Fire Warrior (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  It was felt by Captain Jehnnus Ardias.

  The streets flew apart: masonry confetti enveloping him moments after the scanner went dead. A slab of girder-striated rubble tumbled horizontally on a plume of flame and splattered the Marine pilot of the land speeder like a bursting bubble. Blood scattered airily across Ardias’s cheek.

  Impressions surged past his consciousness: white lights and fire and smoke and, worst of all, the knowledge that he’d been fooled. Sent his men directly into a trap like a first-year rookie on a simulated mission. Suckered. Outwitted.

  He’d told the xeno: There are no longer any rules. There are no approved tactics. All you can do is the best that you can.

  His best, he reflected, had not been good enough.

  The world went sideways, the land speeder’s nose pointed at the ground and the sky both at once, the streets gashed past in a rush of smoke and ruddy red fire and Ardias thought: Aye, straight to hell.

  The hunger was almost intolerable. Were it not for the celestial nature of his restraints and the perpetual vitality of his spirit, his own fury and frustration would have consumed him like wildfire long before. Unable to die, his torment was limitless.

  The Daemonlord Tarkh’ax raged.

  Had he been alive — in the true sense of the word — his vocal cords would have splintered and exploded beneath the force of his ceaseless howling millennia ago. His fingers would have crumbled to ruined, bloody powder at the impotent flexing and scrabbling he subjected himself to. His eyes would be shrivelled prunes, his teeth blunted and shattered, his face clawed apart in self-inflicted flagellation, his bones hammered out of shape by the force of his flexing, gyrating madness, and his mind a maelstrom of insanity.

  But he had no vocal cords to shred (and yet still he howled).

  He had no fingers or nails or eyes or teeth to abuse, but still he scratched and snarled and glared and spat and gnashed.

  He had no face to claw at, but still he twisted his features randomly, inhuman fury segueing seamlessly into childlike mischief.

  He had no bones to shatter, but still he clenched his spiny knuckles and shrugged his claw-pocked shoulders in turmoil.

  And his mind—

  His mind was insane long, long before his incarceration.

  As insubstantial as mist, coiling and billowing inside his glowing warp wall cage, he twitched and screamed and howled and giggled, listening intently to the ebb and flow of reality through the tiny imperfections of the gaol. In such a fashion had he wrought his influence, piece by piece, upon Severus.

  And others...

  The governor was intelligent, at least. He suffered from an unquenchable desire to prove his worth — an insecurity into which Tarkh’ax had gloatingly inserted his insubstantial claws. Initially — after the man first visited the newly unearthed Temple abyss with a xenolinguitor servitor, all interested smiles and academic intentions — Tarkh’ax was barely a whisper: an unconscious demi-urge acting upon the governor’s dreams. The fool’s damnation had been a slow trickle of acquiescence and diminishing resistance, forever convinced that each new heresy was his own idea, forever certain that it was he who stood to gain from the whole convoluted plot.

  Tarkh’ax had played him like a puppet, subtle influence growing every day, guiding him through the dark rituals required to break the eldar curse. It was painstaking work, like attempting to move boulders using only blades of grass, and the frustration mounted with every moment.

  But finally the seals were breaking.

  Sunset. It had to be sunset.

  The eldar farseer had been no fool; he understood that even the sorcerous spellsongs of his people were impermanent, transient like every other aspect of creation. Chaos came to all things, eventually. Unable to kill Tarkh’ax, unable even to banish him for eternity, they imprisoned him behind power-bolstered walls, exiled him to immaterial limbo and weaved an elaborate web of obstacles and falsehoods to prevent any but the most determined liberator from countering their efforts.

  Guided by the daemonlord, Severus’s attempts had gone beyond determination. But their final obstacle remained — one last exquisite delay to leave him stamping and raging uselessly for a few hours more, counting out every split second until the sun set over the eastern mountains of Dolumar IV’s principal continent. The cage had been erected beneath the waning light of the sun; only beneath parallel conditions could it be dismantled.

  Two hours. Two hours until, with no more ceremony than a splatter of blood, he’d throw off his shackles and, in the name of the Changer, murder the galaxy.

  And that would be just the start...

  The scale of the building was impossible.

  Kais stared up from the floor of the hangar, picking his way past construction equipment and cable bundles thicker than a clonebeast, and mused in lightheaded awe upon the sense of constructing a palace of such massiveness within the confines of the flimsy (albeit vast) warehouse.

  Its architecture was positively bizarre: a chapel-fortress rising up sixty storeys or more, vaulted windows and defensive emplacements pocking every square tor’lek of stone and metal. Its external complexity outdid even that of the Imperial warships which, similarly striated by obsidian buttresses and tiered alcoves, it resembled. The conventions of a sturdy, durable edifice, so typical amongst the buildings of the city beyond, were somehow forgotten in favour of a fantastical, exotic aesthetic. No wide foundations based the structure, rather a pair of vast towers flared upwards, joining in a gaggle of enormous tensile brackets and load-bearing machinery. Thus twinned, like prehistoric monoliths supporting a keystone load, the tower struts bore the remainder of the building’s bulk.

  But the strangeness went on. Way above — almost occluded in the clouds of moisture lurking in the shadows of the hangar’s upper reaches — the broad ramparts of the palace’s roof extended way beyond the sensible limits of the central stack. The flared top-heaviness created a sense of unwieldy clumsiness; an impression compounded by an apparently random outcropping of curved chambers and sensory outlooks from the forward facing facade. Stranger still, suspended from beneath the limits of the palace’s outermost reaches like enormous stalactites, a pair of vast heavy weapons hung immobile, house-sized joints like elbows inert and silent.

  Kais frowned.

  Like elbows...

  He closed his eyes and mentally adjusted his frame of reference before looking upwards once again. His breath caught in his throat.

  Not monolith-towers; legs.

  Not building-stalactites; weapon-tipped arms.

  Not an over-wide series of ramparts and spires; shoulders.

  Shoulders supporting a curved head, no less, complete with mournful eye sockets and a sweeping jawline.

  “By the path...” he hissed, his ability to restrain himself from exclamations long since forgotten...

  A dataload burst in his memory, didactic information implanted during his training swimming unbidden to the fore of his consciousness. He’d examined it before, this one, reading through the artificial memories like data wafers inside his head during some sleepless night in the battledome. He hadn’t fully believed it, back then.

  An Imperial titan, haloed by the harsh floodlights of the gigahanger, cast its hunchbacked shadow across him and reduced him to microscopic ineffectuality, deep shaded eye sockets filling his world with vast, godlike mournfulness. Such things were little more than a whisper to his race. City-sized war machines: the stuff of untaulike fancy and legend. Completely absurd, the Shas’ar’tol said, an irrational propaganda item dreamed up by some gue’la administrator to terrify those races less focused than the tau into submission.

  Just make-believe.

  Looming over.

  If it were alive; if its machine parts were muscle and bone and sinew; if its overshadowed view ports were eyes; if its portcullis vents were nostrils and ears; if in fact it were a giant, crouching massively within its oubliette dwelling, it wouldn’t even have noticed him.

  “
Ardias?” he commed, still feeling light headed. The Ultramarine’s instructions had been characteristically vague: the gue’la fleet had detected some sort of war vehicle being powered up in Lettica’s eastern districts and — in the absence of any friendly units confirming their involvement — had decided it had been hijacked by Chaos forces. Kais’s task was, simply, to stop them. He might as well cast grains of sand at a mountain.

  Far, far above, he thought he could hear laughing. An unhuman, untau cackle scatter-echoing on the uneven surfaces of the titan and flitting around the hangar. Mocking him. A sequence of lights rose up from nowhere in the monstrosity’s central core with a whine, making his heart race. Somewhere inside the colossal shell the twisted minions of the Dark Powers, those Mont’au devils made flesh, were powering up, settling in, preparing themselves.

  Kais’s didactic memories lacked any footage of a titan in action but... One didn’t need the imagination of a fio’la to anticipate the horror. Street-sized strides. Warship-strength weapons. Crushing. Obliterating.

  Without finesse, without grace, without subtlety: a walking engine of mass-destruction. Wholesale murder.

  “Ardias?”

  Still no answer. In contacting him aboard the Enduring Blade, the Space Marine had altered his helmet communicator somehow, pushing aside the detector tightbeam he shared with his tau comrades and imposing some sort of unshiftable gue’la code. Since then, Kais had been unable to raise Lusha or the Or’es Tash’var, despite repeated attempts. The ugly holes and dents covering his helmet — not to mention the unexploded bolter shell still lodged deep within the fio’tak — were not, he suspected, helping.

  Abstractly, he wondered if the Or’es Tash’var was still there at all. He wondered where Lusha was; whether he was still riding on the optic signals; how disappointed he felt at his pupil’s loss of control. He wondered about Ju and Vhol and where they were — fighting or injured or dead. He wondered about Ko’vash and the grey-haired admiral and the governor with his feral smile and his gaudy robes. He wondered where in the name of the One Path he fitted into any of this madness.

  But more than anything else, above all things, he wondered about how Ardias could have been so colossally stupid to imagine that he, a lone tau, could possibly hope to stop a titan. And now he couldn’t even contact the grizzled snae’ta to tell him what he thought of him.

  Focus.

  We’re all cogs in the machine.

  He realised with a twinge of guilt that he was chuckling beneath his breath at the thought of his father’s famous “machine” oratory. It had been intended as a cunning metaphor: a fitting symbol of unity, of all parts relying on all others. Cogs and chains and pistons and levers, all as important as one another. A stirring speech and a resounding, enduring allegory for the tau’va.

  Kais wondered what his father might think of him now, standing before the most colossal machine of all and seriously contemplating its destruction.

  The gun felt heavy in his hands, its unfamiliar balance more than made up for by its usefulness. The journey to the hangar had not been without incident.

  The weapon was vaguely reminiscent of a pulse rifle: a long barrel and squat stock with little obvious room for firing mechanisms. It was almost completely smooth but for a long groove running the length of the muzzle on either side. Unlike its rifle counterpart, it was black, a glossless matt darkness that made it seem unreal — a lance of shadows obstructing the paleness of his gloves. He’d seen weapons like it before: vast things slung to the stalwart undersides of Moray-class gun-ships, or else mounted massively on the wide shoulders of Broadside battlesuits.

  It was a railgun, in miniature, and he’d already used it to punch holes through Traitor Marines with as little effort as sliding a needle through fabric. Tiny gravitic accelerators running the length of the barrel hyperaccelerated a single shell to unimaginable speeds: a linear concentration of energies that negated recoil and left its target blindly clutching at itself, senses far too slow to even register the impact until it was too late.

  New technology, he guessed. Experimental, maybe. A prototype infantry version of an artillery weapon, fielded by test-shas’uis as a final assessment of its abilities. They’d died.

  Too bad for them.

  Kais squared his shoulders, locked off the auto-load on the coal-black gun, and stalked forwards towards the titan’s feet, ignoring the piles of dead gue’la technicians the littered the ground.

  “Captain Ardias? Come in, Captain Ardias.”

  “Come-in?”

  “...WW...”

  “Ardias? Reply, please.”

  “...what is...? What?...”

  “Captain Ardias? Lord, is that you?”

  “...uungh... Emperor’s grace... what happened?”

  “Lord? Are you all right?”

  “Nothing serious. A few new scars.”

  “Lord, this is Ensign Corgan, with the Purgatus.”

  “This had better be important. I’ve just lost two entire squads. I haven’t time for navy trivialities...”

  “My lord... We think we’ve found the epicentre.”

  “The epicentre?”

  “The centre of the warp portals. Like an... uh...”

  “An HQ?”

  “Yes... Yes, I suppose so. Commissar Gratildus with the Third battalion managed to discuss things with an enemy prisoner and—”

  “Skip it. Where?”

  “East, my lord. The mountains, to the east. It looks subterranean, some sort of pit.”

  “Send me the co-ordinates.”

  “Bu—”

  “Ensign. Fifteen of my brothers are dead. My communicator is damaged, I can’t patch through to the rest of my company and even if I could, I’m cut off from them by a fire like an Inferria-Prime summer. My land speeder is all but destroyed, I’ve lost two fingers from my left hand and at least five of my ribs are broken. Do not waste my time.”

  “S-sending co-ordinates now...”

  Plaguelord Siphistus, Disease Marine of the Death Guard Legion, twitched his carrion lips into a lopsided impression of a smile and hissed pleasurably A strand of spittle, uncollected by the gyrations of his prehensile tongue, collected in bubble-flecked viscosity at the corner of his mouth and began the slow journey across his ulcerous chin.

  Of his entire face, the only features not actively degrading in malignant pestilence were his eyes, burning with crystal intelligence: icebergs adrift in a polluted ocean. He giggled like a schoolchild and drummed his fingers— encased in millennia-old armour — against the armrests of the throne.

  Old Grandfather Nurgle, most ancient and intractable of the Chaos Gods, had been truly generous this day. Siphistus’s excitement overcame him briefly and he coughed a thick soup of infected fluids, bubbling and wheezing glutinously and not bothering to wipe away the sputum.

  “Power at sixty per cent...” one of the scurrying plague-priests gurgled, leech-like hands sucking raw information from the consoles around the command nave. “Ready now, lordship, yes.”

  “Good. Good. Mm.” He sneered in pleasure, pink tongue flitting briefly from his mouth to clean his irises, lizardlike. “Do it. Do it now.”

  Two more plague-priests — once-black robes of the Adeptus Mechanicus now stained with green mould and pus-like contagion — shuffled forwards in a chorus of creaking joints and rasping breaths, carrying the mindcrown. They settled it over his bald skull reverently, tightening clasps and inserting connector cables with clumsy, sluglike fingers.

  “Connecting now, lordship,” one hissed, twisting a valve wheel.

  Unfamiliar sensations rocked through the plague lord; a barrage of information and uncertainty, challenging his self-perceptions and opening conduits of thought and movement unconnected to his physicality. He could see from any one of a hundred internal cameras, each revealing the tight confines of the titan’s interior. He wondered if this was how flies felt: compound pupils flitting across myriad views at will.

  He could gaze through
the city machine’s eyes, hundreds upon hundreds of alternative angles and filters endowing him with complete wraparound sensory overload. He could hear what it heard, taste the air itself with electronic sensitivity, detect odours and gases and pheromones, feel its power emissions like a warm glow in his own guts-He was the titan-god.

  He was the first machine child of the factories of Dolumar IV, an incarnate engine of destruction, holy vessel for the nascent machine spirit Imperio Prince-Nebulae Draconis, which moved through its logic engines with youthful exuberance, perplexed and invigorated by the presence of its first pilot.

  Siphistus giggled again.

  “Hello, my pretty-pretty...” he whispered, thoughts coiling insidiously around and through the confused spirit. “Won’t you come share with me...?”

  Princeps? the machine thought, logic engine consciousness filled with slow analysis.

  “Yess...” he hissed. “Yess, your princeps. Lord Siph. Me. Yess. Won’t you come share?”

  The god-mind surged with power and dissolved into his thoughts, tasting and melding sensually, trusting in the sincerity and morality of its pilot guide to provide its moral compass. A child, placing its trust in a doting parent.

  They intertwined and ran together.

  When the two thought streams detached, Siphistus’s consciousness withdrawing slowly to behold its work, the Imperio Prince-Nebulae Draconis was changed. Radically changed.

  “Lordship?” a Traitor Marine flanking his throne leaned closed to him, concerned. “Is all well?”

  “No, brother...” Siphistus chuckled, dragging a maggot finger across his boil-encrusted brow. “All is vile.”

  Like tendrils of decay, twisting and reticulating, black thoughts spiralled through the machine-spirit; pestilent conceits and amoralities swelling throughout its logic engines with a groan of displaced circuitry. All things rot, it accepted with childlike wonder. All things perish and decay and fester. Why fight against nature?