by Rob Sanders
Stroika privately agreed with the ruststalker’s withering assessment. He could not help but feel the vulnerabilities of their position on the shattered walkways that creaked over the monstrous rage of the Abystra-Dynomicron.
As Nalode Deka 871 led the skitarii down through the network of scaffold stairwells and scorched platforms, Tiberiax followed, urging the skitarii on. The cybernetic soldiers climbed down through the structure. They dropped through openings to lower platforms and shimmied down ladders with sparks showering the skitarii below.
Stroika phylactically felt his way to the pict streams of skitarii soldiers dying up in the decimated capital district. The Iron Warriors were on the ground. Through the fading, grainy visuals, the Primus saw Dreadclaw drop pods fire their descent rockets and hit the wreckage-strewn wasteland with their landing talons. Hydraulic lifts descended with a shudder, revealing the infernal light of the Dreadclaw interiors.
Stroika watched as hulking monsters were unleashed onto the field of battle. They wore the battered, ancient plate of Tactical Dreadnought armour. The silver and gold of their suits was mottled with corrosion and splattered with blood. Faded black and yellow chevrons marked out individual plates and spiked sections.
Some horrific curse of the flesh had changed the Iron Warriors of the 51st Expedition. Monstrous clusters of muscle, tendon and brawn seemed to have outgrown the ancient Terminator suits which all the Iron Warriors wore. The warped flesh appeared to be part of the suits’ structural integrity, with the shattered pieces of helms embedded in the monstrous heads and faces of the long-changed Chaos Space Marines.
They moved with the assurance of Titans, stomping across the smouldering wasteland about the Magnaplex Maximal, yearning for the death and destruction to come. Most disturbing were their hands, that seemed bloated with the brawn of cursed flesh. The limbs had broken entirely free of plate and gauntlet. The metal of their suits morphed into the corruption-laced abomination of their flesh. At the malformed termination of such limbs, however, flesh solidified once more to metal. Bloated appendages formed a myriad of spawned heavy weaponry – colossal claws, bio-chemical flamers and multi-barrelled flesh cannons.
Rusted Thunderhawk gunships swooped in, belching black smoke and depositing legionary battle tanks and siege weaponry, while spiked lighters and ram-shuttles descended, spilling genebred Space Marines and cult cybernetic warriors enslaved to the Iron Warriors’ dread cause. Suddenly the pict stream was obscured by the loathsome shape of an Iron Warrior monster, who, looking down on a dying skitarii warrior with its warped face, stamped on the soldier’s head.
As Haldron-44 Stroika scanned for manifestations he saw a group of three monstrosities appear from the lead-smeared shimmer of teleportation. Stroika felt the creak of the scaffold superstructure as the Iron Warriors assumed their horrific form. The two flanking mountains of fleshmetal were armed like their warped brethren falling from the skies in an iron plague.
The warlord in the middle appeared bigger and more wretchedly malformed than even his monstrous escorts. A tarnished mail cloak was draped across the huge globes of his shoulders, marking him out among the afflicted Iron Warriors as a warsmith or officer. The hulking abomination’s Tactical Dreadnought armour was dripping with skulls and chains. This gave way to dread-formed fleshmetal that assumed the shapes of gargantuan killing claws, the tapering digits of which were cursed with the thrashing titanium teeth of chainswords.
The Chaos Space Marine’s head was an age-cracked mess of malformed features. His smashed half-skull was held together with wire mesh, through which his warped flesh had dribbled, sliding his features down onto the monstrous muscle of his neck.
As the Iron Warriors warsmith got his bearings, he almost toppled forward on the platform. Grabbing the warping rail with a gargantuan claw, the monster steadied himself and gave Stroika a fiendish half-grin of mock relief.
Rangers and vanguard soldiers halted their descent and leant their weapons against ladders and rails. They took aim with their galvanic rifles, transuranic arquebuses and radium weaponry. With their targeters and expert marksmanship, the skitarii shredded the cables and fixtures of the walkways connecting the Iron Warriors’ platform to their own section, allowing the macroscaffolding to fall away.
As the Iron Warriors bounced uncertainly on their own platform, Stroika thought to press his advantage and have his skitarii take down the larger section, sending the warsmith and his monsters into the burning maelstrom of the core below. Before Stroika could issue the command, the abominable warsmith, smiling no more, grabbed for support on the shaking platform. He waved in a pair of Thunderhawks with a giant, malformed claw.
The first of the corrosion-pitted gunships swooped in for its master, obscured in a bank of belching, black smoke. The second gunship was a riveted nightmare of extra plating barely kept in the air under the power of its guttering engines. A pair of flank-mounted heavy bolters opened fire as the gunship hove into view.
Stroika leapt down stairs and dropped through ladder wells with his descending skitarii, as the heavy bolters shattered their way through the companionways above. As the cockpit-fused monstrosity of an Iron Warrior pilot guided his Thunderhawk in, he mangled platforms and section supports with the wings of the gunship. Bringing the gunship down sharply he collapsed a section, forcing Stroika and several skitarii vanguard soldiers to leap for an adjacent platform. As Stroika hit the shaky mesh and rolled, another cybernetic soldier was helped over the rail by 10-Victro Tiberiax and two of his rangers. Two other skitarii tumbled to their deaths with the plummeting scaffolding.
The shells blasted away in unison, hammering through the armaplas of the Thunderhawk cockpit canopy. As they thudded through the monstrous head of the Iron Warrior pilot, the gunship began to fall away. As Stroika made his way down through the macroscaffold of the shipyards, he saw the descending gunship smash into the second before ploughing straight through a web of cabling and down into the daemonic core of the planet.
With Tiberiax and his rangers on his metal heels, Stroika negotiated the labyrinth of mesh and railing, all the while watching the warsmith’s remaining Thunderhawk level out and rescue itself from disaster.
oined them. 10-Victro Tiberiax brought up the rear, his rangers backing in with their arquebuses aimed back out of the tunnel.
As the skitarii filed in through the hatch, Nalode Deka 871 closed it and braced the broken lock with a thick plasteel pole. Deka and Tiberiax looked to their Primus as bolt-fire directed up the tunnel began to hammer at the thick metal of the door.
Tiberiax streamed at Deka.
1011
SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +HELLFORGE+
The skitarii moved with slick synchronicity through the infernal gloom of the underforge. With their trench-cloaks wrapped about them and their weapons held in close, cybernetic soldiers followed freshly promoted sub-alphas through barbed bulkhead doors and fanged archways. Down through stairwells twisted in their grand designs. In and out of node columns that crackled in ruinous-symbol-inspired orientations.
Wounded skitarii trailed blood and oil, cradling broken limbs and shattered appendages, while the spindly shapes of ruststalkers slipped silently ahead. Drifting in the lead on its cog-blade, Phrenos~361 used its omnispectrals to alert the skitarii of the Dark Mechanicum menaces ahead.
Stroika found himself stepping through the merciless economy of the ruststalkers’ handiwork. Flightless cherubim, butchered in their filthy robes, the horror of their infant features still buried in their hoods. Dismembered security-servitors, lying dead next to the wickedness of their close combat appendages. Temple praetorians and heretek hench-units with their workings stabbed out of them.
Haldron-44 Stroika led a unit of vanguard skitarii in the footsteps of Princeps Deka and his augmented assassins. Leading with a palm-locked arc pistol, Stroika moved across furnace works and through chambers of twisted architecture. Some contained heretek machinery and possessed cogitators that glowed red and green in their malevolence. Others were laid out with surgical altars that burned with daemonic technoscript. Upon the altars, damned creations of flesh and dark technology lay half finished while abominable intelligences went about propagating their evil, uncaring of the skitarii interlopers that moved silently through the shadows.
There were bizarre chambers sporting large, empty pools of curdling unguent. Others held corrupt machinery – nests of arms gathered about blood-filthy thrones, bearing claws, pincers, drills and flayers. Multitudes of warped mechanoids that had been obscenely interfaced. Monstrous, heretekal creations whose dangers were contained within stasis fields. Warpsmiths emerging from their socket-sarcophagi, crafting with the corrupt, immaterial energies at their command.
All throughout the temple, the sound of industry dominated. Sparking. Arcing. The thousands of slave-engines hammering at armoured plate. The ceaseless suffering of constructs as part of dread experimentation and whim. The modulated vox-screams of warped workers claimed by the daemonic creatures they had had a hand in forging.
Throughout their infiltration of the Magnaplex Maximal, Stroika’s equalisers recorded the hiss of molten iron. Liquid metal from the daemonic core not only fed the hellforges of the temple, it travelled along trench rivulets set in the stone of chamber floors and passageways. The sentient iron spat and flared with flame, lighting the halls, workshops and corridors of the forge temple and forming the infernal glow of crafted sigils and symbols.
As the overforge housing dark ceremonial halls, heretek workshops and warped laboratories gave way to the diabolical grandeur of the underforge, Stroika felt the blessed alloys of his combat chassis and appendages steam. In the presence of such unspeakable evil, the Cog Mechanicus that emblazoned the skitarii’s battleware blackened. The very metal of their Omnissiah-honouring cybernetic bodies and armour burned. Here daemonic drones drifted through the busy, black architecture of the underforge on the sickly sibilance of duct fans. They were larva-like entities whose disgusting, fat tails dribbled interface cabling and whip-like mechadendrites. Their heads were flesh-fused with otherworldly augurs that scanned the forge-chambers and corridors through which they patrolled. These daemon-constructs in particular the ruststalkers and the skitarii following them took great pains not to alert.
In the daemon furnaces, warpsmiths and arch-hereteks were hard at work, their monstrous, myriad forms smudged silhouettes against the brilliance of their forges. The possessed servo-automata and machinery of the forge swooped magna-claws, cauldrons of infernal iron and pincers over the heads of misshapen servitors and the sentience of liquid metal thrashing in channels and pits. Spiked chains draped down through the forges like forests of kelp, knotted with construct cadavers and machine victims. Strange aethyric energies arced across the great chambers, while molten iron was dispersed through the temple in fat, raging cascades. The daemon iron was drawn up from the planetary core by pulsing tractor fields and distributed throughout the Magnaplex Maximal and the forge world furnace works beyond.
As the ruststalkers came to a hidden halt, Nalode Deka 871 moved from shadow to shadow, working his way back to his Primus. Leaving his rangers covering the skitarii rear, 10-Victro Tiberiax came forward, meeting Stroika by a sacrificial anvil-altar. With Stroika’s vanguard skitarii crackling with radioactive lethality about them, the officers met in silence, face to face. Drifting back through the gloom, Phrenos~361 came to land on Stroika’s outstretched gauntlet.
As Stroika’s optics did the same, he zeroed in on the damned industry below – one level of sizzling pits, furnaces and machinery set beneath a number of others, with the molten sentience of the Abystra-Dynomicron field-streamed up through the hollow centre of the underforge. Warpsmiths and heretek magi were conducting dark techno-rituals, with vox-hailing servitors chanting dread summonings. The forges swarmed with bat-winged cherubim that flew above the pits, helping to manoeuvre servo-automata and parts into place.
Warpstreams from totem node columns passed across the surface of furious pits of molten iron, churning them to a vortex. From these hellish gateways, daemonic manifestations and entities were drawn, dragged forth from the horror of the immaterium. As fluxing monstrosities of otherworldly energy seared to form they were scalded into reality by the Abystra-Dynomicron’s molten iron. The polychromatic sheen of liquid metal gave the daemons the monstrous appearance of forge fiends. They screeched. They hissed. They thundered. The spidery automata-arms of possessed machinery moved in with damned choreography, covering the abominations with clinkered plates of barbed, black armour. As the plates were agonisingly riveted and plasma-fused to the daemons’ forms, winches and infernal cherubim manoeuvred mountings and brute experimental weaponry into place.
The forges shook with the corporeal sufferings of the creatures as Dark Mechanicum warpsmiths enslaved them to their will and the underforge crafted them into daemon engines. Stroika watched as the daemon engines stomped forth from their molten birthing pits at the curse-coded command of their warpsmith handlers. Towering walkers of defiled metal and daemonflesh. Scuttling monster-machines of cutting claws and many legs. Cannon-fused traitors whose spiked, glowing tracks chewed up the temple flooring. Forg
e fiends and maulers that furnace-roared their destructive appetites.
Deka wasn’t wrong, Stroika reasoned.
Deka looked from the daemon engines to the entrance to the overforge.
Haldron-44 Stroika told Deka.
Tiberiax nodded. Deka slowly followed with his own understanding.
Stroika launched Phrenos~361 from his gauntlet, sending the servo-skull off into the darkness.
Haldron-44 Stroika and Tiberiax slapped metal gauntlets together, holding their bionics in a sparking grasp – their armoured knuckles forming the Holy Cog of the Cult Mechanicus.
SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
