Wrath of Iron Read online

  ‘The assault on the hives will come soon,’ said Morvox, turning back to Khatir. ‘Why are we not preparing for that? Mortals can do this work.’

  Khatir didn’t reply immediately. Morvox stared into the Iron Father’s helm-mask, sensing nothing of the mood underneath.

  Perhaps Khatir no longer had moods. The Iron Father had been inducted into the Chapter a long time ago, and Morvox knew that much of his body would be augmetic. Some of those changes were surface-visible: an evidently bionic right leg and lower right arm. Like all members of the Chapter, his left hand had long been replaced with a mechanical facsimile, and it was likely most of his internal organs were either vat-grown substitutes or full-metal analogues.

  Eventually, the Iron Father turned away from him, saying nothing. That was the only answer Morvox required.

  I should not have asked the question, he thought.

  Khatir snaked carefully higher up the crater slope, grinding his boots through the ash as he went. The sight was incongruous – like watching a giant ironclad beetle burrowing its way across a patch of broken earth. Once at the top, a faint whirr gave away subtle adjustments to Khatir’s bionic optics.

  Morvox shuffled his way to Khatir’s side. Moving slowly, he lifted his helm above the crater’s edge, and let his helm filters sort through the clouds of black dust in front of him.

  Ahead, no more than two hundred metres distant, was the object of their assignment.

  The Gorgas had once been a thriving industrial zone, jammed with overspill manufactoria from the main hive cluster. Morvox remembered absorbing the tactical data while aboard the Kalach with the rest of the clave: 2.3 million inhabitants (estimate); 87 per cent employed in heavy/mid-heavy industry; 12 per cent military levy; prodigious, if irregular, production quotas; minimal protective establishment.

  It had been that last fact that had doomed it. Once Territo’s Navy blockade had commenced the fire from orbit had been relentless. With no voids to speak of, the Gorgas had been turned, within hours, into a havoc of burning metal and exploding incendiaries.

  An orbital barrage of such magnitude left little behind it but dust. Morvox looked carefully from left to right at the results, unconsciously absorbing the terrain detail and assessing the best route across it.

  Metal struts lay in twisted, skeletal piles across the pitted earth. A few walls remained in place, though most had been blasted apart, leaving empty, gaping spaces open to the elements. Promethium fires still burned in isolated patches, fed by the parchment-dry air and desiccated soils.

  On Morvox’s left flank lay the ruins of a standard-pattern Ecclesiarchy chapel. The outlines of prefab stone angels were still visible lurking in the rubble, and their empty, cracked eyes gazed up at the heavens from where punishment had come.

  On his right, by the look of the wreckage, had been a collection of old hab-units. The blocks must have once been six, maybe seven, storeys; now they were little more than indeterminate heaps of debris with the occasional steel doorframe poking up from the ruin.

  2.3 million inhabitants.

  Concentrate.

  Directly in front of the crater was the target – a defence bunker, semi-buried by debris. Two of its turrets still looked operational. Morvox zoomed his helm-display in on them, judging fire capacity and arc coverage.

  ‘Two active fire-points,’ said Khatir, confirming. ‘Swivel-mounted cannons. Some small-arms from the walls.’

  Morvox swept his gaze across the visible sections of the bunker walls, noting where long slits allowed the occupants to launch defensive fire. Like all the bunkers dotted across the Gorgas, the structure was hexagonal and low-profile. Morvox knew the basic pattern from experience: a central chamber within, containing anything up to a hundred troops, would lead to a connecting tunnel network behind.

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Khatir.

  ‘No,’ said Morvox. ‘That’s all we need.’

  The Iron Father nodded, and Morvox signalled the attack plan to the rest of the squad in the crater below.

  ‘Twin-flanks, standard split,’ he voxed. ‘We’ll take the doors.’

  The Iron Hands moved instantly, none of them uttering a word but silently hoisting weapons into place and creeping up the slopes of the crater. The tactical squad split into two groups, the squad’s support weapons dividing between them. Morvox watched Brother Gergiz hoist a lascannon on to his shoulder just as Brother Sulzar did the same with the huge bulk of a missile launcher. Despite the weight of their weapons the two specialist Iron Hands moved nearly as quickly and smoothly as their unburdened brothers.

  Morvox made a final assessment of distances before glance-checking his own bolter.

  ‘Forty-five seconds,’ he voxed to the group. ‘Suppression on twenty.’

  The two teams clambered over the edge of the crater, one heading left, the other heading right. Skirting wide and ducking under the plentiful cover of the ruins, they slipped into the darkness on either flank.

  Morvox and Khatir remained in the crater. The Iron Father didn’t carry a ranged weapon in his hands, but that didn’t make him any less dangerous than Morvox: his mag-locked thunder hammer and gauntlet-mounted flamers made Hervel Khatir a daunting prospect up close.

  Morvox watched his chrono carefully, barely noticing the runes on his proximity scanner showing the two halves of his squad getting into position on either side of the bunker.

  Twenty seconds came up. Heavy weapons fire suddenly streaked out into the smog. A las-beam snapped out from Gergiz’s position, as wide as a man’s arm, and cracked into the bunker’s left side. At the same time, a missile screamed across from the right, impacting in a booming crash. Bolter fire followed, heavy and accurate, splintering and shattering the bunker’s outer armour.

  One of the turrets, already damaged by the missile impact, was knocked out by the torrent of bolter rounds. The other one swung around to target the source of the lascannon blast. It unleashed a hail of return fire, but Morvox didn’t need to consult his display to know that Gergiz had already moved on and was readying for another strike.

  A volley of las-beams shot out from the bunker. The aim from the men within was reasonably disciplined, but they couldn’t hope to hit much at such range and with such poor visibility. More bolter rounds impacted on the edges of the firing slits, cracking the lips of the rockcrete.

  ‘Five seconds,’ announced Morvox, more out of habit than necessity – Khatir had already readied two grenades.

  By then the defensive fire had split into two. Las-beams shot out to the right and left of the bunker, frantically searching for targets hidden in the wreckage around it. The remaining autocannon turret managed to get a few more shots away before the weight of incoming bolter fire broke it open. Its barrels exploded with an echoing crump, sending shrapnel spinning high into the air.

  ‘Zero,’ said Morvox, and both he and Khatir exploded into movement.

  The two Iron Hands broke from the edge of the crater and charged straight towards the bunker. As soon as they emerged into the open, the suppressing bolter fire from the hidden Iron Hands on both flanks altered direction, aiming higher and avoiding the leading edge of the bunker wall.

  Khatir and Morvox went quickly, veering and weaving around the plentiful cover, each with primed grenades in hand. Neither uttered a word – they ran silently, burning up the ground between them and the bunker walls like a pair of Medusan night-ghouls. The defenders inside the bunker concentrated their fire on the enemies they knew about, firing volley after volley out to the left and right flanks.

  Morvox reached the bunker doors first and slammed his body into the wall to their left. At shoulder height was a narrow slit through which the defenders could fire. Morvox threw his grenade through the gap and crouched down.

  As it went off, Khatir reached the other side of the doors. He shoved one of his own grenades through the firing slit
on his right even as scream-laced explosions from Morvox’s grenade broke out from inside the bunker. The doors bulged outwards, but held.

  Khatir mag-locked his final grenade against the damaged doors, and crouched away from the explosion just as Morvox had done.

  The two blasts went off together, wrapping the doors on either side in a crippling embrace of rolling flame. The door-metal buckled, cracking along its length.

  Even before the blast-shock had died away, Khatir and Morvox had risen to their feet. They dropped shoulders in unison and crashed straight into the reeling barrier. The tortured metal shattered under the heavy impact.

  Morvox straightened up and swept his bolter round in a low arc, scything through the dazed ranks of defenders ahead of him. Khatir opened up with his flamers, flooding the narrow space in a curtain of blood-red immolation. The claustrophobic interior was immediately filled with a riot of colour, noise, screaming and panic.

  Morvox strode into the heart of it, calmly picking his targets. He sent short bursts of bolter rounds into those few defenders still capable of mounting some kind of resistance. Any who somehow got through his barrage were met with the embrace of Khatir’s flamers.

  Unleashed into combat, the Iron Father was a terrifying prospect. He went slowly, purposively, doling out streamers of fire from both clenched fists. Flames wrapped around his coal-black gauntlets, echoing the red of his helm-lenses. The visible metallic extensions to his armour, each of them looking like arcane torture devices from a lost age of nightmares, reflected the swirling patterns of destruction.

  The two Iron Hands cleansed the bunker interior with cool efficiency. Neither spoke – they killed in silence, working from one side of the chamber to the other, purging the crowded space clean of life.

  As they neared the far side, the remainder of Clave Arx joined them inside. Their heavy boots crunched through flak-jackets, armour plates and bones as they strode across the carpet of the slain. Just like Morvox and Khatir, they went silently.

  Morvox reached another set of doors at the far end of the chamber.

  ‘Fierez, Malloch: secure the bunker,’ he voxed, reloading his bolter. ‘All others, with me.’

  As Morvox spoke, Khatir strode up to the doors. He grabbed them in both hands and wrenched them open, pulling one clean from its frame. A tunnel led steeply down beyond, lit sparsely by faulty strip-lumens. Ten metres down the tunnel was another closed doorway.

  Khatir paused for a second. Morvox could see the tell-tale flicker of his lens-mounted augurs as they ran a scan of the space beyond the closed doors.

  ‘Multiple targets on the far side,’ he reported. ‘Take it out.’

  Sulzar stepped up, his missile launcher loaded and mounted on his shoulder. The rest of the clave withdrew, and Sulzar pressed the trigger.

  A muffled explosion cracked out, and the entire tunnel disappeared in a maelstrom of dust and splintered metal. A cloud of earth flew back up through the open doorway, covering Sulzar in a layer of filth and blooming out into the ruined bunker chamber. The lumens in the tunnel smashed, throwing it into near-complete darkness.

  Morvox strode into the breach, not waiting for the debris to clear. His helm compensated for the low-vis, picking out targets amid the gloom. He saw two bodies reeling towards him, and sent bolter-rounds through both of them.

  ‘Caution,’ came Khatir’s voice over the vox. ‘I have residuals on the–’

  Even as the Iron Father spoke, another body emerged from the clouds of dust. Morvox fired at it, but it shifted left, moving quickly. In its wake came another one like it – a humanoid figure, moving strangely, leaping from the tunnel walls like a simian and apparently unharmed by the explosion.

  The one Morvox had missed lurched up towards him with a blade in its left hand. Morvox had a brief impression of two glowing eyes hurtling towards him before he lashed out with his gauntlet, crunching his armoured fist into the creature’s face and sending it tumbling back the way it had come. He spun on the ball of his right foot, backhanding its companion into the tunnel wall. As the creature bounced and crumpled down to the floor, he got a better look at it.

  It was human-shaped, though slightly bigger than the soldiers who’d manned the bunker’s main chamber. Close-fitting armour enclosed its limbs, though the head was uncovered, revealing grey skin and luminous purple eyes. For a moment he thought of the xenos genestealers he’d faced on Terarga, but then he saw the marks of mutation and recognised features that had once been human.

  More of them raced up the tunnel, and Morvox heard the whine of Khatir’s flamers gearing up. He pressed himself back against the tunnel wall just as a storm of blue-tinged flame thundered past him, slamming into the oncoming mutants and withering them instantly. They screamed and thrashed as they burned, tearing at their popping eyes and rolling on the ground in agony.

  Khatir strode past, feeding the conflagration. Morvox fell in behind the Iron Father. With Khatir in the lead, the clave swept down the length of the tunnel and broke through the demolished doorway at its base.

  Beyond it was another chamber, ten metres across and cut roughly from the earth. Cables hung from the ceiling, fizzing angrily and throwing bizarre flickers of light across the space. Cogitator banks, destroyed by the missile blast, vomited showers of sparks across the floor as their machine-spirits dissipated. A series of pict screens around the edge of the room showed nothing but static.

  Several more mutants sheltered there, some carrying projectile weapons, but their presence was an irrelevance. In the centre of the room lurked something else – a bloated monster of a man, over four metres tall and sickeningly obese. Folds of milk-white blubber, glistening with sweat, trembled as the creature swung its flabby arms around it. Its chins wobbled as its jaws opened, revealing several rows of teeth and a black flailing tongue. Its eyes were entirely white-less, and what remained of its podgy legs had folded under its massive bulk, broken and useless.

  As the Iron Hands burst into the chamber, it whipped two flails sharply across at Khatir. The lashes were studded with dozens of spiked balls that detonated when they struck the Iron Father’s battle-plate, dousing him in a hail of tiny spore explosions.

  Khatir staggered, and the gouts of flame from his gauntlets faltered.

  Morvox took aim and fired. The round punched deep into the creature’s flesh with a wet pop – and disappeared. No detonation rang out, and the monster merely winced as its blubber closed over the wound.

  ‘Blades,’ ordered Khatir, unlocking his thunder hammer from his back with a flourish. Its disruptor field rippled along the killing edge, piercing in the dusty darkness.

  Morvox complied, stowing his bolter and unsheathing his own weapon, a wide-bladed short sword with a serrated lower edge.

  Then the Iron Hands got to work, punching and slicing with their weapons, moving in concert and spreading out to evade each other’s blows. Sulzar and Gergiz discarded their heavy weapons and went after the lesser mutants, leaving the remaining nine to attack the primary target.

  The creature lashed out wildly, flinging its flails in whistling arcs. Every time one of the spiked barbs connected bursts of spores would explode from the impact. The particles clogged in airways and between armour-edges, burrowing deep and eating through metal like acid.

  Morvox drove in close for a decisive stab and took a flail across the face of his helm. The force of the blow knocked him back a pace and his lenses clouded, swarming with spores. He jabbed out blindly and felt his blade bite. The edge sank deep into what felt like tar and was nearly pulled free of his grip. He hauled it out as his vision cleared, just in time to see the wound he’d inflicted close up.

  He tensed, ready to dive back in. Only then did he see Khatir make his move. The Iron Father leapt high, propelled sharply upwards by his power armour, his hammer held above his head and pointing down.

  The creature swung round, almost g
etting a limb in the way, but didn’t move fast enough. Khatir swooped down onto it, plunging his hammerhead deep into the creature’s neck. As he slammed the weapon down, the disruptor flared into crackling brilliance.

  The creature screamed, its head locked back and almost severed clear by the wound at its neck. Khatir dragged the hammer down, using his momentum to carve a long, jagged rent from throat to chest. The disruptor field ripped the monster’s blubber open, revealing a throbbing, bloody pulp within.

  Morvox powered forwards, swiping his blade as he charged. The other Iron Hands did likewise, ignoring the threat of the flails and jointly stabbing their swords deep into the flesh of the lurching mutant.

  Clear fluids pumped out of six separate wounds, spraying across the black shells of the Iron Hands’ armour. The monster shrieked with pain, but its resistance swiftly became enfeebled. Lines of oil-black blood ran down from its eyes as heavy slabs of fat and sinew slapped to the floor.

  Khatir crunched deeper with huge, shuddering blows. A flail came down across his exposed breastplate, but he shrugged it off. With a final whirl, he spun his thunder hammer around and switched back across at the creature’s bleeding neck. The head of it passed straight through, decapitating the monster with a flurry of blood, pus and fat. Its bulbous head flew through the air, eventually landing with a moist smack against the dirt floor.

  The rest of its body twitched for a moment, still upright, before it slumped in on itself, subsiding in a slow-moving welter of sliding, toppling blubber.

  Morvox withdrew from it carefully, watching for sudden movement.

  None came. The remaining mutants had been killed, and the chamber fell quiet again. The last echoes of the fighting died away, to be replaced by the gentle bubbling of the monster’s collapsed innards.

  Khatir stalked over to where the creature’s head had fallen, and picked it up.

  ‘I will take this back,’ he said. ‘Lord Telach will wish to study it.’

  Morvox nodded, letting his sword fall so the fluids on it could run free of the metal. As he did so, he noted autopsy readings scrolling across his retinal display. No life signs remained; the bunker had been cleansed.