The Siege of Castellax

by C. L. Werner

  A sickly yellow light slowly began to rise about the bloodwood platform. Through the glow, Vallax could be seen snarling orders at his Raptors, demanding their courage and restraint. It was the last view Oriax had of the Iron Warriors. In the next instant the glow engulfed them all, rising to blinding intensity.

  All at once, the sickly light winked out, restoring the chamber to its normal, dingy illumination. Where the light had shone, there was nothing but the bloodwood disc. Five Iron Warriors and a dozen Steel Blood had vanished, evaporated from reality in the blink of an eye.

  Oriax pivoted in his dais, stabbing a servo-arm at one of the switches on his command console. A section of wall within his sanctum slid aside, exposing a tiny observation room. From the dark space, the horned figure of Captain Rhodaan emerged, the demi-organic wings on his back fluttering nervously in such proximity to the Daemonculum.

  ‘You have seen?’ Oriax demanded. ‘You have observed?’

  Rhodaan nodded, turning his head towards the bloodwood dais. ‘How do I know this device does what you claim? It stinks of witchery.’

  Oriax recoiled into his seat, his face fairly dripping with scorn. ‘Any science which is incomprehensible to a small mind is decried as witchery,’ the Techmarine stated. ‘The deluded slaves of the False Emperor have bound their Imperium in chains of superstition and ignorance through such conceits. Our misguided brothers in the Eye have displayed kindred ignorance, hobbling themselves with fables about gods and magic.’ The Techmarine’s pincers folded inwards, pointing at the decayed cuirass. ‘Only I, Fabricator Oriax of the Third Grand Company, have displayed the intellect to understand. To truly understand. Witchery?’ he scoffed. ‘This is technology.’

  ‘Save your speeches, Fabricator,’ Rhodaan retorted. ‘You haven’t answered my question. How do I know this… technology… does what you claim it does? How do I know what has happened to Vallax and his Faceless?’

  Oriax fixed his mechanical eyes upon the Raptor. ‘You don’t,’ he said in a steely hiss. ‘Perhaps it is all just smoke and mirrors.’ The Techmarine’s claw waved towards the walls of the Daemonculum. ‘Perhaps they are hidden in some little spy hole, observing you as you observed them.’

  Rhodaan kept his gaze fastened on Oriax. ‘I was thinking more in the nature of disintegration.’

  Static crackled from the Fabricator’s throat, a mechanised approximation of laughter. ‘I had thought you less ignorant,’ Oriax stated. ‘If I wanted Vallax dead, there are far simpler ways it could be arranged. Besides, what do you think the Warsmith’s reaction would be if he were to discover I vaporised an entire squad of Raptors without his permission?’

  Rhodaan considered that objection to be a good one. Oriax presented an even better one a moment later.

  ‘You have already committed yourself, captain,’ the Fabricator reminded. ‘The transports have already left Vorago. You and your Raptors were not on them, any more than Vallax and his. The Warsmith would take this as an act of rebellion against his authority. You don’t need to be reminded what that would mean.’

  ‘Then they have actually been teleported into Dirgas?’ Rhodaan asked, still unwilling to believe what he had seen.

  ‘They are in Dirgas even as we speak,’ Oriax answered. To prove his point, the Fabricator pivoted and depressed several runes on his console. Immediately, several pict screens winked into life, displaying images of Squad Vidarna engaged in furious battle with mobs of orks in what looked to be a standard-pattern blockhouse.

  ‘They are in Dirgas,’ Oriax repeated. ‘But they are not exactly where they wanted to be. As my Steel Blood transmit the images, you will note, captain, an absence of fuel drums or anything else that might store the liquid pollutants the orks require to keep their planes in the sky. No, I fear all Vallax will find in this blockhouse are orks and more orks.’

  Rhodaan watched the pict screens, studying the savage close-quarters fighting between Iron Warrior and ork. ‘They could fight their way clear and still reach the objective.’

  ‘Improbable,’ Oriax declared. ‘First, they would have to realise their mistake. That will take time because of the standardised layout of the blockhouses we’ve built across Castellax. Second, they will need to locate the correct blockhouse. Third, they will still need to win their way clear of the orks.’ The Techmarine gestured at Rhodaan with his claw. ‘Fourth, they will be too late, because even if they overcome the first three factors, Squad Kyrith will already have reached the target and destroyed it.’

  ‘You are assuming I will submit my men to your Daemonculum,’ Rhodaan observed.

  ‘As I have pointed out, you have no choice,’ Oriax said. He pressed another rune on his console. The flesh-drones lumbered away from the pillars and the bound daemons, shuffling back into the inner recesses of Oriax’s sanctum. In their stead, another detachment of thirteen flesh-drones marched towards the Daemonculum, fresh slaves shackled to their mechadendrites.

  ‘The moment the transports left Vorago without you, you were committed,’ Oriax continued. ‘Do not chastise yourself for your decision. If you had gone on the transports, you would have encountered catastrophe. Brother Uhlan, whom I believe you know, arranged to ensure you didn’t catch the orks by surprise. He planted an explosive charge on one of the transports, setting it to detonate when the squadron reached Dirgas. He was too cunning to leave the charge on your transport, where it might be found, but instead chose one of the janissary ships. The explosion, will, of course, alert the orks and the air defences of Dirgas have proven quite considerable. Formidable enough to deflate even Morax’s pomposity.’

  The Raptor was trapped, and he knew it, but that didn’t make him like the situation any better. ‘How do I know you won’t deceive me as you did Vallax?’

  ‘Logic,’ Oriax stated. ‘If I deceive you, there is just a chance Vallax will reach the real objective. Neither of us wants that. The Over-Captain represents an older facet of the Legion, an atavism that keeps the Third Grand Company mired in the past. We must anticipate new leadership with new ideas if we are to evolve and progress and achieve our destiny. Iron Warriors such as yourself, Rhodaan, fresh and vital without the encrustations of ancient history clouding your vision. My Daemonculum is the key to that future, if you only have the boldness to use it.’

  Rhodaan stared out across the macabre device. For all of Oriax’s protestations, it still stank of witchery and the preternatural, a thing of the Beyond. The daemons stirred in their chains, casting longing eyes at the flesh-drones and their captives.

  ‘The Daemonculum hungers,’ Oriax said. ‘The appetite of a daemon is never sated. They are manifestations of the warp, the void made manifest, shaped by the thoughts and beliefs of physical beings. It is wrong to think of them as actual beings in their own right, they are simply shadows cobbled together from ideas and fears. Without a material mind to give them form, they cannot take shape. They exist simply as energy, flowing through the immaterium. Yet, in our ignorance we cast our minds back to the blackness of superstition and call these entities daemons and invest into them all that is conjured by such a name. Are they daemons because of what they are, or are they daemons because that is what our prejudice and fear have made them?’

  ‘Save your philosophy,’ Rhodaan growled. ‘Whether arcane technology or the blackest sorcery, it matters not. You are right, Fabricator, I have no choice.’

  Oriax swivelled behind his console, depressing runes on the board. ‘If the discussion is over, then you may summon your men,’ the Techmarine declared. ‘It is time you were away.’ The red lights in Oriax’s face dimmed as the Techmarine stared at Rhodaan.

  ‘I anticipate great things from you, captain,’ he said. ‘Do not disappoint me.’

  Rhodaan stiffened under the mechanical gaze. ‘I will honour my oaths and my duty. Squad Kyrith will succeed in the mission Warsmith Andraaz has entrusted to us.’

  The Fabricator shifted in his seat, his pincers flashing across switches and runes. ‘The mission,�
� he hissed in a scratchy whisper. ‘Ah, yes, I had almost forgotten.’

  Processing Omega was situated in the very bowels of Vorago, a gargantuan facility nestled beneath the central terminus for the intra-city mag-rails which conducted supplies throughout the city’s sprawl. The terminus was a shambles now, all but obliterated by the ork bombers and artillery. It was a blighted waste of rubble, desolate and abandoned, fires smouldering among the ruins unchecked, the dead lying abandoned and forlorn.

  Five hundred metres below the surface, however, it was a very different story. Vast tunnels, a spider web of corridors and catacombs, were thronged with tractors and trolleys, push-carts and sledges, virtually every kind of vehicle that could be scrounged and scavenged. Masked men, their bodies draped in the ominous plastic dusters, marched through the gloom, indifferent to the heaped corpses they bore with them deep into the earth. Unlike the abandoned terminus, here, in the belly of Vorago, the dead were not forgotten.

  Taofang stared from behind the goggles of his mask, watching in amazement as Yuxiang’s tractor emerged from the dark tunnel into the hellish light of a vast cavern. He barely noticed the sentries who passed them through, the guard posts and automated defence turrets flanking the mouth of each passageway. Instead, his gaze was captivated by the ghoulish scene awaiting the tractor at the end of its run. Ahead, like a nest of serpents, a profusion of conveyor belts stretched, each belt abutting a small loading dock. Taofang watched as gangs of disposers scurried about the vehicles being offloaded in the docks, using big meat hooks to fish corpses from the cargo beds. The bodies were dumped unceremoniously onto the belts, then whisked away across the cavernous hall.

  Yuxiang parked the tractor in one of the docks. He looked back at Taofang and Mingzhou, riding on the machine’s running boards. Both of the janissaries had donned the uniform of disposers, Mingzhou taking that of Deacon when the overseer decided to stay behind in the tunnels. After all, he already knew what they would find at Processing Omega.

  ‘Are you sure you want to go on?’ Yuxiang asked, his voice muffled by his rebreather. The two janissaries glanced at one another, dreadful anticipation making its presence felt. They were soldiers however, their valour hardened under the cruel pogroms of the Iron Warriors. For them, there could be no fear, only death or survival.

  Yuxiang nodded and emerged from the cab. Already a gang of disposers had assembled around the tractor and were quickly scooping out bodies and dropping them onto the conveyor. It was frantic, hurried activity inspired by the unreachable work quotas set by the Iron Warriors themselves. The very haste of the work made the disposers inattentive; none noticed when, after helping lower a few bodies onto the belt, Yuxiang and his companions drifted away one by one.

  Taofang was the last to break clear. When he was out of sight of the work crew, he hurried to the maintenance shed where Yuxiang and Mingzhou were waiting. The former factory slave gave his companions one last chance to retreat, but their resolve held fast.

  With a grim light in his eyes, Yuxiang reached down and slid back a manhole cover, exposing a slender iron ladder that descended into what seemed to be a pit of green fire. He hesitated a moment, steeling his nerve, bracing himself to revisit the horrors he had already exposed himself to. After a moment, Yuxiang climbed down the ladder, the two janissaries following after him.

  They did not descend far, only deep enough that Taofang could slide the manhole cover closed above them. Arms wrapped about the rungs of the ladder, the three rebels hung suspended a hundred metres above an enormous room. For Yuxiang, the resemblance to a factory was unmistakable: the conveyor belts and winches, cranes and pulleys, gantries and scaffolds. Masked labourers shuffled about the vast installation while pallid servitors maintained their endless vigils at control points and cogitator-terminals.

  ‘This is where Castellax buries its dead,’ Yuxiang whispered in a haunted tone.

  Far below, a nest of conveyors descended from the ceiling to spill the corpses from the unloading stations onto a series of lower belts. From there the mangled remains descended another twenty metres before they were unceremoniously dumped into a gigantic cistern, a vat of bilious green liquid that bubbled incessantly, spewing a scummy froth about each corpse as it dropped into the toxic lake. Bodies bobbed like bits of cork amidst the green filth, but as the liquid seeped into the flesh, the cadavers lost their buoyancy. Quickly they sank towards the bottom of the vat.

  ‘The chemicals in that lake will reduce a human body down to its constituent proteins within ten minutes,’ Yuxiang explained to the janissaries above him, repeating the hideous commentary he’d had from Deacon. ‘Only the enamel from the teeth won’t be reduced.’ He pointed with his hand to a great pipe jutting from the base of the vat. Through a narrow grate, a stream of green mush exuded onto another conveyor belt. Gangs of labourers stood to either side of the grate, removing at regular intervals a series of metal filter screens. The three rebels could see the white paste clogging the screens as they were removed, the only part of the human body that refused to be ‘processed’.

  ‘That sludge you see,’ Yuxiang said, nodding to the mush leaving the pipe, ‘will be further filtered, immersed in bio-secretions, amphetamines and adrenal-extracts. Everything a fighting man needs to maintain his alertness and aggression. Then it will be injected into tubes, ready to be distributed to the defenders of Vorago as protein-paste. Organic supplement for the synthetic diet.’

  Taofang shook his head in shock, trying desperately to refuse the evidence of his eyes. He wanted to be sick. ‘They are feeding us our own dead,’ he groaned.

  Beneath him, Mingzhou made a gagging noise, her body going limp for a moment, one of her boots slipping from the rung. Quickly she remembered herself, grasping the ladder before she could fall. She turned her gaze down upon Yuxiang.

  ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘The Iron Warriors have to be destroyed.’ She stared back at the bubbling vat.

  ‘Death is too good for the monsters who would do this,’ she declared. ‘But it is the only justice we can hope to bring them.’

  Chapter XVI

  I-Day Plus One Hundred and Five

  The ferrocrete halls of the blockhouse were alive with alien roars and the chatter of automatic weapons. Mobs of orks swarmed through the streets of Dirgas, converging upon the scene. After months away from the main fighting, their thirst for battle had reached the point of mania. News of a scrap in the very middle of the city spread like wildfire.

  One after another, the Raptors of Squad Vidarna, Over-Captain Vallax’s infamous Faceless, died. Fighting their way ever deeper into the blockhouse, the Iron Warriors had become the centre of a storm of death. Hundreds of enemy corpses lay strewn through the chambers and corridors of the fortress, but they were losses the orks could easily afford. There were thousands to take their place. From the start, there had been only five Space Marines. It had cost them two comrades to penetrate as far as the manufactory.

  Vallax spun around as Gressil was ripped apart by the lethal chatter of a grotesque combi-weapon. The Over-Captain regarded his underling’s sacrifice with a sneer and leapt upon his killer, an enormous ork encased in crude, blocky armour. The whirling edge of his chain-sword screeched as it churned into the ork’s shoulder. Instead of gnawing through flesh and bone, however, it gouged a mesh of wires and cables. Lubricants and fuel spurted from ruptured hoses and pipes.

  The ork grunted and lashed out with a monstrous power claw, the talons closing tight about Vallax’s sword arm. With a grinding groan, the pneumatic claw began to compress the vambrace, cracking the thick ceramite plate.

  Vallax’s boots hammered into the ork’s chest in a futile effort to kick the brute away. The hulking monstrosity didn’t even flinch, deigning only to smile viciously at the Iron Warrior as it tightened its grip.

  The Raptor squirmed within the ork’s clutch, clenching his teeth against the pain surging from his trapped arm as he twisted his body around. The arm was crushed to a pulp when the o
rk tightened its grasp. Vallax’s brain, conditioned to block out every magnitude of pain, ignored the mutilation, forcing himself to raise his good arm and bring the muzzle of his bolt pistol towards his captor’s face.

  The organic side of the cyborg’s face was obliterated by the high-impact explosive shells, slivers of shrapnel and bone fragments flying from its destroyed skull. Instead of collapsing, however, the ork’s metallic body simply froze in place, its mechanics powering down, another dead machine in the maze of stamping presses and conveyors which littered the floor of the manufactory. A grotesque statue, the cyborg stood, the arm of its killer held fast in its frozen claw.

  Emboldened by Vallax’s immobility, a swarm of gretchin came scurrying from their holes, eyes gleaming with murderous glee. They surrounded the trapped Iron Warrior, shots from their primitive slug-throwers and autoguns glancing off his power armour, clubs and axes clattering against his legs in a futile effort to pierce the Raptor’s shell. Snarling in rage, Vallax gunned down a dozen of the filthy slaveling xenos, but always there were more to replace those he killed.

  Uhlan’s pistol suddenly roared, the report echoing across the manufactory. Gretchin burst beneath his shots, their weedy bodies blasted into gory pulp by the bolt-shells. Screeching in terror, the cowardly survivors broke and fled, darting behind presses and diving into gaps amidst the machinery.

  ‘That is the last of them, my lord captain,’ Uhlan reported.

  Vallax glared at the half-breed, wondering how long Uhlan had waited before intervening. With the rest of Squad Vidarna dead, the mongrel could concoct any story to account for the Over-Captain’s death. Had Uhlan bided his time until he was convinced Vallax would survive with or without his help?

  Vallax strained to free his trapped arm, growling under his breath. ‘Oriax’s Steel Blood was late as usual.’ He scowled as he thought of the spy-skulls and their notable failure to assist the Raptors. ‘The Fabricator’s usefulness to this operation begins to wear thin.’