He did not know what it hit, but it hit something.
The ork bellowed in pain, and the next he knew he was flying with all the power of that immense battlesuit behind him.
He passed through something metal-lined and hollow, hit the ground in a mangle of limbs and bounced once, twice, then skidded. His battleplate tore up sparks from the ferrocrete surface. He slammed up against a wall and flopped down. He saw Reoch, Antille and a number of helmed Scions, but the anonymously-armoured humans swam together.
Then the ten-centimetre-thick plasteel doors that he had just slid though clamped onto his trailing greave.
‘Reverse it,’ growled Reoch.
‘I’m trying!’ came Antille’s voice.
Zerberyn grunted, willing his mind to stop spinning, and pulled on his trapped leg. It did not move. Dirty smoke was beginning to pour out of the door’s pneumatics.
From the other side of the door, there was a bellow of fury. The ground began to shake as something massive took a run-up. Reoch inserted the fierce muzzle of his Umbra-pattern pistol into the gap between the doors. The Apothecary fired on full-auto, bolt pistol beating against the metal frames like a hammer drill.
The doors continued to try and close.
Zerberyn gave one last roar, then spasmed back to the floor in agony as the heavy plasteel cracked bonded ceramite and armaplas like steel pliers on a nut, and snapped his strengthened tibia roughly in two. His genhanced neurochemistry prevented the pain from disabling him, but it was still as close to intolerable as he had ever known. His conscious brain protectively shut itself down for a moment, his twin hearts racing to pump an endorphin rush of pain-suppressing hormones into his bloodstream.
The doors stalled about half a leg-width apart.
Zerberyn looked up, saw the sheathed chainsword hanging from Major Bryce’s hip.
The Scion read his look, unhitching the blade and thumbing the power. Adamantium teeth revved hungrily.
‘Forgive me, lord.’
‘Hurry up and do it.’
Bryce hacked down. Zerberyn roared as the motored blade ate through armour and flesh and from there into bone. Arterial spray turned his battleplate red. Chipped bone rattled everyone’s armour, flying through a pall of bitter ceramite dust. Vibrations tore through his bones. Tears welled up in the Scion’s eyes. The dust.
The human lacked the strength to finish it.
With a growl, Reoch pulled the man aside and stamped down on the back of the chainsword, driving it through Zerberyn’s leg until it stalled in the ferrocrete.
Zerberyn panted in release. His eyes blurred. His skin tingled with the effects of pain-suppressants. The Apothecary kicked Zerberyn’s severed foot out from between the jammed doors. They slammed together, just as something huge bent them out of shape from the other side.
Reoch dropped down beside him and bent immediately to work, using his narthecium’s plasma cutter to cauterise the amputation. Zerberyn grunted. His physiology was adjusted to the higher pain threshold now, and he barely felt it.
Brother Antille and the handful of Scions crowded around them. That was all.
‘Sergeant Columba, and the others?’
‘Through the back wall, following Penitence’s locater beacon,’ said Antille. ‘We were cut off from them, and so intended to follow…’ he glanced sideways at Bryce, ‘our cousins.’
Zerberyn nodded. He would have come to the same conclusion in his brother’s place. It was reassuring.
The door shuddered as something hit it. The discharging power of a disruption field caused it to fold in.
Zerberyn reached for his bolt pistol before remembering that it was empty.
‘Faster, Apothecary.’
Twenty-One
Zerberyn limped down the unlit manufactorum hallway, leaning into Brother Antille’s shoulder to support himself on his remaining foot. The darkness was near absolute, leavened only by the green beams of the Scions’ visual augmenters. It was enough to make out the old blood and las-burns on the walls. The Praxians here had fought. Bestial cries and gunfire echoed through the abandoned rooms. He tried to inject some haste into his stride, but he had yet to adapt to his altered anatomy. A human would have been killed by blood loss or systemic shock by now, but his superiority over human norms was scant consolation.
After several minutes, the rattle of orkish fire growing nearer, the corridor took a ninety-degree turn.
In place of the wall that should have been in front of them, however, was a brick pile. There had been a false wall here. Behind it, illuminated now by the six Scions’ targeting beams, was a blast door that clearly had no due place in an agri-processing facility, large enough to admit a Space Marine in Tactical Dreadnought Armour. It looked like solid adamantium.
And the Iron Warriors had left it locked behind them. Reoch stepped forward and laid his gauntlets on the door. He turned back. His augmeticised face was a glowing skull in the gloom. He shook his head.
Unbreakable.
‘What now?’ Antille murmured.
Swallowing a curse that he could not afford to let the Scions hear, Zerberyn looked away from the door, manoeuvering himself towards the rune-numeric console mounted just inside the frame. Set into the terminal alongside the keypad was a palm scanner.
Kalkator had said that the base’s concealed entrances were secured by a genetic lock. There was genetic variation enough between the IV and their hated cousins of the VII to differentiate them with a fine enough scan, but Kalkator had also said that this fortress was built early in the Great Crusade. And that had been a different time, a time when his gene-ancestors and Kalkator might without rancour have called one another friend and brother.
For long seconds he hesitated, then removed his gauntlet and pushed his palm to the reader.
A red bar backlit the panel and scanned upwards. The light disappeared. Zerberyn tensed. There was a rumble of magnetic seals decoupling and the metal-on-metal scrape of disengaging locks. Zerberyn let out a breath as the blast door slid open.
‘From honour cometh iron. Have admittance, son of my brother.’
The voice was a scratchy, ancient recording, but retained some of the power it must once have held in flesh. It was strength, indomitable iron, something that time and worse than time could never fully corrupt. Zerberyn shivered, uncertain whether he had just been given a rare gift or the darkest curse.
‘Was that…?’
‘To what circle of damnation has he led us?’ said Reoch, his voice a whispered, almost reverential growl.
Visual augmenter beams painted the wall behind the blast door with green bands. It was a circular chamber about the same size as the interior of a drop pod, large enough to accommodate twelve Space Marines in full battleplate. Controls blinked in a variety of different colours. Diodes indicated up and down. Only the ‘down’ was illuminated, a soft white. It was an elevator.
With a nod to Antille, Zerberyn led them in.
Bryce and the Scions flowed in behind him, with Reoch entering last. The Apothecary examined the selector panel. The different levels of the complex were each indicated by an ivory button marked, from top to bottom, with an incrementally decreasing numeral. Reoch shrugged and punched the lowest button.
Zerberyn would have made the same choice.
Exemplars in action and in intent. Exemplars in forethought.
The blast doors whined shut and the elevator plunged into a descent. It was practically freefall. An atmospheric insertion by drop pod could not have been quicker, and the elevator’s depth indicators flashed down in a matter of seconds. Deceleration was equally drastic. The Fists Exemplar had been engineered for high-velocity strikes, and even Zerberyn, with pain pulsing from his severed nerves, remained standing. The Scions, however, were thrown to the ground and scattered to the four walls.