Skitarius
Page 20
He lay on the floor. Bereft of the Machine-God’s blessings. The blessed energy of the Motive Force bled away. The ruined war-plate of his chest rose and fell with the rattle of each doomed breath. Helpless, Haldron-44 Stroika worked the stub of his arm. He lay in a growing pool of his own blood and oil, his smashed optics crackling with the silhouettes of closing Iron Warriors.
The skitarius felt the quake of Idriss Krendl’s footsteps. The warsmith towered over him. As Haldron-44 Stroika felt his systems slipping away and his Machine-God abandon him, the warsmith contorted his half-face around an ugly sneer.
‘Flesh? Iron?’ Idriss Krendl said. ‘You are unworthy of either, tin soldier of a tin god.’ Then finally to the Iron Warriors gathered about him, Krendl commanded, ‘This one lives – if you can call this living. He thinks he honours his Maker with the gargle of each drowning breath – but we shall show him what it truly is to suffer for his god.’
1101
Omnid Torquora disconnected from phylactic communion. From the data-tethered screams and the suffering.
The archmagos explorator sat in his interface throne aboard the Maestrale, surrounded by the tech-priests of the diagnostiquorum. The throne accommodated the bulk of Torquora’s augmented frame and weaponry, and was set in a nest of cables that ran between the archmagos, his tech-priests and everything else in the Mechanicus fleet.
A fleet that had arrived before Engra Myrmidex. That had remained hidden and on station, just outside of the Velchanos system. Observing. Recording. Monitoring. Phylactically experiencing the doom of the Mechanicus mission – the Fabricator Locum’s part of the mission.
Omnid Torquora had not revealed himself as Engra Myrmidex tested the Geller Device or pressed on predictably with his assault on Velchanos Magna. He had not intervened when Myrmidex sent his skitarii legions into a battle they could not hope to win. He stayed silent as thousands of skitarii soldiers fought and died on the forge world’s surface for the greed of a single construct. He remained unmoved as the Fabricator Locum’s fleet was caught between the Dark Mechanicum and the arriving Iron Warriors. As the Ark Mechanicus Opus Machina plummeted to its doom.
Hard data. Torquora had watched and waited as the data he required to succeed in his mission flooded in. The corrupt magi and servants of ruin thought that they prevailed. That they had beaten the Machine-God’s servants. That they had won – but they had not. The battle had barely begun. Omnid Torquora had come to understand – through Engra Myrmidex’s lust for power and the sacrifice of thousands of the Machine-God’s skitarii soldiers – the true nature of his enemy. He had learned, through the loss of others, how to win. It was cold but it was necessary.
About the Author
Rob Sanders is the author of ‘The Serpent Beneath’, a novella that appeared in the New York Times bestselling Horus Heresy anthology The Primarchs. His other Black Library credits include the Warhammer 40,000 titles Adeptus Mechanicus: Skitarius, Legion of the Damned, Atlas Infernal and Redemption Corps and the audio drama The Path Forsaken, along with the Warhammer Archaon duology, Everchosen and Lord of Chaos. He has also written many Quick Reads for the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in the city of Lincoln, UK.
An extract from Forge of Mars.
Low-orbit traffic above Joura was lousy with ships jostling for space. Queues of lifter-boats, heavy-duty bulk tenders and system monitors held station in the wash of augur-fogging electromagnetics and engine flare from the heavier vessels as system pilots manoeuvred them into position for refuelling, re-arming and supply. Musters like this happened only rarely, and for two of them to come at once wasn’t just rare, it was a complete pain in the backside.
The Renard was a ship of respectable tonnage, but compared to the working vessels hauling their monstrously fat bodies between Joura and the fleets competing for docking space like squealing cudbear litters fighting for prime position at the teat, she was little more than an insignificant speck.
Roboute Surcouf didn’t like thinking of his ship like that. No captain worthy of the rank did.
The command bridge of the Renard was a warmly-lit chamber of chamfered wood, bronze and glass, embellished with bygone design flourishes more commonly found on the ancient ships sailing the oceans of Macragge. Every surface was polished to a mirror shine, and though Magos Pavelka called such labours a waste of her servitors’ resources, not even an adept of the Martian Priesthood would gainsay a rogue trader with a Letter of Marque stamped with Segmentum Pacificus accreditation.
Pavelka claimed it was the fragment of the Omnissiah that lived in the heart of a starship that every captain had to appease, but Roboute disagreed with Ilanna’s slavish devotion to her Martian dogma when it came to ships. Roboute knew you had to love a ship, love her more than anything else in the world. Flying sub-atmospheric cutters on Iax as a youth had taught him that every ship had a soul that needed to be loved. And the ships who knew they weren’t loved would be cantankerous mares; feisty at best, dangerous at worst.
Ilanna Pavelka was about the only member of his crew who hadn’t objected to this venture. In fact she’d gotten almost giddy at the prospect of joining Archmagos Kotov’s Explorator Fleet and working with fellow Mechanicus adepts once more. Perhaps giddy wasn’t the right word, but she’d voiced calm approval, which was about as close to excitement as a priest of Mars ever got in Roboute’s experience.
‘Update: berthing docket inloading from the Speranza,’ Pavelka informed him, speaking from her sunken, steel-panelled command station in the forward arc of the bridge. Holographic streams of binaric data cascaded before her, manipulated by the waving mechadendrites that sprang from her shoulders like a host of snakes. ‘One hundred minutes until our allotted berth is available.’
‘How much margin for error in that?’ asked Emil Nader, the Renard’s first officer, seated in a contoured inertial-harness to Roboute’s left as he kept them within their assigned approach corridor with deft touches of manoeuvring jets. Pavelka could bring them in with an electromagnetic tether, but Roboute liked to give Emil a bit of freedom in the upper atmosphere. The Renard was going to be slaved to the Speranza’s course for the foreseeable future, and his cocksure first officer would appreciate this free flight time. Like most natives of Espandor, he had a wild, feral streak that made him averse to unthinking obedience to machinery.
‘Clarification: none,’ said Pavelka. ‘The cogitators of the Speranza are first generation Martian logic-engines, they do not allow for error.’
‘Yeah, but the pilots ahead of us aren’t,’ pointed out Emil. ‘Factor in their presence.’
‘All vessels ahead of us are tethered; as we will need to be before we enter the Speranza’s gravity envelope. There will be no error margin.’
‘Care to wager on that?’ asked Emil with a sly grin.
A soft exhalation of chemical b
reath escaped Pavelka’s red cowl, and Roboute hid a smile at her exasperation. Emil Nader never missed a chance to pick at Mechanicus infallibility, and would never resort to automation if there was an option for human control.
‘I do not wager, Mister Nader,’ said Pavelka. ‘You own nothing I desire, and none of my possessions would be of any use to you without extensive redesign of your ventral anatomy.’
‘Leave it alone, Emil,’ said Roboute, as he saw Nader about to answer Pavelka’s statement with something inflammatory. ‘Just concentrate on getting us up there in one piece. If we stray so much as a kilometre from our assigned path, it’ll put a snarl in the orbital traffic worse than that time over Cadia when that officer on the Gathalamor shot up his bridge, remember?’
Emil shook his head. ‘I try not to. But what did they expect, giving a ship a name like that? You might as well call it the Horus and be done with it.’
‘Don’t say that name!’ hissed Adara Siavash, lounging in Gideon Teivel’s vacant astropath station with a las-lock pistol spinning in one hand and a butterfly blade in the other. ‘It’s bad luck.’
Roboute wasn’t exactly sure what rank or position Adara Siavash held on the Renard. He’d come aboard on a cargo run between Joura and Lodan, and never left. He was lethal with a blade and could fire a rifle with a skill that would have earned him a marksman’s lanyard in the Iax Defence Auxilia. He’d saved Roboute’s life on that run, putting down a passenger who’d turned out to be an unsanctioned psyker and who’d almost killed everyone aboard when they’d translated. Yet for all that, Roboute couldn’t help but think of him as a young boy, such was his childlike innocence and constant wonder at the galaxy’s strangeness.
Sometimes Roboute almost envied him.
‘The lad’s right,’ he said, as he sensed a kink in the ship’s systems. ‘Don’t say that name.’
His first mate shrugged, but Roboute saw that Emil knew he’d crossed a line.
The crew carried on with their assigned tasks and Roboute brought the current shipboard operations up onto the inner surfaces of his retina. A mass of gold-cored cables trailed from the base of his neck to the command throne upon which he sat, feeding him real-time data from the various active bridge stations. Trajectories, approach vectors, fuel consumption and closure speeds scrolled past, together with noospheric identity tags for the hundreds of vessels in orbit.
Everything was looking good, though a number of the engineering systems were running closer to capacity than he’d like. Roboute opened a vox-link to the engineering spaces, almost two kilometres behind him.
‘Kayrn, are you seeing what I am on the coolant feed levels to the engines?’ he asked.
‘Of course I am,’ came the voice of Kayrn Sylkwood, the Renard’s enginseer. ‘I perform six hundred and four system checks every minute. I know more about these engines than you ever will.’
Emil leaned over and whispered, ‘You had to ask. You always have to ask.’
Kayrn Sylkwood was ex-Guard, a veteran enginseer of the Cadian campaigns. She’d been mustered out of the regiment after taking one too many shots to the head on Nemesis Tessera during the last spasm of invasion from the Dreaded Eye. Below Guard fitness requirements and having lost three tanks under her care, the Mechanicus didn’t want her either, but Roboute had recognised her rare skill in coaxing the best from engines that needed a sympathetic touch or a kick in the arse.
‘Just keep an eye on it,’ he said, shutting off the link before Sylkwood could berate him again.
Despite any slight running concerns about the engines, the Renard was a ship like no other Roboute had known. She was fast, nimble (as far as a three-kilometre vessel could be) and carried enough cargo to make running her profitable on local-system runs. Even the odd sector run wasn’t beyond her capabilities, but Roboute never liked stretching her that far. She hadn’t let him down in the fifteen years he’d captained her, and that kind of respect had to be earned.
‘Promethium tender coming in below and behind us,’ noted Emil. ‘She’s burning hotter than I’d like, and it’s closing on an elliptical course.’
‘Probably some planetside dock overseer feeling the whips of his masters to cut the lag on his orbital deliveries,’ replied Roboute. ‘How close is she?’
‘Two thousand kilometres, but her apogee will put her within fifteen hundred if we don’t course correct.’
‘No,’ said Roboute. ‘Two thousand, fifteen hundred, what does it matter? If she goes up, all we’ll see is the flash before we’re incinerated. Conserve fuel and stay on course.’
Roboute wasn’t worried about the danger of collision – even the closest ships had gulfs of hundreds of kilometres between them – what worried the ship masters of each fleet was the threat of delay to their departure schedules. And Roboute didn’t intend to compound that delay by being late for his first face-to-face meeting with Lexell Kotov.
The archmagos had made it clear that such a breach of protocol would not be tolerated.
Of all the bright lights thronging the sky, the brightest and biggest now hove into view as Emil made a final manoeuvring burn.
Even Roboute had to admit to being mightily impressed with this ship. He’d flown the length and breadth of more than one sector, but he had yet to see anything to match this for sheer scale and grandeur.
‘Adara,’ said Roboute. ‘Go below and inform Magos Tychon that we’ll be docking with the Speranza soon.’
The dockers’ bar didn’t have a name; no one had ever thought to give it one. But everyone around the busy port knew it, a bunch of converted cargo containers welded together and fitted with rudimentary power and plumbing. Who really ran it was unclear, but a steady stream of disgruntled and exhausted dock workers could always be found filling its echoing, metallic spaces.
‘This is where you do your off-duty drinking?’ said Ismael, his slurred tone telling Abrehem and Coyne exactly what he thought of this dive. ‘No wonder we’re usually behind schedule.’
Abrehem was already regretting taking the overseer up on his offer of drinks for the crane crew, but it was too late to back out now. They’d made their quota, for the first time in weeks, and Ismael had offered to take them out drinking in a rare moment of largesse.
‘Yeah,’ said Abrehem. ‘It’s not much, but we like it.’
‘Damn, it stinks,’ said Ismael, his face screwed up in disgust.
The loader-overseer was already drunk. The shine served at the first few bars they’d visited had almost knocked him off his feet. Ismael didn’t drink much, and it was showing in his mean temper and cruel jokes at the expense of men who didn’t dare answer back.
A nighttime crowd already thronged the bar’s bench seats, and the pungent reek of engine oil, grease, lifter-fuel, sweat and hopelessness caught in the back of his throat. Abrehem knew the aroma well, because he stank of it too.
Faces turned to stare at them as Ismael pushed his way through the crowd of dock workers to the bar, a series of planks set up on a pair of trestles, upon which sat two vats that had once been the promethium drums of a Hellhound. Some men claimed to be able to tell what kind of tanks the varieties of shine had been brewed in, that each one gave a subtly different flavour, but how anyone could taste anything after a few mouthfuls was beyond Abrehem.
Coyne took Abrehem’s arm as he set off after Ismael.
‘Thor’s balls, you shouldn’t have taken him up on that drink,’ whispered his fellow operator.
Abrehem knew that fine well, but tried to put his best face on. ‘Come on, he’s not a bad boss.’
‘No,’ agreed Coyne. ‘I’ve had worse, that’s for sure, but there’s some lines you just shouldn’t cross.’
‘And getting drunk on shine with a man that can get you thrown off shift is one of them, I know.’
‘We’ll be lucky if he gets away without a beating tonight,’ said Coyne. ‘And
when he wakes up with a cracked skull, we’ll be the ones he blames. I can’t lose this assignment, Abrehem, I’ve a wife and three young’uns to support.’
‘I know that,’ said Abrehem, annoyed that Coyne always thought of his own woes before anyone else’s. Abrehem had a wife too, though she was a stranger to him now. Both their young ones had died of lung-rust before their fifth year, and the loss had broken them beyond repair. Toxic exhalations from the sprawling Mechanicus refineries fogged the hab-zones surrounding the Navy docks, and the young were particularly susceptible to the corrosive atmospherics.
‘Come on,’ said Coyne. ‘Let’s try and get this over while we still have jobs.’
‘We’ll have one drink and then we’ll go,’ promised Abrehem, threading his way through the sullen drinkers towards the bar. He could already hear Ismael’s nasal voice over the simmering hubbub of gloomy conversation. Abrehem knew most of the faces, fellow grafters on the back-breaking labour shifts handling the supply needs of a busy tithe-world.
Times were busy enough normally, but with the Mechanicus fleet at high anchor needing to be furnished with supplies to last an indefinite time, the docks and their workers were being stretched to breaking point. Yes, there had been some accidents and deaths that could no doubt be traced back to excessive consumption of shine distilled in scavenged fuel drums, but the lives of a few drunk dockers mattered little in the grand scheme of things.
Hundreds of fleet tenders were making daily trips back and forth from the loading platforms, fat and groaning with weapons, ammo, food, fuel, spare uniforms, engine parts, machine parts, surgical supplies, millions of gallons of refined fluids for lubrication, drinking, anointing and who knew what else. It was hard, dangerous work, but it was work, and no man of Joura could afford to pass up a steady, reliable credit-stream.