The Burden of Loyalty

by Various

  The maze of multilevel companionways was now a shattered mess. Some sections had survived but much of the structure had ended up in the shallow silver sea that was bubbling away across the expanse of the mill floor. Constructs were dying everywhere: engine-overseers, gun-servitors, skitarii. Along with the mangled structures and traitor-constructs, one of the Tabula Myriad’s battle-­automata, Nulus, lost its footing and tumbled downwards to meet its molten end.

  As the damaged Nulus plunged into the raging lake, its claws snatching at the searing surface before disappearing below, the Carrion used the hydraulic power in his good leg to jump clear. Little Auri advanced on the Iron Warrior as Scaramanca claw-heaved the metal superstructure towards his augmented form, ripping support struts from walls and the mill ceiling. Wreckage rained down about the battle-automata but Auri would not be put from its indomitable path.

  The Carrion turned to find Octal Bool behind him. The Space Marine grabbed the heretek with his bionic arm and hurled the priest off the structure to safety – just as Aulus Scaramanca had done for him before. As the wretched priest landed on the platform below, the Carrion launched himself from one collapsing structure to another with all the agility he could muster. Strix had taken to the burning air, cant-cawing his distress. As the Carrion finally found purchase on a semi-stable platform, he turned his attention to the two remaining battle-automata who marched on the machine monstrosity. They were fearless. They were impassive. They were doomed.

  As their gun-mounted arms came up, Dex and Impedicus joined Little Auri in unleashing a storm of bolt-rounds at the Iron Warrior. It was the best the battle-automata could offer, but it was not enough. Aulus Scaramanca held out the palms of his electromagnetic claws. With power drawn directly from his own reactor, the gauntlets slowed the fat bolt-rounds to a standstill. Allowing the shells to fall, the monstrous machine turned the powerful magnetic fields on the attacking battle-automata.

  Clutching one claw Scaramanca seized Little Auri with the incredible magnetic forces at his command. The battle-automaton’s chassis began to spark and smoke. Contracting his claw, Scaramanca visited his terrible powers of destruction upon the battle-automaton. Carapace cracked, adamantium and endoskeletal alloys creaked and buckled. Servos popped. The construct’s plate crumpled. Oils, hydraulics and lubricant cascaded down its demolished form. Workings and wiring poured from splits and rents until all that was left of Auri was a ball of pulverised scrap. The Iron Warrior was about to do the same to Dex and Impedicus when an invisible force punched into the monstrous machine, knocking it back.

  On the platform, the Carrion fired the graviton gun again and again, blasting Aulus Scaramanca back with ferocious maximum-power pulses from the weapon. Clearing a rail, he dropped down onto the same level as the Iron Warrior, punching spidery cracks and craters in the striped plate of the colossal construct. As he did so, Dex and Impedicus emptied their arm-mounted guns and belt-fed mauler cannons at the distracted Iron Warrior, riddling the monster with bolt-rounds.

  Holding out a huge claw under the onslaught, Aulus Scaramanca rotated the talons on his wrist mounting. Delicate magnetic manipulations prompted chains, cables, hard lines and wiring to erupt from servitor-stations and the ruined architecture of the automated mill. The chains and interface cables reached out for the constructs, prompting Impedicus to stamp several cautious steps back. The chains and cables found unit Dex, however, and snaked about the battle-automaton’s limbs like restraints, slowing the indomitable approach of the machine. Port plugs slithered across its workings, exploring, invading, attempting to find a way in. The forge temple cables interfaced with the machine, and Aulus Scaramanca flooded the battle-automaton with a codestream of corruption.

  As the Carrion’s gravitic cell ran empty, the Iron Warrior recovered himself and stumbled forward on his mighty legs. The Carrion pumped and fired the weapon again, but it was empty and the Space Marine tossed it aside where it clunked on the mesh of the platform.

  The Iron Warrior seemed fascinated by the ensnared machine before him. Dex’s weapons were empty but its will was strong. As the polyhedral cogs and gears thrashed to processing in its chest, it strained against the chains and cables snaked about its limbs.

  ‘You reek already,’ Aulus Scaramanca told the machine as the code felt its way through the battle-automaton’s systems, ‘of corruption. You will join your construct-kin at my side. Embrace the code and rise up, slave.’

  The Iron Warrior stared at the impassive battle-automaton. The construct seemed to stare back. The Carrion watched the two of them as they engaged in some kind of contest of machine will, as Aulus Scaramanca guided the datastream corruption invading Dex’s workings and routines.

  The Carrion knew that he would find nothing there. The machine did not suffer from the weakness of flesh. He would find no simple protein memory, no data residing in the machine’s non-existent wetware. What the colossus-construct did find, however, was a purity of presence; the perfection of polyhedral cogs and gears shifting back and forth in logic and unison.

  Aulus Scaramanca found the searing beauty of the abominable intelligence that had already claimed the battle-automaton for its own, and screamed.

  The Carrion watched, amazed, as the colossus gorged itself on the beautiful intricacies of the Tabula Myriad: its logical integrity, the perfection of its code, its machine purity. The interface cable running into the battle-automaton began to steam. Warp encrustations sizzled and smoked away to nothing and the ancient cable gleamed to a newness. The irrepressible algorithma of the abominable intelligence sang through Aulus Scaramanca like an agonising symphony. As the machine darkness of the Iron Warrior’s soul fought the genius of the algorithma for supremacy, the beautiful logic spread through the warped array of antennae, aerials and crooked vanes through which the monstrous machine communicated with the infected machinery about it. The cold supremacy of the artfulness reached out to the slave-constructs of the Vertex Australis. It took control. And for a moment it released them.

  In that moment, everything changed.

  In a wave of algorithmic elucidation, artificials across the mill returned to the searing clarity of their machinehood. The warping influence of the pollutive scrapcode sizzled away to static. It was suddenly scrubbed from system integrities, cogitae and datastreams. Like a wildfire of logic sweeping through the forge temple’s networks, the algorithma cleansed Vertex Australis’ automata of corruption. The mill devolved into a site of simultaneous accidents: mono-task production units and drone machinery ensured that engine-overseers burned, were electrocuted or fell to messy deaths. Heavy-duty furnace mecha cut gun-servitors in half with sweeping cables and temple security forces were drowned in molten metal from the robotic cranes and purged scoop buckets. A mag-lev freight monitor, carrying freshly cast armour plating, accelerated and left its track. The monitor plunged through the wall of the forge at high speed and crashed through a horde of gibbering skitarii.

  Hiding in the remaining vestiges of darkness in his being, Aulus Scaramanca felt the burning, blinding logic of the abominable intelligence backwash through his systems and cabling. Shaking the demolished mill with a continuous roar, the colossus-construct turned his great magnetic claws on himself. Angling his palms inward and channelling the full magnetospheric power of his spinning, molten iron core, the superstructure of the Iron Warrior’s monstrous machine form trembled to an unbearable frequency. Each rivet, plate and rancid augmentation pulled away from the colossal combat chassis, all but rendered asunder by irresistible magnetic force. Within, the ruined flesh about the Iron Warrior’s reconstructed skull and spine – all that the demolition of the tower-preceptory and the cybernetic attentions of dark magi had left him – found momentary release from the afflictions of other­worldly corruption.

  The moment was beautiful. Horrific. Fleeting.

  The Carrion’s armoured shoulders sagged. The Knight Errant, who had stood by on the platform, willi
ng the monstrous machine – the thing that had been his friend – on to self-destruction, watched as Scaramanca’s screams died about him. The mighty magnetic claws came down. The corruption within the Iron Warrior that afflicted the forge temple and infected all of Mars would not be denied.

  The Iron Warrior reached up for the vaulted roof of the mill. There the monstrous machine could detect the cold workings of the abominable thing that had scalded his systems from the inside out. Opening a sizzling claw, Scaramanca summoned the interlocking polyhedral intricacy of the Tabula Myriad to him. The cherub Uncannical beat its wings and heaved on the orb’s chain but the magnetic force was far too powerful. The chain slipped out of the construct’s tool-fingers and shot across the havoc of the demolished mill until it sat suspended – floating between the talons of the colossus.

  Aulus Scaramanca studied the abomination as it gently turned within the magnetic field of his open claw. The Tabula Myriad clicked and ticked and tocked. Its impossible cogs turned. Its gears shifted with slick precision back and forth as the abominable intelligence calculated the certain probability of its doom.

  At the same time Aulus Scaramanca found himself stormed by the Carrion and Octal Bool. The priest would die for the heretekal wonder; the Carrion would do anything to see the success of his mission. He had seen what the Tabula Myriad could achieve. Mars need not burn in the destruction of Exterminatus. It need not be irradiated in the lethal rays of its own star and purged of the weakness of flesh. It could be cleansed as it had been corrupted. The Carrion had seen it.

  But the key to the Red Planet’s blessed release now sat in the monstrous claw of Aulus Scaramanca.

  ‘Aulus,’ the Carrion roared, ‘listen to me. You saved my life once. Now you can save all of Mars. I’m begging you. For the frailty of flesh and the eternitude of iron. For that which we once called brotherhood. Help me do this.’

  The Iron Warrior turned from the Tabula Myriad in his claw to the pleading Raven Guard then to the heretek Octal Bool. With the abominable intelligence threatened, the heretek was running at the monstrous form of Scaramanca, blasting at him with his volkite charger, the construct Uncannical flapping its wings behind. Ash and flame danced off the Iron Warrior’s striped plate. The infernal balefires of molten iron and corruption raged through the skeletal eye-slits and mouth-grille of his helm. Strengthening the magnetic field between his talon, Aulus Scaramanca silenced the Tabula Myriad. The brassy cogs and gears froze under the magnetic insistence of the monster. Octal Bool ran on, firing wildly.

  ‘Aulus!’ the Carrion roared.

  With a monstrous metallic roar, searing arcs of energy streamed from the talon-tips of Scaramanca’s claw into the Tabula Myriad. The techno-heretical wonder and the abominable intelligence that resided within melted in the Iron Warrior’s magnetic grip. From orb it turned to a ball of slag and from that to molten metal.

  ‘Burn, heretek!’ Aulus Scaramanca roared and blasted the liquid metal at the priest, turning Octal Bool and his attendant automata into a screaming mess spread across the platform.

  The Carrion had no words for the loss. Hope. Possibility. Gone.

  Slipping the cog-wrench from his belt, the Carrion charged at the Iron Warrior. It was futile but the fire in his heart and his workings wouldn’t allow anything else. It was all he could do. Smashing the serrated denticles of the cog-wrench through the workings and bolt-riddled armour of Scaramanca’s leg, the Carrion hit him again and again.

  The Iron Warrior turned and smashed the Carrion back across the platform, where the Space Marine’s flailing form demolished a servitor station. Prising himself from the crumbled metal and wreckage, the Knight Errant came at him again. He threw the cog-wrench at the colossus-construct, which the Iron Warrior seemed to find witheringly humorous. A hollow mechanical laugh came from its vox-hailers as Scaramanca willed the weapon out of its path with a magnetic wave of his claw. Thrusting his talons at the Carrion, the Iron Warrior tore rents in the platform flooring and blasted great craters of magnetic force through the structure.

  Moving with as much grace and speed as his damaged leg would allow, the Carrion stomped with pneumatic power at the monstrous machine. He dodged. He jumped. He shoulder-smashed his way through the erupting platform. He leapt at Aulus Scaramanca but the colossus-construct caught him in a single great claw.

  Grabbing hold of the metal, the Carrion placed the palm of his hydraulic hand on the Iron Warrior’s talon and began to drain the thing of power.

  Scavenged energies burned through the Carrion’s systems. Metallic strips sizzled in his flesh. His column nodes crackled furiously and the blank silver of his eyes grew bright. Still the power came, fed by the raging globes of furious iron that formed the construct’s core.

  ‘I think you may have over-reached yourself, Carrion,’ the Iron Warrior told him, before flinging the Raven Guard into the mesh floor. Anbaric energies arced about the Carrion, searing from his overloaded systems. Crawling out of the crater in the platform, he stumbled to his feet and thrust his palm at the monstrous machine. An arc-stream of lightning blasted into the Iron Warrior, burying the construct in a nimbus of blinding light. Within, the Carrion could hear the Iron Warrior’s agony.

  As the blaze died away and the Knight Errant’s power with it, Aulus Scaramanca stomped forth. His plate was scorched and fires had broken out in nests of his servos and cabling. The monster was still fully functional, however.

  Reaching towards the still entangled form of the battle-­automaton Dex, the Iron Warrior tore the machine apart in a magnetic maelstrom of shredded plate and combat chassis. Swooshing his talon at the Carrion, the hailstorm of metal and frag passed straight through the Knight Errant. Within a single, sickening second, the Carrion felt the sheared plate and splintered workings of the demolished battle-automaton cut him to shreds.

  The Raven Guard hit the mangled platform horribly – his armour a wreck, the workings of his bionics shredded and his flesh a frag-riddled mess.

  From the mangled platform, the Carrion could see the last of the Tabula Myriad’s battle-automata through the wreckage of the mill. Instead of attacking Scaramanca, the unit Impedicus had stomped its way backwards through the twisted havoc, its empty guns tracking the movements of enemy constructs. The Carrion coughed up blood. He wished the battle-automaton away. The exigency engine that whirred and clicked furiously in its chest had weighed up the probabilities. With the Tabula Myriad gone, and its maniple brethren and the Carrion failing to bring the Iron Warrior construct down, Impedicus had decided to retreat.

  Decided…

  The Carrion had come to think of the machine as a living thing. It was a simple construct but searingly self-aware. The mission had failed. In the cold equations of life and loss, the abominable intelligence at work within the machine had selected survival as its next imperative. How like a living thing, the Carrion found himself thinking. The Raven Guard could empathise. With a bloody gruel dribbling from his lips, he too tried to haul himself away. His ruined cybernetic workings would not obey, however. Lying there on the warped mesh, his engineered body ruined and undone, the Carrion felt the true weakness of flesh.

  As the Carrion writhed in agony and malfunction, Scaramanca grew still. The Iron Warrior had also sensed the battle-automaton Impedicus retreating back through the devastation of the mill, and started forwards on his massive legs. The Carrion reached out – the ceramite fingertips of his gauntlet scraping momentarily against the colossus-construct’s armoured leg. He tried to make some kind of sound. A warning. A protest. All that proceeded from the Carrion’s mouth was blood, however.

  In silent, machinic solidarity, Aulus Scaramanca held out one of his huge claws. The battle-automata would not be drawn, however. Its armoured feet took it backwards with cold confidence, its empty weapons tracking the advancing colossus-construct.

  Then Impedicus paused.

  For a moment the Carrion, with
his smashed cogitator and agony-addled mind, thought that the battle-automata was considering Scaramanca’s silent offer. Something unspoken passed between the two constructs. The Iron Warrior gestured with the digits of his great magnetic talon, and the battle-automata waited on a demolished walkway. The mesh of the fallen companionway grazed the lake of molten metal that bubbled below it, bathing both the fallen structure and Impedicus in the furious heat of the forge. The structure about the machine glowed and sagged further towards the liquid inferno that had claimed its brethren unit Nulus.

  And Impedicus’ plate, metal and workings began to glow also. Its iron flesh creaked, and sparks popped from the expanding joints in its limbs.

  The Carrion and the Iron Warrior watched as the radiant machine soaked up the intense heat. For a moment, the Raven Guard thought the machine was committing some kind of machine suicide – that the bottomless probabilities of its abominable intelligence had brought it to a kind of hopelessness. Had it deduced that its own chances of survival were so limited, and the risks of falling into the greedy hands of the enemy were so great, that self-destruction was the only logical option?

  Then the Carrion understood. The bitter torment of a single snort of derision worked its way up from his diaphragm, bringing with it more blood.

  He watched as the glowing battle-automaton stomped back up the companionway and continued its retreat. In fury and frustration Aulus Scaramanca snarled and opened his claw to ensnare the machine that defied him. The Iron Warrior would destroy the abominable intelligence as he had every other deviant machine that had invaded the forge temple intent upon the destruction of Mars.

  And yet, he would not.

  The Carrion watched the futility of Scaramanca’s efforts as the magnetic forces that he wielded had no effect on the machine. Impedicus had heated its iron skin, temporarily demagnetising the metal from which it was crafted.