– Inquisitor Corvin Golrukhan
‘Hold!’ ordered Chaplain Lycaon, and the strike force dropped into cover behind him. In the cavernous fortress ruins there was plenty of cover but limited visibility, with every approach obscured by the walls and battlements rising all around. Techmarine Kho’s Land Speeder droned along just above head height, playing its guns across the surrounding ruins.
‘We have a sighting up ahead,’ voxed Sergeant Gorvetz.
‘Is there anyone to spot us?’ asked Lycaon.
‘I cannot tell,’ replied Gorvetz. ‘I do not think we were seen.’
‘Lysander,’ ordered Lycaon. ‘Join Gorvetz and scout ahead. Let me know if we have a viable target.’
Lysander headed through the rubble field left from a collapsed wall, picking his way from cover to cover as he passed the rest of the strike force and headed towards Gorvetz’s position. The Devastator squad had the point for that segment of the march, and had spread out through the hollow floors of a multi-levelled pale stone building. The late sun was slanting through breaks in the clouds, fractured by the ruins into beams that passed slowly across the dusty wreckage. Lysander spotted Gorvetz’s Imperial Fists ahead, crouching at the far end of the building, their heavy weapons shouldered, watching ahead through magnoculars and viewfinders.
The horizon was a broken mass of ruins. Sergeant Gorvetz was scanning it through his magnoculars as Lysander crouched down behind him.
‘Where is it?’ asked Lysander.
Gorvetz was not a man of many words, and simply pointed into the distance. Lysander looked in that direction, trying to filter some meaning from the tumbledown towers and battlements.
Then, he saw the movement. His vision adjusted to the distance and he made out the shifting clouds around its upper reaches – birds, flying vermin, clustering around the corruption.
It was a war engine. This one was in the shape of a siege tower, its upper floors fronted with a drawbridge forming the lower jaw of an enormous daemonic face. Huge gun emplacements bulged from the tower’s sides, their massive-bore cannon traversing menacingly across the surrounding landscape, fed by ammunition hoppers so large they gave the siege tower a top-heavy, hunchbacked shape. Banners, tattered and fire-stained, hung from its timbers, bearing the iron face mask symbol of the Iron Warriors.
‘I take it,’ said Gorvetz, ‘that’s what we were looking for.’
‘It is,’ said Lysander. ‘Are there any sentries on its battlements?’
‘None that we’ve seen.’
‘Then it’s probably wild,’ said Lysander.
‘Bloody waste if you ask me,’ said Gorvetz. ‘Make a war machine and just turn it loose.’
‘Kraegon Thul is not a fool,’ said Lysander. ‘The wild war engines are left to test the others. They are sent out here to prove themselves before Thul will export them to whatever warzone demands them next. If they can survive beasts like this, they are fit to fight in the colours of the Iron Warriors. That machine has no doubt accounted for plenty others of its kind.’
‘Good,’ said Gorvetz. ‘I was worried this would be easy.’ He said it without a smile, and Lysander could not be certain there was any humour in the Devastator veteran at all.
‘The target is good,’ voxed Lysander to Lycaon.
‘Then we must move quickly,’ said Lycaon, ‘before our position becomes known. We make the approach. Imperial Fists, to battle order!’
Up close, the stench of the machine’s corruption suffused the ruins and it was clear what had attracted the clouds of winged vermin that followed in its wake. It was the stench of carrion, of the battlefield dead. It was a smell that Lysander had become very familiar with, and it brought his mind back to the hundred battles he had fought in the colours of the Imperial Fists.
Had that been the same man? He answered to the name Lysander, he wore the golden armour and the symbol of the clenched fist, but would that man recognise the thoughts in his head, the recent memories? What would that Lysander have said of a man who had recited a list of sins the current Lysander had committed – trafficking with daemons, permitting witches and mutants to live, shirking one duty to fulfil another to his battle-brothers?
Lysander threw out thoughts like that. He had no room in his mind for anything save the thoughts of a soldier now. Squads Kaderic and Lycaon were moving parallel to the siege tower, keeping the ruins between them and any sensors the siege tower must have. It had to be autonomous, controlled by a corrupt machine or daemon, to roam unscrewed through the ruins, and it would be watching for prey just as it had been the day it rolled out of Kulgarde’s forges. The closer Lysander got the fouler the glimpses he had of the machine. Its upper reaches were covered in corpses, mounted on spikes jutting from the blackened timbers. They were old and new, many of obvious mutants, others of ragged creatures dressed in all-covering pale robes who might have been nomads or wandered eking out lives in the region. Hoppers mounted on the engine’s sides seemed to be there for the sole purpose of holding more bodies, many rotted away to skeletons, a few fresh and bloody.
‘We are closing,’ came First Sergeant Kaderic’s vox. ‘All squads, be ready for contact.’
Ahead, a body lay among a host of fallen rubble. The body was of one of the nomads – so far the strike force had not seen any alive but had come across a couple of bodies on their way through the ruins. This one looked to have been trapped by the rockfall, one leg crushed beneath a block of stone, and to have perished where he lay. With a clack of metal on metal a spidery creature, somewhat larger than a man, scuttled over the fallen wall and over the body. Without a word the Imperial Fists shifted into cover, each man putting something between himself and the creature.
It was a form of servitor, a mechanical creature controlled by a biological, human core component. The Imperium created them from condemned prisoners, or those pious folk who left their bodies to be used to continue the Imperium’s work. Presumably this one had been made in Kulgarde – its body resembled that of a ten-legged spider, its body made up of a human torso with the head hanging upside-down to form its face, a single wide lens mounted in the mouth. A forelimb snickered out and sliced the trapped leg off the corpse, before the servitor threw the corpse over its back and carried it over the ruins towards the rumbling of the siege engine’s wheels.
‘It collects them,’ voxed Brother Givenar of Squad Kaderic, the huge Imperial Fist who had wrestled at the funeral games outside Shalhadar’s city.
‘Not for much longer,’ said Kaderic. ‘We’re coming up to the crossroads. Break cover on my word.’
The sound of the siege engine was so loud Lysander could hear nothing else save for the vox, transmitted directly to his middle ear.
‘In position,’ came the vox from Sergeant Gorvetz.
‘Go!’ ordered Lycaon.
The Imperial Fists broke from cover and burst into the crossroads ahead. Soaring walls formed a sheer-sided chasm in one direction – in the other wound a labyrinth of collapsed buildings, countless layers of floors tumbling down over one another. Through this labyrinth the siege tower approached, crunching through the ruins, heralded by a cloud of rubble dust.
Lysander jammed his helmet over his head as the dust cloud rolled over him. Amidst the sound of the siege tower’s engines was the screech of metal on metal as the gun emplacement swivelled to aim at the Imperial Fists that had suddenly appeared in its path.
Bolter fire stuttered up at the engine, pinging off the armour plating that covered its front. Corpses were shot off the spikes covering its upper levels. The huge daemonic face grimaced down at the Imperial Fists as the tower’s guns opened up.
Great rents were opened up in the chasm walls as the guns thundered. Shattered stone rained, red-hot and razor-sharp. Spent cannon shells the size of men fell as Lysander sprinted to one side to avoid them. The percussion of the shots was like a hammer against Lysander’s armour – Imperial Fists were thrown off their feet.
‘We have its attention,�
� voxed Lycaon.
Another volley from the siege tower’s guns threw an avalanche of shattered rubble into the crossroads. Lysander saw a sprawling golden-armoured figure vanish under the torrent. He hauled chunks of rock away until he exposed the battered shoulder guard of another Imperial Fist – Brother Givenar. He pulled on the guard until Givenar came loose. Givenar roared and leapt to his feet, throwing rubble in every direction, furious he had not been strong enough to free himself.
‘Is that it?’ yelled Givenar up at the siege engine. ‘I’ll tear you apart by myself!’
One of the guns was angling down at them. Lysander grabbed Givenar again and dragged him into the relative cover of a section of fallen battlement as the gun roared. The blast picked up Lysander and threw him against a stretch of wall, and he blacked out for a split second in the storm that slammed into him.
He came to on the ground, billows of dust roiling around him. It was Givenar who hauled Lysander to his feet this time, and the pain that ran through Lysander’s limbs was a reminder that they were all basically intact. Lucky, he thought. We have been lucky so far.
‘Get in closer!’ shouted Lysander over the din. He and Givenar forged their way through the debris towards the roaring of the siege tower’s engines. The dust was blown away by a blast of exhaust and the wheels of the siege engine loomed through the half-light. They were three storeys high, of dense black wood and studded with iron spikes. The structure’s lower floors were stained black with old blood, the splits and gaps packed with the long-dried bodies of forge labourers and the sacrifices made to awaken its machine-spirit. More spent shells clattered down against the wheels, crushed flat under them as the siege engine rolled on through the ruins.
Rogal Dorn had written more on the art of the siege than had anyone else in the history of the Imperium. It was his genius, the purpose for which the Emperor had created him at the dawn of the Great Crusade. Every Imperial Fist knew the core tenets of Dorn’s siege-lore – the reduction of fortifications, the murderous geometry of firing zones, the million and one ways in which a set location could be made lethal to any who approached and the equal number of ways to kill an enemy while he skulked behind his walls. Among those principles was one which spoke of the purpose of siege engines, from the primitive rams and ladders of feral peoples to the Imperium’s own Titan Legions. The guns on a siege tower such as this were designed to clear enemy walls of opposition, to open up breaches in their fortifications, and to pound the enemy’s fortress from a distance to soften them up for the approach. They were not designed to kill enemies swarming around the base of the fortress, since such an enemy should be within his walls sheltering from the bombardment as the siege tower rolled forwards.
The Imperial Fists stayed close, moving with the siege engine. Its guns thundered, but they could not target enemies on foot at so close a range – even if they had the flexibility of elevation, they would have blasted the tower’s own wheels off. Thus the theory went, and as Lysander and the rest of the strike force struggled through the rubble to the base of the tower that theory was put to the test.
The theory had not taken the servitors into account. The Imperial Fists, however, were ready for them. Like spiders bursting from their egg sacs, the servitors tore free of the metal blisters covering the middle floors and scurried down the tower’s sides towards the ground. The blisters gave the tower a scabbed and diseased appearance which was not lessened by the knowledge they contained the host of spider-servitors.
The servitors dropped down among the Imperial Fists and, scattered by the storm of gunfire and falling rubble, the Imperial Fists had to face them in ones and twos. One dropped right on top of Brother Givenar, its legs clacking as an industrial pincer tried to slice into his armour. Givenar threw the servitor to the ground in a perfect wrestler’s move and stamped down on the human torso at its centre. Ribs splintered and transparent greyish blood spattered up over his greaves.
Lysander found himself facing another configuration, this one with three upright human bodies fused together at the spine, each with its mouth wired open and a gun barrel jutting from between its teeth. It moved on a cluster of jointed legs, chunky and industrial, and its abdomens were fused to the centre of the cluster with a joint that permitted them to rotate. As it closed with Lysander it spun and Lysander realised a split second before it opened fire that this servitor was designed to spray bullets randomly in all directions, lethally imperilling anyone nearby.
Lysander dived into a roll as the servitor’s guns opened up as one. A spiral of gunfire ripped over his head, filling the air with a buzzing mass of hot shrapnel. Any other soldier would have fled from the servitor, trying to put distance between himself and the stuttering waves of gunfire. A Space Marine knew better. He knew that an enemy with a gun was most dangerous from a distance, because he had time and space to aim and close the gap with a well-placed shot. A Space Marine, on the other hand, was deadliest up close.
Lysander slammed into the servitor and rammed the barrel of his bolter up into its closest ribcage. He squeezed the trigger and hammered half a magazine into its central mass. Desiccated flesh flew as the explosive bolter shells ripped through the servitor from the inside. Lysander kicked over what remained of the servitor to see Brother Givenar reeling, clutching the bloody side of his face.
‘Brother!’ shouted Lysander.
‘Damn thing took my ear off!’ replied Givenar, more angry than hurt.
‘We have a shot!’ came the vox from Sergeant Gorvetz.
‘Take it!’ was Chaplain Lycaon’s reply.
Gorvetz’s Devastator squad had used the chaos to get into position overlooking the intersection. Now, as one, they opened fire from an upper floor, directly into the side of the siege engine. Gorvetz had chosen a spot where an ammunition hopper met the armour plating, where the armour seemed thinner than on the rest of the machine. A plasma blast blew off a panel of armour and heavy bolter fire chewed through wood and metal. Lysander could hear the low stuttering of the heavy bolters over the engines, and then the sudden hot crack of cannon shells cooking off inside the tower. Burning timbers rained down like the giant shell casings had moments before. A sheet of pitted steel fell like a guillotine blade, landing a few metres from Lysander and embedding itself corner-first in the paved ground.
‘Breach!’ yelled Gorvetz over the vox. ‘We have a breach!’
‘On my way!’ replied Lysander. ‘First Sergeant!’
‘Brother Lysander!’ replied First Sergeant Kaderic. The sound of chainblade through bone and metal buzzed away over the vox as he spoke.
‘With me! We go up!’
Lysander ran for the half-collapsed building where Gorvetz was set up. Brother Givenar followed him, and other Imperial Fists from Squad Kaderic. He spotted Lycaon duelling with another servitor, a creature twice his height composed of several bodies wrapped around a steel frame to form its muscles, giving it a hunched, gorilla-like profile. As Lysander watched, Lycaon’s crozius flashed and one of the servitor’s arms came away.
Lysander found a stairway leading to the upper floors of the building, marked with burning flares left there by Gorvetz. He ran up, half blinded by the billows of dust and smoke boiling from the impacts of the tower’s cannon fire. The shapes of Gorvetz’s Devastator squad loomed through the darkness and Lysander made out Gorvetz himself, gnarled old face screwed up in a grimace as he joined his squad in hammering gunfire at the siege tower.
A huge hole had been torn in the side of the tower, three floors up. Inside, lit by the strobes of gunfire, Lysander could make out only a sifting, seething blackness.
‘Kho! Break cover!’ voxed Lysander.
Dorn’s Dagger and the Talon Blade buzzed down from their positions hovering out of sight above the chasm walls. Lysander could see the red armour of Techmarine Kho as he guided his Land Speeder down through the eddies of smoke towards Gorvetz’s position.
The priority was Kho. Anyone else who made it inside was a bonus, but Kho
had to get inside and he had to survive. Otherwise the whole mission on Malodrax would be lost.
The Talon Blade thrummed past the position first. Sergeant Gorvetz and Brother Antinas, carrying the squad’s heavy flamer, jumped down onto the running plates of the Land Speeder. A Land Speeder was not a troop carrier, but if needs be a couple of Space Marines could hold on for a short ride. The Talon Blade swept around close to the breach in the tower’s side and Brother Antinas jumped, disappearing through the black gash in the armour. Gorvetz made ready to leap but a falling chunk of debris forced Gethor, at the Talon Blade’s controls, to swerve away from the breach, and Gorvetz had to hold on.
The Dorn’s Dagger was close now. Lysander shouldered his bolter and jumped, hitting chest-first against the Land Speeder’s engine cowling. He found a handhold and clung on, feeling the impact as Brother Givenar landed alongside him.
The crossroads whirled below him. Lysander could see Captain Lycaon and the Imperial Fists of his squad forming a rough battle line, fending off the combat servitors surging at them through the rubble to be cut down by bolter fire or drawn onto the point of a chainblade. Lycaon was directing as if conducting a symphony.
Gunfire rattled against the underside of Dorn’s Dagger. The Land Speeder lurched, and Techmarine Kho wrestled with the control yoke. The servitors below had realised that the Land Speeders were a target and those that could were firing up at them.
Lysander’s left hand came away with the shift of weight and he was hanging by one hand over the crossroads, feet kicking out over nothing. The Land Speeder levelled and Lysander found another handhold, clutching tighter to the cowling.
‘Brother Givenar, if you will,’ voxed Techmarine Kho. Lysander saw Dorn’s Dagger was level with the breach. Kho put the vehicle into a steady hover and clambered up out of the cockpit, the servo-arms of his harness spread to grab out at anything that might support him. Kho leapt from the Land Speeder and vanished through the breach.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 301