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Faith in Iron – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Faith in Iron

Cameron Johnston

Emergency lighting flickered and died as a corroded servo-arm smashed through the wall in a shower of sparks, the auxiliary limb growling in mechanical pain. Magos Biologis Viridan Shale lurched back in horror as the disease-ravaged servitor tried and failed to push through the opening, babbling corrupted data as it did so. Its flesh was afflicted with leaking boils and suppurating wounds, but the tech-priest’s optics were focused on the rogue servitor’s infected machine implants.

Green and orange moulds caked the servo-arm and oozed from the joins in the servitor’s bionics. Half of its metal skull had been eaten away to reveal sparking components and bare optics dangling from wires. It screeched in agony.

Discoloured patches spotted Viridan’s own metal legs where the flesh and machine joined as one – this was no scrapcode attack, this was a biological infection using her flesh as a vector to corrupt the holy machine parts of her body. The gestation period was non-existent, and the infection rapid and virulent. She cursed the Death Guard putrifiers who had created it, then sent her data recordings shrieking across the local noosphere: a warning that the machine-plague designated Morbus Metallum had been unleashed on the agri world of Dundas II.

The only reply was a corrupted datastream bearing the identifier codes of her research team. The other members were already lost to the infection, leaving the medicae facility as her only hope. It was imperative she fortify that location and summon assistance: the fate of the entire sector hinged on her survival.

Adrenaline and stimulants flooded her organic system, sharpening her senses. Sirens wailed as the magos shunted power to her bionic legs and fled down the corridor. Two more of her research team’s infected servitors blocked access to the heavy vault door securing the medicae facility. Irritated at the delay, she triggered her combat protocols. Lascutters hidden in her mechadendrites sliced them to pieces. She was past their smoking corpses before they fell.

The door’s security systems were extensive – Viridan Shale had put them in place herself, physical machine puzzles and noospheric trickery guarding what was now the most important site on the planet. She entered the facility and triggered a lockdown. The door slammed shut, trapping the magos biologis in the bowels of a capital hive city fallen to the insane forces of Chaos.

It was a suboptimal situation.

The medicae facility was originally of Mechanicus manufacture. A black site for biological testing, it was situated deep in the bowels of the city for ready access to test subjects – undesirable denizens of the underhive such as gangers, criminals and mutants. Operations had been suspended centuries ago, or so the tech-priests on the forge world Patraig VII had thought. Instead, Nurgle-worshipping plague surgeons had repurposed it for their own twisted experiments, reactivating the bio-laboratories and servitor-fabrication wings and decorating them with crudities such as dangling chains and hooks, and human skulls nailed to blood-smeared plasteel. Arcane runes daubed by warp-twisted individuals were still faintly visible on the walls despite two attempts to scour them clean with caustics. The runes were unsettling even to a supremely ordered mind such as Shale’s.

After the Chaos worshippers’ communications had been intercepted, and the following purge by Imperial forces, this facility’s databanks had been mined dry by Viridan Shale’s research team, and all remaining equipment left by the heretek magos in charge had been cleansed and put to work investigating the machine-plague infecting the Albarnan Sector. She had discovered that this very facility was the origin of the Morbus Metallum: a natural strain of subsurface life that fed on corroded metal had mutated inside pools of chem-polluted sewage and then been gene-engineered into a weapon aimed directly at the Adeptus Mechanicus. It spread through weak flesh to corrupt the sacred machine. Her forge world was imperilled and even the most stringent containment and purging protocols had only served to slow the plague’s spread.

And now that mouldering taint was inside her. Her bionics reported searing pain and garbled data, mandating the shutdown of haptic receptors. Her cogitators passed all situational data through tactical subroutines. There was no escape, and soon her cogitators and reasoning would be compromised.

Panic was for lesser beings. Her immediate survival was the primary goal. She took a solitary vial of cloudy yellow liquid from a refrigerated vault and injected it into her flesh. Tests had not been completed. Survival was estimated at forty-five per cent.

Biology rebelled, beyond the ability of her implants to compensate…

She awoke groggy and immediately purged her blood of contaminants to achieve eighty-eight per cent of full operating potential, then reviewed the recorded data and re-enabled haptics. She felt the damage to her prosthetics and implants, but not the burn of infection. The machine-plague had been devoured by a more aggressive, yet benign, strain created from the original. Within her body more of the cure was already being manufactured.

She accessed the vox-array, found main physical lines cut and tertiary data links in the process of being severed. She had time for a single message. The Imperial Guard and Adeptus Mechanicus forces in the area would draw every cultist in the capital. It would be a brutal and protracted battle and since the enemy were already aware of this medicae facility, she calculated a ninety-two point three per cent chance that it would be breached in three days despite her security protocols. Unacceptable. She required a rescue with the precision of a las-scalpel and force of a lascannon.

She sent out the distress call.

Minutes ticked by. More communication links went dark.

Then, a reply bearing Adeptus Astartes authentication codes:

+++Crimson Hammer acknowledges Adeptus Mechanicus Priority Alpha-Iron-Two-One request.+++

+++All available forces rerouted. Complement: one Space Marine with combat servitor.+++

Viridan Shale’s cogitators supplied a low probability of survival. One Space Marine was insufficient to effect her rescue. She was disappointed, a rare emotional response. She wished she had accepted the most extensive of the Mechanicus’ mental pathway architectural enhancements and additional cogitators to eliminate such variances of emotion. Most vexing that her renowned logical inference leaps relied on technological enhancements to her core biology rather than outright replacement.

+++Strike cruiser Crimson Hammer en route.+++

+++Iron Father Rathkugan planetfall in thirty-four standard hours.+++

Her anger terminated as the screen went black. Rathkugan of the Iron Hands was known to the Adeptus Mechanicus. One Space Marine might be enough, assuming he survived the machine-plague.

Ruby beams pierced the grenade smoke, burning through men shambling down the highway towards the Imperial Guard’s makeshift fortification of burnt-out groundcars and haulage vehicles. They were all that stopped crazed cultists from escaping the capital and spreading their filth through the vital farm steadings to the south.

‘Make every shot count, lads!’ Captain Lennox Winters yelled as he drilled a hole through the forehead of another pestilent cultist, burning away the profane symbol carved into her skin. ‘We have to keep them bottled up until reinforcements arrive.’ With their vox jammed his words were more an exercise in maintaining morale than they were spoken with any real expectation of help arriving.

He flexed his crude bionic arm to loosen too-tight joints, shouldered his lasgun and squeezed the trigger. Shoot. Kill. Shoot. Kill. The whine of las-fire set his teeth on edge as the latest wave fell twitching to the highway.

‘Captain!’ Corporal Rikki drew his attention to a burning manufactorum at the edge of the city, just out of firing range. An industrial mining servitor crashed through piled-up groundcars, its body all thick metal plate and whirring drill bits. It was half a ruin already, machine implants covered in glistening green and orange growths. Armed men sheltered behind its metal bulk as it advanced onto the highway, if men those corrupted things could still be called.

Autoguns barked and bullets tinged off the barricade. Winters paid them no heed, trusting his helmet and flak armour against solid rounds. At this range the cultists’ crude weaponry and poor aim was no match for the lasguns of the Guard. His casualties had been solely due to their ever-increasing numbers.

‘Guardsman Crane,’ Winters growled. ‘Light that thing up.’

Crane was a specialist tall enough to give an ogryn pause, for a moment at least. He grinned and hefted his grenade launcher.

The traitors might have been Chaos-worshipping madmen, but they were not stupid. They scattered, but too late to escape the explosion and lethal wave of shrapnel.

A ragged line of cultists using sheets of plasteel as shields advanced through the smoke, followed by a dozen more in gang colours, autoguns chattering as they clambered over the corpses of their brethren. Then came two squads of traitor planetary militia, their Imperial eagles ripped off and replaced with blasphemous symbols. Yells heralded more twisted denizens being drawn to the sound of battle. Winters’ men had carpeted this killing ground in corpses, but the enemy just kept on coming.

After a day and a half of retreat and relentless combat, the ragged and exhausted remnants of his command looked to their captain. He spat towards the enemy and stood tall.

‘The Emperor is watching us, men. He will honour our valiant sacrifice even if our superiors in their command bunker won’t.’ He was lucky there was no Imperial commissar around to hear his words. ‘Best you build me a wall of corpses, lads. That’ll hold the scum back for a while until reinforcements arrive.’

Their laughter was harsh, forced.

‘Aim well,’ he demanded.

Winters squinted through his gunsight and squeezed the trigger. A man died screaming and he quickly shifted his aim to the left and fired again. His men picked off targets as they crawled from broken buildings and sewers, too many to count. Winters knew his command were too few to bottle up the scum here for long, but he had to try – beyond the capital was a planet of sparsely populated farmland that fed the Emperor’s armies, and it would be all too easy to destroy.

A roar from above – a burning star plummeting from the heavens.

The city’s air defences were in the hands of the traitors. They opened up, stitching the sky with fire. The falling star weathered it to shriek over the heads of the embattled Guard towards the outskirts of the city. It smashed into the midst of the Chaos worshippers’ ranks like the fist of the Emperor Himself.

His men gaped. ‘The Emperor protects,’ Guardsman Crane repeated.

Amidst the thick cloud of smoke and dust, the shadows of surviving cultists reeled, coughing and choking. Something far larger and darker loomed above them, reached out for them. Even from afar the crack of bone was sickening as it tossed those smaller shadows aside like broken dolls. A cultist staggered back, the muzzle of his autogun bright and chattering. The looming shadow ignored it, and lashed out with a fist. The headless and broken body of a ganger in colourful rags bounced across the highway and skidded to a stop halfway to the Guard’s crude fortification. The cultists broke and ran. The deep bark and boom of a heavy weapon chased them, cutting them down. Men and women screamed for mercy. None was given.

More cultists and looters had been swarming towards the fight, but now they thought better of it, their scarred faces twisted with terror as they fled down refuse-choked alleyways leading back into the heart of the city.

Silence, save for the shifting of nervous Guardsmen. Then the thud of heavy footsteps approaching.

A huge and imposing figure advanced on them, clad in ornate black power armour chased with silver that bore the emblem of a white hand on its shoulder plate, all scarred and pitted from recent conflict. In his fists a power axe larger than Guardsman Crane thrummed with deadly energy, and on his back were three metal appendages: one with a heavy bolter that swivelled to each of the Guardsmen in turn, a second with a heavy-duty servo-arm, and the third equipped with some sort of claw that crackled with lightning. This was no mere man – this was an angel of the Emperor.

Captain Winters shivered. As a raw recruit he had seen the likes of this newcomer before, during the Kentigern III uprising. This was an Iron Father, a senior Techmarine of the Iron Hands Chapter.

The majority of his men had never seen a Space Marine before: their eyes grew wide and their lips trembled as they took in the looming warrior coming their way.

‘Weapons down and fall in,’ Winters yelled. The Space Marine was terrifying and glorious, the Emperor’s will made manifest. He could kill every one of them in seconds.

The Space Marine approached their makeshift fortification. His servo-arm snaked out, picked up a wreck and tossed it aside. His face was more metal than flesh, ocular implants scanning the Guardsmen assembled before him. The Space Marine’s master-crafted bionics made Winters’ own arm look like it had been made from scrap.

‘Name and designation,’ the Space Marine demanded, voice deep and rumbling like a tank.

Winters stood at attention. ‘Lennox Winters. Captain in the Dundas Seventh, the Grave Gunners.’

‘You have terminated a significant number of hostiles prior to my arrival,’ the Space Marine stated. ‘You are to be commended on your efficiency. You and your remaining combat-capable force will now accompany me into the capital.’

Sweat trickled down the captain’s back. ‘Ah, pardon, my lord?’ He was not corrected as to the correct term of address, and proceeded to get to the point. ‘This highway is the main transport link to the capital hive. If we don’t hold it the outskirts will be overrun.’

‘Irrelevant,’ the Space Marine said. ‘This mission takes priority over all others.’

Winters swallowed. The godly figure looming over him could crush him like an insect, and with as little regret. ‘Under what authority?’ His voice wavered only slightly.

‘I am Iron Father Rathkugan of the Haarmek, Fifth Clan Company of the Iron Hands,’ the Space Marine said. ‘This world’s survival is a secondary goal when the entire Albarnan Sector is on the edge of annihilation.’

Technically, a Space Marine couldn’t command Winters, and if he disobeyed his standing orders he would be facing a commissar’s wrath.

‘I need a good reason to put my men in mortal danger.’

‘We must infiltrate this city and extract a vital agent of the Imperium. The wise would court an Iron Father’s favour rather than his fury.’

Captain Winters’ resistance crumbled. He stiffened and saluted, sweating. ‘Aye, my lord. We are at your disposal. Are we to expect more of you?’

‘No,’ the Iron Father stated. ‘With me.’ He turned and walked towards the city at a speed that had all ten Guardsmen jogging to keep up. A hunchbacked combat servitor with a featureless face of smooth metal detached from the drop pod and flanked him. It was as large as Crane and wearing power armour. One of its arms ended in a blackened meltagun and the other flickered with flame, the distinctive tang of promethium in the air.

Corporal Rikki tilted his scuffed helmet for a better look at their new allies. ‘What are we doing here, cap?’

Winters grimaced. ‘The Emperor’s will.’ He stepped over the charred remnants of a dozen dead traitor militia and scooped up spare power packs as he went. ‘Corporal, secure your helmet strap before I have you up on charges.’

Rikki snorted, but did as he was told.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
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