IRON HANDS Jonathan Green

A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL IRON HANDS Jonathan Green Jonathan Green «Iron Hands» To the DHWFs IT IS THE 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die. YET EVEN IN his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon‐infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperors will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio‐engineered super‐warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever‐vigilant Inquisition and the tech‐priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever‐present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants ‐ and worse. TO BE A man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re‐learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods. Jonathan Green «Iron Hands» OCULARIS TERRIBUS ʹAll the stars in the sky cannot blot out the hateful glare of the red moonʹs eye. The birthing place of the Great Enemy pulses with all the malice of a daemon that is dreaming, casting its shadow over all we have ever done and all we ever shall.ʹ ‐ Eldrad Ulthran, Farseer of Ulthwe craftworld PROLOGUE THE ALL‐SEEING EYE INCENSE SMOKE CURLED through the sickly sweet-scented processed air of the reclusium chamber in a fug of sparkling coral mist, rising into the gloom of the chamber's distant, vaulted dome. Hovering candles created bobbing islands of hazy yellow light amidst the pink- tinged fog of the darkened place. It was silent other than for the crackling and popping of the resinous coals in the braziers. The astropath residing in the centre of the chamber was trance-dreaming. In the unreality of her dream the universe was a pleasant place to live. In her half-waking reverie she could use her legs. She ran through meadows of verdant flocktail grass under a sky that was crystal blue, studded with puffs of white cumulous cloud, not discoloured by a permanent sickly brown smog, even though the only planet she had ever known was an over-industrialised hive world. She had never even seen a meadow, so the green of the rippling grass and the blue of the sky were too vibrant, too brilliant, overexposed in their intensity. The flocktails brushed against her smock and her bare legs, as she exhilarated in the feeling of being free of the strategium shell. The air was fragrant with the heady scent of rose-orchid pollen; the sun's rays beat down on the skin of her uncovered arms and shoulders, warming her skin. She had hair in this existence too, luxurious auburn tresses that cascaded like fine-spun silk to the middle of her back. And in this world she was beautiful and young again, as if the decades of imprisonment had never occurred, as if time had wound back to an instant that had never in fact existed. How was it, she wondered sleepily, that she could dream of things she had never seen or experienced? But of course it was thanks to the same psychic awareness that allowed her to perceive the fluctuating currents of the immaterium, and read the future that was written there for those who had the eyes to see it. With the hiss of compressed gas, the bulkhead door to the reclusium irised open, rousing the dreamer from her hypnotic reverie. A figure stood-silhouetted in the aperture, tall and robed, surrounded by a nimbus of muted backlight. With a whirring of neck servos the astropath looked up. There was very little of her that had not been augmented or adapted in some way. The astropath's life-support cradle was suspended from a gargoyle-mouthed buttress that projected out into the centre of the reclusium, wreathed with power cables and feed-pipes. It hung at the centre of a complex pattern inscribed on the Mhorovite onyx floor of the chamber, the detailing of the warding sigils and inscriptions of holy lore picked out in platinum, silver and gold. Awake, the warp-seer's numerous psycho- and mechanical-induced tics recommenced as well. The elongated fingertips of her hands tapped a rapid staccato rhythm on the polished marble plinth in front of her, her eyes spasmodically glancing at the deck of crystal cards every few seconds. Between glances, the astropath looked up at her visitor. The man was tall and stick thin. His body was swathed by a heavy cowled robe, like those favoured by many servants of the Emperor, its hem elaborately embroidered with the machine-code catechisms of the Omnissiah's priesthood. She could see little of his face beneath the shadowing hood of the cowl, other than the myopic blinking of a red ocular implant. The figure strode across the black stone floor of the chamber towards the seer's consultation plinth, a metallic tapping punctuating the sackcloth scrape of his heavy robes dragging across the floor. The astropath knew why the magos was here: there was only one reason why anyone of his standing ever came to visit her prison. Her gaze lingered for a split second longer on the tarot deck in front of her. There were no words of greeting exchanged between the two. As far as her visitor was concerned, she was merely a tool to be used for a specific job, no different to a lascutter or hydraulic wrench. There was no need for conversation. That said, when the priest utilised a tool such as electro-forceps he made a supplication to its machine spirit before commencing. She did not even warrant that. She knew her place. 'Begin,' was all the visitor said. 'The cards have been prepared, anointed with oils and thrice-blessed before the image of the Emperor Enthroned,' the seer intoned in the accepted litany of the tarot reading, her voice resonating with the buzzing hiss of an augmetic voice box. She raised the deck in her adapted hands and deftly shuffled the cards with the speed of an automated credit counter, the beautifully worked, wafer-thin slivers of crystal flying between her articulated digits and arranging themselves into an esoteric order potent with eldritch potentialities and possibilities, known only to capricious whims of fickle fate. It could take centuries to master the Emperor's tarot, to learn every combination of cards, every subtle nuance of meaning, read every play of warp-light on the psychoplastic-impressed images. Time few practitioners were ever graced with. One scribe-artist would labour his entire lifetime lovingly hand-crafting a single card. The deck of seventy-eight cards on the plinth in Jonathan Green «Iron Hands» front of the seer was itself worth a planetary governor's ransom. Laid out in their entirety, the cards formed an allegorical image of the entire Imperium - a realm that spanned a million worlds and untold billions of souls - its heroes and its enemies. In the Emperor's Tarot there were cards representing the champions of the mankind including the noble warrior, who was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice in his service of the Imperium, the superhuman Space Marine brother of the mighty Adeptus Astartes; the truth-seeking inquisitor; the rabble-rousing preacher of the Imperial creed; the shadowy, death-dealing assassin; the inspiring Chaplain of the Astartes Chapters, the unequivocal judge and the warp-seeing astropath, of course. Conversely, there were also cards bearing terrible, soul-searing images depicting the myriad enemies that threatened the human race. These were the cards of the Arcana Discordia. There was the vile, faithless traitor; the sorcerous alien warlock; the disgusting mutant, and the blasphemous-tongued heretic. There was the hulking tusk-mawed form of the beast ascendant, the leering horror that was the daemon and the notoriously guileful, ambiguous character of the Harlequin - the wild card of the Emperor's tarot. But of course the most potent card in the tarot was that of the immortal Emperor himself, bound within the ancient, unfathomable technology of the Golden Throne of Terra. A skilful astropath could discern the shape of things to come from a reading of the tarot. The many paths that fate might tread in executing its grand designs could be seen in the pattern of the cards since the pictures on their faces were psychically attuned to the constant flux of that otherworldly half-reality that existed beyond the physical universe. The warp. The immaterium. The empyrean. The ether. The Sea of Souls. The Realm of Chaos. It was man's greatest hope and yet also his gravest peril.

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