Skitarius
Page 18
UPLOADING… +MECHANISED EVIL+
The underforge was ablaze.
Infernal fires spread through the chambers, while arcing energies from node columns savaged the surrounding sections. Radioactive rounds sang off railings and twisted architecture. Chains and cadaver-constructs jangled. Beams cut through the dungeon-darkness of the forge temple, searing into pits and channels of molten sentience, causing liquid iron to fountain and splatter. Servitor shells blasted from the upper platforms, turning possessed machinery into thrashing monstrosities that tore through walkways and support columns with their monstrous claws. Transuranic rounds punched through the infernal plate of forge fiends, newly crawled from their spawning iron.
Deka’s ruststalkers had charged. The Sicarians flushed the underforge in a murderous machine wave. The spindly assassins swept through warpsmiths and their heretek hench-units, their transonic blades and chordclaws a blur. Stabbing. Shearing. Cleaving. Decapitating. The ruststalkers tore through the degenerate tech-priests, their spoiling flesh and the fell radiance of their inner workings. Hench-units smashed the cybernetic assassins down into the flooring but within moments, Deka’s killers had powered up out of the cratered meshing. With hydraulic slickness, the ruststalkers dismembered wicked appendages and slit throats. Thrashing through malevolent magi with their shivering blades, the assassins lopped off warp-fuelled weaponry and kicked rancid servitors back over railings and into the thundering forge.
Firing their galvanic rifles, Stroika’s skitarii leapt down from their platform and into the slaughter in the underforge. Servitor rounds slammed through the armour plating of daemon engines, turning mounted weaponry into detonating appendages. Still the monstrosities charged on. Bereft of their warpsmith handlers and knowing only pain in the short time since their daemonic birth, the infernal machines rampaged through the underforge. Blasting about them with the raw interface of weaponry, while tearing at the walls, floor and twisted architecture like demented machines, the daemon engines unleashed their abyssal fury.
As Haldron-44 Stroika moved through the havoc, leading his vanguard skitarii, he blasted things of monstrous, mechanised evil with alternating streams from his arc pistols. The underforge was a vision of rancorous devastation. Struts and support girders spun through the smoke of the chamber. Walkway wreckage rained down upon the battle. Molten iron splashed, raged and blasted forth from channels in curtains of scalding fury. Phrenos~361 bobbed, weaved and swooped through the carnage, leading its master and the skitarii that followed towards the magnelevator on the other side of the forge level.
Stroika’s skitarii were dying. Biometric readings faded on his filtered overlays, telling of the terrible price the Machine-God’s holy soldiers were paying for facing the temple’s daemon engines. Vanguard skitarii were blasted apart by huge, hunched walkers that still dripped with molten iron. The butcher cannons of the daemon engines decimated the soldiers, shredding through cybernetics and war-plate. Siege claws thrust forth through the furnace mist, impaling Stroika’s vanguard troops. The walkers’ weapons revolved horribly, hurling limbs and appendages in all directions.
Monstrous crawlers came forward on their stabbing, spidery legs, shearing through skitarii combat chassis as servitor shells and transuranic bullets thudded through hellforged armour plating. Bringing their infernal flamers up, the defiler engines added to the unnatural fires sweeping up through the forge. Blasting hellfire up through the platform grating and catwalks, the daemon engines turned rangers into thrashing shapes whose base organics were roasted within their war-plate.
Mauling engines decked in thick, barbed plate charged through throngs of Sicarian ruststalkers. The quadruped abominations thundered their diabolical fury as their metal, cloven hooves trampled the spindly assassins. As the ruststalkers were smashed aside and torn appendage from bionic appendage by the passing barbs, one machine beast reared and stamped down on the armoured shells of Sicarian heads. Ruststalkers swept in under magna-cutters and the daemon engine’s lasher tendrils. Drawn to weaknesses between the clinkered plates, Nalode Deka 871 and his assassins closed on the monster, stabbing and goring the metal beast.
The Primus wasn’t finished yet.
A vanguard skitarius surrendered his plasma caliver to his Primus, sliding it across the roasting mesh of the forge floor. As the daemon engine watched the weapon skitter and bounce along and into Stroika’s grasp, it opened its armoured mouth and roared the hellish heat of a furnace at him. The monster’s ectoplasmic cannons clunked around in their mountings, aiming straight down at the prone Stroika.
Bringing the plasma caliver up and settling the weapon against the leaking wound in his midriff, Stroika yanked back on the trigger.
‘Back, abomination!’ he vox-hailed with modulated fury. A stream of blue sunfire globes blasted forth from the plasma gun, hitting the forge fiend in the chest. Blazing like novae, the successive orbs of plasma energy hammered into infernal plate and molten daemonflesh. The infernal engine roared in unearthly agony, scrabbling back. Stroika got to his feet, indomitable in his advance.
‘Back, I say – back to the accursed dimension from which you came!’
The skitarii commander leant into the bulk of the heavy weapon, unleashing a fresh salvo of plasma at the thing. Radium rounds joined the onslaught, driving the beast back. Like his vanguard skitarii, Stroika wouldn’t relent. In an effort to escape the radioactive storm and the searing agony of Stroika’s plasma gun, the daemon engine retreated. Feverishly hauling itself back over the lip of the pit, the bestial machine took another blinding blaze of plasma fire into its hunched, clinker-plated back. Slinking into the liquid metal of the pit, the forge fiend’s fearful form disappeared below the molten surface.
Two skitarii soldiers got the bionics of their fingertips into the crack between the magnelevator’s closed doors. Hauling with hydraulic force, the skitarii prised the doors open, allowing Stroika to peer up and down the abyssal shaft beyond. The freight-car seemed to have been taken down into the bowels of the forge temple – deep into the infotombs and data crypts of the Magnaplex Maximal. Although the car was supported on magnetic fields, a thick, oiled cable ran from the car-roof to a winch set in the top of the shaft. It was only an auxiliary system in the event of a power outage, but it suited Stroika’s needs perfectly. Phrenos~361 drifted through the doors, the servo-skull disappearing into the gloom as it descended through the shaft.
r carbines and arquebuses. Holding the slick cable in the vice-like grip of their bionic gauntlets and wrapping the augmentations of their legs about it, the cybernetic soldiers slid down the shaft.
Looking back across the scene of diabolical carnage unfolding across the flame-swirling underforge, Stroika saw 10-Victro Tiberiax draw a phosphor serpenta and blaze a volley of blinding phosphoric bolts into a charging monstrosity of the Iron Warriors Legion. As the chemical fire raged about the Traitor Space Marine, the guiding light of its fury drew servitor shells in on the same craterous wound, sending the brute crashing down to the floor.
Nalode Deka 871 was up on the back of an infernal engine whose plate-fused daemon body was set in a nest of arachnoid legs. Deka’s transonic blades were buried in the shoulders of the diabolical thing, shivering their way through its daemonflesh. Using one as a handhold on the back of the thrashing machine, he drew the other across the abomination’s throat. Rolling clear of the dropping daemon engine, the spindly princeps gave Stroika the briefest of nods before cleaving his blades back through an attendant ward engine.
Shouldering the plasma caliver, Haldron-44 Stroika grasped the oily cable and slid down into the abyssal darkness of the shaft after his skitarii.
1100
SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +INFOTOMB+
Stroika dropped down through the maintenance hatch and into the magnelevator car. The heavy-duty doors to the temple infotombs were open. Beyond, the skitarii commander found the dusty darkness of a data crypt, darkness lit only by the sickly glow of corrupt machinery. Phrenos~361 drifted out into the chamber.
Vanguard skitarii dropped down into the freight-car two by two, their radium weaponry crackling with radioactive lethality. Stroika sent them off in two columns, left and right out of the doors and in opposite directions about the huge circular chamber. Banks upon banks of corrupted cogitators hummed to themselves, rancid with the glow of their fell calculations. Like concentric stacks in a labyrinthine library, the runebanks sat upon a set of cogs – smaller cogs sitting within the teeth of larger wheels. At one time, the infotomb mechanism had been intended to honour the Omnissiah. Now, the architecture and colossal workings were warped and black. The teeth of the cogs were barbed and the walls of the crypt were decorated with the crowded iconography of dread gods.
The floor cogs turned back and forth within the madness of one another, with the clunk of colossal gears at work beneath the circular infotomb chamber. Warp-encrusted cabling, lines and datalooms ran from each foetid bank to a towering, static unit at the heart of the crypt like ribbons on a festive pole. Phrenos~361 led the way, and the cybernetic soldiers followed.
Filing through the maze of runebanks – supercogitator units that chuntered to themselves in their code-corrupted madness – Stroika and his skitarii moved around, in and out of the ever-changing labyrinth. As the vanguard skitarii worked their way through the data crypt they came across ghoulish transmechanics. The things were cut off at the waist and trailed interface cabling from their ragged trunks, while their spindly arms and long fingers went to work at baroque spools that trailed filthy scrollprint. They floated through the infotombs like evil spirits, hissing static and blurting deranged scrapcode as they happened upon Stroika and his cybernetic soldiers. With conservative blasts from their radium carbines, the skitarii dropped the fell mechanoids.
As Phrenos~361 led Stroika out of the maze of machines and across the central floor-cog, the skitarii felt the chamber rumble and shake with the sound of detonations and heavy weaponry. Pict streams from the remaining skitarii in the underforge told the Primus that time was running out. Scrolling updates and fading biometrics told Stroika that caught between the daemon engines of the Magnaplex Maximal and the monstrous Iron Warriors, his skitarii were being slaughtered.
Of note, amongst the flow of data, was the death of 10-Victro Tiberiax – skitarii officer, recipient of the Crux Mechanicus, survivor of 4,372 enemy engagements, loyal construct of the Omnissiah. Friend. The data filled Stroika with a cold fury buried in the logic of imperatives and protocol. Skitarii existed only to prosecute the will of the Machine-God Incarnate. In such an undertaking, losses were expected. As many as were necessary.
Stroika had lost legions of skitarii soldiers during the doomed assault on Velchanos Magna. While such astronomical losses did not eat away at the cybernetic commander as they might an officer of the Astra Militarum or even the Adeptus Astartes, Stroika still suffered some anxiety over how he was to be represented in the mission record. Would the hard data on the Dark Mechanicum forge world judge him to have been a commander fighting impossible odds with a force insufficient? Or would he be judged as one who failed not only his skitarii soldiers but also his magi and Machine-God?
Advancing on the central unit, Stroika found himself facing a fell piece of machinery. A towering, baroque meme-bank of dark brass piping, twisted form and corruption, lit by the hellish light of its own lamps, buttons and screens. It was the forge temple’s High Altar of Knowledge, warped to machine madness by the heretekal data that it stored. As Haldron-44 Stroika approached he saw that the abominate machine was a slowly melting mess, heated from within by the stream of molten sentience carried up from the daemon core. It was powered by the liquid iron of the Abystra-Dynomicron that flowed up through the dark altar and forge temple underforge.
Stroika’s imperatives flashed up on his optical overlay. The sacred knowledge of the forge temple principal – the eternity of secrets Engra Myrmidex had sent Stroika to secure – lay inside the corrupted meme-banks of the dark altar. The prize that the skitarii commander would deliver instead to Omnid Torquora, should the magos explorator ever appear from the warp.
Summoned, the servo-skull drifted in on the blur of its magnetic cog. Landing on the gauntlet of the Primus, the drone waited. Approaching the dark altar, with its suppurated ports and warp-encrusted interfacia, Stroika brought up his arm.
Depositing Phrenos~361 in an interface-alcove, Stroika took several steps back. Above, the temple underforge rocked with the thunder of heavy weaponry and death. He turned as the magnelevator doors closed and the car began its journey up through the temple. The skitarii were running out of time.
Feeling with its mechadendrites and cabling, the servo-skull interfaced with the High Altar of Knowledge. As Phrenos~361 did so, its optics clunked to an infernal red. The hololithic projector set in the dome of its skull crackled to life.
Stroika stepped back as the drone emitted an excruciating howl of machine suffering. The hololithic projection danced with the exquisite torment of corrupted machine-spirits. These bled away to pict and hololithic captures as file after tainted file was downloaded. As Phrenos~361’s optics grew darker and more infernal, Stroika found his own mesmerised by the technological treasures and hoarded secrets that flashed up before him. The discoveries, both terrible and amazing, that had been made by the Adeptus Mechanicus of Velchanos Magna in the thousands of years before the Great Gyre swallowed the forge world.
Dust rained from the ceiling as the battle in the forge above intensified. The floor-cogs turned and the runebanks and corrupt cogitators circled the skitarii commander. Even as a mere soldier of the Cult Mechanicus, Stroika could see the wondrous knowledge that Velchanos Magna had accumulated through experimentation, exploration and recovery. The dark altar may have been corrupt but it sti
ll held in the forgotten depths of its meme-cores a priceless hoard of hard data. Hard data that would have made Engra Myrmidex the Fabricator General of his own forge world. Hard data that might make Omnid Torquora that still.
Then Stroika saw it. The briefest flash of a hololithic schemata.
There, sizzling and warping in the hololithic haze, Stroika saw the schemata for the Geller Device – the aethyric bomb that the magi of Satzica Secundus had constructed and Engra Myrmidex had tested in the warp storm of the Great Gyre. Stroika’s feeds scrolled with data and confirmations. Cross-referencing the STC designations and plate signatures, Stroika calculated a 98.567 per cent probability that he was looking at exactly the same artefact that Magos Torquora’s survey teams had found on board the Stella-Xenithica.
The infotombs echoed with the sound of rancid laughter. It was a mocking but miserable sound, laced with corrosion and age. As the floor-cogs moved and runebanks parted, a tech-priest of the Dark Mechanicum approached from his hiding place. Surrounded by so many corrupt devices moving about them, Stroika and his skitarii had taken the power signature of the monstrous magos to be a dying transmechanic or a runebank.
The tech-priest was tall, stabbing the cog-floor with stilt-like legs, but hunched in his circuit-laced black robes. Like a mantid construct, the tech-priest ventured forth. His modulated laughter transformed as he approached Stroika and the dark altar. Within gangly steps it had become the roar of existential doom and some kind of machine sobbing. Stroika’s cogitator coils arrived at a calculated guess.