Wrath of Iron

by Chris Wraight

  he canted, flavouring the binaric push with annoyance.

  ‘Working on it,’ replied Bonnem, one of his two moderati. ‘Something’s just made it worse.’

  Nomen grunted, and swung Arma’s head around. The cockpit slewed through the airborne grime, and only patches of the terrain ahead showed up clearly.

  he suggested, knowing his layman’s opinion would probably be rejected by Bonnem, but trying it anyway.

  Bonnem shook his head, making the cables jutting from the back of his skull clatter.

  ‘If it was that, I’d have fixed it,’ he muttered. ‘Want me to drive?’

  Nomen smiled, bringing Arma’s left arm inferno cannon into play. As he did so, the Warhound’s machine-spirit growled its metallic approval. Below him, a whole horde of cultists had abandoned their positions and were fleeing back down the tunnel away from him.

  Nomen gauged the distance, calibrated the burn, and fed it power.

  The flamer sent a jet of blazing promethium streaking out and washing over the retreating gangs of foot-

  soldiers. They ignited in a series of roaring, fizzing fireballs, writhing as they fell to earth.

  The torrent of flame guttered out, and Nomen shifted his attention back to the mega-bolter. Those few of the enemy who managed to escape the flames were mown down by scything barrages of projectiles.

  The exercise of power was always reassuring. It eased the link between his mind and that of the engine’s, and made the business of piloting much more pleasant than it otherwise could be.

  He brought the gun barrels up for reloading. In the brief lull, he let the Manifold feed him what information it could. Nomen had lost contact with the Iron Hands, who had pushed on up the tunnels with surprising speed. In their absence, the three Warhounds had formed the lynchpin of the Imperial advance, forming mobile firebases around which the mortal troops and tank columns could rally.

  As the infantry units had ground their way along the tunnels, however, that pattern had begun to break down. Losing his sensoria readings had been the start of it. Then, one after another, he’d lost signals from the accompanying armour. It had started to feel like he was fighting alone in the dark, for all the information he was getting. The outline of the tunnels still registered – when he lifted the Warhound’s head, its forward-facing lumen beams exposed the curved ferrocrete ceiling above – but more or less everything else was a mess of static-fuzz and feedback.

  It was demeaning. A war machine of Arma’s pedigree and refinement had no business being underground.

  Nomen felt the reload process complete, and geared himself up for renewed action.

  he canted, idly monitoring his weapon heat-levels as the Warhound lurched back into a walk.

  ‘Multiples, bearing 5-6, coming up slow,’ replied Bonnem, working hard to make some sense of what he was getting. ‘Enemy advance steady.’

  He turned in his command throne, craning up to look at Nomen with some concern.

  ‘From what I can see, my princeps, we’ve got a lot of units going backwards,’ he said. ‘We’re almost blind here. Recommend we pull back until I can clear this up a bit.’

  Nomen felt the twinge of unease again. What was that?

  he canted, rolling his shoulders against the painful interface nodes in his flesh, putting it down to a faulty input buffer.

  The clouds of smog cleared a little directly ahead, exposing a ragged line of loyalist troopers pinned down by a steady stream of enemy fire. Just as Bonnem had reported, it looked like they were on the back foot and in a state of disarray. Something registered further out as well – a shimmer on the grid, moving fast, looking for all the world like a sensor artefact.

  he canted, giving something to Bonnem to work with.

  Then he swung the mega-bolter down, opening fire in a long, controlled burst. The advancing traitor line was blown apart in a whirling hail of exploding stone and fire. The noise was tremendous – a hammering, thrumming, thudding roar of pure mechanical rage. Bodies were thrown high into the air, torn into limbs and ragged scraps of armour. The screams of the dying were almost inaudible behind the wall of noise created by the vicious, sustained barrage.

  Nomen let the torrent cease, and prodded the Titan into forward motion again. Below him, the loyalist troops he’d saved scrambled to get out of the way. Clouds of ash and smog continued to thin ahead of him, revealing part of the long tunnel wall ahead. He could see a little more light, which was encouraging. Something up ahead, out where the sensor artefacts had formed, was glowing lilac.

  ‘No response from supporting engines, my princeps,’ reported Bonnem. ‘I begin to suspect vox-jamming. Repeat: we should withdraw.’

  Nomen ran his cable-tied fingers across the arm of his throne, grazing the controls casually. The spectral presence of Ferus Arma was at the forefront of his mind, fresh from the kills that stimulated its ancient consciousness. Whenever he felt that mind press against his so acutely it was hard to heed calls to pull back from combat.

  canted Nomen calmly.

  Something shimmered across the sensor array, ghosting like concentrated interference on a pict screen. Nomen terminated the datastream and sank into the Manifold.

  Then he saw it.

  ‘Incoming!’ shouted Bonnem. The skein of the Mani-fold distorted – even the spatial indicators warped out of alignment, making a mockery of its orientation capabilities.

  Nomen canted, swimming through a sludge of inconsistent readings and feeling his unease rush back like a wave of nausea.

  The first one hit hard, coming out of the dark like a missile.

  Nomen didn’t see much of it – just a pair of eyes, swimming fast out of the gloom, glistening like jewels.

  ‘Hard about!’ Bonnem roared, and the thing hit the frontal voids.

  Shields screamed from the impact, shivering and spraying sparks out like a krak discharge. Arma rocked back on its legs, causing the servos behind the plate armour to hiss and buckle.

  said Nomen, trying to bring the mega-bolter up fast enough. He opened fire, feeling like he was aiming at ghosts.

  Another one streaked in, diving and wheeling through the lanes of fire. Nomen saw something like a woman’s legs kicking, as if the thing was swimming through the air. He tracked it manually, spraying bolter rounds wildly. Something must have connected – he heard a thin wail, and glowing trails of plasma splattered against the voids.

  For a second, the horrendous sense of dread eased. Then two more signals whistled into range. The Manifold buckled, sheared, and started to go dead. It couldn’t track them fast enough.

  ‘They’re using themselves,’ muttered Bonnem, frantically working to divert power to the void generators. ‘Themselves.’

  The two apparitions hurled themselves into the shields, spiralling free of the increasingly erratic bolter fire. A fraction before impact, Nomen caught sight of a face – a woman’s face – snarling with glee, lit up by muzzle-flashes and some strange kind of inner light. The face looked ecstatic.

  Then it disappeared in a riot of colour and flame. The shields shuddered under the dual impacts, and warning klaxons broke out from the chamber beneath the cockpit. Violet lightning arced across the Warhound’s shields, crackling and lashing.

  canted Nomen to his sensori as several of the fixed picts on his console shorted out.

  replied the sensori, working as manically as Bonnem.

  More blurs
of movement materialised ahead of them, crystallising in the swirl of the tunnel’s darkness and hurtling into range – five of them, then six.

  Nomen felt Arma’s machine-spirit raging. He felt the blind, furious lust for the kill rearing up, coursing through cabling and metal sinews.

  Part of him shared that battle-drive. The other half was getting terrified.

  he roared, goading the Titan into a stumbling walk. If he had to meet these devils in combat, he’d meet them going forward.

  He levelled both weapon-arms at the apparitions, and fired. A lethal mix of solid rounds and flame surged out.

  A chorus of fractured screaming broke out, and three of the creatures caught fire as they plunged through the raging curtain. Their immolated bodies slammed hard against the reeling voids, sending shockwaves running across the energised surface. Nomen saw a mutilated corpse tumble down the translucent barriers, disintegrating as it fell. Its limbs – what remained of them – were lithe, oddly alluring even in destruction.

  He kept firing, kept pouring his anger and fear out into the night. More shrieks echoed out, and fragments of flesh spun into the Warhound’s path.

  Nomen roared, feeding more fury into the barrage.

  Then the ammo-counter clicked empty on the mega-bolter. At the same time, the inferno cannon reached critical temperature, and guttered out. For a few precious seconds, the wall of reactive shells and flame gave way.

  cried Nomen, augmenting the command with urgency markers. He felt his heart hammering in his chest.

  The creatures made the most of the brief window, shrieking and laughing as they came. Nomen saw them properly that time – a dozen of them, maybe more. They came in the wake of their destroyed sisters, corkscrewing and diving through the heaps of smog. He watched their fangs glitter in the night.

  More time!

  He felt the ammo-belts feed into the mega-bolter’s chambers with a thick clunk. He brought the barrels round, willing the Warhound’s servos to drive them faster.

  More time!

  The first of them hit him at full tilt. He saw it break across the voids. He saw its limbs break and its claws snap, and the forward view rippled like water.

  Another came in close by, laughing like a girl. It dived right into the shield-matter, snapping with lightning-laced talons. It was destroyed, blasted into atoms by the voids. The backdraft washed across the Warhound, halting its forward momentum and causing it to stumble. The shields trembled, flickered, and shivered out.

  The binaric sign for [weapon ready] flashed up in the remnants of the Manifold, and across his malfunctioning console, and lights rippled down the flanks of the mega-bolter housing.

  Nomen issued the fire commands manually, and braced for the recoil.

  It never came. An apparition pounced onto the Warhound’s weapon-arm, ripping the mega-bolter’s cabling apart from its bracing rods. Another two swarmed across the inferno cannon housing, tearing at its slender barrels with their fangs. Reinforced metal was flayed from the underlying structure like flesh from a bone. More horrors clamped on to the massive guns, ripping, tearing and biting.

  Bonnem got up from his seat, clumsily unhooking his neural implants. His flesh was as white as bone. He reached down for a sidearm with trembling fingers.

  Nomen felt the machine’s pain as if it had been his own. Spikes of pure agony ran up his forearms, paralysing his hands and clamping them to the arms of the command throne.

  he commanded, though he couldn’t keep the raw fear out of his voice. Arma’s agony had flooded into him, like molten lead bubbling through his bloodstream. He kept issuing the command to fire, over and over, but nothing responded.

  Then the left cockpit window smashed, and broken armourglas flew across the confined space. Shards tore into Bonnem’s face, shredding the skin. The sensori, still plugged into his station, issued a panicked shriek.

  Nomen tried to rise. He tried to pull free of the cables shackling his hands and his head. He only stopped when he saw what was coming through the broken window, and something primordial within him recognised the futility of doing anything further.

  The daemon’s outline glistened with light. Its flesh was glassy, as if still half embodied in another place. Blood as black as ink ran down from deep wounds in its flanks. Its eyes were like wells into nothingness, and its sleek face was pulled tight into a mask of delighted cruelty.

  As it came to kill him, its smile was almost kind.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Khadi stumbled in the dark, tripping and using her hands to keep her going. A long line of drool hung down from her chin after she’d vomited until her stomach had locked in cramps. Her left hand throbbed from being burned in a plasma bloom, and she didn’t dare unpeel the remains of her glove to see what kind of mess was under the synthleather.

  Exhaustion made her movements erratic. She caught her foot on some long, semi-buried shaft of metal and crashed to her knees. She stayed there for a moment, panting, shivering, staring.

  She had no idea where she was. The constant hammer of heavy weapons disorientated her. Bright lines of las-fire continued to lance down the tunnel in both directions. Men’s voices echoed from the vaults, and explosions flared out starkly in the ash-choked dark.

  I saw them come.

  She’d moved beyond the initial horror of seeing the daemons and passed into a kind of numb shock. Only luck had kept her alive since that first glimpse of them. She’d fired her lasgun a few more times after that, responding automatically to the flicker of las-fire from out of the dark, but had no idea whether she’d hit anything.

  I saw them take it apart.

  The Warhound had provided some respite. It had loomed up from the gloom, guns blazing, surrounded in a haze of energy, resplendent with the blue and gold of its livery. She’d seen its weapon-arms fire, demolishing the lines of mortal troops in its sights. She’d seen it stride out: invincible, indomitable, the very image of the Imperium’s imperishable might.

  I saw them come.

  Then the… devils had swooped down on it. She’d covered her face and buried it in the mud and dirt, shouting out loud to drown out the sound of their approach.

  They’d screamed as they’d flown in, like demented souls fresh from murder. The sound of them coming had made her want to slit her throat, to gouge her eyes out – anything, anything to make them stop laughing.

  She’d managed to look up once, given a flicker of hope by the sound of the god-machine’s mighty weapons firing again.

  Surely, her rational mind had told her, surely even the devils couldn’t stand against that.

  Her last sight had been blurred by darkness, smog and weapon discharge, but it had been enough: they had been crawling all over it, like hornets around a spider, gorging themselves on it, ripping into it, tearing up the ancient metal in slivers and hurling it aside. She’d seen one of the pilots being taken out, dragged from the cockpit window. He’d been shrieking like a maddened animal, and his primal fear had echoed out into the endless dark.

  She hadn’t watched after that, but his screaming had continued for a long time. She’d crawled away, dropping to all fours, barely able to think at all. Her mind raced, filled with thoughts of wrongdoing, shame, horror, fear. Every shallow deed, every casual lie, rose to the surface like scum on boiling water, crowding out her waking mind and making the very air she breathed a nightmare.

  They hadn’t come for her after that– they had other, more worthy prey.

  So she’d shivered in the dark alone, cowering, drooling, shaking.

  The shadow rose above her silently. She didn’t notice it at first – it was just one more clot of blackness in the shifting, flickering war-hell of the tunnels. When she finally felt the presence close by, she didn’t even lift her weapon. She looked up with the
expectation of finding death at last, and was disappointed to see that she wouldn’t be getting that.

  ‘Khadi,’ said Marivo. ‘Shula Khadi.’

  He was unsteady on his feet, but his lasgun was still in his hand. She could see the charge meter flashing for near-empty. His visor was broken, exposing part of his haggard face.

  She looked up at him stupidly, too weak to say anything. Her hands shook, and she let them.

  He squatted beside her. His movements gave away fatigue – he was no longer striding out with the light of the Emperor in his eyes.

  ‘Badly hurt?’ he asked. A long way down the tunnels, fresh explosions blossomed, briefly flooding the scene in bright orange light. Then it faded away, replaced by the flickering dark once more.

  Khadi didn’t know how to reply. Physically, she’d been worse. Mentally – that was different.

  I saw them come. I saw them take it apart.

  Marivo looked hard at her, lifting up her chin with his fingertip and staring directly into her eyes.

  ‘Can you move?’ he asked. ‘We need to pull back. We need to get out. Can you move?’

  She saw the daemon’s eyes hovering in front of her, like a mirage. They stayed there, even when she closed her eyes and screwed them tight. Those eyes made her want to scream, though she’d already done so much of that that her throat was hoarse and raw.

  Marivo grasped her shoulder, shaking her a little. His movements were urgent, and a little too quick. He was scared too.

  ‘Shula, look at me,’ he said. ‘Look at me. They’ve got the Warhounds. They’re tearing up the tanks. We have to pull back.’

  Somehow, then, swimming from somewhere deep inside, Khadi felt a smile flicker across her chapped lips.

  ‘I’m beginning to like you, Marivo,’ she said, stuttering over the words. Her throat constricted as she spoke, as if the muscles had forgotten how to work properly. ‘You’re learning.’

  Marivo didn’t smile.

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘Really. But now we have to move.’