Forge Master - David Annandale Read online

  Duty came before self. And the self must be used in the furtherance of duty. The principles were that simple.

  Simple, too was the equation that now confronted Ha’garen. Personal risk was irrelevant. The mission was crucial to the survival of far more than a local system. The eldar witch must be found. There was only one Salamander who could find him, and there was only one way to do so. With the equation solved, the reasons to hesitate evaporated like the mirages they were. Strengthened by resolve and communion with the technical purity of the Machine-God, Ha’garen linked himself to the kroozer’s electrical system.

  It was like stepping into a surging river of raw effluent. Ha’garen could imagine no machine realm more disgusting, unless it were one corrupted by Chaos itself, and into those waters he would not have waded, for the risk of contamination was so high. He would have doomed himself, his mission, and everyone and everything he had been trying to save. As it was, he strengthened his mental barriers of purity before he opened himself up to the full picture of debased circuitry that coursed through the ship.

  The kroozer appeared to him as a pulsating line schematic. It was drawn by the currents flowing down cables and through circuits across the ship. Zones of heavy electrical use shone brightly, the lines thick with energy. Bridge, engine room and weapon systems shone like suns. Ha’garen was contemplating a three-dimensional grid in the shape of an ork kroozer. There was no matter to the vision, nothing but void between the lines, but the ship did not appear insubstantial. It was just as vicious in this incarnation as in its physical one. The flickering light-beast was a carnivore on a perpetual hunt, lashing out at the entire universe. It was energy sculpted into rage, and it was inarticulate. But though it would not speak, perhaps it could be read.

  The eldar the Salamanders sought could be in three possible states. He could be dead, though they had the assurance of the Stormseer that he was not. Therefore, he was either engaged in the labour of a slave, in which case he could be almost anywhere on the ship, or he was in a cell. And if he was suffering under the greenskin lash, he would, sooner or later, be returned to his cell. That was the target Ha’garen had to identify. Slave pens would be allocated the bare minimum of energy resources. Orks being what they were, the simplest means of containing their captives would be used, likely little more than a large space in which they could toss the prisoners. Probably in the lower decks.

  There. Minimal circuitry surrounding a void towards the bottom centre of the hull. Only the most sporadic tracery of electrical activity running in those bleak walls. No quick access to cargo hatches or weapon systems there. Anything kept in that space would count for very little. The area was very large, too. It could hold thousands. He had narrowed the search, but not enough.

  Ha’garen opened himself up a bit more to the ship. His awareness closed in on that large emptiness in the grid. The faint energy demands, invisible when blotted by the incandescence of the full ship, became clearer when he looked at the low-use zone in isolation. Find one prisoner, he told himself. Read the electronic entrails and find one prisoner. He scanned the entire zone multiple times before the odd detail popped out. Towards the bottom, near the prow end of the space, there was a small but constant pulse. Someone was drawing on the grid. Not a slave, but in the slave quarters. Guards, Ha’garen surmised. A small number, and in an odd spot. The location was not quite on the perimeter, where even orks would find it logical to place security for the prison as a whole. And indeed, when he pulled back for a moment, Ha’garen saw a glow that likely was the principle guard post. The other, weaker, smaller shine was inside the pen. Extra guards. For select prisoners.

  Special prisoners.

  An eldar seer would be very special. Orks were extremely superstitious, and an enemy who knew what they were going to do before they did would be a prize catch. They would be nervous about what he might be capable of, but also proud to have caught him. He would be an anxiety-inducing trophy. The commander who caught him would expend greater effort in keeping him alive, confined, and helpless.

  Ha’garen pulled out from the ork grid. As he left the cargo bay, he felt a fading aftertaste of his link with the kroozer. It was a stuttering, background vibration in his mind and soul, and a shedding of tainted ash. The purity of his link to the Omnissiah had been compromised, and he didn’t know if it could be cleansed.

  He rejoined his squad. His consciousness had been away from the physical world for less than ten seconds, but even in that lapse of time, events had moved forwards. The noise of the kroozer was ramping up. Retaliation was on its way and closing in.

  ‘Well?’ Ba’birin asked.

  ‘I have a location for the prisoner.’ He filled them in.

  ‘Well done, brother,’ Neleus said.

  Ba’birin was less enthusiastic. ‘Is this a certainty or a surmise?’

  ‘A surmise.’ Ha’garen felt no shame in stating the obvious.

  Ba’birin nodded towards the iron depths of the branching corridors. ‘You will have Brother-Sergeant Neleus and myself rest the fate of our squads on a surmise that gives us little more to go on than “down,” “centre” and “fore.” Forgive me if I wish for something a little more concrete.’

  ‘Don’t be so churlish, brother,’ Neleus put in. ‘Techmarine Ha’garen has done well. He hasn’t just narrowed the field of our search. He has provided us with an actual destination.’

  ‘What of the path to it?’

  ‘Through the bodies of orks,’ Ha’garen said.

  Neleus laughed. He clapped Ba’birin on the pauldron. ‘Spoken like a true brother, no? And so to war!’

  ‘And so to war,’ Ba’birin repeated. There was none of Neleus’s humour in his tone, but there was pure determination. Whatever distrust Ba’birin felt for Ha’garen, he was going to use the information he’d been given, and he would complete the mission.

  Ha’garen asked for nothing more. Faintly, barely detectable at the back of his mind, like a half-heard voice that disappears in a crowd, came a tiny echo of regret. It served no purpose, so he ignored it.

  Cacophony was heading for the Salamanders. It boomed around corners like an avalanche of boulders and swine. It was coming from all sides.

  ‘They come to repel us, brothers!’ Ba’birin thundered. ‘They believe we are a threat! Let us show the greenskins how right they are, and bring war on our terms down on their skulls! Form up!’ He led the way down the nearest side corridor. ‘At my side, Ha’garen,’ he said. ‘Point us the way, if you can.’

  Ha’garen could. He had paid for this ability by acquiring a taint on his soul, but yes, he could point the way.

  The Salamanders moved deeper into the ship. They were a solid mass of force incarnate travelling down the corridor, one whose advance would not be stopped by so weak an obstacle as flesh and bone. The orks threw the obstacle at them anyway. The squads hit the first wave of defenders around the third bend of the passage, just as it reached an intersection with another, larger corridor. The Salamanders did not stop. Two trains collided in cramped quarters. One was ceramite and faith, the other muscle and rage. The crunch of bodies was almost loud enough to drown the howling of the orks. The Salamanders tore into their foes with chainsword and gladius. Blades dug into meat, severing arms and heads. Motors whined with hate and organs spilled onto the floor. The passageway turned into a Stygian abattoir, mired in pulp and blood. The front line of the Space Marines took the initial impact of the forces, but as the Salamanders advanced, the sheer pressure and numbers of the orks squeezed xenos warriors past the sergeants. Nocturne’s sons closed ranks more tightly. Their formation became a clenched fist. There was barely room to swing a blade, but there was plenty of killing for all, and not a bolter round needed. The combat was close, personal, tactile.

  Ha’garen’s servo-arms reached over his head, striking down to crush skulls with their vice grips. He stabbed forwards with his combat blade thro
ugh armour, deep into an ork’s gut. Then he cut upwards, slitting the beast open. As it fell, he snapped his fist out, driving the next greenskin’s nose into its brain. The head was dead, but the ork swung at him one more time before it fell, bouncing its axe against his shoulder. Then it was down, and Ha’garen could take another step forwards. They were wading through a green quagmire, and their progress was agonising.

  The Salamanders reached the intersection. The space opened up, and there was room to swing. The bulk of the orks were storming in from the left. The path to the right was almost clear. The squads took it, mowing down the few orks in the way, grinding them to paste. ‘Move,’ Ba’birin exhorted, and the Salamanders did. They took the corridor at forced-march speed. Brother Ko’bin and Apothecary N’krumor, forming the rear guard, unleashed a punishing wave with their flamers, creating a temporary barricade with the ork dead. Smoke choked the passageway, filtered out by rebreathers but blinding and smothering the orks. The greenskin attack slowed, and the Salamanders gained ground.

  Old instincts died hard. Ha’garen found that he had to remind himself that they were not retreating. They were not fleeing the orks. They were stabbing their blades deeper into the ship.

  ‘We have to do better,’ Ba’birin said.

  He was right, Ha’garen knew. They had picked up speed, and they were moving in the right general direction, but taking corridors at random in the hope that they would lead down into the hull was not a strategy, and time was not an ally. He looked up. The ceiling was idiocy: pipes leaking steam, pipes leaking smoke, pipes dripping filth, exposed conduits, tangled cables. He accessed the memory block that held the image of the kroozer’s power grid. He traced the lines leading from the Salamanders’ current location to the target. He pointed to one of the cables. ‘We follow that one for now,’ he said. ‘Three turns, down one deck. Then there will be another.’

  ‘Another surmise?’ Ba’birin asked.

  ‘A map,’ Ha’garen answered, keeping the grid visible to his mind’s eye.

  Ba’birin nodded once. Whatever he thought of Ha’garen’s loyalty or judgement, he had stopped questioning his expertise. ‘Lead us,’ he said.

  Ha’garen did. The Salamanders’ drive gathered momentum. The Techmarine took the force from cable to cable. There was no hesitation. He had committed himself to a route, and it was beacon-clear to him. He did not know if the end of the path held what they sought – he thought it might – but he knew he could guide the way. He and his brothers would know the truth of his surmise, and know it soon.

  Faster. The drive became a charge. The Space Marines encountered parties of orks and smashed through them with the punch of a maglev train. They left nothing recognisable in their wake. Behind them, the pursuit howled and grew, and grew. But it was not about to catch them. As he followed the grid, reading the language of energy, Ha’garen knew his way around the ship better than the orks did themselves. The Salamanders squads changed direction constantly. They plunged down one corridor, then another. They zig-zagged in three dimensions, taking left and right without pattern or rhythm, rising up a deck in order to drop more quickly down three more. They could not be anticipated. Ha’garen knew why the sounds of the pursuit were only becoming bigger, not closer: the orks kept losing track of their movements.

  The Salamanders plunged deeper and deeper into the maze of the ship, deeper and deeper into its xenos obscenity. The walls and floor were caked with grime both industrial and organic. The lighting was erratic, flickering and browning out much of the time, then suddenly glaring bright. The ship’s architecture remained a savage patchwork, metal welded to metal in slapdash fashion, as impossibly dense and solid as its creators. Some sections seemed unfinished, others damaged, while still others were simply littered with piles of scrap iron. Metal, whether waste, wreckage or caprice, reached from the walls or decks with jagged fangs. And everywhere, ork graffiti covered the walls and ceilings. Crude, snarling faces, clenched fists and bloody axe blades were the favourite images. Surrounding the art were scrawled slogans, many of them painted in blood. The orkish glyphs were unintelligible to Ha’garen. They did not torture eye, mind and soul in the manner of Chaos lithography. These were simply brute aggression transmuted into text.

  Down. Deeper.

  ‘Brother Ha’garen,’ Neleus said, ‘you must be very careful not to die, or the rest of us will never find our way out of this ship.’

  ‘In which case we’ll just have to kill it,’ Ba’birin grunted.

  They were, by Ha’garen’s estimate, three decks up and a few hundred metres aft of the target. The path ahead would take them along a catwalk, from which they would drop down a level and take another corridor that passed through a large open area. It frustrated Ha’garen that he could not anticipate more of the nature of the spaces before the Salamanders reached them. To know where he was going, but not what he was passing through, seemed a reckless approach. His guesses were no more than that. And he guessed that what lay ahead might be an assembly hall of some kind.

  It was loud enough to be one. Even from this distance, and with the echoing hunt shaking the walls to the rear, the cacophony up ahead was deafening. The Salamanders paused. The noise before them was as rage-filled as what was behind. They might be rushing to throw themselves into the jaws of a pincer movement. After a moment, as his Lyman’s ear resolved the noise into more discrete parts, Ha’garen realised that the uproar was not another ork contingent heading their way. He heard chaos, roars, weapons-fire: the sounds of battle.

  ‘Well?’ Ba’birin asked.

  ‘That is our route,’ Ha’garen pointed out.

  ‘I feel left out,’ Neleus said.

  Ba’birin laughed for the first time since Mulcebar’s briefing. Ha’garen felt his own lips twitch, out of practice though they now were with expressing emotion.

  ‘The anvil calls, brothers,’ Ba’birin said, and took the catwalk.

  It did call, Ha’garen thought as he followed. War was what they, and all other Space Marines, had been bred to wage. Some of his brothers embraced it more fanatically than others, and some saw it as a regrettable necessity. But it defined them. They were war, and now battle called with its siren song, and the prosecution of their mission demanded that they answer the summons.

  Down the catwalk. Over its rail. Along the corridor. Armoured boot steps bringing the beat of Vulkan’s hammer to the struggle ahead. The passageway was a wide one, ending at a large double door. Ba’birin and Neleus barrelled into it and knocked it flying from its hinges. The Salamanders burst into the vast chamber. Before them was war.

  Between ork and eldar.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The eldar were clad in crimson armour, its hue offset by a sinuous white rune. Ha’garen pulled a designation from his memory: Saim-Hann, the same force that the White Scars and Raven Guard had encountered. He took in their weaponry. Like the Salamanders, they were conserving ammunition, primarily using their guns to crush ork skulls. But when they fired, the orks before them vaporised. Melta weapons, Ha’garen realised. He was looking at a squad of Fire Dragons. Two had fallen. There were eight remaining. One, in more ornate armour, was wielding a heavy flamer of some sort, and was a bit more free with the trigger. A ninth member of the squad wore robes over his armour and fought with a blade whose elegance and lethality shrieked its sorcerous nature.

  The eldar were fighting hundreds of orks. They moved with a fluidity that should have been foreign to armour, as if they were wearing blood-red light, and were made of nothing more than thought themselves. There was a choreography to their combat, as there was to the Salamanders’, but it was very different in its nature. The Salamanders worked together with the precision of a finely tuned engine of destruction. There was something of the machine in their synchrony, for which Ha’garen gave thanks. The Techmarine knew very little of the arts outside of warfare and its monumental representations, but he knew that they exi
sted – perhaps more in Ultramar, where life wasn’t perpetually on the knife edge of extinction. The movement of the eldar was, he felt instinctively, of a kind with those other arts. The rhythms weren’t the unvarying pulse of machinery. They were syncopated, complex, unpredictable. As unknowable as the race itself. Alien. Ha’garen knew that he was seeing a method of warcraft that was beautiful in and of itself. He did not like it.

  Still, it was remarkable. But though the eldar were dropping orks by the dozens, it was insufficient. The Fire Dragons were doomed.

  The space was an arena. Concentric circles of seating descended steeply to a pit not much more than ten metres in diameter. The Salamanders had entered behind the top row of benches. Their goal was a gated tunnel at one end of the pit. The logic of the path Ha’garen had chosen now became clear to him. The arena was used for gladiatorial combat between slaves. The surface of the pit was deep in the stew of corpses, human and otherwise, in every stage of dismemberment and decomposition. The slaves would be herded in from the tunnel to fight to the death. Ha’garen did not know if they were given weapons. He suspected they were not.

  The barbarism was irrelevant. He filed it away. What mattered now was that the tunnel would lead to the slave pens, and to their target.

  There was almost a full second during which a decision hovered. The Salamanders saw a clash of enemies. One was a plague upon the galaxy. The other was a particular curse upon Nocturne. The decision was not whether to interfere in the conflict, and it was not whether to attack one side or the other. There question was whether to kill both as they fought their way to the tunnel.

  The eldar were clustered about three-quarters of the way down the slope. They appeared to be trying to reach the pit too. They were bogged down. They were a force that would be fearsome in confined quarters, but in the open, they were vulnerable. The orks were upon them in a flood. From the top of the arena, Ha’garen could even see currents and eddies in the rampage of the greenskins.