by C. L. Werner
‘What about me?’ Captain Morax’s voice hissed across the vox.
Rhodaan smiled. ‘Try to keep up,’ he told the Skylord.
Corrosive gas spewed from vents set into ceiling and floor, while titanium panels slid out from the walls to seal either end of the corridor. The glowing, yellowish vapour sizzled as it settled against the Iron Warriors’ power armour, stripping away the smooth veneer and bubbling against the raw ceramite beneath. Rhodaan could well imagine that the gas was specially created to penetrate power armour. He didn’t like to think what it would do to mere flesh and bone.
‘Brother Merihem,’ Rhodaan snapped, pointing his gauntlet at the titanium panel blocking the way ahead.
The Obliterator surged forwards, his armour steaming as the gas billowed around him. Merihem’s left arm rippled, its mass contorting into a nest of slender metal shafts tipped with blocky focusing arrays. A mechanical whine sounded from his shoulder as he swung the multi-melta towards the titanium panel and unleashed its hideous energies against it.
For an instant, the panel glowed white hot, then it cracked and crumbled, smashing to the floor in a heap of smouldering cinders. The Space Marines rushed through the opening, heedless of the heat continuing to rise from the edges of the hole. Streamers of gas clawed at them as they escaped the trap, as though trying to draw them back with phantom fingers.
Beyond the corridor was a small anteroom, devoid of all adornment. Rhodaan’s suspicions rose to the fore. Every hall and passage leading to Oriax’s sanctum had been trapped, testing the Iron Warriors’ mettle every step of the way. Even for Space Marines, Rhodaan considered it almost miraculous they had suffered no casualties in their approach. Now there was this room, with its deceptive tranquillity. What hidden menace lurked here?
Rhodaan glared at the walls. No, he was tired of playing by the Fabricator’s rules. ‘Brother Uzraal,’ he growled into the vox. ‘Melta bombs. North wall.’
Uzraal checked the dispenser on his belt. ‘Two left,’ he reported.
‘That should be enough,’ Rhodaan said, motioning Uzraal to proceed.
Morax grabbed Rhodaan’s shoulder, spinning him around. ‘There’s no cover,’ he objected. ‘We’ll be caught in the blast.’
Rhodaan removed the Skylord’s hand. ‘Better than whatever Oriax has prepared for us,’ he stated. ‘If you haven’t noticed, his traps are worse the further we go. It’s time we stopped doing what he expects us to do.’
Uzraal came dashing back to the other Raptors, the bombs placed against the wall. They dropped down into a crouch, covering their heads. Morax looked at them for a second, then hastily followed their example. Merihem turned his back to the wall, the metallic morass of his body coalescing into thick armour plates.
The detonation of the bombs was deafening. Again, the external audio relays in his helmet crackled and went silent, shielding him from the worst of the din. Chunks of ferrocrete and bits of plasteel glanced from his power armour. The optics in his helmet dropped filters across his vision to penetrate the dust boiling from the ruptured wall. When he saw what was beyond the breach, Rhodaan clenched his fist in vicious jubilation.
Behind the anteroom was a chamber Rhodaan recognised, a place he had been once before. By blasting their way through the wall, they had bypassed the labyrinth of halls and passages and penetrated directly to the heart of Oriax’s domain.
They were in the sanctum.
As soon as he stepped through the breach, Rhodaan knew they were too late. He could feel the clammy, unnatural clutch of warp energies that saturated the sanctum. Turning his gaze towards the chamber that housed the Daemonculum, he could see the weird afterglow emanating from the bloodwood dais. He could see the flesh-drones marching away from the bound daemons, the dead husks of their offerings swaying limply from their mechadendrites.
The Daemonculum had already been used, and recently. Warsmith Andraaz and the Rending Guard were gone, transported to whatever fate Oriax had chosen for them.
‘You are fortunate, Captain Rhodaan,’ Fabricator Oriax’s voice crackled through his sanctum, echoing from a hundred vox-casters. ‘I was aware of your intrusion into
my domain, but I wasn’t at liberty to give your trespass my
full attention. Other, more pressing matters required
my undivided devotion. One does not draw upon the forces of the warp simply by flicking a switch. Neither are those energies so easily dismissed.’
Rhodaan spotted one of the macabre Steel Blood gliding towards him, its optics glowing crimson in the darkness. A blast from his plasma pistol sent the skull-like machine crashing to the floor. ‘You have betrayed the Legion and the Warsmith,’ Rhodaan accused. Another Steel Blood came diving down towards him and quickly shared the fate of its predecessor. ‘You have forgotten your duty, forgotten your honour!’
‘Forgotten?’ There was a static crackle as the Fabricator laughed. ‘I have not forgotten them. I have simply evolved past such archaic conceits. Duty, honour, loyalty. As a Legion, we should have cast them aside long ago. There is only one thing that is of consequence in the galaxy. Knowledge. That is the only true power. The genesis of creation and destruction.’
From behind him, a third Steel Blood hurtled towards Rhodaan, diving at the base of his helmet. Before it could strike him, however, the metal skull flew apart in a burst of sparks and flame. He could see Gomorie standing just beyond the breach, staring at his corrupted hand, a hand that had now fused itself around his bolt pistol and was slowly absorbing the weapon into itself. The other Iron Warriors pressed past Gomorie. There was a look of vicious amusement on Merihem’s little face as he passed by.
‘This way,’ Rhodaan told the others, guiding them through the nest of machinery and around the periphery of the Daemonculum. If the uncanny device truly demanded Oriax’s attention, then the Fabricator should be seated behind the same command console he had used when transporting Squad Vidarna and Squad Kyrith to Dirgas.
‘You think you have come here as my executioners?’ Oriax’s voice bellowed from the vox-casters. ‘Your ignorance pains and upsets me.’
Morax cried out in alarm as the wall beside him suddenly dropped away. Through the opening lumbered the hulking flesh-drones Oriax employed to feed the Daemonculum. Dead slaves still shackled to their mechadendrites, the cyborgs struck with the steel talons that replaced their natural limbs. The Skylord reeled away, mashing the head of one servitor with the fist of his gauntlet.
‘You are here to die,’ Oriax declared. ‘All who share the secrets of my Daemonculum will die. I shall share that power with no one!’
Merihem swung around, his left arm rippling as it transformed into a heavy flamer. Sheets of fire engulfed the flesh-drones, immolating their organics, shorting out their electronics and melting the fibre-plastic nerve-bundles that provided them with motion. The flesh-drones stumbled on a few paces, then crashed in burning heaps.
‘The superstitious pesedjet never understood what they had,’ Oriax crowed. ‘It was left to me alone to unlock the secrets of the Daemonculum, to understand its power and its potential!’
A second phalanx of servitors emerged from behind the walls. Rhodaan left the other Iron Warriors to attend to them. There was only one enemy they had to kill, and he intended to kill him. Across the periphery of the Daemonculum, he could see the Fabricator behind his console, the Techmarine’s confusion of artificial limbs flying across the rune-panels.
Fighting down the revulsion that filled every atom of his being, Rhodaan drew his chainsword and charged across the Daemonculum. He could feel the bound daemons grab at him with ethereal tentacles, struggling to draw his blood to them, to consume the vibrancy of his soul. Their siren wails thundered through his body; begging, threatening, entreating, promising. Only his obligation to the Third Grand Company gave him the will to resist, the strength to plough through their invisible snare. Purity was anathema to the creatures of the warp and nothing was more pure than vengeance.
�
�Warsmith Andraaz would not allow me to continue my work,’ Oriax’s voice droned from the vox-casters. ‘He was impatient to exploit the Daemonculum’s power.
He didn’t appreciate the need to understand its secrets, to know how it worked.’
Rhodaan leaped across the boundary of the Daemonculum, using Eurydice to propel him straight across the sanctum to Oriax’s command console. There was a look of almost comical incredulity on the Fabricator’s face as he looked up and saw Rhodaan’s chainsword slashing down at him.
‘I don’t care how it works,’ Rhodaan snarled at the traitor. ‘I only care how this works!’
Suddenly, a fist of steel slammed into Rhodaan, hurling him away from the console. He crashed into a ring of pict screens, smashing them into shatters beneath his armoured weight. It was the Raptor’s turn to stare incredulously at his foe. Oriax was stepping from behind his console, his withered legs thickening with each step. By contrast, the Fabricator’s left hand began to shrivel, assuming a more natural size than that of the fist which had sent Rhodaan flying.
The optics sunk into Oriax’s face fixed themselves on Rhodaan’s sprawled figure. ‘That,’ the Fabricator hissed, pressing a mechadendrite to the wound in his forehead where the edge of Rhodaan’s sword had grazed him, ‘was inconvenient.’
When Warsmith Andraaz emerged from the Daemonculum, he found himself in a wasteland of rubble and torn bodies, wrecked machines and ruined buildings. In the distance, rising from the ruins, he could see the spire of the Iron Bastion, its structure illuminated by eerie green light as ork artillery shells impacted against the tower’s void shields. Everywhere the howls of orks filled the air, the triumphant roars of beasts gone mad with the thrill of victory.
The Warsmith’s power claw crackled with energy as he brought its talons shearing through the greenskinned alien standing almost at his very feet, gawking at him in amazement. Ribbons of orkoid flesh exploded into the air as the claw’s field shredded the alien. Andraaz raised the storm bolter in his right hand and sent a salvo of explosive shells slamming into a mob of orks trying to pry their way into a disabled tank. Alien blood sprayed across the hull as the Iron Warrior’s shells tore the vandals apart.
‘Biglug!’ Andraaz shouted, his voice thundering through the rubble, hurled down the streets by his armour’s vox-casters. ‘Show yourself, you craven vermin!’
The Warsmith’s armour was rattled by a fusillade of bullets and shells, orks springing from the rubble to assault the hulking Space Marine. Andraaz’s Terminator armour withstood the motley barrage, the Warsmith’s storm bolter sending a far more lethal response slamming into the greenskinned aliens. ‘Concentrate fire on the larger groupings,’ Andraaz growled into his vox. ‘We’ll try to draw out their warlord.’
Only silence answered the Warsmith. He sent a last salvo ripping through a mob of yellow-garbed orks, then turned to snarl a reprimand at the Terminators behind him. What he saw sent a rush of blood pounding through his hearts. The Rending Guard were there, but they couldn’t answer him. The reason they couldn’t answer was that they hadn’t quite made the transition through the Daemonculum as cleanly as the Warsmith. In fact, from the appearance of the gory puddles of flesh and ceramite, it looked as though they’d emerged from the transition inside out.
A fierce bellow sounded somewhere down the street. The rattle of small arms crashing against the Warsmith’s armour lessened. At the sound of a second bellow, they stopped altogether.
Andraaz turned away from the bloody mush that had been his retinue, turned his enraged gaze upon the creature at the end of the street. It didn’t matter that the ork had nothing to do with their deaths, the alien would pay for the Rending Guard just the same.
The alien was gigantic, easily the biggest ork Andraaz had ever seen. It was like a living Dreadnought, its arms as thick around as tyres, its legs built like ferrocrete gambions. The brute’s thick neck was as wide across as a man’s chest, the lantern jaw hanging down from its face was stuffed with yellow fangs the size of bayonets. Slabs of pig iron, steel, titanium and armaplas had been cobbled together into a rude sort of armour to match the ork’s mammoth frame. The ork’s arms were bare to the shoulder, exposing a riot of primitive tattoos and scars. The monster’s face, what little of it was visible under its horned helm crunched down around its ears, was similarly marked. Beady red eyes gleamed from behind the vented visor that hung from the rim of the helmet.
A bandolier of chains crossed the ork’s torso, festooned with hooks from which a collection of trophies rattled against each other. Andraaz recognised the yellowed skull of a genestealer patriarch, a cracked cranium segment ripped from an eldar wraithguard. Ork skulls clattered against kroot jawbones. The Warsmith scowled as he noted the helmets of Space Marines mixed among the trophies, those of rebels and loyalists alike. His anger swelled as he found that he recognised one of the helmets as belonging to Over-Captain Vallax. Beside the Iron Warrior’s helmet was the grinning death’s head of a Steel Blood.
The ork lumbered forwards, growling orders at the aliens around it. A mob of scarred brutes trailing behind it fell back but kept their weapons at the ready.
Biglug, for Andraaz knew this beast could only be the ork warlord himself, stared at the Warsmith for a time, like a fighting dog taking in the scent of its opponent. The ork’s massive paws tightened about the heft of the power axe he carried, the promethium generator fastened to the weapon’s shaft belching black smoke as it strove to maintain its energy field.
Suddenly, Biglug threw back his head, barking with laughter. He grunted something in his crude language and pointed at the slop-heap that had once been the Rending Guard. The aliens in his retinue took up their warlord’s laughter, the mockery spreading to the lesser aliens scattered about the ruins.
Andraaz felt a rage such as he had never known flare up inside him. He had come here prepared to die, to fall in battle to this xenos rabble, but he was damned if he would be laughed at by them.
‘Iron within! Iron without!’ the Warsmith roared, charging down the street at the laughing warlord. Shells from his storm bolter smashed into the brute’s armour, their impact only slightly lessened by whatever field generator protected the monster. Biglug staggered back under the impacts, blood gushing from an arm pitted by one of the shells. The mob behind the warlord surged forwards, but the monster turned on them, howling in anger and chopping one of them down with his axe.
Far from being frightened by Andraaz’s bold attack, Biglug exulted in it. The warlord raised his arms to the polluted sky and bellowed his own war cry. Then he was charging down the street, ignoring the bolt-shells slamming into his armour, intent only upon closing with his foe, matching his axe against the Warsmith’s claw.
The Warsmith rushed at the alien monster, one final victim before the dark claimed him. One last sacrifice to the pride of Andraaz, Lord of Castellax.
Chapter XXI
I-Day Plus One Hundred and Twenty-One
Obliterator! The realisation struck Rhodaan like a physical blow. Oriax was an Obliterator!
The Fabricator must have sensed Rhodaan’s shock. He grinned at the prostrate Raptor, holding his right hand up so that Rhodaan could have a clear view of it as Oriax willed it to change. Metal bubbled up from the pores in his skin, expanding to engulf the entire hand. More and more silvery metal oozed up, thickening the hand until it was a massive cudgel. Still the transformation wasn’t complete,. The cudgel lengthened and flattened, expanding until it took on a hammer-like shape.
‘One does not stare into the abyss unchanged,’ Oriax said. ‘A little bit of it comes back with you, changes you.’ The static crackle of his laughter echoed through the sanctum. ‘Perhaps as I studied the Daemonculum, it was studying me in turn.’
‘You are infected,’ Rhodaan spat at the Fabricator.
The grin crumbled into a scowl. ‘I am enhanced, more than what I was. More than what Vallax pulled from the crystal-swamps of Tarsis.’ Oriax glanced at the mammoth hammer on
the end of his arm. ‘Andraaz was most obliging. He brought me souvenirs from every campaign fought by the Third Grand Company.’ He stalked towards Rhodaan, raising the hammer. Energy crackled about the weapon, sending arcs of electricity snaking across the sanctum. ‘This, you should remember. Before the virus claimed it for its own, this was a thunder hammer. It belonged to the Silver Skulls you helped annihilate on the planet Karkus.’
Rhodaan waited until the Fabricator was only a few steps away, until Oriax lifted the hammer and was about to strike. At that moment, he sprang into action, blasting Oriax with his plasma pistol and using the thrusters of his jump pack to burst from the tangle of collapsed machinery.
The burning ball of plasma seared through Oriax’s hand, sending fingers clattering across the floor. As the thunder hammer came slamming down, it pulverised the machinery but failed to strike the Raptor as he propelled himself away. Everything worked almost as Rhodaan had hoped. It was the mechadendrites that brought him to calamity. The artificial arms, like the rest of Oriax’s wargear, had become infected by the Obliterator virus. Like his armour, like the thunder hammer, they had become a part of the Techmarine’s corruption.
Striking like some jungle serpent, the mechadendrites shot at Rhodaan as he burst from the wreckage. Coils of plasteel and titanium wrapped themselves about the Space Marine, driving him first against the ceiling, then smashing him to the floor. The short blast of propellant wasn’t enough to defy the wiry strength in the tentacles. Dazed by the impact against the ceiling, arms pinned to his sides by the coils, Rhodaan could only watch helplessly as the mechadendrites dragged him back to their master.
Oriax’s hammer was twisting and changing once more, becoming thin and narrow. His other hand bubbled and steamed, the techno-organic substance of his body reeling from the bite of superheated plasma.
‘You only delay the inevitable,’ Oriax scolded his captive. ‘Castellax is doomed. The orks will destroy everything.’ He turned his head and stared at the Daemonculum, beads of oil dripping from his optics like black tears of rapture. ‘No one will learn the secrets of the Daemonculum. They shall perish here, with us!’