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Skitarius – Extract

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SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF III
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +THE HIERARCHY OF COGS+

The snow and ice were red. Not with blood, though the constant exchange of noospheric chatter between Haldron-44 Stroika’s receivers and the explorator arkcruiser Maestrale told him that there was a 94.767 per cent chance that they eventually would be. Now, they were red with algae. The deep freeze of Perborea allowed little light down to the surface, but what gloom made it through the maelstrom fuelled the blooms that streaked the ice world’s face.

Stroika was skitarii – from the hydraulics of his legs and the revolving joints of his arm-appendages to the acknowledged frailty of his flesh. He was as the Machine-God continued to make him. Forge-raised on Satzica Secundus, Stroika had followed the patient path of protocol and worked his way up through the hierarchy of cogs.

<Secondary target identified,> Stroika reported.

Stroika’s cranial engineering sizzled with the static of an uplinked intrusion. Sound that bypassed the ears. Visions that were experienced by the mind and not the eye. Binaric cant, novabyte and noospheric blurts overlaid one upon the other, neuro-synced straight into the brain. Orbital magna-picts, sensory feeds and holo-diagrammaticals dropped from the explorator arkcruiser above, like a thunderbolt, straight into the skitarius’s mind.

The streamed doctrina imperatives all carried the authorisations of Magos Omnid Torquora, but Stroika experienced the intrusion as the pure will of the Machine-God. All forge-worlders, from the Fabricator General to the lowliest servitor, made up the Corpus Mechanicus – glorifying the Machine-God Incarnate with their artifice, both in their workings and their base organics. The Omnissiah found expression in and acted through them all. This was the Motive Force; the holy transference of data and instruction down through the stratified ranks of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Stroika – like all the skitarii of his legion – was possessed of a fraction of the Machine-God. He was one of a billion, billion parts working in magnificent union and harmony. It was through the priesthood and techno-magi of the Cult Mechanicus that the Omnissiah made His needs and wishes known. As hosts of the Machine-God’s unquestioned divinity, the magi spoke the word of the god, in His many favoured cants and streams. Stroika felt his doctrinal wetware respond.

<This mission has been blessed, Stroika-unit,> Magos Torquora told the skitarii officer. <By the cog that turns. By the oil that eases. By the spark that leaps. We do the Great Maker’s work here. This most holy of missions does not allow for complications. You understand me, Stroika-unit? Identify the secondary target. To break with me and the mission is to break with Him. Receive of His blessing and remember all that you have achieved in His name. Know that you will achieve so much more.>

In the great gears of the Mechanicus machine – the machine that made war in the name of indomitable progress and majesty reclaimed – the fighting constructs of the Omnissiah became greater than their parts. Haldron-44 Stroika had striven to become greater still.

Stroika remembered. He reviewed a lifetime in service to the Machine-God. How he had been a star-gazing menial, whose weak flesh was a blueprint of tattoos depicting the holy bionics and augmentations he had dreamed of one day possessing. He remembered a miserable eternity as a citizen-factotum and his subcutaneous electronic bar codes that burned with accumulated tallies and commendations. As an auxilia forge-sentinel, blessed with his first augmetics, he had been given the honour of guarding isotope scrap depot 3-64-63.

His record of off-world service in the numberless ranks of the Legiones Skitarii would have been a credit to any cybernetic soldier of the Cult Mechanicus. As sub-alpha, princeps and alpha he had led clade units of his own. He had earned the Crux Mechanicus and had risen through the ranks. Now, with a small legion his to command, he was Alpha Primus Haldron-44 Stroika of the Deuteron-IV Praetori, seconded to the infamous explorator Omnid Torquora.

Stroika’s attachment of Sicarian infiltrators, selected from his expeditionary legion for the mission, were spindly silhouettes in the snowstorm. The integrated senses of his helm immersed Stroika in a blizzard of data. Omnispectral lenses and bleak optics filtered the red static of the storm. His acquisition reticules fixed on the outline of each of the skitarii soldier-operatives in turn, cycling through radiant energy wavelengths. Stroika’s cogitae cores decrypted and processed the different datastreams fed back to him through the arkcruiser’s phylactix.

The Primus experienced the ice world as no one man of mere flesh and blood could. He saw his column of infiltrators from orbit. Through the arkcruiser’s arrays he acquired the meagre heat of the skitarii organics and the power signatures of their bionics on the razored apex of the icy ridge. High-gain antennae from a swarm of disposable probes returned to him the data-betrayal of the killclade’s own voxmissions and uplink designations. He felt the air-to-ground surveyor pulses of the Mechanicus Sky Talon holding position kilometres above them. He became one with the auspectral returns of the Onager Dunecrawlers that had transported them across the desolate ice plains. The simultaneous datastreams met in Stroika and gave the skitarii commander a holo-dimensional fix on their position. All this, Stroika processed through the busy warmth of his cranial cortex.

The Sicarians of the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 fired the climbing spikes of their cloven metal feet, making progress up the frost-shattered ridge. They were led by the detachment’s commander, Princeps Talus-Spuria I/X, who – like his infiltrators – advanced with his right-hand weapons-cradle collapsed and locked to his back.

The soldiers moved with a hydraulic choreography, bionics trudging in unison and their mantid gait in sympathy with the leading princeps. To Stroika, Talus-Spuria I/X and his nine other infiltrators appeared like long-legged insects, from their gangling advance to the dome of their helmets and bulbous optics.

<Princeps, all stop,> Stroika streamed.

His order received an immediate response. The infiltrators became still, like figures frozen in a pict. Standing like statues on the ridge, dusted with red snow, the skitarii and their princeps awaited further orders.

Bringing the metal digits of a bionic gauntlet to the side of his helm, Haldron-44 Stroika made a series of delicate adjustments to otherwise chunky instrumentation. A crest-holder ran transversally across the top of the helmet: the demicog of a Primus. The vanes and crenellations of the plume crackled with the flow of transmitted data. The silky foil of his officer’s greatcloak, the rust-red of Mars, flapped behind him in the storm, acting as a receptor-threaded receiver.

Haldron-44 Stroika felt the presence of the Omnissiah echo through him. Through his neurocircuitry. Through the synaptic flash of sparks between his brain cells. Through his very soul.

The mind of the Primus flashed with orbital auspectra, static-grained captures and holodiagrammatic representations. Binary streamed through his thoughts, while data-layered codemissions and the cacophonous cant of lingua-technis laced through him. Stroika became momentarily one with the downlink and saw the energy signatures of his targets moving across the blood-streaked ice of the valley. Several kilometres ahead of them, the data-visitation revealed a large life form. No doubt something the targets were stalking whilst Stroika and his infiltrators in turn hunted them.

Silhouettes of codified fauna native to Perborea flashed up beside the energy signature. Another gift from Magos Torquora and the Maestrale. None seemed to match the form, however. This didn’t surprise Stroika, as Perborea Prime, being a backwater ball of ice in a hazardous system, was not a well-documented world.

<Secondary target unknown,> Stroika streamed back to the arkcruiser, his thoughts piggy-backing the phylactic shunt between the skitarii, the Onager Dunecrawler, the Sky Talon and the Maestrale. <Collating…>

Crunching up through the ice, weaving through the column of skitarii, Haldron-44 Stroika assumed position on the razored ridge. Looking down through the bloody, howling maelstrom into the valley below, the Primus could barely make out their targets. Magnocular lenses on his helm whirred to focus and filters cycled but the targets were still just a signatured blur through the blizzard.

Stroika lifted his left arm. It was an augmented appendage terminating in the bionics of an armoured gauntlet, and he held it up like a feudal world lord flying a bird of prey. Instead of a raptor, however, the skitarii officer carried an infoslave servo-skull which bore the designation Phrenos~361. The construct was fashioned after the Cog Mechanicus, being half bone and half cogitator. A cog turned about the skull like the rings of a gas giant, spinning in place on a magnetic field. The barrel of an arc blaster protruded from the servo-skull’s under-jaw, ready to drop and lock in firing position. A bundle of prehensile interface cables drooped down from the stub of Phrenos~361’s spine, anchoring it to Stroika’s arm.

<Get me a visual,> Stroika ordered, launching Phrenos~361 into the crystal-cold air. The servo-skull retracted its serpentine cables, its rotating cog speeding to a magnetically accelerated blur. Angling the blade-cog about it, Phrenos~361 was able to fly down the side of the ridge. Stroika watched the drone surge away. Cycling through the optical arrays of its augmented eye-sockets, Phrenos~361 transmitted a pict feed of its progress across the algae-streaked ice. The servo-skull’s data was uploaded to a visualisation processor in Stroika’s mind.

Buffeted by the streaming blizzard of red, Phrenos~361 cut through the freezing maelstrom, closing on the targets. Shapes smudged into the storm became silhouettes. Phrenos~361 counted twenty-three in total, the outline of each figure searing to brightness before fading away as the servo-skull catalogued them. In the main the column was made up of lumbering brutes, buried in ragged skins and furs. They pushed their exhausted carcasses on, leading with the jutting underbite of their tusk-crowded jaws.

Smaller, sinewy creatures struggled through the red drift about them, large noses protruding from hoods and the shredded cast-offs of their brute compatriots. Phrenos~361 flashed through the outlines of individual limbs and a stream of data analysing bodily proportion and ratio. The dimensions of the figures confirmed what Stroika already knew. Their targets were xenos. They were greenskins.

<Proceed,> the Primus ordered, prompting the servo-skull to move on.

Haldron-44 Stroika had extensive experience of orks. His service record indicated 2,372 confirmed greenskin kills across a range of warzones, but he had never encountered xenos such as these before. The creatures he had expertly despatched on Antioq, Ptolomae Phall and Phaeta Secunda were monsters in love with their godless machines and the devastating capabilities of their primitive xenos technologies.

The column of fur-shaggy aliens Phrenos~361 hovered above sported no such developments. The greenskins were barbarians in the truest sense of the word. They dripped with simple jewellery: bones, teeth and scavenged shiny objects, threaded through their ears, lips and green flesh. The only protection they boasted was the resilience of their monstrous frames and the furs that hunched their backs, trailing red through the snow. Their only weapons seemed to be simple stabbers and choppers, crafted from crude pieces of recovered scrap – dagger shards, spear-sharpened struts and axes fashioned from twisted metal.

The greenskin savages didn’t seem to notice Phrenos~361, who surged ahead of the loping column through the streaming snow. The pict feed relayed back to Stroika showed little more than the red static of the valley floor. Finally, the servo-skull closed in on a larger creature. The blur of the alien monstrosity seared into focus as Phrenos~361 advanced as close as it dared.

The creature’s outline flashed up against a cycling catalogue of potential matches but in the end the Mechanicus survey files failed to identify the beast. Bigger than a Dunecrawler or tracked conveyer, the beast slid through the snow and ice like a slug, warming the freeze beneath it to create a slippery trail that carried its bulk. Its blubbery body was covered with a carpet of shaggy hair while its head was decorated with a quartet of antlers. A thin membrane extended between the network of prongs, filtering the howling gales of their red bounty. Trapped algae funnelled down through the hollow antlers and feeding tubes into the alien herbivore.

<Data collated. Threat assessed,> Stroika told Magos Torquora. <Conclusion: non-threatening. Mission proceeding.>

<Diagnostiquorum consulted,> Torquora told him. <Assessment confirmed… wait… parsing…>

<Magos?>

Stroika’s mind became a kaleidoscope of alerts and warnings. Data-feeds and hologrammaticals told him that an inbound meteorite was due to impact in the vicinity. Perborea was a crowded system, awash with debris and the planetary wreckage of ongoing calamities. Several such impacts had struck the mountains and the Maestrale had suffered collision damage from a number of close encounters.

<Incoming,> Stroika transmitted to his infiltrator clade. The gangly skitarii went down on one knee in unquestioning choreography. The Primus joined them as a meteorite – bright and white – blazed through the sky overhead. It narrowly missed the ridge upon which they were positioned. Following the path of the meteorite, Stroika’s cogitators and targeters flashed estimated trajectories through his mind. He watched it strike the valley floor. A red cloud rocketed angrily for the sky, with a blast wave radiating out from the crater.

<Brace for impact,> the skitarii officer ordered. His modulations were calm but insistent. As the blizzard died about them and the wall of snow and fury roared up the valley side, the Sicarian infiltrators shot anchors and cables into ice at their feet. <Three… Two… One… Impact.>

Haldron-44 Stroika felt the blast wave hit him. The elemental force almost took him from his feet – as it would have done for the rest of his skitarii, but for the anchors that kept the spindly soldiers from flailing away. With his greatcloak whipping about him, Stroika reviewed his sizzling feeds. The greenskins had marched on with indifference through the screeching turmoil of ice and snow. Several of their diminutive attendants had been blown some distance away, their rags catching the force of the blast like kites. The Primus watched Phrenos~361’s pict feed pitch wildly as the servo-skull fought to ride out the storm.

As the howling impact hissed to a stop, Stroika and the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 found themselves submerged in a thick, bloody haze of ice and algae. The meteorite crash had kicked up colossal amounts of snow into the atmosphere. Stroika knew that if he didn’t act swiftly, his greenskin targets would become lost to him. He was not the only one to come to such a conclusion, although it was difficult – and pointless – attempting to separate thoughts of his own from those visited upon him by his tech-priest master up in orbit. In the end, they were all gifts of the Machine-God, regardless of the mind from which they originated.

<Reacquire targets,> Omnid Torquora ordered. <Priority one.>

Stroika acknowledged the order with the noospheric blurt of a salute.

<You heard the magos,> Stroika told Talus-Spuria I/X and his infiltrators, <and through him the Great Maker. Reacquire the targets. Triple-time it.>

With the clunk of climbing anchors released from the ice and whipping back on their cables, the princeps and the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 launched themselves over the frost-shattered ridge. Reaching out with the fingers of a gauntlet to steady himself, Haldron-44 Stroika followed, skidding down the valley side after them with his greatcloak flapping. The blood-red snow of the slope streamed about the skitarii officer and in his descending wake.

SELECTED: DENTRICA II OF III
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +BASE FLESH+

Stroika could hear the wails of the beast. As his skitarii had zeroed in on their targets, cloaked by the red mist of the meteorite impact, the greenskins had closed on their own.

Holding some distance away through the bloody haze, Stroika and the infiltrators were rejoined by the servo-skull Phrenos~361. The drone whirred to a stop, landing on the Primus’s gauntlet and securing itself with the prehensile grip of its snaking cables. The skitarii officer’s clicking optics revolved slowly to focus, overlaying filter upon filter. In false-colour horror, Stroika was presented with a vision of slaughter. The greenskin savages were hacking apart the alien herbivore, burying huge, cleaver-like blades in the beast, shearing through fur, blubber and bone. The creature’s blood turned the snow to dark slush about it. It shook its antlers and emitted a mournful roar of defiance as it attempted to slide its way out of the frenetic butchery.

Stroika’s auditory equalisers rang with the valley-bounced echoes of the beast’s suffering. Infrared filters froze the warmth of blood-splatter patterns as they sprayed through the red miasma. The guttural grunts and bellows of the greenskins were cross-referenced for linguistic origin.

Talus-Spuria I/X and his skitarii held position on the ice of the valley, their spindly forms masked by the haze of snow that still hung in the aftermath of the meteorite strike. With their augurs and optics, Stroika and the skitarii could see the xenos, but the savage greenskins could not see them. The Machine-God abhorred waste, however, and Talus-Spuria I/X had his soldier-operatives run firing protocols, preparatory targeting solutions and xenos data-files, ensuring that when the time did come to engage the enemy, they were as ready as they could be. Kill-shots had already been calculated. Trajectories had been calibrated. Probabilities had been processed. These, augmented by the flexibility, invention and natural instincts of their base flesh, made the Omnissiah’s servants deadly opponents in waiting.

Haldron-44 Stroika watched. Recorded. Monitored. The greenskins finished the miserable alien herbivore before hacking the beast to pieces. They took huge slabs of skinned meat and shaggy fur over their shoulders while their servant creatures dragged antler, bone and the harvested delicacy of internal organs. Little was wasted and by the time the feral hunting party was done, all that remained was a mound of steaming entrails.

<Proceed?> Talus-Spuria I/X transmitted.

<As you were, princeps,> the Primus sent back.

The infiltrators tracked their quarry along the valley and up through a labyrinth of steep-sided ice ravines. The greenskins’ progress was slow but indomitable, while the miasma of blizzard-quelling meteorite impacts helped to mask the presence of the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660. Like skeletal spirits, rimed in red and ice, the skitarii haunted the xenos, matching them step for step, calibrating their own advance to maintain a consistent distance between them and their targets.

Breaking out across a new ice field, Stroika and his skitarii trailed the greenskins to a crooked mountain that reared in isolation from the frozen plain. The outline of the mountain flashed in the optic overlays of Haldron-44 Stroika’s helmet. Angles extended beyond the structure and data streamed down beside the imposing form of the red peak.

<Are you receiving this, magos?> Stroika said.

<Processing,> Omnid Torquora transmitted back from the Maestrale. <The diagnostiquorum concur. It looks favourable, Stroika-unit.>

<Sir,> Talus-Spuria I/X said.

<We have lost the xenos?>

<Yes, Primus,> Talus-Spuria I/X returned. <Solonoid-Spuria IV/X confirms that the xenos have entered a tunnel in the mountainside.>

<Magos,> Stroika said, <I am requesting authorisation to proceed.>

<Granted,> Omnid Torquora told him. <Clarification required. The Omnissiah demands it.>

<Secure the tunnel, princeps,> Stroika ordered.

The infiltrators observed their instructions with simultaneous urgency. The light hydraulics of their cloven legs helped them to bound through the red snow at speed. Stroika’s own appendages brought him up behind their fanning number. His cloak streamed behind him.

<Weapons online,> Talus-Spuria I/X blurted in chuntering code. The glow of the infiltrators’ optic-arrays clunked to a brighter shade. The skitarii of the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 extended their left arms, each holding a flechette blaster. The pistols sizzled to life. The weapons-cradles that replaced their right arms unfolded, extending from where they had been collapsed and locked behind their shoulder joints. Each formed the hydraulic arm and pivot-cradle of a close combat weapon. The infiltrators were armed with taser goads that crackled with voltaic lethality.

As the skitarii infiltrators split into two fast-advancing columns, Haldron-44 Stroika launched Phrenos~361 once more into the air. The servo-skull’s cog-blade whirred silently to a blur, carrying the drone forward to scout the tunnel. With his cloak rippling behind him, Stroika thrust the hydraulics of his bionic arms out, forcing two arc pistols to slide down their length on rails. As the chunky pistols clunked into palm locks, the skitarii commander settled his thumbs back around their grip-interfacia and brought the weapons to crackling life.

<Skitarii,> Stroika transmitted to the infiltrators. <Honour the machine. Be as its parts, working in harmony, in blessed unison, as one.>

The Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 filed into the ragged entrance cut into the ice wall. The algae-threaded freeze gave way to darkness. This mattered little to Stroika and the skitarii. Their augurs and optics fizzled as their visual filters allowed them to probe the depths of the tunnel. Stroika’s feeds recorded the drop in temperature and the changing gradient. They were descending.

The Primus trudged down the centre of the passage, his heavier hydraulics chewing up the ice floor. Infiltrators padded along the walls of the tunnel in two columns, leading the way with the silencers of their pistols. While their combat chassis design offered their base organics ample protection, it was still a lighter designation, suiting their allotted role.

Phrenos~361 had drifted far ahead of the unit, almost catching up to the meat-lugging greenskins. Relaying pict feeds back to its master, each presenting some enhancement or capture of note, the servo-skull showed the xenos disappearing into a ragged metal opening at the end of the tunnel. The rust and twisted serrations made the opening appear like a mouth swallowing the greenskin monsters.

The Mechanicus tech-priests and soldiers formed a shunting chain of hallowed transmissions. Stroika and the infiltrators experienced the mission through the servo-skull’s optics, as Magos Torquora and his diagnostiquorum experienced it through them. The Omnissiah monitored the glorious progress of His servants through every feed, stream and imperative passing between them.

<Vessel located, magos,> Haldron-44 Stroika said. <Praise the Omnissiah.> The skitarii officer regretted the invocation immediately. His rising heart rate and the flush of hormones recorded in his bloodstream smacked of pride and self-congratulatory relief.

<You will be informed when the mission is completed, Stroika-unit,> Omnid Torquora sent back. <When it has met its designated goals to the satisfaction of your priestly betters and to the greater glory of the Machine-God.>

<Understood, magos,> the Primus transmitted. He felt his mind flood with the phylactic intrusion of the priesthood. Like a scope brought to focus or an instrument recalibrated, Stroika felt the trivialities of wayward impulse fade. He felt the procession of sentiments warm from the heart run cold. His mind seared to precision and necessity. The cloud of thoughts and feelings afflicting brain and flesh dissipated, sizzling to the demand of his cerebral systems: targeting data, ballistics and acquisition reticules.

He was no longer Stroika, forge-worlder, proud servant of the Mechanicus and commander with care for both his skitarii and his techno-magi overlords. He was Stroika the living weapon. A cold equation, an eventuality to be delivered, an instrument of divine artifice and design. He was sync-slaved – synapse and engram – to a higher purpose. An instrument of the holy Motive Force.

<Probability that the vessel is the Stella-Xenithica, 17.877 per cent,> Torquora informed him.

Geometrics and augur scans of the isolated mountain flashed through Stroika’s neural engrams and processors. Now the Infiltroriad-Spuria~660 had tracked the xenos back to their ice caves, the Maestrale had been able to narrow its search for a vessel long crashed on Perborea and buried in ice. Only the colossal craft’s mighty prow now protruded above the frozen plateau, in the shape of the crooked mountain. The arkcruiser’s ice-penetrating augurs had given Omnid Torquora and the diagnostiquorum the vessel’s estimated shape and dimensions.

<Probability that the vessel is the Stella-Xenithica, 42.112 per cent,> Torquora said.

The Sicarian infiltrators waited either side of the opening, where the warped metal met the ice. As Phrenos~361 glided through the crumpled superstructure of the ancient vessel, the servo-skull projected a broad shaft of hologrammatic light that felt its way through the ruin. Walls were rust-mulched fragility clinging to the skeletal structure of the vessel’s girders and decking, giving the inside the appearance of a dripping cave or the burnt-out interior of a leviathan’s ribcage. Phrenos~361 moved quietly through the freeze, optics whirring, scan-shaft buzzing. New instruments emerged from its cranium. In the distance, echoing through the tortured architecture of the craft’s vast interior, the drone’s vox-corder isolated the sounds of the greenskins. The monsters were dragging their prize back to the feral tribe that had made the wreckage their home.

Phrenos~361 stopped to repeat a scan, augmenting with filtered optics and captures. The servo-skull had been scanning for positive idents, fixtures and serial numbers. Anything that might help the Mechanicus confirm the vessel as the fabled Stella-Xenithica. A series of digits flashed through Stroika’s mind. It was a serial mark on a trunk distribution pipe, something that had largely escaped the ravages of time and temperature. Something recently uncovered by the soggy collapse of a rust-eaten wall. Stroika’s stubby vanes relayed the find to the Maestrale. Even as he did, he could tell from the archaic numeration that the serial number was old and it was Martian.

<…Positive identification confirmed,> Omnid Torquora told Stroika. The explorator’s voice was cool and steely, betraying nothing of the excitement Stroika knew the magos must be feeling. <Our search is over. The serial confirms the vessel’s origin. The Martian shipyards. The holy Ring of Iron. Cross-referencing the manifests, I am ready to declare this wondrous find as the Stella-Xenithica, Terran colony ship, bound for the Autrega System, lost in the void. Probability 99.678 per cent. Blessed be the number. We give thanks for our certainty. Stroika-unit – secure this hallowed artefact and its secrets.>

<Phrenos~361,> Stroika transmitted, prompting the servo-skull to glide around. <Survey the vessel and report findings.>

The drone turned and, with its revolving cog-blade accelerating about it, drifted off down the passage, scanning and pict-cataloguing the find.

<Skitarii,> the Primus addressed the infiltrators. <We stand before the artifice of our Martian magi and forefathers. Its sacred design, the wonder of its workings and the consecration of ancient iron is ours to claim in the name of the Omnissiah, for it is He who guided Magos Torquora to this place of rediscovery. It is in His name that we shall purge the corruption of the xenos infestation and restore the secrets of this find to the servants of Mars.>

SELECTED: DENTRICA III OF III
ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED
UPLOADING… +HARD DATA+

Stroika heard little of the battle. His mind was drifting on the serenity of screed and data-hymnals that proceeded from the skitarii infiltrators as they fought their way through the green alien plague. With filters and scrubbers engaged, Stroika heard the canticles of the Omnissiah.

The greenskin monstrosities and their runts, however, gripped their skulls with foetid claws and bled from their eyes and ears. Without filters, the aliens were treated to the white noise of crippling neurostatic that proceeded from the Sicarian infiltrators. Despite the veritable assault on the senses that being in the neurostatic aura entailed, the greenskins fought like mindless barbarians. Roaring through their pain and confusion, their brute faces trickle-streaked with blood, the xenos savages fought on – swinging, stabbing and bludgeoning with their primitive weapons.

Stroika leaned out of the path of a monstrous weapon. His mind burned with projections, warnings and hologrammatical trajectories. These, combined with augmented reflexes to act on such information, gave the servants of the Adeptus Mechanicus the edge they required to survive the dangers of a hostile galaxy.

While not genetically engineered for transhuman supremacy like the Adeptus Astartes, the skitarii’s blessed bionic enhancements allowed them to punch above their weight when faced with warp-spawned corruption or the savagery of the alien. For the Cult Mechanicus, there was a tool for every job and a job for every tool. The advanced weaponry, cybernetic resilience and sensory superiority of the skitarii meant that they were invariably that tool. Whether it was the garrisoning of forge worlds and fabricator moons, the merciless punishment of techno-heresy or crusading for that most precious of commodities – data – the Legiones Skitarii were both the tool and the weapon of choice.

Beneath the armour plating, the battleware and bionics, however, there were men. Men who had been butchered in the Machine-God’s name, serving the Great Maker through their flesh, blood and augmentation. Cogitae and bioplastic wetware could do little to match the economy of base organics. For a priesthood who needed warriors who could think for themselves while unquestioningly serving the needs of the Mechanicus, however, the creativity of the human brain and fortitude of the human heart were necessary evils. For where the logic of the machine was absent, mistakes were ultimately made.

The weapon was as savage and uncouth as the orks could have made it: the thick length of a bone, inset with a cleaving blade fashioned of sharpened girder-shard. The barbarian greenskin that wielded it was not about to be lectured on the finer points of design, however. The rude blade whooshed in front of Stroika’s throat before smashing straight through Gaskii-Spuria IX/X. The Sicarian infiltrator was swept aside in a cacophonous blur of plating, hydraulics and blood. Stroika watched Gaskii-Spuria IX/X’s biometric feeds die on his optic overlays, along with the infiltrator as the green beast cleaved what was left of him down through the rusted decking.

Stroika brought up his arc pistols. Blasting streams of electricity from the weapons, the skitarius forced the brute into a retreat. The creature’s hulking frame was punched back by each arcstream burst, its green flesh smouldering to blackness.

As it lifted its monstrous pike above its head, Stroika shot the weapon from palsied green claws that smoked and crackled with the surging energies blasted through them. Stomping forward on his thick-set hydraulics, Stroika fired upon the alien again and again. Two chest-searing streams stopped the beast’s gargantuan heart, a third scorched into its forehead and broiled its brain. The xenos barbarian reeled back like some felled giant, smashing partly through the corroded decking.

From the layout, the cavernous chamber that the greenskins had chosen as their communal hovel had been some kind of flight deck. Mouldering mounds of scrap that had been long-forgotten designs of atmospheric lander littered the space, while a cargo recess in the floor served as a raging fire-pit upon which blubber-fat was burned and meat roasted. Fungal blooms grew out of the scrap and debris, thriving in the dank interior of the ice-entombed derelict.

Runts had been left in charge of preparing the feast. With their unintelligible shrieks of disorientation and alarm bouncing about the dripping darkness, barbaric green beasts and feral hunters were flooding the chamber from adjoining grottos and partially collapsed passageways. One static-enraged beast shouldered a path of destruction straight through a corroded wall.

The infiltrators met the furious rush of green muscle with suppression fire from their blasters. Flechettes thudded across the open space, shredding furs and mauling alien flesh. As the metal darts sank into the tough hide of the feral creatures, electrical signatures drew more of the darts down on the targets, savaging the orks. The greenskin monsters pushed on furiously through the white noise and flechette storm as further blasts ripped through them. Several crashed to the deck in neurostatic incapacitation. As they fell, the infiltrators finished the beasts with the stabbing blaze of their taser goads.

The flight deck flashed with roasting streams of electrical energy. As the cells of Stroika’s arc pistols drained away, he ejected the battery magazines and slammed the grips of the pistols into the thigh-loaders of his titanium legs. There spare mag-cells waited, pneumatically punched into the handgrips of the pistols upon impact.

Bringing up the pistols, Stroika blast-hammered screeching runts back into the great fire and through the weakened deck plates, down into the darkness below. Several ran for their miserable lives, forcing Stroika to shoot them in the back. He turned one into a convulsing nest of spidery arcs that smouldered on the deck, while the force of another arcstream caused an alien wretch to explode in a fountain of crackling gore.

The Sicarian infiltrators soon became stretched. Like Stroika they moved with the unflinching speed and fluidity of the machine. Acquisition reticules and calibrators danced across the darkness, zeroing in not only on enemies but on pre-calculated vulnerabilities. Information streamed. Links and feeds chuntered with the unspoken exchange of combat data. Hard-linked weaponry answered the call of targeter and xenocidal impulse.

Compatible fusions of combat hormones and serenitives were released slowly into their bloodstream, enabling the skitarii to maintain a state of battle-furious calm. Enemies were despatched with a ruthless, religious fervour. This found expression in the cold, almost automatic efficiency of their slick aim and death-dealing lack of sentiment. To an enemy the cybernetic soldiers might appear as machine-spirit guided robots, but the skitarii were more than just hydraulics, gears and processors. They hated with the hearts of men and dreamt the glories of the Omnissiah ascendant, a day when all true constructs of flesh and iron might be connected as one. A time when the Machine-God might extend His data-ravenous reach and that of His empire throughout the whole galaxy.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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

Cover illustration by Bagus Hutomo.

Skitarius © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. Skitarius, 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: 978-1-78251-813-6

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