by Rob Sanders
With the capital districts and their forge temples forever facing away from the system’s bleak star, one half of the planet was cast in perpetual night, seen through the thin veil of a chemical brume. The twisted silhouette of forge-fire-dotted industry extending towards the horizon, however, was backlit by the fierce metallic blaze of light proceeding from the planet’s exposed daemonic core. It was towards this fell brilliance that Haldron-44 Stroika would take his skitarii vanguard, and where, Omnissiah willing, the forge temple principal – the Magnaplex Maximal – awaited him.
‘Phrenos,’ Stroika said, his modulations misting on the cool air of the radioactive peak. ‘Go ahead and apprise Alpha Versorias of my intention to accompany him and his vanguard skitarii in the first wave. We shall meet the enemy on the freightways. We shall destroy them among the very production plants that created them. Tell him to ready his cohorts.’
As the servo-skull drifted off down the radioactive slope, Stroika turned to see Alpha Nanierix march down the drop-ship ramp flanked by a pair of his trench-cloaked rangers. The skitarii held galvanic rifles and, like Nanierix, offered the Primus a noospheric salute.
‘Alpha Nanierix,’ Haldron-44 Stroika said.
‘Yes, my Primus?’
‘The dropsite is yours.’
0111
SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +FALSE CONSTRUCTS+
Haldron-44 Stroika offered his prayers to the Omnissiah and the magi who were both His receivers and His mouthpiece. Through their data-tethers, the skitarii had been calibrated for battle. Their strategic wetware had been synced and their emotions dialled back. They were the living weapons of the Machine-God. Only officers like Stroika were allowed any degree of flexibility. This allowed for inspiration and creativity – qualities that guided tactical deployment, enhanced leadership and ensured a rapid response to new situations and challenges.
The infernal twilight of the Bronte-Chordata forge temple was thick with the metallic fug of smelting. Haldron-44 Stroika’s optics cycled through false-colour filters to enhance his vision in the dungeon-like gloom.
The temple was as much a cathedral to damnation as a forge. The gargantuan workshop of the Machine-God was now a hellish furnace of spiked chains and twisted architecture. The roasted corpses of those whose beliefs had failed to please the Dark Gods hung from the roof struts, while the Cog Mechanicus and temple sigils had long been vandalised and perverted into symbols of daemon patronage. The very metal of the mesh walkways steamed in contact with the footfalls of the Omnissiah’s skitarii servants.
Stroika’s targeting reticules drifted from ghostly outline to outline, discounting the gleam of forgelight off metal and the movement of automatonic machinery. Podium-interfaced servitors went about their endless labours, supervising magna-machinery whose fevered workings seemed to have a fell, glowing life of their own. Like the furnace magna-machinery, the servitors did not react to the skitarii advance. Stroika approached a drone foreman whose flesh-smeared form was a mess of burns and ugly stitching. A set of half-formed horns protruded from his bare servitor skull.
As the crackling muzzle of Stroika’s arc pistol moved towards the thing’s foul form, the light revealed ruinous symbols and sigils carved brutally into the drone’s back flesh. Uplinks from the Fabricator Locum’s magi aboard the Opus Machina phylactically matched the symbols on both the servitor and the temple walls to pict files that had been mnemonically logged and classified in the ancient vessel’s runebanks.
A cascade of information dropped down before Stroika’s optics. Collected intelligence and hard data captures pertaining to the probable corruptions at work on Velchanos Magna. The likely allegiances to which the Dark Mechanicum of the forge world were victim, after a small eternity spent in the warp storm. Inconstant beings that called themselves powers, daemons and gods. Slaves to darkness. The damned vessels into which the unnatural force of Chaos was distilled. Things that twisted the souls of men and the cold integrity of machines alike, bending them to their ruinous will. Fell creatures of dimensional evil, who had corrupted the arch-heretek Kelbor-Hal and the warlord Horus ten thousand years before, splitting both the Martian Empire and the Imperium of Man asunder.
Haldron-44 Stroika felt a cold hatred burn through his neurocircuitry and processor coils. He knew not whether this proceeded from his previous experience of fighting the hollow instruments of Chaos. He did not know whether it was the Great Maker’s revulsion, finding expression through the purity of His constructs, for a corruption that was everything that the Motive Force was not. He did not know whether what he was feeling was simply another doctrina imperative, delivered straight into his mind from the techno-magi above. Those who saw everything he saw. Knew everything he knew.
The Primus’s helm-vanes sizzled with the flood of obedient returns and acknowledgements. The drone foreman went about its business, monitoring the activity of labouring claws and smelting buckets, unaware of the pistol muzzle at the back of its skull or the skitarii forces advancing through the forge temple.
Stroika moved on and his vanguard skitarii with him. With each potential target flashing and fading as it was discounted, Stroika moved his pair of arc pistols. Deployed along their appendage-rails and locked into the palms of his bionic gauntlets, the fat pistols hummed and crackled as they drifted slickly from target to redundant target.
On the companionway overhead and on the one above that Stroika could hear the synchronised footfalls of vanguard skitarii, led by their sub-alphas. Their helms and war-plate jangled softly with their movements, while their red trench-cloaks were a foil whisper in their passing. Through the companionway mesh the Primus could see the glow of their radium carbines. The skitarii soldiers held the radioactive weapons up to their helm targeters, zeroing in on potential targets, like Stroika, as they filed down the walkways. On the other side of the forge temple’s holy furnace, his mindlinked feeds told Stroika that Sub-Alpha Enron’s units were doing the same.
Stroika’s rad-censer crackled and hissed as it bounced from his belt. Its insistence had not subsided since leaving the contamination of the dropsite. This was to be expected. For the vanguard skitarii, their radium weaponry was both a boon and a curse. While benefitting from the devastating effects hyper-irradiated shot visited upon the enemies of the Omnissiah, the skitarii were constantly bathed in the radioactivity of their own weapons. To fight side by side with the vanguard was to suffer the same slow death from rad-poisoning as the Omnissian martyrs themselves.
It was this suffering – this physical and spiritual burden – that made the vanguard such expert killers. They were the Machine-God’s ambassadors of destruction and fearless in the face of enemy threats, which they were routinely the first to encounter. It was difficult to scare or intimidate cybernetic warriors who already knew they were living the last days, minutes and moments of their lives. Moments in which they were resolved to honour the Great Maker, who would soon be welcoming their return and recycling.
side of the forge temple came to a dead stop. Omnispectrals confirmed that something was advancing towards them at speed.
The code-signatures of Phrenos~361 hit Stroika moments before the servo-skull shot by. The drone’s magnetic cog-blade was a blur as Phrenos flew up the companionway at Stroika and his skitarii. Whooshing overhead, the skull streamed its master the data it had collected from its reconnaissance.
‘You trespass in the domain of Ulcan Gnostramari,’ the vox-hailers of the temple boomed through the gloom and the polychromatic mist. The voice was a rancid echo of the proud machine it had once been but still carried the unmistakable imperiousness of a magos or forge master. The words were threaded with the cacophony of encoded madness.
‘Arch-Fabricant of Velchanos Magna.’ The voice descended into a rust-heaving cough, before continuing. ‘Lord Prophetechnos of the Underforge, the Darknid Core, the Iron Almighty… the Abystra-Dynomicron.’
Stroika’s acquisition reticules danced between the profusion of targets. They were only filtered outlines in the darkness but recognition wetware told the Primus that his skitarii faced an assembled force of flesh-corrupted forge guard and hunched, spiked gun-servitors – sickly abominations who were warp-fused to their glowing weaponry. Among them, deep within the ranks of the temple sentinels, Stroika’s filters found the flashing silhouette that seemed to be issuing the vox-hailed ultimatums. The monstrous forge master under whose damned auspices the Bronte-Chordata temple operated. One of Ulcan Gnostramari’s Dark Mechanicum servants.
From the modulations and horrifically augmented outline of the fell forge master, Haldron-44 Stroika failed to identify the monster. He found no match against his historical records and pict files, leading him to believe that the magos must have risen to his position during the forge world’s long isolation and contamination.
Ulcan Gnostramari, however, was a designation well known to Stroika from his mission uploads. He had been Fabricator General of Velchanos Magna well before the apocalyptic warp storm claimed the planet. It seemed that Gnostramari ruled Velchanos still, having found new service in the ranks of the Dark Mechanicum and a ruinous patron in the abominate thing referred to as the Abystra-Dynomicron.
‘The punishment for such trespass,’ the heretek forge master boomed, before rust-hacking once more, ‘is assimilation.’
With the renegade forge guard’s stub-carbines and the IV Tantal’s radium weaponry aimed at one another through the furnace murk, the pits of molten iron bubbling below suddenly exploded. The liquid metal blasted up at the skitarii vanguard, the glowing fury assuming the dribbling shapes of the immaterial entities that possessed it. As huge splatters of molten iron cascaded down, skitarii soldiers were lost to the glowing ferocity. Stroika’s mind echoed with the brief screams of his men. The cybernetic soldiers steamed beneath the molten iron, their flesh and workings melting away, while their souls were torn apart by the daemonic monstrosities who found form in the boiling metal.
As both infernal iron and the assimilated alloys of his skitarii dribbled down through the melting mesh of the companionways, Haldron-44 Stroika gave the order to open fire. Moving forward along the walkways with their radium carbines up to their helms, the vanguard skitarii of the IV Tantal blazed away at the enemy targets. Flagging the overlay signature of the corrupted forge master as a restricted target, Stroika led the way.
With the temple forge singing with the hammering ricochets of stub rounds and radium shot, Stroika watched the forge master and a pair of hench-units withdraw. Negotiating sections of melted walkway with hydraulically powered leaps and crouching behind the cover of rails and meshing, Haldron-44 Stroika led the indomitable advance of his skitarii soldiers through the Dark Mechanicum forge temple.
His optical overlays furious with targeting reticules and infliction data, the skitarii commander ducked and backed before the sweeping pass of possessed machinery. Only his cybernetic reflexes saved Stroika from the walkway-chewing attentions of crane-claws and furnace buckets that attempted to eat skitarii soldiers alive. Fountains of daemonic metal splashed across the walkways, ever weakening their structural integrity and forcing the IV Tantal and their sub-alphas to find alternative routes through the twisted, byzantine structure.
As Stroika and the vanguard skitarii finally closed on their enemies, the Primus found that the cowards were pushing temple slaves down the walkways at them. The cultist labourers were garbed in the ribbed rubber and hoods of forge-worlders. Their rebreather canisters swung before them like trunks. The stitched and stapled rubber barely covered the obscenity of their warped mutations. Through the hood visors, Stroika could see eyes white with a mixture of terror and exultation as the cult menials sacrificed themselves for their forge master, their Arch-Fabricant and the unholy Abystra-Dynomicron.
Forge guard soldiers – the planet-bound, technofeudal armies of individual temples and the forge world as a whole – forced the menials on into skitarii gunfire. The forge guard were a twisted shadow of their former glory. No longer the holy warriors of the Omnissiah, their corrupted flesh was rust-stained and seeped about their workings. Their ceremonial cloaks were black tatters and their tarnished cybernetics decorated with spikes, chains, razor-wire and stub-belts of sigil-carved bullets. Ghoulish optics burned from their black, skull-fashioned helms, picking out targets amongst the advancing skitarii, while their stub-carbines barked from where they were resting on the shoulders of body-shielding menials.
The menials’ rubber suits became shredded remnants as radium rounds tore into them. Warped bone splintered and flesh pulped, before the wounds blackened to rad-poisoned craters. Temple slaves fell dead to the floor, forcing the forge guard forward into the fray. The vanguard skitarii’s aim held no more mercy for the cybernetic soldiers, whose black helms opened up in a splatter of curdled brains and cogitator workings.
The renegade cyborgs’ own aim wavered between single salvoes of unnatural accuracy that seemed guided by some daemon force, and mad, magazine-emptying displays of chattering bravado. With bullets showering the companionways, both behaviours held dangers for the advancing skitarii.
Stroika engaged his conversion field, allowing the energy shielding to soak up the onslaught of slugs. As the enemy fire intensified and forge guard soldiers vox-hailed madness and code-corruption at the Primus, the conversion field was overwhelmed and sizzled to dormancy.
The skitarii would not be halted, however. Stroika knew from his uplinks and constantly updated feeds that battles like this were taking place across the capital districts, with cybernetic soldiers stoically battling on through mills, workshops, assembly plants, freightways and forge temples; through frightfully warped enemies and their own inevitable losses.
They would not fail their magi and their Machine-God. They could not. There was an evil present that demanded utter destruction, a perversion of the Omnissiah’s purpose that could not be allowed to endure. To see such a duty through required an adamantine resolve. A steel will. An iron nerve. All the Omnissian gifts with which the soldiers of the Legio
nes Skitarii had been blessed. With bullet-chewed vanguard warriors falling from the walkways and cybernetic soldiers clutching bionics that had been blasted off, the IV Tantal marched on.
Stamping through the rancid scrap and corpses of both slaughtered menials and the forge guard who had misused them, the vanguard skitarii suddenly became aware of a new threat. Gun-servitors on the higher platforms were observing their dread directives and opening fire as their enemies reached range. The combat drones were barely human, their bones and parchment skin stretched across implanted heavy weaponry. Hunched, spiked and fused to monstrous packs that fed their heavy bolters and fuelled their multi-meltas, the servitors lumbered forth, their mouths open and glowing in silent screams.
As Sub-Alpha 7-Enron-7 disappeared in a maelstrom of heavy bolter fire and several point-skitarii on the opposite companionways streamed away to flaming flesh, war-plate and alloy under the attentions of a multi-melta aimed down their advancing column, Stroika knew he had to press the skitarii advantage.
With the skitarii pushing the forge guard back with their fearless progress and the storm of radium shot and stubber slugs intensifying between the two enemies, Quendix summoned two of his vanguard skitarii special weapons units. The two cybernetic soldiers stomped forward in unison, swishing their trench-cloaks aside while taking a titanium knee. Bringing up their heavy plasma weaponry, the pair aimed their calivers at the far platforms, unleashing a succession of raging blue orbs that burned like small suns.
The rate of fire was punishing, the skitarii sweeping their calivers left and right to bathe the gun-servitors in a hail of plasma. Combat drones began to fall to their scaffolded knees, with holes burned through their malformed chests. Others shook heavy bolters that had chugged to silence, not realising that plasma orbs had eaten through the weapons and their mechanisms. A gun-servitor on the flank simply detonated, a ball of plasma blasting straight through him and into his pyrum-petrol gas pack. The explosion took two other combat-servitors with it and turned a third into a bolt-blasting inferno that was as much a threat to forge guard with their backs to the drone as to the advancing skitarii.