Skitarius
Page 9
Initiating phylactic communion, Haldron-44 Stroika attempted to mindlink to Tech-priest Captain Pharad or any of the skitarii officers left aboard. All he could manage was the horror of a few seconds spent experiencing the dying moments of tech-priests and cybernetic soldiers. Sizzling through static overlay after overlay, Stroika caught glimpses of the decimated armoury, bodies floating through the zero-gravity of the airless barracks and daemon entities thrashing through the runebanks and servitors of the carrier’s small bridge.
Jumping to the phylactic consciousness of the tech-priest majoris, Stroika found that Magos Androvac and his enginseers were all either dead or dying. Blinking between their static-shot feeds, Stroika saw that the engineering section was bleached with bright, white light. His optic overlays were crowded with code and updates. He searched through the datastreams coursing through his cogitator. His mind was swarming with redundant feeds from all over the Basilika, mixed in with drop-ship acknowledgements and clarification requests from skitarii officers aboard the other troop carriers – including 10-Victro Tiberiax. He had no time to answer.
Amongst a meme-repository of logged items and updata, Haldron-44 Stroika located the confirmation that he had feared finding. Magos Androvac’s final assessment, transmitted only moments before his death. Confirmation that the carrier’s sub-light plasma drive was in the process of overloading. The daemonic entities would not stop until all on board the Basilika were dead. Stroika couldn’t let that happen.
‘All Basilika-registered drop-craft,’ Stroika voxed, ‘you are ordered to disengage your rail-anchors. I repeat. Break launch sequence and initiate drop immediately.’
The servitor-pilot of the Nuncio turned its head, giving Stroika a view of a single dead eye and yellowed teeth.
‘Do it,’ he told the servitor. The drone chuntered code back at the Primus, warning him of the impact to come.
‘All skitarii,’ Stroika called across the internal vox, flicking to the troop bay channel. ‘Brace!’
Stroika felt the familiar leap of the disengagement in the pit of his stomach. Releasing its anchored hold on the rail, the Nuncio fell the short distance between the hangar ceiling and the flight deck. The impact shuddered through the drop-ship’s superstructure, up through the troop bay, the cockpit and the vox-station chair. Tinny alarms and flashing lights erupted from the cockpit instrumentation but the pilot-servitor moved its fingers slickly across switches and studs, silencing the Nuncio.
Without the landing gear lowered, the drop-ship bounced a little off the damaged deck before sliding on its underbelly towards the hangar opening. Grabbing the support handles, Haldron-44 Stroika tightened his harness. As the mesh of a cargo underbay crumpled beneath the weight of the monstrous drop-ship, the craft caught on the lip of the depression and began to tip.
Allowing himself a moment of disconcertion, Stroika felt the craft lurch forward. The cockpit tilted and before the skitarii commander knew it, the Nuncio had tumbled straight out of the rolling hangar nose first, into a thundering freefall.
Hauling on heavy-duty hydraulic handles and plungers, the pilot-servitor began the process of negotiating the plummeting drop-ship out of its dive. Strategically firing airbrakes and flaps as the Nuncio shot down through the upper atmosphere of the forge world, the drone brought the nose of the drop-ship up and fired the descent thrusters – all the while wearing a rictus grin. Stroika could hear the boom of the powerful engine-quad all about them, fighting the force of gravity that was dragging them at horrific speed towards the surface of Velchanos Magna. As the Nuncio levelled out and slowed its descent, Stroika felt that he could risk moving about the cockpit.
‘Troop bay,’ Stroika voxed, ‘Acknowledge.’
‘Troop bay, aye,’ Cytor 2-Circadii returned.
‘Status?’
‘Ready for disembarkation, Primus,’ the alpha told him. ‘On your mark.’
‘The order is given – weapons online.’
‘Weapons online, aye,’ 2-Circadii said.
Unplugging from the vox-station and unbuckling himself from the chair, Haldron-44 Stroika took several anchored steps across the cramped cockpit. The pilot-servitor didn’t even seem to notice him. Craning his neck and looking up through the canopy, Stroika stared back at the Basilika.
One by one, the carrier’s skitarii-laden complement of hulking drop-ships were falling from the port side of the yawing vessel. He watched the Sumptal IV, the Vegra-Maximon and the Lucifex all pull out of their tumbling descents, followed by successive ranks of following drop-craft. Two drop-ships suffered a minor collision upon clearing the carrier, while craft designated to drop from the starboard hangar opening were forced to slip from the launch-rail to the deck and slide backwards the length of the flight deck. It seemed to make little difference to the tumble they found themselves in upon disembarkation.
‘Not exactly protocol,’ Stroika muttered, satisfied that the drop-ships were clear. Not a moment too soon, as the starlit void suddenly blazed white as the sub-light plasma drive of the Basilika went critical and detonated. Cycling through optical filters, Stroika watched the skitarii troop carrier blast itself to a billion shards of voidscrap, prompting evasions and emergency manoeuvring from the other transports.
As Stroika’s optics fell on the Opus Machina, holding station with several arkcruisers above the carrier deployment, the skitarii commander attempted to make phylactic contact with the flagship’s command deck.
Given the nature of his report, Stroika expected to contact Udexl Spontik or the magos catharc. Instead he found the Fabricator Locum inside his head.
Engra Myrmidex sent back nothing for a few moments.
0101
SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +COUNTDOWN+
The pilot-servitor blurted a sequence of code back into the compartment, which amounted to little more than an obligatory caution. The drone didn’t care whether its advice was heeded or whether Haldron-44 Stroika brained himself against the cockpit wall during a rough landing. It delivered the warning anyway.
‘Rea
dy, thirty seconds,’ Stroika voxed down into the troop compartment. ‘Ready all. Ready all. Officers make preparations for disembarkation. Pattern Ensconica. Establish a fall-back perimeter about the landing site, extending skirmish lines about the different sites to establish a foothold and base of operations. Review your mission parameters. Offer your prayers. Observe your screed. You are the Machine-God’s indomitable will in this benighted place. Omnissiah willing, we shall return this world to His empire. Stroika out.’
The descent had been a test. Nuncio had been the point of a thunderbolt, dropping out of the heavens upon Velchanos Magna. One hundred and two skitarii drop-ships had managed to clear their troop carriers, establishing vector columns and descent patterns to avoid being intercepted in the lower atmosphere.
Such precautions hadn’t stopped the searing tracer fire of macrocannon emplacements piercing up through the spiralling columns of drop-ships, or a temple-mounted defence laser quad sending a fat beam of sickly energy at the formation. The blistering stream of light burned the Steel Promise from the sky and went on to make a lucky strike against the hull plating of the manoeuvring arkcruiser Venturossa. The electromagnetic blasts of daemonic entities continued to erupt from silos set in the industriascape below. One such blast struck the drop-ship Stentorius, turning the craft into a deathtrap of detonating engines and possessed cybernetic soldiers who found themselves turning weapons upon each another. All Stroika could do was listen to the unfolding slaughter over the vox. This was compounded as the peeling wreckage of the polluted craft crashed through another drop-ship, claiming further skitarii lives.
As the planet’s surface raced up to meet them, Stroika had taken care to highlight key strategic structures, thoroughfares and districts. As Primus he had been granted access to antique hololithic maps of Velchanos Magna, before its descent into madness and loss to the Great Gyre. These were presented as a filtered overlay that bled across the outline of temples and key structures that Stroika’s optics could pick out of the twisted malaise of the heretek forge world. The hololithic maps had also been updated with evidence from the infotombs of Satzica Secundus of wonders to be secured or pillaged. The Fabricator Locum intended to claim all the technological treasures that the forge world had hoarded, in the name of the blessed Omnissiah.
The servitor-pilot vomited forth a stream of code that brought Stroika back to the moment. The skitarii commander slammed himself back down in the vox-station seat at the drone’s urging. Cockpit instrumentation chimed with approaching augur contacts.
‘Location?’ Stroika demanded, but before the servitor-pilot could oblige, the Primus heard the sound of gunfire. A staccato of heavy-bore shells hammered across the armour plating of the drop-ship. Stroika felt the servitor-pilot respond at the controls, but the Nuncio wasn’t built for such handling. Without offensive weaponry, the Mechanicus drop-ship was essentially a fortified compartment with descent engines. The streams of fire pounded their way across the hull of the Nuncio. Like streaking darkness searing through the forge world skies, Dark Mechanicum aircraft screamed past the cockpit.
The drone chuntered its identification of the aircraft as a Hellblade fighter wing. Stroika watched as swarms of air superiority fighters – like razored pincers cutting through the infernal haze – weaved through the descending columns of drop-ships. The thunder of autocannon fire reverberated through the Nuncio as more and more fighters targeted the craft. Several shells smashed into the cockpit canopy, cracking the armourglass and sending the instrumentation into a panic of lights and high-pitched sound.
‘Enemy aircraft inbound,’ Stroika voxed across the open channel as the storm of Hellblade fighters streaked through their formation. ‘Evasive manoeuvres.’
‘Nuncio, this is Ignicia,’ the vox crackled. ‘We’ve lost steerage way and are drifting.’
‘Nuncio,’ another officer reported across the channel, ‘they’re targeting our engines–’
Other voxmissions were cut off mid-sentence as the Hellblades used their precision fire to take out augur arrays, comms vanes and cockpits.
Stroika felt himself dragged to starboard as the servitor-pilot put the drop-ship into a controlled spin, making it more difficult for the hard-wired slave-servitors in the cockpits of the Hellblades to zero in on its vulnerabilities – vulnerabilities Haldron-44 Stroika understood only too well. The fighter wing’s autocannons couldn’t hope to breach the Nuncio’s thick plating but they could do plenty of damage to essentials like the descent engines, sensors and cockpit.
‘Nuncio to drop-craft,’ Stroika voxed, ‘evasive counterclockwise. Limit exposure. Ignicia, just get on the ground and hold position. We’ll work our way over to you.’
‘Copy, Nuncio,’ Stroika received from the drop-ship as it peeled away.
With his optics whirring to focus, Stroika tried to get a fix on the Hellblade fighter swarm. Through the smashed canopy, with the drop-ship in a corkscrew descent and the enemy aircraft shrieking their way across the twisted industriascape, it wasn’t easy. With diagrammatical overlays showing the fighter swarm banking for another high-speed attack, Stroika realised that it was time to call upon the fleet’s own air support.
Engra Myrmidex hesitated, as was his habit when performing functions for which he had no appetite or inclination.
Stroika did not know exactly what the Fabricator Locum meant but entrusted such considerations to the techno-magi and the Machine-God they served. They were the Omnissiah’s Faithful.
The servitor-pilot blurted a code-garbled warning. Stroika unbuckled his combat chassis from the chair. The momentum of the corkscrewing drop-ship threw him to the opposite wall of the compartment. Edging along it, Stroika took up position behind the ghoulish pilot and peered out through the smashed canopy. The Dark Mechanicum fighter aircraft had come around and were accelerating into an attack run. Stroika watched them stab their way through a cloud bank that was pouring from a nest of crooked tower-chimneys and superstacks. Like tiny flechettes, they shot through the poisonous cloud. The fighter swarm left the piercing twinkle of infernal forgelight in their wake like a hellish constellation in the darkness.
Air support or not, Stroika knew that the skitarii drop-ships couldn’t simply present themselves as helpless targets. His mind and cogitator coils whirled with vectors, angles, airspeeds and trajectories. Scenario after diagrammatic scenario flashed up across his overlays. He did not have time to process every percentage and possibility.
‘Yes,’ the Primus said to himself finally. Confidence flooded his chest, proceeding more from instinct than mathematical certainty. ‘Yes…’
Throwing himself back at the vox-station, he stabbed the comms cable into his haptic helm-port. ‘All skitarii drop-craft,’ Stroika said, ‘Receive and obey. Have your pilots make preparations for an extended engine burn, followed by a cut-off and freefall.’ The skitarii officer didn’t wait for the understandable concerns and questions that would follow such an announcement. There were few protocols that would apply to such a situation.
‘Ready?’ Stroika put to his own pilot. The servitor turned its head and chattered its yellow teeth. A blurt of affirmatory code followed. ‘Synchronise and maintain station on the Nuncio,’ Stroika voxed to the skitarii officers aboard his drop-ships.
Stroika watched the approaching storm of
air superiority fighters whirl by the shattered canopy of the corkscrewing Nuncio. With figures streaming down the side of his evolving diagrammatical overlays, he waited. Two more seconds. No, three.
‘On my mark,’ Stroika called across the open channel. He buckled his harness tighter. ‘Mark!’
The skitarii commander felt himself thrown upwards towards the compartment ceiling but the harness kept the deadweight of his combat chassis in its chair. He heard the descent engines roar and initiated a cogitator count that flashed up before his optic-array.
There was a dull clunk from above as the bloated underbelly of another drop-ship glanced off the Nuncio’s hull. As the servitor-pilot wrestled with the craft’s controls, levelling out the drop-ship following the light impact, Stroika saw the Lucifex plummet past them after a mis-timed burn. Such errors reinforced to Stroika the difficulty of what he was attempting. Even with omnitask servitors at the controls, the drop-ships handled like flying crates. They were designed to take a pummelling, get skitarii forces to the ground and little else. Their machine-spirits tended to be simple, belligerent entities, unused to such demands and improvisations. The kinds of manoeuvres Stroika was demanding from his transports had simply not been factored into the drop-ships’ blessed design.
Stroika’s cogitator countdown flashed its conclusion.
‘Cut engines,’ the skitarius voxed. ‘Engage freefall.’
Stroika felt the powerful rumble of the descent engines die about him. The forge world’s gravity latched back onto the monstrous drop-ship, immediately reasserting its authority. Dragged upwards, only Stroika’s harness managed to keep his cybernetic frame in the chair. Air howled about the drop-ship’s ugly form as the Nuncio plummeted like an adamantium ingot towards the twisted surface of Velchanos Magna.
‘Brace… for… impact…’ the Primus ordered across the vox. The drop-ship rattled about him, while the force of the uncontrolled descent shuffled vehicles about within their belly-hold restraints.