The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

  These forge worlders fought a guerrilla war against the new overlords of Mars, little realising that it was their own Fabricator General who had betrayed them to Horus Lupercal and unleashed dark, ruinous secrets from repositories of techno-heresy like the dread Vaults of Moravec.

  As the battle-automata of the Daedarii Reserve Cohort marched their indomitable way south, the Carrion observed the failures of the loyalists. The robot maniples stamped through the irradiated bones of rag-tag ­soldiers who had been launching hit and run attacks on traitor convoys in the frigid deserts. They passed through demolished hab-hives where resistance constructs had fought a short-lived urban war in the narrow freightways and dere­lict structures. Their priest-leaders toiled in workshops to discover a way to reverse the corruption of the code that, like a plague, took as many of their number as the weapons of traitor thralls and infected automata.

  Then there were the forge temples of the south – some of which had embraced new developments like noospherics, which had offered the great anvil-altars of the Omnissiah some protection against the virulent ruin spilling through the datastreams, hardlines and wireless feeds. These the Daedarii Reserve Cohort found to be gone. Entire temples had been wiped off the face of Mars by Titan war machines, by airstrikes of the Taghmata Aeronautica and orbital barrages launched from Arks Mechanicum stationed beyond the contested Ring of Iron.

  The Carrion admired the spirit of the Martian freedom fighters. It was the Raven Guard’s kind of warfare – striking from the shadows, stealth, sabotage and the lightning sweep of hit and run attacks. These tactics had failed the loyalist guerrillas, however. Beyond the constant threat of scrapcode infection – the corruption ever attempting to worm its way into the untainted workings of the constructs – the freedom fighters were battling against the dark masters of Mars, a Mechanicum removed, revering no longer the Machine-God but dread technological wonders, powers incalculable and forbidden knowledge from which the Omnissiah had so long protected them. These code-screeching slaves, re-forged in purpose and form by the dark fires of ignorance and otherworldly influence, were unremitting in their destruction of the Omnissiah’s true servants. Unified in their shared corruption, they exterminated the loyalist Mechanicum with a prejudice primordial and extreme.

  What flesh and iron could not be warped to the new purpose of Kelbor-Hal, the Warmaster and their infernal allies, had to be destroyed. This was the story Mars told as the Daedarii Reserve Cohort trudged south through sand and frost. Beam-riddled bodies in Omnissian red. Blackened crater-fields left in the wake of airstrikes and god-machine mega-weaponry. Forges forgotten in apocalyptic fire, the blasted red rock of horizon-scraping hollows and unnatural energies blazing down from orbit.

  Still, despite such odds, the Carrion’s legionary eye, his knowledge of Mars and his tactical instincts told him that there was something else at work. In the darkness of the south, where the long polar night and the distant fires of traitor forges had plunged the Red Planet into a sickly twilight, the Raven Guard felt that there were other forces moving. The ruinous oligarchy and feudal priesthood of the ruling magi directed the traitor forces of Mars with the dread authority of their overlord, Kelbor-Hal. Forces on the ground, however, were insanity-canting cybernetic monstrosities. Their sickness-streamed protocols might have dictated their movement, industry and deployment, but the perversions of vat-flesh and constructs of haunted iron were drunk on the dark power that scarified their systems. They were things of mindless madness, throwing off the sober deportment of their previous existence. They stalked. They murdered. They destroyed.

  The Carrion’s cogitator, training and battle experience told him that such successes were not to be expected from such monstrous aberrations. He considered who on Mars the traitor Kelbor-Hal would trust to secure the dawn of his dark empire from remnant loyalists, freedom-fighting constructs and even possible reclamation forces from Terra. Which of his archmagi-militant, his synod-persecutors, magi-reductor, myrmidax or ordinators had the Fabricator General entrusted the security of Mars to? The infamous Skeltar-Thrax? Aloysio Suvias? Haxmyn Tryphon? Perhaps even a trans-Martian, an off-worlder like Cornelis Varicari? The Carrion did not know, and there was little in the scorched bones and obliterated wreckage of loyalist guerrillas left behind to tell him.

  As the sinister computations and predictive calculations of the Tabula Myriad drove the battle-automata of the Daedarii Reserve Cohort south – into darkness and dropping temperatures – and on from victory to decisive victory, the Carrion could not help but feel that he was part of a game. A tactical contest not unlike the one Lord Dorn and the Regent Malcador had discussed, where the frosted sands of the Martian south were the board and Mechanicum constructs the pieces.

  It was possible the Tabula Myriad was not the only dread intelligence at work in these war-torn lands. Although the abomination communicated nothing of such knowledge, the Carrion noticed that the exigency engine guided its army of slave battle-automata with strategic subtlety and sophistication – as if it were playing against an expert tactician, a master in ordnance and fortification.

  The abominable intelligence would avoid some engagements while taking the Daedarii out of its way to indulge others. Sometimes it would direct its battle-automata to march relentlessly towards their mission objective while at other times it had the cohort trudge leagues out of its way, through harsh terrain and over snow-capped mountain ranges. As the days and weeks wore on, the skies blacker, the stabbing temperatures colder and the heat of battle ever fiercer, the Carrion became convinced that the abominable intelligence and its treacherous opposite were playing deadly games with force disposition and an approach on the great polar forge of the south – the traitor-held temple of Vertex Australis.

  The Carrion pulled the frost-stiff material of his black robes about the grey of his plate. The length of his ice-laced hair framed the rawness of his pale face. It was the only bit of his engineered body that could feel the ferocious temperatures, but just looking at Di-Delta 451 and Eta/Iota~13 in their goggles, infrarctic robes and turbans made the Knight Errant feel cold. The cyber-raven Strix hopped between the node-columns protruding from the Carrion’s shoulders, his feathers frosted, but the columns provided a little welcome warmth.

  The Knight Errant and his attendant automata were travelling in a Triaros-class armoured transport – a heavy-duty galvanic traction engine armoured with thick plate. Octal Bool had recovered the carrier-engine from an all but demolished loyalist workshop. The guerrilla constructs had been brutally executed by heavily-augmented shock-troops – a number of which lay broken on the ground as evidence of the determination with which the loyalists had defended their meagre base of operations. Bool found the carrier-engine to have been stripped of servitors and its systems code-scrubbed by the workshop transmechanics. Appropriated for the ease of transporting the biologicals and the Tabula Myriad itself, the Mechanicum carrier-engine chewed up the Martian soil and ice behind the impassive synchronicity of the battle-­automata. Like an ancient Terran warlord, the abominable intelligence marched its war machines up and down the scree of red mountain slopes, through demolished manufactoria and around the distant balelight and sky-skewering discharges that proceeded from traitor-fortified forge temples.

  Prompting Strix to hop onto the digits of his hydraulic hand, the Carrion popped the cyber-raven on the Void’s shoulder. As he got up, the Null went to get to her feet.

  ‘Remain,’ the Carrion ordered. He gave the silent, dead-eyed Uncannical and the incessant whirring and ticking of the interlocking orb of cogs and gears that was the Tabula Myriad a wide berth, climbing up out of the service bay and onto the platform of the control dais. There the Knight Errant found Octal Bool at the carrier-engine’s controls, swathed in thermal robes.

  They were deep in the polar wastes now. The Carrion could hear the armoured feet of the battle-automata crunching down through carbon dioxide snow and ice, while even the heavy-duty t
racks of the vehicle were having difficulty with the depths of the drift through which it was ploughing. The vehicle’s simple energy shielding sizzled through the freeze and kept the worst of the searing wind off the open cab-dais. Here, on the approach to the pole, the abominable intelligence had settled on a route through some of the most dangerous terrain the ice cap had to offer. Abyssal fissures, polychromatic ice sheets, a polar vortex of plasteel-cracking temperatures and cloud banks of freezing vapour which lent, if it were possible, the long night of the south an even greater murk and obscurity.

  Even with the carrier-engine’s search lamps on, the Carrion could barely see the rearmost machines in the cohort columns of Daedarii battle-­automata. The robots were white-washed with snow, marching on dauntlessly into the darkness. Not being able to use the code-corrupted communication channels, seamless coordination was entirely reliant on the miniature exigency engines turning, clicking and whirring in their chests, and the unspeaking communion they shared with the Tabula Myriad itself.

  Not only did the battle-automata seem to think for themselves, they thought for each other, with such thoughts being guided by the abominable intelligence. It was disconcerting and loathsome to behold, but the Carrion had to admit that such techno-heresy was serving the cohort well on its march south.

  The Kastelan-class machines had been a wonder to watch. With the heavy trudge of their hydraulic legs, the rattling plate of their combat chassis and the sizzle of atomantic shielding, the Daedarii Reserve Cohort re-lived the glorious days of off-world conquest and their contributions to the Great Crusade of mankind. Rather than magi and the inflexible algorithms of their combat wetware driving them on, under the integrated control of the Tabula Myriad, the robots were imbued with a simple self-determination that was simultaneously eerie and yet undeniably impressive to see in a machine.

  At Hadriatica, the Carrion had seen the monstrous automata stride through a sea of traitor skitarii, the flash of las-shots searing off their shielding and carapaces while the battle-automata shredded through the soldiers with maximus boltguns and hydraulic sweeps of their arm-carriages. In the ruins of the Ausonian assembly yards he saw them punch through the sides of battle-scarred Land Raiders and carrier-engines, tearing tech-thralls and heavily augmented gun-servitors out through the rents in transports and ripping them limb from limb with their chunky, powered fists.

  They had stormed the freightways and landing strips of the Eridanus deep-core mining fields – smashing through code-­corrupted excavator-constructs and chittering hordes of myrmidon mercenaries, long charged by the feudal overlords of the area to protect their interests. In the dioxide-dusted peaks of the Thylus Heights – amongst the sky-scraping vanes of the Nereitski Towers – the battle-automata cannon-hammered the sides of roving assault carriers and grav-craft that had targeted the exposed cohort on the ridge. Descending on crashed carriers, the Kastelan-class war machines stomped down the frozen slopes and set about demolishing the aircraft. Crushing the tech-thralls escaping the crash-site under armoured feet, they mauled the wreckage and survivors with their shoulder-mounted bolt weaponry before tearing sections off the carrier and downing nearby code-screeching aircraft with hurled wreckage.

  The battle-automata had taken losses, nonetheless. A marauding Warhound Scout Titan had been dogging the Cohort’s indomitable steps since the remains of the Hesperia sub-hives, filling the darkness and the crisp Martian air with the booming madness of its war-horns. The great machine had been crisscrossing the Martian wastes and had finally located the Daedarii Cohort on the shores of Lake Tetanus, a seasonal body of melt­water. The Titan’s command deck lit up with ghoulish satisfaction and the ground trembled with its roar of garbled binary as its vulcan mega-­bolters did their worst.

  Turning the shoreline and rusty shallows of the lake into a maelstrom of destruction, the Warhound decimated a section of the abominable intelligence’s automata army, shredding carapaces, battle chassis and exigency engines in an unrelenting stream of fire. Swift to respond and seeing no probability of success in an assault on the Titan, the Tabula Myriad directed its maniples into the waters of the lake itself, effectively losing the infuriated war machine.

  A strike fighter bombing run lit up the night on the polychromatic expanse of ice but also cut through the columns of marching battle-­automata, turning units into scrap-strewn craters and damaging a further fifty war machines. Losses always seemed to be calculated as part of some ongoing equation being clicked and whirred inside the intricacies of the abominable intelligence.

  The remainder of the Cybernetica cohort certainly wouldn’t pass a diagnostic muster. On most of the battle-automata, the atomantic shielding reactors were operating at below half-strength, their las-scorched carapaces were buckled and bolt-ridden and their ammo-crates and autoloaders were all but empty. The synchronous march of the Daedarii units also wasn’t what it had been, with shredded cabling and hydraulics leading machines to drag armoured feet and allow weaponised limbs to hang uselessly at their sides.

  What was most startling for the Knight Errant, however, was not the way in which the battle-automata soaked up punishment – which was impressive enough – but their incredible resistance to the virulent scrapcode that had infected and wormed its way into nearly every construct on the Red Planet. No matter what malefic binaric was transmitted at them, no matter what corrupted machine attempted to interface with them and flood their workings with insanity, the Carrion saw not one battle-automaton fall to the techno-plague. With the intricacies of their own exigency engines turning, interlocking and calculating a kind of machine reason within them, the Tabula Myriad had created a construct ever-questioning, ever-countering and ever-incompatible with the darkstream.

  As the carrier-engine back-tracked to a slushy halt, the Carrion pulled himself upright in the cab-dais. ‘What is it?’ he asked Octal Bool.

  The temperatures had done little for the heretek’s raw face, but his calmness remained. He pointed out through the frozen darkness and the murk of swirling ice vapour that afflicted the Martian pole. The heretek handed the Knight Errant a pair of magnoculars. In the distance – through the miasma and the lightless polar night – the Carrion could see a colossal structure.

  ‘Is that it?’ the Space Marine asked. ‘Is that the Vertex Australis?’

  Bool nodded.

  Returning to the magnoculars, the Carrion saw the flare of ghostly lights about the great, turning axle-tower of the forge temple. The vast spindle extended through the depths of the Martian crust and into the planet’s metal core. The revolving tower released colossal amounts of energy into the heavens of the Red Planet, feeding the magnetospheric shield that protected all organic living things on Mars from the lethal radiation of the sun and deep space. As flames of unnatural power danced about the forge towers, the Carrion saw other shapes out on the ice. Three mighty war machines: more Warhound Titans. Undoubtedly one of them was the engine that had targeted the cohort before. Peering hard through the magnoculars, the lenses of which further augmented his own optic filters, the Carrion thought he could see gun emplacements out on the ice beyond the manufactoria, mills and habs that surrounded the mighty forge temple. Assault carriers drifted across the expanse in patrol patterns, kicking up snow storms about them while ocularis drones shot this way and that across the ice and about the forge.

  ‘This is not right,’ the Carrion said. ‘This is not right.’

  Octal Bool said nothing.

  As a Raven Guard, the Carrion understood the importance of stealth and its use against an over-confident enemy. Scanning the distant forge, the Carrion was spoilt for choice in terms of invitations to certain death. From the recently erected irradiator gun emplacements to the deployment of Titans and extra surveillance, it appeared very much as if the Daedarii Reserve Cohort were expected. As the Tabula Myriad had expertly weighed the probabilities and strategically guided the cohort of battle-automata across the nightmare o
f traitor-held Mars, the Carrion had been ghosted by the irrepressible suspicion that they were being hunted. How, the Knight Errant could not know. No one on the Red Planet knew of his mission. Yet, here he was – staring at an infiltration target that had been hastily fortified for a siege.

  Looking up into the darkness of the polar night sky, the Carrion could hear the rumble of engines. Somewhere above the cloud of icy vapour was a fighter wing awaiting orders for an air strike. Worse still, the Carrion could swear that the glittering constellation of lights that had moved silently and slowly across the night sky over the past few days was the Ring of Iron – re-­orienting its orbital alignment to encircle the Martian poles and deter any kind of direct attack on the Vertex Borealis, Australis or the planetary axle itself.

  ‘They know we’re coming,’ the Carrion said.

  This time, Octal Bool acknowledged his concerns. ‘The Tabula Myriad concurs,’ the heretek told him.

  Suddenly there was movement in front of the carrier-engine. Looking back through the magnoculars, the Carrion could see that the maniples of the Daedarii Cohort were splitting into three. Striding out of the murk, the battle-automata units Dex, Impedicus, Nulus, Pollex and Little Auri presented themselves to the carrier-engine.

  ‘What’s happening?’ the Knight Errant demanded of Bool and, by extension, the abominable intelligence.

  ‘The defence forces and fortifications must be engaged,’ Bool told him.

  The Carrion shook his head. ‘That’s suicide,’ he said. Even with a full cohort of battle-automata, the Daedarii Reserve stood no chance of success in a direct assault.

  ‘The Tabula Myriad is not aware of the relevance of any such concept,’ Octal Bool said. ‘Mars must be cleansed. The mission must proceed.’