Overfiend

by David Annandale

  ‘I do, autarch.’

  The ranger’s agreement was enough. She held on to the knowledge that she had done all she could, and took that with her into the night.

  The melta bombs detonated, destroying the jetbikes. One of the eldar died instantly. The other two survived the explosions, one just barely. The other, limping, took cover inside the station. Behrasi moved forward, his squad following. ‘Leave the one inside to me,’ he said.

  He approached the doorway. He was greeted by silence. The eldar might have retreated into the structure. Behrasi acted on the presumption of a dangerous foe. The lumen strips inside the plant were dark. A glance at the way the sunlight fell through the doorway told Behrasi where the shadows were at their most concentrated, where the best position for an ambush would be. He charged inside and swung to the left, firing.

  A stream of monomolecular discs greeted his entrance. They sliced deeply into his armour. Blood coursed down from his right shoulder and the side of his throat.

  The arc of Behrasi’s attack found his target. His shells slammed the warrior back, shattering armour and bone. Behrasi advanced, unwavering death, ignoring the last of the eldar’s fire. The xenos fell.

  Rhamm entered the station. ‘Is that all of them?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Behrasi said. ‘Now we find the ranger. Stop him before he destroys the plant.’

  ‘I’m surprised he has the means to do so.’

  ‘Perhaps he doesn’t.’ There had been no repetition of the initial quake. ‘Either way, he dies.’

  Behrasi glanced at the bloodied eldar once more before beginning the search. The sight of the fallen enemy gave him no satisfaction. He was troubled by something more than a sense of waste. The thought that they had made a tragic mistake was half-formed.

  But it was persistent.

  Epilogue

  The war paused on Lepidus Prime, but the shadows occupied Reclamation. The Raven Guard transferred their encampment to the square that had been the eldar base. Every paving stone of the city was once more under Imperial rule. The mortals gathered enough courage to venture out of their habs, though they avoided the square. They were frightened of the iron shadows.

  Krevaan was alone in the command tent. Field repairs to his armour had given him back a fair bit of mobility. He stood, vox-unit in hand, and spoke to the captain of the Verdict of the Anvil. ‘Our mission is complete, Captain Mulcebar,’ he said. ‘The xenos taint has been purged from Lepidus Prime.’

  ‘I thought so,’ the Salamander said. ‘Our augurs have detected something massive heading for the system. It would seem that the Overfiend has taken the bait.’

  ‘Then the hour has come for your forces to bring this war to a close. Good hunting, brother.’

  ‘Thank you. I am still curious as to the orks’ obsession with this system.’

  ‘As am I. We have been unable to determine the cause of their strength.’

  ‘And what of the eldar? I understand the White Scars encountered them too.’

  ‘Another mystery. But we have defeated them as well.’ His answers were bitter on his tongue. The triumph of Eighth Company was ringing hollow. There was so much information that had been denied to him. He had acted as was necessary. If the eldar had managed to destroy the plant, they would have razed Reclamation to the ground. Perhaps they imagined that the Imperium would then have given up on this world, returning it to eldar control. But he had stopped them. His decisions had led to the destruction of all the Emperor’s foes on the planet.

  But his information was incomplete, and he knew it. He had erred. He had been arrogant, too quick to act on his hatred. The unanswered questions made him doubt the truth of his victory. He could not shake the suspicion that somehow, he had won the wrong war.

  And the last of the eldar, the ranger, still had not been found. Alathannas had disappeared into the ruins beneath the power plant. The xenos labyrinth had defeated the search. Eighth Company faced hundreds of kilometres of tangled corridors. The paths spiralled off in meaningless directions and disorienting intersections. Alathannas could evade the best part of an entire Chapter indefinitely in that maze. In the end, Krevaan could do little more than station sentinels at the entrance to the ruins. No further harm had come to the plant. As far as Krevaan could tell, Alathannas had been neutralised. But he had vanished.

  Krevaan’s doubts grew.

  The psychic shriek of the slaughter had pursued Alathannas into the underground tunnels. The terrible silence that followed pushed him even further into the depths. He ran on instinct, not quite blind, but without conscious decision. His spirit writhed beneath the lash of rage and grief.

  The object of the search, so long concealed, became unavoidable. Alathannas was caught in a whirlpool, racing down a wraithbone vortex. He knew where he was going. He knew what awaited him. Yet, after days of flight into the dark, when he saw the thing, dread drove him to his knees.

  Alathannas trembled at the entrance to the chamber. In the centre of this room, at the centre of the serpentine coil of the tunnels, at the centre of the system-wide struggle, was what the Saim-Hann had come to find. He gazed upon the terrible object. He had fulfilled Eleira’s final command. He had found it. But he was alone, and there was nothing he could do. He could not remove it from the planet.

  Nor did he wish to any longer. His trembling was from anger as well as horror.

  The humans had betrayed them. He had deluded himself with the belief that it was possible to forge real links with some individuals of that species. He had hoped, to his eternal shame, that the humans would come to the planet and defeat the orks. He had been wrong. Even if he had the power to take this thing from the planet, what would he do except complete the humans’ victory?

  If he waited, the orks would return. They had no choice. They could not resist the siren call even if they were not conscious of it. And the humans had been weakened by this first conflict.

  Before him, he saw the contours of vengeance given physical shape.

  Rising from the chamber floor was a throne. Seated on it was an immense statue. Its form was distorted, vague, incomplete. It was a body without features. The Lileathan world had been abandoned too long, and what had been left behind had lost its essential connection to the eldar. Endlessly consumed by its fury, the shard of Kaela Mensha Khaine now poured energy into another race, one with an inexhaustible hunger for war.

  From this single point, far beneath the surface of Lepidus Prime, wrath called to the orks.

  Forge Master

  Prologue

  A scream.

  It had no sound, no breath and no voice. And yet it fell upon him with claws of grief. The scream grew until its non-sound tore his soul apart.

  Elisath woke to agony. He had done so for days, weeks; long enough for time to blur, for the past and the future to be lost in an undifferentiated present of drudgery and beatings. His material reality was so present in its pain that it had overwhelmed his senses, shattered his concentration and cut him off from anything other than the torture of his body. The orks had worked him until he had given out. His body was old, weaker than those of the other eldar slaves. His eyes fell on his hands, on the long fingers so translucent, already so far gone towards crystallisation. He was a long way down the Path of the Seer. He had travelled so far that the end of his bodily existence was the shaping fact of his reality. Every perception was filtered through the imminence of his fusion with the infinity circuit. Or so it had been before his capture. The orks had turned him from a being of spirit to a being of nerve endings. But when he could work no longer, they hadn’t killed him. They had taken everything from him. They had even stolen his waystone, either through greed or instinctive cruelty. But they kept him alive. Perhaps they had other uses in mind for an eldar farseer. As brutish as the orks were, they had a cunning that was dangerous to dismiss. Especially their leader.

 
So Elisath woke to agony, but that was nothing new. The new thing, the terrible novelty, was that he hadn’t been jolted to consciousness by a kick in the ribs or a whip across the back. He had been woken by an even greater agony: he had heard his brother’s psychic death cry. It had resonated in his mind and soul as if it were his own scream, but because it was not, it carried the extra charge of consuming grief. And there was still worse. Beyond the pain, beyond the grief, there was the knowledge of what his brother’s end meant. He had a responsibility now, one he couldn’t fulfil.

  The consequences were the raw stuff of despair. They did not take a farseer to predict. The shard of Kaela Mensha Khaine was his to guard and protect. He could not do so, not when he couldn’t even help himself. Broken and in fetters, he had no recourse other than to pray to murdered gods and a splintered one that the shard remain hidden. He tried to divine if it would, but when he sent his consciousness out onto the skein, he ran into the disordered, psychic fury and energy of the orks. The threads of possibility were altered and torn so quickly, and so chaotically, that he could follow no coherent pattern, and the orks’ psychic presence, an incandescence of exuberant anger, threatened to drown him. And he couldn’t venture any further than the immediate disorder. He had no runes. They, too, had been taken from him. He had nothing to guide him out and back along the temporal weave.

  Something was coming. Elisath heard the boisterous cacophony of the guards change in tone. Brawls and barbaric laughter ceased. In their place came awe, excitement and fear.

  Elisath looked up. His cell was little more than a closet, a place to store a possession rather than a living thing. It was barely high enough to sit up in, and he could not lie down without curling foetal-tight. The floor was deep in filth, an archaeology of misery. The door to the cell was, like so much of this ship, crude, clumsy but effective. It was a patchwork of scrap metal, welded together into an object as strong as its edges were ragged. Instead of bars, Elisath looked through gaps and rips in the metal. They were wide enough for him to see the ship’s corridor. They were so narrow, he couldn’t pass his arm through without slicing open his wrists. He watched, waiting, as the creature approached. The ripples of its presence spread before it. Orks howled in ecstatic worship. Prisoners whimpered, hoping for a quick death. Crouching, Elisath kept his gaze steady. He feared ends far worse than his own demise.

  He could hear the beast coming now, its footsteps a pounding drum of war on the metal decking. The booming resonated down Elisath’s spine. It grew louder, shaking dust and powdered rust from the door. Just outside his cell, the monster stopped. The only sound now was the ork’s breathing. It was a deep, growling rattle, the sound of giant strength and hair-trigger rage reverberating in a vast, echo-chamber of a chest.

  The ork blotted out the dim lights of the corridor. Elisath saw nothing but an immense silhouette. It was broader than he was tall. It was violence made flesh. And it was the ruler of an empire.

  Elisath couldn’t see the ork’s eyes, but he could tell from the tilt of its head that it was looking at him. It was pausing, thinking. A meditating ork, in Elisath’s experience, was one of two things. It was either comically idiotic, or fantastically dangerous. There was nothing humorous in the shape before him. There was only doom.

  The ork whirled and bellowed an order. Its voice was a rasping thunder. It strode off. As it did so, Elisath collapsed against the rear wall of his cell. He gasped. The tangle of possible futures had suddenly cleared. Elisath could still see no further forwards than he could before, but now there was no need to know more. The ship had changed course. He knew where it was heading.

  No, he thought. Not there. Not this ork. And still, his knowledge was useless. Still, all he could do was pray.

  Chapter One

  What are you? The question lingered. He could not exorcise it.

  The predator lurked at the outer edges of the Lepidus System. It moved slowly through the void, waiting for its prey. It was not a sleek hunter, but it was immense. Over four thousand metres long, its hull was thick-bodied, with a massively armed prow that projected forwards like a clenched fist. There was nothing subtle about its design. It was a monster whose every rivet and plate were slaved to a single purpose: the brutal annihilation of its enemies. Now it stalked one particular target, one that had to be lured into the killing ground.

  The predator was the Verdict of the Anvil, strike cruiser of the Salamanders reserve Fifth Company. On the elevated strategium of the cathedral-like bridge, Captain Mulcebar briefed his officers. His broad, heavy-browed countenance was not one that smiled easily. He had the visage of a stern, impassive god of war, carved out of onyx, his red eyes the glow of the furnace deep within. But as the captain spoke, Sergeant Ba’birin thought he could detect a hard satisfaction in Mulcebar’s tone. ‘The missions undertaken by our brothers in the Raven Guard and the White Scars have been successful. The orks have been dealt severe blows on the planet and its moon. Of more immediate concern to our mission, these two strikes appear to have had the desired effect. Our sensorium has detected the warp displacement of a large body, accompanied by numerous smaller ones, on approach.’

  ‘He is coming,’ Sergeant Neleus said.

  Mulcebar nodded. ‘So it would seem.’

  There was a stirring among the officers, an anticipation of battle that bordered on eagerness. For some, and Ba’birin was one of those, the wait had been galling. First, the Salamanders had been diverted from their original course. They had been bound for Antagonis, there to assist the Black Dragons combat a plague of undeath. But a more immediate threat to the wider Imperium had declared itself in this system, and so they had responded, only to wait. While the Raven Guard and the White Scars fought with honour, the Salamanders had been stuck out here, hundreds of millions of kilometres from the fields of battle, preparing for an opportunity that might never materialise. Their target was the ork leader himself. The Overfiend. The invasion of the system was his doing, but there had been no possibility of retaliation until now. As far as Imperial intelligence could tell, the Overfiend remained within an enormous fleet, one far beyond the ability of the currently assembled human forces to tackle. But while they could not go to him, they could make him come to them. The broader strategic goal of killing the Overfiend’s lieutenants had been to lure the monster out. And here he came.

  The wait was over. The forge of war called.

  What are you?

  The words looped, a pulsing beat through Ha’garen’s head, as he headed for the enginarium. He had not thought the question needed asking. He had not thought about such a question at all. He was himself, as he had always been. There had been changes, these last years. He was aware of them, even if there was no emotional weight that accompanied that awareness. But the essential truth remained. He was Ha’garen, Techmarine of the Salamanders Fifth Company. How could there be any questions to ask?

  But one had been asked, and not who are you?, as damning and doubting as that would have been. What are you? The doubts were far more fundamental, his identity questioned down to its absolute core. And the question had been asked by not just any brother, but by Ba’birin.

  Ha’garen’s mind, seeking the roots of its unease, flew back to Heliosa, the Beacon City of the Salamanders’ home planet of Nocturne, more than a century ago. Two aspirants survived the trials to become Scouts. That they had known each other before their first true testing on the anvil was unusual. What was unheard of was that they came, essentially, from the same house. Ba’birin was the son of a dealer in sa’hrk hides. His family had taken in the orphaned Ha’garen when his parents had died in the Time of Trials. The two boys had bonded. They were both apprentices to Ba’birin’s father, though Ha’garen had shown none of his foster brother’s promise as a tanner. Then they were recruited. They triumphed together. They became Scouts together.

  They became Salamanders together. Fireborn.

  For seventy years,
they fought side by side, bringing the wrath of Vulkan down on the Emperor’s enemies. Each knew the other’s combat craft as intimately as his own. Their war was a synchronous meshing of lethal gears, never retreating, always implacably advancing on the foe. Their styles were different but complementary. Ba’birin was as mercurial as a Salamander ever became, and had a gift for improvisation. His feints and counter-attacks surprised the enemy, but not his battle-brother, who provided the anchor for their joint assaults. Ha’garen was the constant, unwavering, metronomic beat of relentless war upon which Ba’birin built his flourishes and variations. Ha’garen was the anvil against which Ba’birin’s spirited hammer smashed xenos, heretic and traitor.

  For seventy years, they forged a chain of comradeship. But Ha’garen had a gift with machines. The boy had been hopeless with the organic messiness of hides, but the Space Marine understood the mechanical, and when he spoke to that world, it responded. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that just over thirty years ago, Captain Mulcebar had sent him to Mars.

  He returned a Techmarine. And then, before he could regain his bearings after his absence, Nocturne was invaded. Mulcebar and the Fifth were tasked with the defence of Heliosa. Ba’birin and Ha’garen were on the front lines, fighting for the life of the Sanctuary City of their births.

  It was not a happy reunion. Ha’garen could recognise strain on Ba’birin’s face, though he did not feel it himself. In fact, he felt very little at all. His induction into the cult of the Omnissiah had tempered his emotions. His passions had flattened out to a steady, tempered mixture of logic and worship. His mind and soul were filled with the mysteries of machines and the litanies of the inorganic. When he had become a Space Marine, he had become something his former, mortal, human self would barely recognise, let alone understand. And he had felt the inevitable distance from mortals that a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes experienced. It was a distance that the Salamanders worked to counteract by remaining a part of the society of Nocturne. It was a distance that had become a yawning abyss when Ha’garen returned from Mars. He did not care to bridge it. The flesh was imperfect, a distraction, an obstacle to be overcome. Ha’garen was aware, he thought, of the degree to which he had changed. He knew that his alterations went far beyond the physical. But he did not consider them so radical as to have destroyed the self he had always possessed. It had survived the ascension to Space Marine. It lived on in the Techmarine.