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  Steel Blood

  C. L. Werner

  Valax dropped behind the thick metal shell of a slag-cart, crouching close to the floor as a sheet of burning promethium seared the air above him. Beads of molten steel dripped from the top of the cart, pooling on the ceramite pauldrons and vambraces of his power armour. Warning lights flickered across the displays within his helmet, alerting him that the liquefied metal was eating its way into his armoured shell. Valax ignored the winking lights. He had fought on a million battlefields. He knew his armour’s limits better than its own built-in cogitator. It could take more, much more. Otherwise it would be unworthy of an Iron Warrior.

  The Space Marine snapped a fresh clip into his bolt pistol. Even as he evaded the blast of white-hot promethium, part of Valax’s brain had started a countdown. A standard pattern flamer would take five seconds to cool after expelling a blast of such intensity. There was neither standard nor pattern to the war gear of the barbarous orks. Valax could only trust that such filthy aliens hadn’t improved upon human engineering.

  With two seconds of safety remaining to him, Valax sprang out from behind the slag-cart, smoke rising from his scarred armour. Across the smelt-hall, he saw his adversary’s leathery face pull back in a sadistic leer, a thick stump of cigar falling to the floor. It was a big brute of an ork, its squat, apish body even more massive than Valax’s two metres and two hundred kilos. The thing had a crude metal helmet squashed over its head, a simple visor of plasteel protecting its eyes. A network of straps and chains fastened an enormous fuel tank to its back, a series of cables and hoses connecting the cylinder to the broad-mouthed fire-thrower the ork gripped in its massive paws. A pair of human jawbones framed the nozzle of the weapon, testament to the alien’s morbid humour.

  Valax opened fire the moment he had a clear view of the ork, bolt shells shrieking across the hall to smash into the alien’s grotesque frame. The ork lurched back, blood slobbering from each impact, fragments of bone and flesh spraying from the wounds as the bolt shells detonated inside its body.

  Incredibly, the ork kept standing, defying the havoc Valax’s fire had inflicted upon it. The alien grunted in its debased language and pressed the trigger of its weapon.

  A standard pattern flamer would have refused to activate under such conditions, failsafes built into the weapons causing them to cut out. The very concept of a failsafe was beyond an ork’s comprehension. Valax’s enemy paid the price for that deficiency of xenos mentality. Damaged by the Iron Warrior’s shots, the ork’s flamethrower was spraying fuel from a rent in its side and a tear in one of its hoses. The moment the ork pressed the trigger, a blast of flame spurted from the nozzle of his weapon. Valax rolled back behind cover before the burst of promethium could reach him.

  No sooner was he back behind cover than the smelt-hall was shaken by a tremendous explosion. The blast of flame the ork had sent flickering after him was insignificant beside the bright ball of fire that engulfed it and the dozen other greenskins around it. A momentary blaze of hellish light flickered across the chamber, as though a tiny sun had winked into existence and then been snuffed out.

  The moans of mutilated aliens filled the room as Valax stepped out from cover. Ruthlessly, the Iron Warrior stepped from one ork to another, pumping a shell into each leathery green face, making no distinction between the dead and the dying. If any of his comrades came upon this scene of carnage later, they would know the Faceless had been here, the assault marines of the Third Grand Company.

  Sounds of gunfire from across the chamber drew Valax’s attention. He watched as the other survivors of his squad finished off a cluster of some twenty orks. They had allowed the aliens to take shelter behind a blast-furnace and were finding it hard to displace them. Valax scowled inside his helmet. He might expect such sloppiness from Uhlan, the cur was after all only a half-breed cobbled together from the gene-seed of other Legions, but Gressil was a proper Iron Warrior. He expected better from one of his own. Brother Gressil would have much to atone for when this operation was over.

  Valax reached to his belt and thumbed three small coin-like objects from a pneumatic discharger. Pressing his finger against each in turn, he flung the discs towards the blast-furnace. They clattered across the floor, landing to rest at the base of the furnace. A second later, the smelt-hall was again shaken by a tremendous explosion, even more savage than the first. Beams hurtled from the ceiling, cracks snaked up the walls, dust showered down from the roof.

  The blast-furnace lurched to one side with a titanic groan, the floor at its base evaporated by the destructive force of Valax’s melta-bombs. In the space of a few breaths, the shifting weight of the furnace finished the job the explosion had started. With a final metallic scream, the furnace tore loose from its fastenings and smashed through the damaged floor. The floor around it fragmented and shattered, crashing down into the expanding crater. Valax could hear the furnace pounding its way through the lower floors, thirty tons of runaway ruin hurtling through each level of the blockhouse like the fist of an angry god.

  If the foe had been something worthy of killing, Valax could have savoured the moment. Instead, he aimed his pistol at the few orks clinging to the edges of the pit. After each shot, another alien was sent plunging into the chasm. Soon, Gressil and Uhlan were beside him, helping him finish off the survivors.

  ‘There is no refuge from an Iron Warrior,’ Valax growled at the other Marines. Though their faces were hidden behind their grey helmets, Valax knew the reprimand had cut them like a vibro-blade. The words of Perturabo were things no Iron Warrior wanted turned against him.

  ‘My Lord Captain,’ Gressil said, slapping his fist against his breast in salute. ‘We did not wish to alert more of the foul xenos to our presence.’

  Valax’s hand clenched into a fist, straying towards the chainsword lashed to his wrist. He stared hard at Gressil, wondering if that had been meant as some sort of accusation. After a moment, Valax relaxed. Gressil wasn’t so bold or daring as that. If he had been, he should have received his own command by now.

  Or gone the way of upstarts like Traegus and Amon. The Lords of the Warp were always hungry for the souls of ambitious fools.

  ‘The greenskins already know we’re here,’ Valax said, turning away from the crater. ‘Nothing we do now can stir them up more than they already are.’

  As he spoke the words, Valax thought about their meaning and wondered where it had all gone wrong.

  Over-captain Valax marched along the deserted corridor, the sensors in his helmet stifling the drone of sirens and the thunder of shells. It was a testament to the enormous calibre of the enemy guns that any sound at all could penetrate far enough to reach the bunker. Valax wasn’t certain if such an achievement was impressive or absurd. Anything of such size would be almost immobile. When the time came for the guns to be dealt with, the enemy wouldn’t be able to move them somewhere safe.

  The thought brought a curl to Valax’s scarred lip. As though anywhere was safe for an enemy of the Iron Warriors.

  For ten thousand years the Iron Warriors had stormed the galaxy’s great strongholds, broken down their walls, breeched their defences and slaughtered all who dared stand in their way. Ten thousand years of war and carnage, an unending litany of destruction. Valax had been there from the first; the echo of the Warmaster’s voice yet lingered in his ears, the image of Terra in flames glowed in his eyes and the taste of Olympia’s acrid atmosphere was still in his lungs. He had risen from lowly aspirant to a full battle-brother. His ferocity and initiative had brought him to the forefront of every conflict, in time becomin
g over-captain of the Third Grand Company’s assault marines. In that capacity, he had been one of the first Iron Warriors to descend upon the jungles of Castellax and bring death to its amphibian natives.

  Great had been the honours of that campaign, but foolish was the Space Marine who was content with past glories. Fools did not survive long among the Iron Warriors. There was never any shortage of ambitious subordinates eager to exploit the complacencies of their superiors.

  Valax’s hair shifted colour as raw hate crackled through his brain, a peculiar psycho-reactive mutation inflicted upon him by the baleful emanations of the Warp and its denizens. The very thought of Rhodaan was enough to turn his head from shock white to a muddy crimson. Valax rarely suffered such an irritant for long, but Rhodaan had proven himself not without a certain aptitude. He had not maintained his rank of over-captain for two thousand years by disposing of irritants while they were still useful to him. Still, Captain Rhodaan’s usefulness was no longer equal to the menace he represented. Rhodaan had acquired quite a reputation of his own in the recent campaign against the hrud. Valax didn’t like subordinates who possessed too much renown.

  The Iron Warrior glared at the ferrocrete walls, then fixed his gaze on the pseudo-mechanical flesh-drone acting as his guide. The thing was enough to nauseate even an Iron Warrior; a loathsome hodge-podge of skin and steel, cable and bone. Fabricator Oriax never assembled two of his flesh-drones quite the same way, but there was one thing the techmarine never failed to implement. Each flesh-drone still had a recognizable face stitched onto it somewhere, a face that continually writhed in silent screams. It was said that Oriax never completely lobotomized the subjects of the conversion process, that he left just enough self-awareness in the flesh-drones for them to experience the full horror of their new existence, while their mechanical programming made it impossible for them to end that existence.

  Even among the Iron Warriors, Fabricator Oriax was regarded with a measure of caution, a wariness that stopped just short of being outright fear. The techmarine was an enigma to the rest of the Third Grand Company and had been so for millennia. Maimed in the crystal-swamps of Tarsis 9, Oriax was more machine than flesh, his mind driven by the strange impulses of steel, not the demands of honour and pride. Since the conquest of Castellax, the Fabricator had rarely stirred from the bunker complex beneath the Iron Bastion, and then only at the command of Warsmith Andraaz. Visitors to the bunker were even more rare.

  Valax, however, was a special case. If not for him, Oriax would never have left the crystal-swamps. The techmarine owed his life to the over-captain, a fact which Valax had exploited to his benefit many times in the past. Now it was time for him to do so again.

  The flesh-drone hesitated outside a massive titanium bulkhead, the voxcaster built into its chest spitting and crackling as it transmitted a steady stream of binary. Valax knew the bunker was rife with traps to safeguard Oriax’s seclusion. Without the flesh-drone’s transmissions, nothing alive could penetrate the Fabricator’s sanctum.

  With a growled rumble, the bulkhead door retreated into the floor, allowing Valax and his guide to enter a vast inner chamber, its most prominent feature being the forest-like confusion of pipes rising from its floor and vanishing into the ceiling far overhead. A riotous array of pict-slates flickered from every corner of the room, presenting a thousand different views of Castellax, from the dark depths of the promethium mines, to the jagged spires of the Iron Bastion and the decayed sprawl of Vorago, the city’s outskirts now further despoiled by the marauding orks.

  Valax’s hand shifted to his pistol holster as he saw his own visage fill one of the monitors. His hypno-trained senses immediately estimated from what location such a view of himself would be afforded. Spinning around, he found himself staring into the skeletal face of one of Oriax’s grisly spies, the floating skulls he called his ‘Steel Blood’. The followers of the False Emperor employed similar constructs, but Valax doubted they had the dedication to craft them the way Oriax did. There was the stink of the Warp about the Steel Blood, a daemonic taint that no mortal could experience without a twinge of uneasiness. It was a sensation too elusive for understanding, like something that could be seen only out of the corner of the eye but which hid itself when viewed straight-on.

  While he glared at the Steel Blood, the metal jaw of the floating skull snapped open, exposing the metal meshwork of a voxcaster. ‘Salutation and honour to Over-captain Valax. Deathsmith of the Faceless. Scourge of the Pox-pits. Brother Iron Warrior.’

  The Iron Warrior brushed past the floating skull, ignoring the Steel Blood’s synthesized praises. ‘Show yourself, Oriax!’ Valax’s voice boomed through the forest of cables and pipes. ‘I did not descend twenty levels and forsake the call of battle to waste words with your mindless tinker-toys.’ The Space Marine marched deeper into the tangle of machinery and monitors. ‘I am not the Warsmith, Oriax. I do not suffer proxies.’

  In a single fluid motion, Valax swung about, drew his pistol and sent a single shot slamming into the centre of the Steel Blood’s cranium. The floating skull exploded in a burst of sparks, shards of metal and shreds of organics flying in every direction.

  ‘Your marksmanship is as good as when you patrolled the citadels of Olympia,’ a shrill, mechanical voice reverberated from the darkness.

  ‘It is better,’ Valax said, his armoured thumb rubbing across the smoking barrel of his weapon. The optics of his helmet adjusted to filter away the chemical haze that filled Oriax’s sanctum, but the compounds were so complex as to baffle even the engineering of the Legion’s artificers. His anger rising, Valax marched in the direction of the voice. ‘Reveal yourself, Oriax. I want to look at what I’m speaking to.’

  The chamber shuddered as fans suddenly churned into life, drawing away the obscuring gases and chemicals that enabled the sanctum to retain its preternatural darkness. Valax’s optics immediately adjusted to the natural gloom, but there was no sign of anyone where the voice had spoken.

  ‘Is this better?’ Oriax’s voice came from the same place, rising from a voxcaster fitted to one of the pict-slates. A moment later, the same words echoed from a spot some fifteen metres to Valax’s left. The Iron Warrior spun around, glaring through the darkness. This time there was something to reward his gaze. Nestled amidst a jumble of machinery and cogitator cabinets, their blinking lights and flashing diodes casting a diabolic glow about his body, was Fabricator Oriax.

  The techmarine presented a ghastly shape, devoid of the symmetry of rational design. His body was a mass of cables and gears fused about the remnants of a man. A confusion of spidery steel arms jutted from his figure at every angle, scrabbling at the consoles arrayed about him with dazzling speed. A massive metal claw arced upwards from his back and leered above his head, fiddling with an array of rune-boards suspended from the ceiling. A set of pincers, electricity crackling between the steel talons, projected from his right shoulder, hovering about a table resting at the techmarine’s side. Valax felt a moment of shock when he saw that the pincers appeared to be assembling another Steel Blood – possibly to replace the one he had so noisily destroyed. Efficiency, or anticipation? Valax wasn’t sure which answer was more disturbing.

  ‘You should count yourself favoured, over-captain,’ Oriax’s distorted metal voice declared. ‘There are few I allow to see me as I am.’ The techmarine’s limbs paused in their assorted duties, each curling back to point for a moment at the body to which they were attached. At the core of that trash-heap of cables and gears was a cuirass of ancient armour from the time of the Great Crusade, the skull-helm symbol of the Iron Warriors engraved across the breast. Staring from above the symbol was an iron visage every bit as inhuman and forbidding, a clutch of pale, scarred flesh surrounding a lipless gash of mouth and a torn stump of nose. A brace of mechanical eyes burned with crimson light from the pits of Oriax’s mangled face.

  Valax felt no horror at Oriax’s condition, only a sneering contempt. There was a good reason why the techm
arine hid himself away and tried to guard himself with a cloak of mystery. The brutal fact was there hadn’t been much left of him after the crystal-swamps, less than even a normal man, much less a Space Marine.

  ‘I did not come here to waste time gawking at freaks,’ Valax growled. ‘Your surrogate convinced the Warsmith to allow me to lead the assault.’

  ‘You find that prospect daunting?’ The synthesized voice made it impossible to tell if there was a mocking tone behind the words.

  Valax hesitated before answering. Since the greenskin invasion of Castellax, the xenos had captured much territory and resources while the Iron Warriors withdrew and plotted their campaign. Now, however, the need to regain air superiority was the most important of their concerns. The ork warlord was cagey enough to husband his fuel stores and prevent his fliers from burning through their supplies on pointless sorties and piece-meal assaults. However, the warlord’s craft presented the Iron Warriors with an opportunity. Andraaz wanted a precision strike against the ork fuel reserves. Without fuel, the ork fliers would be grounded and the Iron Warriors would regain command of the skies.

  The honour of staging the crucial assault had been bestowed upon Valax, largely on Oriax’s recommendation, however much the over-captain resented the fact. The assurance Oriax had made regarding how quickly Valax could capture his objective was the aspect that caused him the most concern.

  ‘I worry only that Sergeant Rhodaan will betray his own duty,’ Valax snarled at the Fabricator. ‘The success of my mission depends upon his diversion against the ork headquarters. The vermin must believe that their command centre is our target, not the fuel dump.’

  The techmarine’s claw lowered so that it could point at Valax, shaking at him like the reproving finger of an Olympian combat instructor. ‘Rhodaan won’t know his is a diversion unless you tell him. Lead the upstart to believe his is the real attack. Provide him with enough janissaries to cover his assault. Enough serf-meat to keep the orks occupied.’