by Rob Sanders
‘No matter,’ the monstrous master told him, his grille tentacles quivering. ‘You will know, soon enough.’
Stroika’s lips moved on in silence, prayers spilling from him as a countdown continued in his head.
‘Whose very existence is anathema,’ the skitarii commander said.
Three.
‘Whose living lie betrays the holy Quest for Knowledge.’
Two.
‘Those who have no part in Your grand design…’
One.
The mindscrambler grenade he had primed on his belt minutes before detonated. Free from the incapacitator current that up until then had run up through his legs, his workings, his weaponry and neurocircuitry, the primed grenade once again found its function.
With a brief flash, the bioelectrical pulse of detonation enveloped the surgical laboratorium in an arcstorm. The blast set off the two remaining mindscrambler grenades mag-locked to Stroika’s belt, bathing intricate workings and organics in a second and third wave of bioelectrical incapacitation.
The automaton’s saws and las-scalpels shuddered to a halt above Stroika. Both the protectors and their forge master stumbled back, clutching their hoods in agony and confusion. As they reeled and the bioelectrical storm of the mindscrambler grenades crackled away, Stroika felt his pulse-ravaged mind sink back into blackness.
SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +IMPERATIVE+
Stroika’s optics blinked to life. Given a momentary glimpse of the filthy laboratorium lumens, the skitarii commander felt his vision fade once more. With a warping crackle, his overlays bled forth from the darkness. He had been both unconscious and offline, as returning feeds – sluggish and glitch-fevered at first – informed him.
Diagnostic alerts told him of superficial damage caused to the rear of his combat chassis and motive bionics. Fortunately for Stroika the mindscrambler grenades inflicted overloads and neural trauma on their victims rather than physical damage, though they could even kill lesser-grade mechanoids with the intensity of their bioelectrical pulse. If he had been carrying frag or krak grenades, Stroika would have been blasted to bloody shrapnel – but that wouldn’t have prevented the skitarius from arming the grenade and denying the forge master both his phylactic prize and his miserable life.
Optics and omnispectrals returned to life. A stream of further diagnostic data told Stroika that the dormancy the incapacitator had inflicted on his primary systems – both cybernetic and neural – had shielded him from the worst of the mindscrambler blast. His cogitator coils spooled a list of subsidiary systems that had suffered damage from the bioelectric pulse and recorded a 32.451 per cent chance that Stroika had suffered wetware and brain damage affecting non-essential functions.
Stroika’s vision blurred and his feeds sizzled before searing back to clarity. Bracing himself against the surgical slab and testing the function of his circuitry and appendage hydraulics, the skitarii commander heaved against the binder clasped about the bionics of his right arm. With the surgical automaton and slab workings fried by the mindscrambler pulse, the metal restraint stretched and snapped, releasing Stroika.
Half sitting up on the slab, the skitarius peered about the filthy laboratorium. Overlays annotated his surroundings, while Stroika’s mission chronometer indicated that he had been offline for less than a minute. He found one of the Dark Mechanicum protectors dead and crackling on the dark metal floor. His three black-shelled compatriots were stumbling about the laboratorium, through equipment and the plas partitions. Their cortex processors seemed to be scrambled, while the forge master appeared to be feeling his way along the chrome piping of the wall, similarly affected by the bioelectric pulse.
Stroika’s targeting reticules returned. The cell-power to his arc weaponry was yet to, however. A reticule detected movement from the direction of the balcony platform. Reasoning that some sentry had been recalled from the forge temple roof, Stroika hauled at the restraint clasped around his left arm.
As the signature drifted into the forge master’s private chambers, Stroika outstretched the bionics of his right arm. Shooting down its rail, an arc pistol locked in place with the skitarius’s gauntlet. The signal slowly resolved, Stroika’s ident recognition systems still sluggish after their bioelectric trauma.
The skitarii officer recognised the signature of Phrenos~361. The servo-skull, already searching for its master, had answered Stroika’s phylactic call, ascending the curved roofs of the forge temple’s exterior. Lowering his pistol, Stroika felt power return to the weapon from its tripped mag-cell.
The servo-skull’s rotating cog-blade angled, taking the drone into the main chambers, where it scanned the runebanks for the mechanism that cut off power to the incapacitator. Stroika had no desire to feel once again the polluted energies of the security measure flowing through his combat chassis.
Haldron-44 Stroika took a moment to process the demand.
Stroika turned his arc pistol on the three pulse-dazed Dark Mechanicum protectors in their black shells and plastek robes. Blasting what remained of their sentience from their helm-crania, Stroika moved his arm slickly from one hench-unit to another. As the protectors dropped to the floor, crackling with destructive energy, Phrenos reported that it had deactivated the chamber defences. From outside, Stroika saw the glow of the roof node columns reassume its previous crackling ferocity.
Tentatively, Haldon-44 Stroika climbed down onto the floor and shook down his combat chassis. Exercising his auxiliary appendages, hydraulics and workings, the skitarii commander began to feel like himself again.
The skitarius walked about the private chambers of the forge master, cross-referencing his feeds with what he was seeing on the runebank pict screens.
Engra Myrmidex hesitated.
As the servo-skull drifted back outside, Stroika grabbed the dazed forge master and dragged his rusted metal carcass out onto the balcony platform.
Outside, Stroika marched between the arcing node columns. The thin chemical smog of the forge world’s nightside drifted about the temple roof, the skitarii commander’s movements disturbing its polychromatic miasma. The forge master stumbled and skidded across the platform, coughing and hacking his way to the railing edge.
Beyond, Haldro
n-44 Stroika could see the constellation of forge fires and molten channels that made up the crowded industriascape of the capital districts. The mountainous silhouette of the Magnaplex Maximal reared from the twisted skyline and cut its darkness from the hellish radiance of the exposed core. The infernal glow of the Abystra-Dynomicron created a roaring horizon, with the heat and light of the daemon’s iron core reaching up into the night sky.
Grabbing the forge master by his leather robes, Stroika hauled the servant of the Dark Mechanicum off his feet and over the roof edge. The forge master, still confused from the mindscrambler pulse, blurted coded insanity. His tentacles slithered and knotted about one another while rusty filth gushed through his face grille, splattering Stroika’s gauntlets. The skitarii commander spread his metal feet further apart and balanced the distribution of his weight. The red foil of his cloak rippled in the caustic breeze. The forge master, meanwhile, kicked his legs and clutched his appendages to his barrel chest, desperate not to fall through his own robes.
Stroika’s optics burned into the darkness of the forge master’s hood, the corrupt construct’s own fading like a pair of cooling coals.
‘Impure thing of the dark arts,’ Haldron-44 Stroika said. ‘You claim to have all the answers. That there is no limit to your daemon-sponsored knowledge. Then prove it, by answering a very simple question. Where can I find the Arch-Fabricant?’
The forge master seemed to struggle with his words, blurting cacophonous scrapcode and liquid corrosion from his grille. The skitarius didn’t know whether this insanity proceeded from the master’s scrambled cogitators or his ruinous pollution.
‘Forge master,’ Haldron-44 Stroika said, shaking the corrupt construct above the vertiginous drop. ‘You have already fallen so far in the estimation of the Machine-God. Don’t make me drop you further off the top of your own temple.’
With his tentacles flailing, the master coughed up a stream of rusty filth from his inner workings that cascaded down the gleaming war-plate of Stroika’s chest. As the Dark Mechanicum construct chuckled his madness through his hacking cough, Stroika heard the sound of gunfire.
Patching into Phrenos~361’s pict feed, Stroika saw that around the back of the temple tower, the servo-skull had discovered a launch pad. Waiting on the platform was a baroque skiff – a grav-craft boasting a twisted carriage-bay for the forge master and his retinue, plus a single malformed servitor-pilot who was interfaced with the open cockpit. The cable-threaded drone had drawn a stub pistol on the servo-skull and Phrenos had returned fire with its underjaw arc blaster.
As Phrenos~361 drifted about the crackling corpse of the warped pilot, it transmitted the coordinates of the skiff’s destination. The Magnaplex-Maximal. The forge master was going to flee his temple, with news of its loss taken to Ulcan Gnostramari, Arch-Fabricant of Velchanos. He was going to butcher Stroika and take his phylactic interface – still attached to the skitarii commander’s brain – to the forge temple principal as an offering of appeasement. A gift to help his Arch-Fabricant repel the skitarii invasion.
Haldron-44 Stroika opened the adamantalloy digits of his gauntlets. The dark chuckle died in the congestion of the forge master’s throat as the leather of his robes slipped from the Primus’s fingers.
Stroika watched the forge master flail and vox-shriek his way down the side of the forge temple. He seemed to fall for an eternity before crashing through the twisted architecture of the upper forge, leaving rusty splatters along his path, each impact a trail of corruption on the metal corrugations of the forge temple. The shrieking died on the poisoned air as the forge master plummeted through a set of power vanes that simultaneously electrocuted and shredded the servant of the Dark Mechanicum. As the vanes flared, the corroded workings and spoilage of the forge master rained down into the freightways below.
Haldron-44 Stroika extended an arm and allowed Phrenos~361 to land. The Primus cycled his optics as he drew his gaze across the capital districts of the renegade forge world. He flickered through magscoptics, filters and overlays, while data scrolled and ghostly, phylactic pict streams played one over another. The skitarii commander matched the updates he was experiencing to what he was seeing from his elevated position.
Alpha Versorias was making good progress along the arterial freightways, elevated maglev routes and waste-drains gurgling with toxic run-off. His column of crawlers and Ironstrider engines had punched through the hasty barricades, tractor-conveyers and freight-monitors that had been halted to provide obstructions. Like the ancient caravans of early Mars, their progress through the capital districts was indomitable.
Vanguard skitarii cohorts, like the one now belonging to Sub-Alpha Quendix, moved through the adjoining mills, assembly-lines and complexes, fighting through the gloom and twisted architecture of manufactoria, production complexes and machine workshops. Moving slickly through such environments, their advance had been expert and economical. Skitarii soldiers used cover and in turn covered one another in a silent advance. Like parts of a well-oiled machine, the skitarii cohorts moved in a wave of murderous silence through the capital districts.
In their wake, the freightways, factory floors and forge temples were littered with the scrap and corpses of mechanoids who had failed to stop them. Slave menials armed with little more than the corruptions and bodily blessings that living under ruinous skies had inflicted upon them. Combat-servitors whose warp-kissed flesh was augmented with powered claws and eviscerating chainblades. Spike-armoured soldier-wretches of the temple forge guard. Horrifically modified hench-units that stank of spoiled flesh. Flagellant spawn that had been monstrously fashioned into living weapons. The heretek tech-priests of besieged installations, whose corrupt, sigil-scrawled bodies had been weaponised to fire streams of aethyric energies. Factory automatons that thought and fought for themselves.
10-Victro Tiberiax and his alphas had done well to keep pace with these forward columns. Securing bordering districts, Tiberiax and his rangers had hunted down renegade forge masters and taken temples dedicated to the infernal entity that raged at the planet’s core. His skitarii had claimed two key freight stations, downing scores of orbital barges, hump-shuttles and haulage brigs. The monstrous magna-machinery towering over the Ghorgaxae-Hectra assembly yards had been neutralised. A raging inferno now lit up the night sky with warp-channelled energies where the Mal/Tec Terrawatt fusion reactors had once been. The corrupt genitor lords and magi that ruled the worker sub-hives of the twisted Flesh Forges had been assassinated.
Orbital augur scans and captures relayed from the Opus Machina told Stroika of the hell that waited for them all about the Magnaplex Maximal. The Arch-Fabricant was holding back his personal army of killer constructs and abominations; foul forces attached to the forge temple principal and charged with its defence. Daemon engines that had been born in the fires of the Abystra-Dynomicron.
In the satellite districts Tiberiax and his ranger cohorts had increasingly run into the dread forces of hereteks and magi from across the forge world. Warp-fuelled mechanoids and altereds raced to their Arch-Fabricant’s aid, compelled by the ancient protocols of technofeudal observance and new promises of reward streamed and warp-cast across the planet. Tiberiax and his army of rangers were now working their way up the blazing channels of molten iron that flowed through the satellite districts before forming the ferric falls of the abyssal drop-off, the sentient liquid metal returning to the daemonic core of the cursed forge world.
Time was against all the holy constructs of the Omnissiah fighting for the planetary soul of Velchanos Magna. While Haldron-44 Stroika’s skitarii legions moved in on the capital forge, augur arrays aboard the arkcruisers of the Adeptus Mechanicus fleet told of colossal movements of cybernetic troops and materiel across the surface of the renegade forge world.
Blizzards of atmospheric craft, ugly freighters and lighters now descended
upon the contested districts, packed with wretched reinforcements. Shrieking through the thin chemical skies and over the heads of skitarii soldiers were swarms of fighter wing aircraft. The spiked, black outlines of servitor-piloted Avengers streamed warp trails and cut up the freightways and sacrificial plazas with their merciless boltcannons. The Fabricator Locum was faring little better in low orbit, where the suicidal runs of mangle-fashioned system ships, armed freighters and defence monitors threatened to down the Opus Machina and her arkcruisers. This was made worse by fresh updates of heat signatures in the shipyards and partially constructed Dark Mechanicum vessels rising above the renegade forge world from their dry docks.
As Haldron-44 Stroika phylactically monitored the thousands of skitarii carrying out their tactical invasion of the capital districts, billions of corrupt warriors were making their way through the freightways and ongoing industry of Velchanos Magna, converging on the unholy site of the forge temple principal. Even if Stroika and his skitarii took the Magnaplex Maximal and its secrets for his Fabricator Locum, there was no guarantee he could hold it against such numbers – as Engra Myrmidex undoubtedly expected. This said nothing of the progress of abominable Ordinatus war machines and the spirit-corrupted Titans that were striding through the nightmare industriascape from the damnation of fortress workshops on the other side of the planet.
Stroika stood there. Processing. Analysing. Strategising. When Sub-Alpha Quendix arrived on the balcony platform, leading a unit of vanguard skitarii, he did not bother to turn.
