by C. L. Werner
‘Damn xenos,’ Vortsk thought bitterly.
‘They used my own trick on me.’
‘Grim Lord, there can be no question that the orks will penetrate the second line of defence.’ Admiral Nostraz’s voice was subdued as he made the pessimistic report. He bowed his head in contrition as the Warsmith stirred upon his translucent throne.
‘How long can we expect the third line to hold?’ Andraaz demanded.
Skylord Morax reached out and brought the cluster of lights representing the third of Castellax’s defence fleets into focus. ‘Raiders and slaveships,’ he grumbled. ‘Nothing here that can possibly stand up to the orks.’
‘Then the aliens will make planetfall?’ Captain Gamgin asked, a trace of anticipation and eagerness in his tone. After five generations of training, he was curious to see how his janissaries would perform against an enemy more formidable than a rabble of feral slaves.
Morax ran his glove across his scalp and glowered at Gamgin. ‘An armada that size might have a billion howling greenskins. If they make planetfall…’
‘We will destroy them,’ Andraaz stated, his voice brooking no argument. His red eye focused upon the youngest of his war council. Sergeant Ipos was the only member of the inner-circle who had been created with hybrid gene-seed, a necessity for a Legion whose own genetic material was rife with corruption and mutation. Despite the admixture of gene-seed, Ipos had proven himself a brilliant strategist and tactician, as well as a shrewd political manipulator. He had used a careful campaign of conspiracy and subterfuge to worm his way into his position as Castellan of the Iron Bastion, one long coveted by full-blooded Iron Warriors like Algol and Vallax.
Ipos rose from his chair, sweeping his gauntlet across the surface of the table. The starfield faded. In its place appeared an orbital view of Castellax itself, its satellites and space stations. Another sweep of Ipos’s hand and hundreds of lights began swarming around the world.
‘We shouldn’t expect a concentrated attack by the orks for several hours, perhaps even days,’ Ipos declared. ‘Until their warlord exerts its influence, the xenos will attack by individual squadrons, each warboss trying to cheat its fellows of loot and glory. We can exploit that.’
Admiral Nostraz smirked at the last statement. ‘How do we do that, half-breed?’ he grumbled.
Ipos ignored the admiral, directing his attention instead to the other Iron Warriors. ‘We can’t keep the orks from making planetfall. What we can do is prevent them from gaining a firm foothold once they are here.’ He pointed to the ring of defence satellites and armed weapons stations orbiting the planet. ‘If we adjust the orbits of five per cent of our installations we can present the orks with deliberate gaps in the defences. Eager for plunder, the xenos will use those gaps to try and reach the surface as quickly as possible.’
‘You want to make it easier for the orks to reach Castellax?’ Algol almost choked on the words, such was his incredulity.
The sergeant shook his head and made an adjustment to the illuminated display. Now some of the swarming lights were streaming down towards Castellax. ‘By focusing the orks into pre-arranged windows of opportunity, we will funnel them into specific areas of the planet. Far from the industrial centres, though we will need to present the orks with some lesser installations to maintain their interest. As the xenos converge upon these sacrificial settlements, the Air Cohort will deploy and bomb them into oblivion. We’ll be able to destroy the first wave of orks piecemeal, a tactic which Skylord Morax’s squadrons should be fully capable of implementing.’
Morax clapped his hands together, almost chortling with pleasure as he imagined the glory which would belong to his Air Cohort. ‘Indeed, indeed. We’ll burn down every xenos that sets one foot on Castellax!’
Over-Captain Vallax leaned over the table, studying the pattern of lights swirling about the projected planet. ‘That might settle for the vanguard, but you don’t expect the entire armada to hit us at the same time. I’ve fought orks. They might be stupid, but they’re also cunning. They won’t fall for the same bait twice.’
‘Afraid of getting your chainaxe dirty?’ Morax chuckled, waving his jewelled glove at the Over-Captain. ‘By the time the orks figure out what to do next, our surviving ships will be well on their way to Medrengard for help.’
‘The Third Grand Company fights its own battles, Skylord,’ Vallax snapped. ‘To contemplate anything less is cowardice.’
‘I shall quote you when the warlords of Medrengard demand to know why their shipments of arms are behind schedule,’ Admiral Nostraz retorted. ‘If the greenskins are allowed to set up a siege of even a few months, production will grind to a halt.’
‘We might manage food for the slaves,’ Algol said, pondering the problem. ‘Synthetics will last out for the better part of a year and can be supplemented, but water will be a problem. The only extra water supplies we can tap into are those at the embryo farms and that will deprive us of our next generation of workers. Unless we go out and collect our own on a large scale. Like in the good old days.’
‘Castellax has been fortified against full assault by the False Emperor’s minions,’ the crackling drone of Oriax’s servitor announced. ‘We are the sons of the Iron Cage. We are the Betrayers of Isstvan. However great the xenos horde, it shall break upon our walls.’
Warsmith Andraaz stepped away from his throne, steam venting from the coil of cables sunk into his armour as idle servo-motors pulsed into life. The hulking Iron Warrior stalked across the chamber, his Rending Guard falling into step behind him. Andraaz kept one eye fixed upon the obsidian table while his mechanical eye flashed across the faces of his officers.
‘There will be no call for help,’ Andraaz stated. ‘There are those upon Medrengard who believe the Third Grand Company to be weak, that our days of glory and might are behind us, that we are but a sorry remnant of the past!’ The Warsmith drove his fist straight into the middle of the projection, stabbing deep into the sphere representing Castellax. ‘This battle will belong to us, and us alone! We shall exterminate the xenos and send their skulls to Great Perturabo as tribute. There will be no retreat. There will be no surrender. And there will be no mercy.’
‘What of our fleet, Grim Lord?’ Admiral Nostraz asked. ‘If they remain engaged with the orks they will be destroyed and we will lose them all. We can’t replenish our losses without raiders to secure fresh materials.’
‘The Warsmith has already said there will be no retreat,’ Gamgin growled. His temper subsided when he felt Andraaz’s gaze focus upon him. Abased, he sank down into his chair.
‘The fleet will disengage and withdraw to the far side of the sun,’ Andraaz decided. ‘That will put Castellax between them and the ork armada.’
Morax nodded appreciatively at the strategy. ‘With the orks caught up in the planetary fortifications, we can recall the fleet and have it engage the ships the xenos leave in orbit.’ The Skylord cast a sneer in Nostraz’s direction. ‘Or they can withdraw into the warp and get help.’
A cold smile twisted the half of Andraaz’s face that was still flesh. ‘There will be no withdrawal.’
‘But, Grim Lord, many of our ships are crewed by pirate scum,’ objected Nostraz. ‘If one of them should lose nerve, or perceive our situation as being–’
‘There will be no retreat,’ Oriax’s proxy droned, the servitor’s lifeless eyes staring emptily at the ceiling. ‘The Speaker will issue a compulsion to every Navigator in the fleet. They will bite down upon the capsule hidden in their teeth. The poison will put them into a coma until such time as an antidote can be administered.’
Warsmith Andraaz slammed his fist against the obsidian table once more, vanquishing the display in a crackle of sparks. ‘The pirates will have to come to the Iron Bastion for that antidote. Without the Navigators, they dare not tempt the warp. No, my brothers, there will be no retreat from Castellax, no display of weakness to cheer our persecutors.’
The Warsmith turned and slowly marched back to his throne. ‘
Castellax belongs to the Third Grand Company of the Iron Warriors Legion. No one will forget that fact. Not the filthy xenos. Not the pawns of the False Emperor. And not the warlords of Medrengard.
‘Castellax is ours. Any who think otherwise live on borrowed time.’
Chapter III
I-Day
The binary rasp of a Lingua-Technis chant hissed through the mesh-work funnel of copper and titanium which had replaced the mouth of Enginseer Heroditus three centuries ago. The protruding, insect-like muzzle of his respirator melded into the blocky contours of a face rebuilt in adamantium and platinum. A confusion of pipes and hoses snaked away from his cheeks, coiling around his head to secure themselves to sockets built into his spine and servo-limbs. Crab-like arms jutted from spurs built into his shoulders, steel mechadendrites that rippled with the gleam of idle energies.
There was little of Enginseer Heroditus that remained organic. Five centuries of zealous service to the Omnissiah had replaced most of his decayed flesh with bionics. Bundled in a heavy robe of vat-grown synthfibre, the only exposed portion of the tech-priest betraying his tenuous relation to humanity were the pale, empty eyes staring from the depths of his metal face. Sight had fled from those eyes long ago, his vision replaced by mechanical sensors embedded in his forehead and on the backs of his bionic hands. Heroditus had declined to have his organic eyes removed, despite their obsolescence, believing he must maintain them until the Omnissiah’s advent. Only then would he offer them up to the Machine-God as a final sacrifice of flesh.
The enginseer’s valve-pump slowed its pulsations as his brain sent a surge of emotion crackling through his nerve-relays. The hiss of binary faltered for an instant as Heroditus fought down the pathetic despair that flickered into life within his brain. It was true, he was unlikely to ever make that sacrifice, to gaze upon the glory of the Deus Mechanicus incarnate. That was no excuse for such weakness. To be a servant of the Machine-God was to cast aside the flawed illogic of the flesh and embrace the cold reason of technology. A tech-priest did not know regret. His purpose was to accept the path before him and to walk it in such a way as to bring greater glory to the Machine-God.
Heroditus bowed his head in acknowledgment of his weakness. However much they cut away, it seemed there was still too much flesh left inside to make him complete. Without disrupting the binary chant hissing from his mouth, he transmitted a liturgy of penance from the vox-caster built into his chest, an appeal to the machine-spirits of his bionics and augmetics to forgive the discord caused by his sorrowed emotions. To ensure the sincerity of his prayer, Heroditus had the flagellation bundles fixed to his spine send pulses of electricity throbbing through his organics.
It was an act of self-castigation that Heroditus had performed many times since Castellax fell to the Iron Warriors. When the traitors had descended from the stars and rained death upon the colony, the adepts of the Machine Cult had been spared the most infamous of the Chaos Space Marines’ outrages. Indeed, the invaders had expended some effort taking as many of the tech-priests intact as possible. It was not an act of mercy, of course, but rather a question of practicality. The Iron Warriors wanted to transform Castellax into a forge world to feed the war machine of their infamous Legion. To do that, they required more than billions of simple slaves. They needed specialists, men who understood the arcane sciences of manufacturing and design, processing and refinement.
Under the terrible scrutiny of their Fabricator Oriax, the Iron Warriors had pressed the captured tech-priests into their service. The exchange was simple: life for obedience. Some of the adepts had refused. Their deaths had been terrible spectacles of barbarism, outrages against the machine-spirits of their components as they were disassembled piece by piece.
Most of the adepts, like Heroditus, had agreed to obey, believing that even under the lash of the Iron Warriors they could serve the Machine-God. While they could function, they might yet serve a greater purpose.
Heroditus raised his head, staring at the acid-scoured walls of the immense drainage sluice, watching the crust of oxidised metal slowly drip into the toxic mire on the floor. Twenty metres across, nearly half again as high, the barrel-like tunnel ran the length of Vorago’s processing district, funnelling pollutants and waste from the city into the abandoned strip mines that pock-marked the face of Castellax. Poisonous vapours rose from the rainbow-hued confusion of sludge and slime, filling the passage with an atmosphere so hostile to life that the hardiest sump-rat would be dead before it drew its third breath.
Only something as devoid of organic frailty as a tech-priest could prowl these passages in relative safety; yet even here Heroditus was wary. He knew Oriax was a fiend incarnate, a living devil, a Chaos Space Marine who had compounded his outrages with a perverted corruption of the Quest for Knowledge. There was no place on Castellax one could be certain the Fabricator did not have his spies. The floating ‘Steel Blood’, Oriax’s ghoulish imitation of servo-skulls, flitted throughout Vorago, watching everything and everyone. Oriax claimed each of the fiendish skulls had a bit of his own genetic material pulsing through its circulation, heightening its responsiveness to his commands. Servitors, both those crafted in the Fabricator’s workshops and those scavenged from the conquest of Castellax, were often fitted with transmitters that fed intelligence directly to Oriax’s stronghold in the sub-catacombs of the Iron Bastion. More hideous still were the seemingly organic specimens Oriax had transformed, implanting them with complex mechanics without consideration of the subject’s suitability and worthiness for such augmentation, or the dignity of the machine-spirits of the devices he abused in these monstrous experiments.
A terrible darkness had descended upon Castellax, but Heroditus calculated that there might finally be a chance to see the light again. It was why he chanted orisons to dull and mislead the sentinel-implants Oriax had attached to his body. It was why he braved the toxic miasma of the drainage sluice, hiking through kilometres of corrosive sludge.
Hope, that most irrational of feelings, had begun to burn once more in the mind of Enginseer Heroditus.
Taofang pulled the goggles from his face and stared up at the night sky. Even the sting of Castellax’s polluted atmosphere wasn’t enough to dissuade him from watching the awesome light show unfolding far above the planet. It was a spectacle of such beauty as to move even the hardened janissary to tears. Great spheres of light streaked across the sky, sometimes spewing streams of energy, sometimes expanding into brilliant blazes before collapsing in upon themselves and fading into darkness. Whorls of star-fire coruscated through the blackness, racing about the planet in dazzling displays of colour and patterns of the most compelling fascination. To Taofang, it was like watching the birth of some cosmic–
‘Put those goggles back on!’
The sharp command broke the fascination. Hastily, Taofang pulled the protective lenses back across his eyes and turned his gaze from the sky to the men around him. There were over five hundred of them, janissaries of the Scorpion Brigade, each man fitted out in the corrosion-resistant duster and ore-scuttle helmet of their regiment. Mustered from the grim ferrocrete barracks which cast its shadow across the marshalling yard, the soldiers waited for their quartermasters to distribute arms from a sunken bunker at the far end of the plaza. Officers in black storm coats stalked among the troops, chastising those who, like Taofang, allowed their awe of the light show over Castellax to overcome their discipline.
‘There is a beta-level caution tonight!’ one of the officers, a thick-necked, dark-skinned colonel named Nehring barked over a vox-caster. He raised a gloved hand and tapped the opaque lenses of the goggles he wore. ‘Three minutes of exposure to the air and the pollution will begin to deteriorate your vision. Half an hour, and you would be as good as blind. If that isn’t enough to make you scum keep your goggles on, consider this: any man who can’t pull his own weight is a burden on the regiment...’ Nehring’s hand dropped to the jewelled holster hanging from his belt. There was no need for the colo
nel to continue his threat. The janissaries had seen him use his laspistol too many times to need the consequences explained to them. It was a custom weapon, plunder from some forge world, calibrated to fire a wider, more powerful beam than a standard pattern weapon. The charred wounds it left behind were big enough to put a man’s fist through.
Colonel Nehring removed his peaked cap and raised his face to the sky. A sneer twisted his features. ‘That spectacle you find so fascinating is our orbital defences and satellites being obliterated. A few of the big ones might be remnants of the system fleet falling to xenos guns.’ Nehring’s shielded eyes glared over the faces of his soldiers. ‘Hold a happy thought,’ he growled. ‘When the orks are done up there, they’ll be paying us a visit down here. Then each of you will get the chance to show our masters the quality of your training.’
A few jeers of defiance rose from the ranks. The janissaries weren’t strangers to combat, even if their previous experiences had been limited to putting down slave revolts or tracking renegades in the wastelands between the mining settlements. Only a few of the soldiers in the Scorpion Brigade had ever been seconded to the raider ships and engaged in battle off-world – and even those expeditions had been strikes against the Imperium. None of the janissaries had ever seen a xenos in battle, but they doubted it would be much different to killing their fellow man. All of them had done that often enough to become calloused to the prospect of battle.
Taofang was still in shock. Orks attacking Castellax! It was fantastic, unbelievable. Born and raised under the lash of the Iron Warriors, he had come to view them as invincible, a malignant force as irresistible as an earthquake or an ash-storm. The very idea that anything would dare to attack them was almost absurd to Taofang. That the orks had succeeded in driving through the system fleet and threatening Castellax itself was incredible. Yet, the evidence was all around him. The first frantic rumours of battle above the planet, the frightened mutters of orks from the comms tower garrison, the mustering of every soldier in Dirgas – all of it was grim testament to the reality of the situation.