Faced with such a surplus of space, the wise and benevolent regents of Discidia did the only logical thing: they imported prisoners. They let it be known to all neighbouring systems that here was a location where undesirables of whatever description could be sent and held for a suitable remuneration. And so, for generations had come a flood of inconvenient heirs, rivals and political malcontents, men and women who, for one reason or another, could not simply be assassinated, or whose continued existence was more profitable than their deaths. Those were the prisoners over whom an actual watch was kept, to make sure that they stayed alive for as long as was useful. Over time, the Vorago Fastness had become a profitable enterprise, feeding the wealth of Discidia’s growing leisure class, and financing its exploding prison bureaucracy.
But the prison was a source of riches not only for what it held, but also for what it exported. It was built – by design – over many of the planet’s richest deposits of benthamite. The stone was hard and smooth as marble, yet had the gloss and shine of obsidian. In its pure state it was as translucent as glass, but when other minerals were introduced it took on colours of extraordinary richness and hue. Its beauty and strength made it highly sought after for the construction of monuments. Very little struck awe into the heart of the masses with quite the same power as the sight of a sunset filtered through the beyond-royal blues and reds of a benthamite triumphal arch. And very little gladdened the hearts of Discidia’s nobility quite like the quarrying of one of the subsector’s most valuable resources by slave labour.
All of this Teiras learned on the journey to Discidia. A surprising amount he heard from scarified lips of Dagover himself, who seemed to be everywhere in the lead-up to mission launch. Teiras asked him only once why he had put together a kill-team with such a roster. Dagover had only smiled in response. He had tilted his head, and the black lenses of his bionic eyes had flashed with the reflected light of a lume-strip. Teiras was sure the effect was deliberate.
And on the seventh day, the Thunderhawk gunship Merciless flew Dagover and the kill-team over the capital city, Carcera Lucrosus, towards the Lord Governor’s palace. On Dagover’s orders, the pilot came in low, skimming the rooftops. At first, Teiras had thought the approach was strategic, but there was no sign of conflict. The war they were heading for was confined within the walls of Vorago. What he was granted through the viewing block was a thorough perspective of the city. He glanced at Dagover. The inquisitor was watching him closely. There’s something he wants me to see, Teiras thought. He looked down again, absorbing and evaluating.
Carcera Lucrosus was vast, and its regions varied between forests of glittering spires and shantytown swamps. But the slums were far more sparse, and took up far less real estate than Teiras was used to seeing in a city this size. He also saw none of the ant-like activity he would have expected. The slums were half-empty, some of them wholly deserted, their ramshackle structures collapsed into rubble.
The more affluent areas, on the other hand, were teeming. Sky-reaching needles of ambition and cathedrals of wealth sprouted in enclave after enclave of privilege and entitlement. Architectural follies fought to outdo each other in size and luxury. But the palace, centuries older than any of the buildings that surrounded it, was the grandest monstrosity of them all. Nestled beside the equally monumental outer wall of the Vorago Fastness, it sprawled for blocks, a tasteless concatenation of domes and minarets built beside and on top of each other like a cluster of gold-plated mushrooms. It was an unrestrained explosion of wealth and power. There was no tempering by faith; as evening fell and the Merciless lowered itself to the landing pad, Teiras saw a few devotional figures worked into friezes along the bases of some of the domes, but these gestures seemed hollow, mere artistic fillips.
‘This is a corrupt city,’ Gherak muttered.
Teiras agreed.
Dagover met with Lord Governor Pallens alone. His accompanying servo-skull sent a real-time hololith back to the Space Marines on the Thunderhawk. Teiras studied the updating images closely. The meeting room struck him as simply a throne room with variations. Even though the flicker and the grain of the hololith, the ostentation of the chamber was glaring. Floor-to-ceiling panels alternated between riotous mosaics of gold and benthamite, and enormous mirrors. Wealth and light reflected each other and turned the room into a narcissistic paroxysm. The work tables and pict screens almost disappeared beneath the visual weight of the ornamentation.
Pallens sat on a throne in the centre of the hall. The designs on the floor radiated out from the throne’s dais, as if the Lord Governor were the fount of all knowledge in the room. But Pallens was not looking happy. He was a short, heavy-set man draped with too much finery, and he shrank from the sight of Dagover. Now the rays from the dais were so many accusatory fingers, pointing at the callow little man in the big chair. That he was flanked by the other members of the ruling council didn’t seem to comfort him much. They were cowering just as badly. But all of them, despite their fear, still had an arrogant glint in their eyes. They resented the necessity of outside intervention, Teiras saw. They wanted a dirty job done so they could get back to the business of accumulating wealth. Over the vox transmission, Teiras heard all sorts of references to piety and worship of the Emperor, and he believed not a one.
Dagover consulted a data-slate. ‘These floor plans are entirely accurate?’ he asked the functionary who stood before the table. ‘There has been no deviation from them at any time during or since the construction of the tower?’
‘Those are the amended versions, lord,’ the other man said. ‘They illustrate the control room as it was built, not as it had been planned.’
Dagover nodded. ‘And the power supply?’
‘Prepared to your specifications.’
Dagover turned to go.
‘When will the Fastness be able to resume normal operations?’ Pallens asked. His voice shook, but his greed and arrogance overrode his fear.
‘You are asking when Discidia will be free of the vile xenos taint?’ Dagover’s tone would have stopped the heart of a more intelligent man.
‘Yes, yes,’ Pallens said. ‘Of course. But Vorago has been closed to all traffic in and out since the incident began, and every day that goes by, our economy–’
‘Will stagnate and rot until, by the Emperor’s good grace and my good will, I say otherwise,’ Dagover snarled. He stormed from the hall.
There was nothing useful in that briefing, Teiras thought, as the hololith blinked out. It was all for show. Why does he want us to see this?
Teiras examined the bolter shell before inserting it into the magazine. The kraken penetrator round came to a solid adamantium tip. It was a thing of beauty.
The kill-team was loading up before leaving the Merciless for the generatorium. Dagover had distributed the equipment they would be deploying against the necrons. Along with the specialised shells, the bolters were Mark IVs with range finders, and the grenades were haywire variants. The weapons were impressive, but they were also, Dagover explained, best guesses. The hope was that the kraken rounds would tear through the enemy’s armour, and that the grenades would disrupt the creatures’ eldritch energy. The hope, not the certainty.
‘We know one thing with absolute certainty about the necrons,’ Dagover said as the Deathwatch loaded up. ‘And that is that we know nothing with certainty. Remember that. Be surprised by nothing. You will be fighting a foe who seems to be composed of nothing but armour. What would incapacitate a man or an ork is a mere inconvenience to a necron. We do not even know if they can be truly killed.’
‘Why is that?’ Teiras asked.
‘They vanish,’ said Kyral.
‘You’ve fought them before?’
The Relictor nodded. ‘Once. With my Chapter brothers.’ He tapped his bolter’s magazine. ‘Let us hope these are more effective than standard arms.’
‘What do you mean “they vanish�
�?’
‘Just that. You’ll see. Instead of dying, they simply disappear. They leave no corpses.’
‘Nothing to study,’ Jern realised. ‘Any advice?’
‘Hit them as hard and as quickly as possible.’
‘Disrupt, paralyse, then exterminate,’ Dagover supplied. ‘And beware their weapons. As far as we have been able to determine though battlefield observation, their beams flay matter in molecular layers. Organic or inorganic makes no difference. It is simply sliced away to nothing.’
Teiras grimaced. The concept of the xenos weapon was distasteful. It lacked the directness, the brutal truth, of Imperial guns. He loaded the last of the kraken rounds, murmured a prayer of benediction over the magazine, then slammed it home in the bolter. Teiras liked these weapons. He left the Merciless eager to put them to the test.
The generatorium was vast. Its massed ranks of immense turbines marched into the distant gloom of the hall beneath a vault whose frescoes depicted the heroic rise and rise of Discidia’s ruling caste. The particular blessing of the Emperor that they laid claim to was depicted as nothing less than their due. The walls and floor vibrated with the white-noise hum of the turbines. Here, power for the entire city was produced. Dagover was about to steal all of it for a few crucial seconds.
In an open space before the turbines was the teleporter that had been brought down from the Iudex Ferox. It was ancient. There was an artisanal touch to the ornate pylons that surrounded the pad, in the brass keys of the bulky cogitator, and in the inlaid mosaic of runes on the pad itself. This was a relic. A survivor, Teiras suspected, from the Dark Age of Technology. One of the treasures that the Inquisition held for its own particular use.
‘It’s glorious,’ Kyral said. The Relictor ran a gauntlet over the surface of the cogitator. The machine gleamed with the patina of enormous age.
Jern seemed more concerned with the implications of its presence. ‘How are we using this?’ he asked.
‘To teleport into the control room of the Fastness.’
‘Control room?’ Utor protested.
Jern exchanged a look with Teiras. ‘Which I am sure,’ the Black Dragon said, ‘is located at the top of that centrally located tower, just as I am sure that there is no teleport homer to keep us from phasing into the floor or walls.’
‘Quite,’ Dagover said.
‘This is madness,’ said Utor.
Teiras looked at Gherak. The other Space Marine said nothing. He stood motionless, waiting, his posture suggesting indifference, as if he had seen this game of the inquisitor’s many times before. ‘All right,’ Teiras said to Dagover. ‘What’s the trick?’
‘Data,’ Kyral said, still hovering over the cogitator.
‘Very good.’ The mask of ravaged flesh beamed, and the effect was obscene. ‘Given enough information and power, this teleporter has a flawless precision of beam.’ He held up the data-slate. ‘Hence my insistence that the floor plans be accurate.’
Teiras felt himself grinning. However magical this equipment, there was a lunatic recklessness to the mission that spoke to him. It held a violent promise, one into which he could sink his fangs. He strode onto the pad. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘the xenos foe awaits. Shall we go meet it?’
Reality blinked. The continuity of existence was severed as two spaces conjoined. There was the infinitesimal, but all-encompassing, moment during which the self ceased to be, and then Teiras had being once again.
The teleporter performed as Dagover had promised. The kill-team materialised in a circular chamber about twenty metres in diameter. Armourglas windows, overlooking the full prospect of the Vorago Fastness, ran around the entire periphery. Below them sat banks of cogitators, control panels and pict screens. In the centre of the floor, what looked like an extremely thick pillar was, in fact, an elevator.
Most of these details Teiras did not take in consciously until later. What registered in the moment were the half dozen metal skeletons that stood before him. They did not wear armour because they were armour. They were life of a kind, but their shape was death, their faces as unchanging and unforgiving as the bone they resembled. There was little in the eyes of these warriors beyond a driving hatred for anything that did not share their inorganic half-life. And there was no surprise. They raised their weapons and fired.
Teiras threw himself down. A gauss beam struck where his head had been a moment before. It glanced against his helmet, and warning runes lit up in his retinal display. The merest touch of the beam had damaged the ceramite. The light of the beam was the green of corruption and disease. A death ancient, merciless and incomprehensibly alien had found its expression in that light.
The space was too confined for the haywire grenades. Teiras returned fire with his bolter. The kraken rounds punched into the necrons, some going all the way through to the wall behind. A ghoul jerked and stumbled from the hits, its gun bucking up and the beam shearing away the rockcrete of the ceiling.
But the necron didn’t fall. It stepped forwards. It had been damaged, but it showed no pain. The lack of expression on its face was chilling, because what looked like a helmet was the creature itself, unflinching before the hail of destruction; and still the eyes glowed with that cold, immovable hatred.
Disrupt. Teiras rolled forwards and came up like a battering ram against the undead thing’s chest. He knocked it to the ground. Paralyse. Kneeling on the torso, he snapped out a bone-blade and plunged it into the necron’s neck. With a vicious thrust, he severed the thing’s head, and yet its hands reached up, seeking to pull off his helmet. Exterminate. He brought a fist down, pulverising the skull. There was a spine-grating electronic wail of agony. Then it cut off, and the necron was gone. Its vanishing was another reality blink. Existence cracked and reformed, taking the necron with it. Teiras felt himself twitch, as if he had been violently woken. Around him, there was nothing but a dispersing afterglow of rotted green.
There were other wails, a choir of the damned, as Teiras stood up. His kill-team brothers had destroyed the other machinic ghouls, but even in their passing, the creatures left behind a taint. There was something wrong with the atmosphere of the control room, as if a cemetery had learned rage. Jern’s opponent still struggled. The Son of Antaeus, his armour bearing deep scrapes where a flayer beam had touched him, had shot the necron’s limbs off, but the thing still tried to squirm forwards to attack him. The five of them watched for a few moments more before Jern dispatched the abomination with a shot to the head.
‘A good start,’ Utor said.
Kyral snorted. ‘We’ve done little more than alert the main force to our presence.’
‘So we strike quickly,’ Gherak said. It was the first time he had spoken since they had arrived on Discidia.
‘Agreed,’ Teiras said. He examined the control room’s screens. ‘The mining rail network is still running.’
‘No doubt being used by the enemy,’ Jern said.
Utor grunted. ‘Then we can reach them all the faster.’ Even through the tone-deadening distortion of the Flesh Tearer’s helmet speaker, Teiras heard a false note in Utor’s eagerness. It wasn’t bravado he was detecting – the Space Marine worried about the prospect of battle did not exist. This was something else. Utor was working hard to hold himself back, Teiras realised. It wasn’t battle that worried him; it was his ability to restrain his fall into the Black Rage. His eagerness and surliness were conscious performances, as if by acting the thuggish berserker he could stave off becoming the real thing.
And Dagover probably selected you precisely for that propensity to madness, Teiras thought.
He traced a finger over a hololith map of the prison’s rail system. ‘This line passes directly in front of the north face of this tower and crosses the dig site.’
Gears engaged and there was a steady mechanical hum as the elevator suddenly began to ascend. The kill-team faced the doors, bolters up.
Gherak stepped forwards with a heavy flamer. When the doors of the enclosed metal box opened, he flooded the interior with ignited promethium, bathing the group of necrons within with purging fire. The warriors did not feel pain, and they advanced into the control room, but the flame corroded their bodies. Their legs collapsed within a few steps. The Space Marines crushed the flailing skeletons beneath their boots and watched the bodies vanish in a flare of sickly green. Already, Teiras was growing used to their death wail.
The kill-team piled into the smoking elevator. The walls of the cage were scorched black, and a bas-relief frieze at its rear had been melted to ruin. Kyral pulled the lever that operated the lift. There were only two destinations: the base and the control room. The cage dropped with a rattling groan.
Teiras and Jern took up positions at the doors, and burst through them as soon as they opened, into the night and open air of the Vorago Fastness. They unleashed a stream of bolt-fire as they charged, their kraken shells hammering into the ranks of necrons on the rockcrete platform before them. The others followed, and the kill-team hit the enemy with concentrated punch and momentum. Multiple bolters hit one target, then the next, and with the sheer volume of fire, the kraken rounds were lethal this time. Kyral threw a haywire grenade at the end of the platform, catching the necrons in its disruption field. It did not paralyse them, but their movements became jerky and their guns would not fire. The ghouls marched forwards out of the field. They were even more ghastly as they twitched. They were creatures from the galaxy’s nightmares for whom death had become both meaningless and their only calling.
But the few seconds that the grenade bought were enough, and the bolter-fire did the rest. The necrons went down and vanished, leaving behind the echoes of their hate-filled electronic wails and the uncanny flicker of ghost light.
Hammer and Bolter Presents: Xenos Hunters Page 18