Machine Spirit Read online

  ‘Stoic to the end, captain,’ said Zaeus, letting a little machine edge grate his voice, ‘but you can barely lift your weapon.’

  Polino tried, but his entire arm was shaking.

  ‘And, besides,’ Zaeus added, ‘it wouldn’t matter. We still wouldn’t reach the gunship. We have a further problem.’

  Vortan snarled. ‘This Throne-forsaken mission has been fraught with them.’

  ‘Such as?’ asked Ar’gan, raising his eyebrow in inquiry.

  Zaeus’s eyes narrowed behind his retinal lenses as he found what he needed, but his answer had nothing to do with this discovery.

  ‘I have heard nothing from Brother Carfax in over an hour. The Angel Vermillion is likely already dead.’

  ‘Without the ship, so are we,’ snapped Vortan. He stomped to where Ar’gan was watching the storm belt. ‘So are we to wait here for the end then? Kill as many as we can?’

  ‘You don’t sound displeased with that scenario,’ suggested the Salamander.

  ‘I want to live, but if doomed then I will at least decide the manner of my destruction.’

  Zaeus asked, ‘How many charges do you have?’

  ‘A pair of krak grenades and a melta-bomb, why?’ Ar’gan replied, turning to see Zaeus aiming the focusing dish at a point in front of them. A fractured script beneath the hololith display read: 5.3 km.

  ‘All of you,’ Zaeus corrected, looking down at Polino. ‘Festaron too – someone check his war gear.’

  Vortan did, offering up another krak grenade. ‘I have four incendiaries,’ he said of his own cache.

  ‘Two melta-bombs,’ said Polino, still struggling.

  ‘And with mine that makes four, plus the krak grenades.’ Zaeus shut down the scanner.

  More avian war cries knifed the air, louder now as the herd slowly emerged from the storm.

  ‘You have a plan, Techmarine?’ asked Vortan.

  ‘I do.’ Zaeus pointed. ‘Ahead, about three kilometres, there is a tectonic imperfection. It’s little more than a crack in the desert basin at the moment but with the correct explosive encouragement, I think we can broaden it into a chasm. The fault line is long, easily wide enough to impede the entire herd.’

  ‘And what of the stingwings? A chasm will be no impediment to them?’ asked Vortan.

  ‘I doubt they’ll attack without reinforcement, especially given what we did to them last time.’

  The Marine Malevolent grunted in what could have been either derision or approval. ‘Which way?’ he asked, revealing the truth of his first response.

  ‘North.’

  They went north.

  Thunder erupted across the desert as a line of explosions obliterated the edge of the basin behind them, plunging it into a deep sinkhole many metres wide and many more across.

  It was, as Zaeus had promised, a chasm.

  ‘All our grenades went into making that pretty hole,’ remarked Vortan bitterly.

  Ar’gan ignored the Marine Malevolent, asking, ‘How long will it take them to navigate around it?’

  ‘An hour, maybe two if the Throne is merciful.’

  Zaeus was transfixed, his eyes on the vast clouds of expelled earth spewing into the air in dirty white geysers of calcite.

  ‘And what mercy do you think the Throne has shown us so far?’ asked Vortan, the sneer half-formed on his face when Zaeus struck him.

  The Marine Malevolent crumpled under the blow, like he’d just been charged down by a raging bull.

  In many ways, he had.

  ‘A second blow will shatter your collarbone, and you won’t be able to lift that cannon of yours any more,’ snarled the Brazen Minotaur. ‘Don’t think because I am of the Omnissiah now that I forget my heritage. You have been shown mercy. If any of my brothers had been present here instead of me, you would be dead by now for your constant dissent.’

  Retaliation crossed Vortan’s mind for a split second, Zaeus saw it in the near-perceptible tremor of his fingers, but the Marine Malevolent recognised the error in that and his conduct thus far, so relented.

  ‘We the Watchers, though divided in brotherhood, are as one in our calling,’ he said, uttering one of the many catechisms of the order.

  Zaeus nodded.

  ‘Accord is preferable to conflict, is it not brother?’

  Vortan slowly bowed his head.

  ‘Especially a conflict you would lose. Now,’ said Zaeus, ‘we make for the ship and hope that Carfax yet lives.’

  Brother Carfax was dead. Slumped over the command console, the glacis of the gunship shattered by several dozen bullet holes, the Angel Vermillion had been trying to take off when the snipers ventilated him.

  Vortan was in the cockpit and placed a gauntleted hand against the dead warrior’s brow, closing his eyes, which were still etched with futile anger.

  ‘No way for a warrior like Carfax to pass,’ muttered Ar’gan, solemn as the Marine Malevolent murmured a benediction.

  ‘Aye, he was a bloody bastard,’ Vortan agreed, lifting his eyes from the corpse. ‘Do you remember when he gutted that clade of psykers?’

  Ar’gan smirked ferally, giving a glimpse of the fire in his heart, ‘The eldar barely had a moment to consult their skeins of fate before Carfax had weighed in with bolter and blade to cut them.’

  Vortan laughed warmly at the memory, but Zaeus returning from his inspection curtailed his humour.

  ‘Gunship’s inoperable, but I can repair it,’ the Techmarine informed them. An icon was flashing on his vambrace.

  Abruptly, the mood turned grim.

  ‘How far out is the herd?’ asked the Salamander.

  ‘Too close for me to repair the damage and for us to take off.’

  ‘And what is that on your arm?’ Vortan gestured to Zaeus’s vambrace.

  ‘Carfax engaged the gunship’s distress beacon before he died.’ When the Techmarine’s eyes met the gaze of the others, they were bright and shining behind his retinal lenses. ‘It has picked up a signal.’

  …the Emperor’s name, here all true servants of the Throne will find sanctuary. In the Emperor’s name, here all true servants of the Throne will find sanctuary. In the Emp–

  Zaeus killed the feed.

  ‘There are coordinates and from what I could discern, when I interfaced with the ship’s long range augurs, they lead to a stronghold.’

  Ar’gan had been crouched listening to the looped message, but now he sat up.

  ‘A bastion? Reinforcements?’

  ‘At the very least a way off this rock and back to the Watch.’

  The two of them were sitting in the ship’s hold. Festaron was laid out in front of them, hands folded across his chest in the sign of the aquila. Polino was resting against a bulkhead, his eyes fluttering. In the dull lambency of the internal lighting, the captain’s skin looked sallow and waxy. He gave no indication he had heard either of them.

  Ar’gan remained sceptical. ‘There was nothing in the mission brief that mentioned an Adeptus Astartes garrison on this world.’

  ‘Perhaps it wasn’t relevant. Perhaps it had simply been forgotten. Either way, we must investigate.’

  After a moment’s thought, Ar’gan nodded.

  Vortan was outside, keeping watch through the scopes from a vantage on top of the fuselage.

  Three hard raps against the hull was the signal that he had seen something.

  Wordlessly, Zaeus and Ar’gan went outside.

  The Marine Malevolent handed the magnoculars to Zaeus who augmented the view with his bionic eye.

  ‘It’s them, isn’t it,’ said Vortan.

  ‘Yes,’ Zaeus confirmed, checking the internal chrono on his lens display. ‘Less than an hour. Mercy wasn’t on our side after all.’

  ‘I want to kill them,’ the Marine Malevolent declared.

/>   Ar’gan was casting around the ship. Carfax had set it down in a narrow defile, high cliffs on either side that were tough to reach from the ground. It was a good extraction point: hidden, defensible with only two bottlenecks at either end of the valley as realistic points of ingress.

  ‘Zaeus has found a bastion, potential reinforcement,’ announced the Salamander. He was still appraising their surroundings when he added, ‘We could hold here. Maintain a defensive perimeter until your return.’ He looked at the Brazen Minotaur, who looked back impassively through his retinal lenses.

  ‘Three of these turrets are still functional,’ Vortan weighed in. ‘I can liberate the cannons, set them up behind a makeshift emplacement with the cargo from the hold.’ He thumbed towards Ar’gan. ‘Salamander takes one, I the other. Both ends of the valley covered. A pity you used all our grenades,’ he added wryly. ‘Could’ve mined them too.’

  ‘And Captain Polino?’ Zaeus asked.

  Now the Marine Malevolent gave a short, snorted laugh. ‘He takes the third gun, squeezes the trigger until the moment his fingers give out. He’s close to suspended animation coma as it is, but at least this way his contribution might count for something.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Zaeus, giving the scopes to Ar’gan so the Salamander could take a look at the opposition.

  ‘How far’s the bastion?’ he asked, tweaking the focus. ‘Or should I ask how long do we need to hold them for?’

  ‘Taking into account the return journey, one hundred and thirty-seven minutes. But the ident-marker on that message was Adeptus Astartes in origin, so reinforcement will be substantial and battle-winning.’

  Vortan clapped Zaeus on the shoulder. ‘Then bring back angels on wings of screaming death for our salvation, brother.’

  ‘Always were the poet,’ said Ar’gan.

  The Marine Malevolent corrected him, ‘You’re mistaking poet for zealot, Salamander.’

  Whilst his brothers made ready the defences outside, Zaeus was left alone to explore the hold. Captain Polino was in there too, but inert. Eyes closed, his skin the colour of wax, he might well have been dead. Only the slight murmur of his neck as he breathed fitfully betrayed the ruse.

  ‘Rest easy, brother,’ said Zaeus, lifting a hand from the Imperial Fist’s shoulder as he went deeper into the hold. It was dark, most of the internal lume-strips shorted out or simply destroyed in the attack that claimed Carfax’s life. If the ambushers were still around they had yet to announce their presence, but Zaeus suspected not. Some of the gunship’s contents had been stripped, only that which could easily be carried and re-appropriated. It was why the heavy cannon still remained.

  Zaeus mouthed a silent prayer of binaric to the Omnissiah that something else had proven too cumbersome for the xenos scavengers and smiled when he saw the cargo crate at the very back of the hold, still unopened.

  A luminator attached to his battle-helm snapped on revealing a dusty access panel. There were no runes upon it in which to punch a code. Instead there was a simple vox-corder. A blurt of binaric from the Brazen Minotaur’s mouth grille turned the red lume on the panel to green. Escaping pressure hissed into the cabin and the door to the cargo crate, which was easily as tall as the Techmarine, opened.

  Within, Zaeus found what he sought and quickly set to work.

  The low, angry squeal of a rotating belt-track interrupted the defence preparations around the gunship.

  Ar’gan looked up from fitting a drum mag into one of the cannons he’d liberated from the Thunderhawk’s wing. Vortan was stripping sections of the gunship’s ablative armour to form makeshift barricades behind which the Salamander would set up the guns.

  ‘In the name of the Throne…’ said Vortan, setting down a chunk of scrap he’d been hammering into shape.

  Ar’gan simply stared.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Removed the torso and organics,’ Zaeus told them. ‘It’s crude but will provide much greater land speed across the desert.’ He was squatting on the hard metal frame of a track bed, two wide slatted belts of vulcanised rubber grinding either side, providing locomotion. The Techmarine’s haptic implants were connected to the simple motor engine that had once been slaved to the cyborganic body of a servitor. Through them, he controlled the vehicle’s speed and directionality.

  It had taken him approximately four minutes to affect the modification, engage the machine-spirit and drive from the gunship’s hold.

  ‘I have a revised estimate for my return,’ said Zaeus, ‘Eighty-eight minutes. Think you can last that long?’ he asked.

  ‘Be on your way, brother,’ said Ar’gan.

  Vortan finished for the Salamander, ‘Chrono’s already running.’

  Another xenos coming over the ridge line exploded, and Vortan revelled in the destructive fury of the gunship’s weapons.

  ‘Yes! Come and taste the wrath!’ he bellowed, stitching a line across the narrow aperture into the defile. With a jerk and a grunt, he aimed the cannon upwards to strafe the dwindling swarm of stingwings attempting to attack from above. ‘Watch the skies,’ he warned his comrades through the comm-feed.

  Ar’gan nodded, but had his own problems. His autocannon’s drum mag was empty but locked. He couldn’t free it to slam home another. Polino’s support fire was desultory but no better than that. The captain skirted oblivion now and couldn’t be relied upon to hold down a trigger, let alone cover one side of the ravine.

  Creatures were spilling into the gorge, a mutant soup of alien limbs, chitinous appendages and snapping mandible claws. They were krootis aviana but they were also something else, something altogether more abhorrent.

  Aspects that were distinctly avian persisted about the kroot, their long sloping beaks and spine quills protruding from the backs of their heads. Long-limbed, they had sharp claws and hooves, capable of impressive foot speed with the ability to wield semi-complex weapons. Natural armour was not one of the kroot’s usual traits but these creatures wore a sheath of chitin over their bodies that provided some protection. Others had additional limbs that ended in scything talons. Some were malformed facially, possessing glands not unlike gills through which they could project flesh barbs or trailing hooks.

  Despite their evolutionary advantages, an autocannon could render them down into bio-matter easily enough, but only if it could actually fire.

  Ar’gan railed at his misfortune, eager to cut them and trying to resist the urge to draw blades and do just that. He was adept at close combat, more so than any of his kill-team brothers. In one sheath he carried a Nocturnean drake-sabre, fashioned from sa’hrk teeth honed to a monomolecular edge, and in the other a Kravian fire-ax. The heavy bladed weapon was a rare specimen of the Kravian machine-cult, a faction of xeno-artificers with obscure ties to the jakaero. A third blade, his back-up or culling knife, was strapped to his thigh.

  Against a horde of fifty something kroot-hybrids, its use had limits.

  In the end, it was his boot not his blades that prevailed as a swift kick dislodged the drum. Though quick to slam in a replacement, Ar’gan was already overrun.

  The creatures had advanced almost to the edge of the gunship’s perimeter and the Salamander engaged the cannon’s fully automatic fire mode, yanking back the alternator slide and lighting up the muzzle with a roar of star fire.

  Swathes of the kroot died, malformed carapace yielding to the aggressive fury of the high-calibre shells. Organs were pulped, limbs ripped off and bodies transformed into visceral mist. A clutch made it through the barrage, wounded but determined. Ar’gan wedged the trigger down and leapt over the barricade. He took a solid slug to the left shoulder; it scored his guard but left no lasting damage. A second hit mashed against his breastplate, blunted by adamantium. The kroot sniper lined up a third but Ar’gan’s combat-knife had left its sheath and was lodged in the creature’s throat. It bleated once before crumpling into
a wretched heap of quivering mandibles.

  The autocannon was still eating through its explosive payload when Ar’gan blocked the claw swipe of a second assailant, seizing its wrist and throwing it into the fusillade. Ululating screaming told the Salamander the threat was neutralised. A third and fourth he killed with two strikes, one an elbow smash to the thorax, the second a pile-driving follow up with his clenched fist that broke the fifth creature’s clavicle and went on going into its ribcage. When Ar’gan withdrew his forearm it was steaming with gore and intestinal acids.

  Only when the fifth kept coming did the Salamander draw the drake-sabre. It flensed flesh and bone in an eye blink, leaving two halves of a kroot bifurcated along its breastbone. A rapid lunge, like an assassin would use with a punch-dagger but which Ar’gan employed with a full blade, speared another through the heart. The last he decapitated, just as the autocannon was rattling close to empty, having shred the ravine opening to rubble and corpses.

  The alien head was still falling as he turned, looking for further prey, his other hand hovering near the hilt of his fire-ax. It remained undrawn – the kroot were slain, but Polino was down.

  Ar’gan was already running to the captain when he cried out, ‘Vortan!’

  The Marine Malevolent was finishing off some dregs with snapshots from his bolter. He was an excellent marksman. Vortan looked up, breathless but exultant from the carnage he had wrought and rushed over to Polino.

  A ragged line of flesh barbs was lodged in the Imperial Fist’s upper chest and neck. Fortunately, his armour had borne the brunt of the attack and the cuts weren’t deep, but they were envenomed. Polino was fading, descending into full cardiac shock.

  ‘Keep a watch,’ Vortan snapped at the Salamander, working at the Imperial Fist’s armour clasps so he could remove the front half of his cuirass.

  Ar’gan nodded, his gaze returning constantly to the stricken captain, trying to fight off the guilt threatening to impair his ability to follow orders. Mercifully, both sides of the ravine were clear and swamped with settling white dust.