by C. L. Werner
‘Mingzhou!’ Taofang screamed at the sniper. ‘We have to get out of here!’ Yuxiang leapt down from the cab and added his voice to the janissary’s.
‘Get to cover!’ Mingzhou shouted back. ‘He can’t hit me under here unless he gets close! And when he does, I’ll put a hotshot through his skull!’
The bolter cracked again. Taofang cried out as he watched Mingzhou’s body jerk up and strike the underside of the tractor. Her body slumped back against the ferrocrete paving, blood streaming from her shattered flesh. Instead of closing upon her and coming within range of the sniper’s rifle, the Iron Warrior had fired his shot into the floor several metres in front of the tractor, deflecting his shot so that it arced beneath the vehicle and struck the woman hidden there.
‘She’s dead!’ Yuxiang shouted, trying to drag Taofang away. The janissary pulled away, his hands tightening about the stock of his lasgun. Yuxiang watched incredulously as the janissary began marching down the tunnel towards Algol, the crack of his lasgun echoing through the tunnel as he advanced, oblivious to the distance between himself and his enemy.
Yuxiang knew there was nothing he could do to help Taofang. The janissary was marching to his death, a fate he seemed now to welcome. Algol, with sadistic amusement, held his fire, allowing the doomed man to advance down the tunnel knowing he could strike the soldier down any time he wanted.
Yuxiang turned and ran into the darkness. Survival, the will to live, thundered through his veins, urging him onwards. Behind him, he could hear the steady crack of Taofang’s lasgun, the reports receding into the distance. Finally, as the reports became faint, he heard the boom of the bolter one last time.
He was alone in the maze of tunnels now and somewhere behind him, coming after him as surely as Death, was the Skintaker.
A susurrus of binary echoed through the catacombs, a staccato of pious devotion and supplication filled the darkness. Cowled heads were raised, mechanical eyes were bright with the fervour of zealous anticipation, cybernetic claws were twined in prayer.
Above the conspirators, who had risked all to assemble it, who had offended their own strictures to cobble it together, the warhead of Vindex Lartius hung upon its chains. Like the eidolon of some techno-barbarian cult, the great bomb beamed down upon them, seeming to revel in their adoration. Its machine-spirit would soon claim its function, the purpose to which it was formed. The perfect fusion of purpose and destiny that only the divine machine could achieve.
If it was still possible, Enginseer Heroditus might have felt envy for the purity of Vindex Lartius. Its essence hadn’t been violated and abused by the obscenities of the Iron Warriors. It hadn’t been coerced into labouring for the foul achievements of Fabricator Oriax, the arch-heretic of Castellax. It was clean of the blasphemy with which every man in the catacomb had desecrated himself.
Every man save one. Logis Acestes had never submitted to enslavement, had never allowed himself to be subjected to profane servitude under Oriax. He had hidden himself, bided his time until the opportunity to strike back at the heretics was presented to them by the grace of the Machine-God.
Of them all, only Acestes was clean enough in spirit and purpose to sing the psalm that would arm the warhead, to press the rune that would detonate Vindex Lartius and bring the purifying fires of annihilation to the lords of Castellax. It was an honour of which only Acestes was worthy. Only he could lead them into redemption.
The tech-priests maintained their Lingua-Technis chant while Acestes mounted the causeway and approached the gilded cabinet in which was housed the sacred rune of detonation. He folded his hands together, bowed his head in an attitude of reverence. A soft hiss of binary crackled from his vox-caster, a sonic pulse that swept through the cavernous chamber.
Instantly, the chorus of the conspirators was silenced. Heroditus struggled to speak, but every relay and servo within his body refused to respond, locked into fail-safe redundancies from which they wouldn’t stir. His eyes, the only parts of him that were organic and therefore mobile, rolled in their sockets. His optic sensors observed that the entire congregation had been gripped by the same affliction. Frozen in place, solemn and silent as steel statues, none of them could even give voice to his distress.
Heroditus felt his mind shudder, aware that it was not simply motion that was denied to him. All functionality had been restricted. The orisons of distraction, the subroutine of deception he had been feeding into the spy-implants were no longer running. The implants, if they continued to function, if they weren’t afflicted by the plague-protocol, might even now be alerting Oriax to what the conspirators had achieved. The Iron Warriors might even now be descending upon this place to dismantle Vindex Lartius.
Fear, that most ancient and primal of emotions, coursed through the enginseer’s brain. Coming so close to fulfilling their purpose and achieving redemption only to have it all snatched away from them at the very edge of countdown! If he still possessed tear ducts, Heroditus knew he would have wept for the malicious cruelty of fate.
Then hope stirred within him, rushing through his brain without the impetus of a valve-pump to speed it along. Upon the causeway, Heroditus saw motion! Logis Acestes was raising his head, was staring across the other tech-priests, studying their predicament. Victory and redemption were still within their grasp. It needed only one voice to sing the psalm of activation, one hand to depress the rune of detonation!
Acestes gazed out across the conspirators, the lenses of his optics pivoting within the sockets of his skull. From his speakers, a voice boomed down, but it was not the voice of the logis. It was a voice that had become even more familiar to the tech-priests during the long centuries of occupation. It was the voice of the arch-heretic. The voice of Fabricator Oriax.
‘We come to the end of all things,’ Oriax’s words crackled from Acestes’s speakers. ‘Your craft and efficiency in achieving your purpose have been exemplary. I knew when I first conceived this plan that your productivity would be more zealous were you to labour under an appealing delusion.’ Acestes lifted his arms, extending them outwards to better display his robed chassis. ‘Towards that end, I revived your Logis Acestes from the dust of dissolution, crafting a replica of his semblance and infusing it with a simulacra of his mentality. You should feel honoured. Seldom have I worked so diligently upon one of my flesh-drones.’
Heroditus felt the magnitude of the Fabricator’s betrayal come crushing down upon him. Not for an instant could he question the evidence of his senses. Through the deception of Logis Acestes, Oriax had preyed upon their faith and defiance, had exploited the embers of rebellion burning inside them. Like some daemonic maestro, he had conducted the conspiracy from the very beginning, directing its every move.
‘The time is at hand,’ Oriax pronounced. ‘The full weight of the ork attack descends upon Vorago. Now the Iron Warriors will be annihilated. Vindex Lartius shall break the walls and the horde shall pour in, overwhelming the traitors. The Third Grand Company will be blotted from existence, Warsmith Andraaz will die in disgrace knowing all his achievements perish with him.’ The static crackle of Oriax’s laughter hissed from Acestes’s speakers.
‘I tell you all of this, so that as your spirits are hurled into the void, you will understand,’ Oriax said. ‘Like the orks, you have been a useful tool. I would feel uneasy allowing you to die under the delusion that your sacrifice has been for your Omnissiah and your False Emperor. Understand, as I activate Vindex Lartius, that you perish not as martyrs, but simply as pawns of Oriax!’
The Fabricator’s words rang in Heroditus’s audio relays as he watched the replica of Acestes reach into the gilded cabinet to depress the rune which would annihilate them all.
Chapter XIX
I-Day Plus One Hundred and Twenty-One
Rhodaan brought the churning edge of his chainsword slashing across the snarling face of his adversary, sending a spray of green flesh and yellow tusks spurting across the wall. The ork crumpled, its fingers still tugging at the trigger of its pistol
. Rhodaan kicked the twitching corpse out of his way and lunged at the next alien he had marked for slaughter. There was no shortage of choices. With each breath, dozens of orks were leaping down from the rusty shoulders of the stompa, howling with bloodlust as they dropped to the wall. The huge scrap metal hull of the war machine loomed high above the wall, its massive guns lobbing shells into the city, its spotlights blazing like the eyes of a mad god.
The death cry of an ork shrieked through the audio relays in Rhodaan’s helmet as he opened its guts with his sword and vaporised its chest with a blast of plasma. The Iron Warrior dismissed his mutilated foe, spinning around to catch another ork in mid-drop. The alien’s bullets glanced from his power armour, but the teeth of Rhodaan’s grinding sword caught it squarely as it fell, cutting it open from groin to throat. The severed halves of the ork flopped about its killer’s feet, greasy alien ichor spraying from its organs.
There was no pleasure in killing the orks, however many Rhodaan slew. The deaths were meaningless, devoid of any tactical significance. The fact that the stompas had reached the wall rendered the situation untenable. If the Iron Warriors’ artillery had been able to stop their advance or if Morax could have assembled enough of his strike-bombers to make a direct assault on them, then perhaps the walls could have held. But none of these things had happened. Caught in a fixed position, compelled to rely upon the fire support of mere Flesh, the Space Marines were engaged in a war of attrition now. No tactics, no strategy, not even martial discipline and superior weaponry. Everything was boiling down to a question of simple numbers. With perhaps forty Iron Warriors spread out amongst the entirety of the defences, the numbers favoured the orks by several orders of magnitude.
Rhodaan clenched his teeth as he incinerated the face of a charging ork. Reason railed against the absurdity of the commands coming from the Iron Bastion, yet there was no denying the voice was that of Sergeant Ipos, the Warsmith’s seneschal. What they amounted to was ‘hold and die’, the sort of command dispatched to replaceable Flesh, not to hardened Space Marines. Certainly not to Raptors, the elite of the elite.
Spinning to cut the legs out from under a monster ork with a steam-powered industrial claw welded to its forearm, Rhodaan wracked his mind for some way, some excuse, to discard the orders he had been given. Some way to save himself and his Iron Warriors.
‘Lord captain,’ Brother Uzraal’s voice crackled over the vox. ‘The seismic index of the stompa’s bludgeons has increased ten-fold.’ Stationed within the janissary command post for this section of the perimeter, Uzraal was able to access directly the various intelligence filtering into the headquarters. Among that intelligence was the data being transmitted by the stability cogitators buried deep inside the perimeter wall. From the very start of their attack, the stompas had employed their gigantic claws to pound the wall. Now, it seemed, their barbaric efforts were finally beginning to wear down the ferrocrete.
‘Estimated time before collapse?’ Rhodaan inquired as his chainsword severed the roof of an ork’s skull. The alien froze in its tracks, staring stupidly at the stew of blood and brains dripping down its hands. The Iron Warrior finished it with a thrust that crunched through its ribs and pulped its heart.
‘Collapse within the next rotation,’ Uzraal reported, ‘but we can expect fractures before then. The entire front façade will probably shear off.’
Through his boots, Rhodaan could feel the steady tremor of the stompa’s claw pounding away, a tattoo of destruction that was relentless and implacable. The aliens didn’t care how many of their own perished when the wall came down, that was of no consequence to them at all. What mattered was breaking through this obstacle that had defied them, seeing it smashed down and brought low. Even the orks, Rhodaan thought bitterly, understand that fighting for control of the wall is pointless.
Turning to parry the assault of a screaming ork wielding an electrified mattock, Rhodaan suddenly found himself catapulted into the air, his armoured body spinning end over end as he was hurled far into the smog-choked sky. The air around him was thick with huge chunks of ferrocrete, twisted slabs of metal, gory strips of meat that could only dimly be recognised as belonging to either humans or orks. The audio relays in his helmet emitted only a soft buzz, their dampeners overwhelmed by some terrific sound.
The demi-organic wings fixed to Rhodaan’s jump pack snapped open, turning his aerial tumble into a controlled descent. He was forced to shift and weave through the cascade of debris, nearly being swatted from the sky by a jagged lump of metal he slowly realised was the claw from one of the stompas. It had been sheared off at the joint, tons of steel hurled hundreds of metres into the sky. The force required to do such a thing was incredible, almost unbelievable.
Rhodaan had a full appreciation of how unbelievable a moment later. The filters in his helmet’s optics pierced the thick clouds of smoke and dust, revealing the shattered landscape below. Where the firebreak abutting the perimeter wall had stood there was now just a jagged crater. Hundreds of metres of wall had been obliterated by some tremendous subterranean explosion, the force of the blast crippling the stompa attacking the nearby section, flinging it like a tinker toy to lie floundering on its side, its massive feet churning futilely at the empty air. How many thousands of orks and Flesh had been annihilated outright in the blast, Rhodaan couldn’t say, but he could see their bodies strewn about everywhere. Scattered survivors, dazed and confused, crawled about the ruins.
The Raptor’s mind whirled. Was it possible the orks had sent sappers underneath the wall, that the brutish xenos had managed to infiltrate the complex underground defences of Vorago to plant some planet-cracking bomb under the city? It was a theory that repulsed Rhodaan, yet what other explanation was there?
Increasing the magnification of his optics, Rhodaan forgot his questions about why and how. Beyond the blast, a vast horde of orks were gathering, drawn like moths to the violence of the explosion. At the moment, the aliens were confused and indecisive, but as soon as the smoke cleared they would know what to do. They would see that the blast had obliterated the wall, leaving the interior of Vorago wide open.
‘Squad Kyrith,’ Rhodaan snarled into his vox. His helmet’s external audio receptors were still buzzing from the detonation, but the internal relays were still functional. ‘Report!’
‘Brother Gomorie. Thrown clear. I am two kilometres from your position, lord captain.’
‘Brother Uzraal. Coordinating the Flesh in opening the collapsed passage into the command post.’
Rhodaan waited, but no reply came from Pazuriel. Another of his formidable Raptors squandered in a wasteful death. A sudden thought came to him as he considered the reduced strength of his command. ‘Brother Merihem?’
The Obliterator’s voice hissed across the vox. ‘I function,’ the monster growled. ‘My position is five hundred metres from your location. Allow me a space for my diagnostics to recalibrate.’ Over the vox, Rhodaan could hear a grisly sucking sound, like boiled flesh being stripped from raw bone. Whatever adjustments Merihem’s corrupt body was making, he didn’t want to know.
‘Orders, lord captain?’ Brother Gomorie asked.
Rhodaan stared grimly at the wall. The orders he had been given by Sergeant Ipos were to hold their position, but their position didn’t exist any more. It had been annihilated in the blast. A cold smile formed on his face.
‘Fall back to the Iron Bastion,’ Rhodaan decided. ‘Use your jump packs. We will rendezvous at central command.’ A murderous edge crept into his voice. ‘I think I’m going to discuss strategy with Sergeant Ipos.’
Uzraal’s voice crackled across the vox. ‘Lord captain, the Flesh here want to know what assistance they can render us. Shall I execute them for their impertinence?’
There was a touch of eagerness in Uzraal’s tone that Rhodaan didn’t feel like indulging. ‘Negative. Save your ammunition. We may need it.’ As he gave the command, his mind turned again to Merihem. The Obliterator’s ability to generate his
own ammunition would be beneficial if the monster’s talents could be properly harnessed. He had a feeling that something was terribly wrong back at the Bastion, something he would need every resource to confront.
‘Brother Merihem, what is your situation? Can you make your way back to the Bastion?’
The Obliterator’s hiss crackled across the channel. ‘I am partially extracted from a three-metre deep impact crater. There is a damaged manufactorum ten metres to my west, a smashed Air Cohort fighter fifty metres to my north and a squad of janissaries with a disabled truck one hundred metres to my south,’ Merihem reported.
‘Can you commandeer the transport from the Flesh?’ Rhodaan asked.
The Obliterator’s amusement rippled through Rhodaan’s helmet. ‘Do you think they can stop me, lord captain?’
Rhodaan ignored the question, staring instead at the ork horde. The smoke was clearing now and the aliens were able to see some of the damage that had been done. Already, excited orks were jabbering at their fellows, sometimes punctuating their words by firing a burst into the smoke. It wouldn’t be long now.
‘Squad Kyrith, withdraw to the Bastion,’ Rhodaan ordered. ‘Vorago is lost.’
As he ignited his thrusters and soared across the devastation, his helmet’s external audio crackled back into life. Behind him, Rhodaan could hear the orks give voice to a mighty roar, a bestial cry that had heralded carnage and atrocity across an entire galaxy. He didn’t need to look back to know the horde was rushing into the breach. That semi-articulate roar told him the orks were on the attack.
‘Waaagh!’
Darkness. It had become the entirety of existence, a blackness so all-encompassing that it assumed its own voice. The voice of darkness, roaring through the ears, bellowing its malignance with a thunderous dirge.
No, Yuxiang corrected himself, it was not the darkness that roared and raged, it was the thing which lurked in that darkness. The armoured devil who stalked him through the catacombs, calling out to him with the amplified boom of vox-casters. The fiend whose sadistic taunts pursued him through the empty tunnels, mocking him for his audacity.