Machine Spirit Read online

  Machine Spirit

  Nick Kyme

  ‘Tracking…’

  The gruff voice issued through a mouth grille, reverberating inside the warrior’s battle-helm. Gauntleted fingers rimmed with dried blood, the black ceramite chipped from hand-to-hand combat, twisted a dial on the magnoculars.

  ‘Wait…’

  A slew of data came through the scopes. The myopic visual of a white, trackless desert was augmented by a scrolling commentary describing wind speed and directionality, mineral composition, temperature and atmospherics in truncated rune-script. The most salient piece of intel was revealed in the hazy image return, however.

  Squalls of armour-abrading calcite were whipping across endless dunes farther out, presaging another storm. The more dangerous hazard had yet to reveal itself, but Zaeus knew it was there.

  He grunted, annoyed, and tried to marshal his temper.

  ‘Any sign, Brother Zaeus?’ asked another voice, one partially obscured by the rising wind. What began as a zephyr had developed into a gale.

  The more cultured speaker was crouched below Zaeus in a shallow calcite basin where the rest of the kill-team had taken refuge. He looked up expectantly at the Brazen Minotaur through the burning coals of his eyes. An orange drake head upon a black field on his right shoulder guard marked him as a Salamander, and he was supporting a third warrior who carried the sigil of the Imperial Fists. A fourth knelt in silent vigil beside them both, head bowed, while the last of their group was laid in still repose nearby.

  ‘Weather’s impeding visual feed,’ Zaeus muttered, careful to mask his fatigue. He adjusted the dials again, using small movements that looked too delicate for such a hulking brute.

  Despite their power armour, he was broader shouldered than the others and his chin jutted as if in a challenge, even encased by a battle-helm.

  Distant shadow figures, like patches of blurred ink on a canvas, resolved through the growing blizzard. The grain and rock whipped about within it plinked against Zaeus’s shoulder guards. It wore at the gold trim and cracked the black bull icon against its field of flaking white.

  Some of the shadow figures were larger than the others, gene-bulked by carapace and outfitted with forearm blades. Zaeus’s stomach clenched, as did his jaw, as he remembered the fate of Brother Festaron. The former Star Phantom had killed a swathe of the creatures before they’d gutted him. A greater mass of the less developed aliens moved slowly behind the hulks, bowed against the wind. Their avian war cries, altered slightly by the hybridisation of the thorax, were just audible.

  Zaeus counted at least fifty, but he knew there were more. He made a mental note of the ammunition left in his cache. Thirteen hellfire, four kraken rounds, three metal storm and two tangle-web. Including two clips of standard mass-reactive, it wasn’t much.

  ‘They have our spoor now…’ he told the others.

  He reckoned on over three hundred. The kill-team’s present condition removed ‘combat engagement’ as a mission option. It only left ‘harass and retreat’. That irritated the Brazen Minotaur like a thorn under a nail and he growled.

  ‘I feel it too, brother,’ said Ar’gan, the Salamander, ‘the desire to burn them to ash.’

  Zaeus lowered the magnoculars and headed back down into the basin where the others were waiting.

  ‘Carfax will be expecting us,’ he said, referring to their pilot.

  The kneeling warrior, Vortan, looked up from his litany as Zaeus’s shadow fell across him.

  ‘How many?’ he asked, voice grating, getting to his feet. Vortan was of the Marines Malevolent, and carried a winged bolt of lightning against a yellow background on his guard. He was also a miserable bastard, but hard as adamantium.

  Zaeus stopped, racked his bolter’s slide but didn’t turn. He wore a bulky armature fitted to his power pack, a servo-arm that flexed in simpatico with his body’s movements.

  ‘We will be meeting the Emperor if we stay to find out,’ he said.

  Vortan sneered, hefting a belt feed around his waist and attaching it to his heavy cannon. ‘Fleeing from xenos scum…’ he shook his head. ‘It’s beneath us.’

  The Brazen Minotaur sniffed noncommittally, ‘Then I shall see you again at the foot of the Golden Throne, brother.’ He checked his ammo gauge. ‘My count is low,’ he muttered, stooping to grab a length of chain looped around Festaron’s torso.

  Zaeus grunted, and began to heave the body. The trail left by the dead Star Phantom was quickly absorbed by the drifts of calcite. At least his blood wouldn’t give them away. Not that it really mattered.

  ‘We should move. Use the storm as cover,’ he said, increasing his pace. ‘Ar’gan?’

  The Salamander was helping up Captain Polino. Both went without battle-helms, and Ar’gan’s red eyes flared like hell-fires in the blizzard. His face was like a slab of onyx. It stuck out but then they all did, wearing Deathwatch black.

  ‘So much for the line of Dorn…’ Polino rasped, flecking his ashen lips with blood. The Imperial Fist turned moribund, and as he leaned heavily against Ar’gan’s shoulder said, ‘I’m sorry, brother… I led us to this.’

  Hunters had become hunted, their elite kill-team in danger of extermination by the very filth they were supposed to have already neutralised.

  Ar’gan’s tone was conciliatory. ‘None of us, not even you, Captain Polino, could’ve anticipated what we found in that nest, their immunity to the nerve toxin.’ He nodded to the armoured corpse of Festaron and the fist-sized puncture wound in his breastplate. The Deathwatch had sealed it with a binding solution that kept what was inside dormant. ‘But soon the truth here will be exposed and end the Imperium’s treaty with the tau by unleashing the wrath of the Inquisition.’

  ‘Only if we escape this Throne-forsaken desert before we share the same demise as our eviscerated comrade,’ said Vortan.

  Zaeus kept his own counsel. War with the tau had been ongoing for months with no sign of inroad on either side. Negotiation was sought, but certain interested parties within the Inquisition were keen to avoid that. A single kill-team was dispatched to eliminate the bulk of the alien’s forces, a faction of avian mercenaries designated krootis aviana by Imperial taxonomers, through the utilisation of an Ordo Xenos nerve toxin that would remove them as a threat. Without their mercenary horde, the tau would be unable to match the Imperium on a war footing. That the nerve toxin had proven less than efficacious grated on the Brazen Minotaur, even if its failure did mean he and his comrades had unearthed a greater threat in their midst.

  The Marine Malevolent was still venting. ‘We should have broken into that council session and executed every single one of those grey-fleshed dung-eaters.’

  ‘The Imperial officers would have resisted us,’ said Zaeus.

  ‘They would have been next before my guns.’

  Zaeus believed him. The Marine Malevolent was a singular warrior, driven and harsh to the point of brutality, but he saw only in absolutes and so his view was oft narrow.

  Vortan glanced at the Imperial Fist, whispering to Ar’gan, ‘He slows us,’ before he looked at the Star Phantom being dragged by Zaeus, ‘they both do.’

  As if to make Vortan’s point, Captain Polino staggered and would have fallen if not for Ar’gan. Pain reduced his voice to a rasp between clenched teeth.

  ‘Keep moving…’

  Ar’gan gave Vortan a dark look that was both a reproach and suggested their captain wasn’t going to last much longer. They needed to find Carfax and the gunship before the hunters found them.

  Vortan shrugged, engaging the suspensors on his heavy bolter that allowed him to move as fast as the others in his k
ill-team, even whilst encumbered.

  He marched ahead to take point. ‘Give me a bearing, Zaeus.’

  It was tough to get a reading with so much environmental interference. The retinal lenses of all the helmeted Space Marines were fraught with static, and ghosted with false returns and feedback.

  Heat signatures were non-existent and visual confirmation of landmarks, geography or enemies was reduced to almost point-blank. The data stream through scopes or retinal feed was scrambled, useless. But the Brazen Minotaur possessed much better auspex than his brothers, and could cut through the fog of static easily. He sub-vocalised the coordinates of the rendezvous point relative to their position and ex-loaded them to Vortan’s lens display.

  ‘I have it,’ said the Marine Malevolent. ‘Advancing.’

  Ar’gan’s voice came through Zaeus’s comm-feed, low and full of distaste.

  ‘He would sacrifice them both for the mission.’

  ‘As would I, son of Vulkan,’ Zaeus replied, ‘and as should you.’ He half-glanced over his shoulder at the Salamander.

  ‘But he is callous to a sharpened edge, brother. We all must be pragmatic, but what Vortan suggests is disrespectful.’

  ‘He is of the Marines Malevolent, and therefore practical to the point of being an utter bastard. I thought your Chapter was well familiar with their ways?’

  Ar’gan’s tone grew darker and there was a scowl in his words, ‘That we are, but I cannot condone–’

  ‘Hsst!’ Zaeus raised a clenched fist for silence. ‘Stop.’ It was an order to the entire kill-team, even Captain Polino. The Imperial Fist was all but incapacitated; as Techmarine, the Brazen Minotaur was next in command.

  ‘Brother?’ Vortan asked warily through the feed.

  Intensifying storm winds were making it tough to hear, but Zaeus had reacted to something.

  The Brazen Minotaur’s entire left side, all the way down to his abdomen, was cybernetic, sacrificed to the Machine-God and the glory of the Omnissiah. As well as granting phenomenal strength and endurance, his augmentations also included superlative hearing courtesy of a bionic ear.

  Zaeus arched his neck towards the skies. After four seconds, he shouted out, ‘Incoming!’

  Kraken rounds scudded through the storm-drift, chewing off pieces of carapace that fell in chunks. Vortan heard the creature bleat before it ditched into a nearby dune. Ar’gan was already moving, low with his combat-blade drawn. It was acid-edged, fashioned to slice through hardened xenos-chitin like air. The creature was bleeding, one wing broken, the other shredded and incapable of flight when he found it. A jet of caustic bile spewed from its maw, but the Salamander warded it off with his vambrace before ramming the blade into the insect’s throat. It shuddered once and was still.

  From the shallow ridge, Vortan bellowed, ‘More coming!’ The dug-dug staccato of armour-piercing heavy bolter-rounds joined a muzzle flash that spat from the cannon’s smoke-blackened mouth. Two of the flyers were cut apart, exploding in a shower of viscous gore that coated Ar’gan’s armour.

  The Salamander scowled at his battle-brother, but the Marine Malevolent was laughing, loud and raucously. When the cannon chanked empty and the belt feed ran slack, his humour evaporated as he went for his sidearm. Before he could slip the pistol from its holster, a stingwing arrowed towards him flesh-hooks extended. Vortan used the heavy bolter like a club and smacked the creature head-on, crushing its snout and most of its skull. He stamped on its neck, finishing it off.

  Zaeus stayed at Polino’s side, and also watched over the corpse of Festaron, who would be like carrion to the flyers. The injured captain was doing his best to keep upright, and snapped off loose shots with his bolter.

  ‘Herd them to me if you can, brother-captain,’ said Zaeus, eyes keen as he discerned a jagged shape arcing through the drifts. An ululating challenge, foul with alien cadence, resonated from a stingwing’s throat as it dived hungrily.

  ‘Here, filth!’ Zaeus spat, and swung his servo-arm. The mechanical clamps seized the creature’s neck in mid-flight, piling on the pressure until the reinforced chitin buckled and its head came off with a snap. Gore spewed across the Brazen Minotaur’s battleplate, scoring the metal and acid-burning it down to raw grey. Through his bionic, he performed a split-second analysis.

  ‘High concentrations of sulphuric and hydrochloric acid,’ he related to the data-corder in his helmet. ‘Trace elements of alkali, potential hydrogen levels fourteen or greater. Extremely corrosive, and inconsistent with the bio-strains in-loaded to kill-team mission brief.’

  This he catalogued whilst bringing down another stingwing with a snap shot from his bolter. The designation came from the xenos datacore identified: tau. Countless others filled the hard-wired cogitator arrays of the Iron Fortress watch station where Zaeus and his comrades were currently barracked. Interrogating the data from the mission brief and cross-referencing it with previous engagements, he noticed an inter-species correlation with a second organism class.

  Tyrannic.

  The xeno-form, ‘stingwing’, was a mutated strain corrupted by genetic hybridisation. It could explain why the nerve-toxin failed, and why the kill-team were running for their lives.

  ‘They’re still coming…’ breathed Polino.

  Zaeus gave him a glance. The Imperial Fist was flagging, his left hand perpetually pressed against his torso. Dark blood flowed freely from the wound through Polino’s fingers as his Larraman cells lost the battle against whatever anti-coagulating agents were rife in his dead attacker’s bodily juices.

  ‘Hold on,’ snarled Zaeus, ‘we’re almost through them.’

  Despite their initial frenzy, the stingwings were peeling off and returning to the larger herd now lost in the sandstorm.

  Tracer rounds from Vortan’s heavy bolter followed the creatures and a miniature sun erupted from the hellfire shell the Marine Malevolent had loaded, streaking flame across the choked sky. The red dawn was short-lived, however, though Vortan grunted his satisfaction as he watched the burning carcasses of a pair of stingwings spiral earthwards.

  ‘Slightly profligate, brother?’ Zaeus suggested upon Vortan’s return.

  The Marine Malevolent grunted, almost a verbal shrug as he continued on the marked route that would take them back to Carfax and exfiltration.

  Ar’gan was farther out and ran to catch up to the rest of the kill-team, who were already moving again.

  ‘How is he?’

  Zaeus shook his head, trying to be surreptitious. He need not have bothered. Polino was putting one foot in front of the other, but his eyes were glazed, his expression slackening by the minute.

  ‘We need to get back to Carfax,’ the Salamander urged. He spoke through a comm-bead built into his gorget.

  ‘Aye,’ Zaeus agreed, taking up the chains wrapped around Festaron. The Brazen Minotaur’s eyes were fixed on the hulking ammo hopper attached to Vortan’s back, ‘but we won’t make it.’

  ‘What?’ Ar’gan turned swiftly. ‘Explain, Techmarine.’

  ‘Those flyers didn’t attack us for no reason,’ he said. ‘They were gauging our strength and our foot speed. Across this terrain,’ he gestured to the raging sand storm, ‘and in these conditions, we will be fortunate if we get halfway to Carfax before the herd catches us. And then…’ He paused to draw his hand across his throat in a cutting motion.

  ‘I didn’t mark you for a fatalist, Zaeus.’ There was some reproach in the Salamander’s tone that the Brazen Minotaur ignored.

  ‘I’m not. I’m a realist, as I thought you Nocturneans were supposed to be.’

  Hooting cries, the bleating battle-cant of the hunters, followed them on the breeze.

  ‘Hear that?’ said Zaeus, ‘They are sending another vanguard to slow us down. It’ll be more flyers, but this time with support. This desert is theirs, Ar’gan. In it they are faster, cleverer and more deadl
y. Make no mistake, we are prey here and our head start has almost been eroded.’

  Ar’gan kept up the pace, just less than ten metres behind Vortan and in lockstep with Zaeus. He felt the urge to increase it but Polino was at the edge of his endurance already. He recalled what the Marine Malevolent had said about leaving the Imperial Fist, and dismissed the idea as unworthy.

  ‘How can you know what they’re planning, or did they teach you xeno-lexography on the red world too?’

  ‘It’s what any hunting pack would do,’ Zaeus replied. ‘Trammel us with lesser forces to give the horde time to arrive. Once they’ve encircled us, we will make a last stand and die before we’ve destroyed even half their number.’

  Zaeus had stopped to manipulate a panel affixed to one of his armour’s cuffs.

  He called out, ‘Vortan.’

  The Marine Malevolent only half-turned, barely slowing his determined march in the direction of the Thunderhawk and extraction.

  ‘What are you doing? We need to move! I’m not dying on this dust bowl world.’

  A minuscule hololith projected from a node attached to the Brazen Minotaur’s wrist. There was a small focusing dish appended to it. As he swept around his arm, the landscape was revealed in grainy-green, undulating contours.

  ‘I’m mapping the region, searching for weaknesses, a fissure, anything we can use.’

  Ar’gan’s expression remained concerned as his flicked from the injured Captain Polino to the storm belt now behind them. Somewhere in its depths, the herd were coming.

  ‘Whatever it is you are planning, Zaeus, do it swiftly.’

  ‘Madness, we need to move!’ Vortan reasserted, having now come to a dead halt. ‘If we march hard we can still reach Carfax and the gunship.’

  ‘And what about our injured and dead?’

  It sounded more like a suggestion, even coming from Ar’gan’s lips. So conflicted was he that the Salamander could not bring himself to face Vortan.

  The Marine Malevolent’s solution was brutally simple. ‘We leave them behind. Both.’

  Though he was largely incoherent now, Polino caught enough of the conversation to weigh in himself. He nodded. ‘I will make the sacrifice for the rest, and take a heavy toll of the alien filth.’