by C. L. Werner
What was a man except weak, frail Flesh? How could mere Flesh hope to defy Iron? What hope had worms who rose against gods?
He had killed them all. Algol boasted of the ease with which he had tracked the rebels back to their refuge. He sneered as he described the death of each rebel Yuxiang had recruited. None of them had any chance. Fifty armed men against one legionary? The fight was over before it began.
The Skintaker had hoped for an amusing diversion when he descended into the tunnels to hunt his prey. He had hoped the rebels would put up some manner of defence, at least display enough cunning and ingenuity to give Algol pause. The Space Marine hadn’t even broken a sweat, hadn’t even bothered to tune out the transmissions from the Iron Bastion so he could focus entirely upon the hunt. Yuxiang’s rabble had been pathetic, laughable. Children playing at soldiers.
Yuxiang clung to the wall, sucking in the stagnant air, feeling the industrial pollutants singe his lungs. He’d discarded his gas mask and duster long ago, as well as anything else that would weigh him down and tax his endurance. The lasgun had been the last thing he’d cast aside, but he knew his reluctance to part with it had been absurd, giving in to his fear. There was no chance he could fight the Space Marine, Algol could pick him off any time he wanted. If Yuxiang ever allowed the Iron Warrior to get so close as to offer him a chance to shoot, he knew the giant would finish him before he could get off a shot. As though a measly las-bolt could pierce the ceramite armour encasing the monster.
No, all he could do was run. All he could do was delay the inevitable, to draw out the chase. Eventually exhaustion would overwhelm him or Algol would grow bored. Then it would all be over. Until then, all Yuxiang could do was run, to selfishly cling to each terror-soaked moment left to him. Even when death was so near, a man clung to life with a miser’s greed.
‘Your friends are all dead, little one,’ Algol’s voice thundered from the darkness. ‘They have all left you. Left you alone. Left you to me.’
Yuxiang drew another lungful of polluted air and pushed himself away from the wall, mustering his strength for another effort. One hand trailing along the wall, allowing him to keep his bearings, he raced ahead into the darkness. He could hear the monster laugh, the sound echoing through the corridors.
‘Tired? Is the Flesh growing weak?’ Algol mocked. ‘And you thought you could stand against Iron? That is such an insult that I think I will take my time. I’ll start the knife at your throat and you’ll beg me to dig it a little deeper and end your misery. I’ll stop and listen and make you think maybe you have earned mercy. Then I’ll set to work again and you’ll know it will be a long time before I allow you to die.’
Yuxiang tried to block out the Iron Warrior’s thunderous voice as Algol described outrage after outrage, a litany of torture that only a devil incarnate could conceive. Desperately, he drew upon unknown reserves of strength to push ahead, unreasoning fear goading him towards an escape he knew was irrational to hope for. The legionary had superior strength and endurance, enabling him to far outlast Yuxiang. The optics in his helmet allowed him to see in the dark while Yuxiang could only grope blindly down the passages. Even if he didn’t have the benefit of night vision, the Iron Warrior could track the slave by scent alone, his olfactory senses heightened to the sensitivity of a canid.
No, there was no escape from the horrors Algol described in chilling detail. There was only one thing Yuxiang could do. That was to cheat his tormentor of his victory.
To do that meant to silence that urge to survive, to cling to each moment left to him. Yuxiang gripped the knife in his boot, the combat knife Taofang had given him when the janissary had seen Processing Omega and joined the rebellion. He fingered the knife now, running his thumb along its edge. The keen blade cut the skin, drawing a bead of blood from his finger.
Yuxiang knew Algol would be able to smell his blood. The Iron Warrior’s cruel imagination would guess what his prey was about. Through the corridor, the sound of the armoured giant’s rushing steps rumbled like the roar of a train. Yuxiang pressed the blade against his throat, determined to do what he had to before the legionary could stop him.
Then the world came crashing down.
There was a sound like the cracking of a mountain, a wave of hot air that smashed down from the roof, mashing Yuxiang against the floor. He could feel the ground jumping beneath him, the walls shivering beside him. The stink of ferrocrete dust filled the air, blotting out even the industrial stink of pollutants.
Consciousness threatened to abandon Yuxiang, but he stubbornly forced it to maintain its hold on his mind. The knife had been knocked from his hand by the tumult. Yuxiang desperately groped about in the darkness for the lost blade, still intent on denying Algol his victory.
The blade remained elusive. Each heartbeat, Yuxiang expected to feel the Skintaker’s hands close about his throat, lift him from the ground and shake him like a ragdoll. Then the real torture would begin.
By degrees, even through the panic rushing along his spine, Yuxiang became aware that it was becoming brighter in the tunnel. A sickly stream of daylight was filtering down into the passage through a jagged fissure in the roof. Some colossal explosion had caused the ceiling to fracture and come apart. Great chunks of ferrocrete lay strewn about the tunnel, several of them having missed Yuxiang by only a few metres. He wasn’t sure if that was anything to be grateful for. Crushed under tons of rock would be preferable to what Algol intended.
Then, through the veil of dust, Yuxiang saw something that made his heart stop. He could see the skull-like helmet and the ceramite armour of his tormentor, the hideous cloak drawn across the fiend’s shoulders. It was a moment of pure horror as he stared into the blazing optics of the Skintaker.
The moment passed and was replaced by incredulous jubilation. Yes, Yuxiang could see the Skintaker’s head and shoulders, but he couldn’t see anything else. The rest of the Space Marine was buried under a pile of rubble, great masses of ferrocrete and steel girders. One plasteel rod, projecting from the debris, was coated in blood too bright to belong to an ork or unaugmented human. The sight of Algol’s blood drowned Yuxiang’s fear. The monster was mortal after all!
Slowly, Yuxiang approached the pile of rubble, a twisted plasteel rod clenched in his hands. He stared down at the trapped Space Marine, feeling the arrogance and contempt burning behind the optics. He could see Algol struggling to move, straining to push the masses of ferrocrete and steel off his body. A disjointed, fragmented growl rasped from the damaged vox-casters, allowing Yuxiang to hear only every other word in a steady stream of threats and invective.
Yuxiang was no artificer, no craftsman trained in armourcraft. What he knew were machines, the presses of the factory. There was one simple rule to any machine: it was weakest where its moving parts were. Studying the trapped Space Marine, Yuxiang noted the slight gap between gorget and helmet designed to allow the legionary to turn his head. A cold smile formed on Yuxiang’s face. He lifted the jagged twist of plasteel with its sharp point.
‘This is how it ends,’ Yuxiang told the imprisoned devil. ‘Sometimes even the worm gets its chance. Sometimes even a god dies at a man’s hand!’
Vengefully, Yuxiang drove the plasteel stake into Algol’s throat, worrying it around in the wound until all the Larraman cells in his body couldn’t stop the bleeding. As Algol’s blood tried to seal the wound with scar tissue, Yuxiang’s vicious attentions tore them open again.
Bit by bit, the Skintaker was bleeding out. It was a slow, humiliating death. The sort of death Algol had revelled in bestowing.
The irony of his own destruction only made Algol’s humiliation more complete.
Even locked inside his immense suit of Terminator armour, the sound of the wailing daemons clawed at Warsmith Andraaz’s ears, scratching at his mind with icy talons. He could feel their unnatural essence pawing at the core of his being, hungrily caressing that eternal spark ecclesiarchs and philosophers called the soul. He felt the urge to submit to
the profane violation, to surrender himself to the call of Chaos.
The Warsmith’s scarred face hardened. His tyrannical will exerted itself, driving back the temptations threatening to lure him to distraction. Chaos was a force, a power, a cosmic energy to be tapped and harnessed, exploited and dominated. Let the Word Bearers and Thousand Sons wallow in their bog of superstition and slavery. Let the World Eaters and the Emperor’s Children surrender their very identity to ruinous gods, allow their minds to be devoured by daemonic desires. The Third Grand Company would remain pure. The Third Grand Company would remain steadfast. They would not lose focus upon the Long War. They would not forget the reason for their hate. It was theirs, it belonged to them. They would share their revenge with no one, mortal or god.
Andraaz cast his gaze across the Daemonculum, watching as the flesh-drones brought their offerings before the chained daemons. He could feel the throb of infernal power racing through the bloodwood platform, smell the ethereal taint of warp energy as it gathered in the chamber. Weird coruscations of light crackled between the pillars, plays of brilliance that were at once all colours and none at all.
The Warsmith flexed his fingers, the scythe-like talons of the power claw fitted to his armour unfolding in response, energy rippling down each blade. He could feel the ancient weapon’s eagerness, its thirst for battle. Soon, he promised it, soon it would be sated. It would rend and tear, rip and slash until the very end, until the last breath had been crushed from his body.
He turned his gaze from the daemons and their bloody repast, looking instead upon the five armoured giants standing beside him on the bloodwood dais. The Rending Guard, veterans of Isstvan and Olympia, victors of a million battles. Each of the Iron Warriors was entombed within a hulking mass of ceramite and titanium, their archaic Terminator armour festooned with gilded skulls and runic script. Oaths of blood and honour bound them to the Warsmith, joined their very souls to serving Andraaz faithfully and without question. They would lay down their lives for the Warsmith.
Today, they would.
Andraaz stared hard at his Rending Guard, burning every spike and rivet adorning their armour into his memory. They had served him well down through the millennia, been his strong right hand in every conflict. Never had they failed him. A flicker of guilt tried to find its way into the Warsmith’s hearts as the thought came to him that he had failed them in the end. Andraaz dismissed the idea. He was Warsmith. In a very real way, he was the Third Grand Company. The Iron Warriors under his command were there to serve and obey. He owed no obligations to them. They would fight and they would die to bring glory to Andraaz.
Today, they would die. Andraaz had decided that when he led the Rending Guard into the depths of the Iron Bastion and into Fabricator Oriax’s sanctum. With the breaking of the perimeter wall and the firebreak, there was no longer any question of holding back the xenos scum. Castellax was lost. The Iron Warriors might hold out for a few more months in the Bastion, but the end would be the same. There was no hope of victory now.
All that was left to them was to seize a final chance at glory. To make the orks pay dearly for their triumph. A butcher’s bill that would make even the aliens tremble.
In defeat, Andraaz would seize the only honour left to him. He would meet the ork warlord on the battlefield. He would slay the beast that had brought doom to his world.
Across the chamber, Andraaz could see Fabricator Oriax, the Techmarine’s mechanised manipulators flying about the oval control console arrayed about him, depressing glowing runes and turning bronze dials. The original Daemonculum had required a coven of thirteen psi-witches to control it. Through his machinery, the new Daemonculum needed only Oriax.
The Warsmith’s gaze hardened as he considered the Techmarine and his creation. How long had the Daemonculum been operational? How long had Oriax deceived him about its capabilities? Andraaz had been aware for many decades that the Fabricator was obsessed with the Daemonculum, but he had never suspected how deep that obsession ran. Oriax seemed unduly possessive, as though he had forgotten that the device, and Fabricator himself, belonged to Andraaz.
If he hadn’t needed Oriax to control the Daemonculum now, Andraaz would have shown the Techmarine what it meant to deceive a Warsmith. Circumstances, however, had made him essential to Andraaz’s final chance for glory. The Fabricator’s Steel Blood had located the ork warlord, Biglug. The warlord couldn’t afford to miss the final battle for control of Castellax, if he did then he would lose his hold over the other orks and some other alien would rise to challenge him. Biglug had to participate in the final attack and Oriax’s Steel Blood had spotted the xenos monster leading a mob of his fellows into the breach. Even now, the servitor-spies were monitoring the ork warlord, transmitting updates directly to Oriax’s sanctum.
Biglug had been cagey throughout the campaign, keeping himself away from the battlefield. Perhaps now he felt the Iron Warriors were broken, that they could pose no further threat to him. The ork was due for a grim surprise.
The Daemonculum would transport Andraaz and the Rending Guard directly to the warlord’s position, teleporting them past the thousands of orks closing upon the Iron Bastion. When Oriax completed the arcane sequences and activated the eldritch machinery, Andraaz would step through the warp and meet his destiny.
Warsmith and warlord would meet and to the victor would belong the final glory.
Slaves scattered as the three Raptors stormed into the communications centre. Uzraal tossed the mangled body of the janissary officer who had tried to stop them at the door. The Flesh had been posted there on orders from Sergeant Ipos. The man’s sense of duty had brought him a hideous death. The other janissaries wisely chose to stand down.
Rhodaan’s wings fluttered irritably as he cast his gaze across the hall. The pict screens bolted to the walls displayed scenes from all across Vorago, scenes of the orks rampaging through the ruins. Here and there, pockets of Iron Warriors could be seen, desperately trying to hold sections of the wall. Rhodaan’s blood boiled as he appreciated the dilemma his battle-brothers faced. Annihilation or disobedience. For an Iron Warrior, it was a difficult choice to make.
With every passing moment, however, Rhodaan was convinced he had made the right choice. Upon reaching the Iron Bastion, the Raptors had sought out Warsmith Andraaz, only to learn from his major-domo that he was absent. Along with his bodyguard, the Warsmith had disappeared. He had left no word of either his destination or his intentions. In his absence, the Warsmith had left Sergeant Ipos to coordinate the city’s defence.
That germ of information had brought the Raptors into the communications centre, smashing their way past doors and guards to reach the heart of the Bastion. The Warsmith had left before the explosion that ripped through the walls. That meant the suicidal, irrational orders to hold and die had come from Ipos alone. Rhodaan intended to have a few words with the seneschal. Then it was his intention to peel Ipos out of his power armour and start removing each of the traitor’s implants with his bare hands.
‘Where is Ipos?’ Rhodaan growled over his vox, his voice booming from the speakers in his horned helmet. The terrified Flesh didn’t answer, but a few of them turned anxious eyes towards the armoured nexus at the centre of the room. That told Rhodaan everything he needed to know.
Resembling a multi-faceted cyst of titanium, the nexus was designed as a final control point in the event the Bastion was invaded. Within the armoured tomb, communications could be maintained even after the rest of the tower was lost to the enemy. Designed to resist an army, it was intended as a refuge that could operate for weeks on its own.
Rhodaan glared at the armoured nexus, studying its structure. If he had been intent on capturing it intact he would have found the proposition daunting. However, despite his desire for answers, he was too practical to insist on taking Ipos alive.
‘Melta bombs,’ Rhodaan ordered. The Flesh in the communications centre watched in horror as Gomorie and Uzraal approached the nexus, planting the
deadly explosives in the few relays projecting from the armoured shell. One of the humans screamed, the sound initiating a panicked exodus. The Space Marines ignored the Flesh fleeing past them, focused only upon their objective.
‘Ipos,’ Rhodaan snarled over his vox, using a general frequency that any Iron Warrior would be able to receive. ‘You have betrayed the Third Grand Company. I will give you a count of five to come out and answer for your treason.’ Expectant silence brooded in the communications centre as the Raptors waited. The door of the nexus remained sealed.
‘Die like a traitor dog then!’ Rhodaan roared. He brought his gauntlet down in a slashing gesture. Gomorie depressed the activation stud on the detonator he held.
Star-fire blazed from the nexus as the melta bombs exploded, the shock of the blast ripping through the communications centre with the fury of a hurricane. Cracks snaked across the floor, rubble rained down from the ceiling, pict screens warped and shattered. Smoke billowed from toppled control terminals and communication relays.
The Raptors strode through the devastation like armoured gods marching through Armageddon. Before them, the nexus was broken, a deep crack crawling down its face. Gomorie walked to the titanium shell, slid his fingers into the crack. With a tremendous heave, he sent the broken section of the shell crashing to the floor.
The interior of the nexus was a shambles. Machinery lay in tangles of wire and conduit, shattered bits of pict screen lay strewn across everything. Amidst the wreckage, his armour breached and torn, was the hulk of Sergeant Ipos.
Vindictively, Rhodaan moved to drag the corpse from the debris. As he approached, however, he noted the ugly burn at the centre of the dead Iron Warrior’s chest, a mark that looked to have been inflicted by a close-range plasma discharge. What was more, it was an old wound, at least several hours.