by Ben Counter
These were the battle-brothers to whom Alaric owed his life, simply by virtue of backing him up in battle. They all owed that much to one another - a single Grey Knight could never have lasted this long on Chaeroneia. And Alaric was responsible for their conduct in battle and their spiritual wellbeing. It was an enormous responsibility, one that Alaric accepted because if he didn't, there were very few who could.
Alaric passed Interrogator Hawkespur, who was sitting on the bunk. Her voidsuit was unzipped and hanging around her waist. The underlayer she wore beneath it was thin enough for Alaric to see the outline of her ribs through the fabric. She looked like she had lost weight in the few days she had been on Chaeroneia - much of it must have been lost in the battle against the ugly tumours that formed blue-grey lumps under the skin of her throat and upper chest.
Her face was waxy-pale, her short black hair clinging to her forehead with cold sweat.
'Hawkespur? How are you doing?' asked Alaric.
Hawkespur shrugged. 'I'm fighting it.'
'How long can you go on?'
'As long as I can. My guess would be less than a week, But I only have two years of medicae cadet training. Could be more, could be less.'
'Antigonus will try to get communications with Nyxos in orbit. After that I could leave you here.'
'No, justicar. I am the Inquisitorial representative on this planet. I must know everything you find out, immediately. Just because my time is limited does not mean my mission has already failed.' Hawkespur coughed heavily and one of Antigonus's tech-priests arrived carrying a battered box of medical supplies. Alaric left them to it and walked over to his squad.
'Brothers.' he said. 'Magos Antigonus could be a valuable ally. He knows a great deal about what happened here and how the enemy is structured. It could be that he can help us strike at the heart of the heretics.'
'Good.' said Brother Dvorn. 'I'm sick of hiding in the shadows. There's nothing on this planet that can stand up to us, not one-on-one. All we need to know is where they are.'
'Hopefully that is true.' said Alaric, 'But it may still not be that simple. Antigonus will try to put us in contact with Nyxos in orbit. We can apprise him of the situation and see if he has any new orders for us.'
'Whoever controls this planet.' added Brother Haulvarn, 'they didn't just re-enter real space by accident. And they must have known that sooner or later Imperial forces would find out that Chaeroneia had fallen to daemons and heretics. They're here for a reason and whatever they are planning they must be able to do it soon. Does Antigonus know why they have chosen this moment to show their hand?'
Alaric sat down on one of the bunks - it almost buckled under his armoured weight. He laid down his Nemesis halberd and began unfastening the massive ceramite slab of his breastplate. 'No, he does not. But there is one event we know of that Antigonus did not.'
Haulvarn raised an eyebrow. 'The Eye?'
The Thirteenth Black Crusade has brought more Chaos-worshipping forces into Imperial space than any other event in thousands of years. Perhaps it is a coincidence, perhaps it is not, but if the masters of Chaeroneia are on a mission to aid the Black Crusade then we could win a victory here for the forces stemming the tide at the Eye. And no doubt you have heard the rumours that victories are sorely needed.' Alaric pulled off his breastplate and saw the livid bruises on his skin where he had been shot and battered during the fighting of the last few days. He was tired and aching and there would be new scars alongside his many old ones when he had healed. If he survived, of course. Chaeroneia probably had a great many ways to kill him that he hadn't seen yet.
'But these are matters outside our control for now.' Alaric continued. 'For the present we should concentrate on things we ourselves can change and foremost among those is ourselves. This wargear has seen much corruption on this planet and we must reconsecrate it. The same goes for our bodies and minds. Haulvarn, lead the wargear rites. Archis, speak for the spirit of your Incinerator. We will not have long before we must begin this fight again and we will use the time well.'
Brother Haulvarn began intoning the low, rhythmic words of the wargear rites, imploring forgiveness from the spirits of the squad's armour and weapons for forcing them to confront the moral treachery of Chaeroneia. As the battle-brothers prayed together, anyone who saw them would see the true strength of the Grey Knights - not the physical augmentations or the hallowed wargear, or even the exacting training that prepared them to fight things that should never exist. Their strength was their faith, the shield of pure belief that protected their minds from the predations of Chaos and the lies of daemons. No one else in the Imperium could claim such strength - it was the reason the Grey Knights existed, the reason they were trusted with spearheading holy victories in the Emperor's name.
It was just as well they had that strength. Because on Chaeroneia, it was all they had.
INQUISITOR NYXOS IGNORED the protestations of the protocol adept who manned the doors to the bridge of the Exemplar and barged past the cordon of silent tech-guard, trusting in the unit of Naval armsmen behind him to keep anyone from barring his way. The torpedo alerts were still booming throughout the ship and the confusion common to all battle-readied warships was increasing - menials scurried here and there carrying messages in scroll tubes or carting vital items of equipment between decks. Tech-priests relayed orders in bursts of Lingua Technis and the chattered machine-code overlapped until it sounded like rapid gunfire.
As he walked onto the bridge, Nyxos saw why Magos Korveylan seemed so unwilling to see any visitors to her ship face-to-face. Her body was a solid block of mem-circuits and cogitator units, formed into a dense square pillar of knotted circuitry and wires. The remains of her biological body - her ribcage, spine, heart and lungs and her central nervous system - were contained in a plastiglass cylinder on top of the cogitator stack, her skinless face held up by a web of fine metal struts. She was rooted into the floor of the bridge and only her hands could move, her fingers moving deftly over the array of controls on the dataslate mounted inside the clear cylinder. The more 'normal' face, the one she used for visual communications with other ships, stood to one side on the communications console - it was a simple automaton, used to give the impression that Korveylan looked like the tech-priests someone outside the Mechanicus would have met.
Korveylan looked around as Nyxos walked in. Her face was no more than muscle and bone so he could read no expression off her, but the synthesized voice that blared from the speakers on the front of her mechanical body sounded officious and annoyed. 'Inquisitor. We are at war. Leave my bridge.'
'I hardly think I'm getting in anyone's way,' replied Nyxos breezily. The rest of the bridge seemed staffed only by servitors, slaved into various consoles, dumbly typing at brass-faced keypads or working the gears on cogitator units that looked like they ran on clockwork.
Korveylan's unit rotated so she was facing Nyxos. Her lidless eyes were glossy and black. 'I am the captain of this ship.'
'And I am the instrument of the Emperor's will.' replied Nyxos briskly 'I win.'
There was a pause as Korveylan seemed to consider this. 'Observe.' she said.
Nyxos assumed this meant he could stay, but was not to touch anything. That was fine by him.
The tactical viewer on the Exemplar took the form of a large mechanical orrery a construction of concentric rings that swung around one another like the devices used to demonstrate the relative positions of planets in a solar system. This example, however, had silver and brass icons mounted on the rings that showed the relative positions of the various ships and objects around Chaeroneia. Nyxos noticed that several glinting knife-shaped icons of silver must represent the torpedoes now approaching the Imperial fleet very quickly. Bronze disks mounted further out represented the enemy fleet, including the Hellforger, while a dense sphere of rotating gears at the centre was Chaeroneia itself.
Space combat, Nyxos had learnt in his long Inquisitorial career, was
an agonising affair where manoeuvres and assaults could take hours to pan out. Hours when a competent captain usually knew exactly what was going to happen and often had no choice but to wait for his ship to take whatever the enemy was throwing at it. The enemy attack here had been so sudden that the battle was unfolding on a minute-by-minute scale - lightning-fast by naval standards.
'Engineering.' Korveylan was saying into the ship's internal vox-net, 'Bring auxiliary reactors five and eight on-line. Full power, evasion pattern.'
Several more Mechanicus crewmen were entering the bridge, shouldering through the armsmen Nyxos had brought with him, no doubt summoned silently by Korveylan to keep an eye on the intruder. Nyxos recognised tech-guard uniforms and the brass body armour of the ship's more highly trained Skitarii troopers.
'Impact!' blared the ship's vox-casters and the first of the torpedoes hit, shaking the bridge violently. Nyxos's servo-assisted limbs compensated but several of the servitors were thrown out of their moorings, flailing helplessly like puppets with their strings cut. Tech-guard grabbed anything they could to keep themselves upright. Sparks showered as cogitators shorted and the lighting flickered.
'Damage report.' said Korveylan calmly as the explosion still echoed through the ship. Secondary explosions thudded somewhere deep in the ship's structure, ammo stores or fuel cells blowing.
Pict-screens slid up from the floor beside Korveylan, each showing the wreckage of an area devastated by the impact. To Nyxos's eyes it looked bad, billowing orange-black smoke and twisted metal.
'Engineering damage minor.' came a vox from elsewhere in the ship.
'Ordnance damage minor.' echoed a similar voice. The ship's officers sounded off - the torpedo had struck hard but not hard enough to put the Exemplar in immediate danger.
'Come about, pattern intercept,' said Korveylan. 'Power to prow turrets.'
Nyxos walked towards Korveylan. 'Why are you here, magos?' he asked.
'Now is not the time.' said Korveylan, with a reassuringly human note of annoyance.
'Now is the perfect time. I may not get to ask you again.'
Another explosion sounded, closer this time, metal shrieking only a couple of decks away. Nyxos heard the horrible keening of a deck breach, the air whistling as it was dragged out through a punctured hull.
The Adeptus Mechanicus retains sovereignty over the forge world of Chaeroneia. 'The Exemplar was sent to oversee the reassertion of authority. Your questions require me to multitask, inquisitor and have a directly deleterious effect on my capacity to command this ship.'
'No, magos. I mean why are you here, personally?' Korveylan ignored him. The tactical orrery was showing a shoal of torpedoes closing in and the ship's prow turrets opened up in response, the rapid thuds of their reports vibrating the floor of the bridge.
'I took the liberty of checking before I came aboard. The Mechanicus is meticulous in its record-keeping and an inquisitor's authority gains him access to a great deal. Not all of it, regrettably, but enough. You were a magos piloting cargo ships around the forge world Salshan Anterior barely two years ago. That would make the Exemplar your first battleship command. And yet here you are, hardwired into the bridge as if you own the place. Not to mention the fact that you're a long way from home out here.'
The third impact hit Nyxos as if he had run into a wall, a shockwave ripping through from the prow of the ship and billowing through the decks. Jets of coolant gas spurted from ruptured pipes. Glass and metal shattered. A bloom of fire rippled up one wall, engulfing the servitor wired into it, before automated fire extinguishers doused half the room in choking fumes.
Nyxos realized he was on the floor. He wasn't hurt but he was shaken, his head reeling. He looked around him, face still lying against the floor and saw one of the tech-guard had lost an arm to a flying sheet of torn metal that had sheared right through at the elbow. Deeper explosions sounded, from ahead of the bridge - a torpedo had smacked into the prow, burrowed deep through the reinforced prow armour and exploded close to something the Exemplar couldn't really do without.
'All non-essential personnel evacuate from the bridge.' said Korveylan over the growing din.
A tech-guard hand grabbed Nyxos's shoulder, pulling him up and towards the doors leading off the bridge.
'It's not that easy, Korveylan!' shouted Nyxos. 'I know Archmagos Scraecos was at Salshan Anterior! You studied at the seminary he founded. You translated three volumes of his writings from its original machine-code. And whatever he came to Chaeroneia to find, I think you know it's still there!'
Magos Korveylan paused in making her course calculations and turned to look at Nyxos. Even with no face to hold an expression, there was something in her eyes that told Nyxos the annoyance was gone. There was no point in lying to him any more - Nyxos knew enough to see through the lies. With the sparks still flying and hundreds of warning lights flickering on every console, Magos Korveylan looked suddenly calm.
'The Chief Engineer has the bridge,' she said over the ship's vox-net. She closed her eyes, muttered a prayer Nyxos couldn't hear and exploded in a star-burst of broken glass.
THE WAY to the transmitter obelisk was steep and treacherous, winding up through the remains of Manufactorium Noctis's ancient sewage and drainage systems. Interrogator Hawkespur followed Alaric doggedly along the paths cut into the sheer sides of giant water cisterns and slippery staircases worn almost smooth with time. Magos Antigonus led the way, his consciousness contained within a spry maintenance servitor with four long spiderish legs that scampered easily up steep slopes and over obstacles. Archmagos Saphentis was there, too, almost gliding regally as he kept up with Antigonus. Alaric found the going easier than Hawkespur, his enhanced strength meaning he could just dig his fingers into the crumbling stonework and haul himself upwards. As he followed Antigonus he saw places where primitive burials had left mouldering bones in niches cut into sewer walls, a relic of the time when Chaeroneia's underclass of menials had fallen into tribal savagery for the first centuries after the planet dropped into the warp. There were decrees in the dots and dashes of Lingua Technis carved into marble stele set into the walls, marking the time when the tech-priests had emerged from their spires again and begun building Chaeroneia into the cannibalistic society Alaric had seen above - those menials had been rounded up, refitted and branded with barcode marks of servitude, then fed into the flesh-knitting engines when their lives were spent and turned into the biomechanical monstrosities that ran so much of Manufactorium Noctis.
There had been battles, evidently. Sometimes Alaric glimpsed armour almost corroded into nothing by time, just a green-black metal stain on the stone where a body had fallen quelling some riot or uprising. But for every sign of unrest there were two or three symbols of submission - time-worn statues of heretic tech-priests, machine-cant slogans proclaiming the debased laws of Chaeroneia. From these dank tunnels had marched the menials of Chaeroneia to join the tech-priests they considered their rightful masters and in return the planet had almost literally swallowed them up.
'There is not much further to go.' said Antigonus. The vox-unit on his current servitor made his voice sound tinny and distant. 'The obelisk was once used to transmit a navigational beacon for close-orbit spaceships. We intended to use it to broadcast a distress signal, but we soon understood that we could not get a signal from the warp into real space with the resources we had.'
'But it should reach into orbit now?' asked Hawkespur.
'If it still works, yes.' replied Antigonus.
'Archmagos.' continued Hawkespur, 'did you find out if there are any active tech-priest installations in orbit? They could block our signal, or use it to track us down here.'
'I did not find any information pertaining to that subject.' replied Saphentis.
'I'm still in the dark as to just what you did find.' said Alaric. 'Even though we lost Thalassa and almost all the tech-guard to find out.'
'It would be of limited use to one who was
not a tech-priest.' replied Saphentis.
'Fortunately.' said Alaric, 'we have one right here. Antigonus?'
Antigonus's servitor paused and turned. Its face was a simple brass mask, pitted with age, with two silver studs for eyes and a round grille housing its vox-unit. 'The Enemy deployed its daemons to keep you out of there, archmagos. The knowledge you found must be important.'
The party emerged onto the base of a huge, deep chamber, roughly rectangular, with a ceiling so high it disappeared far up into the shadows beyond the limit of the search lamps mounted on the shoulders of Antigonus's servitor body. It had once been a huge reservoir of water or fuel for the Manufactorium above, but it had been dry and dark for hundreds of years now.
'Very well. The data was incomplete and severely corrupted. I was able to confirm your suspicions about the date, justicar. Chaeroneia has been out of real space for a little under eleven hundred years. Most of the rest of the information related to power output, with which a self-sufficient forge world must understandably be concerned. Chaeroneia's power is generated, output and recycled with an efficiency I have never beheld in the most advanced Adeptus Mechanicus facilities.'
'Don't get too enthusiastic, archmagos.' said Antigonus. 'Tech-priests have been lost to the resistance before by coming to side with the enemy. They always begin with such sentiments. Just because the rulers of this world can cheat the rules that limit the Machine, it does not mean they are superior.'
'Of course.' continued Saphentis. 'Nonetheless it is remarkable. The biomechanical structures of the Manufactorium appear to be central to this system with most of the resultant output being directed towards a very large complex just outside the threshold of Manufactorium Noctis. It appears that this was radioactive wasteland prior to the loss of Chaeroneia. There is no indication as to what is there now. The output rose exponentially just prior to Chaeroneia's re-entry into real space.'
'Whatever they're doing.' said Hawkespur, 'they're doing it there.'
