by Thorpe, Gav
The metal of her callipers buckled and the Space Marine rocked back a step. Pain flared in her arm and her first thought was that she had shattered her wrist.
The Space Marine’s eyelids fluttered and he pursed his lips, sighing his pleasure.
With a crash, a vent cover in the ceiling fell on top of the traitor, its corner gouging a bloodied furrow across the side of the Space Marine’s head.
A wiry figure followed it, wrapping his legs about the warrior’s neck, a glowing knife in one hand and a stub pistol in the other. The Space Marine staggered as a second attacker dropped through the opening and the first opened fire, a bullet punching into the monstrous warrior’s eyeball.
The Space Marine roared, the pain no longer welcome. An armoured hand closed about the arm of the first attacker, who let out a shout of pain and dropped his pistol. He started to saw at the Space Marine’s wrist with his blade. Ghelsa pushed herself towards the multi-tool as blood sprayed, the second assailant straddling a pauldron as she rammed a broad-bladed knife repeatedly into the Space Marine’s throat.
Like a felled tree, the traitor legionary toppled, twisting as he fell. The killers sprang away to avoid being crushed beneath the weight of warplate, landing deftly as the Space Marine crashed to the floor.
They set upon the giant, firing several more shots directly into the eyes and mouth to be sure. Ghelsa recovered her improvised weapon, the claw-head thick with clotted Space Marine blood. The bout of violence had purged much of the stimm from her body, but she still felt on edge. She took a moment to take a better look at her saviours.
By their size she had thought they were adolescents, but now that she looked at them properly she saw they were simply adults who were short and lean, much like Harkas. They were both pale-skinned, with spiderweb tattoos across the left side of their virtually bloodless faces. They wore tight-fitting dark grey trousers and short-sleeved shirts of the same colour, their exposed arms covered in more black inkwork. Each had the Metalica silver cog implanted as a badge on the back of their shaven heads.
‘The xenagia…’ she breathed. ‘You’re vent-fighters from Armageddon.’
‘The name’s Dazi,’ said the woman. She flicked her bloody knife towards the other. ‘This is my choice-kin, Aszad.’
‘I’m so happy to see you,’ said Ghelsa, and then with a gasp remembered the Space Marine firing his bolter.
Harkas was sprawled at the junction and panic made her heart skip. Dashing to where he lay, she knelt down beside the inquisitor, searching for any injury. The left side of his body from ribs to hip was discoloured, reddened and bruised, but the skin was miraculously unbroken. The inside of his left arm was similarly marked where the blast of the bolt round had caught it.
She hesitantly touched a hand to the injury.
Harkas groaned. Ghelsa let out a choked cry of relief and sat back, light-headed from stress and stimm. The inquisitor pushed himself up with a wince and leaned on one arm.
‘The synskin is also a ballistic defence,’ he said, looking down at where the bolt had hit him. ‘Though I feel like I have been trampled by a grox.’
‘Praise the Omnissiah for the gift of His artifice,’ said Ghelsa, touching fingers to her cog rune. ‘In His eternal knowledge are we shrouded from harm.’
She helped Harkas to his feet, noting a few scratches on his face, the blood bright red against his light brown skin. The zip of las-fire and deeper bark of bolters resonated through the passageways still, injecting fresh urgency into Ghelsa’s thoughts.
‘Who are they?’ asked the inquisitor, looking past her to the vent-runners.
‘Xenagia. They’re auxiliaries from Armageddon. Dazi and Aszad.’ His blank look betrayed his ignorance and she continued as they walked towards the newcomers. ‘You sneaked aboard the Casus Belli and you don’t even know about the vent rats? They fought on Armageddon against the orks. Downhivers, used to living in darkness and cramped spaces. The Legio recruited several hundred of them to help defend the Imperators.’
‘We need to go,’ said Aszad, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder. ‘There’s breaches all over the akropoliz. You’re safe now.’
‘Wait!’ called Ghelsa, picking up her multi-tool as she approached the Space Marine’s corpse. ‘We need to get down to the holy decks. It’s really important.’
Dazi grimaced, displaying grimy, uneven teeth.
‘We have to fight,’ she said. ‘If the akropoliz falls we are all dead.’
Ghelsa darted a pointed look at her companion. ‘I don’t think I can lie low, can I?’ she said. ‘And how are you going to get through the akropoliz with a battle going on?’
Harkas looked at the duct-fighters with narrowed eyes. ‘Could you get me to the command module without being seen?’ he asked.
‘Why would you want such a thing?’ asked Aszad.
‘Of course we can,’ said Dazi. The two Armageddon natives glared at each other.
A rapid series of explosions rocked the akropoliz from within, showering them with dust from the open vent.
Aszad cocked his head to one side and held up a hand to stop the others from talking. Gunfire rang along the passage and echoed within the vent above.
‘I think we are going to the same place. That was at the antae.’
‘The traitors are trying to break into the holy decks,’ said Ghelsa, motioning to Harkas. ‘We have to help stop them.’
His look conveyed his opinion that they didn’t have to do anything, but he waved a hand towards the Armageddon fighters as though giving permission.
‘You are a big one, for sure,’ said Aszad, sizing up Ghelsa. ‘No vent-running for you. We’ll need to take the stairs.’
Answering to Exasas’ summons, the magos dominus’ warskin arrived at the lowest level of the atrium from one of the nearby archways. With everything set in motion to contest the entrance to the lower decks, there was nothing else for Exasas to do. His cogitations were far better exercised in more direct intervention.
The spider-like secondary body peeled open, combat blades and heavy weapons splaying to allow ingress as the battle augmentation awaited its controller.
Exasas coiled about herself as he entered the central void. Armoured plates slid into position even as cerebral connectors and motive detectors pierced the sockets that studded his smaller form. The magos felt the increased mass like a blessing of the Machine-God upon his soul, spiritually as well as physically elevated as the warskin straightened its four legs.
Even as the hardened carapace enveloped his form, Exasas-tactical’s more militant, aggressive codeware took command of his mental functions. Gone were hypothesis and introspection, two traits that ran directly counter to decisive combat action. In their place Exasas-tactical streamed empathy algorithms and spread killware into the noosphere to connect with the remaining battle-priests and alphas.
Exasas-tactical fractured, becoming dozens of individual fighters and unit leaders while defensive protocol measures moved the warskin towards the foe, ranged weapons spewing a torrent of devastating fire.
On the uppermost level Exasas-tactical rode in the senses of an alpha leading a counter-attack against Heretic Astartes, a phaserod gleaming in his hand. He ducked beneath a snarling chainsword and thrust the phaserod into his foe’s huge plastron, the weapon’s serrated tip shifting through the armour as if it didn’t exist. A pulse of power ripped apart the Space Marine’s chest cavity, pulverising the organs within.
At the same time the magos felt the impact of a bolt round in the chest of a fulgurite battle-priestess as she hurled herself into more of the traitors on the second level, just a few metres above the dominus’ physical incarnation. Though she felt the puncture and sudden eruption in excruciating pain, to the magos the fatal wound registered as a series of negatively scaling victory factors – the closest to sadness the battle-programmed persona was likely to experience.
Bolts rang against his armoured form, but their impacts were no distraction as he aimed at a s
quad of heretics that had formed a staging point on the starboard stairwell just below the second level. From this vantage they unleashed punishing fire across the other three sides of the atrium, forcing back skitarii squads and driving the auxilia into the scurry-ways and ducts.
Taking direct control of an alpha in a skitarii squad almost directly above the knot of enemy warriors, Exasas-tactical had the squad deploy their fragmentation grenades, while simultaneously commanding another alpha on a gallery opposite to use the distraction to regroup their heaviest weapons to a better firing position. As one cogitation-thread managed this manoeuvre, Exasas-tactical’s other semi-autonomous routines likewise created crossfires against an advance on the aft third level, precipitated a counter-attack into a bloody melee from the bottom stairs of the port walls and orchestrated a feint-and-encircle with a platoon of skitarii on the third floor.
Though Exasas-tactical could not literally be everywhere, at any point when he deployed his focus upon a squad or battle-priest he was able to coordinate with far greater speed and precision than any of his subordinates. He pinpointed weak points in the armour of a squad that continued to unleash devastating salvos of sonic blasts from the uppermost galleries. With this information several disparate squads combined their fire with drastically improved effect, felling three of the augmented warriors in their following fusillade.
Even lone marksmen stalking the vaults felt the momentary presence of the magos, steadying their biological systems, prioritising targets and implementing redeployment commands.
The connection was not one way. Exasas-tactical received continual input from the slaved skitarii, so that he could monitor casualties, fear responses and fatigue, and inload specific local data that remained out of detection of his suite of personal scanning systems. While auditory receivers registered the crack of bolts and shouts of the angry and dying, a far more elaborate battlescape played out in his cogitational circuits. Degrading combat capabilities of both sides registered in various hues of blue and red, conveying an almost physical need to bolster in certain places, demonstrating the ability to relent in others.
The entire force was an extension of the warskin, Exasas-tactical wielding the squads under his influence as a warrior might use their own body. Each squad was a separate limb, each soldier a digit upon it that could be turned to a particular task if need be, whether an opportune counter-strike in close combat or a timely arc rifle shot moments before the target moved out of the shooter’s sight.
Like the eye of a vortex, all of the activity whirled down into Exasas-tactical, and through her the battle for the atrium raged. The strategic necessity for the defence had been affirmed and now all that remained was the execution of the conflict. The enemy had made no move that betrayed any objective other than the atrium floor and access to the command and mechanical decks, and although this single-mindedness made it relatively straightforward to predict their behaviour, physically stopping such a determined assault was far more problematic.
CHAPTER 7
THE CYBERNETIKA
Strobing las-fire and the echoing snarl of bolter rounds warned that the fighting was not far ahead. Flashes lit the frieze-painted walls with splashes of blue and red. Sparks of bolts descended past a high archway at the end of the passage, met by the rising beams of lasguns and the tamed lightning of arc rifles.
‘Quick,’ said Aszad, hurrying forward. He ran awkwardly, his crushed arm tied across his chest with his belt as an improvised sling. In his free hand he carried his stub pistol, waving them on.
Arc rifle in hand, Harkas ran alongside Dazi, leaving Ghelsa to follow. Several dead skitarii were piled in the archway, ripped to pieces by bolt rounds as they had entered the corridor. Harkas hung back with Ghelsa as the two vent-fighters edged forward.
With an encouraging nod, Dazi beckoned them on, waving for them to crouch behind the bodies as she peered out into the chamber beyond. Ghelsa leaned forward to see where they were, resting her weight on the bloody remains of a skitarii soldier.
The ‘stairs’ Aszad had mentioned turned out to be the transit atrium between the upper levels of the akropoliz and the chambers around the antae that led to the holy decks. Delving five storeys into the Casus Belli, the atrium was lined with vaulted galleries, four open stairways ringing the walls from top to bottom.
They had arrived at a landing halfway down, literally in the middle of a firefight. Traitor legionaries held the upper floors, standing at the rails and firing down at the defenders taking shelter in the adjacent corridors and halls. White-clad bodies littered the stairs and landings, the pale stone splashed with crimson. Bullets whined into the renegades from above as duct-runners sprang monkey-like between the girders of the vaults and others fired from the atmospheric circulation hatches. Now and then a traitor turned his weapon upwards to unleash a storm of bolts, but the nimble Armageddon veterans never remained in one place long enough to suffer the return fire.
‘We can’t go out into that,’ said Ghelsa, reeling back as a bolt exploded on the walkway just in front of them. Shards of ferrocrete spattered the corpse mound and fell onto her.
‘Not yet, not yet,’ agreed Dazi. She shuffled to the archway, leaned out to snap off a brace of shots and then scuttled back to them as bolt detonations threw shrapnel from the arch and floor. ‘Friends will be coming soon. Friends with bigger guns.’
‘How soon?’ demanded Harkas.
‘As soon as they are woken up,’ said Aszad. ‘No sooner.’
‘There must be some other way down,’ said the inquisitor.
‘Plenty,’ replied Aszad. ‘But they are sealed to stop the enemy using them. The big gates are shut, and that channels them here to be killed. Unless you have an override?’
‘We can take you another way, through the vents,’ said Dazi. She looked at Ghelsa and shook her head sadly. ‘But not you, big one.’
Ghelsa met Harkas’ gaze and nodded.
‘You should go,’ she said. ‘You don’t need me anymore.’
He looked disappointed but answered with a nod of his own.
‘You have delivered me to the akropoliz, as we agreed. The hyperezia will not be looking for you here.’ He paused as the crack of a fragmentation grenade reverberated up the atrium, followed by an intense thunder of bolter fire. ‘Thank you for your assistance so far.’
Ghelsa was lost for words, not quite sure how she felt. Harkas was right – she had achieved what she had set out to do. And yet it felt like she had an unfinished task to complete.
‘Who are you, strange one?’ Dazi asked Harkas. ‘What do you want in the command decks?’
Harkas shook his head. ‘I cannot tell you.’
Ghelsa was about to speak up for him, to tell the others that Harkas was an inquisitor, but she stopped herself. It was clear he did not want to share that information. More than that, for the first time since they had fled the hyperezia, she asked herself whether she really knew what he intended.
‘I can see you are tributai,’ Aszad said to Ghelsa. He jerked his head towards Harkas in his stolen uniform. ‘He’s no skitarii. Do you trust him?’
A terrible thought cast its shadow on her. What if Harkas was with the rebels? His insistence on coming to the akropoliz seemed convenient now. Had he known about the traitor legionaries’ plan to launch an aerial attack? As much as his outlandish gear and attitude might make him an inquisitor, it was equally likely he was trying to get to the holy decks to open the doors and let the renegades in. Had she been complicit in letting a heretek gain access to the holiest part of the Casus Belli?
Her stomach knotted in apprehension and she forced out a few words. ‘I’ll come with you.’
‘It’s too small,’ said Dazi.
Harkas walked a little way back down the corridor, gesturing for Ghelsa to accompany him. She bent down to hear his whisper.
‘I have to get to the moderatus prime to retrieve my sigil. If I can get into the command centre with Dazi, I need to do it.’
&n
bsp; ‘I have a better idea,’ said Ghelsa, thinking as quickly as she could. She had only a half-formed idea but knew Harkas wouldn’t give her the time to mull it over. She just had a bad feeling – that clumsy, organic instinct again – and didn’t want to let Harkas get away from her. ‘There’s no point getting in there if the traitors break in and kill everybody straight after. They could even be working with the hereteks. If they reach the antae then what’s to stop the tech-priests just opening the gate for them? Why not drive out the traitors first and then get our new friends to take us in after that?’
He sat back on his heels, considering this, the arc rifle across his knees. From the atrium the sound of bolters and the crash of armoured boots grew louder, signalling a renewed assault by the traitors. The skitarii fusillades intensified in response, lighting the corridor with azure and scarlet reflections.
‘You are right,’ said Harkas.
He stood up and checked the power cell on the arc rifle with a surprisingly practised motion, obviously familiar with the weapon. There were so many little contradictions, it drove Ghelsa mad trying to pin down who he really might be.
Harkas pointed the gun at the bodies strewn across the corridor and then to her multi-tool.
‘You might want to get yourself a weapon with more range,’ he said.
‘I don’t think so.’ Ghelsa eyed the arc pistols and mitralocks. ‘I’m tributai, not skitarii. I’m just as likely to blow your head off as do any good with one of those.’
Harkas looked at her, frowning. ‘Being tributai does not define you, Ghelsa vin Jaint,’ he said, stepping close. ‘Do not let others restrict what you can be.’
‘I am not ashamed to be tributai,’ she replied, angry at the assumption and condescension in his statement. ‘Without us the Casus Belli would be an empty shell, like a corpse drained of blood. The Machine-God gives it spirit, but all of us together – duluz, hyperezia and skitarii – bring it to life.’