“Fall back!” shouted Alaric. “Close the circle! They’re surrounding us!”
The Grey Knights moved back from the barrier of the Titan’s arm so they could help the tech-priests who were dying behind them. In close formation they could send out a weight of storm bolter fire enough to batter back the servitors as they moved in for the kill, buying the tech-priests enough time to add some fire of their own. Up close, the servitors were more inclined to kill with their claws instead of their multi-lasers and the tech-priests at least had a chance in a firefight that they didn’t in hand-to-hand combat.
But it meant nothing more than a few more moments. A handful of seconds in which to hurt the Dark Mechanicus more.
Hard black beams of energy played across the bloodstained rockcrete of the makeshift compound, scoring deep gouges in the surface and cutting limbs from bodies where they touched the tech-priests. Alaric looked up to see more Dark Mechanicus troops on the parapet of the Titan’s leg armour—they must have climbed up the sheer ceramite of the armour and were now using their vicious beam weapons to slice apart the few defenders on the parapet.
The new attackers looked like tech-priests but there was something wrong about them, even by the standards of the Dark Mechanicus priests Alaric had seen on Chaeroneia already. Tentacles waved from between the augmetic components that made up their bodies. Darkness bled from under their tattered bloodstained robes and the massive beam weapons they carried in two of their numerous augmetic arms seemed to burn with black flame, as if they were powered by sorcery. They were a fusion of tech-priest and daemonic sorcery, possessed like the servitors but with an intelligence the animalistic data-daemons lacked.
“Firing line!” ordered Alaric. “Up there! Now!”
The Grey Knights opened fire and one or two of the daemonic priests fell, but there were more, suddenly drifting down the near side of the Titan’s leg, apparently moving on some kind of anti-grav unit. Lines of black energy swung as the daemonic priests fired and Brother Cardios fell, his leg sliced through at the thigh.
“Cover!” shouted Alaric. The squad broke up as the daemonic priests concentrated their fire on the Grey Knights. Dvorn barely broke stride to grab the fallen Cardios and haul him into cover, still firing.
Alaric hit the ground behind a fallen slab of the Titan’s torso armour. Magos Antigonus dropped down beside Alaric. His servitor body was barely able to move itself and it was covered in blood and laser scars.
“Photon thrusters,” said Antigonus, glancing past the cover to where the daemonic priests were wreaking carnage among the tech-priests caught out of cover. “Portable particle accelerators. They’ll go through anything. I didn’t know they could make them any more.”
Alaric looked at Antigonus’s wrecked body. “Can you take over one of the servitors?”
“Not with a daemon inside.”
Alaric stood up and fired over the ceramite slab. Thruster beams carved past him in response, slicing a chunk off the Titan armour. As he ducked back down Alaric saw another force of servitors approaching, this time with huge steam-spewing war engines lumbering along behind them. And there was someone leading them.
Antigonus saw it too. A tech-priest, surrounded by the death servitors. The lower part of his face was a nest of writhing mechadendrites and fronds of sensor-wires waved from where his hands should have been.
“Scraecos,” said Antigonus.
Alaric recognized him from the statue in the underground cathedral. “We’ve got them scared. They sent their best to kill us.”
“Then let’s return the favour. It is time, justicar.”
“Can you do it?”
“Probably not. But I always enjoyed a challenge. Cover me from those photon thrusters.”
Alaric nodded. “Grey Knights, covering fire. Get close and keep them busy. With me!”
Alaric broke cover and ran, head down as he charged. Black beams of photons ripped past him and one nearly took his arm off but he kept going, hoping a moving target would be more difficult for the daemonic priests to hit. He fired as he went, spraying storm bolter fire almost at random.
He made it to the base of the Titan’s leg. The closest daemonic priest’s photon thruster changed configuration in his hands and the beam fragmented into dozens of black bolts. They spattered against Alaric’s armour, boring smoking craters into his skin. Bursts of cold pain tore into him. Some of the bolts had gone right through his chest and out through the backpack of his armour, but Alaric had suffered worse and gone on fighting.
Alaric crashed into the priest. The daemon inside it roared and the priest’s body reconfigured, its shoulder rotating to bring its combat-fitted augmetic arms to the fore. A sparking electro-whip lashed at him—Alaric caught the whip on the haft of his halberd and punched the priest in the face hard enough to shatter the desiccated face and expose the sparking electronics underneath.
The arms reached around and grabbed Alaric, trying to wrestle him to the ground. Alaric saw a second priest lowering his photon thruster, ready to bore a massive hole right through Alaric once he was down.
The second priest was bowled aside by a shape that darted in almost too quick to see. It was Archmagos Saphentis, his bionic arms in full combat configuration, stabbing and slicing at the possessed priest.
Alaric stabbed his halberd down into the lower back of the priest that was wrestling with him. Something blew in a shower of blue sparks and the grip slackened—Alaric pushed the priest away from him and swung the halberd blade in an arc that cut the priest neatly in two. The daemon inside gibbered and Alaric saw its image superimposed over his vision for a moment. It was a horrendous thing, gleaming wet exposed muscle, a score of burning green eyes studding its pulsing flesh. Then it was gone, its host destroyed and its substance unable to retain stability in real space.
The rest of the squad was among the daemonic priests. Dvorn was killing one and Haulvarn was fending off another.
Lykkos was lying nearby, probably dead, two large smoking holes burned through his chest and abdomen. Somewhere across the battlefield the crippled Cardios was still pouring flame into the servitors scrambling over the wreckage.
Magos Antigonus had made it over the Titan’s torso and was presumably scrambling across the rockcrete towards his target. He had made it. The daemonic priests had been pushed back against the Titan’s leg and many were dead.
“Grey Knights! Fall back, stay tight!” Alaric led the Grey Knights back into close formation behind a slab of leg armour, keeping up suppressing fire.
“Lykkos is gone,” said Brother Haulvarn.
“I saw,” said Alaric.
“Antigonus has gone after the archmagos veneratus,” said Saphentis.
“That’s right.”
“That is an ambitious plan.” Saphentis’s voice was level in spite of the las-blasts and photon bolts that were smacking into the wreckage around him.
“All the best ones are.”
“I shall join him. The veneratus is a disgrace to his title. And I think the magos will need my help.”
Alaric looked Saphentis up and down. He was covered in gore from the biological parts of servitors and daemonic priests he had torn through and the vicious spinning saw blades of his combat attachments were whirring ready to kill.
“You’re right,” said Alaric. “Good luck. For the Emperor.”
“For the Emperor, justicar.”
Saphentis rose regally and strode out into the battle-field. Alaric yelled the order and the remaining Grey Knights covered him as Saphentis moved with surprising speed towards the Titan’s arm, avoiding the solid black beams of power that swung past him. He must have been calculating firing angles as he went, stepping confidently around volleys of fire and spatters of photon bolts, pausing to slash his way past rampaging servitors. He ran right through the spray of fire from Brother Cardios, who was lying by the Titan’s arm, holding back the mass of servitors almost single-handedly.
Then Saphentis was gone, over the
barricade of the fallen arm and amongst Scraecos’s bodyguard of servitors.
“Stay tight,” said Alaric. “Mark targets. Antigonus’s priests will have to fend for themselves, it’s about survival now. Fight for time.”
“I am the Hammer,” said Haulvarn, praying to prepare his soul for death.
“I am the point of His spear,” continued Brother Dvorn. “I am the mail about His fist…”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“In ancient times, men built wonders, laid claim to the stars and sought to better themselves for the good of all. But we are much wiser now.”
—Archmagos Ultima Cryol, “Speculations On Pre-Imperial History”
Archmagos Saphentis’s power reserves were running low. He was pushing every available scrap of power into his self-repairing units, holding fractured components together with electromagnetic fields and flooding his wounded biological parts with clotting agents to keep him alive. He did not have much time left. But then, he didn’t need much time.
A full maniple of servitors protected Scraecos. From a distance they could have cut Saphentis to shreds with las-fire, but up close they lusted to take Saphentis apart with their claws. It was a fundamental logical flaw and one that proved the servitors were controlled by daemons and not hunter-programs. Saphentis’s combat attachments and the subroutines that ran them, were far more effective when fighting illogical enemies. And Saphentis didn’t have to kill all the servitors—he just had to get past them.
He ducked one slash of claws and sidestepped another, slicing off a servitor’s limb with his bladed one. A servitor reared in front of him like a venomous snake, probe extended to stab through Saphentis’s chest and suck out his soul. Saphentis smacked the heel of his bionic hand into the servitor’s chest and sent it sprawling backwards.
If the servitors had stayed in formation and coordinated their attacks like true machines of the Omnissiah, Saphentis would not have had a chance. But these were creatures of Chaos. They acted, by definition, without logic. So Saphentis drifted past them, calculating their every move with ease, always aiming straight for Scraecos.
The archmagos veneratus had the highest grade of augmetics the Adeptus Mechanicus could produce. Saphentis could tell that just by looking. No doubt they had been fused with the biomechanical technology favoured by the heretics of the Dark Mechanicus—corruptive and foul, but more effective in the short term. Scraecos was maximizing the chances of Saphentis running out of self-repair resources, simply waiting for Saphentis to come to him.
Scraecos would probably kill Saphentis, but that was not the point. The point was that there remained a very small chance that Saphentis would kill Scraecos and pursuing that chance was Saphentis’s duty to the Omnissiah.
The metallic fronds that replaced Scraecos’s hands were glowing blue and spitting sparks into the ground. The strands knotted together into twin lashing ropes of metal and as Scraecos cracked them like whips they sent arcs of blue-white electricity spearing towards Saphentis.
Saphentis stepped past one and took the other full on the chest, feeling circuits bursting like blood vessels inside him, excess power flooding through him and scorching what little flesh he had left.
Scraecos was suddenly closing, whips slashing at Saphentis. Saphentis was too slow—compared to Scraecos he was obsolete, ancient mechanical technology outclassed by the biological heresies that made up Scraecos’s artificial body. One electric whip snaked around one of Scraecos’s arms and the other raked across his shoulders and back.
Saphentis was filled with the kind of pain he thought he had forgotten. Scraecos’s dead silver eyes stared at him through the agony as Saphentis was held immobile, completing the circuit between Scraecos’s power source and the ground. Nerve endings burned. Power coils burned out. Diagnostic alerts flashing against Saphentis’s retinas were drowned out by the pain.
Scraecos grabbed Saphentis by one arm and an ankle and threw him. Saphentis blacked out for a moment as he sailed through the air trailing sparks and slammed hard against the leg of a Warhound Titan.
Saphentis forced his eyes to focus. He was flat on his back with the hunched shape of the Warhound above him—the ceramite of its armour was threaded through with biological growths like veins, just another heresy among many.
Saphentis knew he was some distance from Scraecos and his servitors. He had a few moments, perhaps, before something closed in for the kill. He forced himself to his feet. One of his combat-equipped arms was hanging limp and broken by his side, its mind-nerve impulse unit burned out. He was wreathed in greasy smoke and the smell of cooking meat. Black spots flickered on his vision where facets of his large insectoid eyes had been smashed by the impact.
The servitors, like a host of metal-shelled beetles, were swarming over the Titan wreckage in the distance. There was nothing Saphentis could do to help Alaric fight them now.
Scraecos was approaching. The Dark Mechanicus priest was walking with regal calm into the shadow of the Warhound where Saphentis stood, arm-fronds twisting and untwisting as if Scraecos was uncertain which configuration to kill Saphentis with.
“Old ideas die,” said Scraecos, transmitting his thoughts in the cackling staccato of Lingua Technis. “Just like you.”
“Only heretics die,” said Saphentis.
“Heretic? No. Your ignorance is the only heresy on this world. Around you stands the work of the Omnissiah, dictated to me in His own voice. It is the sickness inside you that makes it ugly in your eyes, but I see the beautiful truth of this world.”
“Your words condemn you,” said Saphentis. The pain was still great and everything human in him begged for it to end. But a great deal of Saphentis was no longer human. It was the sacrifice he had made to the Omnissiah, now it was the only thing keeping him conscious. “Your thoughts are vile enough. But this… this cannibal planet you have built. Everything about it is sick. That you let yourself be corrupted by your time in the warp is bad enough. But that you are too blind to even see it… that is unforgivable.”
Scraecos snaked a whip around Saphentis’s neck and slammed him against the leg of the Warhound. “Blind? When I throw you to the hunter-programs and the Omnissiah mauls your soul, when He rips your mind open so you understand the sickness your Imperium stands for, then you will wish you were blind!” Scraecos’s voice was a snarl, spitting out the zeroes and ones of Lingua Technis like poison. “I have seen the planets and stars rearranged according to His plan, but you will see nothing but blackness and death. Your Omnissiah is a blasphemy, an invention of cowards to crush your imagination. My Omnissiah will eat your soul. When it is done, we will see which one triumphs.”
The blood was cut off from Saphentis’s brain. He had about thirty seconds to live. That was if Scraecos’s patience didn’t run out.
Saphentis’s primary systems were mostly burned out. His entire nervous system was gone. But not everything built into his body was wired into his nervous system any more. Saphentis had been upgraded hundreds of times, each iteration bringing him closer to the Omnissiah by replacing more and more of his fleshy body with increasingly arcane bionics. There was much in Saphentis’s body that had been made obsolete by new augmentations—redundant systems that he had not used in decades, but which were still fused somewhere deep inside him.
Saphentis ran diagnostic routines on his augmetic systems, even as the last flickers of energy bled out of his brain. He saw his motive systems and combat attachments were mostly offline. He could barely feel any of them any more. Even if he could force his bionic arms to work, he needed more time that Scraecos would give him to reroute his nervous system through old connections.
Scraecos’s eyes were blank silver disks, tarnished with biological growths. The skin of his face was pulled so tight there was little more than a skull showing above the fittings of his mechadendrites. It was thrust right up close to Saphentis, so that the face of the Dark Mechanicus would be the last thing Saphentis ever saw.
“My Omnissiah knows what
you worship,” said Saphentis, forcing his transmitter to comply. “He knows about the Standard Template Construct. It is not the sacred thing you think it is.”
Scraecos thrust his face closer to Saphentis, pushing Saphentis deeper into the dent he had formed in the leg of the Warhound. “Is that what you think lies beneath our feet? An STC? You disappoint me, tech-priest. You truly have no imagination.”
Saphentis pulled his augmetic eyes back into tight focus on Scraecos’s loathsome face. Then he forced every last drop of power into his optical enhancers and the full light spectrum bloomed into his vision—infra-red, ultra-violet, electromagnetism and everything besides, forced through his multifaceted eyes with such intensity that they couldn’t take it any more.
Saphentis’s insectoid eyes exploded. Thousands of shards of diamond-hard lenses shredded the skin of Scraecos’s face and punched through the wizened skull into his brain. Scraecos reeled in shock and confusion as the explosion battered his one remaining human organ, his brain.
Saphentis slipped out of Scraecos’s grip and thudded to the ground against the Warhound’s massive foot. Scraecos stumbled back, whips lashing wildly, greyish blood spurting from his ruined face. His mechadendrites spasmed in pain.
Saphentis heard Scraecos spitting random syllables of machine-code. He couldn’t see anything—his eyes were completely destroyed. The front of his skull burned, right through to the backs of his eye sockets where his optic nerves were on fire. But he was alive, for a few moments more.
Saphentis forced his thoughts through old conduits, mind-impulse units that had lain dormant and unused for more years than Saphentis could remember. They wouldn’t hold, but that didn’t matter. He just needed a few more seconds.
[Grey Knights 02] - Dark Adeptus Page 25
