The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

  More degenerate still were the vat-spawned mutants that appeared as if they had climbed straight out of their gene-tanks and into battle. War-savants and code-fevered priests barked orders in harsh binaric to skitarii soldiers. Encouragement rained through the darkness in the form of sheet gunfire hurled across the meltwater by auto-emplacements and sentinel-towers fielding great gatling blasters and mega-bolters in the forge temple’s defence. Smoke-spewing drones coursed above the delirium, while the anti-personnel artificials, light combat-mechanoids and hunter-killer automata formed the possessed backbone of the maniacal surge.

  The Carrion shook his head. Like the Schism of Mars, like the civil war now swallowing the galaxy – it was an incredible waste. The Raven Guard made his way up the shuddering incline, hurdling scrap and hauling himself over rusted obstacles. The Null kept pace, pushing on ahead of the abominable intelligence and its heretek attendants. The monstrous battle-automata thundered up behind, shaking the conveyor support struts with their every step.

  It was vital that their entry did not attract attention. As something metallic and sparking fell from the sky and rounded the forge temple-tops, the Raven Guard blasted it with his graviton gun. The ocularis drone smashed into the temple wall and dropped, bouncing its way down the conveyor belt towards them. Looking at the smoking shell of the machine, the Carrion watched as it cracked like a spoiled egg, bleeding liquid corruption all over the conveyor.

  The Carrion led the constructs into the forge complex, exchanging the polar cold for the searing heat of a raging mill. Magna-arc furnaces melted scrap down into colossal containers and channels of molten metal that separated the mixture of alloys contained in the remnants. The labyrinthine network of mesh catwalks, skeletal stairwells and interconnecting companionways through which the industrial conveyor passed ran above and between the pools of boiling metal. The radiance was unnatural, the infernal mill a place where old Mars came to die. Here materials were recycled and rendered, so that they might be used to create new weapons and servants: an army fuelled by darkness and fit to fight for the Warmaster’s new empire.

  The roar of the furnaces threatened to split the eardrum, but didn’t prevent the demented scrapcode from being vox-hailed through the mill for the adoration of its anchored workforce. The forge was largely automated, with a range of heavy-duty furnace-mecha, mono-task production units, drone machinery and heat shield-clad robotic menials doing the majority of the labour. Machines melted down machines in order to make more machines. Moored pit servitors, with skin scorched to blackness, wailed their excruciating insanity as the Carrion and his constructs tramped between the metal channels and molten falls.

  ‘It was considerate of you to enter through the recycling mill,’ a booming metallic echo of a voice cut through the screeching vox-hailers.

  It was an impossible voice. Modulated, but recognisable. A voice that should have been no more.

  A voice that the Carrion recognised as belonging to his friend. The Iron Warrior.

  Aulus Scaramanca.

  Reconfigure

  ‘If violence ensues in the sanctity of this forge temple then my constructs will not have to drag the deadweight of your quality augmetics and automata far to the smelting pits.’ The humourless mechanical drone echoed about the cavernous mill.

  ‘Aulus?’ the Carrion called, his hearts thumping. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘After a fashion,’ the Iron Warrior said, his modulated voice cutting through the molten hiss of industry. ‘What you left of me… and much more.’

  Something huge stepped down through the nest of derricks, support struts and catwalks. Aulus Scaramanca was no longer an engineered wonder of his primarch’s flesh and blood. He was a monstrous machine, an engineered wonder of Mars, constructed of metal and pure hatred. The Iron Warrior was huge, taller than the siege-automata they had faced outside the forge temple – as tall, perhaps, as an Imperial Knight or Martian war walker. His armoured legs were of brute hydraulics and battered armour. His midriff was a narrow pivoting column, supporting a broad armoured thorax that seemed to be all pauldron-plates and combat chassis, with two colossal appendage-arms. Each arm snaked with cables and crackling power feeds, terminating in monstrous grapple-claws, each talon tapering to a delicate point that arced with electromagnetic energy.

  The construct was dripping with chains. Its scarred plate was studded and painted in the dun colours favoured by the IV Legion, as well as decorated with yellow hazard stripes. In the centre of the gargantuan chest was a ­battered, leering helm in the fashion of the Iron Warriors dour iconography. Before it was a pair of smaller arm-appendages equipped with digi-tools for close work. The size and position of the skull made the monstrous construct appear hunchbacked, but this was only exacerbated by the great globed back of the thing. Ensconced in a reinforced placement was a reactor of molten iron, glowing and spinning like the liquid metal core of a planet. The same radiance reached out from the eye slits and vox grille of the central helm, lending the construct an infernal quality.

  ‘Aulus…’ the Carrion said again. ‘I… How?’

  ‘How?’ the Iron Warrior boomed back. ‘The genius of Mars. When the tower-preceptory collapsed, I was the only survivor beyond you. What was left of me crawled out of the mountain of rubble days after it was demolished, and most of that was a useless mess. Can you imagine, Carrion, the will it took to do that?’

  The Raven Guard said nothing.

  ‘A will of iron,’ Aulus Scaramanca told him. ‘I thought you might return, but you didn’t. I didn’t even know if you were alive. Instead I was found by the magi of Mars. The new Mechanicum.’

  ‘A false Mechanicum,’ the Carrion challenged. ‘Enemies of the Omnissiah, in league with traitors and heretics.’

  ‘You lecture me on heresy,’ Aulus Scaramanca thundered, ‘yet you arrive in the company of the heretic and the abomination yourself. It matters not how you judge or what you think – just as it didn’t matter to me. They offered me a new body. Something to replace all that I had been and more. A body of iron. So that I might survive the procedure, they introduced me to the wonder of the code. A datastream of living consciousness. An altered state. A new way to exist. A life beyond the limitations of flesh and iron. I was disappointed with their first efforts and killed them with the body they had created, for their lack of vision. The magi built me a second and I did the same. Only now am I… complete. I am iron. Within and without.’

  The Carrion couldn’t bear to look upon the thing his friend had become.

  ‘Aulus, you must–’

  ‘Listen to you?’ the Iron Warrior asked. ‘Listen to reason? To my conscience? As my primarch did? A lot has changed in a short space of time, Carrion, as your presence here demonstrates. I serve my primarch Perturabo, and the Warmaster. Mars will be ready for the coming of Horus. I shall ensure it. The Mechanicum has charged me with such a duty. Mars, secure. Impregnable. A worthy fortress world from which to launch the final conquest of a galactic empire and the seat of its Imperial dominion – ancient Terra. I know not which master you serve now, Carrion. Your plate is testament to none. Before a siege, an Iron Warrior starts by knowing the weaknesses of the site he wishes to defend and protect. By understanding best where he himself would attack. Only then can he appreciate how best to fortify it. I know the weaknesses of Mars, my friend, just as I know the weaknesses of this forge temple. The Invalis. The weakness of flesh. The Vertex and the vulnerability of magnetospheric shield. You forget – I was there. I saw you coming before you even knew you were. You shouldn’t have needed half-remembered hereteks and a silica animus to have told you how to destroy Mars. That is the comforting thing about abominable intelligences though… They always fail.’

  ‘I will complete my mission,’ the Carrion told Aulus Scaramanca.

  ‘Your mission is futile,’ the Iron Warrior boomed, the baleful illumination burning bright within his mouth-grille and eye
­sockets. ‘I have stationed every available construct I have in defence of the mighty Vertex. You will not reach it. You will not interfere with the reverence of its ancient construction. Mars has new masters. You will not be allowed to threaten the shadow-sanctity of the new Mechanicum’s domain, or the Warmaster’s inheritance.’

  As the Iron Warrior spoke, the Carrion scanned the mill complex for exits. The conveyor belt was only taking them closer to the monstrous machine that was Aulus Scaramanca. Every bulkhead, blast door and freightway was crowded with forge temple security forces: skitarii, gun servitors, cybernetic shock troops, battle-automata. The Carrion looked back up the conveyor but a swift spectra-scan with his bionic eye revealed a skitarii assault carrier hovering in the frozen air outside. The aircraft’s weapons were hot and the servitor slave-pilot at the controls waiting to call an abrupt end to any attempted retreat.

  ‘Why waste your function on a suicide mission?’ Aulus Scaramanca put to them across his vox-hailers. ‘For those of faraway flesh? It is illogical. Some of you are already hereteks. Our time has come. Join us. Take of the code. Serve both the new glory of the Red Planet and – for once – yourselves. Carrion, we can wipe clean the memory of the old Mars. We can construct a new empire, together.’

  Seconds passed with the conveyor taking the Carrion and his constructs onwards toward the Iron Warrior. The Raven Guard’s cogitator burned with the demands of data-processing the rapidly unfolding futility of the situation.

  ‘Don’t do this,’ Aulus Scaramanca implored. ‘Don’t be the Carrion come to feed off the death of the past. Become the future.’

  ‘Bool,’ the Carrion said to the heretek. ‘Have your construct get the abominable intelligence to safety.’

  ‘I saved your life once,’ Aulus Scaramanca said.

  ‘Automata, stand by,’ the Carrion said to the Null and the machines of the First Maniple. ‘Attack patterns authorised.’

  ‘Don’t make me take back the gift I gave you…’ the monstrous machine warned him. In the metallic ring of his booming voice, the Carrion could hear all the bitterness, the emptiness and pain of what he had become. Aulus Scaramanca was his friend and he would do him one last service, if he could.

  He would destroy him.

  The Carrion and his constructs stepped off the conveyor belt onto the scorched metal platform running alongside. The heat was blinding. At the same time, Uncannical beat its fabricated wings, taking its cherubim body and the orb of the Tabula Myriad up away from the rising heat of molten metal and up into the metal rafters of the mill. The monstrous construct that was Aulus Scaramanca shook its metal helm in the searing silence of disappointment. The forge temple’s security forces began hammering their way across companionways and down industrial stairwells towards the Carrion and his attendant automata.

  ‘Enact,’ the Knight Errant ordered.

  Simultaneously the Carrion and the battle-automata unleashed their weaponry on the deviants and dark machinery stomping towards them.

  They suddenly found themselves face-to-face with the forge master’s skitarii security forces: pallid ghoul-soldiers whose bleached flesh was interfaced with twisted black weaponry. Their fusils screamed beams of dark energy and seemed in control of the skitarii rather than the other way around. The weapons were hungry for sacrifice and led their host symbiotes through the maze of catwalks, stairwells and mesh-platforms that ran around and above the lakes of molten metal.

  A furious exchange of fire blazed across the companionways, with the Kastelans tearing through the mill with bolt fire. Several dark beams punched through the Null’s insensitive flesh, prompting the servo-­automata to bring up her rotor gun. The multi-barrels whirred to lethality before their muzzles became a blinding flare. Sparks rained from the metalwork as shells tore up the companionway and the train of weapon-possessed skitarii were shredded in their tracks.

  As the rotor gun clunked to a stop, the mill alarms could be heard. On the balcony platforms above, the Carrion could see engine-overseers in helmet-hooded flame-resistant robes directing temple security forces down on their position. Albino skitarii reinforcements, driven on by their accursed weaponry, flooded the walkways. Ahead, the Carrion and Di-Delta 451 engaged bloated gun-servitors with stitched, shaven skulls and dead eyes. Instead of arms, the fat servitors shouldered twin-linked heavy weapons that were fused to the bone and braced across their chubby necks like a yoke. They belly-laughed their insanity at the interlopers as their heavy bolters crashed death up the walkway.

  ‘Clear a path!’ the Carrion ordered.

  Dex stomped past with Impedicus and, risking a glance behind, Di-Delta 451 saw that Little Auri and Nulus were holding the gun-drunk skitarii behind with targeted and disciplined bursts of bolt fire, while soaking up blasts of dark energy on their synchronised fields and plate meant for the Carrion and Octal Bool.

  With the injured Null pinned down and taking cover behind the mesh and railings, Dex and Impedicus took the walkway at a determined stomp. Leaning out over the liquid metal, the Carrion aimed his graviton gun and turned the corrupted corpulence of the lead gun-servitor into a mound of broken bone and butchery. Its place was taken by a needle-toothed compatriot that slowed the robots with a hailstorm of dark beams. As the force of the assault hammered off Dex’s synchronised atomantic field and the battered plate of its carapace, Impedicus drew ahead, leading with return fire from its own belt-fed mauler cannon.

  The Carrion felt the walkway rock. It bounced a second and third time as what little give the structure had left was spent absorbing the extra weight of additional bodies. Mechanoid reinforcements were leaping from companion­way to companionway with the agility of death world predators. The spindly hydraulics of their biped legs carried them across the molten death below with powerful anchor-talons latching onto the bars and meshing – Vorax-class hunter-killer units.

  They zeroed in on the Carrion and his constructs with the large sensor-optics of their mantid heads. Once again, the enemy had deployed. Bringing up their back-mounted irad-cleansers, the machines vented bursts of radioactive death at the interlopers before launching themselves forwards. The hunter-killers made short work of the companionway as further members of the pack-maniple landed on the catwalk. The Null made them run the gauntlet of her rotor gun but the Vorax benefitted from the finest reflexes battle-automata had to offer. Lowering their chassis and propelling themselves off rails and meshing, they avoided the worst of the shell storm, the remaining bullets sparking off the hunter-killers’ light armour.

  The sweeping rotor blasts finally found and chewed through the leg of the lead unit, and it slammed into the mesh flooring and ­tumbled into a clunky roll. The battle-automaton came to rest at Nulus’ feet and the machine instinctively stamped down on the small head of the deviant thing. Di-Delta 451’s follow-up went wide, allowing a second artificial to leap its fallen comrade construct, burying its anchor-talons in the unfortunate servo-automata. Nulus smashed the hunter-killer aside with its power fist before finishing the thing with a burst of bolt fire from its mauler cannon.

  The companionway was swarming with the machine predators by the time Di-Delta 451’s rotary cannon ran dry. As Vorax tore up the companion­way, batting each other aside in their drive to maim and murder, telescopic tri-blades on their flanks extended. Locking into wicked claws and crackling with the unnatural energies flowing through the constructs’ power cores, the blades began to revolve at blinding speed, turning the flanks of the mechanoids into wheels of streaking death. The Null was the first to experience the revolving power blades. There was nothing she could do to protect herself from the onslaught, and she disappeared in a blur of light and butchery.

  The Carrion blasted mechanoid after mechanoid off the companionway at close range. Then, turning his weapon on the molten metal below, the Knight Errant slammed a shot of invisible force into the crusted slurp. The liquid metal splashed ceilingward in a glorious, gol
d fountain that upon its descent turned the swollen-­bellied gun-servitors holding the catwalk ahead into howling fusions of melting metal and flesh.

  The Carrion suddenly felt the quake of monstrous footsteps through the superstructure of the catwalk. It was the horrific colossus-­construct of Aulus Scaramanca. The machine seared with agonies undreamed, with the bitterness of iron and hatreds that knotted his wiring and workings. Betrayed at every turn by friend, foe and the Carrion before him – who in the galactic emptiness of falling empires bereft of brotherhood might have been considered both – the corruption of the code fed a fury that already existed in the construct’s raging core. The Iron Warrior became a barely restrained maelstrom of cold machine anger.

  He moved in to do what his temple constructs had failed to achieve. Opening the talons of his electromagnetic claw and with the globe of molten iron spinning in its back-mounting, Aulus Scaramanca used the field-forces to tear through the mill like an invisible storm. The Iron Warrior clawed at the air and thrust his revolving talons at the sky. He tore up the struts, platforms and companionways running over the liquid metal below. The magnetic forces directed from the claws were immense, and the three-dimensional labyrinth of black metal companionways, stairwells and structures rent and twisted with invisible ease. The sound was excruciating. Wreckage, screeching hunter-killers and traitor constructs rained from the fury of the Iron Warrior’s magnetic assault, hissing into the lakes of liquid metal below.

  The factorum complex quaked, shaking stairwells and walkways loose. Electromagnetic explosions rippled through nearby machinery. Platforms and meshing cascaded to the mill floor, carrying with them anchored drones, as well as hordes of code-fevered skitarii and warped gun-­servitors. A molten deluge flew up at the demolished impact, before falling back through its own steam. Those fortunate enough not to plunge to their deaths were splattered with boiling metal and seared to the wrecked companionways.