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  The tunic only lacked a head and the tops of the shoulders. The framework slowly stretched the fabric apart.

  This was the nerve-glove? Back in Trazior, Lexandro had imagined a gauntlet which would slip on to a hand…

  Not a body-glove. A glove that would cover the whole body up to the neck.

  The Chaplain chanted almost rapturously: “The glove will cleave to your whole body, save for your head. Elastic fabric will cling to your legs, to your loins, your trunk, your arms. That mesh of electrofibres will stimulate excruciating pain signals in all the nerves in your flesh without any physical harm being caused to that flesh. Though you shall feel all the agony, and more, of being roasted and incinerated alive, no actual damage will result – thus those agonies may continue unabated.”

  The amputee’s tongue flickered silently, stumpily, as though tasting the molecules of Lexandro’s sweat which escaped into the air, before he resumed his discourse: “The longest that anyone has endured a nerve-glove at level tertius until irreversible insanity, is fifty-two minutes – by which time the pain signals were so burned into the nerves that they could never cease thereafter.”

  The religious officer’s artificial sapphire eyes glowed with an inner light as he gazed at Lexandro. Was he relishing this moment, deliberately prolonging it in anticipation out of bile at the cadet’s blasphemy? No, not so! There was something sacred, mysterious in his scrutiny, as though Pain itself was a god, and he was its pontifex.

  He touched a button on the control pad of his cybercart, and the steel gibbet descended back into the cylindrical pit with glove distended, ready to be worn, the gaping shoulder-mouth sinking level with the riveted plates of the floor.

  “Discard all clothing, Cadet.”

  Momentarily, Lexandro hesitated.

  “Be advised that refusal of orders is a capital offence.”

  Lexandro stripped off his mustardy cadet’s tunic, and boots, and loincloth quickly and stood naked. Goose bumps coarsened his sleek skin, and he tried to still a trembling in his limbs.

  “Drop yourself down into the glove, d’Arquebus. It will not rip apart.”

  Lexandro jumped forward and plummeted down. The glove caught him, encompassed him. It clung around him as a second, intimate skin. Only his bare head remained clear, level with the deck.

  The framework reared up once again, to display him: a body webbed with argent tracery clutched within a thin unyielding skeleton of steel.

  “Pain is… a lesson that the universe teaches us,” intoned the Chaplain. “Pain is the preserver from injury. Pain perpetuates our lives. It is the healing, purifying scalpel of our souls. Pain is the wine of communion with heroes. It is the quicksilver panacea for weakness – the quintessence of a dedicated existence. Pain is the philosophic vitriol which transmutes mere mortal into immortal. It is the Sublime, the golden astral fire! I am in pain always, in blessed pain. Recommend that you fix your attention on the countenance of Rogal Dorn, Cadet.”

  A moment later it seemed that boiling water scalded Lexandro’s whole body below the neck. Simultaneously, furnace-fire incinerated him. He knew what those two victims must have felt when tossed into the heat-sink.

  Except that they had died quickly. Or so he supposed.

  He could not die.

  For his convulsing limbs, gripped within the slender yet firm framework, were not being consumed – even in his agony he understood that his substance remained unblemished.

  His legs were not simply dipped in molten lead; they were made of molten lead. His belly was a crucible, his ribs were a gridiron, and his fingers were tongs. A shrivelled stub of white-hot poker jutted from his groin. Lava coursed through his arteries.

  Nor could he lose consciousness…

  Then the boiling water became superheated. The furnace-fire was incandescent plasma.

  Screeching, he exhausted all air. Could he shriek himself unconscious through asphyxiation?

  No, for his lungs dragged in air to make more screams. The bellows bellowed.

  But not curses directed at the Chaplain. Nor cries for mercy, either. Even in this excruciating extremity a part of Lexandro acknowledged that the former would be folly, the latter would be futile.

  Somehow the glove was keeping him aware and conscious, blocking any opiates of the brain, preventing any saving reflex of a swoon. It played his body thunderously like a piano of pain.

  The alabaster face of Rogal Dorn branded his retinas: a crag of a face, with lush tough lips. Those lips seemed to phrase words intended for himself alone, kissing these words into the soft matter of his brain: “Though you are cast into the ultimate heat-sink, you hover indestructibly. In torment you fly, invincible, superior to mere victims of the fire.”

  Those words stroked a node of madness within him which somehow detached him from his excruciation so that he flew above it fleetingly before sinking back into molten anguish. Even though his mouth still screamed throughout.

  At last the ordeal ceased – so abruptly that Lexandro imagined that his body had evaporated, vanished, and that he had become pure spirit.

  The framework sank down until his lips were level with the floor. A cool hand gripped him under each armpit. Oh cool, so cool. Those two seemingly soothing hands hauled him up from out of the glove.

  One hand belonged to Yeremi Valence, the other to Biff Tundrish. Were they assisting Lexandro – or participating in his punishment?

  Naked, Lexandro knelt before the idol of Rogal Dorn and adored it…

  The Chaplain watched intently. After a while he directed his cybercart to Lexandro’s side and reached out his true arm to touch the cadet.

  “Even before the gene-seed of the primarch is implanted in you…” he murmured reverentially. “Even before… As if the blessed Dorn has marked you out in advance.”

  Lexandro had no rational idea what the Chaplain meant.

  Yet in some zone of his mind where reason played no part, bizarrely he rejoiced.

  “You must not deliberately offend so as to invite such punishment,” whispered the puissant amputee hoarsely. “You must obey and revere and obey! Dress yourself now and stand in rank.”

  And so while the corvette glided on towards its illuminated dock, as a minnow might swim into the mouth of a vast phosphorescent deep-sea predator, the interrupted service of thanksgiving continued.

  The elevation of the nerve-glove had been sacramental too, in its way.

  The Necromundans were to be in the fortress-monastery for six Imperial months before suffering their initiatory hazing at the hands of older cadets. Earlier, and none of them might have survived the ritual of the tunnel of terror…

  CHAPTER FOUR

  UNDER THE GUIDANCE of educated slaves whose forebears had served the Chapter loyally for many aeons, knowing no other world than the massive fortress-monastery, the Necromundans became well acquainted with its topography: its galleries and halls and gymnasia and oratoria, its foundries and chapels and firing ranges, its surgeries and its various scattered scriptories where Librarium data could be accessed.

  Given the sensitive functions of the Librarium which doubled as the communications centre, naturally entry to that chamber was restricted. Astropaths and defence officers were forever on duty in the Librarium, and within too were stored the original codices of the Chapters ten thousand year heritage. Hence, those separate scriptories where one could study the electronic ghosts of unrestricted documents.

  Techs who were expert in the Machine Mysteries, autonomous-minded slaves, administrators, ship crews – all the host of support staff for the Marine Chapter – slept in modestly comfortable dormitories… assuming that they needed, or could avail themselves of modest comfort during sleep-time. The task-adapted technomats, whose original personalities had been erased and replaced with electrografted data and blithe, benign personae, did, and could. So did the servitors who remained fully human. Others of those supplied to the Chapter by the Adeptus Mechanicus on Mars were automata-programmed drones. Stil
l others were specialised cyborgs, part-machine, who could never lie down on a bunk.

  Marines and Marine Scouts and cadets spent the artificial nights in barren cells. In their own refectories they ate a ceramic-reinforced, drug-laden booster diet in silence, ending with a prayer recited by an older initiate.

  D’Arquebus, Valence, Tundrish and companions soon received their first two sets of implants from devout chirurgeons in the Apothecarion wing. First, came the secondary heart which would sustain them should their original heart be destroyed in combat. At the same time, the skeleton-boosting ossmodula – and the biscopea gland to stimulate muscle growth.

  Later, came the haemastamen, and Larraman’s organ: the former to monitor the ossmodula and biscopea and to enrich the blood, the latter to alter the blood’s clotting properties so that scar tissue would almost instantly close up any wound.

  The Necromundan neophytes became very familiar with the operating altars and biomonitoring and chemical assay machines of the Apothecarion – with the mantis-like laser scalpels, the stasis tureens cradling the precious new organs, the examinator device towering like a brass-banded armadillo, its tapering snout scanning the innards of the body, and with the soporificator instrument resembling some giant spider that stung metacurare into the nerves; to which the drone of surgical incantations from the adepts, whose robes were embroidered with arabesque prophylactic hexes and purity emblems, was a macabre lullaby.

  THE CADETS WOULD become ever more familiar with those chambers of the Apothecarion during the next few years. Here was the shrine to the holy art of Surgery, which could transform men into demi-machines – or into paragons of transhumanity.

  One unfortunate boy from the Palatine Hive died early. His haemastamen failed to synchronise his ossmodula. Spurs of bone grew from his spine, bursting through his skin, and his fingers began to fuse into shovel blades. Unthinkable that this anomaly might be due to a misspeaking of the orthodox surgical liturgy! Yet despite remedial chemotherapy and amputation the syndrome continued. So the boy was honourably mind-wiped and his zombie anatomy retained for study in a nutrient tank in a laboratory of the Apothecarion.

  One day, during a recreation period, Lexandro betook himself to a scriptory to study – only to discover that both of his “brothers” were already ensconced there, although at data consoles some distance apart. The eagerness with which Biff Tundrish would make a beeline for the nearest scriptory to soak himself in Imperial Fist history stirred amusement and a certain irritation in Lexandro’s breast.

  “Of course,” he remarked loftily, loitering beside Valence, “our Biff does start from a low base-line of knowledge…”

  “And you, from a high vantage point?” asked Valence witheringly.

  “Ah,” replied Lexandro, “yet what is knowledge of facts worth compared with religious experience?”

  Experience such as Lexandro had gained, or thought he had gained, in the nerve-glove… He himself spent hours in the chapel reserved for cadets, praying to the image of Rogal Dorn, and to the Emperor, attempting to recapture the moment when he had flown through fire, sure that this would stand him in good stead in battle. As he smelled the smouldering frankincense, he would imagine his own body inflamed and his soul soaring from it like smoke.

  Tundrish paid no apparent attention, seemingly lost in the scrolling details of a campaign four thousand years in the past. But Yeremi eyed Lexandro calculatingly.

  “It’s much too soon to provoke an affair of honour,” he remarked.

  And this was true – for only mature battle-brothers were permitted to duel. Permitted? Nay, almost encouraged, so it seemed – yet apparently within the strictest of chivalric constraints…

  Valence’s sly voice insinuated itself again. “I hear that he who is scarred is he who is honoured, being graced by a brother’s nick upon his cheek – a nick like a dainty bite, like a loving kiss. Would you desire the honour of your own cheek being blemished by Biff? Or would you honour him in that style… one day?” Idly, Valence rubbed one of the runes on his own cheek, as though the ex-tech had already been similarly honoured, or anticipated honour.

  Lexandro shrugged. “How do you come by this wisdom about duels?”

  “Through observation and study, brother, rather than through ecstatic intuition. Imperial Fists are dedicated to fastidious and meticulous detail, by the grace of Dorn – detail in military tactics, and in personal conduct too. That is why we adopted—”

  “We?” sneered Lexandro.

  “—why we adopted the Junker model of behaviour.”

  Lexandro did not know the word Junker.

  “Yes, the ancient Prussic code.” Valence was only too happy to explain. “Named after Prusse, on old Earth. There’s a subtle poison in the germ-plasm we receive, d’Arquebus. A heady, intoxicating venom – which you seem almost to be drunken on already.”

  “This is blasphemy I’m hearing!”

  “Would I be so foolish as to blaspheme? Consult the Codex of our heritage a little more, d’Arquebus. Religious afflatus alone, and agony, may not win a battle. Any Marine casualty is a tragedy as well as a triumph.”

  “You’re a blasphemer, who doesn’t believe in prayer! Or a prissy tech pedant, who should have been one of my father’s scribes.” So saying, disdainfully Lexandro left the scriptory and returned to his small cell to recite in private one of the liturgies they had all been taught.

  “Oh Dorn, the dawn of our being,

  Let your sun shine on us, your sons;

  Oh primarch, precursor, asperge us…”

  In one of the firing ranges attached to the foundries, brother-artisans – who had once been hive-dwellers, too, before their transfiguration – introduced the new Necromundans to military bolters, flamers, plasma guns, melta guns, laser weapons. The brothers demonstrated power axes as well as heavier weapons which the neophytes as yet lacked the physique to wield unaided unless those weapons were equipped with suspensors. Nor could the cadets yet don the power armour necessary to heft such bulk. The neophytes were still growing, and only a good while after they had received their final implant of all – the carapace – would they be able to jack into an armoured suit.

  Yet they were growing – apace. Swelling, toughening, expanding.

  The cadets did not as yet, of course, visit the vast locked guarded complex of the armoury, with its racks of weapons and magazines of ammunition both pristine and ancient, protected within stasis fields inside chambers of adamantium.

  Nor as yet, to Lexandro’s regret, the holy Reclusiam, home of the Chapter’s most sacred relics and trophies; only initiates might step in there.

  Nor yet the immense Catacombs down at the base of the fortress-monastery, where heroes ancient and modern lay in ranks of caskets. Too sacred a place for neophytes.

  Nevertheless, minor relics abounded in the home-base.

  The mature battle-brothers – the giant knights of the Imperium, whose attention a cadet must not disturb – were bound on a Crusade, the details of which were hardly for cadets to enquire about. When not exercising, training, or praying, the Imperial Fists often carved scrimshaws meditatively in their cells. Their work, accumulated over millennia, could be seen everywhere. Examples were mounted in tooled silver reliquaries in niches, or displayed in rococo gilt cases which cyborged servitors dusted. Officers wore scrimshaws as jewellery along with the most noble, holy decorations incorporating tiny slivers of the Emperor’s own armour from aeons ago, prior to the time when that Divine Immortal was prisoned in his prosthetic Golden Throne.

  Some of the polished, engraved scrimshaws, so mellow in lustre, depicted weapons; others, armour, or miniature cameos of battle. The raw materials which the Marines used for their scrimshandering were none other than the mighty, ceramically strengthened finger bones – the metacarpals and phalanges – of Imperial Fists who had died in battle or, surviving to old age, been permitted honourable euthanasia. Few of those skeletons resting in caskets in the Catacombs sported hands. Most had been
amputated. Even a dead Imperial Fist, as the saying went, kept his hand in.

  In the rune-friezed, banner-hung oratorium reserved for cadets the Necromundans hung on the words of crippled veteran lecturers; and on one such occasion Lexandro learned that Valence had been correct in his seemingly blasphemous comments uttered in the scriptory…

  The paraplegic Brother Rhetoricus was strapped into the saddle of a powered chair designed in the image of a crouching subhuman. He wore round his neck a scrimshaw on a silver chain. Other scrimshaws hung from the chair itself on thongs. An Imperial eagle lectern carved in jet supported upon its open black wings a huge, chained copy of the Codex Astartes. This rulebook of Space Marine organization was bound in many layers of flayed, cured, alien skin, its letters illuminated ornately with the colour-fixed green and orange blood from two alien races. The brother spoke from memory, and indeed his theme today was not the structure of the Legiones Astartes.

  He commenced in a rasping voice which scratched his words into his listeners’ minds as a claw might groove butter.

  “You have already received some of the precious germ-plasm of our blessed Patriarch to kindle you as a true Imperial Fist.” Seated along a wide curve of plasteel stalls, their canopies embossed with battle scenes, the cadets hardly moved.

  “Your new organs and glands have only one ultimate source – namely the gene-seed of the godly Rogal Dorn enshrined from generation to generation within the temples of our bodies. From those seeds we culture the superhuman glands and organs that shall make you Marines. Before you receive your carapace, the Adepts of the Apothecarion will implant the two progenoid glands which will, during the next half-decade and decade, soak up the pattern of your Imperial Fist metabolism. Harvested from you, these glands will enable our Adepts to culture further organs to kindle further brothers in future.

  “Woe betide if you die before at least those first five years of service! For you will thus deny us the possibility of an additional brother. This is why you will first join a Scout company with a hardened survival-conscious veteran as your Sergeant.”