by Ben Counter
The Tempestus was dead. Sarakos filed this fact away in a datamedium bank for future review.
‘Here,’ said an Astral Knight, standing over him and reaching down. Sarakos took the offered hand. Runes on his retina labelled the brother as Adelphas, Fourth Squad, Third Company. ‘Captain!’ voxed Adelphas. ‘Sarakos is here. He’s alive.’
‘Bring him to the eastward perimeter,’ replied Sufutar over the vox-net. ‘We’re gathering to establish a foothold. Search parties are being recalled.’
‘Yes, captain,’ said Adelphas. ‘Follow me, Techmarine.’
Sarakos was on his feet and picking his way through the wreckage after Adelphas. Other Astral Knights were moving out of the wreckage of the muster hall, some supporting wounded battle-brothers as they clambered up a steep ruined slope towards the open side of the ship.
They passed the body of an Astral Knight impaled on a spike of torn steel. His head hung back and blood ran from the filters of his faceplate. He had died instantly as the steel punctured and severed the organs of his torso. A label rune flickered in red – Brother Fawzat, Ninth Squad, Third Company.
This fragment of information was ushered back into a databank.
The skyline of the World Engine poked over the rampart of wreckage. Spires and minarets reached towards the streaky grey sky. Sculptures of stylised metal crowned towers whose summits vanished among the clouds.
The air was heavy with power. It felt thick and greasy. Sarakos’s auto-senses checked off a breathable atmosphere and Terran-approximate gravity.
Captain Sufutar stood on the ridge ahead with a band of other Astral Knights of the Third and Fourth Companies. ‘Tech-Brother Sarakos!’ he exclaimed as Sarakos clambered up onto the ridge beside him. ‘I am glad to see you. We must push on soon and secure this landing site. Half the Chapter is most of a ship’s length away and are already reporting contacts. Amhrad is organising a regrouping prior to a breakout. We must get off this ship soon, enemies are closing in.’
‘What are our losses?’ said Sarakos.
‘The Fourth took the worst of it,’ said Sufutar. ‘Captain Mohari is dead. The survivors of the Fourth must join with who they can. We will need you with us, Sarakos. You’re half machine, you can weather what your brethren cannot.’
‘We must form an armoured spearhead to break out,’ said Sarakos. ‘Who is in command of our armour? I would ride with them.’
Sufutar shook his head. ‘The vehicle hangars were destroyed,’ he said. ‘I saw what is left of them. They were crushed flat. Our Rhinos and Land Raiders will not carry us out of this hole. We will have to walk.’
‘And Ancients Keldohran and Vhortaas?’ One of Sarakos’s duties in the Astral Knights was to maintain the Chapter’s Dreadnoughts, the crippled warriors entombed in their walking war machines. Sarakos had seen them docked into their places in the vehicle hangar alongside the Rhinos and the formidable Land Raider assault tanks.
‘Gone,’ said Sufutar. In that one word was encompassed the loss of centuries of battle-lore and Dreadnought technology that could not be replicated.
Sufutar filed this away, too, and silently deleted the names of Keldohran and Vhortaas from the Chapter’s order of battle, along with the armoured strength that lay crushed and smouldering in the wreck behind him.
‘Then what are your orders?’
‘Advance and take ground,’ said Sufutar. ‘Find a strongpoint and hold it. We head into that.’
Sufutar pointed down the ridge and into the city. Sarakos’s auto-senses began to map what he saw, sketching lines of information around the broken buildings through which the Tempestus had crashed.
It was a city of palaces and monuments, all rendered in hard polished lines of steel. Elevated walkways and the skeletons of hollow skyscrapers clambered over one another as if trying to reach the lightning-lashed sky. Forests of cables and wiring hung from an immense statue of a humanoid of alien proportions, a mural of inlaid precious metals covered the side of an immense monolith, a deep canyon ran through the city and glittered with millions of winking lights.
It was too much for the mind to take in at once. Sarakos’s data centres took over, compartmentalising the input from his senses and filing the various levels of the city away in the tactical reference centre of his datamedium stack. A battle here could ebb and flow infinitely through the palaces and many-levelled streets. He cycled through the features his internal cogitators had assessed.
‘There,’ said Sarakos. ‘That building, with the columns of steel and the gilded pediment sculptures. It looks the most defensible of the structures nearby.’
‘Agreed,’ said Sufutar. ‘The Eighth Company is on our flank and Captain Zahiros is reporting enemy contacts already. We must move.’ He switched to the local vox-net. ‘Brethren, this is Sufutar. We are advancing. Stay close and stay alert. We are loath to leave you behind, but we cannot remain. Onwards!’
The Astral Knights moved down the slope of wreckage out of the ruin of the Tempestus. The length of the ship crunched through a great swathe of the alien city. Towers had fallen and spilled drifts of torn steel into the sunken roadways. One building had been carved nearly in two, the labyrinth of its metallic innards opened up to the air.
The target building had several ways in, but they were narrow and easily defended, and loose fallen wreckage could be pressed into service as makeshift barricades. The first Astral Knights reached the building’s threshold and took cover among its steel pillars.
A warning icon flashed at the edge of Sarakos’s vision, picking out a flicker of movement that his conscious mind might have missed.
Other Astral Knights saw it too. Sarakos drew his plasma pistol and followed the movement, which had vanished among the shadows of a fallen slab of hull plate. In the swirling smoke and still-falling debris, it was impossible to pick out anything.
‘Stand by,’ voxed Sarakos.
‘Draw in!’ ordered Sufutar. ‘Guns up, brethren, and remember the Codex!’
Stuttering bursts of green fire ripped from the shadows into the Astral Knights. One Astral Knight next to Sarakos was struck on the shoulder and the layers of his shoulder pad were peeled away – paint, then ceramite, then underweave and flesh, stripped apart rapidly and disintegrated. The battle-brother fell back, clutching his ruined shoulder, then switched his bolter into his good hand to return fire.
‘Open fire!’ ordered Sufutar. ‘Suppress and press on!’
Bolter fire streaked across the ruined street. Sarakos picked out the shapes moving towards the Astral Knights position. They were humanoid, rather taller than a man, hunched and skeletal. The flashes of bolter fire picked out their metallic, hollow construction, the sculpted bars of a ribcage-like torso and the head hanging low between the shoulders. They had faces like an almost featureless steel mask with green eyepieces. Some had a single horizontal slit for a mouth or a vertical slit for a nose. Some had nothing but eyes.
Their guns were transparent, glowing green rods clamped with power cables and firing mechanisms, and projected bursts of diffuse energy through a pair of focusing tines. Where the bolts of power hit they left strange stratified craters, annihilating matter layer by layer.
Sarakos squared his shoulders and aimed. A targeting reticule hovered around the closest enemy. He let the pistol’s plasma coil charge and fired a bolt of super-heated energy. It hit the enemy square in the chest, burning through the weapon in its steel hands and boring fat melted holes through its torso.
The Astral Knights were following Sufutar into the colonnaded building. Sarakos went after them, blasting another few plasma shots into the advancing enemy. More of the metallic xenos were advancing from every direction, finding alleyways between the towers to flank the Astral Knights.
Sarakos crossed the threshold into the building. Energy blasts scoured layers off the pillars around him as he ducked between them.
Inside, the shadows were deep and thin shafts of light fell from above to pick out blank-faced statues of humanoid aliens. They were similar in form to the metallic creatures outside but had been flesh and blood, with fantastic regalia ornamenting hunched, wizened bodies with bony ridged faces and spindly limbs.
‘What are they?’ asked Captain Sufutar as the Astral Knights pulled wreckage into barricades and set up fire points around the entrances.
Sarakos felt his subconscious automatically access the datastacks in response to the question. Snatches of battle-lore flickered past his mind’s eye. Sanctuary 101. Volisur Quartus. Hypnoth.
‘Necrons,’ said Sarakos. ‘Tech-constructs. Xenos of uncertain history, origins and motivation.’ The information spooled out of his datastacks – conjecture, contradictions and hearsay, with a minimum of fact and research.
‘Necrons,’ repeated Sufutar. ‘I have heard of this xenos. I have never fought them in the flesh.’ He allowed himself a grim smile. ‘So to speak. And this is one of their worlds. The whole place looks like a monument they built to themselves. They must think themselves gods.’
‘Captain!’ voxed one of the Astral Knights. ‘The structure has levels beneath us. It looks like a tomb.’
‘If they have need of a tomb,’ said Sufutar, ‘then they can die. You know nothing else that might help us, Techmarine?’
‘Their weaponry is based on teleporter principles,’ said Sufutar, sifting through the battle reports in his datastacks. Contact with the necrons was usually brief and bloody, with the xenos unwilling to be brought to battle. Sometimes an Imperial settlement disturbed a necron force that was apparently dormant on a planet. Sometimes raiding forces appeared to torment isolated human worlds. On the few occasions Imperial forces had clashed with the necrons on a larger scale, more questions were asked than answered. The tech-construct bodies tended to vanish before they could be examined. Interrogation was useless against them. Their leaders, assuming there were any, were well protected behind their legions of steel soldiers. ‘The form we encountered makes up the bulk of their forces but there are others. They possess spacefaring and aerial capability.’
‘Anything about how to kill them?’ said Sufutar.
‘Sufficient physical damage,’ replied Sarakos.
‘They take your sense of humour when you go to Mars?’ asked Sufutar. ‘Never mind. Astral Knights! Get spotters up on a higher level. Bring our heavy weapons to the fore. They are closing in!’
From the streets and alleyways around the building more necrons were advancing in step. Behind them drifted another form, resembling the upper half of a steel skeleton mounted on a large anti-grav unit that thrummed two metres above the ground. One of its arms was a cannon, like an upscaled version of the guns the warriors carried, and on its face was mounted an array of targeting lenses.
The Astral Knights returned fire. One necron fell only to stand a moment later, sections of its damaged torso sliding like the panels of a puzzle box to seal its wounds. The flying necron fired its cannon and the middle section of one column vanished, bringing the upper part crashing down around the doorway.
‘You! And you!’ said Sufutar, picking out two Astral Knights firing from a window. ‘Scout behind. Find a position to fall back.’ He switched vox-frequencies and Sarakos could only hear one half of the conversation. ‘Lord Amhrad, we’re in danger of being pinned down here. If we’re trapped we cannot regroup.’
Across the street, the side of a building fell in. Chunks of steel crashed down and a cloud of dust rose from the stone foundations. A huge dark shape emerged from the building, shaped something like an immense metal beetle with six appendages writhing and clacking as it moved. Its head had eight unblinking red lenses for eyes. Its mandibles sparked with electricity as it picked up pieces of debris and wrought them in its mouthparts like a spider weaving prey into its cocoon. It dropped the result to the ground – a miniature version of itself, a flitting metal scarab that scurried around the feet of the warriors marching out alongside it.
One Astral Knight hauled a lascannon into the window beside Sarakos and sighted down it. A burst of las-fire ripped across the street and melted the torso of one warrior into nothing. Sarakos fired from the same window, turning another warrior’s right arm into hissing slag.
Scarabs were swarming across the street now, vomited out by the larger spider-construct. One scarab scurried up through the window and leapt onto the face of the Astral Knight manning the lascannon. Sarakos grabbed the scarab even as its mandibles began to carve through the battle-brother’s faceplate. It spat bolts of power at him, sizzling past his face and against the wall beside him. Sarakos dashed it against the floor and crushed it underfoot.
Scores of warriors were marching on the Astral Knights position now. Even as some fell before the Space Marines’ fire, there were too many of them to hold off.
‘Fall back!’ ordered Sufutar. ‘Back and into the tombs!’
‘My thanks, Techmarine,’ said the battle-brother who had been attacked by the scarab.
‘For what?’ asked Sarakos.
The Astral Knights moved rapidly away from the front of the building as green energy blasts stripped away the cover of the pillars and entranceways. Stray bolts tore chunks out of the monumental statues. Beyond the statues was a grand entranceway to a lower level, where the floor sloped downwards flanked by obsidian wall panels with more of what Sarakos assumed was writing in the necron language. It more resembled circuitry diagrams than any human alphabet.
Beneath the alien city was a necropolis. The building that had resembled a temple or basilica was the entrance to a complex of tombs that reached deep below the surface of the World Engine. Each tomb was a massive slab of brushed metal that cast strange reflections in what little light glimmered from the circuitry running around the necropolis pillars. The tombs were inscribed with more alien language, and pictograms of aliens conquering, crushing, dying and being raised to a higher state. Sarakos’s bionic left eye blink-captured picts of dozens of them as he passed whole dynasties of tombs, each one with a different figure inscribed on its lid, each one held within the lattice of steel that filled the interior of the necropolis.
Scarabs pursued them. In the darkness they scuttled from pillar to tomb, leaping onto the Astral Knights and trying to pare away the layers of their armour with cutting-tool mandibles. The Astral Knights fought back but they were slowed as they threw the scarabs off into the darkness, stamped them beneath their feet or shot them as they lept.
‘The warriors aren’t following,’ came a vox from the rearmost Astral Knights. ‘They’re holding the stairway but they’re not coming down.’
‘Perhaps this is sacred ground,’ voxed Captain Sufutar from up ahead.
‘Or,’ replied Sarakos, ‘they know there is no need to pursue us. If we are trapped, or if there is something waiting for us down here, their guns may be redundant.’
‘I appreciate your positive outlook, Techmarine,’ voxed Sufutar.
Sarakos had not had much cause to interact with Sufutar until fate threw them together on the World Engine. Sarakos had come to understand what sarcasm was after several explanations, but he still did not understand why a Space Marine of Sufutar’s rank would spend useful mental capacity on employing it.
The Astral Knights came to a crossroads in the necropolis. Enormous statues loomed up through the darkness, bowing down as if to glower at the Space Marines gathering there.
‘Make a stand here,’ said Sufutar. ‘Amhrad is coordinating us by vox. Other units have made it into the same necropolis, though some way across it. Scout squads are exploring it and our immediate objective is to link up with them. Some units are out of contact. We don’t know how many made it off the Tempestus but enough of us made landfall to bring down this weapon. And, my brothers, we will.
‘Squad Kelphanar, establish a perimeter. We need eyes on what sur
rounds us. Techmarine Sarakos, you say the necrons are tech-constructs. This whole planet looks like a single machine. Find out if you can access data about our surroundings. The whole Chapter might be on this planet but they are split up and we may have to fight alone before we fight as one.’
Sergeant Kelphanar took his squad, which had survived the crash at full strength, out to explore the tombs nearby. Sarakos noted the squad included Brother Adelphas. The rest of the Astral Knights took up firing positions around the crossroads, setting up the few heavy weapons they had and dividing up their bolters between firing zones.
Sufutar was right. The World Engine was an enormous machine. The structures echoed the materials and proportions of which the necron warriors themselves were made. The possibility that the whole World Engine was an artificial construct, rather than a natural planet outfitted with a world-killing weapon and the means to travel through the void, had been floated among the officers of the Varv Deliverance Mission. Speculation on who or what might have made it had been quickly silenced. Imagining that scale of evil kept the mind from focusing on the immediate danger of the World Engine itself.
Could the necrons have built this world? There was little enough known about them. The few Ordo Xenos files Sarakos possessed painted only an approximate picture of their capabilities on the battlefield. Their culture and history, and the forces that motivated their clashes with the Imperium, were unknown.
Sarakos went to examine the closest tomb. It was a rectangular slab of brushed metal several metres on each side, deeply inscribed with necron hieroglyphs. The incised channels glimmered with faint bluish pulses of energy. On the sarcophagus lid was carved the image of a creature rather like the statues that had stood in the entrance building, carrying a sceptre and wearing an elaborate crown. An aristocrat, perhaps, a member of a ruling class the Imperium had not encountered. It was certainly far more ornate than the plain, functional warriors the Astral Knights had fought so far.