Overfiend

by David Annandale

  The count was complete. There were losses. Five battle-brothers had died in the fusillade. The corpses of three of them had come down, their armour melted into amorphous coffins. The other two, Brothers Jer’wan and Ka’gis, had taken a direct hit and been reduced to floating molecules. There were injuries, some debilitating. Neleus had lost his left arm. The stump, extending a hand’s length below his shoulder, ended in a cauterisation that was ugly, black and weeping. N’krumor was applying sterile clay from his narthecium to the wound.

  Ba’birin was standing over the eldar. Elisath was on his feet, battered, bloody, but intact. Ha’garen caught himself trying to calculate the odds against the prisoner having survived the blast and the fall, unarmoured and in poor condition. Somehow, he had been surrounded by enough Salamanders, who had taken the worst of the damage, and nothing he had hit in the fall had been jagged enough to slice him open. It was impossible not to see the actions of fate in his survival.

  Ba’birin turned to Ha’garen. ‘Where are we?’ he asked. He used the vox. The chamber was filled with a tremendous mechanical din that drowned out every other sound.

  In hell, was what Ha’garen almost answered, and seen by the lights of the Cult Mechanicus, that was exactly where they were. The hold was illuminated by haphazardly placed glow-globes, torches mounted on poles, bursts of ignited gas, and the flaming of filthy engines. What the Techmarine saw, stretching for thousands of metres in every direction, was machinic obscenity. The plasteel hill that had broken the Salamanders’ fall was not simply a pile of refuse. It was a collection of parts, all of them engineered, however crudely, however partially. The entire space was a collection. It was an endless, labyrinthine conglomeration of the unfinished, the discarded and the experimental. Gigantic metal frames were heaped up against each other. Servo-arms sprouted like weeds. Some were motionless, frozen in entreaty. Many were active, and they were worse, locked in endless loops of meaningless activity. One piled objects together while another took the heap apart. Multiple arms, linked into idiotic arachnid configurations, scrabbled in competing directions. Other devices were beyond identification. They were whirling, stomping flights of fantasy, assembled for no possible reason other than that they were conceivable. Some should not have been possible, but they moved and rattled and roared, climbing up and falling over hills of less animate creations.

  The scale was as varied as the objects. Something no larger than Ha’garen’s fist flopped past his feet. It looked like a grenade on tracks, as if it were an abandoned prototype for a self-propelled explosive. Other creations were gigantic. One, several hundred metres towards the bow of the ship, was almost as high as the hold, and Ha’garen had initially mistaken it for another heap. It was roughly conical in shape, a stack of massive rings of decreasing diameter, all spinning in random directions. It also appeared to be jointed, and it nodded and bobbed and weaved, grotesque dancer, drunken mountain.

  And everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, engines keeping the madness going. Engines that were whining irritations. Engines that were monumental maws. Engines being fed fuel by an army of gretchin and chained slaves. They swarmed over the metal nightmarescape, maggots and rats, so consumed by the endlessness of their task that the nearby gretchin were only now starting to notice the Space Marines.

  Wherever Ha’garen looked, he saw the precision and purpose of technology debased. It was not the work of Chaos. It was the work of orks. It was ork logic made concrete. It was the playground of ork science, but it was also something else. A terrible epiphany dawned on Ha’garen, and he knew what he was seeing. Along with experiments, junked and ongoing, there were bits. Parts. Spares.

  He finally answered Ba’birin. ‘The orks store the leftovers here,’ he said.

  ‘Leftovers?’

  ‘The leftovers from the construction of the ship. The pieces that didn’t fit. The ones they weren’t sure what to do with, but thought might be useful some day.’

  ‘I’m sorry, brother,’ Ba’birin said, and there was genuine sympathy in his words.

  Startled by the discovery that he could still experience revulsion, Ha’garen almost missed Ba’birin’s first real expression of friendship since the walls of Heliosa. ‘Thank you,’ he said. It was the correct response, he knew. He wondered if he should be concerned over the fact that his reaction to Ba’birin’s gesture was not gratitude, relief, or even satisfaction, but simply interest.

  What are you?

  Neleus asked, ‘Can we reach our boarding point from here?’

  The gretchin were scurrying to safety and shrieking warnings.

  Ha’garen called up his memory map of the power grid. The readings for this region were erratic, difficult to interpret. But there were some stable junctions. They might well be near entry points to the hold. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. He identified the power flare that was linked to the most promising route out of the hold. Probability, or perhaps just hope, suggested heading sternwards and portside.

  Ba’birin nodded. The Salamanders formed up, with Elisath in the centre of the armoured tortoise configuration, and began to march. The elapsed time since the eldar had opened fire was less than a minute. The squads had regrouped after the fall at speed. The Salamanders did not fetishise speed on the battlefield in the manner of the White Scars. They preferred the steady, unstoppable advance. That did not mean their reaction time was any less rapid.

  But there was a reason for their emphasis on battlefield strength. The foe could easily be faster. The key to victory was not to strike first, necessarily. It was to withstand all that the foe could muster, and then give the decisive blow of the conflict.

  Movement above. Movement on the periphery.

  ‘Be strengthened by the anvil, brothers,’ Ba’birin called, ‘then shatter our enemies against it.’

  Eldar and orks rushed to be shattered.

  The Fire Dragons had come through the gap and were descending the slope of the metal heap. They were moving fast, but they didn’t have a clear shot. The topography of the hold kept changing as the piles shifted, whirled, collapsed over each other and rose again. The Salamanders stayed low, sticking to paths of bare decking, and the movement was as unpredictable and changeable as the environment.

  ‘How much fuel do those melta weapons have?’ Ba’birin wondered.

  ‘Something less than infinite,’ Neleus quipped. The strain had vanished from his voice. He was at war, and he had banished distracting pain.

  ‘They are short-range weapons,’ Ha’garen said. ‘They will need opportunity. There is also the risk. We are very close to the outer hull. Another attack like earlier and everything in this chamber will be cast to the void.’

  Neleus said, ‘I don’t think they’re suicidal.’

  ‘That depends on how desperate they are to complete the mission,’ Ba’birin pointed out. He turned his head to look back at Elisath. ‘Why do they want you dead?’ he asked.

  The eldar didn’t answer. His face was closed, unreadable. He looked desperately fragile to Ha’garen, a bundle of crystal sticks. But he was keeping up with the pace of the much larger Space Marines, and his footsteps were sure.

  Ha’garen checked over his shoulder. The Fire Dragons were still coming on, but now they had to pay attention to their own survival. A hideous tide of orks was spilling through the gap. The greenskins were pouring in through every access hatch and gate. Numbers growing exponentially, they formed a cordon around the edges of the hold and closed in. During the time it took the Salamanders to move a hundred metres towards their goal, so many orks had arrived that their chants and roars were audible above the unceasing clamour of the engines.

  This was no longer a force sent to repel invaders. This was an army. And it had come to fight in an open space. No more bottlenecking in constricted passageways. The Salamanders might as well have been on a planetside battlefield. Ha’garen did not calculate the odds of fewer than twenty Adeptus
Astartes against thousands of orks. He knew what they were. The enemy’s reinforcements were, in practical terms, unlimited.

  None of this mattered. The mission mattered. Duty mattered. The Salamanders would smash their way through ork lines through force of will.

  The tide came on. It arrived as a storm surge of gretchin. Ha’garen looked at the squalling, scrabbling, creatures and saw hook-nosed vermin. They came bounding over the metal waves, wielding makeshift blades and axes, and firing guns that looked even more primitive than the gretchin themselves. Ha’garen saw more than a few pistols explode, killing their owners. The nearby creatures howled with delighted laughter. Larger orks came on immediately behind the gretchin, shouting curses and jabbing at the reluctant with electric prods.

  The diminutive xenos weren’t threats, but they were an obstacle. They swarmed around the Salamanders’ feet, many of them as anxious to flee as they had been to arrive, but just as great a nuisance. They were a morass. Ha’garen swept them away with his servo-arms. His blows pulped. He moved ahead of Neleus and Ba’birin and cleared the way. The crack of bones and squish of internal organs reverberated down the length of the arms. It was like threshing green wheat.

  The Salamanders formation opened fire, bolter rounds streaking not through uncountable gretchin, but straight to the brain pans of their minders. Heads burst like exploded fruit. Bodies toppled. The gretchin panicked. They scrabbled like cornered rats. There was nowhere for them to run as the principle thrust of orks charged. The greenskins laid down a horizontal curtain of heavy-calibre slugs before them. Gretchin exploded into mist. The Salamanders tightened their formation, absorbing the bullets, taking the hits and moving forwards, holding fire and above all protecting the eldar in their midst.

  ‘I am half-sick of irony,’ Neleus muttered.

  The straightest line to the target exit took the Salamanders straight into the thick of the ork host. Towering shapes waved in the corner of Ha’garen’s eye. Inspiration beckoned. He tapped Ba’birin’s shoulder and pointed. The sergeant changed direction without question. The Salamanders pounded over low-lying heaps of scrap towards a cluster of towering axles and pistons. The plasteel trunks vibrated and shook as they rotated. Their foliage was gears and blades several metres in diameter. They spun high above, turning nothing but air.

  Only seconds now to the full impact. Ha’garen felt adrenaline levels surge to levels of ecstatic rage. The other clashes had been mere prologue, and when Neleus shouted ‘Into the fires of battle!’ the cry was more than words. It was the spirit of the Chapter forged in sound.

  The answer came: ‘Unto the Anvil of War!’ And this, this was the will of the warriors. It was the alchemical fusion of fury and righteousness and juggernaut determination. The thunder of the roar was a physical force, the blow of Vulkan’s hammer made manifest. It struck the enemy hard, and the front lines of greenskins actually stumbled a moment before the oncoming wrath.

  Salamanders and orks crashed together in the shadow of the demented forest. It was the collision of solid, burning fist and rampaging mob. The Salamanders unleashed a stream of flamer and bolter-fire. Orks blew apart and burned. The smell of cooking meat mixed with the hard tang of spraying blood and the miasma of ork stench. The rush of orks was slowed less by intimidation than by the need to clamber over and through the dead. Ha’garen saw more than a few greenskins trip and be trampled by their charging kin. The Salamanders descended upon the next lines with the snarl of chainblades. Ha’garen swung his chainaxe and took an ork’s head off above the nose. He rammed forwards, a machine beast with five arms, all of them pounding his enemies to broken sacks of bone and leaking blood. He battered away blows aimed at his head, shrugged off the strikes that hit home. Momentum and fury pushed him ten metres into the lines of the orks.

  It was enough. He was in the midst of the rotating cylinders, just forward of the rest of his battle-brothers. He turned his plasma cutter on an axle. It was thirty metres tall and festooned with cog wheels starting halfway up its length. The wheels varied in diameter from two to four metres, and brushed very close to the shafts on either side. They were so ragged, they could never have been intended to mesh with other gears. They looked predatory. They were metal whose one function was to tear and rip. Ha’garen would see them fed. He cut away a chunk of the shaft, and peered inside the hole as it rotated past. There was no power cable. The axle seemed to have its own power source built in. It was as if its engineer had seen the device as an end in itself, not part of a functioning whole, and, knowing that the object was supposed to rotate, had ensured that it would, no matter what.

  Ha’garen shrugged off the ork logic and sliced through the shaft at an angle, controlling where the towering axle would fall. The rest of the Salamanders reformed around him, dropping the orks that entered the whirling, grinding, humming forest. They created a perimeter ten metres wide, containing the Techmarine and his sabotaged poles. Elisath crouched in the centre. The line was thin, and pressed hard. The Space Marines were barely more than a dozen strong. They held. Green rage crashed against them, hacking with the strength that came of an existence devoted to nothing else except conflict. The Salamanders held. They held because they had to. Ha’garen moved from iron trunk to iron trunk, cutting until each pole was on the razor’s edge of falling, but holding back until he had a dozen ready for the touch of his will. They formed a rough circle.

  As he finished the last one, his brothers pulled in, concentrating their force, constricting the circle within Ha’garen’s trap. Every move the Salamanders had made, from the moment Ha’garen had pointed at this spot, had been accomplished without a word being uttered. Every warrior had seen the location’s potential and had known what to do. The silent efficiency was a hymn to the Omnissiah, Ha’garen thought. Organics functioning together with machinic rigour had an aesthetic and moral strength. It was, he realised, art of a kind, a kind to which he could still respond. Mechanics, war and art were fused together into a manifestation of the divine.

  He felt something in his chest. For a moment, he did not know what it was. Then he recognised it: it was elation.

  He finished his preparatory cuts, then moved to the centre of the Salamanders formation. He raised his cutter arm high above his head. He angled the muzzle down. The squads ceased fire. They let the orks approach. The green horde rushed in, sensing only opportunity. The guttural shouts of the aliens crested against the clanking, grinding clash of the nonsense engines.

  At the back of his mind, Ha’garen noted that the orks were using very few projectile weapons of any sort, and were deploying none of their heavy guns. More data to be analysed later. Now, in this moment, he was experiencing the very flesh-based sensation of contempt. He looked at the orks in their overwhelming numbers as they surged through their macabre, mechanical playground, and saw a slovenly, unforgivable disregard for order and the truth of the machine.

  He fired up the plasma cutter. He spun it in a circle. He finished the cuts.

  Time for a hard lesson.

  Chapter Six

  The shafts split a metre up from where they plunged into the scrap-metal loam that covered the deck. They fell, still spinning. Cog wheels and blades flailed. In their deaths, the shafts were no longer metal trees. They were grotesque, monopod giants panicking in their moments of doom. Vibrating, spasming with centripetal seizures, they crashed down around the Salamanders. They became the spread and grasping fingers of Ha’garen. He had forged a power with a reach of dozens of metres. The shafts crushed the orks beneath them. The jagged wheels dug deep into the flesh of the howling army. The spinning did not stop. The wheels found traction. They chewed the orks into mulch, hurling bloody chunks and splintered bone high and far. They bounced and drove over and through greenskin bodies. The violent rotation carried the shafts away, pulping and shredding. They left a swath of smeared green punctuated by bits of torn armour and splintered, jagged bone. The orks fled from the jouncing mea
t-shredders. The roars were just as loud as before, only now they were hitting the higher registers of surprised fear. The army before the Salamanders thinned, culled and frightened. The rear lines pushed forwards, urged on by something more formidable than the insane axles, but they ran into their fleeing comrades. Confusion reigned.

  The way forward was close to clear. Only a few hundred metres to the cargo bay exit. The Salamanders stormed into the disorder, slashing and crushing. The same tight defensive formation as before, striking like a spiked, mailed fist. Power and chainblades scythed greenskins as they tried to recover their momentum.

  Ha’garen estimated he had gained the squads fifteen or twenty seconds before the orks shrugged off the blow. Perhaps a bit longer, because several shafts were still careening about on unpredictable trajectories.

  Ba’birin gave him an approving nod as they fought their way forwards. ‘Well played, brother,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ha’garen answered, noncommittal. What war had riven, it had now reknit. He noted this with mild interest, and he noted his mild interest with alarm. Was there no possibility for brotherhood left in his evolving configuration?

  What are you?

  A question for later, because now something arced through the air at them. It was small and metallic. It gleamed in the fitful light of the cargo hold.

  ‘Grenade!’ Neleus yelled. It came down in the centre of the squads, expertly thrown. Ba’birin grabbed Elisath and threw himself to one side. Ha’garen leaped with them. The melta bomb went off, vaporising a pile of stacked parts, a whining engine and the lower half of Brother Battarus’s body. Battarus crashed down, a felled monument. The damage was catastrophic. His system could not hope to repair itself. He was still conscious, still clutching his heavy bolter. A sound emerged from his helmet grille. It was agony transmuted into terminal rage.