by David Guymer
To the many things that they did not see, Rauth could add any clear means of forcing access to the Primus subplex.
Maarvuk had proposed that those skitarii forces on the surface might be moving back and forth via subterranean service tunnels too small or too recent – the cart-file Rauth had inloaded was last amended nearly seven hundred years ago – to appear on the Adeptus Mechanicus’ charts. The Scouts had offered no alternative proposal. Who are we, to have opinions of our own? Regardless of whose hypothesis it had been, the evidence appeared to bear it out with a number of what appeared to be service hatches located throughout the area.
In many cases, efforts had been made to obscure the entrances under debris, and they had all been found firmly locked, warded beyond the Iron Hands’ abilities to beseech the servile machine within and open. They had quietly abandoned the attempt to force entry and mined the hatches instead. The entrances had been tiny, anyway, designed for slavish human workers rather than Space Marine warriors. Rauth could have made it through, but Gorgorus and the more heavily refashioned Scouts would have found it dangerously tight. Maarvuk wouldn’t have stood a chance.
They would find another way.
By un-voiced command, Maarvuk rotated Rauth from point, sending Sarrk ahead to scout the groaning frame support of the next pylon while Rauth and his shotgun covered those that followed.
The dark, the muffled disquiet, it was like walking through an ancient forest, something Rauth had once experienced and found disturbingly alien. The ‘trees’ hummed dully as though populated with hidden things, the canopy one of tangled wires, the litter scrap metal and waste munitions. And over every aspect loomed the Titan’s broken skull, like the dark face of a fortress moon.
‘Something.’ Sarrk’s warning drew Rauth from his reverie, scowling to find his ability to maintain focus so obviously flawed.
The Scout crouched behind an escarpment of larger metallic debris. It concealed a sharp decline towards a bunker complex, a triptych of conjoined rockcrete polygons spread through the scrap defile in a U shape. Carapace clacked together, inaudible over the powered susurrus of the overhead feed coils and the commotion below, as the other Scouts joined him. Rauth peered over the wall.
Mixed clades of unorthodox skitarii warrior-builds passed in and out of the bunker. It made it difficult to guess at their numbers. An endlessly reiterative cycle of polished chrome, smouldering vents and cosmetic cyborganics, each individual skitarius drew the eye like a gaudy piece of art. Some were draped in soft pink cloaks of unblemished human flesh. Vat grown, like iron from a mould, as if that makes it less foul. An ingrained desire for pattern and order wanted to identify these as alphas but Rauth could find no corroborative evidence to justify doing so. Others had replaced parts of their exoplate with reflective surfaces, or sheathed it in new skin, modified themselves with haptic sensors or unbalanced full-body sensoria, which at least brought the consolation of an identifiable function, even if that function was nonsensical.
‘What’s been done to them?’ muttered Sarrk.
‘What have they allowed to be done?’ Khrysaar countered with venom.
Gorgorus, Suforr, and the more ancient Scouts simply stared, mute, variable optics frozen as if in horror, leaving it to the neophytes to express their revulsion.
‘Do we go around?’ said Rauth. Obliterate them, his mind spat even as he spoke in more balanced terms. Break them. Bleed them. If the abomination desire a return to flesh then let them suffer for it. Rend them limb from deviant limb.
Visibly emerging from some bruising inner conflict between his emotional buffers and the contrarian constructs arrayed before them in inglorious imperfection, Maarvuk’s systems whined a little harder than they had a moment before. His voice came out a strained rasp.
‘Exterminate.’
Something in Rauth flipped. Some deep conditioned denial was knocked away, and in its place he found rage, a decade of repressed Medusan fury that poured into his veins. With a howl of anger and revulsion he vaulted the escarpment, wielding his shotgun like a club, even as the first rad-rounds punched, unfelt, into his chest carapace. Maarvuk shouted further instructions, but if Rauth heard them then it was no longer on a conscious level, just a wrathful red thought-rune in his mind.
Compliance!
III
This was not Stronos’ first time through a minefield. His right leg above the knee was a grey slab of stiff, bifurcating scar tissue. Beneath it was a rugged cybernetic, solid enough to break an ork’s chest or withstand the blast equivalent of the plasma pulse device that had claimed the original flesh. With shrapnel protruding from the crumpled plate of his legs and their hard-wearing hydraulics hissing with every step, he drew his right boot out of Locis Primus’ newest crater and advanced relentlessly towards the next, wherever it might form. Nearby, another buried charge drove a geyser of shrapnel and debris high into the air. The overhanging cable lines were shredded, but Brother Burr strode through the maelstrom scorched but uncompromised.
They were anti-personnel devices, small explosive charges packing just force enough to turn the very ground they waded through into a primed frag grenade. The skitarii defenders had rightly reasoned that an armour assault through such uncompromising terrain would have been near impossible, but what was a power-armoured Iron Hand but a walking tank?
Withering las-fire from an inclined vector punched into his battleplate and tore indiscriminately into the surrounding metal. He walked through it for a few metres until the sheer energy of the impacts forced him to turn away from it. He tried to pinpoint the source of the incoming fire, but could not. The thin air had swiftly been transformed into a pseudo-plasma of ash, fragmentation shards and splitting energy beams, the world’s low gravity coupled with the sheltered environs of Loci Primus’ surface precincts keeping the after-effects of the ongoing battle aloft.
Still advancing, but at a tangent now that bled the incoming las-bolts of some of their energy, he performed an unconscious mental triangulation using his prior and present position and fired his bolter into the murk. A muted crump and the shredding of metal were his calculation’s rewards. A fixed sentry gun.
As his advance slowed, others pushed theirs at the same unwavering pace. Periodic bangs of bolter-fire and buried explosions illuminated their forward positions, clearing the field of enemy ordnance by the simple expedient of walking through it. Their very tenacity drew enemy fire, predominantly automated or servitor-mounted, betraying their own positions to the infinite patience of the Iron Hands’ guns.
No other force could have had the durability to conceive of such a direct assault, even less the cool discipline under fire to carry it through.
Stronos saw the beauty laid out for him in the vivid network of las-beams and nodal explosions. Not in the way that Iron Father Verrox would have, delighting in his superiority over others and his capacity to inflict crushing, effortless defeat upon them, but in the more abstract, loftier appreciation of a simple task meticulously observed. He suspected that Lydriik, at least, would have approved even if he doubted that his friend would understand.
A vox-cast bellow shook the ash plume like a depth charge, and Stronos followed the blinking markers of his helmet overlay to where Ancient Ares tore into a pair of Kataphron Breacher units armed with siege drills and power hammers, reducing them to scrap metal and twitching flesh parts before unloading his assault cannon into a barricade. There was a scream of perforating metal and then the ribboned leftovers collapsed. The Dreadnought crashed through, bellowed challenges to entities long dead causing the ground beneath his feet to shake, to engage the clade of nacreously armoured skitarii vanguard and hyper-modified Ruststalker claves that had been exploiting the barricade’s cover to flank the Iron Hands advance. It was good to see that the Ancient retained at least some of his senses, if not the full complement of his wits.
Adept Yolanis and her acolytes chased after the
ir berserk charge, escorted, at Stronos’ order, by a demi-clave of Eighth Sergeant Ankaran’s Assault Marines. The bodies of agile combat-adapted warrior-forms were already beginning to fly as the demi-clave, chainblades gunning to full speed, got stuck in alongside their venerated Iron Father. In contrast to Ares’ naked choler, Ankaran and his brothers’ battle wrath was well shackled behind blade routines and doctrina imperatives.
Stronos feared that Ares was getting worse, and watching the Dreadnought lead the red-robed adepts a merry chase as it walked through a metal block wall in order to get at the skitarii heavy gunner that had been sheltering there only added to his own simmering anger. His plan to assault Locis Primus and pen its forces inside until Draevark and the others could arrive to relieve Velt’s floundering advance and deliver the hammer blow was an imperfect response to an imperfect set of conditions. Most of those inherent imperfections arose from the impositions of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and so to see their chosen representatives now succeeding only in upsetting what little order he could bring to their battlefield irked him doubly.
The warriors of Clan Garrsak had a deserved reputation for uncritical loyalty, but they were neither stupid nor blind – the Ancient’s deterioration would eventually be noticed.
‘The fabricator-locum’s skitarii should be covering that flank,’ said Lurrgol, opting to overlook the rampaging Dreadnought in that direction. He was largely recovered from the effects of the mindscrambler device, aside from a lisp that the attending Apothecary had warned would likely be permanent for which was advised a complete relaying of the neural pathways. He blamed himself for the death of Kardaanus, Stronos could tell, and it felt odd to hear his brother speak without the usual hard undercurrent of bleak sarcasm. ‘Does he reply to your transmissions?’
‘The usual.’
With a grizzle of displeasure, Lurrgol blazed into the fug until something exploded. ‘You would think he would thank us, for eliminating the Sicarians harrying his Ordo Reductor contingent.’
‘What about Draevark? Or Drath and the other battle group commanders?’ Govall was the farthest out, his armour taking a battering from automated defence positions as he methodically returned fire.
Stronos considered while he blink-sent a command to reinforce Ankaran’s flank. ‘For a moment I thought I had something. A weak identifier signal, but it is gone now.’
‘A blip,’ said Burr, his bolter kicking back hard into his plastron. ‘There is enough electrical cross talk from these power lines to insert ghost signals into our augurs. Not to forget the radiation.’
‘Perhaps we should bring a few down?’ said Stronos.
‘Kardaanus would have known,’ added Lurrgol sourly, walking into a stream of stubber-fire that had been targeting Stronos and turning his bolter into it. A sequence of hard bangs later and the gun servitor ensconced in a hollowed-out Chimera sixty metres ahead dissolved into a spray of bloodless meat. He lowered his bolter until it hung like a weight in his hands. ‘I miss them both,’ he managed to mutter.
For a long minute, the clave struggled to repress their brother’s admission in its collective memory, focusing instead on the less threatening difficulty, that which could be solved with logic, bolter and blade.
The apothecaries had stripped Trellok and Kardaanus of salvageable bionics along with their gene-seed, but not before Stronos and the others had set aside a few prized components for their own. They had been connected, closer than brothers, and through the bionics they passed on, their strength and experience would live on within the clave. Kardaanus had always been exceptional in his strength. His right arm currently clanked against Stronos’ thigh plate as he advanced.
‘I agree,’ Stronos said. ‘It cannot be wrong to lament the absence of the strong.’
‘I miss Kardaanus’ lascannon,’ said Vand, his bulk anchoring the rear while his plasma cannon vented heat.
‘As do I,’ said Stronos. His power pack could not sustain the heavy weapon indefinitely and he had reluctantly left it in the transport.
‘When we are beaten we rebuild, stronger than we were before,’ said Jalenghaal, his synthesised voice achieving a degree of harshness that Stronos would not have reasoned it capable. ‘That is the Creed. Our brothers will be replaced, as was your eye, or my hand. Clan Dorrvok has toughened their selection process considerably since you or I were inducted into our clan companies. They will make us stronger, as does your eye or my hand, inured against the weakness and disunity that afflicts the Chapter.’
Lurrgol’s acid response was buried under a torrent of bolter-fire.
It was hardly Stronos’ place to question actions that did not directly pertain to the battles he fought and the clan he fought within, but an intensified regimen of psyk-conditioning and even more brutal programme of training did not seem to him the best way to correct the disunity that crippled the Iron Council.
It might work, in time, but at the cost of… He loosed a snapshot at a brief glimpse of skitarii exometal behind a break in a partitioning wall, and tried to summon a word that did not exist in his first or even his second languages. Praalek? In Juuket it meant ‘machine-spirit’. Close, but not quite right. The skitarius appeared further along the artificial barrier and swung its carbine over the top. Soul? A short burst of bolter-fire ripped open the skitarius’ cover and explosively contributed its bizarre augmetics to the ground’s collection. Stronos weighed the unfamiliar Gothic term in his mind.
Yes. That was it.
It would be centuries before today’s intake of new battle-brothers took their places amongst the Iron Council, and centuries before they became the dominant presence. Perhaps these were the timescales that beings such as Kristos or Castron Fel worked within. But even if it were, and they aimed towards a future that Stronos, his scope restricted to the level of battlefield or, perhaps in time, warzone, could not envisage, was the elevation of forty-one robotic approval-engines to supplement the Voice of Mars really what the Iron Hands required from their leaders?
A terrific explosion suddenly tore out of the ground, jaws of corroded iron snapping over Jalenghaal and swallowing him whole. While his Iron Hands brother ground through the frag mine’s disintegrating aftermath, power blistering from yet another jagged bite mark in his armour – this time the hip – Stronos’ interlink feed buzzed with an update from Sergeant Hadruul.
Stronos commanded the interlinked spirits of the demi-clan’s armour systems to flag Hadruul’s find in their overlays. Then he transmitted updated instructions to the Devastators, for the dedicated heavy gunners in his command to keep half an eye over the entrances.
He may have left his old clan allegiances behind him in the forgechain, but he could not help but see the battlefield as an ordnance specialist would, a network of firing lines, high ground and kill zones. He just wished he had the Anvilarum or the other vehicles of the convoy to call upon, but they were stranded half a kilometre back into the blast wastes.
Hadruul dissociated his tether from the one-to-one connection. Stronos did not need the spoken confirmation to know that his orders would be followed to the decimal point.
‘It would be advisable to withdraw,’ said Burr. ‘If the Adeptus Mechanicus cannot secure our advance then we cannot win and this assault serves no purpose.’
‘The assault is its own purpose,’ said Stronos. ‘If the fabricator-
locum wishes to prevent it that only makes me want to push it all the harder.’
‘That sounds…’
‘Errant,’ supplied Lurrgol. Stronos could not tell if it was a joke.
‘Perhaps it is.’
‘The ambush,’ said Jalenghaal, apropos of nothing, as he strode to catch up. His damaged plate appeared to steam as bits of hot metal from the exploded frag mine accumulated to his gargantuan centre of gravity. ‘You think that our response reveals some disguised weakness in the Creed, do you not?’
‘What makes you believe that I would think such a thing?’
Jalenghaal made a disgusted sound and indicated his blast-ravaged girdal plate and the integrated data-tether it contained that he had exchanged with Stronos. ‘Because against my will, I feel it too.’
In spite of his prodigious advantages, both genic and mechanic, Stronos felt sick. He had infected his brothers with his doubts, as efficiently as Ancient Ares had infected him with his. Perhaps that was why the master of the forge and the fabricator-locum had been so reluctant to awaken the Iron Father until now.
Shrugging off Jalenghaal and his brothers, he increased his pace.
The ominous wreck of Pax Medusan loomed over him now, his push on Locis Primus having taken him across the Titan’s unpowered gaze, the inward-leaning nest of pylons to his right. He could see the array of alien weapon platforms that had been rigged around it, the apologetic flicker of what appeared to be a single candle flickering in the murk pinpointing the crown of the condemned machine like a lighthouse beacon. Las-bolts stabbed down from it, extreme range robbing them of both accuracy and power, and singed the blackwork over a wide swathe of terrain. None of the Iron Hands wasted a bolt-round to returning fire.
He could also see what appeared to be a well-fortified bunker complex, earthed up with scrap plates and bits of tank, just under the web of overhead lines that enshrouded the Imperator Titan’s half-buried body and snaked around its far side. It was connected to the weapons’ test grid by buried trunk lines, and hooked into the overheads by scores of redundant reinforced cables. A hub facility of some sort. The static defences appeared to have been set up specifically to defend that position.
