runner, the loose-hanging suit flapping around his staggering legs and swinging arms. His mouth gaped with terror and exertion. One thug tried to break off after him, but they had the rest of the victims to restrain and a brawl broke out under the tilting hulk. Kovind cursed and shouted.
‘Brother!’ the man said as he homed in on Jopell. ‘Brother, they’re mad, get out of here! Get the soldiers, get the preachers, I don’t know what they–‘ and then Jopell, who was good with distances and movement, came up off the ground and into him and broke his jaw with an elbow. The man’s feet shot out in front of him as his head was knocked backward and his full-length landing sent up another puff of grit. A moment later meaty hands were dragging him back to the broken machine.
Jopell strolled after the kicking figure, some of his composure seeping back. The hulk was a Skybreaker train, the segments torn off one another and left in an ungainly pile by some ignorant Throne-licking hauler crew who’d have been acid-flayed for their disrespect in a righter world than this one. This segment, one of the rear ones as far as Jopell could tell, was badly balanced on the pile. Pict records and testimonies from the other crews would show that it had already looked liable to topple over. The gantry cranes had waddled into position on one side of it, where they could plausibly claim to have been trying to stabilise the pile for a cutting crew to start work.
These men weren’t a cutting crew. Skilled cutters were valuable, and the most skilled ones knew about the Customs and even the Traditions and had the same loyalties as Kovind and himself. But they carried a cutter rig, an old one that could be spared, and Psinter was doing her thing in the Administratum compound. By the time the bodies were found the records would show these men had been a cutting crew indeed.