The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

  Hovering above the balcony platform and out of reach of the cannon’s limited fire arcs, crowding assault carriers opened their troop bay doors. Corruption-canting tribunes commanded their Autokrator troops off the juddering ramps, causing skitarii to rain down on the platform, breaking bones that could no longer be felt or landing on the suspensors of bionic legs. They started firing as they landed, pummelling the hangar with blasts of plasma.

  Scaramanca chewed up the hordes of dropping skitarii with whipping streams of photon-fire, but there were too many. Ventidian and Salvador looked on helpless and bereft of ammunition as Phylax and the Carrion made a run back for the cover of the hangar. The Carrion’s hydraulics made light work of the deck, his feet crunching and squelching through what was left of the warrior-constructs. The hulking Salamander was not built for speed and agility – especially with the great bulk of his harness-pack and servo-arm.

  As the Carrion surged on, putting generatoria and hydraulic-wagons of sheet armaplas between him and the storm of phased plasma that was hot on his heels, Nem’ron Phylax slowed with a roar of frustration and came crashing down onto the scratched green of his armoured knees. A salvo of plasma had slammed into his back, raging its way through the workings of his pack. The chittering skitarii delivered the miniature suns of armour-boiling death into the legionary, limping up behind the Salamander to deliver volley after killing volley.

  The Carrion could only watch as the contorted agony of Nem’ron Phylax’s ebony face framed the clenched silver of his teeth. The Salamander’s chest became a bubbling pit of melting plate and blinding light as plasma cored its furious way through his body.

  ‘No!’ the Carrion roared. Ventidian attempted to grab Nem’ron’s arm and pull him to safety, but it was too late – he was gone. As a hail of super-heated death came at him, the Raven Guard weaved this way and that, allowing the hangar equipment and vehicles in various states of repair to take the punishment. As hordes of skitarii dropped down onto the platform and marched on the hangar, the twilight became a blinding blizzard of plasma, turning metal and decking to glowing slag.

  Pinned down behind a cargo power lifter and with the loader turning to molten scrap, the Carrion slammed the digits of his hydraulic hand down on the lifter’s rear-mounted power plant. Placing the conduction plate of his palm in contact with the bulk diaquartzoid cells, the Carrion siphoned the stored energies from the machine. Channelling the stolen power through the metallic strips that wound their way sub-dermally through his pale flesh, the Techmarine-in-training felt his body warm. The silver of his eyes blazed while his torso felt like it burned with the power of a barely contained nova.

  Draining the power plant and stepping back, the Carrion thrust his palm at the power lifter and unleashed a phased discharge of electromagnetic energy. The arcing torrent of energy blasted the monstrous bulk of the loader, caving its side in and sending the machine rolling across the hangar deck. It mangled the grilled floor and the throng of skitarii behind it. The disintegrating power lifter crashed, tumbled and skid through the Mechanicum soldiers in its path and took their smashed bodies with it off the balcony-platform edge.

  Stalking forward with cold fury, the Carrion unleashed the storm inside him. Angling the outstretched digits of his hand and the anbaric fount at nearby Phase-Fusilatrix that had escaped the carnage, the Carrion blasted streams of lightning through the warrior-constructs. The skitarii stopped the code-gibbering and fell to their knees as their smouldering flesh cooked and their workings fried.

  The Carrion’s ears registered the calls of Ventidian and Salvador and even the dying beam-storm of Scaramanca’s photon-thruster as it took one last scything pass across the deck before its power cells died. For his battle-brothers the sickening reality of the situation was unfolding with such force and disbelief that it was difficult to process.

  The doubts and confusion that had been eating away at the Carrion – fed by dark dreams, an overworked cogitator and his genetic instinct for the covert and the clandestine – found sudden expression. However impossible it was for him to believe, there was an enemy to be found on Mars; an enemy that wanted to destroy the Legiones Astartes’ presence on the Red Planet and nullify the threat they posed in being the living, breathing authority of the Emperor. As skitarii warriors raised the baroque barrels of their fusils at the Carrion he scorched them with the channelled energies ebbing from his systems.

  Warrior-constructs were raining from the sky, hitting the platform at a crouch and bringing their phased plasma-fusils up to fire upon the legionaries. The Carrion surged into the throng ahead of him. Snatching his cog-wrench from where it was mag-locked to his belt, he batted weapon barrels aside, sending small suns seething into the deck. He smashed tri-optic targeting systems from skulls in showers of parts and brained the insanity-spewing skitarii with bludgeoning swings of his denticle-­serrated weapon.

  As plasma blasts grazed his midnight plate and seared past him, the Carrion slammed his palm against the clinker-armoured chests of the augmented soldiers. Within moments he drained their combat-chassis housed power cores before using the very same energies to blast the warrior-­constructs back through their code-babbling ranks.

  Before long the Carrion was standing in a mound of metal and scorched flesh. The Phase-Fusilatrix continued to drop from the sky while Autokrator pilots processed what the legionaries already knew. Scaramanca’s devastating photon cannon was out of power. Assault carriers that swarmed the pale red Martian heavens once more swooped in to deliver their corrupted cargos. Rust-red aircraft that already had disgorged their cargo screeched off the surface of the platform, charging their weaponry.

  The Carrion was suddenly pushed sideways by an unstoppable force. It was Tibor Ventidian. The Ultramarine had charged into him with all the brute insistence his powered armour could bring to bear. Slamming the Raven Guard into the crumpled side of an itinerant tool carriage, Ventidian held him there while Alcavarn Salvador knocked a plasma fusil aside with his gauntlet and smashed the skitarii who was holding it down with his armoured fist. The razor-sharp blade of his prized combat blade thudded into another warrior-construct and he drove the tri-optic fused skull of another into the tool carriage several times before tossing the augmented soldier’s body away.

  The Carrion turned his silver-glazed eyes on Ventidian’s patrician face. The Ultramarine was speaking to him but the words would not register. Willing his cogitator to cut through the fug of emotion and supra-­stimulants released into his blood as a result of the battle, the Carrion finally heard Ventidian.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’ the Ultramarine shouted. ‘We have to fall back and regroup with our brothers on the lower floors.’

  The Carrion looked to Salvador, who was recovering his blade. He gave a grim nod, which the Raven Guard managed to copy. Ventidian pulled at his pauldron, turning the Carrion towards the smoke-wreathed twilight at the rear of the hangar. Swinging for another Autokrator soldier as it sidled around the tool carriage with its baroque weapon, Salvador sent the fired plasma blast rocketing for the ceiling. Hooking the digits of his gauntlet into the carriage, the Imperial Fist heaved at the itinerant machine, toppling it over on top of the downed skitarii.

  As the three legionaries dodged between the bulk equipment and trussed vehicles with droves of static-screeching skitarii behind them, the swirling haze of the hangar was lit up by balls of spitting plasma and the stuttering beams of multilaser cutting through obstacles and obstructions. The Techmarines-in-training did their best to keep as much of the heavy-duty equipment and practice pieces between them and the energy storm working its way up behind them.

  Then the Carrion heard it. The dour clunk of the freight elevator. As the Space Marines’ heavy run took them to the rear of the hangar there was an equally dreary ding as the thick elevator doors juddered open.

  ‘Down!’ the Carrion roared, skidding down onto the adamantium sheen of his armoured legs an
d hydraulics. Skitarii of the Phase-Fusilatrix were there, but how the Raven Guard did not know. Perhaps they had worked their way up from swiftly subjugated lower levels. Perhaps they had infiltrated the tower from the other side at the same time as attempting to take the hangars and platforms.

  A wall of plasma came at the legionaries, washing over the Carrion’s head. Balls of superheated hydrogen slammed into Ventidian and Salvador. The Ultramarine was killed outright, a searing blast of plasma taking his head horribly from his armoured shoulders. Raging discharges blasted several holes clean through Alcavarn Salvador’s robes and yellow plate, the momentum causing the legionary to stumble and crash down onto the deck. He bounced off his armoured chest before sliding alongside the prone Carrion, his lifeless face frozen in a moment of sudden shock. The Imperial Fist’s master-crafted blade clattered across the deck and skidded under a nearby vehicle.

  The skitarii marched with heavy augmented steps out of the freight elevator, squealing codespeak passing between the corrupted constructs. Their targeting systems whirred and revolved like the multi-lens of a microscope, fixing on the Raven Guard.

  An officer-construct looked down on the Carrion with something like machine scorn before slipping a bulky volkite pistol from a holster strapped across the clinkerplate of his chest. As he turned it to his prone target the Carrion’s lip curled. Sinking the digits of his gauntlet and hydraulic hand into Alcavarn Salvador’s suit pack, the Carrion hauled the dead Imperial Fist in front of him like a shield.

  As the skitarii officer charged a deflagrating blast into the unfortunate Salvador, the Carrion drained the power cells of the Imperial Fist’s pack and suit’s automotive systems of energy. Resting the armoured bionics of his arm on the Imperial Fist’s pauldron, the Carrion unleashed a short stream of anbaric energy at the officer-construct and blasted his smouldering form back through his skitarii and into the elevator. Getting to his knees, the Carrion blasted a second, third and fourth stream as his attackers tried to turn their plasma fusils back on him.

  As the Carrion got back onto his feet he slammed yet more arcs of seething energy into the departing skitarii. The scavenged power coursing through his systems began to dissipate and as it did the Raven Guard was forced to kick out at the last of the interloping warrior-constructs with one of his bionic legs. Firing the powerful pistons, the Carrion kicked the skitarii back into the hangar wall, shattering its chassis.

  With skitarii working their way through the maze of repair bays and equipment, the Carrion picked his way through the corpses of the dead constructs. Their fusils were built into appendage mountings; it would be impossible for him to appropriate one in the time he had. The Carrion watched as the beams of shoulder-mounted torches and the targeting beams of skitarii cut through the smoke and darkness of the hangar rear.

  The first skitarii rounded a partially disassembled reactor core and immediately raised its fusil. With something approaching surprise, the construct was suddenly seized by something, and wrenched back into the darkness and obscurity. The angle and movement of the skitarii shoulder lamps and tri-optic targeter beams were frantic. There was something with them in the smouldering murk of the multilaser-riddled hangar.

  The jabber-cant of corrupt code became sharp and excitable. Fusils spat balls of plasma in alarm and confusion as skitarii were seized and flung through the obscurity – into each other, the unforgiving sides of equipment and hangar floor and walls. Code-screeching was punctuated by the sound of powered fists smashing warrior-constructs to bloody metal scrap. Shattered workings rained from the darkness, while a fleeing member of the Phase-Fusilatrix backed out of the acrid haze. So preoccupied was it with the brutal destruction of its compatriot units, that it was barely aware of the Carrion’s presence.

  The Raven Guard fired the haptic spikes in his hydraulic fist but no such precautions were necessary. As the skitarii backed away, scanning the smoke with its targeter tri-beams and angling its baroque fusil, the stripped-down chassis of a Land Speeder erupted from the darkness.

  The vehicle didn’t need its ramjets to fly through the air. It had been tossed from the murk with pure mechanical force. The Carrion saw the skitarii lower its weapon, as if accepting the inescapability of its fate. The chassis crashed through the warrior-construct, turning it into mulched flesh and brass before rolling and smashing into the hangar wall.

  From the darkness marched the Iron Warrior Aulus Scaramanca – a vision of battered plate, blood-splattered stripes and plasma-scorched chevrons. He was a mess. While the Carrion had been battling warrior-constructs with Ventidian, Salvador and Phylax on one side of the hangar, the Iron Warrior had been single-handedly keeping the Mechanicum forces at bay on the other. He limped towards the Carrion with a grim glower, his powerful mechadendrite limbs snaking and sparking about him. He looked down at the corpses of Ventidian and Salvador before grunting.

  As he got nearer, the Carrion could see that the flesh on one half of Scaramanca’s face had been blistered away by the near-miss of a raging blast of superheated hydrogen. Tendons, teeth and charred muscle were all on show but it didn’t seem to bother the Iron Warrior. Looking down, he found an Autokrator soldier that the Carrion had blasted into the hangar wall reaching out to an abandoned volkite pistol. The Iron Warrior stepped on the warrior-­construct’s hand with his heavy armoured boot and managed to find enough moisture in his mouth to hock and spit down on the thing. The Carrion nodded. It was hard to articulate the horror of what was happening to them.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

  ‘Face it,’ Scaramanca said, giving the Raven Guard the full glory of his half-melted visage. His black lips cracked to form a sardonic smile. ‘We’re not getting off Mars alive.’

  The Carrion hadn’t even thought that far ahead. Through the hangar wall and the superstructure of the tower-preceptory, he could feel rhythmic tremors. His cogitator shaft told him that there was an eight point two-three-seven per cent chance that the vibrations originated from tectonic activity. Everything else in his systems, his experience and his bones told the legionary that a Titan god-machine was approaching, the one that Ventidian had identified as closing in the orbital images.

  ‘I’m serious,’ the Carrion said.

  ‘When aren’t you?’ the Iron Warrior asked.

  The Carrion worked through the possibilities. Somewhere a code-corrupted logic engine would be monitoring the attack on the tower-preceptory. It had been calculating Phase-Fusilatrix losses as opposed to the calculated likelihood of the Space Marines’ survival. Scaramanca and the Carrion had become an unfortunate part of that equation, and the logic engine had decided on a more drastic solution to the problem.

  ‘This tower is about to be levelled,’ the Carrion told him. ‘A Titan approaches.’

  A snarl creaked through the Iron Warrior’s charred features. ‘Coward constructs of Mars…’

  The Iron Warrior wasn’t wrong, but something else was bothering the Carrion. Looking over Scaramanca’s pauldron, he noticed that the hordes of skitarii had gone, undoubtedly responding to a collective recall. He could no longer hear the scream of multilasers tearing up hangars, on any of the levels. Worst of all, the bleak light of the Martian day had disappeared. Something cold, colossal and intent on absolute destruction was standing before the tower-preceptory. An apocalyptic emissary from the Legio Mortis had arrived with missives of their death and total annihilation.

  ‘Aulus…’ the Carrion began, but it was too late. Their doom had found them.

  The Iron Warrior turned and limped through the smoke. The Carrion paused. There was no time to get to ground level. There would be no rescue or daring escape by shuttle. There was only death. The Carrion walked after his battle-brother. His cellmate, his friend.

  They worked their way through the mangled labyrinth of flaming obstacles that had been their technical hangar, a place where they had spent thirty years together, perfecting
their craft and learning the arcane lore of the Mechanicum and the Machine-God. All to be sacrificed before one of the mightiest of the Omnissiah’s hallowed creations.

  They walked between the bodies and pools of oil and blood that had collected on the balcony-platform and stood side by side on the edge of the landing platform, before the monstrous guns of the Warlord Titan. Mighty banners rippled from the lengths of gargantuan gatling blasters, bearing the death’s head design of the Legio Mortis. From the ancient patchwork of her battle-scars, the Carrion recognised the monstrous god-machine’s designation: ­Tantus ­Abolitorus. At least the legionaries were going to fall to a machine with a glorious history and an eternity of battle honours.

  Across the open space, where skitarii assault carriers were descending and the dust of the storm was settling, the Space Marines could hear the boom of a colossal firing mechanism clearing. The Carrion felt the sound thunder through him and looked down at the spiralling assault carriers. Even for a member of the Legiones Astartes, the prospect of being fired upon by a god-machine was humbling.

  When Tantus Abolitorus opened fire on the tower-preceptory, the sky-shattering hurricane of gargantuan shells would rip through the structure – blasting apart rockcrete, plasteel support structures and everything within, including any legionaries still left alive. The descending carriers were inbound to take up position about the inevitable collapse. Should any of the Emperor’s angels survive being buried under a mountain of rubble, the remaining skitarii of the Phase-Fusilatrix would be ready to end them.

  ‘I fear for Terra,’ the Carrion said finally, ‘and the Emperor. I wish we could have warned them.’