Aaron Dembski-Bowden - The First Heretic

‘We’re being boxed in,’ said Korus, drawing alongside. ‘Do we engage?’

‘For what? To waste shells?’ Dagotal accelerated, feeling the drag in his arms as the jetbike’s thrumming engine wailed louder. ‘Follow me.’

He veered left, taking another corner into a secondary street.

‘We can’t keep running,’ Korus growled. ‘Our fuel’s going to give out if we keep this up.’

Dagotal heard the whine of thirsty engines as his men took the corner behind him. Korus was right – their bikes’ growls were getting dry, and the squad had been playing a game of cat and mouse through these streets for hours now, scouting ahead of the Serrated Sun’s main forces.

‘We’re not running,’ he replied.

A shadow darkened the street, eclipsing the sun and filling the air with the grind of powerful engines. The sleek craft hovering overhead bore the bionic skull symbol of the Martian priesthood on its wings.

Dagotal smiled behind his faceplate. ‘We’re looking for somewhere Carthage can land.’

From beneath a red hood, three green eye lenses peered out at the burning city. This triad of visual receptors continually turned and refocused, each lens tuning to degrees of acuity that went far beyond the capacity of human sight.

‘Processing,’ the owner of the three eyes said. And then, after a pause of several seconds, during which the lenses continued to tune and retune, he added ‘Acknowledged’ in the same tone.

Dagotal’s outriders were using this chance to refuel, each Astartes filling their bike’s tanks with canisters of promethium taken from the Mechanicum lander’s hold.

Dagotal remained on his jetbike, the humming gravity suspensors pulsing quieter now they weren’t suffering strain.

‘Two Obsidians,’ he said to the three-eyed man, ‘coming this way.’ The vox was on fire with squads falling back, summoning help from the Carthage Cohort, requesting armour battalions... ‘The artificials are brutal, Xi-Nu.’

‘I am cognizant of the details, Sergeant Dagotal.’

Xi-Nu 73 was a stick-thin being, human only in the loosest sense. His red robe flapped in the heated wind, revealing an augmented body of lustreless iron bound together by industrial cabling. His arms, which he now raised in order to lower his hood, were a skeleton’s limbs constructed from contoured armour plating, ending in bronze hands with too many fingers. His face, such as it was, appeared from the lowered hood as a mess of thin wires and a noisy respiration mask, with no other discernible features beyond the green eye lenses that formed a triangle’s cardinal points.

Xi-Nu 73 had been human once – almost a century ago in the short, fragile two decades after his birth. Like all of the Mechanicum of Mars, he’d had to endure those early years living in a shell of warm meat and wet blood, until he gained the skill to purify himself.

He’d improved himself a great deal since then.

The tech-priest stood by the Mechanicum lander’s cargo ramp, overseeing the ungainly march of several towering figures. Each one was clad in dense armour plating painted in chipped coats of crimson. They stood almost five metres tall, their mechanical joints not even attempting to mimic human motion. The first two down the clanging ramp were gangly Crusaders, their long bladed arms swinging as their shoulders rocked side to side in awkward motion. Circuitry, thick and crude, was etched along the arm-swords’ edges, linking the blades to power generators in the robots’ bodies.

– Sanguine – said the first, vocalising in tinny machine tones, – standing ready –.

– Alizarin – the second intoned, – standing ready – .

The third figure to stomp down the ramp was twice the width of the first two, bulky where the Crusaders were gangly, great fists of riveted metal fused to form siege hammers. Even more than its kin, it reeked of greased machine parts and the earthy scent of lubricating oils. The Cataphract-class machine was hunched, made dense by sloping armour, and moved with even less claim to grace than the others.

– Vermillion – it droned as it clanked in line with the Crusaders, – standing ready – .

Xi-Nu 73 turned his eye lenses to regard the last machine emerging from the lander’s hold. This one seemed a compromise between its construct-kin, almost human in its posture and gait, armoured with thick plating and bearing weapons for arms. A third cannon rose from its shoulder, with ammunition belts trailing down its back, dreadlocks of bronze shells rattling with each step. Dagotal knew each of Xi-Nu’s wards, familiar with them from twelve years of sharing battlefields. This last was a Conqueror, and the primus unit of the group. It wore a Legion banner over its shoulder, and its armour plating was etched with Colchisian runes.

Several of the Word Bearers saluted this last robotic warrior. It didn’t acknowledge them.

– Incarnadine – the Conqueror declared in a voice devoid of personality, –s tanding ready – .

Xi-Nu 73 turned to the gathered Word Bearers, his eyes refocusing yet again. ‘Greetings, sergeant. Ninth Maniple of the Carthage Cohort, awaiting orders.’

Argel Tal hit the ground running, the boosters on his back cycling down as he ran. Both blades were sheathed; in his fists, a richly-inscribed bolter bucked with each fired shell. He took refuge with several of his warriors in the lowest level of a glass tower, shooting out of the stained glass windows. Whatever patterns the coloured glass once held were gone, smashed through by Word Bearers needing clear lines of fire.

The Obsidian in the street outside dwarfed them all, liberally blasting the road with streams of electrical force from its featureless face. Argel Tal reloaded, and as he slammed a fresh magazine home, he had a momentary glance of a glass shard by his boot – a fragment of the stained glass window showing a figure in golden armour.

Dagotal Squad was running interference, weaving between the artificial’s insect-legs, veering and jinking to avoid its lethal arcs of fire. Bolter shells hammered into its joints from where Torgal’s men took what cover they could find, but their efforts were little more than an irritant.

‘Xi-Nu 73,’ Argel Tal voxed. ‘We’re in position. Make this fast.’

‘Acknowledged, Seventh Captain.’

They came from behind the construct, emerging from a subsidiary road. Sanguine and Alizarin stalked forward first with all the grace of stumbling beggars, their movements a stark contrast to the liquid grace of the enemy machine. Lascannon fire streamed from the shoulder mounts of both Crusaders, carving searing scars into the Obsidian’s skin, the sludge-gleam of melted glass bright against the black. Their arm-blades came up on clanking, motorised hinge joints, slicing down to chop at the construct’s legs.

Recognising this new threat, the Obsidian span to face the Mechanicum war machines. It turned into a barrage of gunfire, shoulder-mounted heavy bolters punching shards from the construct’s face and torso with a torrent of explosive shells. Incarnadine , regal in form compared to its brothers, tracked every movement made by the enemy machine. It didn’t cease fire, even for a second. Nor did a single shot go wide.

The Obsidian’s storm-stream wasted itself, blasting up at the sky as the Mechanicum robotics knocked it off-balance.

The Cataphract-class Vermillion , as bulky as an Astartes Dreadnought, was an altogether more ponderous engine. Stocky and lumbering, it closed the distance as the Obsidian sought to right itself on its four remaining legs. Siege hammers swung in, meeting alien glass with a thunderclap’s refrain. Four legs became three – the glass machine crashed to the knees it had left.