‘He is doing a passable imitation of that state now,’ Neleus said as the Overfiend continued to shrug off bolter rounds. He was seconds away.
‘The shard is still distant. That ork is but a shadow of what he will become.’
‘He lives, and that means he can die,’ said N’krumor. He revved his chainsword and plunged through the ork ranks to meet the Overfiend, G’ova and Eligius at his heels. The sudden burst took the orks by surprise. They stumbled back before the charge, but where the blow of a storming Salamander should have stunned senseless any ork caught in its path, these creatures, touched by the ravening divine, shrugged off the hit.
As the trio closed with the Overfiend, he reached to his left and grabbed a thick exhaust pipe that stuck out of a nearby motor. He yanked the pipe free and swung it like a massive club. It smashed N’krumor off his feet. It didn’t kill him, and his greater mass bent the pipe in two, but he went down in the midst of the horde. They fell on him with axe and sword. Eligius aimed his chainsword at the exposed joint of the Overfiend’s upper leg. He never connected. Two barrels went off simultaneously. Slugs the size of cannon shells ripped the Space Marine apart, exploding out the back of his armour and disintegrating his skull. G’ova scored a hit, slicing between armour plates and into the ork’s upper arm. Snarling, the Overfiend lowered his head and rammed into the Salamander. It was like being hit by an iron-clad boulder with stone-column legs. The impact collapsed the right side of G’ova’s armour, shattering his arm and the shell of his ribcage. His useless hand dropped his chainblade, but he stepped back, reached for his bolter and brought it up one-handed. The point-blank mass-reactive barrage made the Overfiend react, if only with yet greater rage. He smashed G’ova to the ground with the barrel of his shooter, then drove his foot onto the Space Marine’s chest. A force equivalent to several tonnes punched through plate and bone, pulverising G’ova’s hearts.
The supporting fire from the other Salamanders counted for nothing. Tendons bursting as if he might explode with his own power, the Overfiend seemed bigger yet. His minions were vulnerable, though, and half of the squad’s fire was directed at the spot where N’krumor had disappeared. However much they had partaken of a xenos deity’s communion, the orks were still blasted into chunks of meat. N’krumor staggered up from beneath a heaving, flailing mound of green. His helmet had been torn away, he was bleeding through dozens of gouges in his armour, and his left leg dragged as he lurched over the uneven surface. The Overfiend could have been upon him in a single stride, or unloaded the shooter into his back. Instead, the monster ran past him, his eyes on Elisath. He shouldered N’krumor aside with the force of a sideswiping torpedo. The Salamander pitched into the mob of cheering orks.
Ba’birin ran to his aid, ploughing through greenskins with flamer on full, flanking the Overfiend. Neleus shouted for a vox-link to the Verdict of the Anvil. Berengus answered that the strike cruiser was locked in combat with an ork fleet. The last moment before the Overfiend’s arrival was now. Time dilated as Ha’garen ran a cold appraisal of the battlefield. He was on the ramparts of Heliosa, in the breached Verdict again, seeing the inevitable, searching for the least bad option. Under current conditions, the Overfiend would slaughter the Salamanders and retrieve his prisoner.
So change the conditions.
Ha’garen saw what he needed, up a gradual slope, back deeper into the hold. A few hundred metres away. Impossible but necessary. The Ha’garen he had become approved the only strategy available. The echo of the Ha’garen he had once been revelled in the madness of the act.
He grabbed Elisath with his remaining grip arm. He leaped out of the trench and onto the box, knocking the flexible pipes into idiot nods, the Overfiend one stride away. Another leap, across the trench, and he was scrabbling up the ridge of the dorsal fin. It was just thick enough for him to find his footing.
The Overfiend was upon them. He was a colossus of rage, a mountain of iron and claws, tusks and fists. He swatted Neleus aside and lunged for Ha’garen. His claws grasped at air as the Techmarine leaped again. There was no eldar grace in Ha’garen’s movements. Instead, there was power and weight, and that was what he needed. From the peak of the metal fin, he passed over the heads of the nearest orks and landed midway up a teetering heap of discarded objects. Cylinders and polygons tumbled down the slope like old bones. Ha’garen scrambled up to the top of the heap and tore down the other side. He stamped hard as he ran, keeping his feet in the treacherous, sliding metal.
The orks came after him from all sides. Flamer arm raised above his head, he rotated the nozzle, surrounding himself with a continuous stream of fire, keeping the horde at bay. His chainaxe cut down any greenskin too slow or too foolish to get out of his way. Behind him, the Overfiend howled ever escalating rage. The juggernaut pounded in pursuit, the war-drum beat of his iron boots shaking the deck. ‘Proximity to the shard is the source of the Overfiend’s current strength,’ he said to Elisath.
‘It is.’ The eldar clung to the servo-arm with fading strength.
‘So this ship must leave Lepidus Prime’s orbit.’
Elisath made a noise that was both agreement and disbelief.
‘Ha’garen! In Vulkan’s name, what are you doing?’ Ba’birin was on the vox, his voice strained with the effort of combat.
‘Acting on a surmise,’ Ha’garen told him. ‘But I need time.’
‘And how...?’
‘By fire and metal.’ His target loomed ahead.
‘As befits a Salamander,’ Ba’birin said.
Ha’garen noted the praise, filed it, concentrated on the immediate task.
The opportunity was a gigantic blast furnace. Flames licked from the massive grill at its base. It nestled next to a mountain of scrap that rose to the roof of the hold. A conveyor belt tossed a steady stream of discards into the upper maw of the furnace. Molten metal ran in channels from the base, bathing the area in an orange-white glow. A dozen metres further on, moulds of every eccentricity received the metal and shaped it into the objects desired by the operators of the experimental station. Abandoned in the frenzy of the war, the station was a junk pile of workbenches and tables, half-completed devices and burned-out failures. The lunatic flights of orkish science were powered by an electrical station ten metres high. It was a tight group of sparking, spitting pylons and arcing generators. The tops of immense dials on the generators were barely visible above the trash heaps, suggesting the devices were anchored to the deck itself.
Ha’garen’s memory map of the power grid: there was a major node here.
He was moving fast, but the Overfiend, his momentum building, was faster. The vibrations of his footsteps were growing. He was closing.
Good.
Ha’garen used the plasma cutter on the blast furnace as he ran past, slicing it open about midway up its chimney. Gases vented, air rushed in, and reactions became uncontained. The furnace exploded. The shredded framework tore orks apart as it shrieked across the hold. A searing wave of metal fell on Ha’garen’s pursuers. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the Overfiend stumble, raging at the burns that reached through his armour. He was a long way from dead, but he was brought to a stop, so he was where Ha’garen wanted him when the next thing happened.
Its base blown apart, the mountain of scrap trembled and collapsed. Metal shrieked on metal as thousands of tonnes of cataclysm swept to deck level. The Overfiend disappeared beneath the avalanche. As the creaks and roars of tumbling rubble faded, Ha’garen could hear the monster battling his way out from the metal tomb.
But Ha’garen had his lead time.
He reached the generators. He released Elisath, who collapsed against a workbench. The eldar was scorched and bleeding, but alive. Ha’garen approached the nearest generator. He pulled open a control panel and eyed the wiring inside. Monstrously crude, as ever, dangerously improvised, but somehow operational.
‘Well done, b
rother,’ Ba’birin voxed. ‘We will be at your side momentarily.’
‘I will be immobile and rather preoccupied,’ Ha’garen told him. ‘If you are able to keep me from being disturbed, I may be able to act on my surmise.’
A moment of silence, as Ba’birin wondered, perhaps, why Ha’garen did not say outright what he planned. Then he said, ‘Understood.’ Maybe Ba’birin had guessed, or maybe he simply realised a huge risk was involved. ‘Vulkan guide you, brother.’ A valediction. And an act of atonement.
‘Thank you, brother.’ The words were the expected ones. The correct ones to say. But even now, he still felt the disconnection from his earlier self and earlier friendships. The disconnection had not been Ba’birin’s. It had been his.
What are you?
He could not pause for doubts. As at Heliosa, as on the Verdict of the Anvil, there was one path to follow, and he took it. This was his fire of battle, the anvil upon which he must not break. There was no time for a prayer, only an inarticulate reaching out to the Omnissiah as Ha’garen extended his mechadendrites and plugged himself into the generator.
Into the kroozer.
As before, the ship’s power grid opened before him like a nervous system hololith. As before, the ship’s lifeblood was a torrent of electronic filth. The difference was that now Ha’garen did not shield himself from the ship. He did not keep his distance from its xenos insanity. He plunged into it. His consciousness fell into the bloodstream. His awareness ran everywhere. Deeper and deeper he went. He was no longer contemplating a grid. He was the grid. He was every electrical function of the ship. He was thousands upon thousands of individual devices. He was the useful and the broken, the vital and the trivial, the barely logical and the utterly mad. He was the distortions of technology clumsily pilfered from other civilisations, and he was the perverse creations of the orks, inventions that had no right to work but somehow did.
He was the kroozer.
What are you?
Now the question was more pertinent than ever, and more vital. The otherness of the ship was a raging torrent, and it was a vast ocean. It tried to tear him apart, and it tried to drown him in its enormity. Since his first contact with the ship, it had been eating at his soul with the slow erosion of rust. Now it had swallowed him, and if he disappeared, his body would become just another elaborate object of forgotten use in the bottom hold of the ship. He fought for his self. He fought for his soul.
What are you?
I am Ha’garen. I am a Techmarine. I am a Salamander.
Three statements. Three identities. And then the revelation, bright enough to give sight to the blind: those were not three identities. They were one. The more completely he was one facet, the more completely he was all of them. The action he was engaged in was possible because of his transformation on Mars, and he was risking the greatest self-sacrifice possible for the good of his Chapter.
With realisation came unity of identity, and with unity came strength. He remained Ha’garen as he spread throughout the ship. He fought off the alien contamination. He became a virus himself. He claimed everything. Everything became him.
He was not the kroozer. The kroozer was him.
He was everywhere. He knew what moved and died in his vast new body. He felt the Overfiend rise from his metal tomb and come to kill him.
Orks swarmed the Salamanders, fighting them to a standstill. N’krumor lived, but could barely move forwards. The choice came down to leaving either N’krumor or Ha’garen on his own. Ba’birin refused the choice. ‘You know the way forward, brothers,’ he said. Then he followed Ha’garen’s example, scrambling up the dorsal fin and hurling himself over the immediate ranks. A few metres on, and he was through any real resistance. Ha’garen had culled the enemy well.
Ba’birin came over the rise of the fallen mountain in time to see the Overfiend shrug his way free. The beast thundered towards Ha’garen, who stood motionless, tethered to a generator. Elisath tried to take the Space Marine’s chainaxe from his hands, but the fists were those of a statue and not to be opened. Ba’birin charged down the slope, and while still several metres from the base, he leaped. He landed on the Overfiend’s back. He hooked his knees around the Overfiend’s neck, and raised his chainsword. Ork reinforcements were charging forwards, but they had some ground to cross. The avalanche had wiped out all the enemy in the immediate area. The Salamanders had time. Time enough, Ba’birin vowed, to rid the galaxy of this abomination.
He brought the chainsword down. It dug into the Overfiend’s flesh, but it struggled to find a purchase.
The Overfiend swung a massive fist back. It hit Ba’birin with the force of a wrecking ball.
Ha’garen did not see well inside the ship. Random flurries of data from dozens of sensors gave him a shadowy picture of the war in the hold. He knew the Overfiend was near. He knew the ork was in combat, or else he would already be dead. He didn’t know much more.
But outside the ship, his vision was crystalline. He saw the void war in all its balletic magnificence. Even the brute simplicity of the ork ship attacks took on a rough grace when seen from the multifaceted eyes of the ship. Information was an ever-shifting torrent. Updates every fraction of a second showed the changing nature of the battle. War was an accumulation of millions of variables and conflicting vectors. It was the embodiment of the contingent, and the small but unforeseen event carried more weight than the great and predicted.
He saw the Verdict of the Anvil at bay. The Salamanders ship lashed at the swarm. Each strike of the lance, each torpedo launch, each gun volley was strategically placed and lethal. There were so many targets, the Verdict eviscerated one ork vessel after another. The void blistered with the roil of explosions, the death cries of warships. But even as the predator savaged its foe with its claws, so did it suffer its own wounds. The Verdict of the Anvil was bleeding. Its turns were sluggish. The flickering glow of uncontrolled fires licked at its hull. Ha’garen saw dark patches where he should have seen the flash of guns and the stab of lances. Mulcebar had bought the Verdict and the boarding party time, but the great, predictable event of this war was the annihilation of the Salamanders force.
Ha’garen became the unforeseen. He flexed the muscles of his new body.
The blow knocked Ba’birin down into the debris. He jumped back up, head ringing. The Overfiend had turned to face him. The ork brought his fist down hard enough to shatter marble. Iron fragments flew from the meteor impact. Ba’birin lunged, blade whirring at the Overfiend’s face.
The other Salamanders had crossed the top of the hill of debris. They were almost here. They were too far. He had to give Ha’garen a few more seconds. This was the anvil on which his destiny was being shaped. He would make sure it was a worthy one. Worthy of the honour of being a Salamander.
The Overfiend’s reflexes were daemonic. A massive hand snatched up Ba’birin. The grip was adamantine. Ba’birin slashed the blade across the xenos monstrosity’s forehead. The Overfiend howled and crushed him into the scrap. It was like being hammered by a Dreadnought’s power fist. His helmet cracked in two. The Overfiend raised his fist. Ba’birin jerked up, rolled down-slope. The fist came down on air and wreckage. Ba’birin stood and jabbed his chainsword between leg plates, sawing at the ork’s tendons. The Overfiend stumbled forwards and dropped to a knee. And still he was fast. Faster than anything that huge had a right to be. He pivoted, shooter blasting out indiscriminate hell.
Fast. Too fast.
Ba’birin caught the rounds in the chest. Point blank. The first ones punched through his weakened armour. The others punched through him. Bone shattered. Hearts punctured. He felt a terrible loosening inside him as the damage overwhelmed his body’s ability to repair itself. There was a strange impression of liquid, and a coldness that radiated from his core, freezing and numbing his limbs. Darkness followed the cold. He was plunging backwards into an infinite well, and the world w
as receding from his view.
He clung to his sight as he collapsed into a seated position. He would know if he had succeeded.
The Overfiend loomed over him, eyes glinting triumph.
Then a terrible, echoing moan wracked the walls of the hold. There was a jerk like a mountain snapping out of sleep. The ship was moving.
Ba’birin grinned at the Overfiend. ‘My brother has defeated you,’ he said.
The world vanished. Ba’birin dropped into the dark and cold, and accepted their promise of rest.
Ha’garen’s will seized the kroozer’s engines. It seized the steering. It seized the weapon banks. He merged even more deeply with the ship. The engines fired at full, flaring second daylight over the surface of Lepidus Prime. The hull screamed from the strain. The kroozer pulled away from its prey and shot towards the fleet. Its cannons blazed at the ork ships. When it blasted the stern from a Brute, there was a moment of false calm in the war as confusion descended.
And then chaos.
Outraged crews fired at the kroozer. On other vessels, crews just as furious at the perceived mutiny unleashed savage counterattacks. Within seconds, the entire ork fleet was at war with itself. The void was filled with overlapping cannon fire and the tiny suns of disintegrating craft. From out of the disintegrating swarm came the Verdict of the Anvil. Bleeding oxygen and guttering fire, it ripped through the enemy ships, its lances and guns surrounding it with a halo of wrath.
Ha’garen had never had any use for chaos. It was anathema. Even its smallest, most subtle manifestation could be the sign of the Great Enemy at work. But this, this transformation of the void war, this was good. It was the routing of the Emperor’s enemies. It was annihilation. It was glorious. He had done this. He, one soul, one mind, had created this vision of absolute destruction. As the first retaliatory strikes hit the kroozer, he felt a surge of incandescent aggression. The one directive of the universe was to smash and burn everything before him. Each hit on the hull was a gauntlet thrown. He would tear the enemy’s heart out, he would sink his fangs into the throat of his prey, he would–
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