Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill

by Warhammer 40K

  A host of silver, bullet-nosed trains sat idle on humming rails, surrounded by motionless servitors with slack features and eyes devoid of purpose. Bereft of commands, they shuffled between work stations, waiting for tasks that would never come.

  Roboute walked into the light, cupping his hands over his eyes and smiling to see open skies once more. An invisible weight lifted from his shoulders at the sight of such brilliant blue.

  ‘What happened here?’ said Tanna, removing his helmet and taking a breath of uncorrupted air. ‘Where are the storms?’

  ‘Ultra-rapid terraforming,’ said Pavelka, hunched and exhausted with the climb from the depths. ‘Every universal assembler within hundreds of kilometres has been activated.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Telok’s endgame,’ said Kotov, pointing to a gap between the rhomboidal towers of a bifurcating induction rail. ‘They are coming online for the same reason we activated one, to get something up to the Speranza.’

  Roboute followed the archmagos’s mechadendrite and felt a cyst of nausea form in his gut as he saw the sick, shimmering radiance haloing the towers.

  ‘No…’ he said, hints of the spinning mesh of silver leaves and impossible angles making his eyes water. Was it just his imagination or was the Breath of the Gods bigger than before? Was it even possible to know its size with any certainty?

  One by one, eldar, mortal, Mechanicus and post-human, they came to marvel at the ascent of Telok’s diabolical machine. No matter their birth origin, every soul was ensnared by its unnatural light and its physics of violation.

  ‘An abominable birth,’ said Bielanna. ‘The Yngir’s engine tears free from its sepulchral womb.’

  The farseer’s eyes shone with a fierce light, and the burden of age Roboute had seen upon her was undone. The black lines beneath her porcelain skin were now veins of gold in the palest marble. Every one of the eldar seemed invigorated by the light coming from the Breath of the Gods. A salutary reminder that their senses were not cut from the same cloth as humanity’s.

  ‘All times become one,’ she said. ‘Even as the threads of the past and present are cut, new threads are drawn from the future into the engine’s gyre.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ said Roboute.

  ‘New life spreads its light to those around it,’ said Bielanna, tears springing from her eyes. ‘It means I am being renewed. It means that those I thought lost forever might yet be given a chance of life.’

  The train was a wide-bodied cargo transporter. It sped at incredible velocity through the forge world’s towering spires in near silence on linear induction rails. It passed through the interiors of numerous forge-complexes, and within each, the signs of this world’s imminent abandonment were clear. With the Breath of the Gods rising to the Speranza, Telok had no more need of Exnihlio.

  Within each forge, the previously industrious servitors stood immobile. Without their attentions the engines which they had tended were now thundering towards destruction.

  Exnihlio’s machines were dying. Monolithic data-stacks melted down without the proper rites of placation. Generators belched fire and lightning as volatile cores spun up to critical levels.

  Kotov attempted to plot a route from the driver’s compartment as Pavelka sought access to the systems controlling the switching gear for the rails.

  All to bring them to where the Breath of the Gods was ascending.

  Where it was, Telok would be.

  And killing Telok was all Tanna had left.

  He knelt on the grilled floor of the train’s second compartment, his sword held point down before him. Its quillons framed his eyes, and Tanna stared at the spread wings of the golden eagle forming the hilt, admiring the fine workmanship of the artificers.

  A chainsword was not an elegant weapon. No swordsman of note would ever wield one and no epic duels had been fought with such a weapon. It was a butcher’s blade, a tool wrought to kill as quickly and as efficiently as possible. And yet this blade had been given a finish the equal of Varda’s Black Sword. The spirit within was as keen-edged as its teeth had once been.

  Tanna stood and lifted the weapon, turning it over in his hands. He tested the heft and weight, flexing his fingers on the handle.

  ‘Does it feel any different?’ asked Varda.

  ‘A few grams lighter where teeth have come loose, but otherwise unchanged,’ said Tanna.

  ‘Mine too,’ agreed Varda, cutting the air with the midnight edge of the Black Sword and sighting down the length of its blade. ‘Do you think Adept Pavelka did anything at all?’

  ‘I can only hope so,’ said Tanna. ‘Whatever techno-sorcery she has worked on my blade has not altered it in a way I can detect.’

  Varda lowered his blade and lifted Tanna’s fettered sword arm. The links were buckled after the fight against the Tindalosi.

  ‘Your chain,’ said Varda. ‘The binding is all but gone.’

  ‘You worried I’ll drop my sword?’

  ‘No, never that,’ said Varda.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Would that we had the time, brother, I would have been honoured to forge your chain anew as you forged mine.’

  Tanna nodded in understanding and took Varda’s hand in his, accepting the brotherhood his Emperor’s Champion offered. The rest of the Black Templars gathered around him, their weapons drawn, their faces sombre.

  They could all feel it too.

  The end of their crusade was upon them.

  No sooner had Tanna formed the thought than the train roof buckled with multiple powerful impacts. Thunderous booms of iron on steel. Claws like swords punched through the metal and the contoured roof of the train peeled back. Turbulent air rammed inside. Windows blew out and high-tension cables whipped through the compartment as the train’s fuselage crumpled.

  Tanna dived to the side as something vast and silver dropped into the train. A hulking body alive with emerald wychfire. Eyes a mass of dead static and hunger.

  Ebon-black claws unsheathed.

  ‘Tindalosi!’ he shouted.

  Hawkins had fought over Magos Dahan’s training deck more times than he cared to remember. But no simulation, however sophisticated, could ever accurately replicate the truth of war. Even the lethal subterranean kill maze of Kasr Creta, populated by mutant warp-lunatics with hook-bladed knives and ripper-guns, had an air of unreality to it.

  But this?

  This was real.

  The corpses, the smoking craters and the yelling all testified to the reality of this fight. Neon streams of las and alien fire filled the Imperial city currently occupying the deck, a choked mass of plascrete and steel that stank of hot iron and oil. Roving packs of skitarii and weaponised servitors duelled with the enemy forcing a path across the open space at the heart of the deck.

  Hundreds of vacant-eyed servitors milled in a wide plaza with a tall statue of a winged Space Marine at its centre. They reminded Hawkins of gawping civilians who didn’t have the good sense to run like hell when the shooting started. The thousands of crystalith warrior-constructs were ignoring them, but plenty had already been mown down in the blistering crossfire.

  Hawkins and his command platoon sheltered in a modular structure of cavernous proportions towards the starboard edge of the deck. Shot-blasted rebars and chunks of polycarbon rubble surrounded them. Crouched at the edge of the rubble to get a clear line of sight over the battlefield, Hawkins issued orders to other Cadian units in the training deck, shouting into the vox-horn to be heard over the cacophony of gunfire. Behind him, Rae and five Guardsmen fired through hastily punched loopholes. Others reloaded or prepared demo-charges.

  Green fire threw jagged, leaping shadows.

  Explosions blew prefabbed buildings apart. Burning bodies tumbled from their gutted ruins. Most were steel-jacketed skitarii, but some were Cadians. Guardsmen wearing the scarlet campaig
n badges of Creed company leapt from the burning building.

  They ran to take cover in the shadow of a grand, cathedral-like edifice that dominated one end of the plaza. Coordinated fire from its numerous defensive ramparts and armoured pillboxes expertly covered their displacement.

  Lieutenant Gerund’s Hotshot company fought from an emplaced position jutting from the corner of a structure that looked like an Adeptus Arbites Hall of Justice. Hawkins had split Valdor company into marauding combat teams and spread them through the tumbledown ruins to savage the enemy with enfilading missiles.

  Hawkins ducked back as an emerald explosion threw up chunks of rock and mesh decking. He scanned the battlefield for anything he’d missed, any opportunity to exploit enemy mistakes. He saw nothing, but aspects of the city’s layout seemed damnably familiar. Something at the back of his mind told him he’d seen this place before, but where?

  Had Dahan put them through this setup? He didn’t think so.

  ‘Why did you bother with the statue?’ he wondered, then grinned as it suddenly hit him why he recognised this battlefield.

  ‘You clever metal bastard,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that, sir?’ said Rae, ducking beneath the smoking embrasure of his loophole. Barely pausing for breath, Rae expertly switched out the powercell of his rifle.

  ‘Do you know where we are, sergeant?’

  ‘Begging your pardon, sir, is that a trick question?’ asked Rae, wiping smears of blood and sweat from his forehead.

  ‘Come on, Rae,’ said Hawkins, pointing into the plaza. ‘Look!’

  ‘What am I looking at, sir?’

  ‘That statue. Who is it?’

  Rae’s uncomprehending look made Hawkins grin. ‘Come on, a giant Space Marine with wings? How many of them are there?’

  ‘The Lord of the Angels?’ ventured Rae at last. ‘Sanguinius?’

  ‘And look at the building behind it.’

  ‘The Palace of Peace!’ exclaimed Rae, and Hawkins saw his mind shift up a gear as an innate understanding of Cadian military history kicked in. ‘Khai-Zhan! This is bloody Vogen, sir! That’s Angel Square.’

  ‘Dahan must have had the servitors set it up like this the moment the ship was boarded,’ said Hawkins. ‘He knew a Cadian regiment would know how to fight in Vogen.’

  ‘Maybe he does know us after all,’ said Rae, returning to his makeshift firestep.

  Like every Cadian officer, Hawkins knew the Battle for Vogen inside out. He’d learned the city’s every secret from the detailed accounts of soldiers who’d fought for Khai-Zhan’s capital. That gave them an edge.

  ‘Incoming!’ shouted Rae. ‘Displace!’

  Hawkins didn’t second guess the order and took off running. Rae was already ahead of him, the big man’s arms pumping like a sprinter’s. Hawkins ran towards a bombed-out ruin he now recognised as a recreation of Transformer Hub Zeta-Lambda.

  Where Sergeant Oliphant retook the Company Colours from a pack of mutants single-handed on day two hundred and ten of the battle.

  A flash of brilliant light threw Hawkins’s shadow out in front of him. Then he was flying as the hammerblow of a pressure wave slammed into his back. The noise and shock of the explosion engulfed him as he hit a prefabbed wall hard.

  The impact punched the air from his lungs. He fought to draw a breath as a seething column of green light mushroomed from the modular structure. Its corner collapsed and took half the roof with it in a thunderous avalanche of debris.

  ‘Good warning, sergeant,’ shouted Hawkins over the ringing echoes of detonation. His spine felt like it had been stepped on by a Dreadnought as he pushed himself to his knees.

  ‘They’re bringing up the heavy ones now!’ returned Rae, chivvying soldiers into the transformer hub’s cover.

  Hawkins scrambled behind a smoking stub of pressed concrete with rebars poking out like a crustacean’s limbs. Through the twitching smoke and guttering green fires, he saw heavier crystalline creatures entering the deck. Lumbering crab-like things, more of the centipede monsters and hulking brutes as tall as ogryns that were hard edged and non-reflective.

  These last creatures carried glossy shields, wide enough to be siege mantlets. Others extruded lightning-wreathed spikes from multi-faceted hides, energy weapons as big as anything mounted on a superheavy.

  ‘Going to need some bigger guns,’ said Rae.

  Hawkins nodded, scanning the ruins of the transformer hub.

  ‘Where’s Leth?’ he shouted. ‘Where’s my vox-man?’

  ‘Dead, sir,’ said Rae, his back pressed against a slope of brick rubble. ‘Him and his vox are in pieces.’

  Hawkins cursed and looked towards where Creed company were repelling a flanking thrust of crystalline attackers. Even through the smoke it was hard to miss the whip-antenna of Creed’s vox-man.

  ‘Cover me, sergeant!’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I need a vox and Creed’s got a vox,’ said Hawkins, slinging his rifle and crouching at the edge of the ruins.

  ‘It’s fifty metres, sir!’ said Rae.

  ‘I know, hardly any distance at all,’ said Hawkins, breaking from cover and sprinting for all he was worth. Blitzing fire streaked across the deck nearby. Was it aimed at him? He couldn’t tell. Hawkins kept low, cutting a path from cover to cover, diving, rolling and pausing just long enough to catch his breath.

  He heard shouts ahead, soldiers urging him on. Zipping spirals of covering fire drilled the smoke around him. Hawkins fell the last two metres, rolling to an ungainly halt behind the scorched and pitted flanks of a hull-down Chimera.

  Lieutenant Karha Creed was waiting for him by the Chimera’s rear track-guard. She had a thin hatchet-face, with the same high cheekbones and thunderous brow as her illustrious uncle.

  ‘You pair are the luckiest sons of bitches I ever saw,’ she said.

  ‘Duly noted, lieutenant,’ said Hawkins. ‘Wait, pair?’

  ‘You remember what I asked you about putting us in harm’s way, sir?’ said Rae, chest heaving and the cut on his forehead bleeding beneath the rim of his helmet.

  ‘I took it under advisement and decided not to implement your proposal,’ he said, glad Rae was here with him despite the risk he’d taken. Hawkins slapped a hand on his sergeant’s shoulder and turned to address Creed.

  ‘I need your vox, Karha. I need to speak with Jahn Callins in Turentek’s forges,’ said Hawkins. ‘We need the tanks here.’

  Creed nodded and ran to get her vox-man. Hawkins took a moment to cast an eye over the men and women occupying this position. His eyes narrowed at the sight of two particular fighters.

  ‘What the hell are you two doing here?’

  Gunnar Vintras turned from his firing step, a lasrifle cocked on his hip like some kind of Catachan glory-hound.

  ‘After all the training Sergeant Rae here has put me through, I thought it only proper I slum it with the footsloggers for a time,’ said Vintras with that insufferable pearl-white grin. ‘You know, see what all this talk of duty and honour is all about.’

  Hawkins resisted the urge to punch him and turned to Sylkwood.

  ‘What about you?’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t you be on the Renard?’

  ‘Emil doesn’t need my help to fly the shuttle,’ she said. ‘Besides, I’m Cadian. This is where I’m meant to be.’

  Hawkins nodded in understanding as the vox-man arrived. The patch on his shoulder named him as Guardsman Westin. Heat bleed from the bulky, canvas-wrapped unit in his pack hazed the air. Like most vox-men, Westin was skinny and wiry with hunched shoulders and a constantly harried look to him.

  Hawkins spun him around and pumped the crank on the side of the pack. He held the vox-horn to one ear, pressing his palm against the other.

  ‘Call Sign Kasr Secundus, come in,’ he said. ‘Damn it, Callins, are you there?
Where are the tanks you promised me?’

  After a second or two of static, the regiment’s logistics officer came over the earpiece, sounding as put-upon as always.

  ‘Working as fast as we can, sir,’ said Callins.

  Hawkins flinched as a bolt of green light punched into the Chimera’s glacis, rocking it back on its tracks. A fine mist of choking ash-like matter billowed like granular smoke. He heard screams from farther down the line.

  ‘Work faster, Jahn,’ he said. ‘I need those tanks. And Titans too, if you’ve any to spare this millennium.’

  ‘The Sirius engines haven’t moved since I got here, sir,’ grunted Callins in disgust. ‘Lot of crap about rites of awakening and proper observances of blah, blah, blah. They’re choking up the muster routes. I can’t get anything out in numbers that’ll make a damn bit of difference.’

  Hawkins let out an exasperated breath and said, ‘Understood. Do what you can, I’m sending help.’

  ‘Help? What? I don’t–’ said Callins, but Hawkins slammed the horn onto its cradle on Westin’s vox-caster.

  ‘You two, get over here,’ he said, beckoning Sylkwood and Vintras to him. ‘Sylkwood, I assume you can drive this Chimera.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Good, I want you down in Turentek’s prow forges. You know tanks, so help Callins to get them moving faster. Vintras, give your brothers a kick up the arse and beg them to take you back. I want Lupa Capitalina and Canis Ulfrica walking right beside my tanks. And I want you in Amarok again. Understand?’

  ‘I don’t beg,’ said Vintras.

  ‘Today you do,’ said Hawkins, and the look in his eye killed the Skinwalker’s caustic response stone dead. The Warhound princeps nodded and slung his rifle.

  ‘I want to stay here,’ protested Sylkwood. ‘I want to fight.’

  ‘You’re a daughter of Cadia,’ snapped Hawkins. ‘Follow your damn orders and get the hell out of here!’

  Prior to Bielanna’s journey on the Path of the Seer, she too had experienced the visceral joy of a war-mask on Khaine’s Path. She barely remembered that part of her life, the bloody horror of what she’d seen and done locked away in an unvisited prison of dark memory.