Overfiend

by David Annandale

  The engineer was advancing towards him. Dark lightning arced about the muzzle of the gun as it recharged. Krevaan lurched forward, tearing himself free of the nest of wreckage and maglocking his bolter to his thigh. Pipes burst. Gas flooded the space.

  Krevaan threw a krak grenade before the ork. It stepped back, perhaps on instinct, perhaps because it recognised the damage that was about to happen to the floor. The lightning around the gun became a sharp flash, then stopped. The engineer aimed it at Krevaan.

  The grenade went off. The heat ignited the gas. Everything became light and flame. The filters in Krevaan’s lenses dimmed, protecting his sight with momentary darkness.

  He didn’t need to see. He had already chosen his target. He leapt to the right, into a gap between two large gear wheels. Behind him, he heard the blast of the ork’s weapon, the shot going wild. There were more explosions. The rumble of the machinery was giving way to the roar of fire and the ever-rising screams of metal and energy and movement racing to destruction.

  His lenses cleared, and Krevaan moved deeper into the machine. There was more light now, flashing and angry, creating shadows that raged like black flame. Krevaan joined them. He was the dark that moved through the ork’s stronghold. He was the dark that even this greenskin would have to fear. He was the dark that vanquished.

  Krevaan advanced more by feel than by sight. He grabbed a piston, let it carry him away from the wheels, released it to drop onto two more that moved in opposite directions. As great as the mass of his power armour was, the components of the machinery were more than strong enough to support him. The very strength of the locomotive’s construction was making its gradual destruction all the more violent.

  Spider in a moving, unravelling web, Krevaan made his way forward. He drew level with the ork tech. He caught glimpses of the brute through the smoke and clashing gears. It was looking for him, moving back and forth on a small strip of floor between the ladder and the hole created by the grenade. It was snarling, and its attention seemed to be divided between its search and rage at the spreading damage. Krevaan kept watching, and kept moving. The engineer’s movements became more frantic. It was growing anxious. As it should. It was surrounded by shadows, and one of them was coming to kill it.

  For several metres, Krevaan’s access to the ork was blocked. Then he reached a periodic gap. He stood on a crankshaft whose rotation was becoming more and more erratic. Ahead of him, a giant fan turned. Its blades were serrated for no reason beyond the orkish need for violence in all things. Its rotation was sluggish, and it had already lost one blade. Every couple of seconds, the broken section went by. If he moved quickly, he could get through. If his timing was off, he could be caught and dragged down into the growing mangle of iron and fire.

  Krevaan waited through a few revolutions. There was little regularity to them. The fan’s rhythm was broken. Nearby, Krevaan could hear more of the mechanism giving way. There was another gas leak, another explosion. The interior shook with the ecstasy of dissolution. Krevaan held himself steady, eyed the fan, and chose his moment. He threw himself forward while a blade was still blocking his view.

  He hit the fan’s position as the gap appeared. He shot into the passageway, shadow and hammer, and slammed into the engineer. Its force field repelled all forms of energy, including the kinetic. But Krevaan gambled that a certain velocity was needed for the effect to be triggered. If nothing passed though, the greenskin would long since have suffocated. As he and his squad had penetrated the train’s shield, he now broke through the engineer’s personal defence, smashing the ork against the machinery on the other side of the tunnel.

  The engineer reacted with surprising speed, smashing its power claw against him. The fingers were tools. Cutters and drills burned into the side of his armour. He held fast against the assault for a moment, then let himself be hurled to the left. The ork growled with satisfaction. It took a step forwards.

  Krevaan kept going left, coming around the engineer’s flank. He stabbed at the harness with his right hand. His lightning claws shattered one of the coils. Violet energy lashed out. It struck his arm and travelled up his spine. He took in the electric pain and swung his left fist in. He destroyed a second coil and plunged the claws deep into the harness, through the ork’s back.

  The ork howled. It tried to turn and shake him off. It couldn’t reach him. Keeping his right claws embedded in the greenskin’s back, Krevaan brought the left ones down again, and then again. The coils exploded. Krevaan was bathed in an electrical storm. Pain raked his nerves. His body sought to betray him and flail in the grip of the chaotic discharge. He stabbed again. Bursts strong enough to incinerate a grox shook him. He grappled with a mass of desperate fury.

  Another explosion shook the interior. He almost lost his grip on the ork, and his left fist hesitated before the descent. The engineer brought its right arm up and aimed the gun over its shoulder. Krevaan stared down the barrel. He changed the angle of his blow. He brought the claws into the side of the body of the gun. He breached the weapon just as the ork pulled the trigger.

  A volcano erupted in the centre of the locomotive. The engineer was vaporised by its creation. Krevaan flew, a burning mass, into the machinery. Disintegration and avalanche and molten fury surrounded him. They tried to tear a hole in the world, to smash his sense of direction, his will, his consciousness. He refused them and dropped into the maw of the destruction, kicking and punching through hungry debris. He was no longer in the midst of a mechanism. He was in an iron gale. He was buffeted by shrapnel twice his size, seized by explosions and geysers of flame. He kept his sense of direction. He was knocked off his feet. He had to crawl beneath collapses. He fought his way through the vortex of an impossible creation finally succumbing to its own irrationality. He stayed true to his course.

  Severed fibre bundles rendered his armour heavy. His movements grew sluggish, precision lost. The temperature regulator had shut down. He didn’t know how much longer his power unit would function. If it died, so would he, his armour becoming a coffin inside the tomb of the locomotive.

  And there, ahead, a glimpse of light that did not flicker: day shining through the egress. He pulled himself forward, managed to rise to his feet as the weight of the wreckage on his back lessened. He heard something very large crack overhead. He tried to run, but moved at a lethargic stumble instead. He reached for the sides of the doorway, grabbed them and propelled himself through as tonnes of metal crashed down behind him.

  He fell to the ground. Victory when on his knees would be as unacceptable as defeat, and he forced himself to stand once more. Moving at a glacial pace, feet dragging, he walked away from the locomotive towards the spot where Thaene still lay. ‘Brother Akrallas,’ he voxed.

  Silence.

  ‘Dvarax?’

  Nothing.

  He looked to the right. Orks were emerging from the last of the cars. There were many, but many were injured, and they were moving with rare caution. They were gazing at the locomotive.

  Krevaan turned to see its end. Its armour was cracking like an egg, an angry, molten red shining through the fissures. Incredibly, it still had power. The defence turrets and the cannon were firing, though without direction.

  The moment of the great death came. The locomotive did not explode, but a sun blazed through its wounds. The machinic scream was almost sentient. Then the glow was that of ordinary fire. The engine seemed to slump on itself, transformed from monster to wreck.

  And suddenly there was calm. Shooting and movement ceased. The sky over the train cleared, the shimmer of the force field gone.

  ‘Eighth Company,’ Krevaan said, ‘destroy this abomination and all its vermin.’

  The orks fought back as the wrath of the Raven Guard descended upon them. They did not fight long.

  Chapter Eight

  Shadows followed wind. The eldar were fast. Behrasi didn’t expect to catch up with them
. It was enough to track them, and he knew where they were heading. The Saim-Hann riders slowed down once they reached Reclamation. They still moved quickly, but with frequent stops, and uncertain, changing direction. Picking up their trail was not difficult. Neither was following them undetected. The xenos warriors’ attention was entirely on their search.

  The ork shells started hitting shortly after the Raven Guard entered the city. The ordnance was colossal. Each blast was strong enough to level a building. The streets filled with rubble and dust, the bodies of the dead and the injured, and crowds of the mourning, the panicked, and the rescuers. Consumed by their immediate terror and grief, the civilians were unaware of the wind and its shadow that passed near them. Behrasi glanced at the mortals on a few occasions. Avoiding their sight was a simple matter, so automatic that it barely required thought. He wondered briefly what it must be like to be at the centre of a conflict, yet be irrelevant to its stakes and its result. Then he dismissed the thought as a distraction.

  Irrelevant.

  The bombardment was destructive, but brief. After a few minutes, the distant boom of the great gun ceased. The dust still rolled through the streets. The figures in crimson armour sped up. They appeared to have direction again.

  ‘I think they’ve found what they’re looking for,’ Rhamm voxed.

  ‘So it would seem,’ Behrasi agreed. He didn’t contact Krevaan. He would wait until he was sure. If the command was going to be sent, he wanted to be sure that it would not be as a result of an error.

  If it had not been for the destruction rained down on the humans by the orks, Alathannas thought that it might have been hours, perhaps longer, before the idea had come to him. But the dust was thick, darkening the day in the city. He had seen lights on behind the steel shutters over the hab windows. After one strike, the power had gone out for a moment. The flicker had made him think of the city’s energy source, and that was when the realisation had hit.

  He knew where he had to look.

  He knew why the earlier attempts to locate the goal had been foiled.

  The irony that the Saim-Hann encampment had been so close to that goal the whole time did not amuse him. It was too redolent of the perpetual tragedy that haunted his people.

  The humans had built their power plant in the north-west of the city, a short ride from the square that the eldar had used as a base. Alathannas and his escort stopped outside it. A colossal aquila rose over the ornate mosaic of the containment dome, the tips of its wings touching the twin cooling towers. Alathannas dismounted from his jetbike and contacted Eleira.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked when he had told her what he had deduced.

  ‘It would explain our difficulty,’ he said. ‘The human technology is crude, but it is very powerful. The combination of the radiation and the shielding could have interfered with our attempts.’

  ‘There is something fated about the humans building their power source there,’ Eleira agreed. ‘Search it quickly, ranger. Time is short.’

  ‘The orks have the upper hand?’

  ‘Worse. The humans have joined our fight. They have destroyed the rest of the foe. This battle is almost over. You have only a little longer to end the war.’

  ‘I understand.’

  The interior of the control block was deserted. The humans had fled their posts when the shelling had begun. The plant was automated, and though Alathannas saw warning lights flashing on some of the consoles he moved past, there were no klaxons sounding, and the power was still on.

  Alathannas passed through a large, high-ceilinged hall. The architecture had the same prefabricated crudeness of the habitation complexes. The walls were grey, their bas-relief sculptures of the double-headed eagle looming on all sides in perpetual judgement. He found a staircase at the rear, and descended the levels of the complex. If he was correct in his surmise, the control centre would, like so many buildings of the human city, have been constructed atop eldar foundations. He had to find his way into them. He was following hope and a guess. The success of the mission depended on luck.

  At the lowest level, he found himself in a maze of service corridors. He paused, frustrated again by the irony that human interference meant that he could not hear the call that was turning the orks into monsters of war. He relied on his skills instead. He chose the corridors that moved away from the core of the plant. He headed into areas that had seen little use since the construction of the building. He followed dust and disuse. At last, he found himself in a chamber at the western edge of the building. Whatever function it might once have had, it had become a storage space of construction leavings, discarded tools, and failed equipment. The lower half of the outer wall was wraithbone.

  Alathannas cleared away the detritus. The wraithbone ended a few arm’s lengths from the north-west corner. The human portion of the wall was rougher than elsewhere in the room. It was not structurally integral. It was filling a gap. He placed a plasma grenade at its base and retreated to the hallway.

  After the flash and the concussion, there was the sound of collapsing rubble. And then, something else. Before Alathannas could step forward, a wave of inchoate aggression slammed him to the ground. It was familiar, yet alien, and as he gasped for breath, struggling to remain conscious and to keep his thoughts coherent, he understood that he had released nothing. He had opened the way for a call to be answered. The actions needed to complete the mission created the possibility of catastrophic failure.

  The exultation of war shook the foundations. The earth groaned. The hallways fell into darkness.

  A hab in the block nearest the power plant had been felled by the bombardment. Squad Behrasi watched from the rubble as Alathannas entered the plant’s control block. The other eldar turned their jetbikes to face away from the plant. They hovered in a semi-circle near the door, guarding all approaches.

  ‘What do they think they’re doing?’ Rhamm growled.

  ‘Don’t try to tell me they’re protecting the building,’ Gheara said.

  ‘The Shadow Captain says they’ve been searching,’ said Behrasi. ‘That might still be the case. Only one has gone in.’ He only half-believed his own words. The conviction was growing that Krevaan and Caeligus had been correct about the eldar’s perfidy. He waited, though. He would not act without true certainty.

  The wait and the doubts ended with the violent rumble beneath his feet. The entire square heaved. Cracks ran up the façade of the power plant. The eldar on watch reacted with startled gestures. One of them doubled over as if in pain.

  ‘Sabotage,’ said Rhamm.

  Gheara readied his bolter. ‘I’ll give the xenos this,’ he said. ‘Their performance was convincing. I almost believed that they might be honourable.’

  ‘So did I, brother,’ Behrasi said. ‘So did I.’ Though he was puzzled by the reaction of the eldar to the upheaval, he could not let that distract him from the need to act. Another front had opened in the war. He raised Krevaan on the vox.

  As Eighth Company regrouped near the corpse of the train, Krevaan knelt beside Thaene. The Techmarine was conscious. ‘You have earned your rest, brother,’ Krevaan said to him. ‘But you are needed.’

  ‘Good.’ The Techmarine tried to rise.

  Krevaan put out a hand. ‘Stay as you are. Heal. The struggle is not here. I have heard from Brother Behrasi.’

  ‘I see. The eldar have betrayed us.’

  ‘Yes. Send the signal.’

  Thaene made no movement. Yet Krevaan could sense the passing of a fatal instant.

  ‘It is done,’ Thaene said.

  The Space Marine gunship roared over the gully network, its missiles raining down on the remaining ork vehicles. Caught between the cliffs, the orks had nowhere to run. Eleira and Passavan raced away from the marching detonations. They climbed up out of the network to join what was left of their forces. They had broken the back of the ork army, but t
he toll had been enormous. There were only four other skimmers left now. Too few.

  ‘Is Alathannas too late?’ Eleira asked the farseer.

  ‘We have to try,’ Passavan said.

  ‘That is not an answer.’

  She received her answer a moment later. The jetbikes exploded. There was a flare of intense heat at the base of each one’s engine, followed by a larger blast as the anti-grav motors disintegrated, their energy uncontained and wild. Passavan and his mount vanished in a fireball. Eleira was thrown from her jetbike. She hit the ground so fast that there was no sensation of flight. She had been riding, and then she was lying on packed earth. She was broken. She couldn’t move, but she could feel the pain of her ending.

  Her head rested against a slight rise, and she could see the squad of black shadows arriving on jump packs to the site of the wrecks. The humans, those creatures of darkness and war, had come to finish their work. Night seemed to be falling with their arrival, and she realised it was her vision that was failing. She hoped that her spirit passed into her waystone before the Raven Guard reached her.

  She struggled against the agony and the fading light, finding the breath for one last task. She called across the distance to Alathannas. ‘We are betrayed,’ she said. ‘Hurry. You are the mission’s last hope.’

  ‘Let it fail,’ he cried. ‘Let the humans face the consequences of their actions.’

  ‘And if they are defeated here, too, what then? The consequences will pursue us all. You know your duty, Alathannas.’