Contents

Cover

A Small Cog – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

A SMALL COG

Mitchel Scanlon

‘Men are weak. Their bodies will fail and crumble to dust. Only the Machine endures.’

Magos Axos Zarin, 948.M41

Darkness. Black on black. A spark. Pain.

A spark…

Deep in the hollowed dark, they had taken everything from him.

…pain.

‘How long will this take?’

A voice. His captor.

‘Not long. Less time if he cooperates.’

A second voice. Sly. Spiteful. Something in it filled him with loathing.

A spark. Pain. He screamed, begging for mercy.

‘You will not damage him.’

It was a command.

‘Tsk. Blame his masters. So many technical missteps. Bad wiring. But no, I will not damage him. I know his value.’

A high-pitched whine. A drill bit whirring near his head. The smell of burning.

A spark. Pain. He could not move.

‘There. We are getting somewhere. A few more adjustments and I can access his cortex. Then, the hippocampus.’

‘And then?’

‘Between them, we will shake loose his memories. I imagine there will be more screams. Entreaties. Pleading. It is the way of these things.’

‘You have done it before?’

‘Twice. In each case, the subjects died before giving up their secrets. But I have refined my methods. You will have what you want from him.’

‘It had better be so. Remember our agreement.’

‘I remember everything. As will he.’

A spark. Pain. A sense of falling.

‘Given time.’

Falling…

The gun towers had fallen, and the city was burning. Running, ducking through the darkened streets at the head of a ragtag group of followers, Enginseer Vornis-489 did his best to avoid the broken bodies and pieces of rubble strewn underfoot. No small task, given the violence already inflicted on the city.

‘The enemy has taken the gates!’ Ardet yelled, near breathless, by his side.

A local man who worked for Vornis as a lay menial, Ardet kept a handheld vox-unit pressed to his ear, delivering a series of anxious updates as they ran.

‘Our people have pulled back to the Western Market! They’re going to barricade the square to hold them off! Elder Karth has given orders to arm the incendiator!’

From a distance, in the vicinity of the gates, there came an enormous explosion. A momentary fireball lifted above the roofs of the houses blocking their line of sight, lighting the night.

The olfactory filters in the tech-priest’s auto-senses registered the by-products of the admixture of burning bio-fuel and human flesh. It made an unpleasant aroma. Vornis reduced the sensitivity of the filters to prevent the odour from distracting him.

‘They’re still coming.’ Ardet’s voice was crestfallen, despairing.

The tech-priest had told him such updates were unnecessary. It seemed the stress of battle had led to the admonition being forgotten.

The machine-parts of the enginseer’s own body included a much more sophisticated vox-system than anything the local Hakkanite culture could manufacture. With it, he could eavesdrop not only on the comms of the defenders, but on the enemy as well.

The latter encrypted their communications, but the tech-priest’s machine-augmented brain had allowed him to break one of their ciphers, giving access to some of their messages. Not that he had learned much for all his industry. The instructions relayed from the enemy commander to his troops had been simple and brutal.

Attack the city. Capture the target. Kill anyone who gets in your way.

There were no further details regarding their target, but to the priest’s mind there was only one thing in the entire city of Uhrsk worth all their effort.

It was his duty to guard it. To protect it. Vornis was not a warrior by nature, but he would die before letting the enemy have it.

‘Master!’ It was Ardet again. ‘Shouldn’t we stop and make a stand here? This street leads directly to the Western Market and the gates. We could hide in one of these buildings and ambush the enemy as they pass.’

He gestured with his twisted arm to the tenements around them, the buildings left deserted by occupants who had fled or else headed for the gates to defend their city.

Vornis made a signal to the others to pause while he deliberated.

He discounted Ardet’s idea in short order. Uhrsk was an ancient place, but despite the grandeur of the walls and old city, much of it was built using the crudest materials imaginable. A cursory spectrographic scan of the nearest tenement with his augmetic eye indicated a mud-brick structure created by combining sand with organic material – straw and animal dung, most likely.

Such structures were unlikely to provide much cover against enemy weapons fire. Worse, they might collapse when hit with explosives, burying them all alive.

Besides which, his companions were no more warriors than he was. Most were lay menials like Ardet, and shared his physical limitations. Vornis had recruited many such individuals in his fifty years on their planet. He had taken those considered useless and trained them as drudge labourers to handle the tasks below his station as a tech-priest.

His only regret was that his work kept him too busy to equip them with functioning augmetics. Instead, Vornis had been forced to rely on local artisans to create non-motive replacements. Hence they had hooks and peg legs in place of the splendid bionics usually granted to Mechanicus lay workers.

Taken as a whole, they made a singularly unimpressive army. Some had brought their own weapons, while Vornis had armed the rest as well as he could from among his own stores. A mental inventory of their resources counted a dozen Hakkan-variant autoguns, a few hunting rifles, two laspistols, a couple of stub guns, a portable pneumatic hammer, a lascutter, some clubs and a triple-barrelled smoothbore gun he could only assume was some manner of local fowling piece.

He would have given anything to have real troops at his disposal. A few skitarii, perhaps. But there were no skitarii on Hakkan IV, nor any other forces of the Mechanicus. He was on his own: the only member of his order across the breadth of an entire world.

Vornis shook his head. ‘This is no place to make a stand. We will head for the west wall to take control of the gun towers.’

‘The gun towers? The vox said they were destroyed.’

‘Fallen, perhaps. But destroyed? Unlikely. The gun towers of Uhrsk were created during the Great Crusade. They are made to last. Granted, the invaders may have knocked them out for the moment. But if we can restore them, the enemy will be caught between the towers and the defenders elsewhere in the city. We can annihilate them in a crossfire.’

‘We could catch them unawares.’ Ardet nodded, understanding dawning. ‘But if the enemy are approaching the Western Market, they are between us and the wall. How do we get past them?’

‘We move quickly. We will make use of the disorder, find a gap in the enemy lines to pass through before they regroup.’

‘We are not soldiers, master.’ The menial sounded a note of caution.

‘The enemy will surely try to kill us whether we run or stand here, Ardet. Our only hope is to reach the gun towers and see if they can be repaired.’

Vornis gestured with his mechadendrites for the group to get under way.

Ahead, the fires were still burning. The stench of burned flesh in the air became stronger, forcing him to reduce the sensitivity of his olfactory filters even further.

‘There is no other choice.’

Click here to buy A Small Cog.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

A Small Cog © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2022. A Small Cog, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80407-178-6

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

the purchaser of a Black Library e-book product (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase a Black Library e-book (“e-book”). The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media.

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.