TRIAL AND ERROR
Ferro-Giant Omicroid
Saltire Vex, Pelagic Industrial World
Chalnath Expanse
Omicroid’s sea brig looked a dank and lonely place. Held suspended fifty feet below the underside of the promethium rig, the cuboid structure languished amidst a fug-like stench of unrefined fuel and rotting bivalves. The rough caulk of its walls was discoloured by strata of algae and caked salt, and long strands of bladderwrack hung from its underside like the beard of an undersea god.
Handhold by handhold, Farren swung by his arms under the rig’s decking towards it. With his legs in a loose crouch, he had gripped the underside of the lower walkways by their grilles and grate-holes, reached out for thick pipes that looked solid enough to take his weight, and grabbed for the rung hollows of each intermediate stanchion whilst ignoring the trickles of promethium drizzling from above. Thus far, he was making good progress.
Behind him, the three Repulsors were smudges of dark green in the distance. By Gsar’s estimate – and Farren trusted that implicitly – the tanks were too tall to make it under the rig when their engines were active, failing to clear it by a matter of a few infuriating inches. Besides, where a Repulsor made for an obvious sight, a single Space Marine had a chance of making it to the brig and back without being seen by inquisitive eyes. So, without so much as a moment’s hesitation, Farren had taken the hard way.
Ahead the makeshift cell was a lump of dark, near solid black on the lieutenant’s helm display. He could see a tiny trace of yellow through the air vents that hinted at the occupant inside. Doubt crept into his mind, the suspicion he should have stayed in the Harrower gradually coalescing in the shadows of his intent. But he could see no other way to the truth.
Reaching the framework of girders around the brig, Farren moved hand-by-hand around its periphery, taking care not to move too close to the ladder stanchion that led towards its circular vault-hatch. Above the brig was a grille; above that, no doubt, was the occupant’s jailor. His breath quickened, and he pushed aside the pain in his wounded side as his breath came heavier.
The lieutenant knew he was taking a huge gamble in coming down here. He was risking being the brunt of another psychic attack, even by showing his face to the brig’s occupant. But it was the thought of his superiors’ reaction if they found him questioning their prisoner that was making his twin hearts pound. He was almost certain they would settle the matter in violence, swift and final.
The lieutenant dropped down onto the corner of the brig, taking care to crouch with his impact so he didn’t smash the whole thing into the waves. ‘Who’s there?’ came a harsh, croaking voice, barely audible over the pounding surf. ‘I’ve already told you everything I know!’
Farren knelt down, then laid flat on his chest atop the brig, leaning forward over the edge so his face was level with one of the air vents.
‘Xedro Farren. Lieutenant Primaris, assigned to the Third Company.’ He caught himself for a moment. ‘From the hearing room.’
He could just about make out Deel in the darkness, huddled around a thermal battery that – according to his infrared – was all but drained of charge. Sitting there in a couple of inches of brackish water, she looked truly awful, her eyes staring white orbs in the shadows of a skull-like face.
‘Sad to see the company master took his cloak back,’ said Farren.
‘It looked better on him anyway. Are you here to kill me?’
‘No,’ said Farren. ‘Simply to talk, and check you are still whole in body and mind,’ he said.
‘I’ll be dead by nightfall.’
‘Did they torture you?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I ache all over, especially my brain. And parts of my memory are just… missing.’
‘Unfortunate,’ said Farren. ‘We are to withdraw in the next…’ he checked his helm’s chronometer ‘… eighteen minutes. There will be an extraction, not too far from here. If you answer my questions quickly, I will leave the top of this brig open. You can climb out, and begin to rebuild your home.’
‘They have what they need, lieutenant,’ she said. ‘They won’t leave Omicroid to freeze, it’s too much of a liability. They’ll torch this place as they go, and let the cold take care of the rest.’
Farren did not reply.
‘One day my corpse might be found in the brig, I suppose. Maybe even identified. Evidence enough of mutiny, especially when the fact we colluded with the t’au comes to light.’
‘That is the truth, is it not? Some might say you deserve punishment.’
‘We had no choice, I already told you that! The whole thing will be put down to an insurrection rightly punished, its leaders slain by noble Adeptus Astartes, and the rest brought back into the Imperial flock. Just in time to die as dutiful sheep instead of vile heretics.’
‘You have a strange way of looking at our rescuing of you from the xenos that were attacking you,’ said Farren. ‘I am sure you will be relocated from this planet and settled once more when your planet’s winter cycle is over. I will make the arrangements myself if necessary.’
‘Emperor’s Throne, Farren. They will just let me die, and not think twice about it. Why aren’t your brothers visiting the other rigs, then, if you’re here to drive off the xenos influence? I saw that black craft come out of its hiding place, fleeing for low orbit. You Space Marines had better get after it, if you want to catch up.’
‘What craft? What are you talking about?’
‘The black winged craft with the twin cannons. Impressive tech. Not many craft can play submersible, then breach from underwater and boost straight into the sky.’
‘No such craft is part of the Chapter’s armoury,’ said Farren. ‘It must be Navy.’
‘Whatever you say,’ said Deel. ‘It looked a good deal like the fighters pursuing it. And it had many of the same markings. Swords, wings, that kind of thing.’
‘Really. Where was this craft heading?’
‘Hard to say. It vanished within a few seconds of breach. Looked like it was headed for the Scorpid’s Eye, that system’s in roughly that direction. There’s not much else within reach. The pilot was keen on escaping you, no doubt.’
‘Falsehoods,’ said Farren quietly. ‘This is delirium.’
‘At this point, I don’t much care if you believe it or not. I’m dead either way.’
Farren looked back at the Repulsor, and glanced at his chronometer. Fourteen minutes.
‘You know too much to just be left in here.’
‘Is there any other choice?’ she spat. ‘You kept me alive, only to let me die!’
Farren looked up at the grille, then down at the surging waves below the brig. They had risen in height and intensity in the last few minutes, and now they were crashing against the stanchions and the underside of the brig with a steady rhythm. The cold salt tang of their spume filled the air.
Farren balled a fist and punched the vent as hard as he could, timing the impact just as a wave slapped against the underside of the cuboid to mask the noise. The metal buckled, one of the rusted-in screws along its length popping free.
Another wave broke, and Farren levelled another punch, this time forcing an inch-thick hunk of metal to stick outwards. A third wave came in, and Farren grabbed the protruding flap of metal, tearing it half-open with a dull clank.
As he was drawing back for another punch, the entire thing came spinning away into the water below. The toe of Deel’s boot jutted from the other side of the vent for a second before disappearing once more.
The hole they had made was too small for a human to fit through, but in tearing the metal away, Farren had crumbled some of the rebar support beneath it. He grabbed the jutting metal struts and yanked them back and forth, dislodging even more of the pebbled stone.
Deel scrabbled at the mortar and slivers of rock from the other side. She scraped and pulled at the base of each strut, then took off her boot and used the steel toecap as a hammer, slamming it repeatedly into the stonework. Scatterings of pebble-sized stones fell away.
Gritting his teeth, Farren waited for the next wave to come in before violently wrenching the rebar left and right, clearing loose rock with his other hand and forcing jagged struts of metal aside with a grunt of effort.
‘It’ll do,’ said Deel. ‘Move aside. Please.’
Farren checked his lens chrono. Eight minutes. He was lingering too long.
Deel was already up at the vent’s edge, reaching through to grab Farren’s hand. He pulled her through as carefully as he could, but he could see her face was ashen with pain. She squeezed her hunched shoulders through the vent’s widest part. He held his arm out, braced rock-solid with his power armour’s support, and she clambered onto it as if it were the bough of a tree until his forearm was under her waist. Then, shuffling forward, he reached out as she fought to get her hips through, allowing her to bring her legs up and out.
Grunting with effort, Deel climbed over his pauldron and backpack, smearing blood from the dozen cuts and grazes on her arms and legs across the dark green of his power armour. With a final effort, she slumped atop the brig with a heavy sigh.
‘No time for rest,’ said Farren. ‘We need to move.’
Six minutes left, and the waves were rising, getting fiercer.
‘Arms around my neck,’ said Farren. ‘There’s still a chance we can do this.’
Biting her lip in exhaustion and frustration, Deel wrapped her arms around Farren’s gorget, locking one hand on her wrist and the other to the underside of his chest plate. She pressed her body to his backpack, but to Farren, her weight was nothing.
When he was sure she was secure, Farren launched off the edge of the brig and caught an H-shaped girder with the ease of a gymnast catching a bar. Riding his momentum, he let go with one hand, reaching out for the next grip. His fingertips caught it, but not by much. He felt a hot sensation in his side, near his psy-wound. He pushed the feeling away, and focused on going forwards.
Time was running short.
On and on Farren went, the engine of his enhanced physiology driving him forward. He was Adeptus Astartes. A Primaris Marine. He would not fall.
He glanced at the helm’s lens chrono once more as it steadily ticked down.
‘Hold on,’ he said, hanging with both hands from a robust girder as he gathered his strength.
‘Just get on with it,’ said Deel through gritted teeth. He felt her legs wrap around his waist and tighten. He saw muscled arms in his peripheral vision as the rigswoman reached up and grabbed the girder herself to take some of the weight off.
‘It’s fine,’ said Farren. ‘I have this.’
‘It’s quite a way,’ she said.
‘I said I have this!’
He scowled and set off once more. For a minute he made good progress, but the woman’s weight seemed to be growing with each passing minute. He checked his vital signs, and noted with a kind of abstract interest that he had lost a good deal of blood from the injury the human psyker had inflicted.
A wound in a Space Marine’s physiology would normally clot and scab over quickly, the haemastamen’s vital elixir conserving the fluids in a matter of seconds, but this wound had not been inflicted by any normal weapon. For some reason, the blood was not coagulating.
Fresh and unhurt, in the arid air of Mars, Farren knew he would be able to make such a journey three times over and feel little more than a pleasing burn of exhilaration. But here, after the exertion of a battle, with a human cargo skewing his balance and with a psy-wound open and bleeding…
Slowly, insidiously, the seconds on the chrono ticked down. Five minutes left.
Now the waves were slapping at his legs. He tucked them up as best he could, and pushed onwards. Swing, catch, readjust, swing, grab, swing.
Somehow, he had lost focus. He had not come this way, before. The girders here were slick with algal slime, and with each handhold, he felt his fingers slipping.
He had to make it to the next solid grip.
With a heave of exertion, Farren lunged for the promethium pipeline. He caught it easily enough.
Then a wave slammed into his legs, and he nearly lost his hold completely.
‘Oh God-Emperor,’ said Deel. ‘Please tell me you can do this.’
‘It’s fine,’ said Farren, tensing and relaxing his muscle groups to keep them from burning with the acid of exertion.
‘Is it?’
Farren did not reply.
The Repulsor was still a full two-thirds of the rig’s width away, and they were fast running out of time.
‘Where in the Omnissiah’s holy wilderness is he?’ said Vesleigh, racking the bolts into his ammo clip for the ninth time in as many minutes. Around him the rest of the squad were seated in the passenger hold of the Harrower, each busy with his own thoughts or rituals.
‘He will make it back in time,’ said Gsar over the vox-link. It was a credit to his rapport with the Harrower that he had brought it back to full function after the battle, for the tank had taken several plasma hits and ion discharges on its outer hull. With the electrical interference still affecting its systems, Gsar’s voice carried a strange tinny quality.
‘No doubt he wants to make a grand entrance,’ said Moricani. ‘I imagine he will burst through that door at the eleventh hour, to our rapturous applause.’
‘What if he doesn’t?’ said Thrunn.
‘A valid question,’ said Vesleigh, taking the bolts out of his ammo clip again. ‘What if they’ve discovered he made an unauthorised sortie? That will not reflect well on us. We might even get reassigned altogether.’
‘Then we shall excel, centre stage, in a different theatre of war,’ said Moricani.
‘Be serious for once in your life, Moricani,’ said Enrod. ‘We can’t miss the muster. Farren’s got us in enough trouble as it is.’
‘I am being serious,’ said Moricani. ‘He will be back in time.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Enrod.
Silence enveloped the interior of the Harrower once more, the only sound the regular tick-clack tick-clack of Vesleigh’s bolts being racked, cleaned and re-racked in his rifle over and over.
Farren hung from the underside of the promethium rig, Deel’s arms locked around his shoulders. She had brought her legs up high around his waist, now, and entwined her ankles and feet to keep from dropping down into the crashing waves.
The lieutenant swung his legs back hard, then brought them forward and turned with the motion, extending an arm to grab at the next stanchion. He found a solid grip, then rode the movement to grab for the next. He waited for a moment, tucking his legs as a crashing wave rose up to grab at him. Without the tide, Farren could have got into a rhythm, let the swing of his own momentum do much of the work. But with the waves against him…
‘We’re not going to make it, are we?’ said Deel.
‘We have to,’ grunted Farren. ‘Be silent. I must conserve my strength.’
Four minutes.
One slip is all it would take. Even if Deel managed to swim to safety once more, she would be frozen to death before long. Farren would die far sooner, plunging down into the depths like a stone.
Swing, grab, scrabble, shift.
The running joke amongst the Primaris brethren was that though a Space Marine would sink fast – his sheer muscle density and the weight of his battleplate would bear him down – his armour and physiology was so robust he could simply walk along the sea bed to the shore.
But on an ocean world, with a hole through his armour and a wound through his black carapace right into his abdomen, the pressure of the deep would claim him, just as it would any mortal man. His progenoid glands and the geneseed they contained would be irretrievably lost, leaving a hole in the annals of the Chapter forevermore.
Swing, grasp, breathe, reposition.
Three minutes left. They were still only half way back. And it had taken twelve minutes to get to the brig in the first place.
Farren reached up to a spar of metal girder where a patch of seaweed had taken root, and the brine paint had flaked away. Taking their combined weight on one hand, he hammered the most rusted part of the girder with the ball of his other hand. A few more times, and a jagged wedge of metal fell away. Farren caught it deftly before it fell into the crashing waves. He examined the long triangle of metal for a moment.
‘Take this,’ he said to Deel, holding it by the sharp end.
‘Why?’
‘Just take it.’
She grabbed hold of it without saying a word.
‘Now drive it into my side wound. Aim for the heart.’
‘What?’ said Deel, her voice a disbelieving screech. ‘Are you mad?’
‘Just do it. It is our only chance.’
‘You’re insane,’ she said. ‘You’ll kill us both!’
‘Do it! You’re wasting time! Trust me!’
Deel yelled out, a cry of anger and frustration. She slammed the long, rusted shiv into Farren’s wound, all the way up, sinking it into tough flesh until it was buried deep.
Farren’s lips curled, his eyes watering as the pain shot through him. His grip on the algae-slick girder grew weaker as he felt the rusted knife grazing his ribs, cutting at his right lung and puncturing his second heart.
It was enough. A huge rush of stimm chemicals roared around Farren’s system as the implanted organ known as the Belisarian furnace pumped hard into full effect.
Triggered by near-fatal trauma, the furnace was designed by Archmagos Cawl to give the Primaris Marines one last burst of killing energy to let them claim revenge before their death in battle. Or in any extreme situation, come to that. Farren felt his strength return, flow through his limbs, every blood vessel tingling and pulsing as he pulled himself up once more.
With his eyes so wide he felt like they would never close again, Farren swung from girder to stanchion to pipe with jerking, desperate speed. He punched his fingers through rusted metal and crushed steel pipes as he made the straightest course between himself and the Repulsor. Deel hung on for grim life, arms and legs locked and hair whipping across her face as the wind and spume tugged at them.
The hungry waves reached up to grab at their legs, but Farren barely registered them. He breathed through froth that tasted of coppery blood, felt muscles sing even as his injured heart bled into his thoracic cavity.
He was dying, that much was certain. But the Repulsor was close, and he was getting closer with every passing second.
Farren sensed something watching them, back at the brig; a sensation of disapproving eyes piercing his back niggled at the back of his mind. Then it was lost amongst the pain, and a growing sense of triumph.
Thirty seconds later, Farren was kicking at the Harrower’s door with the toe of his boot. The ingress hatch hissed open, and Vesleigh looked out, his handsome features a mask of confusion.
‘Get her in!’ shouted Farren.
Still hanging from the rig’s underside, Farren shrugged Deel forward with his hip. She took the hint, and climbed into Vesleigh’s arms. His battle-brother, too stunned to argue, carried her inside. The lieutenant swung in close behind, coming in so hard that he bowled Vesleigh backwards. Deel staggered away to rebound from Moricani’s broad chest. Farren fell clattering to the floor of the Repulsor, clutching at his side. His hand was covered in half-clotted gore.
‘Throne, Farren,’ said Enrod. ‘You stink of promethium and blood.’
‘He needs help, you fool,’ said Moricani, punching open the Repulsor’s emergency cache and carefully extracting the dormant medi-skull inside it. He muttered an activation phrase – Hellblasters were no strangers to tackling irascible machine-spirits – and set the skull hovering free.
‘He’s shaking,’ said Gsar over the intravox. ‘His furnace has activated.’
‘He made me stab him in his wound,’ said Deel. ‘It was the only way, he said. Somehow it made him fight twice as hard to get back. I could barely hang on.’
Farren struggled to stay conscious as the skull-machine hovered down close, its syringe-tipped manipulators reaching for the red mess that was his side. A sharp spike of pain, and his entire flank became numb.
Dimly he registered his chronometer. Minus three seconds.
‘Your anti-coagulants are working again, Farren,’ said Moricani. ‘We’ll get you stable, then Vaarad and Autinocus can see to you when you get to the ship. We’ll tell them it was embedded shrapnel. Rest now. Gsar, get us out of here.’
Farren nodded weakly in thanks, and let himself slip away.