by C. L. Werner
Uhlan nodded. ‘Indeed, Over-Captain. The failings of his servitors are inexcusable. They should have found the fuel dump for us by now.’
Vallax wrenched the cyborg’s claw downwards, stretching his free arm so he could retrieve his chainsword from the floor. Thumbing the activation rune, he brought the weapon grinding against the metal wrist behind the claw.
The Over-Captain barely concentrated on what he was doing, his mind instead mulling over what Uhlan had said. It was true, the Steel Blood should have located the fuel dump by now. The blockhouses weren’t terribly complex, simply mirrored layers stacked eight and ten deep. A standard pattern repeated all across Castellax.
Vallax cursed as he made the connection. The blockhouses all followed the same blueprint, each floor plan identical to the next. There was the reason the Steel Blood had failed! The Daemonculum had transported them to the wrong blockhouse!
As that horrible certainty impressed itself upon his mind, Vallax heard the wail of one of Oriax’s Steel Blood. He looked towards the sound, watching as the metal skull came flying into the manufactory – a horde of orks rushing after it. The Steel Blood was sounding an alarm all right – but it was an alarm meant for the orks. The damned things had been alerting the aliens and leading them to the Iron Warriors the whole time!
‘Shoot the Steel Blood!’ Vallax snarled at Uhlan. The half-breed stared at him in confusion, then cried out as blood exploded from his ruptured chest. A harpoon of steel protruded from the stricken Iron Warrior’s breast. Even as Uhlan turned to fire on his attacker, the cable fitted to the harpoon snapped taut. He was thrown off his feet as the cable began to retract, dragging him across the manufactory towards the gun carriage that had fired on him and a grinning ork with a blowtorch gripped in its oily paw. Other aliens swarmed past the mekanik, loosing a fusillade of shells, solid shot and glowing plasma at the disabled Uhlan.
Vallax redoubled his efforts to cut away the cyborg’s wrist. Survival was doubtful now, but at least he could die fighting on his feet, like a true Iron Warrior, not slaughtered like Uhlan.
Even as he cut away the last string of cables, Vallax flattened beneath an impact against the back of his head. As he struck the ground he could see the crumpled wreckage of a metal skull lying on the floor beside him, its cranium caved-in by a high-velocity impact. Vallax imagined his helmet must have a similar dent.
The jaw of the damaged Steel Blood dropped open, the vox-caster spewing forth the synthesised voice of Fabricator Oriax.
‘This is the end, Over-Captain. Before you die, know that Captain Rhodaan even now secures the objective for the Warsmith. It is in another blockhouse, of course. The only thing in this one is death. Your death.’
Vallax struggled to rise, but found that his legs refused to respond. Learned in biology as well as mechanics, Oriax had guided his Steel Blood to the precise location to deliver maximum damage upon the Iron Warrior. The impacted helmet had delivered a paralysing blow to Vallax’s spine.
Panic filled Vallax’s hearts as he realised the extent of Oriax’s treachery. He could hear the orks rushing into the room, rushing to seize their helpless prey.
‘You found me like this in the crystal-swamps,’ Oriax’s voice droned. ‘I should have died, but for you. Now, I avenge that crime.
‘Die, Vallax, and may the Chaos Gods show your spirit the same mercy you showed me.’
Alarms wailed overhead as the orks began another strafing run against the defences of Vorago. Fighters came screaming down, the chatter of their guns chewing holes in the firmament, sending slivers of ferrocrete dancing into the night. Janissaries and overseers scrambled into the shelter of bunkers and pillboxes while slaves cowered in their firing pits. The anti-aircraft crews, chained to their batteries, had no option except to stay at their posts and try to bring down the alien attackers.
Taofang watched the carnage unfold from the black mouth of a service tunnel, his lasgun held close to his body beneath the folds of his duster. He waited for the height of panic and confusion, watching to ensure that none of the Iron Warriors were going to put in an appearance and bolster the valour of their minions by giving them something more terrifying than orks to fear.
‘We should move now,’ Taofang said, turning to stare back into the gloom of the tunnel. Clustered around the tractor were a score of men, haggard-looking slaves for the most part but with a few janissaries and renegade disposers among the mix. It was easy to spot the ones who were armed and the ones who weren’t. The armed men had a vicious gleam in their eyes, the unarmed ones simply had weary resignation. They wouldn’t be very useful in a fight – not until they felt that they had a real chance to strike back. Guns would give them that confidence. Guns were the objective of tonight’s excursion onto the firebreak. Yuxiang had built a small army by removing ‘dead’ men from the walls, but if they were to fight, they needed weapons and ammunition. Far more than could be scavenged from the firing pits.
‘Are you certain this is smart?’ Deacon asked in his anxious voice.
‘The height of the ork attack,’ Taofang stated, his tone brooking no argument. ‘The soldiers will be keeping their heads down while the planes are overhead. They won’t stir from their shelters. That means we’ll only have the ones in the command post to worry about.’
Yuxiang fixed the janissary with a sombre look. ‘You know there will be no option but to fight?’ he said. ‘We can’t try to reason with them. Sway them to our cause. There isn’t time.’
Taofang nodded, his expression grim. He glanced over at Mingzhou, locking eyes with the sniper. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Anybody in that command post is no comrade.’ He patted the barrel of his lasgun. ‘Colonel Nehring has had this coming a long time.’
‘Ever since Gamma-Five,’ Mingzhou agreed, a cold smile on her face.
‘We saw a lot of good men die at Gamma-Five,’ Taofang said. ‘I’ve a mind to watch a few bad men die for once.’
Yuxiang lifted his arm, gazing back at the men around the tractor, looking to see that each of them was watching him rather than distracted by the ork attack. In his turn, the factory slave fixed his attention on Taofang. Even when an ork bomb exploded somewhere above the tunnel, shaking it and sending trickles of dust raining down, he didn’t allow his attention to waver. When the moment came, every second that followed would be invaluable. Yuxiang was determined to squander none of them.
By his turn, Taofang maintained a tireless vigil at the mouth of the tunnel, watching as the few janissaries still in the open at last abandoned their posts and went scrambling for cover. Except for the dead and dying, the top of the wall was almost deserted now. He started to turn, started to give the nod to Yuxiang so he could signal the other rebels. It was the hint of motion from the corner of his eye that spun Taofang back around. Frustration boiled up inside him as he watched a trio of janissaries come sprinting into the tunnel.
Until now, even in the height of the attack, fear of the tunnel had kept the soldiers away. No man courted the places of the dead and the service tunnel stank of the disposers and their morbid work. That some of them should overcome their dread now, just when the rebels were set to act sent black despair flooding into his heart. It was as if all their plans and hopes were nothing more than the cruel jest of…
Taofang shivered, unwilling to finish the thought. The Iron Warriors visited the most horrible punishment upon those slaves they found practising the Imperial creed, paying homage to the so-called God-Emperor of Mankind. It was whispered among the Scorpion Brigade that there were other gods beside the Emperor, monstrous things which even the Iron Warriors grudgingly paid homage to.
In his mind, Taofang could hear the mocking laughter of invisible horrors. Having come so far, many of the rebels would never find the courage to reach this point again. Gambling their lives on this adventure, they would cherish the reprieve, hold each hour given back to them as precious and sacrosanct. No, when they retreated back into the tunnels, there would be no coming back
.
The janissaries came rushing into the dark opening, their faces pale, their bodies shivering from the ordeal of battle. One of the soldiers recoiled as he saw Taofang standing inside the opening, shocked and disgusted by the sudden appearance of a disposer. His fright passed quickly, a nervous chuckle starting to rise as he turned to address his comrades.
The soldier never spoke the words on his tongue. As he turned, a bright beam of crimson light slashed through his head, searing through helmet and skull alike. The slaughtered janissaries collapsed in a heap, a new shock stamped forever in his dead eyes.
Mingzhou’s shot threw the two survivors into action. One of the soldiers snapped his lasgun to his shoulder, years of remorseless training allowing him to almost instinctively pick out the direction of the shot. Before he could fire, however, the janissary was lying on the floor of the tunnel, an ugly hole burned through his stomach.
Taofang stared down at the wounded man, smoke rising from the hole where he had fired his hidden weapon through the plastic shroud of his duster. He felt no pity for the stricken man, for all that they might have fought shoulder to shoulder only a few weeks earlier. Because of this man and his comrades, Taofang had been ready to retreat before the battle was even joined. Until that moment when Mingzhou shot and restored his perspective. Now he felt ashamed of his reluctance to do what had to be done, his hesitance to be as ruthless as his enemy. Morality was the refuge of those without the strength to triumph.
Burning light cracked from Taofang’s lasgun, burning another hole through his duster as it stabbed down into the face of the wounded janissary. It was a moment he knew he would carry with him always, the moment when something died deep inside him, to be replaced by something else. Something strong and cold and terrible.
‘What about the third one?’ Yuxiang cried, rushing up to the mouth of the tunnel.
Taofang glanced about. Unlike his comrade, the third janissary had chosen flight over fight. He could be seen dashing across the wall, his boots barely touching the ferrocrete in his haste. If the soldier had kept his wits about him, the rebels would have been undone, but in his panic the janissary simply rushed blindly past bunkers and pillboxes filled with comrades. At any one the survivor could have stopped and sounded the alarm, brought enough armed men swarming into the tunnel to obliterate the tiny gang of rebels.
Only moments ago, Taofang had felt the claws of some unseen force wresting opportunity from them. Now, as if by the same capricious intent, an equally incredulous circumstance was handing that opportunity back to them.
‘Head for Nehring’s bunker,’ Taofang shouted to Yuxiang. He ducked back into the tunnel as an ugly ork plane flashed across the firebreak, dropping a bomb against the superstructure. The explosive impact nearly knocked him from his feet.
‘What are you going to do?’ Mingzhou demanded, her hand tight about his arm, her eyes sharp with concern.
Removing the lasgun from beneath his duster, Taofang checked the power level. ‘I’m going to get him,’ he declared. ‘Catch him before he spreads the alarm.’
Mingzhou clung to him as he tried to leave the tunnel. ‘Stay here,’ she told him. Before he could react, the sniper was darting out onto the wall, throwing herself into the shelter of a bomb crater. An ork fighter went screaming overhead, a little line of tracers skipping across the ferrocrete only a few metres from the woman.
She didn’t even react to death dancing at her side. Tossing back her crimson hair with a roll of her neck, Mingzhou aimed down the sight of her lasrifle.
‘She’ll never make it,’ Yuxiang groaned.
Inwardly, Taofang shared Yuxiang’s doubt. The janissary was over two thousand metres away, darting from side to side to avoid the attacking ork planes. It was absurd to believe anyone, even one of the Iron Warriors themselves, could hit a moving target at such range.
A moment later, the situation was made even more dire. Seeming to stir from his panic, the soldier glanced about wildly, looking for a bunker to dart into. He found one, only a dozen metres away. Spinning around, the janissary raced towards the fortification.
In that brief moment as he turned, the janissary doomed himself. Mingzhou could read his intention as clearly as Taofang, she could see the refugee’s objective. Aiming along the route he must take, the sniper pulled the trigger of her lasrifle. A beam of red light stabbed out, whisking into the janissary. The soldier didn’t even cry out, he simply crumpled to the ground.
Mingzhou leapt up and sprinted back into the tunnel, the lasrifle cradled in her arms. ‘Let’s go visit the colonel now,’ she suggested.
Leaving Deacon and a half-dozen rebels to bring up the tractor behind them, Yuxiang led the rest at a run across the firebreak. Ork aircraft still filled the skies, fumes from their crude engines spilling down over the wall. As one of the fighters came streaking down, its guns spitting, the rebels scrambled for cover. Three of the men, former slaves who had been rescued from the pits, were caught in the fire, their bodies shredded by the heavy-calibre slugs spewing from the xenos guns.
The rest didn’t have the luxury of considering their dead. Rushing past a bombed-out pillbox, the rebels converged upon the grey bulk of Nehring’s command post. In the lead, Taofang hesitated before the armoured door, one last hideous thought occurring to him. So far there had been no sign of Iron Warriors on this section of wall. The reason might be that they were inside the command bunker.
‘Something wrong?’ Yuxiang asked.
Taofang looked at the slave, saw the eagerness and exhilaration on the man’s face. No, he decided, they had come too far to be cheated now. There was no good to come from voicing his fear now. Whatever was on the other side of that door, they would face it together.
Taofang leapt down the short string of steps between the doorway and the bunker proper, surprising the sentries huddled there for protection against the orks. The stock of his lasgun opened the cheek of one sentry, a shot from the barrel settled the second. Maintaining his momentum, Taofang hurdled the bodies and dashed into the anteroom beyond.
Here, too, he found surprised and disordered men, a rabble of soldiers who had taken to the anteroom for shelter. They gapped at him as he stood in the doorway, his duster spattered in the blood of his recent foes, the barrel of his lasgun shifting between them. One of the soldiers reached for his own weapon and was cut down instantly by Taofang’s laser. For a moment, shock held the other soldiers immobile. Before they could recover, Yuxiang and the other rebels came swarming into the anteroom, firing as they came.
Sounds of the massacre must have drifted into the control centre beyond the anteroom, for the heavy steel door slid back and a scowling lieutenant came storming through the portal. The officer had woefully misjudged the situation, however. Thinking he only faced some squabble amongst his men, the lieutenant was unprepared for the scene of carnage, or the victorious perpetrators of that havoc.
Before the officer’s scowl could collapse into shock, before his hand could even reach for the pistol holstered at his side, a crimson beam from Mingzhou’s lasrifle punched a smouldering hole through the lieutenant’s forehead.
‘Death to the Iron Warriors!’ Yuxiang shouted, pushing past the dying lieutenant, making for the closing portal behind him. The battle cry was taken up by the dozen rebels who had made it this far, all save Taofang, who wondered if one of the superhuman fiends did indeed await them on the other side of the door.
The sizzle of lasguns hissed through the air as the rebels burst from the anteroom. The cries of dying men echoed through the confines of the command centre, mixing with the dull rumble of ork bombers being transmitted across exterior vox-casters. Tech-adepts crumpled at their stations, their archaic robes scorched by las-bolts; engineers wilted to the floor, their overalls stained with their life’s blood; officers collapsed across their consoles, their black uniforms folding around them like shrouds.
There was little resistance. Beyond a few sidearms, the occupants of the command centre were
unarmed, outgunned even by the sparse arsenal the rebels had possessed at the start of their attack. Now, equipped with weapons looted off the anteroom dead, the rebels overwhelmed Colonel Nehring’s staff. After a few furious minutes of carnage, barely a half-dozen officers were still alive, their hands raised in defeat, pleas for mercy rolling off their lips. It would have been a different story if one of the Iron Warriors had been present, but thankfully the oversized command throne reserved for a visiting legionary was vacant.
Yuxiang prowled through the wreckage, wincing as sparks from a damaged Steel Blood flared across him, burning his scalp. Intent upon the dead men sprawled on the floor, he hadn’t noticed the hovering servitor. A las-bolt tore into the floating skull, sending it careening across the room to smash itself against the thick ferrocrete wall. Taofang uttered a caustic laugh.
‘It’s a waste of time looking there,’ the janissary barked. ‘There’s only one man we need, and you won’t find him with the dead!’
Mingzhou marched to where the little knot of prisoners was being held. Her face bore a vindictive smile as she grabbed the breast of one man’s tunic and pulled him away from his fellows. The officer’s dusky skin was beaded with sweat, his eyes wide with fright. They grew still wider when he heard the sniper shout to her comrades. ‘Here is the colonel! Always trust him to leave the dying to other people.’
Yuxiang and Taofang stared coldly at the terrified officer. ‘This is the man who can get us weapons?’ Yuxiang asked.
Colonel Nehring licked his lips, his eyes shifting from one man to the other, trying to gauge which of them was in command, to which of them he needed to appeal to save his life. Something about Taofang’s posture made it seem like the janissary was in charge, but one look into the soldier’s eyes was enough to make Nehring cringe. There was hate in those eyes, hate that wouldn’t be placated.
