by Guy Haley
Tzurin bowed deeply. ‘It will not come to that. We will be victorious. You are a genius in conceiving this plan, my lord. Without their natural abilities, the hrud will be helpless. You shall pin them in place temporally. I imagine it will cause them great panic.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Perturabo. ‘But you forget their technological prowess, magos. Another drawback of your creed is the arrogance it breeds in you. Their phasic plasma weaponry is far in advance of anything you and your priesthood can muster. Adequately threatened, they could produce more devastating devices.’
‘I do not think that to be the case, my lord primarch.’
‘You assume that if they possessed more potent devices, they would have used them already. You are complacent. Ascribing human behaviour to xenos is foolish. They are curious creatures. We cannot know what they will or will not do. It is not in my nature to restrain myself in war, magos, but caution is required.’
‘Of course, my lord.’
‘Perhaps Kilos is right. Are you the only one of the high magi in the Taghmata here who believes this will work?’
‘I am, my lord, I must admit. But my field is not well understood or respected by my peers. They lack my insight into these most arcane of secrets. Few can comprehend time as I do - it is the very engine of the universe.’
‘You might support me out of sycophancy, hoping for reward.’ Perturabo tapped the papers against his hand. What schemes flashed along the enhanced neural pathways of this creature? None of the Mechanicum could be trusted. ‘However, I tire of this war. Prepare your devices. We will put my theory to the test. We shall assault the fortress. If it falls, the western landmass of One Twenty-Five Twenty-Three will be ours. The enemy are nearly spent here. If our plan works, we can finish this planet and move onto the next with greater surety of success.’
He handed the papers back to the magos.
Tzurin paused. ‘What if it does not work as anticipated, my lord?’ said Tzurin. ‘Would not a smaller-scale trial be in order first?’
Perturabo smiled bleakly. ‘You turn my own line of reasoning against me. Well then, there are times that one must take a leap in the dark. Are you not confident of your devices, magos? If it fails, we will all die.’
‘Let them hurl their time altering powers against our shields, for the Motive Force is eternal and will not be undone.’ Tzurin took the papers in a snaking appendage of banded metal.
‘Inform me when you are prepared. I shall lead the attack myself.’
Tzurin bowed and left the chamber. Perturabo turned back to the stars.
After the magos had gone, Warsmith Forrix, first captain and Triarch of the Trident, took a hesitant step forwards. Perturabo knew his moods were becoming difficult to judge. His temper, never easy, had become unpredictable the longer they had laboured in the Deeps. Perturabo would once have been alarmed at this new wariness in his warrior’s behaviour, but he took satisfaction in the control it gave him; he certainly had little over the campaign’s outcome.
‘Is this a wise course of action?’ asked Forrix.
His fellow triarchs Harkor and Golg stepped up behind the first captain.
‘You think it is not, Forrix?’ the primarch asked.
‘We will grind ourselves away to nothing here, in the middle of nowhere The nearest human settlement of consequence is light years away. What is the purpose of this action? We should abandon this campaign, regroup and ask for new orders from the War Council.’
This did anger Perturabo. He stood suddenly, causing Forrix to move back. ‘The command to take this benighted stretch of the void comes directly from Terra. It is a test. If my father wishes to see me fail, He will be disappointed. I refuse to give in to these creatures. My orders are to purge them, so purged they will be! If we do not change our strategy, then we will fail. Only fools throw their men against a wall they know will not break.’
‘Then perhaps one of us might better lead this expedition?’ said Harkor. There was always some hidden insinuation in his words. His was a false smile; sometimes Perturabo regretted Harkor’s elevation to the Trident ‘We cannot risk your loss.’
Which one would I send? thought Perturabo.
Forrix was doggedly loyal, but even he was not above the scheming his fellow triarchs indulged in. Harkor was open in his arrogance, but he was too bold and devious, and his ambition was poisoning him. Golg was an attack dog, unsubtle and so blunt that Perturabo had not given him the rank of warsmith despite appointing him as one of his three triarchs. Perturabo was tired of them. He entertained the thought of dismissing them all.
‘I will lead the assault,’ the primarch said. ‘Were any songs ever to be written about this war, how would it look if I lurked at the rear?’ More bitterness crept into his voice; the number of songs penned about his Legion were few. ‘I shall lead. Now leave me!
Perturabo, stirred briefly to enthusiasm, sank back into his throne, where he brooded upon this pointless war.
His Trident, bereft, took their leave.
SIX
TEMPORA MORTIS
999.M30
WESTERN CONTINENT, GUGANN
A peripheral chamber in the central fortress of the hrud burrow complex shook to the rumble of breaching charges, bringing its alien garrison to alertness. A second series of detonations blew in the wall in a blizzard of vitrified rock fragments. The hrud were already firing as the lead elements of the 16th Grand Battalion charged through, the 165th Company at its head.
Breaching squads came first, boltguns firing through the loops of their shields. Hrud phasic plasma materialised in the bodies of men, bypassing their armour and killing them outright. However, where the plasma impacted directly, the shields were thick enough to stop it, though they were soon peppered with holes.
The barrage felled a score of Iron Warriors, but there were too many of them and in moments the fight was over. Captain Anabaxis stepped over the bodies of his men into a room filled with the decomposition vapours of the hrud.
‘Secure that door,’ he ordered, pointing to the sole exit from the room. It was irregularly shaped and mysterious of purpose. ‘Meos’ he said, calling his Master of Signal to him.
Meos came running from the rear, the multiple antennae of his nuncio vox and cognis signum extending from their housings as he approached.
‘Captain?’
‘Make contact with the rest of the Sixteenth Grand Battalion,’ commanded Anabaxis. ‘See if you can raise the Eleventh.’
The Iron Warriors crammed themselves into the room, taking a moment to check their weapons and replenish supplies from the artillery train at the column rear. Though it had been dug rapidly, the Imperial assault mine was perfectly square and cut into the rounded hrud chamber like a sword into flesh.
Fortreidon watched Captain Anabaxis. He was brusque as he checked fallen warriors whom the Apothecaries had not yet reached, summoning aid where needed.
‘If he feels anything for the fallen men, he hides it well,’ said Fortreidon.
‘Iron within,’ murmured Bardan. ‘He deserves his name of unwavering. But do not let it make you think he does not care - he’s not so careless as to kill us all. How would he win if he did?’
‘Sir!’ called Meos. ‘I have contact with the One Hundred and Sixty-Eighth and the One Hundred and Sixty-Ninth line companies, and the Thirty-Third Grand Company. They’re moving in on the hrud citadel ahead of us. The Eleventh Grand Battalion is coming in from the east. The primarch is engaging them from the north.’
‘Then we hurry. Move on,’ Anabaxis ordered. ‘We are behind schedule. The Eleventh Grand Battalion awaits us.’
‘Twenty of ours dead for eight of theirs. I hope the primarch fares better,’ said Bardan as they trooped out of the chamber.
‘Quiet,’ said Sergeant Zhalsk. He was watching their leader carefully. ‘Anabaxis will hear you. If he does not have you on the punishment racks for insubordination, I will - is that clear?’
They fought their way up winding passag
es under heavy fire. The hrud resistance became heavier the closer they came to the citadel at the fortress’ heart. There were so many of the xenos that time became meaningless. Communications between the companies of the legion was hopelessly disrupted. Through storms of fusil fire and areas of temporal disturbance they battled, coming closer and closer to the central holdfast. The aliens, previously stealthy ambush fighters, now came at them en masse. They deployed larger weapons, and warriors in suits of scabrous living armour, and strange things that may have been machine or flesh or both. Corridors became choked with the dead.
One was filled wall to wall with the bodies of the Imperial Army penal auxilia attached to the 11th Grand Battalion. Crumbling uniforms hung from emaciated frames, and wisps of white hair moved in the foetid breezes of the warren. Every one of them had died of old age.
Fortreidon’s company were slain around him. Bardan fell, cut in half by a blade that sucked the life from him. When he hit the floor, his armour shattered into oxidised flakes and his bones into powder. Age clawed harder at Fortreidon with every engagement. The disruption of time disoriented him, putting pressures on his system that even his enhanced physiology could not compensate for.
The muffled booming of mole-mortar fire rumbled from every sinuous passageway. Earthquakes shook the planet The burrows rippled with the shocks, protected somehow from the tectonic strains placed on the planet by the hrud. Fortreidon’s world became confined to an endless procession of screaming alien faces and men dying to the effects of horrific eldritch technology. He became numb, fighting on automatically. After each engagement there was barely enough time to replenish their ammunition before the next horde of xenos bore down on them and the cold ache of age pulled at his bones again. They joined with the 119th Company, who were under direct command of the 11th Grand Battalion’s warsmith Hektor Dos. Together, the two forces were now barely the size of the 165th Company when it had first breached the citadel.
After what seemed like centuries of fighting, they broke through into a huge cavern supported by willowy pillars and crossed by galleries that looked to serve no purpose.
There the hrud were legion. The chamber was vast, and filled with the tumult of full-scale war. Explosions boomed everywhere as a concerted armoured assault pushed its way across the floor through a mass of flickering shapes. As Fortreidon watched, a Typhon siege tank was mobbed by the indistinct outlines of the hrud. There was a flash, and they stepped away, leaving a rusted skeleton behind. A phalanx of Dreadnoughts rushed out from behind only to be felled by searing stabs of focused temporal vortices that rotted them from the inside out. Their chassis collapsed, thinned by oxidation, and a thin, organic gruei spilled onto the ground from their sarcophagi.
A shout went up from a handful of voices at the vanguard of the company.
‘The primarch! The primarch!’
More voices picked up the call. Fortreidon moved to the edge of the walkway and looked down, seeing nothing.
‘Perturabo is here! To his side!’ someone called.
‘Forward!’ ordered Warsmith Dos.
Anabaxis took up the cry, then the rest. ‘Forward!’
‘Iron within!’ shouted Warsmith Dos.
‘Iron without!’ they roared in response.
Fortreidon was caught up in his brothers’ advance, rushing down around a spiral walkway that took them through a multilayered battle A lifetime of horrors emerged from around every turn. His bolter was never silent, and he fired until the barrel glowed. A great tumult in the centre of the chamber suggested Perturabo’s position.
Eventually they came out onto the lowest level, a buckled landscape of nonsense shapes that resonated and hummed discordantly.
And then, there he was: Perturabo, his gene-father and lord of the Iron Warriors.
The primarch pushed his way forwards, unstoppable, a cadre of his Tyranthikos veterans at his back. He was a force of nature. Nothing could arrest his progress. He stepped into the killing waves of the hrud without harm, though explosions roared around him and temporal quickening fields battered at his frame His wargear dulled, but it was so expertly made that it lost none of its functionality, and if he aged by proximity to the hrud’s alien metabolisms and malign weaponry, his face did not show it. He was an avatar of fury, his blue eyes blazing hatred for all that did not wear mankind’s form. The cannons strapped to his forearms spat death in every direction, shattering hrud into rotten meat. Their temporal fields failed to confound him, but sped him on when he encountered them, hastening Perturabo’s movements and the hrud’s deaths.
Clearing the way of aliens, the Lord of Iron looked right at Fortreidon. He raised his fist and pointed, gun barrels smoking. The young Iron Warrior’s breath caught.
‘Protect the device!’ he bellowed. ‘Iron within, iron without!’
In the primarch’s wake came a vehicle of the Mechanicum. Its heavy brass treads crushed the noisome residue of the hrud and fallen Iron Warriors alike into paste. Its bulk shattered the strange shapes of the floor and broke through the support struts of walkways. Beams of crackling energy slammed into its sides, only to be repelled by the arcane sciences of its creators. Though longer than a heavy siege tank, the vehicle’s body was a fragile-looking thing. The spars holding the chassis over its four track units were less than a foot thick, but it was cocooned in protective layers of energy field through which no harm could come. The mechanism was hinged in the middle, the body dividing into two parts. The engine and cogitator bank driving the vehicle occupied the smaller section at the back. The front carried a giant flask that spewed superchilled vapour down its sides.
Fortreidon fell in alongside it as ordered, gun up, shooting when he could get a clear target. The air buckled and swam, making his aim treacherous. Phasic plasma felled the warrior next to him, but the xenos technology could not pierce the shields of the Mechanicum transport; the air beside him rippled with patterns of light.
Hrud weaponry, concealed in the very fabric of space by unclean means, opened fire The transport drew their wrath like nothing else From a thousand hrud throats came a dreadful, haunting keening, and they threw themselves heedlessly at the crawler only to be blasted apart by the growing phalanx of Iron Warriors guarding its sides.
‘Iron within! Iron without!’ they chanted. ‘Iron within! Iron without! Iron within! Iron without!’
The battle shifted. The hrud, seeing their beams of tortured time failing to pierce the atomantic shielding of the crawler, changed tactics.
‘Melee fighters, incoming!’ Anabaxis’ voice filled Fortreidon with savage joy. The pulse of his blood intoxicated him. This was war in its purest form, warrior to warrior in a battle of annihilation.
The cannons turned from the vehicle onto the legionaries, ripping them to shreds as parts of them were displaced in time. Warriors fell, fused with the remains of others as they were shunted thousandths of a second along their own time stream and out of synchronicity with the planet’s motion.
Screeching hrud warriors appeared from folds in the air, each wielding twinned blades of light that smoked with entropic dissolution. They flickered and leapt from place to place, the munitions poured in their direction hitting naught but thin air, or wasted by the beings’ native time fields before they could detonate.
The Legion was embattled on all sides.
The hrud were pouring into the cavern, the effects of their temporal weaponry ripping apart Fortreidon’s perception as efficiently as it dismembered his comrades. Events broke from their normal flow. Fortreidon’s war ceased to proceed from moment to moment, but was instead broken into a disorienting jumble. Many Iron Warriors died, thrown from the middle of desperate combat and then back again, their concentration broken. Weapons fell to pieces as they encountered hrud blades. Warriors speared by unearthly swords exploded, their bodies forced into impossible shapes. Others aged backwards, flushed with vigour for a second, before dying in agony as their bodies gorily rejected their implants.
But the h
rud were not invincible. They could die. Bolts slew them, as did swords, and hands locked around thin alien necks. The Iron Warriors let go of their coldly logical approach to warfare, for it was no use against such creatures. They fought like beasts and the hrud fell, yet even savagery was insufficient. The line of steel between the screaming hrud and the Mechanicum device grew thinner and thinner.
The crawler stopped. With a wheezing groan it shot anchoring harpoons deep into the ground and began a low and throaty rumbling.
Fortreidon gunned down an alien. Swords slid from its limp fingers. Where they pierced the floor, the glassy surface shattered into vitreous sand. Another creature came at him. Fortreidon fired, but his bolts failed to detonate, so he reversed his hold on his bolter and slammed the grip into the chest of the hrud. His hands burned as they came so close to the thing. His armour sang in alarm as the systems in his gauntlets and forearms decayed and failed. The hrud spun back, arms whipping over Fortreidon’s head like twirled ropes. His bolter fell from his hands, components fused with corrosion.
The Mechanicum device pulsed quickly, strobing actinic light across the combatants. The Iron Warriors lit up like phantoms, frozen between each pulse. The strobing slowed, becoming slower and slower, until it was a leaden heartbeat crawl.
With a small sound, light blazed out of the device and the temperature plunged. A coruscating stasis field blanketed the battlefield.
Vortices of light whipped across the cavern where competing temporal currents clashed, tearing apart those unfortunate to be caught in the worst of it The field stabilised. The distorting effects of the hrud were banished as the stasis field overwhelmed their biology, banishing the entropic waves that surrounded them.
The hrud that Fortreidon was fighting screamed in agony and fell to the side. To his amazement, he could see it clearly.
For the first time, Fortreidon saw his enemy.
Huge black eyes blinked in a broad face thick with mucous streaming from dark pores in its flesh. Mandibles twitched in the corners of its mouth. The skin was repellently moist. It had no hair, no expression, no soul-light in its eyes. The basic form of four limbs and a head aside, it was utterly alien. Stinking robes swathed it head to foot, but on one side they had been burned away, revealing articulated armour closely fitted to its flexible limbs. It lifted its sword, but it too was affected by the field, and the sheen of light around it wavered uncontrollably before puttering out.