Forge Master - David Annandale Read online

  ‘How much fuel do those melta weapons have?’ Ba’birin wondered.

  ‘Something less than infinite,’ Neleus quipped. The strain had vanished from his voice. He was at war, and he had banished distracting pain.

  ‘They are short-range weapons,’ Ha’garen said. ‘They will need opportunity. There is also the risk. We are very close to the outer hull. Another attack like earlier and everything in this chamber will be cast to the void.’

  Neleus said, ‘I don’t think they’re suicidal.’

  ‘That depends on how desperate they are to complete the mission,’ Ba’birin pointed out. He turned his head to look back at Elisath. ‘Why do they want you dead?’ he asked.

  The eldar didn’t answer. His face was closed, unreadable. He looked desperately fragile to Ha’garen, a bundle of crystal sticks. But he was keeping up with the pace of the much larger Space Marines, and his footsteps were sure.

  Ha’garen checked over his shoulder. The Fire Dragons were still coming on, but now they had to pay attention to their own survival. A hideous tide of orks was spilling through the gap. The greenskins were pouring in through every access hatch and gate. Numbers growing exponentially, they formed a cordon around the edges of the hold and closed in. During the time it took the Salamanders to move a hundred metres towards their goal, so many orks had arrived that their chants and roars were audible above the unceasing clamour of the engines.

  This was no longer a force sent to repel invaders. This was an army. And it had come to fight in an open space. No more bottlenecking in constricted passageways. The Salamanders might as well have been on a planetside battlefield. Ha’garen did not calculate the odds of fewer than twenty Adeptus Astartes against thousands of orks. He knew what they were. The enemy’s reinforcements were, in practical terms, unlimited.

  None of this mattered. The mission mattered. Duty mattered. The Salamanders would smash their way through ork lines through force of will.

  The tide came on. It arrived as a storm surge of gretchin. Ha’garen looked at the squalling, scrabbling, creatures and saw hook-nosed vermin. They came bounding over the metal waves, wielding makeshift blades and axes, and firing guns that looked even more primitive than the gretchin themselves. Ha’garen saw more than a few pistols explode, killing their owners. The nearby creatures howled with delighted laughter. Larger orks came on immediately behind the gretchin, shouting curses and jabbing at the reluctant with electric prods.

  The diminutive xenos weren’t threats, but they were an obstacle. They swarmed around the Salamanders’ feet , many of them as anxious to flee as they had been to arrive, but just as great a nuisance. They were a morass. Ha’garen swept them away with his servo-arms. His blows pulped. He moved ahead of Neleus and Ba’birin and cleared the way. The crack of bones and squish of internal organs reverberated down the length of the arms. It was like threshing green wheat.

  The Salamanders formation opened fire, bolter rounds streaking not through uncountable gretchin, but straight to the brain pans of their minders. Heads burst like exploded fruit. Bodies toppled. The gretchin panicked. They scrabbled like cornered rats. There was nowhere for them to run as the principle thrust of orks charged. The greenskins laid down a horizontal curtain of heavy-calibre slugs before them. Gretchin exploded into mist. The Salamanders tightened their formation, absorbing the bullets, taking the hits and moving forwards, holding fire and above all protecting the eldar in their midst.

  ‘I am half-sick of irony,’ Neleus muttered.

  The straightest line to the target exit took the Salamanders straight into the thick of the ork host. Towering shapes waved in the corner of Ha’garen’s eye. Inspiration beckoned. He tapped Ba’birin’s shoulder and pointed. The sergeant changed direction without question. The Salamanders pounded over low-lying heaps of scrap towards a cluster of towering axles and pistons. The plasteel trunks vibrated and shook as they rotated. Their foliage was gears and blades several metres in diameter. They spun high above, turning nothing but air.

  Only seconds now to the full impact. Ha’garen felt adrenaline levels surge to levels of ecstatic rage. The other clashes had been mere prologue, and when Neleus shouted ‘Into the fires of battle!’ the cry was more than words. It was the spirit of the Chapter forged in sound.

  The answer came: ‘Unto the Anvil of War!’ And this, this was the will of the warriors. It was the alchemical fusion of fury and righteousness and juggernaut determination. The thunder of the roar was a physical force, the blow of Vulkan’s hammer made manifest. It struck the enemy hard, and the front lines of greenskins actually stumbled a moment before the oncoming wrath.

  Salamanders and orks crashed together in the shadow of the demented forest. It was the collision of solid, burning fist and rampaging mob. The Salamanders unleashed a stream of flamer and bolter-fire. Orks blew apart and burned. The smell of cooking meat mixed with the hard tang of spraying blood and the miasma of ork stench. The rush of orks was slowed less by intimidation than by the need to clamber over and through the dead. Ha’garen saw more than a few greenskins trip and be trampled by their charging kin. The Salamanders descended upon the next lines with the snarl of chainblades. Ha’garen swung his chainaxe and took an ork’s head off above the nose. He rammed forwards, a machine beast with five arms, all of them pounding his enemies to broken sacks of bone and leaking blood. He battered away blows aimed at his head, shrugged off the strikes that hit home. Momentum and fury pushed him ten metres into the lines of the orks.

  It was enough. He was in the midst of the rotating cylinders, just forward of the rest of his battle-brothers. He turned his plasma cutter on an axle. It was thirty metres tall and festooned with cog wheels starting halfway up its length. The wheels varied in diameter from two to four metres, and brushed very close to the shafts on either side. They were so ragged, they could never have been intended to mesh with other gears. They looked predatory. They were metal whose one function was to tear and rip. Ha’garen would see them fed. He cut away a chunk of the shaft, and peered inside the hole as it rotated past. There was no power cable. The axle seemed to have its own power source built in. It was as if its engineer had been seen the device as an end in itself, not part of a functioning whole, and, knowing that the object was supposed to rotate, had ensured that it would, no matter what.

  Ha’garen shrugged off the ork logic and sliced through the shaft at an angle, controlling where the towering axle would fall. The rest of the Salamanders reformed around him, dropping the orks that entered the whirling, grinding, humming forest. They created a perimeter ten metres wide, containing the Techmarine and his sabotaged poles. Elisath crouched in the centre. The line was thin, and pressed hard. The Space Marines were barely more than a dozen strong. They held. Green rage crashed against them, hacking with the strength that came of an existence devoted to nothing else except conflict. The Salamanders held. They held because they had to. Ha’garen moved from iron trunk to iron trunk, cutting until each pole was on the razor’s edge of falling, but holding back until he had a dozen ready for the touch of his will. They formed a rough circle.

  As he finished the last one, his brothers pulled in, concentrating their force, constricting the circle within Ha’garen’s trap. Every move the Salamanders had made, from the moment Ha’garen had pointed at this spot, had been accomplished without a word being uttered. Every warrior had seen the location’s potential and had known what to do. The silent efficiency was a hymn to the Omnissiah, Ha’garen thought. Organics functioning together with machinic rigour had an aesthetic and moral strength. It was, he realised, art of a kind, a kind to which he could still respond. Mechanics, war and art were fused together into a manifestation of the divine.

  He felt something in his chest. For a moment, he did not know what it was. Then he recognised it: it was elation.

  He finished his preparatory cuts, then moved to the centre of the Salamanders formation. He raised his cutter arm
high above his head. He angled the muzzle down. The squads ceased fire. They let the orks approach. The green horde rushed in, sensing only opportunity. The guttural shouts of the aliens crested against the clanking, grinding clash of the nonsense engines.

  At the back of his mind, Ha’garen noted that the orks were using very few projectile weapons of any sort, and were deploying none of their heavy guns. More data to be analysed later. Now, in this moment, he was experiencing the very flesh-based sensation of contempt. He looked at the orks in their overwhelming numbers as they surged through their macabre, mechanical playground, and saw a slovenly, unforgivable disregard for order and the truth of the machine.

  He fired up the plasma cutter. He spun it in a circle. He finished the cuts.

  Time for a hard lesson.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The shafts split a metre up from where they plunged into the scrap-metal loam that covered the deck. They fell, still spinning. Cog wheels and blades flailed. In their deaths, the shafts were no longer metal trees. They were grotesque, monopod giants panicking in their moments of doom. Vibrating, spasming with centripetal seizures, they crashed down around the Salamanders. They became the spread and grasping fingers of Ha’garen. He had forged a power with a reach of dozens of metres. The shafts crushed the orks beneath them. The jagged wheels dug deep into the flesh of the howling army. The spinning did not stop. The wheels found traction. They chewed the orks into mulch, hurling bloody chunks and splintered bone high and far. They bounced and drove over and through greenskin bodies. The violent rotation carried the shafts away, pulping and shredding. They left a swath of smeared green punctuated by bits of torn armour and splintered, jagged bone. The orks fled from the jouncing meat-shredders. The roars were just as loud as before, only now they were hitting the higher registers of surprised fear. The army before the Salamanders thinned, culled and frightened. The rear lines pushed forwards, urged on by something more formidable than the insane axles, but they ran into their fleeing comrades. Confusion reigned.

  The way forwards was close to clear. Only a few hundred metres to the cargo bay exit. The Salamanders stormed into the disorder, slashing and crushing. The same tight defensive formation as before, striking like a spiked, mailed fist. Power and chainblades scythed greenskins as they tried to recover their momentum.

  Ha’garen estimated he had gained the squads fifteen or twenty seconds before the orks shrugged off the blow. Perhaps a bit longer, because several shafts were still careening about on unpredictable trajectories.

  Ba’birin gave him an approving nod as they fought their way forwards. ‘Well played, brother,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ha’garen answered, noncommittal. What war had riven, it had now reknit. He noted this with mild interest, and he noted his mild interest with alarm. Was there no possibility for brotherhood left in his evolving configuration?

  What are you?

  A question for later, because now something arced through the air at them. It was small and metallic. It gleamed in the fitful light of the cargo hold.

  ‘Grenade!’ Neleus yelled. It came down in the centre of the squads, expertly thrown. Ba’birin grabbed Elisath and threw himself to one side. Ha’garen leaped with them. The melta bomb went off, vaporising a pile of stacked parts, a whining engine and the lower half of Brother Battarus’s body. Battarus crashed down, a felled monument. The damage was catastrophic. His system could not hope to repair itself. He was still conscious, still clutching his heavy bolter. A sound emerged from his helmet grille. It was agony transmuted into terminal rage.

  The hull did not burst open. The atmosphere did not rush into the void. Tiny mercies.

  The Fire Dragons leaped from cover to cover, covering ground with the grace and speed of las-fire. Ha’garen’s rolling destruction had given the eldar the chance to break from the ork forces that had been pinning them down. The Salamanders returned fire with bolters, using the weapons’ greater range to break the eldar rhythm and block another grenade toss.

  Battarus’s rasping roar turned into a word. ‘Go!’

  N’krumor had been leaning over him, carnifex aimed at Battarus’s temple to grant him the Emperor’s Peace. ‘Brother,’ he began, ‘you will be sacrificing–’

  ‘Go!’ There was nothing human in the cry, barely anything alive. It was the sound of pure, furious will animating a body just a bit longer, reaching out to punish the enemy one last time. Battarus raised the heavy bolter with arms that shouldn’t have been able to move at all.

  ‘Vulkan guide you, brother,’ Ba’birin said. The Salamanders left him, the mission overriding mercy and the need to recover progenoid glands. As they moved off, Ha’garen heard the heavy bolter open up, its murderous chug-chug-chug denying the Fire Dragons’ advance. Shells blasted through a weak cover point. The eldar warrior behind them exploded into pink mist.

  The Salamanders pushed forwards another dozen metres. The pathway dropped and twisted, turning into a trench through higher stacks of metal. More of these moved, crawling on their clumsy tracks as they carried out non-existent duties. They changed the route of the trench every few seconds. The orks had recovered and were hungry for retaliation. Only the narrow confines of the path now prevented them from crushing the Space Marines with the sheer mass of their numbers.

  The heavy bolter fell silent. Another melta bomb landed close, heat from the heart of a sun banishing a cluster of orks and scrap from sight and memory.

  Ha’garen faced the direction the grenade had come from. He couldn’t see the eldar. There were too many orks pouring over the lip of the trench. His chainaxe chopped down through the skull of the beast in front of him, splitting the greenskin in two. He raised his cutter arm high and fired the plasma beam. It was a blind shot, a raking sweep. He knew he was killing orks. There was no room to miss. As for the eldar, the best he could hope was that he was making them keep their heads down.

  Shrieking whistles. And then an eruption. Fireballs and smoke, an upheaval of metal and a rain of bodies and shrapnel. Enthusiastic carnage concentrated in the region where Ha’garen had last seen the eldar. It was a volley of rockets and grenades, blanketing the area, completely indiscriminate. There was no thought to ork casualties as long as the eldar got a taste.

  None of the ordnance came anywhere close to the Salamanders’ position.

  ‘What just happened?’ Neleus demanded. He plunged his chainsword point-first into an ork’s forehead. The greenskin’s jaw went slack in death and surprise. ‘And I do not want to hear that we just received covering fire from orks.’

  ‘Evidence suggests precisely that,’ Ha’garen answered. And still the orks pressed in. There was no quarter in their attacks, no lack of the furious desire to butcher the Space Marines.

  Neleus grunted. ‘I was wrong earlier,’ he said. ‘I am utterly sick of irony.’

  ‘Why aren’t they shooting?’ N’krumor wondered.

  The detail returned to the front of Ha’garen’s mind. It was insistent this time, demanding to be explained. The answer came a few moments later. A massive ork, bristling in spiked armour, chainaxe in one hand, power claw in the other, rounded the next corner of the path and slammed into Ba’birin. The greenskin was fully as tall as the Salamander, and the force of the blow knocked Ba’birin back a step. The ork raised both claw and axe to pound the Space Marine into the metal litter of the decking. Ba’birin raised his flamer. Ignited promethium engulfed the ork’s head and took out three others coming over the top of the trench. But right behind the big ork came a much smaller one. It didn’t even try to hit Ba’birin. Instead, it ducked around the Salamander’s legs and reached for Elisath. Ha’garen struck it down with his remaining grip arm. The ork collapsed, spine cracked. Ha’garen closed the vice over the greenskin’s head and squeezed it to jelly. He took in that the ork had nothing in its hands. It had a blade at its waist. Sheathed. Ha’garen had never seen a sheathed ork weapon.

/>   Realisation dawned. ‘They want the prisoner back,’ Ha’garen said. ‘They want him alive.’

  Silence on the vox. For a few seconds, the only focus was on killing as implications sank in. Fact: the orks wanted Elisath badly enough that they refrained from using maximum deadly force. Inference: they were being led by a commander canny enough to think beyond bloody-minded violence. Inference: a commander powerful enough to impose restraint on orks. The schemes uncovered by the White Scars and the Raven Guard were proof enough of tactical ability and influence. But the degree of tactical attention on the current battlefield spoke of a moment-to-moment awareness of the conflict’s currents.

  That enormous shadow in the arena.

  The Overfiend was close.

  ‘If he wants his prize badly enough,’ Ba’birin said, ‘he had better show himself.’ He gutted two more orks, and walked over their twitching bodies.

  ‘Eager?’ Neleus asked, sounding like he was.

  ‘The final contours of this mission would be highly satisfactory,’ Ha’garen said.

  An amused snort from Ba’birin. ‘Contain your passion, brother,’ he said.

  ‘I will try,’ Ha’garen answered, making Neleus laugh. (Laugh and snarl, beating and burning orks.)

  They moved closer to the exit, but slowly, too slowly. The orks came on, and on and on. There was no end to them. If the Salamanders could reach the narrower space of the corridors, they stood a chance of fighting through to the boarding torpedoes. But as they rounded another bend in the junkyard madness of the hold, the path rose, and the final stretch was in the open.

  The cry of the orks took on a new note of triumph as they thundered in for the finish.

  In their midst was something huge and clanking.

  The kroozer was closing in on the decision point. Once it reached orbit, Mulcebar would have his hand forced. He could not permit the ork force on the ship to land. Not while there was something on that planet that would power them up. He would not betray the efforts of the Raven Guard, and he would not doom the people. The moment loomed when he would have to deem the mission a failure, and open fire on the kroozer. His grim prayer was that, if the moment came, it would be because his men were already dead. He understood the higher imperative. He knew what had to be done. That did not mean he relished having his warriors’ blood on his hands.