by Rob Sanders
Stroika would have recorded commendations for the impressive vanguard skitarii, but for the fact that beyond engaging automated tallies and sigil recognition, the skitarii commander was barely aware of the deck.
Stroika was in phylactic communion with scores of skitarii officers across the Basilika and the advancing formation of troop carriers. The Augon, the Cyberion and the Treaty of Olympus were all part of the first wave and, like the Basilika, were loading clades of cybernetic soldiers, vehicles, heavy weapons and materiel aboard bulk landers and orbital drop-ships that would put deployments of the Astra Militarum to shame.
Uncaring of claustrophobia and the lack of such personal space as even a Guardsman would require, Adeptus Mechanicus drop-ships could carry nearly twice the force deployment of an Astra Militarum transport. On top of that, the drop-ships and bulk landers themselves were larger. Once loaded, the monstrous craft were carried across the flight deck on parallel columns of ceiling rails that were built into the superstructure of the skitarii carriers. Once they had left the deck and were held over their planetary destination, the drop-ships released their anchor clamps and thundered down into an orbital descent, each followed moments later by another craft and another. It was this procedure that Haldron-44 Stroika was overseeing, not only across the first-wave carriers but across a second and third. As ranking alpha, Stroika led from the front with the first skitarii to get planetside. He had left 10-Victro Tiberiax in charge of the second wave and Nalode Deka 871 – a cold creature, even for a skitarius – with responsibility for the third.
The ear-splitting sound of a klaxon roared across the flight deck. At the same moment, Stroika received a priority stream from the command bridge that superseded his other overlays and interactions. It was Tech-priest Captain Pharad, alerting the skitarii commander that the Basilika had almost achieved orbit around Velchanos Magna.
It hadn’t been an easy approach. The system was strewn with ship wreckage, the dereliction of void-docks and the macroscaffolding of long-abandoned experiments. With the Opus Machina and several arkcruisers shielding the Mechanicus transports, forge tenders and escort carriers, the Fabricator Locum had authorised the fleet’s complement of heavy frigates and destroyers to punch through the system defences.
The Opus Machina had intercepted augur station communications from a moonlet orbiting a red gas giant on the outskirts of the Velchanos system. The scrapcode was heavy with corruption and had alerted the forge world to the approaching danger. The Fabricator Locum had ordered the stations left alone, favouring the speed of an assault directly on Velchanos Magna.
The Ark Mechanicus could not avoid the lance blasts of a sentry ship, however, rising from the upper atmospheric miasma of another bilious gas giant. The black beast of a ship was spiked with vanes, antennae and boarding spikes, and had been hidden from augurs in the dense radiation of the planet. From the look of the heavy cruiser and the sickness of its streamed signatures, it appeared as though Velchanos Magna had continued operating as a hub of industry, construction and maintenance, despite being claimed by the Great Gyre so long ago.
The Opus Machina took the balestream across its port flank but returned fire with its monstrous plasma batteries. As the mauled cruiser fell back into the bile-swirling storms of the gas giant, the Ark Mechanicus had ploughed on. Despatching its blockade-breaking spear tip of frigates, adamanticlads and torpedo-launching destroyers, the Mechanicus fleet surged corewards. The Opus Machina and the skitarii fleet ships negotiated the debris and flashing wreckage of enemy vessels that had been blasted apart or rammed in half by the Mechanicus ships.
The fleet suffered its own losses, however. On the bridge of the Basilika, Stroika had watched fleet tenders and forge ships descend on the frigate Auxilicron and the adamanticlad Mallix with the aim of making void repairs to the crippled vessels. On the approach to Velchanos Magna, the fleet ran parallel to a debris trail that tumbled through the void behind the forge world. Colossal chunks of rock, the size of small moons and rolling with the irregularity of boulders, housed stations, gun platforms, void-beached hulks, silos, anchored mines and electromagnetic nets that sizzled with their powered intention to snag approaching vessels.
Fighting a running battle between the twisted blockaders and the macro-weapon emplacements launching salvoes at the fleet from the debris field, there was little space to manoeuvre. While the troop carriers – carrying their precious skitarii invasion force – thundered on, the Opus Machina and passing arkcruisers blasted the defence installations to pieces. Mechanicus frigates engaged system ships at point-blank range and, vessel by destroyed enemy vessel, the fleet made its indomitable approach.
Stroika pointed his baton at passing cohorts of skitarii soldiers, tallying their identifications. As the Basilika manoeuvred into position above the forge world it was imperative that all of his constructs and materiel were on board the drop-ships. Rangers from the Xenris Phase 404/De-Phracta began filing onto the flight deck, counted in by their attending alpha. Their arc rifles and transuranic weapons were slung. Like the vanguard skitarii before them, the rangers jogged across the deck with a loping, heavy-set choreography.
The rangers began assembling in front of the Nuncio, the drop-ship in whose shadow Haldron-44 Stroika was standing. The monstrous craft’s engines roared to life and cycled with a deep chug that could be felt in the stomach.
‘Alpha Kertz, get those rangers on board,’ Stroika voxed across the hangar.
‘Yes, Primus,’ Kertz answered. There was no embarrassment or resentment in the skitarii officer’s words – only obedience. Like Stroika, Kertz’s emotional capacities had been faded in favour of aegis protocols and acquisition wetware. He thought only of the coming battle and his rangers’ preparation for such hostilities.
Slipping his baton into his belt, Stroika approached the Nuncio. Grabbing hold of a ladder on the side of the rumbling craft, the skitarii commander hauled his combat chassis up the armoured hull towards the cockpit. Halfway up he stopped and turned. The Xenris Phase 404/De-Phracta were still filing in from the barracks decks and armoury, while the crawlers, under the instructions of Master Ansiss, were reversing into the underbelly bay.
Stroika would have cursed himself, if he had such a mind to. While the loading of the drop-ships took place in a silent and organised fashion, the process was still too slow in the skitarii commander’s estimation. With the Basilika descending into position, he could feel in his workings the battle between the pull of the forge world’s gravity and the carrier’s artificial own.
All drop-ships should have been loaded and ready for launch by now. In his present state of mind, however, such disappointment found the form of a file-registered notation. An analysis deferred to post-operation, when the Primus resolved to review embarkation procedures, armoury rotation and access to the hangar from the barracks decks.
The skitarius felt a shudder pass through the troop carrier. Climbing the ladder, Stroika felt the Basilika bank harshly. As he had proceeded with the important duty of assembling his legions for battle – both on board the Basilika and in phylactic communion with commanders on other carriers – the fleet had punched through the forge world’s system defences. The Opus Machina and her arkcruiser consorts had blasted and broadsided their way through the twisted system ships and spiked monitors that ran down on the Mechanicus fleet. Destroyers had launched streams of torpedoes into orbital mines and debris-mounted silos, turning the gargantuan fragments of rock and embedded installations that tumbled after the forge world into showers of stone and scrap. Mechanicus heavy frigates soaked up the firepower of orbital defence platforms and system ships, shielding the skitarii carriers from the worst of the damage.
As the Basili
ka rolled, with fat beams of energy criss-crossing the blackness of the void outside, the flight deck was granted a vertiginous first view of Velchanos Magna. Stroika’s overlays danced with diagrams and flashing notations as he paused on the ladder. There was so much to take in.
The forge world was a planetary horror. Thousands of years buried in the insanity of the Great Gyre had turned Satzica Secundus’s sister forge into a tainted monstrosity. It was an insult to the Machine-God to whom it had originally been dedicated. Bathing in the furnace-light of a spent star, its blessed dirt now crackled with the saturations of the warp. Its surface-smothering industriascape had become a twisted labyrinth of dark labours, while the mighty forge temples that once reached into dusky Velchanosian skies now burned with the balefire of the beyond.
Stroika soaked up the deviant enormity of the vision. The nightmare surface of ventscrapers and smoke stacks roared hellfire and belched spiritual pollutions. The stately forges had now become the perverted palaces of the Dark Mechanicum. Daemon-possessed machinery transported raw materials and weapons, vehicles and warrior constructs across the planet like plagues of spindly, black insects.
Worst of all, Velchanos Magna seemed to have experienced a great physical calamity during its many years of isolation, a planetary affliction born of a malfunctioning weapon or terrible experiment. One quarter of the forge world was missing, blasted to the gargantuan chunks of rubble that tumbled in its orbiting wake. Velchanos Magna now harboured an open wound.
The ragged gash running down the side of the forge world was busy with platforms, macroscaffolding and skeletal dry docks. The structures were set within the exposed rock and the installation-blistered cliff face of the gaping abyss. Half-constructed within shipyards were monstrous vessels, sitting within black scaffolding like fat flies cocooned within a spider’s web. Some of the ships followed recognised, if long forgotten, patterns of architecture. Others were heretekal deviations and experimental craft. Most horrific of all, however, were the abominate craft that almost seemed alive within the construction yards. The very metal of the vessels appeared possessed by otherworldly entities that gave the ships a fell life of their own.
Below the shipyards and constructions, Stroika could see the infernal glow of the planetary core. It was a sea of molten iron, slurping, burning and churning. Even from orbit, the forge world’s heart seemed to be possessed of some daemonic intelligence of its own, forming mind-scalding visions and monstrous faces in the liquid metal of its damnation.
Velchanos Magna was truly a world long lost and damned. A planet taken from the Adeptus Mechanicus and twisted into a dark forge that served the needs of the daemon, the heretek and those tech-pledged to Chaos.
Alarms began to screech across the flight deck. Sodium arc lamps flashed yellow and Stroika felt the upload of contextual data. It was from the command deck. Tech-priest Captain Pharad had sent warning of ground-to-orbit ordnance launched from the forge world below.
Pulling himself up the ladder, Haldron-44 Stroika made for the cockpit of the Nuncio. Cracking comets of electromagnetic fury roared up past the troop carrier. Blasted from nightmarish silos set amongst the slave mills and manufacturing districts of the crowded forge world’s surface, the crackling bolts of the energy blasts seemed to screech, arc and spit with a rabid, infernal fury. Another seared up along the flank of the Basilika, grazing the troop carrier’s hull plating. As Stroika reached the cockpit side-hatch, he heard the wail of a proximity alert. Instinctively locking the fingers of his bionic gauntlets about the rungs of the ladder, the skitarius readied himself for the damage to come.
The Primus fully expected to be thrown from the side of the drop-ship, but the physical shock wave of a weapon striking the underside of the troop carrier never came. His cogitator coils sizzled with possibilities. His overlays streamed with data and the flash of diagrammatical representations. For a moment, Stroika wrestled with the likelihood that they had not in fact been hit at all and that the proximity warning had triggered prematurely.
Exploratory bolts of rancid energy found their way up the side of the carrier and probed the flight deck floor like monstrous digits. Stroika knew that he had been wrong on all counts. The electromagnetic blast was not a crippling volley fired up from the forge world’s surface at all. Cycling through filters, Stroika watched the blasts crackle furiously across the deck and came to realise that the balls of lightning were not weapons as such, but daemonic entities. Separating off, streams of infernal energy snapped and arced across the deck, jumping from one piece of equipment to another. Bulk loaders and powerlifters assumed a horrific life of their own. Their machine-spirits transmitted miserable, codified screams as the daemons devoured them and overloaded the intricate workings of the vehicles.
The skitarii laid down suppressive fire for their compatriots who were still running for the drop-ship ramp at Kertz’s command. The daemonic entities took possession of a cluster of heavy weaponry waiting to be loaded onto the rail-mounted drop-ship behind the Nuncio. A neutron laser projector suddenly came to life, blazing trails of blinding light across the deck. As skitarii rangers ran for the drop-ship they were cut in half by the pinpoint intensity of the powerful weapon.
Electrical arcs cascaded along the walls of the hangar, feeling their way into the circuitry and power lines housed within. The flight deck bulkhead slammed down, decapitating an unfortunate ranger who was caught below the descending door. With their compatriots trapped in the corridor beyond, skitarii of the Xenris Phase 404/De-Phracta worked to manually crank the bulkhead door open.
This did not stop the daemons streaming straight into the skitarii themselves, however. Directing the remainder of his units into the troop bay of the Nuncio, Alpha Kertz had to watch as the infernal entities flooded the cybernetic workings of his soldiers. One by one, Kertz – and through him, Stroika – felt themselves cut off from the ranger units. Possessed by the daemon entities, the skitarii drew arc pistols from their belt holsters and placed the muzzles to the sides of their helmets. A sequence of blasts and dropping bodies worked its way through their number, as one by one the cybernetic soldiers unloaded streams of death straight into their own augmented skulls.
Haldron-44 Stroika swung through the cockpit hatch legs-first. The drop-ship cockpit was small, busy and cramped, with only enough room for a vox-station situated behind a chair-interfaced servitor-pilot. The servo-skull Phrenos~361 sat atop an interface column, waiting for its master, while Cytor 2-Circadii – ranking alpha amongst the skitarii soldiers being transported aboard the Nuncio – climbed the troop bay ladder.
‘Circadii, get those bay doors closed,’ Stroika ordered.
‘But, Primus…’ the alpha said.
‘Right now, skitarius,’ Stroika said, sending the officer back down the ladder. ‘Pilot – you are ordered to make way. All haste, if you please.’
The ghoulish servitor’s teeth chattered between its drawn, black lips. Acknowledging the skitarii commander with a chunter of code, the pilot-servitor moved its digit-interfacia across the cockpit instrumentation.
Returning to the open hatch, Stroika could see that the remaining skitarii of the Xenris Phase 404/De-Phracta were dead. The electromagnetic daemons were nowhere to be seen. The bulkhead door had reopened, however, and the air of the flight deck was being sucked down it. Stroika saw crates and skitarii bodies dragged towards the howling maelstrom of the passageway.
The Primus could barely imagine the hell that was being unleashed on the barracks decks and beyond. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. As the Nuncio rocked on its launch-rail, Stroika realised that the daemonic entities had reached the armoury. The screeching evacuation of air from the hangar promptly ceased as gouts of flame, arcing electricity and pranging frag roared from the opening.
Sealing the cockpit hatch, Stroika stumbled back over to the vox-station. The skitarii commander snatched up a communications line. Stabbing the interface into a haptic port in the side of his helm, he slammed his combat chassis down in the station chair.
‘Calling all drop-craft awaiting disembarkation aboard the Basilika and the carriers beyond,’ Stroika voxed, strapping himself into his seat. ‘This is a command override – Delta/Iota 9-37-64 – you are to ignore your launch protocols. Launch now with whatever troops and materiel you have stowed. I repeat. Launch now. This is an order to purge. Acknowledge.’
As the Nuncio rumbled along its launch-rail, acknowledgement signatures piped up across the vox. The Basilika began to roll, sending a kaleidoscopic blur of the heretek forge world whirring before the cockpit.