by Rob Sanders
‘Far enough,’ the skitarii commander told the Dark Mechanicum abomination, ‘Arch-Fabricant.’
The corrupted magos knelt down, the flesh-fused hydraulics of his long legs bending and his knees crashing into the floor. Pulling back his hood with cruel claw-appendages, the Arch-Fabricant revealed the little that was left of him. A warped spinal column leading to a cancerous brain, that itself was stored in an interfaced jar of sickly suspension.
‘Lord Prophetechnos,’ Stroika said. ‘Ulcan Gnostramari – former Fabricator General of Velchanos Magna.’
There were bits of Gnostramari that remained in the mantid mechanoid that knelt before the dark altar. In the nest of twisted optics, vanes and augurs that gave the Arch-Fabricant the appearance of a withered insect, Stroika could see a misty eyeball. The remnants of corrupted flesh threaded through the nightmare of the construct’s spiny workings. It appeared to Stroika – despite the horror of its augmented form – to be a thing that knew it had lived long enough. A scavenger of forbidden technologies, of lost knowledge and heretekal desires, whose ongoing existence was fuelled by the warp and whose gangling form was crafted in hellfire.
‘Speak,’ Haldron-44 Stroika commanded, his gauntlet digit hooked around the caliver trigger.
‘We are doomed, you and I,’ Ulcan Gnostramari said. His voice was a modulated whisper – a hiss that was vented with a black steam from vox-grilles set in his mandibular cheeks.
Haldron-44 Stroika pointed to the STC schemata that warped and flicked in the servo-skull’s hololithic projection.
‘You have this artefact – the original STC file for this arcane device – stored in a reliquary or vault?’ Stroika put to their prisoner.
‘No,’ Gnostramari corrected him with a brief puff of black steam. ‘It was taken from this temple without my permission.’
‘By whom?’ Stroika pressed, leaning in with his plasma caliver.
‘Who else?’ the Arch-Fabricant wheezed. ‘Idriss Krendl of the Iron Warriors.’
‘The monsters who attack your forge world?’ the skitarii commander clarified. As Ulcan Gnostramari nodded his repulsive head, Stroika’s mind whirled. His cogitator coils burned with the processing of probabilities. Odds that the warped Iron Warriors warsmith Idriss Krendl had already run and put in play.
Krendl, who had taken the STC file and deposited it on board the Stella-Xenithica just ahead of the Maestrale’s survey of Perborea. Who had allowed the Adeptus Mechanicus to recover the wonder of the Geller Device in the predictable expectation that such a find would be constructed and tested on the nearest warp storm anomaly in the sector – the Great Gyre.
‘We are undone,’ Ulcan Gnostramari said. ‘Betrayed. Mechanicum and Mechanicus both.’
‘Silence, traitor,’ Stroika warned.
‘Your magi by the bottomless appetite for knowledge that plagues both our kind. Like Velchanos Magna, Satzica Secundus doomed itself.’
‘Explain,’ Haldron-44 Stroika demanded, his armoured digit tapping at the caliver trigger.
‘You think that you were the first to construct the Geller Device?’ the Arch-Fabricant mocked. ‘The wonder was ours. We built the aethyric bomb and test-detonated the device in the nearby Mawstorm. We foolishly hoped to drive the storm and the things that inhabited it back into the warp. A single device reduced the Mawstorm by half.
‘We were eager to get back to Velchanos Magna to build another bomb to finish the job. What we hadn’t realised was that in strengthening the interdimensional bonds of reality in one place, we weakened them in another. Travelling up the warptrails of our arkships, back to Velchanos Magna, a new storm erupted. The real space anomaly you call the Great Gyre. The magi and citizens of Velchanos Magna welcomed a new age. A dark age of enlightenments. As Satzica Secundus will do also.’
‘Never,’ Haldron-44 Stroika said, but his vox-hailed announcement rang hollow.
‘Perhaps you are more right than you know, simple skitarius,’ Ulcan Gnostramari decided. ‘You betrayed yourselves. I have been betrayed by traitors with whom my forge world traded. By those it called allies. Velchanos Magna should have chosen better ones – the bitterness of betrayal runs in the Iron Warriors’ blood.’
The Arch-Fabricant gestured at the dark altar and the molten sentience of the Abystra-Dynomicron that ran through its corrupted workings. ‘Iron favours iron. The daemon-patron of my world wishes to spread its pollution beyond the confines of Velchanos Magna. It wishes to infect the core of Satzica Secundus and the hundreds of forge worlds beyond. Idriss Krendl and the Iron Warriors of the Obliteratii will see to it that the Abystra-Dynomicron gets its wish. The warsmith will be rewarded with an empire of iron. Forge worlds whose industry will drive a conquest of the galaxy, with Idriss Krendl and his Obliteratii Iron Warriors at its head.’
A shrieking sound made Stroika turn. It was Phrenos~361. The servo-skull’s optics burned to blackness with the corrupt data passing through its workings. Its cog-blade began to whir to searing acceleration, while the bone of its skull trembled. Horns and spikes grew from the skull as it changed shape to assume the ghoulish visage of some daemonic creature. The shriek threatened to damage equalisers but before it could, Phrenos~361 exploded. Pieces of warped skull, polluted workings and shards of spinning magnetic cog-blade shot out in all directions.
As pieces of cog-blade slashed through Stroika’s war-plate like frag, Ulcan Gnostramari took his opportunity. Bringing his plasma caliver back up, Stroika levelled the weapon at the Arch-Fabricant. Gnostramari suddenly lurched for the skitarii commander.
Stroika couldn’t calculate whether it was a feverish attempt on his life by the corrupt magos or some last offering to the Abystra-Dynomicron. There was a good possibility, the Primus reasoned, that Ulcan Gnostramari simply wanted to end it all. The scathing effects of the Geller Device. The betrayal of his daemon-patron. The loss of Velchanos Magna to Iron Warriors riding in on the invasion of the Adeptus Mechanicus. These were all reasons why a magos who had lived well beyond even a cybernetic lifespan might welcome the end.
As Ulcan Gnostramari’s stilt-appendages took him across the cog-floor at Stroika, radium rounds crackling with radioactivity blasted the wasted construct to robe-shredding pieces.
As the Dark Mechanicum Arch-Fabricant shattered across the floor of his infotomb, a moment of silence descended. Stroika pulled pieces of Phrenos~361’s cog-blade from where they were embedded in his back and side. Tossing the fragments to the floor, Stroika noticed how quiet it truly was – even on the levels above.
The leaden smear of materialisation assumed form about the infotombs, the shapes of malformed Traitor Space Marines towering over the runebanks. Stroika knew that they were all dead once the Iron Warriors arrived. They had silenced the skitarii above. Haldron-44 Stroika, conversely, aimed to make as much noise as possible.
Snatching a hydrogen flask from where it was mag-locked to his belt, Stroika threw the spare container at a shimmer of materialisation several stacks back. Bringing the plasma caliver up to his cheek, Stroika fired. The ball of plasma struck the flask, detonating its contents.
The blast knocked vanguard skitarii off their feet and Stroika back into the dark altar. Several Iron Warrior monstrosities assumed form inside the detonation. Two were lost in the globe of raging obliteration that ballooned from the exploding flask. Other Iron Warriors were caught in a furious backwash of heat and plasma, turning them into monstrous infernos.
As Iron Warriors appeared, they raised the horrific clubs of malformed limbs and pointed the metal barrels of mutating weapons at the skitarii. The brutes were small mountains of warped flesh and plate, while their arms were nests of fused weaponry. Ducking lo
w behind possessed cogitators and warp-encrusted runebanks, the skitarii soldiers returned fire with their radium carbines, radioactive bullets punching through fleshmetal and aged plate. The Iron Warriors cared little for the cover the infotombs afforded, sweeping the monstrous weaponry of their altered bodies back and forth. Bullet-shattered runebanks exploded before the streams of heavy gunfire and cybernetic soldiers were blown limb from limb.
The infotombs rocked with the blast. The hydrogen detonation had not only enveloped the Traitor Space Marines in an expanding blaze, it had decimated the cog-floor of the chamber, shattering the great mechanism below. The floor collapsed. The raging glow of the daemonic core filled the data crypt as flooring, mechanism and Iron Warriors disappeared. Displaced rock tumbled with wreckage and flaming bodies into the chasmic damnation of the Abystra-Dynomicron. As the cogs continued to turn, floor plates and cogitator banks toppled over the edge and down towards the daemonic planetary core.
The air thundered with the storm of shot and shell directed at the skitarii commander. Sliding down across the floor, Stroika scrambled behind moving runebanks as a path of shredded destruction followed him. The Iron Warrior gunfire was merciless. Cybernetic soldiers were blown apart before Stroika and one by one he saw the last biometric signatures of his skitarii legion fade. As the sparking shells of possessed cogitators toppled before the onslaught, Stroika found that he was without cover and the target of multiple flesh-weapons.
It was the leaden smear of a materialisation that saved him. Even the Iron Warriors wouldn’t shoot through one of their own number. Appearing before Stroika and drowning him in his shadow, an armoured abomination bled into the reality of the infotomb.
Stroika suddenly realised that the Iron Warrior had a Sicarian ruststalker on his back. He brought up his plasma gun but could not fire for fear of hitting his remaining soldier. As the Iron Warrior turned around, attempting to throw the cybernetic soldier from his hunched back, Stroika recognised the Iron Warriors officer from the platform. The warped Chaos Space Marine whose face had slipped through the wire mesh of a cage and down onto his bulging neck and shoulder like a melted sculpture. Idriss Krendl – warsmith of the Iron Warriors and leader of the Obliteratii.
Krendl gave a half-snarl as he reached for the ruststalker with his colossal, malformed claws. As the Iron Warrior did so, Stroika saw that it was Nalode Deka 871 who had leapt on the monster’s back just moments before he had teleported. Stabbing his transonic blades furiously into the fleshmetal of the Iron Warrior, Deka was suddenly enveloped in the thing’s daemonic claws.
Seizing the princeps in a vice-like grip, Krendl peeled the skitarii assassin from his hunched back. Bringing his monstrous arm down with otherworldly force, Krendl smashed Deka into the metal floor of the chamber. Seconds later, Nalode Deka 871 was a broken pile of shattered bionics and splattered flesh. With annoyance, Idriss Krendl plucked the transonic blade that was still shivering through his flesh and flung it away.
As Krendl looked up, he saw how close Stroika was. The skitarii officer was holding his plasma caliver on the Chaos Space Marine. Blasting him back, Stroika heard the satisfying roar of a Chaos Space Marine in pain. Balls of plasma seared and flashed as they struck the monster’s armour-embedded flesh. The warsmith stormed straight back at Stroika, his heavy footsteps quaking across the infotomb floor.
‘Whether I live or die,’ Stroika vox-hailed at Krendl, ‘today, you die, monster.’
Before the Iron Warrior could reply, Stroika pulled his final hydrogen flask from his belt and threw it up at the ceiling. He blasted the flask with his plasma caliver, and the air above them blazed and expanded like a nova. Being much taller, Krendl was hit first, the force of the explosion knocking him back through a column of cogitators. Stroika was smashed straight into the floor, his bionics clattering as he was blasted head-over-appendages away.
With his optic-array flickering and overlays sizzling from striking his head on the floor, Stroika suddenly felt the ground fall out from under him. Snatching out with a gauntlet, the skitarii officer grabbed for the edge of the demolished floor section. Hanging by his fingertips, Stroika looked down at the swirling patterns of sentient hatred raging through the molten iron of the daemon core. The Abystra-Dynomicron hungered for Stroika. It wanted his flesh and iron. It desired his soul.
Hauling himself up, Stroika latched onto the edge with his other gauntlet. Pushing up with his arms, and with his metal legs still dangling above the infernal core, the skitarii commander saw Idriss Krendl stumble back through the wreckage of runebanks and wave off his trigger-happy Iron Warriors.
‘I’ve been stabbed, burned and shot, tin soldier,’ Idriss Krendl told him. The warsmith’s voice surprised Stroika. It was a deep rumble, like the distant thunder of guns on the breeze. It was still the voice of an officer, however, not a monster. Krendl looked down at the scorched stump that remained of his arm. Pursing his half-lips, the Iron Warrior blew out a flame where his flesh was burning. ‘I was on board the Stainless when she crashed into Balzac Minora. I was at the Eternal Fortress when the sons of Guilliman rained fire from orbit. On Lesser Damantyne, my brothers tried to bury me under a mountain of metal, stone and corpses. Yet, here I am. A word of advice to you, then. If you’re going to kill me – you’d better kill all of me.’
Krendl gave Stroika a nasty half-smile. From the smouldering stump of his arm, Stroika saw the fleshmetal of muzzles emerge. Like plants competing for sunlight, a nest of cannon barrels grew from the roasted ruin of the monstrous arm. Before the mutating arm had time to finish its transformation, the weapons began to fire.
With shells raining about him, Stroika rolled across the cog-floor. Unlocking appendages from his back-cradles, the skitarius brought his arc mauls to life. By the time he had completed the roll and was storming towards the Iron Warrior, his pistols had hydraulically deployed along their rails and were blasting a voltaic storm at Krendl. Stroika’s overlays flashed the urgency of evasive actions and streamed the hopelessness of engaging the vile form of a Chaos Space Marine in battle. In defiance of such warnings, Stroika surged on, knowing he had to close with the monstrous Iron Warrior.
As shells sparked off the alloy of his appendages, one of his newly deployed arc mauls was blasted away. Rotating his shoulder joints and turning in his torso cradle, Stroika rained arcstreams and the merciless thud of his remaining maul down on the monstrosity. Krendl crackled and spat, his obscene form a spidery cage of arcing energies. The maul sparked off the Iron Warrior’s ancient plate but Krendl was like a small mountain of flesh, iron and ruin. He was both immovable object and unstoppable force. Within moments, Stroika came to understand in brutal reality what his overlays had only been communicating in theory. The inevitability of defeat. He was a holy warrior of the Omnissiah, however – last of the skitarii on Velchanos Magna – and he fought on.
The Iron Warrior moved with otherworldy grace and speed, despite his size and monstrosity. He fought with the strength and precision of a killer ten thousand years in the crafting. He was a corruption of the Emperor’s ideal but a demigod all the same. A princely perversion of genetic engineering, driven by the bitterness and rage of an empire denied.
Stroika felt Krendl’s cannons chew through the hydraulics of his leg. The skitarius smashed and blasted at the towering monstrosity, with movements as slick as his battered workings would allow. He could not avoid the backhand of the Space Marine’s mighty claw that sent him staggering through wreckage. The barbed teeth of a chainfist spat gobs of flesh from the edge of the Iron Warrior’s outstretched palm as the blade emerg
ed from the monstrous claw. The fleshmetal of the weapon and Stroika’s bionics met in a spectacular fountain of sparks – the Iron Warrior shearing the skitarii commander’s arm and maul appendage off at the rotating shoulder joint.
Stroika limped and tried to turn, bringing his remaining arc pistol up to meet his enemy. His overlays flashed warnings and streamed data that he could barely process. Before his targeters could get a fix on the warsmith, Krendl stamped down on a runebank, sending its bulk at Stroika. Smashed between the polluted machine and the chamber wall, the skitarius staggered this way and that. His leg was a mangled mess and his acquisition reticules a blur. His calibrators refused to answer. Arcstreams seared across the decimation of the infotomb but hit nothing. He could hear the throaty satisfaction of Idriss Krendl – a dark chuckle that built from within the Iron Warrior’s chest.
Krendl grabbed Stroika’s battered combat chassis in one huge claw, turned and launched him into the wall. The skitarius could feel little but his systems sizzling away as workings shattered and his helm smashed into the cracking rockcrete of the wall. As Stroika tried to get up, he found that his overlays and streams were gone. Targeting was not functional. His cracked optics flickered with the static of system trauma. He got the blurry impression that the Iron Warriors of the Obliteratii were gathering about him like a darkness closing in. He could hear their grim mirth and the bitterness of their hatred.
Stroika tried to bring his arc pistol up but Krendl pinned the workings of his remaining arm against the wall. The skitarius couldn’t move. Stroika saw Krendl up close, his half-face leering through its wire cage. He felt the nest of barrels against his midriff. As they fired in unison, the blasts shredded through the workings of Stroika’s torso socket. As his metal legs fell away, Krendl gunned the chainblade, shearing through Stroika’s remaining arm at the elbow joint. Grabbing him by the alloy stump of his ruined hydraulics, Idriss Krendl threw Stroika at the feet of his Iron Warriors – like a lump of meat to dogs.
