Heralds of the Siege Read online

  She felt the metal of the walls about her retract and tremble with fury and pain as the plasma stream burned up through both opening and flooring to turn the deck above into a light storm. The half-bodies of smouldering constructs thudded down on top of them.

  A daemoniac artisan screeched at the rebels. ‘And you, afflicted thing!’ Lennox roared back, slapping another tri-flask into her plasma caliver and blasting a response. She felt the metal hand of Omnek-70 on her shoulder.

  It was time to leave.

  ‘Tactical withdrawal,’ she ordered, prompting a vat-engineered work-hulk carrying a heavy stubber to stream suppressing fire along the length of the mobile gantry, allowing the rebels time to slide back down through the lower decks. Throwing the caliver across her back on its strap, Lennox clasped the edge of a ladder with the inside of her boots and a loose-gloved grip. Sliding down through the corpse-strewn decks of Ajax Abominata’s rig, she hit the bottom and got out of the way for Omnek-70 and the much larger Zarco.

  The ground floor was a storm of thin, dark beams and arc streams tearing through the scaffolding from reinforcements closing in from outside. The assembly yards were huge and it had taken the installation’s sentries some time to converge upon the Mole and the targeted Titan. The gunfire of Dark Mechanicum constructs cut through the jabbering scrapcode and klaxons shrieking across the assembly yard. As rebels stumbled through the lower level, many were cut down by infernal shock troops closing on their transport.

  ‘Ratchek, reverse drill,’ Lennox called to the moderatii as she hauled herself up to the scratched hull of Archimedex. Slapping thralls and limping battle-automata in through the Mole’s hatch, Lennox felt the scaffold’s superstructure tremble.

  The explosives fired.

  Ajax Abominata’s command deck exploded, blasting the head of the Titan into nothing more than shattered wreckage, raining flaming debris down through the scaffold rig.

  ‘Princeps,’ Omnek-70 said with a cyborg’s lack of emotion and urgency, and pulled Lennox towards the waiting Mole. She nodded. The mighty Belladon Ventorum was also sending quakes through the assembly yards with its every step, the monstrous Titan moving into position. The rebels’ work here was done. Ajax Abominata would be going nowhere without a command deck.

  With Zarco and Omnek-70 in, Lennox stepped inside the transport and heaved the bulkhead shut.

  Safe once more below ground, Archimedex nonetheless rocked with the quaking force of the explosions above as Belladon Ventorum opened fire upon the scaffolding complex of its sister engine.

  Climbing down through the Mole, Lennox felt the rumble fade as they ploughed down through the bedrock to safety. Not even a Warlord’s terrible weaponry could reach them down here.

  It was a job well done. She had denied the Warmaster Ajax Abominata, saving the countless loyalist lives that the monstrous machines would have claimed. She turned and hit the internal vox-stud.

  ‘Ratchek, fire up the noospherics,’ she said with satisfaction. ‘Have Invalis Base advised – mission success. Tell them we’re inbound.’

  Lennox wiped down the squat barrel of her caliver with an oily rag, listening to the booming churn and scrape of soil passing along Archimedex’s hull. It had been a couple of hours since they had left the Temple-Tarantyne assembly yards.

  Ratchek voice crackled over the internal vox. ‘We have a request for assistance.’

  ‘Who?’ Lennox said, standing.

  ‘A scavenger party. Units Forty-Four-Torq and Scallion-Six-One.’

  Lennox knew Invalis Base routinely sent out teams to gather uncorrupted weaponry and equipment, but it was rare to see them this far out. ‘Where?’

  ‘The Autonox solar collection fields,’ Ratchek replied. ‘We’re coming up on their comm-signature now.’

  ‘What’s their problem?’ Lennox muttered. She wasn’t in the habit of exposing their position for scavengers too lazy to haul their finds back to Invalis Base, no matter how dangerous or essential their work was to the Omnissian Faithful.

  ‘Pinned down,’ the moderatii told her, ‘by troops tagged with idents associated with Kelbor-Hal himself.’

  Lennox nodded. While she was loath to interrupt their journey back to Invalis Base, it would be much worse to have affiliated scavenger parties captured and give up its location under binary-torture.

  ‘Tell them to await extraction,’ the princeps said. ‘Confirm their position, and prepare to surface.’

  Ratchek broke ground a little distance off the comm-signature. Leaving the burrowing transport, Lennox emerged into the Martian dusk with Omnek-70 and Zarco. The three insurgents found themselves in the smashed and smouldering remnants of the Autonox fields. The vast solar array had suffered in the civil war, with many of the revolving panels a shattered mess and the collector stations decimated.

  Moving up with her plasma caliver, Lennox froze at the sound of a vehicle in the sky. Crouching behind a demolished solar panel, she reached out for Omnek-70, who passed her a pair of magnoculars. As she peered up through the wreckage and into the sky she could make out a grav-craft, billowing smoke. Its interior glowed with the horrid brilliance of corruption and its loudhailer barked scrapcode-induced madness. The symbol on the side of the hull was that of the Ordo Reductor.

  ‘It’s Gordicor,’ Lennox said to Omnek-70 and the enginseer. ‘Or his minions.’

  Successes like the one secured at Temple-Tarantyne had not gone unnoticed by the Dark Mechanicum. Accordingly, Kelbor-Hal had charged Magos Reductor Diemon Gordicor with locating saboteurs and seditious constructs. The execution squads of the Ordo Reductor were perfectly suited to hunting down and obliterating camps of hiding loyalists.

  Their gathered intelligence told the Omnissian Faithful that Gordicor was answerable only to Aulus Scaramanca and the Fabricator General himself – the magos had secured successes of his own, as testified by loyal constructs recruited from the ashes of such outposts and bases. Lately, Gordicor’s troops had appeared with greater regularity in the southern hemisphere and the polar regions, suggesting to the leadership of the Omnissian Faithful that he was now closing in on their position.

  As the rebels moved through the wreckage of the fields, they took cover once again at the sound of gunfire. The grav-craft was strafing the ground with the atomising stream of an under-turret mounted eradication beamer. As Lennox got closer, she could hear the distinctive sound of rad-cleansers and see the flash of beam impacts past the shattered remains of a toppled solar collector. There she spotted the huddled shapes of three constructs, hiding from the fighting beyond.

  ‘Find a position,’ Lennox told Omnek-70. The skitarii silently obeyed, slipping off with his arquebus to find a place from which to offer covering fire. As always, the Ranger had orders not only to kill Dark Mechanicum constructs but also to put a transuranic round through any members of the Omnissian Faithful if a situation become unworkable and capture seemed likely. The resistance the rebels offered on Mars – symbolically and actually – was bigger than any one construct, even Lennox herself. The princeps had told Omnek-70 that she would much rather suffer his marksmanship than be taken alive into the bosom of corruption.

  ‘What by Holy Mars is going on?’ the princeps hissed as she came up behind 44-Torq and Scallion-61. They were a couple of scavengers with a talent for spotting untainted weaponry and equipment. They had also brought back to Invalis their fair share of recruits and salvaged constructs. They had the sallow skin of forge-worlders, and their overalls were filthy. Their belts were nests of tools for recovering salvage and they carried cargo nets on their backs full of reclaimed parts, equipment and supplies. 44-Torq looked around, startled to find two shapes behind him, but looked down at the sand in relief as he recognised Lennox and the hulking enginseer.

  ‘Are we glad to see you,’ Scallion-61 said.

  Lennox ignored him. ‘Who’s he?’ she asked, pointing her caliver at the ragged figure crouched next to him. Dressed in the remains of a ribbed suit and wearing a gas-
masked hood, the gaunt figure had numerals printed across his forehead.

  ‘Lenk Four-of-Twelve,’ said the stranger, offering his hand. Beyond the burns on his suit, he looked fine to Lennox. Certainly not tainted.

  ‘He’s been with us for a few days,’ Scallion-61 said. ‘Indentured forge labourer. We found him while searching through Dynax Maximal. Says he was over at Icaria.’

  Lennox had been sent over to the rebel forces holed up in the Icaria-Selenium Basin. All she had found was ash and charred bodies.

  ‘We’re bringing him in,’ Scallion-61 said confidently. ‘Well, we were.’

  ‘They almost had us.’ 44-Torq nodded over at the gunfire. ‘Thallaxii – the Ordo Reductor. They came out of nowhere.’

  Lennox lowered her head as a heavy weapons cyborg unleashed a photon thruster cannon at the grav-craft from the ground. A repulsor engine on the craft exploded, causing it to bank and crash spectacularly into the sands.

  ‘Who are they fighting?’

  ‘This, you will not believe,’ 44-Torq told her. ‘They’re killing each other.’

  Lennox was incredulous. ‘Infighting in Kelbor-Hal’s ranks?’

  It seemed strange to the princeps. The corruption suffered by such constructs had been absolute in her experience. They were slaves to darkness.

  ‘We were trying to secure a find,’ Scallion-61 told her. ‘A real prize. A Kastelan-class battle-automata. Pretty beaten up, but in one piece and without a hint of corruption.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Gordicor’s shock troops swooped in on a pass,’ 44-Torq said. ‘We ran for our lives and hid, obviously. Except, when the cyborgs deployed, they didn’t seem interested in sweeping the area for us at all. It seems like they were looking for the unit, too.’

  ‘The Kastelan?’ Lennox said.

  ‘They took our find,’ Scallion-61 said with obvious regret.

  44-Torq shrugged. ‘We hid here for a while and, before we know it, they’re firing on one another...’ As his word trailed off, the sound of gunfire faded, and the scavenger fell silent.

  The battle was apparently over.

  Lennox heard the trudge of footsteps up behind. It was Omnek-70.

  ‘They’re all dead,’ he told the princeps with confidence. ‘Come and see.’

  He led the way through the wreckage of the shattered solar collectors. 44-Torq and Scallion-61 scrambled over to their find, where Enginseer Zarco joined them. While Lenk 4-of-12 and Lennox walked slowly through the carnage, Omnek-70 moved from body to heavily armoured body, checking that the Thallaxii were truly dead. Such cyborg warriors were known for their resilience.

  The Kastelan lay immobile in the red dust. It looked wholly unremarkable, and Lennox paid it no further mind.

  ‘Report,’ she said after Omnek-70 had returned from the crash site.

  ‘Confirmed. All dead. For attacking their own allies, they were thorough.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ Lennox muttered.

  ‘That’s not all,’ Omnek-70 said. ‘These aren’t the only bodies. Look here and here. Skitarii forge-guard out of Vertex Australis.’

  ‘They’re a long way from their forge,’ the princeps said.

  ‘While some of the skitarii have been blasted apart,’ the Ranger said, ‘some of the kill shots are galvanic.’

  ‘You’re saying some of them turned on their own, like the Thallaxii.’

  ‘Not just that,’ Omnek-70 informed her. ‘This body exhibits the kind of corruption associated with scrapcode infection, as does this... But this one does not. Nor this one. If we had come across this skitarii or that cyborg before they were destroyed, we would probably have tried to recruit them.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Lennox said in a tone that suggested it was anything but. ‘Perhaps Gordicor is becoming more subtle in his methods. Enginseer, what do we have on the Kastelan?’

  ‘These markings,’ Zarco told her. ‘First Maniple, Daedarii Reserve Cohort. The barrel on the shoulder-mounted bolt cannon has burned out and the maxims on its arms are empty. Shielding and automotives are down – probably a drained reactor. Wait…’

  ‘What?’ Lennox demanded. She and Lenk 4-of-12 were already giving the thing a wide berth. When the enginseer suddenly got up and backed away, the princeps tensed.

  ‘Is it polluted?’

  Zarco didn’t answer at first. He stared down at the hulking robot before moving back in to check its cranial housing.

  ‘I’m not detecting any evidence of corruption,’ the enginseer told her. With the plating and visor optics removed, he peered inside the workings of the battle-automata’s head. ‘But I’m also not finding any evidence of a bio-plastic cerebra, or doctrina wafers.’

  ‘No wetware?’ Lennox asked.

  ‘Or operational hardware.’

  ‘But looking at the evidence,’ Omnek-70 said, ‘this unit was responsible for the deaths of at least some of the forge-guard – the Thallaxii also.’

  ‘It might have something to do with this,’ Zarco said, pointing at an object at the centre of the Kastelan’s chest with his axe, seeming not to want to get too close. It was an intricate orb of polyhedral cogs and interlocking gears. The Byzantine arrangement became smaller and more complex the deeper they stared into its disturbing depths.

  Lenk 4-of-12 came up behind Lennox, transfixed by the thing. As he peered around her shoulder, the princeps shrugged the menial off with annoyance.

  ‘What is it?’ Lennox asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Zarco told her honestly.

  ‘Enough,’ the princeps said. ‘I don’t want to be out here when the next cohort of Dark Mechanicum troops arrive looking for their fallen comrades. We’re leaving.’

  ‘What about the Kastelan?’ 44-Torq asked. Despite the alien thing embedded in the centre of the battle-automata’s chest, the scavenger was eager to bring back his find.

  ‘I leave that assessment to the enginseer,’ Lennox said.

  Zarco considered. ‘It is a rare and valuable find,’ he decided. ‘Whether we refit the unit or use it for parts, the reclamation is worth the risk.’

  ‘Fine,’ Lennox said. ‘Then when we get back to Invalis, it can go into quarantine with this miserable specimen.’

  As the princeps pushed past Lenk 4-of-12 and marched back towards the Archimedex, the forge labourer looked back and forth between Lennox and the battle-automata.

  ‘What does she mean, “quarantine”?’

  The Mole pushed through the hole in the cave wall and settled on the cradle of its tracked carrier. Exiting the gyroscopic troop section, Lennox marched down a set of stairs slid out by a pair of hunchbacked servitors. The cave was crowded with other tunnelling machines that were the workhorses of the Omnissian Faithful’s holy work: Hellbores, Termites and smaller breaching drills.

  ‘Process the retrievals,’ the princeps ordered as she departed Archimedex, leaving Zarco and Omnek-70 in charge. ‘I’m going to see the lexorcist.’

  Lennox made her way through Invalis Base. Situated as they were, deep beneath the highlands, the Omnissian Faithful had so far managed to avoid the attention of the Dark Mechanicum. Orbital surveillance stations and Marauder Vigilants criss-crossed the hemisphere with their augurs and pict-feeds. Ordo Reductor extermination squads searched for rebel elements forge by forge. Daemon engines stalked the dunes of Mars, following the sweet scent of un-warped flesh.

  None had found Invalis Base. Using burrowing transports like Archimedex, the rebels of the Omnissian Faithful broke surface leagues away, ensuring that no track, no footprints or heat signatures left a trail back home.

  The region had always been a dead zone, avoided by the Mechanicum and Knightly orders alike. Crystal deposits in the mountains gave off a strange radiation that resisted augur scans, turned data-streams to static and drained cells of power. The highlands were scattered with the rusted wrecks of constructs, vehicles and aircraft that had accidentally wandered in, while the canyons swarmed with feral servitors
, whose populations in such an area had gone unchecked. With the base situated in a small network of caves far below the mountains, the Omnissian Faithful managed to operate beyond the debilitating technological phenomenon, while at the same time benefiting from its natural protection.

  Lennox moved through numerous gauntlets and checkpoints, manned by heavily armed gun-servitors and monstrously bastardised servo-automata. The base itself was a ramshackle place of draping power cables, scavenged equipment and facilities creatively crafted from scrap. Genetors worked on vat-bred reinforcements in their improvised labs. Lennox passed liberated tech-thralls who stood at their posts in the rags of their old uniforms. Cybernetically adapted labourers and menials moved crates of ammunition, blessed unguent and supplies to the lower caves. Scavengers delivered weapons and recovered parts to the artisans in the workshops. Repulsor drones drifted about their duties, while enginseers made constant repairs and rough refurbishments to the base. Code scrubbers monitored the local lines, code-streams and noospherics for any hint of corruption. Consoles and runebanks, meanwhile, were manned by exhausted adepts and half-mangled servitors.

  As Lennox marched down the grille walkways, she acknowledged the leaders of other rebel groups heading out on missions to the surface – former skitarii sub-alphas, secutor priests and Adsecularis thrallmasters, all leading squads of mismatched troops and constructs.

  The command centre was a crowded nexus of battered runebanks, cabling and interfaced servitors. The crackle of hololithic displays lit up the gloom, while the air was thick with noospheric chatter and scrubbed vox-streams. Entering the command centre, Lennox found Arquid Cornelicus – the magos catharc in charge of base security. The priest moved between a nexus of runescreens, with a nest of data lines and cables reaching down from the ceiling and plugged into the many ports and interfaces that covered his body. Watching over his work was the hag logista, Algerna Zephyreon – a tall but crooked construct in ragged red robes. The depths of the ancient’s hood were lit by optics of ever-changing colour and sequence, while her emaciated form clicked continually with calculus engines like a fine clockwork instrument.