by Rob Sanders
Stroika looked about. His optics whirred between skitarii assuming the pointlessness of cover, the steady advance of the Dunecrawlers and the warped constructs of the Dark Mechanicum that in their code-madness seemed to care little about the catastrophe to come. Demolished workshops and the shattered plaza glowed with the outline of potential options for shelter but the battlefield was largely a decimated mess of scrap, mounds of rockcrete and collapsed sub-basements. Being the forge temple principal, the mountainous outline of the Magnaplex Maximal – with its hanging forges and molten iron moat – had been built to last. It had been crafted to endure even the apocalyptic events that led to the unearthing of the planet’s daemonic core. Stroika did not, however, have the time to fight his way into the fortified structure.
The Primus’s chronometer began a three-figure countdown to impact. He had less than three hundred seconds before the crashing Ark Mechanicus, coming in shallow, decimated the battlefield. Looking at the glow of the planetary core reaching up into the sky behind the Magnaplex Maximal like a hellish corona, Stroika knew there was only one place his skitarii could take shelter from the apocalypse.
Stroika turned to find Phrenos~361 drifting out from where the cybernetic shock troops had cut their way from the monitor train compartment. The servo-skull gave an affirmatory binaric blurt.
As Stroika’s optic-array automatically cycled to accommodate the foetid darkness of the compartment, he ran through the false-colour static of the gloomy interior. Skitarii rangers filed into the train after their Primus, all following in the omnispectral-scanning wake of Phrenos~361. As the servo-skull drifted through the fug of corruption, it alerted Stroika to the presence of upcoming obstacles. Launching one of his arc pistols on its appendage rail, Stroika blasted the control mechanisms of the heavy metal doors and vestibule locks that separated the armoured carriages. As the control panels crackled and spat with the energies from his pistol, the weight of the sliding doors dragged them down on their rails, creating an opening through which Phrenos flew and Stroika jumped. Hurdling and rolling through the open doors, the skitarii raced through the disorientation and darkness, negotiating the length of the train that shielded them from the madness and intensity of enemy gunfire.
Kicking out the terminus-compartment’s lock, Stroika once again led his skitarii out onto the field of battle. Risking a glance into the sky, Stroika could see the flame-wreathed wreck of the Opus Machina tumbling out of the heavens at them. Through the thin veil of smog, above the thunderbolting derelict, the night sky was a constellation of streaming sparks – the drop-trails of Dreadclaws and Thunderhawk gunships following the Ark Mechanicus out of orbit.
Stroika’s aegis protocols prompted his optics and overlays to identify enemy constructs and the threat of incoming fire so that he might avoid them. Leaping wreckage with his hydraulically powered legs and with the red foil of his cloak flapping after him, Haldron-44 Stroika led his rangers at speed across the destruction of the battlefield. The battle tanks and tracked troop conveyers stationed in front of the temple blasted the plaza and twisted girders about them. Ranger skitarii were disintegrated in optic-scalding beams and rocketed up into the air in cybernetic pieces as heavy ordnance pounded craters into the battlefield.
The Primus’s augurs recorded the returns and mass of skitarii signatures making their way towards the temple. They were coming out from behind cover and sprinting with powered steps across the shattered plaza. Such speed did not allow for evasion and meant that the cybernetic warriors had to find the most direct route between their position and their newly designated objective.
It was exactly the kind of suicidal charge that Stroika hadn’t ordered during the battle for the grievous losses it would have entailed, and the skitarii commander hadn’t been wrong. As his cybernetic soldiers ran across open ground, their aegis protocols engaged and weaponry silent, the Dark Mechanicum forces mauled them. With skitarii running straight at them, the red of their trench-cloaks flowing behind, the corrupt mechanoids of Velchanos Magna could not resist firing upon the fast-moving targets.
As Stroika hurdled scrap and jumped blasted holes in the plaza, he monitored with steely dismay the datastream of deaths that his systems recorded. Skidding down beneath a shearing blaze of gunfire from the temple emplacements, Stroika got back to his feet and fired his hydraulics. Pushing his bionics to their limit, he followed the darting shape of Phrenos~361 across the bullet-chewed plaza, with his train of skitarii behind. His augurs told him that although the cybernetic soldiers under his command were dying in their droves, many were making it through the maelstrom of beams, blasts and chuntering bullet streams. Enough, the Primus hoped and prayed.
With their mechanised reflexes and the indefatigability of their hydraulic legs, the skitarii pushed on through the carnage. Clustering and forming groups of soldiers whose cogitators selected the most direct routes, their gathering numbers presented even the rabid mechanoids and possessed machines of the Dark Mechanicum with too many targets, allowing at least some of the skitarii to make it through the murder zones and choke points the hereteks had waiting for them.
Kicking up soot, ash and grit, Stroika’s footfalls took him straight through the plaza-mulching gunfire of temple emplacements. The skitarii commander did not care. All he could process were the pict streams of hundreds of cybernetic soldiers sprinting across the battlefield in his wake and the star-blotting shape of the Ark Mechanicus raging down through the heavens at them.
As Stroika ran, the black, mountainous shape of the Magnaplex Maximal disappeared. A curtain of blazing gold had risen before it. Like waves crashing against a rocky shore, the molten iron of the temple moat had blasted skyward in its fell radiance. Melting the final bridges, stiltways and maglev lines leading in and out of the forge temple principal, the sentient metal of the core would not allow the skitarii to approach the temple.
As Stroika led the growing horde of skitarii down the structure’s towering length, the fierce heat of the liquid metal and its infernal fury heated their war-plate. With the daemonic metal boiling and fountaining in a curtain alongside the running skitarii and the forge temple’s defences raised, emplacements and enemies stationed beyond the molten moat could not engage them. With the tumbling wreckage of the colossal Ark Mechanicus all but at the surface, it was a small mercy.
Skidding to a stop before the drop-off, where freightways ran off into oblivion and workshops remained half-demolished, Stroika took in the twisted magnificence of the forge world’s shipyards. The macroscaffolding and skeletal supports of dry docks stretched from one side of the planetary breach to the other. Like the victims of spiders in a web, ships were covered with girder scaffolding – partially constructed Chaos cruisers, warped vessels under repair and daemonships suffering the fell techno-rituals of heretek magi.
Below, Stroika could see the daemonic core of the forge world – the Abystra-Dynomicron. The monstrous entity that had possessed the planet, powered the polluted industry of Velchanos Magna and gave the corrupted constructs of the Dark Mechanicum a dread daemon deity to worship in place of the Machine-God. Kilometres distant, the molten iron of the core burned with the brightness of a sun, threatening to scorch Stroika’s cogitators out. All he could see was the infernal blaze of the liquid metal sentience. The hellish underforge. A daemonic entity of iron.
Stroika felt the thunderous quake through the titanium of his legs. His countdown had run to zero. The Opus Machina had arrived. As skitarii ran for their augmented lives, the shattered shell of the ancient spacecraft smashed into the planet’s surface. The Ark Mechanicus rolled through the capital districts with apocalyptic force, the crashed vessel tearing through infernal forges, workshops and twisted temples. As the Opus Machina flattened the industriascape, ripping up foundations and sub-levels, the wreck twisted apart. One section continued to bounce and tumble through the exploding furnace works and arcing reactors. A tumbling maelstrom of flaming decks and smashed superstructure, it decimated the approaching forces of the Dark Mechanicum, burying even the monstrous forms of the possessed Titans.
The prow section sheared through the capital district, obliterating the destruction of the battlefield and shattered plaza. Mechanoids in their thousands as well as skitarii Dunecrawlers were lost in the black storm-front of rockdust, soot and debris that was the herald of utter destruction. Smashed into the forge world’s surface by the horrifying progress of the crashed vessel, constructs that had spent hours attempting to decimate one another were wiped off the face of the planet.
The Primus didn’t know whether it was the mighty forge temple’s deep-set foundations or the sorcerous technologies and arcane rituals of its cursed architecture that saved it. The Ark Mechanicus smashed through a corner of the temple, decimating hanging forges and the fell, daemon-honouring decorations that made up its twisted silhouette. The forge temple principal remained intact, however. Bouncing off the structure, the prow section turned in a wild, plaza-excavating spin.
As Stroika smacked his gauntlet across the armoured backs of skitarii who had made the drop-off, he saw those that had been seconds too late swallowed by the ferocious clouds of black dust and debris. Stroika’s flashing overlays told him that he could no longer afford to wait. Turning from the spectacle of decimation – turning from skitarii soldiers whose pict feeds bleached to static at the horrible moment the Ark Mechanicus buried them – Haldron-44 Stroika ran for the drop-off. With the boom of the crash all about him and the dust-bank at his back, the skitarii officer pushed himself to the physical limits of his cybernetic form. Urging his hydraulics on, Stroika skidded down onto his side. Entwined in the foil folds of his greatcloak, the skitarius went down onto an appendage elbow and slid through the grit.
Skidding off the drop, Stroika fell. His combat chassis and bionic limbs struck the platform below with a ugly clunk before he tumbled helm over appendage down a flight of riveted steps. As he half rolled to his feet the war-plate across Stroika’s chest struck a metal rail, stopping the skitarii commander from flying head first into an abyssal drop and the raging churn of the planet’s daemonic core.
Overhead the crashing destruction of the Opus Machina thundered on, the inferno of the prow section’s exposed decks and superstructure blurring by above Stroika and the descending skitarii. The gargantuan rear section of the Ark Mechanicus had rolled through thousands of Dark Mechanicum constructs and vehicles before tumbling from the edge of the drop-off. It crashed through the macroscaffolding of the shipyards and into the silence of an ungainly plummet, the hellish glare of the daemonic core swallowing it whole.
The prow section launched from the cliff edge, spinning and dropping through the girders, catwalks and thick cabling of dry docks. With a shard-spraying impact, the Opus Machina struck a scaffolded daemonship. The companionways about the possessed vessel had been swarming with heretek tech-priests, readying the abomination for launch with unholy chants and fell blessings. The hull plating of the monstrous cruiser was encrusted with a warped carapace, featuring trap-jaw mouths and the predatory gaze of otherworldly eyeballs. Blood vessels and capillaries had spread through the damned workings of the ship. As the Ark Mechanicus’s prow section struck the daemonship, knocking it from its supports and macroscaffolding, infernal tentacles exploded from the obscenity of fleshy ports, embracing the Opus Machina as the pair tumbled together for the hellish doom of the molten metal core.
SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +IRON PLAGUE+
Stroika took a moment for himself. His cybernetic body did not tire but his cogitator coils needed a few seconds to process the volume of apocalyptic data his system had absorbed. The destruction. The loss of the Opus Machina and the mission priesthood. The deaths of thousands of the Machine-God’s holy skitarii servants. The arrival of the Iron Warriors.
Probabilities and projections extended little way beyond certain death. Imperatives burned unfulfilled. Protocols demanded actions that could not be prosecuted. Haldron-44 Stroika came to understand the nature of his construction. Why the techno-magi of the Cult Mechanicus saw fit to leave their cybernetic legions and officers with the disabilities of base flesh. In situations where imperatives and protocols failed, all skitarii had left were their instincts. Their gut feelings. Their faith.
Looking down at the hellstorm of the Abystra-Dynomicron, into which the Opus Machina still tumbled, Stroika saw Nalode Deka 871. The princeps stood amongst a number of ruststalker units who were waiting on the skeletal platforms several levels below. Deka looked up at his commander, his optics blank and unreadable.
Phrenos~361 drifted by, its spinal mechadendrites clasping the rail and anchoring the servo-skull to the platform. 10-Victro Tiberiax hobbled down the steps. Putting a gauntlet under Stroika’s appendage-arm, he helped his commander to his feet.
Stroika turned. The hydraulics of Tiberiax’s left leg were shattered and his plumed helm was missing. The swarthy skin of his shaved head was bloody and bruised, his features split down the middle by a ragged scar running across his face. Several cranial augmentations had been ripped free of their housings by some head-smashing trauma.
Stroika looked at the vanguard skitarii and rangers that were making their way down the stairwell. Some were black with the roasting attentions of energy beams, while the war-plate of others was dented and punctured where bullets had blasted through their workings. A number had lost arms or appendages.
Each cybernetic soldier still walked straight and tall. Proud and pious, knowing that the Omnissiah still had work for their bionic blessings. Stroika found the sight of the surviving skitarii inspiring and pledged to himself that he would find a duty worthy of them.
&
nbsp;
Stroika looked down at the steely Deka and then back at his second-in-command. He waved a gauntlet at the rocky face of the cliff down which the platforms, skeletal stairwells and ladders extended.