by Ben Counter
Alaric clambered onto the engine housing where Saphentis had now stopped to survey his surroundings. The valley floor ahead of them sloped upwards until it met what looked like a plateau a couple of kilometres away.
'Archmagos!' called Alaric. 'Hawkespur looks unhurt, as does my squad. Many of your tech-guard are dead. Perhaps you should see to them.'
'They are unmoved by death.' replied Saphentis. 'They need no help.'
Alaric had dealt with members of the Adeptus Mechanicus on a few occasions - many were tied to the Ordo Malleus by ancient debts and served to maintain the Inquisitorial fleet anchored on Saturn's moon, Iapetus, or attended inquisitors directly as lexmechanic archivists or augmetic chirurgeons. In Alaric's experience the more senior the tech-priest, the less human they were. Saphentis, with his rank of archmagos, wasn't doing anything to buck the trend.
'We will move to the head of the valley.' said Saphentis. 'We will get a better view of the city.'
'Do you have enough details on Chaeroneia to know where we are?'
'I have full topographic and urban maps of Chaeroneia. However, after a century they are unlikely to be accurate. Information is our first priority.'
'I agree, archmagos and as commander on the ground it is my decision. You are under Inquisitorial authority here, don't forget that.'
Saphentis turned his faceted eyes towards Alaric. 'Of course.'
'Squad, we're moving out.' voxed Alaric to his squad. 'Lykkos, get the psycannon up front. Cardios, keep the Incinerator in the centre in case of ambush. Haulvarn, is Hawkespur conscious?'
'Semi-conscious, justicar.'
'Keep her safe. I would like to get her back to Nyxos intact. Let's move out before something comes to investigate the wreck.'
Saphentis issued a stream of clicking sounds which Alaric guessed was binary machine code, filtered by the vox-receivers on the tech-guard and turned into recognizable language. Alaric would insist everyone on the mission use the same vox-channel once they were safe.
Alaric could hear distant machinery pumping away as the mission moved up the valley. Long and high-sided, the chasm cut out all but a sliver of sky as it wound through the darkness. It headed gradually upwards and Alaric hoped that it would reach a point where they could get a better look at their surroundings. There was something other than just the sounds and the darkness, too - the same psychic resonance he had felt in orbit, a sinister presence that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, diffuse and all-pervading. It flashed through him as the images on the clouds above changed - complex occult wards and sigils, like the symbols cultists painted on their temple walls or etched out on the floor for their rituals. Occasionally shapes would flit across the clouds. Alaric hoped they were aircraft.
'Advanced machining,' Saphentis was saying as they moved past the burned-out heaps of wreckage. 'They have not regressed. They have progressed. Chaeroneia was a Gamma-level macro economy, but it now seems to be approaching Beta-level sophistication.'
'Is that normal?' asked Alaric.
'Not in a century.' said Saphentis.
Tech-priest Thalassa had recovered her wits and was quickly alongside Saphentis. She was mostly human so she stumbled as she fought her way across the uneven wreckage - Saphentis could help himself along with his extra arms. 'We should find somewhere we can interface with the planet's data repositories, archmagos.' she said. Alaric guessed from her circuitry-covered skin that she was Saphentis's data expert. 'I could extrapolate our location from Chaeroneia's last surveys.'
'Could you find out what has been happening for the last hundred years?' interrupted Alaric.
'Maybe.' said Thalassa, looking nervously at Alaric. Alaric remembered how people tended to react to Space Marines - with fear and awe. 'If the data vaults are similar to Mechanicus standard.'
'Contact!' came a shout from one of the tech-guard, barking out of Saphentis's vox-receiver. Alaric span around, Brother Lykkos beside him training the psycannon barrel over the dark valley floor. The tech-guard had hit cover, lying or crouched, squinting along the barrels of the lasguns to cover all the approaches.
'Tharkk?' voxed Saphentis quietly.
'Colsk reported movement.' came the reply.
'And yourself?'
'Can't see anything yet - wait!'
Alaric saw a slim, pallid shape stumble out of the gloom. It looked humanoid. Its pale body was naked except for tattered strips of parchment nailed to its torso and its bare feet shambled across the debris with only enough coordination to keep it upright. Its shaven head was a wreck - the lower jaw was gone and the one remaining eye was a rusting, weeping mechanical optic. It only had one hand, its other arm ending at the elbow in a fitting where the mechanical forearm had been removed.
Alaric overheard one of the tech-guard voxing. 'It's a servitor, sir. Scavenger.'
'Deactivate it.' was Tharkk's reply. One of the tech-guard drew a laspistol sidearm and put a las-bolt through the servitor's head. It shuddered, stiffened and fell to the ground. The tech-guard smashed its skull with the butt of his lasgun.
'Scavengers are dangerous.' said Saphentis. 'Others may be combat-capable. Stay on your guard and do not allow us to be caught out again.'
'Anything else I should be warned about?' asked Alaric as the troops got moving again.
'A forge world is not unlike any Imperial world in that respect.' replied Saphentis. 'It has its criminals and malcontents along with dispossessed menial scavengers and rogue servitors. But they are far less numerous than in a hive city or area of comparable population density.'
They were coming to the end of the valley, where the ground sloped up to meet what looked like a plateau level, spreading away from them. Alaric's retinal readouts were telling him that without his throat implants and superior ability to filter and absorb poisons, toxins from the polluted air would be building up in his body at an alarming rate. Thalassa was breathing heavily, but Saphentis wasn't showing the slightest discomfort.
'We need to be on the same vox-net.' said Alaric. 'If I can't co-ordinate the whole force at once then...'
They had reached the top of the valley slope, level with the small circular plateau that looked out on the cityscape beyond. And Alaric saw one of Chaeroneia's cities properly for the first time.
Chapter Six
It is good that we have seen such terrible things, for now death will be no great sorrow.
- Commissar Yarrick
(attr., at the walls of Hades Hive)
THE CITY WAS an unholy fusion of black iron machinery and a pulsing biological mass, as if something vast and alive was reaching up from the bowels of the planet to strangle the steel city. Below them huge rounded masses of grey muscle bulged up from the city's black depths, ripped through with ribbed cabling and punctured by vents spewing evil-smelling steam. Deep shafts lipped with wet fleshy mouths belched black smoke. Strips of flickering lights suggested there were corridors and rooms hollowed out of the masses, that they were inhabited by whatever had done this to Chaeroneia. In some places slabs of muscle jutted out above the blackness, balconies or walkways, even launching pads for shuttle craft were painted in stained black and purples. Sensor-spines stuck out like poisoned barbs. Massive vertebrae reared up, weeping dark-coloured pus where they broke the skin, bent tortuously as if some massive creature had been chained and shackled under the city.
The forge world's towers soared out of the chasms below, masses of flesh like tentacles wrapped around them as if holding them upright. The towers were in the half-gothic, half-industrial style of the Adeptus Mechanicus but all similarity to an Imperial city ended there. The black steel spires were fused with the city's biological mass, so that some were like massive teeth sticking out from rancid gums or huge steel leg bones, skinned and wrapped in greyish muscle. Bulbous growths fused obscenely with sheer-sided skyscrapers. Sensorium domes trailed waving fronds of tendrils. Pulsing veins snaked in and out between the girders of skeletal buildings, seemingly picke
d clean of their meat. Foul-coloured fluids leaked from wounds hundreds of metres long or sprayed from the mouths of iron gargoyles, gathering into waterfalls of ichor tumbling far down into the city's depths. Bridges of sticky tendrils, like spiders' webs, connected one spire to the next. In places the flesh was rotten and scabbed, covered in weeping sores the size of bomb craters and sagging under its own dying weight.
This had once been a forge world. The signs were there - massive cogs churning in the biological masses below, the thrum of generators over the reedy, stinking wind, the thousands of lights that burned in the spires. Here and there a balcony was edged with the cog-toothed pattern common to the Adeptus Mechanicus, or even a half-skull symbol almost buried in parasitic growths. Huge pistons pumped through the sides of a massive blocky building, but they looked more like the gills of an enormous sea creature than the workings of an engine. The machinery that had driven a world now resembled the organs of single creature, huge and monstrous, turned inside out and draped around a city of sweating black steel.
The tech-priests and Grey Knights had emerged from the valley onto a large circular platform, perhaps originally a landing pad, which jutted from a huge slab of city-layers that looked like it had been forced up from the prehistoric depths, like a tectonic plate driven up to form a mountain range.
'Throne of Earth.' breathed Brother Lykkos. 'Protect us from this corruption.'
'Pray that He does, brothers.' said Alaric. He turned to Saphentis. 'The truth, archmagos. Have you ever seen anything like this?'
'Never.' Saphentis was as inscrutable as before but Thalassa was looking at the sight in open horror, her hand over her mouth and her eyes wide.
'Did you know what we would find?'
'We knew there was something wrong.' Saphentis's voice was passionless. 'But not like this.'
Alaric looked up. As he had suspected, occult symbols were projected onto the clouds, graven images and writing in forbidden tongues spanning the sky on a truly vast scale. Tiny shapes - grav-platforms maybe, carrying cargo or passengers or patrolling the skies - skimmed just below the cloud layer. The sky was the final heresy, swirled with the colours of festering wounds, purples and greys as diseased as the city itself. This world was so steeped in corruption that even the sky was infected.
The tech-guard were joining the tech-priests and Grey Knights. They were showing little reaction to the horrible sight, just spreading out for the scattering of cover by the opening into the valley cleft. Hawkespur was on her feet by now and she saw the city too. Through the faceplate of her voidsuit's cowl Alaric saw even her eyes widen in shock.
'We're in the open here,' said Alaric. 'We have to get into cover. If they can see us here then they can trap us.'
'Tharkk,' voxed Saphentis. 'We require shelter. Fan your men out to find-'
Something large and wet slammed into the platform with a fleshy thud. A massive stain burst across the surface of the platform, dark and bubbling. 'Down!' yelled Alaric before the surface erupted into scores of spiny limbs, shooting up and out with a sound like thousands of breaking bones.
One of the tech-guard was speared by a spike-tipped tentacle, lifted off his feet and slammed against the jagged metal wall behind him. Las-blasts fired in return, severing thorny tentacles, impacting in bursts of foul greasy steam.
A tentacle snaked around Brother Haulvarn's leg but he hacked it off with his Nemesis sword. The other Grey Knights fell back, along with Saphentis and Thalassa. The tech-guard moved to surround Thalassa but Saphentis could evidently look after himself. Circular saw blades snapped into position on two of his limbs and he slashed around him with little apparent effort, sending twitching fragments of tentacle raining down around him.
'Cardios! Flame it!' ordered Alaric. Brother Cardios stepped past him and blasted a gout of blessed flame into the growing monstrosity, scorching wads of ichor off the metallic surface.
The tech-guard were falling back - one of them had seen there was a way into the neighboring building, a monolith of sweating black iron that looked chewed and tunnelled as if by giant worms. The Grey Knights followed, cutting around them as the tentacles swarmed to surround them.
A dark, roughly circular shape buzzed into view, held aloft by a trio of flaring grav-engines on its underside. A jagged bone crown sat on top of the platform and Alaric just glimpsed a figure in the centre of it, held in place by dozens of thick ribbed tentacles. Half-machine, half-biological weapons crowded the platform's edge - Alaric guessed that one, a wide-mouthed mortar-like weapon squatting near the centre, had fired the bio-weapon at them. The other weapons opened up, stuttering down a rain of fire. Alaric returned fire, feeling the air around him split apart by the shells flitting past him, trusting in his power armour to keep him alive until he hit cover.
Brother Lykkos's psycannon put two fat holes through the base of the platform and black ichor sprayed out, the platform bucking as if in pain. The figure in the centre fought to keep it under control, working the vehicle's apparently biological brain like an organist at the keyboard. The break in fire let the Grey Knights hurry out of the range of the tentacles and into the rust-pitted hole that led into the neighboring spire.
It was dark inside. Alaric's augmented vision could easily follow Tharkk's tech-guard as they spread out in the wide tunnel, wary of what they might find but intent on getting away from the attack outside. The place was dark and dank, the curved walls and floor slick with cold blackish liquid.
The gun-platform outside steadied and sent heavy chains of gunfire stammering around the tunnel entrance. Lykkos and Brother Archis returned fire for a few moments before heavy shots began slamming into the metal, hard shells of writhing parasites that burrowed quickly through the iron where they hit the wall.
'Get back!' shouted Alaric as he followed the tech-guard into the tunnel. 'Keep together, we don't know what's in here.' He quickly found Captain Tharkk in the darkness. The tech-guard officer's face was still covered in the opaque rebreather helmet, lit a hard-edged green by the screen of the auspex scanner he was consulting.
'Up or down?' asked Tharkk.
Whoever now controlled Chaeroneia now knew where Alaric and the force were. If they went up they would run out of levels quickly - even though the upper levels were probably less likely to be inhabited they would be easier for the enemy to cut off, trapping the force inside. There was no telling what might be in the spire's depths where the black iron met the heaving biological masses below, but there would certainly be more places to hide.
'Down,' said Alaric. 'Grey Knights, to the fore.' he voxed. All Space Marines were trained - created, even - to fight up close and brutal and they excelled in enclosed spaces where their superior strength and weight of firepower counted for the most. If they were to forge their way to safety, the Grey Knights would be the ones to get them there.
There was more noise from outside. The grav-platform had stopped firing but Alaric could hear more, heavier lifters with deeper engines. Full of reinforcements, maybe. And there was something else - something huge and heavy, travelling up the outside of the building with a sucking, scratching sound that reverberated through the narrow tunnel.
Alaric shouldered his way past the surviving tech-guard and led the way. The tunnels spilt and looped up and down, but the Larraman's ear implant meant Alaric had an excellent sense of balance and direction, picking the course that would take them into the centre of the spire and downwards. Faintly luminescent colonies of fungi clogged some tunnels, others were half-flooded with viscous grey gore. The sound of pumping pistons echoed from down below, the sound of the creaking, shifting iron from all around.
The tunnel opened up ahead. Alaric stopped and waved forward Cardios and Dvorn, who crouched down by the opening where the tunnel led into a much larger cavity in the iron. There was barely any light - while the Grey Knights could see perfectly well, presumably along with Saphentis, he didn't know if the tech-guard would be able to fight in the darkn
ess. There were too many things he did not know. The tiny pilot flame on Cardios's Incinerator flickered as a warm, damp wind flooded down the tunnels. Dvorn's hammer was hefted as if he expected an enemy to be standing just past the corner, waiting to be beheaded.
'Large space.' voxed Dvorn. 'We're in an elevated position. Wait - movement.'
Alaric moved forward to crouch behind Dvorn. The tunnel led onto a balcony formed from the biological curves of the chamber beyond, a large cavity that looked like it had been eaten out of the iron. Scores of sub-tunnels led off in every direction and from one of these the figures Dvorn had spotted was emerging.
Menials. Alaric knew that the Adeptus Mechanicus included a massive underclass of menials, men and women bonded to perform the thankless tasks the Mechanicus required - labouring in the forges and mines, serving the needs of the tech-priests, crewing the Mechanicus's ships, even defending the forge worlds. It was from the ranks of the menials that the tech-guard were drawn and many tech-priests had been recruited from the most able.
But the menials he saw for the first time on Chaeroneia were different. Menials might be effectively controlled by the Adeptus Mechanicus but they were still ultimately free. Everything about these creatures told Alaric they were slaves. Bent postures, pallid skin covered in weeping sores, uniform jumpsuits so filthy Alaric couldn't tell what colour they were. Heavy dark blue tattoos disfigured their faces, broad barcode designs that wiped out any semblance of individual personalities. They had glass vials of strange-coloured liquids carried in harnesses around their waists or shoulders, with tubes leading off to the veins in their throats and wrists. A few were armed with battered autoguns and lasguns but if they were supposed to fight at all, most looked like they did it with bare hands and teeth.
There must have been thirty menials driven out of the tunnel into the gallery. Behind them was a figure standing a clear head taller than any of them, wearing long robes stained black. Its head was a nightmare, with a long, grinning equine skull wrapped round with tendrils of dark meat. One of its arms ended in long segmented whips instead of fingers, soldered directly into the blue-grey skin of its hand. As it lashed the menials forward in front of it, it chattered out a stuttering noise of dots and dashes.
