The servitor was rad-hardened, and its head ended at the top of its lower jaw. The rest of its head was taken up by a holographic projector, surrounded by censer-exhausts, which spewed caustic, sterilizing incense into the air around the servitor. The inhuman features of the technomagos in charge of her operation flickered into view as the servitor stepped down out of the transport.
‘Report,’ he said.
Wordlessly, 6-Friest held up the cipher, in its protective case. The technomagos’s holographic eye-pieces whirred and clicked, focusing in on the cipher. A burble of sound squawked through the servitor’s speakers and it held out a bulky claw. She deposited the cipher into its care, and the servitor slid it into a specially prepared node on its armoured chassis. Safe within that node, the cipher would remain inviolate even if the servitor were jettisoned into the vacuum of space.
‘At last,’ the technomagos rasped. ‘The final cipher of Magos Arcturus Zheng, devised before his disappearance beyond the Ghoul Stars. What knowledge it must contain, what secrets…’ The eyepieces whirred and clicked again, focusing on her rad-scarred features. ‘You have done well, Alpha 6-Friest.’
‘Acknowledged, Archmagos Vule,’ she said. She glanced at the transport. It was small, albeit bulky, but it could hold herself and several of her remaining skitarii. She looked up, through the open bay. The skies were full of tyranid aero-forms, the clouds choked and stricken through with purple, sickly veins of crackling bio-luminescence. ‘Probability of priority evacuation?’
‘Nil,’ Vule said.
6-Freist closed her eyes, but only for a moment. ‘Understood,’ she said, tonelessly.
‘Your rad-output is unacceptable, Alpha 6-Friest. It might damage the cipher if proximity continues,’ Vule said.
‘Explanations are unnecessary, archmagos,’ 6-Friest said. She raised her helmet and slid it on, locking it into place with a twitch of her fingers. ‘Cogs do not question. They merely turn. I only ask that prayers be said on our behalf.’
Vule was silent, for long moments. Then, the servitor reached up, as if its puppeteer, so many millions of miles above the dying world, had inadvertently tugged on a string. The claw twitched, mere millimetres shy of her arm, before falling back. ‘Omnissiah bless you, daughter of the machine,’ Vule said. The hologram flickered and faded. The servitor turned and trundled back up into the flyer. 6-Friest turned away.
The doors at the end of the bay exploded inward, skidding across the floor, trailing sparks. A tide of alien filth flooded into the loading bay, led by the roaring, monstrous shape of a carnifex, its carapace scarred by rad-burns. The bay shuddered as it screeched in rage.
‘Omnissiah guide and keep you all,’ 6-Friest said, as she hefted her weapon. ‘And pray for our brothers, whose task is not yet done. Our burden is soon to be set aside, our service to the Machine-God complete, but theirs must continue.’
‘We pray,’ her maniple murmured, as one.
The carnifex surged up the steps of the dais, plasma belching from its distended maw. Hormagaunts swarmed up the steps alongside it, and behind them came worse things. A crawling tide of filthy creation, a wave of flesh. When metal met flesh, flesh failed. But in failing, it could tangle and swallow. But it could not, would not, consume. She stroked her carbine, wondering how long it would be forced to sit and wait for the servants of the Machine-God to come and take it away. I am sorry, old friend, she thought, as she and her skitarii opened fire. Be patient, for they will come for you, and you will sing the death-song of Mars anew, on other battlefields. The radium carbine shivered in her grip as she fired, as if in melancholy response.
The carnifex reached the top of the platform. A skitarius died, rent asunder by snapping claws. Another was incinerated by a boiling gout of plasma. 6-Friest lifted her arc maul and stepped past the burning remains to confront the monstrous flesh. Behind her, she heard the roar of thrusters. Her mission was done. Her purpose was served, all sub-routines completed.
The carnifex rose up over her, pale flesh already blackening and blistering from its proximity to she and the others. Its jaw sagged, and she could see the incandescent mass growing within its gullet. She smiled as she felt the wash of its heat roll over her, consuming what little flesh was left to her, even as she swung the arc maul towards its skull. 9-Jud had been right.
It was just like the soothing breath of Mars.
CLADE
Rob Sanders
‘When the forge world of Velchanos Magna was rediscovered, the forces of the Adeptus Mechanicus went to war to reconquer it from the Dark Mechanicum. But at the heart of the world lurked a daemon called the Abystra Dynomicron, and its corruption flowed through liquid metal across the planet and powered the dark forges that created the deadly war machines ranged against the Cult Mechanicus forces.
‘Magos Dominus Theronymous Gant was at the forefront of the campaign, commanding skitarii legions and Legio Cybernetica constructs as he fought to bring the Omnissiah’s light back to Velchanos Magna. After one particularly vicious battle to claim the Anathdrach forges, Gant’s foe, Forge Master Vasco Phaedrega, escaped and the tech-priest dominus swore to hunt and kill the heretic and his twisted skitarii bodyguard.’
– From Wars of the Machine Cult, publication suppressed
The spidery hydraulics of Theronymous Gant’s legs were largely hidden beneath his vestments but they made short work of wreckage-strewn terrain of the Planum Obsequia. The tech-priest was a hunched figure with multiple bionic limbs and mechadendrites snaking out from beneath his heavy robes. He walked with his rod of office in one of his many hands, stabbing its interface tip into the grit, scrap and corpses of the battlefield with crabby insistence. The stave’s workings glowed blue in the forge world’s perpetual night, lighting the way through the destruction.
The constructs of the Dark Mechanicum had paid heavily for their twisted faith. Gant skirted a monstrous crater that still steamed in the emptiness of the ashen wastes. A god-machine or one of the Adeptus Mechanicus ships stationed in orbit above had visited its fury on the warped forces gathered here. The planum was littered with bodies, cybernetic limbs and exposed workings.
Gant was followed by Breacher-Clade Rho~4 Servotaurox. Made up of twelve Kataphron heavy battle servitors, the Breacher units were tracked like small tanks. The armoured torsos of turret-interfaced servitors little knew the honour they bore. The Kataphrons were holy weapons of the Machine-God, designed to tear the heart out of enemy formations with their hydraulic claws and arc rifles.
Gant held up one of his many bionic appendages and the Kataphron Breachers crunched to a halt. Gant’s telescopic optics whirred to focus on a series of footprints. They were uniform, like those of bionic replacements, and deep – no doubt belonging to constructs carrying the weight of their war-plate, weaponry and augmentations.
Gant streamed in the binharic cant that the heavy battle servitors understood.
Rho~4[1/12] trundled forward. As the prime unit of the Kataphrons, the priest’s orders were run through him. The servitor gave the simultaneous impression of a man caught in a machine trap – a soul furious to be free – and a cybernetic monstrosity drunk on its own destructive power. The only flesh visible was the Kataphron Breacher’s half-face. Hive world tattoos wove elegantly about his eye and furrowed brow, running up across his shaven head. An ornamental cog attached to his nose clinked against the vox-grille that replaced his mouth.
is hood. He poked the interface tip of his glowing stave at the prints.
Rho~4[1/12] did nothing but update his acquisition protocols and targeting data with numbers and dimensions. Gant snaked the curved alloy of his spine up and around, stabbing his rod of office in the direction the footsteps had taken. His optics whirred, extending telescopically from his hood. The priest cycled through his filters. An annotated enhancement suggested that his target had headed for the Neotrontia Collector Fields and beyond that the towering forges of the Crucib-Pentadictum.
As Gant led his Kataphron Breachers across the Neotrontia Collector Fields – like the nomadic caravans of earliest Mars – he could hear thunder on the horizon. The God Machines of the Legio Interfectra were engaging monstrous traitor Titans amongst the ore-depleted peaks of the Augol Mountains.
Gant’s spidery hydraulics cracked the shattered pieces of solar cells and he looked up. With Velchanos Magna tidally locked with its dismal star, this side of the planet did not receive any light for the collectors to harness. The magos dominus suspected that instead of sunlight, the arrays gathered energy in the form of the fell radiance that ordinarily afflicted the forge world’s skies from the warp storms above.
Looking down at a larger piece of solar cell, the reflective surface broken and warped, Gant’s optics detected something looking back at him. The mirror raged with the infernal glow of the planet’s daemonic core. Gant looked about at the sea of shards. The Abystra Dynomicron was watching him. Lifting one of his appendages, Gant let its tip strike the mirrored surface before putting his augmented weight on the smashed remnant and shattering it further.
They soon came to the Crucib-Pentadictum. The forges of the monstrous complex towered above them but the great powerhouses of production seemed long-dead. All was silent but for the jangle of chains and the sound of grit on the wind. The furnaces were dormant. Bulk conveyers sat on the freightways and cargo plazas. The sprawling installation was devoid of life, mechanical or otherwise.
As grit and glass turned to rockcrete and freightway rails the Kataphrons spread out, turning in their armoured turrets. As they scanned for targets, the weaponry that replaced their arms hummed to ominous life.
The forge shrines were but perverse reinterpretations of form and function. The chassis and carcasses of long-dead unbelievers decorated the buildings alongside ruinous symbols that had been painted, scorched and stamped into the architecture. Vanes had become crowns of corruption-smeared spikes, while gaping entrances and production accessways had melted, sagged and warped into horrific metal maws.
Gant slowed and stopped, looking down at the cracked boulevard they were following. A small trench went up its centre, filled with an off-colour bar of solidified iron that ran like a single rail up through the complex. Gant had seen such trenches all over Velchanos Magna, with no idea to their purpose. It was just one of the world’s mysteries that were yet to be solved. He knelt to investigate the dull and unnatural lustre of the metal.
The bark of a shot echoed about the boulevard, and Rho~4[8/12]’s head exploded. As the servitor’s weaponry drifted downwards with a dying hydraulic hum, Gant snatched up his macrostubber. Rho~4[1/12] rumbled forward, placing his bulk between the shooter and his master. Broadcasting a warning in binharic cant, the Kataphron Breacher lifted his hydraulic claw, indicating that the priest should assume cover. As Gant moved behind the corpse of Rho~4[8/12], several more shots rang out, sparking off the dead battle servitor’s breacher-plate.
Rho~4[1/12] and three of his Breachers accelerated up the boulevard, their tracks chewing up the shattered rockcrete. With sprockets and wheels thrashing away, the heavy battle servitors bounced and smashed through the wreckage adorning the freightways.
Lifting their weapons, the Kataphrons smashed the furnace roofs with helical arc-streams. An enemy shooters dropped to the rockcrete floor and smouldered. Crashing through vanes with the gravitic fields of his torsion cannon, Rho~4[1/12] seized a second cybernetic shooter and ripped him out of the busy architecture. As the tumbling body of the enemy sniper snapped and broke under the force, Rho~4[1/12] dragged his foe down into the crumbling rockcrete floor. Accelerating further, the Breacher ran his tracks straight over the shooter’s helmed head.
Moments later Rho~4[2/12] skidded to a stop beside its primus unit, as Gant clung to the breacher’s back with his mechadendrites and bionic talons. The priest looked down on the headless body of the shooter. Dressed in the rubber cloak and hood of Anathdrach forge temple guard, the Dark Mechanicus skitarii was a mess of deviant, warp-flushed workings.
Gant heard the static-laced sound of vox-hailers.
‘Pig-priest,’ a voice echoed across the boulevard. The wet, metallic hack of a rebreather drowning in corruption got the magos’s attention. ‘Acolyte of an empty god. You wish to follow me? Follow me into the embrace of oblivion, into gratitude of our true galactic masters, the crafters beyond the veil. Join me in a realm of knowledge unbound and advancements undreamed of…’
Gant recognised the voice as belonging to Phaedrega. He looked about the complex, the empty boulevard and the derelict darkness of the furnace works lining the freightway. His quarry was nowhere to be seen.
‘I shall pass, I think, forge master,’ Gant called, his own voice bouncing between the buildings.
‘Join me,’ the vox-hailer crackled and seethed with static, ‘in sacrificing all to the otherworldly lords of incalculable creation. Let us give ourselves – flesh and metal – to the Abystra Dynomicron. Let our deaths be sparks in the darkness, the soul-fuel of gods terrible and true.’
Phaedrega’s invitation echoed about the Crucib-Pentadictum.
‘You first,’ Theronymous Gant called back.
The wet rasp of laughter tailed off into a hiss of madness and determination.
‘I fear not the darkness,’ Vasco Phaedrega said. ‘That which comes next…’
Rho~4[1/12] turned in his turret to face his master and blurted forth a harsh stream of cant. The Kataphron had detected movement on the boulevard ahead. Peering forward, his telescopic optics extending, Gant saw figures moving out of cover. The thrash of tracks, the hum of hydraulics and the roar of power plants filled the air as his Kataphron Breachers moved into formation.
Rho~4[1/12] issued a stream of orders in binharic cant, prompting Rho~4[3/12] and Rho~4[12/12] to assume Gant’s flank while the magos held onto Rho~4[2/12]. The primus unit tore up the cracked and cratered freightway, leading the rest of the Kataphrons into battle. Like a line of small tanks advancing along the boulevard, the Breachers charged their arc rifles and torsion cannons.
As they accelerated to attack speed, the tracks of their armoured hulls leaving a dust trail of pulverised freightway, Gant could see Vasco Phaedrega limping across the freightway at a crossroads ahead, dressed in black, ribbed robes like his skitarii. Phaedrega was reciting some fell incantation, falling in and out of rancid code and languages the magos dominus’s cogitators failed to recognise.
Like a living shield of armoured plate and devotion, Rho~4[1/12] and his Breachers surged forward. Accelerating up behind with Rho~4[2/12] and the pair of battle servitors acting on their aegis protocols, Gant filled the channels with canticles of faith.
As the Kataphron Breachers closed on the malformed Phaedrega and his temple guard, the skitarii primed their carbines. They stood in an unflinching circle before the accelerating might of the Kataphrons thundering down on them. Gathered about their corrupted forge master at the heart of the crossroads, the skitarii stood fearlessly with the furnace towers of dormant forges looming over them.
As the Kataphron Breachers cleared their weaponry to fire, the Anathdrach temple guard did something that was unthinkable to Gant. They turned – the barrels of their carbines aimed inwards – and blasted Vasco Phaedrega with a single salvo of warp-tainted rounds. The forge master was flung this way and that as gunfire tore through his robes and workings. Before the heretek had hit the freightway floor, and with his techno-incantations still echoing through the forge-complex’s vox-hailers, the skitarii of the Dark Mechanicum turned their weapons on themselves. Bringing the muzzles of carbines up to their hoods and under their chins, the temple guard of Anathdrach ended themselves. In a flash of automatic fire and a shower of brain and workings, their warp-tainted bodies crashed to the floor beside their fell master.
As the Kataphrons slowed and lowered their weapons, Rho~4[2/12] rolled on through their ranks. Coming to a stop, the Breacher allowed Gant to disembark. Climbing down from the rear hull of the heavy battle servitor, the magos scuttled towards the corpses on the crossroads. Stabbing his staff of office into the crumbling rockcrete, he made his way through the cybernetic corpses, while the Kataphrons established a perimeter around the slaughter, the magos dominus picked through the remains. He jabbed at dead skitarii with the interface prong of the walking stave and turned corpses over with his snaking mechadendrites, trying to decipher why they would turn on their master in such a way when their doctrina imperatives should have ensured their loyalty and obedience.
The Omnissiah's Chosen - Peter Fehervari Page 9