I see teeth and black, gem-like eyes.
Fangs scrape rock as they leap onto the roof and flanks of the Capitol Imperialis in droves. More drop to the ground in predators’ crouches. Too many to count.
They hiss and screech. Black tongues taste the air.
My shout of warning names these monsters.
‘Genestealers!’
Malcolm shuddered as connection plugs slotted home in his spinal ports. He felt the rush of power to his limbs and blinked as his sight was enhanced by the numerous onboard systems of his armour.
Verdus Ferrox became cover and angles, a battle zone with avenues of attack, rally points and kill zones.
The Knights left to him by Roland came to life around him, each one flexing and twisting as human and machine flowed together in seamless union. Jaime Garratt took the first step forward. Typical of the young buck.
Enoch and Silus waited for him. Stefan lifted his reaper, its teeth revving in anticipation of a fight.
Which there might be if things didn’t go to plan.
Malcolm didn’t want bloodshed, but he was prepared for it.
Farrimond sat in the canopy of his hastily repaired Knight, his movements a little too slow for Malcolm’s liking.
‘I should order you to remain behind,’ said Malcolm.
‘Just try it,’ retorted Farrimond.
‘At least one of us needs to survive if this goes to hell.’
‘You think it will?’ asked Garratt.
‘More than likely, but it’s got to be done if Cadmus are ever to become truly great.’
‘Then let’s get started,’ said Garratt.
Malcolm nodded and marched his Knight through Verdus Ferrox. Sacristans scattered before him, and idly he wondered why Thexton hadn’t been overseeing the repairs.
At the head of his Knights, Malcolm reached the gates of the forge-temple. They rumbled open, and Malcolm paused in his advance as he saw the women assembled on the other side.
Lady Cordelia stood at their head, with Aikaterina and Aeliana to either side. Cassia held her book clutched close to her chest, head bowed and just behind Roland’s wife.
Cordelia took a step forward, her face cut from defiance.
‘You understand what you’re doing?’ she asked.
Malcolm leaned his Knight armour down until his head was just above Cordelia. She looked up at him without fear.
For someone so small, someone he could crush without breaking stride, there was strength and cold calculation to Cordelia he hadn’t noticed until recently.
‘You’re bloody right I understand,’ he said.
‘Once you commit to this path, there’s no turning back.’
‘I’m not one for turning back, Lady Cordelia,’ said Malcolm. ‘You ought to know that about me by now.’
‘Battle cannon,’ I say.
The command activates a red-ringed kill reticule. Too many possible targets. The auspex struggles to fix on a firing solution. I override it and shoot without aiming.
Recoil feedback shocks my arm. It feels good.
Twin shells explode in the genestealer swarm. I fire two more. Another two. I am trying to clear a path, but there are just too many of the swift-moving beasts.
Bardolf appears at my side. His Knight adds its own weapon to the barrage. More and more of the beasts are closing in. Stubber fire and battle cannons rip into the pack ahead of us.
And then they are among us.
Claws that make a mockery of armour tear at the plates of my legs. I stifle a scream as I feel every hurt. They scramble up my body like Whiteshields on an assault course.
I crush some with my battle cannon. My relic blade slashes down. Left and right. The roaring of the blade is magnified tenfold in the confines of the tunnel.
I crush xenoforms beneath my feet, and I feel their bodies burst apart.
The point defence guns of the Capitol Imperialis rake indiscriminately throughout the tunnel. Magos Vril knows his guns can inflict only minimal harm to our armour but will be deadly to the genestealers.
I lose track of the battle, my situational awareness completely lost as I stagger through the tunnel with a score of genestealers clinging to my armour. Something jars my leg and I go down on one knee amid an abandoned convoy of fuel tankers, crushing the nearest one open. Viscous fluid gushes out, and I rear up to hurl genestealers from my carapace.
Tellurus is fighting like a man possessed, his damaged reaper blade hewing the screeching killers with finesse that is frankly astonishing. His Knight moves with a speed and precision I have never before seen.
Aktis Bardolf fights with his Knights, still honouring their duty to protect the Capitol Imperialis. House Cadmus rally to me, and we fight in a circle of Knights, many fewer than began this mission for Arch Magos Kyrano.
Roderick flays the beasts from my legs with snap fire from his stubbers. William and Anthonis join our circle of resistance, firing battle cannons and thermal lances.
Another Knight’s bio-sign winks out.
My auspex is too crowded, I cannot see who has died.
The tunnel is a strobing nightmare of light and dark. The aliens have smashed the great arc lights on Vril’s mechanical leviathan. Only the stablights of the Knights spin and dip and rise as we fight for our lives.
More genestealers are boiling from the cracks in the walls and through the internal ducting systems. I see a handful burst apart, shot down by collimated fire from a rapidly moving trio of cargo-8s.
The last of the progena are still alive.
I see Raym Bartaum in the back of a vehicle that surely should not still be able to function, let alone lead others across the detritus of battle that fills the tunnel.
He looks up at my Knight and I see where they are going.
I want to shout to him, but there is no link between us. I did not bother to establish a vox-protocol between us, thinking he and his charges would be dead before we reached the mountains.
How arrogant of me. How dismissive of ordinary human heroism that seems. I cannot stop him, so I do the next best thing. I honour what will be a supreme sacrifice.
‘All Knights,’ I say. ‘Brace for impact.’
Arch Magos Kyrano was used to the insolence of knightly houses, especially Cadmus, but to hear such demands from the mouth of a mere consort was a step too far.
He stood on a postern platform in the centre of his forge-temple’s main gate, looking down on a sight that was, for want of a better word, rebellion.
‘Clarification: is this some kind of a joke?’
‘It’s about as far from being a joke as it’s possible to get,’ Lady Cordelia of House Cadmus called up to him. Baron Roland’s consort stood with a collection of Cadmus Knights and their consorts standing with her.
Had it not been for the seriousness of her demand, he would have laughed aloud.
‘This is entirely out of order,’ said Kyrano.
‘I want to see Adept Nemonix.’
‘Who?’
‘Adept Nemonix,’ said Cordelia. ‘Your attack dog. The adept you sent to yoke Cadmus back under Martian control.’
‘No such adept resides within my forge,’ said Kyrano, pleased to be so certain this woman was deranged. ‘Yes, I petitioned the dataproctors to despatch an adept, but he never arrived on Vondrak.’
‘You know, I think you truly believe that, arch magos,’ said Cordelia. ‘Which makes you as much a victim of his manipulations as House Cadmus.’
‘Lady Cordelia, don’t you think that if there was an unregistered adept in my forge-temple I would know about it?’
‘I think maybe you did, but that you’ve forgotten.’
‘My neural augmentations do not forget anything.’
‘I know he is in your forge,’ said Cordelia, dragging forward a man in the
robes of a Sacristan. ‘Assembler Thexton might just be a Sacristan to you, but he’s rather clever and meticulous when it comes to finding things.’
‘Lady Cordelia, I assure you that–’
‘Shut up, I’m not finished,’ said Lady Cordelia. ‘Adept Nemonix is very clever at erasing his presence of and clouding the workings of machines and people who rely on machines for their memories. But when you know what to look for or, rather, what absences to look for, it’s actually quite simple to find someone who thinks he can’t be found.’
Kyrano shook his head in exasperation. ‘I literally have no idea what you are talking about, Lady Cordelia. And I do not have time for riddles and foolishness.’
Baron Roland’s consort sighed and lifted a hand. ‘It’s very simple, arch magos,’ she said. ‘Either you open your gates or I’ll have Sir Malcolm and his Knights here blow them off.’
The threat of violence against his forge horrified Kyrano, but he wasn’t about to be dictated to by a consort.
Before he could respond to Lady Cordelia’s threat, a heavy bass note of clattering gears and the motion of immense cogs sounded from within the gate housing. The twin leaves of the gate split apart and began to swing outwards with a ponderous, stately motion.
‘What did you do?’ demanded Kyrano, horrified at this gross intrusion within his sanctum sanctorum. ‘This is a violation of the Cardinal Rights of the Mechanicus, as laid down by the Binary Saints themselves!’
‘Not me,’ said Cordelia, as the Knights marched through the opening gates with their weapons raised. ‘I suspect you’ll find that Adept Nemonix just let us in.’
The trucks of the progena race towards the stalled convoy of fuel tankers. Coming from who knows where, the tanker crews were within sight of safety when the rock fall that sealed the tunnel also sealed their doom.
Raym Bartaum stands in the rear cargo compartment. He has an exotic-looking weapon pulled tight to his shoulder, one with a conical snout and a coiled magnetic accelerator. I recognise it as a Mark XXXV Magnacore. Bartaum handles it with the aplomb of a veteran soldier.
The Knights have seen what I see and know what is coming.
Twin bolts of blue-white fire streak from Bartaum’s plasma gun. Too fast for the eye to follow, the first strikes the tanker I broke open when I was driven to my knees. The second punches through the armoured skin of the tanker behind it.
The promethium within ignites with a deafening thunderclap.
And the darkness is banished utterly as tens of thousands of litres of volatile fuel gel explode. The blast vaporises Bartaum’s vehicle instantly as a roiling pressurised fireball fills the tunnel with a deafening roar.
Searing heat fills the pilot’s compartment of my armour. Awful, intolerable heat that fuses many of its delicate control mechanisms. I feel the skin of my arms burn on the metal restraints of the Throne Mechanicus.
I feel the pain of those fires, but I will survive.
The genestealers have no protection at all.
I see them consumed as the churning clouds of flame burn them to greasy residue on my canopy. The flame roars back down the tunnel, burning the markings from our armour and rendering us equals. House gonfalons and kill banners are burned to ash, and our weapons are rendered useless in the blink of an eye as ammo feeds and fuel flasks detonate.
The pain is incredible, but survivable.
I hear the screeching cries of the aliens over the roar of the flames. Like insects burning under the lens of a magnifying glass or a mutant with its belly torn open and wailing to be finished.
The heat continues to rise, the confines of the tunnel intensifying the power of the inferno. I turn my armour towards the light above us and push through the billowing clouds of living flame.
‘With me!’ I shout over the vox. The heat within my armour sears my throat. I can barely breathe, and I can only hope my Knights and Hawkshrouds hear the order.
Sealed within the Capitol Imperialis, Magos Vril and his adepts will be safe from the fires spreading farther down the tunnel. If any other xenos organism has managed to follow us into the tunnels, it will be in for a fiery shock.
I stagger through the hellish conflagration. Each step I take is a victory. The heat in my armour is too much.
My vision blurs. Sweat coats me like a second skin.
I push on.
Every auspex and external sensory apparatus is gone, flash-burned in the instant of the tankers’ detonation. I can no longer tell how far I am from the surface.
As I climb the trammelled slope of the tunnel, the rhomboid of daylight grows larger and larger. I can almost feel the cold, clear air being pulled down into the underground network. I open my canopy and suck in a lungful of fresh air, gasping as the chill of the surface touches my skin. The sensation is painful, but welcome. My eyes hurt and I blink away stinging tears.
I see a blurred, angular shape silhouetted at the mouth of the tunnel and know we have escaped.
‘Sir Gregor?’ I say. ‘Sir Martyn?’
Neither of the Knights I left to guard the entrance answers, but I am not surprised. So many of my armour’s systems are damaged or destroyed that it is a wonder I am able to stay upright, let alone maintain command and control.
I keep going, and the shape resolves in front of me.
It is not Sir Gregor.
Nor is it Sir Martyn.
The lictor vaults towards my open canopy. Its legs slam into my chest and whipping lengths of clawed, sinewed hooks dig into the plates of my armour. A tentacle-fronded jaw spreads wide, exposing fangs that hinge out in all directions.
I cannot move. I cannot evade this attack.
Mantis claws like scythes stab for my chest.
Before they impale me, a length of scorched steel intercepts them. Broken saw-blade teeth roar a handspan from my skull.
The reaper twists and slices up, tearing through the lictor’s arms. The creature looses a howling screech of pain. The flesh-hooks embedded in my armour loosen as the lictor fights to free itself.
It is not fast enough.
Tellurus brings his blade back down and hacks the beast in two with dazzling speed. Alien blood detonates from its execution, drenching me in unclean viscera.
The shorn halves fall from my armour. Pink ropes of wet sinew still dangle from my canopy.
Aktis Bardolf appears at my side and uses the fused, useless remains of his battle cannon to scrape away the lictor’s remains. A number of bony, cartilaginous hooks remain embedded in the metal cowl of my compartment.
‘Told you we were being followed,’ he says.
Apotheosis
Cordelia walked with her head held high. As the consort of Baron Roland, she was no stranger to unusual places. House Cadmus had travelled to planets so different from Vondrak or Raisa that she was surprised they were still considered part of the Imperium.
But the interior of a forge-temple was something else entirely. Its workings, layout and ergonomics owed nothing to the human form and everything to the logic of a facility for machinery.
Its iron-framed processionals, steam-wreathed halls and pounding mechanical heartbeat were not for those whose concerns were of flesh and blood. She sensed, if not outright hostility from the temple, at least a measure that she was walking in a place that did not welcome flesh.
Behind her, Malcolm’s Knights kept their pace slow, one step for every ten the consorts took. Their weapons were locked and loaded, and though she hoped they would not need to fight, the threat of violence was a very real possibility.
She emerged into a wide, glass-roofed space: a cathedral to the machine. Its walls were iron panels, acid-etched with scriptural binary, holy circuits and cog-toothed emblems of Mars. Silk-steel banners hung from soaring arches overhead, and beams of variegated light in precise spectra arced through the space.
A vast en
gine dominated the far wall, like a templum organ, but belching steam instead of hymnala and criss-crossed by clanking chains, slowly rotating gears and hissing pistons that boomed and thudded like the heartbeat of a sleeping god.
Where a templum might be expected to have pews upon which its worshippers might rest their weary bodies, this machine temple made no such concessions to comfort. The floor was metalled, inscribed with angular lines, strange symbols and annotations that looked like the interior of a logic engine but were probably something else.
‘Lady Cordelia,’ said a black-robed figure at the foot of the giant machine wall. His voice easily carried the hundreds of metres between them, amplified by either the temple’s acoustics or some innate property of his voice.
‘Adept Nemonix,’ she replied.
With her knightly escort, Cordelia marched towards the adept. A dataproctor, that was what Kyrano had called him. She didn’t know exactly what that meant, but didn’t let that show.
Nemonix was not alone. A shape limned with a haze of light was partially obscured by the adept.
‘Is that a hologram?’ said Cassia, clutching her book to her chest as though it were the most important thing in the world.
Right now, Cordelia supposed it was.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a hologram.’
‘Who do you think it is?’ asked Aeliana.
Cordelia said nothing, knowing that Nemonix would be able to hear every word that passed between them. It didn’t do to reveal your ignorance to an enemy.
They were halfway across the cathedral when Arch Magos Kyrano emerged from a chain-hung transept. Blessed oil ran down the chains, and the ten skitarii warriors that followed him in glossy crimson battleplate gleamed with viscous trails of lubricant. Gleaming droplets fell from the perforated barrels of the tech-guards’ oversized weaponry.
‘I think the arch magos is as angry as you,’ said Aeliana.
‘Angrier, I’d say,’ replied Cassia.
‘He’s going to get even angrier in a minute,’ said Cordelia.