Only war stories from th.., p.48
Only War: Stories from the 41st Millennium, page 48
She had hoped her armoured weight would shove the thing onto its back, but it shuffled quickly to support her. The machine rose to its full height, and her feet threatened to slip as she clung to its collar. Hefting her chainsword single-handed, she tried to reach the trigger, hoping to stab the whirring tip through the viewing slit in its chest. A robotic hand snatched the blade before it could activate, wrenching the weapon from her grip and flinging it to the ground.
Its other hand went to grab her, but she managed to kick it away and scramble over the battlesuit’s shoulder. It seized her ankle, almost crushing her foot as it dragged her back. Her fingers caught a ridge in the war machine’s armour, stalling her long enough to unholster her bolt pistol. Fired in rapid succession at point-blank range, her bolts blew ragged holes in metal arms and hands, scattering enough fingers to pull herself free.
She dropped the pistol the second it clicked dry, grabbing the battlesuit’s head as she boosted herself up and over its shoulder. A pair of shredded hands came after her as she hung down its back, using her weight to pull its head backwards. The machine staggered several paces, wearing her like a cloak. She was blinded by the smoke still churning from the melted engine beside her. The glowing metal of its back felt soft as wet sand beneath her knees and boots as she struggled for purchase. She felt the head give at the throat, its socket no doubt warped by the melta-blast. It was scrabbling at her gauntlets with its broken fingers as it lurched violently from side to side. Adamanthea managed to plant first one foot, then another in the small of its back and pulled, determined to rip the battlesuit’s head from its shoulders.
Warning runes flashed crimson in her visor display. The battlesuit had ceased thrashing. She realised veins of energy were now coursing over her gauntlets, slithering up her arms. The xenos war machine had deployed some kind of anti-personnel charge, reserved for discouraging infantry and saboteurs. Adamanthea knew her power armour was not like that of the Adeptus Astartes and would provide only limited insulation. Already she could feel her bodyglove overheating.
She ignored it and kept pulling at the battlesuit’s head, encouraged by the strain she could feel in its mechanical throat. The electricity hummed through her armour, intolerable heat burrowing into the servo-muscles beneath, searing her flesh. Something blistered against her ribs, a bundle of overheated nanofibres erupting under pressure. She yelled in surprise more than pain, and a foot slid out from under her as the machine bucked again.
She maintained her grip on the battlesuit’s head, her fingers clinging to its hood. Her lenses obscured with smoke as the smell of roasting flesh filled her helm. She could see nothing outside but white flashes that snapped like a swarm of carnivorous fish, seconds from eating her alive. The last of her warning runes shivered and vanished.
Whatever the cost, I shall afford it.
The agony in her ribs screamed at her to let go, but the deeper the pain seared, the tighter her grip became. A single invading snap of electricity sent a shiver of lightning through her nervous system. Her body spasmed, hot blood bursting in her mouth as she bit her tongue. But she held on, clinging through the chaos, determined to put an end to the madness she had created. She welcomed the agony as a blessing and gave the head a savage twist. It finally came free, tethered by a length of sparking wires.
The web of lightning sheathing the battlesuit’s body abruptly vanished into smoke. The xenos war machine staggered forward, groping blindly. Adamanthea crawled onto its shoulders and unclasped her helmet, releasing smoke from within as she gasped. The battlesuit shuddered beneath her as a section of its chest shunted forward at an awkward angle, smoke escaping. Tortured mechanisms screamed within. Something had jammed. Had the pilot attempted to eject?
She punched her gauntlet through the aperture where the battlesuit’s head had once sat, thrusting her arm down to her pauldron. She felt something squirming inside. Hands. A blade jabbing at her gauntlet. She swatted it aside and caught something else. A head. Her fingers crawled into a pair of eyes and muffled screams suddenly rose from within. The sight of her valiant Dominions sprawled in the dust nearby purged Adamanthea of pity. She squeezed, wishing she could drag the xenos’ commander up through the neck of its battlesuit. If only she could hurl the creature into the dirt, leave it blind and dying amid the devastation they had wrought together.
The battlesuit shuddered and froze in place as Adamanthea extinguished its heart. She withdrew her dripping hand, wondered at it a moment, then slipped and fell with a crash at the statue’s feet.
She gathered herself, crawling and wheezing through the dust as she retrieved her Eviscerator. She clung to its hilt for a moment, hugging it like a child. The sun peered down. Her synthesised voice was cracked.
‘What else would you have me do, my lord?’
She paused, awaiting an answer.
Someone groaned nearby.
One of her Dominions stirred. She was struggling to sit up, a row of wounds punched across her chest. Adamanthea wrenched open the girl’s visor. Sister Iris coughed. Her eyes blinked into a smile.
Darts of plasma fire sailed overhead. Several more followed. Adamanthea scooped up Iris’ melta and fired at the nearest target: a drone armed with two guns, one of several now rising from among the rocks on the eastern side of the hill. Adamanthea dragged Iris into cover behind the battlesuit’s armoured legs. The wounded Dominion grunted, blood drooling from a hole in her breast-plate. Adamanthea touched her vox-bead.
‘Reverend Canoness, the target is down. Repeat, target down.’
‘Understood, Sister Adamanthea. Aerial support confirm xenos infantry closing on your position. Fall back immediately. I’ll send a flyer to cover your retreat.’
Adamanthea hesitated in her reply. She could see xenos helmets bobbing among the rocks to the east, hear the clatter of their rifles. Her fingers strayed to the trigger of her Eviscerator.
‘Forgive me, Reverend Mother,’ Iris whispered. ‘But I would follow you as though you were Celestine herself.’
Adamanthea shuddered. Mention of that name stirred a swarm of evil memories.
Iris gripped Adamanthea’s armour, her stare unblinking, pleading. ‘Has the Emperor not spared me so that I might follow you into martyrdom?’
Plasma bolts whizzed, ricocheted off the battlesuit’s sturdy armoured legs.
‘I would follow you anywhere, Viventem Miraculum.’
‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Adamanthea, slinging the girl’s arm over her shoulder. ‘Then you will have no objection to my leading you home.’
The two women clung to each other as they retreated into the canyon, leaving the dead behind them.
SERVANTS OF THE THRONE
GHOSTS OF IRON
MARC COLLINS
The dream of Mars was dead.
The thought haunted Calliope as they fled across the desert, clawing at her as they braved the storm. The wind and oxide grit could scour her implants and sully her robes, but the thought lingered. It harried her as surely as the hereteks. She did not know, as it cycled with memetic frequency, whether it was truly hers or not. The sky had birthed horror, misrule and unreason before. Why should this be any different?
She attempted to still her mind, looking instead to the storm that surrounded them. Dust plumes leapt and broke apart in impossible patterns of crimson and ochre, tinted through with the hell-light of the Rift. Her entire life she had been spared the indignity of choking in dried chemical effluent, sheltered beneath the great void shields of Forge Avarna. Those shields no longer burned in their silent majesty, and now swathes of forge-complexes were steadily being reclaimed by the caustic tides of the dying world.
Focus, she thought. The mission demands it.
The crackle of binharic communion broke her from her mournful reverie, and she turned to see her companions stumble out of the haze. Their normally sure-footed passage was marred by battle damage, their crimson raiment torn and dirtied. She offered a canted prayer, but knew the comfort was cold.
Tyr 4-2 nodded curtly as he finally matched Calliope’s pace. His right arm was a shredded ruin, silvered circuitry alive with erratic discharge. The crackle of electricity lit the pale green bionics that replaced his eyes, and the respirator sutured to his lower face.
For how long? The poison data circled in her mind through feedback loops of doubt and strife. She had pared away much in her own Quest for Knowledge, ridding herself of her flesh weakness. With the sky torn open she felt frail in ways she had long since thought consigned to memory. She stretched, her internal reactor whining as her four legs braced against the storm. Her trifold occularis rotated, clicked and realigned, till she could see Kappa-Ix drawing closer through the gale. The last skitarius of their number stumbled through the dunes, dragging the heavy bulk of his radium carbine. He stopped periodically, jerking and spasming, before continuing his tortured march.
As a magos domina, in more civilised times, she would have rendered him down for parts and protein. In this desecrated epoch she was loath to part with any advantage or protection. They were the last now, after all. The last of her cell, perhaps the last loyal souls upon Sareme. Her hand brushed the data-repository that hung from her robes, iron against silver, and past philtres of oils and unguents. That they lived meant that their allies had not died in vain. They yet had purpose.
This war will break us. Yet we still fight. We still resist. Iron, in the service of the Machine-God.
Their destination leered out of the gloom, like some ancient pagan fane. There was defiance in its grim countenance, a Warlord unbroken by the storm winds. Static discharge whipped and cracked like lightning, framing the cyclopean monolith of its being, picking out the kill-marks upon its fluttering banners. FURORE MARTIS, it proclaimed, Fury of Mars.
There was no motion from the machine, no signs of life. She looked down as they passed, her feet nudging at debris that the dust had coated. They were bodies. The lifeless bodies of secutarii, blanketing the ground around the stationary Titan. Dead eyes stared up, transfixed upon the roiling heavens, and Calliope did not allow herself to share their morbid sight.
They pushed on haltingly, uncertain, into the shadow of the great engine until they found an access hatch. Calliope hunched over, sheltering the panels from the wind and dust as she began to interface with the Titan’s subsystems, mechadendrites coiling as they extruded into the waiting ports. Chill crept along her iron spine as her reactor bled power and awakened the mechanisms. Her life was being siphoned, moment by moment, essence sacrificed that their mission might yet be fulfilled. Her prayers were low and soft, soothing the machine-spirits as they woke from pain and dormancy.
The door hissed open, creaking with hydraulic effort as they forced their way into the gloom. Around them the bastion fane was still and silent, dust slowly being displaced by the creeping dirt they had trailed in with them. Even the lumens were dead.
The base of the leg was as much temple as fortress, gateway and guardhouse. The walls were inscribed, laser-etched with the binary rotes of victories. When the crew marched into Fury of Mars, they looked upon these walls, dwelt upon its history and basked in its glory; but for their small band the weight of the place felt curdled, their own failings an insult to the vaunted past.
Tyr 4-2 had moved up and ahead of her, hoisting his sword in his working hand as he scanned the room. Kappa-Ix lumbered further back, a glacial presence of whining feedback. Their lights split the darkness in crisscrossing arcs, picking out the disarray of the once pristine chamber. Oily runoff streaked the walls, tarnishing the recorded battles with the wear and the rot of the abandoned. There were burn marks, faded, yet speaking of the urgency of battle. She imbibed the air, atmosphere processors hissing in her chest as they analysed.
Rust. Rot. Burnt flesh. Stagnation and death.
It is a refuge. She allowed herself the thought. The Machine-God works by strange circumlocution, but it yet orders the universe. There was opportunity here, to tend their wounds and to consecrate anew the spirit of the great engine.
Behind her, Kappa-Ix pushed the door back into place, dislodging the piling sand as he heaved it shut. Darkness closed in around their islands of light. The dream of Mars might be dead, she thought, but we are not.
In the close darkness of the chamber, their lights played over another great door, inlaid with the crown-and-cog symbol of the Legio Arconis, the Iron Kings of Sareme. It was broad enough that two Kastelan war automata could march shoulder to shoulder through it, and a full three feet taller. She walked past the barricades and pressed her fingers to the metal, as though will alone could force it open.
‘If it cannot serve the will of the Machine-God, then it must be denied to the enemy. There is no greater insult than the despoliation of such a weapon.’
The archmagos would be dead now, with the rest of them. She did not like to think of those who had been left behind, their fate to join the choir of the crucified, their binharic suffering echoing out across the wastes.
A whine drew her attention. A minor thing, a shift in the environmental conditions. The air pressure had changed, but there was something else beneath that, like the slow beating of an arrhythmic heart.
The chamber’s lights flickered, their illumination fitful and diffuse. Calliope turned back towards the door, one hand around the haft of her axe and the other locked on her phosphor serpenta. Loath as she was to unleash such killing fury within these holy halls, not least for fear of damaging the Titan and insulting its machine-spirit, she had to be prepared for what might lie beyond. Kappa-Ix stood to her left, carbine trembling, while on her right Tyr engaged his powerblade with a whisper of blue-white fields.
Artfully crafted locks spun and clicked in the door, cog becoming crown becoming cog again. There was a growl of redistributing pressure, and the door began to slide sideways to reveal…
Nothing.
The path ahead was empty, a set of stairs leading steadily up and towards the body proper of the Titan. Each tier was engraved with litanies of war, lessons imparted with every step of the ascent. Calliope crossed the threshold, tentatively, and her clawed feet clattered on the iron-rimmed steps.
No one. No allies in welcome, nor enemies poised to strike. What, then, opened the way?
The base of her axe tapped against the stairs, again and again. She stilled her agitation, almost surprised that she had not noticed it. The air had drawn in around her, hot and close, and she felt what remained of her flesh-self shudder.
This was a sign, though she knew in her core that it was a contrary one.
