by Rob Sanders
Haldron-44 Stroika ran forth, his footfalls shaking the walkway, flanked by two vanguard skitarii who blasted warped forge guard soldiers out of their commander’s path with conservative volleys of radium shot. As their magazines ran dry, the Primus unleashed twin streams of electrical fury from his arc pistols. Corrupted mechanoids convulsed as they were hit by the arcstreams. They spasmed and clutched their stub-carbines, sending sporadic blasts of bullets down through the walkway mesh.
Stomping past, Stroika didn’t even wait for the arcstream to fry their flesh and workings. With the fading of their biometric returns, Stroika’s cogitator added the kills to a running total for the mission which had already reached three digits. Such records were useful – as much in the case of a Primus as any other skitarii soldier – for determining promotions, legionary responsibilities, status and cybernetic enhancements. Unlike the Astra Militarum or the Adeptus Astartes where such decisions were left to the fallible human and suprahuman judgements of individual officers, in the Legiones Skitarii such matters were decided using hard data.
Having reloaded their radium carbines, the skitarii soldiers followed, but their commander suddenly stopped. As several slugs sparked off his battleware, Stroika’s overlays were flashing a warning. A colossal fountain of molten iron was raging up beside the companionway. Stroika could see the nightmarish shapes of daemon entities reaching out for him in the dribbles and slurps that embodied their melted forms.
Turning, Stroika extended his arms. With a hydraulic clunk, the pistols sprang back on their rails. Raising his knee, the Primus kicked the first skitarii soldier in the chestplate, sending him stumbling back into his compatriot – just out of the descending path of the liquid metal. As the companionway melted before Stroika and the skitarii, he turned to find that another splatter of raging iron had turned the other side of the walkway into a dribbling mess. The structure began to waver beneath his feet.
Stroika’s optics flashed and streamed with alerts that told of an all too obvious danger but little in the way of options to escape it. Kicking the railing out in front of him, Haldron-44 Stroika backed up to take advantage of the short run the weakening companionway afforded him. Stamping across the mesh, the skitarii officer powered his hydraulics for a leap of faith. Once more he found himself streaming prayers to the Omnissiah and hoping that the Machine-God was receiving them.
Launching from the trembling companionway, Stroika sailed across the open space. Below him the raging heart of the forge bubbled and spat. Kicking his titanium legs for momentum, he snatched a length of tarnished chain from a number that were hanging from redundant rails set in the furnace chamber ceiling.
Swinging across the distance with the red foil of his cloak rippling behind, Stroika’s metal feet found the rail of the parallel companionway. Snatching for a hold on the structure he saw that Alpha Quendix and his vanguard skitarii had yet to reach his position. The Primus found himself surrounded by a surprised collection of enemies.
With radium rounds hammering into the throng, Stroika kicked a twisted menial’s hooded head from his shoulders before dropping down on the companionway. Grabbing the forge guard who had been using the temple drudge as a shield by his horn-pierced helm, Stroika smashed the Dark Mechanicum soldier’s head into the railing. As his horns broke away and the helm shattered about his daemonic half-face, Stroika grabbed the forge guard’s weapon and brutally backhanded the stinking soldier with his bionic gauntlet. Turning the stub-carbine on the downed soldier, the skitarius then sprayed the weapon’s barrel back and forth before the throng of corrupted slaves and soldiers.
Body after cybernetic body fell before the point-blank fury of the weapon. As his carbine ran empty, Stroika threw it with hydraulic force at a fat, flailing menial who was spilling out of his rubber suit. The weapon struck the warped worker on the hood and dashed the consciousness from him.
With the skitarii commander so close and isolated, the forge guard fought back with a vengeance, clambering over the bullet-ridden corpses of their compatriots to get to him. Stepping backwards along the companionway, Stroika tore a pair of fat mindscrambler grenades from where they were mag-locked to his belt. Depressing their studs he bounced them down the walkway. They detonated with a brief flash, and the mesh companionway became a lightning storm of faint blue energies that crackled about the advancing forge guard. The bio-electric surge coursed through their workings and crippled their minds, causing the corrupted cybernetic soldiers to fall to their knees or clutch their helms in agony.
As Quendix and his skitarii advanced hurriedly to envelop Stroika in their number, radium rounds hammered the forge defenders back in a rad-storm of savage gunnery.
With blackened bodies falling before them in droves, the skitarii pressed on as their protocols dictated. Stroika had already received imperatives from Engra Myrmidex that superseded these.
Haldron-44 Stroika climbed up on the same rail and hauled himself up through the twisted metal of the companionway above. He looked down at the sub-alpha.
1000
SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING…
UPLOADING…
UPLOADING…
SIGNAL INTERFERENCE… +FLESH AND IRON+
Clawing the tips of his bionic digits into the elevator doors, Haldron-44 Stroika braced his combat chassis and heaved. As the black doors parted, the skitarii commander was granted a view of the twilight halls beyond. He had travelled from the unholy forgeworks of the temple up to the private quarters of the temple’s forge master, situated at the very top of the structure.
The vaulted chamber through the doors was a benighted den of dark chrome and runebanks that glowed with the light of pict screens and warped augurs. A twisted servitor was fused to the banks, silently monitoring the unfolding havoc in the forge temple.
Sparse furniture gave way to a dark metal mosaic representing some fell sigil in the perversion of a cog. Private workshops and diagnostica led to a laboratorium cordoned off by a partition of splatter-stained plas. A filthy cyber-surgical slab took pride of place, interfaced with a multi-limbed automaton that sat in a nest of barbaric tools and instruments. Beyond the laboratorium, the chambers opened out onto a balcony platform extending over the temple roof, set between a quad of node columns that arced furiously with the unnatural energies of the forge.
Stroika cycled his optics and omnispectral augurs searching for signatures but he could find none. Perhaps the forge master had abandoned the Bronte-Chordata temple in search of safety with his Arch-Fabricant. With his arc pistols humming down by his sides, the Primus moved quietly into the chambers.
Like a lightning bolt down through his spine, it hit him. Haldron-44 Stroika fell forward onto his knees, denting the dark metal of the floor. Now across the threshold of the chamber, his overlays lit up with the outline of targets, hidden from view but from little else. Their signatures lit up on all available spectra but had failed to do so from behind some kind of scrambling field protection the forge master operated in his private chambers.
Stroika could smell his flesh cooking about the heat o
f his combat chassis and bionics, as the paralysing energies of an incapacitator flowed up through the floor. The node columns outside were now dormant as their vented energies seethed through the skitarii commander instead. His cabling, his neurocircuitry and his nerves burned with the overwhelming power. Stroika could barely move. He could barely think.
He tried to aim his arc pistols but no targets presented themselves. His optics began to shimmer and his overlays to scramble. Lightning arced from the floor up into his outstretched gauntlets, firing the hydraulics on his pistols and sending them back up their rails and into their cavity holsters. The multi-coloured energies crackled between the dark metal of the floor and the outstretched fingers of his gauntlets, dragging his hands to the ground. His auxiliary appendages tried to unlock from his back-cradles but they too would not respond under the electrifying lock the incapacitator had on his systems.
‘No, no, no,’ a voice boomed from the blurry gloom beyond, the same one he had heard in the furnace chambers below. ‘That will not do. How can I learn anything from you…’ The voice broke off, hacking its way through the rusty gargle of a cough. ‘…learn anything from you if you are trying to kill me? Eh? Eh?’ The forge master seemed amused and managed the dark echo of a chuckle before falling foul of more coughing.
‘See, fool servant of the one god – cold, distant and removed,’ the forge master said, ‘the Arch-Fabricant will reward me for the data inside your cogitator cortex and the phylactic interface through which the mindlinked intelligence of your puny invasion flows.’
The voice seemed to get closer as the forge master approached from behind a pillar. Stroika’s optics faded in and out of clarity, his filters flickering with the spoiled current passing through his cybernetic superstructure.
The forge master was a tall but hunched thing, whose barrel-body – broad with rancid augmentations – was lost in the black leather of a huge hood and robes that draped his workings. From his back sprouted countless slender claws and tarnished mechadendrites. Two socket orbs of molten iron burned within his hood like newly formed worlds, while the tentacles of some facial corruption dribbled through the filthy grille of a vox-speaker.
Two other dark shapes ventured forth from alcoves, lank of metal limb. The transparent plastek of their robes showed them to be Dark Mechanicum protectors. Their warped flesh was pallid and their battle shells and bionics a filthy black. Their gauntlets were nightmare nests of torturous weaponry – transonic blades, rusted saws, needles and crackling talons – while their faces were featureless black masks. Two more appeared from behind Stroika, where they had always been concealed, just either side of the open elevator doors.
‘When I hand you, your skitarii and the dusty old tech-priests who sent you here to my master, the Abystra-Dynomicron will not only bless my temple with iron to be forged but will forge me anew, with the crafting power of the warp flowing through me. Nothing will be beyond my unmaking.’
The excitement of the idea got the better of the forge master as his leather robes rose and fell with the exertions of his hacking cough. Spitting a rust-corrupted ichor that dribbled forth through the grille and down the shivering tentacles that squirmed through it, the Dark Mechanicum magos hocked the last of the filth onto the floor before moving towards the surgical laboratorium.
‘Bring him, bring him,’ the forge master said, clearing his congested throat. As the protectors took Stroika under the arms and hauled him up from the crackling metal of the floor, he could see that the hench-units and the forge master wore rubber coverings on their feet-appendages. Stroika’s, however, they dragged along the incapacitating metal of the floor that ran through the length of the chambers. The strange energies arced and snapped between the skitarii officer’s cybernetic form and the dark metal.
Stroika tried to fight the paralysis being visited upon him but the incapacitator was simply too powerful. The dread energies felt their way not only through his power core but also the cells of his arc weaponry. He could neither power nor deploy his weapons, reducing them to lumps of dead metal dragging his weakened frame down. Feeling feebly for the mindscrambler grenades that were mag-locked to his belt, he found them to be equally useless.
The skitarius felt his physical systems begin to shut down. Neural processors and battle wetware ran to dormancy. Feeds and overlays died with a crackle. It was all he could do to keep his optics, life support and base cogitations running.
In desperation Stroika reached out through phylactic channels for assistance. Someone who might be able to offer aid – even if that was denying the forge master his prize. The Opus Machina was too far away for such a stream. As was 10-Vitro Tiberiax. If ever Stroika was in need of Nalode Deka 871’s cold, murderous skills it was now, but he had despatched him on a mission to secure the dropsite. His only hope was a broad spectrum phylactic appeal. Perhaps Aemod-44 Versorias or Sub-Alpha Quendix could respond.
As the Dark Mechanicum protectors dragged him through to the filthy laboratorium and dumped his body on the slab, the cyber-surgeon automaton came to vicious life, chuntering with pincers, las-scalpels and bone saws.
Stroika could do little but feel anger at his own failure and dread at the procedure to come. The skitarius didn’t fear the savage surgery or disassembling that was the automaton’s foetid duty. He feared that after failing his Machine-God so completely, his parts and base organics would not even be deemed worthy of recycling. After passing through the polluted claws of the Dark Mechanicum, why would the Omnissiah want what was left of him?
The skitarii commander felt a raw fury proceeding straight from his thumping heart, but trapped as it was inside the immobilised metal coffin of his combat chassis, there was little that could be done.
The forge master had retreated behind his trap and waited for a skitarius to venture forth: an officer, a killclade, a unit of Omnissian soldiers, it didn’t matter. The forge temple was lost. Greater prizes waited for the forge master if he could give his dark overlords access to the mission directives and the doctrinal imperatives that guided the Adeptus Mechanicus invasion.
Darker thoughts clouded the Primus’s mind. With Stroika’s phylactic interface – a piece of him that would be recycled to serve the needs of the Dark Mechanicum – the enemy could monitor and frustrate the Legiones Skitarii’s every move on Velchanos Magna. The problem personally for Haldron-44 Stroika was that his brain and neurocircuitry would come attached to that interface, with little need for anything else.
Feeling the hopelessness of his predicament and with no cogitated probabilities to inform or comfort him, Stroika’s arc-scalded mind drifted to screed and prayer.
‘Great Maker,’ he mumbled through lips that burned with the unnatural energies of the incapacitator, ‘aid Your cybernetic servants in the prosecution of Your unbreakable will.’
The wretched forge master, whose attentions had been focused on priming his dread automaton, leant in to listen. About Stroika the black shapes of the protectors were gathered.
‘You think prayer will help you now?’ the monstrous mechanoid coughed through his rust-stained grille. ‘You think your Machine-God cares for you, soldier?’
‘Through beam, blade and the wrath of righteous iron, visit through us Your punishment of the unbeliever,’ Stroika continued.
‘Your god cares nothing for your sufferings,’ the forge master said, hacking up rusted filth that splattered and speckled Stroika’s war-plate. ‘Empty vessel of the Mechanicus,’ the forge master told him, leaning over Stroika and allowing the filth of his dangling tentacles to settle on Stroika’s paralysed appendages.
‘You are blind, like the tech-priests of Mars,’ the corrupt construct said. ‘Your Machine-God is as cold as steel and as aloof as your prayers unanswered. Under his technotyranny, you serve the machine. Here, the machine serves us. Here we do not celebrate interface and augmentation. We are a living glorification – we are the union of flesh and iron
in ways you could not possibly understand.’
Stroika tried to block out the poison of the forge master’s words.
‘Punish he whose path twists with the darkness of his faith,’ the skitarii commander mumbled on. ‘He who has embraced ignorance over the true enlightenments. Whose creations are false without Your spirit.’
As the forge master went about making final preparations, engaging restraints and raising the surgical slab on its hydraulic crank, he dribbled further madness at his victim.
‘Our masters demand no less of us than your hollow god,’ the fell forge master hissed. ‘Yours sends you across the galaxy to pillage the knowledge and technological wonders of others. We, however, are repaid for our allegiance. In the giving of body, craft and soul to the ageless beings of the beyond, the secrets of the galaxy, the universe and those planes that exist beyond it, shall all become ours. Beings that existed long before technology’s Dark Age… before our understanding took us to the stars… before the first of our kind picked up a rock and dashed out the brains of another. Only they can deliver us from ignorance – the only true evil.’
Haldron-44 Stroika felt the metal binders snap shut about his bionic appendages. As the surgical restraints locked and the automaton moved in with its tools of butchery, Stroika felt the slab rise and the titanium of his feet leave the dark metal of the floor.
The relief found expression in the dull spark of power cells returning to life, the sluggish return of automotive functions and cerebral systems rebooting.
Unaware and uncaring of such revelations, the forge master withdrew slightly to accommodate the closing tools of his blood-speckled automaton.