by Ben Counter
‘We keep moving,’ said Captain Khabyar. ‘Until we receive orders to the contrary, our immediate goal is to preserve our own survival and compel the enemy to expend resources in pursuing us.’
‘Captain Sheherz would have taken this to the enemy,’ said First Sergeant Kypsalah, the most senior surviving member of the decimated Sixth Company.
‘Sheherz is dead,’ said Khabyar. ‘If you wish to challenge my command, do so before the judgement of the Chapter Master on Obsidia, as the Codex demands. Otherwise, remain silent on what another commander may or may not do.’
Codicier Valqash looked between the two men. They had never liked one another. The captain of the Ninth Company was a stickler for the Codex and no lover of innovation and reckless aggression, as befitted the commander of a company composed of heavy-weapon-armed Devastator squads. Kypsalah had taken on the aggression of Sheherz, the Master of the Fleet, in favouring attack over defence in all cases. It was no wonder Sheherz had favoured the most direct of tactics – it was easy to charge into the fray in command of a battle-barge, which in most cases was the most devastating weapon in the engagement. On the surface of Borsis, things were different.
‘Whatever we choose,’ said Valqash, ‘we must choose it soon. The necrons are on the move. The Scouts report them within a kilometre behind us. They might move slowly but they never stop and they know this ground better than we do.’
‘Then what do we choose, Codicier?’ asked Kypsalah. He emphasised Valqash’s rank in a way that suggested something less than complete respect.
The first sergeant wanted to stand and fight. The captain wanted to move on and force the enemy to continue pursuing. In such a case it fell to the Librarians of the Chapter to offer their counsel. It was barely a year ago that Valqash had earned the rank of Codicier and first accompanied the Astral Knights to war. He was aware of the gaps in his knowledge. But there was no one else to defer to, and Valqash knew his duty.
‘The necrons could pounce at any moment,’ he said. ‘And this is no ground for a battle. It is not cowardice to deny the enemy the battle they seek. And even if they know Borsis better than we do, we can move across the canyon faster than their thousands of warrior-constructs can. We move on.’
Captain Khabyar nodded with the air of a man who considered the matter settled. He was the oldest man in the whole Chapter – he had been a full battle-brother when Chapter Master Amhrad was first recruited. There was nothing the enemy or the galaxy could throw at him that could surprise him. To him, this was just another battle.
‘We’re moving,’ voxed Kypsalah to the squads of the Sixth Company.
From the ruins on the edge of the canyon the Astral Knights emerged from their cover. There were about a hundred and twenty battle-brothers in the force that had broken out from the crash site under Captain Khabyar. The red rain washed down the white and blue of their livery. Most of them belonged to Khabyar’s Devastator squads and carried lascannon, missile launchers and heavy bolters. Not ideal for the difficult path across the canyon, but that could not be helped.
Valqash stood at the edge of the pavilion and looked down into the canyon. Pathways led down through the torn metal of the canyon sides, so at least it was possible to make it down and up the other side on foot. He could not tell whether the canyon had been deliberately created or was the result of an earthquake or impact. The Astral Knights did not even know yet whether Borsis was a single machine or whether there was a natural planetoid underneath its metal skin. The World Engine was still keeping its secrets.
Valqash glimpsed the temple first about halfway down, as he was traversing a tight switchback along with a squad of the Ninth Company. It was on the far side, revealed just past a dogleg bend in the canyon. It was several storeys high and fronted with a massive gate inscribed with necron hieroglyphs and pictograms of dynastic rulers seated on vast pyramid-thrones. Unlike the rest of the area it was not ruined or corroded and gleamed bright silver through the haze of incessant rain. Valqash knew instinctively that it was holy ground – that instinct had been with him since his childhood among the nobles of Obsidia, and it had never failed him yet.
It was a sacred place, which meant the necrons had gods. For some reason that thought seemed more ominous than the sight of the ranks of warriors and war machines that were following the Astral Knights. What could count as a god to beings that worshipped themselves?
‘Below us,’ came a vox from up ahead. Valqash went to the edge of the pathway and looked down to the river of liquid metal. The company was halfway down the canyon wall and many of the squads were further along, picking their way along the winding pathways. The strikeforce’s few Scouts ranged ahead to test the footing and it was one of them who had voxed.
The river was rising up in fingers of quicksilver. It formed slabs of glimmering, dripping metal, floating up into the air towards the crest of the ravine wall. The whole river was pouring upwards into square segments, gradually assembled into wider sections.
‘They’re making a bridge,’ voxed Valqash. ‘Captain, the necrons are making a bridge to cross. They’ll be at the other side before us.’
Valqash didn’t need to say it would mean the Astral Knights were trapped. The plan to evade the necron column marching after them had led to the whole strikeforce being stranded at the bottom of a ravine with necrons on both sides. There was no worse position to get caught in.
The bridge was forming slab by slab, already stretching partway across the ravine.
‘Squads Belphegar and Sehellan!’ voxed Captain Khabyar. ‘Set up across the river! Get fire on the bridge! Kypsalah, take the tactical units and secure that structure!’
‘The temple, captain?’ voxed Valqash. ‘It could be a key objective for the necrons. It may not be the best place to make a stand. If it is a religious site for them the lord of Borsis might throw everything they have at us there.’
‘It’s also the only defensible structure in this hole,’ retorted Khabyar. ‘We take it and defend it. Those are my orders.’
The strikeforce picked up speed and began to ford the river. The quicksilver rushed around fallen chunks of corroded debris, making for poor footing. The Devastator squads manhandled their heavy weapons across to set up on the opposite shore. The Scouts were already finding the surest routes towards the silver temple hallway up the ravine wall.
Valqash knew better than to argue with Captain Khabyar on a hunch, but every thought he had about the temple was one of foreboding. As a psyker, he had learned to trust those instincts. At the very least he could get there first and assess the risks for himself.
Valqash broke away from the squads moving beside him and hurried as fast as he could across the river. He was sure he could see faces in the water as it rushed past and spat fat globules into the air. The bridge was half-completed overhead.
The ancient rusted bodies of necrons were buried in the corrosion of the far ravine wall, discarded and abandoned. Valqash found himself wondering how long Borsis had been drifting through the galaxy. What had humankind achieved when Borsis was first forged and the necrons first staked their claim there? Had they left Terra in the first days of the Scattering? Did humanity even exist?
Sergeant Kypsalah’s squad was furthest ahead and had reached the approach to the temple. The closer Valqash got the vaster the temple seemed, and the brighter among the corrosion of this district. If the necron shells buried in the canyon wall were ancient, the temple must have been just as old, but it looked like it had been built the day before.
‘Then we shall fight here after all, Librarian!’ exclaimed Sergeant Kypsalah as Valqash clambered towards him. Kypsalah’s squad was made up of the few surviving veterans of the Sixth Company, equipped with a mix of weapons and armour marks. Seeing the patchwork nature of the squad brought home the severity of the losses the Astral Knights had already suffered on Borsis. ‘We could have saved us all a lot of walking if
we had decided to fight up there.’
Missile fire streaked up from the Devastator squads below into the half-assembled bridge. Some missiles flew wide but several hit and orange blossoms of fire erupted in the air. Fragments of metal fell, mingling with the rain that still drizzled down from the darkened sky. A few of the necrons with the anti-gravity chassis were flying across already, the vanguard of the column. A host of scarabs accompanied them like a swarm of metal locusts.
‘Let us see what we are dealing with, brothers,’ said Valqash. ‘I would see inside the temple before I rely on it to…’
Valqash felt a vibration through his feet. Something was rumbling deep inside the canyon wall. It could be an earthquake, it could be a necron weapon or an ancient machine starting up.
‘Borsis has noticed we are here,’ said Kypsalah. ‘If you can tell what lies in our future, Codicier, we’d all be grateful.’
‘Forgive me, but the arts of divination are beyond me. Mine is a more direct application of the mind.’
‘Then I hope you have some use.’
Valqash assumed Kypsalah was joking and followed the squad as it approached the first step of the temple’s foundations, almost three metres high as if built for a race of giants. The canyon shuddered again and loose debris rolled down the canyon wall. Valqash noticed a corroded necron skull bouncing past him.
Valqash clambered up onto the first step, and mounted the next. The squad followed him, covering one another as they moved forwards. The threshold of the temple was an immense rectangle of yawning darkness broken by silver pillars like the bars on a cage.
Valqash could just make out the shapes of statues inside, too far for the weak light to fully reach. He took cover behind a pillar to get a closer look as Kypsalah’s squad trained their plasma guns and bolters into the darkness.
They were not statues. They were necron constructs, similar in proportion to the necron warriors but with bronze armour plating and tall halberds with blades of green crystal. And there were thousands of them, ranks upon ranks, stretching in perfect formation far into the darkness.
They looked different to the necrons the strikeforce had fought a running battle with since the crash. They were more ornate and their weapons looked more advanced than the gauss blasters carried by the warrior-constructs. Among them, further back in the shadows, Valqash could see raised litters each supporting a throne on which sat another construct, more ornate still with a grand headdress and a collar of mosaic panels. This force had its leaders, magnificent and enthroned. Valqash was reminded of the grand sarcophagi of certain savage races who buried thousands of statues alongside their kings, to serve them in the afterlife.
‘Throne alive,’ swore Kypsalah as he joined Valqash by the pillar. ‘How many are there?’
‘An army,’ said Valqash. ‘But they sleep. And we cannot risk waking them.’ He switched to the command vox-channel. ‘Captain, we cannot hold the temple. It is full of necron constructs. If they awake, we will face two armies.’
‘Received,’ came the vox-reply from Captain Khabyar.
‘Their world is invaded,’ said Sergeant Kypsalah. ‘And we have reached the very threshold of this temple. Why do they still sleep?’
‘Sacred ground,’ said Valqash. ‘Whatever they are guarding, it is more important than anything else on Borsis.’
The ground shook again. Debris clattered over the pediment of the temple and scattered across the steps.
‘We need to fall back,’ said Valqash. ‘We will fight on the slope of the ravine, not here. Our brothers will need our help.’
As Kypsalah led his squad back from the threshold of the temple, the side of the ravine heaved and a landslide of corroded metal rumbled down on the far side of the temple entrance. Something huge thumped against the inside of the ravine wall, like a buried animal trying to batter its way out.
Overhead the bridge was complete. The necron warriors were marching across, accompanied by their walking war machines and the anti-grav chariots of their commanders. Fire from the Devastator squads blew sections from the bridge but the scarabs repaired the damage almost before the few shattered necron warriors hit the river. The ranks of necron warriors were already assembling on the far side of the canyon and once they were in position, they would march down both sides to trap the Astral Knights in the open at the canyon’s lowest point. It was difficult to imagine a worse tactical position.
The side of the canyon heaved again. Valqash ran for the most secure-looking ground, a protruding slab of pitted steel. If he was going to die here it would be in combat with the necrons, not buried by an earthquake.
A section of the wall fell in a few metres from Valqash. Kypsalah’s veteran squad scattered to keep from being sucked into the widening hole. Valqash dropped to one knee and instinctively drew his force axe. His mind tuned into the weapon’s psychic circuit and he felt the axe as an extension of his body.
He had learned to trust his instincts. They had come to him since he had been a child, when his family had brought him in secret to the witch-seers of the lowest castes so he could be exorcised and cured. But it had not worked. The seers were charlatans who dealt in parlour tricks and theatrics. When they realised Valqash’s instincts were the symptom of a greater power, they had been terrified. He had known when things were going to happen – especially bad things. His family had been pardoned for concealing him from the grey-faced men who enforced Imperial law, in return for bringing him before the Chaplains of the Astral Knights.
A great dark shape heaved up from the sinkhole. It let out a metallic roar as a rust-covered arm reached out, its jagged fingers groping. It was enormous, three times the height of a Space Marine. Its details were obscured by the encrustation of corrosion but beneath Valqash could make out joints and surfaces of pitted steel.
The hand grabbed the edge of the slab on which Valqash was standing. Valqash saw its segments were made up of the torsos of necron warrior-constructs, with components of limbs and necron skulls forming the joints. It was the necron equivalent of the walking dead, a golem of corpses torn to pieces and welded together in a haphazard monstrosity. Its head emerged next, a mass of necron body segments with a massive undershot jaw and a single off-centre eye sunk into the metal. Its other arm tore from the canyon wall – it had no hand, just a cannon with a huge bore surrounded by clusters of the same glowing green rods that fuelled the gauss weapons carried by the necron warriors.
Valqash’s instincts were crying out now. They were a voice in his head, not one that formed words but that held up concepts and alerts in front of his mind’s eye. By the Codex he should defer to Kypsalah, the veteran, or to Khabyar, the commanding officer. But the Astral Knights had sought him out because of the power of his mind, and that was a weapon he had a duty to use as best he could.
That instinct was that the enemy was above him, not beside him.
‘What are you?’ yelled Valqash.
The steel hulk raised its head to the sky and bellowed. The sound shook the whole canyon. More corroded, long-deactivated necrons tumbled from the tear in the surface of Borsis. The rods around the cannon glowed bright and raw power gathered in the barrel.
‘Bring it down!’ voxed Kypsalah.
‘Hold fire, brothers!’ retorted Valqash. ‘To the necrons this thing is an abomination. It is a blasphemy we can use!’
‘It is about to open fire!’ voxed Kypsalah. Valqash could see the veteran squad lining up ready to fire from the slope below.
‘If you ever trust a battle-brother,’ said Valqash, ‘trust me now. Hyalhi spoke of an ally on Borsis. Sarakos spoke of one who seeks our help. Trust me now and hold fire!’
Kypsalah held up a fist to rescind the order he had given a moment earlier. His squad’s fingers hovered over their triggers.
The hulk hauled its body out of the hole. It was entirely composed of discarded necron bodies. Its exposed sp
ine was a row of ribcages and pelvises. The joint at its waist rolled on bearings of necron skulls, the rust on them ground off as the hulk moved. It aimed its cannon up into the sky and fired a great blast of shimmering green energy with a sound like reality tearing open.
A section of the bridge vanished in an eruption of greenish flame. One of the striding war machines found itself without a bridge under its feet and it tumbled, bringing half a dozen necron warriors with it, to plunge into the silver waters.
‘This thing had better stay on our side,’ voxed Kypsalah.
The hulk clambered down the side of the canyon. Its cannon was dark now as it recharged. It held out a hand over the rushing metallic waters and a host of tiny scarabs emerged from the joints of its body, scurrying over it like insects over a corpse. A trickle of them jumped from the hulk’s outstretched fingers into the river.
Valqash could feel the information flickering through the air. Geometric shapes appeared in the metallic flow of the river, to dissolve again and reform. The air felt thick and greasy and sparks earthed from the armour of the Astral Knights into the corroded ground.
‘Devastators, hold fire!’ ordered Captain Khabyar.
Valqash saw now what Khabyar had. Sections of the bridge were disappearing. They melted into globs of mercury that mingled with the filthy rain as they fell.
The hulk raised its hand and brought it down suddenly. The bridge dissolved away faster. The necron column shifted to keep the bridge under their feet but they were rapidly running out of space.
‘Take cover!’ ordered Khabyar. ‘Fire zones all directions! They will come down right on top of us!’
Khabyar was right. A long section of the bridge vanished as the hulk let out a triumphant roar. Scores of necrons were falling now. The first of them landed in the river or against the canyon floor. One hit near Valqash and was dashed to pieces. As he watched, its components scrabbled back together and it rose again, lopsided and dented but still wielding its gauss blaster.