by Various
‘Is something wrong?’ he said over the encrypted vox-link. ‘Shall I take the shot?’
‘Can you compensate for the radioactive cross-wind, or the flux variables inherent in the magnetocline layers?’ asked Wayland. ‘Is your weapon linked to your nervous system to better compensate for biological variance?’
‘Just take the damn shot.’
‘When I’m good and ready,’ said Wayland, and Sharrowkyn heard a hiss of augmented machine exhalation.
A bloom of burning violet fire shot skywards behind the far wall of the manufactory, and a rolling wash of hot wind surged through the ruins. Sharrowkyn tasted strontium and potassium chloride in the fallout, a chem-silo’s destruction or a buried reactor stack reaching critical mass.
Sharrowkyn’s armour registered lethal levels of radioactivity, but nothing to trouble him. Though his armour was a patchwork creation that would either horrify the Shadowmasters of the Ravenspire or earn him a commendation, it was proof against such toxicity.
The echo of Wayland’s pulse round was lost in the crackling rush of air sucked into the vortex of combusting gases and radioactive meltdown, but Sharrowkyn heard it as clearly as an ice-drill on a frozen promethium face. The ferrovore slumped to the ground as its sinuous legs folded beneath it. The furnace light of its eyes faded and it let out a long wheeze of chemical breath.
Even as Sharrowkyn heard the clatter of a ratcheting bolt action, he was moving.
He ghosted from cover, vaulting onto a tumbled mass of twisted metal. His practised eye knew exactly where to place his weight, and he leapt from solid ground to solid ground, finally springing onto an angled roof girder. He landed lightly and sprinted up the flattened edge of the fallen beam.
‘Four seconds,’ said Wayland.
Sharrowkyn didn’t answer and triggered the jets of his jump pack, powering over the wide vent chute of a pulverised milling machine in a fiery arc.
‘Two seconds.’
Sharrowkyn unclipped a fist-sized device the size of a melta charge from his belt before he slammed down onto the broad shoulders of the ferrovore. The red glow of its eyes swelled, but before it could do more than twitch its limbs, he clamped the device to the base of its neck. Injector needles pistoned into the creature’s neck, and the device gave out a piercing binaric whine.
‘One.’
The ferrovore reared up and Sharrowkyn was thrown from its back. He turned his fall into a controlled descent, twisting his body and spinning his carbine around himself He landed lightly, with the weapon’s hand-crafted stock pulled into his shoulder. His finger put pressure on the trigger, but trained reflexes kept him from tightening too far.
The ferrovore’s red eyes burned into him, but its missile pods remained sheathed and its weaponised arms hung limp at its sides.
Sharrowkyn let out a breath.
Wayland emerged from his position, hidden in the wide air vent that cut through the forge’s one remaining wall. His heavily augmented bolter was slung casually over one shoulder, as though he’d just brought down a grazing herbivore and not an enemy battle servitor.
‘You cut that one fine,’ said Wayland.
‘If you hadn’t waited so long to shoot, I wouldn’t have had to travel so far.’
Wayland shrugged. His battleplate was black like Sharrowkyn’s, but where the Raven Guard’s was stripped down and compact, Wayland’s was bulky and enhanced with multiple augmetics. Where Sharrowkyn’s shoulder bore the white raven of his Legion – albeit obscured by ionised particles of dust – Wayland’s bore the silvered gauntlet of the Iron Hands. One of Wayland’s arms was a bionic replacement, and much of his internal biology had been replaced in the wake of injuries suffered at the hand of the Phoenician himself.
‘I anticipated that detonation of chemical and radioactive elements, and reasoned I could use the thermal and electromagnetic wash to cover my shot,’ said Wayland. ‘I calculated that you could still reach the ferrovore in time.’
‘I wish you’d stop calling them that,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘Giving things like this names reeks of permanence.’
‘How little you know,’ said Wayland, shouldering his rifle and clambering onto the immobile form of the ferrovore. ‘Bestowing a name upon a machine allows me to know it. If I know it, I can understand it. If I can understand it I can overcome it. Now, hurry up and get on before the creature’s cognitive architecture burns through the spinal block inhibitor.’
Sharrowkyn swallowed his distaste and climbed onto the ferrovore’s back alongside Wayland, using the growths of excreted armour plating to haul himself into the oozing cavity between its missile pods and rotten-meat back. Wayland’s gauntlet extruded a long spike of silvered metal, and Sharrowkyn instinctively winced at the reflections it gave off.
Wayland rammed the spike into the base of the ferrovore’s spine, and though Sharrowkyn could see nothing outwardly different, he felt the tremors wracking the cybernetic creature’s body as it fought to retain dominance over its control functions.
Wayland nodded and said, ‘It’s ours.’
It had been a plan of desperation to pair Sharrowkyn with Wayland, but so far the Iron Hand had acquitted himself well. His stealth abilities were sorely lacking, but he more than made up for that with his more specialised skills. Sharrowkyn and Wayland were as different in expertise and outlook as it was possible to imagine, but they had one shared experience that united them with a bond that would only ever be appreciated by a handful of Legion Astartes.
They were survivors of Isstvan V.
Cut off from his primarch and his battle-brothers, Sharrowkyn escaped the Dropsite Massacre in an Iron Hands Stormbird, one of only a handful that had blasted its way through the firestorm of rockets. Sharrowkyn was near death, torn up by traitor bolter shells that had penetrated his war-plate with sickening ease. Sabik Wayland had dragged his wounded body onto the Stormbird and screamed at the pilot to lift off. Even a hair’s breadth from death, Sharrowkyn had felt the hammering impacts on the armoured skin of the Stormbird as it fought to escape the disaster.
Months of healing followed, though Sharrowkyn remembered little save blurred memories of a gravel-voiced form looming over him in the apothecarion.
‘You will not die, Raven Guard,’ the voice had said. ‘Do not let the weakness of flesh betray you, not when you have survived so much. I took a blow from the Phoenician, yet I live. You will live too.’
He remembered the authority of the voice, and Sharrowkyn hadn’t dared disobey. He heard the bitterness, but hadn’t understood it until he learned that Ferrus Manus was dead, slain by the same hand that had wounded Sabik Wayland.
In the wake of the disastrous counter-attack against the Warmaster, the Iron Hands sought a way to retaliate. Despite the devastating loss of their primarch, the sons of Medusa were combat-ready within a day of rendezvousing with following forces that had managed to evade the Warmaster’s trap.
Over the next six months, the fragmented Iron Hands task force harried enemy fleets in a manner that would have made Corax proud. Attacking, withdrawing and attacking again, they struck wherever an opportunity presented itself. Like a punch-drunk pugilist who just won’t stay down, the Iron Hands kept coming back to the fight.
And now they had a worthy target for their rage.
By the time the Imperial forces regrouped to face the threat in the Thramas sector, it was already too late for Cavor Sarta. Its vast resources were already in enemy hands, and the traitors were already co-ordinating their considerable assets to pluck the remaining forge worlds from the Martian priesthood’s grip. Imperial commanders were horrified at the masterful co-ordination displayed, and sought to break intercepted astropathic transmissions flowing between captured worlds and the traitor fleets.
Such methods were a tried and tested means of thwarting enemy plans, but something was very wrong. The transmissions were encrypted of course, but the Thramas Mechanicum boasted the finest cipher-breakers, and the carrier-codes were quickly unravelled. B
ut instead of transmissions revealing fleet movements, dispositions and strengths, the revealed text was a garbled hash of corrupt binary woven into an unidentified strain of linguistic communication that conformed to no known language family that could be translated.
Only after the capture of a traitor flagship did further information come to light. The vessel’s warp engines had failed as it fled an aborted ambush, and warriors from the First Legion had boarded it and killed everyone on board. One of the discovered bodies was that of a heavily modified hybrid creature that bore the hallmarks of genetic manipulation and augmetic surgery of a kind never before seen. Though the creature’s brain had been liquefied and its communication organs ripped out, a detailed post-mortem had led the Adepts of Mars to an inescapable conclusion.
The creature was an artificially-engineered, hybridised life form with a language set of its own and a method of articulation that could only ever be interpreted by one of its own kind. It was the perfect code carrier, one whose ciphers the Mechanicum could never hope to break unless they were somehow able to take possession of a living specimen.
Mechanicum adepts codified them as Unlingual Cipher Hosts.
Wayland called them the Kryptos.
They squatted in the ruins of an ore refinery, a bubbling quagmire of hissing petrochemicals and toxic fumes. Located amid a towering collection of relay towers that crackled with fizzing bursts of electricity, the refinery was as close as the ferrovore could take them. It had carried them through the layered defences around the forge temple, past corpse-hung habitation towers and fire-gutted manufactories that echoed with sourceless machine-cant burbling into static as it was corrupted. They saw machine shops ringing with the hammers of re-tasked construction engines, and a landscape changing from soaring silver and gold to scorched iron and altars of bloodstained bronze.
Dozens of ferrovores had come close, but none had so much as looked in their direction thanks to Wayland’s manipulation of their creature’s power output. Mortal patrols and vehicles gave them a wide berth, for the ferrovores were capricious things and were as likely turn their hunger upon friend as foe. It knew the safe routes through the razor mines, the blind spots of motion detectors, and had the locomotive dexterity to negotiate the fields of laser trips.
Beyond the relay towers was the walled heart of a forge temple, a blocky arrangement of cubes, pyramids and spheres. Strange symbols and arcane equations were daubed on the domed roofs with unguents of blood and oil, the sacred architecture of the Omnissiah corrupted by non-Euclidian geometries and distorting Escherite algebra.
The ferrovore squatted behind them, its brutal mechanical growling swallowed by the penetrating bass thrum of the towers in which they were concealed. At least fifty similar creatures stalked the battered wasteland of sabotaged industry around the temple, moving in overlapping patrol circuits and augmented by several hundred armed soldiers equipped with modified skitarii auspex gear.
‘Defence towers, pict-scanners, motion sensors, pressure differentials, interlocking fields of fire. And a single entrance,’ said Sharrowkyn, noting one defensive measure after another. He lay on his belly in the shadows, peering through shielded magnoculars. ‘From the security around this place, I’d say our sources were right. The Kryptos is in there.’
‘And you know a way we can defeat that level of security?’ asked Wayland, kneeling behind a giant ceramite insulating dish that had fallen from a wrecked tower. He had his bolter clicked into place at his shoulder, though the barrel and sights were retracted.
‘Think you can take out fifty ferrovores?’ asked Sharrowkyn.
‘No, but if we had a company of Iron Hands too we could fight our way inside.’
‘Getting what we want out of there isn’t about battering rams and guns. Charge through those gates, and the Kryptos will be lying on the floor with its brain melting out of its skull.’
‘So how do you propose we gain entry?’
‘We don’t,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘There’s no way to get in there without being detected.’
‘So has this mission been a waste of time?’ hissed Wayland. ‘I thought you Raven Guard were experts at this sort of thing; covert intrusions and operating around enemy defences.’
‘We are, but there are some insertions you just can’t make. Some defences are so tight that no tactical approach is going to get you past them.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning that if we can’t get inside, we get the enemy to bring the Kryptos out.’
Given the devastation wrought around the forge temple, it was a simple matter to locate exposed data trunking that linked the temple to the planetary network. Much of the wiring was damaged or melted beyond repair, but a few bundles of oily cable still functioned, and it was upon these that Wayland directed his efforts. Numerous wiring clips and clicking devices extruded from his scrimshawed gauntlet, and even the tiny sparks of corposant arcing between his tools were making Sharrowkyn nervous.
‘They won’t detect this, will they?’
‘Only if you keep distracting me,’ answered Wayland, running a cable from the tangle of wiring to a boxy device clipped to his belt. The Mechanicum cipher engine whirred as it chewed through high-level encryption with a touch soft enough to avoid detection.
‘I’m in,’ said Wayland, as a blurt of coded binary hissed from the cipher engine. ‘High-grade noospheric intercommunications. Only the best for the Kryptos…’
‘Keep it light,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘If the traitors so much as think we’re out here, this mission is over.’
‘Just because I am an Iron Hand does not mean I cannot be subtle when the occasion demands it, Nykona,’ said Wayland, deliberately using his first name. ‘I trained on Mars and Adept Zeth’s innovation in noospheric networks is not unknown to me.’
‘So you’ve interfaced with this kind of system before?’
‘I have studied it extensively,’ said Wayland.
‘Studied it?’ said Sharrowkyn, spotting the deflection. ‘You mean you’ve never actually used something like this?’
‘Not as such, but I am confident I will be able to interface successfully,’ said Wayland, lifting a connector plug and sliding it home in the base of his modified gorget.
‘I’ll remind you of that if we have to run for our lives,’ said Sharrowkyn.
Wayland didn’t answer, stiffening as a flood of information surged from the golden cables into his augmented cortical implants.
The Iron Hand moved his gauntlets through the air, manipulating operating systems, power and data flow only he could see. Haptically-enabled fingertips sifted reams of noospheric data with each blink of an eye lens as the barrage of information filled him.
Sharrowkyn left Wayland to his infiltration of the forge temple’s data systems, and returned his attention to its defences, looking for any sign their intrusion had been detected.
‘It helps me…’ whispered Wayland, and Sharrowkyn inclined his head to listen.
‘What?’
‘The forge,’ said Wayland, his voice sounding distant and strained. ‘It hates what it has become, and wishes me to end its suffering. Its systems are overwriting my data footprints.’
Sharrowkyn shifted uncomfortably at the idea of the forge temple exhibiting anything that might be construed as sentience. Though the Mechanicum were an invaluable part of the Imperium, their belief in a divine force behind the machines they maintained and built was at odds with the Imperial Truth.
But as with most useful things, expediency and utility outweighed conviction.
‘I have it,’ said Wayland, twisting one hand and punching in what looked like an access code on an invisible panel. ‘Expect to see some activity soon.’
Sharrowkyn returned his attention to the temple as a number of warning sirens blared throughout the complex. Emergency lights flashed and barking announcements in gurgling cant brayed from klaxons mounted on defence towers. Streams of armed men poured from the iron structures, a mix of feral
skitarii cohorts and panicked Army units.
‘I don’t know what you did,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘But it’s got them running scared.’
‘With the temple’s consent, I disengaged the control rods from the atomic core of its reactor and altered the composition of the catalysing elements to bring the isotopes to critical mass at an exponential rate. When that happens, everything within a hundred kilometres is going to be vaporised.’
‘Including us?’
‘No,’ said Wayland, tapping another Mechanicum device attached to his belt. ‘Not us.’
The enemy troops converged on a point just outside the main gates of the temple, assuming a defensive formation as they stood waiting. A palpable sense of fear gripped the enemy, and when an opponent was off balance was the perfect moment to strike.
‘There,’ said Wayland. ‘That’s got to be it.’
Sharrowkyn looked to where Wayland was indicating. A warrior in burnished red plate, awash with fluttering, wax-sealed scrolls, escorted a nondescript adept in a flowing black robe. Bereft of the reticulated machine arms and augmentation common to most tech-priests, there was nothing to outwardly mark this adept as special.
‘Word Bearer,’ said Sharrowkyn, his voice tight with controlled hatred.
‘The magnetic discharge will block vox-traffic,’ said Wayland. ‘But we have less than five minutes to take possession of the Kryptos.’
‘Then let’s move,’ replied Sharrowkyn, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Is it ready?’
Wayland engaged the slave mechanism of their captured ferrovore.
‘Oh, it’s more than ready,’ he said.
Booming geysers of superheated, radioactive steam blew out domes and walls of the forge temple, and burning traceries of inverted lightning arced through the volatile atmosphere. As the atomic core of the temple boiled itself to destruction, venting systems and dispersal protocols were wilfully deactivated or simply failed to function. The few adepts that remained at their stations found their efforts to avert the temple’s impending destruction thwarted at every turn.