Chapter 41: The Iron Snakes Chapter
As Duvette had anticipated, the moment the first Bane Engine was physically wedged in the cargo lane and destroyed, Asphodel's buried nerve was finally touched.
The Heritor, whatever else he was, had the instincts of a tactician beneath the madness. He immediately recognised that these mortals infiltrating the upper hive like rats possessed a destructive capacity well outside any standard Astra Militarum parameter.
The strategic map changed violently.
Several of the enormous red dots that had been locked in combat with the Titan Legion on the front lines reversed direction without warning, abandoning their positions on the plains and driving toward Duvette's position at the map's core with the urgency of something that has caught a scent.
"Stroud, Anderson, Elias, Finn, Evan — each of you take a harassment combat group and split off." Duvette pressed the comms. "Don't get drawn in. Don't try to destroy them. Use thermal decoys, comms signals, and brief exchanges to redirect them."
The upper hive was not open ground. Multi-layered grand colonnades, complex towering building clusters, maintenance shafts dropping to depths that had no visible floor: perfect terrain for making large machines miserable.
"Use the terrain. Be bait." His orders carried no emotion at all. "Pull those returning Bane Engines off my path. Destroy load-bearing bridges, cut off passages, draw them down into the lower-level maze. Buy the main force time. Understood?"
"Understood, boss. Running circles and kiting — we know that work." Stroud's voice came with the click of a shotgun round chambering.
Five veterans in force-feedback power armour, each taking a company of roughly a hundred soldiers, broke from the main formation quickly.
They deliberately exposed their thermal signatures and used their high mobility and precision terrain destruction to pull the enormous machines off Duvette's route.
The sounds of distant building collapses and the furious noise of Bane Engines reported from further and further away. The path ahead cleared.
Duvette led the 112th's remaining main force like a blade tip directly toward the Cognitor Array at the spire top.
Along the way, the cultists that tried to block them were entirely overwhelmed by veterans whose capabilities [United We Stand] had elevated well above the human baseline. Laser beams swept through the Gothic corridors like tools working through grain. Heretic remains covered marble floors.
During the advance, Duvette's peripheral vision caught something on the map.
Among all the moving contacts, there was an extremely dense cluster of blue friendlies active on the display. A hundred or more icons, advancing in a wedge formation at a speed that was difficult to reconcile with anything mortal, in a different direction across the upper hive.
He had initially taken them for Storm Trooper remnants who had been unable to withdraw. Looking more carefully, he revised that assessment. Their movement pattern was too controlled. Against the Bane Engines and heavy fire they were encountering along the way, they showed almost no large-scale reduction in numbers, and they were driving in a straight line toward coordinates marked as the large Void Shield generator array at the upper hive's edge.
Ordinary Storm Troopers could not achieve that quality of assault.
But he had no attention to spare on identifying that friendly force's nature right now. His one objective: destroy the Cognitor Array, sever Asphodel's command chain to the Bane Engines, and free the Titan Legion that the machines had suppressed on the plains.
Where is Asphodel?
The thought crossed his mind as he stepped across burning bodies.
He ran through the intelligence on this Chaos warlord. The Heritor, the man who in years to come would face his destined confrontation with Ibram Gaunt at Vervunhive and ultimately be destroyed there, operated with extreme caution. He would never place himself anywhere near a front line. He habitually sheltered in a mobile super-heavy command fortress or in some concealed Mechanicus shrine. The moment a situation turned against him, he left with his inheritance intact.
Since Asphodel was not here, the Cognitor Array ahead was the most lethal vulnerability he had left exposed.
Then, without any warning, the 112th's advance stopped dead.
Screams and the sound of weapons catching in bone flooded the comms. One contact, one exchange: the leading infantry squad took devastating casualties before the veterans could establish any kind of fire net. They were cut apart in the corridor.
The casualty rate was worse than the Eldar elite engagement in the bilge.
Duvette drew the power sword, pushed past the soldiers pulling back, and reached the line. When he saw what had stopped them, his pupils tightened slightly.
A force that had discarded humanity entirely.
They wore crude but enormously thick cursed dark-iron armour, blood-stained spikes welded across every surface. Their backs had been forcibly implanted with massive mechanical spinal columns. Exposed pipes connected to the armour like external blood vessels, filled with a dark green chemical agent.
They carried long-hafted axe-guns equipped with disintegration fields, and in the other hand held thick composite heavy shields rated to deflect a direct boltgun shot. Their faces wore blasphemous masks. Their vocal organs had been crudely rebuilt into amplifiers — every roar they produced interfered with the minds of anyone in range.
Asphodel's Heritor Iron Guard.
Duvette's brow came together. "Hold formation! Melta gunners forward!" The order came as he was already moving, driving forward directly into this group advancing like a wall of black iron.
One of the Iron Guard released a piercing roar. The heavy axe-gun carrying a wall of compressed air came down directly at Duvette's skull.
His reaction speed under the skills' combined effect was something that had passed mortal limits by a considerable margin. He did not retreat. He went forward instead. The plasma pistol in his left hand came up and he fired directly at the heavy shield's edge.
The blue-white plasma burst was blinding. The extreme heat instantly melted through a corner of the shield. The enormous impact force produced a fatal lock in the Iron Guard's movements for one moment.
In that moment, the master-crafted power sword became a blue arc of light.
The blade entered precisely through the gap the shield's destroyed corner had opened, drove through the Iron Guard's neck armour gap, and severed the mechanical nerve connections to the spinal column.
Blood and machine oil sprayed outward together. The enormous body hit the floor.
More Iron Guards came forward over their companion's remains.
Duvette moved through the narrow hall with a close-quarters dominance that left no room for question. His greatcoat swept through the storm of blood. Every power sword strike was followed inevitably by armour coming apart and something losing a limb.
Under [United We Stand]'s amplification, the 112th veterans around him pressed forward with bayonets, using the gaps Duvette tore in the line to place cluster grenades precisely into the Iron Guard armour joints.
In the chains of violent explosions and the stench of burning flesh, the Chaos elites guarding the spire top were ultimately eliminated under the 112th's savage and entirely efficient butchery.
Treading on what covered the floor, soaked in blood, Duvette pushed open the heavy alloy doors to the central hall.
What he saw stopped him for a moment, and he had seen a great deal.
The entire vast hall was completely occupied by a single enormous, twisted Cognitor Array.
The construct resembled an evil structure built from metal and flesh. Hundreds of twisted screens embedded in pulsing metal casing flickered with nauseating blasphemous characters and corrupted data. Tonnes of thick cables hung from the dome like waterfalls, writhing slowly in the air as though they possessed their own biology. Warp energy fluctuations saturated the space. The air carried the combined stench of ozone and rot.
"No need to look any further. This is the brain." Duvette drove the power sword into the floor and leaned on it. "Demolition team, move up. Attach every melta charge you have to its main trunk. Force this blasphemous wreckage to stop."
Several experienced engineers rushed forward with heavy explosive packs and began locating optimal detonation points.
Then Duvette raised his hand sharply, eyes locked on a detail in the structural diagram on his map.
"Hold on. Stop placement."
He walked forward and crouched. In the shadow of the Cognitor Array's enormous base, several superconducting pipes so thick three men could not encompass them in linked arms were deeply embedded in the hall floor.
He traced their direction against the structural diagram. His expression went cold.
This was a deliberate chain trap.
Asphodel had physically connected this Cognitor Array, which commanded all the Bane Engines, directly to a massive plasma reactor stack deep within the upper hive core. Those enormous pipes were the pressure-balance valves holding the connection stable.
If the 112th forced the array's destruction with melta charges right now, the instantaneous energy imbalance would cause the plasma reactor underneath to overload and self-destruct.
If the reactor went, the entire upper hive core area would collapse instantly. Every person here, and everything for several city blocks in every direction, would be consumed by tens of thousands of tonnes of steel rubble and plasma fire.
But sending people down to the lower pipe sections to manually shut off the plasma reactor: there was no time for it. The outer perimeter could collapse under the wave of enemies at any moment.
In this deadlock, something came to him.
He reached inside the coat, found the cold crystalline chip that had been stored against his body since Belisarius Cawl's projection delivered it to him.
What Cawl had called the "supreme logic key" was essentially an extremely aggressive piece of Mechanicus base-level code. Cawl had said it could take over or overload any Cognitor Array.
Since Cawl had already located his existence through the projection, this chip's value as an identifier had already served its purpose.
"All demolition teams, stand down." Duvette stood, holding the faintly glowing chip. "Everyone fall back. Establish a circular defensive position. If my plan fails, we'll consider the mutual destruction option then."
He walked to the central control console at the Cognitor Array's core. The operation panel was covered in biological material that he did not look at for longer than necessary. Without any hesitation, he drove the cold chip into an exposed data interface with considerable force.
The hum that followed was felt in the chest.
At the moment of contact, a ring of visible blue static electricity burst from the interface and propagated instantly through the writhing cables to every part of the enormous array.
The next second, every screen displaying blasphemous characters across the Cognitor Array seemed to be seized by an irresistible force. The images distorted violently and tore.
The largest screen on the main console turned a clean pale green. Several lines of text appeared.
[WARNING! Non-local unauthorised access detected.]
[High-risk Warp corrupted-code contamination detected.]
[Machine-Spirit corruption confirmed.]
[Purge code initiating...]
[Estimated duration... thirty minutes.]
Duvette looked at the countdown beginning on the screen. His brow drew together hard.
Thirty minutes.
Under normal circumstances this was the time for a couple of cigarettes and a cup of bad Scaff. On a battlefield that could change completely at any second, in an isolated tower behind enemy lines that every Bane Engine in the upper hive was now pointed toward, thirty minutes was a very long time to hold.
A violent shuddering came through the floor. The entire magnificent tower trembled. Dust and rubble fell from the dome in a continuous shower.
The enemy was attacking this building's load-bearing base.
Immediately in the comms: Stroud's voice, heavy breathing and explosion sounds wrapped around it. "Boss! Serious trouble! The Bane Engines have lost their composure. They're driving straight for your position regardless of anything in the way!"
The Cognitor Array was the brain of the Bane Engines. The forced overwrite had triggered the highest-level defensive response. The steel giants that had been dispersed across the hive were now converging, trying to reach the array before the purge code finished its work.
"Can you hold them with the terrain?" Duvette watched the countdown, voice steady.
"No! Absolutely not possible!" Stroud's response was immediate. "They're smashing straight through the load-bearing bridges and the buildings themselves!"
At that moment, the comms channel erupted with an extremely violent surge of static. Then: a series of massive explosions, low-pitched and terrible, like a thunderstorm viewed from directly below, came through the tower walls from far overhead.
That was orbital bombardment from the Imperial fleet.
Duvette raised his head sharply. He registered something changed in the environment around him. The Void Shield energy field that had been enveloping the upper hive — the one producing that constant oppressive sensation with its low-frequency hum — was gone.
He checked the strategic map immediately.
At the map's edge: the enormous Void Shield generator array controlling the entire upper hive's defences had been destroyed.
And those nearly hundred blue dots that had been constantly active, having completed the destruction of the generator, were now moving toward Duvette's tower at a speed that was genuinely difficult to accept.
There it was.
They were not the only team executing a decapitation strike on this battlefield. Another extremely capable force had punched through the defensive shell protecting everyone, under the full weight of Bane Engines and cultist heavy fire, and done it without taking prohibitive casualties.
But this also created a critical new danger immediately. With the Void Shield down, the expedition fleet in near orbit would not leave this opportunity unused. Those fleet captains had been waiting for this and they would not wait long before opening fire on the area and flattening it entirely.
"Vox-operator!" Duvette spun and shouted at the soldier carrying the high-power auspex unit. "Immediately connect me to the orbital fleet command on maximum encrypted frequency! Use Marshal Blackwood's authorisation code! Tell those idiots there is absolutely to be no orbital strike on this coordinate! We are sitting directly above a plasma reactor stack, one macro-cannon shell and most of the upper hive collapses with us in it!"
The vox-operator sweated through his uniform, frantically cycling through frequencies.
Then all the static stopped.
Duvette's private command channel was forced open by an extremely powerful signal cutting in from outside.
A voice came clearly to his ear. Deep, measured, carrying the weight of something that was accustomed to authority and found no need to announce it.
"Cease your unnecessary calls, mortal. The fleet's guns have been held by us."
"This is the Adeptus Astartes, Iron Snakes Chapter. I am Brother-Captain Khûres."