The Siege of Castellax (Space Marine Battles) by C L Werner

Author:C L Werner [Werner, C L]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter XII

I-Day Plus Ninety-Two

Enginseer Heroditus carefully made his way around the hulking atmosphere generator, reciting a binary mantra of serenity as the machine shuddered and wheezed erratically. He set a slender appeasement seal against the device’s power plant, a long strip of aluminium lined with letters etched in acid. The generator seemed to accept the offering, subsiding with a shudder into a lesser degree of agitation.

The generator’s machine-spirit had every right to take offence, Heroditus reflected, feeling a twinge of guilt transmit through the neurofibres of his nervous system. It had been woefully abused in its hurried disassembly and clandestine removal to the depths beneath Vorago. Necessity had demanded that the customary rituals of approbation be dispensed with. Only the most cursory of placations had been attempted and there had been no time to wait for the generator’s acquiescence to its relocation. Heroditus felt like an atavistic techno-barbarian defiling such a complex mechanism in so crude and deliberate a fashion.

Still, he had to defer to the wisdom of Logis Acestes. Since the beginning of the ork assault on Vorago, the vaults beneath the city had become compromised. Packs of escaped slaves from the factories, deserters from the janissaries, renegade overseers and slavedrivers; all of these and more had fled the besieged city to take refuge in the forgotten tunnels and catacombs. It was a situation that could not be tolerated by Acestes and his disciples. Their work was too important to allow any risk of exposure.

Precious labour had been expended constructing

combat-servitors to patrol the passages connecting to the assembly chamber. Nothing so ostentatious as a Praetorian, but rather an assemblage of cyborgs that would appear quite mundane until their murderous directives asserted themselves. Meticulous care had been taken with their neurologic protocols so that should one of the combat-servitors be disassembled it would appear to be the subject of malfunction rather than deliberately pernicious programming.

Such crude measures of dealing with intruders was too uncertain to satisfy Acestes, however. His plan was to employ the atmosphere generator from one of the smelting plants to ensure the conspirators would be undisturbed. The atmosphere in the tunnels was poisonous, but its lethality might be bypassed by taking certain precautions. Death was certain for any organism exposed to the air in the tunnels for a prolonged period, but there was a big difference between a matter of minutes and a slow decline over several decades from trace carcinogens.

It made Heroditus ashamed the way the generator had been adjusted, its function deliberately violated to transform it from a source of clean, sustaining air to a purveyor of death. Instead of removing toxins from the air, the generator was now pumping them into it, a vicious cocktail of proticide that would bond with its victims on a molecular level, rendering the protons within the atoms unstable. Death would be almost instant and within an hour, even the evidence of a corpse would be obliterated as the body reduced itself to a sort of protean goo.

Heroditus had passed several of these puddles of organic mash on his descent into the catacombs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.