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Tech-Priest - Extract

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

Omnid Torquora waited for the heavy elevator doors to shudder aside. As they did, the darkened diagnostiquorum chamber was revealed to the magos explorator. The bridge of the Maestrale was the nexus from which the arkcruiser was controlled, but the might of the Adeptus Mechanicus army that fought on the world below was coordinated here.

Torquora strode from the elevator, the car sighing as the tech-priest’s monstrous metal form departed. With the clunk of heavy steps, Torquora crossed the chamber.

While the magos explorator’s organic body was but a cable-interfaced sack of spoiling meat, the Machine-God had made Torquora much more. As he had explored the most lethal corners of the galaxy and fought the enemies of the Omnissiah over trinkets and ancient technologies, the tech-priest had indeed become less and less of a man. He had not only lost limbs and the function of flesh – he had been stripped of his humanity. But what the xenos had taken from Omnid Torquora, the Omnissiah had replaced and enhanced. The magos explorator was no longer human. He had become something beyond such constraints. He had transcended the limitation of base organics to assume an aspect of the Machine-God Himself.

The ghoulishness of Torquora’s cadaverous features sat within the darkness of his robes, hidden by the blinding intensity of his blaze-blue optics. His butchered body had travelled to the far reaches of the galaxy and had been chewed up and spat back at the Adeptus Mechanicus for augmentation. Now it was a punctured nest of cables, pipes and lines. About the stench, the withered flesh and wired bones, Omnid Torquora wore the glory of metal and intricate workings. Like an armoured sarcophagus, a suit of clinker-plate and heavy hydraulics enveloped him. Mechanical legs carried the deck-denting progress of his form. Brute appendage-cradles supported the weight of stowed heavy weaponry. An armoured hood of overlapping plates extended over his cranium like a mechanical headdress.

To some, Omnid Torquora was a metal monster, a servant of the Omnissiah so consumed with the holy Quest for Knowledge that he had forsaken much of his mind for the processing power of supercogitators, auspexes and meme-banks. He had become a stomping, whirring, crackling priest-machine, whose reactor, when it fired, drowned out the insignificance of lesser constructs with its thunder. To others, Torquora was exactly what the Great Maker intended for the galaxy. An itinerant idol. The brutal fusion of flesh, feeble from the womb, and the Omnissiah’s glorious workings.

As the baroque tech-priest wound his way between the runebanks and phylactic console interfaces, he trailed the oil-stained length of his accommodating robes. The chamber was a silent hive of god-fearing industry. Servitors, masked and robed, moved about the nests of runebanks, running cables and plugging their masters into the labyrinthine network of feeds that draped from the ceiling and snaked through the consoles. Cyber-cherubim descended in a small flock about Omnid Torquora. The drones swooped about the monstrous magos on engineered wings, attending to his needs. They varied in size and appearance, from infant cherubs to flapping, foetal constructs. Each dragged an interface or length of cable and began porting their master into the phylactic of information that flowed through the diagnostiquorum.

Magi, logistae and the tech-priests of the diagnostiquorum were hard at work, their minds connected to those of the Mechanicus’s servants throughout the fleet and fighting on the planet below. The dark chamber boasted no ports or windows, for the priests of the diagnostiquorum saw the bloody wonders of battle through thousands of optics, omnispectrals and interfaced eyeballs. Through their runebanks, they devoured the hard data fed to them from vane arrays, tethers and stream umbilicals. The thoughts of skitarii soldiers were theirs to know. The havoc of battle, victory and death was to them a torrent that reduced the pict-streamed, the chemical and experiential to cold data. Data to be processed, amassed and collated.

Unlike the runebank-interfaced tech-priests, Omnid Torquora did not require a throne and console. He was his own walking runebank. His auxiliary appendages slipped out from his robes, and their multi-digits went to frenetic work across the cogitators and logic engines housed within the armoured pulpit that projected from the priest-machine’s chest.

With his flock of cherubim circling, porting and interfacing, the magos explorator came to a halt at the hub of the dark chamber. As his diagnostiquorum of priests monitored the battle below – from every apocalyptic cannon crash to the flash of each targeting reticule – Omnid Torquora in turn monitored them. Through the cybernetic forces of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the priests saw all, felt all and knew all. Through the diagnostiquorum, Omnid Torquora came to know even more. Through them he advised and guided skitarii soldiers. He became a conduit for the Motive Force and – when the occasion demanded such measures – he would become one with the servants of the Adeptus Mechanicus. He was a puppet-master for whom the cybernetics of skitarii officers and soldiers were armour to wear and weapons to wield.

<Engage neural congress,> Torquora announced through the priestly consciousness of the chamber. <Wireless autoshunt acquired. Upload…>

Torquora’s mind became a feverish constellation of thoughts, imperatives and raw data. The tech-priest’s supercogitators tamed the torrent of infostreams, the blizzard of pict feeds and omnispectral miasma. It was a searing privilege to experience the Machine-God’s holy war through so many optics, augurs and targeters. To comprehend the Motive Force through an unfolding data-storm of events, both planet-shattering and inconsequential. It was how Torquora imagined the Omnissiah experienced the galaxy – through the hallowed workings of all true constructs at once and in glorious union.

It had been half a year, Martian-standard, since Omnid Torquora had initiated the attack on Velchanos Magna. As the warp storm of the Great Gyre had retreated, the forge world had been revealed like a treasure over which the Dark Mechanicum and the Traitor Space Marines of the Iron Warriors had fought. Now, the indomitable forces of the Adeptus Mechanicus contested the world. Furnished with the precious data of an expendable and exploratory attack, Torquora’s forces now fought both the subjugated Mechanicum and their Iron Warriors overlords. For 344 days, the Adeptus Mechanicus had taken the fight to the tainted, the machine-corrupted and the Chaos-pledged. For 344 days, Omnid Torquora had taken his station in the diagnostiquorum of the arkcruiser Maestrale and led his skitarii legions, his engines of mass destruction and his priests-militant in battle.

Like plucking a star from a cosmos of consciousnesses, Omnid Torquora selected one of his soldiers. The tech-priest could immerse himself in the skitarius, while at the same time monitoring all others.

Ballistarius First Class Unix 77-Endocek was a gunner riding out the undulations of his Ironstrider engine. The walker, its monotask servitor-driver and Endocek belonged to the Novo Nine-Two Saggitariaq. The unit was making progress through the assembly avenues of the Graia-Mactoria. As the walkers stalked past the wreckage of half-constructed battle tanks and the possessed macromachinery assembling them, they were fired upon by warped gun-servitors and hench-units of the Dark Mechanicum. Still responding to the darkness of their active protocols, the polluted constructs tried their best to defend the smouldering, battle-smashed installation.

Leading the column of Ironstrider engines, Unix 77-Endocek’s roving omnispectral beams stabbed through the smoke and darkness, searching for targets. Dark Mechanicum followers were taking cover behind the shattered shells of tanks, sheltering among the corrugated roof tops and taking aim from within stilt-mounted observation pods that still stood along the length of the assembly avenue. Acquiring each in turn, 77-Endocek despatched them with cold precision.

The Graia-Mactoria echoed with the lonely blast of single autocannon shells. The twin barrels of the cognis weaponry had the capability to turn vehicles and buildings into shot-shattered wrecks with fully automatic streams of devastating gunfire. Such tactics were considered a waste of time and ammunition without necessity, and the ballistarius first class opted for the searing accuracy of single shots, blasted alternately from each barrel. Each round tore through the mangled metal of cover, through buckled doors and the spiked barricades of roof-mounted forts and emplacements.

The rabid gunfire and code-shrieks of the enemy fell silent as, one by one, the rounds turned the tainted into streaks of streaming gore across metal and rockcrete.

Hunchbacked installation thralls burst forth from a reinforced control cabin at the Ironstrider engine’s feet, blasting sickly beams up at Unix 77-Endocek from their baroque lasrifles. The Ironstrider ballistarii would not be stopped, however. Hauling their grips and triggers up and pushing the barrels of the autocannons down towards the ground, the Novo Nine-Two Saggitariaq chewed up the miserable thralls with monstrous gunfire. Urging his servitor-driver and Ironstrider engine on, 77-Endocek stepped down on a malformed menial who was slapping his malfunctioning rifle with a palm. Leaving the mound of pulverised bone and flesh in its wake, the engine strode on with the ballistarius blasting gun-servitors from overhead wire walkways.

Omnid Torquora allowed himself to drift, his phylactic presence moving from construct-consciousness to construct-consciousness. Blinking between the optics and augurs of skitarii soldiers, the magos explorator saw a planet at war. From the ground, through the shaky pict streams and spooling data, Torquora watched the servants of the Dark Mechanicum die. He watched skitarii macroclades stoically advance through the twisted metal, demolished structures and cybernetic cadavers of the ruinous forge world. He monitored the progress of spindly Sicarian ruststalkers and infiltrators as they silently picked their way through the shattered industriascape, stabbing Dark Mechanicum hereteks in the back of their power packs, slitting feeds and cutting hooded heads from the shoulders of code-polluted tech-priests.

Two leagues to the south, the Onager Dunecrawlers of the V Column Adamanica-Phractora had closed on Dark Mechanicum battle tank contingents. The area had been the fabricator districts of the leaning Noctroi Hive but now was a cratered, cannon-blasted wasteland of drifting smoke and crackling energies.

Within the Dunecrawler designated Arachsus-440, Omnid Torquora willed himself into the electro-amniotic tank of the vehicle’s driver. 1-Lotun Cacheca was interfaced with the crawler and its machine-spirit, spearheading an Onager attack on a ramshackle armoured division. The Dark Mechanicum ranks were made up of smoke-belching battle tanks, dozer-bladed conveyers and spider-legged walkers. As the Dunecrawlers made flaming shells of the enemy tanks, scuttling over the derelicts with their crab-like legs, Torquora moved between 1-Lotun Cacheca and Ipsota 6-Dramski, the Onager’s designated gunner.

Rotating his gatling launcher, Dramski hammered rocket after rocket into a battle tank whose lightning cannon had glowed to readiness. Successive explosions tore through the tank, a final blast sending the wreckage skyward in a raging fireball. As the derelict landed and bounced back through the Dark Mechanicum lines, 1-Lotun Cacheca followed it through the flames.

Leading the slow, leg-stabbing crawl of a charge, Arachsus-440 breached the enemy lines, drawing the fury of Dark Mechanicum tank fire down on itself. The vehicle’s Emanatus force field became a globe of rancid light as Dark Mechanicum walkers and battle tanks turned the monstrosity of their energy weapons on the Onager Dunecrawler. Omnid Torquora felt the field integrity of the vehicle’s defences drop even as 1-Lotun Cacheca did.

The Dunecrawler had greater problems, however. As well as the putrescent energy of the heavy beam storm, the Onager’s augurs had picked up an armoured conveyer, thundering towards it at ramming speed. A nightmare of spiked track, serrated dozer blades and cyborg shock troops clinging to its twisted architecture, the conveyer bounced up and over the lips of craters before accelerating straight for the spearheading Dunecrawler.

Stepping back and lifting a single arachnoid leg, 1-Lotun Cacheca allowed the armoured conveyer to pass before his hallowed vehicle. As the conveyer back-tracked, the skitarii driver brought the tapering talon of the leg down to skewer through the conveyer’s roof and troop compartment. Cybernetic shock troopers began to clamber up and across the spiked wreckage of the transport. Ipsota 6-Dramski cycled from gatling launcher to cannons on the turret array before hammering the enemy into blood, oil and frag.

Suddenly, another vehicle was amongst them. While the Arachsus-440 attempted to extricate its leg and blast boarding shock troopers to oblivion, a spindly spider walker had mounted the enmeshed vehicles. The dish of an irradiator burned into the Onager’s armoured shell from a mounting on the walker’s underbelly, while the vehicle’s single, monstrous claw slammed through the side of the driver’s compartment.

Omnid Torquora felt the breached tank empty of its electro-amniotic fluid. The crooked, crackling pincers of the spider walker’s greatclaw had pierced the armour plating. Extended, they arced and spat either side of 1-Lotun Cacheca’s sagging form. The compartment interior showered Cacheca with sparks. Above, Torquora lived the horror of Ipsota 6-Dramski’s death, as a corruption-leaking cyborg stood over the gunner on the roof of the Dunecrawler and ran its rifle-mounted heavy chainblade through him.

With 1-Lotun Cacheca’s biometrics faltering, Torquora assumed control of the skitarius’s workings and failing systems. In his last moments, the driver felt the Machine-God’s presence. The Motive Force acted through him, and Omnid Torquora through the Motive Force. As the crackling pincers closed about him, Torquora willed the bionics of Cacheca’s arm up towards the Onager’s controls. With automotive power and hydraulics fading, every second was a mechanised agony as Torquora reached out with a dying gauntlet.

Slamming a bank of switches down and stabbing at a thick button with an armoured finger, Torquora willed 1-Lotun Cacheca to carry out a final duty. Hauling down on a pair of plunger handles, the skitarius initiated the vehicle’s destruct sequence. Torquora would deny the Dark Mechanicum even the derelict scrap of the vehicle. The tech-priest felt the machine-spirit of the Arachsus-440 purge its precious banks of collected battlefield data along a stream umbilical and up towards the Maestrale. Overloading the vehicle’s power core, Torquora felt the searing pincers of the claw arc-sizzle and close, cutting 1-Lotun Cacheca in two.

Withdrawing, Torquora found his way to Rota Volatis-22, gunner of the Dunecrawler Hermektris-600 that was making its way up behind. As Arachsus-440 exploded, a nova of detonating fuel-rods, ammunition and power enveloped the surrounding vehicles. While the pinned conveyer and a closing battle tank erupted in a chain reaction of detonations, the scaffold structure of the decimated spider walker skittered and sparked in the flames. As the driver of the Hermektris-600 took the Onager on and Rota Volatis-22 ended the enemy walker with a neutron laser stream, the column of Adeptus Mechanicus Dunecrawlers stalked on through the opening in the Dark Mechanicum lines.

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

Omnid Torquora travelled the dread freightways of Velchanos Magna in phylactic communion with his warriors: vanguard skitarii whose ranks crackled with the radioactivity of their radium weaponry, rangers who climbed up through the shattered floors of hab-blocks and took aim at Dark Mechanicum priests with their transuranic arquebuses. He lived the death-dealing charge of Sicarian ruststalkers as they carved a path through hordes of corrupt skitarii temple guard. The scrapcode-chuntering constructs defended the contested ruin of Gamma Hydrax to the last warped soldier.

While the killclades and legions of Torquora’s skitarii fought on, the machine that was the Traitor forge world maintained its fell production. While habs, entire hives and cratered deserts of orbitally-bombarded ruin were given up to the Adeptus Mechanicus advance, clusters of Dark Mechanicum forge temples and assembly yards toiled night and day to reproduce the forces sacrificed to Torquora’s invaders. For every warped cyborg, cult-thrall and weaponised servitor the hereteks lost, the gene-mills and forges of Velchanos Magna brought forth ten more replacement abominations.

Worse, such invaluable installations were guarded by daemon engines that savaged attacking skitarii cohorts and tore through columns of Ironstrider engines. Even Onager Dunecrawlers struggled to survive the otherworldly savagery of these infernal machines and the droves of possessed battle-automata that supported them. Above the forge temples were twisted Dark Mechanicum cruisers, maintaining their suicidal station in surface-grazing orbit. The monstrous vessels blotted out the stars, replacing the light with a fell glow of their own from flight decks and holds.

Repaired and sustained by the forge world’s mighty shipyards, which remained in Traitor hands, the disfigured cruisers protected the key production centres on Velchanos Magna from Adeptus Mechanicus arkcruisers and skitarii ground invasions alike. Visiting warp-fuelled bombardments, scything plagues of Hellblades and the air strikes of fighter-bombers on advancing legions of cybernetic soldiers, the twisted vessels ensured that clusters of forge temples maintained their horrific rates of production.

Omnid Torquora, conversely, had but a few forge ships to repair and maintain his cybernetic forces, their vehicles and their weaponry. He had nothing in the way of shipyards for the vessels of his battle-scarred fleet or temples to provide him with reinforcements. It had been the reality of this equation that had created a stalemate scenario between the Adeptus Mechanicus and the corrupt constructs of the Dark Mechanicum for the last 344 days.

Torquora’s skitarii legions were battle-hardened veterans, whose sweeping victories honoured their magos explorator but whose numbers he could not replace. The Dark Mechanicum forces were made up of corrupt constructs, polluted tech-priests and freakish fusions of daemon and machine. They could not stand against the indomitable onslaught of Torquora’s forces, but they did not have to. Moments after they fell, their warped forms were replaced by something that had been engineered, dreadfully augmented and infused with daemonic malignance in a forge temple but an hour before.

With every loss and every moment the Dark Mechanicum held their production centres on the dark side of the planet, the odds turned against Omnid Torquora.

The far side of the planet was a blasted mess. Tidally locked, one half of the forge world was bathed in eternal night while the other half suffered the perpetual bleakness of day. For Omnid Torquora, blinking between skitarii soldiers fighting daemon engines in the infernal twilight between, the daylight seemed worse.

In the dull glow of the distant star, the full twisted horror of what warp storm isolation had done to the once magnificent forge world was clear. The proud industry of the planet was now a twisted malaise of crooked tower-stacks and ventscrapers that poured the poison of corruption into skies once tarnished only with honest industry. The very architecture was twisted and tangled – a labyrinth of barbed buildings and razored wire, lost in soul-draining mists of damnation. The warp-saturated metal and stone assumed mind-aching shapes that honoured the dark creators of the world and afflicted the servants of the Omnissiah with their perversion.

Reactors arced otherworldly energies that crackled across the serrated roof tops. Where chemical seas had long dried up, the air shivered above the fiery blaze of liquid metal lakes. Canals of molten iron criss-crossed the globe with a patchwork of daemonic malevolence. Gene-mills spawned a never-ending horde of corrupted freaks, while the temple forges – once bright centres of technological achievement – were now architectural abominations dedicated to daemon overlords and the Ruinous Powers of the galaxy.

It was in these palaces of mighty craft and endless industry, originally built to honour the Machine-God, that the worst atrocities had been committed against the sanctity of the machine. Temples had been turned into warp-spawn forges, fusing daemonic entities to tainted workings of diabolical design. The resultant abominations stalked the forge world, eager to indulge their hatred of everything pure and visit the destruction of their obscene weaponry upon the forces of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

In the south, entire quadrants of the forge world’s industriascape had been decimated, leaving behind mangled architecture, flame-cleansed sand and cratered waste. There, giants ruled. The arkcruisers of the Adeptus Mechanicus had blasted installations, forge temples and construction yards from the face of the planet with apocalyptic accuracy, and the great war machines of the Centurio Ordinatus trundled through the death and destruction, their colossal tracks mulching constructs and buildings alike into the quaking ground.

The Ordinatii were grand expressions of the Omnissiah’s will. Towers and sky-scraping chimneys trembled and collapsed at their approach. The beams of lesser weaponry sparked harmlessly off the great, globed surfaces of dispersion fields and the supra-armoured forms of the holy machines themselves.

Horizons were lost in the blinding flash of blessed weaponry delivering the wrath of the Great Maker. Missiles raged up into the sky from the war machines before dropping like thunderbolts towards their targets and blanketing enemy sectors in a catastrophic carpet of flame. The great dishes of sonic disrupters bathed forge districts in powerful energies that quaked buildings to rubble and split the earth asunder.

The forge world was not without its own warped versions of such machines. Twisted behemoths trundled and crawled across the field of battle like ancient monsters, mindlessly decimating loyalist and Traitor forces alike with streams of energy drawn directly from the warp. Nova cannons blasted explosive shells between the war machines of both forces, crashing through shield and plate at near approaching the speed of light. Derelict giants ground to a halt, wreathed in flame with tech-priests and soldiers spilling from emergency exits. Several even detonated, turning entire battlefields of warring constructs into frag storms of fiery destruction.

Through such utter decimation, delivered from orbit or visited upon Velchanos Magna by the behemoth clashing of the Ordinatii war machines, walked the god-machines of the Collegia Titanica. While Ordinatii Minoris and ferocious Scout Titans stalked the southern ruins, ripping through regrouping cohorts of troops and tank formations, Battle Titans of the Legio Interfectra and the Ironoclast clashed.

Warlords and Reavers of the Legio Interfectra flanked colossal Imperator Titans as the Adeptus Mechanicus god-machines demolished hab-towers with their passing and turned sub-hives into decimated pyres of metal, rockcrete and corpses. As Omnid Torquora’s skitarii legions advanced in their mountainous shadow, the Titans of the Legio Interfectra engaged the monstrous deviancy of the Ironoclast. Formerly the Legio Fortiori, the machines of the Ironoclast were now warped giants of heretekal design that burned with an infernal inner fire. The ground shook with their feral charge. Huge storms of dust and soot enveloped the gargantuan clashes. From within the murky maelstrom, the heavens cooked with the beams and blasts of turbolasers and plasma annihilators. Scrap and shrapnel rained as the possessed god-machines of the Ironoclast tore through Warhounds and Reaver Battle Titans with chainfists and crackling claws.

From the fleet arkcruisers, to the gargantuan war machines of the Centurio Ordinatus and Collegia Titanica, all were under Omnid Torquora’s command. The archmagos had plenipotentiaries and skitarii aides attending on his tech-priest captains, the Grand Master of the Legio Interfectra and the Lords Ordinatus. His word and the determinations of the diagnostiquorum were carried through the ranks of the Legio Cybernetica, the siege-smiths of the Ordo Reductor, the war savants of the Auxilia Myrmidon and the tech-priests dominus who warred in the name of the Machine-God. All were Torquora’s to command through the word of his machine emissaries or interfaced actions of his own. A powerful fleet and an Adeptus Mechanicus army were at his fingertips. The cold wrath of the Omnissiah was his to wield.

And yet, Velchanos Magna had not fallen to the Cult Mechanicus.

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

With his skitarii legions, his tech-priests and an army of the Omnissiah’s finest war machines at his disposal, Velchanos Magna should have been Omnid Torquora’s months before. He had the hard data, the materiel and the indomitable will to conquer the forge world – yet still it remained in the hands of the Traitors.

The Dark Mechanicum and hereteks of the forge world were skilled in their dread arts and determined to the last construct. But it was not their fell faith that had sustained them against Torquora, nor their worship of the Abystra-Dynomicron, the daemon entity that possessed the liquid iron core of the planet. It had been the Iron Warriors that had upset Torquora’s estimates, undone his equations and pushed his probabilities to their limits.

The warsmith Idriss Krendl had once led his Iron Warriors to Velchanos Magna for supplies, infernal weaponry and repairs. Stealing ancient knowledge and techno-artefacts from the forge world’s vaults and revealing to the Adeptus Mechanicus of Satzica Secundus the wonders of a Geller bomb, the warsmith had waited for the Machine-God’s servants to damn themselves. Testing the terrible weapon, the tech-priests of Satzica Secundus had not only weakened the Dark Mechanicum of Velchanos Magna but also plunged their own forge world into a warp storm of their own making.

Now Idriss Krendl had not one forge world beneath his merciless boot, but two. Two centres of colossal industry to produce armies of slave-constructs, infernal engines, weapons of mass destruction and daemonships for the Iron Warriors fleet. Omnid Torquora could not know what such a maniac would do with such resources, but the Iron Warriors were born conquerors and their warsmiths brutal tyrants. Whatever Idriss Krendl had planned for the galaxy, it would be celebrated in blood and iron. Of that, the magos explorator was sure.

For now, Torquora had blockaded Velchanos Magna, but Satzica Secundus was a rich prize waiting to be plucked by the warsmith. The archmagos aimed to deny Krendl the bounty of his tainted forge world and the dark blessing of reinforcements.

<Archmagos,> a tech-priest said from a nearby console. <Blockade runners. Sector 34.>

Torquora blinked back to the deck of the diagnostiquorum, with its humming banks and silent priests in communion with the forces on the planet’s surface.

<Give me a visual feed,> the archmagos ordered.

Within moments his mind was filled with the glorious vista of the Maestrale’s forward lancet screens. He could see what Tech-priest Captain Cyntreq Voltram was seeing on the arkcruiser’s command deck. The blackness of space, besmirched with the aethyric static of the nearby warp storm. The nightmare of Velchanos Magna rolling beneath the cordon of Adeptus Mechanicus warships, a patchwork of monstrous industry and utter destruction. Gaping like a blazing wound in the forge world’s surface, Omnid Torquora could see the vast rift that uncovered the daemonic planetary core, exposed and raging with infernal brilliance.

Across the colossal chasm, Torquora saw the scaffolding of dry docks and shipyards. In their warped and tangled midst, Chaos cruisers were being constructed. The skeletal frameworks of new raiders and escort ships were visible, while system ships, Dark Mechanicum arkfreighters and Iron Warriors strike cruisers sat suspended over the molten fury of the Abystra-Dynomicron in various states of repair and augmentation. Daemonships sat in scaffold webs of fell significance that marked out patterns and ruinous symbols about the possessed craft. It was from the shipyards that the blockade runners had departed.

‘Tech-priest Captain Voltram,’ Torquora said, but his words proceeded from the lips of a servitor stationed on the bridge. The consular unit was embedded into a column beside Voltram’s throne.

‘Archmagos,’ the tech-priest captain voxed back.

‘Identify.’

‘Dark Mechanicum corvette, my lord,’ Voltram said, ‘running behind a pair of adamanticlads. They aim to test us.’

‘There will be no test,’ Torquora told his tech-priest captain. ‘You will see to it.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Trajectory?’

‘They’re heading for the Mandeville point, archmagos.’

‘Predictable. Magnify…’

The Maestrale’s screens brought up the blockade runners in searing detail. The Dark Mechanicum vessels were twisted perversions with little regard for pattern or grace. Their sub-light engines stormed behind them, leaving ghostly, glowing trails in the vessels’ wakes as they rocketed up from the shipyards and out of orbit. The adamanticlads were system ships with no warp capability to speak of. Their bulk was dedicated to armour plating, defensive fields and batteries designed to hold off pursuing craft. Such vessels had been constructed and augmented with one purpose in mind: to break the Adeptus Mechanicus cordon surrounding Velchanos Magna.

Torquora knew from experience of boarding such vessels that they carried little in the way of crew. They were battering rams designed to soak up all Torquora’s fleet had to throw at them, ensuring the safe delivery of the precious corvette to the Mandeville point where the vessel would translate into the warp. At least, it would if Omnid Torquora ever failed in frustrating such an attempt.

Blockade runners had become a regular challenge, the heavily defended shipyards vomiting forth vessel after rank vessel with the intention of one day finding an opening in the cordon. Like the vessels that had preceded it into certain destruction, the corvette undoubtedly carried representative tech-priests from Velchanos Magna, sent by Idriss Krendl to establish a Chaotic concord with Satzica Secundus and secure a fleet of reinforcements. Most of the time, single attempts were made to breach the line of Cult Mechanicus ships stationed around the forge world. Occasionally, several attempts were mounted simultaneously to stretch the coverage of Torquora’s fleet.

‘Receiving messages from the Quantica and the Motive Force, my lord,’ Tech-priest Captain Voltram reported. ‘Blockade runners breaking from the surface.’

‘Where?’ Torquora asked.

‘The poles,’ Voltram said.

Omnid Torquora allowed himself to drift through the constellation of augmented consciousnesses. Blinking into the minds of skitarii storming an immobilised Chaos Titan in the southern districts, Torquora saw second-hand the Dark Mechanicum vessels rising from gargantuan pit-hangars at the pole. In the north, the archmagos saw the surface from the perspective of a spindly Sicarian infiltrator. The princeps was directing his murderous skitarii to butcher the tech-priests and artisans manning an arc reactor crowning the northern pole. Prompting the infiltrator to look up from his blades and the mauled hereteks crawling away from him, Torquora saw a heavily armoured monitor vessel rise from a hidden dry dock ahead of a black, spiny raider.

Torquora was suddenly there, on the bridge of the Motive Force, the Quantica and the Maestrale, his modulated orders erupting from the withered lips and vox-hailers of consular units.

‘Engage! Nothing gets through. Nothing.’

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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 Helge C. Balzer.

Tech-Priest © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. Tech-Priest, 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: 978-1-78251-805-1

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