by Rob Sanders
Even though Stroika’s cogitator countdown – now running in reverse – told him that the collision was coming, it was still a surprise. The drop-ship might not have fielded offensive weaponry but there was little that could have prepared the pilot-servitors of the Hellblade fighters for drop-ships falling out of the sky. Craft using the bulk deadweight of their own armoured forms as falling artillery.
With the drop-ships not where the aircraft’s targeters expected them to be, the swarm of Dark Mechanicum fighters overshot their objective. Instead of being engaged in a weaving attack run amongst the bark of autocannons, the Hellblades found themselves cutting through open space and the thin, radioactive smog that blanketed the forge world.
From above, the skitarii drop-ships plummeted through the fighter wing formations. Hellblades detonated against the reinforced hulls of the craft, enveloping their brute architecture in harmless fire and fury. Drop-ships smashed wings and tails from the streaking fighters and cleaved aircraft clean in half. While critically damaged Dark Mechanicum fighters rained down among the thunderbolting drop-ships, following Hellblades failed to pull up. Servitor-pilots had no choice but to fly their serrated fighter craft straight into an armoured wall of free-falling transports.
As the tail of the fighter wing formation came to the realisation that their approach vectors had been compromised, servitors of warp-polluted flesh and vox-shrieking madness peeled away. Hellblades banked to narrowly miss the falling drop-ships, with a few fortunate aircraft managing to accelerate straight through the descending havoc.
As a fighter smashed into the port side of the Nuncio, Haldron-44 Stroika was thrown back and forth in his harness. The cockpit instrumentation recorded the collision and light damage, firing alarms and blinking lamps until the pilot-servitor deactivated them. Unnatural flames washed briefly across the shattered canopy before receding with the crash.
Several swerving Hellblades shrieked by but after a few precious seconds bereft of impacts, gunfire or blazing fighters, Stroika decided that he had to slow the column’s descent.
‘All craft,’ the skitarii commander voxed, ‘engage airbrakes, flaps and fire descent engines, full thrust. Mark. Three… two… one… fire.’
Stroika felt the sudden deceleration tear at the weight of his bionics. His harness straps cut across his armour and his heart reached for his throat. The descent engines roared about the craft. The servitor-pilot hauled once again on handles and plungers. The Nuncio lurched as flaps were torn from the drop-ship by the irresistible forces at work.
Stroika’s mind and cogitator coils reeled with numbers and descent vectors but this time there was little he could do to influence the dire circumstances to which his skitarii were committed. Air brakes screeched. Flaps failed. The powerful descent engines roared their insistence. Stroika heard the superstructure of the Nuncio groan like a beast of burden that had given its last. He felt the torment of the craft’s machine-spirit.
As the drop-ship slowed, the Primus saw the forge world’s surface rise to meet them, a spiked and serrated labyrinth of mills, manufactoria and freightways. Flames rose from vents and furnace pits, burning in all the colours of daemonic darkness. Radioactive steam swirled into soot-streaked clouds of sulphur, while a toxic, heavy-metal smog seemed to hang over everything. Through the chemical haze, Stroika could see the underworld glow of venting forge temples and the hellfire of heretekal craft. Possessed magna-machinery swung colossal arms and freight-claws above factory roofs on towering derricks. Below their dread labours, armies of frightfully augmented slaves and warped servitors swarmed along freightways and channels of molten iron that flowed up from the planet’s daemon-infused core.
As the Nuncio moaned to a halt, the drop-ship’s belly smashed down through the scaffolding and oiled cables of a broad assembly line. The structure ran the length of the line, supporting magnetic claws and cargo-conveyors that transported finished products. With the descent engines still raging at full power the Nuncio rose, dragging a section of scaffold and cabling away with it.
Most of the drop-ships aimed for open spaces like freightways or container yards and benefitted from the extra distance such areas afforded. Several could not save themselves from the structures of higher buildings, however, crashing down through the light architecture of vents, vanes and corrugated roofing.
The only real loss was the Dromedo, the drop-ship coming down between a quad of belching superstacks. Getting entangled in the girders and support lines holding the metal ventscrapers together, the Dromedo brought the creaking chimneys down and itself down with them.
As the Nuncio led the thundering assembly of idling drop-ships away towards the appointed landing site, leaving the downed Dromedo and its skitarii survivors, Stroika issued the same orders he had to the crippled Ignicia and Lucifex.
As Primus he could not afford to compromise his legions or the mission for a single skitarius, cohort or clade. The alphas and skitarii soldiers of the Ignicia, Lucifex and Dromedo understood their protocols and what was expected of them. As the Mechanicus invasion force roared across the infernal industriascape of Velchanos Magna, Haldron-44 Stroika began to understand, in turn, the horrific enormity of what Engra Myrmidex and the Machine-God expected of him.
0110
SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +DROPSITE+
111/389.777_453.22’23’22 had been selected as the dropsite by the Fabricator Locum in consultation with his attendant magi and Primus Haldron-44 Stroika. On a hololithic representation it was just a grid coordinate. An area of clear land, identified on antiquated schematics and devoid of the busy architecture that characterised the rest of the manufactoria district. Stroika had decided that it was as strategically sound a starting point for an urban invasion as twenty-seven thousand other dropsites, but Engra Myrmidex favoured this position over all others for the simple fact that it was situated closest to the Magnaplex Maximal – the former forge temple principal of all Velchanos.
For the Fabricator Locum, the Magnaplex Maximal had to be a key operational target for Stroika and his skitarii for a number of reasons. As he had told his magi, Stroika and his senior alphas, the forge temple principal was still likely the technofeudal capital of the planet – even under the Dark Mechanicum – housing the forge world’s command structure. Myrmidex hoped for a swift and decisive invasion, with the forge world’s ruling priesthood annihilated in the opening stages. The lower strata of hereteks could then be mopped up by purgation actions while the infotombs and technological treasures of Velchanos Magna were plundered and catalogued.
The Fabricator Locum also told Stroika and the gathering that the infotombs below the Magnaplex Maximal housed the forge temple’s High Altar – the respository of the forge world’s most precious knowledge. Thousands of years of secrets, from both before and after Velchanos Magna’s terrible tragedy, awaited them.
These factors had weighed heavily on Stroika’s analysis and battle plans. On the planetary approach, when the fleet became truly acquainted with the extent of the damage suffered by the forge world, the Primus feared that Myrmidex’s key objective had been lost. By some fell miracle however, the Magnaplex Maximal had escaped decimation. The monstrous forge temple sat on the edge of the colossal drop-off that plunged kilometres down to the raging planetary core.
Settling on the dropsite, Stroika had been asked by 10-Vitro Tiberiax how they could count on the site still being clear and suitable for landing the Mechanicus bulk troop transports. Stroika had told his second-in-command that Mars itself still bore much the same layout as it had done ten thousand years before, despite suffering several apocalyptic tragedies – including civil war and the treachery of Horus. As holy sites, forge temples were not demolished or moved. Since the needs of such sites remained the same, the supply networks that existed in surrounding districts also tended to remain the same
. When Stroika showed Tiberiax the ancient data he had on the dropsite, the skitarii officer was further convinced. The landing zone had been a radioactive waste dump known as the rad-barrens before the warp storm, and not a great prospect for redevelopment.
Haldron-44 Stroika walked up beside him, with the servo-skull Phrenos~361 hovering nearby. Tiberiax was amazed. The Primus had been right. Thousands of years of warp storm isolation and spiritual pollution had done little to change the area. It was still a radioactive wasteland, bar the fact that after thousands of years of continuous service it was more of a mountain of radioactive waste.
Like a conquering general of old, Haldron-44 Stroika had taken the high ground. All about the rad-barrens, terraces had been cleared by magna-machinery and dozers to enable further use of the site. The radioactive machinery now sat as smouldering wrecks, permanent additions to the site they tended – a testament to the precision fire of skitarii rangers. The terraces served as landing sites for the Mechanicus drop-ships that were spilling forth thousands of skitarii solders, Ironstrider engines and Dunecrawlers that made short work of the radioactive slopes.
Nalode Deka 871 trudged up the slope towards them, flanked by a pair of his ruststalkers. It had been Deka’s killclades that had been responsible for the bodies that lay strewn across containment barrels, tumbling down gritty slopes and face down in pools of radioactive seepage. Before the cybernetic sharpshooters of Tiberiax’s ranger cohorts or even the vanguard skitarii – whose function it was to establish such a foothold in enemy territory – Princeps Deka had unleashed his cybernetic killers.
Exploiting a loophole in his protocols, Nalode Deka 871 had deployed his spindly ruststalker units upon touchdown and they had set about massacring the servitors, waste processors and slave-reclamators with their transonic blades. Even now, under Deka’s orders, the gas-masked killers picked their way across the rad-barrens on their cloven appendages, butchering the misshapen denizens of the shanty communities at the foot of the radioactive mound.
Stroika transmitted back.
As the three skitarii officers stood in mindlinked communion, Ironstrider engines and their riders filed past. The long legs of the walkers took them down the ramp and over the radioactive shallows.
Deka told his Primus, his optics burning to pinpoints of light from within his hood.
Princeps like Nalode Deka 871 saw themselves as manifestations of the Motive Force – the violent requirements of progress and change. In becoming but a scrap of flesh within a metal body, Deka viewed himself and his sufferings as taking a step ever closer to the Omnissiah’s ideal. He viewed the flesh of his enemies similarly so and aimed to relieve them of its burden with his transonic blade and the chordclaw appendage of crackling talons that shimmered with molecular dissonance at his side.
Nalode Deka 871 didn’t answer.
Once again, Nalode Deka 871 was silent. The princeps seemed to sense movement in 10-Vitro Tiberiax’s servos and before the other princeps could issue a doctrinal remonstration, issued a static-laced response of his own.
Turning and walking away down the hill, Deka stopped. A stream of autocannon fire tore up the black grit of the slope, sending fountains of radioactive seepage splattering for the sky. A forge world Hellblade – one of the regrouping remnants of the fighter wing that had attacked the drop-ships – shrieked overhead. Streaking up behind it through the thin chemical smog was a Lightning strike fighter, painted in the god-pleasing red of Mars. The aircraft had been despatched from the fleet’s arkcruisers upon Engra Myrmidex’s command. Fast as they were, the Lightnings and their servitor-pilots had not been of service during the skitarii insertion, but were now proving their worth against the forge world’s defence wing and temple-mounted emplacements.
As Nalode Deka 871 continued down the slope, the Lightning seared a pair of las-beams at the attacking Hellblade, downing the enemy aircraft with its cannons. A second Lightning screamed in to despatch the falling target. It fired a missile that turned the enemy craft into a ball of tumbling flame before peeling away.
With frag raining harmlessly down about him, Haldron-44 Stroika felt the steely presence of the Fabricator Locum through his umbilical data-tether. Ghosting the Primus and his skitarii soldiers through the sweeping interface of phylactic communion, Engra Myrmidex surveyed the dropsite through the eyes, optics and augurs of the skitarii on the ground.
10-Victro Tiberiax felt the phylactic intrusion also and gave his Primus a nod. Even the Fabricator Locum’s mere presence was enough to prompt the officers. Engra Myrmidex was watching – and through him, the Machine-God.
10-Victro Tiberiax left his commander and stepped off the side of the Nuncio’s ramp, slipping between a train of Onager Dunecrawlers that were making their arachnoid way onto the field of battle from the drop-ship’s hold. Stroika cast his cycling optics across the rad-barrens and the heretek forge world beyond. With a lidless blink he cleared his datastreams and overlays.
His rad-censer crackled with the deadly radiation of the mountainous dump, like those that dangled from the silvered battleplate and red trench-cloaks of the skitarii thousands disembarking their monstrous drop-ships. Stroika watched the sea of hoods and helmets bob down the mountainside, the blistering blue glow of weaponry like marker-lights signifying their progress. The gait of robotic legs and the sight of so many cybernetic soldiers in synchronised movement was almost hypnotic. Orders were streamed. Obedience was silent. It would have made for a serene vision but for the torturous din beyond.
The heavy-metal clunk of crawlers and Ironstrider engines. The sky-splitting scream of heretek fighters and Mechanicus Lightnings doing battle above. Worst of all, the sickening thunder of endless forge world production. Vox-hailers bawling corrupt scrapcode, warnings and inducements. Bottomless quarries being blast-plundered of raw materials – stone, metals and ores, all warped by the storm-bathed taint of the Great Gyre. Hell-fed furnaces, raging with immaterial energies. Vast, baroque complexes that roared with machinery possessed, swarms of warp-thralled workers and monstrous weapons of daemonic design.
Beyond the shimmering mire of spent fuels, rusted barrels of contaminant and irradiated scrap upon which Stroika stood, the forge world of Velchanos Magna extended like a nightmarish vision of infernal industry and black, byzantine architecture. Exhaust towers vented strange flame, while sky-scraping node columns arced unnatural energies. It was a darkness of chains, corrugation and mechanised vastness, lit by sparks, arcing energies and cascades of molten metal.
