by Ben Counter
The arms reached around and grabbed Alaric, trying to wrestle him to the ground. Alaric saw a second priest lowering his photon thruster, ready to bore a massive hole right through Alaric once he was down.
The second priest was bowled aside by a shape that darted in almost too quick to see. It was Archmagos Saphentis, his bionic arms in full combat configuration, stabbing and slicing at the possessed priest.
Alaric stabbed his halberd down into the lower back of the priest that was wrestling with him. Something blew in a shower of blue sparks and the grip slackened - Alaric pushed the priest away from him and swung the halberd blade in an arc that cut the priest neatly in two. The daemon inside gibbered and Alaric saw its image superimposed over his vision for a moment. It was a horrendous thing, gleaming wet exposed muscle, a score of burning green eyes studding its pulsing flesh. Then it was gone, its host destroyed and its substance unable to retain stability in real space.
The rest of the squad was among the daemonic priests. Dvorn was killing one and Haulvam was fending off another.
Lykkos was lying nearby, probably dead, two large smoking holes burned through his chest and abdomen. Somewhere across the battlefield the crippled Cardios was still pouring flame into the servitors scrambling over the wreckage.
Magos Antigonus had made it over the Titan's torso and was presumably scrambling across the rockcrete towards his target. He had made it. The daemonic priests had been pushed back against the Titan's leg and many were dead.
'Grey Knights! Fall back, stay tight!' Alaric led the Grey Knights back into close formation behind a slab of leg armour, keeping up suppressing fire.
'Lykkos is gone,' said Brother Haulvarn.
'I saw,' said Alaric.
'Antigonus has gone after the archmagos veneratus,' said Saphentis.
'That's right'
'That is an ambitious plan.' Saphentis's voice was level in spite of the las-blasts and photon bolts that were smacking into the wreckage around him.
'All the best ones are.'
'I shall join him. The veneratus is a disgrace to his title. And I think the magos will need my help.'
Alaric looked Saphentis up and down. He was covered in gore from the biological parts of servitors and daemonic priests he had torn through and the vicious spinning saw blades of his combat attachments were whirring ready to kill.
'You're right.' said Alaric. 'Good luck. For the Emperor.'
'For the Emperor, justicar.'
Saphentis rose regally and strode out into the battle-field. Alaric yelled the order and the remaining Grey Knights covered him as Saphentis moved with surprising speed towards the Titan's arm, avoiding the solid black beams of power that swung past him. He must have been calculating firing angles as he went, stepping confidently around volleys of fire and spatters of photon bolts, pausing to slash his way past rampaging servitors. He ran right through the spray of fire from Brother Cardios, who was lying by the Titan's arm, holding back the mass of servitors almost single-handedly.
Then Saphentis was gone, over the barricade of the fallen arm and amongst Scraecos's bodyguard of servitors.
'Stay tight.' said Alaric. 'Mark targets. Antigonus's priests will have to fend for themselves, it's about survival now. Fight for time.'
'I am the Hammer.' said Haulvarn, praying to prepare his soul for death.
'I am the point of His spear.' continued Brother Dvorn. 'I am the mail about His fist...'
Chapter Eighteen
'In ancient times, men built wonders, laid claim to the stars and sought to better themselves for the good of all. But we are much wiser now.'
- Archmagos Ultima Cryol, 'Speculations On Pre-Imperial History'
ARCHMAGOS SAPHENTIS'S POWER reserves were running low. He was pushing every available scrap of power into his self-repairing units, holding fractured components together with electromagnetic fields and flooding his wounded biological parts with clotting agents to keep him alive. He did not have much time left. But then, he didn't need much time.
A full maniple of servitors protected Scraecos. From a distance they could have cut Saphentis to shreds with las-fire, but up close they lusted to take Saphentis apart with their claws. It was a fundamental logical flaw and one that proved the servitors were controlled by daemons and not hunter-programs. Saphentis's combat attachments and the subroutines that ran them, were far more effective when fighting illogical enemies. And Saphentis didn't have to kill all the servitors - he just had to get past them.
He ducked one slash of claws and sidestepped another, slicing off a servitor's limb with his bladed one. A servitor reared in front of him like a venomous snake, probe extended to stab through Saphentis's chest and suck out his soul. Saphentis smacked the heel of his bionic hand into the servitor's chest and sent it sprawling backwards.
If the servitors had stayed in formation and coordinated their attacks like true machines of the Omnissiah, Saphentis would not have had a chance. But these were creatures of Chaos. They acted, by definition, without logic. So Saphentis drifted past them, calculating their every move with ease, always aiming straight for Scraecos.
The archmagos veneratus had the highest grade of augmetics the Adeptus Mechanicus could produce. Saphentis could tell that just by looking. No doubt they had been fused with the biomechanical technology favoured by the heretics of the Dark Mechanicus - corruptive and foul, but more effective in the short term. Scraecos was maximizing the chances of Saphentis running out of self-repair resources, simply waiting for Saphentis to come to him.
Scraecos would probably kill Saphentis, but that was not the point. The point was that there remained a very small chance that Saphentis would kill Scraecos and pursuing that chance was Saphentis's duty to the Omnissiah.
The metallic fronds that replaced Scraecos's hands were glowing blue and spitting sparks into the ground. The strands knotted together into twin lashing ropes of metal and as Scraecos cracked them like whips they sent arcs of blue-white electricity spearing towards Saphentis.
Saphentis stepped past one and took the other full on the chest, feeling circuits bursting like blood vessels inside him, excess power flooding through him and scorching what little flesh he had left.
Scraecos was suddenly closing, whips slashing at Saphentis. Saphentis was too slow - compared to Scraecos he was obsolete, ancient mechanical technology outclassed by the biological heresies that made up Scraecos's artificial body. One electric whip snaked around one of Scraecos's arms and the other raked across his shoulders and back.
Saphentis was filled with the kind of pain he thought he had forgotten. Scraecos's dead silver eyes stared at him through the agony as Saphentis was held immobile, completing the circuit between Scraecos's power source and the ground. Nerve endings burned. Power coils burned out. Diagnostic alerts flashing against Saphentis's retinas were drowned out by the pain.
Scraecos grabbed Saphentis by one arm and an ankle and threw him. Saphentis blacked out for a moment as he sailed through the air trailing sparks and slammed hard against the leg of a Warhound Titan.
Saphentis forced his eyes to focus. He was flat on his back with the hunched shape of the Warhound above him - the ceramite of its armour was threaded through with biological growths like veins, just another heresy among many.
Saphentis knew he was some distance from Scraecos and his servitors. He had a few moments, perhaps, before something closed in for the kill. He forced himself to his feet. One of his combat-equipped arms was hanging limp and broken by his side, its mind-nerve impulse unit burned out. He was wreathed in greasy smoke and the smell of cooking meat. Black spots flickered on his vision where facets of his large insectoid eyes had been smashed by the impact.
The servitors, like a host of metal-shelled beetles, were swarming over the Titan wreckage in the distance. There was nothing Saphentis could do to help Alaric fight them now.
Scraecos was approaching. The Dark Mechanicus priest was walking with regal calm
into the shadow of the Warhound where Saphentis stood, arm-fronds twisting and untwisting as if Scraecos was uncertain which configuration to kill Saphentis with.
'Old ideas die.' said Scraecos, transmitting his thoughts in the cackling staccato of Lingua Technis. 'Just like you.'
'Only heretics die.' said Saphentis.
'Heretic? No. Your ignorance is the only heresy on this world. Around you stands the work of the Omnissiah, dictated to me in His own voice. It is the sickness inside you that makes it ugly in your eyes, but I see the beautiful truth of this world.'
'Your words condemn you.' said Saphentis. The pain was still great and everything human in him begged for it to end. But a great deal of Saphentis was no longer human. It was the sacrifice he had made to the Omnissiah, now it was the only thing keeping him conscious. 'Your thoughts are vile enough. But this... this cannibal planet you have built. Everything about it is sick. That you let yourself be corrupted by your time in the warp is bad enough. But that you are too blind to even see it... that is unforgivable.'
Scraecos snaked a whip around Saphentis's neck and slammed him against the leg of the Warhound. 'Blind? When I throw you to the hunter-programs and the Omnissiah mauls your soul, when He rips your mind open so you understand the sickness your Imperium stands for, then you will wish you were blind!' Scraecos's voice was a snarl, spitting out the zeroes and ones of Lingua Technis like poison. 'I have seen the planets and stars rearranged according to His plan, but you will see nothing but blackness and death. Your Omnissiah is a blasphemy, an invention of cowards to crush your imagination. My Omnissiah will eat your soul. When it is done, we will see which one triumphs.'
The blood was cut off from Saphentis's brain. He had about thirty seconds to live. That was if Scraecos's patience didn't run out.
Saphentis's primary systems were mostly burned out. His entire nervous system was gone. But not everything built into his body was wired into his nervous system any more. Saphentis had been upgraded hundreds of times, each iteration bringing him closer to the Omnissiah by replacing more and more of his fleshy body with increasingly arcane bionics. There was much in Saphentis's body that had been made obsolete by new augmentations - redundant systems that he had not used in decades, but which were still fused somewhere deep inside him.
Saphentis ran diagnostic routines on his augmetic systems, even as the last flickers of energy bled out of his brain. He saw his motive systems and combat attachments were mostly offline. He could barely feel any of them any more. Even if he could force his bionic arms to work, he needed more time that Scraecos would give him to reroute his nervous system through old connections.
Scraecos's eyes were blank silver disks, tarnished with biological growths. The skin of his face was pulled so tight there was little more than a skull showing above the fittings of his mechadendrites. It was thrust right up close to Saphentis, so that the face of the Dark Mechanicus would be the last thing Saphentis ever saw.
'My Omnissiah knows what you worship.' said Saphentis, forcing his transmitter to comply. 'He knows about the Standard Template Construct. It is not the sacred thing you think it is.'
Scraecos thrust his face closer to Saphentis, pushing Saphentis deeper into the dent he had formed in the leg of the Warhound. 'Is that what you think lies beneath our feet? An STC? You disappoint me, tech-priest. You truly have no imagination.'
Saphentis pulled his augmetic eyes back into tight focus on Scraecos's loathsome face. Then he forced every last drop of power into his optical enhancers and the full light spectrum bloomed into his vision - infra-red, ultra-violet, electromagnetism and everything besides, forced through his multifaceted eyes with such intensity that they couldn't take it any more.
Saphentis's insectoid eyes exploded. Thousands of shards of diamond-hard lenses shredded the skin of Scraecos's face and punched through the wizened skull into his brain. Scraecos reeled in shock and confusion as the explosion battered his one remaining human organ, his brain.
Saphentis slipped out of Scraecos's grip and thudded to the ground against the Warhound's massive foot. Scraecos stumbled back, whips lashing wildly, greyish blood spurting from his ruined face. His mechadendrites spasmed in pain.
Saphentis heard Scraecos spitting random syllables of machine-code. He couldn't see anything - his eyes were completely destroyed. The front of his skull burned, right through to the backs of his eye sockets where his optic nerves were on fire. But he was alive, for a few moments more.
Saphentis forced his thoughts through old conduits, mind-impulse units that had lain dormant and unused for more years than Saphentis could remember. They wouldn't hold, but that didn't matter. He just needed a few more seconds.
Saphentis's three remaining arms snapped into action. His legs were moving again. He felt himself shuddering as he tried to bring his body under control and bit by bit he forced himself to his feet.
His robes were burning. His flesh was, too. But the part of Saphentis that didn't feel pain ignored the protestations from the rest.
He heard Scraecos cursing in machine-code, furious at being tricked. He couldn't see - he would never see again - so Saphentis gauged Scraecos's location from the sound and leapt.
Saphentis crashed into Scraecos, knocking him to the floor. Instantly Scraecos's facial mechadendrites were wrestling Saphentis and they were abnormally strong. Saphentis sliced through one mechadendrite with a wild swing of his remaining saw-bladed arm and reached down blindly with his hands, gouging at Saphentis's face and chest. The mechadendrites snagged one of Saphentis's arms and snapped it neatly, crushing the elbow joint and ripping off the forearm.
Scraecos punched a mechadendrite up into Saphentis's body like a spear and it went straight through the archmagos's torso.
Saphentis's spine was severed and his legs were effectively gone. He reached down through Scraecos's mechadendrites and grabbed him by the throat. He couldn't strangle Scraecos, he knew that - but he didn't have to. If it all went right, if the Omnissiah was watching them and willed Saphentis to win, then it was enough just to keep Scraecos there a few moments longer.
The end of the mechadendrite opened into a wicked claw and Scraecos dragged it back through Saphentis's body, wrecking organs and augmetics, sending Saphentis's entrails spilling out onto the ground. Saphentis kept up his grip, slashing hopelessly as the mechadendrites with his saw-tipped arm. The mechadrendrites were around his waist and neck now, trying to lever him off Scraecos and in a few moments they would succeed.
'The chances of your prevailing over me.' said Scraecos, 'were never higher than nil. Your death here was a logical imperative from the start. Here the equation is balanced with your death, for death is the ultimate logic.'
'Your reasoning is faultless.' replied Saphentis, his voice howling with static as his vocabulator failed. 'Except for the one factor of which you are not aware.'
'Really?' sneered Scraecos as his mechadendrites began the brutal work of tearing Saphentis apart. 'And what is that?'
'You are outnumbered.' said Saphentis calmly.
Scraecos felt the Titan move before he saw it, its massive power outputs like the deafening roar of a storm to his attuned mind. The Warhound Titan was a scout model designed for speed rather than size and toughness, but it was still immense, twenty metres of corrupted steel and ceramite powered by a plasma reactor that was flooding its limbs with uncountable levels of energy.
'No!' spat Scraecos. 'I am the logic of death! My will is the end of the equation!'
'No, Scraecos. I am the end. I always was.' Magos Antigonus's voice boomed from the Warhound's speakers, as the Warhound's closest foot rose up off the ground.
'You!' yelled Screacos. 'You died! You died!'
'Heretics die. The righteous live on. You do not.'
Scraecos struggled, but Saphentis's hand was locked around his throat and the archmagos's weight was on him. He wrapped his mechadendrites tighter around Saphentis's body and threw him aside as the sha
dow of the massive foot passed over him like an eclipsing moon.
Scraecos almost made it to his feet. But before he could scrabble to safety, the Titan's foot came crashing down so hard it left a crater in the ground, crushing the bodies of Scraecos and Saphentis alike.
MAGOS ANTIGONUS WATCHED both Scraecos and Saphentis die below him, their deaths signified by the faint crackle of escaping energy as they were crushed flat by the Titan's foot.
Saphentis had served his Omnissiah in death. It was all any tech-priest could wish for. Antigonus felt a hot pang of regret that Saphentis had given his life just to slow Scraecos down, so Antigonus would have the chance to transfer his consciousness into the Warhound and control it long enough to kill Scraecos. It should have been Antigonus down there, giving his life. What had happened on Chaeroneia was his responsibility, because he had been there from the start.
But he was here at the end, too. And he knew there would be plenty more chances for him to die. So he shook the regret out of his mind, thought a silent prayer to the Omnissiah for the safe passage of Saphentis's soul and turned back to the Titan.
The inside of the Warhound was dank and stinking the ancient technology of the Titan Legions made corrupted and foul. Inside the Warhound's datacore everything felt spongy and slimy, like the inside of a creature instead of a machine. Antigonus felt the corruption wet and warm against his mind, like something trying to ooze its way into him and colour his thoughts with decay.
The Warhound Scout Titan was a massive and complicated machine, normally requiring at least three operators and usually more. But in place of the cockpit inside the Titan's head, this Warhound just had a mass of stringy, brain-like data medium. Had Antigonus still possessed a body, he would have shuddered to think what the Dark Mechanicus intended to use to control the Titan.