Forge Master - David Annandale Read online

  What are you?

  In himself.

  The seeds of doubt responded to the scalding hate. They rose to meet it like poisonous desert blooms. Their tendrils tangled in his will, strangled his sense of self. They suffocated him, concealing everything, becoming everything. They had their own will, and that was to bring him to his knees in despair. Their blackness reached beyond the soul as his physiology reacted to the attack. His vision greyed. There was weakness in his limbs. The very air turned to grasping mud that would not let him move. Awareness of the orks charging at his back, of Kaderial raising his blade, of anything other than the dark flowering of doubt shrank to a distant point.

  He fought back. He attacked the doubt with the weapons that remained to him: the certainties of Emperor, Omnissiah and Chapter. Those were the unshakeable bedrock of his being, the core without which he would not exist, and he did exist. And as long as he existed, there was duty. It too, was beyond doubt. Its demands did not care for doubt. Duty was action, and if he did not act, he would fail in his duty.

  And betray Emperor, Omnissiah, Chapter.

  Rage, pure and holy, at the mere concept of betrayal burned through the foliage of doubt. The poison still coursed through his system, but it had been there before Kaderial’s attack. It would still be there after the eldar lay dead at his feet.

  His vision cleared. The darkness evaporated. Kaderial was still raising his blade. He still had his palm out. Ha’garen’s internal war had lasted less than the blink of an eye. Too long. In his anger, he surged forwards, chainaxe roaring for blood. His three remaining servo-arms lunged at Kaderial to grasp and cut and burn. Ha’garen struck to overwhelm. This was the attack the eldar had tried to prevent. This was the attack against which no degree of foreknowledge could help. This was doom.

  Ha’garen stormed into Kaderial, bringing the eldar within the full, terrible storm of his grasp. He surrounded Kaderial with the war-form of his rage. Plasma beam, promethium and chainaxe descended on the eldar from all sides. There was no escape. Kaderial did not dodge. He did not attempt that futility. Instead, he attempted another: to kill a Space Marine in the full transport of righteous fury. With nowhere to retreat, he met Ha’garen’s charge. The clash was unbalanced, a reed against a stampeding sauroch. But the weed had a thorn, and Kaderial plunged the Witchblade deep into Ha’garen’s torso. The Techmarine did not deflect the blow. The fury of his assault threw Kaderial’s aim off, and the sword did not strike true. It stabbed Ha’garen in the side. The wound was deep, the blood flow copious. He would heal. The blood would clot in a few moments. But now the sword was his. He clamped an arm against his side and trapped the blade in his body. Kaderial tried to tug it out. He didn’t have the strength. Ha’garen closed the burning, searing, crushing trap around the eldar.

  ‘By your ignorance,’ Kaderial began, ‘you will destroy all...’ The words failed him by the end, and Ha’garen barely caught them. Then there was crushing and paralysis, cutting and flame. He reduced the eldar to pulp and charcoal.

  When there was nothing left of Kaderial, Ha’garen looked for Elisath. The seer wasn’t far. He was still within the thinned ranks of the Salamanders. He was crouched behind a large metal box from which sprang a profusion of flexible stalks. Dangling from the stalks were chunks of iron cut into a senseless variety of shapes. Ha’garen had no idea what use the object could possibly have. Then again, he could say the same about Elisath.

  But he knew his duty.

  Ha’garen ran to the seer. Just behind the box, a melta bomb had gouged a crater in the scrap metal, almost down to the bare deck. Its walls were steep, and on the far side rose what looked like a dorsal fin five metres high. The location was almost defensible. Ha’garen tossed the seer into the makeshift trench.

  As his battle-brothers took down the Fire Dragons and converged on his position, Ha’garen turned to face the next threat to the seer. It was the eldar commander. He was advancing behind the wall of flame that his weapon was projecting. His approach, stolid and relentless, was, Ha’garen thought, more Salamander than eldar in style. It was also, for this warrior, suicidal. Down to his last few troops, lightly armoured, outnumbered by a factor of many thousands, the eldar had little chance of surviving beyond the next few seconds. But he might well drive his flame through enough foes to reach and kill his target. There was a commitment there that Ha’garen understood, even as he prepared to thwart it.

  Ha’garen heard thunder. He looked past the eldar leader. The oncoming orks were turned into silhouettes by the glare of the flames. They were big, much bigger than the ones the Salamanders had been fighting. Leading them was a monster. Ha’garen recognised the gigantic shape from the arena. It was larger than any ork he had ever seen. The entire hold seemed to shake with the doom-beat of its footfalls.

  ‘Brothers,’ Ha’garen said. ‘He is here.’

  The Overfiend loomed over the Fire Dragons commander. The eldar must have known what had come for him. The energy of the ork’s presence alone was overwhelming. But the eldar did not look back, did not deviate, marched straight on towards Ha’garen’s position and the seer.

  Such was his duty. Such was his end.

  The Overfiend fell upon the Fire Dragon. He reached a massive, mailed hand down.

  Before the Overfiend could grasp the eldar, something happened. And the flames shone hellish light on a terrible miracle.

  The kill kroozer entered low orbit of Lepidus Prime. Dropping through the ionosphere to a point less than a hundred kilometres in altitude, it skimmed the upper mesosphere like a bird of prey trolling for fish. It was visible from the surface, a bloated, grotesque shadow as it passed before the sun. A new moon had come to the planet, and its rising was a dark omen. It declared the futility of all resistance, and the pointlessness of dreams. It was the end of hope. It was the end.

  The Overfiend had come, and with him the green horde in numbers to drown a world.

  On the surface, the people of the city of Reclamation gazed at the new moon as it passed overhead, and knew a great despair. The Raven Guard looked up, and knew resolve, along with a grim realism.

  A being of absolute aggression was on the planet’s threshold. Beneath the surface of the planet, the fragment of a shattered god responded. There were none of the deity’s worshippers at hand to propitiate and redirect the inchoate hunger for war that the shard embodied. But now, near at hand were more of the beings who not only did not resist the shard’s desires, but were eager for its gifts, even if they did not yet know it. They were pure. They were aggression and war and nothing else. They fed the shard with violence, and it repaid them with the capacity for even greater feats of destruction.

  The shard’s essence reached out and caressed the kroozer. It was drawn inside, called by the enormous potential of the creature whose will the ship obeyed. The creature was found, and mindless energy underwent a kind of ecstasy. It poured itself into the orks and, most of all, into a monster whose capacity for violence was infinite.

  In the darkness of its temple, the shard vibrated and glowed. It called to the monster. It fed him and promised more. It promised him power on the same scale as his dreams of rage.

  The moon of ill-omen had not just risen over the planet. It had risen over the galaxy.

  Something entered the ship. Ha’garen felt it at an atavistic level. There was an apprehension of the alien and the divine, but no more. The orks had a much stronger reaction. All of them paused where they stood, and roared. The collective shout drowned out the machines. The roar was triumph, glee, ferocity, power. It was the sound of a species on the path to apotheosis. For a moment, the orks seemed to glow. No light shone from them, but they radiated energy in an almost palpable form. And they grew. That, Ha’garen could tell, was no illusion. Armour strained against expanding chests and swelling limbs. The footsoldiers, the greenskins that the Space Marines saw as little more than cannon fodder, suddenly had the
mass and ferocity of elite units. The officers were turning into monsters of war. And the Overfiend...

  Ha’garen was reluctant to apply a word to what the Overfiend was becoming. He did not want to used a word like ‘god’.

  The undertow was hard to resist.

  The Overfiend raised his arms as if to smash the universe. His roar obliterated even that of his army. He was already twice the height of a man, and he grew larger yet. His armour sported a termagant skull on each shoulder, and looked like a disassembled Leman Russ tank. Massive steel plates covered his torso and limbs, and his lower face was protected by a jutting metal jaw. Pistons linked the joints and provided powered assist. The resemblance to a tank went beyond appearance. It must have been, Ha’garen could tell, like wearing a tank. And now the Overfiend expanded. For a moment, Ha’garen thought the ork was going to be crushed by his own armour. Instead, the flesh and muscle won out. The pistons were yanked from their sockets. The fastenings of the individual plates were flexible enough to withstand the pressure of the greater beast. Without the support of the pistons, the monster should have collapsed under the weight of his protection. But he stood at ease, half again as tall and wide as he had been, his fanged jaw now the same size as the metal guard. The multi-barrelled gun in his right hand seemed no more than a pistol. His left hand was an organic version of the battle claws wielded by his lieutenants.

  The eldar leader had sensed the hand reaching for him, and turned at the last second. What he saw changed his mission priority. He never let up on the flamer. Eldar fire and Salamanders bolter rounds anointed the Overfiend throughout his transformation. The rounds exploded chunks of his armour, but no more. The flames were simply a baptism. Something had chosen the ork, and would not allow the moment to be tarnished.

  The moment, a paltry second of chronological time, an age in the fortunes of war, passed. Their blessing received, the orks charged with unholy energy. The Overfiend moved with a speed that belied the weight of his armour. His hand snapped around the upper body of the Fire Dragon. He lifted the eldar warrior as if hoisting a doll. He squeezed. Runic armour collapsed. The eldar jerked. Bones shattered with audible cracks. The eldar’s helmet shook back and forth as if plugged into an electrical circuit. Then blood cascaded over the pauldron from beneath the helmet. The Overfiend hurled the broken doll to the ground and marched on the Salamanders.

  The Fire Dragons had been exterminated. The Salamanders closed their thinned ranks around the seer.

  In perfectly accented Gothic, and with the voice of despair, Elisath spoke. ‘You must tell your commander to destroy this ship.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘If you know what just happened, tell us,’ Ba’birin told Elisath. ‘Quickly.’

  The Salamanders were only metres from the exit, but taking it was no longer a viable strategy. An unending river of orks flowed in though the gate. There was no way out.

  ‘There is a fragment of Kaela Mensha Khaine, our god of war, on the planet. The orks respond to it, and it to them. If a being as powerful as the ork warlord were to come into direct contact with the shard, he would be invincible.’

  ‘He is doing a passable imitation of that state now,’ Neleus said as the Overfiend continued to shrug off bolter rounds. He was seconds away.

  ‘The shard is still distant. That ork is but a shadow of what he will become.’

  ‘He lives, and that means he can die,’ said N’krumor. He revved his chainsword and plunged through the ork ranks to meet the Overfiend, G’ova and Eligius at his heels. The sudden burst took the orks by surprise. They stumbled back before the charge, but where the blow of a storming Salamander should have stunned senseless any ork caught in its path, these creatures, touched by the ravening divine, shrugged off the hit.

  As the trio closed with the Overfiend, he reached to his left and grabbed a thick exhaust pipe that stuck out of a nearby motor. He yanked the pipe free and swung it like a massive club. It smashed N’krumor off his feet. It didn’t kill him, and his greater mass bent the pipe in two, but he went down in the midst of the horde. They fell on him with axe and sword. Eligius aimed his chainsword at the exposed joint of the Overfiend’s upper leg. He never connected. Two barrels went off simultaneously. Slugs the size of cannon shells ripped the Space Marine apart, exploding out the back of his armour and disintegrating his skull. G’ova scored a hit, slicing between armour plates and into the ork’s upper arm. Snarling, the Overfiend lowered his head and rammed into the Salamander. It was like being hit by an iron-clad boulder with stone-column legs. The impact collapsed the right side of G’ova’s armour, shattering his arm and the shell of his ribcage. His useless hand dropped his chainblade, but he stepped back, reached for his bolter and brought it up one-handed. The point-blank mass-reactive barrage made the Overfiend react, if only with yet greater rage. He smashed G’ova to the ground with the barrel of his shooter, then drove his foot onto the Space Marine’s chest. A force equivalent to several tonnes punched through plate and bone, pulverising G’ova’s hearts.

  The supporting fire from the other Salamanders counted for nothing. Tendons bursting as if he might explode with his own power, the Overfiend seemed bigger yet. His minions were vulnerable, though, and half of the squad’s fire was directed at the spot where N’krumor had disappeared. However much they had partaken of a xenos deity’s communion, the orks were still blasted into chunks of meat. N’krumor staggered up from beneath a heaving, flailing mound of green. His helmet had been torn away, he was bleeding through dozens of gouges in his armour, and his left leg dragged as he lurched over the uneven surface. The Overfiend could have been upon him in a single stride, or unloaded the shooter into his back. Instead, the monster ran past him, his eyes on Elisath. He shouldered N’krumor aside with the force of a sideswiping torpedo. The Salamander pitched into the mob of cheering orks.

  Ba’birin ran to his aid, ploughing through greenskins with flamer on full, flanking the Overfiend. Neleus shouted for a vox-link to the Verdict of the Anvil. Berengus answered that the strike cruiser was locked in combat with an ork fleet. The last moment before the Overfiend’s arrival was now. Time dilated as Ha’garen ran a cold appraisal of the battlefield. He was on the ramparts of Heliosa, in the breached Verdict again, seeing the inevitable, searching for the least bad option. Under current conditions, the Overfiend would slaughter the Salamanders and retrieve his prisoner.

  So change the conditions.

  Ha’garen saw what he needed, up a gradual slope, back deeper into the hold. A few hundred metres away. Impossible but necessary. The Ha’garen he had become approved the only strategy available. The echo of the Ha’garen he had once been revelled in the madness of the act.

  He grabbed Elisath with his remaining grip arm. He leaped out of the trench and onto the box, knocking the flexible pipes into idiot nods, the Overfiend one stride away. Another leap, across the trench, and he was scrabbling up the ridge of the dorsal fin. It was just thick enough for him to find his footing.

  The Overfiend was upon them. He was a colossus of rage, a mountain of iron and claws, tusks and fists. He swatted Neleus aside and lunged for Ha’garen. His claws grasped at air as the Techmarine leaped again. There was no eldar grace in Ha’garen’s movements. Instead, there was power and weight, and that was what he needed. From the peak of the metal fin, he passed over the heads of the nearest orks and landed midway up a teetering heap of discarded objects. Cylinders and polygons tumbled down the slope like old bones. Ha’garen scrambled up to the top of the heap and tore down the other side. He stamped hard as he ran, keeping his feet in the treacherous, sliding metal.

  The orks came after him from all sides. Flamer arm raised above his head, he rotated the nozzle, surrounding himself with a continuous stream of fire, keeping the horde at bay. His chainaxe cut down any greenskin too slow or too foolish to get out of his way. Behind him, the Overfiend howled ever escalating rage. The juggernaut pounded in pursu
it, the war-drum beat of his iron boots shaking the deck. ‘Proximity to the shard is the source of the Overfiend’s current strength,’ he said to Elisath.

  ‘It is.’ The eldar clung to the servo-arm with fading strength.

  ‘So this ship must leave Lepidus Prime’s orbit.’

  Elisath made a noise that was both agreement and disbelief.

  ‘Ha’garen! In Vulkan’s name, what are you doing?’ Ba’birin was on the vox, his voice strained with the effort of combat.

  ‘Acting on a surmise,’ Ha’garen told him. ‘But I need time.’

  ‘And how...?’

  ‘By fire and metal.’ His target loomed ahead.

  ‘As befits a Salamander,’ Ba’birin said.

  Ha’garen noted the praise, filed it, concentrated on the immediate task.

  The opportunity was a gigantic blast furnace. Flames licked from the massive grill at its base. It nestled next to a mountain of scrap that rose to the roof of the hold. A conveyor belt tossed a steady stream of discards into the upper maw of the furnace. Molten metal ran in channels from the base, bathing the area in an orange-white glow. A dozen metres further on, moulds of every eccentricity received the metal and shaped it into the objects desired by the operators of the experimental station. Abandoned in the frenzy of the war, the station was a junk pile of workbenches and tables, half-completed devices and burned-out failures. The lunatic flights of orkish science were powered by an electrical station ten metres high. It was a tight group of sparking, spitting pylons and arcing generators. The tops of immense dials on the generators were barely visible above the trash heaps, suggesting the devices were anchored to the deck itself.