Adeptus Mechanicus: Skitarius (Warhammer 40,000) by Rob Sanders

Author:Rob Sanders [Sanders, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2015-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

0111

SELECTED: DENTRICA I OF I

ENGAGE NEURAL CONGRESS – WIRELESS AUTOSHUNT ACQUIRED

UPLOADING… +FALSE CONSTRUCTS+

<I am one with the Motive Force. One with the Great Maker – He who crafts all true constructs in one of His many images. He who infuses, fills with His power, lends His strength.>

Haldron-44 Stroika offered his prayers to the Omnissiah and the magi who were both His receivers and His mouthpiece. Through their data-tethers, the skitarii had been calibrated for battle. Their strategic wetware had been synced and their emotions dialled back. They were the living weapons of the Machine-God. Only officers like Stroika were allowed any degree of flexibility. This allowed for inspiration and creativity – qualities that guided tactical deployment, enhanced leadership and ensured a rapid response to new situations and challenges.

The infernal twilight of the Bronte-Chordata forge temple was thick with the metallic fug of smelting. Haldron-44 Stroika’s optics cycled through false-colour filters to enhance his vision in the dungeon-like gloom.

The temple was as much a cathedral to damnation as a forge. The gargantuan workshop of the Machine-God was now a hellish furnace of spiked chains and twisted architecture. The roasted corpses of those whose beliefs had failed to please the Dark Gods hung from the roof struts, while the Cog Mechanicus and temple sigils had long been vandalised and perverted into symbols of daemon patronage. The very metal of the mesh walkways steamed in contact with the footfalls of the Omnissiah’s skitarii servants.

Stroika’s targeting reticules drifted from ghostly outline to outline, discounting the gleam of forgelight off metal and the movement of automatonic machinery. Podium-interfaced servitors went about their endless labours, supervising magna-machinery whose fevered workings seemed to have a fell, glowing life of their own. Like the furnace magna-machinery, the servitors did not react to the skitarii advance. Stroika approached a drone foreman whose flesh-smeared form was a mess of burns and ugly stitching. A set of half-formed horns protruded from his bare servitor skull.

As the crackling muzzle of Stroika’s arc pistol moved towards the thing’s foul form, the light revealed ruinous symbols and sigils carved brutally into the drone’s back flesh. Uplinks from the Fabricator Locum’s magi aboard the Opus Machina phylactically matched the symbols on both the servitor and the temple walls to pict files that had been mnemonically logged and classified in the ancient vessel’s runebanks.

A cascade of information dropped down before Stroika’s optics. Collected intelligence and hard data captures pertaining to the probable corruptions at work on Velchanos Magna. The likely allegiances to which the Dark Mechanicum of the forge world were victim, after a small eternity spent in the warp storm. Inconstant beings that called themselves powers, daemons and gods. Slaves to darkness. The damned vessels into which the unnatural force of Chaos was distilled. Things that twisted the souls of men and the cold integrity of machines alike, bending them to their ruinous will. Fell creatures of dimensional evil, who had corrupted the arch-heretek Kelbor-Hal and the warlord Horus ten thousand years before, splitting both the Martian Empire and the Imperium of Man asunder.

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