That would leave thirteen. They were too close for the heavy weapons, and the gate guards lacked line of sight; the five could be effectively discounted.
The skitarii’s enhanced neural systems and combat training would respond to the attack almost instantaneously. Radium carbines would rise. Enhanced optics would initialise combat protocols, squad-level algorithms disseminating targets for massed retaliation. Efficient.
But no bionic could rival the reaction time of a Space Marine.
Salvu, Aetius, and Luhgarak would act first, pumping the loosely spaced skitarii with rounds while Jaggai fired his bolt pistol and charged towards Borhus’s side, chainsword revving hungrily.
Casualties amongst the pilgrims would be high, but acceptable. Borhus projected ninety-seven per cent. Collateral damage to the outpost in the ensuing panic and rushed skitarii counter-deployments would be unavoidable.
And unacceptable.
The inquisitor had been adamant on that. First and foremost, there was a world to be won, and the Adeptus Mechanicus forces were vital to that.
Borhus terminated his projection.
A wing of Marauder fighter-bombers roared overhead, escorted by several squadrons of Thunderbolts flying in arrowhead formation. The sickly yellow rainclouds churned up in their wake rumbled with their sonic booms.
His thumb rolled off the activation rune of his thunder hammer.
‘How may we be of assistance, Space Marine?’ blurted the skitarii alpha in command of the gate cohort. His voice came like a magnetic recording, warped, chewed and mangled by static and emerging from a vox-caster set into his throat. His mouth was a palpating grille of oxygen scrubbers and rebreather tubes, part of a steel faceplate that left only a pair of red-glowing slits for the eyes. He was, on surface appraisal of the facial and digital enhancements visible outside of his dark robes, only residually human.
‘I wish to speak with Tech-Priest Dominus Rygel Sul,’ said Borhus. ‘You may escort us to him or…’ he moved his gauntleted fingers to form a cogwheel over his breastplate, and nodded respectfully to the Mechanicus’s sanctified basilica. Inquisitor Laurelline was not an idiot. She had not randomly selected an Iron Hands legionary to command this delegation. ‘Or you may dispatch a man to bring him here.’
The alpha stood stock still, processing. His personality was intact, but could be suppressed by his tech-priest masters when required. In combat, he could be almost without fear, but Borhus nevertheless sensed a split-second hesitation in response to his demand.
Jaggai growled. ‘He’s asking politely. Do we need to drag your master out by the mechadendrites?’
Borhus’s fingers strayed to the mag-holster on his hip and the bolt pistol it contained. The alpha offered no overt hostility, but that could change. He was just awaiting the order. Borhus replayed his combat projections and allowed himself a smile. There was no likely variable that would enable two squads of skitarii to overcome a Deathwatch kill-team at close quarters.
A touch on his arm shocked him from his projections.
It actually shocked him.
Suit sensors reported a low amperage electrical shock discharged against the elbow joint. The bulk of the voltage was turned by his power armour’s non-conductive ceramite, but the jolt retained power enough to jerk his elbow out. He looked down, unable to mask the revulsion that spread across the organic residual of his face.
One of the pilgrims stood beside him, touching his armour like a war orphan begging the blessing of a crusader saint. The man was garbed in rough old robes, torn in several places to reveal a body that was both impressively muscular and unhealthily cyanotic. Beneath the robes he wore rubber boots and a strange copper torso cage. It barely warranted the term ‘augmetic,’ but resembled some ancient medicae technology for the bracing of broken ribs. The man’s bald head came level with the ivory aquila on Borhus’s breastplate. That and his bare chest was hatched with strange-looking tattoos that glowed with an electric light. Most disconcerting of all, however, were his eyes. They had not been replaced with improved bionics.
The man had no eyes.
It looked as though each socket had simply been subjected to a melta torch, then left to cool and reset in whatever unnerving form the Omnissiah willed. The stare of those black, melted eyes gave Borhus an itch he could not relieve, and he could not shake the sense – the weak, illogical feeling – that those charred discs perceived him more completely than his own genhanced occulobe and advanced bionics could provide him in return.
The irrational conclusion that it was in fact the pilgrim with blessings to bestow on the orphaned ignorant hovered over him like a faulty hazard rune.
‘What are you?’ asked Aetius.
The pilgrim ignored the question, and stared blindly up at Borhus. ‘Are you here to experience the Motive Force?’
Cursing his momentary weakness, Borhus pulled his arm from the pilgrim’s grasp and backed away.
Any servant of the Imperium who came into contact with the technologies of Mars – the vast majority of countless trillions – would have at one time formulated a prayer to the Machine-God or to the Omnissiah, ignorant as they doubtless were to the theological distinction between them. The Motive Force was the completion of the divine Martian trinity. It was the fundamental that allowed the others to exist. It charged mankind’s weapons, powered its warships across the void and gave the universe its laws. Perhaps it was because of that cold, cosmological constancy that few ever spared it their prayers.
‘Yes,’ Salvu answered, calmly. ‘I believe we are.’
‘Ave Motriceum,’ the pilgrim smiled, opening his bare palms in blessing to reveal the copper-wired gauntlet array that had delivered the earlier shock. He lowered his hands as he turned away towards the basilica, the skitarii guards reluctantly standing down rather than obstructing his path.
Luhgarak sighted back down the line of pilgrims with his long-barrelled stalker boltgun, then lowered the weapon in thought. There were hundreds of the humans.
Borhus rotated his shocked elbow joint. His gauntlet’s grip felt unresponsive, and he suspected that the pilgrim’s touch had depolarised some of the neural connections. That his suit was not providing him with damage indicators suggested its internal diagnostic sensors had been similarly haywired.
That ninety-seven per cent figure would require amendment.
‘Ave Omnissiah,’ he muttered with rather more than the usual feeling, and strode after the pilgrim past the waiting skitarii.
Tech-Priest Dominus Rygel Sul awaited them inside.
The pict-captures that the inquisitor had exloaded from concealed pickups on Stygies VII did not do the tech-priest justice.
Sul’s enchanced form boasted defensive systems equivalent to a Space Marine Dreadnought, and came in greater than the squad’s Land Speeder Storm in raw mass. His heavy armature was enveloped by a swarm of multiply-articulated servo-limbs that clicked, chittered, whirred, buzzed and blinked – a cold, insectile amalgam of scalpel blades and microlasers. The core build remained roughly humanoid – an affectation that even the most ancient tech-priests stubbornly clung to – but locomotion was delivered not by human-model limbs but a semi-rigid pseudopod studded with tiny mechatendrils. His upper torso was integrated into that metallic chassis, flesh of patchwork colour and decomposition surgically stapled onto a steel matrix. His cranium extended back, not dissimilar to an eldar war helm, and was encased in what looked like adamantium, a material more conventionally employed in the construction of voidship hulls.
Borhus raised his hand from his weapons. The others withdrew to the antechamber’s modular plate-steel walls. Jaggai and Aetius took flanking positions, while Salvu held back with half an eye on the gate where they had entered, a rectangle of acid-browned sunlight colouring his right pauldron and brightening the side of his helm. Luhgarak had slipped into the gloom altogether, the giant Death Spectres S
pace Marine blending so perfectly with the coolant cisterns and slow-respiring oxygen pumps that he had become a part of the chamber.
They were here to talk, but also prepared for battle.
The tech-priest glided forwards on gleaming cilia, and something flickered around him that left an ozone taste in Borhus’s mouth and an ache in his brain. Pincers and callipers scissored about the tech-priest’s head. ‘Time wasted is blessed gun batteries lying idle, Space Marine. Whatever you are here for, I assure you I have been granted broad authorisation by Admiral Dreyfuss and my work is sanctioned by the subsector fabricatum herself.’
‘I would advise you not to enter into a competition with us over who is backed by the greater authority, dominus,’ Aetius warned.
A squeal of binharic derision blarted from the tech-priest’s flaccid lips. ‘Does the Inquisition believe I will be intimidated by its killclade? My work here is too important. You will achieve nothing here by force. Nothing that the xenos would not achieve for themselves if they could.’
The tech-priest’s tendrils flickered, threatening.
‘Inquisitor Laurelline has given me leave to… negotiate for transfer of the xenos technology,’ said Borhus, the unfamiliar phrase forming with difficulty, like a crudely organic attempt at binharic.
‘Xenos technology?’ The dominus glided back coyly. ‘You are surely aware that the study of such alien archaeotech is strictly proscribed.’
‘It is detectable from orbit,’ Aetius growled. ‘So just surrender it or we will be forced to take it. And some of us will enjoy doing so.’
‘If an artefact unearthed from this world is indeed in my possession then it could predate Homo sapiens by millions of years. Think what we could learn! Then again, the resources of the Inquisition are said to rival those of Mars… What can your mistress offer to make something so unique and valuable… go quietly away?’
‘You are entertaining this, dominus?’
The strange pilgrim who had guided them through the gates stepped out from amongst the Space Marines and approached the vast armature of Dominus Rygel Sul.
‘You brought them here, Valtohm,’ Rygel Sul countered.
‘To experience the Motive Force. The Hybernaculum is a miracle, and the Electro-Priesthood will not tolerate its surrender.’
‘You speak of the xenos device?’ asked Borhus.
Rygel Sul’s mechadendrites dipped in what might have been a nod.
‘Xenos device?’ The electro-priest sneered. His tattoos flickered like ghosts. ‘The Machine-God and the Omnissiah proscribe, but the Motive Force is universal. Do mass and energy lose equivalence the further one travels from Terra? No. Does gravity care what species orbits a star? It does not. And nor do the faithful.’
‘Be silent, Valtohm,’ Rygel Sul hissed. It was difficult to tell, but he looked nervous, as though uncertain who it was best to placate. ‘I will deal with this.’
‘The Motive Force is for all,’ said Valtohm, reaching forward to lay a gauntlet upon the angrily twitching tech-priest. ‘Its truth hides within the light.’
Too late, Borhus perceived the threat.
The electro-priest’s hand was fifteen centimetres from Rygel Sul’s metal armature when a bolt of current leapt from the man’s palm.
‘No–’
There was a bang, like a sonic boom, a sudden superheating and expansion of air that would have been shocking enough observed through three kilometres of atmosphere and which, zeroed down to a terrestrial scale, buckled the antechamber’s plate-steel walls and flung the Space Marines back.
Lightning arced through the tech-priest’s frame. His electricals flared, shorted, and then burst into flame. His flesh simply cooked. Threat-reflex autonomics caused his crippled armature to writhe, squealing out a high-pitched distress cry. Then, with a final spasmodic jerk of mechadendrites, Dominus Rygel Sul collapsed into a steaming heap of still-screaming metal.
Borhus slammed a bolt-round through the tech-priest’s radio-frequency emitter bulb, shutting off the death scream permanently.
Dazed, he saw the electro-priest, Valtohm, fleeing for the single, downward-sloping, passageway into the basilica’s interior. He guessed that was where he would find the so-called Hybernaculum.
Jaggai, who had been partially shielded from the concussion wave by the dominus’s body, was already giving chase, squeezing off rounds that ripped through the walls and ceiling. The White Scar disappeared down the passage.
Borhus shook his head, his Lyman’s ear struggling to compensate for the shock, but all he could hear was that ghost-vox screech. Blood trickled from his ear between his gauntleted fingers, with a repeating signal.
The flesh is weak. The flesh is weak.
He looked around for the rest of the squad. Salvu had been hit. For a moment Borhus assumed that the force with which the Hospitaller had been hurled into the wall had cracked his backplate, but then he saw the ugly radium burn that marred the fractured ceramite. Gunfire blistered the Iron Hand’s wounded eardrums, rad-rounds spanking off the metallic surfaces. A lumen bulb shattered above them. Pressurised air bled from a perforated oxygen pump. Another round punched out Salvu’s hip and spun him to the ground.
The skitarii from the gate were pouring into the antechamber, timed volleys of sequential fire driving the Space Marines behind the only piece of genuine cover to hand: the corpse of Rygel Sul.
Dull impacts rang through the tech-priest’s broken armature. Keeping low, Borhus drew in Salvu by the ankles while Aetius rose from cover to spray the door with fire. The mass-reactive rounds tore the skitarii vanguard to pieces. They were blood blooms, opening for the storm of explosive rounds as real flowers would for the sun. Petal imprints pasted walls, ceiling and floor, as mangled bits of high-end augmetic cut through the enclosed space.
In effect, it was like dropping a frag grenade under the cupola hatch of a tank and watching the aftermath.
‘Stand down!’ Borhus yelled, after he had pulled Salvu into cover and sat him up.
Aetius’s boltgun continued to spit and bark. The Novamarine was picking his shots now, the sporadic few coming back his way beating against the body of the dominus.
‘Salvu,’ said Borhus, running his fingers over the break in the Hospitaller’s backplate and the bad one in his leg. His gauntlet came away dry. The Space Marine’s Larraman cells had already clotted the wound. Whether his system could cope as well with the radiation dose was another matter, and one for later. ‘I believe you will fight another day, brother, though on an augmetic limb I suspect.’
‘Lucky me,’ Salvu wheezed.
The drum of rad-rounds played in an audible energy build-up. Aetius ducked back into cover as a massive plasma discharge cracked out and pushed the dominus back half a metre. The Space Marine pushed back against the force and fired one-handed back over his shoulder.
‘Do you believe in the divinity of the Omnissiah?’ Salvu asked, seriously.
‘Do you believe in the divinity of the Emperor?’ Borhus returned.
‘Less than most, more than some.’
Borhus chuckled. ‘I will use that one day.’
‘Go after the priest, secure the target. I’ll hold the skitarii here.’
‘You are not ready for a last stand yet, brother.’
‘Then hurry back, and you and Aetius can carry me to the Land Speeder.’
Borhus nodded and motioned for Aetius. Between them they lifted the Hospitaller up and propped him against the dominus. There, Salvu squeezed off a round that detonated under the collar of a black-robed skitarii, blasting the soldier’s brain and upper torso across the wall. Nodal sub-processors kept its body in action for a moment more before it collapsed.
‘Aetius, with me,’ said Borhus, backing up and laying down a blanket of suppressive fire. The Novamarine did the same, driving the relentless skitarii back up to the door.
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This was a fortress. It was built for defence, and Salvu had been built to defend it.
‘Emperor be with you, brothers,’ the Hospitaller called over his shoulder as Borhus and Aetius turned, his own boltgun taking up the slack.
The passage sloped in and down, deep into the core of the basilica complex. Branch corridors split off to other chambers. From them, the sounds of weapons fire warred with the deep grind of manufactories, the restless breath of air filtration systems. The two Space Marines charged on, following the electro-priest’s ozone trail.
‘Captain,’ Aetius barked, honouring his Iron Hands brother for the first time with proper recognition of his rank. He pointed his boltgun down.
Running up in the opposite direction was a group of pilgrims, a dozen or so, the ground sparking under the butts of their long-hafted staves. Most likely they were innocent pilgrims, fleeing the rampage of a rogue electro-priest. They were blind and infirm. It was utterly implausible that a band of such men could have made it past Jaggai were they hostile. Borhus had a moment to consider.
All his preconceived variables were currently suspect.
‘Kill them.’
Aetius opened fire. The first pilgrim went down, chest explosively parting from his ribs. Around the second, some kind of voltaic field flashed into life and stung the bolt from the air, then again around the third – a sequential energy blossom like a void shield puckering under a barrage of solid rounds. They wore no armour, no bulky power pack, nothing at all besides a metal harness and a stick. How were they generating an energy field powerful enough to turn a bolt-round? Aetius opened up on full auto, tearing the fourth pilgrim apart in a welter of bloody matter.
The Omnissiah's Chosen - Peter Fehervari Page 6