killers that the enemy fought on after having sustained wounds that would drop a regular human. The Word Bearers, and the Anointed in particular, were far from regular humans themselves - they were demi-gods of war, and they tore apart the Skitarii with fury and passion.
Within ten minutes, as if a switch was flicked inside the mechanical heads of the thousands of remaining Skitarii, they began to re-form, walking steadily backwards as one, while continuing to lay down their withering fire into the Chaos Marines.
With a surge of his servo-enhanced muscles, Kol Badar pushed forwards into the retreating foe, punching the whirling chainblade that served as a bayonet upon his combi-bolter through the pudgy white face of another foe, and ripping the head and spinal column from another, electrodes and sparking fuses still attached to the vertebrae.
Heavily armoured servitors moved to the fore, stalking forwards between the ordered ranks of the lesser warriors, and Kol Badar was pleased to see that these foes were more to his liking. Around the height of a regular Chaos Space Marine, these were heavily armoured in thick, dark, metal armour. The mechanics of their left arms ended in spinning cannons that roared as they pumped fire from their multiple barrels. Ammo-feeds smoked as fresh bullets were fed to the guns from heavy integrated backpacks.
Concentrated bursts from the weapons were carving through power armour, and Kol Badar hissed in anger as he was rocked backwards by their force, though his Terminator armour was not breached. He fired his combi-bolter, blasting the gun-arm from a warrior in a shower of sparks, but it kept coming at him swinging its other arm towards him in a murderous thrust as the drill-arm began to spin. Metallic tentacles attached to the Skitarii's spinal column reached forwards to ensnare him, but Kol Badar had no intentions of backing away from the machine warrior.
With a backhand swipe of his power talons, he smashed the whirling, industrial drill away and fired his combi- bolter into the chest of the foe. Mechadendrite tentacles latched onto his chest and shoulder plates, and small drill pieces whined as they began to bore neat holes through the ancient suit. Firing his bolter again into the chest of the warrior, he ripped at the tentacles. Their grip on him was stronger than their binding to the warrior's spine, and he ripped them free of the Skitarii's back. Firing again, its armour cracking and shattering, the Skitarii fell onto its back. Kol Badar ended its straggles by slamming his heavy foot down into its head, pulverising the human skull and brain within its blank, metal faceplate.
Ripping off the tentacles still attached to his armour, he saw with pride that not one of his Anointed had fallen to these warriors, though several power armoured warrior-brothers had succumbed to their weaponry. He saw one of the Skitarii warriors torn apart by the fire from the reaper autocannon of one cult member, its chest a ruin of armour, machinery and seeping blood.
The enemy continued to retreat, but the thought of calling off the battle never entered Kol Badar's head. He would push on, deep into the foe, and inflict as much damage as possible, only calling off the attack when the terrain began to favour the Imperials once more. Even then, calling off the slaughter would be difficult, nigh on impossible, for the frenzied Dreadnoughts that were ploughing into the enemy.
One of the insane war machines broke into a lumbering run, smashing aside a warrior-brother in its eagerness to reach the foe. It was roaring incoherently, and gunfire leapt from its twin autocannon barrels and from the underslung bolters beneath its scything array of war blades. Other, swifter warrior-brothers backed out of the way of the charging machine, and it ripped into the Skitarii, its war blades cutting down four of them with one scissoring blow.
The Coryphaus recognised the Dreadnought as housing the corpse of Brother Shaldern, who had fallen against the hated coward Legion of Rouboute Gulliman, the Ultramarines, during the battle on Calth. His sanity had long since abandoned him. Such was the way with those entombed within the sarcophagi of the dangerous war machines, and Kol Badar wondered briefly if he would rather die upon the field of battle than suffer endless torment within one of those cursed engines. Few retained any semblance of rationality. That the Warmonger maintained as much lucidity as he did was a testament to the intense faith and belief that the Dark Apostle had wielded in life, and had taken with him into his hateful half-life.
The machine ploughed through the enemy and a great roar went up from the Word Bearers.
'Forward, warrior-brothers!' Kol Badar bellowed. 'For the glory of the Legion!'
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mechadendrites attached to the spinal column of Techno-Magos Darioq stretched out before him. Needle-like electro-jacks emerged from the tips of these mechanical, clawed tentacles and plunged into circular plugs around the base of the cylindrical device rising smoothly from the floor of the control room. Each of the electro-jacks was around fifteen centimetres in length, and they rotated as the magos connected with the machine-spirit of his command vehicle.
The room was dark and claustrophobic, with exposed pipes and wires lining the walls and twisting across the low ceiling. Eerie light spilled from the screens around the room as lines of data flicked across their surfaces. Hissing steam vented from latticed grills in the floor plates, and thick, ribbed tubing snaked from the grills to climb the walls and disappear amongst the dense, confusing network of conduits.
Pilots and technicians hard-wired into the control room were built into the walls, their forms almost hidden amongst the mass of coiling pipes that engulfed them. Insulated wiring entered the fused hemispheres of their brains through eye sockets, nostrils and ears. They manipulated controls through cables that plugged into the remnants of flesh that remained of their mortal bodies, and from each fingertip spread a spider web of intricate cables, attaching them directly into the holy machine that they were a part of.
Darioq muttered the incantation of supplication to the machine-spirit and recited the logis dictates that would ignite the spark of connection as his electro-jacks continued to manipulate the inner core workings of the command column. Speaking blessings to the Omnissiah, he tripped the internal switches within his own mechanised form, and his spirit joined with that of his flagship in a surge of images, information and release.
Hovering fifty metres in the air, the bloated airship that served as Darioq's command centre was as stable as the ground, despite the torrential downpour of rain and the sharp burst of wind that the magos felt buffeting its banded sides. Connected to the huge machine's spirit, he felt the rain and wind on its thick sides as if it were an extension of himself. Massive rotating spotlights that cut through the darkness were his eyes, and endless feeds of information flooded through the multiple logic engines within his construction, filing through the domed hemispheres of his ''true'' brain, which then filtered relevant data out into the charged liquid housing domes that enclosed his secondary brain units.
He felt the smooth running engines that powered the mass turbines keeping the hulk airborne, and sensed the holy oils lubricating the cogs and gears slipping through the mechanics, as the dictates required. He could feel the scurrying feet of servitors, Skitarii and priests through the labyrinthine tunnels within the airship's underhull, and the spark of sensation as these servants of the Omnissiah plugged themselves into the vast machine, linking them to him and him to them. He could see through the augmetic eyes of these lesser minions and feel the twitch of their vat-born muscles.
His spirit reached out through the thick, insulated cabling that fed from his control station, travelling through the circuitry and carefully constructed piping that linked the airship to the
Probing at the plasma-reactor at the core of the
With a twist of one of his mechadendrites, Darioq turned a function dial on the command pillar and a hololith atop the pillar sparked into life. A three-dimensional image of an Imperial Guard officer sprang into existence, his every feature picked out in the intricate network of crisscrossing green lines. It showed the man's head and shoulders, and extended down to his chest.
