Skitarius

by Rob Sanders

 

  Stroika streamed,

  Quendix reported.

  Stroika knew that the princeps would detest such a duty. It was time, however, to let Deka’s ruststalkers off the leash.

  1001

  SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I

  ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED

  UPLOADING… +THE NUMBERS HAVE SPOKEN+

  Haldron-44 Stroika found himself buried in the abominable shadow of the Magnaplex Maximal. The molten blaze of the planet’s daemonic core raged behind it, while the dark magnificence of the forge principal had long been refashioned into a temple celebrating the infernal union of man and machine, the daemon and the Ruinous Powers of the warp.

  The Magnaplex Maximal was a dread wonder of hanging forges and iron falls, the molten metal lighting up the darkness with the spit and slurp of its malevolence. The falls fed a broad moat that was both a defensive feature and an aesthetic one. The fiery channels met around the rear of the mighty forge, spilling over the great drop that bordered the temple in a broad cascade that rejoined the vast daemon entity from which it originally flowed. The Abystra-Dynomicron, infernal sponsor of the renegade forge world and provider of its power and its unnatural craft.

  There had once been a circular plaza surrounding the forge temple principal, with doctrinal quadrangles forming the denticles of a cog. It was a wonder that could be seen from orbit and honoured the Omnissiah with its form. Now there was but a shattered thoroughfare of black, iron-threaded stone, with much of the layout having been lost to the cataclysm that had exposed the core.

  The quadrangles now housed small mountains of mouldering scrap and bone – the fused carcasses of cybernetic constructs who had failed or disappointed the Arch-Fabricant and the daemonic core to whom he was Lord Prophetechnos. Obscene symbols dedicated to the daemon and the rancid deities of the beyond were carved into the floor and displayed on the pillars of elevated freightways and twisted maglev lines that strangled the cog-plaza like overgrown metal vines.

  It was there – before the abominate forge temple that spewed forth infernal iron and the daemon engines for which Velchanos Magna had become infamous – that the Arch-Fabricant made his stand.

  The battle had raged for hours. The skitarii vanguard had kept pushing forward under Stroika’s command, cohorts of fearless cybernetic soldiers crackling with radioactivity from the contamination of their devastating weaponry. Moving through the smouldering destruction about the forge temple principal, immaculate in their battleware, were sentinels in crimson and silver.

  Ranger units crept through the wreckage of vehicles and over small mountains of debris created by stilt-freightways that had been blasted and toppled for cover. With their galvanic rifles and arquebuses, they turned the battlefield of shattered rockcrete, twisted black metal and fire-gutted factories into a hailstorm. The shrieking path of servitor shells turned corrupt mechanoids into crackling infernos of systematic overload. As bullets of depleted transuranium from arquebuses smacked through armour plating and buildings, the renegade forge-worlders inside were turned into streaming showers of blood, oil and workings. All the while, the skitarii vanguard made their advance before the maelstrom of such pinpoint slaughter.

  Sicarian ruststalkers haunted the derelict workshops and factories, butchering their way through the Dark Mechanicum troops who were sheltering there. With the shimmer and buzz of transonic blades, the ruststalker units disassembled cybernetic warplings, finishing the polluted constructs with the molecular dissonance of chordclaw sweeps, the blurs of talons ripping effortlessly through flesh and bionics.

  Haldron-44 Stroika rode on the back of an Onager Dunecrawler, leading a contingent of other armoured arachnoid vehicles across the debris of the smouldering battlefield. Clutching the bulbous back of the crawler with a single gauntlet and the toe-point of a metal foot, Stroika led columns of the vehicles, like swollen metal ticks, towards the enemy. With broadening eradication beams atomising enemy formations and neutronic streams turning spiked vehicles and monstrous automatonic machines into crackling, burnt-out wrecks, the Dunecrawlers continued their indomitable advance. Servitor-driven Ironstrider engines moved nimbly across the debris and body-strewn terrain. Weaving between the Dunecrawlers, they seared fat las-beams into approaching enemy contingents and the twisted shapes of light vehicles.

  For the skitarii commander, the battle was havoc overlaid with havoc. While his legions exchanged fire with loathsome, warp-fuelled fusions of man and machine, his optics and phylactics provided further complication and insight.

  Stroika’s cogitators burned inside the tissue of his brain and the plastek of his battle wetware. The angles and extended trajectories of incoming beams and bullets updated in a continuous cycle. The twisted battlefield was a vista of flashing forms. Targeting reticules shot back and forth, identifying the warped, myriad forms of the Dark Mechanicum to be locked and killed.

  Data spooled in an endless, updating loop, apprising Stroika of strategic openings, enemy reinforcements and skitarii losses. Phylactic pict feeds and vox-transmitted reports recreated the cacophony of battle within his mind. Simulations bled to nothing as the speed of unfolding events overreached them and fizzling filters showed Stroika the battlefield in all its auspectral glory.

  Cutting through the miasma of overlaid data and the moment-by-moment, life-or-death decisions, the Fabricator Locum was ever present. Boosted by the phylactic arrays carried by the armoured Dunecrawlers, Engra Myrmidex’s voice echoed about Stroika’s mind.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Stroika drifted the fingers of his gauntlet down to a wound in his midriff. An enemy shell had found its way through both the overlapping force fields of the Dunecrawler and his own conversion field. Passing straight through both his war-plate and his side, it had been an incredibly fortunate shot. Stroika suspected that sniper constructs sat up in the hanging forges of the temple were using some kind of daemonic guidance to place their shots. Bringing the bionic digits up, the officer could see the rich, red blood on his fingertips, the same that was running down the side of his silvered armour.

  The skitarii commander felt the burn of doctrina imperatives that were yet to be met and protocols unfulfilled. Waving an Ironstrider engine rider over to him, Stroika stepped from the Dunecrawler onto the side of the walker. Once again holding on with a single gauntlet and the tip of his metal toe, Stroika rode out the rough terrain, pulling in close as the Sydonian Dragoon rider took the Ironstrider engine at speed up and down a mound of rubble and serrated girders. Phrenos~361, who had been shelte
ring in an alcove amongst the Dunecrawler’s armour plating, whirred to a magnetic blur and drifted through the mayhem behind its master.

  Warp-beams of unnatural energy cut through the reality about Stroika, while autocannon fire chewed up an advancing file of vanguard skitarii. Temple tech-thrall soldiers, attached to the forge principal, turned the air into a criss-crossing web of red needle beams.

  An accompanying ballistarius engine that had been pacing Stroika went down in a stream of boltcannon fire, delivered by Dark Mechanicum fighters swooping in low on their spiked wings. As another volley and another followed, hammering the servitor-driver, the engine and its skitarii rider into the rockcrete, Stroika updated the column of crawlers he had just left with the aircraft’s course. Within moments, several Onager Dunecrawlers had fired their rocket arrays, blasting the midnight-black fighter and its wing-servitors out of the sky.

  Halting and moving, halting and moving through the battlefield hailstorm of gunfire and searing beams, the Sydonian Dragoon allowed successive rockcrete pillars to soak up the worst of the attention. Arriving at the forward extent of the skitarii advance, Stroika found hundreds of cybernetic soldiers pinned down behind the toppled section of an elevated maglev rail and the armoured train it was carrying. A skitarii maniple held its pinned position as warped Dark Mechanicum battle tanks pulverised the debris with their massive tracks. They exchanged heavy blasts of energy with the advancing line of Onager Dunecrawlers.

  Meanwhile, the interior of the maglev monitor train that had fallen across the battlefield glowed with an ominous light. The contingent of cybernetic heavy shock troops that the monitor train had been carrying to harass the skitarii rear sections now cut through the armour of the compartment roofs with their barrel-mounted chainblades.

  Levelling the length of his taser goad like a lance, the Sydonian Dragoon riding the Ironstrider engine smashed one of the corrupted cyborgs back through its compatriots. With a flash of power, the heavy shock trooper was smash-blasted into several razor-wire-entwined bionics. Along with heavy-duty appendages and cradled weaponry, the twisted ladder of an interfaced spine and a shrunken skull-helm flew back into the darkness of the carriage-compartment.

  Dropping down to the shattered rockcrete, Haldron-44 Stroika launched his arc pistols on their appendage-rails and blasted several shock troopers back. The warrior cyborgs droned machine madness inside their spiked, armoured shells. They experienced the battle as a miasma of electromagnetic turmoil, heat signatures and seismic percussion.

  As the constructs rattled with Stroika’s assault, spidery arcs feeling their way across armour and through the black ooze of their workings, Stroika cycled his shoulder joints. Turning his torso socket at the same time, the skitarii commander became a cranking whirlwind of arc mauls. The weapons trailed a blaze of sizzling power, smashing shrunken cybernetic heads from barrel-chassised bodies and pushing the flared muzzles of warp-blasters aside.

  With Stroika cycling his limbs and turning, each slick movement firing with a hydraulic thunk, the Primus beat and blasted the emerging shock troopers into a headless throng of weaponless warriors. Battering the aethyric beams of their rifles and appendage-cradles aside, Stroika mercilessly ended cyborg after cyborg. He ducked and leant out of the clumsy, chugging paths of barrel-mounted chainblades. He crushed skull-helms and visited point-blank storms of electrical energy into the juddering, smoke-streaming torso-units of the augmented killers.

  Within moments the forward skitarii registered the presence of their Primus fighting among them. They processed the emerging danger of the corrupted shock troops, who were cutting their foetid way out of the very cover the skitarii were using. Retaining the shelter of their positions, the skitarii turned to face the toppled train. They blasted a synchronised volley of servitor shot from their galvanic rifles. Hammering the droning shock troops aside, the sophisticated ammunition caused the cyborgs to overload and explode in battery-blasts of crackling power and slime-coated workings.

  As Haldron-44 Stroika took cover with his skitarii, the last of the heavy shock troopers stomped out of the monitor train compartment, only to succumb to the shrieking attentions of servitor shot.

  Turning his helm aside at the explosive overload and the fine spray of black slime, Stroika swished his greatcloak aside and worked his way down the line of skitarii. Identica told the Primus that he was amongst the 4.2 Fortisoi-Cyratica. Stroika found their registered alpha, 606-Sartrid Inculus.

  Stroika said.

  Inculus told him.

  Stroika told him.

  Inculus said.

  Like the skitarii alpha, Haldron-44 Stroika could make an endless list of what the invasion force needed. Scrambling up the side of the monitor train – the armour of which was covered with shredding metal barbs and spines – Stroika risked a look over the mangled maglev line and the debris of the collapsed stiltway.

  Inculus said.

  Up on the train, Stroika came to appreciate the warning. Just above the vanes and crenellations of his half-cog plume, a raging storm of heavy shell, chuntering cannon and fat energy beams was being exchanged between ranks of black, baroque battle tanks and the advancing Mechanicus crawlers. As Phrenos~361 rose to join its master in cataloguing the area, Stroika put a gauntlet on the servo-skull’s bone crown and pushed it down below the havoc of bullets and beams.

  It was no place for man or machine, as the lines of half-atomised skitarii bodies testified. The cybernetic soldiers that 606-Sartrid Inculus had sent to test the approach had been blasted apart mere moments after surmounting the debris beyond the train.

  The grit and twisted metal of the collapse suddenly flashed with the hammering of sickly, stuttering beams. Stroika ducked his helm as the beams, fired from one of many cannon-emplacements set in the hanging forges of the monstrous temple, cut through the air overhead. Where the sickly streams of energy phased into the covering wreckage, the metal struts began to squirm and the rockcrete liquefied to a bubbling sentience. Stroika withdrew his gauntlet as the living wreckage reached out for him.

  Looking up just in time, Stroika’s optic-array and overlays alerted him to the fact that the tapering turret of an enemy battle tank had acquired his position. The skitarii commander jumped down from the train just as the long turret vomited forth the blinding purple flash of a shot. Wreckage and plaza debris vaulted into the air as the cannon blast thudded into the embankment of plasteel and shattered rockcrete. The toppled monitor train was knocked back, forcing the skitarii taking cover behind to jump, scramble and crawl out of the pulverising path of the rolling carriages.

  Haldron-44 Stroika urged, rolling to his metal feet. He jabbed the finger of a gauntlet along the length of the monitor train.

  As Alpha Inculus and the 4.2 Fortisoi-Cyratica retreated along the tangled carriage-compartments, the tank shot evolved into a miniature storm of sizzling, abyssal energies that tore up the armoured train’s bulbous engine. It was another of the Dark Mechanicum’s warp-fuelled weapons. The monitor train’s forward compartments disintegrated in the maelstrom before the anomaly itself finally dissipated.

  Settling back into cover a little way down the train’s length, Stroika stared up into the sky. He could hear the throaty roar of Mechanicus Thunderbolt fighter-bombers from the arkcruiser Ultros coming in low and savaging a maniple of Dark Mechanicum battle-automata with their nose-mounted cannons. As the rockcrete-punching cannon bursts ripped through the lumbering advance of the warp-plated robots, they fell apart. The horrific phantasms of polluted machine-spirits clawed and raged as they sizzled into the broken ground about
the clattering plate and hydraulics.

  As the Thunderbolts climbed once more and banked about the mountainous, black form of the unholy forge temple, Haldron-44 Stroika phylactically reached out for the magi of the arkcruiser.

  Stroika streamed amongst the din of explosions, heavy-gauge cannon fire and whining beams of unnatural energy.

 

  Climbing up the spikes of the temple monitor train once more, Stroika got a fix on the position of the column of armour and tracked conveyers that sat under the protection of the forge temple gun emplacements.

  Stroika transmitted.

  the techno-magos aboard the Ultros returned.

  Stroika streamed back.

  Phrenos~361 issued a warning blurt of binary, re-streaming the feed from its optics to the skitarii commander’s overlays. Spilling out of several monstrous conveyers, Stroika detected the clustered signatures of Dark Mechanicum thralls.

  The soldier-menials were running through the hail of beams and heavy stub rounds proceeding from the approaching Dunecrawlers. Ejecting his arc pistol mag-cells, Stroika slammed the weapons down into his thigh-loaders.

  Stroika transmitted to Alpha Inculus and his skitarii. With the polished wooden stocks of their galvanic rifles pulled in close and barrels aimed up over the train, the rangers waited for the rush.

  Thralls ran with ruinous abandon at the skitarii position. Broad streams of murderous energy from the skitarii armour cut them in half, eradication beamers atomised their left flank and crawler-mounted heavy stubbers chewed up the first wave. As the soldier-menials that made it through the barrage reached the embankment of wreckage they jumped, the stumbling momentum of their battlefield run taking them over the monitor train.