Rho-IR01 realised the others were gathered around him, Ixtchul-IR03 included. When had the scout returned from the tower?
How long was I staring at the sky like a broken servitor? Rho-IR01 thought. His head was throbbing with the afterimage of prismatic shadows.
He went rigid as new mission data poured into his mind from the magos. The brief communion cleansed him of confusion and he cast the tainted clouds from his mind.
‘A prisoner,’ he said. ‘Objective Skysight is a prisoner.’
The beachhead was secure and the cohort was drawing closer to the xenos fortress, leaving a trail of the dead and the dying in its wake. Wounded vanguard limped, staggered or crawled behind their intact brethren, driven by the magos’s will until they expired. Scarlet-robed rangers stalked past them, sometimes crushing their fallen comrades underfoot as they sniped single-mindedly at the enemy.
Twin whorls of light lanced a pair of vanguard to his right, sundering them into ragged sludge. He traced the missiles’ contrails back to their source and saw a hulking battlesuit standing on the roof of the gatehouse. Massive cannons jutted from each of its shoulders, dwarfing the moulded block of sensors that served as its head. Its white carapace was striped with red and a black snowflake adorned its breastplate, marking it as a leader.
Sniper-rounds streaked towards the battlesuit as entire squads of rangers switched their focus, but the xenos giant was sheathed in an energy shield that blunted their strikes. The few bullets that punched through shattered against its carapace, discharging in ephemeral threads of electricity. As if angered by the assault, the Broadside turned on the snipers. Its twin cannons flared with indigo light and gouged a smoking crater out of the ground where Squad Lithios had been a moment before.
Throughout the vanguard every seventh warrior turned his sacred jezzail rifle upon the battlesuit, adding its wrath to the galvanic volleys of the rangers. The Broadside’s shield began to pulse erratically under the sustained fire.
With a scream of thrusters two more battlesuits soared up to the bastion’s ramparts to flank their beleaguered comrade. They were similar to the Broadside, but subtly sleeker and more compact, exchanging massive cannons for more manoeuvrable wrist-mounted guns.
Silence. The Primus understood her master’s reluctance. She knew how precious – how irreplaceable – the ballistarii were on this forsaken world, but ultimately even they were expendable.
The cohort snapped to a halt as a signal pulsed through the warriors.
In austere harmony the skitarii widened their formations, opening pathways through their ranks. A monstrous pounding sounded behind them, growing louder by the second until it became a thunder of pistons and venting steam. Moments later a towering bipedal engine strode past Viharok-TH01, bathing him in an exhaust of incense and voltaic code-psalms. A Skitarius was hunched in the machine’s high saddle, manning its las cannon while a bonded mono-servitor steered in obedience to the gunner’s will. Four more Ironstriders matched its step, charging past the vanguard lines in unison.
‘On iron we stride! ‘ Viharok-TH01 bellowed after them.
Alpha Vhaal-FE01’s skull was filled with thunder as he rode into battle – the tireless clockwork thunder of his Ironstrider’s hooves and the eager red thunder of his own heart. Unlike his fellow riders, the Alpha was permanently bonded to his mount, the scorched husk of his body woven into its frame like a princeps at the heart of a Titan. Only three memories of his former life lingered: first, he had been a rider, though of what and when, he was clueless. Second, his final ride had ended in fire and pain. And third… Third was just a number that he cherished without understanding: 214. Somehow that triptych of shadows had conspired to make him the finest ballistarii rider in the cohort.
His machine swerved aside as an explosion tore through the ground ahead. He glanced up and saw the Broadside battlesuit’s smoking railguns tracking him, angling for a killing shot. It had recognised him as a primary threat. The realisation sent a thrill of satisfaction through his cortex.
Fire… Pain… 214…
Both Crisis suits ignited their jetpacks and leapt from the bastion, soaring towards the ballistarii like humanoid spacecraft.
The five ballistarii struck in concord, assaulting the massive battlesuit with a cannonade of heavy laser fire. Despite their headlong charge their aim was faultless and the lasbolts pounded the Broadside in rapid succession. Its shield collapsed and its carapace ruptured, spewing fire. The vanguard roared their approval in raw fleshspeak as the burning giant toppled from the bastion.
Then the Crisis suits were upon the ballistarii. One dived across Gyrax-FE04’s path, angling to strike him with its claw-hammer feet as it landed. Its weight crushed the skitarius into pulp and tipped his mount over. The fallen Ironstrider’s legs continued to pump mindlessly against the sand, whirling the construct around in circles like a broken toy as the Crisis suit stomped past it.
The second battlesuit unleashed a torrent of flames from its weapon as it came down, scorching Akosh-FE03 into oxidised bones. Encased in the Ironstrider’s lower recess, his mono-servitor pilot survived to enact a pre-set emergency protocol. Spinning the machine around it raced for the ships, trampling a pair of advancing vanguard in its haste.
Prioritising the Broadside had been costly but necessary, Alpha Vhaal-FE01 decided, as he circled the second battlesuit. He swung his lascannon round to target it while his mount loped just ahead of its flamethrower’s blazing arc. As he duelled with the xenos a tenebrous thought surfaced from the sludge of his past: I have been here before.
He opened fire, punishing the heavier war machine with a slow, but steady stream of las-bursts, allowing his cannon time to cool between every shot. There was plenty of time. His enemy had no shields, so every hit – and they were all hits – bit deep into its carapace. The xenos should have retreated, but the Vhaal-FE01 had it hooked, tantalizing it by almost slipping into its arc of…
Fire.
He nodded unconsciously as he struck again, knowing this would be the killing shot.
Pain.
The Crisis suit buckled and erupted into flames.
214.
The infiltration team fanned out as they entered the compound’s outer precincts, weaving parallel paths through a hovel of ragged plasteel shacks that appeared to be Imperial in origin.
This is where their human allies are penned, Rho-IR01 guessed.
Looming beyond the shantytown he saw the bulbous towers and cupolas of the tau enclave. They rose above the squalor of the human district like heretical monoliths, glimmering with a pearlescent sheen that was utterly alien.
As he pressed deeper into the compound the plasteel shacks gave way to windowless geodesic spheres and bulging ovoid towers. Like the perimeter walls, the xenos structures were assembled from hexagonal plates of white alloy that seemed to shrug off rain and dirt, but even here the decay was apparent, revealing itself in missing tiles and collapsed walls. And then there was the mould… Ixtchul-IR03 hadn’t been entirely correct about nothing growing on the island, for the grey blight was rampant. It mottled the smooth facade of the buildings and congealed into fuzzy slime between the tessellated plates. A heavy antiseptic stench hung about the place and there were signs of constant cleaning, but Rho-IR01 sensed the tau were losing this battle. The sounds of distant gunfire made him wonder how they were faring in their other, more pressing battle against the cohort.
He found Ptoltec-IR02 near an enormous, sensor-studded dome. The elder cyborg was crouched behind a Hammerhead that appeared to have been abandoned in mid-repair. Acknowledging his comrade’s click of caution, the Alpha peered round the tank and spied a tall battlesuit standing beside a recessed hatch in the dome. The warrior’s armour was dented and discoloured, but the weapons attached to its arms were clearly intact and its sensor lenses glowed softly.
This place is valuable to them, Rho-IR01 guessed. Even with the cohort at their gates they left a guard. This is where the prisoners will be.
Ptoltec-IR02 said.
‘We have to attack together,’ the Alpha whispered.
‘Agreed.’ Rho-IR01 scanned the area, trying to formulate a plan. His thoughts were still occluded by the shadows he’d glimpsed in the sky.
Ptoltec-IR02 offered.
‘Granted.’
Rho-IR01 circled round to the coordinates his comrade had assigned him and took cover behind a stack of containers to the battlesuit’s right. Ptoltec-IR02 remained by the tank, staying close to their target to compensate for his arc rifle’s shorter range. First Ixtchul-IR03, then Brok-IR04 appeared, each ranger stalking silently to his designated position. The Alpha offered a silent prayer to the Omnissiah and lined up the battlesuit in his gun sights.
Squad Irridio opened fire as one.
They all aimed true, but only Ixtchul-IR03’s bullet pierced the sentry’s carapace, lodging deep inside its left-hand weapon. Though Ptoltec-IR02’s arc rifle couldn’t inflict any structural damage, its electricity wreaked havoc on the battlesuit’s sensor array and shattered both its lenses. The blinded guardian reacted instantly, its weapons jerking up to spew streams of superheated plasma in wide arcs that incinerated everything in their path. The ferocity of its response caught Brok-IR04 by surprise and a plasma burst hit him square in the chest. He staggered back with a smouldering crater in his breastplate and tried to fire again, but the arc swept back and scorched away his head and shoulders.
The others reacted more swiftly, ducking as the searing enfilade lashed towards them. The hab-sphere concealing Ixtchul-IR03 was shredded, burying him under a heap of molten debris. An instant later the servitor bullet he’d planted inside the battlesuit’s weapon triggered a critical overload. Both the weapon and the arm bearing it were consumed in a white-hot eruption that splashed the sentry’s chest with plasma.
‘For the Omnissiah!’ Rho-IR01 yelled, targeting the bubbling patch of armour.
This abomination is destroying us, Rho-IR01 realised as his comrade’s biometric readings flatlined.
Rho-IR01 screamed as a hallowed war routine ignited in his brain and spread like cognitive wildfire, rewiring and quickening his neural pathways. His world liquefied into nonsense then crystallised into a vista of sudden absolutes.
I am His wrath made manifest.
His next bullet pierced the battlesuit’s carapace with almost molecular precision and drilled through to the pilot’s skull. An instant later reality collapsed back in on itself and Rho-IR01’s mind began to shut down.
…
<… RhO… ach… I… rHoacH… I… I…>
…
An arc of bright pain lanced through Rho-IR01, jolting him back from oblivion.
The ranger realised his titanium legs had kept him standing while he’d blanked out. The battlesuit he’d fought was also standing, but its arms hung limply at its sides.
It’s dead, Rho-IR01 decided. As dead as Squad Irridio…
He flicked through his fellow rangers’ biometrics. Ixtchul-IR03’s still showed activity, but he was trapped under a pile of fused metal. The others were gone.
I am the last. Inexplicably Rho-IR01’s eyes wandered towards the siren sky.
The chamber beyond was vast, yet smaller than its outward appearance had suggested. Its inner walls were composed of some kind of variegated, gnarly stone, not the smooth metal Rho-IR01 had expected.
Coral, he realised. The tau built a dome around one of Phaedra’s ruins. Why…? The thought process terminated abruptly as his programming cut in. Questions were irrelevant to his function. Only facts mattered. He appraised the chamber with clinical efficiency. The aliens had transformed the ancient temple with their techno-heresies, threading the coral with flanged pipes and glowing conductor strips that connected panels of softly humming machinery. And bodies.
Rho-IR01 paused, trying to make sense of what he saw. The upper walls of the temple were lined with corpses – row upon row of them, neatly stacked and held in place by cocoons of translucent fabric. They were all human. Somewhere in Rho-IR01’s mutilated mind a voice kindled by the sky-blight raged at the horror of this place, but he had lost the capacity to listen. Dismissing the bodies, he scanned the ground level. A cluster of bulbous power generators occupied the centre of the chamber. Insulated conduits extended from the machines to a circular platform suspended from the vault of the temple. Whatever was up there, it was devouring enormous quantities of power.
Up there… Under the sky…
There was a metal ramp fixed to the walls. It spiralled upwards, offering access to the gallery of corpses. Rho-IR01 climbed, his tread filling the chamber with clattering reverberations.
They’re not dead, he realised as he reached the first body. It was a woman, emaciated but still breathing. Intravenous tubes coiled about her form, insinuating themselves into her nostrils, mouth and wrists, feeding her just enough nutrients to withhold death.
Rho-IR01 moved on to the next captive, a shaven-headed, tattooed apparition who might once have been a giant.
A copper-skinned man…
So it went until
he stopped in front of a man with the sunken, brittle features of a living corpse. Even by the standards of the sleepers he was hideously atrophied, his skin stretched to parchment across an oddly distended skull. A metal circlet was clamped around his head, widening at the front to cover his high forehead.
The sleeper’s eyes opened as Rho-IR01 cut him free. They were feverish. Enraged.
‘Give it back!’ the prisoner hissed, clawing at his rescuer with palsied hands. His feeding tubes tore free as he lunged forward, spattering them both with dark blood. ‘It’s all I have…’ He shrieked as Rho-IR01 hauled him from his cocoon, then a spasm rippled through his body and his eyes fluttered white. The skitarius caught him before he could fall.
The xenos have wired them all into the temple, he realised. Into Phaedra…
There was a whisper-thin sigh from above, like the last breath of a living body as it became a corpse. Rho-IR01 glanced up at the shadowed platform in the vault of the temple. Everything terminated there: the conduits from the plasma generators… The web of skull cables… The truth of this profane xenos experiment…
Incapable of disobeying his master, the Alpha turned his back on the mystery. Like questions, answers were irrelevant.
As he descended his thoughts turned to the sky.
The battle for the gates was over. Alpha Vhaal-IR01’s Ironstrider stepped over the smoking wreckage of the last Crisis suit. Its pilot had fought with skill, claiming another of his squadron before it died, but the sheer weight of the skitarii numbers had compromised it, allowing Vhaal-IR01 to make the killing shot.
214… and counting… he thought fleetingly.
The Omnissiah's Chosen - Peter Fehervari Page 4