by Rob Sanders
While the Kataphrons seemed an unstoppable force of fury and destruction, the daemon engines kept coming. Even as the battle servitors tore hellish hearts from armoured chests, crushed prone war machines beneath their tracks and drove the monstrous essence of daemonic fusions from their armoured tombs, more of the dread automata proceeded from infernal furnace works. Decimators smashed lesser engines aside to get to the Kataphrons, roaring their elemental rage. Rho~4[11/12] was impaled on the talon of a siege claw and torn from his turret socket. The servitor’s truncated body was thrown between Decimator engines who tore his body apart.
Rho~4[5/12] was immobilised by a small horde of twisted battle-automata who smashed their crackling power fists down through his hull and left track. Swamped by droning daemon engines, the Kataphron Breacher was rendered into ruptured flesh and scrap.
Rho~4[9/12] fought with the furious might of the Machine-God, all but clearing the western approach before walking heresies blasted walls of warpflame from the barrels of carapace-mounted combustors, and the Breacher was lost in the torrent.
The Breachers protecting Gant offered supporting fire from the sacrificial site. The blinding brilliance of arcstreams blasted through the warp-tainted automata, overloading their workings and turning their hell-crafted forms into explosions of immaterial flame and pranging shrapnel. Torsion cannons cut swaths of destruction through the advancing metal monstrosities. As the torque fields fixed on hulking limbs, weaponry and spiked plate, the projections revolved, tearing a churning maelstrom of invisible force through the enemy.
Daemon engines had appendages torn from their bodies, plate was wrenched and twisted savagely from Decimators and automata were broken in half. Forge-spawned robots were thrown backwards while other infernal constructs were smashed into ruins that sparked and streamed smoke from the freightway floor.
Within the armoured circle of Kataphron Breachers, Gant stepped from rear hull-section to rear hull-section, aiming his own weaponry between the brute forms of his heavy battle servitors. Tapping on plated shoulders with his staff of office, the magos dominus had the Breachers lean aside as he sent hailstorms of bullets from his macrostubber into the approaching enemy. Locking his shoulder-mounted eradication ray into position, Gant fired the powerful weapon, melting monstrous Decimator engines into nothingness and evaporating from existence entire columns of relentless daemonic machines.
The magos dominus emptied his macrostubber into the daemonic war machine as it turned and charged towards him. Crumbling shards of rockcrete bounced on the boulevard with its every step while its armoured chest turned into a display of sparks and stub ricochets. As the priest’s weapon ran dry the Decimator engine answered with its own storm lasers, cutting through Rho~4[2/12] with sizzling beams of warp-streaked light. As the heavy battle servitor died in his turret, Gant was forced to leap onto the hull of Rho~4[10/12], who suffered a similar fate.
Suddenly the great Decimator stopped, as though its thunderous advance had been stopped by some unseen force. Pulled down to its knees, the rockcrete shattering beneath it, the thing’s weaponry grew silent. The sound of shredded workings and cabling could be heard within the plate of its barrel chest. Gore and oil splattered to the ground as the abomination’s head was pulled backwards into its chest to be churned up with the rest of its afflicted innards. As the daemon engine fell forward and collapsed in a heap, Gant saw that Rho~4[1/12] had rolled up behind the thing and blasted rotating beams of gravitic energy up through the daemon engine’s back.
Rho~4[6/12], still fighting the daemon engines, exploded in a ball of flame and his ruptured power plant took out a throng of battle-automata that had been beating the Breacher into the freightway with their power fists. With that last knot of foes defeated and straggler engines still marching into the withering fire of Gant’s heavy battle servitors, the magos dominus was about to announce their victory. The furnace works all about them were either demolished wrecks or twisted temples of silent darkness. He turned his eradication ray on the last operational forge, blasting the entrance columns, causing the superstructure of the furnace works above to collapse and bury the bright blaze of the maw in thousands of tonnes of wreckage.
Then he heard an ungodly roar. The trench of daemonic iron that fed the forge with its malefic power still burned bright in the boulevard before it. The small mountain of wreckage that the building had become began to quake. A pair of huge hydraulic pincers punched through the scrap to take hold of a girder that had collapsed across the entrance. At first Gant thought that the monstrosity beyond might heave the thick girder aside but instead it cut through the structural support with ease.
As the magos dominus stumbled back, Rho~4[1/12] and his remaining Breachers thrashed forwards on their tracks. The daemonic war engine pushed through the wreckage of the forge, shaking off cabling, struts and sections of roof. It was unlike the daemonic walkers that had marched from the other furnace works. Scuttling forth like a spider on spiked hydraulic legs, the infernal engine cleared a path with its metal claws. Riding atop the legs was a tank-like hull that mounted fearsome weaponry, including the fat barrel of a battle cannon. Crowning the abomination was a daemonic skull of black metal that leered at Gant and what remained of his Kataphrons. As its horrific maw opened and an inhuman bellow of mechanical rage emitted from its armoured chest, Gant thought he heard the frustration of the Abystra Dynomicron.
Arc-streams of searing energy blazed from Rho~4[12/12] and Rho~4[4/12] and danced across the daemon engine’s form. Grabbed in one colossal pincer, Rho~4[12/12] was turned into a mulch of pulverised flesh and plate. The abomination’s second claw came down like a hammer, smashing Rho~4[4/12] down through his own hull and tracks. The resulting explosion damaged the claw and knocked the magos dominus back into a stagger.
As the metal monster retracted the sparking stub of its mangled limb, Rho~4[7/12] blazed an arc-stream across its armoured chest. For a moment the daemon engine stalled before returning fire from its reaper autocannons. A torsion cannon blast from Rho~4[1/12] turned the weapons array into a mangled mess of twisted barrels and spilling ammunition belts. Jammed, the weapon exploded, knocking the daemon engine sideways on its scuttling legs.
Locking hydraulics in place and bracing itself, the daemon engine blasted a shell from the fat cannon mounted centrally on its spiked hull. Rho~4[7/12] was annihilated by the apocalyptic blast that thundered through a forge opposite and brought the building crashing to the ground.
Only Rho~4[1/12] was left. The Kataphron Breacher voxed a stream of binharic cant at his priestly master. The battle servitor needed to get the magos away from the great daemon engine.
As the daemon engine reached out, Gant blasted away with his eradication ray, turning the monstrous claw at the end of the appendage to streaming smoke carried away on the wind. With a resounding clunk, the engine smashed Gant’s augmented body aside with the stump. It angled a multi-barrelled missile launche
r down with a series of nasty clicks, forcing Gant to engage his refractor field.
As a missile slammed into the protective field, the magos dominus was knocked back, his form at the centre of a crackling ball of energy. At such close range the daemon engine was also battered back, but that didn’t stop the thing firing another missile at Gant. This time he was knocked head over cybernetic body, coming to rest at the foot of a furnace building’s column, his refractor field sizzling to nothing about him.
The daemon engine turned its hull on its spidery legs and shrugged off the attentions of Rho~4[1/12]’s torsion cannon. As armoured panels twisted and detached from its obscene mechanical body, it locked hydraulics and fired the monstrous battle cannon. Rho~4[1/12] sped backwards and missed the worst of the catastrophic blast, but as a fountain of rockcrete was sent skywards, the Kataphron Breacher bounced on a smashed track. With the explosion washing over his breacher-plate and grit raining down about him, the battle servitor came to a shuddering halt.
‘Over here, you abominable machine…’ Theronymous Gant vox-hailed across the freightway. The daemon engine turned on its hydraulic legs, its battle cannon moving towards the magos dominus and then back towards the battle servitor who, though immobilised, was re-charging his weapon. Gant fired a beam of discorporating energy from his eradication ray straight through the legs of the monstrous machine, blasting a spiked limb to nothingness. Unbalanced, it toppled backwards.
< Rho~4[1/12],> Gant transmitted in binharic cant.
The Breacher turned in his turret with a damaged judder and blasted the gravitic force of his torsion cannon at the nearest forge, tearing the structural innards out of the fell temple. The building cascaded down around the Kataphron. Heavy support struts, corrugated wall sections, girders and furnace works architecture smashed down around Rho~4[1/12] like an avalanche of steel.
As the Kataphron disappeared beneath the collapsing forge, the tumbling wreckage partially buried the daemonic war machine. With girders lying across it and the twisted detritus of the temple weighing it down, the abomination could not get to its legs or turn its armoured hull. Its monstrous weaponry was now fixed on the sky.
Scrambling up the mound of wreckage, hidden by a miasma of dust, Gant made his desperate way up towards the buried engine. Holstering his macrostubber and locking his spent eradication ray in place on his shoulder weapons cradle, the magos dominus pulled his cog-bladed power axe from his back and gripped it in two of his many bionic talons. Using his walking stave to steady himself across the debris, Gant pulled himself up towards the daemon engine with the snaking length of his mechadendrites.
The infernal creation was still attempting to raise its bulk from the wreckage and turn its useless weaponry. The leering metal skull of its daemonic form roared the ire of not only the furious entity that possessed it but also the Abystra Dynomicron that had given it dread life.
Swinging his power axe down with all the force in his augmented body, Gant attempted to chop the abomination’s head from its mechanical body. The sizzling serrations of the cog-blade bit into daemonic flesh again and again. The thing roared, and then it screamed. Its death was not clean, with the axe taking five strikes to cut through the brawn of its neck. Finally, and with the agonised screeches of the monstrosity still echoing about the Crucib-Pentadictum complex, its metallic head bounced down the wreckage slope.
Taking a moment to thank the Omnissiah for the victory, Theronymous Gant followed the head down to where Rho~4[1/12] had been lost to the collapsing forge. Using the power axe like a pick, the priest began to dig the heavy battle servitor out of the wreckage. Uncovering his head and shoulder, Gant soon realised how pointless the endeavour was. A girder had caved in the servitor’s tattooed head and knocked the ring from his nose. The magos stood there for a moment before grunting. He hadn’t uncovered Rho~4[1/12] out of concern or respect.
Without the Kataphron Breacher and his tracks, it would be a long walk back to the forces of the Machine-God.
Shouldering his power axe, Magos Theronymous Gant left the heavy battle servitor behind and made his way south out of the complex, his staff of office tapping the freightway as he did.
About The Author
Rob Sanders is the author of ‘The Serpent Beneath’, a novella that appeared in the New York Times bestselling Horus Heresy anthology The Primarchs. His other Black Library credits include the Warhammer 40,000 titles Adeptus Mechanicus: Skitarius, Legion of the Damned, Atlas Infernal and Redemption Corps and the audio drama The Path Forsaken, along with the Warhammer Archaon duology, Everchosen and Lord of Chaos. He has also written many Quick Reads for the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in the city of Lincoln, UK.
A discovery of ancient technology sends a skitarii legion, commanded by Alpha Primus Haldron-44 Stroika, into battle on a forge world overrun by Chaos.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS UK.
Cover illustration by Roman Cherepov.
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ISBN: 978-1-78251-533-3
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