Word Bearers

by Anthony Reynolds

  Walyon died, his flesh burning and liquefying, and a moment later the Leman Russ exploded violently, throwing the blackened hull into the air.

  A battle cannon shell detonated on the flank of the Land Raider’s hull, spinning the behemoth to the side, its momentum lost.

  ‘Out!’ roared Burias. ‘Lower the attack ramp!’

  Leading the coteries from the Land Raider, desperate to get to grips with the enemy, Burias swung his head from side to side as battle tanks roared past them. Snarling, he snapped off an ineffectual shot with his bolt pistol.

  One of the tanks spun amid a rising cloud of salt dust as its track was blown clear by a meltagun shot and the coterie broke into a run towards the slowing vehicle, roaring to the heavens.

  One of the tank’s side sponsons screeched as it rotated and unleashed its salvo into the Word Bearers, ripping apart bodies. Burias leapt over the fallen warrior-brothers.

  Drak’shal surged to the surface of the Icon Bearer’s being and his shape blurred as muscles bulged within his power armour. Bunching his legs beneath him, he leapt through the air, landing atop the Demolisher tank. He gripped the hatch atop the cannon turret and ripped it clear of its housing in one brutal movement, wires and cables sparking as the metal was wrenched out of shape, and he hurled it aside. Thumbing a pair of grenades into his hand, he hurled them into the exposed interior before leaping from the tank.

  The grenades detonated behind him, but his focus had fixed on something new, and he stared into the impenetrable smoke cloud, his nostrils flaring. A giant shape appeared, roaring towards the Word Bearers.

  Larger than even a Land Raider, a super-heavy Gorgon transport vehicle loomed out of the smoke. A giant, angled assault ram of thick metal protected its front, and the gunfire of the coterie pinged off its surface. The metal turned molten beneath the touch of melta weaponry, but even that was not enough to penetrate the thick armour.

  Chattering gunfire ripped up the ground around the Coterie and a spray of autocannon shells smashed Burias back a step. He felt his anger grow. Lascannons from the Land Raider pierced the metal side of the massive super-heavy vehicle, but it did not slow, and Burias once again tensed his leg muscles, making ready to spring.

  With a roar, he leapt as the massive tank bore down on him and he landed on the upper side of the assault ramp, the force of the impact causing him to hiss in pain. A second later, the Gorgon slammed into the wreckage of the Demolisher, smashing the battle tank aside with contemptible ease, nearly crushing Burias. He pulled himself up over the lip of the giant dozer blade. The vehicle was open-topped and he snarled in pleasure as he saw the score of heavy battle servitors packed within. Several were borne upon large tracked units, while others were bipedal, easily as large as a Space Marine, held in place by large clamps around their waists. Autocannon fire slammed into one of Burias’s arms, shattering the ceramite, and he lost his grip momentarily, sliding precariously. With a roar he pulled himself up and, kicking off with one foot, he descended into the midst of the heavy Praetorian battle servitors. They raised their massive inbuilt weapon systems towards him, though they were hampered by the tight confines of the Gorgon.

  Spinning cannons screamed, the heavy calibre gunfire tearing armour and flesh from Burias-Drak’shal’s body, but he was amongst them in an instant. The holding clamps hissed open, releasing the Praetorians. Their immense weight and solid construction ensured they did not lose their footing, despite the speed the Gorgon was travelling at. He ripped the augmented head from the shoulders of one of the warriors as he landed, and protein rich, sickly, white synth-blood, sucrosol, sprayed out, mixing with spurting oil and Burias-Drak’shal’s sizzling, scarlet vital fluids.

  Another three possessed Chaos Marines launched themselves over the side of the Gorgon, landing amidst the Praetorians, roaring their dedications to the Chaos gods. Chainaxes and power swords rose and fell in bloody arcs and their bolt pistols barked as they fired into the tight press.

  The enemy was all around him and Burias-Drak’shal lashed out blindly, ripping mechanical arms from torsos and punching his talons through chests. The Praetorians were the most highly advanced servitors created by the Adeptus Mechanicus, fitted with neuro-linked targeting processors and enhanced combat brain-stem implants, as well as heavy weaponry and powerfully armoured shells. They were easily a match for an Astartes warrior-brother.

  One of the berserkers was clubbed to the ground by a heavy blow from a chaingun, mechanics and augmetics whirring as they lent immense power to the blow. Placing a heavy foot upon the downed warrior’s chest, buckling his power armour, the Praetorian levelled its cannon towards the Word Bearer’s helmet, which was torn to shreds beneath the power of the burst of fire it unleashed. The headless corpse twitched as it died.

  Burias-Drak’shal caught a swinging, metal arm in one hand and with a powerful twist ripped it from its mechanical socket. Lashing out with his other hand, he slashed his claws across the head of another, tearing its red blinking eye free and ripping away a chunk of skull and brain with it. A spinning cannon was levelled at his back, but he spun around, the daemon within him sensing the danger. He knocked the weapon to the side using the Skitarii’s dismembered arm as a club. Gunfire burst from the barrels, tearing apart a pair of Praetorians.

  A heavy blow smashed into his head and Burias-Drak’shal staggered to the side, straight into another swinging metal arm that smashed into his high gorget. He was slammed backwards, falling to the floor of the roaring Gorgon, and a multi-barrelled cannon swung around towards him. The barrels of the gun were shorn off with the sweep of a power sword and a burst of bolt fire knocked the Skitarii backwards, allowing Burias-Drak’shal the time to regain his feet.

  He came up fast, the talons of one hand swinging up in a slashing uppercut, ripping the head from a Praetorian, even as the warrior-brother that had saved him was slain, a hole appearing in his chest as a burst of cannon fire ripped through him. Holy Astartes blood splashed over Burias-Drak’shal’s face, congealing even as it landed on his pale skin, and he grabbed the rotating cannon in his hands as it swung in his direction. The barrels halted instantly under his daemonic, crushing grip. He wrenched the metal out of shape and smoke rose from the mechanics of the weapon.

  With a barked roar, he slammed his fist into the Praetorian’s head, pulverising its skull. Burias-Drak’shal hurled it into one of its comrades, slamming it against the thick metal interior of the Gorgon.

  The next minute passed in a flurry of bloodshed and gunfire. Burias-Drak’shal alone stood on his feet. Every Skitarii had been ripped and hacked apart, and lay twitching and sparking on the floor of the super-heavy vehicle. His fallen brethren lay unmoving, their souls having passed on to the Ether.

  Burias-Drak’shal reached out and gripped a heavy, metal hatch, the metal bending out of shape beneath his grip as he wrenched it from its hinges. A withered servitor was revealed, hard-wired into the cabin of the vehicle, its sightless eyes staring forward and its arms connected directly to the gearshift and steering column of the tank. He grabbed the wretch around its throat and ripped it out of the cabin amid a shower of sparks and pale, sickly blood. It was ripped in half, its lower torso still attached to the machine, and its mouth moved soundlessly as milky fluid rose in its throat. The super-heavy vehicle came to a halt.

  Burias intoned the words of binding and Drak’shal was pushed back within, fighting against the strength of its master. The overgrown tusks that protruded from his mouth retracted painfully and his long talons receded back into his hands. His posture straightened and he was once again the elegant, controlled warrior, though his body was ravaged and exhausted, the after-effects of possession.

  ‘Coryphaus,’ he spoke.

  ‘Speak, Icon Bearer,’ said the vox reply.

  ‘Met the foe, head on,’ said Burias, breathing heavily. ‘My warriors fought well. More have advanced around us. Beware the Gorgons.’

  ‘Acknowledged.’

  ‘You wish me to re
turn to the bulwark, Coryphaus?’

  ‘No. The enemy has committed to the attack. They may have left their command unprotected. Continue your advance. Drive through them and kill their commanders. Succeed and the Cult of the Anointed will embrace you, young one.’

  Wiping blood from his face, his breathing having almost returned to normal, Burias nodded his head.

  ‘It will be done, my Coryphaus.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The anti-aircraft batteries tore the heavens apart overhead, but the Warmonger was focused only on the Leman Russ battle tank climbing the embankment towards him. The Dreadnought stood motionless as a battle cannon shell streaked past its shoulder and its armoured plates were peppered with explosive heavy bolter rounds.

  The Warmonger stepped heavily to the side, into the path of the tank. As it breached the top of the battlement, its front lifting up into the air, the Dreadnought reached up with its massive power claw and brought the vehicle to a screaming halt. Servos groaned as it held the tank and its huge mechanical feet slid backwards beneath the vehicle’s weight and momentum. Its underbelly was less armoured than its front and the Warmonger fired its weaponry, the rapid firing rounds punching through the undercarriage, shredding the weakling mortals within and tearing through the Leman Russ’s vital systems.

  The Chaos Dreadnought’s servos whined as it exerted its strength and pushed the tank back the way it had come, sending it toppling end over end down the embankment to smash into the front of another battle tank.

  ‘Kill for the Warmaster!’ the Dreadnought roared as it re-fought the battle for the Emperor’s palace in its damaged mind. ‘Destroy the Emperor, the betrayer of the Great Crusade!’

  Bodies fell all around Kol Badar. Many of them were already dead, though their timed grav-chutes were in operation and slowed their descent mere metres above the ground. Still, thousands of living drop-troopers were landing all along the second tier and the open space behind the first, and he fired off controlled bursts left and right as he killed.

  The attack had been well coordinated, timed to perfection. The first drop-troopers had landed just as the line of tanks had emerged from the cloud wall and just after a scything attack run by air that had cost him many warriors and war machines of the dark gods.

  It was a well-organised attack, but one that was ultimately flawed. Given an inordinate amount of time, the enemy would prevail, for their numbers were great, but time was not on the Imperials’ side. Even he, Kol Badar, who felt the touch of the dark gods only faintly, could feel the birth tremors of the Gehemehnet. He knew that the enemy would feel it too. They would be fearful and rightly so.

  In the meantime, the enemy would die upon his warriors’ blades.

  The haemonculus attached to Techno-Magos Darioq via aqueduct cables flooded his system with suppressants and holy vital fluids, filtering his veins and cables for viruses. Red robes hid the tumorous, cancer-ridden flesh of the stunted creature that had been bred in the nutrient tanks of Mars. It diverted the diseases and weaknesses of the flesh into itself so that they did not afflict him; such was its purpose in life.

  He quoted the fifteenth Universal Lore to himself, ‘Flesh is fallible, but ritual honours the machine-spirit’, and he intoned a prayer to the Omnissiah as his system was cleansed.

  Nevertheless, he recognised something amiss within the frail remnants of his flesh body and he opened up the cortex channels to the right-hand side of his brain in order to determine its purpose. Synapses sparked and he realised that what he felt were crude and fleshy emotions: tension, trepidation and anger.

  Such base, human things, emotions, yet he found them intriguing as well as deplorable.

  It had been a long time since last he had stepped foot upon planet c6.7.32, what the Elysians called Tanakreg. He accessed the hard memories of his secondary brain units and one of the myriad arrays of screens within the control centre of his airship flashed with data.

  It showed his report to the Fabricator Tianamek Primus, dated over two thousand years earlier, though his current brain units had no record of him having scribed them.

  Access to primary expeditionary focus/purpose denied. Magos Metallurgicus Annonus unable to determine material make-up of structure. Impervious. Logis cogitator augurs recommended path – terraform c6.7.32 and dissemble discovery. Magos Technicus Darioq to fabricate auditory station, and post watch over c6.7.32.

  That was the source of the alien emotions of tension and trepidation that he had felt in the past two millennia. None had sought out that which he had been unable to breach, yet here was a powerful enemy of the Omnissiah on c6.7.32. It was imperative that they did not uncover the structure that he had gone to such pains to eradicate from all Imperial and accessible Mechanicus records.

  But anger had nothing to do with the exploratory expedition he had led. That strange, hot temper had been brought upon him by the nature of the foe. He could feel the affront to the Machine-God in their essence, in the unholy constructions that they had defiled beyond all heresies.

  Their machines, infused with the essence of daemonic warp entities, were the greatest corruption that the adepts of Mars could contemplate, a blasphemy that made all other blasphemies pale. All thinking machineries of the Mechanicus had souls within their flesh, for a soulless sentient machine is the epitome of true evil. And upon the battlefield, raging beyond the concealing clouds of blind-smoke, were machineries that had been polluted by their merging with the soulless entities of the warp. A soulless sentience is the enemy of all.

  Such heresies were utterly wrong and Darioq was both revolted and horrified by how low the Legion of the Word Bearers had stooped. He shut off the receptors and synapses that synched his right brain hemisphere and the uncomfortable feelings instantly vanished. All that remained was the irrefutable fact that the enemy made use of sacrilegious, dangerous machineries that were an affront to his god and that they needed to be neutralised, their heresies eradicated and their hold over c6.7.32 removed.

  His mechadendrites plugged into the central control column and, connected as he was to the delicate sensors on the outside of the hull, he registered the field of disruption that spread out in a cone from the enemy’s tower. At his impulse, the command ship was lowered towards the ground. It was imperative for him to maintain contact and hence control over his thousands of Skitarii warriors. If he were cut off from them and his adepts then his entire army would grind to a halt.

  Vast turbine engines rotated in their housings as the airship began to descend, the linking cable that connected it to the holy Ordinatus Magentus drawing it in towards the docking station on its upper deck.

  One of the servo-arms of Darioq’s quad-manifold rotated, whining softly, and its clamp-like jaws eased open.

  ‘Enginseer Kladdon, open the hiemalis chamber and bring forth my blessed cogitation units.’

  One of the red-robed junior priests behind him lowered the head of his power halberd in respect for his master’s order and stepped towards one of the walls of the command centre. He spoke the words of awakening as he pressed the buttons of the hiemalis unit ritualistically, timing his speech to coincide with the correct sequence of buttons. With a blessing to the machine-spirit he gripped the sunken circular handle and, as he incanted the correct words beseeching the unit for its acquiescence, he pulled the drawer open.

  Fog billowed from the unit as the ice-cold air within reacted to the heat outside. Held within a long shelf were over a dozen carefully stored bell jars. Within each jar was a blessed brain hemisphere held in static charged null-liquid. One of Darioq’s servo-arms reached forward, hovering over several of the jars before the magos selected the required unit, and his servo-arm gently lifted it free.

  Another servo-arm folded down and grasped the top of one of the bell jars protruding from the massive power generator he bore, and as he muttered the required intonations of supplication, mechadendrites whirred as he loosened the cog-shaped bolts fixing the bell jar to him. Needle-like incisio
n spikes clicked out of the centres of other mechadendrite tentacles and were carefully inserted into the cog-shaped holes revealed with the removed bolts. They turned and with a hissing sound the bell jar was lifted clear. He felt the loss of information and processing power of the brain unit like a vague emptiness within him.

  Swiftly and precisely he placed this brain unit within the gap in the hiemalis unit and attached the new bell jar to his core systems. Fresh information that he had not accessed for many centuries flooded through him, including memories and algorithms that had departed from him completely when he had disconnected the brain unit.

  Much of the content of this brain unit would have been classed as heretical by some of the priesthood of Mars, but Darioq had felt driven to re-synch with the hemispheres within the bell jar. This was the unit that he had utilised when he had been part of the explorator team that had first investigated planet c6.7.32, and it had none of the synapse burns that altered and neutered many of the right brain functions.

  This was a creative brain unit. Only a few secretive and covert members of the priesthood would dare to access such a component. The knowledge of the ancients stands beyond question, the tenets said, and for him to utilise a creative thinking brain unit to make adaptations and improvisations to mechanics, as he had done in the past when wired into this particular bell jar, was at best the height of hubris and, at worst, heresy of the worst kind.

  His devotion to the Machine-God, Deus Mechanicus, and its conduit manifestation, the Omnissiah, was unwavering. To deny the effectiveness of such a creative drive when prescribed methodology would fail was abject foolishness, but even as these thoughts ran through his mind, he recognised the danger inherent within them. He must not utilise this brain unit for long periods, or he risked his whole being. Such dogmatism is folly, he thought. I must retain my dogmatism, he thought. The conflicting impulses gave him pause, but the new addition was the more dominant presence.