by Rob Sanders
The greenskins came at them, the bloody beads of their eyes searing with neurostatic rage and territoriality. The ancient crash site of the Stella-Xenithica was their tribal home, possibly since their original planetary infection. They were not going to give it up or be driven out onto the merciless, algae-streaked plateaus of the ice world. The feral beasts charged, their fur-wrapped feet thundering across the quivering deck, their eyes bleeding and their jaws opened wide in fang-furious display. The beasts were gigantic and wielded bludgeoning blades fashioned from twisted struts and torn decking – huge, rude and serrated.
With stabbing, hydraulic steps, the skitarii infiltrators formed a circle, their backs to one another and the roaring fire. Their blasters punched through the darkness beyond, ripping through hearts and throats. The resilience of the alien beasts, however, was something to behold. Stroika’s cogitator grew warm inside his skull, processing the data of death and destruction that was all around him. As feral greenskins crashed into the deck, the brutes behind them stamped through their carcasses in rage-filled desperation.
The skitarii officer saw the wall of jagged weaponry and green muscle close about them like a trap. It was a spiked and shrinking enclosure of alien rage that would skewer and then pulverise the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660.
Haldron-44 Stroika felt the presence of the Machine-God burning through his neurocircuitry and the brain in which it was embedded. Magos Torquora was transmitting the gifts of the Omnissiah from the phylactic diagnostiquorum aboard the Maestrale. Alien dissections. Files of xenos research and experiments that bordered on the heretekal in their detail. Structural schematics of early Terran colony ships from the infotombs of Mars. Through Stroika, the Omnissiah made His merciless need known to the soldiers of His machine empire.
The Sicarian infiltrators turned in unison. Three greenskin monsters were tearing their way up through the rusted mesh of a bay floor-cover nearby. Like the digits of an ancient timepiece, Stroika’s warning relayed to the cybernetic soldiers the position of the emerging aliens – four teeth or denticles around the Cog Mechanicus. The space became a storm of shredded darkness.
Stroika aimed his arc pistols at the chamber ceiling. His targeters and uplinked overlays attempted to find a structural weak spot in the blackened girder supports running the corroded length of the hangar. As he fired, the infiltrators zeroed in on the target and added their own blasts to the strategic fire. The chamber grew to brightness before Stroika’s crackling streams faded. The mauled, white-hot section gave. The weight of the girder tore its opposite end from the mouldering supports. Stroika watched as the girder fell, followed by a cascade of detritus from the floor above, burying the three greenskins hauling themselves out of the decking.
With the added weight of charging greenskins slamming down on the floor section, the join sheared away with a rippling fountain of rust. Within moments the decking beyond the seam was gone and a number of the stomping greenskins with it. Stroika watched the feral savages fall down through the wreckage, into the blackness beneath.
Several of the scrawnier, snaggle-toothed specimens went down and struggled to get up under the repeated attentions of the arcstreams. The larger brutes – feral orks jangling with rings and primitive glyph-carved tokens – seemed able to shrug off both the scorching beams and the muscle-spasming effects of the current. With several greenskins dead or dying on the flight deck but many more still raging for the skitarii, Haldron-44 Stroika’s arc pistols stuttered and fizzled dry.
The effect was instantaneous. The xenos brutes came back at the circle of cybernetic soldiers like a green tidal wave. The infiltrators’ white noise seemed to infuriate the beasts as much as disorientate them. The huge monsters heaved their primitive axes down. The skitarii used their optic-arrays, logistic overlays and pneumatically fired reflexes to avoid the worst of the greenskins’ fury. Spindly infiltrators leaned back, stepped sideways and turned aside bludgeoning weapons that demolished the flooring and smash-scattered wreckage. Despite the heart-stopping fury of the attacks, the skitarii’s movements were fluid and assured.
As the alien beasts roared at them, the infiltrators had only a dull awareness of their human fears, their minds sizzling with the rush of data being processed and shared. Their magi overlords had calibrated their experience of the world to suit the needs of the mission. Fear was but an inconvenience. Feelings, emotions, relationships, these all had their allotted place and purpose in Mechanicus society. In battle however, such frailties of the flesh were phylactically dimmed and eclipsed by their function as living weapons of the Omnissiah.
Their brains might have been allowed the creativity and invention to make them a flexible force – capable of evolving strategy, zeal and improvisation. Their hearts, however, were a void. Instead of sentiment and inclination, the skitarii felt targeting data, battle-protocol, imperatives and the processed thought-streams of their officers and lord magi. They felt the presence of the Omnissiah in order and instruction. They felt Him act through their very bodies, their bionics and organics. For the soldiers of the Legiones Skitarii, it was all they needed to know.
The rabid violence of the chamber was intoxicating. With fury and frustration, the greenskins came at the skitarii with growing speed, savagery and force. The Sicarians of the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 calibrated their movements and predictions to remain a millisecond or two ahead of their monstrous foes, looking for an opening. The greenskin savages were not without a mad unpredictability, however, and for Quasiq-Spuria II/X and Valek-Spuria V/X the opening never presented itself.
Stroika felt the biometrics of both infiltrators spike and fade as the orks they were combating unleashed their feral wrath. One green monster slammed a strut-spear straight through the chest housing of Valek-Spuria V/X, skewering the skitarius. The ork heaved the cybernetic soldier up with ease, allowing him to screech horribly down the length of the serrated shaft.
The greenskin savage shook the thick spear from side to side. Valek-Spuria V/X’s spindly appendages flailed about, before his ruined torso and gimbal waist-socket parted. Stamping down on his helm with a fur-wrapped foot, the greenskin put the infiltrator out of his misery. Quasiq-Spuria II/X was felled by another alien beast, the force with which the creature chopped down with its hacker enough to smash the skitarius into bloody scrap.
As the feral
greenskins intensified their territorial assault, the princeps and his infiltrators deployed their close combat weapons. Flechette blasters still shredded orks to distraction, between the brutal sweeps and stabs of primitive weaponry. Adding to their ragged thud, taser goads sparked off crude blades and sent bolts of bone-shattering energy through green flesh from their hyperdynamo capacitors.
Several greenskins backed away like chastised animals, snorting, working their mangle-fanged jaws and shaking the shock from their weapons. A number of beasts dropped their hackers and choppers, glaring at the Sicarian infiltrators with suspicion and rage before drawing their skinning shards from fur belts.
The most hulking and monstrous of the savages – a thing that wore the skull of an even larger chieftain as a tribal helm – lumbered forth. It wielded a spiked metal totem pole as a weapon, which it used to spark-smash the taser goad of Schrada-Spuria VII/X aside. Grabbing the infiltrator’s slender metal arm in one great claw, the greenskin chieftain seemed unfazed by the thudding of crackling flechettes into his barrel chest. The chieftain used the bionic appendage to wield the Sicarian infiltrator as a weapon. Smashing aside Solonoid-Spuria IV/X and Cynkade-Spuria X/X with their comrade’s armoured body, the towering savage beat Schrada-Spuria VII/X from side to side into the demolished decking.
Stroika’s revolving shoulders cycled clockwise, sending his appendage-arms down and around. As they did, his wrist joints turned, presenting his arc pistols to the rear. Two auxiliary appendages cycled and unfolded over the tops of his whirring shoulders, from where they had been carriage-locked to the back of his combat chassis and hidden beneath his officer’s cloak. Each weapons-cradle held a crackling arc maul. The weapons sizzled with electrical energies. With his quad weapons appendages charged and presented, Stroika prepared himself to face the monstrous chieftain.
From the arkcruiser, the Machine-God answered his call. The Primus’s cogitator coils and combat overlays were flushed with additional data downlinked from Magos Torquora and the explorator diagnostiquorum. Species-specific vulnerabilities. Logistae projections. Battle-addenda, compensating for the creature’s larger size and resilience.
‘Meet my Maker…’ Stroika voxed at the oncoming ork, his static-laced voice a metallic boom in the cavernous chamber.
The noise just seemed to provoke the hulking thing. The greenskin chieftain swung its totem like a great, spiked metal club. Stroika’s movements were assured and hydraulically slick, his helm and crest-holder ducking down beneath the furious passage of the uncouth weapon.
He side-stepped, allowing the beast to cave the decking in beside him, the totem tearing mangled mesh and cargo pit covers up from the floor. Flinging the scrap aside, the greenskin chieftain came at Stroika again. The red beads of its bleeding eyes burned with territorial hatred, while the beast’s scar-cratered face contorted with its desire to see Stroika and his skitarii join the mouldering wreckage of the chamber.
Augurs and phylactic intrusions crowded Stroika’s optics with trajectories, highlighting and streaming notation. The skitarii commander turned up the length of the deck-buried totem. Stroika’s torso spun in its interface socket, his outstretched arms coming around like a wheeling star. One arc maul, followed by the other, smashed through the globed muscle of one green arm, knocking the chieftain back with the intense electrical shock that the arc mauls delivered. With energy snapping in a spidery web about the wound, Stroika brought around his pistols, streaming fire from one and then another into the beast’s barrel chest.
The greenskin roared its pain and shock. Even the beast, dull as its nervous system was, could feel the intense flow of electricity through its bones. In its retreating frustration, the hulking creature lashed its totem column back, taking the head of Vega-Spuria III/X from his armoured shoulders with a sickening clunk.
Lifting its weapon, the chieftain stomped across the ruined deck at Stroika. Burying the spiked totem in the busy, encrusted architecture of the hangar roof, the green abomination hauled on the superstructure. Stroika’s neurocircuitry sparked with warnings and contingencies. With a groan, the corroded metal gave. Using the totem as a grapnel, the alien pulled part of the chamber roof down on Stroika, forcing the skitarii officer to take several powered steps and dive out from under the descending wreckage.
Bringing his arc mauls up, Stroika created an improvised roll cage from the curvature of his appendage-arms and the length of the weapons. Tumbling back to his metal feet in one fluid movement, the Primus whipped his foil cloak about his cybernetic frame and positioned himself on the greenskin’s flank.
Blasting the monster in the neck and side of the head with twin streams from his pistols, Stroika monitored the beast’s predicted reaction. Bringing its claw to its seared face, the stun-shock of electricity coursing through its thick skull, the monster stumbled to one side. Still carrying the momentum of the roll, Stroika stomped behind the beast. He smashed at the monstrosity through its furs, prompting an agonising roar from the greenskin.
It brought its girder totem around savagely, but Stroika stopped, anchoring his metal feet to the deck and locking his hydraulic frame. Holding the arc mauls out to deflect the weapon, the skitarius felt his absorbers, pistons and fibre-bundles soak up the impact. The anchors on the soles of his feet tore up the rusted deck and he was pushed backwards by the monstrous force of the swing.
With alarms and integrity warnings flashing through the darkness of his helm, Stroika intensified the blaze of electricity between the metal totem and the crackling mauls. Heaving back with his hydraulic might, Stroika shocked the weapon from the spasming claws of the feral chieftain.
Pressing his advantage, the Primus rotated his shoulder demi-joints. Bringing his pistols back overhead and his arc mauls behind, he blasted continuous arcstreams at the beast, forcing it into a retreat. Holding out its massive claws before the onslaught and howling its alien agony, the monster stumbled back through the engagements of several of its tribe. Its kin were faring just as badly against the Sicarian infiltrators.
Falling back over a rust-shattered pipe, the greenskin monster went down. Still it retreated, half crawling and half convulsing back beneath the intense energies that razed its flesh and wracked its body. The creature looked up at the Omnissiah’s cybernetic servant, its blood-bead eyes glassy with alien hatred.
As Stroika brought his crackling arc mauls over and down once more, he beat the alien creature down into the deck. The skitarius turned with the force of a fired piston. The arc mauls came around, trailing a static-bright glare. They struck the hulking greenskin in the side of the head. The first stove in the skull it was wearing as a tribal helm and then the beast’s own. The second took the ugly head from its globed shoulders and sent it bouncing off through the darkness.
‘For the sanctity of the Machine,’ Stroika voxed down at the fountaining carcass of the green monster, ‘and He who works through the miracle of its operation. You are an aberration and not part of the Omnissiah’s grand design. Therefore, you must be destroyed.’
Keying back into his feeds and the web of data streaming from the engagement, the Primus found the chamber to be strewn with alien bodies. Among the rank corpses of the feral monsters was Cadmiad-Spuria VI/X, who had died a few footsteps away. Princeps Talus-Spuria I/X moved about the chamber with his surviving infiltrators, pointing their pistols down at dying greenskins and blasting a point-blank and functional death into the skulls of the beasts. It was not execution. It was eradication.
Stroika felt the return of his humanity – the shred his duties allowed him. He was no longer the living weapon that circumstance demanded. Emotions flooded back. Filtered though they were through his psychosurgical suppressions, they still presented as an intoxicating rush. He felt the conflicted warmth of concern, of rel
ief, of satisfaction. As he cast his busy optics across the bodies of his dead skitarii, he noticed the distant pang of loss and responsibility in deaths that had previously been reported and catalogued.
Riding on the magnetic hush of its revolving cog, Phrenos~361 drifted forth out of the darkness, augurs, scopes and pict lenses retreating into cavities in the servo-skull’s cranium. Revolving his shoulder joints, Stroika cradle-locked his maul-appendages to his back. Ejecting his spent power cells and extending the hydraulics of his arms he sent his arc pistols back along their rails to where they sat in cavity holsters inset within his chest plating. The Primus brought up his arm and allowed Phrenos~361 to land, anchoring itself with prehensile cables and micro-mechadendrites. The drone uploaded the hard data of its survey findings.
The report was a formality but one Stroika took legitimate pride in delivering. Through phylactic communion, Magos Torquora and the diagnostiquorum saw what the skitarii saw and experienced the mission vicariously from the Maestrale. Through the umbilical streams of invisible data-tethers, they were one with the Omnissiah.