and augmetics whirring as they lent immense power to the blow. Placing a heavy foot upon the
downed warrior’s chest, buckling his power armour, the Praetorian levelled its cannon towards the
Word Bearer’s helmet, which was torn to shreds beneath the power of the burst of fire it unleashed.
The headless corpse twitched as it died.
Burias-Drak’shal caught a swinging, metal arm in one hand and with a powerful twist ripped it
from its mechanical socket. Lashing out with his other hand, he slashed his claws across the head of
another, tearing its red blinking eye free and ripping away a chunk of skull and brain with it. A
spinning cannon was levelled at his back, but he spun around, the daemon within him sensing the
danger. He knocked the weapon to the side using the Skitarii’s dismembered arm as a club. Gunfire
burst from the barrels, tearing apart a pair of Praetorians.
A heavy blow smashed into his head and Burias-Drak’shal staggered to the side, straight into
another swinging metal arm that smashed into his high gorget. He was slammed backwards, falling
to the floor of the roaring Gorgon, and a multi-barrelled cannon swung around towards him. The
barrels of the gun were shorn off with the sweep of a power sword and a burst of bolt fire knocked
the Skitarii backwards, allowing Burias-Drak’shal the time to regain his feet.
He came up fast, the talons of one hand swinging up in a slashing uppercut, ripping the head
from a Praetorian, even as the warrior-brother that had saved him was slain, a hole appearing in his
chest as a burst of cannon fire ripped through him. Holy Astartes blood splashed over Burias-
Drak’shal’s face, congealing even as it landed on his pale skin, and he grabbed the rotating cannon
in his hands as it swung in his direction. The barrels halted instantly under his daemonic, crushing
grip. He wrenched the metal out of shape and smoke rose from the mechanics of the weapon.
With a barked roar, he slammed his fist into the Praetorian’s head, pulverising its skull. Burias-
Drak’shal hurled it into one of its comrades, slamming it against the thick metal interior of the
Gorgon.
The next minute passed in a flurry of bloodshed and gunfire. Burias-Drak’shal alone stood on
his feet. Every Skitarii had been ripped and hacked apart, and lay twitching and sparking on the
floor of the superheavy vehicle. His fallen brethren lay unmoving, their souls having passed on to
the Ether.
Burias-Drak’shal reached out and gripped a heavy, metal hatch, the metal bending out of shape
beneath his grip as he wrenched it from its hinges. A withered servitor was revealed, hard-wired into
the cabin of the vehicle, its sightless eyes staring forward and its arms connected directly to the
gearshift and steering column of the tank. He grabbed the wretch around its throat and ripped it out
of the cabin amid a shower of sparks and pale, sickly blood. It was ripped in half, its lower torso still
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attached to the machine, and its mouth moved soundlessly as milky fluid rose in its throat. The
super-heavy vehicle came to a halt.
Burias intoned the words of binding and Drak’shal was pushed back within, fighting against the
strength of its master. The overgrown tusks that protruded from his mouth retracted painfully and
his long talons receded back into his hands. His posture straightened and he was once again the
elegant, controlled warrior, though his body was ravaged and exhausted, the after-effects of
possession.
“Coryphaus,” he spoke.
“Speak, Icon Bearer,” said the vox reply.
“Met the foe, head on,” said Burias, breathing heavily. “My warriors fought well. More have
advanced around us. Beware the Gorgons.”
“Acknowledged.”
“You wish me to return to the bulwark, Coryphaus?”
“No. The enemy has committed to the attack. They may have left their command unprotected.
Continue your advance. Drive through them and kill their commanders. Succeed and the Cult of the
Anointed will embrace you, young one.”
Wiping blood from his face, his breathing having almost returned to normal, Burias nodded his
head.
“It will be done, my Coryphaus.”
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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The anti-aircraft batteries tore the heavens apart overhead, but the Warmonger was focused only on
the Leman Russ battle tank climbing the embankment towards him. The Dreadnought stood
motionless as a battle cannon shell streaked past its shoulder and its armoured plates were peppered
with explosive heavy bolter rounds.
The Warmonger stepped heavily to the side, into the path of the tank. As it breached the top of
the battlement, its front lifting up into the air, the Dreadnought reached up with its massive power
claw and brought the vehicle to a screaming halt. Servos groaned as it held the tank and its huge
mechanical feet slid backwards beneath the vehicle’s weight and momentum. Its underbelly was less
armoured than its front and the Warmonger fired its weaponry, the rapid firing rounds punching
through the undercarriage, shredding the weakling mortals within and tearing through the Leman
Russ’s vital systems.
The Chaos Dreadnought’s servos whined as it exerted its strength and pushed the tank back the
way it had come, sending it toppling end over end down the embankment to smash into the front of
another battle tank.
“Kill for the Warmaster!” the Dreadnought roared as it re-fought the battle for the Emperor’s
palace in its damaged mind. “Destroy the Emperor, the betrayer of the Great Crusade!”
Bodies fell all around Kol Badar. Many of them were already dead, though their timed grav-chutes
were in operation and slowed their descent mere metres above the ground. Still, thousands of living
drop-troopers were landing all along the second tier and the open space behind the first, and he fired
off controlled bursts left and right as he killed.
The attack had been well coordinated, timed to perfection. The first drop-troopers had landed
just as the line of tanks had emerged from the cloud wall and just after a scything attack run by air
that had cost him many warriors and war machines of the dark gods.
It was a well-organised attack, but one that was ultimately flawed. Given an inordinate amount
of time, the enemy would prevail, for their numbers were great, but time was not on the Imperials’
side. Even he, Kol Badar, who felt the touch of the dark gods only faintly, could feel the birth
tremors of the Gehemehnet. He knew that the enemy would feel it too. They would be fearful and
rightly so.
In the meantime, the enemy would die upon his warriors’ blades.
The haemonculus attached to Techno-Magos Darioq via aqueduct cables flooded his system with
suppressants and holy vital fluids, filtering his veins and cables for viruses. Red robes hid the
tumorous, cancer-ridden flesh of the stunted creature that had been bred in the nutrient tanks of
Mars. It diverted the diseases and weaknesses of the flesh into itself so that they did not afflict him;
such was its purpose in life.
He quoted the fifteenth Universal Lore to himself, “Flesh is fallible, but ritual honours the
machine-spirit”, and he intoned a prayer to the Omnissiah as his system was cleansed.
Nevertheless, he recognised something amiss within the frail remnants of his flesh body and he
opened up the cortex channels to the right-hand side of his brain in order to determine its purpose.
Synapses sparked and he realised that what he felt were crude and fleshy emotions: tension,
trepidation and anger.
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Such base, human things, emotions, yet he found them intriguing as well as deplorable.
It had been a long time since last he had stepped foot upon planet c6.7.32, what the Elysians
called Tanakreg. He accessed the hard memories of his secondary brain units and one of the myriad
arrays of screens within the control centre of his airship flashed with data.
It showed his report to the Fabricator Tianamek Primus, dated over two thousand years earlier,
though his current brain units had no record of him having scribed them.
Access to primary expeditionary focus/purpose denied. Magos Metallurgicus Annonus unable to
determine material make-up of structure. Impervious. Logis cogitator augurs recommended path—
terraform c6.7.32 and dissemble discovery. Magos Technicus Darioq to fabricate auditory station,
and post watch over c6.7.32.
That was the source of the alien emotions of tension and trepidation that he had felt in the past
two millennia. None had sought out that which he had been unable to breach, yet here was a
powerful enemy of the Omnissiah on c6.7.32. It was imperative that they did not uncover the
structure that he had gone to such pains to eradicate from all Imperial and accessible Mechanicus
records.
But anger had nothing to do with the exploratory expedition he had led. That strange, hot temper
had been brought upon him by the nature of the foe. He could feel the affront to the Machine-God in
their essence, in the unholy constructions that they had defiled beyond all heresies.
Their machines, infused with the essence of daemonic warp entities, were the greatest corruption
that the adepts of Mars could contemplate, a blasphemy that made all other blasphemies pale. All
thinking machineries of the Mechanicus had souls within their flesh, for a soulless sentient machine
is the epitome of true evil. And upon the battlefield, raging beyond the concealing clouds of blindsmoke,
were machineries that had been polluted by their merging with the soulless entities of the
warp. A soulless sentience is the enemy of all.
Such heresies were utterly wrong and Darioq was both revolted and horrified by how low the
Legion of the Word Bearers had stooped. He shut off the receptors and synapses that synched his
right brain hemisphere and the uncomfortable feelings instantly vanished. All that remained was the
irrefutable fact that the enemy made use of sacrilegious, dangerous machineries that were an affront
to his god and that they needed to be neutralised, their heresies eradicated and their hold over
c6.7.32 removed.
His mechadendrites plugged into the central control column and, connected as he was to the
delicate sensors on the outside of the hull, he registered the field of disruption that spread out in a
cone from the enemy’s tower. At his impulse, the command ship was lowered towards the ground. It
was imperative for him to maintain contact and hence control over his thousands of Skitarii
warriors. If he were cut off from them and his adepts then his entire army would grind to a halt.
Vast turbine engines rotated in their housings as the airship began to descend, the linking cable
that connected it to the holy Ordinatus Magentus drawing it in towards the docking station on its
upper deck.
One of the servo-arms of Darioq’s quad-manifold rotated, whining softly, and its clamp-like
jaws eased open.
“Enginseer Kladdon, open the hiemalis chamber and bring forth my blessed cogitation units.”
One of the red-robed junior priests behind him lowered the head of his power halberd in respect
for his master’s order and stepped towards one of the walls of the command centre. He spoke the
words of awakening as he pressed the buttons of the hiemalis unit ritualistically, timing his speech
to coincide with the correct sequence of buttons. With a blessing to the machine-spirit he gripped
the sunken circular handle and, as he incanted the correct words beseeching the unit for its
acquiescence, he pulled the drawer open.
Fog billowed from the unit as the ice-cold air within reacted to the heat outside. Held within a
long shelf were over a dozen carefully stored bell jars. Within each jar was a blessed brain
hemisphere held in static charged null-liquid. One of Darioq’s servo-arms reached forward,
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hovering over several of the jars before the magos selected the required unit, and his servo-arm
gently lifted it free.
Another servo-arm folded down and grasped the top of one of the bell jars protruding from the
massive power generator he bore, and as he muttered the required intonations of supplication,
mechadendrites whirred as he loosened the cog-shaped bolts fixing the bell jar to him. Needle-like
incision spikes clicked out of the centres of other mechadendrite tentacles and were carefully
inserted into the cog-shaped holes revealed with the removed bolts. They turned and with a hissing
sound the bell jar was lifted clear. He felt the loss of information and processing power of the brain
unit like a vague emptiness within him.
Swiftly and precisely he placed this brain unit within the gap in the hiemalis unit and attached
the new bell jar to his core systems. Fresh information that he had not accessed for many centuries
flooded through him, including memories and algorithms that had departed from him completely
when he had disconnected the brain unit.
Much of the content of this brain unit would have been classed as heretical by some of the
priesthood of Mars, but Darioq had felt driven to re-synch with the hemispheres within the bell jar.
This was the unit that he had utilised when he had been part of the explorator team that had first
investigated planet c6.7.32, and it had none of the synapse burns that altered and neutered many of
the right brain functions.
This was a creative brain unit. Only a few secretive and covert members of the priesthood would
dare to access such a component. The knowledge of the ancients stands beyond question, the tenets
said, and for him to utilise a creative thinking brain unit to make adaptations and improvisations to
mechanics, as he had done in the past when wired into this particular bell jar, was at best the height
of hubris and, at worst, heresy of the worst kind.
His devotion to the Machine-God, Deus Mechanicus, and its conduit manifestation, the
Omnissiah, was unwavering. To deny the effectiveness of such a creative drive when prescribed
methodology would fail was abject foolishness, but even as these thoughts ran through his mind, he
recognised the danger inherent within them. He must not utilise this brain unit for long periods, or
he risked his whole being. Such dogmatism is folly, he thought. I must retain my dogmatism, he
thought. The conflicting impulses gave him pause, but the new addition was the more dominant
presence.
“Tech-priests, go forth and ready the plasma reactors of the Ordinatus. And bring the void
shields up to full power.” Magos Technicus Darioq said. The robed figures bowed their cog-bladed
