‘The Word Bearers,’ it said, ‘are not all gone.’
‘You have no place here, tech-adept,’ Aquillon gestured with the point of his sword.
‘Correct.’ Xi-Nu 73 applied an exact amount of pressure on the trigger of the signum control in his left hand, and a massive figure made of gears and armour plating moved into view behind him. It took up the entire door arch as it gave a mechanical growl of warning. Xi-Nu 73 steeled himself to finish speaking. ‘I have no place here. But he does.’
The robot’s arms, both mounted with heavy bolter cannons, were preloaded and cycled live – they’d been powered up for hours, ready for this worst of possible moments. Cyrene hurled herself off the bed, seeking all the distance she could put between herself and Aquillon.
‘For the Legion.’ The voice was like steel bars tumbling over rock.
The Custodes were already moving, their halberds spinning, when Incarnadine opened up at them with a horrendous storm of fire.
Argel Tal sprinted up the gunship’s ramp, his boots clanging all the way into the troop bay. He was the last aboard. The vox was a hive of conflicting voices as the Gal Vorbak snapped at him to hurry. Other Thunderhawks, proud in the Legion’s grey, were already lifting off.
‘Take off,’ he ordered the pilot over the vox, unashamed by the threat of panic in his voice. ‘Get us back to the ship.’
Rising Sun shivered as its claws left the parched soil.
Argel Tal switched vox-channels. ‘Jesmetine. General, are you there?’
Distortion.
‘Answer me, Arric.’
‘Lord.’ The general was breathless. ‘Lord, they are loose.’
‘We just received the warning. Tell me exactly what has happened.’
‘They landed. The Custodes landed. They stormed the monastic deck soon after. Something has enraged them. They must have discovered the truth, though I’ve no idea how. All Euchar forces there are out of contact or already confirmed dead. One of them, one of them, is holding the corridor leading to Cyrene’s chamber. Blood of the gods, Argel Tal... he has a barricade made from the bodies of my men. Every charge sees more cut down. We cannot overwhelm one of them, let alone four.’
The Word Bearer felt the gunship lurch beneath his feet. ‘We have started primus burn, and are en route. What of Xi-Nu 73?’ Across the vox, he could hear the snap-crack of lasguns barking their payloads. More Euchar engaging in futility.
‘No word,’ the elder general replied. ‘Not a damn word. Where the hell are you?’
‘We are on our way.’ Raum? he quested.
Weak. The link was sluggish and feeble. Slumber.
The gunship climbed, its engines exhaling smoke and flame as it left the killing fields far below.
Sythran fought as he always fought: in the perfection of silence and solitude. Everything was in motion to an exacting standard – each twist of the spear haft brought the blade up to block las-fire or down to cut flesh, while each weave and duck was performed with the necessary vigour to keep him unwounded, but never left him overbalanced or needing to reposition himself. His footwork was stoic and rigid only long enough to kill the nearest soldier, before blending back into the dance of movement.
They fell back again. No, they fled.
Behind his faceplate, Sythran smiled. The bolter on his spear juddered with its release, punching explosive shells into the spines of all who were cowardly enough to turn their backs on him. The rhythmic pound of detonation after detonation made an abattoir of the hallway. Sythran went prone behind a mound of the dead, spinning his spear to hold the blade end. A clunk, a click, and the weapon was reloaded. Sythran rose again, already cutting the air with grand sweeps, batting aside the streaking laser fire.
‘Syth,’ crackled Aquillon’s voice. ‘We move.’
Sythran returned an acknowledgement blip by blinking at the affirmation rune on his retinal display. More Euchar, so very proud in their dull orange fatigues, came charging down the corridor. Sythran leapt his cadaver barricade and met them head on. They fell in pieces, and beyond a las-burn along his shoulder guard, the blood on his blade was the only evidence he’d even been fighting. The corridor was clear for now, populated by dead fools who’d believed they could bayonet him where their fellows had failed. Sythran looked over his shoulder in time to see his brothers emerge from the witch’s cell. But only two. Nirallus and Aquillon, their armour pitted and cracked by incendiary fire.
Perhaps they detected his questioning glance without seeing his face, for Aquillon said ‘Kalhin is dead. We must hurry.’
Well did he mark the blood shining on Aquillon’s sword point.
Xi-Nu 73 sighed. It vocalised from his rebreather mask as an insect’s buzzing. The sensory inhibitors lining his nerves like insulating cable around wire were doing all they could, but they failed to entirely mute the pain of shutting down. Shutting down? Dying. In his final mortal moments, he couldn’t resist the biological descriptor. Such resonance. Dying... Death... So dramatic.
He laughed, and made more static-laden buzzing. It became a cough that tasted of spoiled oil.
With his one remaining hand, the adept started the laborious task of dragging himself across the floor. A potential subroutine to this task presented itself as he moved. Could he not stop halfway and examine the corpse of the human female?
A cost/benefit analysis flickered in his thought-core. Yes. He could. But he would not. The subroutine was discarded. His hand clawed at the smooth deck, and he dragged himself another half-metre with the squeal of his metal body along the floor. All the while, functionality statistics formed charts behind his eyes. He realised there was a chance, though small, that he would terminate before he reached his objective. It spurred him on, while the bionic nodules attached to his few remaining mortal organs stimulated the fading flesh with jolts of electrical energy and injections of emergency chemicals.
The tech-adept was blind by the time he reached his destination. His visual receptors had failed, as blank as a monitor with no power. He felt his hand clank against his intended target, and used the motionless bulk to pull himself closer. The fallen robot was a toppled statue, a fallen avatar of the Machine-God, and Xi-Nu 73 embraced it as one would a beloved son.
‘There,’ he murmured, barely hearing his voice as his aural receptors failed next. ‘Duty done. Honoured. Name inscribed. In. Archive of. Visionary. Merit.’ His throat vocaliser failed at the last word, leaving him mute for the remainder of his existence.
Xi-Nu 73 expired twenty-three seconds later as his augmetic organs powered down without hope of restarting. He would have taken no pleasure at all in the irony that his withered organs of meat strove on for half a minute more, still trying to feed life through a body that couldn’t process it.
The chamber remained still and quiet for only a short while. Booted footfalls soon drummed down the hallway, heralding the arrival of more inhumans.
The figure in crimson armour stood in the doorway, framed against the bloodstained wall behind. He waited there without moving, unable to accept what lay before his eyes.
‘Let me through,’ said Xaphen.
Argel Tal stopped him with a glare, and went inside himself.
Xi-Nu 73 lay in embryonic repose, curled foetally beside Incarnadine’s cracked and broken shell. The robot was in complete ruin, its armour riven into a hundred chopped canyons inflicted by hacking blades. The war machine’s banner-cloak and oath scrolls were likewise ravaged, reduced to shredded rags. The walls and floor had fared no better. Holes showed through the sides of the armoured chamber into adjacent rooms, and where the walls still stood whole, they were cratered by punishing bolter fire.