Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Read online

  In every revivification space, a pict screen came to life and the silver-eyed tech-priest appeared.

  ‘More intruders have come,’ said the tech-priest in a voice that was an unnatural amalgam of machine cadences and overlapping flesh tones.

  ‘Orders?’ grunted one of the awoken sleepers, its cranium encased in synaptic enhancers and its neural pathways surgically altered to allow it a measure of autonomy.

  ‘Kill the warriors,’ said the tech-priest. ‘Bring us the Mechanicus personnel alive.’

  Hawkins could feel his heartbeat thudding through the heavy stock of his lasgun. Despite the cold, beads of sweat formed on his brow and he fought the urge to lift his visor to wipe them clear. The corridor was brightly lit now, the shadows banished, but strangely that didn’t make him feel any better. The station was rousing further with every passing second, with glowing bulbs kept behind wire cages flashing as though some emergency was imminent. Burbling streams of binary issued from speaker-horns mounted on the ceiling, but what message they imparted was a mystery to him. The vox was still down, and he’d been unable to raise Rae’s squad or anyone back on the Speranza.

  He and his men were arranged in the cover of ironwork buttresses, their lasguns aimed unswervingly down the corridor, each man ready to fill his assigned fire sector with a slew of carefully placed shots. The Black Templars hadn’t moved since the first signs of the station’s reawakening, braced like immovable statues with their weapons locked at their hips.

  Kotov worked at a panel to the side of the blast shutter, but the string of binaric curses and bursts of sparks told Hawkins that he was having little success. Fighting with your back to something solid was all well and good when you were defending a static position, but when it cut you off from your supporting forces and your only way out, it was something else entirely.

  Hawkins slid from cover and drew level with Kul Gilad.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ he said.

  ‘It is a good position,’ said the Reclusiarch. ‘Enemy forces cannot outflank us.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Hawkins. ‘Kotov can’t open that door, but that damn magos with the silver eyes certainly can. Without any line of retreat, we’re as good as dead if this fight goes against us.’

  ‘To admit defeat is to blaspheme against the Emperor,’ said Kul Gilad.

  ‘Really? Because I seem to remember you saying something about defeat always being possible and how recognising that makes you a great warrior.’

  ‘I said it makes a man fight with heart.’

  ‘Yeah, well no matter how much heart we have, this position reeks of a last stand, and that’s something Cadian officers prefer to avoid wherever possible. I know you Space Marines like your glory and heroics, but I’d rather live through the next hour if that’s all the same.’

  Kul Gilad turned to him, and the red eye-lenses of his helm fixed him with their steely glare. For a moment, he thought the Reclusiarch might strike him down for his temerity, but the moment passed and the giant Space Marine slowly nodded his skull-faced helm.

  ‘You are right,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘We will take the fight to the enemy.’

  ‘Keep moving forwards,’ said Hawkins. ‘That’s the Cadian way of doing things.’

  The Terminator-clad Reclusiarch turned to Kotov and said, ‘Archmagos, forget the shutter, we are moving on to the central command deck as you suggested. Whatever is at the heart of this, we will meet it on our terms.’

  Kotov nodded and withdrew his digital dendrites from the door panel.

  ‘The door will not open anyway,’ said Kotov in disgust. ‘I have status and protocol on my side, but the machines do not heed me. They are enslaved to the will of something inhuman and rebuff every signifier of my exalted rank.’

  ‘No matter,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘The time for subtlety is over.’

  ‘Good thing too,’ said Hawkins. ‘I was never very good at subtle.’

  With the Black Templars in the centre, and the Cadians and skitarii on the flanks, the boarders moved off down the corridor at speed, and it only took a few moments for the wisdom of that choice to become evident. The blast containment shutter that had thwarted Archmagos Kotov withdrew into the ceiling with a rumble of machined servos.

  A host of heavily muscled servitors crafted from the same hideous form as the one Tanna had killed stood revealed. They were unmistakably orks, but with human skin grafted to their oversized bulk. The effect was sickening and terrifying at the same time. Like malformed ogryns, the orkish servitors were armed with a varied collection of energised blades, crackling prods and heavy mauls. To Hawkins’s lasting regret, they didn’t move like servitors, but with the relentless, simian gait of their savage species.

  ‘Move faster,’ ordered Kul Gilad. ‘We need to reach the upper levels. Archmagos, how far away are those stairs to the upper decks?’

  ‘Fifty-two metres,’ said Kotov. ‘This way!’

  The Black Templars marched backwards in perfect unison, firing a thunderous volley of bolter fire back down the corridor. The mass-reactives barely had time to arm before detonating within the hard flesh of the greenskin servitors. Explosions of meat and bone erupted across the front rank of enemies, gaping wounds that would reduce a mortal body to bone fragments and vaporised blood, but which only staggered the robust physiology of the greenskins. A handful fell, but the rest came on without heed of their losses. Ork resilience and servitor immunity from pain was combining to make these enemies near impossible to put down unless taken apart. Cadian and skitarii fire augmented the shooting of the Space Marines, but it was the mass-reactives that were doing the bulk of the killing.

  Moving back to a better shooting position, Hawkins fired a three-round burst at the nearest enemy, a brute with an iron-encased skull and a series of hideous surgical sutures zig-zagging their way across its thick features. His shots all struck home, burning through the centre mass without effect. Another deafening roar of bolter fire slammed the servitors, blowing the limbs from more of them. Hawkins shifted his aim, took a breath and squeezed the trigger twice.

  His first shot punched through the nasal cavity of the ork, the second vaporised its eyeball and cored through its skull to the brain cavity. The hunk of organic matter that animated the ork cooked to burned meat in the enclosed vault of its cranium, and the cybernetic abomination dropped without a sound as its brain functions were sheared.

  ‘And stay down!’ shouted Hawkins, sighting at another servitor; one with a set of enormous bolt-cutting shears that could lop off a limb or slice through a neck with equal ease. Blasts of bolter fire threw off his aim, and his shots burned chunks of flesh from the ork’s head and left its jawbone hanging loose.

  The orks were dangerously close now, almost close enough to bring their lethal tools to bear.

  ‘Back,’ said Hawkins as a whipping tracery of white-hot fire lashed the walls of the corridor with a thunderclap of electrical discharge. The overpressure hurled Hawkins to the ground. He rolled and saw a servitor with an implanted static-charger unleash another blast from its ad-hoc weapon. A pair of skitarii screamed as thousands of volts burned them alive inside their armour.

  The lashing line of blue light zig-zagged over the width of the corridor, arcing across to one of the Space Marines. The warrior dropped to his knees, convulsing as his nervous system went into spasm and his skin fused with the inner surfaces of his warplate. The powerful energies writhed like an angry snake, catching two of Hawkins’s men and ripping them apart in an explosion of boiling blood and flashburned organs.

  ‘No!’ yelled Hawkins, scrambling to his feet and sighting at the servitor’s slack features.

  A flurry of bolter shells struck the servitor and tore the weapon arm from its body in a detonating flurry of bone and machine parts. A second burst tore its head off at the neck and a third opened it up from sternum to groin. Kul Gilad abandoned his stead
y retreat and advanced towards the servitors, his gauntlet-mounted weapon chugging out explosive round after explosive round. His Terminator armour made him mighty, and he struck the servitors like a wrecking ball. The Reclusiarch’s enormous power fist swept out and where it struck, the orks were pulped like blood-filled bags or clubbed into bent and broken shapes that couldn’t possibly live.

  The Black Templars fought at his side, his inspirational slaughter driving their own aggression and skill. Chainswords tore open orks sheathed in human skin, and bolt pistols blew out the exposed organs and bones. The Emperor’s Champion waded through the servitors, his monstrous black sword cleaving orkflesh with every strike. A cybernetic with a roaring cutting saw came at him, but the champion ducked beneath the weapon and brought his blade up to shear its arms away at the elbows. His return blow split its skull, and a spinning follow-on move sliced the legs out from an ork snapping at him with an energised cable cutter.

  ‘Reclusiarch!’ shouted Kotov. ‘More of them behind us!’

  Hawkins turned to see yet more servitors coming from farther back along the corridor, two dozen at least. Like the ones Kul Gilad and the Black Templars fought, they were a hideous confection of human skin and ork physiology married to Mechanicus technology. Worse, these ones were armed with what looked like actual weapons. Metallic bangs echoed behind them as an advancing servitor triggered its implanted riveter. Hawkins ducked as a clanging series of hot bolts smashed into the wall beside him, some ricocheting down the corridor, some embedding in the plating with a hiss of red-hot metal.

  Ten metres in front of the servitors, he saw the entrance to the stairwell, a circular iris door set within a cog and apparently locked open by rusted bearings. The steady light of functioning glow-globes spilled down from above, and no door had ever looked so inviting.

  ‘Cadians, firing line!’ he yelled, turning and running for the centre of the corridor at the entrance to the upper levels. His remaining Guardsmen ran with him, dropping to one knee beside him as he brought his rifle up to his shoulder. ‘We take them down one at a time, lads. We’ll start with that big bastard with the riveter! Fire!’

  Collimated las-fire stabbed out from the Cadian rifles, and the ork servitor slumped to his knees with half its skull blasted away. Its hull-repair gun fired in the creature’s death spasms, hammering a line of hot rivets into the deck plates and blasting the kneecap from the cybernetic next to it. A rippling salvo of shot-cannon, lascarbine and hellgun fire slashed overhead, and Hawkins risked a glance over his shoulder to see Kotov’s skitarii adding the fire of their more esoteric weapons to the fusillade. The archmagos himself fired a long-barrelled pistol of ornamented brass that sent bolts of searing plasma into the advancing hordes.

  ‘Right, the ork with the las-cutter next,’ ordered Hawkins with more calm than he felt.

  The servitor dropped with multiple lasburns searing its neck open and a pressurised squirt of blood sprayed over the walls. A second ork with a hull-plate repair cannon opened fire and one of Hawkin’s men grunted as a cylindrical void of flesh and bone was punched through the centre of his chest. The Guardsman slumped, but Hawkins didn’t dare stop firing to see if there was hope of saving him.

  ‘We can’t go on like this,’ Hawkins shouted to Kotov. ‘We need to get up those stairs.’

  Kotov nodded and turned back to where the Black Templars slew the hideous cybernetics. Though they wreaked a fearsome slaughter, they had suffered loss too. The Space Marine felled by the static-charger lay unmoving and another of their number fought with only one arm, the other severed cleanly by a set of power shears. Many others bore burn scars or sported bloody gouges in their plate where energised edges driven by ork strength had cut them open. They fought a steady retreat, forced back by simple weight of numbers and brute strength.

  In a one on one fight, the ork servitors were no match for the Black Templars, but they were six against a never-ending tide.

  ‘Kul Gilad!’ boomed Kotov, his voice augmented to deafening levels. ‘We must leave. Now!’

  The Reclusiarch gave no obvious acknowledgement of the archmagos’s words, but as he punched his fist through a servitor’s chest, he took a backward step, and his warriors came with him. The Emperor’s Champion was the last to disengage, buying time for his brethren with a devastating sweep of his sword.

  ‘Go for the stairs,’ said Kotov, turning back to Hawkins. ‘We will cover you.’

  Hawkins nodded and ran hunched over towards the open iris, firing from the hip as he went. The four other Cadians ran with him, piling through the door as Hawkins fired a last stream of las-fire on full auto. Another servitor went down as his power cell blinked empty. He darted into the cover of the door edges and snapped the charge pack from the breech before expertly swapping it for another. His men were already supplying covering fire for the archmagos by the time the cell engaged.

  Kotov’s skitarii leapt through the circular door and moved up the stairs, guns aimed at the glowing rectangle of light at the top. The archmagos knelt beside the door controls and extended his digital dendrites into the input ports.

  ‘Can you close it?’ shouted Hawkins over the din of bolter rounds and las discharges.

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ said Kotov, and bent to his work.

  Cold air, a whiff of disinfectant and the soft gurgling of fluids sounded from above, putting Hawkins in mind of a medicae bay, but one that had likely been perverted to a darker purpose. He leaned out through the door and fired into the approaching servitors. He blew an implanted drill from the shoulder of a particularly fearsome servitor, but it kept coming despite the loss.

  Kul Gilad and the Templars were withdrawing in good order, the one-armed warrior dragging the fallen Space Marine while his brothers marched in lockstep towards the irised door. The wounded Space Marine came through first, followed by the youngster that had fought Dahan. Tanna came next, then the sword-wielding Emperor’s Champion. Lastly came Kul Gilad, the Reclusiarch’s surplice stiff with blood and lubricants from the cybernetics he’d killed. His powered gauntlet shed droplets of heated blood and a plume of acrid propellant smoke issued from his storm bolter.

  ‘Hurry!’ shouted Hawkins as the implacable wave of numberless servitors closed on the stubbornly open door. Sparks flashed from the panel as Kotov’s dendrites flexed and wrestled with the enslaved machine-spirit of the lock.

  ‘And those that are exalted in the eyes of Mars shall be lauded, even by the spirits of the lowliest machine,’ barked Kotov with a complementary burst of aggravated binary. The door mechanism hissed in irritation and rusted sheets of sharpened metal began irising shut.

  An ork cybernetic appeared at the door and its colossal clamp-arm grabbed Hawkins by the front of his flak vest, dragging him back through the door. Kul Gilad snatched at Hawkins’s shoulder and his grip was like a Sentinel’s power lifter. The storm bolter unloaded into the servitor’s face and the irising door sliced cleanly through the ork’s arm as it fell back. Hawkins collapsed onto the bottom step, nearly deafened by the close-range blast of the Reclusiarch’s gunfire. He shook off the disorientation and prised loose the severed limb from his armour as the ork’s blood pumped from the stump and into his lap.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, dropping the arm by the door as a series of booming impacts deformed the metal. Sparks and a glowing spot of light appeared at the top of the door as the servitors brought cutting tools, drills and heavy power-hammers to bear.

  ‘Thank me later,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘We need to keep moving.’

  Hawkins nodded and scrambled up the stairs after the skitarii and Black Templars.

  The room at the top of the stairs was indeed a medicae bay, one that had been created by the simple expediency of knocking down the partitioning walls that had previously divided the space into numerous workshops and laboratories. Bright lumen-strips kept the entire bay well lit, and even Hawkins’s limited understandin
g could tell that the entire level was given over to augmetics.

  A score of surgical slabs were laid out with geometric precision and at least a dozen had bodies stretched out on them; orks lying supine and kept immobile by adamantium fetters and copious amounts of somnolicts. Data screens suspended at the head of each occupied slab flickered with biometric readings; slowed heartbeats, lowered blood pressure and dormant brain activity.

  Hissing machines that resembled brass spiders hung from the ceiling on a host of chains, pneumatic cables and gurgling feed tubes as they performed major-level augmetic work on the greenskins. Clicking, clacking armatures with drills, scalpels, saws and laser-cauterisers, nerve splicers and bone-melders worked to amputate limbs, remove redundant organs from body cavities and otherwise prepare the host bodies for nerve grafts and replacement body parts.

  Overhead cradles transported bionic limbs, organs and cranial hoods for implantation, like an automated manufactorum producing armoured vehicles on an assembly line. The hanging spider-machines attached the new parts with relentless machine efficiency, each attachment accompanied by a tinny burst of recorded binaric chanting and a puff of incense vapour from an inbuilt atomiser.

  Rows of fluid-filled vats ran the length of the chamber, milky and opaque, and stinking of preservative fluids. A number of chrome-plated servo-skulls scooted and zipped through the air with trailing lengths of parchment dangling from their mandible calipers. Three of the walls were obscured by pale curtains that hung from the high ceiling like the scenery backdrop of a Theatrica Imperialis playhouse. Fluid drizzled down the curtains in a constant stream, dripping from the fringed bottom into collection reservoirs, where it was drained away to destinations unknown. It was impossible to tell what purpose these curtains served, and Hawkins led his Guardsmen over to the nearest, intending to check for servitors lurking behind in ambush.