Forge Master - David Annandale Read online

  Ha’garen’s memory map of the power grid: there was a major node here.

  He was moving fast, but the Overfiend, his momentum building, was faster. The vibrations of his footsteps were growing. He was closing.

  Good.

  Ha’garen used the plasma cutter on the blast furnace as he ran past, slicing it open about midway up its chimney. Gases vented, air rushed in, and reactions became uncontained. The furnace exploded. The shredded framework tore orks apart as it shrieked across the hold. A searing wave of metal fell on Ha’garen’s pursuers. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the Overfiend stumble, raging at the burns that reached through his armour. He was a long way from dead, but he was brought to a stop, so he was where Ha’garen wanted him when the next thing happened.

  Its base blown apart, the mountain of scrap trembled and collapsed. Metal shrieked on metal as thousands of tonnes of cataclysm swept to deck level. The Overfiend disappeared beneath the avalanche. As the creaks and roars of tumbling rubble faded, Ha’garen could hear the monster battling his way out from the metal tomb.

  But Ha’garen had his lead time.

  He reached the generators. He released Elisath, who collapsed against a workbench. The eldar was scorched and bleeding, but alive. Ha’garen approached the nearest generator. He pulled open a control panel and eyed the wiring inside. Monstrously crude, as ever, dangerously improvised, but somehow operational.

  ‘Well done, brother,’ Ba’birin voxed. ‘We will be at your side momentarily.’

  ‘I will be immobile and rather preoccupied,’ Ha’garen told him. ‘If you are able to keep me from being disturbed, I may be able to act on my surmise.’

  A moment of silence, as Ba’birin wondered, perhaps, why Ha’garen did not say outright what he planned. Then he said, ‘Understood.’ Maybe Ba’birin had guessed, or maybe he simply realised a huge risk was involved. ‘Vulkan guide you, brother.’ A valediction. And an act of atonement.

  ‘Thank you, brother.’ The words were the expected ones. The correct ones to say. But even now, he still felt the disconnection from his earlier self and earlier friendships. The disconnection had not been Ba’birin’s. It had been his.

  What are you?

  He could not pause for doubts. As at Heliosa, as on the Verdict of the Anvil, there was one path to follow, and he took it. This was his fire of battle, the anvil upon which he must not break. There was no time for a prayer, only an inarticulate reaching out to the Omnissiah as Ha’garen extended his mechadendrites and plugged himself into the generator.

  Into the kroozer.

  As before, the ship’s power grid opened before him like a nervous system hololith. As before, the ship’s lifeblood was a torrent of electronic filth. The difference was that now Ha’garen did not shield himself from the ship. He did not keep his distance from its xenos insanity. He plunged into it. His consciousness fell into the bloodstream. His awareness ran everywhere. Deeper and deeper he went. He was no longer contemplating a grid. He was the grid. He was every electrical function of the ship. He was thousands upon thousands of individual devices. He was the useful and the broken, the vital and the trivial, the barely logical and the utterly mad. He was the distortions of technology clumsily pilfered from other civilisations, and he was the perverse creations of the orks, inventions that had no right to work but somehow did.

  He was the kroozer.

  What are you?

  Now the question was more pertinent than ever, and more vital. The otherness of the ship was a raging torrent, and it was a vast ocean. It tried to tear him apart, and it tried to drown him in its enormity. Since his first contact with the ship, it had been eating at his soul with the slow erosion of rust. Now it had swallowed him, and if he disappeared, his body would become just another elaborate object of forgotten use in the bottom hold of the ship. He fought for his self. He fought for his soul.

  What are you?

  I am Ha’garen. I am a Techmarine. I am a Salamander.

  Three statements. Three identities. And then the revelation, bright enough to give sight to the blind: those were not three identities. They were one. The more completely he was one facet, the more completely he was all of them. The action he was engaged in was possible because of his transformation on Mars, and he was risking the greatest self-sacrifice possible for the good of his Chapter.

  With realisation came unity of identity, and with unity came strength. He remained Ha’garen as he spread throughout the ship. He fought off the alien contamination. He became a virus himself. He claimed everything. Everything became him.

  He was not the kroozer. The kroozer was him.

  He was everywhere. He knew what moved and died in his vast new body. He felt the Overfiend rise from his metal tomb and come to kill him.

  Orks swarmed the Salamanders, fighting them to a standstill. N’krumor lived, but could barely move forwards. The choice came down to leaving either N’krumor or Ha’garen on his own. Ba’birin refused the choice. ‘You know the way forwards, brothers,’ he said. Then he followed Ha’garen’s example, scrambling up the dorsal fin and hurling himself over the immediate ranks. A few metres on, and he was through any real resistance. Ha’garen had culled the enemy well.

  Ba’birin came over the rise of the fallen mountain in time to see the Overfiend shrug his way free. The beast thundered towards Ha’garen, who stood motionless, tethered to a generator. Elisath tried to take the Space Marine’s chainaxe from his hands, but the fists were those of a statue and not to be opened. Ba’birin charged down the slope, and while still several metres from the base, he leaped. He landed on the Overfiend’s back. He hooked his knees around the Overfiend’s neck, and raised his chainsword. Ork reinforcements were charging forwards, but they had some ground to cross. The avalanche had wiped out all the enemy in the immediate area. The Salamanders had time. Time enough, Ba’birin vowed, to rid the galaxy of this abomination.

  He brought the chainsword down. It dug into the Overfiend’s flesh, but it struggled to find a purchase.

  The Overfiend swung a massive fist back. It hit Ba’birin with the force of a wrecking ball.

  Ha’garen did not see well inside the ship. Random flurries of data from dozens of sensors gave him a shadowy picture of the war in the hold. He knew the Overfiend was near. He knew the ork was in combat, or else he would already be dead. He didn’t know much more.

  But outside the ship, his vision was crystalline. He saw the void war in all its balletic magnificence. Even the brute simplicity of the ork ship attacks took on a rough grace when seen from the multifaceted eyes of the ship. Information was an ever-shifting torrent. Updates every fraction of a second showed the changing nature of the battle. War was an accumulation of millions of variables and conflicting vectors. It was the embodiment of the contingent, and the small but unforeseen event carried more weight than the great and predicted.

  He saw the Verdict of the Anvil at bay. The Salamanders ship lashed at the swarm. Each strike of the lance, each torpedo launch, each gun volley was strategically placed and lethal. There were so many targets, the Verdict eviscerated one ork vessel after another. The void blistered with the roil of explosions, the death cries of warships. But even as the predator savaged its foe with its claws, so did it suffer its own wounds. The Verdict of the Anvil was bleeding. Its turns were sluggish. The flickering glow of uncontrolled fires licked at its hull. Ha’garen saw dark patches where he should have seen the flash of guns and the stab of lances. Mulcebar had bought the Verdict and the boarding party time, but the great, predictable event of this war was the annihilation of the Salamanders force.

  Ha’garen became the unforeseen. He flexed the muscles of his new body.

  The blow knocked Ba’birin down into the debris. He jumped back up, head ringing. The Overfiend had turned to face him. The ork brought his fist down hard enough to shatter marble. Iron fragments flew from the meteor impact. Ba’bi
rin lunged, blade whirring at the Overfiend’s face.

  The other Salamanders had crossed the top of the hill of debris. They were almost here. They were too far. He had to give Ha’garen a few more seconds. This was the anvil on which his destiny was being shaped. He would make sure it was a worthy one. Worthy of the honour of being a Salamander.

  The Overfiend’s reflexes were daemonic. A massive hand snatched up Ba’birin. The grip was adamantine. Ba’birin slashed the blade across the xenos monstrosity’s forehead. The Overfiend howled and crushed him into the scrap. It was like being hammered by a Dreadnought’s power fist. His helmet cracked in two. The Overfiend raised his fist. Ba’birin jerked up, rolled down-slope. The fist came down on air and wreckage. Ba’birin stood and jabbed his chainsword between leg plates, sawing at the ork’s tendons. The Overfiend stumbled forwards and dropped to a knee. And still he was fast. Faster than anything that huge had a right to be. He pivoted, shooter blasting out indiscriminate hell.

  Fast. Too fast.

  Ba’birin caught the rounds in the chest. Point blank. The first ones punched through his weakened armour. The others punched through him. Bone shattered. Hearts punctured. He felt a terrible loosening inside him as the damage overwhelmed his body’s ability to repair itself. There was a strange impression of liquid, and a coldness that radiated from his core, freezing and numbing his limbs. Darkness followed the cold. He was plunging backwards into an infinite well, and the world was receding from his view.

  He clung to his sight as he collapsed into a seated position. He would know if he had succeeded.

  The Overfiend loomed over him, eyes glinting triumph.

  Then a terrible, echoing moan wracked the walls of the hold. There was a jerk like a mountain snapping out of sleep. The ship was moving.

  Ba’birin grinned at the Overfiend. ‘My brother has defeated you,’ he said.

  The world vanished. Ba’birin dropped into the dark and cold, and accepted their promise of rest.

  Ha’garen’s will seized the kroozer’s engines. It seized the steering. It seized the weapon banks. He merged even more deeply with the ship. The engines fired at full, flaring second daylight over the surface of Lepidus Prime. The hull screamed from the strain. The kroozer pulled away from its prey and shot towards the fleet. Its cannons blazed at the ork ships. When it blasted the stern from a Brute, there was a moment of false calm in the war as confusion descended.

  And then chaos.

  Outraged crews fired at the kroozer. On other vessels, crews just as furious at the perceived mutiny unleashed savage counterattacks. Within seconds, the entire ork fleet was at war with itself. The void was filled with overlapping cannon fire and the tiny suns of disintegrating craft. From out of the disintegrating swarm came the Verdict of the Anvil. Bleeding oxygen and guttering fire, it ripped through the enemy ships, its lances and guns surrounding it with a halo of wrath.

  Ha’garen had never had any use for chaos. It was anathema. Even its smallest, most subtle manifestation could be the sign of the Great Enemy at work. But this, this transformation of the void war, this was good. It was the routing of the Emperor’s enemies. It was annihilation. It was glorious. He had done this. He, one soul, one mind, had created this vision of absolute destruction. As the first retaliatory strikes hit the kroozer, he felt a surge of incandescent aggression. The one directive of the universe was to smash and burn everything before him. Each hit on the hull was a gauntlet thrown. He would tear the enemy’s heart out, he would sink his fangs into the throat of his prey, he would–

  What are you?

  The question was the faint but clear toll of iron on iron. The refrain had been repeated so many times, metal folded over itself again and again, hammered and hammered until it had a new unity of strength, a new identity. The question resounded with Ba’birin’s voice as though he were asking it for the first time, and it demanded an answer.

  What are you?

  I am Techmarine.

  I am Salamander.

  I am Ha’garen.

  I am losing my soul.

  He pulled out. The reality of the hold grasped him as he yanked his mechadendrites from the generator. He staggered, the ork taint leaving his self with reluctance. He felt shredded and hollowed out. He looked to his left and saw the Overfiend stride past Ba’birin’s crumpled figure. The monster was coming to collect his prize.

  The Overfiend paused. His expression changed from snarling omnipotence to enraged panic. As the ship powered away from the planet on the course Ha’garen had commanded, what had entered the orks now left, its reach overextended. Ha’garen saw the Overfiend wither before him, diminishing from god to mere monster. The hold echoed with the howl of despairing orks. The Overfiend’s armour, lacking the power assist of its pistons, turned into a prison. The ork was wearing a tonne of inert iron. He toppled forwards with a booming crash.

  They stared at each other for a moment, the fallen ork warlord and the Space Marine who stood only because he didn’t attempt to walk. The Overfiend glared at Ha’garen with the fury of thwarted destiny. Ha’garen tried to raise a weapon, but his limbs and will were weak and drained. His servo-arms hung as motionless.

  Bolter-fire hammered into the Overfiend’s armour as the other Salamanders came down the hill. Their aim was thrown as a massive seizure shook the deck and the walls of the hold. The kroozer was rocked by the cannons of its own fleet. The Overfiend found the strength of desperation and struggled free of his armour. As he rose, a shell struck him in the shoulder. Instead of dropping him, it spurred him. The beast, still a gigantic monument of violence, but now raging impotence, tore past Ha’garen in a limping sprint and disappeared into the gloom of the hold.

  The kroozer shook again, the battering even more insistent. The deck heaved. Towers of pointless mechanism collapsed. Even blessedly severed from his link to the ship, Ha’garen could feel it begin to die. The orks that had been charging to the aid of their ruler had lost all discipline. They were disappearing from the field of battle as quickly as they had arrived. They were routed, panicked, fleeing the destruction of their vessel.

  Ha’garen took his first step as his battle-brothers rejoined him. ‘Ba’birin,’ he began.

  ‘He will live on,’ N’krumor said.

  Ha’garen nodded. So the harvest of Ba’birin’s progenoid glands was complete.

  More explosions. Somewhere in the distance, there was the ominous sound of wind. The hull had been breached. Berengus said, ‘Contact from the Verdict of the Anvil. A Thunderhawk is on its way. It needs a location.’

  The kroozer’s every bolt was clear in Ha’garen’s mind. He knew the ship as he knew the Verdict. He set aside thoughts of being tainted and said, ‘There is a loading bay close at hand. One deck up.’ He gave Berengus the coordinates to pass on to the Thunderhawk.

  Prisoner in tow, the Salamanders plunged through the maelstrom of the agonised ship. It was as if the madness of the hold had spread throughout the hull. Corridors fell into pits of fire. Walls twisted under terminal strain and heat. Smoke choked the passageways. The light was the light of ending, flickering red and shrieking white. And filling the air was the song of a ship breaking up: a hellish choir of screaming metal punctuated by the deep, internal, fatal arrhythmia of explosions. Ha’garen led the way. There were no secrets in the iron warren any more, and he countered every blocked path with an alternative route. There was no hesitation, no delay. He had been shaped into the necessary weapon for this war, and he used the xenos knowledge to guide his brothers out of the kroozer as it succumbed to the purity of flame.

  The docking bay was in the grip of a hurricane. The Thunderhawk Mount Deathfire had blasted its way into the bay, and the kroozer’s atmosphere was pouring itself into the void. Elisath collapsed, gasping for air. Ha’garen carried him the rest of the way to the gunship.

  As the Mount Deathfire pulled away from the kroozer, Ha’ga
ren watched through a viewing block as the ork flagship underwent its death throes. By this point, it was no longer taking fire, and its own guns had fallen silent. Its engines were dark. It drifted now, its frame pulsing with the bursts of the fires that raced down its arteries. Those would fade, too, as the air finished venting from the dozens of breaches. It did not die with fury and glory. It burned to an ember, a broken shell. It would soon be a husk, a broken tombstone to its master’s ambition.

  Neleus emerged from the cockpit. He had removed his helmet, and his face was lined with exhaustion, less from the loss of his arm than from the toll of the fallen. ‘Word from our captain,’ he announced. ‘The ork fleet, what is left of it, is in full retreat.’

  ‘Then the Overfiend is dead?’ N’krumor asked.

  ‘No,’ Ha’garen put in. ‘A retreat means they stopped fighting each other. Someone imposed order. They still have their leader.’

  ‘Many small craft were seen escaping the kroozer,’ Neleus said. ‘But if he lives, his designs on this system have been crippled.’ He turned his head to look at the prisoner. ‘And we will destroy what was calling to the greenskins.’

  Elisath said nothing. Ha’garen glanced at the eldar, and saw a being who had little to benefit from in his change of captors. He turned his attention back to the viewing block. The ork ship was going dark, disappearing into the night of the void. He was catching his last sight of Ba’birin’s grave.

  He asked the question on his brother’s behalf. What am I? He knew the answer, for now, but he also knew that answer would continue to change. He had been able to kill the ship because of how much of the flesh and of the human he had surrendered. Remember the human, Ba’birin had said. So he would, but one could only remember what one no longer possessed. The path of this destiny was clear. He must transform. Contact with the kroozer had left him with a spiritual cancer. He felt it gnawing, and must burn it away. He must throw himself into the forge until he became the most perfect weapon in the service of his Chapter and his Emperor. Before the process was done, what had once been Ha’garen would be as dead as his brother.