by Paul Kearney
Captain Ixion knelt on one knee as heavy autocannon fire whipped past his head in a bright skein of tracer. It was still some three hours until this part of the hulk turned back towards Iax’s sun, and the entire area was obscured not only by darkness, but by boiling clouds of metallic dust and pulverised rockcrete. The noise was deafening, but his autosenses tuned out the worst of it, allowing him to concentrate on the matter at hand. The vox was perfectly clear as he called up the flight of Thunderhawks overhead.
‘Overwatch Flight, do you read?’
‘Affirmative, captain. This is Brother Odyr of Fifth on the Penitent. We await your orders.’
‘Odyr, make a low pass and see if you can make out the enemy positions. They have heavy weapons emplaced all around us. I want your gunships to locate them and take them out.’
‘Acknowledged. Be aware, captain, visibility is very low, and onboard augur systems are compromised.’
‘Follow their tracer, Odyr. And report any other enemy movement.’
‘It shall be so. Penitent out.’
Within seconds a new sound tore through the thin atmosphere as the three Thunderhawks came swooping in low over the perimeter. The roar of their approach drowned out even the heavy weapons fire, and their Mars-pattern engines sucked up great spiralling circles of dust in their wake. At once, the autocannons of the enemy switched targets, and stabbing lances of light shot up into the sky, following the aircraft. A web of tracer scattered across the stars. The Ultramarines below looked up to see rounds bouncing and careering off the thick protective armour of the Thunderhawks. They were taking a torrent of fire, but they had been built to take punishment, and they ended their pass intact, before wheeling back over the position again, gaining altitude and banking so as to bring their sponson-mounted weapons to bear.
‘Attack run, Naevus formation,’ Brother Odyr said on the vox. ‘Brothers, follow me in. Targets of opportunity on my axis. Watch out for our brothers of Seventh.’
‘Carenus ready, on your three, brother.’
‘Victris ready, on your nine. Lead us in.’
The aircraft powered across the blazing sky, and as they came in they loosed off hunter-killer missiles from their wing-pylons. The missiles arced down onto the surface, setting up a rippling series of explosions, a line of tawny boiling dust spouting up into the thin air with a maelstrom of fire at its base.
‘Adjust on my axis,’ Brother Odyr said. ‘Coming round for a strafing run.’
Again, they swooped round, banking so steeply that they set up a shrieking scream of tortured air and hammering engines. Now the heavy bolters in the sponsons opened up, sending streams of burning tracer in a torrent that walked along the perimeter. There was a spatter of secondary explosions on the ground as ammunition cooked off, and the Ultramarines of Seventh saw other things hurled through the air by the force of the detonations.
Captain Ixion looked up, following the flight of the Thunderhawks and noting the placing of their missiles, the avenue of attack they had chosen. As he watched, a second line of enemy weapons opened up from half a mile away, thick threads of white light pulsing up into the sky. One of the Thunderhawks was caught in that fiery mesh of energy and yawed wildly.
‘Penitent, this is Carenus. Systems overload. I am losing altitude.’
‘I see you, Carenus. We are taking fire from heavy arc rifles a thousand yards on bearing one seven three.’
‘Break off attack, make altitude if you can.’
‘Negative, brother. Damage is too severe. Carenus is going down.’
The Ultramarines within the perimeter watched in rage as the Thunderhawk tilted up in a last-ditch attempt to clear the cocoon of fire that was now tearing it to pieces. There was an explosion on board, one wing blown clean off the hull; then the great craft slewed drunkenly across the sky and tumbled down into the surface of Fury like a blazing meteor. As it struck, the massive explosion was felt through the feet of the watchers, like the tremor of a far-off earthquake.
The other two Thunderhawks screeched upwards, with lightning-like streaks of energy stabbing up into the sky in their wake. It seemed that for miles around, the surface of the hulk had come alive with hidden batteries.
‘Captain, this is Penitent,’ Brother Odyr said.
‘Send, brother.’
‘Carenus crash-site in view – no survivors likely. It went down too hard. We are returning to Octavius for damage assessment and rearming. We will be back, captain, you can rely on that.’
‘Emperor guide you, brother. I know you will return. When you do, come in force.’
‘Aye. Penitent out.’
The Librarian of Seventh Company, Brother Belisar, strode up to Ixion.
‘Captain, they are about to attack again. I can sense them – their minds are poor, half-formed things, broken and bestial. And there are thousands out there.’
‘What in Throne’s name are they?’ Ixion demanded irritably. ‘Not Chaos.’
‘No – not Chaos. Though that mark is on them – somehow they have felt its taint, but it does not direct them.’
‘Be clear, brother. I have no time for riddles.’
Belisar’s hood gleamed blue. His tone was savage. ‘I hear scraps of machine code on the aether, fragments of binharic. These things are not agents of the Ruinous Powers – they are minions of the Adeptus Mechanicus.’
Ixion was startled into momentary silence. From the perimeter, the cry went up. ‘Ware brothers – enemy approaching!’
The Ultramarines of Seventh, along with their brethren from Ninth and Tenth, manned their shattered breastworks, pushed aside shoals of spent bolter shells, and took aim once more. The deep thunking pop of the missile launchers sounded out first, followed by the hungry roar of meltaguns.
Then the heavy bolters went to work, stabbing out into the dust-choked darkness, tracer lighting up long serried ranks of cowled figures that came rushing forward in clots and mobs, then spread out under fire, losing dozens before they went to ground in the wreckage, and began firing back in a close-gripped, raging ring of violence.
The entire perimeter was engaged all at once, and the star-filled night of Fury was broken open by a volcanic blaze of light that echoed out into nearby space, watched by the crews of the great ships orbiting above.
Eleven
Tech-priest Alt-seven stopped dead in his tracks, his head cocked to one side. Inside its sealed lens, his eye opened and closed slowly.
Before him the two enginseers paused in their work and looked back. A leakage of binharic code squirted out of the communication matrices of his bioware, and then was clamped shut again.
Alt-seven stumbled, then straightened.
The Adeptus Mechanicus party continued with their work. While the four skitarii stood guard, the two enginseers were busy cutting an opening in a bulkhead with their welding torches, the white-blue glare of the plasma-acetylene lighting up the chamber fitfully. Alt-seven stood silent and still, watching them.
They were back in the chamber of consoles and cogitators that they had been through earlier, but now a mass of wreckage had been lifted away from the far wall to reveal a tall sealed door, very like an airlock hatch
, which had lain hidden behind it.
The door had been located in the initial survey, but Marneus Calgar’s impatience had meant that there was no time to investigate what lay behind it. Magos Fane had not pushed the point, unwilling to make an issue of the thing. In fact he had behaved as though there were nothing of interest left to investigate in that entire wing of the ruins they had traversed. But Alt-seven was his senior Artisan, and included in many of his decisions. He had felt the magos’ excitement. There was something else here, something which it might be best not to reveal to the Adeptus Astartes and the Inquisition.
Sentience is the ability to learn the value of knowledge, the Third Mystery of the Cult Mechanicus said. But the Seventh Warning also stated: Flesh is fallible.
What the magos had sensed here had nothing to do with the other Adepts of the Imperium. It belonged to the Mechanicus, and as such, it must be investigated by their own.
Alt-seven was here to do his superior’s bidding.
The incantatory programs against scrapcode were in place, but still, Alt-seven’s bio-cogital interface had been sending up strange snaps and tweaks of fragmentary messaging in the last hour; some weirdly conversational, but most of a technical variety. It defied the analysis of his ward-logic rituals, and he had decided to quarantine and isolate it, but all the same, some leaked through. It was not an assault or a battery of his mental mechware; more a playful hit and run, irritating, even fascinating, but no threat to his core systems.
Until now. The entire mainframe of his primary logi-stack had been taken offline for diagnosis and purge, and Alt-seven was unsure what to do about it. His auxiliary systems had come online perfectly; communications, limbic control, motor function, environmental awareness. But his primary was still running in the background, every line of holy code being examined by his inbuilt cogitator protection script.
Something was wrong – but it did not feel wrong.
And Alt-seven began to feel something that was completely unfamiliar to his experience.
Fear.
The door crashed inwards, spraying gobbets of molten metal like glowing raindrops. Beyond, there was an acrid stench and utter darkness.
The skitarii stepped through the still glowing outline of the door, arc rifle poised. Two spotlights blinked yellow on either side of his brazen skull, illuminating a corridor, narrow and uneven, the plates that lined it buckled and bent, their supporting struts poking up like tree stumps.
Alt-seven collected himself.
Alt-seven focused. The chrono clicked in his readout, counting down the magos’ estimate of the maximum time available for the mission before the Adeptus Astartes grew suspicious.
A broken and much blasted maze of corridors and passageways opened out before the Adeptus Mechanicus party in the blackness. Some were mere warrens, others grander affairs with towering arches blotched by the passage of centuries, dead, black terminals and vid-screens inset in the walls. The chrono ran on, clicking away their time. Protocol stated that there were to be no communications with the magos until the party was on its way back to the main body, but Alt-seven felt that fear again, mingled with the determination to fulfil his task. The darkness was empty but for the far glimmer of binharic life on his bioware readout, up ahead, getting closer as they trudged deeper into the shattered innards of Fury. A system that had endured this long – and the corridors they picked their way through now were truly ancient – had to have been of major importance, with many backups and safeguards, otherwise it would have died long ago.
By his own rough estimates, Alt-seven reckoned that the code signature he was picking up had been running for some two thousand years.
The two skitarii went ahead, their spotlights flaring up the buckled and stained walls of the passageway. Alt-seven let his senses range over the immediate area, taking in the signs of warp-damage, as though some gigantic force had taken the very fabric of the hulk and shaken and twisted everything slightly out of true.
But there was more to it than that. As he looked closer, he saw that some of the damage was explosive; plates that were torn and blackened as well as buckled, and here and there a line of shell holes in the plasteel – large impacts that had to be the work of bolter fire. Interspersed with these traces were other relics of past conflict; the long, searing furrows of arc-rifle blasts. There had been some kind of battle on Fury, long ago, and by the evidence, it had been between his own Adeptus, and that of the Adeptus Astartes. This was something Magos Fane must learn at once. But he was still in vox lockdown, while the mission lasted. It would have to wait.
A blast of impatience went through him. There was no word from the two skitarii; they had been swallowed up by the darkness ahead.
Nothing. Alt-seven wondered if there was some blockage of the signal; the skitarii were less than fifty yards away. They were still on his bioware’s auspex, as was the low murmur of the dying machine-spirit that was still running up ahead – so close now.
With the other two skitarii in the lead, the party continued up the passageway. There was a tumbled mass of wreckage which partially blocked their way, but they clambered through it. Beyond, there was a sense of greater atmosphere – of moving air. The readout on Alt-seven’s personal display clicked through the numbers. It was warmer here – there was water vapour, growing humidity, rising levels of sulphur dioxide and ammonia. Methane also. If he had possessed a sense of smell, Alt-seven would have been sickened by the stench, but as it was he merely filed the information away in his binharic log.
They were through the thicket of wreckage.
Alt-seven felt an urge to knock his fist against the side of his own bronze-encased skull. It felt as though some insect were clambering around inside his wetware and biomechanical interfaces; a bug in his brain. He staggered slightly.
Taghma one and two were standing stock-still before a vast, looming spire of wire-frapped mechani
ca, the muzzles of their arc rifles leaning on the floor. Nothing came up from their systems; no acknowledgement, no sign of life. But they were stood there, breathing quietly, heads down.
Vid-screens snapped into momentary flashing life, a haze of static, reams of cable running serpentine all around the floor in a slowly boiling fog of vapour. And the huge many-branched pillar, composed of interwoven components of all kinds and eras, rose before them all like some unquiet blinking icon, fifty feet tall, a machine tree with limbs of cable and wire and plasteel supporting struts that rose up to grasp at the tall ceiling overhead.
The spirit within it leapt up into true binharic life – the sudden power of its onset seared green lines across Alt-seven’s optical input. All around the great, trash-strewn, shattered chamber in which it stood, secondary modules clicked and spat into sputtering function. There was movement, minute, vibrating, a stirring of the hot mist that enveloped the place. From the fog-choked garbage of the floor rose up six servo-skulls, their eye-sockets glaring green, yellow teeth grinning and dripping with slime.
Alt-seven called up his internal vox, to try and reach out to Magos Fane.
His communications systems were overridden, the ciphers deleting a million lines from his memory, his logi-stacks wrenched open by an invasion of foreign, alien code which was at the same time tantalisingly familiar.
The Adeptus Mechanicus party assembled in a regimented line before the great techno-tree and the floating skulls. Their hands opened, and they dropped their weapons. The mechadendrites attached to Alt-seven and the enginseers fell limp with metallic clangs. Alt-seven’s mind was a whirring blaze of uploading data, his head shaking on his shoulders as it flooded him. His warding incantations and protective protocols were swept aside like so much chaff, and a massive, blinding, enveloping stream of data coursed through him, realigning all his thought processes, rerouting programs, rewriting the base holy code that made him who he was.
