Telach could see all those things, far more acutely than even his fellow Codiciers in the clan, and the rank sickness of it all resonated like a virus coursing through his bloodstream. His temples throbbed from the constant effort of maintaining the psychic shield around him. His hands bled freely from the summoning of warp-born fires. His muscles ached, his eyes pricked from tears, his mouth bled under his heavy blue helm.
And yet, the goal was close. The ruinous charge down the transit corridors was at its end, and now only the gates themselves remained to be taken.
Telach bowed his head for a moment, gathering his strength. Screams and the laughter of daemons passed, for a moment, into the background. He let the current of the warp sweep up into him, surging from the depths of his consciousness and into his waking mind. The power rose quickly, like dark waters pooling in the shaft of a well.
No machine could do this.
The words came to him unbidden, like a memory unearthed at random. He discarded them.
By the Immortal Hand of the Emperor, the Master of Mankind.
Telach recited those words reverently, concentrating on the task of gathering warp energy to himself. He knew the daemons would sense the build-up. Very soon they would streak towards him, heedless of the protective aegis swirling around him.
Let them. Such bravado will only hasten their mortal deaths.
He opened his eyes, and the world of the senses rushed back in. His heart-rates picked up. The myriad systems in his psychically-charged armour activated. His breathing deepened. The aether pumped through him, roaring and frothing at the bonds he had set on it.
Gift me the power of that which is the doom of the weak. Gift me the power of that which our uttermost enemy calls home.
Telach’s fingers began to leak warp power. It spilled from his gauntlets like pearls, smashing on the floor below and letting out flickers of glimmering witchlight. The massive potency was hard to contain, even before it reached the full level of devastation.
Gift me the power which is the true and just inheritance of Mankind, his destiny, his calling, his birthright to rule.
Telach lifted his head again. The gates towered over him. The screaming of the souls embedded in its structure reached fever-pitch – a chorus of agony arranged in mockery of the holy chants given every waking hour in the cathedrals of the boundless Imperium. Daemons, having sensed the danger, hurled themselves towards him, pulling free of combat with the Iron Hands in their midst and streaking in his direction. Their faces no longer laughed, but were pinched with fear.
They knew what he was about to do.
Telach knew what he was about to do.
For all the pain he was in, for all the pain he knew it would bring him, he still smiled.
For the honour of the Throne, for the honour of Manus.
The smile broadened.
Now you die.
He flung his arms wide, and raw warp fire exploded out from them. Beams of piercing white light shot towards the gates, rippling and thrumming with uncoiled intensity. Two columns of aetheric-fire, snaking like tornados, lashed out from his hands and smashed into the doors of the gate.
The daemons plunged into it and were torn apart. They detonated like frag-charges, scattering across the tunnel vaults in showers of blazing sparks. Telach’s columns of fire roared out – undiminishing, thundering and rushing with the force of eternity.
It was agony. Even as the awesome power coursed through his body, Telach could feel it destroying him. He could feel his remaining flesh cauterising, curling away from the augmetics that riddled it. He could feel his hearts burst messily, flooding his chest with blood and drowning him from within.
The sensations were illusions – visions of what would come should he fail to control the torrent of otherworldly flame – but they hurt him nonetheless. It felt for all the world like a part of him was dying; perhaps on some other plane of existence where the divide between warp and materium was less certain, perhaps nowhere else but in his mind.
More. Give me more.
The columns of crackling energy wrapped themselves around the open doors. Like two enormous flaming tentacles, they began to pull them closed.
The daemons stepped up their frantic attacks. They tore towards him like bullets, crackling and burning as the warp-fire rushed through them.
One nearly got to him. It detonated just metres from his unprotected face, shrieking like an animal as the rush of cold flame roared through it.
Telach remained unmoving. His arms were flung wide, channelling the vast power roaring through him.
I am the conduit. I am the process. I am the vessel.
Slowly, grindingly, the doors began to close. The screams of the trapped souls in the metal reached a fresh crescendo. The Iron Hands stepped up their withering assault, launching fresh salvos of bolter fire into the fervid atmosphere. His Codiciers sent out warp fire of their own, cutting down the daemons even as they rallied for a final, frantic assault.
Telach felt his strength began to ebb. He tasted fresh blood. His heartbeats picked up again, thudding like a drum deep within his rib-fused chest.
Not yet. Just a little more.
The fires lashed out, snaking around the edges of the doors. The gap between them narrowed down to a red-tinged slit. Telach began to cry out. He heard his own voice as if from far away, muffled by the crashing tides of the aether around him.
The spire was resisting him. The stone, the metal, the ferrocrete – it was mustering against the power ignited at its base. Whatever dwelt at the summit had corrupted every part of the gigantic structure, like a cancer spreading down from the diseased head, and now the Capitolis itself was alive.
When he felt the full extent of that power, Telach felt his strength falter. He remembered what he’d seen when his soul had been cut loose.
I remember you being stronger.
+No!+ he roared, blazing his defiance psychically. +No. No.+
Then he let loose one final time, feeling the power of the immaterium tear through him with the raging force of a hurricane. Fresh aether-fire surged out, thrashing and writhing, clamping onto the doors and hauling them together.
They closed with a huge, echoing clang. As soon as the metal crashed together, the baleful presence from above lessened.
Telach cut the raging inferno loose, and fell to one knee. Warp essence tore free of him, curling out into the dark like a whiplash, before exploding in a multi-coloured nova against the hot metal of the closed gates.
The daemons, those that had survived the Iron Hands’ onslaught, launched into a final vicious assault, knowing they were cut off now and at the mercy of Emperor’s Angels. Still they came on, fearlessly, devastatingly, with the fire of the warp in their eyes.
Telach drew in thick, heaving breaths. His real-world sight became blurred. He fell forwards, dizzy, and had to put out a hand to stop himself pitching to the floor.
Every muscle in his body glowed with pain. Even his bionic implants had been stressed, and he could feel the heat in the mechanical components as they wound down.
It was a dangerous time. Drained of energy, bereft of the warp-drawn aegis that protected him, his body and soul were vulnerable to the daemons.
He looked up, ignoring the bite of pain in his neck muscles, readying to use his force-staff in self-defence.
He needn’t have worried. Ten huge silhouettes of power armour surrounded him. He heard the roar of Khatir close by, driving his acolytes on to ever greater feats of arms. The daemons still rushed towards the bringer of their torment, shrieking with frustrated anguish, but had no chance of penetrating the cordon around him.
Telach felt some of his strength return. He swallowed, and tasted the blood in his mouth. Moving slowly, panting with the effort, he regained his feet.
Rauth broke from combat then, turned, and lumbered over to him. The commander’s armour was streaked with blood and purple fluid; an unholy mixture of mortal and immortal essences. In his absence, Imanol�
�s warriors maintained the protective shield.
+The gates are closed, lord,+ Telach sent. His mouth was still too raw to move.
‘Indeed,’ said Rauth. He sounded neither pleased nor disappointed, despite the fact that the tunnels had now been sealed from further enemy reinforcement. As ever, his tone was impassive. ‘What is your status?’
+I will live.+
‘Good.’
Rauth looked out, over Telach’s shoulder and back down the long, gaping maw of the tunnels. Moving more gingerly, Telach turned to look the same way.
‘What do you see?’ asked Rauth.
Telach grimaced, and gathered his farsight once again. The effort of summoning it felt like ripping sinew from bone.
+We have taken the tunnels, lord,+ he said, letting his senses sweep back down the length of them. +Once the residual enemy is dispatched, they will be secure.+
His vision rushed onwards, racing across scenes of devastation.
‘And the mortals?’
Telach’s mind-sight passed over the wreckage of three Warhound Titans, each one burning and gutted. They stood in the darkness like braziers, wrapped in unwholesome, purple-tinged flames. He saw whole companies of men lying butchered amid the slime of the tunnel floor. He saw lines of tanks, broken and tilted and with their armour plate defaced. Survivors still fought with traitors along the entire length of the transit routes. In the wells where the grav-train tracks had been sunk, blood lapped at the gutters like the tide against the shore.
+Heavy fighting,+ he sent.
Rauth nodded.
‘When the last of the neverborn are dissipated, the claves will relieve them,’ he said. ‘Those that survived will be re-formed and will accompany us into the spires.’
Telach let his mind-sight sink back behind his physical eyes.
Thousands have died. Tens of thousands.
He blinked heavily, and fresh blood ran down his cheeks.
+Was this the only way, lord?+ he asked, almost without meaning to. He caught himself too late, and found himself looking up into the blank deathmask of Rauth’s Terminator helm.
Rauth paused for a moment before responding. From behind him, the noises of battle began to diminish as the remaining daemons were destroyed.
‘Every mortal who dies frees up a Space Marine to kill,’ he said. ‘We cannot shepherd them all. Do you object?’
Telach felt sick, and knew exactly why that was. He had overexerted himself already, and knew that the greater challenge was still to come. He was in no condition to think clearly or cogently about the tactical situation. He was in no condition to think clearly about anything.
‘No,’ he said out loud, wincing as the flesh of his lips cracked. ‘Forgive me. I need just a little time, to recover.’
Rauth continued looking at him. As ever, the clan commander gave nothing away, sealed inside his massive sarcophagus of sable armour. Only the low grind of his power generators gave away the fact that he was alive at all.
‘They were acceptable losses, Telach,’ Rauth said. ‘Do not lose your nerve. The final assault will come soon, and I will need you.’
Telach bowed stiffly.
‘By your command,’ he said.
Acceptable losses.
‘Do you require an Apothecary? An Iron Father?’
Tens of thousands.
‘An Apothecary?’ asked Telach. He looked up, high into the vaults where the last of the daemons were pinned down by bolter fire. Their sweet stink lingered in the air, hanging alongside the reek of blood and charred metal.
The nausea in the back of his throat intensified. He couldn’t shake the blurriness of his vision, nor the resonance of screaming in his ears.
It would be good to be rid of such things. It would be good to lose the organs and the glands that made him feel that way. It would be good, perhaps, to see the world as Rauth did – lines of force, resistance, possibility – and nothing else.
‘No, not an Apothecary,’ said Telach, and his words slurred from mortal exhaustion. The battle for the tunnels was over, and they had won it, but he took no pleasure in it.
‘For what I have become,’ he said, ‘for what we have become, what good would that be?’
III:
The Machine-Spirit
Chapter Sixteen
The ash clouds over the Iron Hands’ Helatine command complex buckled and glowed, quickly moving from black to a dull ember-red. Warning lights flickered on across the landing stages, tracing out a hexagonal figure on the wind-blasted rockcrete. Automated defence turrets swung into position, extending their barrels and activating a shimmering level of void shields twenty metres above the ebony walls of the facility.
Nearly as soon as the defensive measures had taken effect, the systems shut down. The gun barrels slumped into dormancy. The void shields rippled away, leaving the landing stages exposed and unprotected.
The clouds continued to boil and churn. The ember-red glow turned a deep crimson, then orange. A whole swathe of ash was blown free, exposing a thundering column of flame dropping down slowly through the atmosphere. Seven circles of fire hove into view, each one a thruster for a descending lander.
Master of Thralls Gerod Siirt watched the vessel’s approach from behind several layers of blastproof plexiglass. A steady stream of runes told him that his systems had been breached and that something subtle and difficult was preventing his servitors getting them back up again. Fearful aides hovered close by him, all dressed in sheer black robes and sporting esoteric bionics across their pale faces, none of them daring to pass on any further bad news.
None of them, to be fair, could have told him anything he didn’t already know. Siirt’s own internal systems, including a hard-plugged auspex array that was finer than that possessed by most non-military starships, gave him better information than all of them put together.
From this, he knew several things.
First, that the lander had come down from high orbit, above the level where the Medusan strike cruiser Kalach and its scorts held anchor. For this to have been possible, it must have been capable of concealing its presence with considerable guile – the instruments on board the Iron Hands capital ship were a match for almost anything else in the Imperium.
Second, that the lander did not belong to the Imperial Navy, which had maintained its presence further out. Nothing possessed by Admiral Malfia would have been capable of making planetfall so stealthily, nor of shutting down the base’s automated turrets.
Third, that Siirt’s defensive systems would not become operational fast enough to prevent the landing. The craft would touch down unopposed with its weapons at full pitch and its own shields intact. Such actions were not those of a friendly power.
Fourth, that the energy signature of the lander’s engines was of a distinctive type. Siirt had seen similar patterns before on previous campaigns, and so recognised the vessel as being of the Mechanicus. A quick check on his internal cogitator’s memory banks run against three pict-shot profiles of the vessel confirmed its identity: lander UJ-I8 (Spectre class, heavily modified), listed as complement on special liaison vessel 778, designation Factor Balance.
Siirt knew enough then to guess that something serious had taken place, and had time to regret the fact that the entire Adeptus Astartes capability of Clan Raukaan was deployed in theatre. The clan’s seven Dreadnoughts in hibernation aboard the Kalach would take days to summon, as they had never been intended for on-world deployment. The command complex was full of Medusan auxiliaria, many of whom had bio-enhancements and augmetics on a parallel with skitarii, though if the Mechanicus vessel were powerful enough to interfere with the defence grid remotely there was no telling whether that force would be nearly enough to hold the complex.
Such were the thoughts running through Siirt’s mind as he watched the lander touch down in the centre of the landing stage. He made no move to restore power to the autocannons mounted on the walls surrounding it, nor did he attempt to open a channel for comms.
‘Two squads,’ he voxed to his resident troop contingent, turning away from the viewport and walking towards the reception chambers below. ‘Station all available others overlooking the vessel. Make them obvious.’
As he moved down to the reception levels, the two squads of thralls he’d requested fell in behind him. They were all dressed in matt-black carapace armour with blank visors and angular shoulder guards. Each trooper carried a heavy-gauge lasgun and had steel augmetic traces littered across their battle-plate.
They were all Medusan, all battle-hardened, and all heavily altered by the tech-chirurgeons. In normal circumstances, such soldiers would have been capable of taking on virtually anything. In normal circumstances, Siirt would have trusted them to keep him alive for a very long time.
‘Any signal from the front?’ he voxed back to the command chamber as he walked.
‘Negative, master,’ came the reply. ‘Clan Commander Rauth remains out of range.’
‘Keep trying.’
Siirt strode down the short corridor to the blast doors, watching diagnostic readings from the complex’s sensoria scroll down his retinal display. The defence grid was still dormant.
Just days earlier, he’d overseen the preparations for the arrival of Lord Telach on the same landing stage. Then, of course, Siirt, had stayed very much out of sight, and it had been Rauth and his retinue who had walked out onto the apron to meet him. Siirt didn’t like being out of the shadows. He was a Medusan mortal; like all his race, he disdained the harsh light of exposure. His home world was too dark, too cold, to relish anything other than concealment.
He paused before the doors, collecting himself. From the far side, he could hear the dull thud of a landing ramp hitting the ground and the slow whine of engines running down.
‘So,’ he said to himself. ‘Let us see what we will see.’
He gestured, and the doors slid open. The foul air of Shardenus gusted in, spreading ash across the low-lit corridor floor.
Twenty-five figures waited for him, clustered under the slowly cooling bulk of the lander. Twenty-four of them were skitarii. As usual with the servants of the Mechanicus, their appearance was heterodox – collections of artificial limbs, implanted weaponry, metal faceplates or tank-tracks in place of legs.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 233