“It’s reconfiguring itself all the time,” said Ajir. “How could you ever find your way around this thing? Enter one room here and a moment later you exit it on the other side of the complex!”
A slab of deck ground past them as Mohl located a skinny copper podium and bent over it. Rafen saw the thin, snake-fast movements of his mechadendrites as they probed outward and found interface ports on the podium’s surface.
“Cover him,” he ordered, and brought his bolter to his shoulder. Aiming upward, through the weapon’s targeting scope he picked out a flight of clockwork monitor birds as they broke off from a circular flight pattern and angled towards them.
Puluo braced himself and unleashed an arc of shell-fire into the air from his heavy bolter, the rounds killing most of the machine-proxies with murderous blowback.
Mohl shivered and stepped down. “No maps for this place,” he coughed. “There are wards in place and the Archeohort’s machine-spirit is conflicted. But even as it will not show me some things, that too is a guide of sorts.”
“We go where it doesn’t want us to go?” said Kayne.
“Aye,” replied the Techmarine. He tapped his helmet. “I have computed a route. I have it here, but we must go now. If we tarry, the configuration will shift and it will be rendered meaningless.”
Another deck slab rotated into place, and Mohl made for it, the rest of them following him.
Rafen grimaced at the mad geometry all about him. “How can we hope to find a way through this giant’s puzzle?”
Noxx gestured towards his man. “We make sure we keep Mohl alive.”
The harpoons were taller than the statues atop Mount Seraph. Spinning, barbed things the length of a gun-cutter or system boat, they were ejected from the Archeohort’s interior and ranged up and out through the hidden ports, probing after the Gabriel and the Tycho. The weapons had crews, after a fashion, if one were willing to give that name to a handful of limbless human torsos tanked in shock-resistant canisters of support fluid.
Chains with links that could loop a hundred men, double-and triple-threaded, rippled out behind the thruster-guided lances, screaming from helix rigs in the Archeohort’s hull. The weapons spun and twirled, racing for the bodies of their enemies.
Cannons answering with death, the two warships veered from their courses, making stiff turns that sent grinding gravity shocks the length of their iron spines; but it was not enough.
“Quickly!” The deck parted beneath Kayne’s boots, one planted on one side, one on the other, one section rising, the other dropping away. He felt strong hands take a grip on him as he reached out to take the hand of a Flesh Tearer. His fellow Astartes grunted with effort and Kayne pulled him up just as the deck they had been upon changed from horizontal to vertical orientation.
“This place is like the inside of an engine, all moving parts and grinding gears,” growled the Flesh Tearer. “My thanks, cousin.”
“Kayne,” said the Blood Angel. “And you?”
“Eigen,” came the reply. “How these Mechanicus cog-boys can live in this and not be turned insane for looking at it, I cannot know.”
“Cogs are cogs,” shrugged the Astartes. “They’re mad enough already.”
Swift and low, the warriors threaded through ranks of quartz columns that reached away to support a vaulted roof overhead. Everywhere there were panes of glass that displayed streams of flashing machine-code, some hanging on suspensors, other chained to walls or the pillars themselves. The waterfalls of symbols cascading ever downward were utterly unintelligible to Kayne, but he knew that to someone like Mohl, these screens were filled with secrets. They were windows into the raw workings of the Archeohort and its machine-spirit, the mechanical equivalent of what he might see if he peered down a kinescope and into the swarming cells of his own blood.
Up ahead of the unit, Kayne heard Mohl call out directions; the Techmarine seemed to know where he was going, but so far each chamber they had passed through was one oddity after another. A tremor reached up through the floor and the metallic tiles beneath their boots shook.
Eigen frowned. “Not the decking this time… That was an impact from outside.”
“Perhaps our ships are making headway against this thing,” Kayne replied. “It’ll count for little if we can’t stop Zellik running for the warp, though.”
“Enemy!” The cry came from the middle of the formation—from the psyker Ceris, he noted—and in the same moment a wavering blue-white cloud phased into reality over their heads. Kayne raised his gun in time to see a face gain definition and form; a giant face coated in mirror-bright silver, shrouded by a red-trimmed hood.
“That’s him…” said Eigen. “It’s some sort of hololithic image.” The Flesh Tearer looked around, searching for anything that resembled an emitter pod.
“Astartes!” The air around them vibrated into the sound of the Magos’ voice. “You have made a great error in attacking me! I stand with all of Mars at my side! Your Chapters dare to board my vessel without my permission, kill my helots? Have you gone mad?”
Up ahead, Brother-Sergeant Rafen skidded to a halt on the polished tiles and shouted back his defiance to the floating image. “Surrender, Zellik. Present yourself to us now and I’ll consider lenience. Your petty infractions of Mechanicus laws are of no importance to me. But you have information we want, and we will not leave without it.”
Zellik spluttered with amazement and ire, the sound like the clicking of switches. “Your arrogance outstrips your idiocy, Blood Angel. Once I have left your warships behind, I will make your living bodies into cannon-bearers, and your Chapter Master will beg my forgiveness!”
“There!” Eigen pointed at a spherical pod floating high up in the shadows. “The projector device. You see it?”
Kayne aimed. “I see it, cousin.” He released half a breath and fired.
The sphere exploded in a flat bang of noise, and Zellik’s face winked out.
“Good shot,” remarked Puluo. “I’m already sick of him.”
The deck trembled again, and this time Kayne released a snarl of annoyance. “Not a hit this time…”
“Contact!” Eigen called, pointed once more. The Flesh Tearer had sharp eyes, it could not be denied. More tech-guards were emerging from behind a quartz pillar across the way, charging at the Space Marines.
Kayne saw something arc through the air towards him, and recognised the shape of a grenade. “To cover!” he yelled, shoving Eigen away and into the lee of another column, as gunfire erupted around them anew.
The grenade landed and detonated—but instead of an explosive discharge, a globe of emerald energy expanded out, at full size perhaps big enough to envelop a groundcar. When the glow dissipated, there was a perfect circle cut through the decking, the edges smooth and bright as if polished.
“Baal’s blood! It must be a demat sphere!” said Ceris, firing off a burst as he approached. “An archeotech weapon. Like a teleport, but everything inside the radius is disintegrated. I never thought to see such a relic in action…”
“I though those devices were a myth!” said Eigen.
“So did I,” the psyker said grimly. “It would appear otherwise.”
Kayne saw a flicker of movement. “Another one!” A second globe looped towards the assembled Space Marines, projected by a weapons-helot with a scaled-down trebuchet instead of an arm.
Kayne watched in amazement as Ceris jumped up into the air, to meet the demat sphere as it fell towards them. The psyker plucked the globe out of its arc and threw it as he dropped; it was a clumsy interception, but still effective. The sphere landed at the feet of the helot who had thrown it, and it triggered. The dissipation effect hummed and when it faded, there were only the odd, starkly severed parts of three gun-servitors remaining.
Ceris landed heavily and stumbled, drawing gunfire. Without hesitation, Kayne and Eigen ran from cover to aid him, and the three warriors broke into a dash, racing to close u
p with the rest of their comrades.
“Zellik must really want us dead,” ventured Turcio. “Those spheres are worth a governor’s ransom.”
“Then you should consider it a compliment, penitent,” said Ajir.
Mohl gestured towards a diamond-shaped door cut into the wall. “We are wasting time. Zellik is trying to trap us. This way, quickly!”
Lasers snapping at their heels, the Astartes moved on, killing everything that dared to follow them.
Tycho took the spear through the plough-shaped blades of its bow plate; Gabriel fared worse, the other harpoon entering the hull of the strike cruiser along its portside axis at an oblique angle. Both weapons buried themselves in the marrow of the warships and locked fast.
And then, even as the echo of the impacts resonated and faded, the huge chains of vacuum-forged alloy flexed and pulled taut. Deep inside the mechanism of Zellik’s great construct, wheels began to turn, gears worked, and the lines drew home, reeling them in.
The shipmasters of the Tycho and the Gabriel had given their gunnery captains leave to fire with freedom, and so they did, punishing the Archeohort for such an attack, others training guns on the lines of chain, hoping to sever them.
On the other side of the construct, a hundred tiny suns flared into being, boles of fusion fire spilling out into the void. With increasing speed, the Archeohort dragged its attackers away, moving towards clear space free of the debris that clogged this zone. Calculations were already being made, formulae computed, courses laid in. A leap to the warp would follow, and the ships now chained to the construct, like rabid dogs straining at their leashes, would be ripped apart by the flux of transition.
The melta bomb exploded and took down not only the armoured hatchway sealing off the command chamber, but also a few sections of wall to either side. The corpses of the heavy gun-servitors that had defended the entrance were ripped apart where they lay, the ammunition in their weapons cooking off in secondary blasts. Noxx led the charge with Puluo at his side, both Astartes shouldering in through the smoke-wreathed remains of the entrance with guns blazing. Skitarii went down in disarray, those that had not already been killed by the funnelled blast of the breaching charge.
Rafen followed them in, Turcio and Ajir at his flanks, delivering the Emperor’s judgement with snapshot fire to the twitching, hooded figures sitting in the control pits before their command organs. The Blood Angels sergeant was only a few paces into the room when his keen Astartes senses, honed through the action of countless battles, rang a sour note in his mind. He halted suddenly. “Wait…” he began, a creeping disquiet spreading through him.
Outside, holding the corridor with the other Space Marines, Brother Ceris made a growl in his throat—a sound of warning.
Ajir was deepest into the chamber, frowning at a seated adept. For all the sudden violence of their entrance, the crew at their stations had barely reacted. The warrior pushed the barrel of his bolter into the adept’s back and gave it a hard shove. The figure rocked forward and the hood fell away.
There was no face beneath it, only an oddly featureless orb crafted to vaguely resemble a human head. It was a mannequin, little more than a body-proxy like those deployed on firing galleries. Rafen had destroyed thousands of them in target practice with his bolter and his sword.
Noxx ripped the cloak from another crew-serf, then another and another. All were identical automata, ghosting through the motions of a command crew. Only the handful of tech-guards that had been in the room appeared to be what they had seemed. “What is this?” demanded the Flesh Tearer.
Mohl was behind him. “This is the command centre…” he muttered. “I am certain…”
“It’s a fake,” said Turcio. “Like a castle made of cloth and wood to fool a distant observer!”
Rafen glared at a console before him; it was nothing but a flat panel of blinking lights. “Out!” he shouted.
The order came too late. Mohl flung himself away as a sheet of metal dropped like a guillotine blade across the ruined entranceway, cutting off any means of escape. Immediately, the deck began to shift as a crack opened in the floor beneath their feet. The false consoles yawned open like mouths to accept the mannequins, folding away into hidden spaces like some clever theatre trick. Stanchions and supports contracted into themselves, every handhold slowly retracting as the angle of the floor became steeper with every passing moment.
A belch of hot, dry air vented into the chamber and Rafen caught sight of a harsh orange glow beneath them. A long tray of molten metal, perhaps a conveyer barge from the foundry modules of the Archeohort’s factorium, was sliding into place down there, ready to accept them when they lost their grip and fell.
As a trap, it was as elaborate and melodramatic as one might have expected from an arrogant Mechanicus tech-lord, and as Rafen looked up, he saw the ceiling overhead fold back to present a hanging gondola pod, and in it, behind glass and webs of brass, an adept and a bodyguard of skitarii. He saw no silver mask—it was not Zellik himself, then—but he could not miss the cluster of optical relays bristling from the bottom of the gondola. Wherever he was, the damned skulk was watching them inch towards death as if it were some kinema performance made for his amusement.
Boots scraping against the steepening floor, Rafen punched an armoured fist through the metal and made a temporary handhold for himself. He heard Puluo utter a curse as the Devastator Space Marine almost lost his grip before Noxx pulled him back.
They had moments before the strange folding room turned itself inside-out and deposited them all into the embrace of the molten iron. Even with their power armour, it would be questionable if the Space Marines could survive for more than a few seconds in such incredible temperatures.
“If we fall, he falls with us,” Rafen snarled, and with his free hand took aim at the gondola. His bolter crashed, and with it sounded shot and shell from his comrades as they joined in the attack. For a moment it seemed as if the defiant gesture would be in vain; but then the armoured glass webbed with fractures and splintered. Red and black fluid spurted through the shimmering air and a heavy tech-guard tumbled past them, falling soundlessly into the hot bath of liquid metal. The gondola began a desultory retreat along a dangling cable, but it was too late. By exposing themselves to watch the Space Marines die, the Mechanicus lackeys had placed themselves in the firing line.
With a stuttering wail of binary, the cloaked adept lost balance, stumbled into the air and fell, serpentine cyberlimbs whipping about, snatching at nothing.
Cursing the choice he was forced to make, Rafen let his precious bolter fall from his fingers to release his free hand. Extending as far as he dared, the Blood Angel lashed at the adept’s robes and grabbed a handful of them. He grunted as the additional weight strained his one handhold, but did not release.
Beneath him, his weapon spiralled away into the glowing, sluggish liquid, melting into a string of hard, concussive blasts as the ammunition exploded with the heat.
The adept twisted about and came to rest dangling from the Space Marine’s arm. He looked up, showing a face that was almost human; only his sapphire-blue augmetic eyes ruined the illusion. The Mechanicus tech-priest wore an expression of utter panic.
“That gun served me well,” Rafen snarled. “Give me a reason why I should not send you to fetch it back!”
The adept’s binary chatter warped and changed, becoming recognisable speech. “Zero zero zero no no no no,” he rattled. “Please no, zero, no! My orders… I did not—”
“Stop this death trap!” shouted the Blood Angel. “Or I swear you’ll perish screaming!”
“One one one yes yes yes!” The tech-priest stuttered out a reply, and from beneath his cloak came a viper’s nest of mechadendrites. Manipulator tips reached for the walls, probing, flipping open seamless panels that Rafen had not even known were there. The adept gave a clicking sigh, and at once the floor reversed its motion. The contracting panels and columns were arrested, the
n began to telescope once more. In moments, the chamber was resetting itself, returning to its original form.
Rafen stood up, still holding the tech-priest in his grip, as the metal wall behind him rose in stutters. Heavy impact marks had distended it where Ceris and the others had tried to break through.
The psyker advanced warily into the false room. “Lord?” he asked, the question in his hard eyes.
The sergeant did not answer; instead he drew his power sword from the scabbard across his backpack and pressed the glowing blade to his prisoner’s chest. “Where is Matthun Zellik?” he demanded.
The adept gulped air. Blood and oil dripped from his dangling limbs, pooling on the deck. “Understand, Astartes, I could not stop him.”
“I did not ask you for an excuse,” Rafen growled. “You came to capture the moments of our deaths for your master’s pleasure. You have already forfeit your life to me. Answer, and it will end quickly.”
Noxx took a menacing step closer to the struggling tech-priest. “More than he deserves,” snarled the Flesh Tearer. “Give him to me, cousin. I’ll make him speak.” The other sergeant drew his flaying knife, the wicked barbs along one edge glinting.
“I do not know where he is!” shouted the terrified adept. “I, Logis Goel Beslian, swear on my oath to the Omnissiah that I do not know! Zellik’s sanctum cube is in constant motion throughout the mechanism of the Archeohort. You cannot find him unless he wants you to!”
Rafen’s lips thinned. “Then, my esteemed Logis Beslian, you have no more value to us.” He turned the sword to present the tip to the adept’s sternum.
Blood Angels - The Complete Rafen Omnibus - James Swallow Page 88