by Paul Kearney
Brother Fortunus crouched, his engine stacks smoking at his back, and gleaned what he could from the tactical readout. The tunnel could take only one of these bulky vehicles at a time.
Create a chokepoint. Use it to maximise the killing zone.
He charged forward, moving at all the speed he could muster, twelve tonnes of heavy metal now accelerating to the speed of a running man, the energy levels required of the manoeuvre sending amber sigils all across his sight. Just before impact, the dust cleared enough to let him see a tracked vehicle surmounted by what might have been a humanoid-shaped torso – a kataphron of the Adeptus Mechanicus. He slammed into it at full tilt, his left hand – a claw almost a yard wide – closing on the head and torso, and his right coming up with the flamer poised within its claw to loose a billowing jet of flame beyond.
The crash shunted the kataphron back on its tracks for five yards, metal shrieking upon metal. Brother Fortunus’ whole weight was on the Mechanicus beast; he felt the snap and slump as its suspension gave under him. His left hand ripped into the armoured torso that surmounted it, and he felt the pop and snap of bones and flesh breaking, even through the grinding shriek of the broken armour that encased its frame.
He rose up, straightening from the wreck, and with him came the torn-free organic remnants of the creature. He crushed them in his clawed fists, tossed them aside, felt the searing burn of arc-rifle fire on his armour, and bending, he took the entire caterpillar-tracked base of his dead enemy and reared it up on its stern. He pushed it in front of him like a great shield, rounds impacting against it, and powered forward, finally giving the broken chassis a massive shunt with all his strength, sending it tumbling down the tunnel, into the face of his enemies.
Then he backed up, popping out more smoke, and running a quick register of his systems. Some were throbbing red, others amber, but he was still combat-functional.
Now, come to me, and see what you shall receive.
Unaimed fire came roaring up the tunnel, from arc rifles that sizzled lightning through the dust, to the shimmering rip of torsion cannons. The volley tore free a stream of plates from the entire structure and made the tunnel shake and twist in their wake. The firing soon stopped. Some among the enemy knew that they were in danger of collapsing the passageway around them.
Brother Fortunus backed up another ten yards – he still had plenty of room behind him before the yawning abyss in the heart of Fury – and he automatically checked his ammo readouts. He still had plenty of death to go around.
The arc-rifle fire continued, but it was desultory and speculative; he could afford to ignore it. Clearly, the enemy was engaged in bringing up something heavier, but due to the increasing instability of the tunnel, it could not be heavy long-range fire. Whatever came next would fight close-in.
And he heard it, minutes later. The heavy tread of feet in the tunnel, slower than human pace but more massive – almost as massive as his own. He flexed his tri-clawed fists, feeling them move at his behest just as his fingers once had when he had been of flesh and blood entire. He had not been in vox contact with the rest of his Chapter for some time now, but he sent out a message nonetheless.
‘Fortunus, location some hundred and fifty yards bearing two eight six of my last vox contact. Enemy advancing in force. About to engage. Vox unworkable. I will stand here until I am ordered otherwise. Fortunus out.’
He thought of the bright mountains, the blue skies of Macragge, which had been his home world. He thought of Andromache, the sheer peak he had always meant to climb. Last of all, he thought of Caito Galenus, his sergeant, who had also been his friend, and who was now Captain of Fifth as he had been. Those were good memories to fight for.
He strode forward, twelve tonnes of violence bent on murder.
This time it was something else confronting him. There was no more fire, and the silence was broken only by the thunderous clap of his feet on the plates of the tunnel. He stopped, and if he had still possessed eyes he would have narrowed them, staring into the fog of smoke and dust and wreckage that now scarred and cluttered the passageway ahead of him for some fifty yards.
But he could still hear the enemy coming up, the slow clump of footsteps too massive to be that of mere men.
And as the first huge shape cleared the dust he opened fire, targeting the head.
It was man-shaped, very like the form of an Adeptus Astartes in some respects, but more rounded, with massive-fingered gauntlets, and a heavy flamer affixed to one shoulder, which now bloomed out in a harsh rushing roar of bright fire. Ten feet tall – smaller than the bulk of the Dreadnought frame of Brother Fortunus, and with a rounded skull which had a visage of sheer, polished metal. It advanced with the steady sureness of a human walker, but Brother Fortunus knew that it was entirely mechanical. There was nothing human about it at all, unless it might be the shadowy, darting figure that hovered in its wake – an Adeptus Mechanicus datasmith.
He had heard of these things, but never faced them in combat. It was a kastelan, a mere robot. Fortunus felt disgust at having to fight such an unworthy foe, but he squared off nonetheless, aware that such things were high among the fighting elements of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
There were two of them, but they could only come at him one at a time in the smoking, half-wrecked tunnel. A blast of promethium surged around Fortunus and blistered the paint from his armour plate, clouding his visual readout for a second, and then the kastelan was upon him, claws reaching out to try and grasp his own.
He tried to blow one off with a sustained volley of storm-bolter fire, the heavy rounds snapping into the kastelan’s torso and forearms, many streaking away in ricocheting whines, others tearing into the ceramite and adamantium. But the great fists were unhurt, and they crackled now with pale streaks of light. Too late, Brother Fortunus realised that they were power weapons. One seized the layered alloy and ceramite and adamantium of his hull, and the fingers of it sank into the metal with a vicious tearing crackle, the lesser metals of his armour melting in a bright glowing stream, the ceramite snapping, blackening. A chunk of Brother Fortunus’ great frame was torn off and flung away in a spatter of molten sparks and gledes, and he felt the sudden lessening of vitality in his systems, red runes flashing up in his display. Some of his core servo-leads were exposed to the air, steaming with lubricant like a man’s exposed intestines.
Anger lit up in his mind like a blaze. He smashed his free fist into the head of the kastelan, to no avail – it was armoured to an incredible degree – and let rip with his storm bolter until he could feel the ammo belt whining from his hull reservoir and saw the overheat warning in his weapon’s runic outlay. The bright fusillade staggered the big robot and made it back up a step. Fortunus sent out a great gout of burning promethium and aimed it not at his foe, but behind it, at the Mechanicus datasmith who was to the rear, tapping on some kind of control device. The tech-servant was caught in the cloud of fire and shrieked as he lit up, his red robes kindling, half a dozen bionic limbs flailing up around his head, trying to beat out the flames – but the greasy, clinging promethium blazed on, burning white and turning him into a tottering torch.
The first kastelan ignored the fate of its overseer and came forward again with mindless implacability, power fists reaching out, wreathed in the destructive field which flared in sinuous lightning across the blunt fingers. A last burst from Brother Fortunus’ storm bolter was aimed square at the heavy flamer affixed to the robot’s shoulder, blowing it apart. Promethium rained down on the kastelan and it blazed as brightly as its master, the red paint on it blackening. But it seemed otherwise unaffected.
Brother Fortunus backed up, popping out a smoke grenade in the face of his foe. He was on fire himself, but it was only a patchwork of guttering flame, a splash of promethium that burned itself out on his armoured hull. He reached out and grasped at the side of the passageway, his claws digging deep into the plating that formed it.
Tearing free a massive plate, he threw it edge-on at the advancing, burning kastelan, and struck it on the gleaming head. The thing staggered, but barely paused.
He pulled out wreckage from both walls, and finally his clawed digits found a thick metal stanchion. Tugging on it, his immense servo-motors whined and spat as they fulfilled his will. The stanchion came free, and as it did a large section of the tunnel collapsed around him.
He had been backing away, the enemy robot still advancing. Debris clattered off his hull, but the kastelan was half buried in it. For a moment it struggled there, fighting to free its arms. Brother Fortunus stepped up, holding the stanchion in both claws like a spear, and ran it through his enemy, the heavy reinforced plasteel bending under the impact. Fortunus sent it deep into the metallic torso of the kastelan, red runes flashing all over his readouts with the wicked force of the thrust. The giant robot struggled, impaled, and Fortunus worked the stanchion round, widening the great wound in the machine, feeling the cables and levers within the thing break and snap and bend. The kastelan shuddered, then was still.
More smoke, and then Brother Fortunus backed away again, battering aside the wreckage which now half-filled this section of the tunnel, kicking his way free. His searchlight flickered, then steadied. His backup systems came online, but he could feel the overstrained artificial sinews in his arms, some severed, others skewed and bent. His visual readout was a mosaic of flashing runes.
Fifty yards more and then he halted again. The great pit that led down into the guts of Fury was not far off now. He could feel it yawning behind him like an open grave. An internal fire was extinguished by his safety systems, and the ancient technologies embodied in his frame worked to mitigate the worst of the damage he had suffered. His ammo counter was in the red; he had loosed off over five thousand rounds in the last five minutes. Promethium was at five per cent.
There was a mad crashing in the smoke ahead of him. The second kastelan was trying to get to him over the fallen carcass of its comrade, fulfilling the last order of its dead datasmith. Fortunus stepped forward, bringing up what he could in the tactical outlay, and began a series of carefully controlled bursts of storm-bolter fire, aiming for the joints of the machine, blasting off the heavy weapon affixed to its shoulder. A hot streak lanced past him and detonated further back in the tunnel; a lascannon of some sort. He concentrated fire on it, and blew it from its mountings; and with that, his internal magazines came up dry.
The second kastelan thrashed through the wreckage and confronted him, opening and closing its fists so that they glittered with throbbing disruptive energy. It stood there one moment, as though taking stock, and then came hurtling towards him, a massive steel juggernaut whose footfalls made the entire passage quiver and raised up the metallic dust to merge with the dissipating smoke in a silver-flecked fog.
Fortunus knew that to let the thing grapple with him at close quarters would be to suffer defeat. He threw out a fiery blast with what remained of his promethium reserves, filling the tunnel with flame, and backed away as quickly as his massive legs would carry him, calling up the tactical readout, noting the environmental stability around him, the distance from the pit – all in a split second.
Then the kastelan barrelled into him with a high ringing crash.
The impact jarred him backwards, despite the fact that the Castraferrum-pattern Dreadnought he inhabited was taller and heavier. The power fists of the enemy robot tore at his armour, his limbs, rending his metal flesh, the fingers of the enemy digging deep, reaching for his core systems and servos, trying to rip the life out of him. He was able to grab one arm by the elbow joint and, with an immense effort, lever it free of his own torso and squeeze until he felt the joint break under his triclawed digits. The power field which surrounded that fist winked out, and the limb fell lifeless.
But the other had clawed its way deep into the innards of his form, tearing away the protective armour, coming close to the sarcophagus which enclosed what was left of his organic remains. Fortunus’ consciousness flickered for a second, his visual input darkening. The great stacks on his back stuttered out gouts of black smoke lit with sparks, backfiring and shuddering as his basic servos began to shut down.
This is my death, he thought calmly. I must bear it well. I must do something of meaning with it – something to make these scum fear the sigil I bear.
‘Guilliman!’ his harsh, inhuman bellow roared out, augmented by the speakers in his hull. With the last of his strength he fastened on to the kastelan, and embraced it in both his arms. He lifted the struggling machine clear off the ground for a second, and slewed it round.
Yes – he had gauged it right. He was close enough.
A final, titanic thrust from his mighty legs, and the pair of them went staggering back along the last few yards of the tunnel, the kastelan tearing frantically at the sarcophagus which enclosed Fortunus, which he had been honoured with. The body which allowed him to give his life for his Chapter a second time.
Brother Fortunus lurched on the edge of the great pit for a moment, his enemy caught tight in the failing strength of his deadly embrace. Then with the last of his strength, he hurled them both over the lip of the tunnel’s ending, into the emptiness beyond.
He felt himself falling free, just as the final layer of his sarcophagus was breached, just as the acrid air of Fury hissed into the amniotic sac which enclosed his mortal remains.
He did not feel the first, massively destructive impact, one which finally broke the kastelan free of his embrace. He did not see the giant robot explode as it struck a protruding girder with enormous, hurtling force. He did not feel the final detonation of his own internal reactor as its shielding was torn open, its coolant blooming out like silvered spray.
Brother Fortunus had gone by then, to join his brothers who had walked before him on that long road into the darkness.
Seventeen
Inquisitor Drake felt a tremor of disgust run through him as he surveyed the way ahead. The corridor was ten feet high, fifteen broad, and had once been composed of neatly moulded plasteel tiles supported by heavy ferrocrete pillars reinforced with steel rods. Standard Imperial construction for mass-produced civilian shipping; cheap and effective for a vessel which was not expected to endure void combat. He was in the hull of some ancient, lost freighter that had been chopped up, realigned and brought into the overall architecture of Fury.
Now the Imperial construction was overlaid with a miasmatic swamp of slime-mottled mud in which gleaming pale tendrils quivered like intestinal worms, faintly luminous, translucent, things that fed on and vomited filth.
They veined the passageway in a seething maze, and hung from the ceiling in trembling snakes. The air was foetid, thick with steamy mist, and the grease of it clung to his armour like an unclean touch. Up ahead, he could see faint movement in the very stuff of the floor, as though things coursed and slithered under the muck; but they moved in the walls as well, the very plasteel running and bulging like overfired clay.
‘Just when I thought I was beginning to understand,’ he murmured.
The passageway ran on ahead into darkness. There was no sound but the gloop and drip of its contents, the far distant thrum of drive engines, the soft sough of the heavy atmosphere as it moved in currents known only to itself.
‘Regan,’ he said.
A man in a heavily armoured void-suit joined him. He bore a Locke-pattern bolter, a laspistol and a power maul that hung from his belt. His breastplate sported the faint skull and scales of the Adeptus Arbites. His helm was of Arbites-pattern, its design in turn inspired by those of the Adeptus Astartes. He was half a foot taller than the inquisitor, but there was no doubt who was in command here. His tone was deferential on the closewave vox.
‘Nothing on auspex, sir. Life readings all around, but they are not sentient. We’re clear for two hundred yards in every direction.’
Drake nodded sligh
tly. ‘We have a conundrum here, my friend. I feel the echo of the Blood God in this place. The air is rank with anger, like a cloud which seeks to blind us. But that thing’s worshippers would never produce an environment such as this. There is more.
‘Here, I smell the stink of the oldest of the Ruinous Powers. I sensed it on the Chaos Marines who attacked back in the cathedral chamber. The filth of that so-called deity who is known by his acolytes as the Plague Father. And yet…’
‘Could they both have their adherents here, on the hulk?’ Regan asked his superior.
‘Let us hope not. But the red rage of the Lord of Blood lies thick on Fury. There are times I think I can almost taste it. I would bet that even the Ultramarines are affected by it, though their conditioning is proof against the rage it engenders. For them it is an impulse to be ignored. Lesser men might be hip deep in one another’s entrails by now, lost in a berserk frenzy.’
‘I have felt it,’ Regan whispered.
Drake seemed to collect himself. ‘And you can thank the conditioning of my Order that it has not taken root in you. Not yet, anyway.
‘It would seem that our foes have been subject to the attentions of more than one foul deity in their long travels. I begin to understand now why some of the Consuls stood in the dark to wait for death. It must have seemed better than what was consuming their brethren.’
‘Does Lord Calgar know this?’ Regan asked.
‘Lord Calgar has a deep and subtle mind, but I doubt he possesses my familiarity with the wiles and conflicts of the Ruinous Powers and their disciples,’ Drake said. ‘Nor do I believe he has ever tasted the bitterness of utter despair.’ He shrugged. ‘I do not boast. It has been my life’s work, is all.’
Another of the dozen men behind Drake came forward, this one in faded green camo, but as heavily armoured as Regan. On his shoulder plate was the number 214, and the double-headed eagle of the Astra Militarum.
