Skitarius
Page 15
Galvanic rifles barked in unison. The range was close and the shrieking reports short-lived. Many of the Dark Mechanicum thralls died in the air, the servitor rounds turning their minor augmentations into detonators for associated power systems. As crackling corpses rained down on the skitarii, missing heads and legs, Haldron-44 Stroika realised that the soldier-menials were missing something else.
Those thralls that escaped the synchronous blast of servitor shot dropped down into the cover behind the train. They rolled and skidded back to their feet like code-fevered constructs. Stroika saw that the butchered workers had already had their arms cut from their shoulders and therefore didn’t carry any weapons. They wore gas masks over their mouths but the rest of their faces bore the hallmarks of mutation – scales, spines and the warped flesh of the heretek. They came back at the skitarii, running into the wooden stocks of rifles as Inculus’s rangers put them down. As they scrambled back to their feet, Stroika saw that each mutilated menial wore a pack that began to shimmer, crackle and glow.
The menial’s pack detonated with a soul-wrenching boom. Stroika’s world momentarily became a kaleidoscope of receiver-splitting sound and otherworldly energies. His optics flashed with warnings and unidentified field detections. As the packs of the other thralls simultaneously detonated, including those attached to rifle-blasted corpses, explosions swiftly became implosions.
The manic menial before Stroika streamed away to a molecular mist that was dragged into an aethyric vortex. The phenomenon opened up in the floor where the pack had detonated, dragging Stroika to the ground and towards the swirling rift. While small, each vortex pulled at reality with warp-gaping power, swallowing scrap, wreckage and soldiers of the 4.2 Fortisoi-Cyratica. Allowing his pistols to ride back on their rails, the skitarii commander slammed the digits of his gauntlets into the shattered rockcrete like grapnels. As Alpha Inculus lost his grip on the monitor train, Stroika reached out for the officer, snatching for his arm as he was dragged by.
Then – as swiftly as they had begun – the warp vortices closed and disappeared, swallowing themselves up and leaving the cacophonous reality of the battlefield behind. Between the air-searing beams that criss-crossed about him, the chuntering cannon fire and the incessant overloads and explosions that rocked the battlefield, Stroika’s mind felt like it was under assault. As the vortices subsided, he became once more aware of the sheer volume of data and information he was processing. Clarifications phylactically addressed. Updates from the Opus Machina and the arkcruisers in low orbit. Contextual pict feeds. Monitored losses. Verified kills.
Ironstrider walkers had engaged robotic machines infused with abominable intelligence of their own – gravitic forge-claws, sentinel machinery and the towering menace of tracked slave-drivers.
Several Onager crawlers had become scrapcode-infected by multi-limbed cyber-parasites that skittered, rolled and crawled across the battlefield in a polluting plague. The electro-amniotically immersed drivers were forced to set their crawlers and the precious data that they carried to self-destruct, taking out several chain-draped Knight walkers in the process.
Vanguard skitarii of the Saggitarq 8/90 Io-thetra had succumbed to machinator units. The Quoidos VIth Neutriad were down to half-strength against various sects of mechadendrite-swarming magi militant – hereteks who had taken to the field personally to visit the dark wrath of their monstrous, experimental weaponry on the servants of the Omnissiah.
Nalode Deka 871 and his ruststalkers had almost been buried alive in the sub-basement ruins of a demolished factory by a siege-automaton that was spiked like an urchin and carried its cybernetic victims as trophies, impaled on its rusted defences.
10-Victro Tiberiax, meanwhile, had made little progress against the constant influx of reinforcements. His rangers aimed their rifles and transuranics back and forth, caught between the expertly drilled warriors of the Magnaplex Maximal praetorian forge guard and arriving technofeudal reinforcements sent by satellite forge temples. Small armies of gun-servitors, forge thralls, battle-automata and hench-units – all warped by the touch of Chaos.
Scrabbling back to cover, the remaining skitarii rangers of the 4.2 Fortisoi-Cyratica put their backs to the monitor train. Some had lost their weaponry to the strange vortices, while others now slipped off their helms to reveal their sub-dermal circuitry, optics and swarthy forge world features. Phrenos~361 shot between mangled wreckage and pieces of cover, once more joining its master.
As Stroika slammed his greatcloak and back against cover once more he knew that the officer’s suggestion did not come from cowardice but cold logic. However, Stroika couldn’t abandon his commitment to the progress they had already made. Advancing on another front would take hours that the skitarii didn’t have.
The Primus looked up as his equalisers isolated the rising rumble of Thunderbolt fighter-bombers on their attack run.
Stroika and Inculus watched the rust-red Thunderbolts line up for their attack run on the Dark Mechanicum columns of armour and conveyers.
The night sky suddenly lit up with detonations, but not those initiated by bombs dropped by the Thunderbolts. One after another, the fighter-bomber wing of the arkcruiser Ultros disappeared in a disintegrating smear of destruction. From the south, Stroika saw a flickering stream of gargantuan tracer fire. Some colossal weapon had blown the entire fighter wing out of the sky.
As Stroika’s cogitator cycled through threat possibilities, the colossal, stooped silhouettes of not one but two Warhound Scout Titans stomped into view. The monstrous machines travelled parallel to the abyssal drop-off and the exposed planetary core. As they strode closer and Stroika’s telescoptics pict-resolved in, the skitarii commander was cursed with a vision of annihilation. Watching the first of the godless machines limp closer, it became clear that their hulls had been possessed by daemonic entities. Void shielding that rippled with field-haunting entities flickered with some infernal malfunction. The lupine metal architecture of the Titan’s forward command deck was transmuted into the daemonflesh of some monstrous creature of the warp. While one of its legs retained the corroded workings and plate of its original design, the other was warped and covered in a crustacean-like shell.
It was draped in the power cabling and chains that the Titans had walked through to reach the forge temple in time. At its side it carried the Vulcan mega-bolter it had used to wipe out the Thunderbolts, while the monstrous muzzle of its blast gun dribbled warp-threaded plasma into the freightways below and the buildings it was demolishing beneath its huge feet.
‘Machine-God of mercy…’ Stroika said to himself. Looking up into the sky, he didn’t find the Great Maker to whom he offered his prayers. He did see the Opus Machina in low orbit, like the fleet’s mauled arkcruisers, fighting off charging system ships, boarding actions and the turbolaser batteries of orbital defence platforms.
It had been two minutes and thirteen seconds since the Fabricator Locum’s last demand for information or status. This told Stroika that something was keeping Engra Myrmi
dex busy. Perhaps it was the Opus Machina. Or the increasingly bleak picture orbital data was painting of closing Dark Mechanicum forces as they were drawn from across the planet down on the Fabricator Locum’s precious objective.
The Fabricator Locum didn’t seem to understand what Stroika was saying.
Stroika looked over at the dark, mountainous shape of the Magnaplex Maximal, then up at the Opus Machina.
Stroika streamed.
Stroika told him.
Stroika was running out of time. His mind burned with phylactic intrusion, with the pict feeds of the dying and the cold equations of war.
<–and they say that we are lost.>
1010
SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +FORGEBREAKER+
With a blinding flash, the huge and ancient Ark Mechanicus cracked down the middle, exposing the fiery innards of the ship. Decks in flame. The ruptured keel. The intricate workings of interstitial sections and the battery-banks of the port cannons. Like a molten wound it opened, the reinforced superstructure of the vessel protruding like shattered bones. The Opus Machina – colossal Ark Mechanicus of the Omnissiah – split in two.
But for his overlays and logic coils, Haldron-44 Stroika wouldn’t have believed what he was seeing. The Opus Machina’s back was broken. She had been struck by another vessel at ramming speed on her starboard side. The shields of both ships arced and seared as the Ark Mechanicus was bulldozed through the atmosphere towards the Dark Mechanicum forge world.
Stroika stumbled back. The beams cooking the air about him and the shells sparking off the wreckage seemed to fade away. In that moment, the deaths of skitarii soldiers and the corrupt constructs they were fighting became inconsequential. The explosions and battlefield destruction paled to nothing in comparison to the apocalypse unfolding above Stroika’s head.
Flames ripped through the shattered wreck of the Ark Mechanicus as the vessel’s catastrophic damage met the oxygen and chemical taint of the lower atmosphere. Stroika couldn’t believe it. The ramming vessel was still smashing the flagship on. Finally, like the ruined carcass of a gored beast, the Opus Machina tumbled at Velchanos Magna. She rolled dorsal over keel, twisting, splitting and raging. As she plummeted towards the planet’s surface, her shearing fore and aft sections barely attached, the attacking vessel was revealed.
Stroika’s optic-array cycled furiously through filters while he stood, like many others on the field of battle, dumbfounded. Even the glow of Phrenos~361’s optics were fixed upon the orbital spectacle. As a cybernetic construct – a skitarii soldier – the Primus knew he had to fight on. His doctrina imperatives and protocols allowed for little else. As a man – who thought and felt for himself – Haldron-44 Stroika was horrified. He struggled to process what was happening. For the sickening steeliness of the moment, he was lost.
The attacking vessel was no system ship or monitor, her colossal size and design told Stroika that. The vessel, like those that followed in a brute flotilla, seemed of an altogether different design to the craft defending Velchanos Magna. They might have been repaired or augmented in the forge world’s great shipyards, but they had certainly not been built there.
Stroika’s overlays mapped the dimensions of the monstrous vessel. Even from the surface, he could make out its original class, obscured by an eternity of augmentation and experimentation. It was a portless beast of the void, storming forth blind through the blackness. The clinker-armoured nightmare of plate laid over reinforced plate gave way to sections of what appeared to be bronzed flesh, stretched across the sharp ridges of the ship’s architecture. Beyond this was a bulbous, cathedralesque aft section. The vessel’s reinforced prow sat in a nest of gargantuan impact-absorbing hydraulics and was shaped like a mighty hammer. It had been this terrible weapon that had smashed the Opus Machina asunder.
Flashing projections showed Stroika how the ramming vessel had emerged from the raging maelstrom of the nearby storm front undetected. Unseen from the surface. Unavoidable for those unfortunate vessels already in orbit. The projections flashed its ramming-speed run at the Ark Mechanicus, with its flotilla of rusted cruisers, fat troop-hulks and squat frigates keeping pace. The Fabricator Locum and his magi had run their evasive models and probabilities. Their conclusion was that nothing could save the stately Ark Mechanicus from the inevitability of such a devastating attack.
Seconds passed for Stroika like minutes stretched to hours. The impossible had happened. The Adeptus Mechanicus flagship had been destroyed and the commanding priesthood under whose authority the mission was prosecuted were gone. The bombardment cannons and prow lance batteries on the flanking enemy cruisers opened fire at near point-blank range, tearing into the Mechanicum arkcruisers. The vessels glowed with devastation, the impacts of the enemy weapons like volcanic eruptions opening up in their armoured mid-sections. Stroika watched the Ultros fall away as the cruisers ploughed on, engulfing troop carriers, adamanticlads and Mechanicus heavy frigates in a void storm of merciless cannon fire that obliterated what was left of the Machine-God’s fleet.
Stroika’s feeds streamed with the last data the flaming Ark Mechanicus had to offer. Runebank and meme-log confirmations of the enemy vessel’s designation, based upon design, age and ancient identica. The Opus Machina had factored every last scrap of data into their doomed resolution and the cold acceptance of their fate.
Stroika watched the colossal vessel pull up its hammer-shaped prow, and rain tiny descent craft down on Velchanos Magna like a fish seeding eggs. Dreadclaws. Stormbirds. Gunships. Stroika’s optics flashed with flotilla identifications ancient and terrible. The hammer-prowed nightmare was a battle-barge called Forgebreaker, last recorded to be under the command of one Idriss Krendl, warsmith of the Iron Warriors Traitor Space Marines.
As the phylactic returns from the Opus Machina and the arkfreighters died and their magi with them, Haldron-44 Stroika was confronted with a number of searing facts. The first was that he was now the ranking representative of Satzica Secundus, the Mechanicus invasion force, and the holy Machine-God on the surface of Vel
chanos Magna.
The second was the fact that what remained of the skitarii legions under his command were now trapped on a Dark Mechanicum forge world – a planet that without orbital support and at their present force disposition they could not hope to conquer.
The third fact reduced the first and second to mere formalities. The Iron Warriors had arrived in force above Velchanos Magna. Not to resupply their monstrous Chaos Space Marine forces. Not to repair or refit their cursed and indomitable vessels. Not to trade for fell weaponry, genebred slave-troops or the daemon engines of the planet’s hellforges.
They were attacking the Dark Mechanicum forge world. The Iron Warriors did not want what Velchanos Magna had to offer the sons of Perturabo. They wanted Velchanos Magna. Like scavengers of the plain they had waited as a mighty beast had been attacked and felled by a noble predator, only to run the predator off. Descending on the wounded beast, they now aimed to deliver the kill. It was the unstoppable progress of history repeating itself. The inescapable nature of all living things. The universal cycle of galactic life and death.
Stroika’s optic-array moved from the horrific shape of the Forgebreaker delivering its warped payload of transhuman death to a more immediate threat. His overlays sizzled with the flashing outline of the falling Ark Mechanicus and the projected trajectories of its descent.