by Various
‘The skitarii have calculated that they can’t work up from the ground and take the tower floor by floor,’ the Raven Guard decided.
‘It would give us too much time to get entrenched,’ Salvador said.
‘Indeed,’ the Carrion agreed. ‘As Tibor says, the Phase-Fusilatrix will hit all floors simultaneously from the air. They’ll rely on numbers–’
‘And the fact that they have weapons and we do not,’ Nem’ron Phylax added, pulling the vox-caster from his ebony cheek.
‘We are weapons,’ Aulus Scaramanca growled.
‘We’ll use the hangar equipment for cover,’ the Carrion said, ‘and take as many of them as we can as they attempt entrance. Unfortunately the tower-preceptory was not designed with a siege in mind…’
‘That works in both our favours,’ Scaramanca agreed.
‘…but we can fall back to the workshops if required, and if time allows, move for the roof or work our way down through the levels to rendezvous with our brothers below.’
‘Time won’t allow for that,’ Tibor Ventidian said suddenly. The Ultramarine was still studying the static-laced hololithic display. He pointed at a ghostly dark shape on the Hellesponticae, making for Novus Mons.
‘What is it?’ the Carrion asked.
‘A Titan war machine,’ Ventidian said bleakly. ‘Warlord-class, I think.’
‘Terra…’ Alcavarn Salvador murmured.
‘What is their Legio designation?’ the Carrion asked.
‘The Legio Mortis,’ Ventidian confirmed, flash-reading the scrolling columns of runes.
‘What does that matter?’ Phylax put to the Raven Guard.
‘The Legio Mortis are pledged to Kelbor-Hal,’ the Carrion told the legionaries. He allowed a moment to let the scale of their doom sink in.
‘We have to alert Terra,’ Salvador said, turning to the runebank. ‘I must warn my Lord Dorn.’
At that moment the lamps and hololithic haze died about the Techmarines-in-training. A great clunk echoed about the technical hangar as equipment simultaneously fell silent, plunging the hall into twilight. Only the pale red light of the long Martian sunrise reached inside from the hangar entrance.
‘They cut the power,’ Phylax said, dropping the vox-caster.
‘Probably to the entire quadrant,’ the Carrion said. Outside, the legionaries could hear the growing shriek of aircraft engines as a swarm of silhouettes bled out of the haze of the Martian dust storm. The assault carriers of Martian Autokrator ground forces.
‘I can’t actually believe this is happening,’ Ventidian said. ‘Mars and Terra at war?’
‘We don’t know that,’ Phylax said. ‘Mars could be at war with itself.’
‘The dark code,’ the Carrion told them. He thought on the insanity beyond the data-net and his dream of the heretek Octal Bool. ‘The corruption is spreading. The streams could pollute all the Red Planet’s systems. The canker bleeds from every port and interface. This is a doom of Martian making, I am sure of it.’
Aulus Scaramanca’s smile curled to a snarl.
‘It doesn’t matter. Let’s get this done,’ the Iron Warrior said.
The Carrion didn’t have anything better for the gathered legionaries, who stared in disbelief as their Mechanicum overlords turned against them. ‘Positions,’ he instructed.
As the legionaries took cover behind the shells of stripped-out tanks and bulk equipment, black shapes like birds of prey resolved themselves from the pale Martian sunrise. Loudhailing augmitters were projecting a cacophony from above: a squealing codefeed that filled the chamber. The Carrion had taken a forward position with Tibor Ventidian, selecting the long shaft of a cog-wrench from an assortment of tools sitting in an open storage crate.
The cog-wrench was a multitool. It had the weight of a hammer, while its denticle-serrated cog-blade crackled with its own cutting field. Squeezing a clutch-handle set in the crank prompted the cog-blade to part, juddering up and down the shaft railing, turning the tool into heavy-duty wrench and a brutal weapon.
Ventidian, who was slapping a sickle magazine into the breech of his Phobos-pattern boltgun, suddenly doubled over. The Carrion heard an unseemly shriek escape the Ultramarine’s lips. Casting a glance over the top of the plasma-core generator he was hiding behind, the Raven Guard got to his feet. The bionics of his replacement legs carried him swiftly across the open space of the hangar, skidding down on his armoured knees beside Ventidian. The legionary, who was sheltering behind a stripped-down gravcraft power plant, was in obvious agony, and had dropped his weapon on the floor.
Approaching the problem as he might with any malfunctioning machine, the Techmarine-in-training saw that the incapacitated Ultramarine was clutching his ear. Prising a clenched gauntlet away from his head, the Carrion saw that the cognis-signum built into the side of the Ultramarine’s reconstructed cranium was sparking and his optic was flickering with agony. Fearing that the communications array was amplifying the transmission of dark code, the Raven Guard settled on a swift solution.
Clenching his hydraulic fist, the Carrion fired his interface spikes. Withdrawing three of the pins and the fourth to half-extension, he punched Ventidian in the side of the head. Firing the socket-lock at the end of the spike, the Carrion tore his bionic fist back, dragging the sparking array with it. He flicked the code-squealing device at the floor and turned to inspect his handiwork. The hollow in the Ultramarine’s cranium oozed blood and oil but after a moment Ventidian’s blue optic sizzled back to life and the legionary brought up a gauntlet to indicate that he was alright.
As the Ultramarine scooped up his boltgun from the deck, the las-storm began. The Carrion heard the whirr of multilaser barrels as hull-mounted weapons lit up the gloom of the hangar with a staccato of light. Searing beams cut through lesser equipment and plating in a relentless hail of streaking energies. The blinding sting of las-fire chewed up the grille flooring and punched patterns of tiny holes through plasteel and diagnostic equipment. Bleak Martian daylight threw thin shafts through the smoking holes, crisscrossing the hangar.
The legionaries had expected such an attack. Their training and experience on the battlefields had prompted them to take cover behind materials and equipment that could withstand such an onslaught. The Carrion saw Nem’ron Phylax kneeling behind a partially dismantled Executioner tank, while Aulus Scaramanca was busy amongst the cables and power cells of a half-built cannon emplacement. As the gunner’s cab turned to scrap under the slashing beams of an assault carrier’s multilaser, the Iron Warrior completed his rites of activation and hasty socketwork. The beamstorm turned into a spheric wall of refracted light as Scaramanca charged and jury-rigged the emplacement’s field defences.
The ancient Valkyrie aircraft drifted and screeched before the hangar opening, the loud-hailed binaric falling out of them like madness. The Carrion could hear the cacophony of code, vectorjets and multilasers playing out on the floor below and the one below that. He could imagine the tower-preceptory swarming with assault carriers, the twinkle of guns slashing the hangars, balcony-platforms and shuttered viewports with their las-weaponry. Filtering through the noise and havoc of the assault, the Carrion swore that he could hear the distant thunder of bolt-fire. He hoped that his battle-brothers on the lower decks had received their warning and had been able to make preparations for the coming slaughter.
The lightshow was suddenly over. Bleached sunlight filtered through the beam-shot hangar, cutting through the smoke and small explosions of ruptured cells and equipment. The Carrion had expected as much. The Mechanicum forces were clearly not themselves – slaves to the code corruption that flooded their systems – but the skitarii could be relied upon to act in accordance with their ancient and inflexible martial protocols. He heard the vox-hailed jabber-cant grow in volume as the assault carrier swept in. After the multilaser mauling of the tower, the aircraft were drifting
in to deliver their deadly cargo of constructs: the Scopulan Phase-Fusilatrix.
Risking a quick glance above the power plant behind which he had positioned himself with Tibor Ventidian, the Carrion saw the fuselage and underhung wings of three assault carriers drift in. Their canopies glowed with a sickly luminescence while the same balelight poured forth from the troop sections as door-ramps juddered open under the fuselage. The Carrion could see the silhouettes of skitarii warriors filing forward through the radiance and caterwauling code.
Slipping back down the side of the engine column, the Carrion signalled Nem’ron Phylax. He pointed at the Executioner hull that the Salamander was using for cover before jabbing towards the nearest assault carrier, whose landing gears were grazing the balcony-platform. Phylax gave a slow nod, priming his boltgun. The Carrion readied himself, similarly drawing Alcavarn Salvador’s attention to the mighty Salamander and slapping Ventidian’s pauldron.
He didn’t have to wait long. Moments later he heard the excruciating grind of tank tracks eating up the grille floor of the hangar.
Using his great servo-arm to lift the rear of the tank, Phylax had his pack against the Executioner’s hull, heaving it step by magnetised step towards the enemy. The skitarii exiting the assault carrier in feverish lines were things of crimson cloaks and clinkered bronze. They were draped in ceremonial mail, while their faces had been replaced by skull-fused tri-ocular targeting systems. Their phased plasma-fusils spat balls of energised hydrogen at the Executioner’s hull, striking the tank’s plating like sickly suns in miniature. The armour facing of the Phase-Fusilatrix began to glow, melt and dribble into ruin.
As Nem’ron Phylax heaved the vehicle at them, using its thick plate like a gargantuan shield, the Carrion signalled Ventidian and Salvador to offer cover fire with their boltguns. Pushing the Executioner forwards on its thick tracks, Phylax forced the disembarking skitarii to fan left and right to outflank him. Alcavarn Salvador was moving forwards himself, expertly making use of cover offered by the bulk equipment and practice pieces littering the technical hangar. As an Imperial Fist he was as one with the siege, where it was essential to drive the enemy from your ground without giving away any. Crouching, sidling and moving swiftly between cover, the legionary blasted single rounds at the Autokrator ground troops who were flooding the platform. From corners, over busy cover and on the move, the Imperial Fist’s aim was impeccable, each bolt smashing through the armoured chests of warrior-constructs and putting the sickly fusions of man and machine down on the deck.
As Salvador’s expert marksmanship put down the right flank, the skitarii on the left had fanned out and were hammering the side of the Executioner tank with volleys of blinding orbs. The Carrion could hear the repetitive clunk of a firing mechanism as Tibor Ventidian failed to appease the weapon’s spirit. He could hear the Ultramarine’s mumbled frustrations as rites, litanies and pleading prayers to the Omnissiah did nothing to get the boltgun operational.
‘Carrion…’ Ventidian said. ‘Carrion, I…’
The Carrion looked from Ventidian, willing the weapon to work, to Nem’ron Phylax, who was heaving the ruined tank with the great strength of his servo-arm and one of his gauntlets while holding his boltgun in the other, desperately slamming bolt-rounds through code-dribbling skitarii who had made their way around the vehicle.
The Carrion broke cover and accelerated into a piston-charged run. Unlike Salvador he did not possess a siegemaster’s innate understanding of cover and firing arcs. What he had was the power and acceleration of his bionic limbs and a Raven Guard’s instinct for impending death and destruction – both received and delivered.
Surging across the hangar, the Carrion immediately attracted the tri-optic targeters of the flanking Phase-Fusilatrix. Turning their weapons around on the streaking shadow in midnight plate, their distracted attention allowed Nem’ron Phylax a moment’s respite. Searing balls of unnatural plasma slammed into the deck in the Carrion’s wake. Stamping dents into the grille with his increasing speed, the Carrion leapt out of the path of a plasma volley, scaling bulk equipment and the stripped-out chassis of myriad vehicles before bounding across the open space between them – the air behind him roasted by rocketing shots.
Landing on the sloping wing of an engineless light cargo hauler, the Carrion hooked into the battered plating with his replacement hand, his hydraulic digits acting like a grapnel. He stopped there for a moment, allowing the shuttle to soak up the barrage of plasma the code-squealing skitarii were pumping at him. He was close now and could hear the grunt of the Salamander’s exertions, the thud of blasted warrior-constructs hitting the deck, and the clunk of the boltgun’s half-magazine running dry.
Releasing his hold on the patchwork plating of the wing, the Carrion allowed himself to slide off and roll to one side. He tumbled across his pauldrons and the conduction-finia of his node-columns – appearing briefly between an ambulatory freight-hoist and a pair of giga-barrels that had contained consecrated oils. The phased plasma-fusils of the skitarii scorched through the hangar decking and blasted the barrels clear, but the Carrion was already gone.
Bounding up the framework of the derrick, the Carrion launched himself into the air. The Raven Guard’s black robes flapped and trailed about him as he surged across the open space at the disembarking skitarii, the shaft of his cog-wrench held high.
With a servo-shredding effort that drew a roar from Nem’ron Phylax, the glowing wreck of the Executioner accelerated across the platform. From above, the Carrion could see Salvador’s economical bolt-fire crash through skitarii chests and combat-chassis on the far side of the tank. Below him warrior-constructs erupted in a fountain of oil, gore and workings; Ventidian had finally coaxed his boltgun into operation. With steely yanks on the trigger, the Ultramarine shredded the skitarii front line beneath the Carrion’s plasteel-crafted feet.
When the Carrion did land, it was with brute assurance. Delivering the killing blow to a bolt-mangled member of the Phase-Fusilatrix, he crushed the warrior-construct into the deck. The skitarii’s tri-optics were whirring and rotating with discombobulation as a combination of the tank, Ventidian’s belated bolt-fire and the Carrion simultaneously came at them. Their boots had barely touched down on the platform of the tower-preceptory before they had transformed from those carrying out the assault to those suffering in it.
Before they had time to fully process what was happening, the Carrion was among them. His replacement fist was an adamantium hammer smashing through optics, brain-integrates and bone. The fired interface spikes were a metal talon that he used to cross-slash skitarii and skull-stab the warrior-constructs to the deck. His crackling cog-wrench was a wheeling, serrated cosh that he turned in one gauntlet, smashing Mechanicum soldiers aside and off the edge of the platform.
The Carrion heard the Executioner crash into the assault carrier, and the aircraft scraped back on its landing gears. With the Phase-Fusilatrix scattered, and Salvador and Ventidian’s merciless bolt-fire pirouetting warrior-constructs and cutting skirmish lines in half, the Carrion pumped the hydraulic jaws of the cog-wrench open. Using the power of both arms – one flesh and the other bionic – the Space Marine cut though the trunks and combat chassis of the unfortunate soldiers. With chunks of flesh and shattered workings raining about him, the Carrion took the head clean off a code-gabbling officer-tribune before mag-locking the cog-wrench to his belt and joining Nem’ron Phylax behind the derelict tank.
Stomping into the deck and firing the magna-hydraulics of his replacement legs, the Carrion heaved at the smashed Executioner and the skidding landing gears of the assault carrier beyond. The cockpit and troop bay glowed with the same wretched radiance as before. There was no panic as the shell of the smouldering tank drove the rear gears of the Valkyrie off the platform. There were no screams. Just the same rabid cant and rancid code that poured forth from the aircraft loudhailers.
With the last of the Autokra
tor ground troops dropping about them and Salvador and Ventidian moving in, Phylax and the Carrion heaved for all their legs and shoulders were worth. Releasing his great servo-arm, Phylax barged with the Raven Guard, and with a final scrape the carrier and the tank plummeted off the platform edge. Looking down, the Carrion and the Salamander watched the pair of vehicles fall. The assault carrier didn’t even attempt any kind of rescue, nor did the crew abandon their aircraft. The spinning Valkyrie smashed through several others hovering off the edges of low hangar platforms, creating a plunging knock-on of wrecked fuselage and tumbling skitarii down the side of the tower. The building was swarming with aircraft, however, with two more drifting down toward the balcony-platform. One turned around to present its screeching door gunner and the gaping barrel of a heavy bolter, while the other put down heavily as the door-ramp of its troop bay opened.
Suddenly the assault carrier drifting before Phylax and the Carrion seemed to blur in a scything storm of dark energy. The aircraft and all the skitarii inside were riddled through with tenebrous needle-beams that carved up the craft from within before causing it to erupt in a fireball of exotic, black flame. Tracing the devastation back to its origin, the Carrion found that while they had been repelling the first wave of Phase-Fusilatrix, Aulus Scaramanca had performed a field repair on the gun-emplacement in which he had taken refuge. Cycling the emplacement’s refractor field with the firing emissions, the Iron Warrior had brought the photon-thrusters back to timely life, shredding the first Valkyrie before slashing through the mob of screeching skitarii hammering down the ramp of the second.
As the sound of bolt-fire across the platform died, Phylax and the Carrion turned to retreat with cover provided by the technical hangar. Both Salvador and Ventidian were out of precious ammo but there was no shortage of red assault carriers sweeping in. Undeterred by the resistance of several decks and encouraged by the slaughter on others, the skitarii extermination force would not be denied. Even the needle-beams of pure darkness seething out of the hangar interior from Scaramanca’s photon-thruster could not put the code-crazed soldiers off.