‘No,’ said Honsou, looking up at the warp core, where the light gathered in a maelstrom of phantom claws, teeth and a multitude of eyes. He pointed his silver arm at the blackened outline of a human form that had been burned into the bronze. Where other portions of the warp core were covered in wardings, this part was bare, and tendrils of crackling light oozed from the buckled plates. ‘Shoot that part.’
‘Shoot the warp core?’ hissed Vaanes. ‘Are you insane? You’ll kill us all!’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Honsou. ‘Grendel, do it.’
Grendel shrugged and shouldered the melta gun, unleashing his last charge on the brass plating where he had watched the armoured woman burn to death. The armoured plating was no match for the close range blast of a melta gun and the metal vaporised in the superheated explosion.
As though a vast ocean of seething blue white energy had been kept dammed within the core, the titanic energies bound within flooded outwards. But instead of filling the chamber with deadly forces that should have consumed the entirety of the star fort, the light poured into the bound Dreadnought.
The mighty war machine bucked and heaved as the immaterial energies suffused it, taking every molecule of its being as its own. A terrible howling echoed from the walls, but whether it was from the Dreadnought or the newly released daemon was impossible to tell.
The Dreadnought shook off its captors’ grip, tearing the chain grapples from the ogre creatures and shuddering in the grip of daemonic energies that poured into it. Its substance swelled and bloated as its limbs lengthened and stretched, becoming hideous melds of machine and daemonic flesh. Its armoured carapace stretched and cracked, burning cracks of light seeping from within as though the warp itself flowed through its circuits and joints instead of blessed oil and amniotic suspension.
The manifesting daemon dropped to its knees, screaming at this violent transition from prison to freedom. The pain of its birth was felt by everyone around it, and Honsou’s body was wracked by agonising pain, as the hurt of every wound done to him in his long life as a warrior returned to haunt him.
The granite of its carapace pulled and twisted like wax paper, and a snarling, horned head pressed itself through the stone. Metal, stone and warp-spawned flesh moulded together to shape the fleshless skull of the Thrice Born, an elongated, bestial face that writhed with the memory of ancient tattoos.
The Dreadnought’s arms stretched and cracked, the assault cannon reshaped into some hideous mecha-organic weapon of unknown function. The mighty hammer crackled with bilious light, its substance fluid and impossible to fix. Honsou blinked as it seemed to flicker through one form after another; one moment a shimmering sword, the next a clawed arm, the next a seething mass of formless light.
At last the hurricane of energy ceased and the Thrice Born climbed to its feet, now clawed and sheathed in iron. It towered over everything, a hulking, monstrous, luminous being of immaterial flesh and steel. It flexed its new limbs, and the power radiating from its body was palpable.
Behind the mighty daemon lord, the warp core continued to beat, the power of a hundred stars still caged within its heart. Shimmering warp-spawned light sealed the wound Grendel’s melta gun had caused, and screaming faces swam in that light, stretched mouths and pleading eyes; the souls of the Thrice Born’s victims bound eternally to its service.
The daemon lord’s fanged maw split wide open, exposing yellowed teeth like sharpened tombstones as it swept its baleful gaze around the warp core. Its eyes fixed on Honsou, and he met its appraising look with one of his own.
Dark light of torment shone in the depths of its eyes, and Honsou quailed before the hatred and malice he saw in them. His own reservoir of hate was as a paltry thing next to the venom this being had for the scions of Guilliman.
Honsou felt his heart race as it saw his purpose and rejoiced in it.
This was a being with which he would wreak a terrible vengeance. The worlds of Ultramar would burn in its wrath and Uriel Ventris would know suffering and pain the likes of which he could not even begin to imagine.
The Thrice Born raised its arms and the air within the chamber grew thick with static and the taste of blood and metal. Shapes formed from twists of folded reality and hideous creatures of scales, horns and fangs slipped through the veil that separated realities. Hundreds of monstrous daemons crackled into existence, and Honsou sensed the presence of tens of thousands more just waiting for the chance to force their way through.
‘Behold the vanguard of my daemon army,’ roared the daemon lord.
The rings of Aescari Exterio burned red as the Indomitable broke orbit, moving under its own volition for the first time in its existence. A new power burned at the heart of the star fort, one that was not bound by conventional laws of nature or the designs of a long-dead priest of the Machine-God.
Honsou’s fleet and the vessels crippled in the fighting to take the fortress were berthed in its dock facilities, and even now thousands of captured techs and servitors repaired and rearmed them for the war to come. The damage done in the battle to capture the star fort was undone and the Iron Warriors built fresh fortifications atop the ruins of the old.
Where once the Indomitable’s bastions had been raised with pride, standing with honour and majestic beauty, they were now ugly donjons of iron and stone, crowned with rusted spikes and forests of razorwire. What had once been glorious was now a hideous parody of honour, a brooding fastness of bitter anger and spite.
A fortress of the Iron Warriors.
The Indomitable – though it would soon shed that name – departed Aescari Exterio, moving to the outer reaches of the Triplex system. Safely distant from the gravity well of the system’s star, space collapsed as the veil of real space was torn aside and the star fort vanished, hurled into the Empyrean to ride the currents of the warp.
Its new masters had but one destination in mind.
The empire of the Ultramarines.
Ultramar.
THE IRON WITHOUT
NOW
His name was Soltarn Vull Bronn and ten of his vertebrae were mangled beyond the power of even the most mechanically adept Apothecary to save. His legs had been crushed to paste and his left arm jutted from the misshapen ruin of his chevroned shoulder guard like a broken girder. No amount of will could force it to move, but he was able to free his right arm from beneath his breastplate.
The circumvallations at the cave mouth were gone, buried beneath the collapsed ceiling of the enormous cavern. Through dust-smeared eyes, he saw that the wall and his command staff were a crushed ruin of flames and smoke. That meant Teth Dassadra was likely dead as well. Bronn had no feelings towards the man save apathy and an Iron Warrior’s natural mistrust, but at least he had been a vaguely competent siege-smith.
His collapsing lungs heaved to sift enough oxygen from the smoke- and dust-clogged air as his ears rang from the apocalyptic detonation that had triggered the collapse. He coughed a wad of bloody phlegm, knowing the position was lost and that any of his warriors who had survived the cave-in he had caused were as good as dead. The Ultramarines’ guns would see to that.
Had that been the plan all along?
Try as he might, Bronn could see no other conclusion.
He had followed the Warsmith’s orders to the letter, with diligence and dogged loyalty.
In retrospect, perhaps that was the problem.
The Warsmith was a warrior like no other, a killer of men whose mind functioned in a radically different way to the Legion in whose name he once fought. To some, that had marked him for greatness, but to others it was a vile stain on their honour that he should bear the visored skull of the Iron Warriors.
Half-breed, they called him.
Mongrel upstart.
Honsou.
He had left them to die, and though Bronn suspected that defeat would be the inevitable outcome of so risky a war, he found he was still surprised. A lifetime of betrayals; from the dawn of the Imperium, when gods walked am
ong their disciples, and all through the Long War to this latest spasm of rebellion. Ever was it the lot of the Iron Warriors to taste perfidy, but this latest treachery was the bitterest Bronn had ever swallowed.
He had believed in Honsou.
Despite his squalid inception, the half-breed had risen through the ranks with the persistence of a monotasked servitor digging an approach trench, displaying just the right balance of initiative and blind obedience to his betters until those less skilled had fallen by the wayside.
It had been on Hydra Cordatus his chance to excel had finally come. Bronn remembered the thundering violence of that siege, the brittle regolith that collapsed at every turn, the hot sun that baked slaves alive and bleached their bones before they were buried in the foundations of the redoubts. Most of all, he remembered the deep yellow rock that resisted every pick and shovel.
It had been a masterfully wrought approach, each sap pitched at a precise angle and every battery thrown up with a speed that would have made the artisan masters of lost Olympia proud. Bronn had fought in the Grand Company of Forrix, and he could still remember the pain of seeing his master gunned down by the Imperial battle engine at the moment of final victory. Standing triumphant in the ruins of the fortress, Forrix had been killed in the moment of regaining his lost fire.
At battle’s end, Honsou was named the Warsmith’s successor and he had given Forrix and Kroeger’s warriors a stark choice: accept him as their new Warsmith and live, or deny him and be destroyed. It was no choice at all, and every warrior had dropped to one knee and sworn fealty to their new master. From Hydra Cordatus, they had battered a path through Van Daal’s Black Legion whelps at Perdictor and returned to Medrengard. Honsou had claimed the timeless fortress of Khalan-Ghol for himself, as was his right, but brooding in a crooked spire was not to be the half-breed’s destiny.
Jealous eyes had fallen upon Khalan-Ghol, and the grand armies of Lord Toramino had joined forces with the berserk horde of Lord Berossus to attack Honsou in his mountain lair.
Though pain was eating away at his formidable powers of endurance, Bronn grinned wryly at how the two lords of Medrengard had been humbled by the upstart half-breed, their armies broken and scattered to ashes beneath the cruel light of the daemon world’s black sun.
Whisperers railed at being commanded by a warrior without lineage, a half-breed with no memory of the Great Betrayal, who had not known the pain of the thousand indignities heaped upon the Legion by the Emperor, and who had not earned his bitterness on the fire-blackened rock of Terra. Honsou’s warriors were now fighters without a fortress, rootless wanderers little better than sell-swords, and that was hard to stomach for men who had stood at the side of a living god.
Even after the destruction of Tarsis Ultra, they called Honsou unworthy, and not even the release of the daemon lord M’kar from his imprisonment on the Indomitable had appeased his doubters. They hated him, called him impure, and plotted his downfall. Heritage and purity of genetics was all that mattered to these schemers, and no matter how many victories Honsou won, they would never accept him.
Bronn had hunted those who spread dissent and ended them, for he had always known that a warrior’s worth was measured in the blood he shed, the soil he dug, the walls he raised and the citadels he split asunder.
By that measure, Honsou was a true Iron Warrior.
But now this…
Bronn could stomach betrayal, it was the Iron Warriors’ lot, but to have it come from within on so grand a scale was galling.
What could be so important beneath the surface of Calth that was worth this?
THEN
Earth-moving machinery roared and bellowed, spitting clouds of caustic, lung-tarring smoke, spraying stone chips from beneath solid rubber tyres. A hundred and fifteen machines pulled like blood-maddened flesh hounds on chains at the cave’s exit. The confined air reeked of machine oil, blood offerings, petrochemical fumes and sweat. Over four thousand mortals in reinforced work overalls and canvas hoods huddled in the shadow of the heavy machines, armed with picks, shovels and rock-breaking drills.
Soltarn Vull Bronn swept his gaze around the widened chamber with a critical eye.
‘I need more machines,’ he said.
‘A hundred and fifteen should be more than enough,’ replied Teth Dassadra, comparing the arrangement of machines with hand-drawn schemata plotted out by Bronn less than an hour ago. ‘The forward redoubt only needs to be five hundred metres wide and twenty high.’
‘You say “only” as though we will be building it in a summer meadow with the enemy attacking us with flower blossoms,’ said Bronn.
‘No,’ said Dassadra, unable to keep the impatience from his voice. ‘I know the mathematics of construction as well as you. My logarithmic calculations are correct, even allowing for losses.’
‘And if those losses are greater than we expect?’
‘Why should they be?’
‘Because this is a world of Ultramar,’ said Bronn.
‘A world like any other,’ said Dassadra with a dismissive shrug as they reached a group of workers crouched behind a kinetic mantlet and bearing heavy picks across their shoulders. The men were tense, awaiting the order to advance into the teeth of massed artillery. For men under a virtual death-sentence, they appeared remarkably calm.
Bronn rounded on Dassadra. ‘No, it is not. These are the best fighters we have faced. They fear us, yes, but not so much that they will break and run when the first shells land among them. So long as the Ultramarines stand, so too will they.’
‘You admire them,’ hissed Dassadra.
‘I do not admire them, fool, I simply recognise their abilities,’ countered Bronn. ‘It would be stupid to do otherwise.’
Dassadra gestured to the thousands of men, servitors and drones gathered around the machines. ‘Plenty of meat and bone to raise a wall if the diggers fail.’
Bronn turned to the group of men sheltering behind the mantlet. With a casual twist of his arm, he unsheathed his entrenching tool from its shoulder scabbard. Its name was Earthbreaker, and its dull iron was scored and nicked where swords and axes had gouged its haft, yet the pointed half-moon of its blade was as sharp as the day it had been taken from the forge-armoury.
As a tool of siege, Earthbreaker had dug countless trenches, excavated a thousand tunnels beneath the hardest rock and raised earthworks so vast as to be visible from low orbit. As a weapon, it had taken the head of ten captains of the Fists, had split the spine of a greenskin warlord of six systems and hewed innumerable humble rankers in the bloody heave and swell of close-quarters battle.
Bronn hammered its blade into the nearest slave’s back. Blood welled around the embedded iron, and the man jerked as his ruptured spinal column sent contradictory impulses flailing around his dying body.
‘Mortal muscle to drive iron tools is in plentiful supply, and can be easily replaced when blood inevitably soaks the earth,’ said Bronn, irritated at needing to explain his methodology to Dassadra. ‘Machines are less easily replaced.’
Bronn shook the split body from his blade as another mortal ran up from the rear ranks to take his place. The dead man’s former comrades threw his corpse in front of the bulldozer, to be crushed into the rock when the assault began.
Using Earthbreaker like a walker’s staff, Bronn moved through the cavern, marking out lines of advance and reinforcing his construction orders as he went. The mortals looked up in terror as he passed, which was as it should be. He was sending them to their deaths, but even marching out into a hellstorm of artillery, gunfire and shrapnel was more palatable than displeasing an Iron Warrior.
Dassadra watched his every move, searching for mistakes and flaws in his orders, but Bronn knew he would find none. His aide had come to him from the shattered survivors of Lord Berossus’s army, and though those warriors had sworn loyalty to Honsou, they were little better than whipped dogs, volatile and always looking for advantage.
Bronn paused at the machine clos
est to the cavern mouth, a towering eighteen-wheeler on spiked iron tracks and with a giant hopper of crushed stone secured at its rear, rubble gathered from the collapsed ruin left by the defenders after the destruction of the giant tunnel leading from Guilliman’s Gate to Four Valleys Gorge. From this debris would be built a wall to shelter the heavy guns of the Iron Warriors, and the dark symmetry of this pleased Bronn no end. Flexible pipes at its sides pulsed like intestines, filled with rapid-setting permacrete that would be used to bind the loose rubble together and allow the mortal slaves to erect the mesh-wrapped blockwork of the batteries.
The cavern mouth was a semi-circular slice of wan daylight, something that grated against Bronn’s sensibilities. They were underground, and underground places should be dark. It made no difference to the projected operation, but it offended his sense of the way things ought to be. Bronn knew the subtleties of rock better than anyone, and it was said with only a spoonful of irony that it spoke to him.
Where there was a weak seam in a wall, Bronn would find it. Where the soil was softer and more amenable to undermining, he would know of it. Just by touching the rock, Bronn could know its hidden strengths, its complex structure and its inherent weaknesses. Where others might mount an escalade with more flair or know best when a breach was practicable, no-one knew the rock better than he.
Bronn held out his hand for the plan he had drawn earlier. Dassadra gave it to him with the speed of one who knows well his master’s desires. Bronn checked the distances between his machines and the cavern walls, the lines of advance and the routes of dispersal once they emerged from the transient safety of this tunnel.
‘This is all wrong,’ he said, swinging up onto the integral steps machined into the flank of a vast bulldozer with its shovel blade worked in the form of an enormous fanged daemon maw. The machine had been a gift from the Tyrant of Badab after the Skull Harvest, and was, to Bronn’s eyes, needlessly embellished. The operator’s cab was set behind a heavy mantlet of flared horns and armoured in sheets of layered metal, with only a thin slit by which the driver could see out.
Iron Warriors - The Omnibus Page 54
