The Siege of Castellax Read online

‘They will look for leadership,’ Ipos stated. ‘In that, they are no different than any thinking creature of limited ability. When beset by calamity, they look to something better than themselves to tell them what to do.’ The Iron Warrior shook his head, his features dripping with disdain. ‘That has been the foundation of societies primitive and modern, the basis of every religion, government and tyranny. The weak look to the strong. They desire to be dominated.’

  Andraaz continued to regard Oriax’s ghoulish proxy. ‘Tell me, Fabricator, where do the orks look for guidance? Where is their leader?’

  Again, the servitor was silent for a space. Deep within his sanctum, Oriax was consulting the data being fed to him by his grisly spies. It was almost a minute before the servitor answered.

  ‘There is evidence of a convergence of xenos around the battlefortress,’ Oriax pronounced. ‘Data gathered by Captain Rhodaan and our martyred battle-brother Captain Gamgin suggest that the warboss of the attack against Aboro was headquartered within a similar battlefortress. It would be unlike an ork to stray too far from custom.’

  The Warsmith digested the information, nodding his head as he pondered the situation. His cold gaze swept across the assembled commanders of the Third Grand Company, finally settling on Over-Captain Vallax.

  ‘Recall your squads from the walls,’ Andraaz commanded. ‘I have a mission for my Raptors.’ His gaze hardened and an edge crept into his tone. ‘All of them, this time, Over-Captain.’

  Vallax bristled under the reprimand, crimson streaks shifting through his mutated hair. ‘I obey, Grim Lord,’ he replied, adding another humiliation to the growing list of offences Rhodaan had perpetrated. The upstart’s luck couldn’t last forever. It was a prediction that eased Vallax’s pride.

  Especially since he intended to take a hand in bringing that prediction to fruition.

  Chapter XII

  I-Day Plus Ninety-Two

  Enginseer Heroditus carefully made his way around the hulking atmosphere generator, reciting a binary mantra of serenity as the machine shuddered and wheezed erratically. He set a slender appeasement seal against the device’s power plant, a long strip of aluminium lined with letters etched in acid. The generator seemed to accept the offering, subsiding with a shudder into a lesser degree of agitation.

  The generator’s machine-spirit had every right to take offence, Heroditus reflected, feeling a twinge of guilt transmit through the neurofibres of his nervous system. It had been woefully abused in its hurried disassembly and clandestine removal to the depths beneath Vorago. Necessity had demanded that the customary rituals of approbation be dispensed with. Only the most cursory of placations had been attempted and there had been no time to wait for the generator’s acquiescence to its relocation. Heroditus felt like an atavistic techno-barbarian defiling such a complex mechanism in so crude and deliberate a fashion.

  Still, he had to defer to the wisdom of Logis Acestes. Since the beginning of the ork assault on Vorago, the vaults beneath the city had become compromised. Packs of escaped slaves from the factories, deserters from the janissaries, renegade overseers and slavedrivers; all of these and more had fled the besieged city to take refuge in the forgotten tunnels and catacombs. It was a situation that could not be tolerated by Acestes and his disciples. Their work was too important to allow any risk of exposure.

  Precious labour had been expended constructing

  combat-servitors to patrol the passages connecting to the assembly chamber. Nothing so ostentatious as a Praetorian, but rather an assemblage of cyborgs that would appear quite mundane until their murderous directives asserted themselves. Meticulous care had been taken with their neurologic protocols so that should one of the combat-servitors be disassembled it would appear to be the subject of malfunction rather than deliberately pernicious programming.

  Such crude measures of dealing with intruders was too uncertain to satisfy Acestes, however. His plan was to employ the atmosphere generator from one of the smelting plants to ensure the conspirators would be undisturbed. The atmosphere in the tunnels was poisonous, but its lethality might be bypassed by taking certain precautions. Death was certain for any organism exposed to the air in the tunnels for a prolonged period, but there was a big difference between a matter of minutes and a slow decline over several decades from trace carcinogens.

  It made Heroditus ashamed the way the generator had been adjusted, its function deliberately violated to transform it from a source of clean, sustaining air to a purveyor of death. Instead of removing toxins from the air, the generator was now pumping them into it, a vicious cocktail of proticide that would bond with its victims on a molecular level, rendering the protons within the atoms unstable. Death would be almost instant and within an hour, even the evidence of a corpse would be obliterated as the body reduced itself to a sort of protean goo.

  Heroditus had passed several of these puddles of organic mash on his descent into the catacombs. It was a pity that the dead were unaware they were martyrs to the Omnissiah, that their passing was necessary to ending the heretical dominion of the Iron Warriors on Castellax and ending the blasphemies being churned out from their factories. Of course, their deaths had been so quick they really hadn’t had the opportunity to reflect on such blessed dissolution even if they had known what was killing them and why.

  As the enginseer stepped around the shuddering generator, he removed the complicated array of anti-toxin injectors from his chassis. He stared at them for a moment, evaluating how much of the chemicals remained. Enough for another journey through the tunnels? Perhaps for two? It was beneficial that so much of his flesh had been sacrificed to the Machine-God already, even to sustain what little remained against the effects of proticide took a distressingly high proportion of anti-toxin.

  It was even more distressing that there were insufficient resources at hand to manufacture the poison in volume. Had there been, Castellax could be scoured of both its infectious presences! Heroditus quietly reprimanded himself for such a flagrantly emotional thought. There were too many orks to simply poison into extermination and, even if they could, there were the Iron Warriors themselves to consider. Against a normal human, the poison was invariably lethal, but the holy Adeptus Astartes and their fallen kin were a different matter. Proticide had proven incapable of defiling the enhanced genetics of a Space Marine, the advanced healing and regenerative properties of their cells nullifying the poison almost instantaneously. The best that exposure could inflict on an Iron Warrior would be a sensation of nausea. Even that was something of a triumph for the unknown geneseer who had created the poison.

  No, even with the tunnels around the assembly chamber filled with proticide, the conspirators still had to fear discovery by the Iron Warriors. The blasphemous Chaos Marines would have nothing to fear from the poison, they could march through it at their leisure to reach the rebel tech-priests.

  This was the subject of Heroditus’s recent foray into the city. Every opportunity had to be exploited to prevent the Iron Warriors from becoming aware of the hidden cabal dedicated to their annihilation. The enginseer had met with other tech-priests, those who had remained at their posts in the factories and power plants, armouries and assembly centres. If things were too quiet, the Iron Warriors would become suspicious. For this reason, the tech-priests had arranged small acts of sabotage and in-efficiency in the factories ever since the beginning of the campaign. Now, however, logic dictated that they should step up their efforts, become almost openly overt in their sabotage. It was the natural evolution demanded by the changing situation and the seeming vulnerability of the Iron Warriors in the face of their xenos attackers.

  Heroditus knew what he was asking of his brothers. The Iron Warriors would be severe in their retaliation. Where before the production had been sabotaged in subtle ways so as not to draw too much attention or too close a scrutiny, now they had to be almost blatant. Guns would be produced with dramatic proclivities towards inaccuracy. Explosives would be rendered half as destructive. Amm
unition would be altered from their design to increase swelling and warpage after use to increase jamming and blockage.

  While the Iron Warriors concentrated upon a thousand fiascos throughout Vorago, they would be oblivious to the great menace growing under their very feet.

  The pumps in the enginseer’s chest increased their rhythm as he contemplated the tremendous blast which had shook the city when the Iron Warriors demolished the perimeter wall and invited the orks into their trap. The ordnance Acestes was assembling would make the earlier blast seem insignificant, it would be like the fist of the Omnissiah crashing down upon the foul violators of holy standard template constructs.

  Heroditus focused his optic senses from the murk of the chamber floor to the causeway where the warhead housing was reaching completion. He could see Logis Acestes kneeling before the weapon, his vox-speaker crackling with a Lingua-Technis mantra of baptism.

  After careful evaluation, it had been decided to christen the machine-spirit of the new ordnance after its defiled predecessor. Vindex Lartius. When it was complete, it would fulfil its purpose in a cataclysm of destruction.

  Vindex Lartius would avenge not only Lartius Maximus, but all of Castellax.

  Heroditus paused, an incongruous thought occurring to him. Even at this late stage, there was still the potential for failure. Everything depended upon the barbaric xenos maintaining their assault, pressing their attack against Vorago. If that attack should falter, then the opportunity would be lost. The deployment of Vindex Lartius would be inconsequential.

  The hour of vengeance must await the onslaught of the orks.

  The thunder of anti-aircraft shells burst all around the assault boat as it hurtled above the wasteland. The rattle of shrapnel against the hull formed a persistent clamour, echoing and re-echoing through the craft. The serf-slaves tending the craft looked more like frightened vermin as they tended to their duties.

  ‘What’s wrong, flesh-maggot?’ Brother Uzraal growled through his helmet at the human he had selected as his current irritation. ‘Did you think you would live forever?’ The human, shivering from head to toe, tried to ignore the giant’s taunts, burying himself in his study of a proximity terminal. It was the worst thing he could have done. Uzraal, feeling slighted, rose from his crash-couch and began to walk towards the man.

  ‘Answer your betters when they speak to you,’ Uzraal hissed. The assault boat rocked wildly as flak burst directly below it, but the mag-clamps in the Space Marine’s boots made him barely react to the craft’s motion.

  ‘Leave it alone, brother,’ Pazuriel advised. ‘The Flesh isn’t worth the effort.’

  Uzraal turned and favoured the other Raptor with an icy stare. ‘It has forgotten its place. It needs a lesson.’

  Pazuriel glanced aside at Baelfegor and Gomorie before replying. ‘I was unaware you had taken up slave indoctrination as a vocation,’ he said. ‘A peculiar secondary specialty for an Iron Warrior. It is fine for Captain Algol, he’s a degenerate homicidal sadist with delusions of godhood.’ He paused, leaning back as though pondering a sudden revelation. ‘Actually, Uzraal, it probably suits you.’

  The other Raptors laughed at Uzraal’s expense. Uzraal glared back at them as he stalked back to his crash-couch. Battle-brothers bound by duty and obligation, shackled to one another by chains of honour and loyalty. That didn’t make them despise each other any less. When he looked at another Iron Warrior, he saw a reflection of himself and there were few in the Legion who liked what he saw.

  Captain Rhodaan left his squad to vent their agitation. After a tour along the walls, supporting pathetic contingents of Flesh, they were all eager for real action, a proper deployment that would allow them to use the skills they had been taught. A tactical strike against the enemy, that was the purpose of Raptors, not a demeaning role as nurse-maids to a rabble of puny humans who couldn’t even manage a defensive role without help. There was no glory to be had there!

  Rhodaan smiled. That was over now. Warsmith Andraaz was unleashing the sword of the Third Grand Company at last! A swift thrust straight into the ork headquarters, and the extermination of the ork warboss. With the head struck from the body, the rest of the xenos horde would collapse, riven by infighting as thousands of petty warlords vied with one another for control. The death of the warboss would shatter the alien juggernaut and allow the Iron Warriors to pick it apart at their leisure.

  There would be no moment of greater import in the entire campaign. Only the thought that he must share the glory with Over-Captain Vallax and his Faceless bothered Rhodaan, though he supposed Skylord Morax would be there too, to try and steal some of the thunder. The Castellax Air Cohort was being deployed in a diversionary assault, attacking the battlefortress from the north while the assault boats struck from the south.

  Far below the assault boat, the great swamps of industrial sewage beyond Vorago’s walls were giving way to the desolation of the desert. Orange dirt, riddled with pollutants and baked into a consistency as tough and unforgiving as cement, stretched away in a great sweep of waste, broken here and there by the blackened smudge of a fallen aircraft. Ork or human, the debris shared a kindred expression of forlorn abandonment. Even the scavenging xenos were unwilling to trek across the bleak wastes for so meagre a prize. The wrecks would linger there for months until wind and pollution broke them apart and added their rusty residue to the dirt.

  Beyond the desolation, the sprawl of the alien encampment loomed like the shore of some tainted ocean. A smudge of smog and smoke rose from the camp, defiling even the polluted sky of Castellax. At this distance, the camp was just an indistinct blackness on the horizon, but here and there bright flashes winked amidst the darkness. The discharge of missile launchers and cannon, the chatter of flak guns and plasma batteries. The orks had noticed the raiders flying towards them across the desert.

  As the assault boat was shaken by a nearby burst of flak, Rhodaan considered that Morax’s pilots were managing a commendable performance. He could almost picture the Skylord briefing his crews, laying out the parameters of their mission before enjoining them about taking extreme care not to lose any planes in the execution of that mission.

  ‘Distance to target,’ Rhodaan snapped at the serf-slave tending the proximity terminal.

  ‘Fi-five kilometres, lord captain,’ the human stammered, casting a wary glance in Uzraal’s direction as he answered.

  Rhodaan turned towards the door in the side of the assault boat, the demi-organic wings of his jump pack unfolding expectantly, knowing that soon the Raptor would again be soaring through the sky. The other members of Squad Kyrith made last minute inspections of their armour and gear, Pazuriel and Baelfegor tending one another’s jump packs to ensure the intakes were free of dirt. Uzraal hefted the bulk of his meltagun, conspicuously pointing it in the direction of the human irritation. Gomorie knelt on the deck, scrubbing his tainted hand. The serf-slaves watched the water drip into the metalised flesh, smacking their lips in longing. It had been three months since any of them had tasted real water, forced to subsist off rations of liquid reclamations that had been processed and recycled dozens of times.

  ‘It won’t help,’ the rolling bellow sounded from deep within the cargo hold. Gomorie looked up to stare at the grotesque hulk of Merihem.

  ‘The virus will win out,’ Merihem explained. ‘You should embrace your doom. Defying it will only bring you pain.’

  Gomorie stood and turned towards the monstrous Obliterator. ‘My honour and my duty will sustain me,’ he declared.

  Merihem laughed, his pallid face exposing its steel teeth. ‘So I thought… once.’ His body flowed in an undulation of liquefied metal, ropes of raw meat gleaming behind the confusion of plates and wires. ‘Accept what is and what will be. All else is… delusion.’

  Captain Rhodaan listened to the exchange between the Space Marine and the monster. It was the first time Merihem had spoken since embarking and Rhodaan wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. He had read the reports d
etailing the Obliterator’s performance in the ork attack on the perimeter wall. Merihem had single-handedly held a three-kilometre section, accounting for some five hundred xenos casualties. Of course, the reason the abomination had defended his post alone was because he’d also accounted for three hundred janissaries and slave-militia, going so far as to dig the latter from their firing pits.

  More and more, Rhodaan was coming to appreciate the kind of beast Merihem was. The virus had wiped out all sense of kinship to the Legion. He suspected that the only thing motivating the Obliterator was some perverse fascination with Gomorie’s infection and the Raptor’s efforts to overcome it. What would happen if that fascination were to lose its hold was something Rhodaan hoped he wouldn’t have to find out. The orks and the schemes of Vallax were enough to worry about, he didn’t need the prospect of a blood-mad Obliterator at his back.

  ‘Two kilometres, lord captain,’ the serf-slave announced. The assault boat shuddered violently as a flak shell exploded against the fuselage, sending slivers of metal slashing across the cabin. Two humans wilted under the debris, their bodies torn and mangled. Baelfegor grunted in irritation, plucking a six-centimetre chunk of steel from his vambrace. The coagulants in his blood sealed the wound almost immediately.

  ‘Squad Kyrith,’ Captain Rhodaan growled, reaching to the door and flinging it open. Wind whipped about him, smoke from the damaged fuselage streaming into the ship. He could see the confused sprawl of the ork encampment whizzing by far below, a jumble of scrap-heaps, bonfires and sheet metal shanties. Here and there, patches of desert burned a rusty orange by the pollutants in the air gaped between the ork bivouacs. Beyond the junkyard sea, like a great island of darkness, towered the enormity of the battlefortress. Rhodaan felt the faintest flicker of doubt as he stared at the cyclopean machine. Grimly, he crushed his uncertainty. He was an Iron Warrior. He would not fail in his duty, whatever obstacles the xenos might put in his way. His voice was an angry snarl as he hissed into his vox-bead. ‘Ready for battle.’