by Braden Campbell, Mark Clapham, Ben Counter, Chris Dows, Peter Fehervari, Steve Lyons
‘The Xenarites have not been idle,’ Branatar observed with grudging respect.
‘Yet for all their labours they have forged only a soulless monstrosity,’ Malvoisin mocked.
The brother warriors were watching the fortress from a crumbling ruin on the outskirts of the plaza. It was one of the few structures that had escaped the Xenarites’ purge.
‘I am in position,’ Anzahl-M636 reported on the vox.
‘Confirmed,’ Branatar replied. ‘Black Shield?’
‘Ready to hunt,’ Hauko voxed from his sniper’s nest on the roof. ‘Multiple targets already marked on the watchtowers.’
‘Confirmed.’ Branatar switched back to the Techmarine. ‘One-Thousand, you are cleared to go. May the Emperor walk with you.’
‘Acknowledged,’ the soulless voice replied. ‘Commencing deployment.’
Branatar watched as the Techmarine walked into the plaza alongside the Sicarian Infiltrator he had captured. The sentries on the watchtowers spotted the pair immediately and multiple searchlights swept down to mark them as they approached the bastion. Anzahl-M636 was unarmed save for his retracted servo arm and he had removed his helmet to make himself vulnerable to the Infiltrator’s taser goad. To all but the sharpest of observers he would appear to be the captive and the skitarius his captor, but his mechadendrite was buried covertly in the back of the Xenarite’s head. Reprogramming the skitarius was beyond the Techmarine’s ability so he was controlling it like a servitor on a tight leash. It was a dangerous ruse, but the kill team needed any edge it could get.
‘The Techmarine wasn’t chosen for this mission by chance,’ Malvoisin gauged. ‘Do you trust him, Garran?’
Branatar snorted. ‘I trust nothing about this mission except you, my brother.’
Malvoisin was silent for a moment, considering. ‘I am not to be trusted either,’ he said finally.
‘Your actions on the roof were… rash…’ Branatar began, recalling the rage that had overcome his comrade.
‘They were the actions of a madman,’ Malvoisin hissed. ‘There’s something inside me, brother. A taint, like an iron barb in my soul.’
Before Branatar could reply, a towering bipedal engine clattered across the courtyard to intercept the Techmarine. A servitor hunched in a recess of the machine’s lower carriage while a skitarius in ornate black armour rode astride it. The rider tilted its lance towards Anzahl-M636 and questioned his ‘captor’ in harsh binaric as the machine paced in tight circles before them. The Infiltrator answered in kind.
‘This is an unclean world, brother,’ Branatar said as he watched the exchange. ‘Such corruption kindles rage in every one of us. Your fury was righteous.’
His friend made no answer.
‘Icharos…’
There was a buzzing hoot from the plaza and the skitarius dragoon stowed its lance, apparently satisfied. It swung round and strode away, resuming its patrol as the intruders continued their advance. The blast doors retracted as they neared the bastion, revealing more skitarii in the gatehouse, their bulky guns glowing with baleful blue light in the darkness. These warriors wore backswept helmets slit by narrow visors and their armour was swathed in robes that trailed to their feet. Another figure appeared at the threshold, taller than its fellows and sporting a fan-like crest of blades on its helmet. It assessed the newcomers in silence.
The silence stretched.
‘That slave hasn’t lost its instincts,’ Branatar murmured to Malvoisin, watching the tall skitarius intently. It was obviously a leader of some kind. ‘Be ready, brother.’
Suddenly the leader lunged towards the Techmarine with a flanged mace, but Anzahl-M636 had anticipated it and his servo claw swung round to intercept the blow. Its buzz-saw jaws snipped off the cyborg’s arm just above the elbow, chewing through metal and bone in seconds. Simultaneously the Infiltrator beside him emitted an ululating wail that surged through the skitarii in the gatehouse like a killing current. They howled in almost human torment as their muscles convulsed in the throes of a voltaic seizure. Some fell to their knees and clawed at their vibrating helmets, while others flailed about blindly, crashing into the walls or one another as they sought to escape the sonic scourge.
Only the leader appeared resistant. It staggered back and raised the gun in its surviving hand, but Anzahl-M636 followed and smashed the weapon aside. Before the skitarius could retreat again his servo claw swept down and clamped its jaws around the cyborg’s head. The Xenarite screeched like a klaxon as its helmet crumpled.
Branatar was moving before the leader died. He brought down a three-metre stretch of his hideout’s wall with a single blow of his power fist and stepped into the plaza. Malvoisin’s sword flared into life as he followed. The searchlights found them instantly and gunfire followed a moment later, thudding into their armour in a slow but steady barrage. Fortunately, the sentries lacked heavy weapons, but Branatar’s auspex detected rising levels of radioactivity as the bullets ricocheted off his carapace.
The crimson light of Hauko’s sniper rifle swooped overhead and silenced one of the sentries, then slid across to another tower. The Terminators were drawing all the fire, leaving the sniper to ply his craft unhindered.
‘Keep those doors open, One-Thousand!’ Branatar bellowed into his vox as he fixed his gaze on the portal. Anzahl-M636 had pressed on into the gatehouse and he heard muted gunfire, but the enslaved Infiltrator had fallen silent.
Malvoisin grunted as a shot grazed his temple. He was shielding his face with a splayed gauntlet, but it was a crude defence. Branatar had never understood why so many veterans chose to fight with their heads bare – almost as if war were a game to them.
‘I told you to put your damned helmet back on, Icharos,’ he chided.
‘I lost one of my optics in the fall,’ Malvoisin said lightly. ‘I’ll not fight half blind, brother!’ He sounded almost cheerful, as if battle had salved his guilt.
There was a raucous hoot of fury from their right and the mounted skitarius thundered towards them, its lance crackling with energy. Clouds of ochre incense billowed from the dragoon’s mount as it charged, its reverse-jointed legs hammering across the ground like giant pistons.
Branatar and Malvoisin faced the rider together, standing side by side as it bore down on them. The Salamander’s flamer rumbled as he nudged the slumbering inferno within to life.
‘We rise on burning wings!’ Malvoisin yelled.
And then the strider was upon them, and for a few shining moments the battle-brothers were perfectly at one with the purpose for which they had been forged.
The dragoon arced its iron steed towards Malvoisin and set its lance for Branatar, intending to trample one and impale the other in a single pass. Recognising its intent the Terminators held their ground, as motionless as statues.
Waiting… waiting…
At the last moment, Malvoisin surged forwards and dodged out of the strider’s path, swinging his blade backhanded to parry the lance aimed at his comrade. There was a flare of light as he sliced clean through the prong, sending darts of energy swarming up the haft. In the same instant, the Salamander breathed his fire, first immolating the engine’s servitor, then tilting the stream up to catch the dragoon. He squeezed down hard on the flamer’s trigger, maximising the promethium flow to reach the rider on its high perch. The weapon answered with a belch of fire that hit the cyborg like a guided comet, transfiguring it into a scorched metal shell filled with liquefied flesh and bone. Branatar grinned as the strider clattered past, blindly bearing the funeral pyre of its master. It crashed through the perimeter wall and raced on into the dark city beyond.
‘That was well done, brother!’ the Salamander said, turning in time to see his comrade’s head snap back as something struck his skull.
Still gripping his sword, the Angel Resplendent fell to his knees, held for a moment, then toppled over.
‘Icharos!’ Branatar bellowed. He stalked over to his friend and turned him over clumsily, for once cur
sing the bulk of his sacred armour. A scorched rift arced across Malvoisin’s forehead where the bullet had torn a path through the flesh, but not quite penetrated the skull. It was a fluke of trajectory so rare that those who survived such traumas were considered blessed, but Branatar doubted whether this wound would be a benediction. The skin around the gash was already necrotising in the wake of the irradiated bullet. It looked like a jagged crown had been carved across his friend’s brow.
‘Brother?’ Branatar hissed.
‘It’s a lie,’ Malvoisin whispered. ‘All of it.’ His eyes opened, burning with a truth only he could see. ‘We condemn ourselves…’
Then his gaze clouded as his consciousness slipped away.
‘Go! Do your duty!’ Athondar urged. His words slurred into a merciless loop of accusation, a noose around Branatar’s soul hauling him back to Gharuda, from one betrayal to another. He could almost see the shrine world’s temples unfurling around him…
‘Be silent!’ Branatar roared. He closed his eyes, indifferent to the bullets battering his armour.
‘Salamander?’ Hauko’s voice crackled over the vox. ‘You need to keep moving.’
The thought that the Black Shield was witnessing his private torment struck Branatar like a knife, silencing Athondar and severing the thread of despair he was weaving.
No, Branatar thought, it isn’t Athondar…
‘It almost had me,’ he said.
‘I don’t understand.’ For once Hauko sounded puzzled.
‘This damned, dead city,’ Branatar snarled. ‘It’s full of… of…’
He looked at the injured Angel Resplendent. There was nothing he could do for his friend until the mission was done.
‘I will return, Icharos,’ he vowed. Then he turned away and stalked towards the bastion.
‘One-Thousand!’ Branatar called as he stepped into the gatehouse. There were dead skitarii everywhere, sprawled about in contorted positions like broken mannequins. The enslaved skitarius was among them. Its domed head had erupted into a crown of jagged petals that looked like the result of an internal explosion. Inspecting the corpse, he noted that the plasma pistol Anzahl-M636 had secreted under its robe was gone, as was the Techmarine himself.
‘One-Thousand, status report?’ Branatar voxed.
There was no reply.
He tried again, but his receiver remained stubbornly silent. It was possible that the Techmarine’s vox had been damaged, but Branatar suspected he was choosing not to answer. He didn’t like the implications of that at all.
He switched frequency. ‘Black Shield?’
‘On my way, Salamander,’ Hauko replied immediately.
Branatar frowned. He was suddenly struck by the thought that Hauko and Anzahl-M636 might be communicating on a private vox-channel. They were both outsiders, but were they outsiders to each other?
A cold rage swelled in his chest.
Growling low in his throat, Branatar stormed through the gatehouse and into the courtyard beyond. The open space was like a smaller box within the great box of the bastion. A puzzle box… Countless doors led off from the courtyard and a metal staircase zigzagged along the walls, offering access to the upper levels. It would take an intruder days to scour the stronghold if he went in blind.
‘But you know exactly where you’re going, don’t you, One-Thousand,’ Branatar murmured. He spotted a pair of skitarii corpses at the far side of the square. The molten craters in their breastplates were unmistakably the work of a plasma weapon. An iron hatch lay among them, evidently ripped from the doorway beyond.
Branatar had his path.
The Techmarine’s trail of violence led Branatar through a maze of corridors to a wide stairwell that descended into the fort’s underbelly. There was a lift beside the stairs, but only a fool would trust such a contraption when hunting a rogue magos. Kill Team Sabatine had already lost one of its brothers to an abyss and Branatar was damned if he’d follow.
‘Salamander,’ Hauko voxed, ‘I’m in the courtyard. What’s your position?’ This time it was Branatar who remained silent.
The trail of dead skitarii ran dry three levels down, but Branatar pressed on without hesitation, sensing in his guts that Lem would be in the depths of her stronghold. Hauko had tried contacting him once more, then gone quiet. Perhaps he’d guessed Branatar’s suspicions.
‘Secrets and lies, Garran,’ Athondar whispered sadly. ‘They will eat the Imperium from the inside out.’
‘You’re not wrong, shadow,’ Branatar agreed.
The staircase terminated at a narrow gallery overlooking a circular amphitheatre some twenty feet below. Titanic pistons rose and fell along the perimeter of the cavernous chamber, venting steam as they powered the arcane mechanisms of the bastion. The floor of the chamber was encrusted with a tangle of machinery and insulated pipes woven around a massive central dais. A cluster of glass cylinders rose from the dais like giant specimen bottles. Metal rings reinforced the vessels and electricity spiralled around them at regular intervals, illuminating the chamber with flickering blue light. Scores of robed servitors wandered the mechanical maze, attending to their duties with dull diligence. None of them paid any attention to the intruder.
Branatar stepped onto the moving conveyer ramp that connected the gallery to the dais. As he approached his destination he caught sight of an armoured giant slumped against a cylinder on the far side of the platform. Though the figure was partially obscured by the tanks, it was unmistakably Anzahl-M636.
‘One-Thousand?’ Branatar voxed. He neither expected nor received an answer.
A few moments later the Techmarine was fully revealed. His right arm had been hewn off at the elbow and his servo claw hung limply across his chest, its rotary blades spinning idly. Deep rifts criss-crossed his armour and a broken blade jutted from his sternum.
Branatar coaxed his flamer into life as he stepped onto the dais and circled around the glass tanks. He grimaced at the dark shapes that hung suspended inside the containers. Though blurred by the murky liquid that held them, those hulking, aberrant forms filled him with a loathing that ran blood-deep. The intensity of the emotion was almost overpowering and Branatar was suddenly certain of the righteousness of this mission. Despite his misgivings about the inquisitor who’d sanctioned the purgation, he had none about the kill itself. Nedezdha Lem’s hunger for knowledge had lured her into unspeakable heresy.
She had to die.
‘Salamander…’ Anzahl-M636’s voice was little more than a sigh on the vox.
Branatar approached the slumped Techmarine cautiously. The upper part of the blue ‘M636’ code tattooed across his forehead was gone, along with the top of his shaven head. Both had been sliced away with clinical precision to reveal a concentric geometry of flesh, bone and brain. Augmetic implants sparked amidst the cross-section map of his brain like splintered power pylons.
And yet the Techmarine somehow still lived.
His piercing eyes locked onto Branatar and the Salamander noticed their irises were angular rather than round – almost crystalline.
Are those augmetics or a mutation? Branatar wondered. Abruptly the eyes shifted focus to something over the Salamander’s shoulder.
‘Secutor…’ Anzahl-M636 rasped.
The Salamander swung round without conscious thought, opening fire as he turned. His blazing whiplash struck the thing behind him as it lunged forwards with myriad blades. A shimmering corona burst around his attacker as the flames were caught in some kind of energy field and spat out as impotent ricochets of light.
Branatar cursed at the techno sorcery as he backed away, slowing his enemy with a steady flow of fire. The thing’s shape was silhouetted against the radiance as it pressed through the flames like a man swimming upriver. A flowing robe veiled it from head to foot, but Branatar glimpsed the glittering humanoid spider beneath. It swarmed with razor-tipped mechadendrites and multiple arms that wielded whirling swords. The creature loomed over him, hunched under the weight of its e
lephantine cranium. Its face was a revolving bronze cog with a nest of serpentine dataspikes at its centre. Every spoke of that abstract visage housed a glowing optic that cycled through the spectrum as its cog-face rotated.
Was this abomination Nedezdha Lem? Branatar knew the priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus could take countless forms so there was no telling how far a heretic magos might go.
‘Nedezdha Lem,’ he challenged, ‘stand down in the name of the Ordo Xenos!’
The eightfold web of eyes regarded him with detached contempt, but the cyborg made no answer as it advanced. It was formidable, but it was moving with a pronounced limp, always lurching to the left, as if its legs were unbalanced. Two of its arms drooped, trailing their swords listlessly along the ground.
‘Then you will be judged by fire, heretic!’ Branatar bellowed and he increased the flow of promethium to his weapon.
With a final burst of light the abomination’s aura collapsed, overloaded by the Salamander’s assault. The conflagration engulfed it instantly, incinerating its robes and revealing its adamantium frame. The left side of its torso was a ragged ruin, almost certainly the result of plasma fire. Evidently, the Techmarine had not accepted his fate quietly.
‘You fought well, brother,’ Branatar said. It was the first time he’d used the epithet for Anzahl-M636.
His back bumped into one of the cylinders. He could retreat no further. With almost loving precision he modulated the flow of promethium to his flamer, sacrificing range and spread to increase the intensity further still. The weapon shook violently as it struggled to direct the inferno.
‘I walk in fire, as fire walks in me,’ Branatar intoned as the cyborg bore down on him. It was glowing white-hot now, imbuing it with an almost supernal cast.
‘Target acquired,’ Hauko voxed.
A ray of light lanced from the gallery above and locked onto one of the cyborg’s rotating eyes. There was an explosive crack and both the eye and the spoke that housed it were shattered.
That was no ordinary sniper round, Branatar gauged, but then Hauko is no ordinary sniper.
