Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [85]
It was enough to break the spell. Las-fire opened up again, streaming into the embattled aliens.
‘Fall back only when you must reload! Stand and fire until then!’
Andrej swore under his breath after he gave the order. The orks were already scrambling closer in an avalanche of green flesh, axe blades and ragged armour. Around the retreating team, the docks burned and thundered with the sounds of more submersibles beaching themselves. Andrej caught a momentary glimpse of another team of dockworkers through the smoke some distance away, breaking into flight as they were chopped to pieces by the orks in their midst.
The same was about to happen to his ragtag gang, and he swore again. He hoped Domoska was faring better.
What a stupid place to die.
Kilometres away from Helsreach, beneath the sands of the wastelands to the north-west, there was a loud and unprecedented clunk of heavy machinery.
Jurisian, Forgemaster of the Eternal Crusader, rose to his feet with a slowness born of exhaustion. Tears stood in his eyes – a rarity indeed for a being that had not wept in over twenty decades. His mind pulsed with a thundering ache, a dull and thudding heat that had nothing to do with physical weakness.
He could smell his servitors now that his senses were returning from their focusless lock on his primary task. Turning to regard them where they lay, Jurisian could smell the decay setting into their organic parts. They had been dead for weeks, starved of sustenance. He hadn’t noticed. They had proven useless after the first few hours, over a month ago, their internal cognitive processors unable to keep up with the ever-evolving code. Jurisian had needed to work alone, cursing Grimaldus all the while.
Another deep clunk of grinding machinery restored his attention to the present. His joints ached – both the mechanical ones and his still-human ones – from such a period of inactivity. He had been a statue in place for four weeks, his mind alive and his body in hunched, tense stasis by the console.
He had not slept. He knew that on several occasions, as his closing, exhausted mind had drifted close to shutting down, he had almost lost grip on the code. With his thoughts moving sluggishly, the code had outpaced him just as it had done to his servitors. In these moments of panicked intensity, he had resisted by silencing sections of his mind with clinical meditation, operating at a lessened capacity, but at least he was still awake.
Jurisian stared ahead at the vast doors.
- OBERON -
That word burned itself into his core, written in towering letters, more a warning than a tomb marker.
A last resonant machine-sound signalled the grinding rollback of the final interior lock. Pressurised coolant vapour flushed into the corridor as the door’s seal systems vented it. It reeked of chlorine – not poisonous, but stale from being cold-cooked for so many years while the door remained silent and still. In a ballet of rumbling, shuddering technology, the portal began to open.
‘Reclusiarch,’ Jurisian voxed, horrified at the dull scratchiness of his voice. ‘The defences are broken. I am in.’
CHAPTER XV
Balance
The chamber offered nothing at first. Nothing except a powerless darkness that was blacker than black, even to Jurisian’s visor lenses. A whispered keyword cycled his vision filters through a thermal-seeking infrared, through to a crude echolocation that falsified an auspex scanner’s silent chimes to detect movement. He had made these modifications himself, with the proper respect to the machine-spirit of his wargear.
It was this last sense that produced a response. A vague grey blur passed his vision, and with it, the whirring of internal mechanisms. Hinges. Cogs. Fibre muscles. The sound was as familiar to Jurisian as his own breathing, but brought with it an edge of disconcerting curiosity.
Joints. He was hearing joints.
Something was wrong. The suggestion of static interference at the edges of his vision display told a tale of interference, obfuscation,