Recoil

By author StrenousActivity

"I do not mean to offend you, Jonahn, but where did you get that?"

Cyrus perked up at his brother's words, following Memnon's line of sight to the gyro-stabiliser in his hand.

"Oh, this? I took it from one of Lady Xiao's wrecks. I promised her I'd fix her next bike in exchange for it."

The Third Primarch huffed. "Surely there's a way to source your components from someone less… unsavoury than the Demon Queen?"

"It was convenient at the time." Cyrus shrugged nonchalantly. "I needed the stabiliser and taking surplus from one of Xiao's bikes lessens the chance of it being suboptimal."

"You know," Memnon stated, putting a hand on Cyrus's shoulder, "I would have been more than happy to help you build one custom-made, had I been invited sooner."

"And it is my fault that you could not."

The Androphagian dictator nodded, still mildly annoyed that a man as morally upright as Cyrus could be so dismissive of the actions of Jiun Xiao's ilk as to casually do favours for her in exchange for something as mundane as a gyroscopic stabiliser.

"But that is in the past now, Brother." Cyrus handed him a dataslate. Memnon took it and gave its contents a quick scan, his eyes widening at the end.

"What do you think?"

"This is…" Memnon paused for a moment to reread the schematics. The longer he looked, the more ideas and improvements began to flit about at the speed of thought as he began piecing together what his similarly technologically inclined brother was proposing.

"This is very ambitious."

"So are you interested?" Cyrus tested with a smile.

"The recoil would be insane, even for one of us."

"Surely the safeguards in place would be more than enough?"

"Jonahn, you are wings, a tail, and a suitably aerodynamic chassis away from reinventing rudimentary powered flight if we don't use something stronger."

Cyrus guffawed out loud, knowing full well that nothing Memnon had just said was hyperbole.

"That's why I invited you, Brother."

It took the Bronze Primarch a moment to decipher Cyrus's words, and he let out a huff of confounded laughter.

"You already tested it? Without any recoil mitigation?"

"Yes."

Memnon shook his head.

"How far did you go?"

Cyrus uploaded a vid-cast to the dataslate. Memnon peered back down and pressed the play rune.

It was Cyrus wearing full armour. He stood in the middle of an open desert, presumably recording himself with a servo-skull, while the protoype was slung over his shoulders. Memnon could make out the shapes of Astartes in the far distance, tiny specks he assumed were also servo-skulls floating around them.

The feed moved around to aim at Cyrus directly, now setting the massive rifle… cannon… abomination down on the ground. Memnon watched his younger brother fiddle with its tripod. The switches on each leg made them sink into the ground. The Tuilean tugged at them, making sure the miniature gravity fields held firm to the earth.

Memnon eyed Cyrus, who smiled sheepishly.

"I thought they were good enough then."

The Third Primarch kept watching.

The Cyrus in the vidcast began flicking various switches, each one followed by a new steady thrum of energy that built, and built, until it reached a fever pitch where the barrel itself began to sputter and spark, ready to unleash whatever munition Jonahn had loaded.

"This is… kinetic hypercaster test—" the Ninth Primarch peered down at his arm— "Six Oh Three Two, I have finally reached the prep stage immediately before firing without setback, which is very good news. Beginning fire test."

And with that, Cyrus squeezed the trigger.

The feed immediately switched to the Astartes recording from a much farther distance. The servo skull microphones picked up an echoing boom from their gene-father's location, then a gust of air as Cyrus quite literally whooshed past them in a cloud of rust-red dust and smoke at a speed that made Memnon's brows raise when he watched him zoom, and zoom, zoom even farther until the Emperor's youngest son finally slammed into a distant rock formation, and the vid-cast cut out.

Memnon gingerly placed the dataslate on the table, his head turning until he looked the Rust Spiders' Primarch dead in the eye.

Then he did what any man would do in the face of a younger sibling's foolishness, and smacked Cyrus in the back of the head, eliciting a yelp from his curly red-haired brother.