by C. L. Werner
The Space Marine could tell his helmet had been removed by the cloying caress of foul air against his skin. The recyclers in his helmet would never have allowed such a concentration of filth to impact his senses. He could feel the dull, lethargic stirring of the air around him, the faintest hint of motion against his skin. Allied to the closeness of the smell, Vallax knew he was inside a room somewhere, a room with only the most rudimentary circulation.
Vallax opened his eyes, the action sending a sliver of pulsating agony through his skull. He was in a room, but such a room as would make Algol’s private abattoir seem a quiet place of contemplation. A riotous array of hooks, pincers, blades, saws, chisels and mauls hung from the corroded walls. Shelves displayed a weird collection of jars, bottles, boxes and bags each stuffed with a deranged assortment of bones, limbs and organs. Flies buzzed about the more exposed parts of the collection, glutting themselves on the rotting flesh.
Beside the macabre collection, a long workbench equipped with a pneumatic grip and a small furnace, an assortment of gears strewn about its surface. Oversized claws, piston-driven legs, even a box with steel jaw bones, lay piled around the bench. A crate of scrap metal loomed against the wall, several pieces jutting from the mess appearing to be recycled implants from ork cyborgs. Vallax recognised the power claw that had crushed his arm lying towards the top of the heap. Hulking against the side of the crate, wheezy snoring noises hissing through its speakers, was the mechanical mass of a killa kan, its murderous arms hanging limp against its hull while its entombed pilot slept.
Gritting his teeth, Vallax managed to turn his head. The motion sent a shudder of perfect agony cascading through his skull, the dull knife seeming to press deeper into his brain. The Iron Warrior resisted the clamour of his nerves, forced his head to turn still farther.
What he saw was a ghastly ork, its apelike body draped in a filthy coat of blood-stained white. The alien’s head had a squashed, flattened appearance rendering its broad face somehow toad-like. Above its enormous, toothy grin, the ork’s beady eyes lurked behind a set of tiny glasses with frosted lenses. The monster was ignoring Vallax, puttering about with a tall, box-like device that seemed to be a graveyard of dials and diodes. Electricity arced between horns set about the machine’s superstructure, dancing between them in random leaps.
The ork fumbled with the machine, then delivered a vicious swat to its side as the alien’s patience exploded. Angrily, it started to rip out a wire running between the side of its head to the machine. The wire resisted the ork, however, and before it could complete the operation, its beady eyes noticed Vallax’s awareness.
Clapping its paws together, its toad-like grin opening still wider, the ork returned to its machine, turning dials and smacking its sides.
Suddenly, it seemed as if the inside of Vallax’s head had been set on fire. He clenched his eyes closed, feeling a stabbing agony rippling through his optic nerves. Strange images flashed through his mind, a deranged panoply of confused impressions of savagery and violence. Prominent among the nightmarish discord were images of orks strapped to tables, screaming as their bodies were carved to ribbons by a grinning greenskin surgeon.
The ork paused, peering at him intently. Then the creature’s body began to shake, a braying bellow howled through the room. Vallax struggled to move, but was unsurprised to find that his limbs were securely chained, lashed to some crude metal armature. Even so, his pride refused to accept that he was helpless, that all he could do was sit there and let an ork laugh at him.
Then the Space Marine saw his reflection in the ork’s glasses. He had expected to see himself bound, laid out upon some sort of standing frame. What he hadn’t expected was to see his head bare, battered and shaved. He hadn’t expected to see a section of his skull missing, the living brain standing naked and exposed. The dull knife sensation was explained now. There was a dull knife stuck in his brain, wires fastened to its hilt streaming back to the ork’s weird machine.
The ork gestured with its thumb. Vallax followed the gesture, noting for the first time a rabble of orks clustered about the hatchway leading into the hideous surgery. They were big, brawny types, utterly unlike the squashed surgeon, yet each of them seemed reluctant to trespass on his domain.
Somehow, Vallax found he knew what the monsters were. Kommandos, orks that possessed a strange capacity for strategy and tactics, especially infiltration and ambush. The surgeon was called a painboy, his name was Gorflik and he was held in a weird alchemy of respect and outright terror by the orks of Waaagh! Biglug.
The Iron Warrior’s mind reeled. How did he know this? What obscenity were these filthy xenos perpetrating on his brain?
One of the orks in the doorway, a massive monster wearing camouflaged leggings and a long leather storm coat, the remains of a peaked cap squashed about its cranium, leaned across the threshold and growled something at Gorflik. Vallax could tell from the painboy’s reaction that the growl had been some sort of command. The ork in the coat was called Kaptain Grimruk, boss of the kommandos gathered in the hall.
Gorflik chuckled, adjusting the dials on his machine. Immediately, Vallax felt burning torment flare through his skull. Images were again rising unbidden, not the surface thoughts of the ork, but memories of his own. He could see the Iron Bastion in his mind, could see himself mentally prowling through its halls.
Immediately, Vallax knew the purpose behind this torture, the fiendish function of Gorflik’s machine. Before his thoughts could solidify, Vallax crushed them down with his ferocious will. Over and again in his mind he repeated the war cry of the Legion. Iron within! Iron without!
A snarl of disgust from Gorflik told Vallax his ruse had worked. He had built the mental equivalent of chaff inside his head, blocking the ork from the information it wanted: the layout of the Iron Bastion. The secret routes into and out of the fortress. The ork’s enraged thoughts came storming back across the wire. In his mind, Vallax could see the beast interrogating other captives. When they resisted Gorflik the way Vallax had done, the painboy took steps to break their defiance.
Gorflik reached to his head once more, pulling out the metal prong which connected the wire from the machine to the ork’s brain. Without bothering to clean the probe, the painboy let it fall and started towards the assemblage of cutters and saws Vallax had noted earlier.
The treacherous Oriax had certainly arranged a merciless and ignominious death for him, but as Vallax watched the ork pick out its tools, vindictive determination steeled him for the ordeal. Whatever happened, he would endure. The orks would never break an Iron Warrior. They would kill him first.
But before that happened, Vallax intended to be free. There were things he had to do before he died and it would take more than millions of orks and thousands of kilometres of polluted wasteland to stop him.
Oriax would rue his treachery.
Chains swayed in the fitful breeze created by the atmospheric modulators, clashing against one another in an eerie clangour. The dull, raw impacts as the objects dangled from the stout hooks formed a weird percussion to accompany the sound. The robed mamelukes scurrying about in the dingy, scarlet light which filtered down into the hall shivered with each note of the macabre orchestra, a shiver that owed nothing to the clammy temperature of Algol’s domain.
Each man knew the Iron Warriors regarded him as nothing more than Flesh, something weak and disposable. Skintaker Algol was worse. He found Flesh amusing and spared few opportunities to indulge his perverse humour. His demesne within the Iron Bastion was littered with the wreckage of men and women who had the misfortune to attract his attention. Through deed, misdeed or simply a tragic uniqueness of appearance, once the Skintaker’s eye was upon them, there was no escape.
Algol sat upon an adamantine chair, listening to the sound of the swaying chains and the dull thumps of the things hanging from them. The Iron Warrior’s eyes were half closed, his face contemplative. Around him, eyes averted from their ruinous master, a gang of slaves mended
the gruesome cloak of human skin.
The heavy lids slowly pulled back, exposing the sadistic eyes. Algol smiled coldly as he studied the broken bodies suspended upon the hooks, masses of meat and muscle stripped of skin. There was discord among his grisly chimes. He suspected one of the older components was beginning to give out. It would need to be replaced. Judging by the lack of harmony, he’d require something of about seventy-three kilograms. Less the weight of five litres of blood and two square metres of skin, naturally.
Slowly, Algol lowered his gaze, contemplating the creature standing beneath the chains rather than the creatures suspended above it. Unlike the mamelukes, the flesh-drone didn’t shiver in the chill of the chamber, despite the ice-crystals forming on its pallid skin. True, the face writhed and contorted in various expressions of agony, but that was some extravagance of Fabricator Oriax rather than anything induced by Algol.
The Skintaker found that fact a source of vexation.
‘You may speak now,’ Algol decided, settling back in his chair. He studied a chronometer fashioned from a human skull. ‘The orks should make another push against the perimeter at dawn. I intend to be there to meet them.’
The flesh-drone gave no notice of Algol’s depreciatory tone. All it did was open its mouth and allow the voice of its creator to issue from the speaker implanted in its throat. ‘I am unaccustomed to waiting upon the hedonist indulgences of an inveterate sadist,’ the voice of Oriax hissed from the speaker.
Algol rose from the chair, striding towards the servitor. ‘And I do not grant audiences to a decaying meat-puppet,’ he snarled. ‘If you want to speak with me, stir from your sanctum. I’ll leave what’s left of your mouthpiece where you can salvage it.’
The flesh-drone retreated before the angered Space Marine. ‘Wait, Algol!’ the voice entreated. ‘What I have to disclose will be of interest to you.’
The Iron Warrior hesitated, doubt flickering through his eyes. ‘I will listen until you bore me, Fabricator.’
The flesh-drone eased its way back across the room, chains glancing from its lobotomised cranium. ‘Would you be interested in a cell of rebel Flesh?’ Oriax asked.
Algol didn’t bother concealing his smile, his fingers straying across the folds of his cloak. ‘I have heard claims that some of your minions have strayed from their oaths of loyalty,’ he said.
‘I bring you more than slave gossip and rumour,’ Oriax declared. The mechadendrites fastened to the flesh-drone’s torso unfolded, exposing the gleaming metal skull of a Steel Blood. The gruesome cyborg rose from the servitor’s claws, hovering in the chill air of Algol’s abattoir. The lens in its left eye socket began to glow, throwing a three-dimensional image onto the floor. In exacting detail, the Steel Blood transmitted a view of Colonel Nehring’s command post as it was being overrun by Yuxiang’s rebels.
‘I always keep several sets of eyes around places of interest,’ Oriax explained. ‘The Flesh destroyed one of my Steel Blood that was inside the command post, but they didn’t discover this one.’
‘You believe these maggots are connected with the renegade tech-adepts?’ Algol asked.
The flesh-drone shuffled forwards. ‘These ones are well-organised and well-prepared,’ Oriax explained. ‘There might be someone more capable behind them.’
Algol rose to his feet, chains brushing against his shoulders. ‘I will inform the Warsmith. Detach a combat squad from the walls. We will track down these overbold worms and bring them to account.’ His eyes seemed to glow in the crimson murk. ‘They will tell all before I have finished with them,’ he promised.
The rasp of a mechanised sigh rattled from the flesh-drone’s speaker. ‘You disappoint me, Algol,’ Oriax said. ‘I thought you were more confident in your abilities. An entire combat squad to deal with a few dozen Flesh? The Warsmith will laugh at you for such excess… if he doesn’t shoot you for cowardice.’
‘Do not tempt me, half-warrior,’ Algol snarled at the servitor. ‘No organism alive mocks my valour! I have strode across the battlefields of a thousand worlds, brought death to a million souls. None can question my prowess!’
‘Prove it,’ Oriax’s voice rasped from the servitor. In one swift motion, Algol pounced upon the flesh-drone, ripping its head from its shoulders with his bare hands. Angrily, he dashed the mangled mess of flesh and metal against the wall.
Despite the outburst, Algol found he hadn’t silenced the voice of Oriax. The Fabricator’s words streamed now from the mouth of the Steel Blood.
‘I came here to offer you the glory of smashing these rebels on your own, with none to share in it. Think how well the Warsmith will look upon the Skintaker then.’
Algol dropped the headless husk of the flesh-drone and stared at the hovering Steel Blood, doubt in his gaze. ‘Why would you bestow such a boon upon me?’ he wondered aloud.
‘I never forget my debts,’ Oriax said. The optics of the Steel Blood glowed a little brighter as the transmission continued.
‘There are services you rendered me in the crystal swamps…’
Chapter XVIII
I-Day Plus One Hundred and Twenty
Remnants of the Castellax Air Cohort streaked through the brown smudge of sky, guns roaring as they strafed the orks massed before the walls of Vorago. Bombs rained down upon the scrap-work alien machines, obliterating them in showers of smoke and fire. Each sortie brought death to thousands of the invaders.
It wasn’t enough.
Watching the sorry spectacle from the battlements, Captain Rhodaan could only shake his head at the futility of the air attack. The time for such tactics was long past. Like some grasping miser, Skylord Morax had held the strength of his air force in reserve. Rhodaan could easily imagine the other captain’s intention. It was obvious to anyone with the least degree of observation. Morax had been waiting for this moment, when the enemy came on in full strength, to make the final push against Vorago. Then he would unleash the carefully husbanded might of his Air Cohort against them, breaking their attack and the siege in one fell swoop.
Morax’s plan was typical of those who allowed their contempt for a species as primitive and uncouth as the orks to cloud any appreciation for their capabilities. Because the orks weren’t subtle, because they were crude and simple and direct in their approach to warfare, many commanders made the same mistake. It was the sin of pride and arrogance. Something didn’t need to be clever or complex to kill. It only needed to be strong.
The orks were strong. It offended Rhodaan to admit that, but there was no other way to say it. Where any other army would have broken under Morax’s aerial assault, the orks had held fast, using great dozers to clear away the wreckage and maintain their attack. No thought was spared for their dead, no fear displayed that they might be the next to die. With stupid stubbornness, the orks threw themselves towards one purpose and one purpose only: attack.
With each sortie, the Air Cohort’s strength bled away. Flakwagons and missile launchers took their toll, bringing down several fighters with each pass. Ork planes claimed their share as well, punishing each intrusion by the humans and pursuing them far out into the wastes. Morax had issued orders against any pilot leading orks back to the Air Cohort’s underground aerodromes, and for many of the escaping planes the sight of an ork on its tail was a death sentence whether the xenos caught it or not.
By this stage in the siege, the sorties had become nothing more than the empty posturing of a commander in disgrace. Each time the Air Cohort sallied forth they encountered ever heavier concentrations of flak, ever more numerous swarms of ork planes eager to score a kill. The last few squadrons had barely even started their runs against the alien ground forces before they were compelled to withdraw.
Through his restraint, Morax had allowed the skies of Castellax to belong to the orks. Now, when he wanted to take them back, the Skylord was discovering that it was too late.
Rhodaan turned his gaze from the skies, focusing instead upon the perimeter wall. His section boasted so
me two thousand Flesh, a mix of factory slaves and janissaries, as well as the Space Marines of Squad Kyrith, minus the dead Brother Baelfegor. In his stead, Brother Merihem had been placed under his command. According to Sergeant Ipos, Rhodaan was the only officer capable of even a marginal degree of control when it came to the Obliterator.
The Raptor knew that fragile control had nothing to do with him, but rather owed itself to Merihem’s unsettling fascination with Gomorie and his struggle against the corruption infecting him. Whenever there was a pause in the fighting, sometimes even in the heat of battle, Merihem would stop and stare at Gomorie, his tiny face spreading in a mocking smile. Rhodaan wasn’t certain he wanted to understand the Obliterator’s humour.
‘The xenos are mustering for another push.’ Uzraal reported over the inter-squad vox. He had been stationed within the command post for this section of the perimeter, providing him with access to the intelligence being transmitted down from the Iron Bastion. ‘The big battle-fortress is taking up position on the flank of the main ork encampment. Several thousand orks are disembarking and rushing to reinforce the assault troops around the walls.’ There was a pause and Uzraal’s tone was tense when he continued his report. ‘The xenos are unloading three walkers. Intelligence categorises them as “stompas”.’
Rhodaan felt his blood chill as he heard Uzraal’s statement. Stompas were gigantic ork war machines, somewhere between the hulking dreadnoughts and the Titan-like gargants in size. It was fortunate that the aliens hadn’t been able to construct any of the city-crushing gargants, but the presence of the smaller stompas was still a crisis in the making. Turning his gaze in the direction of the ork camp, Rhodaan focused the optics in his helmet to maximum magnification.
True to Uzraal’s report, he could see the huge, clumsy machines lumbering away from the cyclopean battle-