In the centre of the forge, kneeling beside a black iron anvil, was the Weaponsmith.
The pain all caught up to Chrysius at once. He slumped down, supporting himself with one hand. He wanted to pitch forward onto the floor and let unconsciousness take over, but refused to allow himself such respite.
The Weaponsmith was three-quarters the height of a human, half the height of a Space Marine. It was roughly humanoid, though its limbs were too long for its body and its oversized feet had multi-jointed prehensile toes. Its hands had similarly long fingers, so dextrous they curved back on themselves like snakes. It was covered in red-brown fur. Its face was flat, almost simian, with an underdeveloped nose and wide mouth. It wore no clothing but had a pair of welding goggles clamped to its face and a bandolier of tools strung across its chest.
The anvil beside it was covered in tools and components. As Chrysius watched, it assembled a few into another creation, a spinning armature like a clockwork toy for the amusement of a child. The Weaponsmith let the device fall whereupon it took flight, catching the updraft of hot air from the forge and flitting towards the ceiling like an insect. The Weaponsmith watched it with curiosity, paying no attention to Chrysius at all.
There was no one else in the forge. The Iron Warriors were dead or fighting the main Imperial Fists force outside. Chrysius had been certain he would see the multi-armed servo-harness of Gurlagorg, the steam that belched from the engines and reactors mounted on his archaic armour, the pallid mask of synthetic flesh he wore as a face. But none of those were here, just the strange furred creature beside the anvil.
Another of the barricades fell in, shoved down by the combined weight of two members of Kholedei’s Deathwatch kill-team. Kholedei himself followed them in.
‘Kholedei!’ shouted Chrysius. ‘What is this? Where is Gurlagorg?’
Kholedei walked forwards slowly. ‘Step back, brother, This battle is over.’
‘Where is Gurlagorg?’ demanded Chrysius again. ‘My squad died to get to him. Where is he?’
‘Gurlagorg was never here, Brother Chrysius,’ said Kholedei.
‘But you spoke of the Weaponsmith! We heard you! That was why you were here!’
‘And we were,’ replied Kholedei, his voice level and calm. ‘But I never spoke of Gurlagorg. This creature is of a species possessing a rare technological skill. The Iron Warriors were using it to manufacture wargear for them. It might reasonably be called a weaponsmith. That is what we were here to find.’
‘You… you knew we would hear you,’ said Chrysius. ‘Over the vox. You knew we would believe it was Gurlagorg we were hunting, and you let my squad sacrifice themselves to kill him!’ Chrysius aimed his bolt pistol at the alien, which again did nothing to acknowledge any of the Space Marines around it. ‘And perhaps I will!’
Kholedei held up a calming hand, but the Space Marine beside him, who wore the golden livery of the Scimitar Guard beside the black of the Deathwatch, had his bolter up and aiming at Chrysius.
‘The kraken rounds my kill-team use can punch through even the ceramite of a Space Marine’s armour,’ said Kholedei. ‘Including yours, Brother Chrysius. Though you may not be familiar with the brain stem grafts of the Scimitar Guard, be assured that Brother Shen here can shoot you dead before your finger has finished pulling the trigger. We are here for the alien and we will take him alive. That is our mission, and we will complete it even if we have to go through you. I do not say this lightly, Chrysius. That we bring this alien back to the Inquisition is a matter outweighing either of our lives.’
Chrysius slumped and let his pistol drop. ‘We were brothers, Kholedei. At Hive Mandibus you pulled Gruz from the rubble of that blast, and you debated with Vryskus for hours! They were your brothers! You were my brother! You knew we would die for the chance to kill Gurlagorg and you let us believe it anyway.’
‘The Iron Warriors were trying to get this alien off the station,’ said Kholedei. ‘We had to take this position as quickly as we could. That meant spurring the Imperial Fists on to storm this place with all haste, more than combat doctrine would allow. We told you no lies and we fought as sternly as any of you, and for the same end.’
Kholedei knelt beside Chrysius and put a hand on his shoulder, and for a moment Chrysius saw in him the same White Scar who had once fought alongside him. But then that face was gone, replaced with another – the face of a Space Marine sworn to the Inquisition, and not to the battle-brothers at his side. ‘And this xenos is a powerful asset to the Inquisition. Even among its own kind, it is a genius. It is responsible for arming whole Black Crusades and now that skill will be used for the good of the Imperium. You may not understand all that we have achieved here, but if you have ever trusted me, trust that it is a greater victory than killing a hundred Gurlagorgs.’
Kholedei waved the Praetors of Orpheus Techmarine forward. He placed cuffs on the alien’s wrists and ankles. The xenos did not resist. One of the Techmarine’s servo-arms was equipped with a syringe – this injected the alien, which slumped unconscious. The Techmarine picked it up and slung it over his shoulder.
‘We must leave,’ said Kholedei. ‘I will pray for your fallen.’
‘They are your fallen, too,’ said Chrysius.
With that the kill-team left the forge, moving rapidly back towards the boarding rams. When the main Imperial Fists force breached the barricades, they found nothing but Assault-Sergeant Chrysius, slumped beside the anvil, exhausted and beaten.
Chrysius watched the science station explode and be scattered in the void, shattered by a few demolition charges placed at strategic points. Behind him, on the observation deck, were the bodies of Brothers Hestion, Vryskus and Myrdos, covered in shrouds for they were in no condition to be viewed. Here they would lie until the Imperial Fists force had loaded their wargear and wounded onto their strike cruiser for the journey back to the Phalanx. The dead would be buried there, and their gene-seed would be extracted to be implanted into another generation of battle-brothers. It should have been a consolation.
Chrysius’s helmet sat on the workbench in front of him. He had a little time before the force had to leave this place. He had found some paint and a brush among the workmen’s tools on the fuel depot. Before he started work he glanced through the viewport again and caught his own face, illuminated by the ruddy light of the dark Euklid IV, covered in the gang tattoos that were far more monstrous than anything he had seen on the faces of the Iron Warriors. There had been nothing monstrous on the face of his friend Kholedei, either, but perhaps it had been there, exploited by the Inquisition to fulfil their mission at any cost – even the cost of fellow Space Marines’ lives.
Perhaps Kholedei had been justified. Perhaps the Inquisition’s mission had outweighed any Imperial Fist. Chrysius realised now, for the first time, he did not know.
As dawn broke on the far edge of Euklid IV, igniting the planet’s atmosphere anew, Sergeant Chrysius began to draw the black stripe down the centre of his helmet. Brother Myrdos had never avenged his shame of losing at the Tournament of Blades. Chrysius doubted he would never avenge his shame, either. But until he did, or more likely until he died, this would be the face he would wear.
The Vorago Fastness
David Annandale
‘To be seconded to the Deathwatch is a great honour,’ Captain Vritras had said. ‘For the warrior, and for the entire Chapter.’
There had been just enough irony in the captain’s tone for Teiras to feel he could respond freely. So he had. ‘For an Ultramarine, certainly.’
‘And for a Black Dragon?’
‘This must be a joke.’ He had never heard of any brother from a Chapter of the Twenty-first Founding serving in the Ordo Xenos’s force of Adeptus Astartes.
Vritras’s smile had been tight-lipped, grim and bitter. ‘Of course it is a joke,’ he had said. ‘The Inquisition is famous for its sense of humour.’
Sense of humour? Perhaps not, Teiras thought now as he approached a massive set of doors aboard the Inquisition battle cruiser Iudex Ferox. But a sense of the perverse? Ah, that’s a different story. And still he looked for the joke.
Beyond the doors was a small theatre. The curving rows of seats descended to a proscenium stage, where a marble lectern was flanked by rows of pict screens and, to the left, a hololith table. There were four other warriors present. They turned to look at him as he worked his way down to take a seat. He ran his eyes over the insignia on their right shoulders, and it seemed to him that here, perhaps, was the punch line. He started to grin.
‘Do we amuse you?’ growled the Flesh Tearer sitting in the front row.
Teiras shook his head. ‘Your pardon, brother. I meant no offence. It is the situation that makes me smile.’
‘What do you see that we don’t?’ the Relictor demanded. He sounded no more friendly than the Flesh Tearer, but had none of the other’s defensiveness. There was a haughtiness to his tone.
‘He sees a pattern, as now do I.’ The speaker sat on the far right and at the rear of the chamber, as far as possible from the dim light of the single lume-strip that ran down the centre of the ceiling. He was the only Space Marine present who wore his helmet, and his right pauldron had no insignia. His livery was of the Deathwatch alone. He was anonymous.
‘So do I,’ said a soft voice. The Son of Antaeus sat a few rows back from the front, and he was a head taller than any of the others. He was one of the biggest Space Marines that Teiras had ever seen. Only Volos, a fellow Dragon Claw of the Second Company, was larger. Teiras nodded to the Son of Antaeus and took a seat beside him. ‘Teiras,’ he said. ‘Well met.’
‘Jern,’ said the other, nodding back. He pointed to the others. ‘The Flesh Tearer is Utor, and the Relictor is Kyral.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘And our shadowy friend tells us his name is Gherak.’ His gaze focused on Teiras’s forehead. ‘You’ll want to be careful. Our sponsor might decide a head like yours should have a place of honour atop a column.’
‘Beauty like mine is a rare thing,’ Teiras agreed, and showed his fangs. From the centre of his head grew a single horn, the gift of an overproducing ossmodula zygote. Like the other mutated battle-brothers of his Chapter, Teiras had moulded the bone protuberance, teasing out the shape it suggested and sheathing it in adamantium. It was conical, and curved to a lethal point. ‘I plan to keep my head where it is,’ he said, and as he held up an arm and flexed his fist down, a bone-blade suddenly jutted out from his wrist. The flash of pain as it emerged was so familiar, he didn’t even wince.
‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said a new voice. ‘Your head is of far more use to me attached to your shoulders.’
Teiras faced forwards as Lord Otto Dagover stalked towards the lectern. The Black Dragon had known the name of the inquisitor whose orders he would be following, but little else. As monstrous as Teiras knew he looked to most mortals, and to more than a few Space Marines with his horn and stone-grey flesh, he was a physical ideal next to the creature that now stood before them. Dagover had so many bionic modifications, he might have passed for a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus were it not for the ostentatious morbidity of his remaining flesh. His ornate power armour was night-black, with silver spines rising along the shoulders and back. He was accompanied by a constant hum of servo-motors, and Teiras wondered how much of Dagover’s original being was encased in ceramite, and how much of the ceramite encased anything at all.
Both of his arms, certainly, were artificial. They were longer than a human’s, had several joints and ended in iron-clawed fingers that twitched at the air as if searching for prey. Above his shoulders, Dagover’s head emerged from his gorget like a malignant tumour. There had been no juvenat treatments for the inquisitor. He wore his centuries and his battle scars like badges of honour and masks of horror. A few strands of grey hair hung like coarse spider’s webs from a scalp that flowed like molten wax off his skull. Oversized lenses replaced eyes in something that was not so much a face as it was a hanging curtain of wrinkled, savaged flesh. Hooks pulled back the cheeks to reveal an almost lipless mouth. Teeth poked through, but they weren’t genuine fangs like those of Teiras and Utor; they had simply been filed to cruel points.
Draped over the inquisitor’s armour, pierced by its spines, was a cloak. It was a meticulously crafted leather patchwork, the different shades of hide suggesting the colours of a noble house. It took a moment for Teiras to realise the cloak was composed of flayed xenos skin.
Dagover’s arms reached out and tapped at the screens and table. Picts of a planet appeared on the former, while the table generated a hololith of an immense fortification with a towering spire at its centre. ‘Your mission,’ he began without preamble, ‘concerns the planet Discidia.’ His words were amplified by a speaker in his gorget, but his natural voice was still audible, its cancerous rasp overlaid by the electronic scrape. There was just enough delay to create a sepulchral reverberation; the sound was redolent of all the nuances of pain both given and received. ‘Your target,’ Dagover went on, ‘is the Vorago Fastness.’ He gestured at the hololith.
Teiras took in just how many structures were contained within the walls displayed before them. There was a sprawling, disorganised quality to the layout, as if the buildings had sprung up over time and been built without regard for anything except the convenience of the moment. There was nothing liveable about the fortification, and it was far too large to be barracks. Judging from the scale of the buildings, the Fastness covered thousands of square kilometres. The meaning of the tower and the height of the walls registered. ‘A prison,’ he said.
Dagover nodded. ‘A most profitable one, thanks in part to its quarries. One in particular also has a certain xeno-archaeological interest. My colleague,’ he said with weary loathing, ‘Inquisitor Salmenau has been overseeing a dig site at this location,’ a light began to blink near the north-east wall, ‘and his team has found a xenos relic of considerable importance.’
Kyral sat forwards. ‘What kind of relic?’
To Teiras’s surprise, Dagover answered. ‘Early reports point to a cyranax weapon.’
There was a pause. The cyranax watchers were a xenos race that existed somewhere between myth and rumour. Teiras had heard whispers that the creatures possessed world-destroying technology, but he didn’t know anything verifiable about them, not even whether or not they still existed. Teiras wasn’t sure what was more startling: the nature of the information, or the fact that Dagover had revealed it so readily. The inquisitor smiled, and seemed to chill the air by several degrees. A sense of humour, by the Throne, Teiras thought.
Utor broke the silence. ‘And the problem is?’
‘Other than the fact that Inquisitor Salmenau’s judgement makes him an unfit guardian of that weapon? An enemy force has arrived before us to claim the prize.’
‘What enemy?’ Teiras heard Utor’s temper flare at Dagover’s tease.
‘The ruling council of Discidia has no idea. But their fragmentary intelligence strongly suggests the necrons.’
Teiras fought back a snort of disbelief. A single kill-team against an enemy about which so little was known beyond its utter implacability? Was there more information available than he suspected? ‘What connection do the necrons have to the cyranax watchers?’ he asked.
‘Unknown, if indeed there is one.’
Better and better, Teiras thought. ‘Are we really an adequate response to–’
‘You are more than adequate,’ Dagover interrupted. ‘The necron force must be a small one, or all of Discidia would already have fallen, and Inquisitor Salmenau, of all people, has been able to stand up to the siege for a week. Furthermore, it is the will of the Inquisition that Discidia and its resources be preserved intact, not turned to so much glass and cinder by a large-scale war.’ He began to shut down the pict screens. ‘We will reach Dis
cidia in a week.’ He turned to go.
‘How long can Inquisitor Salmenau hold out?’ Teiras asked.
‘His supplies should last for another five days.’ The inquisitor’s carrion flesh smiled again. ‘If we get there too soon, there will be no incentive for him to leave his refuge, now will there?’ Then he left the stage, metal and death disappearing back into the shadows.
‘Well,’ said Jern after a few moments. ‘He told us a lot more than I was expecting.’
‘But not the important thing,’ Teiras observed.
‘Which is what?’ Kyral asked.
‘Why us?’
Black Dragon. Son of Antaeus. Relictor. Flesh Tearer. Two fell results of the Cursed Founding, one member of a Chapter that was dancing on the edge of outright heresy, and one warrior whose genetic makeup was so corrupted that madness was not just a risk but a destiny. And if Gherak felt the need to keep his Chapter allegiance anonymous in this company, then his secrets were dark indeed. They were all from Chapters that were, at best, regarded with suspicion by the Inquisition and the more orthodox Adeptus Astartes. At worst, they were the targets of outright ostracism and investigation. The situation was more than bizarre. Not one of them should be in the Deathwatch. Teiras had no idea what game Dagover was playing, but he knew now that he was a long way from seeing the punch line to the inquisitor’s joke.
Why us?
The feudal lords of Discidia were a forward-thinking aristocracy. Centuries earlier, the Vorago Fastness had been built with room for a near-infinite prison population. Larger than any one city on the planet, it had been conceived as a means of political control at least as much as a dumping ground for the criminal element. Discidia had the highest incarceration rate of any world in the Maeror subsector. It also had the lowest crime rate. Justice there was rudimentary to the point of being meaningless: any infraction, or even the mere perception of one, resulted in the accused being thrown into Vorago and forgotten. The abysmally short life expectancy in the prison hive kept the population density to merely hellish, rather than impossible.
Hammer and Bolter Presents: Xenos Hunters Page 17