The Siege of Castellax

by C. L. Werner

  The entry of the vanguard into the first ring of mines was the signal Gamgin’s artillery had been waiting for. Biding their time while the ork flyers raged across the sky, now the wall’s heavy guns roared into violent life, hurling tons of explosive across the desert to slam into the oncoming xenos. Tanks were shattered by four-ton shells, their hulls shredded like parchment. Battlewagons vanished in great sheets of flame, the aliens swarming about their decks obliterated in the flash of an eye.

  Somehow, the orks refused to break under the onslaught. Every second brought death to hundreds of the aliens, yet still they came, thundering through the artillery barrage, racing across the smoking moonscape of the minefield. Now the alien vanguard was near enough to the wall that the janissaries began opening up with their lasguns and autocannon.

  Gamgin watched as the orks hit the next ring of defences, the buried chainwire that leapt up from the sand as the vibrations of the alien machines activated their sensors. He saw ork bikers hit the snarling stretches of wire, their bodies torn into gory cubes by the whirling blades. Dozens of orks hit the wire, cut to ribbons in a burst of blood and gristle, yet still the creatures refused to break. Heavier vehicles lumbered forwards, firing a crazed array of weaponry into the obstructions or simply riding it down beneath their treads.

  Ferrocrete tank traps, the jagged obstructions called the Devil’s Teeth, delayed the orks only a bit longer than the chainwire. With callous disregard for their own comrades, the orks slapped explosive charges to the obstacles, wrapped chains about them and pulled them free or employed heavy dozer blades to topple them over. All of this while a withering fire poured down on them from the black face of the Witch Wall. The carnage was unspeakable, thousands of greenskin dead lying torn and mangled across the desolation.

  Yet still they came.

  Gamgin growled into the vox-bead, sending his fury echoing along the wall, enjoining his troops to still greater effort. Guns fired into the orks until their barrels became red-hot, elevators shot up from the arsenals with such rapidity that fresh gangs of slaves had to be sent along to unload the ammunition when it reached the gun emplacements and missile batteries. Hour by hour, the humans strove to repulse the alien invader. Protein-pastes packed with stimulants were dispensed, punishment squads executed those too fatigued to fight, conscripts were drawn from the subterranean workshops and munitions plants.

  The orks finally penetrated the Devil’s Teeth, sparing no thought for their massed dead. Now the rumble of alien guns slammed against the battlements, pitting and scarring the black walls. The aliens plunged ahead, striking hidden gas projectors and deadfalls, subsidiary pillboxes and fortified blockhouses. Each obstruction was met with the same response – mindless, barbaric violence. There was no hesitation, no pause to consider strategy in the face of a changing battlefield. Nothing, it seemed, would be allowed to blunt the momentum of the ork advance.

  Gamgin glared down from the wall, appreciating for the first time the nature of the enemy. He had allowed himself to be deluded, to mistake the individual ork, the crude almost bumbling savage as his real foe. It was not the individual ork he was fighting, but the Waaagh!, the gestalt collective, the millions-strong warhost, an elemental force that could do nothing except advance and attack.

  The Iron Warrior snarled into his vox-bead, calling up fresh reserves from the lower bunkers. Swiftly, the soldiers ascended to the battlements, bringing with them massive drums of lead. With practised precision, the janissaries opened the drums, exposing the ash-like contents. Gamgin turned and faced towards the dead sea, evaluating the strength and direction of the wind.

  If the orks were an elemental force, then he would use another element to destroy them. ‘Seed the wind,’ Gamgin ordered. Obediently, the janissaries dug into the barrels of ash with long leaden ladles and cast the shimmering poison into the wind. The corrosive chemical would bond with the toxic dust swirling up from the dry ocean bed. A few moments after being cast into the breeze, it would create an acidic cloud capable of chewing through flesh. The orks might be hardy enough to breathe the polluted fumes of Castellax’s atmosphere, but they wouldn’t shrug off the Daemon’s Breath.

  It was a death sentence, of course, for the advance troops down in the bunkers and blockhouses, but Gamgin was pragmatic about such losses. With the orks already swarming about their positions, the isolated men were as good as dead already. Besides, there was plenty of fresh Flesh waiting and eager to replace them. Common humanity needed little encouragement to breed like vermin.

  Agonised howls rose from the massed orks as the deadly cloud descended upon them. Through the magnoculars, Gamgin could see the acid corroding their flesh, scorching and blistering as it gnawed its way through the leathery skin. Where an instant before there had been an unstoppable horde, now he stared down upon a twitching morass of suffering. Coldly, he ordered the men on the wall to fire down into the afflicted aliens.

  Uncertain of what had beset their vanguard, the main body of the ork column shifted, changing direction. Gamgin sneered at their effort to escape the trap. The aliens might avoid the cloud, but they would soon find themselves beset by an even more primal adversary. Eagerly, Gamgin watched as the first ork tank rumbled out onto the seemingly innocuous stretch of desert on the southern flank. Only a trained eye could see the subtle difference in hue, even the men stationed on the Witch Wall weren’t so sharp as to immediately spot the difference. And it was an important difference.

  The difference between life and death.

  The tank’s speedy advance collapsed in a groan of protesting gears and shrieking aliens. The armoured vehicle plunged into the open ground, sinking through the thin scum of dirt and debris which covered the polluted quagmire. Not as impressive as the Convallis Robigo, the canyon was more strategically placed, an implacable barrier to guard the fortress’s flank.

  Unable to check the momentum of their charge, dozens of other ork machines followed the first tank into destruction. Frantic drivers and crew tried to throw themselves from their doomed machines only to flounder in the toxic mire as they too were sucked down. Once the oily clutch of the mire closed about a victim, no force could drag it free.

  Locked between the quagmire and the billowing acid cloud, thousands of orks were abandoned to the mercy of the Iron Warriors. Gamgin would show them none. At his command, a vicious barrage of artillery and missiles slammed into the confusion of buggies and battlewagons.

  From the doomed column to the south, Gamgin turned his gaze to the north. A section of the ork assault force had diverted towards the railway, braving the minefields in preference to the acid cloud and the quagmire. The Iron Warrior glared at the alien machines. They would not escape. Issuing orders into his vox-bead, he started to redirect his artillery against the northern column. It was then that the entire fortress was shaken by a tremendous impact. The janissaries in the gun emplacement closest to him were knocked about like rag dolls, one man splitting his head open against the bore of the gun. Gamgin himself was nearly thrown from his feet. A kilometre away, he could see a great smouldering crater pitting the face of the Witch Wall.

  An instant later, the wall was rattled by a second impact, an entire stronghold collapsing in an explosion of ferrocrete and plasteel. Gamgin’s mind whirled at the impossible devastation, something he would expect only from a battleship or the largest Titans.

  Raising the magnoculars once more, he followed the slender ribbon of railway into the west. There, in the distance, Gamgin saw them: two gigantic lumbering machines. In size, they bore no kinship to any tank or train he had ever seen. They were more like Imperial strike cruisers mounted on carriages, trundling down the railway with sluggish yet inexorable momentum. Gaping in the face of each of the mobile battlefortresses was a mammoth cannon, the sort of thing that would be more properly used to pummel a planet into submission from high orbit.

  Gamgin clenched his fist. The Witch Wall would never withstand the approach of these monsters. Their guns would blast op
en a hole in them through which the entire Waaagh! could pour. There was nothing he could do to stop them. All he could do was inform the Warsmith that he had failed. The Witch Wall was breached. The Mare Ossius lay open before the invaders and perhaps Vorago as well.

  Chapter VIII

  I-Day Plus Sixty-Four

  Through the poisonous green mist, the droning crackle of the Lingua-Technis echoed, slithering off the maze of immense pipes and slime-covered conduits. It was the phantom voice of forbidden praise, the shadow worship of the doomed and the damned.

  Enginseer Heroditus bowed his head and kept his mechadendrites piously folded as the chant progressed. Only that facet of his brain assigned to reciting binary orisons to confuse the sentinel-implants hidden within his own body was not devoted to the ritual of praise. All bless the Omnissiah!

  Gathered within the radioactive sump-pit, the abandoned sub-catacomb far beneath the manufactorums of Vorago, the indentured tech-priests of Castellax resembled a conclave of grotesque ghouls in their robes of synth-

  fibre. The stink of antiseptic unguents and grease-lubricant oozed from one and all, a stench which would have overcome anything still more flesh than machine. With their senses partitioned by automated cogitators or replaced entirely by cybernetic mechanisms, the tech-priests barely perceived the reek, much less reacted to it.

  Heroditus cast his gaze across the clandestine gathering. There were nearly a dozen this time, an observation which brought a tremble to his valve-pump. It was dangerous to assemble in such numbers. If the absence of even one of them were to be noticed, if anyone were lax in his orisons or failed to lose a trailing Steel Blood…

  Fabricator Oriax’s punishment would be a thing of unrivalled horror, of that Heroditus was certain. If the Iron Warrior discovered why his slaves were sneaking through the sewers and catacombs, his vengeance would be more terrible still.

  Strangely, that observation brought confidence rather than caution. Heroditus suspected it was organic illogic, but somehow the thought that Oriax would be alarmed if he became aware… That made the enginseer feel pride. It made him feel strong. For the first time since Castellax had fallen to the Iron Warriors, he had a sense of accomplishment.

  It was a reckless emotion and Heroditus drove it from his mind as soon as it started to assert itself. Pride and confidence might make a man, even a tech-priest, overbold. With all the evil of the Iron Warriors already ranged against them, they did not need their own foolish mistakes, errors born of hubris, presenting them with still greater obstacles.

  As his mind emerged from such ruminations, Heroditus focused upon his fellow tech-priests. More had arrived and there were nearly twenty of them, hunched amid the pipes, perched upon the corroded gantries, skulking against ferrocrete reservoirs and titanium flow valves. Again, he felt an impulse of wariness as he considered such numbers. If even one of his fellows had failed to distract his sentinel-implant…

  ‘Brothers of the Machine!’ the voice of Logis Acestes sliced across the binary chant like a rusty razor. The senior adept of the Mechanicus to survive the invasion, Acestes was a lank apparition, a scarecrow of steel and plasfibre bundles draped in a heavy cloak of synthetic leather. An expert at predictive simulation and mathematical extrapolation, Acestes was the only member of their little cabal who had avoided capture at the fall of Castellax. His robes yet bore the Cog Mechanicus symbol of the Adeptus, a mark not only of his freedom but of his uncompromised servitude to the Machine-God. The Logis had hidden himself away for many decades in the most forsaken depths of Vorago before emerging from the shadows and recruiting his congregation from Oriax’s slaves.

  The chant fell silent as Acestes raised his arms, slim pistons of steel fitted with an array of hinged servo-limbs, each ending in an esoteric confusion of tools, blades and pincers. The nest of tubes and hoses which protruded from the hood of his robe contracted as the Logis drew air into the archaic circulator attached to his chest. The device hissed and shuddered as it distilled the worst pollutants, expelling them in a black slime which oozed from a vent in its side.

  ‘My brothers,’ the Logis spoke. ‘Long have we endured the confusion of servitude, of prostituting the rites of the machine-spirit to obscene purposes. But now, the time of forced blasphemy is nearly over. Soon we shall rise and achieve that for which we have struggled!’

  Speaking, Acestes pivoted on his ankles, swinging his body around and gesticulating at the jumble of machinery piled atop a brick-work causeway. Pale servitors, their mechanics displaying a frightful state of decay and corrosion, their flesh branded with the Cog Mechanicus, scurried about the seeming scrap-heap, choosing isolated pieces and arranging them in carefully sorted piles.

  ‘We may thank the Omnissiah for providing the xenos incursion, for it has given the heretical oppressors over to distraction. While their eyes are set upon the orks, they allow their vigilance to wane. Opportunity, so long elusive, now provides us with all we require.’

  The crimson optics protruding from the nest of hoses that served Acestes as a face whirred on their metal stalks, fixing a lone tech-adept with their mechanical stare. One of the Logis’s limbs circled forwards, jabbing a slender plasma-cutter in the adept’s direction.

  ‘We cannot allow anything to interfere with our duty,’ Acestes declared. ‘One among you has become suspect. The Steel Blood are no longer attentive, as though they have lost interest. There can only be one cause for such an adjustment in their calculations.’

  The doomed tech-adept did not protest, did not seek to escape. He understood the judgement that had already been reached. Though he was aware of no conscious treachery, the possibility of implanted treachery was too great to permit. He himself had reported the inattentiveness of the Steel Blood towards him. Alone among the conspirators, he did not need to chant the liturgy of distraction to elude the servitor-spies. It was a problem that had perturbed him greatly. Despite his role in the drama, he admired the directness of Acestes’s solution.

  Stepping around the scorched husk of the tech-adept, Enginseer Heroditus approached Acestes. He bowed his head before addressing the Logis, an act of almost automatic contrition. Acestes had not profaned his knowledge and ability by serving the cause of the traitors; that placed him far closer to the Machine-God than any of them. It was a holiness that made the enginseer feel lowly and unclean. If his synthesised voice was capable of conveying emotion, his words would have been meek and humble as he spoke.

  ‘The heretic Ipos has mobilised nearly a million slaves,’ Heroditus reported. ‘He works them day and night, without rest or respite. Already the first of the munitions have been disassembled and removed from the city.’

  Acestes nodded, digesting the enginseer’s words. ‘It is a sacrilege to defile such holy armaments,’ he sighed. ‘The traitors compound their sins without thought of what they do. For all their terrible potential, the vile Traitor Marines yet wallow in the ignorance of their barbarities. We must not repeat their error! Have the machine-spirits been placated? Have the proper supplications been made?’

  ‘Yes, Revered Logis,’ Heroditus answered. His mechadendrites curled in upon themselves, grasping the thick loop of power coil protruding from the synthfibre sack he carried. Extending the cybernetic limbs, he offered the heavy loop of electrum to Acestes. The Logis nodded and gestured with one of his steel claws. With another bow, Heroditus deposited the coil on the ground beside the senior tech-priest.

  ‘The heretics continue to allow us to oversee the profanation of the ordnance,’ Heroditus explained. ‘Their janissaries understand nothing of what we do. With their eyes upon us, we take what we need. It is only when Ipos or one of the other Chaos Marines are around that we must display caution.’

  ‘What of the arch-blasphemer Oriax?’ Acestes demanded. ‘Are his spies not observing you?’

  A curious sensation tugged at Heroditus’s mind as he heard the question. It took him a moment to realise his brain was sending out the impulse to make his face smile… as
if there was still enough organic flesh for such an expression. ‘We have practised the logarithms which will deceive the Steel Blood,’ he explained. ‘Beneath the purification and pacification litanies to sanctify the blasphemous disassembly, we disseminate the logarithms and confuse the sensors of Oriax’s servitors. The Fabricator sees only what we allow him to see. Any of our own whom we suspect of serving him have been deleted. The frantic pace of Ipos’s schedule has resulted in many accidents. The traitors have not noticed those we have arranged.’

  ‘It is well,’ declaimed Acestes, ‘but never allow your vigilance to become complacent. Any of our brothers may become corrupted and lose their spirits to the heretical dogma of the traitors. We cannot allow that. There is too much work yet to be done. We must not fail in this duty which the Omnissiah has bestowed upon us.’

  ‘We will not fail,’ Heroditus promised. ‘We have been studious in our distasteful labour. Never do we take more than can be concealed. From each of the ten, we take only what will not be noticed. Though it is a profanation of the sacred template, we have bypassed fail-safes and redundancies to ensure the mechanisms remain functional.’ The enginseer paused, a sensation of disgust crackling through his neurons as he contemplated the despicable violations he had helped perpetrate. He could only trust that the machine-spirits of the offended ordnance would forgive him for what he had done.

  ‘The problem,’ Heroditus continued, ‘is with Lartius Maximus. We were compelled to remove systems without redundancies. Revered Logis, the machine-spirit is impaired. The ordnance will not function.’