There was a roar of triumph from the vanguard gathered outside the fortress as the gates finally relented to the magos’s will and spiralled open. The warriors surged inside and Vhaal-IR01 heard gunfire from within, but it was sporadic – merely the dregs of a defence. This battle was done, but the xenos had not died easily. Five hundred skitarii had set out from the Iron Diadem, but fewer than a hundred would return.
Vhaal-IR01 rode forward, following his brethren through the gatehouse and into the hexagonal, multi-tiered expanse of the fortress beyond. The vanguard filled the cavernous chamber with jagged battle hymns as they exchanged fire with scattered bands of defenders. Most of the surviving enemy were human traitors. All were extraneous to the ballistarii’s current mission.
Responding to the neural lash of Vhaal-IR01’s will, his servitor quickened their mount and they loped across the tessellated hall, ignoring the desultory fire that came their way. The inner gates of the fortress fell to the Alpha’s third shot and they burst through to the compound beyond. As they raced through the abstract geometry of the tau enclave, passing pale clusters of spheres and domes, the Alpha spun about in his saddle, alert for hidden enemies. He expected none, but the vile xenos structures unsettled him despite the dictates of his programming.
Fire… Pain… 214… It was Vhaal-IR01’s personal mantra to the Omnissiah and he chanted it over and over as he forged deeper into the unclean territory.
He found the lone ranger standing beside a vast dome. A scrawny figure was slumped beside his metal legs, evidently unconscious.
The ranger didn’t acknowledge Vhaal-IR01’s coded salute. He was staring at the sky and his noospheric aura had dimmed to a somnolent smog. The ballistarii rider followed the silent warrior’s gaze and caught sight of something swirling behind the clouds. Something… He averted his eyes sharply. Nothing. There was nothing there. Evidently the ranger had been damaged during the final phase of his mission.
Vhaal-IR01 switched to sentry mode and waited for reinforcements.
The shuttle swept over the dome precisely seven point two six hours later. The same journey had taken the cohort almost two weeks by river, but there had been no alternative, for the craft could carry no more than a dozen troops. Most of the skitarii would be returning to the Iron Diadem as they had come.
By the magos’s decree the cohort did not linger on the island. There was a storm coming and the skitarii were required back at the Iron Diadem. In the haste of their departure the shadow haunted dome at the heart of the xenos enclave was forgotten, along with the broken ranger who stood beside it with his eyes fixed upon the sky. Long after his brothers were gone, Rho-IR01 was still looking.
And in time the sky looked back.
‘Together we possess the heart and the mind,’ Caul cajoled the ancient ship. ‘Now we only await the eye.’
I was a fool to let myself be blinded to the stars, he admitted.
Losing his Navigator had been a grave error. He had guarded her from the planet’s perils fastidiously, but she had simply worn out with the passage of time. Distracted by his research, Caul had forgotten that mortals were so vulnerable. Without a Navigator his ship would have been lost in the immaterium, so he had been trapped on this world, biding his time until a replacement could be found. But once again his work had consumed him and the urgency of escape had faded until the coming warp storm forced his hand.
It is a sign from the Omnissiah, he decided. A push. It is time that I returned to the Mechanicus.
With renewed focus he had directed his intelligence network to scour the planet for a replacement Navigator. Countless Imperial and rogue factions had spiralled down to Phaedra during the long war. Perhaps one of the precious mutants could be found among their detritus? And with perfect, almost ironic concordance, he had found his prize in the enclave of his former associates, obliging him to expunge his shame in order to escape.
Yes, the Machine-God’s iron hand was undoubtedly at work here.
The Alpha Primus escorted the prisoner alone, for only she and the Diadem’s consecrated cyborg guardians had access to the magos’s sanctuary.
They are a wretched breed, she thought, regarding the wizened creature limping ahead of her, yet the Imperium would collapse without their gift.
Her prisoner hadn’t spoken, but she could read the fury coiled up inside his puny frame, though its focus was unclear.
‘If you attempt harm upon the magos you will suffer,’ she warned in sibilant fleshspeak. Despite his fragility she knew her charge was potentially lethal, for it was certain death to gaze upon the thing locked away behind his metal circlet.
The xenos were wise to bind this creature’s void eye, she thought.
‘I have a ship,’ the magos informed the withered mutant without preamble. ‘You will guide it through the immaterium.’
The prisoner was silent.
‘Repeat: I have a ship and I require a Navigator.’
A harsh laugh burst from the Navigator’s lips. A moment later the sound became a low, almost feral whine. And then he was giggling. It was a wild, hopeless sound that had nothing whatsoever to do with humour.
He is dead to fear, the Alpha Primus realised. Dead to everything… With a flash of blood-deep insight she sensed the truth of things: their prize was quite insane.
‘They stole it,’ the mutant snickered. ‘The tau… they stole my eye… you see…’ He trailed off uncertainly and his gaze slithered to the Primus, fixing her with sudden calculation. ‘Can you get it back, do you think?’
With a howl of white noise the magos lashed out with his mechadendrites, snaring the creature and hauling him into the air to hang suspended above his data throne. His noospheric aura blazed and delicate arcs of electricity played about his form as centuries of self-control fractured.
‘You lie,’ he said. His flesh voice was the rasp of a desiccated corpse. A swarm of mechafilaments surged from his cowl and wrapped around the prisoner’s skull, insinuating needle-sharp points into his flesh.
‘I’m blind,’ his captive said solemnly. Delicate rivulets of blood were leaking from his torn scalp, but he was as dead to pain as he was to fear.
‘You lie,’ the magos repeated, but under his denial the Primus sensed a gnawing dread.
‘They said my eye was too dangerous,’ snickered the prisoner. ‘They said it had to go… for the Greater Good.’
echafilaments tightened in reflexive rage and the prisoner’s circlet snapped apart.
The magos’s words distorted into a jagged howl of null-code as he gazed upon the terrible truth the mutant had been hiding. His noospheric aura flared into a brief, bright nova then imploded in nothingness.
Silence.
‘I lied,’ he said. And then he was laughing again.
INFINITE CIRCUIT
David Guymer
Rain scalded the enamelled exterior of Borhus’s battleplate, raising a senfgas hiss from the bridging organics between his gorget’s soft seals and the gleaming gunmetal alloy that plated fifty-two per cent of the Space Marine’s cephalic structure. He brought his magnoculars to his eyes with a soft whir, followed by a click as the left eyepiece interfaced with his bionics. As always there was a reflex instinct to blink. His eyelid was a ghost, exorcised in successive rebuilds, but neural wiring was more plastic. The mind remembered, an organic irritation akin to an itch in an amputated limb.
With a thought, his vision zoomed across the potholed terrain. Old trenches, sutured shut with razorwire, and craters. Peels of armour plating were scattered over them, energy-lashed, too small even for the scrap trawlers roving up behind the Saltern Front. Hazard signifiers alerted him to sub-toxic atmospheric accumulations of lyddite, fycelin, and a string of complex nitro-compounds that his armour’s sensorium suite lacked the capacity to tackle.
The land had been beaten and then chemically euthanized.
And it had worked. The necrons were being ground back.
A rail track cut a straight line across the murdered landscape and his gaze followed it to an outpost, walled and ferric-red. The magnoculars’ auto-focus over-adjusted and Borhus dialled it back.
Men in protective all-weather coveralls with their hoods up rose into focus through a flood of steam, slapping shipping tags onto the sides of munitions crates as they were driven onto the rail platform. Tracked Kataphron-class heavy armament platforms equipped with lifting tines took up massive stacks, millions of rounds, enough to wage war for – his estimate – eighteen minutes, and manoeuvred them trackside. There, long lines of mono-task loading servitors integrated into rotating platforms engaged in an articulated peristalsis of hooks and cranes to winch the armament loads onto waiting carriages.
Every few minutes, armoured trains hundreds of compartments in length drew in or pulled away. Quad-linked autocannons tracked the yellow-brown eddies in the clouds from the roofs of flak carriages, their jerking movements governed by a complex Fourier system to affect randomness.
Borhus checked the distance gauge on his magnoculars.
Nine-point-one kilometres.
Even from here, his enhanced hearing could detect the hiss of coolant and the squeal of marginally misaligned magnetic brakes.
Slowly, he moved his view across the platform to the station exit. A pair of visored skitarii in dense black robes stood guard at a checkpoint. A being’s choice of armament said more about them and their culture than all the accumulated works of art or technology they produced. That the skitarii would poison their bodies with radiation in exchange for the stopping power of their radium carbines spoke volumes.
There was no higher praise than that offered with overwhelming firepower.
Motionless under the caustic rain, the skitarii stood patiently as a monstrous Luna-pattern bulk loader backed towards the checkpoint laden with arms and munitions fresh from the outpost fabricatories. The road crunched under massive solid rubber tyres, rain weaving through the treads and spattering the cab. Wipers squeaked back and forth, intermittently revealing a pair of Departmento Munitorum troopers in dust-grey fatigues, smiling, sharing a lho-stick and watching the rain with the radiator on full. Vertical exhaust stacks spluttered a petrochemical blackness into the air. On the road behind the massive vehicle, squads of skitarii ran escort for open-topped personnel carriers driving grim-looking workers to the manufactories.
Borhus panned right, too fast for the magnoculars’ autofocus, the image blurring over prefabricated industrial units and vehicle silos until it fixed on a tall, pyramidal structure. A basilica. An obvious place to secure an article of rogue tech. And with all the respect that Borhus held for the adepts of Mars, they rarely deviated far from the obvious.
The structure’s walls were plascrete, painted red in homage to the Red Planet. Its sloped sides were riveted with plates of a dark, energy-conducting metal that Borhus could not identify, and decaled with intercalated sequences of cogwheel motifs. In shape and ornamentation the structure looked the part of a place of worship, but that pyramidal shape owed as much to geometric symbolism as did the sloping glacis plate of a main-line battle tank. It presented maximum armour thickness for minimum material expenditure, calculated to the trillionth decimal. It was a fortress, built to withstand anything short of a sustained artillery barrage or a determined aerial strike.
Fire superiority servitors integrated directly into crenellated casemates presented overlapping fields of fire onto the street-level approaches. At the top of the flight of rockcrete steps that climbed from the outpost two full squads of skitarii with tripod-mounted transuranic arquebuses stood sentry by the main gate.
As Borhus studied the defences, an energy wash rippled down the structure. He followed it down the steep rockrete steps, to where groups of gaunt pilgrims ascended, a number climbing with the aid of long copper-clad staves.
The image suddenly became snowed by static.
Borhus withdrew the magnoculars from his eyes and thumped the plastek casing, uttering the ritual cant used by the Iron Fathers, but the distortion effect remained. Most likely its uncomplicated machine-spirit had been corrupted by the powerful electromagnetic field emanating from the basilica, a field strong enough to be picked up on passive auspex sweeps from orbit.
‘It almost makes me want to know what he is keeping in there myself,’ he said, dropping the magnoculars into the stowage basket under his seat and turning to the Space Marine sat beside him. ‘He is definitely inside?’
‘I marked his entry, captain,’ said Jaggai, lightly gripping on the controls of the stripped down Land Speeder Storm. He looked over. Like Borhus, the Space Marine was unhelmed. His topknot lay across his pauldrons and looped about his thick neck. His grin was savage. ‘I have not seen him leave.’
‘In his own compound.’ Luhgarak sat in the passenger compartment, rearward facing, scraping out the mechanism of his stalker-pattern boltgun with a scythe blade in pursuance of some subatomic particle of grit. He sighed. ‘Regale us again, son of the Khan, with a tale of your prowess in the hunt.’
Beside him, Aetius shook his head but said nothing, a deliberate statement of coded disapproval when he would much rather have ignored his companions’ very un-Codex one-upmanship more completely. The Novamarine shifted very slightly in his seat, then returned his attention to the inscriptions along the barrel of his boltgun, and his own orisons of battle.
Borhus accepted his subordinates’ weaknesses with more grace.
The strong would shine, like metal implanted in flesh, and no word or deed from another would uplift the weak, even if Inquisitorial decree had made them brothers.
‘Brother Salvu?’ Borhus called back, hooking his arm behind his headrest and twisting to look back across the passenger compartment.
The Space Marine was standing at the back of the Land Speeder with one hand on the shoulder height handrail and the other holding his own pair of magnoculars to his helmet visor. Rain beaded on the moulded ceramite plates of his power armour, gathering and then rushing for the soft seals around the joints and spiralling down to the deck to pool l
ike moats of acid-yellow around the rivets. Salvu muttered to himself, mentally codifying the myriad features of the basilica into a checklist of weaknesses, strengths and dangerous unknowns. Salvu knew fortresses. He knew how to build them, how to hold them and, more pertinently, how to break them. The reticular cross of the Hospitallers smouldered acidly from his white pauldron. The rest of his armour was black.
Deathwatch black.
‘And,’ Borhus said, ‘do you see a way in?’
Salvu lowered his magnoculars. Somehow, despite his helm, Borhus could always tell when the Hospitaller was smiling. Jaggai grinned eagerly and thumbed the ignition. The Land Speeder shuddered, rising from the ground as the vehicle’s ramjets flared and full power was routed to the anti-gravitic plates.
‘I can see one.’
There were twenty skitarii on the gate.
Two were on a raised platform set to one side of the top steps with the heavy weapons, crouched behind a barricade of wire boxes filled with shell casings and rubble and strung with razorwire. Low tech, but effective. Three more were set back into the tunnel that passed through the basilica’s thick walls. That left fifteen. The augmented soldiers were spread out over the steps, trading bursts of data-dense binharic and marshalling the flow of pilgrims through the gate.
Borhus disregarded the pilgrims. They were unarmed and thus inconsequential to his projections. He returned his attention to the main body of skitarii.
The five soldiers stationed furthest down the steps and thus closest to his approach brought their weapons to bear. An Imperial Guardsman or a planetary militiaman would have been sufficiently impressed by the approach of a squad of battle-brothers to drop their guard – or at least shake it – but not the skitarii. They had protocols to conform to, and they would conform.
They did not fire.
And why should they, unless the tech-priest dominus had reason to feel threatened?
At point-blank range there would barely be enough time between pulling the trigger of his bolt pistol and the bolt striking the nearest skitarius’s thoracic carapace for the bolt’s propellant to ignite. The impact would be low velocity, probably insufficient to fully penetrate the armour, but enough to detonate the mass-reactive round. The explosion would liquefy the skitarius’s soft tissue, the resultant pressure front and blast shrapnel disabling the two soldiers either side.
The Omnissiah's Chosen - Peter Fehervari Page 5