More Adeptus Mechanicus from Black Library

FORGE OF MARS
Includes the novels Priests of Mars, Lords of Mars and Gods of Mars, plus the Quick Read ‘Zero Day Exploit’.

Discover the war machines of the Adeptus Mechanicus in

KNIGHTS OF THE IMPERIUM
A Warhammer 40,000 novella

TITANICUS
A Warhammer 40,000 novel

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

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SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF III
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +THE HIERARCHY OF COGS+

The snow and ice were red. Not with blood, though the constant exchange of noospheric chatter between Haldron-44 Stroika’s receivers and the explorator arkcruiser Maestrale told him that there was a 94.767 per cent chance that they eventually would be. Now, they were red with algae. The deep freeze of Perborea allowed little light down to the surface, but what gloom made it through the maelstrom fuelled the blooms that streaked the ice world’s face.

Stroika was skitarii – from the hydraulics of his legs and the revolving joints of his arm-appendages to the acknowledged frailty of his flesh. He was as the Machine-God continued to make him. Forge-raised on Satzica Secundus, Stroika had followed the patient path of protocol and worked his way up through the hierarchy of cogs.

<Secondary target identified,> Stroika reported.

Stroika’s cranial engineering sizzled with the static of an uplinked intrusion. Sound that bypassed the ears. Visions that were experienced by the mind and not the eye. Binaric cant, novabyte and noospheric blurts overlaid one upon the other, neuro-synced straight into the brain. Orbital magna-picts, sensory feeds and holo-diagrammaticals dropped from the explorator arkcruiser above, like a thunderbolt, straight into the skitarius’s mind.

The streamed doctrina imperatives all carried the authorisations of Magos Omnid Torquora, but Stroika experienced the intrusion as the pure will of the Machine-God. All forge-worlders, from the Fabricator General to the lowliest servitor, made up the Corpus Mechanicus – glorifying the Machine-God Incarnate with their artifice, both in their workings and their base organics. The Omnissiah found expression in and acted through them all. This was the Motive Force; the holy transference of data and instruction down through the stratified ranks of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Stroika – like all the skitarii of his legion – was possessed of a fraction of the Machine-God. He was one of a billion, billion parts working in magnificent union and harmony. It was through the priesthood and techno-magi of the Cult Mechanicus that the Omnissiah made His needs and wishes known. As hosts of the Machine-God’s unquestioned divinity, the magi spoke the word of the god, in His many favoured cants and streams. Stroika felt his doctrinal wetware respond.

<This mission has been blessed, Stroika-unit,> Magos Torquora told the skitarii officer. <By the cog that turns. By the oil that eases. By the spark that leaps. We do the Great Maker’s work here. This most holy of missions does not allow for complications. You understand me, Stroika-unit? Identify the secondary target. To break with me and the mission is to break with Him. Receive of His blessing and remember all that you have achieved in His name. Know that you will achieve so much more.>

In the great gears of the Mechanicus machine – the machine that made war in the name of indomitable progress and majesty reclaimed – the fighting constructs of the Omnissiah became greater than their parts. Haldron-44 Stroika had striven to become greater still.

Stroika remembered. He reviewed a lifetime in service to the Machine-God. How he had been a star-gazing menial, whose weak flesh was a blueprint of tattoos depicting the holy bionics and augmentations he had dreamed of one day possessing. He remembered a miserable eternity as a citizen-factotum and his subcutaneous electronic bar codes that burned with accumulated tallies and commendations. As an auxilia forge-sentinel, blessed with his first augmetics, he had been given the honour of guarding isotope scrap depot 3-64-63.

His record of off-world service in the numberless ranks of the Legiones Skitarii would have been a credit to any cybernetic soldier of the Cult Mechanicus. As sub-alpha, princeps and alpha he had led clade units of his own. He had earned the Crux Mechanicus and had risen through the ranks. Now, with a small legion his to command, he was Alpha Primus Haldron-44 Stroika of the Deuteron-IV Praetori, seconded to the infamous explorator Omnid Torquora.

Stroika’s attachment of Sicarian infiltrators, selected from his expeditionary legion for the mission, were spindly silhouettes in the snowstorm. The integrated senses of his helm immersed Stroika in a blizzard of data. Omnispectral lenses and bleak optics filtered the red static of the storm. His acquisition reticules fixed on the outline of each of the skitarii soldier-operatives in turn, cycling through radiant energy wavelengths. Stroika’s cogitae cores decrypted and processed the different datastreams fed back to him through the arkcruiser’s phylactix.

The Primus experienced the ice world as no one man of mere flesh and blood could. He saw his column of infiltrators from orbit. Through the arkcruiser’s arrays he acquired the meagre heat of the skitarii organics and the power signatures of their bionics on the razored apex of the icy ridge. High-gain antennae from a swarm of disposable probes returned to him the data-betrayal of the killclade’s own voxmissions and uplink designations. He felt the air-to-ground surveyor pulses of the Mechanicus Sky Talon holding position kilometres above them. He became one with the auspectral returns of the Onager Dunecrawlers that had transported them across the desolate ice plains. The simultaneous datastreams met in Stroika and gave the skitarii commander a holo-dimensional fix on their position. All this, Stroika processed through the busy warmth of his cranial cortex.

The Sicarians of the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 fired the climbing spikes of their cloven metal feet, making progress up the frost-shattered ridge. They were led by the detachment’s commander, Princeps Talus-Spuria I/X, who – like his infiltrators – advanced with his right-hand weapons-cradle collapsed and locked to his back.

The soldiers moved with a hydraulic choreography, bionics trudging in unison and their mantid gait in sympathy with the leading princeps. To Stroika, Talus-Spuria I/X and his nine other infiltrators appeared like long-legged insects, from their gangling advance to the dome of their helmets and bulbous optics.

<Princeps, all stop,> Stroika streamed.

His order received an immediate response. The infiltrators became still, like figures frozen in a pict. Standing like statues on the ridge, dusted with red snow, the skitarii and their princeps awaited further orders.

Bringing the metal digits of a bionic gauntlet to the side of his helm, Haldron-44 Stroika made a series of delicate adjustments to otherwise chunky instrumentation. A crest-holder ran transversally across the top of the helmet: the demicog of a Primus. The vanes and crenellations of the plume crackled with the flow of transmitted data. The silky foil of his officer’s greatcloak, the rust-red of Mars, flapped behind him in the storm, acting as a receptor-threaded receiver.

Haldron-44 Stroika felt the presence of the Omnissiah echo through him. Through his neurocircuitry. Through the synaptic flash of sparks between his brain cells. Through his very soul.

The mind of the Primus flashed with orbital auspectra, static-grained captures and holodiagrammatic representations. Binary streamed through his thoughts, while data-layered codemissions and the cacophonous cant of lingua-technis laced through him. Stroika became momentarily one with the downlink and saw the energy signatures of his targets moving across the blood-streaked ice of the valley. Several kilometres ahead of them, the data-visitation revealed a large life form. No doubt something the targets were stalking whilst Stroika and his infiltrators in turn hunted them.

Silhouettes of codified fauna native to Perborea flashed up beside the energy signature. Another gift from Magos Torquora and the Maestrale. None seemed to match the form, however. This didn’t surprise Stroika, as Perborea Prime, being a backwater ball of ice in a hazardous system, was not a well-documented world.

<Secondary target unknown,> Stroika streamed back to the arkcruiser, his thoughts piggy-backing the phylactic shunt between the skitarii, the Onager Dunecrawler, the Sky Talon and the Maestrale. <Collating…>

Crunching up through the ice, weaving through the column of skitarii, Haldron-44 Stroika assumed position on the razored ridge. Looking down through the bloody, howling maelstrom into the valley below, the Primus could barely make out their targets. Magnocular lenses on his helm whirred to focus and filters cycled but the targets were still just a signatured blur through the blizzard.

Stroika lifted his left arm. It was an augmented appendage terminating in the bionics of an armoured gauntlet, and he held it up like a feudal world lord flying a bird of prey. Instead of a raptor, however, the skitarii officer carried an infoslave servo-skull which bore the designation Phrenos~361. The construct was fashioned after the Cog Mechanicus, being half bone and half cogitator. A cog turned about the skull like the rings of a gas giant, spinning in place on a magnetic field. The barrel of an arc blaster protruded from the servo-skull’s under-jaw, ready to drop and lock in firing position. A bundle of prehensile interface cables drooped down from the stub of Phrenos~361’s spine, anchoring it to Stroika’s arm.

<Get me a visual,> Stroika ordered, launching Phrenos~361 into the crystal-cold air. The servo-skull retracted its serpentine cables, its rotating cog speeding to a magnetically accelerated blur. Angling the blade-cog about it, Phrenos~361 was able to fly down the side of the ridge. Stroika watched the drone surge away. Cycling through the optical arrays of its augmented eye-sockets, Phrenos~361 transmitted a pict feed of its progress across the algae-streaked ice. The servo-skull’s data was uploaded to a visualisation processor in Stroika’s mind.

Buffeted by the streaming blizzard of red, Phrenos~361 cut through the freezing maelstrom, closing on the targets. Shapes smudged into the storm became silhouettes. Phrenos~361 counted twenty-three in total, the outline of each figure searing to brightness before fading away as the servo-skull catalogued them. In the main the column was made up of lumbering brutes, buried in ragged skins and furs. They pushed their exhausted carcasses on, leading with the jutting underbite of their tusk-crowded jaws.

Smaller, sinewy creatures struggled through the red drift about them, large noses protruding from hoods and the shredded cast-offs of their brute compatriots. Phrenos~361 flashed through the outlines of individual limbs and a stream of data analysing bodily proportion and ratio. The dimensions of the figures confirmed what Stroika already knew. Their targets were xenos. They were greenskins.

<Proceed,> the Primus ordered, prompting the servo-skull to move on.

Haldron-44 Stroika had extensive experience of orks. His service record indicated 2,372 confirmed greenskin kills across a range of warzones, but he had never encountered xenos such as these before. The creatures he had expertly despatched on Antioq, Ptolomae Phall and Phaeta Secunda were monsters in love with their godless machines and the devastating capabilities of their primitive xenos technologies.

The column of fur-shaggy aliens Phrenos~361 hovered above sported no such developments. The greenskins were barbarians in the truest sense of the word. They dripped with simple jewellery: bones, teeth and scavenged shiny objects, threaded through their ears, lips and green flesh. The only protection they boasted was the resilience of their monstrous frames and the furs that hunched their backs, trailing red through the snow. Their only weapons seemed to be simple stabbers and choppers, crafted from crude pieces of recovered scrap – dagger shards, spear-sharpened struts and axes fashioned from twisted metal.

The greenskin savages didn’t seem to notice Phrenos~361, who surged ahead of the loping column through the streaming snow. The pict feed relayed back to Stroika showed little more than the red static of the valley floor. Finally, the servo-skull closed in on a larger creature. The blur of the alien monstrosity seared into focus as Phrenos~361 advanced as close as it dared.

The creature’s outline flashed up against a cycling catalogue of potential matches but in the end the Mechanicus survey files failed to identify the beast. Bigger than a Dunecrawler or tracked conveyer, the beast slid through the snow and ice like a slug, warming the freeze beneath it to create a slippery trail that carried its bulk. Its blubbery body was covered with a carpet of shaggy hair while its head was decorated with a quartet of antlers. A thin membrane extended between the network of prongs, filtering the howling gales of their red bounty. Trapped algae funnelled down through the hollow antlers and feeding tubes into the alien herbivore.

<Data collated. Threat assessed,> Stroika told Magos Torquora. <Conclusion: non-threatening. Mission proceeding.>

<Diagnostiquorum consulted,> Torquora told him. <Assessment confirmed… wait… parsing…>

<Magos?>

Stroika’s mind became a kaleidoscope of alerts and warnings. Data-feeds and hologrammaticals told him that an inbound meteorite was due to impact in the vicinity. Perborea was a crowded system, awash with debris and the planetary wreckage of ongoing calamities. Several such impacts had struck the mountains and the Maestrale had suffered collision damage from a number of close encounters.

<Incoming,> Stroika transmitted to his infiltrator clade. The gangly skitarii went down on one knee in unquestioning choreography. The Primus joined them as a meteorite – bright and white – blazed through the sky overhead. It narrowly missed the ridge upon which they were positioned. Following the path of the meteorite, Stroika’s cogitators and targeters flashed estimated trajectories through his mind. He watched it strike the valley floor. A red cloud rocketed angrily for the sky, with a blast wave radiating out from the crater.

<Brace for impact,> the skitarii officer ordered. His modulations were calm but insistent. As the blizzard died about them and the wall of snow and fury roared up the valley side, the Sicarian infiltrators shot anchors and cables into ice at their feet. <Three… Two… One… Impact.>

Haldron-44 Stroika felt the blast wave hit him. The elemental force almost took him from his feet – as it would have done for the rest of his skitarii, but for the anchors that kept the spindly soldiers from flailing away. With his greatcloak whipping about him, Stroika reviewed his sizzling feeds. The greenskins had marched on with indifference through the screeching turmoil of ice and snow. Several of their diminutive attendants had been blown some distance away, their rags catching the force of the blast like kites. The Primus watched Phrenos~361’s pict feed pitch wildly as the servo-skull fought to ride out the storm.

As the howling impact hissed to a stop, Stroika and the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 found themselves submerged in a thick, bloody haze of ice and algae. The meteorite crash had kicked up colossal amounts of snow into the atmosphere. Stroika knew that if he didn’t act swiftly, his greenskin targets would become lost to him. He was not the only one to come to such a conclusion, although it was difficult – and pointless – attempting to separate thoughts of his own from those visited upon him by his tech-priest master up in orbit. In the end, they were all gifts of the Machine-God, regardless of the mind from which they originated.

<Reacquire targets,> Omnid Torquora ordered. <Priority one.>

Stroika acknowledged the order with the noospheric blurt of a salute.

<You heard the magos,> Stroika told Talus-Spuria I/X and his infiltrators, <and through him the Great Maker. Reacquire the targets. Triple-time it.>

With the clunk of climbing anchors released from the ice and whipping back on their cables, the princeps and the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 launched themselves over the frost-shattered ridge. Reaching out with the fingers of a gauntlet to steady himself, Haldron-44 Stroika followed, skidding down the valley side after them with his greatcloak flapping. The blood-red snow of the slope streamed about the skitarii officer and in his descending wake.

SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF III
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +BASE FLESH+

Stroika could hear the wails of the beast. As his skitarii had zeroed in on their targets, cloaked by the red mist of the meteorite impact, the greenskins had closed on their own.

Holding some distance away through the bloody haze, Stroika and the infiltrators were rejoined by the servo-skull Phrenos~361. The drone whirred to a stop, landing on the Primus’s gauntlet and securing itself with the prehensile grip of its snaking cables. The skitarii officer’s clicking optics revolved slowly to focus, overlaying filter upon filter. In false-colour horror, Stroika was presented with a vision of slaughter. The greenskin savages were hacking apart the alien herbivore, burying huge, cleaver-like blades in the beast, shearing through fur, blubber and bone. The creature’s blood turned the snow to dark slush about it. It shook its antlers and emitted a mournful roar of defiance as it attempted to slide its way out of the frenetic butchery.

Stroika’s auditory equalisers rang with the valley-bounced echoes of the beast’s suffering. Infrared filters froze the warmth of blood-splatter patterns as they sprayed through the red miasma. The guttural grunts and bellows of the greenskins were cross-referenced for linguistic origin.

Talus-Spuria I/X and his skitarii held position on the ice of the valley, their spindly forms masked by the haze of snow that still hung in the aftermath of the meteorite strike. With their augurs and optics, Stroika and the skitarii could see the xenos, but the savage greenskins could not see them. The Machine-God abhorred waste, however, and Talus-Spuria I/X had his soldier-operatives run firing protocols, preparatory targeting solutions and xenos data-files, ensuring that when the time did come to engage the enemy, they were as ready as they could be. Kill-shots had already been calculated. Trajectories had been calibrated. Probabilities had been processed. These, augmented by the flexibility, invention and natural instincts of their base flesh, made the Omnissiah’s servants deadly opponents in waiting.

Haldron-44 Stroika watched. Recorded. Monitored. The greenskins finished the miserable alien herbivore before hacking the beast to pieces. They took huge slabs of skinned meat and shaggy fur over their shoulders while their servant creatures dragged antler, bone and the harvested delicacy of internal organs. Little was wasted and by the time the feral hunting party was done, all that remained was a mound of steaming entrails.

<Proceed?> Talus-Spuria I/X transmitted.

<As you were, princeps,> the Primus sent back.

The infiltrators tracked their quarry along the valley and up through a labyrinth of steep-sided ice ravines. The greenskins’ progress was slow but indomitable, while the miasma of blizzard-quelling meteorite impacts helped to mask the presence of the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660. Like skeletal spirits, rimed in red and ice, the skitarii haunted the xenos, matching them step for step, calibrating their own advance to maintain a consistent distance between them and their targets.

Breaking out across a new ice field, Stroika and his skitarii trailed the greenskins to a crooked mountain that reared in isolation from the frozen plain. The outline of the mountain flashed in the optic overlays of Haldron-44 Stroika’s helmet. Angles extended beyond the structure and data streamed down beside the imposing form of the red peak.

<Are you receiving this, magos?> Stroika said.

<Processing,> Omnid Torquora transmitted back from the Maestrale. <The diagnostiquorum concur. It looks favourable, Stroika-unit.>

<Sir,> Talus-Spuria I/X said.

<We have lost the xenos?>

<Yes, Primus,> Talus-Spuria I/X returned. <Solonoid-Spuria IV/X confirms that the xenos have entered a tunnel in the mountainside.>

<Magos,> Stroika said, <I am requesting authorisation to proceed.>

<Granted,> Omnid Torquora told him. <Clarification required. The Omnissiah demands it.>

<Secure the tunnel, princeps,> Stroika ordered.

The infiltrators observed their instructions with simultaneous urgency. The light hydraulics of their cloven legs helped them to bound through the red snow at speed. Stroika’s own appendages brought him up behind their fanning number. His cloak streamed behind him.

<Weapons online,> Talus-Spuria I/X blurted in chuntering code. The glow of the infiltrators’ optic-arrays clunked to a brighter shade. The skitarii of the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 extended their left arms, each holding a flechette blaster. The pistols sizzled to life. The weapons-cradles that replaced their right arms unfolded, extending from where they had been collapsed and locked behind their shoulder joints. Each formed the hydraulic arm and pivot-cradle of a close combat weapon. The infiltrators were armed with taser goads that crackled with voltaic lethality.

As the skitarii infiltrators split into two fast-advancing columns, Haldron-44 Stroika launched Phrenos~361 once more into the air. The servo-skull’s cog-blade whirred silently to a blur, carrying the drone forward to scout the tunnel. With his cloak rippling behind him, Stroika thrust the hydraulics of his bionic arms out, forcing two arc pistols to slide down their length on rails. As the chunky pistols clunked into palm locks, the skitarii commander settled his thumbs back around their grip-interfacia and brought the weapons to crackling life.

<Skitarii,> Stroika transmitted to the infiltrators. <Honour the machine. Be as its parts, working in harmony, in blessed unison, as one.>

The Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 filed into the ragged entrance cut into the ice wall. The algae-threaded freeze gave way to darkness. This mattered little to Stroika and the skitarii. Their augurs and optics fizzled as their visual filters allowed them to probe the depths of the tunnel. Stroika’s feeds recorded the drop in temperature and the changing gradient. They were descending.

The Primus trudged down the centre of the passage, his heavier hydraulics chewing up the ice floor. Infiltrators padded along the walls of the tunnel in two columns, leading the way with the silencers of their pistols. While their combat chassis design offered their base organics ample protection, it was still a lighter designation, suiting their allotted role.

Phrenos~361 had drifted far ahead of the unit, almost catching up to the meat-lugging greenskins. Relaying pict feeds back to its master, each presenting some enhancement or capture of note, the servo-skull showed the xenos disappearing into a ragged metal opening at the end of the tunnel. The rust and twisted serrations made the opening appear like a mouth swallowing the greenskin monsters.

The Mechanicus tech-priests and soldiers formed a shunting chain of hallowed transmissions. Stroika and the infiltrators experienced the mission through the servo-skull’s optics, as Magos Torquora and his diagnostiquorum experienced it through them. The Omnissiah monitored the glorious progress of His servants through every feed, stream and imperative passing between them.

<Vessel located, magos,> Haldron-44 Stroika said. <Praise the Omnissiah.> The skitarii officer regretted the invocation immediately. His rising heart rate and the flush of hormones recorded in his bloodstream smacked of pride and self-congratulatory relief.

<You will be informed when the mission is completed, Stroika-unit,> Omnid Torquora sent back. <When it has met its designated goals to the satisfaction of your priestly betters and to the greater glory of the Machine-God.>

<Understood, magos,> the Primus transmitted. He felt his mind flood with the phylactic intrusion of the priesthood. Like a scope brought to focus or an instrument recalibrated, Stroika felt the trivialities of wayward impulse fade. He felt the procession of sentiments warm from the heart run cold. His mind seared to precision and necessity. The cloud of thoughts and feelings afflicting brain and flesh dissipated, sizzling to the demand of his cerebral systems: targeting data, ballistics and acquisition reticules.

He was no longer Stroika, forge-worlder, proud servant of the Mechanicus and commander with care for both his skitarii and his techno-magi overlords. He was Stroika the living weapon. A cold equation, an eventuality to be delivered, an instrument of divine artifice and design. He was sync-slaved – synapse and engram – to a higher purpose. An instrument of the holy Motive Force.

<Probability that the vessel is the Stella-Xenithica, 17.877 per cent,> Torquora informed him.

Geometrics and augur scans of the isolated mountain flashed through Stroika’s neural engrams and processors. Now the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 had tracked the xenos back to their ice caves, the Maestrale had been able to narrow its search for a vessel long crashed on Perborea and buried in ice. Only the colossal craft’s mighty prow now protruded above the frozen plateau, in the shape of the crooked mountain. The arkcruiser’s ice-penetrating augurs had given Omnid Torquora and the diagnostiquorum the vessel’s estimated shape and dimensions.

<Probability that the vessel is the Stella-Xenithica, 42.112 per cent,> Torquora said.

The Sicarian infiltrators waited either side of the opening, where the warped metal met the ice. As Phrenos~361 glided through the crumpled superstructure of the ancient vessel, the servo-skull projected a broad shaft of hologrammatic light that felt its way through the ruin. Walls were rust-mulched fragility clinging to the skeletal structure of the vessel’s girders and decking, giving the inside the appearance of a dripping cave or the burnt-out interior of a leviathan’s ribcage. Phrenos~361 moved quietly through the freeze, optics whirring, scan-shaft buzzing. New instruments emerged from its cranium. In the distance, echoing through the tortured architecture of the craft’s vast interior, the drone’s vox-corder isolated the sounds of the greenskins. The monsters were dragging their prize back to the feral tribe that had made the wreckage their home.

Phrenos~361 stopped to repeat a scan, augmenting with filtered optics and captures. The servo-skull had been scanning for positive idents, fixtures and serial numbers. Anything that might help the Mechanicus confirm the vessel as the fabled Stella-Xenithica. A series of digits flashed through Stroika’s mind. It was a serial mark on a trunk distribution pipe, something that had largely escaped the ravages of time and temperature. Something recently uncovered by the soggy collapse of a rust-eaten wall. Stroika’s stubby vanes relayed the find to the Maestrale. Even as he did, he could tell from the archaic numeration that the serial number was old and it was Martian.

<…Positive identification confirmed,> Omnid Torquora told Stroika. The explorator’s voice was cool and steely, betraying nothing of the excitement Stroika knew the magos must be feeling. <Our search is over. The serial confirms the vessel’s origin. The Martian shipyards. The holy Ring of Iron. Cross-referencing the manifests, I am ready to declare this wondrous find as the Stella-Xenithica, Terran colony ship, bound for the Autrega System, lost in the void. Probability 99.678 per cent. Blessed be the number. We give thanks for our certainty. Stroika-unit – secure this hallowed artefact and its secrets.>

<Phrenos~361,> Stroika transmitted, prompting the servo-skull to glide around. <Survey the vessel and report findings.>

The drone turned and, with its revolving cog-blade accelerating about it, drifted off down the passage, scanning and pict-cataloguing the find.

<Skitarii,> the Primus addressed the infiltrators. <We stand before the artifice of our Martian magi and forefathers. Its sacred design, the wonder of its workings and the consecration of ancient iron is ours to claim in the name of the Omnissiah, for it is He who guided Magos Torquora to this place of rediscovery. It is in His name that we shall purge the corruption of the xenos infestation and restore the secrets of this find to the servants of Mars.>

SELECTED: DENTRICA III OF III
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +HARD DATA+

Stroika heard little of the battle. His mind was drifting on the serenity of screed and data-hymnals that proceeded from the skitarii infiltrators as they fought their way through the green alien plague. With filters and scrubbers engaged, Stroika heard the canticles of the Omnissiah.

The greenskin monstrosities and their runts, however, gripped their skulls with foetid claws and bled from their eyes and ears. Without filters, the aliens were treated to the white noise of crippling neurostatic that proceeded from the Sicarian infiltrators. Despite the veritable assault on the senses that being in the neurostatic aura entailed, the greenskins fought like mindless barbarians. Roaring through their pain and confusion, their brute faces trickle-streaked with blood, the xenos savages fought on – swinging, stabbing and bludgeoning with their primitive weapons.

Stroika leaned out of the path of a monstrous weapon. His mind burned with projections, warnings and hologrammatical trajectories. These, combined with augmented reflexes to act on such information, gave the servants of the Adeptus Mechanicus the edge they required to survive the dangers of a hostile galaxy.

While not genetically engineered for transhuman supremacy like the Adeptus Astartes, the skitarii’s blessed bionic enhancements allowed them to punch above their weight when faced with warp-spawned corruption or the savagery of the alien. For the Cult Mechanicus, there was a tool for every job and a job for every tool. The advanced weaponry, cybernetic resilience and sensory superiority of the skitarii meant that they were invariably that tool. Whether it was the garrisoning of forge worlds and fabricator moons, the merciless punishment of techno-heresy or crusading for that most precious of commodities – data – the Legiones Skitarii were both the tool and the weapon of choice.

Beneath the armour plating, the battleware and bionics, however, there were men. Men who had been butchered in the Machine-God’s name, serving the Great Maker through their flesh, blood and augmentation. Cogitae and bioplastic wetware could do little to match the economy of base organics. For a priesthood who needed warriors who could think for themselves while unquestioningly serving the needs of the Mechanicus, however, the creativity of the human brain and fortitude of the human heart were necessary evils. For where the logic of the machine was absent, mistakes were ultimately made.

The weapon was as savage and uncouth as the orks could have made it: the thick length of a bone, inset with a cleaving blade fashioned of sharpened girder-shard. The barbarian greenskin that wielded it was not about to be lectured on the finer points of design, however. The rude blade whooshed in front of Stroika’s throat before smashing straight through Gaskii-Spuria IX/X. The Sicarian infiltrator was swept aside in a cacophonous blur of plating, hydraulics and blood. Stroika watched Gaskii-Spuria IX/X’s biometric feeds die on his optic overlays, along with the infiltrator as the green beast cleaved what was left of him down through the rusted decking.

Stroika brought up his arc pistols. Blasting streams of electricity from the weapons, the skitarius forced the brute into a retreat. The creature’s hulking frame was punched back by each arcstream burst, its green flesh smouldering to blackness.

As it lifted its monstrous pike above its head, Stroika shot the weapon from palsied green claws that smoked and crackled with the surging energies blasted through them. Stomping forward on his thick-set hydraulics, Stroika fired upon the alien again and again. Two chest-searing streams stopped the beast’s gargantuan heart, a third scorched into its forehead and broiled its brain. The xenos barbarian reeled back like some felled giant, smashing partly through the corroded decking.

From the layout, the cavernous chamber that the greenskins had chosen as their communal hovel had been some kind of flight deck. Mouldering mounds of scrap that had been long-forgotten designs of atmospheric lander littered the space, while a cargo recess in the floor served as a raging fire-pit upon which blubber-fat was burned and meat roasted. Fungal blooms grew out of the scrap and debris, thriving in the dank interior of the ice-entombed derelict.

Runts had been left in charge of preparing the feast. With their unintelligible shrieks of disorientation and alarm bouncing about the dripping darkness, barbaric green beasts and feral hunters were flooding the chamber from adjoining grottos and partially collapsed passageways. One static-enraged beast shouldered a path of destruction straight through a corroded wall.

The infiltrators met the furious rush of green muscle with suppression fire from their blasters. Flechettes thudded across the open space, shredding furs and mauling alien flesh. As the metal darts sank into the tough hide of the feral creatures, electrical signatures drew more of the darts down on the targets, savaging the orks. The greenskin monsters pushed on furiously through the white noise and flechette storm as further blasts ripped through them. Several crashed to the deck in neurostatic incapacitation. As they fell, the infiltrators finished the beasts with the stabbing blaze of their taser goads.

The flight deck flashed with roasting streams of electrical energy. As the cells of Stroika’s arc pistols drained away, he ejected the battery magazines and slammed the grips of the pistols into the thigh-loaders of his titanium legs. There spare mag-cells waited, pneumatically punched into the handgrips of the pistols upon impact.

Bringing up the pistols, Stroika blast-hammered screeching runts back into the great fire and through the weakened deck plates, down into the darkness below. Several ran for their miserable lives, forcing Stroika to shoot them in the back. He turned one into a convulsing nest of spidery arcs that smouldered on the deck, while the force of another arcstream caused an alien wretch to explode in a fountain of crackling gore.

The Sicarian infiltrators soon became stretched. Like Stroika they moved with the unflinching speed and fluidity of the machine. Acquisition reticules and calibrators danced across the darkness, zeroing in not only on enemies but on pre-calculated vulnerabilities. Information streamed. Links and feeds chuntered with the unspoken exchange of combat data. Hard-linked weaponry answered the call of targeter and xenocidal impulse.

Compatible fusions of combat hormones and serenitives were released slowly into their bloodstream, enabling the skitarii to maintain a state of battle-furious calm. Enemies were despatched with a ruthless, religious fervour. This found expression in the cold, almost automatic efficiency of their slick aim and death-dealing lack of sentiment. To an enemy the cybernetic soldiers might appear as machine-spirit guided robots, but the skitarii were more than just hydraulics, gears and processors. They hated with the hearts of men and dreamt the glories of the Omnissiah ascendant, a day when all true constructs of flesh and iron might be connected as one. A time when the Machine-God might extend His data-ravenous reach and that of His empire throughout the whole galaxy.

The greenskins came at them, the bloody beads of their eyes searing with neurostatic rage and territoriality. The ancient crash site of the Stella-Xenithica was their tribal home, possibly since their original planetary infection. They were not going to give it up or be driven out onto the merciless, algae-streaked plateaus of the ice world. The feral beasts charged, their fur-wrapped feet thundering across the quivering deck, their eyes bleeding and their jaws opened wide in fang-furious display. The beasts were gigantic and wielded bludgeoning blades fashioned from twisted struts and torn decking – huge, rude and serrated.

<Pattern Involutia,> the Primus ordered.

With stabbing, hydraulic steps, the skitarii infiltrators formed a circle, their backs to one another and the roaring fire. Their blasters punched through the darkness beyond, ripping through hearts and throats. The resilience of the alien beasts, however, was something to behold. Stroika’s cogitator grew warm inside his skull, processing the data of death and destruction that was all around him. As feral greenskins crashed into the deck, the brutes behind them stamped through their carcasses in rage-filled desperation.

The skitarii officer saw the wall of jagged weaponry and green muscle close about them like a trap. It was a spiked and shrinking enclosure of alien rage that would skewer and then pulverise the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660.

Haldron-44 Stroika felt the presence of the Machine-God burning through his neurocircuitry and the brain in which it was embedded. Magos Torquora was transmitting the gifts of the Omnissiah from the phylactic diagnostiquorum aboard the Maestrale. Alien dissections. Files of xenos research and experiments that bordered on the heretekal in their detail. Structural schematics of early Terran colony ships from the infotombs of Mars. Through Stroika, the Omnissiah made His merciless need known to the soldiers of His machine empire.

<Be the sacred oil that soothes the impairment of age,> Haldron-44 Stroika transmitted to the skitarii squad, <and the prayer that reclaims spirits thought lost. Cleanse the holy form of His design of pollution – of alien life that is death to the machine and an affront to the purity of the Omnissiah’s purpose. Fourth denticle, concentrate fire.>

The Sicarian infiltrators turned in unison. Three greenskin monsters were tearing their way up through the rusted mesh of a bay floor-cover nearby. Like the digits of an ancient timepiece, Stroika’s warning relayed to the cybernetic soldiers the position of the emerging aliens – four teeth or denticles around the Cog Mechanicus. The space became a storm of shredded darkness.

Stroika aimed his arc pistols at the chamber ceiling. His targeters and uplinked overlays attempted to find a structural weak spot in the blackened girder supports running the corroded length of the hangar. As he fired, the infiltrators zeroed in on the target and added their own blasts to the strategic fire. The chamber grew to brightness before Stroika’s crackling streams faded. The mauled, white-hot section gave. The weight of the girder tore its opposite end from the mouldering supports. Stroika watched as the girder fell, followed by a cascade of detritus from the floor above, burying the three greenskins hauling themselves out of the decking.

<Tenth denticle, concentrate fire,> Stroika transmitted to his skitarii. The schematic Magos Torquora had sent him revealed the weakness of a plasma-welded join in the decking nearby. The joint marked where cargo bays had given way to the flight deck proper. Blasting a pair of arcstreams along the length of the rust-weakened seam, Stroika’s fire encouraged the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 to follow suit with their rust-shredding blasters.

With the added weight of charging greenskins slamming down on the floor section, the join sheared away with a rippling fountain of rust. Within moments the decking beyond the seam was gone and a number of the stomping greenskins with it. Stroika watched the feral savages fall down through the wreckage, into the blackness beneath.

<Now show the Omnissiah your reverence and bend a knee,> Stroika commanded. As the circle of infiltrators knelt in unison, Stroika turned. With his bionics firmly anchored to the ruined deck, his torso began to revolve. Turning within the abdominal gimbal-mounting of his hydraulic legs, Stroika brought up his arc pistols. Holding the weapons out to either side of him, he let loose streams of electrical energy that twirled about him and over the helmets of the kneeling skitarii. The arcstreams crackled and spat through the darkness, lashing greenskins back with their fury. Green flesh smouldered in the wake of the revolving beams, while bolts of residual electricity rippled about the hulking frames of the oncoming monsters.

Several of the scrawnier, snaggle-toothed specimens went down and struggled to get up under the repeated attentions of the arcstreams. The larger brutes – feral orks jangling with rings and primitive glyph-carved tokens – seemed able to shrug off both the scorching beams and the muscle-spasming effects of the current. With several greenskins dead or dying on the flight deck but many more still raging for the skitarii, Haldron-44 Stroika’s arc pistols stuttered and fizzled dry.

The effect was instantaneous. The xenos brutes came back at the circle of cybernetic soldiers like a green tidal wave. The infiltrators’ white noise seemed to infuriate the beasts as much as disorientate them. The huge monsters heaved their primitive axes down. The skitarii used their optic-arrays, logistic overlays and pneumatically fired reflexes to avoid the worst of the greenskins’ fury. Spindly infiltrators leaned back, stepped sideways and turned aside bludgeoning weapons that demolished the flooring and smash-scattered wreckage. Despite the heart-stopping fury of the attacks, the skitarii’s movements were fluid and assured.

As the alien beasts roared at them, the infiltrators had only a dull awareness of their human fears, their minds sizzling with the rush of data being processed and shared. Their magi overlords had calibrated their experience of the world to suit the needs of the mission. Fear was but an inconvenience. Feelings, emotions, relationships, these all had their allotted place and purpose in Mechanicus society. In battle however, such frailties of the flesh were phylactically dimmed and eclipsed by their function as living weapons of the Omnissiah.

Their brains might have been allowed the creativity and invention to make them a flexible force – capable of evolving strategy, zeal and improvisation. Their hearts, however, were a void. Instead of sentiment and inclination, the skitarii felt targeting data, battle-protocol, imperatives and the processed thought-streams of their officers and lord magi. They felt the presence of the Omnissiah in order and instruction. They felt Him act through their very bodies, their bionics and organics. For the soldiers of the Legiones Skitarii, it was all they needed to know.

The rabid violence of the chamber was intoxicating. With fury and frustration, the greenskins came at the skitarii with growing speed, savagery and force. The Sicarians of the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 calibrated their movements and predictions to remain a millisecond or two ahead of their monstrous foes, looking for an opening. The greenskin savages were not without a mad unpredictability, however, and for Quasiq-Spuria II/X and Valek-Spuria V/X the opening never presented itself.

Stroika felt the biometrics of both infiltrators spike and fade as the orks they were combating unleashed their feral wrath. One green monster slammed a strut-spear straight through the chest housing of Valek-Spuria V/X, skewering the skitarius. The ork heaved the cybernetic soldier up with ease, allowing him to screech horribly down the length of the serrated shaft.

The greenskin savage shook the thick spear from side to side. Valek-Spuria V/X’s spindly appendages flailed about, before his ruined torso and gimbal waist-socket parted. Stamping down on his helm with a fur-wrapped foot, the greenskin put the infiltrator out of his misery. Quasiq-Spuria II/X was felled by another alien beast, the force with which the creature chopped down with its hacker enough to smash the skitarius into bloody scrap.

<Maintain formation,> Stroika heard Talus-Spuria I/X order. The princeps moved in to plug the gap where his pair of infiltrators had died.

As the feral greenskins intensified their territorial assault, the princeps and his infiltrators deployed their close combat weapons. Flechette blasters still shredded orks to distraction, between the brutal sweeps and stabs of primitive weaponry. Adding to their ragged thud, taser goads sparked off crude blades and sent bolts of bone-shattering energy through green flesh from their hyperdynamo capacitors.

Several greenskins backed away like chastised animals, snorting, working their mangle-fanged jaws and shaking the shock from their weapons. A number of beasts dropped their hackers and choppers, glaring at the Sicarian infiltrators with suspicion and rage before drawing their skinning shards from fur belts.

The most hulking and monstrous of the savages – a thing that wore the skull of an even larger chieftain as a tribal helm – lumbered forth. It wielded a spiked metal totem pole as a weapon, which it used to spark-smash the taser goad of Schrada-Spuria VII/X aside. Grabbing the infiltrator’s slender metal arm in one great claw, the greenskin chieftain seemed unfazed by the thudding of crackling flechettes into his barrel chest. The chieftain used the bionic appendage to wield the Sicarian infiltrator as a weapon. Smashing aside Solonoid-Spuria IV/X and Cynkade-Spuria X/X with their comrade’s armoured body, the towering savage beat Schrada-Spuria VII/X from side to side into the demolished decking.

<God of man and machine,> Haldron-44 Stroika thoughtstreamed to himself, <guide me, Your instrument, in destroying this pollution of Your great works.>

Stroika’s revolving shoulders cycled clockwise, sending his appendage-arms down and around. As they did, his wrist joints turned, presenting his arc pistols to the rear. Two auxiliary appendages cycled and unfolded over the tops of his whirring shoulders, from where they had been carriage-locked to the back of his combat chassis and hidden beneath his officer’s cloak. Each weapons-cradle held a crackling arc maul. The weapons sizzled with electrical energies. With his quad weapons appendages charged and presented, Stroika prepared himself to face the monstrous chieftain.

From the arkcruiser, the Machine-God answered his call. The Primus’s cogitator coils and combat overlays were flushed with additional data downlinked from Magos Torquora and the explorator diagnostiquorum. Species-specific vulnerabilities. Logistae projections. Battle-addenda, compensating for the creature’s larger size and resilience.

‘Meet my Maker…’ Stroika voxed at the oncoming ork, his static-laced voice a metallic boom in the cavernous chamber.

The noise just seemed to provoke the hulking thing. The greenskin chieftain swung its totem like a great, spiked metal club. Stroika’s movements were assured and hydraulically slick, his helm and crest-holder ducking down beneath the furious passage of the uncouth weapon.

He side-stepped, allowing the beast to cave the decking in beside him, the totem tearing mangled mesh and cargo pit covers up from the floor. Flinging the scrap aside, the greenskin chieftain came at Stroika again. The red beads of its bleeding eyes burned with territorial hatred, while the beast’s scar-cratered face contorted with its desire to see Stroika and his skitarii join the mouldering wreckage of the chamber.

Augurs and phylactic intrusions crowded Stroika’s optics with trajectories, highlighting and streaming notation. The skitarii commander turned up the length of the deck-buried totem. Stroika’s torso spun in its interface socket, his outstretched arms coming around like a wheeling star. One arc maul, followed by the other, smashed through the globed muscle of one green arm, knocking the chieftain back with the intense electrical shock that the arc mauls delivered. With energy snapping in a spidery web about the wound, Stroika brought around his pistols, streaming fire from one and then another into the beast’s barrel chest.

The greenskin roared its pain and shock. Even the beast, dull as its nervous system was, could feel the intense flow of electricity through its bones. In its retreating frustration, the hulking creature lashed its totem column back, taking the head of Vega-Spuria III/X from his armoured shoulders with a sickening clunk.

Lifting its weapon, the chieftain stomped across the ruined deck at Stroika. Burying the spiked totem in the busy, encrusted architecture of the hangar roof, the green abomination hauled on the superstructure. Stroika’s neurocircuitry sparked with warnings and contingencies. With a groan, the corroded metal gave. Using the totem as a grapnel, the alien pulled part of the chamber roof down on Stroika, forcing the skitarii officer to take several powered steps and dive out from under the descending wreckage.

Bringing his arc mauls up, Stroika created an improvised roll cage from the curvature of his appendage-arms and the length of the weapons. Tumbling back to his metal feet in one fluid movement, the Primus whipped his foil cloak about his cybernetic frame and positioned himself on the greenskin’s flank.

Blasting the monster in the neck and side of the head with twin streams from his pistols, Stroika monitored the beast’s predicted reaction. Bringing its claw to its seared face, the stun-shock of electricity coursing through its thick skull, the monster stumbled to one side. Still carrying the momentum of the roll, Stroika stomped behind the beast. He smashed at the monstrosity through its furs, prompting an agonising roar from the greenskin.

It brought its girder totem around savagely, but Stroika stopped, anchoring his metal feet to the deck and locking his hydraulic frame. Holding the arc mauls out to deflect the weapon, the skitarius felt his absorbers, pistons and fibre-bundles soak up the impact. The anchors on the soles of his feet tore up the rusted deck and he was pushed backwards by the monstrous force of the swing.

With alarms and integrity warnings flashing through the darkness of his helm, Stroika intensified the blaze of electricity between the metal totem and the crackling mauls. Heaving back with his hydraulic might, Stroika shocked the weapon from the spasming claws of the feral chieftain.

Pressing his advantage, the Primus rotated his shoulder demi-joints. Bringing his pistols back overhead and his arc mauls behind, he blasted continuous arcstreams at the beast, forcing it into a retreat. Holding out its massive claws before the onslaught and howling its alien agony, the monster stumbled back through the engagements of several of its tribe. Its kin were faring just as badly against the Sicarian infiltrators.

Falling back over a rust-shattered pipe, the greenskin monster went down. Still it retreated, half crawling and half convulsing back beneath the intense energies that razed its flesh and wracked its body. The creature looked up at the Omnissiah’s cybernetic servant, its blood-bead eyes glassy with alien hatred.

As Stroika brought his crackling arc mauls over and down once more, he beat the alien creature down into the deck. The skitarius turned with the force of a fired piston. The arc mauls came around, trailing a static-bright glare. They struck the hulking greenskin in the side of the head. The first stove in the skull it was wearing as a tribal helm and then the beast’s own. The second took the ugly head from its globed shoulders and sent it bouncing off through the darkness.

‘For the sanctity of the Machine,’ Stroika voxed down at the fountaining carcass of the green monster, ‘and He who works through the miracle of its operation. You are an aberration and not part of the Omnissiah’s grand design. Therefore, you must be destroyed.’

Keying back into his feeds and the web of data streaming from the engagement, the Primus found the chamber to be strewn with alien bodies. Among the rank corpses of the feral monsters was Cadmiad-Spuria VI/X, who had died a few footsteps away. Princeps Talus-Spuria I/X moved about the chamber with his surviving infiltrators, pointing their pistols down at dying greenskins and blasting a point-blank and functional death into the skulls of the beasts. It was not execution. It was eradication.

Stroika felt the return of his humanity – the shred his duties allowed him. He was no longer the living weapon that circumstance demanded. Emotions flooded back. Filtered though they were through his psychosurgical suppressions, they still presented as an intoxicating rush. He felt the conflicted warmth of concern, of relief, of satisfaction. As he cast his busy optics across the bodies of his dead skitarii, he noticed the distant pang of loss and responsibility in deaths that had previously been reported and catalogued.

Riding on the magnetic hush of its revolving cog, Phrenos~361 drifted forth out of the darkness, augurs, scopes and pict lenses retreating into cavities in the servo-skull’s cranium. Revolving his shoulder joints, Stroika cradle-locked his maul-appendages to his back. Ejecting his spent power cells and extending the hydraulics of his arms he sent his arc pistols back along their rails to where they sat in cavity holsters inset within his chest plating. The Primus brought up his arm and allowed Phrenos~361 to land, anchoring itself with prehensile cables and micro-mechadendrites. The drone uploaded the hard data of its survey findings.

<Magos,> Haldron-44 Stroika transmitted back to the explorator arkcruiser. <The Stella-Xenithica has been purified of the alien infestation. No further xenos targets detected.>

The report was a formality but one Stroika took legitimate pride in delivering. Through phylactic communion, Magos Torquora and the diagnostiquorum saw what the skitarii saw and experienced the mission vicariously from the Maestrale. Through the umbilical streams of invisible data-tethers, they were one with the Omnissiah.

<Status report,> Torquora streamed back.

<Princeps Talus-Spuria I/X reports the loss of seven Sicarians. I am recommending the princeps, Solonoid-Spuria IV/X and Cynkade-Spuria X/X for the Exonumia-Maxital in recognition of their part in this historic undertaking. With your permission I would like their designations recorded in the mission log.>

<Granted, Stroika-unit,> Torquora transmitted back.

<The vessel-artefact is secure, magos, and awaits your inspection,> Stroika told him. <A survey reveals an estimated two-thirds of the colony vessel intact. I would, however, recommend that purge teams accompany your survey catalogistae and the magi archeotechnis down to the crash site. The vessel may still be infested with alien growths and spores.>

<They have already been despatched, Stroika-unit,> Magos Torquora told him, visiting upon the skitarius an orbital pict of a great explorator drop-ship, sat on the ice beside the buried wreck of the Stella-Xenithica.

<I don’t understand, magos.>

<They were despatched the moment you confirmed the identification of the vessel,> Magos Torquora told the skitarius. <The Omnissiah allows not for doubt in these matters of high significance and I allowed none for your failure. You have and will always have my complete confidence, Primus.>

<The honour is all yours, magos explorator,> Stroika sent back. <By the Machine-God’s good grace, your researches led His servants to this great find. Who knows what secrets will be unearthed from a relic-vessel of such age?>

<I am coming down to the surface,> Omnid Torquora told him. Stroika could detect, even in the ancient magos’s steely transmissions, the hint of excitement. <Let us find out.>

0010

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +THE CORPUS MECHANICUS+

The arkcruiser Maestrale made its descent. Below the explorator vessel the forge world of Satzica Secundus turned. Bathed in the heat and red light of its local star, the planet’s thick, black cloud cover was tinged with an infernal hue. The arkcruiser’s approach meant dropping down through the planet’s swarm of tiny fabricator moons. Upon doing so it drifted downwards through the orbital plates, defence platforms and shipyards that circled the forge world. The ponderous progress of their mesmerising paths was a thing of intersecting beauty. These obstacles the Maestrale negotiated with clockwork precision. There would be many scopes, optics and eyes trained on the vessel and Magos Torquora would not risk the disaster of a collision.

The low gravitational conditions on Satzica Secundus meant that the factoria, smoke stacks and strato-forges reached high up into the sky. They pierced the planet’s oppressive cloud cover, the result of thousands of years of relentless industry. The chemical brume of heavy metal vapours was a pincushion through which the tallest soot-stained towers, forge temples and ventscrapers rose.

Haldron-44 Stroika stood on the edge of the flight deck, looking down upon his forge world home as it rose up to meet him. The servo-skull Phrenos~361 hovered idly nearby, waiting to be of some service to its master. About them the superstructure of the bay creaked as the arkcruiser once more knew the gravitational pull of low anchorage. Stroika’s optics glazed with idle trajectories and data unsought. As it was, the Maestrale was keeping rotational pace with a colossal structure below – a mighty forge whose temple towers rose so high out of the black cloud that they almost appeared to reach out for the arkcruiser.

Stroika didn’t need datastreams to tell him that he looked upon the forge temple principal, the seat of the Fabricator General and High Gnostarch of Satzica Secundus. It was known across the forge world as the Thunderfane, for taking the cacophony of its sacred industry highest into the heavens.

As Stroika watched, he saw a baroque craft of ornate design ascend from the Thunderfane’s apex platforms, a vessel all brass, gold and Martian red. Extending the telescoptics of his helm, the Primus scanned the vessel for identification. To his surprise, the Fabricator General’s own orbital barge was approaching the Maestrale, flanked by a pair of ornamental landers.

<Sir.>

The stream carried the signifiers of 10-Victro Tiberiax, Stroika’s legionary second among the Deuteron-IV Praetori. While alphas, commanders and princeps like Talus-Spuria I/X led individual units, Stroika and Tiberiax held responsibility for every skitarii soldier on board the Maestrale, and both the martial and cult traditions that governed their number.

<Report.>

<The magos, sir.>

The landing bay was suddenly awash with activity. A gaggle of tech-priests arrived on the deck, the skirts of their rust-red robes trailing after them. Some were spindly magi sporting scaffolds of slender clawed appendages, while others were nests of snaking mechadendrites. Several of the diagnostiquorum were broad, barrel-chested constructs whose augmentations had added a baroque bulk to otherwise feeble frames.

The tech-priests were shadowed by Mechanicus protectors, personal bodyguards of frightful augmentation. The magi and their personal ward engines in turn were flanked by 10-Victro Tiberiax and soldiers of the Lex-70 Ranger-Expatriarii. All knew their place in the stratified ranks of the Mechanicus. The heavy hydraulics of the skitarii’s legs beat a rhythm on the deck that could be heard and felt.

Stroika had assigned the rangers as a planetary escort, ensuring that the visored helm and plate of each soldier gleamed. Their robust hydraulics had been soaked in baptismal oils and received special attention for the slightest lag or fault. With ceremonial battle cloaks and polished galvanic rifles, Stroika was certain that the Lex-70 Ranger-Expatriarii would do both himself and his magos proud.

At the heart of the delegation was Magos Omnid Torquora. The explorator had spent an extended lifetime in the field. He had favoured the perils and rewards of exploration and reconquest over a forge world existence, with its feudal politics and currying favour at the Thunderfane.

His choices had cost him, however, especially during his early survey missions as a young explorator in the Dragortha Deeps. His body was now but a flesh-plugged husk. The depths of his red hood hid the ghoulish features of a cadaverous face and the darkness within it framed the blue burn of optics that seared with priestly obsession.

Torquora’s torso was spoiling flesh shot through with cables, while the ragged stumps of his limbs had been surgically interfaced with a hulking suit of crafted armour. The clinker-plate frame lent the ancient tech-priest the bulk of a battle-automaton, the magna-pneumatics of each shoulder supporting stowed heavy weaponry. The chunky hydraulics of armoured legs carried the weight of the explorator’s augmentations, clunking with each heavy step.

A slender pair of auxiliary appendages reached out through the tech-priest’s chassis-concealing robes. Their multi-digits were feverishly at work across the runebanks of cogitators and logic engines housed within the armoured pulpit that formed the suit’s projecting chest.

Omnid Torquora led his diagnostiquorum of tech-priests, logistae and artisan advisors. The disciples of the Machine-God. Behind them an itinerant ark trundled on thick tracks. The prize within was hidden behind adamantium plate, a kaleidoscopic bubble of overlapping protective shielding, stasis fields and a chrono-containment lock. A technological treasure the explorator had recovered from the Stella-Xenithica and was now to ceremonially present to his Fabricator General.

<Escort and delegation ready, sir,> Tiberiax communicated.

10-Victro Tiberiax marched ahead of his skitarii and the diagnostiquorum’s protector ward engines. Like his rangers and Stroika, Tiberiax gleamed for the occasion. The silver of his plate and the rich red of his battle cloak honoured the event. The only individual who seemed to have gone to no extra preparation was Torquora himself, whose brazen bionics went unpolished and whose robes were dark with the stain of maintenance and grease. Even the explorator’s spoiling stench had gone unmasked. Stroika’s processors told him that there was a 16.349 per cent chance that the magos had simply been too busy with his preparations. Based on how the officer knew Torquora felt about forge world politics, the skitarius estimated a 43.998 per cent likelihood that it was intended as some kind of slight or insult.

<Very good,> Stroika sent back to Tiberiax. <You are right on time.>

Tiberiax sent the noospheric blurt of a salute to his commander, which Stroika returned as he joined the party. Cranial locks turned on the side of Stroika’s cog-plumed helmet, allowing the Primus to disengage it from his cranial interfacing. His shaven head was covered in haptic sockets, flesh plugs and a web of embedded cabling. He held the helmet out and allowed the servo-skull Phrenos~361 to carry it in its trailing mechadendrites.

Stroika’s skin was swarthy like that of his Satzican brothers. His eyes were his own, but ringed with screw-interfacia optics that gave him the appearance of wearing lensless goggles. His mouth was relaxed and his face at the kind of peace and obedience of mind that surgeo-suppression procedures ensured.

Stroika looked to Magos Torquora and opted for the modulated informality of speech.

‘The Fabricator General sends his personal barge for you, my lord.’

‘For me?’ the explorator said, his own modulations shot through with truculence and sickly static. ‘For you? No, Stroika-unit. For the treasure we bring him. He honours the Machine-God’s wonder with his barge, not our own.’

‘Are we not all the Machine-God’s wonders, magos?’ Stroika ventured.

‘Yes, but we are not all equal in His eyes,’ Torquora replied, the party of tech-priests and its ceremonial escort making its way across the deck. The Fabricator General’s barge rose to meet them, the ornate transport settling in a flight bay. The hydraulics of its landing claws hissed and the craft was briefly lost in a cloud of steam. ‘One cog may turn another through a set of gears and yet by the nature of the mechanism the two cogs never meet. We are those cogs, dutifully turning, lending power to the betters turning above us.’

‘But we are about to meet the Fabricator General…’ Stroika said.

‘By the grace of your function, you have been allowed your curiosity,’ Torquora warned the Primus. ‘Do not use such a hallowed gift for insolent suggestion.’

‘My lord, I…’

<I know what you are thinking before you do, Stroika-unit,> the magos explorator told him, his voice echoing through the skitarius’s thoughts. <Do not forget that. If your questions proceed from a spiritual impulse–>

‘They do, magos,’ Stroika assured him.

<Spoken like a cult soldier,> Torquora streamed. The Primus did not know whether this was a compliment or not. Once again, Stroika heard the magos’s voice proceed from his jaundiced lips.

‘These events are unusual in their historical significance. Protocol is being subverted. You are to me as I am to the Fabricator General. As billions are to him. He is nothing, however, to the Great Maker – who is the glory of the Machine absolute, the Corpus Mechanicus. The Omnissiah can make us and He can break us. In this instance, something wonderful has happened. A gift long lost has been given back to our empire. This audience with the Fabricator General is not an honour – it is a formality. I tell you this: the Omnissiah has bestowed this gift on us all. I shall be flesh-damned before I let it end up in the depths of some vault or as part of a political pay-off. It shall function as it was intended and through that function honour us all. I would not meet with this nest of silicon vipers, were they not to be the key to such a realisation.’

‘Then you hold no regard for the Fabricator General and the priesthood of Satzica Secundus?’ Stroika asked.

‘I hold them in every regard,’ Omnid Torquora told him. ‘I simply wish to be that cog far removed. I do not desire to be coated in the grease of their oily dealings, their affairs of heart and greed. Why do you think I sought the path of the explorator? It was the ships of such undertakings and the tech-priests that commanded them that could take me farthest from this place. We must, however, pay the price of our successes.’

As the delegation of tech-priests, protectors and skitarii rangers approached the orbital barge, its ramp descended. Lowering with it was Master-Manciple Proxis, the Fabricator General’s personal emissary. Proxis kept the claw-toolage of his appendages buried in his accommodating sleeves. The master-manciple’s ribbed gown and hood concealed the wonder of his workings, but his face was plain to see. Within the glass bowl of his head sloshed an excited mixture of liquid metal that masked his features. The metal had the ability to replicate the faces of those whom he addressed. Combined with a dialogus-matrix, this made Proxis an excellent emissary for his master, since it was difficult to feel hostility towards one’s own face.

Proxis issued forth a stream of code, reverential blurts and binaric cant. He followed this introduction with one issued from his vox-hailers.

‘Magos Torquora,’ Proxis said, his features assuming the semblance of the explorator’s rancid own, ‘his excellency Voricar Trega, Fabricator General and High Gnostarch of Satzica Secundus, bids you a welcome return.’

‘I am honoured,’ said Omnid Torquora, turning his hood slightly to reinforce to Stroika that he was anything but. Within moments the master-manciple’s face had changed again. It assumed the form of his Fabricator General – the flattery of a younger incarnation, of course – before returning to a silvery representation of Torquora’s own.

‘It has been too long, magos,’ Proxis said.

‘And yet not long enough…’ Torquora returned, allowing a ripple of doubt to pass through the liquid metal in the bowl, ‘…to fully complete my mission. I had to leave a macroclade of skitarii to secure the remaining secrets of the site. I fear that we leave further secrets undiscovered, to be pillaged by the enemies of Mars.’

‘The Fabricator General regrets that,’ Proxis told him, ‘but wishes me to assure you that reinforcements are en route to the Perborea system to further secure the Stella-Xenithica site.’

Torquora turned to allow Haldron-44 Stroika to see the displeasure on his ruined face, the light from the deck lumens invading the depths of the tech-priest’s hood. Stroika had left a skitarii garrison under the command of Talus-Spuria I/X, who had received a well-earned promotion for his part in securing the colony ship.

His orders had been to provide security for the wreck and the small army of catalogistae and magi archeotechnis Omnid Torquora had left on the miserable ice world to continue the Omnissiah’s good work. Stroika had thought it unlikely that the secrets of the colony ship would be discovered by others, based upon the length of time that had passed between previous visitations. The Primus could not believe that the Stella-Xenithica or even the greenskin savages had purposely visited the ice ball of a planet, which held little strategic or resource value. What Stroika hadn’t factored into his assessment was the danger posed by other magi and explorators, eager to get to Perborea and steal the vessel’s valuable secrets and treasures for themselves.

‘Is that–’ Proxis began, craning the bowl of his head around to see the itinerant ark behind.

‘Yes,’ Torquora cut him off. ‘It is.’

‘When the Fabricator General learned of your find, from the encrypted astrotelepathic field reports, he insisted upon seeing such a treasure for himself. He was eager that it benefit immediately from the sanctity and full security of the forge world. That is not a problem, is it, magos?’

‘No problem,’ the explorator said, through gritted adamantalloy teeth.

‘You understand, of course, magos…’

‘Oh yes,’ Torquora told him. ‘I understand completely.’

‘Shall we, then?’ Proxis said. ‘The entire forge world awaits you and your treasure.’

‘Let’s.’

SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF II
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UPLOADING… +THE QUEST FOR KNOWLEDGE+

The orbital barge roared across the surface of the clouds, churning up a billowing chromatic haze from the toxic darkness below. As Haldron-44 Stroika stood in the baroque luxury of the bay-vestibule, he watched his home world blur by. The barge passed between zeppelins tethered to processing towers and down through the torrents of high-altitude traffic: haulage brigs, bulk transports and freighters.

Cherubim and silver-skinned servitors moved about the barge passengers, all decked out in the feudal livery of the Thunderfane, offering consecrated oils, power and amasec for those tech-priests who were partial.

A pair of ancient security-automata flanked the closed bay ramp, their still and imposing forms like statues. Master-Manciple Proxis was exchanging words of congratulation with the tech-priests of Torquora’s diagnostiquorum, as his role dictated. Several electro-priests came forth chanting cult litanies and giving thanks, the flesh of their faces a network of sub-dermal circuitry. Making the sign of the Holy Cog and slashing the crackling bolts of blessing across chests with the termini of their fingertips, the tech-priests moved on to more formal rituals about the shape of the tracked ark.

Like the magos explorator, the skitarii rangers and protector bodyguards wanted little to do with the ceremony and fuss unfolding in the vestibule-bay. With the servo-skull Phrenos~361 still holding his helmet beside him, Haldron-44 Stroika returned his gaze to the broad viewport on the barge’s elevated belvedere.

The barge was surging across the thick ocean of black cloud, taking a tour of the region’s grandest and most significant strato-forges. Upon their clean domes, pyramids and temple tops that reached clear of the smog, thousands of tech-priests, magi and forge world significants gathered to watch the passage of the barge from balconies and platforms. They were there to honour the return of the Maestrale and its precious cargo, but despite gathering for the purpose of celebration, there were no shouts of jubilation or waving from the crowd. They simply stared blankly at the passing of the barge and the treasure it contained. They made the sign of the Holy Cog and streamed their coded praise.

Stroika knew that it would be the same in the darkness below the cloud cover. In earlier service to the Omnissiah, he had toiled in the groundmills and scraper-factoria. He had done so as both a fresh-fleshed menial and a citizen construct, proudly putting the first of many augmentations to work in the name of the Machine-God Incarnate.

Code-streaming vox-hailers would have announced through the smog the arrival of the explorator arkcruiser and the unseen overhead passage of the barge. Forge-worlders in rubber and trunk-trailing gas masks would have stopped to observe the occasion on the freightways and up through the workshop-platforms. They would have done so in similar silence, no doubt enjoying a moment’s respite from their back-breaking duties.

Completing their brief tour, the flanking ornamental landers peeled away as the barge set its course for the Thunderfane. The vessel coursed between columns of flame that reached up from the stackscrapers of satellite strato-forges as the temple furnaces vented in its honour. The forge temple principal towered magnificently against the Satzican sunset, its colossal crown of node towers arcing with power. Coming in through the electrical storm, the ceremonial barge deposited its passengers on a lofty temple platform.

With Phrenos~361 hovering beside him with his helmet, Stroika led the way between the still forms of the security-automata. 10-Victro Tiberiax fell in line and the two skitarii officers stepped off the platform with their cloaks flowing behind them. Omnid Torquora followed with platform-shaking steps, trailing his diagnostiquorum and the itinerant ark, which itself was flanked by ranger sentinels and protector bodyguards.

The delegation from the Maestrale found it slow going through the outer halls of the strato-forge temple. As the capital forge on the planet, its halls were grand and swarming with a sea of tech-adepts: forge masters, arch-magi, tech-priests, magnates, logistae and cult retainers. Temple thralls stood guard in cages mounted on stilt-platforms, dotted throughout the chamber’s length. The smell of ceremonial ozone burned on the air.

Stroika and Tiberiax parted the crowds, but with so many wishing to congratulate the magos explorator and catch a glimpse of the trundling ark, negotiating the hall took time. Finding another hall and another, each boasting its own sub-strata of forge world society and significance, Stroika knew that Omnid Torquora would be detesting every wasted moment. They had both spent so much time away from their home, exploring and on legionary deployment, that they were not ready for the overwhelming welcome.

<Stroika-unit,> Torquora streamed, <get us out of here. That would be an order.>

Stroika and Tiberiax exchanged a wry glance and a nod, the two skitarii officers surging on through the crowds. Through the great arch beyond, lined with choral servitors vox-blurting code-canticles of the Cult Mechanicus, Stroika found a ceremonial doorway guarded by another pair of relic security-automata.

Master-Manciple Proxis and Torquora’s delegation were admitted by armed temple thralls. The inner temple beyond was sparse in comparison to the entrance halls, with a few dozen forge masters, logistae and magi in attendance about the enthroned figure of the Fabricator General.

‘Magos Explorator Omnid Torquora,’ Master-Manciple Proxis announced. The call was echoed by vox-hailing servitors ornamentally embedded in the chamber pillars.

The huddle of tech-priests parted as Torquora stomped his augmented way across the chamber and up to the throne, flanked by Stroika and Tiberiax. The skitarii officers went down on one knee, as did the explorator in his hulking suit. He rose again, towering over the attendant magi and advisors. A swarm of winged cherubim scattered from where they had been perched around the throne and the scaffold about it. Machinelings scuttled away. The suddenness of the movement turned hoods and drew the sear of optics. The glowers – both organic and artificial – were palpable. While he was not the only imposing construct among them, Torquora’s size and offline weaponry were designed to intimidate.

Such displays did not stop a robed member of the Fabricator General’s retinue from venturing forth. The construct wore the black robes of a temple codescrubber, a magos catharc charged with the Fabricator General’s spiritual security.

A mekspider rappelled from the chamber ceiling on a tiny winch-wire, landing on Stroika’s shoulder. Extending a probe-interface, the mekspider momentarily explored a local flesh-plug in the skitarii officer’s ear before dropping onto the floor and crawling up a member of the diagnostiquorum. Mekspider drones of different sizes and designs skittered about the explorator delegation, criss-crossing the open space with their wire feeds. They were all conduit-connected to the magos catharc, who was checking Torquora and his attendants for any sign of technological deviance or xenological corruption. The magos catharc took readings from Omnid Torquora personally.

The black cloak and hood of the Fabricator General’s codescrubber housed a rippling body made up almost exclusively of writhing, tentacular mechadendrites. The helmet-mask of its face and whirring telescoptics did little to offset the horrible suggestion of a body buried in a nest of strangling serpents. As it moved through the crowd, the tech-priests and forge masters instinctively withdrew. Some of them had clearly received the chief codescrubber’s invasive attentions. Haldron-44 Stroika shuddered to cogitate the lengths to which the magos catharc would go to purify a machine of code-corruptions or xenos infection.

‘Omnid, Omnid, Omnid…’

The metallic voice was everywhere. Like a whetstone along a blade – chill and grating.

‘My Fabricator General,’ Torquora said.

‘Approach, my friend,’ the metallic boom announced. ‘It is good to see you.’

At the Fabricator General’s suggestion, the magos catharc slithered aside and the mekspiders crawling about Torquora’s delegation rose towards the ceiling on their fibre-cables. Stroika watched his magos stomp up towards the throne, allowing the skitarii officer a better view. The throne was set upon a dais of colossal cogs. About it was a scaffold from which draped a semi-transparent foil. The material was shot through with engrammatic patterns and circuitry, forming the sigil of the Thunderfane forge temple and its planetary overlord. Through the foil Stroika could make out the enthroned figure of Voricar Trega, High Gnostarch of the Thunderfane and Fabricator General of Satzica Secundus.

The steel hiss of the Fabricator General’s voice proceeded from huge vox-hailers set in the throne. The throne itself was not only the figurative seat of power in the forge temple principal and the Mechanicus world beyond; it was an actual seat of power. The throne was made up of a quad of fusion towers from which electricity snapped and arced. The Fabricator General sat within – an almost permanent fixture. Little of the man that had been Voricar Trega remained, the ancient magos now being little more than a robed automaton, sitting in a nest of interfaced power cables and haptic feeds. It was said the very power produced by the forge world itself passed through the Fabricator General’s crackling form.

Omnid Torquora knelt once more and took up the foil with one of his auxiliary appendages. Drawing it to his hood, he kissed the Fabricator General’s sizzling sigil. Standing, the magos explorator drew back.

‘What has it been, Omnid?’ Trega said, his voice echoing through the floor and chamber. ‘A century?’

‘Two, my lord,’ Torquora told his master.

‘You have been busy, magos.’

‘The Great Maker wishes it so,’ Torquora said. ‘I see His blessing continues to burn bright in both Satzica Secundus and your resplendent self. This is your third incarnation?’

‘The Omnissiah favours me with His grand design,’ the Fabricator General affirmed. ‘Enough about me. This day looks to your accomplishments. So, the Stella-Xenithica…’

‘The Perborea system, my lord,’ Omnid Torquora said. ‘Out on the Nooneus Drift. Planetoid seven of sixteen.’

‘A Terran colony ship, out there?’ Trega boomed. ‘How did you come to find the vessel-artefact?’

‘Many years of research, data-salvage and dead ends, Fabricator General,’ the magos explorator told him.

‘But the defining piece of evidence,’ Voricar Trega said. ‘Come now, Omnid. Don’t be modest. Share your successes and receive, through us, the Machine-God’s thanks. The relevance is pressing.’

Stroika felt his magos hesitate. The skitarii officer’s equalisers recorded faint stress patterns in Torquora’s returns and a vague sense of threat in the Fabricator General’s own. The gathered retinue of forge masters, magi and logistae seemed to close in on Torquora and his revelations. The small horde of sycophants and predatory advisors was mostly made up of scrawny, cybernetic fusions – hooded tech-adepts draped in robes and spidery servo-appendages. Punctuating their number, however, were true oddities, ancients and sectarians like Torquora and Trega, who had fully embraced their machine form.

‘Merchant Charter records, my lord,’ the magos explorator told him. ‘Guild losses are reported by law to the Chartist Captains but can be acquired by interested parties for a price. I detected a pattern of disappearances in the vicinity of the Nooneus Drift. My Navigator and magi aethyricus isolated a tempestuous region of the warp nearby on a backwater trade route. It was my theory that the anomalous conditions pushed traversing vessels off course.’

‘That was your theory,’ Voricar Trega said, the node columns of his throne crackling with expectation. ‘But the Omnissiah demands of us data, does He not, Omnid? Hard data.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ Torquora said. ‘I took the arkcruiser Maestrale along the same route.’

‘A risk?’

‘Aye, but a necessary one,’ the magos explorator said. ‘For the Great Maker did not engineer us merely to exist but to push the boundaries of that existence. To become more – and that cannot be achieved without risk.’

‘Good, Omnid. Good…’

‘The tumultuous immeteorology of the route forced us to drop out of the warp on the edge of the Perborea System. Sixteen unremarkable planets orbiting an unremarkable star. The system was, however, crowded with debris, making exploration hazardous.’

‘But that did not stop you.’

‘No, my lord,’ Torquora said. ‘We made a systematic survey of the worlds, cataloguing many new species of xenos fauna and flora. We discovered several wrecks. Merchant vessels listed as losses in the Chartist records.’

‘And the Stella-Xenithica?’

‘Yes, my master,’ Torquora confirmed. ‘En route from Terra to Autrega, the colony ship had suffered the same fate – only thousands of years earlier. The crew perished in the extreme conditions and the artefact-vessel had suffered both the crash and the effects of time and environment. My skitarii forces purged the derelict of xenos infestation and secured the site for archeotechnological investigation. Cataloguing continues, but one of our first finds was of such magnitude that protocol dictated you should be informed, my master.’

‘Show us,’ the Fabricator General commanded with a gesture, his metallic digits slow and heavy with expectation.

Haldron-44 Stroika and 10-Victro Tiberiax advanced with the tracked ark, flanking the machine. A number of the magos explorator’s diagnostiquorum came forth to collapse the shielding, stasis fields and chrono-containment security systems of the armoured chest. Removing the heavy lid, several magi went to delicate work connecting cables and mumbling spirit-appeasing litanies of candescence over the technological wonder inside.

‘A Mark IV Martian hololithic projector,’ Omnid Torquora announced as his tech-priests made the sign of the Holy Cog and retreated before the Fabricator General. ‘A relic in its own right.’

Torquora nodded and one of his magi archeotechnis hauled down on a switch handle set within the itinerant ark’s side. The hoods and faces of the gathered tech-priests were illuminated by the hololithic static that fizzled in the space above the baroque projector. With a clunk, the projector cycled through a series of three-dimensional images. The air shimmered with intricate charts, blueprints and construction details. These were accompanied by columns of test data, material designations and litanies; a hololithic template containing all the sacred knowledge required to build the wonder of a technological artefact.

‘By the Motive Force…’ one of Trega’s forge masters uttered.

From the ripple of prayers and makings of the Holy Cog, Stroika assumed that many of the tech-priests had not believed the magos explorator’s reports. The Fabricator General knew Torquora of old, however, and had had no such lack of faith.

‘Praise the Omnissiah,’ Voricar Trega thundered, ‘for here before us are His missives, brought forth from the doom of our past and the darkness of ignorance.’

The forge masters and tech-priests watched as the blueprints of an ancient weapon flashed before them.

‘I present to you,’ Omnid Torquora announced, ‘the Standard Template Construct schematic for what these hololithic captures term a “Geller Device” or “Empyreal Bomb”.’

Stroika watched as optics intensified and a ripple of Omnissiah-honouring prayers passed through the gathering. There were no gasps or exclamations – only the drone of engaged cogitators and logic engines.

‘This is indeed a wonder,’ Voricar Trega said, ‘as you promised, Omnid. You have done well and honoured both your forge world and the Great Maker, whose ancient works grace our presence. What say you, my councillors?’

The gathered magi and forge masters turned in on themselves, gabbling code and cant as they unleashed their enthusiasm on each other. Stroika watched them in silence, the air alive with wireless feeds and identifications transmitted as badges of authority.

‘Phlegra Octaveen,’ the Fabricator General urged. ‘What say you?’

A tall, armaplas tank crawled forward on a quad of legs. The tank was filled with a murky liquid and a respirator rose and fell on its brass top. Lamps flickered on within, illuminating Phlegra Octaveen III, arch-calculus and cipher engine. There was little left of the old hag. Her threadbare cranium and toothless maw were strapped into an oxygen mask, while a wrinkled, saggy torso floated in the tank’s murky solution, supporting a single, skeletal arm. Pipes and nutri-lines ran up through the solution and into the logista’s diaphragm and the ragged stump of her other shoulder. The inside of the tank was covered in smears and numerals: the notations, mathematical enumeration and supra-calculi of the cipher engine.

‘Lord Fabricator,’ Octaveen said, bubbles rising from her mask as she spoke through a pair of vox-hailers. ‘Even the briefest of computations show the impact such a device might have on the galaxy. The Imperium and the Martian Empire are beset by warp storms in the void and immaterial storms within the aethyr itself that frustrate communication and physical expansion. This device would revolutionise warfare and travel. We could be looking at another golden age for both empires.’

‘A-a-and why would we want that?’ Eudoxus Zultra vox-stuttered, the gangling forge master looking around for agreement from the hooded tech-priests about him. ‘T-t-t-t-he Machine-God has seen fit to bestow this wonder on Satzica Secundus and its priesthood. W-w-w-w-why share such a gift with those of base flesh? T-t-t-t-he worlds of men would appropriate it as their own – as they do all the Omnissiah’s wonders.’

‘They honour not the Machine-God…’

‘Terra must be notified. Our accords have lasted thousands of years…’

‘The device belongs with Mars…’

‘Argentae,’ the Fabricator General said, the metallic hush of his voice descending upon the argument like a foil blanket on the flames of a fire, extinguishing it instantly. ‘Argentae Nuvias, my old friend. Your thoughts, magos aethyricus?’

Haldron-44 Stroika saw that the tech-priest could not attend personally and instead joined the retinue as a ghostly hololithic presence that bled from the gloom of the chamber. Nuvias’s hood and robes crackled, providing little evidence that anything existed within them.

‘As a weapon,’ the magos aethyricus said, ‘it would deny the pollutive entities of the warp purchase on the dimensional reality of worlds sacred to the Omnissiah. A powerful tool in our never-ending fight against the incorporeal threats that lay claim to our very plane of existence – the plane where flesh and iron exist in harmony.’

‘Could it even be constructed?’ Engra Myrmidex said, drifting forward through the crowd. The Fabricator Locum was second in authority only to Voricar Trega himself, and had long upgraded beyond the restraints of humanoid form. His shell-hull was comprised of clinker brass plates, arched into a foetal curve. The head of the ancient was a nest of optical arrays, pictcorders and auspectra, and below these hung a delicate array of fine brass instruments and mechadendrites. His tail dribbled a length of interface cables and holding his frame in place were a pair of coaxial propellers – ducted fans that helped him to hover above the ground. Most grotesque of all was the techno-magos’s tri-sentience: three surgically intermeshed brains, carried beneath the shell like a bulbous, pulsing, precious cargo. Three minds that spoke as one. ‘Reproduced? Mass produced?’

‘Well, Argentae? Phlegra?’ the Fabricator General demanded. ‘Speak, as you would before the Great Maker himself.’

‘The template seems intact, my Lord Fabricator,’ the logista bubbled.

‘The Machine-God will provide the rest,’ Argentae Nuvias said with shimmering confidence. The tech-priest and tech-priestess had little intention of disappointing their machine master.

‘Then, my Fabricator General,’ Engra Myrmidex said, drifting his fans and form around to face the enthroned Trega, ‘I would consider it an honour only your greatness could bestow, to oversee the construction of this Geller device, this empyreal bomb, and test it.’

‘You will do no such thing,’ Omnid Torquora announced.

Stroika looked about the chamber. Silence had once more descended. The necks of magi and forge masters clicked around as they moved their hoods between the magos explorator, the Fabricator Locum and their Fabricator General. The skitarii officer detected the heat signatures of weapons held by temple thralls as they came online. He felt his aegis protocols stir and his own weapons engage. A stream of noospheric chatter passed silently between the Primus and 10-Victro Tiberiax.

‘Kn-kn-kn-know you not your place, magos?’ the forge master Eudoxus Zultra said, craning his lank frame over Omnid Torquora and jabbing the spindly toolage of a finger at him.

‘You address your betters here,’ the magos catharc hissed from the octopoid slithering of its hooded robes. ‘This is not the void or some backwater rock where you might feel the freedom of your lofty station. Take care, magos. You stand among giants here at the Thunderfane. Magi ordained by the Great Maker and charged with His authority decide what will and will not be done. All else goes against the Omnissiah’s grand design and is deemed heretekal.’

‘Your name and designations will forever be recorded in the discovery of this wondrous find, Omnid,’ the Fabricator General soothed. ‘You wish to be involved further in its development?’

‘I do, my Lord Fabricator,’ the magos explorator said.

‘Your encoded messages betrayed some reticence about being recalled to Satzica Secundus, Magos Torquora,’ the Fabricator Locum said. ‘It was expected that you would return to your work on Perborea and unearth further wonders for your forge world and Fabricator General.’

‘Would you not rather return, Omnid?’ Voricar Trega asked. ‘Construction. Deployment. These were never your calling, old friend. And this technological wonder must be tested. Data, my friend. The ongoing Quest for Knowledge supersedes petty notions of ownership. We must know the device’s capabilities. The discovery was yours but the find brings glory to all. Besides, the Omnissiah fashioned you for service amongst the stars.’

‘Where I would serve him, Lord Fabricator,’ Torquora insisted. ‘Testing the Geller Device.’

‘Absolutely out of the question,’ Engra Myrmidex said.

‘It sounds to me, Fabricator,’ Torquora seethed through the metallic hiss of each carefully chosen word, ‘that you speak not for your master but in his stead. You are not Fabricator General yet, Lord Myrmidex. As others gathered here have been swift to remind me, remember protocol. Remember your place in the mighty machine of our forge world collective.’

Stroika’s equalisers could detect the strain in the modulated voice of the magos. He knew his master did indeed wish to leave the forge world and return to his duties. He would not, however, give up the prize of an STC template so easily to the scheming magi of the forge world priesthood. Even Haldron-44 Stroika, with his limited appreciation for temple politics, could see that the Fabricator Locum was attempting to claim the all but limitless power of the Geller Device for himself.

The chamber was silent. Myrmidex did not want to repeat his mistake, nor Omnid Torquora overreach himself in the opinion of his Fabricator General. Voricar Trega seemed equally impressed and disappointed in them both.

‘The Fabricator Locum,’ the Fabricator General said finally, ‘his attendant magi and the forge masters under his purview will undertake the holy construction of this Geller Device for the testing of it on the nearest immaterial anomaly to Satzica Secundus – the Great Gyre, the warp storm that claimed our sister forge world Velchanos Magna, so long ago.’

‘Very wise,’ Argentae Nuvias said, the hololithic representation of the magos aethyricus crackling and warping.

‘V-v-v-v-velchanos Magna, yes, yes,’ Eudoxus Zultra agreed. Other forge masters and magi gave their modulated approval.

‘However,’ the Fabricator General said, hushing the gathering once more, ‘I do not wish my old friend Omnid Torquora to be separated from this undertaking. The Omnissiah chose him as I do now, to see this holy experiment through and usher in this new golden age of which we speak. He will attend on the Fabricator Locum as his executive second and aid him in securing the data required to deem this undertaking a success. This is part of the Great Maker’s design, and as such cannot be contravened or perverted. For as my magos catharc was right to indicate – that is a heretekal path. Lord Myrmidex?

‘Spoken like the Omnissiah himself, Fabricator General,’ Engra Myrmidex said stiffly.

‘Archmagos Torquora?’ Voricar Trega asked, elevating the explorator with a single word. Monitoring his master, Haldron-44 Stroika detected an almost imperceptible hesitation before Omnid Torquora spoke. When he did, his words cut with steely acceptance.

‘All praise the Omnissiah…’

0011

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +OPUS MACHINA+

The lighter put down on the flight deck of the Ark Mechanicus vessel Opus Machina with all the slick urgency its cockpit-interfaced slave-servitor could manage. As the rear ramp descended, Haldron-44 Stroika strode out and across the hangar. His footsteps thudded into the deck plates with rhythmic insistence, forcing 10-Victro Tiberiax to hurry from the lighter to catch up.

As the two skitarii officers made their way through the hump-shuttles and landers being manoeuvred around the flight deck by tracked conveyers, the void beyond the hangar was obscured by the vessels of a Mechanicus fleet. Arkcruisers, explorator vessels. Mechanicus heavy frigates. Armed arkfreighters. Adamanticlads and forge tenders. The fleet was dominated, however, by troop carriers of the Legiones Skitarii, like the command carrier Basilika that Stroika and Tiberiax had just left.

<Is it wise to question the Fabricator Locum in this way, sir?> Tiberiax transmitted. Marching through the Ark Mechanicus was like traversing a small city. The vessel was bustling with tech-priests and underlings going about their staid business. Stroika strode through armies of servitors, deck menials, crew-constructs, enginseers and magi, taking crowded passages, stairwells and elevators up to the command deck. Skitarii were posted as sentries, members of the Rho-Micron 3-6-3 Hysparsii serving as cybernetic armsmen aboard the Opus Machina. The skitarii offered salutes in the form of noospheric blurts as the officers passed, acknowledging Haldron-44 Stroika’s rank and position as expeditionary commander.

<The fleet is fragmented,> Stroika returned, as Tiberiax followed him through the labyrinthine interior of the Mechanicus capital ship. <The Opus Machina might have successfully translated, but only half of the skitarii carriers made it through.>

<It was a rough warp translation,> Tiberiax admitted. <And the journey little better.>

<What of our mass conveyers and super-heavy transports? Our Titan battle groups? Our Ordinatus war machines?> Stroika said. <This is a catastrophe. And what of the archmagos?>

<I’m sure that they have just been delayed in the warp, Primus,> Tiberiax said, attempting to offer some kind of reassurance. <Archmagos Torquora and the rest of the fleet will join us presently.>

<If they haven’t been destroyed,> Stroika sent back, <or sent thousands of light years off course by some immaterial tempest or perversity of the warp. Even the Basilika’s Navigator admitted that the immeteorology was unusual.>

<Affirmative,> 10-Victro Tiberiax admitted. <Those are, of course, possibilities too. We can at least give thanks to the Omnissiah that the test device is safe on board. Can you imagine the loss? The first empyreal bomb to be crafted in centuries – claimed by the warp. Such a tragedy would not have been without irony.>

<That’s just it,> Haldron-44 Stroika told him as they arrived on the busy command deck. <I don’t think the Geller Device is still safe on board.>

SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +NISSIAH+

The command deck of the Opus Machina was crowded. Omni-task servitors whose torsos were fused into deck podia lined runebanks and bridge consoles. Lexmechanics walked up and down the screens and data repositories, pointing out anomalies and advising adjustments. Climbing up to a mezzanine deck supporting the command throne and hololithic altar, Haldron-44 Stroika saw the spindly silhouettes of the vessel’s techno-magi against the sickly glare of the Great Gyre.

The bridge’s great lancet screens were bleached with the warp storm’s amaranthine glow. A colossal phantasmic smear on the blackness of the void, the Great Gyre silently raged in a mind-numbing swirl. The riftspace across its vast border spumed and fluxed, not seeming to know what it was. With the Opus Machina and its Mechanicus fleet stationed above the angled plane of the warp storm, the screens also commanded a view of the reality-shredding maelstrom at the heart of the Great Gyre. Optics crackled and faded at such a sight, while Stroika’s filtered overlays sizzled and warped, offering nonsensical returns.

<It’s quite a sight – don’t you think, Primus?>

The phylactic intrusion caught Stroika off guard and it took a moment for the skitarii officer to run permissions and identifications. He swiftly found that he was being addressed by Engra Myrmidex and that the Fabricator Locum unsurprisingly had phylactic access to all lower cybernetic operatives. The skitarii legions attached to the mission were not only his to command – each individual soldier was his to interrogate and know.

<Lord Fabricator?>

<One could stare at it for hours, wondering what secrets hid within,> Myrmidex transmitted.

<Would that not be inadvisable, my lord?> Stroika said, some base part of his emotional matrix finding the intrusion unwelcome. Stroika and Magos Torquora had a long standing relationship. Torquora was a tech-priest – a holy man and prophet, who read in the galaxy and its workings the presence of the Omnissiah. Engra Myrmidex, so Torquora had suggested, was part of a stratum of forge world society which saw, in politicking and seized chances to serve, the opportunity to speak for the Machine-God rather than be His mouthpiece.

Torquora had warned Haldron-44 Stroika to take care around the Fabricator Locum; that the testing of the Geller Device was yet another of Myrmidex’s seized opportunities. That saddled with an all but immortal Fabricator General in Voricar Trega, Myrmidex desired power and promotion that Satzica Secundus could not offer him. With Myrmidex haunting his thoughts, Stroika tried to suppress such recollections.

<Go on, Stroika-unit,> the Fabricator Locum urged playfully. Standing with Tiberiax, who seemed to be phylactically engaged by one of the tri-sentience’s other brains, the skitarii officer watched Myrmidex drift up from behind him and join the magi gathered about the hololithic altar. The Fabricator engaged the tech-priests with his vox-hailer, conducting a conversation with Tiberiax, his techno-magi and Stroika all at once.

<Would not a god-fearing servant of the Omnissiah go mad staring at such insanity?> Stroika sent back.

<That is why I look at it through your eyes, Primus,> Engra Myrmidex told him. Stroika found that his optics were fixed once more on the mind-searing vision of the Great Gyre. The eye of the warp storm spewed forth a reality-curdling miasma that polluted the thought and tugged at the will.

<Sir,> Stroika said.

<Have you reviewed the mission files for the Gyre, Stroika-unit?>

<Yes, my lord, but…>

<Tell me,> Myrmidex said. <Why do you think we are here?>

<To test the Geller Device, my lord. To deploy the empyreal bomb and record the data.>

<But why here? Why not some other immaterial rift? The Mawstorm or the Charybdiseum?>

With his eyes and optics still fixed on the Great Gyre, Stroika’s signa-senses recorded returns of discomfort and pain, while the cogitators embedded within his skull grew warm.

<You want what is to be found inside the storm,> Stroika streamed back.

<What the storm took from us. Satzica Secundus. Velchanos Magna. Ptolomae Phall. A tripartite of Mechanicus forge worlds. The powerhouse of the Outer Reach. The envy of the segmentum. When the greenskin plague took Ptolomae Phall, did we not fight for our sister forge world? Did we not wrestle it back from the savage invader? You fought in that war. I have reviewed your records.>

<My lord, please.>

<When the warp storm erupted, when the Great Gyre laid claim to our tiny corner of the Martian Empire – what did we do? I’ll tell you, Stroika-unit. We did nothing. For the storm held us back and our forge-kin perished – or worse, were assimilated into the madness and corruption of those that call the warp their home. Now we have a weapon we can use against those that pollute forge world soil with their presence. A weapon that will blow a hole in the side of that storm and allow us to take back Velchanos Magna and its secrets.>

Stroika had been trying to turn his head. When he was abruptly allowed to do so, the sudden movement almost unbalanced him. 10-Victro Tiberiax reached out with his inhuman reflexes to steady his Primus. Blurting his appreciation, Stroika made for the hololithic altar. He blinked his eyes and shutter-cycled his lenses, attempting to rid his vision of the Great Gyre’s ruinous glare.

‘Primus,’ Engra Myrmidex announced through his vox-hailers. The Fabricator Locum turned on his duct fans, prompting the tech-priests and techno-magi gathered about the hololithic display to turn briefly also. ‘Thank you for coming across to the Opus Machina at such short notice. I trust your skitarii legions are ready for the coming action.’

Stroika and Tiberiax exchanged a glance. The Fabricator Locum hadn’t summoned them, but was now appropriating their attendance as if he had. Stroika went to answer but he suddenly felt the anger warming his chest fade. His personal concern for Omnid Torquora, the absent vessels of the fleet and the other half of his skitarii force died in his throat. Myrmidex was phylactically dialling back his capacity to feel emotion and process his all too human anxieties. The Fabricator Locum needed Haldron-44 Stroika the weapon on the command deck – unquestioning and ready to be deployed. He did not need the sentiments of the flesh and the concerns of a mere skitarius clouding the judgements of his tech-priests about the altar.

‘I have completed my tour of inspection,’ Stroika informed his priestly master. ‘All troop carriers are ready for deployment. My skitarii legions await your orders, Lord Fabricator.’

‘Very good, Primus,’ Engra Myrmidex said. ‘And they shall receive them shortly. Come forth. You are about to witness history in the making.’

Stroika obeyed. Striding across the mezzanine deck he turned to see Udexl Spontik, the tech-priest captain of the Opus Machina, hard-wired into the command throne. At the rail, Stroika saw Xyphon Rae, commander of the Rho-Micron 3-6-3 Hysparsii stationed on the vessel. Xyphon Rae saluted his Primus with a noospheric acknowledgement, which Stroika returned.

A shaft of hololithic representation blazed up from the altar, and tech-priests, logi and Mechanicus artisans gathered about the sizzling display. There were several that Stroika recognised – magi that the Fabricator Locum had favoured with positions of responsibility on the project to create and test the Geller Device. Argentae Nuvias was no longer a hololithic representation. The magos aethyricus stood flesh and iron on the mezzanine bridge, consulting with the artisans who had constructed the device from the STC template. Standing silently behind, Stroika could see that the Fabricator General had given Myrmidex his magos catharc for the mission. The octopoid nest of mechadendrites glowered at the skitarii commander from the depths of his hood and rippling robes.

Bridge alarms and some commotion from the busy rows of runebanks and consoles below prompted Engra Myrmidex to turn gently to his tech-priest captain.

‘Spontik?’

The tech-priest captain’s quad-array of optics lit up within his hood.

‘Augur arrays have detected an object exiting the perimeter of the storm cloud,’ Udexl Spontik droned.

‘Bring it up,’ Engra Myrmidex commanded. The hololithic display became a three-dimensional diagrammatic overlay of the void space between the storm’s perimeter and the Adeptus Mechanicus fleet. The display tracked an object moving at speed towards the Opus Machina.

‘Speed and mass match the servo-probe of the arkfreighter Nissiah,’ a tech-priest called, moving between the altar and the rail for runebank confirmations from below.

‘Identification confirmed, Fabricator Locum. It is the Nissiah’s servo-probe,’ another tech-priest chuntered in code.

‘General order,’ Engra Myrmidex said, his modulated voice echoing across the cavernous command deck. ‘Pass throughout the fleet. No vessel to open fire on that probe.’

‘Receiving a transmission, Lord Fabricator,’ a tinny voice called up from the lower command deck. It was a deck tech-priest, hovering over a lexmechanic and a pair of console-embedded bridge servitors.

‘Isolate,’ Myrmidex ordered. ‘Magos catharc. Have the transmission codescrubbed and band-filtered for corruptions. I don’t want anything getting through.’

‘Noospheric signal isolated and purified, my lord,’ the magos catharc announced as he slithered and coiled within his robes. ‘I have a single cleansed transmission. A pictolith, with auditory overlay and contextual codestream.’

‘Patch it through,’ the Fabricator Locum ordered.

The hololithic display rising up from the bridge altar warped and crackled into a three-dimensional freeze-frame of some horrific, static-laced entity. A code-screech ripped through the altar vox-hailers, like some damned thing trying to be free of its own datastream. As the pictolithic capture proceeded, the warp entity disappeared to reveal a hangar of the arkfreighter Nissiah.

The capture was shaky and degraded, as though the transmechanic charged with its recording were being thrown about the deck by quakes running through the vessel. The capture proceeded in silence for a moment before the cacophonous din of the Nissiah’s klaxons and alarms intruded. The monstrous boom of things trying to breach the thick hull of the arkfreighter could be heard, drowning out even the klaxons. Stroika’s equalisers isolated the sound of skitarii gunfire. Galvanic rifles firing at maximum wattage.

A tech-priest appeared before the capture, delivering a mission-log entry.

‘This is Magos Aethyricus Third-Class Dornelis Trask,’ the tech-priest reported. ‘Tech-priest Captain Oblonox is dead. The bridge is lost and the Nissiah no longer has steerage way. Fields have become overwhelmed and have collapsed. We have been boarded.’ The pict capture suddenly plunged deckwards as the vessel suffered another impact. When it returned to Magos Trask he was pointing the toolage of a long finger beyond. ‘Kill it… kill it,’ the tech-priest called, prompting the flash and stream of weapons fire. ‘I repeat, we have been boarded. Most of the commanding priesthood are dead. The skitarii armsmen cannot hold the ship. I undertake as my last duty the historic activation and test detonation of the Nissiah’s payload: the Geller Device.’

The vessel shook as Trask moved through the hangar, sending the tech-priest crashing through itinerant console-podia and instrumentation. Haldron-44 Stroika watched the magos aethyricus mumble prayers and rites of ignition as he worked at the side of a large, baroque construction. It looked like an orbital mine – all accretions, crackling nodes and trailing cables.

Stroika’s meme-coils and the flashing outline of his identification overlays told the skitarii officer that he was looking at the Geller Device. This was the empyreal bomb that Myrmidex, Omnid Torquora and a small legion of artisans had toiled to create on Satzica Secundus from the details provided on the recovered STC template. Stroika watched as Magos Trask calibrated the Geller Device, throwing switches and hauling down on the robust sequence of handles that armed the device. The magos aethyricus stumbled back as overlapping fields that fluxed and crackled from the nodes suddenly enveloped the device and grew in brightness and intensity.

‘I have armed the empyreal bomb for detonation,’ Trask said, speaking straight into the shaky capture. ‘Without access to the bridge, I do not know if we are on top of our target coordinates. Tech-priest Captain Oblonox reported that augur arrays and instrumentation are highly unreliable within the storm. It is my estimation that we are some way short of the Velchanos system. I am launching the mission-log aboard this servo-probe as arranged. Machine-God willing, it should survive the proximity of the detonation and ride the shock wave, accelerating towards the rendezvous. I cannot speak for the environmental corruptions or time-space dilations it might encounter.’

The pictolith shook violently and the searing flash of galvanic streams intensified. Stroika could hear fresh alarms and the excruciating sound of bulkheads being rent and beaten to mauled scrap.

‘Commend me to my forge temple,’ Magos Trask announced, ‘to my Lord Fabricators and the Great Maker – to whom my workings shall return.’

With those final words, the recording fizzled to nothing and the tech-priests found themselves looking at each other over the altar.

‘The servo-probe, Lord Fabricator?’ Tech-priest Captain Spontik asked from his command throne.

‘Magos catharc?’ the Fabricator Locum asked.

‘Polluted, my lord.’

‘Destroy it,’ Engra Myrmidex commanded.

‘Turrets,’ Spontik droned. ‘You have your target.’

Haldon Stroika advanced to the rail where the Fabricator Locum hovered on his angled duct fans. The skitarius watched as the servo-probe was blasted to fragments by the Ark Mechanicus’s supercharged forward turrets.

‘Where is it?’ Myrmidex demanded, his bank of optics and augurs directed at the bridge lancet screens. The tri-sentience of his conjoined brains pulsed with agitation, while the cogitator banks to which they were connected within the shell of his chassis chuntered away. ‘Data – we must have data.’

The Fabricator Locum stared into the madness of the raging warp storm. The smear of unreality that besmirched the void. The flashing fury of immaterial tempests. The raging static that arced and sizzled as two planes of existence fought to establish themselves.

‘Something!’ Myrmidex vox-blasted across the command deck. It was strange for Stroika to see a holy tech-priest of the Machine-God indulge his passion in such a way. The skitarii officer could only imagine that as Fabricator Locum of all of Satzica Secundus, Engra Myrmidex was used to controlling the events around him. Out in the cold blackness, at the mercy of the void and the unnatural disasters that intruded upon it, events were often beyond such control.

Myrmidex turned on his priestly advisors. ‘Well?’

Logos Voygann couldn’t help himself.

‘My lord,’ the walking cipher engine offered. ‘There is a 69.345 per cent chance that the Geller Device failed to realise its purpose.’

Several artisans piped up, refuting such a possibility. They were in the middle of assuring their Fabricator Locum that they had followed the specification detail in the recovered STC template precisely when Myrmidex interrupted them.

‘Logos Voygann,’ the Fabricator Locum said, ‘you are relieved.’

‘But, my Lord Fabricator…’

‘You may leave,’ Myrmidex hissed through his vox-hailers.

‘Sir,’ a deck tech-priest trumpeted up from below.

‘What?’ Myrmidex roared, his frustration echoing about the cavernous command deck.

‘Augur arrays show a disturbance in the immaterial cloud formations, my lord.’

The Fabricator Locum drifted back to the rail, up to where Haldron-
44 Stroika had forced himself to stare once again into the Great Gyre.

It was imperceptible at first. The briefest dot of an afterglow. Gradually, as the skitarii officer’s optics focused and filters cycled, he began to appreciate an opening in the swirling maelstrom. As the black of the void beyond the warp storm showed through, it became clear that an area within the galactic south-west quadrant of the monstrous storm was returning to reality.

‘Data, data, data,’ Engra Myrmidex called, his magi and artisans returning to their runebanks and instruments.

‘Readings suggest the re-establishment of dimensional equilibrium.’

‘A rimward area of the storm is suffering instability.’

‘Area expanding, Fabricator Locum.’

‘Geller field signatures confirmed, my lord. We are observing the effects of the empyreal bomb.’

Stroika and the Fabricator Locum watched as a rolling front of erupting reality coursed through the warp storm. Like a drop of ink on parchment, soaking and spreading outwards, the blast wave of the empyreal bomb pulsed powerful Geller waves out through the storm. The same life-preserving fields that encapsulated warp capable vessels during immaterial travel now expanded, establishing a bubble of reality in the south-west corner of the Great Gyre. Through the lancet screens it appeared as though some colossal, void-cruising creature had taken a huge bite out of the storm.

‘Tech-priest Captain,’ a helm servitor droned from the command deck. ‘Warning. Shockwave approaching.’

Haldron-44 Stroika looked at the smeared disturbance of the Great Gyre. The field pulse of the detonating Geller Device was now spreading unseen through the void, detected only by the Ark Mechanicus’s augur arrays and instrumentation. The skitarii commander instinctively reached out for the mezzanine rail.

‘To port!’ Tech-priest Captain Udexl Spontik called from his throne. ‘Helm answer.’

‘What are you doing?’ the Fabricator Locum countered. ‘Enact evasive manoeuvres.’

For a moment, confusion swept through the bridge of the Ark Mechanicus. It was an unusual phenomenon among the command deck crew, and all the more disorientating for it.

‘Emergency override 7690-8832,’ the tech-priest captain said, the modulations of his voice urgent and vox-hailed across the chamber. This the deck tech-priests and bridge servitors understood. Protocol. Contingency. ‘To port. Helm answer. We must ride out the wave prow-on.’

Stroika could almost hear the workings of the Fabricator Locum’s cogitators within his armoured shell. For the moment, Engra Myrmidex remained silent.

‘Advise engineering to engage Geller field protections,’ Udexl Spontik commanded.

‘Tech-priest captain,’ Haldron-44 Stroika said. ‘The carriers. The fleet.’

Spontik nodded, stabbing at the studs of a vox-system set in the arm of his throne. ‘Transmechanics, pass the word.’

With his bionic gauntlets fixed like anchors to the rail, Stroika felt the Opus Machina tremble beneath him. The Ark Mechanicus was huge and not used to such treatment. The bridge consoles erupted with a cacophonous din. As the invisible shockwave reached the mighty Mechanicus vessel, sparks fountained from runebanks and the command deck lamps flashed to an emergency red.

Stroika leaned to see through the side lancet windows. Enhancing his optics he could make out the shape of the Basilika and other skitarii carriers riding out the Geller shockwave, prow-on like the flagship.

‘Damage report,’ Udexl Spontik demanded. Stroika listened as deck tech-priests and servitors listed the minor malfunctions and disruptions suffered by the mighty Ark Mechanicus. Although the skitarii commander was no expert in the workings of such a vast vessel, the damage seemed light. Spontik ordered, ‘Have the fleet tech-priest captains report in.’

As the laborious drone of listed repairs and the observed protocols of vessels calling in their status went on, Haldon-44 Stroika’s whirring optics were drawn once again to the warp storm. It was the Great Gyre no more. With a quarter of its dread maelstrom cleansed from the void, the cyclonic nightmare of its form had been disrupted. It was truly a wonder to behold and the skitarius offered thanks to the Omnissiah. Once again, an example of His great works had driven back the forces of ignorance and superstition – blasting the corruptions of the warp storm back to the beyond. Stroika thought of Omnid Torquora. When the magos explorator arrived he would be secretly furious that he had missed the successful test detonation of the Geller Device.

‘Have the augurs and magnascopes begin an audit of the region uncovered by the device,’ the Fabricator Locum ordered.

‘Known effects already being catalogued, my lord,’ one of Myrmidex’s magi reported.

‘The region uncovered by the blast seems to be holding its integrity,’ another told him.

‘Dimensional matrix established and empyreal instabilities fixed,’ the magos catharc said, slithering back and forth between runebanks on the mezzanine deck. ‘For now. There is no data to establish how long that will last, whether it will last at all or whether the Geller effect is now a permanent phenomenon in the region.’

‘Then we should not waste any time,’ Engra Myrmidex said, drifting back and forth on his duct fans. His nest of optic-arrays and augurs cycled, extending and focusing on the devastation he had created in the void beyond.

‘You aim to proceed into the warp storm, my lord?’ Haldron-44 Stroika said. ‘Without waiting for Magos Torquora and the rest of the fleet?’

‘I want an audit of all the worlds uncovered by the Geller Device,’ Myrmidex ordered, ignoring Stroika. ‘Check them against historical charts for the region, pre-dating the emergence of the storm.’

‘Cataloguing, Fabricator Locum,’ the tech-priest captain of the Opus Machina said. ‘However, the Primus has made a valid point. Any exploration of the worlds within the revealed region would be extremely hazardous. The area could return to its previous instability about the fleet.’

‘And you command but half of that fleet,’ Haldron-44 Stroika cautioned. ‘My lord, would it not be better to wait for Magos Torquora? The god-machines of our Titan battle groups? The blessed war machines of the Centurio Ordinatus?’

‘By then we will have more data, Fabricator Locum,’ Udexl Spontik said. ‘The region might have settled.’

Engra Myrdidex remained silent. Haldron-44 Stroika, 10-Victro Tiberiax and the tech-priest captain of the Ark Mechanicus exchanged grim glances.

‘Have you found it?’ the Fabricator Locum seethed, his modulated voice shot through with static. His magi knew exactly what he was referring to. The real reason Engra Myrmidex had desired the honour of test detonating the Geller Device. The real reason he had come to the Great Gyre equipped for war.

‘Quadrant Beta~Phi/Gamma, my lord,’ a magos reported.

‘Sector 17-52,’ a second tech-priest clarified.

‘The Nissiah detonated her payload prematurely,’ the magos catharc told his Mechanicus master.

‘Have such failure added to the service records of Tech-priest Captain Oblonox and Magos Aethyricus Trask,’ the Fabricator Locum said.

‘Very good, my lord,’ the magos catharc replied. ‘Velchanos Magna located.’

‘Where?’

‘On the detonation perimeter, Fabricator Locum,’ the magos catharc said. ‘The Nissiah fell somewhat short of her target.’

‘You’re sure it’s the forge world?’ Engra Myrmidex said.

‘Historical charts match position and pattern of satellite distribution, my lord,’ the magos catharc confirmed.

‘Fabricator Locum,’ Haldron-44 Stroika said. ‘Please, listen to your tech-priests. The forge world is beyond our reach.’

‘I never said that,’ the magos catharc hissed. ‘It is located on the Geller pulse perimeter – on the storm front.’ He looked to his Fabricator Locum. ‘Nothing, however, is beyond the Machine-God’s reach – as we have just proven.’

‘My lord…’ Udexl Spontik began.

‘Yes, tech-priest captain,’ the Fabricator Locum shot back. ‘I know, extremely hazardous. Bring the magnascope capture up on the screens.’

With enough of a hesitation to communicate his disagreement, Udexl Spontik ordered a deck servitor to process the Fabricator Locum’s command. The lancet screens crackled from the crispness of the void to the pixellation of extreme magnification. There, before the gathered magi of Satzica Secundus, was the blurry, misshapen smear of a planet. Their sister forge world, Velchanos Magna.

As the magos catharc had informed them, the mighty forge world was located on the detonation perimeter. About the planet, the cold cleanliness of the void met the sizzling pollution of the warp storm. The fluxspace was stained a mind-aching magenta by the immateriality of the Great Gyre that raged beyond.

Engra Myrmidex glided about on his duct fans, the tech-priests and crew of the mezzanine deck falling under the searing gaze of his optics.

‘That is Velchanos Magna,’ the Fabricator Locum said, his attention settling on Haldron-44 Stroika. ‘Its secrets – like those of the Stella-Xenithica – wait to be reclaimed by the servants of the Omnissiah. We shall cleanse its surface of the unreal, the unbeliever and those that would pervert the purity of the Machine-God’s purpose. Primus Stroika, Tech-priest Captain Spontik. I charge you with such a hallowed responsibility. You will use the forces and materiel in your possession and retake that forge world. You will do this for Satzica Secundus and to the greater glory of us all. I demand this of you as you will demand of your subordinates. As the Omnissiah demands of me. This is the Covenant of the Machine, and as such, cannot be broken.’

Once more Haldron-44 Stroika felt the phylactic intrusion of Engra Myrmidex. The Mechanicus overlord was in his mind, his cogitator coils and the Omnissiah-appeasing designation of his purpose. His very being became one with the Fabricator Locum’s cold requirements.

Staring at Myrmidex and the storm-wracked forge world beyond, he felt his objections and calculations melt away. He became the unquestioning weapon wielded. No more caring of consequence than the machine-spirit of a rifle whose trigger had been pulled.

‘Yes?’ Engra Myrmidex put to the magi on the deck.

‘Yes, Fabricator Locum,’ they answered back, filling the command deck with the boom of their obedience.

0100

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +PURGE+

The flight deck was in chaos. As Haldron-44 Stroika strode across the open space, he tucked his officer’s baton under one arm. The skitarii commander’s coils burned with the traffic being relayed through them. Stroika had been rewarded for his part in the discovery of the Perborea STC template with greater responsibilities. Every skitarii soldier and support construct aboard the fleet’s carriers and arkships was under his authority. Legions were his to command. Deploying so many cybernetic soldiers, their associated crawlers and Ironstrider engines was no easy task, even for one of the Machine-God’s favoured servants. The slick choreography and unison with which the skitarii deployed and carried out their deadly duties required drill, communication and absolute obedience.

The helter-skelter dispersal of forces such as the Astra Militarum lacked the precision and fearless commitment of the skitarii. It was lax, improvident and Stroika suspected cost as many lives in getting down to the surface as the Adeptus Mechanicus spent securing a landing site in enemy hands. Stroika almost felt sorry for the machine-spirits forced to operate alongside such soldiers.

Every skitarius knew his place in the wider scheme of battle. Each was a cog set within the teeth of another, turning in silent synchronicity. The banter and fearful smiles of Guardsmen had no place aboard a skitarii drop-ship. Emotional engagements were dialled back by the fleet’s priestly overlords, meaning that even in the midst of an assault, with havoc unfolding about them, skitarii reviewed their protocols, calibrated targeters and uploaded strategic overlays.

The Primus stepped forward as a column of towering ballisterii engines walked past, followed by an Onager Dunecrawler, chewing up the deck with its crustacean-like legs. An alpha jogged by, offering Stroika the blurt of a salute, his metal footfalls in rhythm with the skitarii vanguard that ran behind him. With radium carbines leant against one armoured shoulder and trench-cloaks flapping behind, the gleaming soldiers were an impressive sight. Beneath their crackling pack generators, battleware and war-plate, their poisoned flesh told a different story. Missing teeth. Bleeding ports. Radioactive burns like a camouflage pattern across pallid flesh.

Stroika would have recorded commendations for the impressive vanguard skitarii, but for the fact that beyond engaging automated tallies and sigil recognition, the skitarii commander was barely aware of the deck.

Stroika was in phylactic communion with scores of skitarii officers across the Basilika and the advancing formation of troop carriers. The Augon, the Cyberion and the Treaty of Olympus were all part of the first wave and, like the Basilika, were loading clades of cybernetic soldiers, vehicles, heavy weapons and materiel aboard bulk landers and orbital drop-ships that would put deployments of the Astra Militarum to shame.

Uncaring of claustrophobia and the lack of such personal space as even a Guardsman would require, Adeptus Mechanicus drop-ships could carry nearly twice the force deployment of an Astra Militarum transport. On top of that, the drop-ships and bulk landers themselves were larger. Once loaded, the monstrous craft were carried across the flight deck on parallel columns of ceiling rails that were built into the superstructure of the skitarii carriers. Once they had left the deck and were held over their planetary destination, the drop-ships released their anchor clamps and thundered down into an orbital descent, each followed moments later by another craft and another. It was this procedure that Haldron-44 Stroika was overseeing, not only across the first-wave carriers but across a second and third. As ranking alpha, Stroika led from the front with the first skitarii to get planetside. He had left 10-Victro Tiberiax in charge of the second wave and Nalode Deka 871 – a cold creature, even for a skitarius – with responsibility for the third.

The ear-splitting sound of a klaxon roared across the flight deck. At the same moment, Stroika received a priority stream from the command bridge that superseded his other overlays and interactions. It was Tech-priest Captain Pharad, alerting the skitarii commander that the Basilika had almost achieved orbit around Velchanos Magna.

It hadn’t been an easy approach. The system was strewn with ship wreckage, the dereliction of void-docks and the macroscaffolding of long-abandoned experiments. With the Opus Machina and several arkcruisers shielding the Mechanicus transports, forge tenders and escort carriers, the Fabricator Locum had authorised the fleet’s complement of heavy frigates and destroyers to punch through the system defences.

The Opus Machina had intercepted augur station communications from a moonlet orbiting a red gas giant on the outskirts of the Velchanos system. The scrapcode was heavy with corruption and had alerted the forge world to the approaching danger. The Fabricator Locum had ordered the stations left alone, favouring the speed of an assault directly on Velchanos Magna.

The Ark Mechanicus could not avoid the lance blasts of a sentry ship, however, rising from the upper atmospheric miasma of another bilious gas giant. The black beast of a ship was spiked with vanes, antennae and boarding spikes, and had been hidden from augurs in the dense radiation of the planet. From the look of the heavy cruiser and the sickness of its streamed signatures, it appeared as though Velchanos Magna had continued operating as a hub of industry, construction and maintenance, despite being claimed by the Great Gyre so long ago.

The Opus Machina took the balestream across its port flank but returned fire with its monstrous plasma batteries. As the mauled cruiser fell back into the bile-swirling storms of the gas giant, the Ark Mechanicus had ploughed on. Despatching its blockade-breaking spear tip of frigates, adamanticlads and torpedo-launching destroyers, the Mechanicus fleet surged corewards. The Opus Machina and the skitarii fleet ships negotiated the debris and flashing wreckage of enemy vessels that had been blasted apart or rammed in half by the Mechanicus ships.

The fleet suffered its own losses, however. On the bridge of the Basilika, Stroika had watched fleet tenders and forge ships descend on the frigate Auxilicron and the adamanticlad Mallix with the aim of making void repairs to the crippled vessels. On the approach to Velchanos Magna, the fleet ran parallel to a debris trail that tumbled through the void behind the forge world. Colossal chunks of rock, the size of small moons and rolling with the irregularity of boulders, housed stations, gun platforms, void-beached hulks, silos, anchored mines and electromagnetic nets that sizzled with their powered intention to snag approaching vessels.

Fighting a running battle between the twisted blockaders and the macro-weapon emplacements launching salvoes at the fleet from the debris field, there was little space to manoeuvre. While the troop carriers – carrying their precious skitarii invasion force – thundered on, the Opus Machina and passing arkcruisers blasted the defence installations to pieces. Mechanicus frigates engaged system ships at point-blank range and, vessel by destroyed enemy vessel, the fleet made its indomitable approach.

Stroika pointed his baton at passing cohorts of skitarii soldiers, tallying their identifications. As the Basilika manoeuvred into position above the forge world it was imperative that all of his constructs and materiel were on board the drop-ships. Rangers from the Xenris Phase 404/De-Phracta began filing onto the flight deck, counted in by their attending alpha. Their arc rifles and transuranic weapons were slung. Like the vanguard skitarii before them, the rangers jogged across the deck with a loping, heavy-set choreography.

The rangers began assembling in front of the Nuncio, the drop-ship in whose shadow Haldron-44 Stroika was standing. The monstrous craft’s engines roared to life and cycled with a deep chug that could be felt in the stomach.

‘Alpha Kertz, get those rangers on board,’ Stroika voxed across the hangar.

‘Yes, Primus,’ Kertz answered. There was no embarrassment or resentment in the skitarii officer’s words – only obedience. Like Stroika, Kertz’s emotional capacities had been faded in favour of aegis protocols and acquisition wetware. He thought only of the coming battle and his rangers’ preparation for such hostilities.

<Master Ansiss, I want those crawlers stowed and secured,> Stroika transmitted through the din to a skitarii officer pacing a trio of lumbering vehicles. <Do you read me? Lively, now.>

<Immediately, Primus.>

Slipping his baton into his belt, Stroika approached the Nuncio. Grabbing hold of a ladder on the side of the rumbling craft, the skitarii commander hauled his combat chassis up the armoured hull towards the cockpit. Halfway up he stopped and turned. The Xenris Phase 404/De-Phracta were still filing in from the barracks decks and armoury, while the crawlers, under the instructions of Master Ansiss, were reversing into the underbelly bay.

Stroika would have cursed himself, if he had such a mind to. While the loading of the drop-ships took place in a silent and organised fashion, the process was still too slow in the skitarii commander’s estimation. With the Basilika descending into position, he could feel in his workings the battle between the pull of the forge world’s gravity and the carrier’s artificial own.

All drop-ships should have been loaded and ready for launch by now. In his present state of mind, however, such disappointment found the form of a file-registered notation. An analysis deferred to post-operation, when the Primus resolved to review embarkation procedures, armoury rotation and access to the hangar from the barracks decks.

The skitarius felt a shudder pass through the troop carrier. Climbing the ladder, Stroika felt the Basilika bank harshly. As he had proceeded with the important duty of assembling his legions for battle – both on board the Basilika and in phylactic communion with commanders on other carriers – the fleet had punched through the forge world’s system defences. The Opus Machina and her arkcruiser consorts had blasted and broadsided their way through the twisted system ships and spiked monitors that ran down on the Mechanicus fleet. Destroyers had launched streams of torpedoes into orbital mines and debris-mounted silos, turning the gargantuan fragments of rock and embedded installations that tumbled after the forge world into showers of stone and scrap. Mechanicus heavy frigates soaked up the firepower of orbital defence platforms and system ships, shielding the skitarii carriers from the worst of the damage.

As the Basilika rolled, with fat beams of energy criss-crossing the blackness of the void outside, the flight deck was granted a vertiginous first view of Velchanos Magna. Stroika’s overlays danced with diagrams and flashing notations as he paused on the ladder. There was so much to take in.

The forge world was a planetary horror. Thousands of years buried in the insanity of the Great Gyre had turned Satzica Secundus’s sister forge into a tainted monstrosity. It was an insult to the Machine-God to whom it had originally been dedicated. Bathing in the furnace-light of a spent star, its blessed dirt now crackled with the saturations of the warp. Its surface-smothering industriascape had become a twisted labyrinth of dark labours, while the mighty forge temples that once reached into dusky Velchanosian skies now burned with the balefire of the beyond.

Stroika soaked up the deviant enormity of the vision. The nightmare surface of ventscrapers and smoke stacks roared hellfire and belched spiritual pollutions. The stately forges had now become the perverted palaces of the Dark Mechanicum. Daemon-possessed machinery transported raw materials and weapons, vehicles and warrior constructs across the planet like plagues of spindly, black insects.

Worst of all, Velchanos Magna seemed to have experienced a great physical calamity during its many years of isolation, a planetary affliction born of a malfunctioning weapon or terrible experiment. One quarter of the forge world was missing, blasted to the gargantuan chunks of rubble that tumbled in its orbiting wake. Velchanos Magna now harboured an open wound.

The ragged gash running down the side of the forge world was busy with platforms, macroscaffolding and skeletal dry docks. The structures were set within the exposed rock and the installation-blistered cliff face of the gaping abyss. Half-constructed within shipyards were monstrous vessels, sitting within black scaffolding like fat flies cocooned within a spider’s web. Some of the ships followed recognised, if long forgotten, patterns of architecture. Others were heretekal deviations and experimental craft. Most horrific of all, however, were the abominate craft that almost seemed alive within the construction yards. The very metal of the vessels appeared possessed by otherworldly entities that gave the ships a fell life of their own.

Below the shipyards and constructions, Stroika could see the infernal glow of the planetary core. It was a sea of molten iron, slurping, burning and churning. Even from orbit, the forge world’s heart seemed to be possessed of some daemonic intelligence of its own, forming mind-scalding visions and monstrous faces in the liquid metal of its damnation.

Velchanos Magna was truly a world long lost and damned. A planet taken from the Adeptus Mechanicus and twisted into a dark forge that served the needs of the daemon, the heretek and those tech-pledged to Chaos.

Alarms began to screech across the flight deck. Sodium arc lamps flashed yellow and Stroika felt the upload of contextual data. It was from the command deck. Tech-priest Captain Pharad had sent warning of ground-to-orbit ordnance launched from the forge world below.

<All skitarii board your nearest drop-ship,> the Primus transmitted on all streams and channels. <Drop-ships Nuncio, Vegra-Maximon, Lucifex, Sumptal IV, prepare for launch.>

Pulling himself up the ladder, Haldron-44 Stroika made for the cockpit of the Nuncio. Cracking comets of electromagnetic fury roared up past the troop carrier. Blasted from nightmarish silos set amongst the slave mills and manufacturing districts of the crowded forge world’s surface, the crackling bolts of the energy blasts seemed to screech, arc and spit with a rabid, infernal fury. Another seared up along the flank of the Basilika, grazing the troop carrier’s hull plating. As Stroika reached the cockpit side-hatch, he heard the wail of a proximity alert. Instinctively locking the fingers of his bionic gauntlets about the rungs of the ladder, the skitarius readied himself for the damage to come.

<All skitarii, brace for impact,> Stroika ordered across all mindlinked streams and synced frequencies. <All skitarii, brace for impact.>

The Primus fully expected to be thrown from the side of the drop-ship, but the physical shock wave of a weapon striking the underside of the troop carrier never came. His cogitator coils sizzled with possibilities. His overlays streamed with data and the flash of diagrammatical representations. For a moment, Stroika wrestled with the likelihood that they had not in fact been hit at all and that the proximity warning had triggered prematurely.

Exploratory bolts of rancid energy found their way up the side of the carrier and probed the flight deck floor like monstrous digits. Stroika knew that he had been wrong on all counts. The electromagnetic blast was not a crippling volley fired up from the forge world’s surface at all. Cycling through filters, Stroika watched the blasts crackle furiously across the deck and came to realise that the balls of lightning were not weapons as such, but daemonic entities. Separating off, streams of infernal energy snapped and arced across the deck, jumping from one piece of equipment to another. Bulk loaders and powerlifters assumed a horrific life of their own. Their machine-spirits transmitted miserable, codified screams as the daemons devoured them and overloaded the intricate workings of the vehicles.

<Do not engage,> Stroika ordered, but it was too late. Rangers of the Xenris Phase 404/De-Phracta, entering the hangar and as yet to embark their designated drop-ships, fired on the boarding entities. On Alpha Kertz’s orders, a cohort of skitarii blasted the rogue hangar machines to smouldering wreckage, forcing the daemons to arc from the floor, to the ceiling, to the hangar wall and into a fresh selection of equipment.

The skitarii laid down suppressive fire for their compatriots who were still running for the drop-ship ramp at Kertz’s command. The daemonic entities took possession of a cluster of heavy weaponry waiting to be loaded onto the rail-mounted drop-ship behind the Nuncio. A neutron laser projector suddenly came to life, blazing trails of blinding light across the deck. As skitarii rangers ran for the drop-ship they were cut in half by the pinpoint intensity of the powerful weapon.

Electrical arcs cascaded along the walls of the hangar, feeling their way into the circuitry and power lines housed within. The flight deck bulkhead slammed down, decapitating an unfortunate ranger who was caught below the descending door. With their compatriots trapped in the corridor beyond, skitarii of the Xenris Phase 404/De-Phracta worked to manually crank the bulkhead door open.

<Get out of there!> Stroika commanded, but within moments the electromagnetic daemons were amongst the rangers. As Alpha Kertz backed across the flight deck, firing his arc rifle and dragging as many skitarii as he could muster, the entities crackled and spat through the rest of his cohort. Jumping from sparking weapon to weapon, the daemons overloaded the power packs, turning skitarii rifles into small hand-held bombs. As rangers dropped to the deck in a succession of eye-searing explosions, other cybernetic soldiers had the presence of mind to abandon their weapons.

This did not stop the daemons streaming straight into the skitarii themselves, however. Directing the remainder of his units into the troop bay of the Nuncio, Alpha Kertz had to watch as the infernal entities flooded the cybernetic workings of his soldiers. One by one, Kertz – and through him, Stroika – felt themselves cut off from the ranger units. Possessed by the daemon entities, the skitarii drew arc pistols from their belt holsters and placed the muzzles to the sides of their helmets. A sequence of blasts and dropping bodies worked its way through their number, as one by one the cybernetic soldiers unloaded streams of death straight into their own augmented skulls.

Haldron-44 Stroika swung through the cockpit hatch legs-first. The drop-ship cockpit was small, busy and cramped, with only enough room for a vox-station situated behind a chair-interfaced servitor-pilot. The servo-skull Phrenos~361 sat atop an interface column, waiting for its master, while Cytor 2-Circadii – ranking alpha amongst the skitarii soldiers being transported aboard the Nuncio – climbed the troop bay ladder.

‘Circadii, get those bay doors closed,’ Stroika ordered.

‘But, Primus…’ the alpha said.

‘Right now, skitarius,’ Stroika said, sending the officer back down the ladder. ‘Pilot – you are ordered to make way. All haste, if you please.’

The ghoulish servitor’s teeth chattered between its drawn, black lips. Acknowledging the skitarii commander with a chunter of code, the pilot-servitor moved its digit-interfacia across the cockpit instrumentation.

Returning to the open hatch, Stroika could see that the remaining skitarii of the Xenris Phase 404/De-Phracta were dead. The electromagnetic daemons were nowhere to be seen. The bulkhead door had reopened, however, and the air of the flight deck was being sucked down it. Stroika saw crates and skitarii bodies dragged towards the howling maelstrom of the passageway.

The Primus could barely imagine the hell that was being unleashed on the barracks decks and beyond. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. As the Nuncio rocked on its launch-rail, Stroika realised that the daemonic entities had reached the armoury. The screeching evacuation of air from the hangar promptly ceased as gouts of flame, arcing electricity and pranging frag roared from the opening.

Sealing the cockpit hatch, Stroika stumbled back over to the vox-station. The skitarii commander snatched up a communications line. Stabbing the interface into a haptic port in the side of his helm, he slammed his combat chassis down in the station chair.

‘Calling all drop-craft awaiting disembarkation aboard the Basilika and the carriers beyond,’ Stroika voxed, strapping himself into his seat. ‘This is a command override – Delta/Iota 9-37-64 – you are to ignore your launch protocols. Launch now with whatever troops and materiel you have stowed. I repeat. Launch now. This is an order to purge. Acknowledge.’

As the Nuncio rumbled along its launch-rail, acknowledgement signatures piped up across the vox. The Basilika began to roll, sending a kaleidoscopic blur of the heretek forge world whirring before the cockpit.

Initiating phylactic communion, Haldron-44 Stroika attempted to mindlink to Tech-priest Captain Pharad or any of the skitarii officers left aboard. All he could manage was the horror of a few seconds spent experiencing the dying moments of tech-priests and cybernetic soldiers. Sizzling through static overlay after overlay, Stroika caught glimpses of the decimated armoury, bodies floating through the zero-gravity of the airless barracks and daemon entities thrashing through the runebanks and servitors of the carrier’s small bridge.

<Pharad,> Stroika transmitted, but all the tech-priest captain had for him was the insanity of a man possessed. Smashing his cranial augmentations against the command deck wall, Pharad had lost himself to the daemon that flooded his conduits and workings. Stroika caught a glimpse of brains and bloody bionics as the tech-priest captain indulged the insanity of his daemon puppet-master. Hearing the code-laced corruption of the infernal entity whispering to him through the phylactic interface, Stroika broke off the connection.

Jumping to the phylactic consciousness of the tech-priest majoris, Stroika found that Magos Androvac and his enginseers were all either dead or dying. Blinking between their static-shot feeds, Stroika saw that the engineering section was bleached with bright, white light. His optic overlays were crowded with code and updates. He searched through the datastreams coursing through his cogitator. His mind was swarming with redundant feeds from all over the Basilika, mixed in with drop-ship acknowledgements and clarification requests from skitarii officers aboard the other troop carriers – including 10-Victro Tiberiax. He had no time to answer.

Amongst a meme-repository of logged items and updata, Haldron-44 Stroika located the confirmation that he had feared finding. Magos Androvac’s final assessment, transmitted only moments before his death. Confirmation that the carrier’s sub-light plasma drive was in the process of overloading. The daemonic entities would not stop until all on board the Basilika were dead. Stroika couldn’t let that happen.

‘All Basilika-registered drop-craft,’ Stroika voxed, ‘you are ordered to disengage your rail-anchors. I repeat. Break launch sequence and initiate drop immediately.’

The servitor-pilot of the Nuncio turned its head, giving Stroika a view of a single dead eye and yellowed teeth.

‘Do it,’ he told the servitor. The drone chuntered code back at the Primus, warning him of the impact to come.

‘All skitarii,’ Stroika called across the internal vox, flicking to the troop bay channel. ‘Brace!’

Stroika felt the familiar leap of the disengagement in the pit of his stomach. Releasing its anchored hold on the rail, the Nuncio fell the short distance between the hangar ceiling and the flight deck. The impact shuddered through the drop-ship’s superstructure, up through the troop bay, the cockpit and the vox-station chair. Tinny alarms and flashing lights erupted from the cockpit instrumentation but the pilot-servitor moved its fingers slickly across switches and studs, silencing the Nuncio.

Without the landing gear lowered, the drop-ship bounced a little off the damaged deck before sliding on its underbelly towards the hangar opening. Grabbing the support handles, Haldron-44 Stroika tightened his harness. As the mesh of a cargo underbay crumpled beneath the weight of the monstrous drop-ship, the craft caught on the lip of the depression and began to tip.

Allowing himself a moment of disconcertion, Stroika felt the craft lurch forward. The cockpit tilted and before the skitarii commander knew it, the Nuncio had tumbled straight out of the rolling hangar nose first, into a thundering freefall.

Hauling on heavy-duty hydraulic handles and plungers, the pilot-servitor began the process of negotiating the plummeting drop-ship out of its dive. Strategically firing airbrakes and flaps as the Nuncio shot down through the upper atmosphere of the forge world, the drone brought the nose of the drop-ship up and fired the descent thrusters – all the while wearing a rictus grin. Stroika could hear the boom of the powerful engine-quad all about them, fighting the force of gravity that was dragging them at horrific speed towards the surface of Velchanos Magna. As the Nuncio levelled out and slowed its descent, Stroika felt that he could risk moving about the cockpit.

‘Troop bay,’ Stroika voxed, ‘Acknowledge.’

‘Troop bay, aye,’ Cytor 2-Circadii returned.

‘Status?’

‘Ready for disembarkation, Primus,’ the alpha told him. ‘On your mark.’

‘The order is given – weapons online.’

‘Weapons online, aye,’ 2-Circadii said.

Unplugging from the vox-station and unbuckling himself from the chair, Haldron-44 Stroika took several anchored steps across the cramped cockpit. The pilot-servitor didn’t even seem to notice him. Craning his neck and looking up through the canopy, Stroika stared back at the Basilika.

One by one, the carrier’s skitarii-laden complement of hulking drop-ships were falling from the port side of the yawing vessel. He watched the Sumptal IV, the Vegra-Maximon and the Lucifex all pull out of their tumbling descents, followed by successive ranks of following drop-craft. Two drop-ships suffered a minor collision upon clearing the carrier, while craft designated to drop from the starboard hangar opening were forced to slip from the launch-rail to the deck and slide backwards the length of the flight deck. It seemed to make little difference to the tumble they found themselves in upon disembarkation.

‘Not exactly protocol,’ Stroika muttered, satisfied that the drop-ships were clear. Not a moment too soon, as the starlit void suddenly blazed white as the sub-light plasma drive of the Basilika went critical and detonated. Cycling through optical filters, Stroika watched the skitarii troop carrier blast itself to a billion shards of voidscrap, prompting evasions and emergency manoeuvring from the other transports.

As Stroika’s optics fell on the Opus Machina, holding station with several arkcruisers above the carrier deployment, the skitarii commander attempted to make phylactic contact with the flagship’s command deck.

<Ark Mechanicus,> Stroika transmitted, <Ark Mechanicus, be aware. Ground-to-orbital ordnance. Ground-to-orbital ordnance. Immaterial infection. Be advised, haul off to a safe distance.>

Given the nature of his report, Stroika expected to contact Udexl Spontik or the magos catharc. Instead he found the Fabricator Locum inside his head.

<Stroika-unit,> Engra Myrmidex said, his words like thought-crafted steel. <Status report.>

<We lost the Basilika and her crew to immaterial infection,> the Primus told him. <We have deployed at 82 per cent fighting strength. I have ordered the rest of the skitarii legions to initiate insertion prematurely also. The mission proceeds as normal, Fabricator Locum.>

<Make sure that it does, Stroika-unit.>

<My lord,> the skitarii commander said. <Naval resources, plus the encountered system and planetary contingencies, point to a determined defence.>

<What is your point, Stroika-unit?>

<Only, Lord Fabricator, that Velchanos Magna has not been idle in its isolation,> Stroika transmitted back. <The forge world seems at the height of its defensive and productive powers. Are you sure that you wish to commit our ground forces without reinforcements?>

Engra Myrmidex sent back nothing for a few moments.

<Just do your duty,> the Fabricator Locum streamed finally. <Take the planet for me, for your Fabricator General and forge world, for the Machine-God. Just take back what belongs to the Holy Mechanicus.>

<Yes, my lord.>

0101

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +COUNTDOWN+

The pilot-servitor blurted a sequence of code back into the compartment, which amounted to little more than an obligatory caution. The drone didn’t care whether its advice was heeded or whether Haldron-44 Stroika brained himself against the cockpit wall during a rough landing. It delivered the warning anyway.

‘Ready, thirty seconds,’ Stroika voxed down into the troop compartment. ‘Ready all. Ready all. Officers make preparations for disembarkation. Pattern Ensconica. Establish a fall-back perimeter about the landing site, extending skirmish lines about the different sites to establish a foothold and base of operations. Review your mission parameters. Offer your prayers. Observe your screed. You are the Machine-God’s indomitable will in this benighted place. Omnissiah willing, we shall return this world to His empire. Stroika out.’

The descent had been a test. Nuncio had been the point of a thunderbolt, dropping out of the heavens upon Velchanos Magna. One hundred and two skitarii drop-ships had managed to clear their troop carriers, establishing vector columns and descent patterns to avoid being intercepted in the lower atmosphere.

Such precautions hadn’t stopped the searing tracer fire of macrocannon emplacements piercing up through the spiralling columns of drop-ships, or a temple-mounted defence laser quad sending a fat beam of sickly energy at the formation. The blistering stream of light burned the Steel Promise from the sky and went on to make a lucky strike against the hull plating of the manoeuvring arkcruiser Venturossa. The electromagnetic blasts of daemonic entities continued to erupt from silos set in the industriascape below. One such blast struck the drop-ship Stentorius, turning the craft into a deathtrap of detonating engines and possessed cybernetic soldiers who found themselves turning weapons upon each another. All Stroika could do was listen to the unfolding slaughter over the vox. This was compounded as the peeling wreckage of the polluted craft crashed through another drop-ship, claiming further skitarii lives.

As the planet’s surface raced up to meet them, Stroika had taken care to highlight key strategic structures, thoroughfares and districts. As Primus he had been granted access to antique hololithic maps of Velchanos Magna, before its descent into madness and loss to the Great Gyre. These were presented as a filtered overlay that bled across the outline of temples and key structures that Stroika’s optics could pick out of the twisted malaise of the heretek forge world. The hololithic maps had also been updated with evidence from the infotombs of Satzica Secundus of wonders to be secured or pillaged. The Fabricator Locum intended to claim all the technological treasures that the forge world had hoarded, in the name of the blessed Omnissiah.

The servitor-pilot vomited forth a stream of code that brought Stroika back to the moment. The skitarii commander slammed himself back down in the vox-station seat at the drone’s urging. Cockpit instrumentation chimed with approaching augur contacts.

‘Location?’ Stroika demanded, but before the servitor-pilot could oblige, the Primus heard the sound of gunfire. A staccato of heavy-bore shells hammered across the armour plating of the drop-ship. Stroika felt the servitor-pilot respond at the controls, but the Nuncio wasn’t built for such handling. Without offensive weaponry, the Mechanicus drop-ship was essentially a fortified compartment with descent engines. The streams of fire pounded their way across the hull of the Nuncio. Like streaking darkness searing through the forge world skies, Dark Mechanicum aircraft screamed past the cockpit.

The drone chuntered its identification of the aircraft as a Hellblade fighter wing. Stroika watched as swarms of air superiority fighters – like razored pincers cutting through the infernal haze – weaved through the descending columns of drop-ships. The thunder of autocannon fire reverberated through the Nuncio as more and more fighters targeted the craft. Several shells smashed into the cockpit canopy, cracking the armourglass and sending the instrumentation into a panic of lights and high-pitched sound.

‘Enemy aircraft inbound,’ Stroika voxed across the open channel as the storm of Hellblade fighters streaked through their formation. ‘Evasive manoeuvres.’

‘Nuncio, this is Ignicia,’ the vox crackled. ‘We’ve lost steerage way and are drifting.’

‘Nuncio,’ another officer reported across the channel, ‘they’re targeting our engines–’

Other voxmissions were cut off mid-sentence as the Hellblades used their precision fire to take out augur arrays, comms vanes and cockpits.

Stroika felt himself dragged to starboard as the servitor-pilot put the drop-ship into a controlled spin, making it more difficult for the hard-wired slave-servitors in the cockpits of the Hellblades to zero in on its vulnerabilities – vulnerabilities Haldron-44 Stroika understood only too well. The fighter wing’s autocannons couldn’t hope to breach the Nuncio’s thick plating but they could do plenty of damage to essentials like the descent engines, sensors and cockpit.

‘Nuncio to drop-craft,’ Stroika voxed, ‘evasive counterclockwise. Limit exposure. Ignicia, just get on the ground and hold position. We’ll work our way over to you.’

‘Copy, Nuncio,’ Stroika received from the drop-ship as it peeled away.

With his optics whirring to focus, Stroika tried to get a fix on the Hellblade fighter swarm. Through the smashed canopy, with the drop-ship in a corkscrew descent and the enemy aircraft shrieking their way across the twisted industriascape, it wasn’t easy. With diagrammatical overlays showing the fighter swarm banking for another high-speed attack, Stroika realised that it was time to call upon the fleet’s own air support.

<Lord Fabricator?>

<Yes, Stroika-unit. I am here. We are all here. We wait in expectation, Primus.>

<My lord, our insertion is encountering heavy resistance. Enemy air superiority fighters are frustrating our approach.>

<Yes?>

<Lord Fabricator,> Haldron-44 Stroika insisted. <I already have but half the force required to successfully execute this mission. If you don’t wish me to have only half of that again, then the arkcruisers will need to despatch their own squadrons.>

Engra Myrmidex hesitated, as was his habit when performing functions for which he had no appetite or inclination.

<My lord…>

<Stand by, Stroika-unit. The Omnissiah will provide.>

Stroika did not know exactly what the Fabricator Locum meant but entrusted such considerations to the techno-magi and the Machine-God they served. They were the Omnissiah’s Faithful.

The servitor-pilot blurted a code-garbled warning. Stroika unbuckled his combat chassis from the chair. The momentum of the corkscrewing drop-ship threw him to the opposite wall of the compartment. Edging along it, Stroika took up position behind the ghoulish pilot and peered out through the smashed canopy. The Dark Mechanicum fighter aircraft had come around and were accelerating into an attack run. Stroika watched them stab their way through a cloud bank that was pouring from a nest of crooked tower-chimneys and superstacks. Like tiny flechettes, they shot through the poisonous cloud. The fighter swarm left the piercing twinkle of infernal forgelight in their wake like a hellish constellation in the darkness.

Air support or not, Stroika knew that the skitarii drop-ships couldn’t simply present themselves as helpless targets. His mind and cogitator coils whirled with vectors, angles, airspeeds and trajectories. Scenario after diagrammatic scenario flashed up across his overlays. He did not have time to process every percentage and possibility.

‘Yes,’ the Primus said to himself finally. Confidence flooded his chest, proceeding more from instinct than mathematical certainty. ‘Yes…’

Throwing himself back at the vox-station, he stabbed the comms cable into his haptic helm-port. ‘All skitarii drop-craft,’ Stroika said, ‘Receive and obey. Have your pilots make preparations for an extended engine burn, followed by a cut-off and freefall.’ The skitarii officer didn’t wait for the understandable concerns and questions that would follow such an announcement. There were few protocols that would apply to such a situation.

‘Ready?’ Stroika put to his own pilot. The servitor turned its head and chattered its yellow teeth. A blurt of affirmatory code followed. ‘Synchronise and maintain station on the Nuncio,’ Stroika voxed to the skitarii officers aboard his drop-ships.

Stroika watched the approaching storm of air superiority fighters whirl by the shattered canopy of the corkscrewing Nuncio. With figures streaming down the side of his evolving diagrammatical overlays, he waited. Two more seconds. No, three.

‘On my mark,’ Stroika called across the open channel. He buckled his harness tighter. ‘Mark!’

The skitarii commander felt himself thrown upwards towards the compartment ceiling but the harness kept the deadweight of his combat chassis in its chair. He heard the descent engines roar and initiated a cogitator count that flashed up before his optic-array.

There was a dull clunk from above as the bloated underbelly of another drop-ship glanced off the Nuncio’s hull. As the servitor-pilot wrestled with the craft’s controls, levelling out the drop-ship following the light impact, Stroika saw the Lucifex plummet past them after a mis-timed burn. Such errors reinforced to Stroika the difficulty of what he was attempting. Even with omnitask servitors at the controls, the drop-ships handled like flying crates. They were designed to take a pummelling, get skitarii forces to the ground and little else. Their machine-spirits tended to be simple, belligerent entities, unused to such demands and improvisations. The kinds of manoeuvres Stroika was demanding from his transports had simply not been factored into the drop-ships’ blessed design.

Stroika’s cogitator countdown flashed its conclusion.

‘Cut engines,’ the skitarius voxed. ‘Engage freefall.’

Stroika felt the powerful rumble of the descent engines die about him. The forge world’s gravity latched back onto the monstrous drop-ship, immediately reasserting its authority. Dragged upwards, only Stroika’s harness managed to keep his cybernetic frame in the chair. Air howled about the drop-ship’s ugly form as the Nuncio plummeted like an adamantium ingot towards the twisted surface of Velchanos Magna.

‘Brace… for… impact…’ the Primus ordered across the vox. The drop-ship rattled about him, while the force of the uncontrolled descent shuffled vehicles about within their belly-hold restraints.

Even though Stroika’s cogitator countdown – now running in reverse – told him that the collision was coming, it was still a surprise. The drop-ship might not have fielded offensive weaponry but there was little that could have prepared the pilot-servitors of the Hellblade fighters for drop-ships falling out of the sky. Craft using the bulk deadweight of their own armoured forms as falling artillery.

With the drop-ships not where the aircraft’s targeters expected them to be, the swarm of Dark Mechanicum fighters overshot their objective. Instead of being engaged in a weaving attack run amongst the bark of autocannons, the Hellblades found themselves cutting through open space and the thin, radioactive smog that blanketed the forge world.

From above, the skitarii drop-ships plummeted through the fighter wing formations. Hellblades detonated against the reinforced hulls of the craft, enveloping their brute architecture in harmless fire and fury. Drop-ships smashed wings and tails from the streaking fighters and cleaved aircraft clean in half. While critically damaged Dark Mechanicum fighters rained down among the thunderbolting drop-ships, following Hellblades failed to pull up. Servitor-pilots had no choice but to fly their serrated fighter craft straight into an armoured wall of free-falling transports.

As the tail of the fighter wing formation came to the realisation that their approach vectors had been compromised, servitors of warp-polluted flesh and vox-shrieking madness peeled away. Hellblades banked to narrowly miss the falling drop-ships, with a few fortunate aircraft managing to accelerate straight through the descending havoc.

As a fighter smashed into the port side of the Nuncio, Haldron-44 Stroika was thrown back and forth in his harness. The cockpit instrumentation recorded the collision and light damage, firing alarms and blinking lamps until the pilot-servitor deactivated them. Unnatural flames washed briefly across the shattered canopy before receding with the crash.

Several swerving Hellblades shrieked by but after a few precious seconds bereft of impacts, gunfire or blazing fighters, Stroika decided that he had to slow the column’s descent.

‘All craft,’ the skitarii commander voxed, ‘engage airbrakes, flaps and fire descent engines, full thrust. Mark. Three… two… one… fire.’

Stroika felt the sudden deceleration tear at the weight of his bionics. His harness straps cut across his armour and his heart reached for his throat. The descent engines roared about the craft. The servitor-pilot hauled once again on handles and plungers. The Nuncio lurched as flaps were torn from the drop-ship by the irresistible forces at work.

Stroika’s mind and cogitator coils reeled with numbers and descent vectors but this time there was little he could do to influence the dire circumstances to which his skitarii were committed. Air brakes screeched. Flaps failed. The powerful descent engines roared their insistence. Stroika heard the superstructure of the Nuncio groan like a beast of burden that had given its last. He felt the torment of the craft’s machine-spirit.

As the drop-ship slowed, the Primus saw the forge world’s surface rise to meet them, a spiked and serrated labyrinth of mills, manufactoria and freightways. Flames rose from vents and furnace pits, burning in all the colours of daemonic darkness. Radioactive steam swirled into soot-streaked clouds of sulphur, while a toxic, heavy-metal smog seemed to hang over everything. Through the chemical haze, Stroika could see the underworld glow of venting forge temples and the hellfire of heretekal craft. Possessed magna-machinery swung colossal arms and freight-claws above factory roofs on towering derricks. Below their dread labours, armies of frightfully augmented slaves and warped servitors swarmed along freightways and channels of molten iron that flowed up from the planet’s daemon-infused core.

As the Nuncio moaned to a halt, the drop-ship’s belly smashed down through the scaffolding and oiled cables of a broad assembly line. The structure ran the length of the line, supporting magnetic claws and cargo-conveyors that transported finished products. With the descent engines still raging at full power the Nuncio rose, dragging a section of scaffold and cabling away with it.

Most of the drop-ships aimed for open spaces like freightways or container yards and benefitted from the extra distance such areas afforded. Several could not save themselves from the structures of higher buildings, however, crashing down through the light architecture of vents, vanes and corrugated roofing.

The only real loss was the Dromedo, the drop-ship coming down between a quad of belching superstacks. Getting entangled in the girders and support lines holding the metal ventscrapers together, the Dromedo brought the creaking chimneys down and itself down with them.

As the Nuncio led the thundering assembly of idling drop-ships away towards the appointed landing site, leaving the downed Dromedo and its skitarii survivors, Stroika issued the same orders he had to the crippled Ignicia and Lucifex.

As Primus he could not afford to compromise his legions or the mission for a single skitarius, cohort or clade. The alphas and skitarii soldiers of the Ignicia, Lucifex and Dromedo understood their protocols and what was expected of them. As the Mechanicus invasion force roared across the infernal industriascape of Velchanos Magna, Haldron-44 Stroika began to understand, in turn, the horrific enormity of what Engra Myrmidex and the Machine-God expected of him.

0110

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +DROPSITE+

111/389.777_453.22’23’22 had been selected as the dropsite by the Fabricator Locum in consultation with his attendant magi and Primus Haldron-44 Stroika. On a hololithic representation it was just a grid coordinate. An area of clear land, identified on antiquated schematics and devoid of the busy architecture that characterised the rest of the manufactoria district. Stroika had decided that it was as strategically sound a starting point for an urban invasion as twenty-seven thousand other dropsites, but Engra Myrmidex favoured this position over all others for the simple fact that it was situated closest to the Magnaplex Maximal – the former forge temple principal of all Velchanos.

For the Fabricator Locum, the Magnaplex Maximal had to be a key operational target for Stroika and his skitarii for a number of reasons. As he had told his magi, Stroika and his senior alphas, the forge temple principal was still likely the technofeudal capital of the planet – even under the Dark Mechanicum – housing the forge world’s command structure. Myrmidex hoped for a swift and decisive invasion, with the forge world’s ruling priesthood annihilated in the opening stages. The lower strata of hereteks could then be mopped up by purgation actions while the infotombs and technological treasures of Velchanos Magna were plundered and catalogued.

The Fabricator Locum also told Stroika and the gathering that the infotombs below the Magnaplex Maximal housed the forge temple’s High Altar – the respository of the forge world’s most precious knowledge. Thousands of years of secrets, from both before and after Velchanos Magna’s terrible tragedy, awaited them.

These factors had weighed heavily on Stroika’s analysis and battle plans. On the planetary approach, when the fleet became truly acquainted with the extent of the damage suffered by the forge world, the Primus feared that Myrmidex’s key objective had been lost. By some fell miracle however, the Magnaplex Maximal had escaped decimation. The monstrous forge temple sat on the edge of the colossal drop-off that plunged kilometres down to the raging planetary core.

Settling on the dropsite, Stroika had been asked by 10-Vitro Tiberiax how they could count on the site still being clear and suitable for landing the Mechanicus bulk troop transports. Stroika had told his second-in-command that Mars itself still bore much the same layout as it had done ten thousand years before, despite suffering several apocalyptic tragedies – including civil war and the treachery of Horus. As holy sites, forge temples were not demolished or moved. Since the needs of such sites remained the same, the supply networks that existed in surrounding districts also tended to remain the same. When Stroika showed Tiberiax the ancient data he had on the dropsite, the skitarii officer was further convinced. The landing zone had been a radioactive waste dump known as the rad-barrens before the warp storm, and not a great prospect for redevelopment.

<Incredible,> 10-Vitro Tiberiax streamed, standing on the huge ramp of the Nuncio. <Just incredible.>

Haldron-44 Stroika walked up beside him, with the servo-skull Phrenos~361 hovering nearby. Tiberiax was amazed. The Primus had been right. Thousands of years of warp storm isolation and spiritual pollution had done little to change the area. It was still a radioactive wasteland, bar the fact that after thousands of years of continuous service it was more of a mountain of radioactive waste.

Like a conquering general of old, Haldron-44 Stroika had taken the high ground. All about the rad-barrens, terraces had been cleared by magna-machinery and dozers to enable further use of the site. The radioactive machinery now sat as smouldering wrecks, permanent additions to the site they tended – a testament to the precision fire of skitarii rangers. The terraces served as landing sites for the Mechanicus drop-ships that were spilling forth thousands of skitarii solders, Ironstrider engines and Dunecrawlers that made short work of the radioactive slopes.

Nalode Deka 871 trudged up the slope towards them, flanked by a pair of his ruststalkers. It had been Deka’s killclades that had been responsible for the bodies that lay strewn across containment barrels, tumbling down gritty slopes and face down in pools of radioactive seepage. Before the cybernetic sharpshooters of Tiberiax’s ranger cohorts or even the vanguard skitarii – whose function it was to establish such a foothold in enemy territory – Princeps Deka had unleashed his cybernetic killers.

Exploiting a loophole in his protocols, Nalode Deka 871 had deployed his spindly ruststalker units upon touchdown and they had set about massacring the servitors, waste processors and slave-reclamators with their transonic blades. Even now, under Deka’s orders, the gas-masked killers picked their way across the rad-barrens on their cloven appendages, butchering the misshapen denizens of the shanty communities at the foot of the radioactive mound.

<You streamed for me,> Nalode Deka 871 said as he reached the ramp of the Nuncio. In his metallic hiss of a voice, it sounded more of an accusation than a statement.

<I did,> Stroika transmitted back. <And you know why, princeps. Report.>

As the three skitarii officers stood in mindlinked communion, Ironstrider engines and their riders filed past. The long legs of the walkers took them down the ramp and over the radioactive shallows.

<I prosecuted my duty in line with my protocols,> Deka told his Primus, his optics burning to pinpoints of light from within his hood.

<But not in line with my intentions,> Stroika warned. The skitarii commander didn’t know how much of the man Nalode Deka 871 had been existed within the spindly armour of a ruststalker. Stroika suspected very little. Perhaps just a brain, full of murderous service, and an icy heart that beat to the rhythm of war. With their blasted bodies dragged from the field of battle and straight to a surgical slab, dying skitarii who had served their overlords well were blessed with future function in the form of Sicarian ruststalkers. Little more than cybernetic assassins, they were close combat constructs of cold savagery.

Princeps like Nalode Deka 871 saw themselves as manifestations of the Motive Force – the violent requirements of progress and change. In becoming but a scrap of flesh within a metal body, Deka viewed himself and his sufferings as taking a step ever closer to the Omnissiah’s ideal. He viewed the flesh of his enemies similarly so and aimed to relieve them of its burden with his transonic blade and the chordclaw appendage of crackling talons that shimmered with molecular dissonance at his side.

<Every construct must play his part, princeps,> Stroika told the ruststalker, <his allotted part in the successes to come. For if one part of a machine decided to perform the function of another and abandon its own, where would that leave the machine as a whole?>

Nalode Deka 871 didn’t answer.

<Perhaps your cogitator is busy doing something else, princeps?> Haldron-44 Stroika said.

<No, Primus.>

<Good,> Stroika said, his stream crackling with growing infuriation. <Perhaps it can handle this. You will leave the vanguard to its duties, for it is my honour to lead them as any Primus should. From the front – with his unquestioning legions behind him.>

<Yes, Primus,> Nalode Deka 871 hissed.

<Since you have seen fit to turn our dropsite into a mound of corpses, I have further butchery for you,> Stroika transmitted. <While my cohorts advance on the forge temple principal and Princeps Tiberiax’s spread out through the surrounding districts, sub-hives and forges, you will secure the dropsite further.>

<You wish me to remain behind with the drop-ships?> Deka streamed incredulously.

<Alpha Nanierix and his ranger contingent have that responsibility,> Stroika said, shooting Deka down once more. <His rangers, omnispectrals and servo-skulls have reconnoitred the structures around the rad-barrens. This district is dominated by slave mills. Indentured labour units and cybernetically enhanced slave populations – in their thousands. Nanierix tells me that their dark overlords have them on the move and suspects they have been given impromptu directives to storm the dropsite, while defence forces are assembled. Tiberiax and I will handle the defence forces. Those indentured wretches, however, are to be slaughtered where they toil. Take your killclades to the mills, princeps. Neutralise the threat to our foothold here. Do you understand your duties, Princeps Deka? Their import and the limitations of their parameters?>

Once again, Nalode Deka 871 was silent. The princeps seemed to sense movement in 10-Vitro Tiberiax’s servos and before the other princeps could issue a doctrinal remonstration, issued a static-laced response of his own.

<It will be done, Primus.>

Turning and walking away down the hill, Deka stopped. A stream of autocannon fire tore up the black grit of the slope, sending fountains of radioactive seepage splattering for the sky. A forge world Hellblade – one of the regrouping remnants of the fighter wing that had attacked the drop-ships – shrieked overhead. Streaking up behind it through the thin chemical smog was a Lightning strike fighter, painted in the god-pleasing red of Mars. The aircraft had been despatched from the fleet’s arkcruisers upon Engra Myrmidex’s command. Fast as they were, the Lightnings and their servitor-pilots had not been of service during the skitarii insertion, but were now proving their worth against the forge world’s defence wing and temple-mounted emplacements.

As Nalode Deka 871 continued down the slope, the Lightning seared a pair of las-beams at the attacking Hellblade, downing the enemy aircraft with its cannons. A second Lightning screamed in to despatch the falling target. It fired a missile that turned the enemy craft into a ball of tumbling flame before peeling away.

With frag raining harmlessly down about him, Haldron-44 Stroika felt the steely presence of the Fabricator Locum through his umbilical data-tether. Ghosting the Primus and his skitarii soldiers through the sweeping interface of phylactic communion, Engra Myrmidex surveyed the dropsite through the eyes, optics and augurs of the skitarii on the ground.

10-Victro Tiberiax felt the phylactic intrusion also and gave his Primus a nod. Even the Fabricator Locum’s mere presence was enough to prompt the officers. Engra Myrmidex was watching – and through him, the Machine-God.

<Praise the Omnissiah,> Tiberiax said, making the sign of the cog with the interspaced knuckles of his gauntlets.

<Praise the Omnissiah,> Stroika agreed. <Let this day be His. Let this fallen world’s secrets be our Lord Fabricators’ and victory our own. To your cohorts. I expect the capital districts designated Chorga, Numaris, Achaton and Daesirius – including their sub-hives and temples – to be in skitarii hands by this denticle tomorrow, Velchanosian Standard.>

<My skitarii will not rest until it is so, Primus.>

10-Victro Tiberiax left his commander and stepped off the side of the Nuncio’s ramp, slipping between a train of Onager Dunecrawlers that were making their arachnoid way onto the field of battle from the drop-ship’s hold. Stroika cast his cycling optics across the rad-barrens and the heretek forge world beyond. With a lidless blink he cleared his datastreams and overlays.

His rad-censer crackled with the deadly radiation of the mountainous dump, like those that dangled from the silvered battleplate and red trench-cloaks of the skitarii thousands disembarking their monstrous drop-ships. Stroika watched the sea of hoods and helmets bob down the mountainside, the blistering blue glow of weaponry like marker-lights signifying their progress. The gait of robotic legs and the sight of so many cybernetic soldiers in synchronised movement was almost hypnotic. Orders were streamed. Obedience was silent. It would have made for a serene vision but for the torturous din beyond.

The heavy-metal clunk of crawlers and Ironstrider engines. The sky-splitting scream of heretek fighters and Mechanicus Lightnings doing battle above. Worst of all, the sickening thunder of endless forge world production. Vox-hailers bawling corrupt scrapcode, warnings and inducements. Bottomless quarries being blast-plundered of raw materials – stone, metals and ores, all warped by the storm-bathed taint of the Great Gyre. Hell-fed furnaces, raging with immaterial energies. Vast, baroque complexes that roared with machinery possessed, swarms of warp-thralled workers and monstrous weapons of daemonic design.

Beyond the shimmering mire of spent fuels, rusted barrels of contaminant and irradiated scrap upon which Stroika stood, the forge world of Velchanos Magna extended like a nightmarish vision of infernal industry and black, byzantine architecture. Exhaust towers vented strange flame, while sky-scraping node columns arced unnatural energies. It was a darkness of chains, corrugation and mechanised vastness, lit by sparks, arcing energies and cascades of molten metal.

With the capital districts and their forge temples forever facing away from the system’s bleak star, one half of the planet was cast in perpetual night, seen through the thin veil of a chemical brume. The twisted silhouette of forge-fire-dotted industry extending towards the horizon, however, was backlit by the fierce metallic blaze of light proceeding from the planet’s exposed daemonic core. It was towards this fell brilliance that Haldron-44 Stroika would take his skitarii vanguard, and where, Omnissiah willing, the forge temple principal – the Magnaplex Maximal – awaited him.

‘Phrenos,’ Stroika said, his modulations misting on the cool air of the radioactive peak. ‘Go ahead and apprise Alpha Versorias of my intention to accompany him and his vanguard skitarii in the first wave. We shall meet the enemy on the freightways. We shall destroy them among the very production plants that created them. Tell him to ready his cohorts.’

As the servo-skull drifted off down the radioactive slope, Stroika turned to see Alpha Nanierix march down the drop-ship ramp flanked by a pair of his trench-cloaked rangers. The skitarii held galvanic rifles and, like Nanierix, offered the Primus a noospheric salute.

‘Alpha Nanierix,’ Haldron-44 Stroika said.

‘Yes, my Primus?’

‘The dropsite is yours.’

0111

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +FALSE CONSTRUCTS+

<I am one with the Motive Force. One with the Great Maker – He who crafts all true constructs in one of His many images. He who infuses, fills with His power, lends His strength.>

Haldron-44 Stroika offered his prayers to the Omnissiah and the magi who were both His receivers and His mouthpiece. Through their data-tethers, the skitarii had been calibrated for battle. Their strategic wetware had been synced and their emotions dialled back. They were the living weapons of the Machine-God. Only officers like Stroika were allowed any degree of flexibility. This allowed for inspiration and creativity – qualities that guided tactical deployment, enhanced leadership and ensured a rapid response to new situations and challenges.

The infernal twilight of the Bronte-Chordata forge temple was thick with the metallic fug of smelting. Haldron-44 Stroika’s optics cycled through false-colour filters to enhance his vision in the dungeon-like gloom.

The temple was as much a cathedral to damnation as a forge. The gargantuan workshop of the Machine-God was now a hellish furnace of spiked chains and twisted architecture. The roasted corpses of those whose beliefs had failed to please the Dark Gods hung from the roof struts, while the Cog Mechanicus and temple sigils had long been vandalised and perverted into symbols of daemon patronage. The very metal of the mesh walkways steamed in contact with the footfalls of the Omnissiah’s skitarii servants.

Stroika’s targeting reticules drifted from ghostly outline to outline, discounting the gleam of forgelight off metal and the movement of automatonic machinery. Podium-interfaced servitors went about their endless labours, supervising magna-machinery whose fevered workings seemed to have a fell, glowing life of their own. Like the furnace magna-machinery, the servitors did not react to the skitarii advance. Stroika approached a drone foreman whose flesh-smeared form was a mess of burns and ugly stitching. A set of half-formed horns protruded from his bare servitor skull.

As the crackling muzzle of Stroika’s arc pistol moved towards the thing’s foul form, the light revealed ruinous symbols and sigils carved brutally into the drone’s back flesh. Uplinks from the Fabricator Locum’s magi aboard the Opus Machina phylactically matched the symbols on both the servitor and the temple walls to pict files that had been mnemonically logged and classified in the ancient vessel’s runebanks.

A cascade of information dropped down before Stroika’s optics. Collected intelligence and hard data captures pertaining to the probable corruptions at work on Velchanos Magna. The likely allegiances to which the Dark Mechanicum of the forge world were victim, after a small eternity spent in the warp storm. Inconstant beings that called themselves powers, daemons and gods. Slaves to darkness. The damned vessels into which the unnatural force of Chaos was distilled. Things that twisted the souls of men and the cold integrity of machines alike, bending them to their ruinous will. Fell creatures of dimensional evil, who had corrupted the arch-heretek Kelbor-Hal and the warlord Horus ten thousand years before, splitting both the Martian Empire and the Imperium of Man asunder.

Haldron-44 Stroika felt a cold hatred burn through his neurocircuitry and processor coils. He knew not whether this proceeded from his previous experience of fighting the hollow instruments of Chaos. He did not know whether it was the Great Maker’s revulsion, finding expression through the purity of His constructs, for a corruption that was everything that the Motive Force was not. He did not know whether what he was feeling was simply another doctrina imperative, delivered straight into his mind from the techno-magi above. Those who saw everything he saw. Knew everything he knew.

<Touch nothing,> Haldron-44 Stroika warned the skitarii vanguard of the IV Tantal. <Interface with nothing. Review your protocols and mission directives. This place, this entire planet reeks of corruption. It will try to fool your filters. It will attempt to twist your calculations. Above all it will seek to pollute your workings and make the holy craft of your form an instrument of powers dark and unknowable. The use of dataspikes is prohibited. The only thing you put into the servants of the Dark Mechanicum are the shells from your radium carbines. Understood?>

The Primus’s helm-vanes sizzled with the flood of obedient returns and acknowledgements. The drone foreman went about its business, monitoring the activity of labouring claws and smelting buckets, unaware of the pistol muzzle at the back of its skull or the skitarii forces advancing through the forge temple.

Stroika moved on and his vanguard skitarii with him. With each potential target flashing and fading as it was discounted, Stroika moved his pair of arc pistols. Deployed along their appendage-rails and locked into the palms of his bionic gauntlets, the fat pistols hummed and crackled as they drifted slickly from target to redundant target.

On the companionway overhead and on the one above that Stroika could hear the synchronised footfalls of vanguard skitarii, led by their sub-alphas. Their helms and war-plate jangled softly with their movements, while their red trench-cloaks were a foil whisper in their passing. Through the companionway mesh the Primus could see the glow of their radium carbines. The skitarii soldiers held the radioactive weapons up to their helm targeters, zeroing in on potential targets, like Stroika, as they filed down the walkways. On the other side of the forge temple’s holy furnace, his mindlinked feeds told Stroika that Sub-Alpha Enron’s units were doing the same.

Stroika’s rad-censer crackled and hissed as it bounced from his belt. Its insistence had not subsided since leaving the contamination of the dropsite. This was to be expected. For the vanguard skitarii, their radium weaponry was both a boon and a curse. While benefitting from the devastating effects hyper-irradiated shot visited upon the enemies of the Omnissiah, the skitarii were constantly bathed in the radioactivity of their own weapons. To fight side by side with the vanguard was to suffer the same slow death from rad-poisoning as the Omnissian martyrs themselves.

It was this suffering – this physical and spiritual burden – that made the vanguard such expert killers. They were the Machine-God’s ambassadors of destruction and fearless in the face of enemy threats, which they were routinely the first to encounter. It was difficult to scare or intimidate cybernetic warriors who already knew they were living the last days, minutes and moments of their lives. Moments in which they were resolved to honour the Great Maker, who would soon be welcoming their return and recycling.

<Hold,> Haldron-44 Stroika streamed, his phylactic command echoing through the minds and cogitators of the IV Tantal, to which he had attached himself. The skitarii soldiers above him and advancing on the other side of the forge temple came to a dead stop. Omnispectrals confirmed that something was advancing towards them at speed. <Lock target,> Stroika commanded, feeding his data to the IV Tantal. He heard the whine of their radium carbines change pitch and the soft jangle of aims being corrected in unison.

The code-signatures of Phrenos~361 hit Stroika moments before the servo-skull shot by. The drone’s magnetic cog-blade was a blur as Phrenos flew up the companionway at Stroika and his skitarii. Whooshing overhead, the skull streamed its master the data it had collected from its reconnaissance.

<Belay that,> Stroika ordered, allowing the servo-skull to pass the skitarii unmolested. The Primus’s overlays were rapidly updated. The dark depths of the Bronte-Chordata forge temple suddenly blazed with the glowing outlines of new targets. Targets Phrenos~361 had discovered on its forward sweep. A small, misshapen army waiting in ambush, scrambling the skitarii filters. The forge temple’s corrupt mechanoids seemed to know they had been discovered.

‘You trespass in the domain of Ulcan Gnostramari,’ the vox-hailers of the temple boomed through the gloom and the polychromatic mist. The voice was a rancid echo of the proud machine it had once been but still carried the unmistakable imperiousness of a magos or forge master. The words were threaded with the cacophony of encoded madness.

‘Arch-Fabricant of Velchanos Magna.’ The voice descended into a rust-heaving cough, before continuing. ‘Lord Prophetechnos of the Underforge, the Darknid Core, the Iron Almighty… the Abystra-Dynomicron.’

Stroika’s acquisition reticules danced between the profusion of targets. They were only filtered outlines in the darkness but recognition wetware told the Primus that his skitarii faced an assembled force of flesh-corrupted forge guard and hunched, spiked gun-servitors – sickly abominations who were warp-fused to their glowing weaponry. Among them, deep within the ranks of the temple sentinels, Stroika’s filters found the flashing silhouette that seemed to be issuing the vox-hailed ultimatums. The monstrous forge master under whose damned auspices the Bronte-Chordata temple operated. One of Ulcan Gnostramari’s Dark Mechanicum servants.

From the modulations and horrifically augmented outline of the fell forge master, Haldron-44 Stroika failed to identify the monster. He found no match against his historical records and pict files, leading him to believe that the magos must have risen to his position during the forge world’s long isolation and contamination.

Ulcan Gnostramari, however, was a designation well known to Stroika from his mission uploads. He had been Fabricator General of Velchanos Magna well before the apocalyptic warp storm claimed the planet. It seemed that Gnostramari ruled Velchanos still, having found new service in the ranks of the Dark Mechanicum and a ruinous patron in the abominate thing referred to as the Abystra-Dynomicron.

<Hard data, Stroika-unit,> Engra Myrmidex said, the hiss of his phylactic intrusion a tidal wave of doctrinal imperatives crashing through the skitarii commander’s thoughts. <We must clarify Gnostramari’s position. Only he will have access to the forge world’s oldest, deepest, darkest secrets. Hard data, Stroika-unit. Hard data.>

‘The punishment for such trespass,’ the heretek forge master boomed, before rust-hacking once more, ‘is assimilation.’

With the renegade forge guard’s stub-carbines and the IV Tantal’s radium weaponry aimed at one another through the furnace murk, the pits of molten iron bubbling below suddenly exploded. The liquid metal blasted up at the skitarii vanguard, the glowing fury assuming the dribbling shapes of the immaterial entities that possessed it. As huge splatters of molten iron cascaded down, skitarii soldiers were lost to the glowing ferocity. Stroika’s mind echoed with the brief screams of his men. The cybernetic soldiers steamed beneath the molten iron, their flesh and workings melting away, while their souls were torn apart by the daemonic monstrosities who found form in the boiling metal.

As both infernal iron and the assimilated alloys of his skitarii dribbled down through the melting mesh of the companionways, Haldron-44 Stroika gave the order to open fire. Moving forward along the walkways with their radium carbines up to their helms, the vanguard skitarii of the IV Tantal blazed away at the enemy targets. Flagging the overlay signature of the corrupted forge master as a restricted target, Stroika led the way.

With the temple forge singing with the hammering ricochets of stub rounds and radium shot, Stroika watched the forge master and a pair of hench-units withdraw. Negotiating sections of melted walkway with hydraulically powered leaps and crouching behind the cover of rails and meshing, Haldron-44 Stroika led the indomitable advance of his skitarii soldiers through the Dark Mechanicum forge temple.

His optical overlays furious with targeting reticules and infliction data, the skitarii commander ducked and backed before the sweeping pass of possessed machinery. Only his cybernetic reflexes saved Stroika from the walkway-chewing attentions of crane-claws and furnace buckets that attempted to eat skitarii soldiers alive. Fountains of daemonic metal splashed across the walkways, ever weakening their structural integrity and forcing the IV Tantal and their sub-alphas to find alternative routes through the twisted, byzantine structure.

As Stroika and the vanguard skitarii finally closed on their enemies, the Primus found that the cowards were pushing temple slaves down the walkways at them. The cultist labourers were garbed in the ribbed rubber and hoods of forge-worlders. Their rebreather canisters swung before them like trunks. The stitched and stapled rubber barely covered the obscenity of their warped mutations. Through the hood visors, Stroika could see eyes white with a mixture of terror and exultation as the cult menials sacrificed themselves for their forge master, their Arch-Fabricant and the unholy Abystra-Dynomicron.

Forge guard soldiers – the planet-bound, technofeudal armies of individual temples and the forge world as a whole – forced the menials on into skitarii gunfire. The forge guard were a twisted shadow of their former glory. No longer the holy warriors of the Omnissiah, their corrupted flesh was rust-stained and seeped about their workings. Their ceremonial cloaks were black tatters and their tarnished cybernetics decorated with spikes, chains, razor-wire and stub-belts of sigil-carved bullets. Ghoulish optics burned from their black, skull-fashioned helms, picking out targets amongst the advancing skitarii, while their stub-carbines barked from where they were resting on the shoulders of body-shielding menials.

The menials’ rubber suits became shredded remnants as radium rounds tore into them. Warped bone splintered and flesh pulped, before the wounds blackened to rad-poisoned craters. Temple slaves fell dead to the floor, forcing the forge guard forward into the fray. The vanguard skitarii’s aim held no more mercy for the cybernetic soldiers, whose black helms opened up in a splatter of curdled brains and cogitator workings.

The renegade cyborgs’ own aim wavered between single salvoes of unnatural accuracy that seemed guided by some daemon force, and mad, magazine-emptying displays of chattering bravado. With bullets showering the companionways, both behaviours held dangers for the advancing skitarii.

Stroika engaged his conversion field, allowing the energy shielding to soak up the onslaught of slugs. As the enemy fire intensified and forge guard soldiers vox-hailed madness and code-corruption at the Primus, the conversion field was overwhelmed and sizzled to dormancy.

The skitarii would not be halted, however. Stroika knew from his uplinks and constantly updated feeds that battles like this were taking place across the capital districts, with cybernetic soldiers stoically battling on through mills, workshops, assembly plants, freightways and forge temples; through frightfully warped enemies and their own inevitable losses.

They would not fail their magi and their Machine-God. They could not. There was an evil present that demanded utter destruction, a perversion of the Omnissiah’s purpose that could not be allowed to endure. To see such a duty through required an adamantine resolve. A steel will. An iron nerve. All the Omnissian gifts with which the soldiers of the Legiones Skitarii had been blessed. With bullet-chewed vanguard warriors falling from the walkways and cybernetic soldiers clutching bionics that had been blasted off, the IV Tantal marched on.

Stamping through the rancid scrap and corpses of both slaughtered menials and the forge guard who had misused them, the vanguard skitarii suddenly became aware of a new threat. Gun-servitors on the higher platforms were observing their dread directives and opening fire as their enemies reached range. The combat drones were barely human, their bones and parchment skin stretched across implanted heavy weaponry. Hunched, spiked and fused to monstrous packs that fed their heavy bolters and fuelled their multi-meltas, the servitors lumbered forth, their mouths open and glowing in silent screams.

As Sub-Alpha 7-Enron-7 disappeared in a maelstrom of heavy bolter fire and several point-skitarii on the opposite companionways streamed away to flaming flesh, war-plate and alloy under the attentions of a multi-melta aimed down their advancing column, Stroika knew he had to press the skitarii advantage.

<Sub-Alpha Quendix, take command there,> Stroika transmitted. <Bring up your calivers. Target the heavy weaponry.>

With the skitarii pushing the forge guard back with their fearless progress and the storm of radium shot and stubber slugs intensifying between the two enemies, Quendix summoned two of his vanguard skitarii special weapons units. The two cybernetic soldiers stomped forward in unison, swishing their trench-cloaks aside while taking a titanium knee. Bringing up their heavy plasma weaponry, the pair aimed their calivers at the far platforms, unleashing a succession of raging blue orbs that burned like small suns.

The rate of fire was punishing, the skitarii sweeping their calivers left and right to bathe the gun-servitors in a hail of plasma. Combat drones began to fall to their scaffolded knees, with holes burned through their malformed chests. Others shook heavy bolters that had chugged to silence, not realising that plasma orbs had eaten through the weapons and their mechanisms. A gun-servitor on the flank simply detonated, a ball of plasma blasting straight through him and into his pyrum-petrol gas pack. The explosion took two other combat-servitors with it and turned a third into a bolt-blasting inferno that was as much a threat to forge guard with their backs to the drone as to the advancing skitarii.

Haldron-44 Stroika ran forth, his footfalls shaking the walkway, flanked by two vanguard skitarii who blasted warped forge guard soldiers out of their commander’s path with conservative volleys of radium shot. As their magazines ran dry, the Primus unleashed twin streams of electrical fury from his arc pistols. Corrupted mechanoids convulsed as they were hit by the arcstreams. They spasmed and clutched their stub-carbines, sending sporadic blasts of bullets down through the walkway mesh.

Stomping past, Stroika didn’t even wait for the arcstream to fry their flesh and workings. With the fading of their biometric returns, Stroika’s cogitator added the kills to a running total for the mission which had already reached three digits. Such records were useful – as much in the case of a Primus as any other skitarii soldier – for determining promotions, legionary responsibilities, status and cybernetic enhancements. Unlike the Astra Militarum or the Adeptus Astartes where such decisions were left to the fallible human and suprahuman judgements of individual officers, in the Legiones Skitarii such matters were decided using hard data.

Having reloaded their radium carbines, the skitarii soldiers followed, but their commander suddenly stopped. As several slugs sparked off his battleware, Stroika’s overlays were flashing a warning. A colossal fountain of molten iron was raging up beside the companionway. Stroika could see the nightmarish shapes of daemon entities reaching out for him in the dribbles and slurps that embodied their melted forms.

Turning, Stroika extended his arms. With a hydraulic clunk, the pistols sprang back on their rails. Raising his knee, the Primus kicked the first skitarii soldier in the chestplate, sending him stumbling back into his compatriot – just out of the descending path of the liquid metal. As the companionway melted before Stroika and the skitarii, he turned to find that another splatter of raging iron had turned the other side of the walkway into a dribbling mess. The structure began to waver beneath his feet.

Stroika’s optics flashed and streamed with alerts that told of an all too obvious danger but little in the way of options to escape it. Kicking the railing out in front of him, Haldron-44 Stroika backed up to take advantage of the short run the weakening companionway afforded him. Stamping across the mesh, the skitarii officer powered his hydraulics for a leap of faith. Once more he found himself streaming prayers to the Omnissiah and hoping that the Machine-God was receiving them.

<Great Maker, I am Your holy instrument, blessed of iron and cursed of flesh. Lord Omnissiah, Machine-God of Mars and patron of forge-fires all, guide my workings.>

Launching from the trembling companionway, Stroika sailed across the open space. Below him the raging heart of the forge bubbled and spat. Kicking his titanium legs for momentum, he snatched a length of tarnished chain from a number that were hanging from redundant rails set in the furnace chamber ceiling.

Swinging across the distance with the red foil of his cloak rippling behind, Stroika’s metal feet found the rail of the parallel companionway. Snatching for a hold on the structure he saw that Alpha Quendix and his vanguard skitarii had yet to reach his position. The Primus found himself surrounded by a surprised collection of enemies.

<Protect the Primus!> Stroika heard Quendix stream to his skitarii.

With radium rounds hammering into the throng, Stroika kicked a twisted menial’s hooded head from his shoulders before dropping down on the companionway. Grabbing the forge guard who had been using the temple drudge as a shield by his horn-pierced helm, Stroika smashed the Dark Mechanicum soldier’s head into the railing. As his horns broke away and the helm shattered about his daemonic half-face, Stroika grabbed the forge guard’s weapon and brutally backhanded the stinking soldier with his bionic gauntlet. Turning the stub-carbine on the downed soldier, the skitarius then sprayed the weapon’s barrel back and forth before the throng of corrupted slaves and soldiers.

Body after cybernetic body fell before the point-blank fury of the weapon. As his carbine ran empty, Stroika threw it with hydraulic force at a fat, flailing menial who was spilling out of his rubber suit. The weapon struck the warped worker on the hood and dashed the consciousness from him.

With the skitarii commander so close and isolated, the forge guard fought back with a vengeance, clambering over the bullet-ridden corpses of their compatriots to get to him. Stepping backwards along the companionway, Stroika tore a pair of fat mindscrambler grenades from where they were mag-locked to his belt. Depressing their studs he bounced them down the walkway. They detonated with a brief flash, and the mesh companionway became a lightning storm of faint blue energies that crackled about the advancing forge guard. The bio-electric surge coursed through their workings and crippled their minds, causing the corrupted cybernetic soldiers to fall to their knees or clutch their helms in agony.

As Quendix and his skitarii advanced hurriedly to envelop Stroika in their number, radium rounds hammered the forge defenders back in a rad-storm of savage gunnery.

With blackened bodies falling before them in droves, the skitarii pressed on as their protocols dictated. Stroika had already received imperatives from Engra Myrmidex that superseded these.

<Sub-Alpha Quendix,> Stroika transmitted to the officer. <You will take command here and clear the forge temple of false constructs. I want this structure purged of those that answer the call of the Dark Mechanicum. Do you understand?>

<Yes, my Primus,> Quendix said, leaning back out of the path of a bullet that ricocheted off a nearby rail. <Sir, where are you going?>

Haldron-44 Stroika climbed up on the same rail and hauled himself up through the twisted metal of the companionway above. He looked down at the sub-alpha.

<To inform the master of this forge that he is master no more,> Stroika told him before climbing up through the labyrinthine scaffolding of the walkways above.

1000

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING…
UPLOADING…
UPLOADING…
SIGNAL INTERFERENCE… +FLESH AND IRON+

Clawing the tips of his bionic digits into the elevator doors, Haldron-44 Stroika braced his combat chassis and heaved. As the black doors parted, the skitarii commander was granted a view of the twilight halls beyond. He had travelled from the unholy forgeworks of the temple up to the private quarters of the temple’s forge master, situated at the very top of the structure.

The vaulted chamber through the doors was a benighted den of dark chrome and runebanks that glowed with the light of pict screens and warped augurs. A twisted servitor was fused to the banks, silently monitoring the unfolding havoc in the forge temple.

Sparse furniture gave way to a dark metal mosaic representing some fell sigil in the perversion of a cog. Private workshops and diagnostica led to a laboratorium cordoned off by a partition of splatter-stained plas. A filthy cyber-surgical slab took pride of place, interfaced with a multi-limbed automaton that sat in a nest of barbaric tools and instruments. Beyond the laboratorium, the chambers opened out onto a balcony platform extending over the temple roof, set between a quad of node columns that arced furiously with the unnatural energies of the forge.

Stroika cycled his optics and omnispectral augurs searching for signatures but he could find none. Perhaps the forge master had abandoned the Bronte-Chordata temple in search of safety with his Arch-Fabricant. With his arc pistols humming down by his sides, the Primus moved quietly into the chambers.

Like a lightning bolt down through his spine, it hit him. Haldron-44 Stroika fell forward onto his knees, denting the dark metal of the floor. Now across the threshold of the chamber, his overlays lit up with the outline of targets, hidden from view but from little else. Their signatures lit up on all available spectra but had failed to do so from behind some kind of scrambling field protection the forge master operated in his private chambers.

Stroika could smell his flesh cooking about the heat of his combat chassis and bionics, as the paralysing energies of an incapacitator flowed up through the floor. The node columns outside were now dormant as their vented energies seethed through the skitarii commander instead. His cabling, his neurocircuitry and his nerves burned with the overwhelming power. Stroika could barely move. He could barely think.

He tried to aim his arc pistols but no targets presented themselves. His optics began to shimmer and his overlays to scramble. Lightning arced from the floor up into his outstretched gauntlets, firing the hydraulics on his pistols and sending them back up their rails and into their cavity holsters. The multi-coloured energies crackled between the dark metal of the floor and the outstretched fingers of his gauntlets, dragging his hands to the ground. His auxiliary appendages tried to unlock from his back-cradles but they too would not respond under the electrifying lock the incapacitator had on his systems.

‘No, no, no,’ a voice boomed from the blurry gloom beyond, the same one he had heard in the furnace chambers below. ‘That will not do. How can I learn anything from you…’ The voice broke off, hacking its way through the rusty gargle of a cough. ‘…learn anything from you if you are trying to kill me? Eh? Eh?’ The forge master seemed amused and managed the dark echo of a chuckle before falling foul of more coughing.

‘See, fool servant of the one god – cold, distant and removed,’ the forge master said, ‘the Arch-Fabricant will reward me for the data inside your cogitator cortex and the phylactic interface through which the mindlinked intelligence of your puny invasion flows.’

The voice seemed to get closer as the forge master approached from behind a pillar. Stroika’s optics faded in and out of clarity, his filters flickering with the spoiled current passing through his cybernetic superstructure.

The forge master was a tall but hunched thing, whose barrel-body – broad with rancid augmentations – was lost in the black leather of a huge hood and robes that draped his workings. From his back sprouted countless slender claws and tarnished mechadendrites. Two socket orbs of molten iron burned within his hood like newly formed worlds, while the tentacles of some facial corruption dribbled through the filthy grille of a vox-speaker.

Two other dark shapes ventured forth from alcoves, lank of metal limb. The transparent plastek of their robes showed them to be Dark Mechanicum protectors. Their warped flesh was pallid and their battle shells and bionics a filthy black. Their gauntlets were nightmare nests of torturous weaponry – transonic blades, rusted saws, needles and crackling talons – while their faces were featureless black masks. Two more appeared from behind Stroika, where they had always been concealed, just either side of the open elevator doors.

‘When I hand you, your skitarii and the dusty old tech-priests who sent you here to my master, the Abystra-Dynomicron will not only bless my temple with iron to be forged but will forge me anew, with the crafting power of the warp flowing through me. Nothing will be beyond my unmaking.’

The excitement of the idea got the better of the forge master as his leather robes rose and fell with the exertions of his hacking cough. Spitting a rust-corrupted ichor that dribbled forth through the grille and down the shivering tentacles that squirmed through it, the Dark Mechanicum magos hocked the last of the filth onto the floor before moving towards the surgical laboratorium.

‘Bring him, bring him,’ the forge master said, clearing his congested throat. As the protectors took Stroika under the arms and hauled him up from the crackling metal of the floor, he could see that the hench-units and the forge master wore rubber coverings on their feet-appendages. Stroika’s, however, they dragged along the incapacitating metal of the floor that ran through the length of the chambers. The strange energies arced and snapped between the skitarii officer’s cybernetic form and the dark metal.

Stroika tried to fight the paralysis being visited upon him but the incapacitator was simply too powerful. The dread energies felt their way not only through his power core but also the cells of his arc weaponry. He could neither power nor deploy his weapons, reducing them to lumps of dead metal dragging his weakened frame down. Feeling feebly for the mindscrambler grenades that were mag-locked to his belt, he found them to be equally useless.

The skitarius felt his physical systems begin to shut down. Neural processors and battle wetware ran to dormancy. Feeds and overlays died with a crackle. It was all he could do to keep his optics, life support and base cogitations running.

In desperation Stroika reached out through phylactic channels for assistance. Someone who might be able to offer aid – even if that was denying the forge master his prize. The Opus Machina was too far away for such a stream. As was 10-Vitro Tiberiax. If ever Stroika was in need of Nalode Deka 871’s cold, murderous skills it was now, but he had despatched him on a mission to secure the dropsite. His only hope was a broad spectrum phylactic appeal. Perhaps Aemod-44 Versorias or Sub-Alpha Quendix could respond.

As the Dark Mechanicum protectors dragged him through to the filthy laboratorium and dumped his body on the slab, the cyber-surgeon automaton came to vicious life, chuntering with pincers, las-scalpels and bone saws.

Stroika could do little but feel anger at his own failure and dread at the procedure to come. The skitarius didn’t fear the savage surgery or disassembling that was the automaton’s foetid duty. He feared that after failing his Machine-God so completely, his parts and base organics would not even be deemed worthy of recycling. After passing through the polluted claws of the Dark Mechanicum, why would the Omnissiah want what was left of him?

The skitarii commander felt a raw fury proceeding straight from his thumping heart, but trapped as it was inside the immobilised metal coffin of his combat chassis, there was little that could be done.

The forge master had retreated behind his trap and waited for a skitarius to venture forth: an officer, a killclade, a unit of Omnissian soldiers, it didn’t matter. The forge temple was lost. Greater prizes waited for the forge master if he could give his dark overlords access to the mission directives and the doctrinal imperatives that guided the Adeptus Mechanicus invasion.

Darker thoughts clouded the Primus’s mind. With Stroika’s phylactic interface – a piece of him that would be recycled to serve the needs of the Dark Mechanicum – the enemy could monitor and frustrate the Legiones Skitarii’s every move on Velchanos Magna. The problem personally for Haldron-44 Stroika was that his brain and neurocircuitry would come attached to that interface, with little need for anything else.

Feeling the hopelessness of his predicament and with no cogitated probabilities to inform or comfort him, Stroika’s arc-scalded mind drifted to screed and prayer.

‘Great Maker,’ he mumbled through lips that burned with the unnatural energies of the incapacitator, ‘aid Your cybernetic servants in the prosecution of Your unbreakable will.’

The wretched forge master, whose attentions had been focused on priming his dread automaton, leant in to listen. About Stroika the black shapes of the protectors were gathered.

‘You think prayer will help you now?’ the monstrous mechanoid coughed through his rust-stained grille. ‘You think your Machine-God cares for you, soldier?’

‘Through beam, blade and the wrath of righteous iron, visit through us Your punishment of the unbeliever,’ Stroika continued.

‘Your god cares nothing for your sufferings,’ the forge master said, hacking up rusted filth that splattered and speckled Stroika’s war-plate. ‘Empty vessel of the Mechanicus,’ the forge master told him, leaning over Stroika and allowing the filth of his dangling tentacles to settle on Stroika’s paralysed appendages.

‘You are blind, like the tech-priests of Mars,’ the corrupt construct said. ‘Your Machine-God is as cold as steel and as aloof as your prayers unanswered. Under his technotyranny, you serve the machine. Here, the machine serves us. Here we do not celebrate interface and augmentation. We are a living glorification – we are the union of flesh and iron in ways you could not possibly understand.’

Stroika tried to block out the poison of the forge master’s words.

‘Punish he whose path twists with the darkness of his faith,’ the skitarii commander mumbled on. ‘He who has embraced ignorance over the true enlightenments. Whose creations are false without Your spirit.’

As the forge master went about making final preparations, engaging restraints and raising the surgical slab on its hydraulic crank, he dribbled further madness at his victim.

‘Our masters demand no less of us than your hollow god,’ the fell forge master hissed. ‘Yours sends you across the galaxy to pillage the knowledge and technological wonders of others. We, however, are repaid for our allegiance. In the giving of body, craft and soul to the ageless beings of the beyond, the secrets of the galaxy, the universe and those planes that exist beyond it, shall all become ours. Beings that existed long before technology’s Dark Age… before our understanding took us to the stars… before the first of our kind picked up a rock and dashed out the brains of another. Only they can deliver us from ignorance – the only true evil.’

Haldron-44 Stroika felt the metal binders snap shut about his bionic appendages. As the surgical restraints locked and the automaton moved in with its tools of butchery, Stroika felt the slab rise and the titanium of his feet leave the dark metal of the floor.

The relief found expression in the dull spark of power cells returning to life, the sluggish return of automotive functions and cerebral systems rebooting.

Unaware and uncaring of such revelations, the forge master withdrew slightly to accommodate the closing tools of his blood-speckled automaton.

‘No matter,’ the monstrous master told him, his grille tentacles quivering. ‘You will know, soon enough.’

Stroika’s lips moved on in silence, prayers spilling from him as a countdown continued in his head.

‘Whose very existence is anathema,’ the skitarii commander said.

Three.

‘Whose living lie betrays the holy Quest for Knowledge.’

Two.

‘Those who have no part in Your grand design…’

One.

The mindscrambler grenade he had primed on his belt minutes before detonated. Free from the incapacitator current that up until then had run up through his legs, his workings, his weaponry and neurocircuitry, the primed grenade once again found its function.

With a brief flash, the bioelectrical pulse of detonation enveloped the surgical laboratorium in an arcstorm. The blast set off the two remaining mindscrambler grenades mag-locked to Stroika’s belt, bathing intricate workings and organics in a second and third wave of bioelectrical incapacitation.

The automaton’s saws and las-scalpels shuddered to a halt above Stroika. Both the protectors and their forge master stumbled back, clutching their hoods in agony and confusion. As they reeled and the bioelectrical storm of the mindscrambler grenades crackled away, Stroika felt his pulse-ravaged mind sink back into blackness.

SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +IMPERATIVE+

Stroika’s optics blinked to life. Given a momentary glimpse of the filthy laboratorium lumens, the skitarii commander felt his vision fade once more. With a warping crackle, his overlays bled forth from the darkness. He had been both unconscious and offline, as returning feeds – sluggish and glitch-fevered at first – informed him.

Diagnostic alerts told him of superficial damage caused to the rear of his combat chassis and motive bionics. Fortunately for Stroika the mindscrambler grenades inflicted overloads and neural trauma on their victims rather than physical damage, though they could even kill lesser-grade mechanoids with the intensity of their bioelectrical pulse. If he had been carrying frag or krak grenades, Stroika would have been blasted to bloody shrapnel – but that wouldn’t have prevented the skitarius from arming the grenade and denying the forge master both his phylactic prize and his miserable life.

Optics and omnispectrals returned to life. A stream of further diagnostic data told Stroika that the dormancy the incapacitator had inflicted on his primary systems – both cybernetic and neural – had shielded him from the worst of the mindscrambler blast. His cogitator coils spooled a list of subsidiary systems that had suffered damage from the bioelectric pulse and recorded a 32.451 per cent chance that Stroika had suffered wetware and brain damage affecting non-essential functions.

Stroika’s vision blurred and his feeds sizzled before searing back to clarity. Bracing himself against the surgical slab and testing the function of his circuitry and appendage hydraulics, the skitarii commander heaved against the binder clasped about the bionics of his right arm. With the surgical automaton and slab workings fried by the mindscrambler pulse, the metal restraint stretched and snapped, releasing Stroika.

Half sitting up on the slab, the skitarius peered about the filthy laboratorium. Overlays annotated his surroundings, while Stroika’s mission chronometer indicated that he had been offline for less than a minute. He found one of the Dark Mechanicum protectors dead and crackling on the dark metal floor. His three black-shelled compatriots were stumbling about the laboratorium, through equipment and the plas partitions. Their cortex processors seemed to be scrambled, while the forge master appeared to be feeling his way along the chrome piping of the wall, similarly affected by the bioelectric pulse.

Stroika’s targeting reticules returned. The cell-power to his arc weaponry was yet to, however. A reticule detected movement from the direction of the balcony platform. Reasoning that some sentry had been recalled from the forge temple roof, Stroika hauled at the restraint clasped around his left arm.

As the signature drifted into the forge master’s private chambers, Stroika outstretched the bionics of his right arm. Shooting down its rail, an arc pistol locked in place with the skitarius’s gauntlet. The signal slowly resolved, Stroika’s ident recognition systems still sluggish after their bioelectric trauma.

The skitarii officer recognised the signature of Phrenos~361. The servo-skull, already searching for its master, had answered Stroika’s phylactic call, ascending the curved roofs of the forge temple’s exterior. Lowering his pistol, Stroika felt power return to the weapon from its tripped mag-cell.

<Phrenos~361,> Stroika streamed. <Deactivate the chamber defences.>

The servo-skull’s rotating cog-blade angled, taking the drone into the main chambers, where it scanned the runebanks for the mechanism that cut off power to the incapacitator. Stroika had no desire to feel once again the polluted energies of the security measure flowing through his combat chassis.

<Stroika-unit,> Engra Myrmidex said, his voice once more echoing about the fuzzy recesses of Stroika’s mind and cogitators. <Stroika-unit, you have been offline. Status report.>

Haldron-44 Stroika took a moment to process the demand.

<Interference from the temple structure, my lord,> Stroika lied. <Unsanctioned energy sources, architectural deviancy, field transonics.>

Stroika turned his arc pistol on the three pulse-dazed Dark Mechanicum protectors in their black shells and plastek robes. Blasting what remained of their sentience from their helm-crania, Stroika moved his arm slickly from one hench-unit to another. As the protectors dropped to the floor, crackling with destructive energy, Phrenos reported that it had deactivated the chamber defences. From outside, Stroika saw the glow of the roof node columns reassume its previous crackling ferocity.

<Secure prisoner,> Stroika commanded, pulling his arm and the hydraulics of his legs free of the surgical slab. Phrenos~361 drifted in on the magnetic whirr of its cog-blade. As the foetid forge master – barely cogitating where he was – turned, with his hunched back to the wall, the servo-skull buzzed in close. The forge master lifted his hood, grille and face-tentacles and froze as the drone’s cog-blade accelerated before his throat. Using the serrated cog like a circular saw, Phrenos~361 pinned its prisoner to the wall.

Tentatively, Haldon-44 Stroika climbed down onto the floor and shook down his combat chassis. Exercising his auxiliary appendages, hydraulics and workings, the skitarii commander began to feel like himself again.

<Stroika-unit, respond,> Engra Myrmidex demanded. <Status.>

The skitarius walked about the private chambers of the forge master, cross-referencing his feeds with what he was seeing on the runebank pict screens.

<The mission proceeds ahead of schedule, Lord Fabricator,> Stroika streamed back. That wasn’t an untruth. Both Alpha Versorias and 10-Victro Tiberiax had made excellent progress through the capital districts, taking many significant installations and forge temples along the way. <I am securing hard data in respect to the location of the enemy commander as we speak. It is imperative that he is secured with the forge temple principal, yes, Fabricator Locum?>

Engra Myrmidex hesitated.

<Proceed, Stroika-unit.>

<Thank you, my lord,> Stroika told the Fabricator Locum. Then to Phrenos~361 he streamed, <Search the roof. Full auspectral scan – all filters.>

As the servo-skull drifted back outside, Stroika grabbed the dazed forge master and dragged his rusted metal carcass out onto the balcony platform.

Outside, Stroika marched between the arcing node columns. The thin chemical smog of the forge world’s nightside drifted about the temple roof, the skitarii commander’s movements disturbing its polychromatic miasma. The forge master stumbled and skidded across the platform, coughing and hacking his way to the railing edge.

Beyond, Haldron-44 Stroika could see the constellation of forge fires and molten channels that made up the crowded industriascape of the capital districts. The mountainous silhouette of the Magnaplex Maximal reared from the twisted skyline and cut its darkness from the hellish radiance of the exposed core. The infernal glow of the Abystra-Dynomicron created a roaring horizon, with the heat and light of the daemon’s iron core reaching up into the night sky.

Grabbing the forge master by his leather robes, Stroika hauled the servant of the Dark Mechanicum off his feet and over the roof edge. The forge master, still confused from the mindscrambler pulse, blurted coded insanity. His tentacles slithered and knotted about one another while rusty filth gushed through his face grille, splattering Stroika’s gauntlets. The skitarii commander spread his metal feet further apart and balanced the distribution of his weight. The red foil of his cloak rippled in the caustic breeze. The forge master, meanwhile, kicked his legs and clutched his appendages to his barrel chest, desperate not to fall through his own robes.

Stroika’s optics burned into the darkness of the forge master’s hood, the corrupt construct’s own fading like a pair of cooling coals.

‘Impure thing of the dark arts,’ Haldron-44 Stroika said. ‘You claim to have all the answers. That there is no limit to your daemon-sponsored knowledge. Then prove it, by answering a very simple question. Where can I find the Arch-Fabricant?’

The forge master seemed to struggle with his words, blurting cacophonous scrapcode and liquid corrosion from his grille. The skitarius didn’t know whether this insanity proceeded from the master’s scrambled cogitators or his ruinous pollution.

‘Forge master,’ Haldron-44 Stroika said, shaking the corrupt construct above the vertiginous drop. ‘You have already fallen so far in the estimation of the Machine-God. Don’t make me drop you further off the top of your own temple.’

With his tentacles flailing, the master coughed up a stream of rusty filth from his inner workings that cascaded down the gleaming war-plate of Stroika’s chest. As the Dark Mechanicum construct chuckled his madness through his hacking cough, Stroika heard the sound of gunfire.

Patching into Phrenos~361’s pict feed, Stroika saw that around the back of the temple tower, the servo-skull had discovered a launch pad. Waiting on the platform was a baroque skiff – a grav-craft boasting a twisted carriage-bay for the forge master and his retinue, plus a single malformed servitor-pilot who was interfaced with the open cockpit. The cable-threaded drone had drawn a stub pistol on the servo-skull and Phrenos had returned fire with its underjaw arc blaster.

<Scan skiff destination,> Stroika streamed to the servo-skull.

As Phrenos~361 drifted about the crackling corpse of the warped pilot, it transmitted the coordinates of the skiff’s destination. The Magnaplex-Maximal. The forge master was going to flee his temple, with news of its loss taken to Ulcan Gnostramari, Arch-Fabricant of Velchanos. He was going to butcher Stroika and take his phylactic interface – still attached to the skitarii commander’s brain – to the forge temple principal as an offering of appeasement. A gift to help his Arch-Fabricant repel the skitarii invasion.

Haldron-44 Stroika opened the adamantalloy digits of his gauntlets. The dark chuckle died in the congestion of the forge master’s throat as the leather of his robes slipped from the Primus’s fingers.

Stroika watched the forge master flail and vox-shriek his way down the side of the forge temple. He seemed to fall for an eternity before crashing through the twisted architecture of the upper forge, leaving rusty splatters along his path, each impact a trail of corruption on the metal corrugations of the forge temple. The shrieking died on the poisoned air as the forge master plummeted through a set of power vanes that simultaneously electrocuted and shredded the servant of the Dark Mechanicum. As the vanes flared, the corroded workings and spoilage of the forge master rained down into the freightways below.

Haldron-44 Stroika extended an arm and allowed Phrenos~361 to land. The Primus cycled his optics as he drew his gaze across the capital districts of the renegade forge world. He flickered through magscoptics, filters and overlays, while data scrolled and ghostly, phylactic pict streams played one over another. The skitarii commander matched the updates he was experiencing to what he was seeing from his elevated position.

Alpha Versorias was making good progress along the arterial freightways, elevated maglev routes and waste-drains gurgling with toxic run-off. His column of crawlers and Ironstrider engines had punched through the hasty barricades, tractor-conveyers and freight-monitors that had been halted to provide obstructions. Like the ancient caravans of early Mars, their progress through the capital districts was indomitable.

Vanguard skitarii cohorts, like the one now belonging to Sub-Alpha Quendix, moved through the adjoining mills, assembly-lines and complexes, fighting through the gloom and twisted architecture of manufactoria, production complexes and machine workshops. Moving slickly through such environments, their advance had been expert and economical. Skitarii soldiers used cover and in turn covered one another in a silent advance. Like parts of a well-oiled machine, the skitarii cohorts moved in a wave of murderous silence through the capital districts.

In their wake, the freightways, factory floors and forge temples were littered with the scrap and corpses of mechanoids who had failed to stop them. Slave menials armed with little more than the corruptions and bodily blessings that living under ruinous skies had inflicted upon them. Combat-servitors whose warp-kissed flesh was augmented with powered claws and eviscerating chainblades. Spike-armoured soldier-wretches of the temple forge guard. Horrifically modified hench-units that stank of spoiled flesh. Flagellant spawn that had been monstrously fashioned into living weapons. The heretek tech-priests of besieged installations, whose corrupt, sigil-scrawled bodies had been weaponised to fire streams of aethyric energies. Factory automatons that thought and fought for themselves.

10-Victro Tiberiax and his alphas had done well to keep pace with these forward columns. Securing bordering districts, Tiberiax and his rangers had hunted down renegade forge masters and taken temples dedicated to the infernal entity that raged at the planet’s core. His skitarii had claimed two key freight stations, downing scores of orbital barges, hump-shuttles and haulage brigs. The monstrous magna-machinery towering over the Ghorgaxae-Hectra assembly yards had been neutralised. A raging inferno now lit up the night sky with warp-channelled energies where the Mal/Tec Terrawatt fusion reactors had once been. The corrupt genitor lords and magi that ruled the worker sub-hives of the twisted Flesh Forges had been assassinated.

Orbital augur scans and captures relayed from the Opus Machina told Stroika of the hell that waited for them all about the Magnaplex Maximal. The Arch-Fabricant was holding back his personal army of killer constructs and abominations; foul forces attached to the forge temple principal and charged with its defence. Daemon engines that had been born in the fires of the Abystra-Dynomicron.

In the satellite districts Tiberiax and his ranger cohorts had increasingly run into the dread forces of hereteks and magi from across the forge world. Warp-fuelled mechanoids and altereds raced to their Arch-Fabricant’s aid, compelled by the ancient protocols of technofeudal observance and new promises of reward streamed and warp-cast across the planet. Tiberiax and his army of rangers were now working their way up the blazing channels of molten iron that flowed through the satellite districts before forming the ferric falls of the abyssal drop-off, the sentient liquid metal returning to the daemonic core of the cursed forge world.

Time was against all the holy constructs of the Omnissiah fighting for the planetary soul of Velchanos Magna. While Haldron-44 Stroika’s skitarii legions moved in on the capital forge, augur arrays aboard the arkcruisers of the Adeptus Mechanicus fleet told of colossal movements of cybernetic troops and materiel across the surface of the renegade forge world.

Blizzards of atmospheric craft, ugly freighters and lighters now descended upon the contested districts, packed with wretched reinforcements. Shrieking through the thin chemical skies and over the heads of skitarii soldiers were swarms of fighter wing aircraft. The spiked, black outlines of servitor-piloted Avengers streamed warp trails and cut up the freightways and sacrificial plazas with their merciless boltcannons. The Fabricator Locum was faring little better in low orbit, where the suicidal runs of mangle-fashioned system ships, armed freighters and defence monitors threatened to down the Opus Machina and her arkcruisers. This was made worse by fresh updates of heat signatures in the shipyards and partially constructed Dark Mechanicum vessels rising above the renegade forge world from their dry docks.

As Haldron-44 Stroika phylactically monitored the thousands of skitarii carrying out their tactical invasion of the capital districts, billions of corrupt warriors were making their way through the freightways and ongoing industry of Velchanos Magna, converging on the unholy site of the forge temple principal. Even if Stroika and his skitarii took the Magnaplex Maximal and its secrets for his Fabricator Locum, there was no guarantee he could hold it against such numbers – as Engra Myrmidex undoubtedly expected. This said nothing of the progress of abominable Ordinatus war machines and the spirit-corrupted Titans that were striding through the nightmare industriascape from the damnation of fortress workshops on the other side of the planet.

Stroika stood there. Processing. Analysing. Strategising. When Sub-Alpha Quendix arrived on the balcony platform, leading a unit of vanguard skitarii, he did not bother to turn.

<The forge temple is in our hands, Primus,> Quendix reported. <All defending forces have been annihilated.>

<Very good, sub-alpha,> Stroika said. <Your skitarii may take a moment for prayer, for the anointment of damage with consecrated oils and replenishing ammunition.>

<Thank you, Primus.>

<No,> Stroika said. <Thank you, Alpha Quendix. I am enacting a field promotion based upon your record and the loss of your cybernetic superior.>

<You honour me, Primus.>

<I do,> Stroika streamed, <and you will honour me and the Machine-God for whom you fight with the following. I aim to move on with the column and take the forge temple principal with all despatch. I need you and your cohorts to take Cynodon Delta, Cynodon Gamma and Dispyria-Omicros by force, as you have this temple. We cannot allow the forge masters of those installations to flank our approach. Questions?>

<None, Primus,> Quendix reported.

<Good. Have incapacitated skitarii returned to the dropsite and instruct Princeps Deka to have his Sicarians transport ammunition and power to the advancing columns.> Stroika knew that the princeps would detest such a duty. It was time, however, to let Deka’s ruststalkers off the leash. <Inform him that I have duties more suited to his skills upon his arrival.>

1001

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +THE NUMBERS HAVE SPOKEN+

Haldron-44 Stroika found himself buried in the abominable shadow of the Magnaplex Maximal. The molten blaze of the planet’s daemonic core raged behind it, while the dark magnificence of the forge principal had long been refashioned into a temple celebrating the infernal union of man and machine, the daemon and the Ruinous Powers of the warp.

The Magnaplex Maximal was a dread wonder of hanging forges and iron falls, the molten metal lighting up the darkness with the spit and slurp of its malevolence. The falls fed a broad moat that was both a defensive feature and an aesthetic one. The fiery channels met around the rear of the mighty forge, spilling over the great drop that bordered the temple in a broad cascade that rejoined the vast daemon entity from which it originally flowed. The Abystra-Dynomicron, infernal sponsor of the renegade forge world and provider of its power and its unnatural craft.

There had once been a circular plaza surrounding the forge temple principal, with doctrinal quadrangles forming the denticles of a cog. It was a wonder that could be seen from orbit and honoured the Omnissiah with its form. Now there was but a shattered thoroughfare of black, iron-threaded stone, with much of the layout having been lost to the cataclysm that had exposed the core.

The quadrangles now housed small mountains of mouldering scrap and bone – the fused carcasses of cybernetic constructs who had failed or disappointed the Arch-Fabricant and the daemonic core to whom he was Lord Prophetechnos. Obscene symbols dedicated to the daemon and the rancid deities of the beyond were carved into the floor and displayed on the pillars of elevated freightways and twisted maglev lines that strangled the cog-plaza like overgrown metal vines.

It was there – before the abominate forge temple that spewed forth infernal iron and the daemon engines for which Velchanos Magna had become infamous – that the Arch-Fabricant made his stand.

The battle had raged for hours. The skitarii vanguard had kept pushing forward under Stroika’s command, cohorts of fearless cybernetic soldiers crackling with radioactivity from the contamination of their devastating weaponry. Moving through the smouldering destruction about the forge temple principal, immaculate in their battleware, were sentinels in crimson and silver.

Ranger units crept through the wreckage of vehicles and over small mountains of debris created by stilt-freightways that had been blasted and toppled for cover. With their galvanic rifles and arquebuses, they turned the battlefield of shattered rockcrete, twisted black metal and fire-gutted factories into a hailstorm. The shrieking path of servitor shells turned corrupt mechanoids into crackling infernos of systematic overload. As bullets of depleted transuranium from arquebuses smacked through armour plating and buildings, the renegade forge-worlders inside were turned into streaming showers of blood, oil and workings. All the while, the skitarii vanguard made their advance before the maelstrom of such pinpoint slaughter.

Sicarian ruststalkers haunted the derelict workshops and factories, butchering their way through the Dark Mechanicum troops who were sheltering there. With the shimmer and buzz of transonic blades, the ruststalker units disassembled cybernetic warplings, finishing the polluted constructs with the molecular dissonance of chordclaw sweeps, the blurs of talons ripping effortlessly through flesh and bionics.

Haldron-44 Stroika rode on the back of an Onager Dunecrawler, leading a contingent of other armoured arachnoid vehicles across the debris of the smouldering battlefield. Clutching the bulbous back of the crawler with a single gauntlet and the toe-point of a metal foot, Stroika led columns of the vehicles, like swollen metal ticks, towards the enemy. With broadening eradication beams atomising enemy formations and neutronic streams turning spiked vehicles and monstrous automatonic machines into crackling, burnt-out wrecks, the Dunecrawlers continued their indomitable advance. Servitor-driven Ironstrider engines moved nimbly across the debris and body-strewn terrain. Weaving between the Dunecrawlers, they seared fat las-beams into approaching enemy contingents and the twisted shapes of light vehicles.

For the skitarii commander, the battle was havoc overlaid with havoc. While his legions exchanged fire with loathsome, warp-fuelled fusions of man and machine, his optics and phylactics provided further complication and insight.

Stroika’s cogitators burned inside the tissue of his brain and the plastek of his battle wetware. The angles and extended trajectories of incoming beams and bullets updated in a continuous cycle. The twisted battlefield was a vista of flashing forms. Targeting reticules shot back and forth, identifying the warped, myriad forms of the Dark Mechanicum to be locked and killed.

Data spooled in an endless, updating loop, apprising Stroika of strategic openings, enemy reinforcements and skitarii losses. Phylactic pict feeds and vox-transmitted reports recreated the cacophony of battle within his mind. Simulations bled to nothing as the speed of unfolding events overreached them and fizzling filters showed Stroika the battlefield in all its auspectral glory.

Cutting through the miasma of overlaid data and the moment-by-moment, life-or-death decisions, the Fabricator Locum was ever present. Boosted by the phylactic arrays carried by the armoured Dunecrawlers, Engra Myrmidex’s voice echoed about Stroika’s mind.

<Stroika-unit…>

<Warhound-designation god-machine inbound…>

<Battle maniple kill-ratios are falling…>

<Unidentifiable power flux detected, sixth denticle…>

<The Omnissiah guides us, in all things…>

<Protocol 96/3-1 states that when…>

<Status?>

<Legionary accuracy down 0.24 per cent…>

<Securing the secrets of the forge is of prime importance…>

<Observe your doctrina imperatives…>

<The temple is not to be damaged…>

<Estimates revised – parameters extended…>

<Time is running out…>

<You must take that temple…>

<Stroika-unit, report…>

Stroika drifted the fingers of his gauntlet down to a wound in his midriff. An enemy shell had found its way through both the overlapping force fields of the Dunecrawler and his own conversion field. Passing straight through both his war-plate and his side, it had been an incredibly fortunate shot. Stroika suspected that sniper constructs sat up in the hanging forges of the temple were using some kind of daemonic guidance to place their shots. Bringing the bionic digits up, the officer could see the rich, red blood on his fingertips, the same that was running down the side of his silvered armour.

The skitarii commander felt the burn of doctrina imperatives that were yet to be met and protocols unfulfilled. Waving an Ironstrider engine rider over to him, Stroika stepped from the Dunecrawler onto the side of the walker. Once again holding on with a single gauntlet and the tip of his metal toe, Stroika rode out the rough terrain, pulling in close as the Sydonian Dragoon rider took the Ironstrider engine at speed up and down a mound of rubble and serrated girders. Phrenos~361, who had been sheltering in an alcove amongst the Dunecrawler’s armour plating, whirred to a magnetic blur and drifted through the mayhem behind its master.

Warp-beams of unnatural energy cut through the reality about Stroika, while autocannon fire chewed up an advancing file of vanguard skitarii. Temple tech-thrall soldiers, attached to the forge principal, turned the air into a criss-crossing web of red needle beams.

An accompanying ballistarius engine that had been pacing Stroika went down in a stream of boltcannon fire, delivered by Dark Mechanicum fighters swooping in low on their spiked wings. As another volley and another followed, hammering the servitor-driver, the engine and its skitarii rider into the rockcrete, Stroika updated the column of crawlers he had just left with the aircraft’s course. Within moments, several Onager Dunecrawlers had fired their rocket arrays, blasting the midnight-black fighter and its wing-servitors out of the sky.

Halting and moving, halting and moving through the battlefield hailstorm of gunfire and searing beams, the Sydonian Dragoon allowed successive rockcrete pillars to soak up the worst of the attention. Arriving at the forward extent of the skitarii advance, Stroika found hundreds of cybernetic soldiers pinned down behind the toppled section of an elevated maglev rail and the armoured train it was carrying. A skitarii maniple held its pinned position as warped Dark Mechanicum battle tanks pulverised the debris with their massive tracks. They exchanged heavy blasts of energy with the advancing line of Onager Dunecrawlers.

Meanwhile, the interior of the maglev monitor train that had fallen across the battlefield glowed with an ominous light. The contingent of cybernetic heavy shock troops that the monitor train had been carrying to harass the skitarii rear sections now cut through the armour of the compartment roofs with their barrel-mounted chainblades.

Levelling the length of his taser goad like a lance, the Sydonian Dragoon riding the Ironstrider engine smashed one of the corrupted cyborgs back through its compatriots. With a flash of power, the heavy shock trooper was smash-blasted into several razor-wire-entwined bionics. Along with heavy-duty appendages and cradled weaponry, the twisted ladder of an interfaced spine and a shrunken skull-helm flew back into the darkness of the carriage-compartment.

Dropping down to the shattered rockcrete, Haldron-44 Stroika launched his arc pistols on their appendage-rails and blasted several shock troopers back. The warrior cyborgs droned machine madness inside their spiked, armoured shells. They experienced the battle as a miasma of electromagnetic turmoil, heat signatures and seismic percussion.

As the constructs rattled with Stroika’s assault, spidery arcs feeling their way across armour and through the black ooze of their workings, Stroika cycled his shoulder joints. Turning his torso socket at the same time, the skitarii commander became a cranking whirlwind of arc mauls. The weapons trailed a blaze of sizzling power, smashing shrunken cybernetic heads from barrel-chassised bodies and pushing the flared muzzles of warp-blasters aside.

With Stroika cycling his limbs and turning, each slick movement firing with a hydraulic thunk, the Primus beat and blasted the emerging shock troopers into a headless throng of weaponless warriors. Battering the aethyric beams of their rifles and appendage-cradles aside, Stroika mercilessly ended cyborg after cyborg. He ducked and leant out of the clumsy, chugging paths of barrel-mounted chainblades. He crushed skull-helms and visited point-blank storms of electrical energy into the juddering, smoke-streaming torso-units of the augmented killers.

Within moments the forward skitarii registered the presence of their Primus fighting among them. They processed the emerging danger of the corrupted shock troops, who were cutting their foetid way out of the very cover the skitarii were using. Retaining the shelter of their positions, the skitarii turned to face the toppled train. They blasted a synchronised volley of servitor shot from their galvanic rifles. Hammering the droning shock troops aside, the sophisticated ammunition caused the cyborgs to overload and explode in battery-blasts of crackling power and slime-coated workings.

As Haldron-44 Stroika took cover with his skitarii, the last of the heavy shock troopers stomped out of the monitor train compartment, only to succumb to the shrieking attentions of servitor shot.

Turning his helm aside at the explosive overload and the fine spray of black slime, Stroika swished his greatcloak aside and worked his way down the line of skitarii. Identica told the Primus that he was amongst the 4.2 Fortisoi-Cyratica. Stroika found their registered alpha, 606-Sartrid Inculus.

<Report, alpha,> Stroika said.

<Armour and conveyers, Primus,> Inculus told him. <Battle tanks and automatons mounting heavy weaponry. All supported by temple emplacements. Exploratory advance negated. We experimented with a frontal assault but the losses were unacceptable. We need the crawlers.>

<Armour is on its way,> Stroika told him.

<We need air strikes,> Inculus said. <Sir, we need orbital bombardment.>

Like the skitarii alpha, Haldron-44 Stroika could make an endless list of what the invasion force needed. Scrambling up the side of the monitor train – the armour of which was covered with shredding metal barbs and spines – Stroika risked a look over the mangled maglev line and the debris of the collapsed stiltway.

<Be careful, sir,> Inculus said.

Up on the train, Stroika came to appreciate the warning. Just above the vanes and crenellations of his half-cog plume, a raging storm of heavy shell, chuntering cannon and fat energy beams was being exchanged between ranks of black, baroque battle tanks and the advancing Mechanicus crawlers. As Phrenos~361 rose to join its master in cataloguing the area, Stroika put a gauntlet on the servo-skull’s bone crown and pushed it down below the havoc of bullets and beams.

It was no place for man or machine, as the lines of half-atomised skitarii bodies testified. The cybernetic soldiers that 606-Sartrid Inculus had sent to test the approach had been blasted apart mere moments after surmounting the debris beyond the train.

The grit and twisted metal of the collapse suddenly flashed with the hammering of sickly, stuttering beams. Stroika ducked his helm as the beams, fired from one of many cannon-emplacements set in the hanging forges of the monstrous temple, cut through the air overhead. Where the sickly streams of energy phased into the covering wreckage, the metal struts began to squirm and the rockcrete liquefied to a bubbling sentience. Stroika withdrew his gauntlet as the living wreckage reached out for him.

Looking up just in time, Stroika’s optic-array and overlays alerted him to the fact that the tapering turret of an enemy battle tank had acquired his position. The skitarii commander jumped down from the train just as the long turret vomited forth the blinding purple flash of a shot. Wreckage and plaza debris vaulted into the air as the cannon blast thudded into the embankment of plasteel and shattered rockcrete. The toppled monitor train was knocked back, forcing the skitarii taking cover behind to jump, scramble and crawl out of the pulverising path of the rolling carriages.

<Back!> Haldron-44 Stroika urged, rolling to his metal feet. He jabbed the finger of a gauntlet along the length of the monitor train. <Back!>

As Alpha Inculus and the 4.2 Fortisoi-Cyratica retreated along the tangled carriage-compartments, the tank shot evolved into a miniature storm of sizzling, abyssal energies that tore up the armoured train’s bulbous engine. It was another of the Dark Mechanicum’s warp-fuelled weapons. The monitor train’s forward compartments disintegrated in the maelstrom before the anomaly itself finally dissipated.

Settling back into cover a little way down the train’s length, Stroika stared up into the sky. He could hear the throaty roar of Mechanicus Thunderbolt fighter-bombers from the arkcruiser Ultros coming in low and savaging a maniple of Dark Mechanicum battle-automata with their nose-mounted cannons. As the rockcrete-punching cannon bursts ripped through the lumbering advance of the warp-plated robots, they fell apart. The horrific phantasms of polluted machine-spirits clawed and raged as they sizzled into the broken ground about the clattering plate and hydraulics.

As the Thunderbolts climbed once more and banked about the mountainous, black form of the unholy forge temple, Haldron-44 Stroika phylactically reached out for the magi of the arkcruiser.

<Ultros,> Stroika streamed amongst the din of explosions, heavy-gauge cannon fire and whining beams of unnatural energy. <Ultros, this is Primus Stroika. Identica confirm.>

<Confirmed, Primus Stroika.>

Climbing up the spikes of the temple monitor train once more, Stroika got a fix on the position of the column of armour and tracked conveyers that sat under the protection of the forge temple gun emplacements.

<I’m sending you coordinates for a Thunderbolt bombing run on the temple plaza,> Stroika transmitted.

<Be advised, Stroika-unit,> the techno-magos aboard the Ultros returned. <Air strike risks damage to the forge temple principal and the mission objectives.>

<Then ensure your servitor-pilots don’t miss,> Stroika streamed back.

Phrenos~361 issued a warning blurt of binary, re-streaming the feed from its optics to the skitarii commander’s overlays. Spilling out of several monstrous conveyers, Stroika detected the clustered signatures of Dark Mechanicum thralls.

The soldier-menials were running through the hail of beams and heavy stub rounds proceeding from the approaching Dunecrawlers. Ejecting his arc pistol mag-cells, Stroika slammed the weapons down into his thigh-loaders.

<Enemy inbound,> Stroika transmitted to Alpha Inculus and his skitarii. With the polished wooden stocks of their galvanic rifles pulled in close and barrels aimed up over the train, the rangers waited for the rush.

Thralls ran with ruinous abandon at the skitarii position. Broad streams of murderous energy from the skitarii armour cut them in half, eradication beamers atomised their left flank and crawler-mounted heavy stubbers chewed up the first wave. As the soldier-menials that made it through the barrage reached the embankment of wreckage they jumped, the stumbling momentum of their battlefield run taking them over the monitor train.

Galvanic rifles barked in unison. The range was close and the shrieking reports short-lived. Many of the Dark Mechanicum thralls died in the air, the servitor rounds turning their minor augmentations into detonators for associated power systems. As crackling corpses rained down on the skitarii, missing heads and legs, Haldron-44 Stroika realised that the soldier-menials were missing something else.

Those thralls that escaped the synchronous blast of servitor shot dropped down into the cover behind the train. They rolled and skidded back to their feet like code-fevered constructs. Stroika saw that the butchered workers had already had their arms cut from their shoulders and therefore didn’t carry any weapons. They wore gas masks over their mouths but the rest of their faces bore the hallmarks of mutation – scales, spines and the warped flesh of the heretek. They came back at the skitarii, running into the wooden stocks of rifles as Inculus’s rangers put them down. As they scrambled back to their feet, Stroika saw that each mutilated menial wore a pack that began to shimmer, crackle and glow.

<Alert!> Stroika transmitted to the rangers. Phrenos~361 banked and drifted out of range. As the skitarii commander knocked a thrall to one side with the clutched grip and protruding mag-cell of his arc pistol, the rabid worker’s mask came away. Instead of a mouth, the Dark Mechanicum thrall had a worm-like scolex, with metallic, needle-like teeth. It came at the skitarii commander again, forcing Stroika to launch it back with a hydraulically fired kick against the thrall’s chest.

The menial’s pack detonated with a soul-wrenching boom. Stroika’s world momentarily became a kaleidoscope of receiver-splitting sound and otherworldly energies. His optics flashed with warnings and unidentified field detections. As the packs of the other thralls simultaneously detonated, including those attached to rifle-blasted corpses, explosions swiftly became implosions.

The manic menial before Stroika streamed away to a molecular mist that was dragged into an aethyric vortex. The phenomenon opened up in the floor where the pack had detonated, dragging Stroika to the ground and towards the swirling rift. While small, each vortex pulled at reality with warp-gaping power, swallowing scrap, wreckage and soldiers of the 4.2 Fortisoi-Cyratica. Allowing his pistols to ride back on their rails, the skitarii commander slammed the digits of his gauntlets into the shattered rockcrete like grapnels. As Alpha Inculus lost his grip on the monitor train, Stroika reached out for the officer, snatching for his arm as he was dragged by.

Then – as swiftly as they had begun – the warp vortices closed and disappeared, swallowing themselves up and leaving the cacophonous reality of the battlefield behind. Between the air-searing beams that criss-crossed about him, the chuntering cannon fire and the incessant overloads and explosions that rocked the battlefield, Stroika’s mind felt like it was under assault. As the vortices subsided, he became once more aware of the sheer volume of data and information he was processing. Clarifications phylactically addressed. Updates from the Opus Machina and the arkcruisers in low orbit. Contextual pict feeds. Monitored losses. Verified kills.

Ironstrider walkers had engaged robotic machines infused with abominable intelligence of their own – gravitic forge-claws, sentinel machinery and the towering menace of tracked slave-drivers.

Several Onager crawlers had become scrapcode-infected by multi-limbed cyber-parasites that skittered, rolled and crawled across the battlefield in a polluting plague. The electro-amniotically immersed drivers were forced to set their crawlers and the precious data that they carried to self-destruct, taking out several chain-draped Knight walkers in the process.

Vanguard skitarii of the Saggitarq 8/90 Io-thetra had succumbed to machinator units. The Quoidos VIth Neutriad were down to half-strength against various sects of mechadendrite-swarming magi militant – hereteks who had taken to the field personally to visit the dark wrath of their monstrous, experimental weaponry on the servants of the Omnissiah.

Nalode Deka 871 and his ruststalkers had almost been buried alive in the sub-basement ruins of a demolished factory by a siege-automaton that was spiked like an urchin and carried its cybernetic victims as trophies, impaled on its rusted defences.

10-Victro Tiberiax, meanwhile, had made little progress against the constant influx of reinforcements. His rangers aimed their rifles and transuranics back and forth, caught between the expertly drilled warriors of the Magnaplex Maximal praetorian forge guard and arriving technofeudal reinforcements sent by satellite forge temples. Small armies of gun-servitors, forge thralls, battle-automata and hench-units – all warped by the touch of Chaos.

Scrabbling back to cover, the remaining skitarii rangers of the 4.2 Fortisoi-Cyratica put their backs to the monitor train. Some had lost their weaponry to the strange vortices, while others now slipped off their helms to reveal their sub-dermal circuitry, optics and swarthy forge world features. Phrenos~361 shot between mangled wreckage and pieces of cover, once more joining its master.

<Thank you, sir,> 606-Sartrid Inculus said, getting up and helping his commander to his feet. <Primus, should we not explore another avenue of attack?>

As Stroika slammed his greatcloak and back against cover once more he knew that the officer’s suggestion did not come from cowardice but cold logic. However, Stroika couldn’t abandon his commitment to the progress they had already made. Advancing on another front would take hours that the skitarii didn’t have.

The Primus looked up as his equalisers isolated the rising rumble of Thunderbolt fighter-bombers on their attack run.

<No need, Alpha Inculus,> Stroika reassured him. <Omnissiah willing, our entry point to the objective is about to be blown wide open.>

Stroika and Inculus watched the rust-red Thunderbolts line up for their attack run on the Dark Mechanicum columns of armour and conveyers.

<Incoming,> Inculus alerted his remaining rangers.

The night sky suddenly lit up with detonations, but not those initiated by bombs dropped by the Thunderbolts. One after another, the fighter-bomber wing of the arkcruiser Ultros disappeared in a disintegrating smear of destruction. From the south, Stroika saw a flickering stream of gargantuan tracer fire. Some colossal weapon had blown the entire fighter wing out of the sky.

As Stroika’s cogitator cycled through threat possibilities, the colossal, stooped silhouettes of not one but two Warhound Scout Titans stomped into view. The monstrous machines travelled parallel to the abyssal drop-off and the exposed planetary core. As they strode closer and Stroika’s telescoptics pict-resolved in, the skitarii commander was cursed with a vision of annihilation. Watching the first of the godless machines limp closer, it became clear that their hulls had been possessed by daemonic entities. Void shielding that rippled with field-haunting entities flickered with some infernal malfunction. The lupine metal architecture of the Titan’s forward command deck was transmuted into the daemonflesh of some monstrous creature of the warp. While one of its legs retained the corroded workings and plate of its original design, the other was warped and covered in a crustacean-like shell.

It was draped in the power cabling and chains that the Titans had walked through to reach the forge temple in time. At its side it carried the Vulcan mega-bolter it had used to wipe out the Thunderbolts, while the monstrous muzzle of its blast gun dribbled warp-threaded plasma into the freightways below and the buildings it was demolishing beneath its huge feet.

‘Machine-God of mercy…’ Stroika said to himself. Looking up into the sky, he didn’t find the Great Maker to whom he offered his prayers. He did see the Opus Machina in low orbit, like the fleet’s mauled arkcruisers, fighting off charging system ships, boarding actions and the turbolaser batteries of orbital defence platforms.

<Ark Mechanicus, Ark Mechanicus,> the skitarii commander streamed. <This is Stroika. Respond.>

It had been two minutes and thirteen seconds since the Fabricator Locum’s last demand for information or status. This told Stroika that something was keeping Engra Myrmidex busy. Perhaps it was the Opus Machina. Or the increasingly bleak picture orbital data was painting of closing Dark Mechanicum forces as they were drawn from across the planet down on the Fabricator Locum’s precious objective.

<Ark Mechanicus, respond,> Stroika transmitted.

<Yes, Stroika-unit,> Myrmidex responded. His transmissions sounded strange.

<We need orbital support,> Stroika said. <Two targets inbound. God-machines. Warhound-class. South-south-east. Seventh denticle.>

The Fabricator Locum didn’t seem to understand what Stroika was saying.

<You are failing Him, Stroika-unit,> Engra Myrmidex told him. <We are all failing Him. We are undone in the Great Maker’s eyes.>

Stroika looked over at the dark, mountainous shape of the Magnaplex Maximal, then up at the Opus Machina.

<I don’t believe that, Lord Fabricator,> Stroika streamed. <I believe that the Omnissiah’s work can be done, even here on this heretek-swarming abomination of a world. My cogitator coils tell me that our objectives can be achieved.>

<You know nothing, Stroika-unit,> Engra Myrmidex told him, his transmission laced with the heaviness of defeat. It had the signature of a magos who had accepted his fate and that of everyone else. <How could you? You are but a weapon. An instrument fashioned by the priesthood to wage war.>

<I am a holy warrior – a crusader of the Omnissiah,> Stroika told him. <And as such, by my imperatives and protocols, I tell you that we can win this.>

<You sound like I did, Stroika-unit,> Engra Myrmidex told him. <I too was blessed with ignorance at the beginning of this enterprise. But sometimes belief is not enough. Like I was then, you are not in possession of all the facts. The data eludes you – as it did us all. Soon you will understand.>

Stroika was running out of time. His mind burned with phylactic intrusion, with the pict feeds of the dying and the cold equations of war.

<My lord, we need those orbital strikes. Two targets. South…>

<The calculus engines have run the probabilities, Stroika-unit,> Engra Myrmidex told him. <The logi have made their determinations. Anything else is a waste – of energy and materials. The Machine-God abhors waste. We live and die by His manifestation: in flesh, in metal and in number. The numbers have spoken, Stroika-unit–>

<Lord Fabricator!>

<–and they say that we are lost.>

<My lord!>

<Goodbye, Stroika-unit.>

1010

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +FORGEBREAKER+

With a blinding flash, the huge and ancient Ark Mechanicus cracked down the middle, exposing the fiery innards of the ship. Decks in flame. The ruptured keel. The intricate workings of interstitial sections and the battery-banks of the port cannons. Like a molten wound it opened, the reinforced superstructure of the vessel protruding like shattered bones. The Opus Machina – colossal Ark Mechanicus of the Omnissiah – split in two.

But for his overlays and logic coils, Haldron-44 Stroika wouldn’t have believed what he was seeing. The Opus Machina’s back was broken. She had been struck by another vessel at ramming speed on her starboard side. The shields of both ships arced and seared as the Ark Mechanicus was bulldozed through the atmosphere towards the Dark Mechanicum forge world.

Stroika stumbled back. The beams cooking the air about him and the shells sparking off the wreckage seemed to fade away. In that moment, the deaths of skitarii soldiers and the corrupt constructs they were fighting became inconsequential. The explosions and battlefield destruction paled to nothing in comparison to the apocalypse unfolding above Stroika’s head.

Flames ripped through the shattered wreck of the Ark Mechanicus as the vessel’s catastrophic damage met the oxygen and chemical taint of the lower atmosphere. Stroika couldn’t believe it. The ramming vessel was still smashing the flagship on. Finally, like the ruined carcass of a gored beast, the Opus Machina tumbled at Velchanos Magna. She rolled dorsal over keel, twisting, splitting and raging. As she plummeted towards the planet’s surface, her shearing fore and aft sections barely attached, the attacking vessel was revealed.

Stroika’s optic-array cycled furiously through filters while he stood, like many others on the field of battle, dumbfounded. Even the glow of Phrenos~361’s optics were fixed upon the orbital spectacle. As a cybernetic construct – a skitarii soldier – the Primus knew he had to fight on. His doctrina imperatives and protocols allowed for little else. As a man – who thought and felt for himself – Haldron-44 Stroika was horrified. He struggled to process what was happening. For the sickening steeliness of the moment, he was lost.

The attacking vessel was no system ship or monitor, her colossal size and design told Stroika that. The vessel, like those that followed in a brute flotilla, seemed of an altogether different design to the craft defending Velchanos Magna. They might have been repaired or augmented in the forge world’s great shipyards, but they had certainly not been built there.

Stroika’s overlays mapped the dimensions of the monstrous vessel. Even from the surface, he could make out its original class, obscured by an eternity of augmentation and experimentation. It was a portless beast of the void, storming forth blind through the blackness. The clinker-armoured nightmare of plate laid over reinforced plate gave way to sections of what appeared to be bronzed flesh, stretched across the sharp ridges of the ship’s architecture. Beyond this was a bulbous, cathedralesque aft section. The vessel’s reinforced prow sat in a nest of gargantuan impact-absorbing hydraulics and was shaped like a mighty hammer. It had been this terrible weapon that had smashed the Opus Machina asunder.

Flashing projections showed Stroika how the ramming vessel had emerged from the raging maelstrom of the nearby storm front undetected. Unseen from the surface. Unavoidable for those unfortunate vessels already in orbit. The projections flashed its ramming-speed run at the Ark Mechanicus, with its flotilla of rusted cruisers, fat troop-hulks and squat frigates keeping pace. The Fabricator Locum and his magi had run their evasive models and probabilities. Their conclusion was that nothing could save the stately Ark Mechanicus from the inevitability of such a devastating attack.

Seconds passed for Stroika like minutes stretched to hours. The impossible had happened. The Adeptus Mechanicus flagship had been destroyed and the commanding priesthood under whose authority the mission was prosecuted were gone. The bombardment cannons and prow lance batteries on the flanking enemy cruisers opened fire at near point-blank range, tearing into the Mechanicum arkcruisers. The vessels glowed with devastation, the impacts of the enemy weapons like volcanic eruptions opening up in their armoured mid-sections. Stroika watched the Ultros fall away as the cruisers ploughed on, engulfing troop carriers, adamanticlads and Mechanicus heavy frigates in a void storm of merciless cannon fire that obliterated what was left of the Machine-God’s fleet.

Stroika’s feeds streamed with the last data the flaming Ark Mechanicus had to offer. Runebank and meme-log confirmations of the enemy vessel’s designation, based upon design, age and ancient identica. The Opus Machina had factored every last scrap of data into their doomed resolution and the cold acceptance of their fate.

Stroika watched the colossal vessel pull up its hammer-shaped prow, and rain tiny descent craft down on Velchanos Magna like a fish seeding eggs. Dreadclaws. Stormbirds. Gunships. Stroika’s optics flashed with flotilla identifications ancient and terrible. The hammer-prowed nightmare was a battle-barge called Forgebreaker, last recorded to be under the command of one Idriss Krendl, warsmith of the Iron Warriors Traitor Space Marines.

As the phylactic returns from the Opus Machina and the arkfreighters died and their magi with them, Haldron-44 Stroika was confronted with a number of searing facts. The first was that he was now the ranking representative of Satzica Secundus, the Mechanicus invasion force, and the holy Machine-God on the surface of Velchanos Magna.

The second was the fact that what remained of the skitarii legions under his command were now trapped on a Dark Mechanicum forge world – a planet that without orbital support and at their present force disposition they could not hope to conquer.

The third fact reduced the first and second to mere formalities. The Iron Warriors had arrived in force above Velchanos Magna. Not to resupply their monstrous Chaos Space Marine forces. Not to repair or refit their cursed and indomitable vessels. Not to trade for fell weaponry, genebred slave-troops or the daemon engines of the planet’s hellforges.

They were attacking the Dark Mechanicum forge world. The Iron Warriors did not want what Velchanos Magna had to offer the sons of Perturabo. They wanted Velchanos Magna. Like scavengers of the plain they had waited as a mighty beast had been attacked and felled by a noble predator, only to run the predator off. Descending on the wounded beast, they now aimed to deliver the kill. It was the unstoppable progress of history repeating itself. The inescapable nature of all living things. The universal cycle of galactic life and death.

Stroika’s optic-array moved from the horrific shape of the Forgebreaker delivering its warped payload of transhuman death to a more immediate threat. His overlays sizzled with the flashing outline of the falling Ark Mechanicus and the projected trajectories of its descent.

<Holy Omnissiah, preserve Your great works,> Stroika streamed. In the phylactic absence of Mechanicus magi – the prophets through whom the Machine-God Incarnate heard and answered all prayers – the Primus didn’t know who he was communicating with. Stroika could not escape the impossible truth, however. With the cold calculations of a machine, the Iron Warriors – experts in the arts of siege – had fired off their first salvo. The Opus Machina. Striking the behemoth vessel in exactly the right place, at the right speed and time, Forgebreaker had hammered the Ark Mechanicus not just at Velchanos Magna, but precisely at the zone about the forge temple principal. The battlefield fought over by the thousands of skitarii soldiers and corrupt mechanoids who would be first in line to defend such an objective against merciless opportunists like the Iron Warriors.

Stroika looked about. His optics whirred between skitarii assuming the pointlessness of cover, the steady advance of the Dunecrawlers and the warped constructs of the Dark Mechanicum that in their code-madness seemed to care little about the catastrophe to come. Demolished workshops and the shattered plaza glowed with the outline of potential options for shelter but the battlefield was largely a decimated mess of scrap, mounds of rockcrete and collapsed sub-basements. Being the forge temple principal, the mountainous outline of the Magnaplex Maximal – with its hanging forges and molten iron moat – had been built to last. It had been crafted to endure even the apocalyptic events that led to the unearthing of the planet’s daemonic core. Stroika did not, however, have the time to fight his way into the fortified structure.

The Primus’s chronometer began a three-figure countdown to impact. He had less than three hundred seconds before the crashing Ark Mechanicus, coming in shallow, decimated the battlefield. Looking at the glow of the planetary core reaching up into the sky behind the Magnaplex Maximal like a hellish corona, Stroika knew there was only one place his skitarii could take shelter from the apocalypse.

<Disengage,> Haldron-44 Stroika ordered across the phylactic link that still existed between him and his skitarii legions. <Disengage and make with all haste for the shipyard drop-off. I repeat. This is an Eta-Sigma-Zeta override. I am ordering you to abort your mission imperatives. Initiate your aegis protocols and get clear of the battlefield. All other considerations rescinded. To me, skitarii. To me!>

Stroika turned to find Phrenos~361 drifting out from where the cybernetic shock troops had cut their way from the monitor train compartment. The servo-skull gave an affirmatory binaric blurt.

<Go!> Stroika ordered, following the servo-skull inside.

As Stroika’s optic-array automatically cycled to accommodate the foetid darkness of the compartment, he ran through the false-colour static of the gloomy interior. Skitarii rangers filed into the train after their Primus, all following in the omnispectral-scanning wake of Phrenos~361. As the servo-skull drifted through the fug of corruption, it alerted Stroika to the presence of upcoming obstacles. Launching one of his arc pistols on its appendage rail, Stroika blasted the control mechanisms of the heavy metal doors and vestibule locks that separated the armoured carriages. As the control panels crackled and spat with the energies from his pistol, the weight of the sliding doors dragged them down on their rails, creating an opening through which Phrenos flew and Stroika jumped. Hurdling and rolling through the open doors, the skitarii raced through the disorientation and darkness, negotiating the length of the train that shielded them from the madness and intensity of enemy gunfire.

Kicking out the terminus-compartment’s lock, Stroika once again led his skitarii out onto the field of battle. Risking a glance into the sky, Stroika could see the flame-wreathed wreck of the Opus Machina tumbling out of the heavens at them. Through the thin veil of smog, above the thunderbolting derelict, the night sky was a constellation of streaming sparks – the drop-trails of Dreadclaws and Thunderhawk gunships following the Ark Mechanicus out of orbit.

Stroika’s aegis protocols prompted his optics and overlays to identify enemy constructs and the threat of incoming fire so that he might avoid them. Leaping wreckage with his hydraulically powered legs and with the red foil of his cloak flapping after him, Haldron-44 Stroika led his rangers at speed across the destruction of the battlefield. The battle tanks and tracked troop conveyers stationed in front of the temple blasted the plaza and twisted girders about them. Ranger skitarii were disintegrated in optic-scalding beams and rocketed up into the air in cybernetic pieces as heavy ordnance pounded craters into the battlefield.

<Faster,> Stroika streamed to all receiving skitarii. <For your Primus. For your forge world. For the Machine-God and everything that is pure – get to the drop-off!>

The Primus’s augurs recorded the returns and mass of skitarii signatures making their way towards the temple. They were coming out from behind cover and sprinting with powered steps across the shattered plaza. Such speed did not allow for evasion and meant that the cybernetic warriors had to find the most direct route between their position and their newly designated objective.

It was exactly the kind of suicidal charge that Stroika hadn’t ordered during the battle for the grievous losses it would have entailed, and the skitarii commander hadn’t been wrong. As his cybernetic soldiers ran across open ground, their aegis protocols engaged and weaponry silent, the Dark Mechanicum forces mauled them. With skitarii running straight at them, the red of their trench-cloaks flowing behind, the corrupt mechanoids of Velchanos Magna could not resist firing upon the fast-moving targets.

As Stroika hurdled scrap and jumped blasted holes in the plaza, he monitored with steely dismay the datastream of deaths that his systems recorded. Skidding down beneath a shearing blaze of gunfire from the temple emplacements, Stroika got back to his feet and fired his hydraulics. Pushing his bionics to their limit, he followed the darting shape of Phrenos~361 across the bullet-chewed plaza, with his train of skitarii behind. His augurs told him that although the cybernetic soldiers under his command were dying in their droves, many were making it through the maelstrom of beams, blasts and chuntering bullet streams. Enough, the Primus hoped and prayed.

With their mechanised reflexes and the indefatigability of their hydraulic legs, the skitarii pushed on through the carnage. Clustering and forming groups of soldiers whose cogitators selected the most direct routes, their gathering numbers presented even the rabid mechanoids and possessed machines of the Dark Mechanicum with too many targets, allowing at least some of the skitarii to make it through the murder zones and choke points the hereteks had waiting for them.

Kicking up soot, ash and grit, Stroika’s footfalls took him straight through the plaza-mulching gunfire of temple emplacements. The skitarii commander did not care. All he could process were the pict streams of hundreds of cybernetic soldiers sprinting across the battlefield in his wake and the star-blotting shape of the Ark Mechanicus raging down through the heavens at them.

As Stroika ran, the black, mountainous shape of the Magnaplex Maximal disappeared. A curtain of blazing gold had risen before it. Like waves crashing against a rocky shore, the molten iron of the temple moat had blasted skyward in its fell radiance. Melting the final bridges, stiltways and maglev lines leading in and out of the forge temple principal, the sentient metal of the core would not allow the skitarii to approach the temple.

As Stroika led the growing horde of skitarii down the structure’s towering length, the fierce heat of the liquid metal and its infernal fury heated their war-plate. With the daemonic metal boiling and fountaining in a curtain alongside the running skitarii and the forge temple’s defences raised, emplacements and enemies stationed beyond the molten moat could not engage them. With the tumbling wreckage of the colossal Ark Mechanicus all but at the surface, it was a small mercy.

Skidding to a stop before the drop-off, where freightways ran off into oblivion and workshops remained half-demolished, Stroika took in the twisted magnificence of the forge world’s shipyards. The macroscaffolding and skeletal supports of dry docks stretched from one side of the planetary breach to the other. Like the victims of spiders in a web, ships were covered with girder scaffolding – partially constructed Chaos cruisers, warped vessels under repair and daemonships suffering the fell techno-rituals of heretek magi.

Below, Stroika could see the daemonic core of the forge world – the Abystra-Dynomicron. The monstrous entity that had possessed the planet, powered the polluted industry of Velchanos Magna and gave the corrupted constructs of the Dark Mechanicum a dread daemon deity to worship in place of the Machine-God. Kilometres distant, the molten iron of the core burned with the brightness of a sun, threatening to scorch Stroika’s cogitators out. All he could see was the infernal blaze of the liquid metal sentience. The hellish underforge. A daemonic entity of iron.

<Go, go, go,> Stroika ordered as those skitarii soldiers fortunate enough to have survived the charge ran towards him. Rangers carrying galvanic rifles and arquebuses. Rad-troopers of the skitarii vanguard, crackling with radioactive contamination. Spindly ruststalkers armed with blade and claw. Although the Dunecrawlers had been too slow to make the drop-off, several Ironstrider engines had managed to negotiate the mayhem of the battlefield unscathed. As Stroika urged his skitarii on, he saw soldiers abandon their walkers and sprint for their Primus.

Stroika felt the thunderous quake through the titanium of his legs. His countdown had run to zero. The Opus Machina had arrived. As skitarii ran for their augmented lives, the shattered shell of the ancient spacecraft smashed into the planet’s surface. The Ark Mechanicus rolled through the capital districts with apocalyptic force, the crashed vessel tearing through infernal forges, workshops and twisted temples. As the Opus Machina flattened the industriascape, ripping up foundations and sub-levels, the wreck twisted apart. One section continued to bounce and tumble through the exploding furnace works and arcing reactors. A tumbling maelstrom of flaming decks and smashed superstructure, it decimated the approaching forces of the Dark Mechanicum, burying even the monstrous forms of the possessed Titans.

The prow section sheared through the capital district, obliterating the destruction of the battlefield and shattered plaza. Mechanoids in their thousands as well as skitarii Dunecrawlers were lost in the black storm-front of rockdust, soot and debris that was the herald of utter destruction. Smashed into the forge world’s surface by the horrifying progress of the crashed vessel, constructs that had spent hours attempting to decimate one another were wiped off the face of the planet.

<Go, go, go!> Stroika streamed to his skitarii. While those throngs of cybernetic soldiers who had made the drop-off were racing down skeletal stairwells and ladders that ran down the rocky cliff-face, others were still running for their lives. The prow section of the Opus Machina struck the robust architecture of the Magnaplex Maximal. The ground shook under Stroika’s feet, almost knocking the sprinting skitarii from theirs.

The Primus didn’t know whether it was the mighty forge temple’s deep-set foundations or the sorcerous technologies and arcane rituals of its cursed architecture that saved it. The Ark Mechanicus smashed through a corner of the temple, decimating hanging forges and the fell, daemon-honouring decorations that made up its twisted silhouette. The forge temple principal remained intact, however. Bouncing off the structure, the prow section turned in a wild, plaza-excavating spin.

As Stroika smacked his gauntlet across the armoured backs of skitarii who had made the drop-off, he saw those that had been seconds too late swallowed by the ferocious clouds of black dust and debris. Stroika’s flashing overlays told him that he could no longer afford to wait. Turning from the spectacle of decimation – turning from skitarii soldiers whose pict feeds bleached to static at the horrible moment the Ark Mechanicus buried them – Haldron-44 Stroika ran for the drop-off. With the boom of the crash all about him and the dust-bank at his back, the skitarii officer pushed himself to the physical limits of his cybernetic form. Urging his hydraulics on, Stroika skidded down onto his side. Entwined in the foil folds of his greatcloak, the skitarius went down onto an appendage elbow and slid through the grit.

Skidding off the drop, Stroika fell. His combat chassis and bionic limbs struck the platform below with a ugly clunk before he tumbled helm over appendage down a flight of riveted steps. As he half rolled to his feet the war-plate across Stroika’s chest struck a metal rail, stopping the skitarii commander from flying head first into an abyssal drop and the raging churn of the planet’s daemonic core.

Overhead the crashing destruction of the Opus Machina thundered on, the inferno of the prow section’s exposed decks and superstructure blurring by above Stroika and the descending skitarii. The gargantuan rear section of the Ark Mechanicus had rolled through thousands of Dark Mechanicum constructs and vehicles before tumbling from the edge of the drop-off. It crashed through the macroscaffolding of the shipyards and into the silence of an ungainly plummet, the hellish glare of the daemonic core swallowing it whole.

The prow section launched from the cliff edge, spinning and dropping through the girders, catwalks and thick cabling of dry docks. With a shard-spraying impact, the Opus Machina struck a scaffolded daemonship. The companionways about the possessed vessel had been swarming with heretek tech-priests, readying the abomination for launch with unholy chants and fell blessings. The hull plating of the monstrous cruiser was encrusted with a warped carapace, featuring trap-jaw mouths and the predatory gaze of otherworldly eyeballs. Blood vessels and capillaries had spread through the damned workings of the ship. As the Ark Mechanicus’s prow section struck the daemonship, knocking it from its supports and macroscaffolding, infernal tentacles exploded from the obscenity of fleshy ports, embracing the Opus Machina as the pair tumbled together for the hellish doom of the molten metal core.

SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +IRON PLAGUE+

Stroika took a moment for himself. His cybernetic body did not tire but his cogitator coils needed a few seconds to process the volume of apocalyptic data his system had absorbed. The destruction. The loss of the Opus Machina and the mission priesthood. The deaths of thousands of the Machine-God’s holy skitarii servants. The arrival of the Iron Warriors.

Probabilities and projections extended little way beyond certain death. Imperatives burned unfulfilled. Protocols demanded actions that could not be prosecuted. Haldron-44 Stroika came to understand the nature of his construction. Why the techno-magi of the Cult Mechanicus saw fit to leave their cybernetic legions and officers with the disabilities of base flesh. In situations where imperatives and protocols failed, all skitarii had left were their instincts. Their gut feelings. Their faith.

Looking down at the hellstorm of the Abystra-Dynomicron, into which the Opus Machina still tumbled, Stroika saw Nalode Deka 871. The princeps stood amongst a number of ruststalker units who were waiting on the skeletal platforms several levels below. Deka looked up at his commander, his optics blank and unreadable.

Phrenos~361 drifted by, its spinal mechadendrites clasping the rail and anchoring the servo-skull to the platform. 10-Victro Tiberiax hobbled down the steps. Putting a gauntlet under Stroika’s appendage-arm, he helped his commander to his feet.

Stroika turned. The hydraulics of Tiberiax’s left leg were shattered and his plumed helm was missing. The swarthy skin of his shaved head was bloody and bruised, his features split down the middle by a ragged scar running across his face. Several cranial augmentations had been ripped free of their housings by some head-smashing trauma.

<Tiberiax…>

<Orders, Primus?>

Stroika looked at the vanguard skitarii and rangers that were making their way down the stairwell. Some were black with the roasting attentions of energy beams, while the war-plate of others was dented and punctured where bullets had blasted through their workings. A number had lost arms or appendages.

Each cybernetic soldier still walked straight and tall. Proud and pious, knowing that the Omnissiah still had work for their bionic blessings. Stroika found the sight of the surviving skitarii inspiring and pledged to himself that he would find a duty worthy of them.

<Primus?> Tiberiax transmitted.

<The fleet is lost and the commanding priesthood with them. There is no one left to speak for the Machine-God except us – and for the skitarii, actions speak louder than words.>

<Yes, Primus,> Tiberiax agreed.

<We have to stay true to our faith,> Stroika streamed, <even in this benighted place, at this most testing of times. Our faith in the Great Maker and His creations.>

<Affirmative.>

<The rest of the fleet is delayed, but they will arrive – eventually.>

<If they are lost in the warp, Primus, they might not arrive for days, weeks – years even,> 10-Victro Tiberiax reasoned.

<Then we know the enormity of the task ahead,> Stroika said. <Omnid Torquora will come for us – of that I have no doubt.>

<What until then?>

<We must do our best to facilitate that arrival by taking and holding our objective,> Stroika said.

<The forge temple principal?> Even Tiberiax was surprised at his Primus’s insistence.

<Yes, the Magnaplex Maximal,> Stroika said. <In the temple the objectives of Engra Myrmidex and Omnid Torquora meet. Taking the forge temple and the secrets contained within is the most economical use of our limited resources. Through such an action, many of our imperatives can still be met.>

<With entire legions at our disposal we could not take the Magnaplex,> Nalode Deka 871 intruded. <What makes you think we can with a few hundred survivors?>

Stroika looked down at the steely Deka and then back at his second-in-command. He waved a gauntlet at the rocky face of the cliff down which the platforms, skeletal stairwells and ladders extended.

<Above us is the Magnaplex Maximal,> Stroika told them. <Down here – the temple underforge and infotombs. The forge temple draws its power and iron from the daemon core below. There must be a way in. The freightways above have been cut off. There must be access tunnels below the surface that were similarly truncated.>

<You wish to infiltrate the forge from below?> Deka clarified.

<Take it,> Stroika streamed to the officers. <Hold it. Plunder it of its secrets. Hard data. It’s what we were sent here to do. Despite the odds stacked against us and the determination of the Dark Mechanicum to deny us our prize.>

<The Geller Device stirred up a vespid’s nest here,> Tiberiax agreed.

<I always had faith in our success and I still do.>

<Against the Iron Warriors?> Deka put to him.

<Against all enemies of the Omnissiah,> Haldron-44 Stroika said.

<What do you need of us, Primus?> Tiberiax transmitted.

<Princeps,> Stroika streamed. <You are to lead our forces on down the cliff-face. Find us a way in to the temple underforge.>

<Affirmative,> the ruststalker officer returned after a crackle of hesitation. <Anything to get off this scaffold.>

Stroika privately agreed with the ruststalker’s withering assessment. He could not help but feel the vulnerabilities of their position on the shattered walkways that creaked over the monstrous rage of the Abystra-Dynomicron.

<Tiberiax.>

<I’m yours, Primus.>

<Verify our number, our supplies of power and ammunition,> Stroika commanded. <We have a mixture of cohorts here. Divide by designation and nominate officers by ratio of confirmed kill where we are missing sub-alphas.>

<Right away, Primus,> 10-Victro Tiberiax said.

<Wait, do you detect that?>

<Affirmative…>

<Teleportation signatures,> Stroika streamed. <Go!>

As Nalode Deka 871 led the skitarii down through the network of scaffold stairwells and scorched platforms, Tiberiax followed, urging the skitarii on. The cybernetic soldiers climbed down through the structure. They dropped through openings to lower platforms and shimmied down ladders with sparks showering the skitarii below.

Stroika phylactically felt his way to the pict streams of skitarii soldiers dying up in the decimated capital district. The Iron Warriors were on the ground. Through the fading, grainy visuals, the Primus saw Dreadclaw drop pods fire their descent rockets and hit the wreckage-strewn wasteland with their landing talons. Hydraulic lifts descended with a shudder, revealing the infernal light of the Dreadclaw interiors.

Stroika watched as hulking monsters were unleashed onto the field of battle. They wore the battered, ancient plate of Tactical Dreadnought armour. The silver and gold of their suits was mottled with corrosion and splattered with blood. Faded black and yellow chevrons marked out individual plates and spiked sections.

Some horrific curse of the flesh had changed the Iron Warriors of the 51st Expedition. Monstrous clusters of muscle, tendon and brawn seemed to have outgrown the ancient Terminator suits which all the Iron Warriors wore. The warped flesh appeared to be part of the suits’ structural integrity, with the shattered pieces of helms embedded in the monstrous heads and faces of the long-changed Chaos Space Marines.

They moved with the assurance of Titans, stomping across the smouldering wasteland about the Magnaplex Maximal, yearning for the death and destruction to come. Most disturbing were their hands, that seemed bloated with the brawn of cursed flesh. The limbs had broken entirely free of plate and gauntlet. The metal of their suits morphed into the corruption-laced abomination of their flesh. At the malformed termination of such limbs, however, flesh solidified once more to metal. Bloated appendages formed a myriad of spawned heavy weaponry – colossal claws, bio-chemical flamers and multi-barrelled flesh cannons.

Rusted Thunderhawk gunships swooped in, belching black smoke and depositing legionary battle tanks and siege weaponry, while spiked lighters and ram-shuttles descended, spilling genebred Space Marines and cult cybernetic warriors enslaved to the Iron Warriors’ dread cause. Suddenly the pict stream was obscured by the loathsome shape of an Iron Warrior monster, who, looking down on a dying skitarii warrior with its warped face, stamped on the soldier’s head.

As Haldron-44 Stroika scanned for manifestations he saw a group of three monstrosities appear from the lead-smeared shimmer of teleportation. Stroika felt the creak of the scaffold superstructure as the Iron Warriors assumed their horrific form. The two flanking mountains of fleshmetal were armed like their warped brethren falling from the skies in an iron plague.

The warlord in the middle appeared bigger and more wretchedly malformed than even his monstrous escorts. A tarnished mail cloak was draped across the huge globes of his shoulders, marking him out among the afflicted Iron Warriors as a warsmith or officer. The hulking abomination’s Tactical Dreadnought armour was dripping with skulls and chains. This gave way to dread-formed fleshmetal that assumed the shapes of gargantuan killing claws, the tapering digits of which were cursed with the thrashing titanium teeth of chainswords.

The Chaos Space Marine’s head was an age-cracked mess of malformed features. His smashed half-skull was held together with wire mesh, through which his warped flesh had dribbled, sliding his features down onto the monstrous muscle of his neck.

As the Iron Warriors warsmith got his bearings, he almost toppled forward on the platform. Grabbing the warping rail with a gargantuan claw, the monster steadied himself and gave Stroika a fiendish half-grin of mock relief.

<Skitarii,> Stroika ordered. <Take out the walkways.>

Rangers and vanguard soldiers halted their descent and leant their weapons against ladders and rails. They took aim with their galvanic rifles, transuranic arquebuses and radium weaponry. With their targeters and expert marksmanship, the skitarii shredded the cables and fixtures of the walkways connecting the Iron Warriors’ platform to their own section, allowing the macroscaffolding to fall away.

As the Iron Warriors bounced uncertainly on their own platform, Stroika thought to press his advantage and have his skitarii take down the larger section, sending the warsmith and his monsters into the burning maelstrom of the core below. Before Stroika could issue the command, the abominable warsmith, smiling no more, grabbed for support on the shaking platform. He waved in a pair of Thunderhawks with a giant, malformed claw.

The first of the corrosion-pitted gunships swooped in for its master, obscured in a bank of belching, black smoke. The second gunship was a riveted nightmare of extra plating barely kept in the air under the power of its guttering engines. A pair of flank-mounted heavy bolters opened fire as the gunship hove into view.

Stroika leapt down stairs and dropped through ladder wells with his descending skitarii, as the heavy bolters shattered their way through the companionways above. As the cockpit-fused monstrosity of an Iron Warrior pilot guided his Thunderhawk in, he mangled platforms and section supports with the wings of the gunship. Bringing the gunship down sharply he collapsed a section, forcing Stroika and several skitarii vanguard soldiers to leap for an adjacent platform. As Stroika hit the shaky mesh and rolled, another cybernetic soldier was helped over the rail by 10-Victro Tiberiax and two of his rangers. Two other skitarii tumbled to their deaths with the plummeting scaffolding.

<Go, sir!> Tiberiax told his Primus, having set up two rangers with transuranic arquebuses on the platform. As the rusted Thunderhawk drifted out and down, rounds from its heavy bolters ricocheted off the rocky wall of the cliff-face. <Mark your target,> Tiberiax told his rangers. <Fire!>

The shells blasted away in unison, hammering through the armaplas of the Thunderhawk cockpit canopy. As they thudded through the monstrous head of the Iron Warrior pilot, the gunship began to fall away. As Stroika made his way down through the macroscaffold of the shipyards, he saw the descending gunship smash into the second before ploughing straight through a web of cabling and down into the daemonic core of the planet.

With Tiberiax and his rangers on his metal heels, Stroika negotiated the labyrinth of mesh and railing, all the while watching the warsmith’s remaining Thunderhawk level out and rescue itself from disaster.

<Deka!> Stroika streamed.

<Found one, sir,> the princeps transmitted back, his ruststalkers filing into the smashed entrance of a truncated tunnel set in the cliff-face. They were cutting a maintenance lock from its hinges. As hundreds of skitarii soldiers crammed into the confines of the soot-caked tunnel, Stroika joined them. 10-Victro Tiberiax brought up the rear, his rangers backing in with their arquebuses aimed back out of the tunnel.

As the skitarii filed in through the hatch, Nalode Deka 871 closed it and braced the broken lock with a thick plasteel pole. Deka and Tiberiax looked to their Primus as bolt-fire directed up the tunnel began to hammer at the thick metal of the door.

<I don’t think that’s going to hold them,> Tiberiax streamed at Deka.

<It won’t have to,> the ruststalker returned. <Look at how difficult it was for us to get in here. That scaffold won’t hold an Iron Warrior.>

<They will find a way in,> Tiberiax said, certain of their enemy’s determination.

<We’re in,> Haldron-44 Stroika told his officers. <And we’ve got a job to do. Princeps, find us a way down through the underforge. We need the forge temple infotombs.>

<Affirmative.>

1011

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +HELLFORGE+

The skitarii moved with slick synchronicity through the infernal gloom of the underforge. With their trench-cloaks wrapped about them and their weapons held in close, cybernetic soldiers followed freshly promoted sub-alphas through barbed bulkhead doors and fanged archways. Down through stairwells twisted in their grand designs. In and out of node columns that crackled in ruinous-symbol-inspired orientations.

Wounded skitarii trailed blood and oil, cradling broken limbs and shattered appendages, while the spindly shapes of ruststalkers slipped silently ahead. Drifting in the lead on its cog-blade, Phrenos~361 used its omnispectrals to alert the skitarii of the Dark Mechanicum menaces ahead.

Stroika found himself stepping through the merciless economy of the ruststalkers’ handiwork. Flightless cherubim, butchered in their filthy robes, the horror of their infant features still buried in their hoods. Dismembered security-servitors, lying dead next to the wickedness of their close combat appendages. Temple praetorians and heretek hench-units with their workings stabbed out of them.

Haldron-44 Stroika led a unit of vanguard skitarii in the footsteps of Princeps Deka and his augmented assassins. Leading with a palm-locked arc pistol, Stroika moved across furnace works and through chambers of twisted architecture. Some contained heretek machinery and possessed cogitators that glowed red and green in their malevolence. Others were laid out with surgical altars that burned with daemonic technoscript. Upon the altars, damned creations of flesh and dark technology lay half finished while abominable intelligences went about propagating their evil, uncaring of the skitarii interlopers that moved silently through the shadows.

There were bizarre chambers sporting large, empty pools of curdling unguent. Others held corrupt machinery – nests of arms gathered about blood-filthy thrones, bearing claws, pincers, drills and flayers. Multitudes of warped mechanoids that had been obscenely interfaced. Monstrous, heretekal creations whose dangers were contained within stasis fields. Warpsmiths emerging from their socket-sarcophagi, crafting with the corrupt, immaterial energies at their command.

All throughout the temple, the sound of industry dominated. Sparking. Arcing. The thousands of slave-engines hammering at armoured plate. The ceaseless suffering of constructs as part of dread experimentation and whim. The modulated vox-screams of warped workers claimed by the daemonic creatures they had had a hand in forging.

Throughout their infiltration of the Magnaplex Maximal, Stroika’s equalisers recorded the hiss of molten iron. Liquid metal from the daemonic core not only fed the hellforges of the temple, it travelled along trench rivulets set in the stone of chamber floors and passageways. The sentient iron spat and flared with flame, lighting the halls, workshops and corridors of the forge temple and forming the infernal glow of crafted sigils and symbols.

As the overforge housing dark ceremonial halls, heretek workshops and warped laboratories gave way to the diabolical grandeur of the underforge, Stroika felt the blessed alloys of his combat chassis and appendages steam. In the presence of such unspeakable evil, the Cog Mechanicus that emblazoned the skitarii’s battleware blackened. The very metal of their Omnissiah-honouring cybernetic bodies and armour burned. Here daemonic drones drifted through the busy, black architecture of the underforge on the sickly sibilance of duct fans. They were larva-like entities whose disgusting, fat tails dribbled interface cabling and whip-like mechadendrites. Their heads were flesh-fused with otherworldly augurs that scanned the forge-chambers and corridors through which they patrolled. These daemon-constructs in particular the ruststalkers and the skitarii following them took great pains not to alert.

In the daemon furnaces, warpsmiths and arch-hereteks were hard at work, their monstrous, myriad forms smudged silhouettes against the brilliance of their forges. The possessed servo-automata and machinery of the forge swooped magna-claws, cauldrons of infernal iron and pincers over the heads of misshapen servitors and the sentience of liquid metal thrashing in channels and pits. Spiked chains draped down through the forges like forests of kelp, knotted with construct cadavers and machine victims. Strange aethyric energies arced across the great chambers, while molten iron was dispersed through the temple in fat, raging cascades. The daemon iron was drawn up from the planetary core by pulsing tractor fields and distributed throughout the Magnaplex Maximal and the forge world furnace works beyond.

As the ruststalkers came to a hidden halt, Nalode Deka 871 moved from shadow to shadow, working his way back to his Primus. Leaving his rangers covering the skitarii rear, 10-Victro Tiberiax came forward, meeting Stroika by a sacrificial anvil-altar. With Stroika’s vanguard skitarii crackling with radioactive lethality about them, the officers met in silence, face to face. Drifting back through the gloom, Phrenos~361 came to land on Stroika’s outstretched gauntlet.

<We have a problem,> Deka told them.

<We have two,> Tiberiax said.

<Princeps?>

<The underforge works its way down through a number of sub-levels. The temple infotombs and data crypts should be located below,> Nalode Deka 871 informed his commander. Beckoning Stroika forward and telescopically focusing his optics, Deka pointed down at the hellforge beneath.

As Stroika’s optics did the same, he zeroed in on the damned industry below – one level of sizzling pits, furnaces and machinery set beneath a number of others, with the molten sentience of the Abystra-Dynomicron field-streamed up through the hollow centre of the underforge. Warpsmiths and heretek magi were conducting dark techno-rituals, with vox-hailing servitors chanting dread summonings. The forges swarmed with bat-winged cherubim that flew above the pits, helping to manoeuvre servo-automata and parts into place.

Warpstreams from totem node columns passed across the surface of furious pits of molten iron, churning them to a vortex. From these hellish gateways, daemonic manifestations and entities were drawn, dragged forth from the horror of the immaterium. As fluxing monstrosities of otherworldly energy seared to form they were scalded into reality by the Abystra-Dynomicron’s molten iron. The polychromatic sheen of liquid metal gave the daemons the monstrous appearance of forge fiends. They screeched. They hissed. They thundered. The spidery automata-arms of possessed machinery moved in with damned choreography, covering the abominations with clinkered plates of barbed, black armour. As the plates were agonisingly riveted and plasma-fused to the daemons’ forms, winches and infernal cherubim manoeuvred mountings and brute experimental weaponry into place.

The forges shook with the corporeal sufferings of the creatures as Dark Mechanicum warpsmiths enslaved them to their will and the underforge crafted them into daemon engines. Stroika watched as the daemon engines stomped forth from their molten birthing pits at the curse-coded command of their warpsmith handlers. Towering walkers of defiled metal and daemonflesh. Scuttling monster-machines of cutting claws and many legs. Cannon-fused traitors whose spiked, glowing tracks chewed up the temple flooring. Forge fiends and maulers that furnace-roared their destructive appetites.

Deka wasn’t wrong, Stroika reasoned.

<Access to the infotombs?>

<Magnelevators on the forge levels,> the princeps pointed out across their mindlink.

<Tiberiax?>

<My rearguard rangers report scrambled drones and gunfire in the overforge,> Tiberiax told him.

<The Iron Warriors?>

<They found a way in,> Tiberiax said.

Deka looked from the daemon engines to the entrance to the overforge.

<Perhaps we can orchestrate an introduction,> the ruststalker officer said.

<I think that’s inevitable at this point,> Haldron-44 Stroika told Deka. <But we can’t rely upon our enemies to provide the kind of time we need.>

Tiberiax nodded. Deka slowly followed with his own understanding.

<My rangers will hold back the Iron Warriors,> 10-Victro Tiberiax streamed with grim acceptance.

<Leave the daemon engines to my killers,> Nalode Deka 871 said. <We’ll take the forge.>

<And hold it,> Tiberiax agreed. <For as long as you need to execute the Fabricator Locum’s imperatives.>

<Praise the Omnissiah,> Stroika said.

<Bless His construct-creations,> Tiberiax continued, the prayer sizzling phylactically between the skitarii officers.

<And death to those who are not part of His grand design.>

Stroika launched Phrenos~361 from his gauntlet, sending the servo-skull off into the darkness.

<Go!> the Primus commanded as he smacked his gauntlet on the shoulder plate of the departing Nalode Deka 871.

Haldron-44 Stroika and Tiberiax slapped metal gauntlets together, holding their bionics in a sparking grasp – their armoured knuckles forming the Holy Cog of the Cult Mechanicus.

SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF II
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +MECHANISED EVIL+

The underforge was ablaze.

Infernal fires spread through the chambers, while arcing energies from node columns savaged the surrounding sections. Radioactive rounds sang off railings and twisted architecture. Chains and cadaver-constructs jangled. Beams cut through the dungeon-darkness of the forge temple, searing into pits and channels of molten sentience, causing liquid iron to fountain and splatter. Servitor shells blasted from the upper platforms, turning possessed machinery into thrashing monstrosities that tore through walkways and support columns with their monstrous claws. Transuranic rounds punched through the infernal plate of forge fiends, newly crawled from their spawning iron.

Deka’s ruststalkers had charged. The Sicarians flushed the underforge in a murderous machine wave. The spindly assassins swept through warpsmiths and their heretek hench-units, their transonic blades and chordclaws a blur. Stabbing. Shearing. Cleaving. Decapitating. The ruststalkers tore through the degenerate tech-priests, their spoiling flesh and the fell radiance of their inner workings. Hench-units smashed the cybernetic assassins down into the flooring but within moments, Deka’s killers had powered up out of the cratered meshing. With hydraulic slickness, the ruststalkers dismembered wicked appendages and slit throats. Thrashing through malevolent magi with their shivering blades, the assassins lopped off warp-fuelled weaponry and kicked rancid servitors back over railings and into the thundering forge.

Firing their galvanic rifles, Stroika’s skitarii leapt down from their platform and into the slaughter in the underforge. Servitor rounds slammed through the armour plating of daemon engines, turning mounted weaponry into detonating appendages. Still the monstrosities charged on. Bereft of their warpsmith handlers and knowing only pain in the short time since their daemonic birth, the infernal machines rampaged through the underforge. Blasting about them with the raw interface of weaponry, while tearing at the walls, floor and twisted architecture like demented machines, the daemon engines unleashed their abyssal fury.

As Haldron-44 Stroika moved through the havoc, leading his vanguard skitarii, he blasted things of monstrous, mechanised evil with alternating streams from his arc pistols. The underforge was a vision of rancorous devastation. Struts and support girders spun through the smoke of the chamber. Walkway wreckage rained down upon the battle. Molten iron splashed, raged and blasted forth from channels in curtains of scalding fury. Phrenos~361 bobbed, weaved and swooped through the carnage, leading its master and the skitarii that followed towards the magnelevator on the other side of the forge level.

Stroika’s skitarii were dying. Biometric readings faded on his filtered overlays, telling of the terrible price the Machine-God’s holy soldiers were paying for facing the temple’s daemon engines. Vanguard skitarii were blasted apart by huge, hunched walkers that still dripped with molten iron. The butcher cannons of the daemon engines decimated the soldiers, shredding through cybernetics and war-plate. Siege claws thrust forth through the furnace mist, impaling Stroika’s vanguard troops. The walkers’ weapons revolved horribly, hurling limbs and appendages in all directions.

Monstrous crawlers came forward on their stabbing, spidery legs, shearing through skitarii combat chassis as servitor shells and transuranic bullets thudded through hellforged armour plating. Bringing their infernal flamers up, the defiler engines added to the unnatural fires sweeping up through the forge. Blasting hellfire up through the platform grating and catwalks, the daemon engines turned rangers into thrashing shapes whose base organics were roasted within their war-plate.

Mauling engines decked in thick, barbed plate charged through throngs of Sicarian ruststalkers. The quadruped abominations thundered their diabolical fury as their metal, cloven hooves trampled the spindly assassins. As the ruststalkers were smashed aside and torn appendage from bionic appendage by the passing barbs, one machine beast reared and stamped down on the armoured shells of Sicarian heads. Ruststalkers swept in under magna-cutters and the daemon engine’s lasher tendrils. Drawn to weaknesses between the clinkered plates, Nalode Deka 871 and his assassins closed on the monster, stabbing and goring the metal beast.

<Down!> Haldron-44 Stroika yelled, sliding down onto the forge floor. A forge fiend reared from a pit of molten metal, streaming with sickly liquid iron. Glowing like a hellish, armoured hound, the thing brought forth the ectoplasmic cannons mounted on its shoulders. Two of Stroika’s skitarii rolled aside but the three others filing across the forge floor disintegrated in the spectral path of ectoplasma that thrashed through the cybernetic soldiers. The forge fiend jumped from the pit, standing over Stroika like a monstrous scavenger guarding a half-eaten corpse.

The Primus wasn’t finished yet. <Caliver!> Stroika streamed as molten iron dribbled over him, burning his war-plate and greatcloak. Stroika thrust his outstretched gauntlet at the forge fiend, sending his arc pistols back up their rails.

A vanguard skitarius surrendered his plasma caliver to his Primus, sliding it across the roasting mesh of the forge floor. As the daemon engine watched the weapon skitter and bounce along and into Stroika’s grasp, it opened its armoured mouth and roared the hellish heat of a furnace at him. The monster’s ectoplasmic cannons clunked around in their mountings, aiming straight down at the prone Stroika.

Bringing the plasma caliver up and settling the weapon against the leaking wound in his midriff, Stroika yanked back on the trigger.

‘Back, abomination!’ he vox-hailed with modulated fury. A stream of blue sunfire globes blasted forth from the plasma gun, hitting the forge fiend in the chest. Blazing like novae, the successive orbs of plasma energy hammered into infernal plate and molten daemonflesh. The infernal engine roared in unearthly agony, scrabbling back. Stroika got to his feet, indomitable in his advance.

‘Back, I say – back to the accursed dimension from which you came!’

The skitarii commander leant into the bulk of the heavy weapon, unleashing a fresh salvo of plasma at the thing. Radium rounds joined the onslaught, driving the beast back. Like his vanguard skitarii, Stroika wouldn’t relent. In an effort to escape the radioactive storm and the searing agony of Stroika’s plasma gun, the daemon engine retreated. Feverishly hauling itself back over the lip of the pit, the bestial machine took another blinding blaze of plasma fire into its hunched, clinker-plated back. Slinking into the liquid metal of the pit, the forge fiend’s fearful form disappeared below the molten surface.

<Hydrogen flasks,> Stroika transmitted, prompting skitarii to throw him ammunition for the caliver, which he mag-locked to his belt. Stroika smashed a shrieking warpsmith aside with the butt of his plasma gun, sending the heretek to the deck in a shower of workings. Fat-bellied servitors, built into yoke-like augmentations that bore heavy lifting claws, turned black with the hails of radium shells crackling into their spoiling flesh. Stroika barged them aside in his hurry to get to the temple magnelevator. Signatures were dying all about him and up on the platforms of the overforge, 10-Victro Tiberiax and his rangers had been forced to turn the merciless accuracy of their galvanic rifles and transuranic arquebuses on approaching Iron Warriors.

<Doors,> Stroika ordered.

Two skitarii soldiers got the bionics of their fingertips into the crack between the magnelevator’s closed doors. Hauling with hydraulic force, the skitarii prised the doors open, allowing Stroika to peer up and down the abyssal shaft beyond. The freight-car seemed to have been taken down into the bowels of the forge temple – deep into the infotombs and data crypts of the Magnaplex Maximal. Although the car was supported on magnetic fields, a thick, oiled cable ran from the car-roof to a winch set in the top of the shaft. It was only an auxiliary system in the event of a power outage, but it suited Stroika’s needs perfectly. Phrenos~361 drifted through the doors, the servo-skull disappearing into the gloom as it descended through the shaft.

<Cable, go!> the Primus ordered. One by one, his vanguard skitarii soldiers shouldered their carbines and arquebuses. Holding the slick cable in the vice-like grip of their bionic gauntlets and wrapping the augmentations of their legs about it, the cybernetic soldiers slid down the shaft.

Looking back across the scene of diabolical carnage unfolding across the flame-swirling underforge, Stroika saw 10-Victro Tiberiax draw a phosphor serpenta and blaze a volley of blinding phosphoric bolts into a charging monstrosity of the Iron Warriors Legion. As the chemical fire raged about the Traitor Space Marine, the guiding light of its fury drew servitor shells in on the same craterous wound, sending the brute crashing down to the floor.

Nalode Deka 871 was up on the back of an infernal engine whose plate-fused daemon body was set in a nest of arachnoid legs. Deka’s transonic blades were buried in the shoulders of the diabolical thing, shivering their way through its daemonflesh. Using one as a handhold on the back of the thrashing machine, he drew the other across the abomination’s throat. Rolling clear of the dropping daemon engine, the spindly princeps gave Stroika the briefest of nods before cleaving his blades back through an attendant ward engine.

Shouldering the plasma caliver, Haldron-44 Stroika grasped the oily cable and slid down into the abyssal darkness of the shaft after his skitarii.

1100

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +INFOTOMB+

Stroika dropped down through the maintenance hatch and into the magnelevator car. The heavy-duty doors to the temple infotombs were open. Beyond, the skitarii commander found the dusty darkness of a data crypt, darkness lit only by the sickly glow of corrupt machinery. Phrenos~361 drifted out into the chamber.

Vanguard skitarii dropped down into the freight-car two by two, their radium weaponry crackling with radioactive lethality. Stroika sent them off in two columns, left and right out of the doors and in opposite directions about the huge circular chamber. Banks upon banks of corrupted cogitators hummed to themselves, rancid with the glow of their fell calculations. Like concentric stacks in a labyrinthine library, the runebanks sat upon a set of cogs – smaller cogs sitting within the teeth of larger wheels. At one time, the infotomb mechanism had been intended to honour the Omnissiah. Now, the architecture and colossal workings were warped and black. The teeth of the cogs were barbed and the walls of the crypt were decorated with the crowded iconography of dread gods.

The floor cogs turned back and forth within the madness of one another, with the clunk of colossal gears at work beneath the circular infotomb chamber. Warp-encrusted cabling, lines and datalooms ran from each foetid bank to a towering, static unit at the heart of the crypt like ribbons on a festive pole. Phrenos~361 led the way, and the cybernetic soldiers followed.

Filing through the maze of runebanks – supercogitator units that chuntered to themselves in their code-corrupted madness – Stroika and his skitarii moved around, in and out of the ever-changing labyrinth. As the vanguard skitarii worked their way through the data crypt they came across ghoulish transmechanics. The things were cut off at the waist and trailed interface cabling from their ragged trunks, while their spindly arms and long fingers went to work at baroque spools that trailed filthy scrollprint. They floated through the infotombs like evil spirits, hissing static and blurting deranged scrapcode as they happened upon Stroika and his cybernetic soldiers. With conservative blasts from their radium carbines, the skitarii dropped the fell mechanoids.

As Phrenos~361 led Stroika out of the maze of machines and across the central floor-cog, the skitarii felt the chamber rumble and shake with the sound of detonations and heavy weaponry. Pict streams from the remaining skitarii in the underforge told the Primus that time was running out. Scrolling updates and fading biometrics told Stroika that caught between the daemon engines of the Magnaplex Maximal and the monstrous Iron Warriors, his skitarii were being slaughtered.

Of note, amongst the flow of data, was the death of 10-Victro Tiberiax – skitarii officer, recipient of the Crux Mechanicus, survivor of 4,372 enemy engagements, loyal construct of the Omnissiah. Friend. The data filled Stroika with a cold fury buried in the logic of imperatives and protocol. Skitarii existed only to prosecute the will of the Machine-God Incarnate. In such an undertaking, losses were expected. As many as were necessary.

Stroika had lost legions of skitarii soldiers during the doomed assault on Velchanos Magna. While such astronomical losses did not eat away at the cybernetic commander as they might an officer of the Astra Militarum or even the Adeptus Astartes, Stroika still suffered some anxiety over how he was to be represented in the mission record. Would the hard data on the Dark Mechanicum forge world judge him to have been a commander fighting impossible odds with a force insufficient? Or would he be judged as one who failed not only his skitarii soldiers but also his magi and Machine-God?

Advancing on the central unit, Stroika found himself facing a fell piece of machinery. A towering, baroque meme-bank of dark brass piping, twisted form and corruption, lit by the hellish light of its own lamps, buttons and screens. It was the forge temple’s High Altar of Knowledge, warped to machine madness by the heretekal data that it stored. As Haldron-44 Stroika approached he saw that the abominate machine was a slowly melting mess, heated from within by the stream of molten sentience carried up from the daemon core. It was powered by the liquid iron of the Abystra-Dynomicron that flowed up through the dark altar and forge temple underforge.

Stroika’s imperatives flashed up on his optical overlay. The sacred knowledge of the forge temple principal – the eternity of secrets Engra Myrmidex had sent Stroika to secure – lay inside the corrupted meme-banks of the dark altar. The prize that the skitarii commander would deliver instead to Omnid Torquora, should the magos explorator ever appear from the warp.

<Secure the artefact,> Stroika ordered, prompting his skitarii to assume formation about the dark altar. <Phrenos.>

Summoned, the servo-skull drifted in on the blur of its magnetic cog. Landing on the gauntlet of the Primus, the drone waited. Approaching the dark altar, with its suppurated ports and warp-encrusted interfacia, Stroika brought up his arm.

<Interface and downstream,> Stroika commanded. The skitarii commander could not risk the virulent code-corruption of linking himself to such a foul machine. Without codescrubbers or the Fabricator Locum’s magos catharc, Stroika had no choice but to sacrifice his servo-skull to the duty.

<Scan and retrieve artefact-data, code vermillion or above. File, reverse chronological.>

Depositing Phrenos~361 in an interface-alcove, Stroika took several steps back. Above, the temple underforge rocked with the thunder of heavy weaponry and death. He turned as the magnelevator doors closed and the car began its journey up through the temple. The skitarii were running out of time.

Feeling with its mechadendrites and cabling, the servo-skull interfaced with the High Altar of Knowledge. As Phrenos~361 did so, its optics clunked to an infernal red. The hololithic projector set in the dome of its skull crackled to life.

Stroika stepped back as the drone emitted an excruciating howl of machine suffering. The hololithic projection danced with the exquisite torment of corrupted machine-spirits. These bled away to pict and hololithic captures as file after tainted file was downloaded. As Phrenos~361’s optics grew darker and more infernal, Stroika found his own mesmerised by the technological treasures and hoarded secrets that flashed up before him. The discoveries, both terrible and amazing, that had been made by the Adeptus Mechanicus of Velchanos Magna in the thousands of years before the Great Gyre swallowed the forge world.

Dust rained from the ceiling as the battle in the forge above intensified. The floor-cogs turned and the runebanks and corrupt cogitators circled the skitarii commander. Even as a mere soldier of the Cult Mechanicus, Stroika could see the wondrous knowledge that Velchanos Magna had accumulated through experimentation, exploration and recovery. The dark altar may have been corrupt but it still held in the forgotten depths of its meme-cores a priceless hoard of hard data. Hard data that would have made Engra Myrmidex the Fabricator General of his own forge world. Hard data that might make Omnid Torquora that still.

Then Stroika saw it. The briefest flash of a hololithic schemata.

<Back,> Stroika ordered, amongst the din of battle several levels above. Phrenos~361 let out a tortured hiss of displeasure before halting the download. As it moved back through pict captures of lost, vellum-scrawled knowledge and arcane technological wonders, Stroika streamed, <Stop.>

There, sizzling and warping in the hololithic haze, Stroika saw the schemata for the Geller Device – the aethyric bomb that the magi of Satzica Secundus had constructed and Engra Myrmidex had tested in the warp storm of the Great Gyre. Stroika’s feeds scrolled with data and confirmations. Cross-referencing the STC designations and plate signatures, Stroika calculated a 98.567 per cent probability that he was looking at exactly the same artefact that Magos Torquora’s survey teams had found on board the Stella-Xenithica.

The infotombs echoed with the sound of rancid laughter. It was a mocking but miserable sound, laced with corrosion and age. As the floor-cogs moved and runebanks parted, a tech-priest of the Dark Mechanicum approached from his hiding place. Surrounded by so many corrupt devices moving about them, Stroika and his skitarii had taken the power signature of the monstrous magos to be a dying transmechanic or a runebank.

<Hold your fire,> Haldron-44 Stroika ordered. It seemed that there was more hard data to gather and the dark altar could not give him the answers he needed. The skitarii kept their crackling carbines on the interloper, moving their barrels in unison as he approached. Stroika held his plasma caliver up, ready to blast the ancient to oblivion should the Dark Mechanicum tech-priest give any indication that he was going to attack.

The tech-priest was tall, stabbing the cog-floor with stilt-like legs, but hunched in his circuit-laced black robes. Like a mantid construct, the tech-priest ventured forth. His modulated laughter transformed as he approached Stroika and the dark altar. Within gangly steps it had become the roar of existential doom and some kind of machine sobbing. Stroika’s cogitator coils arrived at a calculated guess.

‘Far enough,’ the skitarii commander told the Dark Mechanicum abomination, ‘Arch-Fabricant.’

The corrupted magos knelt down, the flesh-fused hydraulics of his long legs bending and his knees crashing into the floor. Pulling back his hood with cruel claw-appendages, the Arch-Fabricant revealed the little that was left of him. A warped spinal column leading to a cancerous brain, that itself was stored in an interfaced jar of sickly suspension.

‘Lord Prophetechnos,’ Stroika said. ‘Ulcan Gnostramari – former Fabricator General of Velchanos Magna.’

There were bits of Gnostramari that remained in the mantid mechanoid that knelt before the dark altar. In the nest of twisted optics, vanes and augurs that gave the Arch-Fabricant the appearance of a withered insect, Stroika could see a misty eyeball. The remnants of corrupted flesh threaded through the nightmare of the construct’s spiny workings. It appeared to Stroika – despite the horror of its augmented form – to be a thing that knew it had lived long enough. A scavenger of forbidden technologies, of lost knowledge and heretekal desires, whose ongoing existence was fuelled by the warp and whose gangling form was crafted in hellfire.

‘Speak,’ Haldron-44 Stroika commanded, his gauntlet digit hooked around the caliver trigger.

‘We are doomed, you and I,’ Ulcan Gnostramari said. His voice was a modulated whisper – a hiss that was vented with a black steam from vox-grilles set in his mandibular cheeks.

Haldron-44 Stroika pointed to the STC schemata that warped and flicked in the servo-skull’s hololithic projection.

‘You have this artefact – the original STC file for this arcane device – stored in a reliquary or vault?’ Stroika put to their prisoner.

‘No,’ Gnostramari corrected him with a brief puff of black steam. ‘It was taken from this temple without my permission.’

‘By whom?’ Stroika pressed, leaning in with his plasma caliver.

‘Who else?’ the Arch-Fabricant wheezed. ‘Idriss Krendl of the Iron Warriors.’

‘The monsters who attack your forge world?’ the skitarii commander clarified. As Ulcan Gnostramari nodded his repulsive head, Stroika’s mind whirled. His cogitator coils burned with the processing of probabilities. Odds that the warped Iron Warriors warsmith Idriss Krendl had already run and put in play.

Krendl, who had taken the STC file and deposited it on board the Stella-Xenithica just ahead of the Maestrale’s survey of Perborea. Who had allowed the Adeptus Mechanicus to recover the wonder of the Geller Device in the predictable expectation that such a find would be constructed and tested on the nearest warp storm anomaly in the sector – the Great Gyre.

‘We are undone,’ Ulcan Gnostramari said. ‘Betrayed. Mechanicum and Mechanicus both.’

‘Silence, traitor,’ Stroika warned.

‘Your magi by the bottomless appetite for knowledge that plagues both our kind. Like Velchanos Magna, Satzica Secundus doomed itself.’

‘Explain,’ Haldron-44 Stroika demanded, his armoured digit tapping at the caliver trigger.

‘You think that you were the first to construct the Geller Device?’ the Arch-Fabricant mocked. ‘The wonder was ours. We built the aethyric bomb and test-detonated the device in the nearby Mawstorm. We foolishly hoped to drive the storm and the things that inhabited it back into the warp. A single device reduced the Mawstorm by half.

‘We were eager to get back to Velchanos Magna to build another bomb to finish the job. What we hadn’t realised was that in strengthening the interdimensional bonds of reality in one place, we weakened them in another. Travelling up the warptrails of our arkships, back to Velchanos Magna, a new storm erupted. The real space anomaly you call the Great Gyre. The magi and citizens of Velchanos Magna welcomed a new age. A dark age of enlightenments. As Satzica Secundus will do also.’

‘Never,’ Haldron-44 Stroika said, but his vox-hailed announcement rang hollow.

‘Perhaps you are more right than you know, simple skitarius,’ Ulcan Gnostramari decided. ‘You betrayed yourselves. I have been betrayed by traitors with whom my forge world traded. By those it called allies. Velchanos Magna should have chosen better ones – the bitterness of betrayal runs in the Iron Warriors’ blood.’

The Arch-Fabricant gestured at the dark altar and the molten sentience of the Abystra-Dynomicron that ran through its corrupted workings. ‘Iron favours iron. The daemon-patron of my world wishes to spread its pollution beyond the confines of Velchanos Magna. It wishes to infect the core of Satzica Secundus and the hundreds of forge worlds beyond. Idriss Krendl and the Iron Warriors of the Obliteratii will see to it that the Abystra-Dynomicron gets its wish. The warsmith will be rewarded with an empire of iron. Forge worlds whose industry will drive a conquest of the galaxy, with Idriss Krendl and his Obliteratii Iron Warriors at its head.’

A shrieking sound made Stroika turn. It was Phrenos~361. The servo-skull’s optics burned to blackness with the corrupt data passing through its workings. Its cog-blade began to whir to searing acceleration, while the bone of its skull trembled. Horns and spikes grew from the skull as it changed shape to assume the ghoulish visage of some daemonic creature. The shriek threatened to damage equalisers but before it could, Phrenos~361 exploded. Pieces of warped skull, polluted workings and shards of spinning magnetic cog-blade shot out in all directions.

As pieces of cog-blade slashed through Stroika’s war-plate like frag, Ulcan Gnostramari took his opportunity. Bringing his plasma caliver back up, Stroika levelled the weapon at the Arch-Fabricant. Gnostramari suddenly lurched for the skitarii commander.

Stroika couldn’t calculate whether it was a feverish attempt on his life by the corrupt magos or some last offering to the Abystra-Dynomicron. There was a good possibility, the Primus reasoned, that Ulcan Gnostramari simply wanted to end it all. The scathing effects of the Geller Device. The betrayal of his daemon-patron. The loss of Velchanos Magna to Iron Warriors riding in on the invasion of the Adeptus Mechanicus. These were all reasons why a magos who had lived well beyond even a cybernetic lifespan might welcome the end.

<Execute,> Stroika streamed.

As Ulcan Gnostramari’s stilt-appendages took him across the cog-floor at Stroika, radium rounds crackling with radioactivity blasted the wasted construct to robe-shredding pieces.

As the Dark Mechanicum Arch-Fabricant shattered across the floor of his infotomb, a moment of silence descended. Stroika pulled pieces of Phrenos~361’s cog-blade from where they were embedded in his back and side. Tossing the fragments to the floor, Stroika noticed how quiet it truly was – even on the levels above.

<Teleportation signatures,> he streamed as his overlays told him of incoming materialisations. <Skitarii – take cover!>

The leaden smear of materialisation assumed form about the infotombs, the shapes of malformed Traitor Space Marines towering over the runebanks. Stroika knew that they were all dead once the Iron Warriors arrived. They had silenced the skitarii above. Haldron-44 Stroika, conversely, aimed to make as much noise as possible.

<Fire in the hole!> Stroika warned.

Snatching a hydrogen flask from where it was mag-locked to his belt, Stroika threw the spare container at a shimmer of materialisation several stacks back. Bringing the plasma caliver up to his cheek, Stroika fired. The ball of plasma struck the flask, detonating its contents.

The blast knocked vanguard skitarii off their feet and Stroika back into the dark altar. Several Iron Warrior monstrosities assumed form inside the detonation. Two were lost in the globe of raging obliteration that ballooned from the exploding flask. Other Iron Warriors were caught in a furious backwash of heat and plasma, turning them into monstrous infernos.

As Iron Warriors appeared, they raised the horrific clubs of malformed limbs and pointed the metal barrels of mutating weapons at the skitarii. The brutes were small mountains of warped flesh and plate, while their arms were nests of fused weaponry. Ducking low behind possessed cogitators and warp-encrusted runebanks, the skitarii soldiers returned fire with their radium carbines, radioactive bullets punching through fleshmetal and aged plate. The Iron Warriors cared little for the cover the infotombs afforded, sweeping the monstrous weaponry of their altered bodies back and forth. Bullet-shattered runebanks exploded before the streams of heavy gunfire and cybernetic soldiers were blown limb from limb.

<Fire in the hole!> Stroika called again, a second hydrogen fuel flask in his gauntlet. As a hail of cannon fire shredded through the foil of his greatcloak, the Primus turned. Several Iron Warrior monstrosities were stomping through demolished runebanks at him. Bouncing the flask across the floor at the mutated Space Marines, Stroika blasted the container at their armoured feet.

The infotombs rocked with the blast. The hydrogen detonation had not only enveloped the Traitor Space Marines in an expanding blaze, it had decimated the cog-floor of the chamber, shattering the great mechanism below. The floor collapsed. The raging glow of the daemonic core filled the data crypt as flooring, mechanism and Iron Warriors disappeared. Displaced rock tumbled with wreckage and flaming bodies into the chasmic damnation of the Abystra-Dynomicron. As the cogs continued to turn, floor plates and cogitator banks toppled over the edge and down towards the daemonic planetary core.

The air thundered with the storm of shot and shell directed at the skitarii commander. Sliding down across the floor, Stroika scrambled behind moving runebanks as a path of shredded destruction followed him. The Iron Warrior gunfire was merciless. Cybernetic soldiers were blown apart before Stroika and one by one he saw the last biometric signatures of his skitarii legion fade. As the sparking shells of possessed cogitators toppled before the onslaught, Stroika found that he was without cover and the target of multiple flesh-weapons.

It was the leaden smear of a materialisation that saved him. Even the Iron Warriors wouldn’t shoot through one of their own number. Appearing before Stroika and drowning him in his shadow, an armoured abomination bled into the reality of the infotomb.

Stroika suddenly realised that the Iron Warrior had a Sicarian ruststalker on his back. He brought up his plasma gun but could not fire for fear of hitting his remaining soldier. As the Iron Warrior turned around, attempting to throw the cybernetic soldier from his hunched back, Stroika recognised the Iron Warriors officer from the platform. The warped Chaos Space Marine whose face had slipped through the wire mesh of a cage and down onto his bulging neck and shoulder like a melted sculpture. Idriss Krendl – warsmith of the Iron Warriors and leader of the Obliteratii.

Krendl gave a half-snarl as he reached for the ruststalker with his colossal, malformed claws. As the Iron Warrior did so, Stroika saw that it was Nalode Deka 871 who had leapt on the monster’s back just moments before he had teleported. Stabbing his transonic blades furiously into the fleshmetal of the Iron Warrior, Deka was suddenly enveloped in the thing’s daemonic claws.

Seizing the princeps in a vice-like grip, Krendl peeled the skitarii assassin from his hunched back. Bringing his monstrous arm down with otherworldly force, Krendl smashed Deka into the metal floor of the chamber. Seconds later, Nalode Deka 871 was a broken pile of shattered bionics and splattered flesh. With annoyance, Idriss Krendl plucked the transonic blade that was still shivering through his flesh and flung it away.

As Krendl looked up, he saw how close Stroika was. The skitarii officer was holding his plasma caliver on the Chaos Space Marine. Blasting him back, Stroika heard the satisfying roar of a Chaos Space Marine in pain. Balls of plasma seared and flashed as they struck the monster’s armour-embedded flesh. The warsmith stormed straight back at Stroika, his heavy footsteps quaking across the infotomb floor.

‘Whether I live or die,’ Stroika vox-hailed at Krendl, ‘today, you die, monster.’

Before the Iron Warrior could reply, Stroika pulled his final hydrogen flask from his belt and threw it up at the ceiling. He blasted the flask with his plasma caliver, and the air above them blazed and expanded like a nova. Being much taller, Krendl was hit first, the force of the explosion knocking him back through a column of cogitators. Stroika was smashed straight into the floor, his bionics clattering as he was blasted head-over-appendages away.

With his optic-array flickering and overlays sizzling from striking his head on the floor, Stroika suddenly felt the ground fall out from under him. Snatching out with a gauntlet, the skitarii officer grabbed for the edge of the demolished floor section. Hanging by his fingertips, Stroika looked down at the swirling patterns of sentient hatred raging through the molten iron of the daemon core. The Abystra-Dynomicron hungered for Stroika. It wanted his flesh and iron. It desired his soul.

Hauling himself up, Stroika latched onto the edge with his other gauntlet. Pushing up with his arms, and with his metal legs still dangling above the infernal core, the skitarii commander saw Idriss Krendl stumble back through the wreckage of runebanks and wave off his trigger-happy Iron Warriors.

‘I’ve been stabbed, burned and shot, tin soldier,’ Idriss Krendl told him. The warsmith’s voice surprised Stroika. It was a deep rumble, like the distant thunder of guns on the breeze. It was still the voice of an officer, however, not a monster. Krendl looked down at the scorched stump that remained of his arm. Pursing his half-lips, the Iron Warrior blew out a flame where his flesh was burning. ‘I was on board the Stainless when she crashed into Balzac Minora. I was at the Eternal Fortress when the sons of Guilliman rained fire from orbit. On Lesser Damantyne, my brothers tried to bury me under a mountain of metal, stone and corpses. Yet, here I am. A word of advice to you, then. If you’re going to kill me – you’d better kill all of me.’

Krendl gave Stroika a nasty half-smile. From the smouldering stump of his arm, Stroika saw the fleshmetal of muzzles emerge. Like plants competing for sunlight, a nest of cannon barrels grew from the roasted ruin of the monstrous arm. Before the mutating arm had time to finish its transformation, the weapons began to fire.

With shells raining about him, Stroika rolled across the cog-floor. Unlocking appendages from his back-cradles, the skitarius brought his arc mauls to life. By the time he had completed the roll and was storming towards the Iron Warrior, his pistols had hydraulically deployed along their rails and were blasting a voltaic storm at Krendl. Stroika’s overlays flashed the urgency of evasive actions and streamed the hopelessness of engaging the vile form of a Chaos Space Marine in battle. In defiance of such warnings, Stroika surged on, knowing he had to close with the monstrous Iron Warrior.

As shells sparked off the alloy of his appendages, one of his newly deployed arc mauls was blasted away. Rotating his shoulder joints and turning in his torso cradle, Stroika rained arcstreams and the merciless thud of his remaining maul down on the monstrosity. Krendl crackled and spat, his obscene form a spidery cage of arcing energies. The maul sparked off the Iron Warrior’s ancient plate but Krendl was like a small mountain of flesh, iron and ruin. He was both immovable object and unstoppable force. Within moments, Stroika came to understand in brutal reality what his overlays had only been communicating in theory. The inevitability of defeat. He was a holy warrior of the Omnissiah, however – last of the skitarii on Velchanos Magna – and he fought on.

The Iron Warrior moved with otherworldy grace and speed, despite his size and monstrosity. He fought with the strength and precision of a killer ten thousand years in the crafting. He was a corruption of the Emperor’s ideal but a demigod all the same. A princely perversion of genetic engineering, driven by the bitterness and rage of an empire denied.

Stroika felt Krendl’s cannons chew through the hydraulics of his leg. The skitarius smashed and blasted at the towering monstrosity, with movements as slick as his battered workings would allow. He could not avoid the backhand of the Space Marine’s mighty claw that sent him staggering through wreckage. The barbed teeth of a chainfist spat gobs of flesh from the edge of the Iron Warrior’s outstretched palm as the blade emerged from the monstrous claw. The fleshmetal of the weapon and Stroika’s bionics met in a spectacular fountain of sparks – the Iron Warrior shearing the skitarii commander’s arm and maul appendage off at the rotating shoulder joint.

Stroika limped and tried to turn, bringing his remaining arc pistol up to meet his enemy. His overlays flashed warnings and streamed data that he could barely process. Before his targeters could get a fix on the warsmith, Krendl stamped down on a runebank, sending its bulk at Stroika. Smashed between the polluted machine and the chamber wall, the skitarius staggered this way and that. His leg was a mangled mess and his acquisition reticules a blur. His calibrators refused to answer. Arcstreams seared across the decimation of the infotomb but hit nothing. He could hear the throaty satisfaction of Idriss Krendl – a dark chuckle that built from within the Iron Warrior’s chest.

Krendl grabbed Stroika’s battered combat chassis in one huge claw, turned and launched him into the wall. The skitarius could feel little but his systems sizzling away as workings shattered and his helm smashed into the cracking rockcrete of the wall. As Stroika tried to get up, he found that his overlays and streams were gone. Targeting was not functional. His cracked optics flickered with the static of system trauma. He got the blurry impression that the Iron Warriors of the Obliteratii were gathering about him like a darkness closing in. He could hear their grim mirth and the bitterness of their hatred.

Stroika tried to bring his arc pistol up but Krendl pinned the workings of his remaining arm against the wall. The skitarius couldn’t move. Stroika saw Krendl up close, his half-face leering through its wire cage. He felt the nest of barrels against his midriff. As they fired in unison, the blasts shredded through the workings of Stroika’s torso socket. As his metal legs fell away, Krendl gunned the chainblade, shearing through Stroika’s remaining arm at the elbow joint. Grabbing him by the alloy stump of his ruined hydraulics, Idriss Krendl threw Stroika at the feet of his Iron Warriors – like a lump of meat to dogs.

He lay on the floor. Bereft of the Machine-God’s blessings. The blessed energy of the Motive Force bled away. The ruined war-plate of his chest rose and fell with the rattle of each doomed breath. Helpless, Haldron-44 Stroika worked the stub of his arm. He lay in a growing pool of his own blood and oil, his smashed optics crackling with the silhouettes of closing Iron Warriors.

The skitarius felt the quake of Idriss Krendl’s footsteps. The warsmith towered over him. As Haldron-44 Stroika felt his systems slipping away and his Machine-God abandon him, the warsmith contorted his half-face around an ugly sneer.

‘Flesh? Iron?’ Idriss Krendl said. ‘You are unworthy of either, tin soldier of a tin god.’ Then finally to the Iron Warriors gathered about him, Krendl commanded, ‘This one lives – if you can call this living. He thinks he honours his Maker with the gargle of each drowning breath – but we shall show him what it truly is to suffer for his god.’

1101

Omnid Torquora disconnected from phylactic communion. From the data-tethered screams and the suffering.

The archmagos explorator sat in his interface throne aboard the Maestrale, surrounded by the tech-priests of the diagnostiquorum. The throne accommodated the bulk of Torquora’s augmented frame and weaponry, and was set in a nest of cables that ran between the archmagos, his tech-priests and everything else in the Mechanicus fleet.

A fleet that had arrived before Engra Myrmidex. That had remained hidden and on station, just outside of the Velchanos system. Observing. Recording. Monitoring. Phylactically experiencing the doom of the Mechanicus mission – the Fabricator Locum’s part of the mission.

Omnid Torquora had not revealed himself as Engra Myrmidex tested the Geller Device or pressed on predictably with his assault on Velchanos Magna. He had not intervened when Myrmidex sent his skitarii legions into a battle they could not hope to win. He stayed silent as thousands of skitarii soldiers fought and died on the forge world’s surface for the greed of a single construct. He remained unmoved as the Fabricator Locum’s fleet was caught between the Dark Mechanicum and the arriving Iron Warriors. As the Ark Mechanicus Opus Machina plummeted to its doom.

Hard data. Torquora had watched and waited as the data he required to succeed in his mission flooded in. The corrupt magi and servants of ruin thought that they prevailed. That they had beaten the Machine-God’s servants. That they had won – but they had not. The battle had barely begun. Omnid Torquora had come to understand – through Engra Myrmidex’s lust for power and the sacrifice of thousands of the Machine-God’s skitarii soldiers – the true nature of his enemy. He had learned, through the loss of others, how to win. It was cold but it was necessary.

<Phylactic streams from the surface?> Omnid Torquora put to the tech-priests of his diagnostiquorum.

<Dead, my lord.>

<Have we catalogued the data from all test-engagements?> Torquora asked.

<Including the effects of enemy weaponry, their favoured tactics and the success ratios of strategies employed by our skitarii soldiers against them. Yes, my lord. All data-locked.>

<What about astrotelepathic returns from Satzica Secundus?> Torquora asked.

<None, archmagos. All contact with the forge world is lost.>

<Summon my Lords Militant,> the archmagos explorator ordered. <The ranking skitarii alpha. Tech-priests of the Ordo Reductor and Auxilia Myrmidon. The magi cybernetica. My lords of the Centurio Ordinatus. The Legio Grand Master of our Collegia Titanicus detachments. The tech-priest captain of the Maestrale. Have them all assemble in the tactical oratorium.>

<Yes, archmagos. Is it time?>

<The time for gathering data is at an end,> Omnid Torquora told the diagnostiquorum. <Now is the time for war.>

About the Author

Rob Sanders is the author of ‘The Serpent Beneath’, a novella that appeared in the New York Times bestselling Horus Heresy anthology The Primarchs. His other Black Library credits include the Warhammer 40,000 titles Adeptus Mechanicus: Skitarius, Legion of the Damned, Atlas Infernal and Redemption Corps and the audio drama The Path Forsaken, along with the Warhammer Archaon duology, Everchosen and Lord of Chaos. He has also written many Quick Reads for the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000. He lives in the city of Lincoln, UK.

An extract from Forge of Mars.

Low-orbit traffic above Joura was lousy with ships jostling for space. Queues of lifter-boats, heavy-duty bulk tenders and system monitors held station in the wash of augur-fogging electromagnetics and engine flare from the heavier vessels as system pilots manoeuvred them into position for refuelling, re-arming and supply. Musters like this happened only rarely, and for two of them to come at once wasn’t just rare, it was a complete pain in the backside.

The Renard was a ship of respectable tonnage, but compared to the working vessels hauling their monstrously fat bodies between Joura and the fleets competing for docking space like squealing cudbear litters fighting for prime position at the teat, she was little more than an insignificant speck.

Roboute Surcouf didn’t like thinking of his ship like that. No captain worthy of the rank did.

The command bridge of the Renard was a warmly-lit chamber of chamfered wood, bronze and glass, embellished with bygone design flourishes more commonly found on the ancient ships sailing the oceans of Macragge. Every surface was polished to a mirror shine, and though Magos Pavelka called such labours a waste of her servitors’ resources, not even an adept of the Martian Priesthood would gainsay a rogue trader with a Letter of Marque stamped with Segmentum Pacificus accreditation.

Pavelka claimed it was the fragment of the Omnissiah that lived in the heart of a starship that every captain had to appease, but Roboute disagreed with Ilanna’s slavish devotion to her Martian dogma when it came to ships. Roboute knew you had to love a ship, love her more than anything else in the world. Flying sub-atmospheric cutters on Iax as a youth had taught him that every ship had a soul that needed to be loved. And the ships who knew they weren’t loved would be cantankerous mares; feisty at best, dangerous at worst.

Ilanna Pavelka was about the only member of his crew who hadn’t objected to this venture. In fact she’d gotten almost giddy at the prospect of joining Archmagos Kotov’s Explorator Fleet and working with fellow Mechanicus adepts once more. Perhaps giddy wasn’t the right word, but she’d voiced calm approval, which was about as close to excitement as a priest of Mars ever got in Roboute’s experience.

‘Update: berthing docket inloading from the Speranza,’ Pavelka informed him, speaking from her sunken, steel-panelled command station in the forward arc of the bridge. Holographic streams of binaric data cascaded before her, manipulated by the waving mechadendrites that sprang from her shoulders like a host of snakes. ‘One hundred minutes until our allotted berth is available.’

‘How much margin for error in that?’ asked Emil Nader, the Renard’s first officer, seated in a contoured inertial-harness to Roboute’s left as he kept them within their assigned approach corridor with deft touches of manoeuvring jets. Pavelka could bring them in with an electromagnetic tether, but Roboute liked to give Emil a bit of freedom in the upper atmosphere. The Renard was going to be slaved to the Speranza’s course for the foreseeable future, and his cocksure first officer would appreciate this free flight time. Like most natives of Espandor, he had a wild, feral streak that made him averse to unthinking obedience to machinery.

‘Clarification: none,’ said Pavelka. ‘The cogitators of the Speranza are first generation Martian logic-engines, they do not allow for error.’

‘Yeah, but the pilots ahead of us aren’t,’ pointed out Emil. ‘Factor in their presence.’

‘All vessels ahead of us are tethered; as we will need to be before we enter the Speranza’s gravity envelope. There will be no error margin.’

‘Care to wager on that?’ asked Emil with a sly grin.

A soft exhalation of chemical breath escaped Pavelka’s red cowl, and Roboute hid a smile at her exasperation. Emil Nader never missed a chance to pick at Mechanicus infallibility, and would never resort to automation if there was an option for human control.

‘I do not wager, Mister Nader,’ said Pavelka. ‘You own nothing I desire, and none of my possessions would be of any use to you without extensive redesign of your ventral anatomy.’

‘Leave it alone, Emil,’ said Roboute, as he saw Nader about to answer Pavelka’s statement with something inflammatory. ‘Just concentrate on getting us up there in one piece. If we stray so much as a kilometre from our assigned path, it’ll put a snarl in the orbital traffic worse than that time over Cadia when that officer on the Gathalamor shot up his bridge, remember?’

Emil shook his head. ‘I try not to. But what did they expect, giving a ship a name like that? You might as well call it the Horus and be done with it.’

‘Don’t say that name!’ hissed Adara Siavash, lounging in Gideon Teivel’s vacant astropath station with a las-lock pistol spinning in one hand and a butterfly blade in the other. ‘It’s bad luck.’

Roboute wasn’t exactly sure what rank or position Adara Siavash held on the Renard. He’d come aboard on a cargo run between Joura and Lodan, and never left. He was lethal with a blade and could fire a rifle with a skill that would have earned him a marksman’s lanyard in the Iax Defence Auxilia. He’d saved Roboute’s life on that run, putting down a passenger who’d turned out to be an unsanctioned psyker and who’d almost killed everyone aboard when they’d translated. Yet for all that, Roboute couldn’t help but think of him as a young boy, such was his childlike innocence and constant wonder at the galaxy’s strangeness.

Sometimes Roboute almost envied him.

‘The lad’s right,’ he said, as he sensed a kink in the ship’s systems. ‘Don’t say that name.’

His first mate shrugged, but Roboute saw that Emil knew he’d crossed a line.

The crew carried on with their assigned tasks and Roboute brought the current shipboard operations up onto the inner surfaces of his retina. A mass of gold-cored cables trailed from the base of his neck to the command throne upon which he sat, feeding him real-time data from the various active bridge stations. Trajectories, approach vectors, fuel consumption and closure speeds scrolled past, together with noospheric identity tags for the hundreds of vessels in orbit.

Everything was looking good, though a number of the engineering systems were running closer to capacity than he’d like. Roboute opened a vox-link to the engineering spaces, almost two kilometres behind him.

‘Kayrn, are you seeing what I am on the coolant feed levels to the engines?’ he asked.

‘Of course I am,’ came the voice of Kayrn Sylkwood, the Renard’s enginseer. ‘I perform six hundred and four system checks every minute. I know more about these engines than you ever will.’

Emil leaned over and whispered, ‘You had to ask. You always have to ask.’

Kayrn Sylkwood was ex-Guard, a veteran enginseer of the Cadian campaigns. She’d been mustered out of the regiment after taking one too many shots to the head on Nemesis Tessera during the last spasm of invasion from the Dreaded Eye. Below Guard fitness requirements and having lost three tanks under her care, the Mechanicus didn’t want her either, but Roboute had recognised her rare skill in coaxing the best from engines that needed a sympathetic touch or a kick in the arse.

‘Just keep an eye on it,’ he said, shutting off the link before Sylkwood could berate him again.

Despite any slight running concerns about the engines, the Renard was a ship like no other Roboute had known. She was fast, nimble (as far as a three-kilometre vessel could be) and carried enough cargo to make running her profitable on local-system runs. Even the odd sector run wasn’t beyond her capabilities, but Roboute never liked stretching her that far. She hadn’t let him down in the fifteen years he’d captained her, and that kind of respect had to be earned.

‘Promethium tender coming in below and behind us,’ noted Emil. ‘She’s burning hotter than I’d like, and it’s closing on an elliptical course.’

‘Probably some planetside dock overseer feeling the whips of his masters to cut the lag on his orbital deliveries,’ replied Roboute. ‘How close is she?’

‘Two thousand kilometres, but her apogee will put her within fifteen hundred if we don’t course correct.’

‘No,’ said Roboute. ‘Two thousand, fifteen hundred, what does it matter? If she goes up, all we’ll see is the flash before we’re incinerated. Conserve fuel and stay on course.’

Roboute wasn’t worried about the danger of collision – even the closest ships had gulfs of hundreds of kilometres between them – what worried the ship masters of each fleet was the threat of delay to their departure schedules. And Roboute didn’t intend to compound that delay by being late for his first face-to-face meeting with Lexell Kotov.

The archmagos had made it clear that such a breach of protocol would not be tolerated.

Of all the bright lights thronging the sky, the brightest and biggest now hove into view as Emil made a final manoeuvring burn.

Even Roboute had to admit to being mightily impressed with this ship. He’d flown the length and breadth of more than one sector, but he had yet to see anything to match this for sheer scale and grandeur.

‘Adara,’ said Roboute. ‘Go below and inform Magos Tychon that we’ll be docking with the Speranza soon.’

The dockers’ bar didn’t have a name; no one had ever thought to give it one. But everyone around the busy port knew it, a bunch of converted cargo containers welded together and fitted with rudimentary power and plumbing. Who really ran it was unclear, but a steady stream of disgruntled and exhausted dock workers could always be found filling its echoing, metallic spaces.

‘This is where you do your off-duty drinking?’ said Ismael, his slurred tone telling Abrehem and Coyne exactly what he thought of this dive. ‘No wonder we’re usually behind schedule.’

Abrehem was already regretting taking the overseer up on his offer of drinks for the crane crew, but it was too late to back out now. They’d made their quota, for the first time in weeks, and Ismael had offered to take them out drinking in a rare moment of largesse.

‘Yeah,’ said Abrehem. ‘It’s not much, but we like it.’

‘Damn, it stinks,’ said Ismael, his face screwed up in disgust.

The loader-overseer was already drunk. The shine served at the first few bars they’d visited had almost knocked him off his feet. Ismael didn’t drink much, and it was showing in his mean temper and cruel jokes at the expense of men who didn’t dare answer back.

A nighttime crowd already thronged the bar’s bench seats, and the pungent reek of engine oil, grease, lifter-fuel, sweat and hopelessness caught in the back of his throat. Abrehem knew the aroma well, because he stank of it too.

Faces turned to stare at them as Ismael pushed his way through the crowd of dock workers to the bar, a series of planks set up on a pair of trestles, upon which sat two vats that had once been the promethium drums of a Hellhound. Some men claimed to be able to tell what kind of tanks the varieties of shine had been brewed in, that each one gave a subtly different flavour, but how anyone could taste anything after a few mouthfuls was beyond Abrehem.

Coyne took Abrehem’s arm as he set off after Ismael.

‘Thor’s balls, you shouldn’t have taken him up on that drink,’ whispered his fellow operator.

Abrehem knew that fine well, but tried to put his best face on. ‘Come on, he’s not a bad boss.’

‘No,’ agreed Coyne. ‘I’ve had worse, that’s for sure, but there’s some lines you just shouldn’t cross.’

‘And getting drunk on shine with a man that can get you thrown off shift is one of them, I know.’

‘We’ll be lucky if he gets away without a beating tonight,’ said Coyne. ‘And when he wakes up with a cracked skull, we’ll be the ones he blames. I can’t lose this assignment, Abrehem, I’ve a wife and three young’uns to support.’

‘I know that,’ said Abrehem, annoyed that Coyne always thought of his own woes before anyone else’s. Abrehem had a wife too, though she was a stranger to him now. Both their young ones had died of lung-rust before their fifth year, and the loss had broken them beyond repair. Toxic exhalations from the sprawling Mechanicus refineries fogged the hab-zones surrounding the Navy docks, and the young were particularly susceptible to the corrosive atmospherics.

‘Come on,’ said Coyne. ‘Let’s try and get this over while we still have jobs.’

‘We’ll have one drink and then we’ll go,’ promised Abrehem, threading his way through the sullen drinkers towards the bar. He could already hear Ismael’s nasal voice over the simmering hubbub of gloomy conversation. Abrehem knew most of the faces, fellow grafters on the back-breaking labour shifts handling the supply needs of a busy tithe-world.

Times were busy enough normally, but with the Mechanicus fleet at high anchor needing to be furnished with supplies to last an indefinite time, the docks and their workers were being stretched to breaking point. Yes, there had been some accidents and deaths that could no doubt be traced back to excessive consumption of shine distilled in scavenged fuel drums, but the lives of a few drunk dockers mattered little in the grand scheme of things.

Hundreds of fleet tenders were making daily trips back and forth from the loading platforms, fat and groaning with weapons, ammo, food, fuel, spare uniforms, engine parts, machine parts, surgical supplies, millions of gallons of refined fluids for lubrication, drinking, anointing and who knew what else. It was hard, dangerous work, but it was work, and no man of Joura could afford to pass up a steady, reliable credit-stream.

Abrehem reached the bar to find Ismael loudly arguing with the shaven-headed barkeep at the drum. With a gene-bulked and partially augmented ogryn nearby, it was a poor fight to pick. Abrehem had seen the creature take off a man’s head with the merest twist of its wrist, and knew it wasn’t above a bit of casual violence when its tiny brain was fogged with shine. The filters in his eyes read the scrubbed ident-codes on the augmetics applied to the ogryn’s arms and cranium.

Backstreet, fifth-gen knock-offs. Crude and cheap, but effective.

‘Have you tried this?’ demanded Ismael. ‘This bloody idiot is trying to poison me!’

‘It’s a special blend,’ said Abrehem, taking a glass from the barkeep and sliding an extra couple of credit wafers across the bar. ‘Unique, in fact. Takes a bit of getting used to, that’s all.’

The barkeep gave him a fixed stare and nodded to the exit. Abrehem understood and took the three drinks from the bar as Coyne steered Ismael away from the glowering ogryn. With his overseer out of earshot, Abrehem leaned over the bar and said, ‘We’ll down these and be on our way. We’re not here for trouble.’

The barkeep grunted, and Abrehem followed Coyne and Ismael to a bench seat located in the corner of the containers away from most of the bar’s patrons. This part of the bar was mostly empty, located as it was next to the latrines. The stink of stale urine and excrement was pungent, and only marginally more offensive than the acrid fumes of their drinks.

‘Emperor’s guts,’ swore Ismael. ‘It stinks here.’

‘Yeah, but at least we have a seat,’ said Coyne. ‘And after a day’s shift at the docks, that’s all that matters, right?’

‘Sure,’ agreed Abrehem. ‘You get to our age and a seat’s important.’

‘I spend my days sitting down in a control cab,’ pointed out Ismael.

‘You do, we don’t,’ said Coyne, unable to keep the resentment from his voice.

Fortunately Ismael was too drunk to notice, and Abrehem shot Coyne a warning glance.

‘Come on, let’s sink these and we’ll get out of here,’ said Abrehem, but Ismael wasn’t listening. Abrehem followed his gaze and sighed as he saw a familiar face hunched low over a three-quarters-drunk bottle of shine.

‘Is that him?’ said Ismael.

‘Yeah, it’s him,’ agreed Abrehem, putting a hand on Ismael’s arm. ‘Leave him alone, it’s not worth it. Trust me.’

‘No,’ said Ismael, throwing off Abrehem’s hand with an ugly sneer. ‘I want to see what a real hero looks like.’

‘He’s not a hero, he’s a drunk, a liar and a waste of a pair of coveralls.’

Ismael wasn’t listening, and Abrehem gave Coyne a nod as their overseer made his way over to the man’s table. Abrehem saw the ogryn heft a length of rebar as long as Abrehem’s leg and start moving through the crowded bar, parting knots of men before it like a planetoid with its own gravitational field. A few of the more sober patrons, sensing trouble, headed for the exit, and Abrehem wished he could follow them.

He cursed and sat next to Ismael as he planted himself on a stool at the drunk’s table.

‘You’re him,’ said Ismael, but the man ignored him.

Abrehem studied the man’s face. Lined with exhaustion and old before its time, a network of ruptured capillaries around his ruddy cheeks and nose spoke of a lifetime lived in a bottle, but there was a hardness there too, reminding Abrehem that this man had once been a soldier in the Guard.

A bad soldier if the stories were to be believed, but a soldier nonetheless.

‘I said, “you’re him”, aren’t you?’ said Ismael.

‘Go away,’ said the man, and Abrehem heard the sadness in his voice. ‘Please.’

‘I know you’re him,’ said Ismael, leaning forwards over the table. ‘I saw you on shift last week, and heard all about you.’

‘Then you don’t need me to tell you again,’ said the man, and Abrehem realised he wasn’t drunk.

The bottle in front of him was an old one, and the drink in his hand was untouched.

‘I want to hear you tell it,’ said Ismael, his tone viperous.

‘Why bother? I’ve told it over and over, and no one believes me,’ said the man.

‘Come on, hero, tell me how you killed the Iron Warrior. Did you breathe on him and he keeled over dead?’

‘Please,’ said the man, an edge of steel in his voice. ‘I asked you nicely to leave me alone.’

‘No, not till you tell me how you took on an entire army of Traitor Space Marines,’ spat Ismael, reaching for the man’s bottle.

The man slapped Ismael’s hand away and before anyone could stop him, he had a knife at the overseer’s throat. It glinted dully in the low light. Abrehem scanned the serial number on the blade: 250371, Guard-issue, carbon steel and a killing edge that could cut deeper than a fusion-weld in the right hands.

The ogryn reached their table, the rebar slamming down and sending their drinks flying. Broken glass and splintered wood flew. Abrehem fell away from the table onto the ribbed floor. The stink was worse down here, and he rolled as the ogryn stepped in close to where Ismael was pinned against the wall by the knife-wielding man.

‘Put down knife. Put down man,’ said the ogryn in halting, child-like speech.

The man didn’t acknowledge its words, pressing the knife into Ismael’s throat with enough force to draw a thin line of blood.

‘I’d kill you if I thought it would stop anyone else asking the same damned questions over and over,’ said the man. ‘Or maybe I’ll just kill you because I feel like crap today.’

‘Put knife down. Put man down,’ repeated the ogryn.

Before the man could comply, metal shutter doors throughout the bar crashed open and a chorus of vox-amplified voices blared inside. Sodium-tinged light flooded through the doors and from his vantage point on the floor, Abrehem saw strobing spotlights mounted on the backs of giant vehicles. Black-armoured figures poured into the bar, clubbing men to the ground with vicious blows from shock mauls and the butts of automatic shotguns. Metal-skinned hounds on chain-leashes barked with augmetic anger, their polished steel fangs bared. Hungry red eyes fixed on the bar’s patrons.

‘Collarmen!’ shouted Coyne, scrambling away from the overturned table. Abrehem struggled to his feet, suddenly sober at the sight of the impressment teams as they dragged men out to the rumbling confinement vehicles. The man with the knife stepped away from Ismael, and the overseer bolted for the nearest way out, sobbing in fear and confusion.

The bar was in uproar. Concussion sirens brayed and blinding light strobed through the bar, all designed to stun and disorientate. Abrehem’s ocular cutoffs screened him from the worst of the light, but the horns were still deafening. Men encased in black leather and gleaming carapace armour with bronze, faceless helmets swept through the bar like soldiers clearing a room. Abrehem saw Ismael shot in the back by a soft round and slammed into a metal wall with the force of the impact. He slumped to the ground, unconscious, and two of the growling cyber-hounds dragged the overseer’s limp body outside.

A hand grabbed his shoulder. ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ cried Coyne.

Abrehem looked for a way out. The collarmen and their mastiffs had all the exits covered, or at least all the obvious ones. There had to be a few they didn’t know about.

‘This way,’ said the man with the knife. ‘If you don’t want to get taken, follow me.’

The man ran, but the ogryn grabbed him by the scruff of the neck as it dumbly watched the methodical subduing tactics of collarmen. Soft rounds slammed the ogryn, but it hardly seemed to feel them, and Abrehem rolled behind the grunting creature as it tried to make sense of what was happening and why these men were shooting it.

The knifeman struggled in the ogryn’s grip, but he was as helpless as a child against its strength.

‘Let go of me, damn you!’ yelled the man.

‘Forget him,’ said Coyne. ‘There’s a back way out through the latrines.’

Abrehem nodded and moved past the stupefied ogryn as a flurry of soft rounds battered the container wall next to his head. From the deformation of the sheet steel, Abrehem didn’t reckon those ‘soft’ rounds were particularly soft.

Coyne pushed open the flimsy door to the latrines and was immediately flung back as a shock maul slammed into the side of his head. He dropped, poleaxed, to the ground. Abrehem skidded to a halt and tried to reverse his course. A crackling baton swung at his head, but he ducked and ran back the way he’d come. He heard the metallic cough of a shotgun blast and pain exploded in his lower back as his legs went numb under him. Abrehem crashed to the floor again, feeling twitching spasms of pain shooting up and down his spine.

Mesh-gauntleted hands hauled him upright and he was dragged through the shattered remains of the bar, with its former clientele pleading, threatening and bargaining with the collarmen. Abrehem tried to struggle, but was held fast. Once the collarmen had you, that was it, you were bound to life aboard a starship, but that didn’t stop him from trying to beg for his freedom.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘You can’t... I have... permits. I work! I have a wife!’

He blinked away static interference as they dragged him outside, the discordant wail of the sirens making him feel sick and the constant barking of the cyber-hounds setting his teeth on edge. The collarmen dumped him at the open doors of the growling volunteer-wagon, and fresh hands hauled him upright. His legs were still weak, but he was able to stand as a clicking bio-optic was shone in his eyes and overloaded his filters.

‘Exosomatic augmetics,’ said a voice, surprise evident even muffled by a vox-grille.

‘Tertiary grade,’ said another. ‘We can pull a full bio-ident and service history off them.’

‘Got it. Loader-technician Abrehem Locke, assigned to Lifter Rig Savickas.’

‘A lifter-tech with tertiary grade augmetics? Got to be black market.’

‘Or stolen.’

‘They’re not stolen,’ gasped Abrehem as his filters recalibrated. Three men in glossy black armour stood before him. Two held him upright. Another consulted a data-slate. ‘They were my father’s.’

‘He was bonded?’ demanded a fourth voice, heavily augmented by vox-amplification.

Abrehem turned to see a magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, swathed in hooded crimson vestments, only the hot coals of a tripartite optic visible in the shadows. A black and gold stole with cog-toothed edges and a host of blurred numbers hung from his neck, and a heavy generator pack was fixed to his back. A haze of chill air gusted from its vents like breath, causing a patina of frost to form on the nearest collarman’s armour.

‘Yes, to Magos Xurgis of the 734th Jouran Manufactory Echelons.’

‘Then you might be useful. Bring him and do not damage his optics,’ said the magos, turning away and moving on down the ragged line of collared men and women, floating on a shimmering cushion of repulsor fields.

‘No, please! Don’t!’ he cried, but the men holding him gave his pleas no mind. A bulked-out servitor with piston-driven musculature hauled him inside the iron-hulled vehicle, where at least thirty other men were shackled in various states of disarray. Abrehem saw Coyne and Ismael trussed like livestock ready for slaughter. The ogryn sat with its back resting against the interior of the confinement compartment with a bemused smile on its face, as though this were a mild diversion from its daily routine instead of a life-changing moment of horror.

‘No!’ he screamed as the steel doors slammed shut, leaving them sealed in dim, red-lit darkness.

Abrehem wept as he felt the engine roar and the heavy vehicle moved off. He kicked out at the doors, almost breaking bone as he slammed his heels into the metalwork again and again.

‘Won’t do you any good,’ said a voice behind him.

Abrehem turned angrily to see the man who’d threatened Ismael with the knife. He no longer had his weapon, and his hands were bound before him with plastek cuffs. Like the ogryn, he seemed unnaturally calm, and Abrehem hated him for that.

‘Where are they taking us?’ he said.

‘Where do you think? To the embarkation platforms. We’ve been collared and we’re on our way to the bowels of a starship to shovel fuel, haul ammunition crates or some other shitty detail until we’re dead or crippled.’

‘You sound pretty calm about it.’

The man shrugged. ‘I reckon it’s my lot in life to get shit on from on high. I think the Emperor has a very sick sense of humour when it comes to my life. He puts me through the worst experiences a man could have, but keeps me alive. And for what? So I can go through more shit? Damn, but I wish He’d have done with me.’

Abrehem heard the depths of the man’s anguish and an echo of something so awful that it didn’t bear thinking about. It sounded like the truth.

‘Those things you told the regimental commanders really happened, didn’t they?’ said Abrehem.

The man nodded.

‘And all that stuff on Hydra Cordatus? It was all true?’

‘Yeah, I told the truth. For all the good it did me,’ said the man, holding out a cuffed hand to Abrehem. ‘Guardsman Julius Hawke. Welcome to the shit.’

Click here to buy Forge of Mars.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2015.
This eBook edition published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS UK.

Cover illustration by Bagus Hutomo.

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* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.