Forge Master - David Annandale Read online

  Ba’birin glanced at Ha’garen’s plasma cutter. ‘You are inviting us to gain initial entry to the target’s prison?’

  Kaderial stepped to one side. He made a sweeping, expansive gesture that took in both deck and Salamanders. ‘By our wishes,’ he said.

  ‘Brother-sergeant?’ Ha’garen voxed.

  ‘I’ve never seen such a shameless trap,’ Neleus observed, still on the company channel.

  ‘It can afford to be,’ Ba’birin said. ‘We can’t refuse it.’

  ‘We don’t know what Ha’garen will be cutting into.’

  ‘It is not likely to be explosive,’ Ha’garen put in, ‘or the eldar would be destroyed also. They are too close.’

  Neleus wasn’t placated. ‘It isn’t likely to be the location of our target, either.’

  When Ha’garen spoke again, it was with resignation. ‘There is little choice. Furthermore, I estimate that the likelihood of our being in the immediate vicinity of the target is high. So...’

  He moved forwards.

  ‘With our thanks, Forge Master,’ Kaderial said.

  Ha’garen froze. He could still take offence, Ba’birin noted. ‘I am no such thing,’ the Techmarine snapped at the eldar. ‘There is but one Master of the Forge, and that is Master Argos. You taint his honour and mine with your tongue.’

  Kaderial cocked his head. ‘Perhaps. My apologies, by your leave.’ He seemed amused. ‘Still, by your path, you are exceptionally at one with the machine.’

  Ha’garen ignored the comment. He lowered his cutter-wielding servo-arm until it was close to floor level. The plasma beam sliced metal, scalpel in flesh. Ha’garen traced a large rectangle, far larger than would be needed for simple access down below. He was thinking, Ba’birin realised, of squad movements, planning for speed and force. The eldar stepped back out of the way of the widening perimeter. They made no objection.

  Ba’birin’s suspicions grew.

  ‘They are being much too accommodating,’ Neleus said, echoing his thoughts.

  Ba’birin said nothing. But as Ha’garen completed the cut, he raised his flamer. He angled it towards the floor, ready to incinerate whatever might lunge from below, but it would take nothing to jerk the muzzle higher and train it on the Fire Dragons.

  Ha’garen’s two manipulator servo-arms reached down and fastened their vice grips to the decking. He finished. The outline of the cut was incandescent. He gave the decking a yank. It lifted as a single piece three metres long by two wide. The eldar did not rush in. Ba’birin took a cautious step forwards to see what was below.

  More of the ork ship’s sickly penumbral light. He was looking at another corridor, with more cells on either side of it. The drop was a short one. The space was not cavernous like the one where they stood. The cries of prisoners moaned up through the gap. The babble of pleas drowned out individual voices, but Ba’birin could still make out the articulations of words and phrases. The souls down there were still sentient. Theirs, he thought, was the more cruel fate. They could hope for rescue, and despair when it did not come.

  ‘Where is he?’ Ba’birin asked.

  ‘Aft and port, by my numbers,’ said Kaderial. ‘A few lengths more.’ He made an elaborately casual hand gesture that suggested both an apology and shrug. ‘Cutting directly above, by my thinking, would have been lethal to our lost one.’

  ‘Quite,’ Ba’birin said. He and Neleus faced each other, sharing a silent debate. Split the squads or descend together? Attack the eldar now, forestalling the trap?

  He recoiled at the idea of the pre-emptive strike. There was no honour in the act, and though he knew the warlock was setting him up, he lacked the formal proof that would satisfy his own conscience. The Salamanders had experienced treachery in the most foul form imaginable at the dawn of the Heresy, and it was repugnant to consider an action that even approached that particular sin. The eldar were a race that Ba’birin despised with every fibre of his being, but the behaviour of these warriors had all the trappings of honour, even if that couldn’t possibly be the truth of their actions.

  ‘Together,’ Neleus said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ba’birin agreed. They would not be divided. ‘Brothers,’ he called to the squads, and then dropped down to the deck below.

  ‘The orks, by their noise, are not long in coming,’ Kaderial said. ‘Do not tarry.’

  Ba’birin bit back a retort. He could hear the growing savage rumble. The greenskins must have discovered that their bombardment had not produced the expected number of bodies.

  Aft and port, Kaderial had said. Ten metres on, the Salamanders found the cell. The eldar seer was crouched inside the claustrophobic box, weak and covered in filth, but his gaze steady. He looked more than a little confused as Ha’garen ripped the door off its hinges.

  ‘Can you understand me?’ Ba’birin asked. When the eldar said nothing, the Space Marine jerked a thumb, and the prisoner staggered out of his cell. The Salamanders moved to surround him. Down the corridor, a group of ork guards were yelling at each other and the intruders. Two of them ran deeper into the ship. The others attacked. Berengus’s bolter cut them down. ‘Which way?’ Ba’birin asked Ha’garen.

  The Techmarine looked at the cabling. ‘Back,’ he said. ‘The routes from that deck to our entry point are more direct.’

  Ba’birin accepted this, along with the imminence of the struggle for custody of the seer. He still couldn’t see what strategic benefit the eldar were imagining would be theirs by letting the Salamanders take first possession of the prisoner.

  They headed back. Halfway there, Kaderial called to them. ‘It is done?’

  ‘It is,’ Ba’birin answered. He braced himself. The opening was just ahead. He could see the Fire Dragons outlined in the noxious glow of the larger chamber.

  ‘He did not suffer long, by your hands?’

  Ba’birin froze. Calculations and assumptions crumbled. What? he thought. The eldar had been pretending concern for the prisoner’s safety? They had been assuming the Salamanders were pretending too? What, what, what?

  ‘Ah,’ Kaderial said. ‘This is, by its perversity, a realm most inimical to sight. But now I see.’

  The silhouettes moved. Fusion guns and dragon’s breath fired.

  Everything became flame.

  Madness.

  Obliteration.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Amidst the flash, amidst the hurtling through disintegrating space, amidst the battering thunder-burn of being caught in a fusion gun fusillade, Elisath slipped onto the skein. Time expanded as he dropped into the impossibly dense knot of his own tangled fates. The grains tumbling down the abyssal hourglass paused. When the next grain fell, his body would collide with something unyielding, unforgiving. If the impact were hard enough, the knot would be sliced as his fates came to an end. But if the blow was not fatal, the knot would grow more tangled yet. He still couldn’t see far. To the disorienting energy and randomness of the orks had been added the gigantic improbability that was now unfolding. An improbability he had helped bring about.

  The next grain wanted to fall. His body would soon hit. He raced up and down the paths that were visible to him, stealing a bit more time. The loss of his waystone was a cancer of fear on his soul. If death waited with the plummet of that grain, he was engaged in his final acts of awareness before he fell prey to She Who Thirsts. So he took what he could.

  He meditated on irony.

  (His body spinning. The moment coming. Time slowed, but unforgiving, and coming for him.)

  He was being hunted by his kin. So he had taken the only path open to him. He had placed himself at the mercy of the Salamanders. His vision of the future was crippled, but the thread drawn by the Fire Dragons had been clear enough. They thought that killing him would preserve the secret of the shard. Stupid. Didn’t they know whose ship they were on? Didn’t they see where it was head
ed?

  Didn’t they know what ork it was who ruled here?

  Blocking Kaderial’s vision had been a simple matter. Weak as he was, Elisath was more than a match for the warlock. All he had had to do was direct Kaderial’s attention to the thread that saw the Salamanders coming to kill him. This was the particular irony that Elisath savoured now: the most improbable thread had been the one that common sense would have declared inevitable.

  The grain dropped. Time and frailty hurled him from the skein, back to his body and the annihilating pain of his salvation.

  A sun was born inside the kroozer. It was the offspring of simultaneous fusion and flamer barrage. It was a tiny, wailing infant of a star, an insignificant mote. Except that it did not seem like a mote in a ship’s corridor. It did not seem insignificant from the inside.

  Ha’garen understood the principles of the fusion gun. He knew it was similar to the Imperium’s melta weapons. He knew what such a weapon did to defensive positions. To armour. To living flesh. But he did not have the luxury of reflecting on his theoretical knowledge of the fusion gun. He was too busy surviving his practical experience of its blast in the midst of a flamer attack. His world became a sear of absolute light in the microsecond before his helmet lenses shuttered, sealing his eyes in sight-preserving darkness. The heat, no less absolute, was the teeth of the light. It devoured all. It snapped its jaws around Ha’garen, and there was a moment of pain such as he had never imagined. It was a wave and a spike, an invasion from without and an attack from within. It swallowed every thought, sensation and instinct. It was his all.

  And yet no, it was not. As absolute as the light, as absolute as the fire, was the core of his being, defined and shaped by the Promethean Cult. It shouted with exultation, taking the exterminating blow, accepting yet another strike on the shaping anvil, rising to the test that Vulkan sent his sons. To be of Nocturne, to be a Salamander, was to confront the ordeal. It was to endure.

  And thus grow stronger.

  (And from the Omnissiah, the gift of the mortification of the flesh. What is weak shall be replaced. What is strong shall be transformed.)

  In his faiths, Ha’garen found the strength to survive a first moment in the jaws of the fire. A second moment would have killed him, but the decking melted faster. The shape of the corridor evaporated. The Salamanders dropped. The deck below disintegrated just as they hit it, and the lower abyss of the kroozer opened its jaws wide.

  His lens shutters opened. Ha’garen fell into darkness. He hit something, bounced off, slammed into more metal. He bounced between ill-defined objects, his fall slowing. His eyes had adjusted before he hit the bottom. He processed his surroundings and his injuries simultaneously.

  His armour was badly scorched, his body burned not by flame but by sheer heat. The damage to the flesh was extensive but shallow. Regeneration was already under way. His armour was still viable, though one of his manipulator arms had melted to slag. Joints and seams were distorted, making movement more awkward. He took a step, learning the new character of the armour, learning what compensatory effort would be necessary to keep up his reaction speed.

  Neleus, his voice strained, was calling for the count. Ha’garen answered, all the while processing the new circumstances, analysing, evaluating, extrapolating options.

  The space they found themselves in was enormous. It was the largest they had yet seen on this ship. As far as Ha’garen could tell, it ran the entire length of the hull, and its ceiling was a good thirty metres high. The Salamanders’ plunge had been broken by what appeared, at first glance, to be two towering heaps of scrap metal. The Space Marines had been deposited in a valley between these twisted mountains. Flames licked at the hole through which the squads had fallen. The glow was fading, the infant star dying.

  The count was complete. There were losses. Five battle-brothers had died in the fusillade. The corpses of three of them had come down, their armour melted into amorphous coffins. The other two, Brothers Jer’wan and Ka’gis, had taken a direct hit and been reduced to floating molecules. There were injuries, some debilitating. Neleus had lost his left arm. The stump, extending a hand’s length below his shoulder, ended in a cauterisation that was ugly, black and weeping. N’krumor was applying sterile clay from his narthecium to the wound.

  Ba’birin was standing over the eldar. Elisath was on his feet, battered, bloody, but intact. Ha’garen caught himself trying to calculate the odds against the prisoner having survived the blast and the fall, unarmoured and in poor condition. Somehow, he had been surrounded by enough Salamanders, who had taken the worst of the damage, and nothing he had hit in the fall had been jagged enough to slice him open. It was impossible not to see the actions of fate in his survival.

  Ba’birin turned to Ha’garen. ‘Where are we?’ he asked. He used the vox. The chamber was filled with a tremendous mechanical din that drowned out every other sound.

  In hell, was what Ha’garen almost answered, and seen by the lights of the Cult Mechanicus, that was exactly where they were. The hold was illuminated by haphazardly placed glow-globes, torches mounted on poles, bursts of ignited gas, and the flaming of filthy engines. What the Techmarine saw, stretching for thousands of metres in every direction, was machinic obscenity. The plasteel hill that had broken the Salamanders’ fall was not simply a pile of refuse. It was a collection of parts, all of them engineered, however crudely, however partially. The entire space was a collection. It was an endless, labyrinthine conglomeration of the unfinished, the discarded and the experimental. Gigantic metal frames were heaped up against each other. Servo-arms sprouted like weeds. Some were motionless, frozen in entreaty. Many were active, and they were worse, locked in endless loops of meaningless activity. One piled objects together while another took the heap apart. Multiple arms, linked into idiotic arachnid configurations, scrabbled in competing directions. Other devices were beyond identification. They were whirling, stomping flights of fantasy, assembled for no possible reason other than that they were conceivable. Some should not have been possible, but they moved and rattled and roared, climbing up and falling over hills of less animate creations.

  The scale was as varied as the objects. Something no larger than Ha’garen’s fist flopped past his feet. It looked like a grenade on tracks, as if it were an abandoned prototype for a self-propelled explosive. Other creations were gigantic. One, several hundred metres towards the bow of the ship, was almost as high as the hold, and Ha’garen had initially mistaken it for another heap. It was roughly conical in shape, a stack of massive rings of decreasing diameter, all spinning in random directions. It also appeared to be jointed, and it nodded and bobbed and weaved, grotesque dancer, drunken mountain.

  And everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, engines keeping the madness going. Engines that were whining irritations. Engines that were monumental maws. Engines being fed fuel by an army of gretchin and chained slaves. They swarmed over the metal nightmarescape, maggots and rats, so consumed by the endlessness of their task that the nearby gretchin were only now starting to notice the Space Marines.

  Wherever Ha’garen looked, he saw the precision and purpose of technology debased. It was not the work of Chaos. It was the work of orks. It was ork logic made concrete. It was the playground of ork science, but it was also something else. A terrible epiphany dawned on Ha’garen, and he knew what he was seeing. Along with experiments, junked and ongoing, there were bits. Parts. Spares.

  He finally answered Ba’birin. ‘The orks store the leftovers here,’ he said.

  ‘Leftovers?’

  ‘The leftovers from the construction of the ship. The pieces that didn’t fit. The ones they weren’t sure what to do with, but thought might be useful some day.’

  ‘I’m sorry, brother,’ Ba’birin said, and there was genuine sympathy in his words.

  Startled by the discovery that he could still experience revulsion, Ha’garen almost missed Ba’birin’s fir
st real expression of friendship since the walls of Heliosa. ‘Thank you,’ he said. It was the correct response, he knew. He wondered if he should be concerned over the fact that his reaction to Ba’birin’s gesture was not gratitude, relief, or even satisfaction, but simply interest.

  What are you?

  Neleus asked, ‘Can we reach our boarding point from here?’

  The gretchin were scurrying to safety and shrieking warnings.

  Ha’garen called up his memory map of the power grid. The readings for this region were erratic, difficult to interpret. But there were some stable junctions. They might well be near entry points to the hold. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. He identified the power flare that was linked to the most promising route out of the hold. Probability, or perhaps just hope, suggested heading sternwards and portside.

  Ba’birin nodded. The Salamanders formed up, with Elisath in the centre of the armoured tortoise configuration, and began to march. The elapsed time since the eldar had opened fire was less than a minute. The squads had regrouped after the fall at speed. The Salamanders did not fetishize speed on the battlefield in the manner of the White Scars. They preferred the steady, unstoppable advance. That did not mean their reaction time was any less rapid.

  But there was a reason for their emphasis on battlefield strength. The foe could easily be faster. The key to victory was not to strike first, necessarily. It was to withstand all that the foe could muster, and then give the decisive blow of the conflict.

  Movement above. Movement on the periphery.

  ‘Be strengthened by the anvil, brothers,’ Ba’birin called, ‘then shatter our enemies against it.’

  Eldar and orks rushed to be shattered.

  The Fire Dragons had come through the gap and were descending the slope of the metal heap. They were moving fast, but they didn’t have a clear shot. The topography of the hold kept changing as the piles shifted, whirled, collapsed over each other and rose again. The Salamanders stayed low, sticking to paths of bare decking, and the movement was as unpredictable and changeable as the environment.