‘You have found something?’
Furax picked his way through the half-collapsed remains of a hive city tenement chamber, shoving aside twisting iron spars and mounds of rubble as he approached his brethren. The lights of their luminators cast horrid shadows amongst the detritus of what had once been a monument to human engineering, a place where billions of lives had begun, lasted and ended, all contained completely within its cyclopean walls.
The squad of Iron Warriors had been deployed to comb through the ruins of the hive city, in search of a quarry they had been told in no uncertain terms that they would be unwelcome to return without. The patience of their lord was profoundly spare, and Furax had no interest in testing its limits any further.
Furax reached his brothers, looking down at what they had discovered.
He shone the light from his shoulder-mounted lumen over a group of emaciated mortals. They were deathly pale, crouching in a corner. They recoiled from the torchlight, covering eyes that had grown accustomed to total darkness.
The Iron Warrior glared down at the humans with undisguised revulsion. His mind travelled back to a boarding action he had taken part in against a warship of the hated VIII Legion. Light had been one of the Iron Warriors’ greatest weapons in that battle, as they methodically butchered their way through the decks of the Night Lords vessel, killing swathes of mortal crew who had never seen sunlight.
‘Why have we stopped,’ said Furax, ‘for this?’
‘They managed to survive in here, and to avoid our slavers for this long,’ posited Gaios with a shrug. ‘That shows cunning.’
Tybald reached out, extending his narthecium gauntlet over the cowering wretches. The internal auspex within the bulky device chattered as it scanned them. ‘They are severely malnourished. Acute vitamin deficiencies and extensive muscle atrophy are rampant. All of them have one form or another of immune disease, brought on by the advanced degree of starvation and extended dehydration.’
‘Your conclusion?’ asked Furax.
‘I doubt they would survive the journey to the servile pens,’ replied the Apothecary. ‘Any viable utility for those that do, even at my best estimations, would be negligible.’
‘We were not sent to find slaves,’ said Koronos quietly, ever the voice of reason in the squad. ‘They are not our objective, and would do nothing but slow our progress towards it.’
Furax nodded. ‘So be it.’
They turned their bolters on them.
Hours passed as the Iron Warriors descended through the ruins of the hive. The gargantuan structure’s near collapse at the hands of Quradim’s vindictive geology had rendered any traditional schematics useless. Vast sections of the city were gone, having detached and slid away into the fault lines like steeldust avalanches. Others had fallen for dozens of levels, crumbling away to ruin or crashing and twisting into others in a bizarre labyrinth of mangled metal.
The auspex Furax held chattered in his fist, filling his visor with a slew of deceptive echoes and false positives that he dismissed with an angry blink. The squad pressed on through the forest of twisted rebar, their formation expanding to scout and contracting to stay together like a beating heart, before at last they made the first useful discovery of their mission.
Furax arrived to find Koronos standing over an abyss. He looked down, seeing nothing but more crumbling architecture that terminated in shadow. The Iron Warrior edged a loose chunk of rockcrete over the edge, sending it plummeting down into darkness. A distant crack a few seconds later gave them the length of the drop.
‘The markings here,’ Koronos gestured to the rest of the squad as Tybald and Gaios reached them. He pointed to the level above, to a faded Munitorum placard in blurred Gothic, and then to the wall beside them. The very material of the construction had changed, from cheap plasteel and rockcrete to a dense, black alloy. A different language was las-etched into its surface, one that caused each of the Iron Warriors’ pulses to quicken, if only for an instant.
‘Olympian,’ said Tybald. He swiped the dust from the series of faded runes, before looking over the edge to where the floor terminated into the gulf ahead of them.
‘We have reached the foundation,’ said Furax. ‘What we seek may very well be below.’ He peered down into the shadows beneath. ‘The fall is not substantial.’
He stepped off the edge.
‘It was here,’ said Furax.
Pride battled against frustration in the Iron Warrior’s heart. Pride at locating the storage facility he had been tasked to find amidst the disorder and madness of the hive’s collapse. Frustration at finding it deprived of the quarry he sought.
An enormous chamber stretched out around them, filled with the skeletal remains of what had once been an ordered and fully provisioned heavy munitions magazine. Heavy iron racks filled the chamber, some toppled over or shattered but most having held their shape despite the crash. Thousands of man-sized apertures stared at Furax like industrial honeycomb, empty of their cargo.
‘The stockpile was here,’ growled the Iron Warrior. He took up a rusted plate festooned with biological hazard warnings and snapped it in half before casting it aside in disgust. ‘We built this place, it was here.’
‘They could have been taken by another Warsmith in the retreat,’ said Koronos.
‘No,’ said Furax. ‘I was among the last to evacuate. We gathered much, but they were too volatile to risk. They were left behind.’
‘Then where are they now?’ asked Tybald.
‘Brothers!’ Gaios called out from further within the chamber. The squad rallied to him, finding him standing before a heavy sealed bulkhead.
‘This chamber.’ Furax frowned as his auspex played over the bulkhead. ‘It still has power.’
‘Impossible,’ grunted Tybald. ‘After all this time, this destruction?’
‘Containment protocols for such a cache would have included a robust and independent power source,’ said Koronos. ‘To safeguard against the contents discharging in the event of some unforeseen catastrophe.’
Furax scraped his gauntlet against the thick armourglass viewport built into the bulkhead. The interior of the chamber was cast in total darkness, but his vision was acute enough to see the vague outline of an object within.
‘We need to get this door open,’ said Furax.
The Iron Warriors gathered their helms from their belts, sealing them in place to their armoured collars.
Koronos knelt beside the bulkhead’s control panel. Millennia ago, in the time before the Warmaster’s failed rebellion, he had been sent as a young legionary to the red world of Mars, to learn the secrets of the machine cult and return to the IV Legion in the red of the Techmarines. He had been upon Mars for mere months before the command of his primarch had sent him back, as he and his brethren were informed of the great war they would soon embark upon. A war that he continued to fight to this very day.
With a small effort, Koronos pried the face of the control panel loose. Thick armoured fingers worked with curious care over the delicate fronds of wires and circuitry that governed the bulkhead. A series of twists and manipulations awakened the system, and another bypassed the safeguards locking the chamber away. With a sonorous groan, the bulkhead’s mechanisms engaged, hauling the thick plate of reinforced adamantium aside.
‘Tybald,’ said Furax. The Apothecary nodded, extending his narthecium just within the chamber. The device warbled and clicked, tasting the stale air of the confined airtight cube of metal and plastek. Tybald withdrew his gauntlet, helm tilting as he pored over the data screed playing over its inbuilt data-slate.
‘There are no contaminants present,’ he said after a moment, looking back at Furax. ‘We can proceed.’
Furax played the light from his luminator over the barren remnants of a biological research laboratorium. One wall was dominated with more of the honeycombed racks and stasis chambers, just as empty as the one before. He scanned the centre of the chamber, the light reflecting from an object lying upon the floor. The light revealed a waist-high cylinder of dull, dusty metal, the sole object in the room.
A crackling lumen strip guttered to frantic life as Furax stepped within the chamber, granting a moment of illumination before shorting out in a brief spurt of sparks. As before, biological containment sigils adorned every surface. The Iron Warrior’s eyes remained locked to the object in front of him as he approached it.
Furax knelt before the cylinder. Its casing was bathed in the muddled green glow of his eye-lenses as he inspected it. He raised a hand, bringing it just shy of touching it with his fingertips.
‘This can’t be the entire cache,’ said Tybald. ‘This chamber alone was constructed to house dozens.’
‘It isn’t,’ said Furax. His visor wavered, clouding his display with static. He growled. His armour’s spirit had not been at peace for years, ever since the raids against the Dark Mechanicum on the fringe of Goda Prime. He disengaged his collar seals, removing his helm and sneering at the faceplate before setting it down next to him.
‘Then where are the rest of them?’
Furax ran his hand over the dust-shrouded canister, tapping the casing with a knuckle. It gave a soft, hollow ring. Empty.
‘There is nothing here,’ said Furax, his lower lip curling in frustration.
He gave the container another dismissive tap. It teetered and toppled over, crashing onto the ground with a hollow clang that reverberated through the silence of the ruined hive section.
‘Careless,’ hissed Tybald.
Furax was ready to voice a retort, to remind his brother of his place, when he froze.
No mortal would have heard the crackle of compromised seals. Despite the boon of genetically enhanced hearing, even a legionary could have failed to register the softest of gasps that escaped from within the reinforced housing.
‘Wait–’ said Furax.
The Iron Warriors leapt back. Tybald’s boots pounded against the ground and threw the accumulated dust of centuries into the air. Furax scrambled back and followed after his brother, but he was a step behind and a second late.
A trill tone squawked from the Apothecary’s gauntlet as its systems registered something in the air. Tybald barked to Koronos as he vaulted through the threshold, and the insulated bulkhead clanged shut. Heavy clunks beat a short tattoo around the doorway as it locked and sealed, separating Furax from the rest of his squad.
Furax roared as animal instinct flooded his veins. His reason was clouded, forced aside as he illuminated the dim chamber with fractured shadows cast by his power fist igniting. The rest of the squad raised their bolters, turning them upon him despite the massive bulkhead separating them.
Furax charged forwards, his power fist poised to smash down and tear the reinforced doorway from its hinges. He looked to each of their faces, and froze. The wild fury of his innate instinct for survival drained from him. The rumbling cry died upon his lips.
Furax opened his fist, the internal mechanics of each thick metal finger uncurling slowly and with a snarl as if rebelling against his control. The crackling lightning field enshrouding his power fist dissipated with a thin clap of static.
‘Brothers,’ said Furax quietly, his words a crackling rasp across the vox. ‘Forgive me, I have forgotten myself.’
In that moment, the Iron Warrior accepted his brothers’ abandonment. He made peace with the cold logic of the choice that they had been forced to make, and knew without malice that he would have done the same, had it been any of them. He made peace with the fact that here, in the darkness of a decrepit chamber deep in the bowels of a derelict hive on a forgotten backwater, a proud son of Perturabo would meet his ignoble end.
Furax straightened. His flesh was just beginning to tingle. He raised his chin, and hammered his fist against his chest. ‘For the Warsmith,’ he said, as his squad finally lowered their bolters.
‘Iron within!’ he bellowed.
‘Iron without!’ his brothers roared in reply.
‘Iron within!’
‘Iron without!’
‘Iron with–’ he snarled. The transmission degraded rapidly as the bead in his collar began to steam. ‘–in.’
Fumes began to curl from the flexible rubberised joints of his armour. Furax smashed his fist against the wall as his blood caught fire with agony. The other Iron Warriors watched in silence through the viewing block of the bulkhead as he reached down with trembling fingers and tried to affix his helmet back in place. The collar seals binding his helmet to his gorget were distorted, preventing it from closing.
‘I–’ Furax choked. ‘Iron.’ He flung his helmet away, its surface deforming and trailing thin strings of silver as the metal liquefied. He vomited a black coarse sludge that stripped the paint from his armour as it spilled down his chest. The gold and jet hazard striping adorning the plates ran together, melting into a foul ochre slick. His brothers were stalwart sons of Perturabo, yet their mettle was tested as they watched the flesh slough away from Furax’s skull, spitting black froth and slithering free from the bone.
‘Hnnng, iiirron.’ The words came as little more than a wet rattle hissing from between disintegrating teeth. Furax staggered to his knees. His left arm slid loose from his body, splashing into a spreading pool of chemical soup.
In moments, the warrior that had been Furax was gone. All that remained was a fused lump of molten iron and dissolved flesh, roughly in the shape of a legionary. Nothing, even the bones of his skeleton, remained intact as the lump bubbled away into a noxious froth on the floor of the sealed chamber.
‘Iron without,’ said Furax’s brothers, a whispered eulogy offered over yet one more casualty of the Long War, before they turned to the shadows to make their way out of the ruins of their ancient bastion.
Theron strode onto the embarkation deck, making speed towards the Pilum as he locked his weapons to the magnetic strips running down the outside of his thigh and waist. The gunship had finished refuelling, its teams of attendant servitors withdrawing as the vessel made ready to depart the Light of Iax once more.
‘Brothers?’ Theron strained, still finding the word difficult to ascribe to his new charges.
‘We stand ready, brother-sergeant,’ came the reply, as a pair of giants appeared from behind the Stormraven.
Melos and Iason were even larger within their armour. They dwarfed Theron, encased in wargear that resembled some strange melding of that of an Assault Marine and one wearing Tactical Dreadnought plate. Heavy assault packs perched upon their shoulders, surrounded by stabiliser vanes. Iason wore a helm of the same design as the other Primaris Marines beneath the protective cowl of his armour, whereas Melos looked out from a hardened sphere of ceramite, taking in the world around him through a narrow vision slit. Bulky hydraulic boot plates extended beneath their feet, snarling with powerful servos that caused the pair of Primaris Space Marines to bounce with every step taken.
Iason bore a modified heavy bolter in each fist, cut down in scale so that each was only slightly larger than a storm bolter, and able to be operated single-handed. Each of the cannons trailed ribbons of ammunition to underslung box magazines hidden behind ceramite shield plates that protected all but the weapons’ protruding barrels. Melos was armed with a pair of plasma guns of new design. They appeared to Theron to be similar to the weapon used by Helios, but where the Chaplain’s pistol was a tool of war created countless centuries ago, these were a refined reflection, gleaming from recent birth in the Martian forges and bulked to match the scale of the warrior bearing them.
Theron now understood the discipline shown as the two warriors had drilled close combat, using only techniques possible with closed fists. The weapons they held promised an impressive amount of firepower, but limited the Inceptors’ options if an opponent closed to melee range. The sergeant looked to his own implements of war, and thought of how he felt most at home in a battle bringing his chainblade to bear against an enemy’s throat. He would need to adjust his tactics to lead Iason and Melos, in order to maximise their capability on the battlefield.
‘Time is against us,’ said Theron. ‘We need to get aboard and deploy immediately.’
‘Our armour is designed for extra-orbital insertion,’ said Iason.
‘We have made the necessary modifications to the Pilum,’ added Melos. ‘We can proceed via attachment points on the hull and once we reach the planet’s atmosphere, we can deploy as our protocols and training dictate.’
Theron donned his helmet, sealing his expression away behind the crimson ceramite mask. His visor display flashed to life, bathing his retinas in tactical data readouts and detailed analysis of his surroundings.
‘However your protocols dictate, embark.’
The assault ramp of the Pilum rose to seal as Theron stepped aboard. The deck beneath his boots thrummed as the Stormraven’s drives spun up. He felt the bones of the destroyer heave, rattling as she manoeuvred against the larger cruiser drawing down upon her.
‘Get us to the surface,’ he ordered up into the cockpit.
‘Compliance,’ came the flat, lifeless reply from the gunship’s servitor pilot.
The Pilum shuddered as it lifted into the air. A building whine from behind Theron became a roar as he locked himself into a restraint throne in the crew bay, alone with his thoughts as the Stormraven blasted out into the void.