[40k] Strange Machines
A cluster of figures moved through the shadows of the access passage, urgent whispers punctuating the dull drone of machinery which throbbed within the surrounding walls. A eight pairs of feet rang in dissimilar cadence along worn metal decking as the group proceeded, skirting between pools of dirty light in the otherwise dark corridor. Furtive glances were taken over shoulders, searching for something in the murky darkness, the tangible humidity in the air conspiring to render the atmosphere of their flight all the more oppressive.
‘I don’t see any.’ Spoke a tense, male voice. It’s bearer slowing beneath a dim lumen bulb to consider the passage in their wake. A soldier by his cut, with a standard issue las carbine held in a too-tense grip. He reached up to rub a bandaged palm over his face and shaven pate, rugged skin saturated with both condensation and sweat. It was the cleanest his face had been in days. ‘D-do you think they’re going to follow us?’ The man’s hesitation was less than a moment as he quickly fell back in step to catch up with the others, plunging from the light into the shadows at their backs.
‘Doesn’t matter, Dorval. The quicker we get there the better, keep it moving.’ Anther male, towards the front of the file, barked. If the extra rough around the edges were any indicator, this would’ve been the guy in charge. If not, the sergeant’s stripes on the shoulder of his battered flak armor worked too. He carried a deactivated chainsword in one hand and a las pistol in the other and kept narrowed eyes intent upon the darkness in front of them. ‘I think I can see it, up ahead.’ The sergeant hissed after a few moment’s silence, ‘Can you confirm, cogboy?’ There was a sputter of noise from the midst of the group as one of them fell out of step. This one of lighter stature than the rest, save one, and clad in robes which marked them as a priest of the Machine God.
‘I regret I cannot do so while at a full run, Sergeant Malkien.’ As much as human emotion may have been anathema to the devotees of the machine cult and as much as a vocoder can sound sardonic, Adept Phileas did. Though for all his ill-concealed ire, he set immediately to work on a wrist-mounted data slate as the others slowed ahead of him. Another hooded individual, in similar robes, stepped away to join him. Sergeant Malkien snapped off orders to the rest of the group in the mean time, his squad. They had stopped at a junction in the tunnel which meant there were now at least two other routes by which threats could approach. ‘This will require a moment, these plans are very dated.’
That would’ve been a bit of an understatement, to say the least. The passages through which they were currently racing were nothing short of ancient. The facility humming all around them was no typical piece of terrestrial architecture but rather a large part of the vessel once known as the Gloria Vidya – the Glorious Vision. This was, as planetary history held, the original colony ship to land upon the planet which would become Thordendal many millennia ago. While it was not at all uncommon – and indeed expected – that colony ships be stripped and cannibalized for parts, it was quite rare indeed for the reactor of one of them to remain fully functional after so long a period of time. While most of the ship had been recycled and dismantled, the reactor cores and superstructure surrounding them remained as one and now stood as a proud testament to the planet’s founders. And an even prouder testament to the Techpriests who had maintained the facility through the ages. It gave their mission here and immensely bittersweet edge which was lost upon no one in the group.
Dorval took up position at the corner of one of the side tunnels with Private Farsen posting up on the oposite. Wells Farsen was the youngest of their merry band with barely eighteen years under his belt and only one of them spent in the Thordendal PDF. The kid had availed himself well since the invasion began, not once yet loosing his cool and carrying himself and his combat shotgun with far more ease than Dorval was feeling himself at that moment. The other trooper caught his look and gave a slight quirk of the lips which betrayed only a hit of unease. Dorval nodded and returned the gesture, rolling his shoulders a bit in an attempt to loosen himself up.
‘I always thought the path to glory would be a little brighter.’ He chuckled with forced mirth and Farsen smirked lightly in response.
‘There is no darkness through which the guiding light of the Emperor cannot pierce.’ As the younger trooper spoke it was Dorval’s turn to smirk. He felt a momentary pang of sympathy for the kid but quickly decided that, given a choice, he’d rather go to his death filled with that sort of unquestioning resolve rather than the nest of apprehension currently gnawing into his core. It just didn’t sit well to be on a mission where, even in success, you were guaranteed to wind up dead. Instead of lashing out with some brash retort he found himself replying simply,
‘The Emperor protects.’ He murmured, with far more conviction than he truly felt. Bostian Dorval was going to die and he simply could not live that knowledge down. No amount of the Emperor’s Grace was going to put him at ease and on top of everything else, there was those two cogboys over there piddling back and forth with one another. Nothing considered human had any business making noises like that. It always made the trooper’s skin crawl to hear devotees of the machine god make exchanges in their queer language of clicks and chirps. It wasn’t that he had a lack of respect for machines and the spirits thereof, he blessed his own rifle at least once a day while cleaning it, but he blessed it in words which could be spoken by a human tongue. Dorval tried to drown them out, concentrating on the more mundane sounds of the machinery all round them as he fixed his eyes to the poorly-lit corridor he and Farsen were covering.
After a few moments longer, Phileas approached Sergeant Malkien,
‘Honored sir, we are indeed upon the proper track.’ His augmented voice rasped as he raised a many-fingered bionic hand to indicted the portal at the end of the corridor, ‘This door will grant us access to the heart of the Vidya and from there we may proceed with the final phase of our mission.’ Malkien took this in with a nod though there was a protracted silence which hung over the group as they all exchanged looks. Phileas did not quite grasp the reason for the pause though, for completely dissimilar reasons, he had his own apprehensions in the matter.
‘Alright then.’ Malkien grumbled and picked out two of his squad, ‘Bretz and Vintoben, you two cover them while they get the door open. Make it quick.’ The two troopers nodded assent and moved off towards the end of the corridor with the Techpriests in tow. Malkien took up one of the abandoned cover positions with the last remaining member of the squad, a flamer specialist named Eicher. It was down to the wire now, the prize was within sight. Ross Malkien shifted his grip on the weighty chainsword in his hand, the promethium smell of Eicher’s idling flamer nearby was welcome compared to the stale, antiqued air of the power plant. Some part of him was silently wishing for a more glorious end than that which awaited them though he supposed he should have been more satisfied that he’d be partly responsible for preserving the fate of the whole planet. Even still, he a was a solider and the thought of dying anywhere but the thick of battle chaffed at him greatly.
Meanwhile, Dorval had successfully tuned out the now-departed Techpriests and indeed, everyone else as well. Lulled into introspection and distraction by the hum of ancient machinery. He failed to notice private Farsen trying to get his attention as he starred off into the dimness of the adjacent corridor. He failed to notice as he watched the lines of conduits winking in the near-darkness. He failed to notice the rhythmic clink-clank above the drone of machines. He failed to notice that the shadows were moving in time with it.
‘Dammit, Bostian. What the heck has gotten into you, man?’ Farsen hissed, now standing next to the paralyzed trooper, a hand gripping his upper arm. Dorval, turned to look at the younger man. Sweat trickling in glistening paths down his rugged, dumbfounded features.
He failed to notice until it was too late.
Trooper Farsen was abruptly engulfed by a flash of emerald light and the sound like a great whip of electric discharge snapped Dorval from his reverie like a kick to the chest from a grox. He fell back against the wall, staring wide-eyed at the glistening skull which used to be Wells Farsen’s face. The boy’s shotgun clattered from his hands as he dropped like so much dead weight to the metal decking. From waist up the body had been stripped to the bone: armor, uniform, skin, muscle and meat. Gone. Blood began to pool from the lower half of the man’s body, unhurriedly for there was no longer a heart present to pump it.
‘They’re here.’ Dorval was repeating the words over and over, muttering to himself as the shouts of his fellows sounded meaninglessly around him. He saw the sergeant approach and felt someone drag him away, stumbling, towards the doorway at the end of the corridor. Dorval looked down to the hand gripping him. It was Farsen’s. Still attached to his upper arm, leaking blood down the front and side of his uniform.
Sergeant Malkien cursed harshly as he heard Dorval cry out while Eicher hauled him away. Though he saw what had unnerved the trooper so and couldn’t suppress the shock of ice which shot down his spine at the sight. The sergeant holstered his sword and pistol quickly and snatched up Farsen’s fallen shotgun, ducking to cover behind the corner of the passageway just as another lashing crack of energy snapped in his direction. Whatever technology these things were using, there was no denying its lethality. But there was only two of them. Hopefully.
‘Get that damn door open, now!’ He barked, as if the others needed any further encouragement. The figures advancing through the gloom were close enough by now for him to see them clearly and it was the first time he had. The way the light shifted almost organically across their glossy exoskeletons. The lambent glow of viridian light seeping from within their chest cavities and that same light peering out with implacable malice from their death-mask faces. Ross Malkien took in all these details in the split second it took him to calmly raise his shotgun and draw a bead on the closest of the two.
The report of the shotgun was almost deafening in the close quarters and the sergeant hammered out every round in its magazine with the steady ra-chink of the weapon’s manual slide. They’d discovered early on that the enemy were very resilient to most of the weapons at their disposal but there were few things which wouldn’t buckle under the kinetic abuse of solid slugs at close range. These things were no different. Malkien watched the skeletal machination buck and twitch through the shotgun’s sights as the slugs pounded into it, denting and deforming its exoskeleton in showers of sparks. Pieces of metal flew away as the thing stumbled and was knocked off its feet by the sheer force of the repeated impacts. He’d barely fired off the last shot when the other abomination lurched forward to close the remaining distance with alarming speed.
Ross bit out another curse and lept back from the opening of the passageway, holding the empty shotgun up defensively just in time for the bladed end of the thing’s wicked, alien firearm to come arcing straight for his head; he prayed, oh how he prayed the frame of the gun would hold. There was an awful, grating noise as the curved blade hacked into the metal of the shotgun’s receiver and Malkien turned with the impact, releasing his grip on the weapon and hoping to send the fiend off balance. It didn’t work as well as he had hoped but his head was still on his shoulders and a split second later his chain sword was back in his hand. But the thing was back on the attack almost immediately and the sergeant found himself parrying aside a vicious lunge even as the teeth of his sword howled to life.
‘Come on, you son of a bitch. Let’s do this.’ He growled and swung his chainsword in a punishing horizontal arc which scrapped across the thing’s breastplate in a cascade of sparks. It was somewhat disheartening to see that the gesture had done little but dull the finish on the strange metal. Even so, if this was how he was going to meet his end then it was better by far than the alternative. Ross kept his steel and soundly struck aside another powerful but graceless thrust from the alien weapon, this time aiming his response at the exposed joint of the thing’s shoulder. That one bit. He felt the diamond-edged teeth of his chainsword claw into the softer material, chewing through fibrebundles and wiring before tearing free. The effect was immediate as the thing’s gun arm sagged and its cumbersome back sweep was easily dodged. Malkian let the momentum of the sidestep carry him around his enemy’s flank, lashing out his chainsword to rake the exposed wiring on its side. It swung a metal fist for his head but he took it on the shoulder and stumbled with the impact, a feral grin cutting his features. These things weren’t so tough. He glared into the thing’s implacable death-mask and attacked again.
Dorval had regained his senses by the time Eicher slammed him up against the bulkhead a few times, a gesture to which Adept Phileas voiced considerable objection,
‘Sirs, I simply cannot work with all that banging.’ He rasped and blurted something in binary at the other Techpriest who was presently interfacing with the door control and attempting to coerce the spirits within to grant them access in the absence of proper security chants. Phileas worked furiously at his data slate, uttering an otherwise continuous stream of machine cant as his companion worked. Whatever they were doing was obviously having an effect as the cypher runes on the door’s control panel were slowly cycling from red to green.
‘Are you in yet?’ The trooper with the flamer inquired and found himself soundly ignored. With an anxious grumble he stepped back, standing near Dorval as the two of them watched the contest raging in the middle of the junction about thirty yards distant. The competitors looked evenly matched from that distance though it was obvious that one was not moving as smoothly as the other.
‘The Sarge is winning…’ Dorval murmured, riveted to the scene since the moment he’d come back to himself. The trooper was anxiously fidgeting with the las carbine he’d miraculously managed to hang on to despite not only his bout of nerves but the repeated jarrings against the wall. Beside him, Eicher muttered something he didn’t quite catch as the dueling figures clashed again.
Pain throbbed in Sergeant Malkian’s thigh where he’d underestimated his weakened opponent once already, just as another narrowly missed his upper arm. It was time to end this, the alien machination wasn’t a formidable combatant in terms of skill but it struck with implacable strength in even the most minute blow and despite obvious damage to its metallic limbs, showed absolutely no sign of letting up until it was completely dismantled. That could be arranged. With a few more sparking blows traded, the thing came in with a sweeping strike which Ross deftly turned and struck down two-handed with his own sword into the side of the machination’s knee. He growled with effort as the teeth of his chainsword screamed, chewing into the armor joint as the force of the blow shifted the thing off balance.
On the periphery of perception he heard something, but the moment was locked between him and the soulless fiend brought low on the decking in front of him. Those glowing eyes turned upward, devoid of any hint of understanding or emotion. Malkian even wondered if there truly was a sense of malice there or if his own, human mind had simply chosen to see that in the mute, morbid visage of his enemy. In the moments during which he considered all this, he brought his sword around, watching the thing before him attempting to bring up defense even as the whirring chainsword slammed downward into its neck joint. The diamond teeth skittered for purchase, squealing as they tore into alien metal and thick wire bundles. Malkian snarled and bore down, bracing a hand on the guard of the weapon to force it onward. His chainsword whined in protest as his hand clenched, gunning it wide open. Something sharp and hot tore across his cheek, a broken tooth from his sword, but he felt and saw it finally starting to tear into his foe’s neck even as it destroyed itself in the endeavor.
Finally, the sword choked, grumbled and fell silent. In the sudden absence of noise, the sound of his own breath and the hammering of his heart seemed huge and out of control. He immediately focused on drawing himself back to the present. The light had faded from his enemy’s eyes and its head now hung limp on the ragged remains of its neck. At least he could die satisfied, knowing he had beaten one of the bastards one on one. Ross chuckled quietly as he attempted to wrench his ruined chainsword free when the nagging intrusion returned in blaring clarity:
Watch Out.
‘It won’t fire, shit! It won’t fire!’ Dorval exclaimed, fussing over his las carbine as Eicher called out to sergeant Malkian. Another emerald flash punctuated the gloom with a crack like lightening as the trooper ejected the clip of his rifle and slammed it back in place, punching the prime rune and finally receiving the tell-tale whine of positive power diffusion. Eicher had fallen to his knees, moaning something. ‘I’ve got it!’ He was already shouldering the rifle to sight in on the new threat. The battered form of the other abomination had, somehow, dragged itself up and was drawing a bead on sergeant Malkian. As his eyes focused down the peep scope of his rifle, he saw the thing’s leering eyes snap in his direction. He forced himself to focus, waiting for the weapon’s power capacitors to signal readiness. Nothing less than an over-shot would even scratch these things. Dorval ignored Eicher’s cries and settled the red dot of his sight squarely on the center of the thing’s skull-like face. As it tried to drag its hulking weapon up to bear on him, his rifle issued a ready chime.
Dorval pulled the trigger and blinding flash of reddish light connected the end of his rifle with the forehead of the alien machination for less than a split second. A sharp crack echoed off the walls and the thing fell in a heap where it stood. When he lowered the rifle, he noticed that no one was left standing in the dimly-lit tunnel junction. Nothing moved but the dirty fog which permeated the place. He heard Eicher sobbing nearby. Sergeant Malkian was already dead. Dorval stared dumbfounded down the misty corridor until a rasping voice beside him broke the numb reverie.
‘Sirs. We have access.’ The locking mechanism of the door disengaged with a riotous complaint of ancient hardware and Adept Phileas moved to drag the bulkhead portal open on corroded hinges.
