by Various
‘Why you wouldn’t let me go with my sons,’ said Horus.
‘You always want to be first, don’t you?’
‘Is that so bad?’
‘Of course not, but I need you elsewhere.’
‘Here?’ said Horus, unable to mask his disappointment. ‘What good will I do from here?’
The Emperor laughed. ‘You think we’re going to watch this abomination die from here?’
Horus turned to face the Emperor, now seeing his father was girt for battle, towering and majestic in his gold-chased warplate of eagle wings and a bronze mantle of woven mail. A bluesteel sword was unsheathed, rippling with potent psychic energies. Custodians attended him, weapons at the ready.
Upon the largest teleporter array Horus had ever seen.
‘I believe you call it a speartip, yes?’ said the Emperor.
A blaze of light, a vertiginous sense of dislocation and a world out of joint with itself. No sense of movement, but a powerful sense of time. Phosphor bright light faded from Horus’ eyes, replaced by a furnace coal glow of seething workshops and volcanic fissures.
The bridge of the Emperor’s flagship was gone.
In its place was a vision conjured straight from his youth.
Cthonia rendered in iron and mud.
Horus had explored the very depths of his adoptive home world, beyond the deepest ore-delvings, where the insane and the crippled waited to die. He’d even ventured beneath the dripping cadaver pits, avoiding the screeching murder-haruspex with their disembowelling knives and organ cloaks.
Cthonia was a warren of nightmarish rookeries filled with unimaginable horrors at every turn, its claustrophobic tunnels lit with pulsating light from magma fissures. Thick with ash, a toxic miasma clogged the lungs, fouled the eyes and stained the soul.
This was just like that. Bowing ceilings laced with knotworks of rusted reinforcement, caged bulbs that sputtered with fitful light and a fug of sulphurous fumes.
The scrapworld stank of hot iron and flames, of oil and sweat and waste matter left to rot. The chamber was rank with the stench of beasts, as though the herds of livestock were kept here and never mucked out. This was the fetor of the ork, ammoniac and strangely redolent of spoiled vegetable matter.
A thousand or more greenskins roared to see several hundred armoured warriors appear without warning in the midst of the wide chamber. Every ork was encased in rusted plates of hissing iron, strapped and bolted to their swollen bodies. Horus’ suspicion of a ruling tech class was all but confirmed at the sight of the wheezing pneumatics, cracking power generators and hissing, lightning-edged weapons.
‘At them!’ bellowed the Emperor.
Much to Horus’ chagrin, the Custodians moved first, bracing their spears and letting fly with an explosive volley of mass-reactives from their guardian spears. The Justaerin opened fire a heartbeat later and the ork line bloomed with fiery detonations.
Then the Emperor was amongst them.
His sword was a bluesteel shimmer, too fast to follow with the naked eye. He moved through the orks without seeming to move at all, simply existing at one point to kill before appearing elsewhere to reap greenskin lives by the score. Each blow struck with the force of an artillery impact, and shattered bodies flew from his sword as though hurled aside by a bomb blast.
Nor was his sword the Emperor’s only weapon.
His outstretched gauntlet blazed with white-gold fire, and whatever the flames touched disappeared in explosions of red cinders and ash. He battered orks to bonelessness with bludgeoning blows, he crushed them with invisible coils of force and he repelled their gunfire with thoughts that turned their rounds to smoke.
They came at him in their hundreds, like iron filings to the most powerful magnet, knowing they would never find another foe so deserving of their rage. The Emperor killed them all, unstoppable in his purity of purpose.
A crusade of billions distilled in one numinous being.
Horus had fought alongside the Emperor for well over a century, but the sight of his father in battle still had the power to awe him. This was war perfected. Fulgrim could live a thousand lifetimes and never achieve anything so wondrous.
Horus fired his storm bolter, decapitating a monster with twin rotating hooks for hands. It spun around and gutted another greenskin that stared stupidly at its unspooling entrails for a moment before collapsing. Horus followed his father into the mass of alien flesh and steel. His sword slashed low, taking the leg from a towering ork of absurdly oversized machine-musculature. He crushed its skull beneath his boot as he pushed over its thrashing body.
The Justaerin fought to his left and right, a solid wedge of black-armoured terminators battering their way through an ocean of iron-hard green flesh. Ezekyle led them with characteristic bullishness: shoulders squared against the foe, fist sawing back and forth like a relentless piston as his twin-bolter spat explosive death.
Horus had waged every form of warfare imaginable, but never relished it more than in a bloody broil with the greenskin. Hundreds of greasy bestial bodies surrounded him, howling, yelling, screaming and braying. Fangs snapped on his vambrace. Roaring cleavers shattered on his shoulder guards. He shrugged off every impact, rolled with every blow, killing his attackers with pure economy of force.
Stinking alien viscera coated him, hissing from the blade of his sword and the barrels of his storm bolter. Next to him, Ezekyle slew with furious urgency, pushing himself to the limit to stay by his primarch’s side.
The Custodians hewed the orks with precisely aimed blows of their guardian spears. They could wield them in lethally inventive ways, but this was not the place for elaborate fighting styles. Here it was kill or be killed. Strikes that would end any other life form thrice over had to be repeated again and again just to put a single beast down.
The orks fought back with all the primal, animalistic fury that made them so dangerous. Even terminator armour could be breached, legionaries killed.
The orks were doing both.
At least a dozen Custodians were dead. Perhaps the same again in Justaerin. Horus saw Ezekyle go down, a colossal spiked mace, twice the height of a mortal, buried in his shoulder. An ork war-captain, ogryn-huge, wrenched the mace clear and swung the weapon around its immense body to deliver the death blow.
A shimmering sword sliced in to block the descending mace.
Bluesteel, two handed and wreathed in fire.
The Emperor rolled his wrist and the monstrous weight of the spiked head fell from its wire-wound haft. The Master of Mankind spun on his heel and the fire-edged sword licked out in a shimmering figure of eight.
The towering greenskin collapsed in four keenly-sliced segments. Its iron-helmed head still bellowed defiance as the Emperor bent to retrieve it from the deck. He waded into the orks, the roaring war-captain’s truncated torso in one fist, sword in the other.
Horus dragged Ezekyle to his feet.
‘Can you fight?’ demanded Horus.
‘Aye,’ snapped Ezekyle. ‘It’s just a scratch.’
‘Your shoulder is broken and the bone shield on your left side is fractured. As is your pelvis.’
‘They’d need to break every bone in my body keep me from your side,’ said Ezekyle. ‘As it is for you and the Emperor, beloved by all.’
Horus nodded.
To say more would be to shame Ezekyle. ‘No force in the galaxy will keep me from his side.’
As if Ezekyle’s words were a dare to the galaxy, Gorro convulsed in the grip of a violent quake that ripped up from far below.
‘What was that?’ asked Ezekyle.
There could be only one answer.
‘The gravitational fields keeping Gorro coherent are spinning out of control,’ said Horus. ‘The scrapworld is tearing itself apart.’
No sooner had Horus spoken than the deck plates buckled throu
ghout the chamber. Metres-thick sheets of steel ripped like paper as geysers of oily steam belched from the depths. Bulging walls collapsed inwards and debris rained from the splintering ceiling. Cracking fissures spread across the bloody ground, tearing wider with every second as Custodians, Justaerin and orks fell into the scrapworld’s fiery depths.
Horus fought for balance, pushing to where he saw the golden light of the Emperor surrounded by greenskin marauders.
‘Father!’ yelled Horus.
The Emperor turned, one hand outstretched to Horus.
Another quake struck.
And the scrapworld swallowed the Emperor whole.
Sejanus had no idea where they were. Everything was smoke and ash and blood. Three of his squad were dead already, and they hadn’t even laid eyes on the enemy. Red light painted the interior of the smoke-filled drop pod, dripping wet where Argeddan and Kadonnen’s bodies had been explosively gutted by spikes of penetrating debris. Feskan’s head rolled at his feet, leaving spirals of blood on the floor.
The drop pod’s boosters had failed and what should have been a controlled landing with the rest of the Fourth Company instead became a violent descent through hundreds of layers of honeycombed scrap towards Gorro’s core.
According to the squalling, static-filled sensorium on his visor, his company was around two hundred kilometres above him. The reek of scorched metal and rotten food poured in through tears in the side of the drop pod.
Sejanus heard the booming, clanking, screeching sound that was the hallmark of greenskin technology. And behind that, the guttural bark-language of orks. The sound had a grating metallic quality to it, but he didn’t have time to dwell on that now.
‘Up!’ he shouted. ‘Up now! Get out!’
His restraint harness endlessly ratcheted as the deformed metal tried to unlock. He wrenched it away and pushed himself upright, turning to rip his bolt pistol and sword from the stowage rack above. For good measure, he took a bandolier of grenades as well. The rest of his squad followed suit, freeing and arming themselves with complete calm.
The base of the pod was canted at a forty-five degree angle, the drop-hatch angled towards the ground. Sejanus kicked the emergency release. Once, twice, three times.
It gave, but only a little.
Two more kicks finally freed it, and the panel fell out with a heavy clang. He dropped through the hatch and spun out from underneath its groaning remains. One by one, the survivors of his squad joined him on the scorched ruin of the deck. They followed him out from under the drop pod, bolters ready.
The ground was rumbling, the after-effects of a quake or something more serious? Powerful forces travelled through the ironwork lattice of Gorro. Metal and crushed rock lay in dust-wreathed heaps.
Sejanus looked up to see a rain of debris tumbling from the high ceiling, a wire-tangled hole marking their drop pod’s entry to the crackling, lightning-filled vault.
Smashed machinery surrounded the crashed pod. Spars of metal and bodies had been pulverised by their impact and the quake. Arriving this deep had caught the half-dozen ork survivors here by surprise, but the clanking, smoke-belching things closing in on them weren’t greenskins.
At least not of the flesh and blood variety.
‘Throne, what are they?’ said Sejanus.
Heavily armoured in what appeared to be all-enclosing suits of crudely-beaten iron, he’d taken them for ork chieftains, brutish war-leaders able to demand the heaviest armour, the biggest, loudest weapons.
But that wasn’t what they were at all.
Their skulls were metal, as were their bodies. No part of them was organic, they were entirely formed of rusted iron, perforated vent chimneys hulking buzz saws and enormous cannons with flanged barrels.
Hundreds of tiny, shrieking, green skinned menial things surrounded them. Cackling, mean-looking serviles by the look of them, though even they were augmented with primitive bionics. Some carried smoking ad-hoc pistols, others held what looked like miniature blowtorches or tools more surgical than mechanical. Sejanus dismissed them as irrelevant.
The clanking, hissing metal greenskins stomped towards them and a hail of wild fire blasted from their guns. Sejanus skidded into cover. The gunfire was hopelessly inaccurate, but there was a lot of it. Grating speech that sounded like a machine badly in need of oiling ripped from the ironclad orks.
It always surprised Sejanus that the greenskin had mastered language. He supposed it was to be expected, given the incongruent levels of technology they possessed, but that so bestial a race communicated offended him on a gut level.
Shells exploded overhead, tearing through the heavy machine sheltering him. Almost immediately after, the snapping, cackling servile creatures swarmed over the top. They were tiny, virtually inconsequential. Until one started blowtorching the side of his helmet.
Sejanus pulverised it with a sharp headbutt. It exploded like a green blister over his helm. He rolled and wiped the stinking mess of its demise from his visor. They were all over him, cutting, stabbing and shooting with their tiny pistols.
He scraped them off. He stamped on them like insects.
He had dismissed them as irrelevant, and individually they were. But throw a hundred of them into a fight, and even a legionary had to take them seriously.
Because while he was killing them by the score, the ork ironclads were still coming. The swarm kept attacking, fouling the joints of his armour with their ridiculous little tools, screeching with glee as they sawed serrated blades into seams between plates. The rest of his squad fared little better, fouled like prey beasts in a net.
‘I don’t have time for this,’ he snarled, snapping off the string of frags from his belt. He snapped the arming pins and lobbed them into the air.
‘Brace for impact!’ shouted Sejanus, dropping to a crouch with his arms over his head.
The frags blew out with a rippling thunderclap of sequential detonations. Red-hot shrapnel scythed out in all directions. Fire engulfed Sejanus, and the overpressure threw him forward against the hulking machine. His armour registered a few penetrations where the creatures had managed to weaken the flexible joints at his knees and hip, but nothing serious.
The serviles were gone, shredded to bloody scraps on nearby machinery, like leavings from an explosion in a doll manufactory. Only a few remained alive, but even those were no threat. He rose to his feet, slathered in alien blood, and aimed his pistol at the oncoming ironclads.
‘Take them,’ ordered Sejanus.
The Glory Squad, that’s what they called the warriors Sejanus commanded. Dymos, Malsandar, Gorthoi and the rest. Favoured by Horus and beloved by all, they had more than earned the name. Some thought the name vainglorious, but those who had seen them fight knew better.
Malsandar killed a beast with twin blasts from his plasma carbine, the ironwork effigy going up like a volcano as the searing beam set off a secondary detonation within it. Gorthoi put another down with a slamming right hook from his power fist, going on to tear it limb from limb as though he were back in the kill-pits of Cthonia.
Dymos and Ulsaar kept another at bay with concentrated bursts of bolter fire while Enkanus circled behind it with a melta charge. Faskandar was on his knees, his armour aflame and ceramite plates running like melting wax. Sejanus could hear his pain over the vox.
Sejanus picked his target, an ironclad with enormous bronze tusks welded into a serrated metal jaw. Its eyes were mismatched discs of red and green, its body a barrel-like construction with grinding pneumatics and beaten-metal weapon limbs. He put his bolt-round through the centre of its throat. The mass-reactive detonated and blew its head onto its shoulder in a shower of flame and squirting bio-organic oils.
The thing kept coming, raising a heavy, blunderbuss-like weapon with a flared muzzle. Sejanus didn’t give it time to shoot and vaulted from cover. His boots thundered into its ches
t. The ironclad didn’t fall. It was like slamming into a structural column.
A claw with monstrously oversized piston-driven motors snapped at his head. Sejanus ducked and thumbed the activation stud on his chainsword’s hilt. The saw-toothed blade roared to life and he hacked through the last remnants of spurting oils and whirring chains holding the ironclad’s head in place.
Its horned skull fell to the deck, and Sejanus stamped down on it. Metal splintered, and viscous fluid, like that cocooning the mortal remains of a mortis brother within his dreadnought, spilled out alongside a twitching root-like spinal cord. Sejanus felt his gorge rise as he saw what lay within the iron skull.
A spongy, grey green mass of tissue, like a fungal cyst of knotted roots filled the skull. Two piggish, red eyeballs hung limp on stalks from the broken metal, both staring madly up at him from the ruin of the metallic skull.
His horror almost cost him his life.
The headless ironclad’s snapping claw fastened on his chest and lifted him from the deck. Black smoke jetted from the exhausts on its back as its pincer claw drew together. The plates of his armour buckled under the crushing pressure. Sejanus fought to free himself, but its grip was unbreakable.
Mars-forged plate cracked. Warning icons blinked to life on his sensorium. Sejanus cried out as his bones ground together and blood began filling the interior of his armour.
He braced his feet against the ironclad’s chest and twisted to bring his pistol to bear. The red eyes within the slowly draining helm were looking up at him, relishing his agony. The bolt-round exploded and the brain matter of the ironclad and its body convulsed with its destruction. The claw spasmed, dropping Sejanus to the deck.
He landed badly, his spine partially crushed. White light smeared his vision as palliatives flooded his body to shut the pain gate at the nape of his neck. He’d pay for that later, but this was the only way to ensure there was a later.
Sejanus took a moment to restore his equilibrium.
The other ironclads were dead.
So too was Faskandar, his body reduced to a gelatinous mass by the fire of the unknown greenskin weapon. Dymos knelt beside their fallen brother.