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  Iron Corpses – David Annandale

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  Iron Corpses

  David Annandale

  The blast was a roar beyond all storms. It was bigger than sound. It shattered coherence. It was war in paroxysm, and it tore the battlefield apart.

  It brought no triumph, only loss. And it stole a victory that had been in sight. The warsmith had seen it. Koparnos had seen the enemy falling.

  But then had come another fall. An immense shape from the skies. Fire lighting the clouds. A shadow falling over the battle.

  And then the blast.

  The roar.

  After the roar came only the shriek of the wind. It scoured the murdered land, kicking up dust clouds so thick that day and night were indistinguishable. Five days of wind. Five days of the unending howl of a war’s collapse into madness.

  On the sixth day, the wind dropped just enough that day returned in the form of a deep, withered twilight.

  It was time to abandon the Rhino. Koparnos was the only survivor. The troop hold had been breached. Sealed in the driver’s compartment, he had held out this long, but the poisons of Tallarn were working their way inside even here. His body temperature rose as his system fought to keep the weakened viruses out. There was no real shelter in the Rhino’s blasted shell, only a more prolonged end. Koparnos could hear the wind whistling through the rents in the armoured hull.

  It was taunting him. It was the sound of defeat and death.

  And it could outwait him.

  For those five days, he had fought with the Rhino’s systems, trying to coax life back to its engines. His struggle was futile. The tank was as dead as his brothers. But during those days of night, there had been nothing else to attempt. Now he had a choice of endings.

  He chose to go. Doing so would hasten his death, but he would act as though there were a real chance of shelter. His war was not over. Not yet.

  Koparnos slid the driver’s door back and entered the troop compartment. His brother Iron Warriors were seated on the benches – they created an illusion not of life, but of discipline. Though their bodies had turned to sludge, their power armour remained upright, as if their corpses were still ready to march into battle at his command.

  The dust and ash of Tallarn spiralled around their boots and fell upon their shoulders. It had already turned the iron gleam of their armour to a dun shadow. There was strength in the silhouettes, but it was slowly being buried. The wind would blow the dust into the Rhino until it filled the interior completely.

  Koparnos climbed through the torn side hatch and out of the tomb.

  The wind greeted him with its full howl. The dust clouds swirled around and past him, revealing and concealing the landscape. From one moment to the next, visibility went from zero to a thousand metres, and back to zero again. He saw the battlefield through shifting veils – huge, tortured shapes were a deeper black against the grey.

  Those shadows were Titans.

  Some had been melted into slag. They were now low, jagged hills. Others still stood, frozen in mid-combat. Allied and enemy alike, they had all died in the great roar. Between the motionless colossi were the tanks. The blast had hurled them across the plain. They lay variously upended, on their sides, and torn open. Koparnos had been lucky, then. Not many had landed intact.

  The dust swirled over a portrait of a single moment of war, arrested in time. Koparnos was surrounded by towering gravestones. They were an iron cry of agony, preserved, extended, and given voice by the mindless shriek of the wind.

  Koparnos’ visor display flashed its warning runes. The radiation levels were extreme. Even protected by his power armour, prolonged exposure would be lethal. The blast had also scoured the land of the worst of the viral toxins that had killed this world, but the contamination was still present. It was still reaching through his rebreather. His fever spiked, but his body was holding fast. The deliquescence had not yet begun. The clash of poisons had bought him some time. Not long. A few minutes, he guessed.

  He would spend every second fighting, and he would fight for a few seconds more.

  The situation was no different, except in degree, to any number of suicidal campaigns that his Legion had faced. That was what the Emperor, in all his perversity, had decided the Iron Warriors were good for. How many times had Koparnos and his battle-brothers struggled through impossible sieges and over the landscapes of death worlds, leaving a wake of their own blood, only for Dorn or Guilliman or one of the other pampered favourites to swoop in and claim credit after the fact? If Koparnos died now, his end would have no substantial difference from the rest of his life.

  At least he was free of the Emperor’s hypocrisy.

  ‘Do you call this a victory?’ he shouted to absent enemies, and a demigod as distant as he was false. ‘You choose to destroy your own forces along with ours? That is weakness. That is why you will lose.’

  He started walking. He had a vague impression of a great shadow not far to his right. It was a destination. It was a goal to strive for, futile though it might be. He would have a purpose even as his organs disintegrated.

  His boots kicked up puffs of ash that flew off in the wind. As he walked, he switched though the vox-channels. He had been doing so for days, and the results were the same: nothing but static, an electronic echo of the wind. Death in the air, on the ground, in the vast and tortured shapes, and in the aether beyond.

  The wind pushed against him, mocking. It shouted at him that he was alone, the last thing moving across the ruined battlefield.

  ‘Look at me!’ he cried back. His voice sounded too thick. His breath rasped. There was liquid in his lungs. It grew thicker. They were beginning to disintegrate, turn into fluid, seeking to drown and suffocate him at once. Speech was difficult, but he would give voice to his defiance. ‘Look at me! I live. I fight on. You will not stop us. You made us too well. We will march until… until we crush you!’

  He coughed, straining for more of the deadly air beyond his suit’s reserves. He marched faster. The huge shadow gathered definition and mass. He could distinguish the gigantic limbs from the trunk. Then the way before him cleared for a moment, revealing the Titan.

  It was a Warlord-class, named Ostensor Contritio. Over thirty metres tall to the carapace, and almost as wide, it was a hulking mass of immobilised destruction. Its arms bore great cannons, pointed forwards. Koparnos glanced in the direction the Titan was facing. Some distance away, there was wreckage. A battalion of tanks. Ostensor Contritio’s final kill.

  As the dust rolled back in, Koparnos saw a faint red flicker in the viewports of the Warlord’s head. Just one weak flash, but that was enough.

  A trace of power. Koparnos could use that.

  He wasn’t marching out of bitter defiance now. He was racing against his death. He had a hope of survival. More importantly, he had a hope of vengeance.

  He reached Ostensor Contritio’s left leg. Overhead, above the Titan’s waist, the lower access hatch was partly open. What was left of a Mechanicum acolyte lay halfway across the threshold – robes in a vaguely human form were drenched in black, organic soup. A pair of limp mechadendrites hung beyond where the head had been, as if trying to reach an imagined salvation. Death had reached into the Titan, and this fool had been panicked into thinking that it did not also await him outside.

  A fluid, multiplying pain was spreading out from Koparnos’ core and into his limbs. His movements were becoming sluggish. His joints felt loose, and burned with acid pain. He didn’t have much longer. Scaling the
seized pistons of the leg, he hauled himself upwards towards the hatch, seeking hand and footholds wherever he could.

  Once inside the Warlord, he slid the hatch shut. Adamantium armour many times thicker than the Rhino’s hull now shielded him from the poisoned world outside. All that remained was to purge the viral taint from the interior.

  His helmet lamp lit the confines of the dark space. There were more biological remains here. He guessed they had been servitors from the limited, specialised tool limbs that sat in the sludge.

  Further in was another door. He grasped the wheel at its centre, turned it and hauled it open.

  He crossed the threshold into the engineering deck. There were more Mechanicum dead here, tech-priests who had stayed at their posts until the end. Their servo-skulls littered the floor, eyes dark and wide as though in shock. Koparnos staggered to a workstation that faced the core of the Titan. It was beside a large cluster of ducts running to and from the Warlord’s reactor shields. The station’s screen was dark, and one of the liquefied operator’s servo-arms was still resting against the keyboard. Koparnos moved the limb aside and examined the controls.

  The pulse from the blast could well have shut down the Titan’s systems – perhaps the priest had been in the process of restarting the mechanical heart of the god-machine. Something had begun, or at least survived, for that light in the Titan’s head to have been possible.

  Koparnos found the circuit controls. One of them was open. He turned the others on one by one. A groaning, hissing life returned to Ostensor Contritio. Lumen orbs strobed, then settled at a dull crimson glow. The deck and walls shook, as the Titan’s heart struggled to beat once more.

  He would grant it life, and in return it would gift him the same.

  The hollow, automated voice of the machine crackled from the emitters.

  ‘Primary systems activating. Reactor failsafes engaged. The blessings of the Omnissiah be upon us. Warning. Warning. Malfunctions in secondary and tertiary nodes. Locations One-One-Seven to One-Three-Five...’

  Koparnos examined the tech-priest’s servo-arms, found a plasma cutter, and fired it up.

  He examined the ducts, eventually tracing one that vented the power plant’s heat upwards into the exchange system at the rear of the carapace. He deactivated the failsafes and cut though until a rush of superheated, radioactive steam burst from the pipe. Within seconds it had filled the engineering chamber.

  ‘Warning. Warning. Extreme hazard. Heat spike detected. Coolant system failure imminent.’

  Alarms howled. Koparnos dropped the cutter and began to remove his armour.

  ‘Warning. Warning. Radiation levels in excess of working maximums. Evacuation advised for all organic personnel.’

  ‘Poison… against poison…’ he gasped as the scalding death hit his exposed skin.

  He stood in the middle of the cloud, a fresh clash of pain erupting in his body as his genhanced biology absorbed the radiation. His melanchromic organ went into overdrive, his skin pigments blackening instantly. He breathed deeply, and the burn reached into his lungs. It scoured the slow rot from him with an even more deadly agony.

  Poison against poison.

  He stood in the lethal cloud for a full minute before the dose overwhelmed his ability to process toxins. The virus was dead, and he began to die in a new way.

  He dropped to his knees and vomited out a black, stinking mass that began to eat its way through the deck. Then he stood again. Little more than the force of his own will kept him conscious. The steam was damaging him much faster than he could heal, but he waited another full minute before he reached for his battleplate once more. If even a trace of the virus remained, he would be done.

  His mucranoid began a last-ditch attempt to preserve him. A waxy shield oozed from his pores, sealing him off from the lethal atmosphere of the chamber. He fumbled with the armour, his fingers growing slick. Carapace. Chestplate. Power pack. One piece at a time, he took sanctuary from the radiation. His vision greying from exhaustion and pain, he closed the manual redirect valves to reroute the exchange system leak.

  When he was done, the radioactive fog lingered. He felt as though it had penetrated his skull, and his senses were overwhelmed by a grand mosaic of pain. He was one shock away from falling into a sus-an coma, but he stood still and tried to force the darkness from his mind.

  His work was not done. He had shelter, but it would serve no purpose if he could not fight...

  ‘Iron within, iron without,’ he muttered. Both had carried him this far. They would see him back into war. The loyalists no doubt thought that they had turned the Iron Warriors’ victory into a mutual defeat. All they had done was throw more of the same hopelessness at the Legion that it had battled and surmounted for centuries.

  He would show them their error. He would show them his Legion’s iron.

  The vow made, his pain took him into the night. He fell, unconscious even before he hit the cold deck.

  ‘Enginseer Meridius?’

  Crackling woke him. An electronic scrape in his ear. The internal vox was active. There was a gasp, someone drawing a deep breath before finding the strength to speak again.

  ‘Enginseer Meridius, we have power again. Are you well?’ The woman’s voice was that of a mortally wounded warrior.

  Koparnos dragged himself back to the workstation in silence. He was no adept of the Mechanicum, but he was a warsmith. Though he was not privy to the most arcane mysteries of the Titans, he knew how to shape a battlefield. He knew how to shape war itself. So he would make Ostensor Contritio answer to his will. One way or another.

  ‘Meridius?’ the voice called again.

  Koparnos was surprised by the strength of it. The speaker was dying. The alchemy of desperation and hope was the fuel for the cry.

  He would answer, but not yet.

  He succeeded in running a rough diagnostic of the Warlord. Power appeared to be reaching most quadrants. The potential for movement and attack was there. That left the most important motive force: the princeps. If this woman was only one of the moderati, there would be little he could do. He would be stuck in an immobilised shelter, no better off in the long term than in the Rhino.

  He worked his way to the upper levels of the carapace. He found the pods of the moderati minoris. They were closed, but they had not been sealed from the contamination of the virus. The gunners were dead. They left behind ruined uniforms and the stinking slurry at the bottom of their pods. Koparnos wrote off the secondary weapons.

  ‘Meridius! Why don’t you answer?’

  Koparnos reached the reinforced hatchway to the Titan’s head. Outside it were the remains of another tech-priest, twin servo-arms slumped against the door, and the metal marred with scratches and burns. Another sign of mindless panic. What had the adept hoped to accomplish? The bridge space beyond was a sanctuary only as long as the door did not open.

  Koparnos turned to the comm-link on the wall to the right of the door. ‘Meridius is dead,’ he said.

  At first there was only silence. Then the voice spoke again. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘I am Koparnos, and I am your only hope. Identify yourself.’

  ‘Princeps Benrath,’ she answered without hesitation, recognising the deep reverberations of his voice. ‘You are of the Legiones Astartes.’

  ‘Are the moderati majoris still alive?’ Koparnos asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. They were an hour ago, but they haven’t spoken since. They don’t answer any more.’

  ‘You are unable to confirm one way or the other?’

  ‘I can’t move,’ she said. ‘When the pulse hit us, there was a surge before the power went down. The neuro-feedback was... devastating. I am paralysed.’

  ‘What about your connections to the Titan?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Until the power returned, I was linked to a void. I can feel its life now,
but not the machine-spirit. Ostensor Contritio is as paralysed as I am.’

  The fact that Benrath was severed from the machine-spirit was to be expected. Koparnos had seen the system breakdowns in the diagnostic. The machine-spirit was still alive, but isolated.

  ‘I saw light in the cockpit earlier,’ he said.

  ‘The head has enough reserve power to function in isolation for an extended period.’

  ‘You didn’t eject.’

  ‘What purpose would that have served?’

  ‘None,’ he agreed. Good. Benrath was fully conscious of her situation. Separating the head from the crippled body of the Titan would only have shifted the position of the survivors in the blasted land. There were no retrieval teams coming. Not for anyone. Whatever events remained to play out here, they would do so cut off from the rest of the planet.

  ‘Princeps,’ Koparnos said, ‘I can end your paralysis. I can give you back your purpose.’

  The phrasing did not come naturally. To offer rather than to command went against his training and his being. But he needed her consent, along with that of the moderati majoris, assuming either was still alive. If they were this close to death, a struggle of any kind could be lethal.

  ‘You can restore Ostensor Contritio to us?’ She sounded understandably sceptical.

  ‘Not exactly. I can restore you to it.’

  He waited for Benrath to deduce what he meant. He gave her some space to approach the idea on her own, to assimilate its reality and its implications. He was standing still but, all the same, he was reshaping the battlefield.

  ‘We have no neural bus, no amniotic tank,’ Benrath said. She knew what was coming, then, and was already halfway to acceptance.

  ‘I am aware of that.’

  ‘You are able to proceed without one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the process is irreversible?’

  ‘Would you ask that of a Legion Dreadnought, honoured princeps?’

  ‘No. Forgive me. The weakness of my body is not the weakness of spirit.’

  ‘Then I will begin. Know this – the interior is highly radioactive.’