Priests of Mars Read online

‘Back,’ said Hawkins as a whipping tracery of white-hot fire lashed the walls of the corridor with a thunderclap of electrical discharge. The overpressure hurled Hawkins to the ground. He rolled and saw a servitor with an implanted static-charger unleash another blast from its ad-hoc weapon. A pair of skitarii screamed as thousands of volts burned them alive inside their armour.

  The lashing line of blue light zig-zagged over the width of the corridor, arcing across to one of the Space Marines. The warrior dropped to his knees, convulsing as his nervous system went into spasm and his skin fused with the inner surfaces of his warplate. The powerful energies writhed like an angry snake, catching two of Hawkins’s men and ripping them apart in an explosion of boiling blood and flashburned organs.

  ‘No!’ yelled Hawkins, scrambling to his feet and sighting at the servitor’s slack features.

  A flurry of bolter shells struck the servitor and tore the weapon arm from its body in a detonating flurry of bone and machine parts. A second burst tore its head off at the neck and a third opened it up from sternum to groin. Kul Gilad abandoned his steady retreat and advanced towards the servitors, his gauntlet-mounted weapon chugging out explosive round after explosive round. His Terminator armour made him mighty, and he struck the servitors like a wrecking ball. The Reclusiarch’s enormous power fist swept out and where it struck, the orks were pulped like blood-filled bags or clubbed into bent and broken shapes that couldn’t possibly live.

  The Black Templars fought at his side, his inspirational slaughter driving their own aggression and skill. Chainswords tore open orks sheathed in human skin, and bolt pistols blew out the exposed organs and bones. The Emperor’s Champion waded through the servitors, his monstrous black sword cleaving orkflesh with every strike. A cybernetic with a roaring cutting saw came at him, but the champion ducked beneath the weapon and brought his blade up to shear its arms away at the elbows. His return blow split its skull, and a spinning follow-on move sliced the legs out from an ork snapping at him with an energised cable cutter.

  ‘Reclusiarch!’ shouted Kotov. ‘More of them behind us!’

  Hawkins turned to see yet more servitors coming from farther back along the corridor, two dozen at least. Like the ones Kul Gilad and the Black Templars fought, they were a hideous confection of human skin and ork physiology married to Mechanicus technology. Worse, these ones were armed with what looked like actual weapons. Metallic bangs echoed behind them as an advancing servitor triggered its implanted riveter. Hawkins ducked as a clanging series of hot bolts smashed into the wall beside him, some ricocheting down the corridor, some embedding in the plating with a hiss of red-hot metal.

  Ten metres in front of the servitors, he saw the entrance to the stairwell, a circular iris door set within a cog and apparently locked open by rusted bearings. The steady light of functioning glow-globes spilled down from above, and no door had ever looked so inviting.

  ‘Cadians, firing line!’ he yelled, turning and running for the centre of the corridor at the entrance to the upper levels. His remaining Guardsmen ran with him, dropping to one knee beside him as he brought his rifle up to his shoulder. ‘We take them down one at a time, lads. We’ll start with that big bastard with the riveter! Fire!’

  Collimated las-fire stabbed out from the Cadian rifles, and the ork servitor slumped to his knees with half its skull blasted away. Its hull-repair gun fired in the creature’s death spasms, hammering a line of hot rivets into the deck plates and blasting the kneecap from the cybernetic next to it. A rippling salvo of shot-cannon, lascarbine and hellgun fire slashed overhead, and Hawkins risked a glance over his shoulder to see Kotov’s skitarii adding the fire of their more esoteric weapons to the fusillade. The archmagos himself fired a long-barrelled pistol of ornamented brass that sent bolts of searing plasma into the advancing hordes.

  ‘Right, the ork with the las-cutter next,’ ordered Hawkins with more calm than he felt.

  The servitor dropped with multiple lasburns searing its neck open and a pressurised squirt of blood sprayed over the walls. A second ork with a hull-plate repair cannon opened fire and one of Hawkin’s men grunted as a cylindrical void of flesh and bone was punched through the centre of his chest. The Guardsman slumped, but Hawkins didn’t dare stop firing to see if there was hope of saving him.

  ‘We can’t go on like this,’ Hawkins shouted to Kotov. ‘We need to get up those stairs.’

  Kotov nodded and turned back to where the Black Templars slew the hideous cybernetics. Though they wreaked a fearsome slaughter, they had suffered loss too. The Space Marine felled by the static-charger lay unmoving and another of their number fought with only one arm, the other severed cleanly by a set of power shears. Many others bore burn scars or sported bloody gouges in their plate where energised edges driven by ork strength had cut them open. They fought a steady retreat, forced back by simple weight of numbers and brute strength.

  In a one on one fight, the ork servitors were no match for the Black Templars, but they were six against a never-ending tide.

  ‘Kul Gilad!’ boomed Kotov, his voice augmented to deafening levels. ‘We must leave. Now!’

  The Reclusiarch gave no obvious acknowledgement of the archmagos’s words, but as he punched his fist through a servitor’s chest, he took a backward step, and his warriors came with him. The Emperor’s Champion was the last to disengage, buying time for his brethren with a devastating sweep of his sword.

  ‘Go for the stairs,’ said Kotov, turning back to Hawkins. ‘We will cover you.’

  Hawkins nodded and ran hunched over towards the open iris, firing from the hip as he went. The four other Cadians ran with him, piling through the door as Hawkins fired a last stream of las-fire on full auto. Another servitor went down as his power cell blinked empty. He darted into the cover of the door edges and snapped the charge pack from the breech before expertly swapping it for another. His men were already supplying covering fire for the archmagos by the time the cell engaged.

  Kotov’s skitarii leapt through the circular door and moved up the stairs, guns aimed at the glowing rectangle of light at the top. The archmagos knelt beside the door controls and extended his digital dendrites into the input ports.

  ‘Can you close it?’ shouted Hawkins over the din of bolter rounds and las discharges.

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ said Kotov, and bent to his work.

  Cold air, a whiff of disinfectant and the soft gurgling of fluids sounded from above, putting Hawkins in mind of a medicae bay, but one that had likely been perverted to a darker purpose. He leaned out through the door and fired into the approaching servitors. He blew an implanted drill from the shoulder of a particularly fearsome servitor, but it kept coming despite the loss.

  Kul Gilad and the Templars were withdrawing in good order, the one-armed warrior dragging the fallen Space Marine while his brothers marched in lockstep towards the irised door. The wounded Space Marine came through first, followed by the youngster that had fought Dahan. Tanna came next, then the sword-wielding Emperor’s Champion. Lastly came Kul Gilad, the Reclusiarch’s surplice stiff with blood and lubricants from the cybernetics he’d killed. His powered gauntlet shed droplets of heated blood and a plume of acrid propellant smoke issued from his storm bolter.

  ‘Hurry!’ shouted Hawkins as the implacable wave of numberless servitors closed on the stubbornly open door. Sparks flashed from the panel as Kotov’s dendrites flexed and wrestled with the enslaved machine-spirit of the lock.

  ‘And those that are exalted in the eyes of Mars shall be lauded, even by the spirits of the lowliest machine,’ barked Kotov with a complementary burst of aggravated binary. The door mechanism hissed in irritation and rusted sheets of sharpened metal began irising shut.

  An ork cybernetic appeared at the door and its colossal clamp-arm grabbed Hawkins by the front of his flak vest, dragging him back through the door. Kul Gilad snatched at Hawkins’s shoulder and his grip was like a Sentinel’s power lifter. The storm bolter unloaded into the servitor’s
face and the irising door sliced cleanly through the ork’s arm as it fell back. Hawkins collapsed onto the bottom step, nearly deafened by the close-range blast of the Reclusiarch’s gunfire. He shook off the disorientation and prised loose the severed limb from his armour as the ork’s blood pumped from the stump and into his lap.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, dropping the arm by the door as a series of booming impacts deformed the metal. Sparks and a glowing spot of light appeared at the top of the door as the servitors brought cutting tools, drills and heavy power-hammers to bear.

  ‘Thank me later,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘We need to keep moving.’

  Hawkins nodded and scrambled up the stairs after the skitarii and Black Templars.

  The room at the top of the stairs was indeed a medicae bay, one that had been created by the simple expediency of knocking down the partitioning walls that had previously divided the space into numerous workshops and laboratories. Bright lumen-strips kept the entire bay well lit, and even Hawkins’s limited understanding could tell that the entire level was given over to augmetics.

  A score of surgical slabs were laid out with geometric precision and at least a dozen had bodies stretched out on them; orks lying supine and kept immobile by adamantium fetters and copious amounts of somnolicts. Data screens suspended at the head of each occupied slab flickered with biometric readings; slowed heartbeats, lowered blood pressure and dormant brain activity.

  Hissing machines that resembled brass spiders hung from the ceiling on a host of chains, pneumatic cables and gurgling feed tubes as they performed major-level augmetic work on the greenskins. Clicking, clacking armatures with drills, scalpels, saws and laser-cauterisers, nerve splicers and bone-melders worked to amputate limbs, remove redundant organs from body cavities and otherwise prepare the host bodies for nerve grafts and replacement body parts.

  Overhead cradles transported bionic limbs, organs and cranial hoods for implantation, like an automated manufactorum producing armoured vehicles on an assembly line. The hanging spider-machines attached the new parts with relentless machine efficiency, each attachment accompanied by a tinny burst of recorded binaric chanting and a puff of incense vapour from an inbuilt atomiser.

  Rows of fluid-filled vats ran the length of the chamber, milky and opaque, and stinking of preservative fluids. A number of chrome-plated servo-skulls scooted and zipped through the air with trailing lengths of parchment dangling from their mandible calipers. Three of the walls were obscured by pale curtains that hung from the high ceiling like the scenery backdrop of a Theatrica Imperialis playhouse. Fluid drizzled down the curtains in a constant stream, dripping from the fringed bottom into collection reservoirs, where it was drained away to destinations unknown. It was impossible to tell what purpose these curtains served, and Hawkins led his Guardsmen over to the nearest, intending to check for servitors lurking behind in ambush.

  ‘To render the flesh of the xenos into a servitor is an abomination,’ hissed Kotov as he took in the full horror of the work being carried out by the transmogrification machines. ‘Only the idealised human form may be so blessed. It is unholy... No adept of the Mechanicus would ever dare sanction such techno-heresy.’

  ‘Then who did this?’ demanded Kul Gilad.

  ‘Something degenerate has taken control of this Manifold station, Reclusiarch. I desire to know exactly what that is as much as you.’

  ‘No,’ said Kul Gilad, directing his warriors forwards. ‘I care nothing for what has done this. I only want to kill it.’

  The Black Templars made their way methodically through the room, and the rotten plant-matter stink of ork blood filled the medicae as they killed the recumbent greenskins with swift thrusts of chainswords to throats. The data screens above each slab shrilled as each partially transmogrified ork was slain, and warning alarms chimed throughout the medicae. The servo-skulls descended to hover above each of the dead cybernetic hosts, a chattering stream of angry machine language burbling from the augmitters implanted in laser-cut fontanelles.

  Hawkins reached the softly swaying curtain and pulled it aside. The curtain was smooth and flexible, and even through the tough weave of his gloves Hawkins could feel a dreadfully familiar texture.

  ‘Throne of Terra,’ he said, backing away from the monstrous curtain, craning his neck to fully appreciate the nightmarish scale of it. ‘It’s skin... all of it, it’s human skin.’

  Kotov broke off from his remonstrations with Kul Gilad and approached the swaying curtain of skin, taking hold of it and rubbing it between his metallic fingers.

  ‘Vat-fresh synth-skin,’ he said. ‘Ideal for burn victims or those in need of reconstructive surgeries. It is not normally grown in such quantities, but the quality is excellent.’

  Hawkins suppressed an involuntary shudder at the thought of these disembodied acres of human skin. That it had been grown and not cut from living bodies didn’t make it easier to take that there was enough suspended skin to clothe hundreds more of these cybernetics. Why anyone would want to skin the hide from orks and replace it with human skin was a mystery to which Hawkins wasn’t sure he wanted an answer.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ he said, nauseating fear uncoiling in his gut. ‘Now. Where’s the way out? There has to be a way to the command deck.’

  Kotov nodded and said, ‘Indeed there should.’

  ‘What do you mean, “should”?’ said Hawkins. ‘Is there or isn’t there?’

  ‘The station schemata indicate that there should be numerous dividing partitions on this level, together with an elevating platform to the upper deck, but as you can see much has been altered since those plans were drawn.’

  ‘Then we don’t have a way out?’

  ‘I shall endeavour to locate an alternate route to the upper deck,’ said Kotov.

  Hawkins took a deep breath, hearing fresh impacts below as the servitor host increased their pressure on the door. With the myriad cutting tools and bludgeoning weapons at their disposal, it wouldn’t take long for those unnatural monsters to get in.

  ‘Can’t we teleport back to the Speranza?’ he asked. ‘You have that technology, don’t you?’

  ‘If we could have done that, do you not think I might have suggested it before now, captain?’ said Kotov. ‘The same interference that is blocking the vox makes such a mode of transportation impossible. In the absence of such an escape route, might I suggest you join the Templars in rendering this location more defensible?’

  Hawkins nodded, ashamed he had let his disgust at the curtains of skin blind him to the current tactical environment. He quickly directed his men to assist the skitarii and Templars in shifting heavy gurneys and banks of medicae equipment, creating a number of barricades to provide interlocking fields of fire. Storage crates, chairs, tables and workbenches were thrown down the stairs to impede the servitors, while Archmagos Kotov worked to access the Manifold station’s systems in an attempt to gain a better understanding of this abnormal situation.

  A resounding clang of metal told them that the door to the medicae had been breached. The Templars took position at the top of the stairs, their bolters aimed downwards. Hawkins and his Cadians took position at the barricades to the left of the door, while the skitarii took the right. If the advance of the servitors proved unstoppable, the Templars would retreat to a barricade in the centre of the chamber, letting the enemy walk into a killing ground of enfilading fire.

  Hawkins took position with his Guardsmen, Ollert, Stennz, Paulan and Manos. Good soldiers all, who deserved better than this.

  ‘When those bastards get up here, and they will, pour everything you’ve got into them,’ he said.

  The Guardsmen nodded, and Hawkins rested his lasrifle on the lip of an upturned workbench. Kul Gilad stood at the top of the stairs, virtually filling the space there, with two of his warriors at either edge of the opening; one kneeling, one standing. Hawkins heard the clatter of servitors breaking through the furniture and debris they’d thrown down the stairs, and knew it would
n’t be long before the dying started.

  The data screens above the corpses on the slabs flickered as they switched from displaying the whining straight lines of dead bodies to the loathsome tech-priest with the gleaming silver optics.

  ‘You are all going to die here,’ said a dozen representations of the tech-priest. ‘Your bodies will be harvested and used to replace those you have damaged.’

  ‘I’m going to shut that bastard up,’ snapped Hawkins, aiming his rifle at the nearest screen.

  The tech-priest on the screens turned to face him.

  ‘You should save your munitions,’ he advised. ‘You’re going to need them.’

  Kul Gilad took the first kill of this second wave of fighting. His storm bolter cratered the skull of the first servitor to emerge onto the stairs, sending it crashing back down and toppling the two behind it. Hawkins felt the colossal pressure of the bolter fire and smelled the biting stink of propellant as the gunsmoke accumulated in the medicae facility. The full weight of the Templars’ fire filled the stairwell with explosive death, mass-reactives detonating skulls and blowing open ribcages with every shot.

  Hawkins had no idea how many servitors were dead, but it only took a few minutes for the Templars to exhaust their ammunition to the point where they were forced to fall back. Without the continuous barrage keeping them at bay, the ork servitors easily pushed through the debris and bodies choking the stairs.

  Hawkins heard their heavy footfalls and pressed the stock of his rifle into his shoulder.

  ‘Head shots where you can,’ he said. ‘Hit them in the eyes or try and take out any cranial augmetics. Make every shot count.’

  The four Guardsmen nodded and Hawkins said, ‘For Cadia and for honour.’

  ‘Or the Eye take us,’ responded the Guardsmen.

  The first servitor reached the top of the stairs, and it was Archmagos Kotov who took the first kill. A pencil-thin beam of retina-searing white light speared from his pistol and burst the cybernetic’s head apart in a fountain of steaming blood. It toppled forwards, its augmetic legs still scrabbling at the floor as another came after it. The skitarii opened fire next, pummelling the creature with energy beams and solid rounds. Its perforated corpse fell beside the first servitor.