They must not be allowed to cross the bridge. A Warlord would wreak untold havoc among the evacuating Mechanicum. But wounded and drained, she knew her chances of survival were at best insignificant. Even with Black Sky aiding her, it would be two gravely wounded Ignatum engines against two fresh foes.
<Retreat,> she canted to the injured Black Sky. <Fall back to the evacuation zone. Live! Survive to fight once more on the surface of Mars! I will deal with these apostates.>
So be it. The Scion would make her last stand here.
The very heart of the Great Work. As fine a place as any, and far finer than most.
Missiles streamed past the withdrawing Reaver, leaving smoke trails in the mist. Launched in haste by unlocked targeting systems, they had precious little hope of impacting at such a range. None of them even brushed Black Sky’s voids.
<Sanctuary,> the Reaver canted as it reached the bridge end. Its code was laden with relief at survival as well as shame at needing to withdraw. Contemptuously, it ground an abandoned Rhino into the wraithbone avenue. Just another smear of wreckage amidst the devastation. Before their arrival, the alien necropolis had been bare of anything but smooth, gleaming bone. Now it was a graveyard for numberless vehicles and unburied corpses. They blanketed the roadways and bridges, a dark swathe between buildings of pale bone.
<Sanctuary,> Scion confirmed. Black Sky veered slowly away, stalking towards safety.
Across the span, the first of the enemy engines began its approach. The Warlord was undamaged, its sloping and scaled armour typical of forge world Omadan’s engines. The open hand of the forge’s symbol showed scarification upon the palm, runic scarring in patterns that resembled no known language for the Scion to process.
The Warhound loped past and ahead of its slower brother, its hunchback swaying, gunlimbs rising. It crossed the bridge far faster, and the Scion noted the riven markings of its own power fist gouged along the second engine’s back.
You die first.
She was destined to be left here, but she would choose her own death. With hydraulic majesty, the Scion of Vigilant Light rose to her final challenge, war-horn blaring.
The Archimandrite lifted its fist. The rebel legionary thrashing in its one-handed clutch barely even strained the hydraulics of the war machine’s grip. Two bolt shells hammered against the durabonded thickness of its facial armour, causing its visuals to grey out for a fraction of a second. With no more ammunition, the Space Marine hurled the pistol with an impact that would have broken a human’s spine. It spanked off the side of the Archimandrite’s faceplate, as harmful as a kindly caress.
The machine applied pressure, closing its fist by degrees. Purple armour warped, then cracked, then the meat beneath began to bleed through the ravaged ceramite. Bones cracked, then crumbled. Only then did the warrior cry out, as his torso and thighs were reduced to shards of bone and mangled flesh barely held together by a layer of metal. The ruination no longer resembled a man at all.
‘You bore me,’ the Archimandrite told the Space Marine. After dropping the crippled mess to the ground, it silenced the warrior for good with a press of its clawed foot.
To untuned and untrained senses, the evacuation looked much the same as the rest of the siege. The grinding of opposing forces across the city had changed little on the surface. Only in the catacombs was the evidence of flight more profound, as the Mechanicum’s adepts who formed the first wave filtered into the hazy tunnels. War servitors went with them. A carefully cogitated number, a subtle exodus alongside the true evacuation, dispersed almost to the point of being hidden. The Archimandrite oversaw this second dispersal with the same precision it had arranged the first.
A heavy chainsword slammed against the machine’s knee joint, the kind of brute weapon that found easy homes in the more savage Legions, capable of rending an armoured man in two. Sparks arced from where the racing, revving teeth met Martian metal. The Archimandrite didn’t even have time to kill its attacker. The red-plated World Eater collapsed, headless, beneath a sweep of a Custodian’s spear.
The machine, Executor Principus of the Martian Mechanicum’s forces here, approached its role with calculating fervour. In its flesh-life it had wrought weapons, infusing them with spirit and purpose before sending them away to wage holy war. Now it was a weapon in its own right. With each kill, Magos Domina Hieronyma of the Ordo Reductor died a little more inside her own mind. She went willingly, subsumed by the cogitations and mathematical processes of annihilating her foes.
The Archimandrite was in ascendance. No longer a high priestess of the Unmaker God, but an avatar of it.
The Archimandrite was only doing as it was made to do. It had joined the Great Work and in-linked to the entirety of the Mechanicum’s army. Now it saw through their eyes, accessed their thought patterns, and led them into battle.
<Home.>
It canted the word into the noosphere, that metadigital network of datastreams accessible only to those born of the Red Planet and subsequently fitted with high-grade augmetics. Its transmissive was laden with codes and equations and coordinates of birth-foundries and manufactories, of plateaus where great battles were fought between forges.
<Home,> it broadcast to those capable of hearing it, instilling the concept itself within the minds of the more aware Mechanicum leaders.
Many of them canted back replies of their own – <Home!> and <For Fabricator General Kane!> most commonly – while still more chorused their words out loud, augmitting them as battle-cries into the faces of their foes.
The Archimandrite paid special heed to the Custodians. It was increasingly evident that the Legio Custodes was no unified army. Its warriors fought without formation or Legion-scale order, even at the squad level. Each one was an individual among other individuals, trailed by his own artificers and arsenal thralls, the latter of whom reloaded the Custodians’ guardian spears each time a warrior called out.
Their ranks seemed informal, like gestures of respect towards veterans and gifted individuals rather than a command structure to be rigidly adhered to. Few of them, even Tribune Endymion or those who shared Diocletian Coros’ rank of prefect, ever gave orders.
They simply immersed themselves wherever the fighting was thickest, slaughtering in silence.
And yet, there was unity. Unity of purpose, if nothing else. Despite the lack of order and the length of their spinning blades, they never burdened one another or blighted the paths of the other warriors around them. Consummate reflexes far in advance of a legionary’s own genhanced grace gave them a talent that required years for human soldiers, even Space Marines, to learn through repetitive discipline. Yet the Ten Thousand were masters of it. The Archimandrite watched them whirling and killing, their energised blades passing within a hand’s breadth of another golden warrior, yet never once threatening the other Custodian’s life. Each one of them existed within his own sphere, a warlord unto himself.
Nor was that all. The Archimandrite’s observation revealed an inherent defensiveness in the initial blows of each duel. At first this seeming passivity during the first seconds of engagement made little sense, but further analysis showed the truth. Each Custodian spent those precious moments studying his foe, adjusting his fighting style to compensate, then delivering a killing blow. They could simply overpower their enemies immediately with superior strength, speed and armament. Instead, they learned from each and every fight.