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Infinite Circuit

David Guymer

Rain scalded the enamelled exterior of Borhus’s battleplate, raising a senfgas hiss from the bridging organics between his gorget’s soft seals and the gleaming gunmetal alloy that plated fifty-two per cent of the Space Marine’s cephalic structure. He brought his magnoculars to his eyes with a soft whir, followed by a click as the left eyepiece interfaced with his bionics. As always there was a reflex instinct to blink. His eyelid was a ghost, exorcised in successive rebuilds, but neural wiring was more plastic. The mind remembered, an organic irritation akin to an itch in an amputated limb.

With a thought, his vision zoomed across the potholed terrain. Old trenches, sutured shut with razorwire, and craters. Peels of armour plating were scattered over them, energy-lashed, too small even for the scrap trawlers roving up behind the Saltern Front. Hazard signifiers alerted him to sub-toxic atmospheric accumulations of lyddite, fycelin, and a string of complex nitro-compounds that his armour’s sensorium suite lacked the capacity to tackle.

The land had been beaten and then chemically euthanized.

And it had worked. The necrons were being ground back.

A rail track cut a straight line across the murdered landscape and his gaze followed it to an outpost, walled and ferric-red. The magnoculars’ auto-focus over-adjusted and Borhus dialled it back.

Men in protective all-weather coveralls with their hoods up rose into focus through a flood of steam, slapping shipping tags onto the sides of munitions crates as they were driven onto the rail platform. Tracked Kataphron-class heavy armament platforms equipped with lifting tines took up massive stacks, millions of rounds, enough to wage war for – his estimate – eighteen minutes, and manoeuvred them trackside. There, long lines of mono-task loading servitors integrated into rotating platforms engaged in an articulated peristalsis of hooks and cranes to winch the armament loads onto waiting carriages.

Every few minutes, armoured trains hundreds of compartments in length drew in or pulled away. Quad-linked autocannons tracked the yellow-brown eddies in the clouds from the roofs of flak carriages, their jerking movements governed by a complex Fourier system to affect randomness.

Borhus checked the distance gauge on his magnoculars.

Nine-point-one kilometres.

Even from here, his enhanced hearing could detect the hiss of coolant and the squeal of marginally misaligned magnetic brakes.

Slowly, he moved his view across the platform to the station exit. A pair of visored skitarii in dense black robes stood guard at a checkpoint. A being’s choice of armament said more about them and their culture than all the accumulated works of art or technology they produced. That the skitarii would poison their bodies with radiation in exchange for the stopping power of their radium carbines spoke volumes.

There was no higher praise than that offered with overwhelming firepower.

Motionless under the caustic rain, the skitarii stood patiently as a monstrous Luna-pattern bulk loader backed towards the checkpoint laden with arms and munitions fresh from the outpost fabricatories. The road crunched under massive solid rubber tyres, rain weaving through the treads and spattering the cab. Wipers squeaked back and forth, intermittently revealing a pair of Departmento Munitorum troopers in dust-grey fatigues, smiling, sharing a lho-stick and watching the rain with the radiator on full. Vertical exhaust stacks spluttered a petrochemical blackness into the air. On the road behind the massive vehicle, squads of skitarii ran escort for open-topped personnel carriers driving grim-looking workers to the manufactories.

Borhus panned right, too fast for the magnoculars’ autofocus, the image blurring over prefabricated industrial units and vehicle silos until it fixed on a tall, pyramidal structure. A basilica. An obvious place to secure an article of rogue tech. And with all the respect that Borhus held for the adepts of Mars, they rarely deviated far from the obvious.

The structure’s walls were plascrete, painted red in homage to the Red Planet. Its sloped sides were riveted with plates of a dark, energy-conducting metal that Borhus could not identify, and decaled with intercalated sequences of cogwheel motifs. In shape and ornamentation the structure looked the part of a place of worship, but that pyramidal shape owed as much to geometric symbolism as did the sloping glacis plate of a main-line battle tank. It presented maximum armour thickness for minimum material expenditure, calculated to the trillionth decimal. It was a fortress, built to withstand anything short of a sustained artillery barrage or a determined aerial strike.

Fire superiority servitors integrated directly into crenellated casemates presented overlapping fields of fire onto the street-level approaches. At the top of the flight of rockcrete steps that climbed from the outpost two full squads of skitarii with tripod-mounted transuranic arquebuses stood sentry by the main gate.

As Borhus studied the defences, an energy wash rippled down the structure. He followed it down the steep rockrete steps, to where groups of gaunt pilgrims ascended, a number climbing with the aid of long copper-clad staves.

The image suddenly became snowed by static.

Borhus withdrew the magnoculars from his eyes and thumped the plastek casing, uttering the ritual cant used by the Iron Fathers, but the distortion effect remained. Most likely its uncomplicated machine-spirit had been corrupted by the powerful electromagnetic field emanating from the basilica, a field strong enough to be picked up on passive auspex sweeps from orbit.

‘It almost makes me want to know what he is keeping in there myself,’ he said, dropping the magnoculars into the stowage basket under his seat and turning to the Space Marine sat beside him. ‘He is definitely inside?’

‘I marked his entry, captain,’ said Jaggai, lightly gripping on the controls of the stripped down Land Speeder Storm. He looked over. Like Borhus, the Space Marine was unhelmed. His topknot lay across his pauldrons and looped about his thick neck. His grin was savage. ‘I have not seen him leave.’

‘In his own compound.’ Luhgarak sat in the passenger compartment, rearward facing, scraping out the mechanism of his stalker-pattern boltgun with a scythe blade in pursuance of some subatomic particle of grit. He sighed. ‘Regale us again, son of the Khan, with a tale of your prowess in the hunt.’

Beside him, Aetius shook his head but said nothing, a deliberate statement of coded disapproval when he would much rather have ignored his companions’ very un-Codex one-upmanship more completely. The Novamarine shifted very slightly in his seat, then returned his attention to the inscriptions along the barrel of his boltgun, and his own orisons of battle.

Borhus accepted his subordinates’ weaknesses with more grace.

The strong would shine, like metal implanted in flesh, and no word or deed from another would uplift the weak, even if Inquisitorial decree had made them brothers.

‘Brother Salvu?’ Borhus called back, hooking his arm behind his headrest and twisting to look back across the passenger compartment.

The Space Marine was standing at the back of the Land Speeder with one hand on the shoulder height handrail and the other holding his own pair of magnoculars to his helmet visor. Rain beaded on the moulded ceramite plates of his power armour, gathering and then rushing for the soft seals around the joints and spiralling down to the deck to pool like moats of acid-yellow around the rivets. Salvu muttered to himself, mentally codifying the myriad features of the basilica into a checklist of weaknesses, strengths and dangerous unknowns. Salvu knew fortresses. He knew how to build them, how to hold them and, more pertinently, how to break them. The reticular cross of the Hospitallers smouldered acidly from his white pauldron. The rest of his armour was black.

Deathwatch black.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS UK.

Cover illustration by Da Yu.

Infinite Circuit © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. Infinite Circuit, Adeptus Mechanicus, 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.
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ISBN: 978-1-78251-535-7

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