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The Only Way is Through – Extract

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The Only Way is Through

Avalon Irons

‘WARNING – DECOMPRESSION IMMINENT.’

‘Brothers, move, now!’ Warpsmith Nikia Belevonis shouted above the warning klaxons, shouldering the enormous weight of a wounded veteran. His blood trailed down Nikia’s battle plate and across the floor, casting red on everything like a distress beacon. The squad of power-armoured giants lumbered through the bulkhead door ahead of him. They were exhausted, splattered with viscera, and riddled with divots from bolter fire. The Warpsmith’s armour sensors were flashing an array of angry colours, all pointing to a rapidly buckling section of the pressurised antechamber. They were on one of the outer decks of the strike cruiser Irreverent, and it was clear that the layers of plasteel and ceramite between them and the black abyss had been severely damaged. The barrage from the Black Templars’ macro-laser cannons had been utterly relentless.

‘You are… foolish, Warpsmith…’ Calix Rova’s voice wheezed over the crackling vox-link. ‘You should have left me to haunt those zealots. I’m as good as gone already.’

The chainsword had done its filthy work on the legionary. The gouges in his chest were deep, and Nikia knew he would find shattered bones and a deflating lung within at the very least.

‘Consider it the preservation of resources our warband cannot afford to lose,’ Nikia said with great exertion as he shifted the fallen warrior’s mass more onto his shoulders.

‘I consider it a force of habit.’ Rova made a noise like a gurgled laugh. ‘Make all the monsters and machines you like, Belevonis. You’ll always be a sawbones under it all.’

‘Chide me again, and maybe I will think better of my “habits”.’ He growled as his muscles strained.

No reply came. Rova had lost consciousness, whatever obstinate jape he would have made coagulating with the blood in his mouth.

It truly would kill you to be miserable along with the rest of us, Nikia scoffed to himself.

‘WARNING – DECOMPRESSION IMMINENT.’

The machine spirit within the Irreverent’s bulkhead cogitator continued to blare the warning flatly, as if the sudden rush of the void into the strike cruiser wouldn’t trouble it in the slightest. The legionaries of the Olympia’s Bellows warband, however, were keenly aware of the tolerances of their power armour. Not even Vashtorr’s patronage could save them from the forces of physics if the legionaries did not act swiftly.

Massive, reverberating steps like the crashing of thunder followed behind them. The last of Nikia’s daemon engines, a Decimator, came from the hangar bay door and into the damaged antechamber.

Such an ugly, brutish thing… Nikia narrowed his eyes at it. The monstrous, bipedal machine stood taller and broader than a Dreadnought, and somehow managed to make those armour-plated caskets look graceful. Its head hung low in the centre of its chest like an ork, framed by reinforced shoulder plates and two stout arms, one terminating in a siege claw and the other a butcher cannon.

He’d known other Warpsmiths over his centuries of service. Nearly all took immense pride in their creations. Nikia’s hands had given animation to multitudes of skilfully made daemon engines, and he could only ever regard them with pragmatism and contempt in equal measure. Even thinking of the smouldering wrecks of his Heldrakes and Maulerfiends yielded only frustration at the wasted resources and spent effort.

Even dwelling on this is an act of sentiment. The Warpsmith shook his head to clear his mind. The only way for you now is through.

Nikia could feel the Irreverent beginning evasive manoeuvres to outrun their foes. A hull breach here could spell ruin for the entire warband.

‘Reinforce the wall! Use yourself!’ the Warpsmith shouted at the daemon engine. Viaios would be furious, but it was the only course left to him. The incursion from the Black Templars on the death world below had already forced him to abandon the majority of his daemon engines to hold the line while the warband escaped to the Irreverent. He could and would create new and terrible death-dealing machines, but the cost would continue to climb.

The Decimator complied instantly. The hulking abomination of daemonic form and material function easily detected the compromised area and began ratcheting itself in place, steadily becoming part of the structure of the ship itself. Just as Nikia and Rova cleared the bulkhead door, the atmosphere suddenly began to vent before the daemon engine had completed its work. Unable to withstand the vacuum of space, the daemonic flesh that once gave locomotion to the Decimator boiled away into sickly purple gas. Its mechanical components continued to operate on its last known command until it could move no longer, sealing and reinforcing the cracked wall in the vessel.

Nikia watched through the cogitator’s display screen as the bubbling flesh splattered against the wall. The Decimator was gone. Now, the Irreverent had a strong, albeit unsightly, repair holding up the antechamber’s structure. As the Geller field fizzed into life, the strike cruiser made its narrow escape into the warp with its many wounded legionaries stowed securely, though never safely, within its cavernous bones.

‘I’m going to need you to hold still, Timos,’ Nikia said with uncanny placidity. His brothers, including his current patient, found most of their minds at ease in gruff bitterness or mathematical condescension. It did not grate on him; his own uncentered self often wandered to those spaces as well. But when he truly cleared his mind of all its distractions, an unfeeling serenity enveloped him like a heavy blanket.

It helped to balance the narthecium’s laser scalpel.

He guided the beam between the twisting purple rot climbing up Timos Galani’s arm and the viable flesh at his shoulder. The warp and its beasts were dangerous tools. The risk was calculated to be worthwhile, but all who dipped their curious hands into the sea of souls knew it was only a matter of time before mutation took hold.

It was admirable how long the Master of Possession held out before he began to grimace, then drew blood from his blistered lips. All Iron Warriors shared a certain sternness about them, but Galani had the intimidation and rigidity of an ancient stone statue. He had welded protective sigils of wrought iron directly onto his body over the past century. In Galani’s line of work, it was a sensible, if mildly grotesque, preventative measure.

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