Iron Warrior

by Graham McNeill

  ‘We’ll give them a fight they’ll not soon forget,’ said Decimus, and Olantor nodded, relishing this chance to prove his mettle once more.

  He heard the click and whirr of lenses from Sibiya’s helm.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘Some kind of standard?’

  Olantor narrowed his eyes, peering through the haze of ice crystals to where the interrogator was pointing. A huge berm of stone had been thrown up at the end of the docking pier and his enhanced vision picked out the hazy outline of a dull, iron coloured banner pole wedged in the rubble.

  Set in the centre of an eight-pointed star was a grinning skull-masked helm, the icon of a dread foe from the ancient days.

  ‘Iron Warriors,’ he hissed.

  A phrase of which his tutor on Macragge had been fond flashed into his mind.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  Chapter Three

  Within moments of landing, the Iron Warriors were at work. Tonnes of materiel were ferried down to the fort’s surface in the opening minutes of the landing, along with thousands of warriors, slaves and specialised labourers. The ruined edges of the southern docking pier and the smashed buildings to either side were bulldozed into enormous contravallations to protect the flanks.

  Unable to dig into the adamantium structure of the star fort, gargantuan earth-moving machines instead shaped the rubble into high walls of debris and statuary in jagged lines of saw-toothed ramparts. No enemy force could now threaten the main thrust of the Iron Warriors’ attack without being forced to fight over a defensive wall at least as powerful as those facing the invaders.

  As the flanks were made secure, the high gun towers on the farthest end of the pier were rebuilt and strengthened. On solidly anchored iron platforms, hulking interceptor guns and flak batteries were positioned and linked to the surveyors of the ships above. The defenders would almost certainly launch bombing raids and strafing runs from the launch bays still under their control, but these guns raised an umbrella of cover over the siege works.

  A rain of frozen particles drizzled over the battlefield, shimmering in the copper light of the planet below, and the first captured fighters and bombers streaked from the landing bays seized by Cadaras Grendel. The fight to secure the hangar bays had been brutal and bloody, but the outcome had never been in doubt, for the defenders were cut off and vastly outnumbered by a foe that offered no mercy and was relentless in the business of killing.

  Even as the Iron Warriors’ landing was being secured, the ships of Honsou’s fleet fought in the space around the Indomitable, keeping the few remaining escorts of the Ultramarines at bay.

  Enormous earthworks of pulverised rock were swiftly thrown up before the Iron Warriors’ positions, banks of heavy stone and steel that provided protection from the many guns mounted on the two colossal towers overlooking the seized pier. Pounding blasts of fire hammered the newly-established positions, but it was already too late to prevent the invaders from securing their hold on the pier.

  Behind these huge redoubts, the carriers of the Iron Warriors ferried a constant stream of men and supplies to the Indomitable’s surface: great tunnelling machines, diggers, augurs – equipment at least as important as the artillery pieces, armoured vehicles and warriors who came in equal number.

  The Iron Warriors had their bridgehead.

  Honsou felt his soul thrill at the sight of so much martial industry. Within minutes of setting foot on the enormous star fort, he had felt his old instincts returning. Every structure became a focal point for launching an escalade, every shattered cloister and ruined thoroughfare a potential lynchpin of a defence in depth. No sooner was an avenue of attack identified than a fortified wall arose to block it.

  ‘I’ve been away from this for too long,’ he said, stood atop the remains of what had once been a vast lance battery. The monstrously huge barrels were twisted out of shape and looked like enormous brass tunnels laid out in a haphazard manner on the surface of a moon.

  ‘What did you say?’ said Cadaras Grendel, his armour bloody from the slaughter in the hangar bays.

  Honsou swept his arms out to encompass the siege works taking shape around them. A dozen raids on outlying Imperial worlds too far from help had furnished Honsou with thousands of slaves to dig his trenches and raise his walls. An army of men and hundreds of machines laboured to raise defensive bulwarks and armoured redoubts.

  The first parallel, a defensive wall studded with hardened bunkers, buried magazines and vacant battery pits, was almost complete, giving the Iron Warriors the perfect place to begin the first approaches to the walls.

  ‘This,’ he said, as dozens of chained guns crunched through the ruins under the wary supervision of the gunnery masters towards their assigned firing positions. ‘I’ve been so busy orchestrating things for a distant goal that I forgot how good it feels to take the iron to the stone once more. This is what I was made for, and it’s about time the Imperium learned why they fear the Iron Warriors.’

  Grendel’s lip split in a feral grin. ‘Aye, it’ll be good to get in the dirt and blood of a trench, storm a breach and carry a wall.’

  Honsou nodded, feeling a rare camaraderie with Grendel. The moment passed as he saw Ardaric Vaanes and the Newborn climbing the slope of rubble towards him. Vaanes’s armour had been bulked out with the addition of his jump pack, and the Newborn’s patchwork face was hidden by a battered iron helmet with chevrons of yellow and black. Its armour had been repainted in the colours of the Iron Warriors, as had Honsou’s and Grendel’s. Alone of the gathered warriors, only Vaanes was a warrior without visible allegiance.

  ‘You know what you have to do?’ asked Honsou.

  ‘Yes,’ confirmed Vaanes. ‘Get behind their lines and sow as much fear and confusion as we can. Cut supply lines, destroy communications and divert troops from the front lines.’

  ‘You think you can do it?’ said Grendel. ‘We won’t come get you if you run into trouble.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would,’ replied Vaanes. ‘But this is just the sort of work I trained for.’

  ‘What about that?’ said Grendel, jerking his thumb at the Newborn. ‘Can it cut it?’

  ‘It can hold its own,’ said Vaanes. ‘And we have the loxatl brood-group of Xaneant too. I think we’ll be fine.’

  ‘Too bad if you’re not,’ said Grendel.

  ‘Yes, too bad,’ snapped Vaanes, his lightning-sheathed claws sliding from his gauntlet. Ever since New Badab, Grendel and Vaanes had been at loggerheads, but that was nothing new, for Grendel was an easy man to dislike. Honsou sensed an undercurrent to Vaanes’s anger, as though his true hatred was more directed inwards than upon Grendel.

  ‘Go,’ said Honsou. ‘Get inside however you can and wreak havoc. I’ll see you in the basilica when the fight is done. Me and Grendel will be taking a more direct route.’

  ‘Through the walls?’ said Vaanes.

  ‘Aye,’ grinned Honsou. ‘With big guns and brute strength. It’s what I do best.’

  The guns of the Iron Warriors opened fire en masse less than an hour later. A hundred artillery pieces spoke with one cataclysmic voice and a volley of high-explosive rounds slammed into the walls of the Gauntlet Bastions. The walls vanished in a firestorm of impacts, screeds of masonry and sheet steel falling like rain to the ground.

  Yet the defensive engineers had done their work well, strengthening the walls with all manner of reinforcements and refinements to withstand such pounding. The guns fired again and again, gangs of slaves working in shoddy vacuum suits that leaked or provided little protection from the rigours of working in such a hostile environment. Scores of men died every hour as their suits failed or they came too near one of the daemonic artillery pieces and paid for such incaution with their lives.

  Gunners of the Iron Warriors plotted optimal fire patterns and orchestrated simultaneous firings to increase the force of their barrages tenfold. Shells impacted within seconds of one another, tearing cracks wider and deepening craters
in the walls with every earth-shaking detonation.

  Under the cover of each barrage, a thousand slave labourers worked in the shadow of the vast bulldozers, pushing angled walls of rock and debris forward from the opening parallel to form a pair of sheltered walkways that inched towards the mighty bastions. Honsou oversaw the approach to the left bastion, Grendel the right, and a keen sense of rivalry drove each approach forward as much as the picks, shovels and back-breaking labour of the slaves.

  Counterbattery fire hammered these walled approaches, but as each Imperial battery unmasked to fire, Adept Cycerin identified its position and passed its precise coordinates to the Iron Warriors gunners. Ruthless bracketing fire hammered the battery, destroying it before it could retreat beneath its armoured hoardings.

  In their eagerness to push forwards, some of the bulldozers exposed themselves to the two towers behind the bastions and were obliterated by deadly accurate return fire. Against these guns, the Iron Warriors had no defence save hunkering down behind their walls or in hardened bunkers.

  Slaves and labourers were forced to press themselves into whatever cracks in the stonework they could find and many were buried beneath tonnes of rubble as the day’s work was undone by the Imperial guns. Still, no matter how much damage the counter battery fire inflicted, it could not keep up with the relentless, implacable pace set by the Iron Warriors.

  Imperial bombers launched attack after attack on the siegeworks, but aircraft from the captured launch bays kept the majority of them at bay. Even those that penetrated the screens of fighters were soon brought down by the interceptor guns under Adept Cycerin’s control. The corrupted Magos unleashed a scrapcode infection into the star fort’s outlying systems, a burbling corruption that caused system failures and power blackouts throughout the mighty fortress as it replicated and worked towards the central logic engines of the Basilica Dominastus.

  Day by day, the approaching ramparts of stone crept closer to the walls, zigzagging towards the tips of the bastions so that no matter how cunningly the defenders sited their guns, they could not enfilade the approaching troops.

  Within five days, the approach trenches had covered a third of the distance between the end of the docking pier and the Gauntlet Bastions, and Honsou ordered the construction of the second parallel. A great wall of stone and iron branched out from each of the approaches, linking in the middle to provide cover from which to unleash ever more deadly and carefully aimed barrages.

  Shadows flashed past Ardaric Vaanes as he dropped from his position of concealment in the recessed machicolations of the slate-coloured ore barn. His claws unsheathed from his gauntlets with a crackling snick! His jump pack flared a last minute burst of fire and he landed in the midst of the shocked soldiers with a crack of stonework.

  Vaanes swept his arms out. Screams and blood followed him.

  He saw panicked faces, saw their terror and shut it out as he killed.

  Fifty men, two armoured fighting vehicles and a trio of supply skiffs, their most ambitious attack yet, but there were few that could match the Raven Guard for their skill in ambush killing. Rifles fired and las-bolts sparked from his blank armour as he spun and sliced his way through the soldiers. The reptilian loxatl crawled and skittered across the walls, flechette rounds slashing downwards to shred officers and sergeants trying to impose some kind of order on the slaughter.

  One of the fighting vehicles exploded, its engine block a flaming ruin as a loxatl flechette bomb punched through the armoured glacis. Men on fire fell from escape hatches and Vaanes watched them burn with a hideous sense of pleasure. The smell of their seared flesh and hair, the thought of their liquefying skin as it ran from their bones like melted rubber…

  His inattention almost cost him his life as a shimmering rapier slashed for his neck. Vaanes spun beneath the blade and punched out with his clawed gauntlet, spearing his attacker and spraying his helmet with blood. An officer in a blue frock coat and golden breastplate stamped with the inverted omega of his masters flopped like a landed fish on the claw, his flesh sizzling and frying with the electric heat of the weapon.

  Vaanes flicked the body from his claws, angry with himself for being so easily distracted in the heat of a battle. Distractions were what got you killed. He drove all thoughts of sensation from his mind, focusing on the job at hand.

  The supply skiffs were bolting, skidding around the burning wreck of the lead fighting vehicle, but a spray of loxatl darts shattered the armaglass canopy and shredded the first driver. It slammed into the side of the ore barn and rucked up on a stack of barrels and pallets.

  The remaining two skiffs fought to break out of the trap, the pilots reacting with commendable speed and calm at the sudden, shocking violence around them.

  Ultramarines training, thought Vaanes. Too bad mine is better.

  More flechette rounds blew out the engines of the second skiff, knocking it out of the air and sending it screeching and spinning across the ground. The last skiff was brought down when a dozen loxatl leapt upon it and clawed their way inside. The grey-skinned aliens moved and fought with a series of jerky movements that appeared riotously uncoordinated and yet amazingly supple at the same time, their wiry limbs and powerful dewclaws able to tear through thin armour and flesh with a single sweep. Snapping jaws and hooked talons ripped the crew of the skiff apart in moments.

  A heavy, chugging series of impacts tore up the rockcrete beside him, and Vaanes dived aside. He rolled smoothly to his feet, seeing the gunner in the hatch of the second armoured fighting vehicle slew his heavy calibre weapon around. Before the gunner could fire, a warrior in iron armour reared up behind him and tore his head off with its bare hands. Blood jetted over the vehicle, and the corpse slumped over the gun, sending a last geyser of shots into the air.

  The Newborn hauled the body from the turret and dropped a pair of grenades inside before slamming the hatch shut. A tremendous detonation rocked the vehicle, and acrid smoke billowed from its vents and underside.

  The sounds of fighting were suddenly silenced, and Vaanes let out a pent up breath of… what? Exhilaration? Regret? He wasn’t sure.

  The Newborn dropped from the back of the destroyed vehicle and walked over to him. Fifty men were dead, two tanks destroyed and a trio of skiffs seized, but it seemed as untroubled as though it had just completed a training session.

  Vaanes took a moment to compose himself, restoring his calm after the exhilaration of the victory. The killings had inflamed the part of him that relished the defeat of his enemy, but it had been more than that. The time they had spent behind the lines of the enemy, attacking supply convoys, small unit redeployments and isolated repair crews had awakened something in him he thought long buried.

  Pride.

  He had always been the best at what he did, and to have his abilities compromised by these newly awakened appetites angered him greatly. He quelled the rising fury, silently mouthing the Mantra of the Hidden Hunter. His heartbeat returned to its resting state and he felt a wordless shiver of distant anger from somewhere far away.

  ‘Another good ambush,’ said the Newborn, removing its helmet now that the fighting was done. ‘You have great skill in anticipating where to find the most lucrative targets.’

  Vaanes nodded. ‘I was trained by the best,’ he said.

  ‘The Raven Guard?’

  ‘Yes, the Raven Guard,’ said Vaanes. ‘I was a senior training instructor at the Ravenspire.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It was… is… the fortress monastery of my Chapter,’ said Vaanes. ‘A grand tower on the dark side of Deliverance. It’s a wonder, you know, the largest man-made structure on the planet. Or pretty much any planet, come to think of it. It’s an incredible place, a place where the very walls are made of history and legend.’

  ‘You sound like you miss it,’ said the Newborn without irony.

  Vaanes started to reply, but the easy dismissal forming on his lips died as he realised the Newborn was right.


  In the hold of her ship, berthed in one of the roof hangars of the basilica, Interrogator Sibiya shivered. She stood inside a large refrigerated shipping container, but she wasn’t cold, for her power armour protected her from the artificially maintained chill of the air. No matter how many times she told herself it was dormant, there was always that thrill of fear whenever she came here. Vapour gusted from wall vents like breath. Which, she supposed, it was in a way. Coiled ribs wrapped the specialised container in humming machinery and the chemical bite of coolant fluids was an acrid tang at the back of the throat.

  ‘Why have you brought me here?’ asked Brother Olantor, looking in puzzlement at the wealth of complex machinery built into the walls of the chamber. ‘I have a battle to fight.’

  ‘Surely Brother Altarion can manage without you for a little while, or don’t you trust his ability to command?’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ said Olantor. ‘I have a duty to stand with my men.’

  ‘This will only take a moment, I just wanted you to see this.’

  ‘See what? All I see is a freezer compartment in the hold of your starship.’

  Sibiya nodded to a hooded adept in a thickly-furred robe who stood with his shaven head bowed by the only entrance, an armoured door that not even Olantor could break down. The adept ran his fingers over a gem-studded console of flashing lights and brass dials. Numerous pict screens displayed steady, pulsing lines like ponderously slow vital signs.

  Sibiya’s breath misted before her and she pulled her cloak tighter about her shoulders as a blunt, oblong box slowly lowered from the ceiling. Formed from banded ribs of adamantium and steel, it resembled something used to contain hazardous bio-matter or unstable atomics.

  Its surfaces were fogged with crystals of white, and long icicles dripped like glassy knife blades from its overhanging surfaces. Sibiya warily approached the container and wiped her hand across a frosted glass panel on its topside, beckoning Olantor to join her.