The World Engine

by Ben Counter

The sound came again, closer and seemingly from every direction. It sounded like a thousand dying breaths let out at once. Though none of the squad mentioned it, the sound hadn’t come from the hunting wraiths – those constructs were silent save for the faint slither of their trailing cables on the floor as they moved.

  The first of the constructs moved into sight. The only light in the necropolis came from the glow of the hieroglyphics on the tombs, and a Space Marine’s enhanced sight could only reach so far through such near-complete darkness. Faraji glimpsed the red glistening of fresh blood on steel.

  Metal feet scrabbled on the stone floor. Steel limbs clacked against the walls. One of the enormous scarab-constructs drifted into view next, its beetle-like carapace shielding a body with six segmented legs, one of its front limbs ending in a complex weapon of spinning projector tines and glowing power conduits. It had three green lenses set into its blunt head, and its underside seethed with dozens of scarabs. It was a canoptek spyder, reported by the slaves to be the custodians of the necropolis where they kept watch over the tombs and shepherded the ever-present swarms of scarabs.

  ‘Group up and fire!’ ordered Faraji. ‘Watch the angles! Don’t let them get behind us!’

  Kazzin shot the approaching foot-construct through the skull. Faraji saw it was one of the constructs Hyalhi’s honour guard had reported encountering – the fast, spindly constructs that wore the skins of the dead. The slaves had called them ‘flayed ones’. They seemed to be a cursed underclass, diseased or outcast, that haunted the hidden and derelict areas of Borsis. Slaves who were cast aside or who escaped were said to fall prey to these scavengers, who were obsessed with wearing the skins of biological prey. They were creatures of cruelty and horror, but their psychological impact was wasted on Space Marines.

  However, there were a lot of them. A dozen more lept and sprinted over the fallen construct. The spyder disgorged a mass of scarabs and the tip of its weapon glowed as it powered up. On the opposite side of the crossroads another pack of flayed ones approached, and behind them strode a squad of constructs similar to the warriors who made up the ranks of Borsis’s armies topside but larger and more armoured. The Astral Knights had a name for them, again thanks to Borsis’s slaves – immortals, named after a legion of unbeatable warriors from the legends of a frontier world Borsis had raided. Perhaps they were the necron equivalent of the Space Marines, elites who could wade through the worst the enemy could throw and strike back with the heavier weapons they carried.

  Palao and Nilhar held the far side and rattled fire into the flayed ones. Palao’s shotgun blasted bloody chunks from the hides the enemy wore. Nilhar’s bolter was more useful at this range, and Faraji let himself feel a little pride as Nilhar put close bursts of bolter fire through the central mass of three flayed ones.

  The spyder opened fire and a lash of purplish energy whipped through the crossroads. It scoured deep furrows across the faces of the tombs and narrowly avoided taking Brother Samahl’s head clean off. Samahl blasted a volley of shotgun fire into the scarabs swarming along the floor towards him – Faraji did the same with his bolt pistol, taking some satisfaction from the healthy kick of the weapon in his hand.

  There were too many necrons. Faraji had known that before the engagement had begun. He had an under-strength squad and the enemy was approaching in numbers from all directions. His Scouts could not stand and fight.

  ‘Rahaza!’ he yelled. ‘With me!’ Faraji ran to the doors of the green-veined tomb. Rahaza was at his side, his own bolt pistol in his hands.

  ‘Open it!’ ordered Faraji. Rahaza realised the decorations on the tomb formed a door and tried to find purchase between them. For all Faraji knew the door was just a carving on the tomb’s surface, but if it was real and allowed entry it was the only chance his squad had of survival.

  Faraji forced his fingers into the crack between the doors and pulled. Rahaza was doing the same. He could hear gunfire and yelling from behind him and had to fight the instinct to turn and help the Scouts he had sworn to lead. But if he did, they would all die. He was absolutely certain of that.

  ‘Lay a hand on a son of House Kelvanah,’ Nilhar was yelling, ‘and lose it!’

  Faraji glanced back from the doors and saw Brother Nilhar had shouldered his bolter and drawn his twin combat knives as the flayed ones closed in to use their blades. Nilhar slashed around him, parrying the talons that stabbed at him and cutting through the throat of one of the constructs. Whatever cabling connected the components in its skull to the working of its body was severed. The flayed one flopped to the floor in a heap of spidery limbs and tattered flesh.

  Palao blasted another flayed one in the chest with his shotgun. One of the construct’s arms spun off, trailing scraps of skin. He racked the slider and fired again, rattling off shells into the pack of flayed ones closing on him. Faraji could see there were too many.

  ‘Palao!’ shouted Faraji. ‘Fall back! Back!’

  A flayed one grabbed Palao around the throat. Talons sank into flesh. Palao threw the construct off him and blasted the remaining shells into it as it writhed on the floor. He ran towards the centre of the crossroads, grabbing Nilhar by the shoulder. Crimson sprayed down his white-painted breastplate.

  Faraji hauled again. The doors gave way, just a little. He forced both hands into the gap and Brother Rahaza did the same beside him.

  Ancient, bone-dry air rolled out. Palao and Nilhar reached the doorway, firing as they moved. Palao was firing his shotgun one-handed, clutching his slashed throat with the other.

  Brother Samahl was stabbing about himself with his combat knife to throw off the scarabs that were swarming over him. Steel mandibles chewed at the ceramite plates of his Scout armour. He and Kazzin were falling back, too, as more fire from the spyder raked across the tombs and the scarabs flowed from it as if its body concealed a bottomless well of metal insects.

  The door was wide enough to admit the squad members. Faraji grabbed Palao and pushed him through first, then turned to help the others fend off the approaching constructs. ‘Go!’ he ordered. ‘All of you, inside!’

  The squad ran into the tomb as Faraji fired into the mass of approaching constructs. The elites in the rear ranks halted their advance and aimed their heavy gauss rifles at Faraji and he realised there was no more fighting to be done here. He ducked inside the doorway, ready to haul it shut behind him.

  A hand closed around his ankle. Pain flared where the talons cut through the armoured boot. Faraji fell onto his front and turned over to see a flayed one on top of him.

  It wore a human skin over its head and chest. Faraji’s insides turned cold as he recognised the face of Brother Vehaal. It was raw and bloody, for it had been torn off the Scout’s corpse just minutes earlier. Through the flapping opening of Vehaal’s mouth glared a pair of eye-lenses, covered in a film of fresh blood.

  Faraji blasted up into the flayed one’s body with his bolt pistol as he grabbed the construct’s arm with his free hand before it thrust its talons into his throat. He wrestled it, trying to roll on top of it and pin it to the ground. It got its other arm free and Faraji had to let go of his pistol to trap that arm in his elbow before the talons raked at his face.

  It was stronger than it looked and it fought like an animal, all uncoordinated fury and instinct. It was all Faraji could do to contain it. In the narrow doorway only one of the flayed ones could get at him, but others were crowding around to grab a leg and haul Faraji out into the crossroads.

  They wanted to wear him as another cloak of flesh. That thought alone gave Faraji the strength to wrench one of the construct’s arms around in its socket, to the accompaniment of tearing metal and sparks.

  The flayed one reared up and tore its remaining hand free of Faraji’s grip. It drew back its talons to impale Faraji through the face.

  With a deafening report the upper half of the flayed one’s head vanished in a burst of
flame and shrapnel, taking the obscene sight of Vehaal’s facial skin with it. Faraji glimpsed Brother Samahl standing over him and blasting another volley of shells into the flayed ones. One construct forced its way through to grab Faraji again but Brother Nilhar darted forward and jammed a combat blade through its eye-lens. The flayed one fell back and Nilhar grabbed Faraji under the arms, dragging him back through the doorway.

  The rest of the squad were just inside the tomb. They pushed the doors closed again but not before a single flayed one got halfway over threshold. It was with a most satisfying crunch that the flayed one’s head was caught between the closing doors and crushed flat.

  ‘Can you walk, sergeant?’ asked Brother Nilhar.

  Faraji got carefully to his feet. One ankle and calf was lacerated, but the boot provided enough support and it was nothing he could not deal with. ‘I can,’ he said. ‘Good work.’

  ‘Well, we’ve locked ourselves in a tomb,’ said Brother Samahl as he reloaded his shotgun. ‘At least we’ve found an appropriate place to die.’

  ‘What does the Codex say about striking a brother?’ asked Palao.

  ‘The primarch endorsed it,’ replied Faraji, ‘if it is justified. Kazzin, what lies ahead of us? These doors will not hold the necrons forever.’

  Some trick of perspective and light made the tomb seem larger than it did from the outside. Its walls were of the same greenish marble, inlaid with golden pictograms that showed ranks of necron constructs arrayed as if for war. Floating war machines filled the sky above them and their lords, presumably from the dynasty entombed here, sat on massive ornate thrones held aloft by hordes of slaves. Faraji saw the green-skinned orks and slender eldar among those depicted as slaves, but no humans. Perhaps this tomb had been built before the necrons encountered humankind.

  The light came from glowing strips along the floor and ceiling. Around the centre of the tomb floated stone sarcophagi that cast strange shadows across the walls. Each sarcophagus was different and each was more elaborate than the last. One depicted a crescent-shaped starship of a similar design to the necron fighters that had attacked the Tempestus on the way in. Another was a mass of miniature necron constructs carved in glossy black stone, all holding up the sarcophagus slab on which was carved the image of a regal necron with a mass of segmented tentacles in place of legs.

  ‘It continues below us,’ said Brother Kazzin. ‘This is the tomb of a whole dynasty.’

  ‘They’re not following,’ said Samahl, who was keeping his shotgun trained on the closed doors. There was no sound from outside. Not the scrabbling of flayed one claws against the doors, not the sizzle of the spyder’s beam boring through the tomb wall, nothing. ‘Why do they not follow?’

  ‘Because they do not have to,’ said Rahaza. ‘They have us trapped. They know all the ways in and out.’

  ‘Onward,’ ordered Faraji. ‘If they do not seek to force these doors, that means there is another way in they want to use to flank us. We will find it first.’

  The black hole of the tomb plunged downwards, describing a spiral further into the innards of the necropolis. One of the most laboured points of the Codex Astartes was how a Space Marine never fought a battle without knowing what lay before him – the enemy, the lay of the land, the plans and counter-plans. He struck hard and fast, and watched the enemy crumble, because he was fully armed with all the intelligence to make victory an inevitability. Here the Astral Knights were blind and ignorant, and Faraji was leading the young brothers of his squad further into the darkness. He could not have defied the Codex more completely if he had tried.

  That was the battle Chapter Master Amhrad had chosen to fight. The Astral Knights had crash-landed on Borsis with no knowledge of what was lying on the planet waiting for them. Sometimes even a Chapter Master had to cast aside the Codex to do the Emperor’s duty – Faraji accepted that, even as he led his squad down a narrow passageway winding into the tomb’s lower levels. He just wished he knew why Amhrad had made his decision. Whatever the reason, it had not been communicated to a Scout-sergeant like Faraji. If the Scouts were to ask him why the Astral Knights were on Borsis, Faraji did not know if he would have an answer for them.

  The air was chill here, and the Scouts’ breath formed icy vapour. The light came from the strips running around the walls, forming halos around the faces of necron dynasts. Other faces glared down from the ceiling. Niches in the walls contained skeletal sculptures, perhaps representations of the dynasts entombed behind those walls, perhaps the actual constructs encased in polished stone.

  A quiet clattering and hissing came from beyond the walls, carried on the cold breath rising up from the tomb.

  Faraji knew what was coming before he saw it. The Scouts did, too. He realised then why the necrons had let them flee into the tomb from the crossroads.

  The first wraith drifted through the wall ahead. Its hunched body merged with one of the carved necrons for a moment, as if it was an ancient necron corpse rising from its sarcophagus. Another descended from the ceiling, plunging into the passageway with its blades ringing off the stone. It dived down at Faraji, scythes first.

  Faraji threw himself backwards against the wall and the scythes slashed deep into the stone. He blasted half a magazine into it from his bolt pistol and components pinged off the wraith’s body. It reeled and lashed at him, and Faraji felt the scythe cutting deep into his side. Anyone else would have opened up as much distance between himself and the wraith as possible, but Faraji was a Space Marine and he reacted with battle-lore instead of flawed instinct.

  He dived inside the wraith’s guard, where its scythes could not be brought to bear. He rammed his chainblade up into its torso, grabbing one of its mandibles before it could bite into his throat and face. Gunfire erupted around him, filling the passageway with chains of bolt-shells and shredding blasts of shot. Brother Palao dived onto the wraith as Faraji grappled with it and the wraith dropped to the floor. The cables trailing from its body lashed about like whips. The wraith bucked and threw Palao off it before it sank into the floor. Faraji lost his grip as it vanished through the stone.

  The second wraith vanished, too, disappearing through the wall as gunfire from the rest of the squad pinged off its carapace. Palao got unsteadily to his feet.

  ‘Sound off,’ said Faraji.

  ‘Unhurt,’ said Samahl.

  ‘It got my leg,’ said Palao. ‘I can walk but do not expect me to run.’ Palao was in poor shape – the wound to his throat had not been mortal and it had closed up rapidly, but he had lost plenty of blood and now he was hobbled as well.

  ‘Unhurt,’ said Rahaza and Nilhar in rapid succession.

  ‘Just superficial,’ said Kazzin, who had a hand held over his eye. Blood oozed between his fingers. ‘But you are wounded, sergeant.’

  The pain caught up with Faraji. The scythe had sliced into his ribcage and it felt like a section of it was floating loose under the skin of his chest. The warmth of the blood running down the inside of his armour seemed scalding in the chill of the tomb. It was bad, but not bad enough to stop him. ‘We must keep moving,’ he said. ‘They will be back.’

  He did not know what lay further down, but it had to be better than being trapped in the passageway or facing whatever still waited for them above at the crossroads. As they ran deeper into the tomb the wraiths struck again, darting out of the stone as fast as serpents. Each time the squad hammered fire at them and each time one of Faraji’s battle-brothers was caught by a passing scythe that phased right through his armour and into flesh and bone. Kazzin lost three fingers on his right hand and switched his rifle to his left. Palao’s other leg was wounded, a blade cutting deep through the meat of his thigh, and Samahl supported him as they moved on.

  Ghosts. They were fighting ghosts. Faraji knew now how dangerous despair was to a soldier, because he could see himself collapsing to the floor and inviting the wraiths to finish him off
just to end this. A Space Marine did not act on that despair. Though he was fighting ghosts, Faraji would fight on, because that was what it meant to wear the colours of the Astral Knights.

  The wraiths burst into the passageway again. Faraji blasted the closest in the face with a volley of bolt pistol shots – half of them passed right through the half-real construct, but the others hit the housing of its insect-like head and the wraith dived back through the wall before it could attack. Palao and Samahl blasted back the other with shotgun fire, but not before it cut right through Nilhar’s shoulder.

  Then, Faraji saw the end of the passageway. It terminated in a great circular wall of stone covered in concentric rings of hieroglyphics.

  ‘We’re trapped, said Samahl, still supporting the wounded Palao. ‘They chased us into a dead end.’

  ‘You are fast to see our doom, brother,’ said Kazzin. ‘By the Codex, we fight until the end, no matter how apparent our deaths might be.’

  ‘Damn the Codex!’ retorted Samahl. ‘Now we die. I accept it. Spend your last moments pretending they mean something if you will. I am not such a fool.’

  ‘Quiet,’ said Faraji. He placed a hand against the circular wall. The glow of the hieroglyphics brightened at his touch.

  ‘They’re waiting back there,’ said Rahaza, who was covering the passageway behind the squad. ‘Both of them. They do not approach.’ Faraji glanced back and picked out the silvery shapes of the wraiths hanging patiently in the gloom.

  ‘Probably until we starve,’ said Samahl.

  Faraji ran his hands across the stone. The light followed them. A strange instinct took him and placed in his mind the content of the last communication he had received from the other Astral Knights in the necropolis, the intelligence from Techmarine Sarakos about the only word any of them knew in the necron language.

  Help.

  Sarakos had transmitted the hieroglyph as a retinal projection to all the Astral Knights in range. Faraji had thought it was a pointless piece of information, typical of Sarakos who seemed more interested in collecting irrelevant knowledge than in fighting the Emperor’s battles. But perhaps the Techmarine had known what he was doing after all.