Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Augustus realized something was wrong.

He had meant to slip false data into the Skitarii's predictive firing matrices so that Lin wouldn't die too fast. But those Blackshield Astartes had appeared out of nowhere and annihilated the closing Skitarii before he could even apply pressure.

His preparations had gone to waste entirely.

The unforeseen development stalled his logic for a brief moment. He tried to identify these Astartes, but the deliberately defaced power armour gave him nothing.

The only thing he could confirm was that they were not Imperial Fists.

His logic engines told him that a complication this small would not alter his plan. Even so, the surprise left him irritated.

"Disregard casualties. Press the attack," he ordered. "Let us apply some genuine pressure to this Magos and his endless 'surprises.'"

With no Archmagos sabotaging them from within, the Skitarii deployment turned coordinated and fluid under the direction of the logic network. Squad after squad reorganized the assault — but a Magos working in concert with battle-hardened Astartes was far beyond anything they could pin down.

The Ruststalkers blocking the corridor were carved up by Efron, the better close-quarters fighter. Off to one side, a group of Rangers tried to draw a bead on Lin, and before they could raise their weapons Lin had already kicked off a wall and vaulted at them.

One Ranger's head split open, spraying a mixture of blood and machine oil across the plaster. The Rangers beside him obeyed the logic prompt and tried to open up a safe distance, but Lin's silhouette had already slipped away into the shadows of the passage.

"They know Magma City's terrain better than we do!" was all the Rangers could report.

The maps Occam had scouted out in advance were paying off now. The Night Lord guided the whole team through the overlapping shadows of the structures, and the four of them, each with his own role, used Magma City's labyrinthine layout to run rings around thousands of enemies.

"Either we escape through Magma City's main gate, or we get out on an Archaeopter," Occam explained the next stage of the plan to Lin in the middle of the melee.

"An Archaeopter? Why would one be here?"

"We spotted it while we were scouting the Skitarii deployment. It's parked in a plaza not far from here. As long as you can fly it, we can use it to get clear. Though in my experience, a vehicle sitting there that conveniently is usually a trap the other side set up."

Lin knew all about Chekhov's gun. "So what's your real plan?"

"We pretend to head for the Archaeopter. Koda uses his Psychic powers to project the illusion that we're trying to seize it. In reality we double back and break straight out through the main gate."

"Augustus, the one running this experiment, is entangled with daemons. Are you sure we want to use Psychic power to pull this off?"

"If you have a better idea."

"Then we do it my way. We take the Archaeopter, straight up!"

With the objective settled, the squad drove forward without hesitation. Their kill efficiency in the narrow terrain was such that the Skitarii themselves began to doubt they could ever bring them down. Even with the Priests repeating over and over that there were only four of them, the morale of soldiers not yet fully stripped of emotion started to waver.

But the slaughter could not go on forever. As Lin neared the plaza where the Archaeopter was berthed, the terrain inevitably opened up.

"I said stop them!"

For the first time, Augustus raised his voice.

Their rate of penetration through the Skitarii exceeded his projections.

The Shanzheng had not yet detected the disturbance inside Magma City. If Lin boarded that Archaeopter now — even with the contingency he had left aboard the craft — his plan would develop unpredictable variables.

He needed to force the plan back on course.

"Bring up the heavy firepower. Hold nothing back!"

The Battle-Automata Kubik had assigned him were pushed onto the field. Shaped like miniature Knights, these Vorax-pattern Battle-Automata were specialist hunter-killers.

Massed in the plaza, they blanketed Lin with Rotor Cannons firing at a terrifying rate.

Lin raised an Energy Shield to weather it, but Augustus had learned about that particular trick back on Cath Maximus, and he ordered the Vorax straight in. They swung their custom power blades, trying to cut Lin and his companions in half.

Bolter fire looked thin against a true Battle-Automata legion. At the critical moment, Occam hurled several strange grenades daubed in red. They clung to the Vorax hulls and burst with a horrifying force no weaker than a small melta.

The Vorax, only light-armoured units within a Battle-Automata legion, were instantly reduced to knots of twisted scrap.

"Where'd you get the good stuff?" Lin asked, curious.

"From your apprentice. Say what you like, weapons made by an ork you've trained are more dependable than anything a forge world turns out. He even managed to knock together a few Stasis Grenades."

The last obstacle cleared away, the group seized the Archaeopter in one swift rush. The cockpit of this transport variant was just large enough to accommodate Lin, which only made him more certain about why the vehicle was sitting here in the first place.

He wasn't worried about that. "Occam, want to see Mars at four in the morning?"

"What?"

"Hold on tight. We're taking off!"

Lin jacked his cables into the Archaeopter's control programs, and the craft beat its wings and lifted from the ground.

The Skitarii turned their weapons skyward, but the Ornithopter design gave the Archaeopter absurd manoeuvrability.

Dodging every shot, Lin took the craft into a climb and reached safe altitude in moments, leaving behind only the Skitarii staring at one another and an Archmagos whose face had gone black with rage.

He had arrived at his own understanding of why Viktor had lost to Lin on Cath Maximus.

This unnerving Magos could always dig some unexpected "surprise" out of thin air.

But he was not that cornered Deputy Forge Director!

Even if he had not expected Lin to seize the Archaeopter this quickly, Augustus had prepared thoroughly. He turned over his second-to-last card: "Launch the Pteraxii!"

Unlike the jump-pack warriors of the Astartes, these Mechanicus fliers could fly in the sky in the truest sense. The half-mechanized soldiers scrambled the instant the order came; powerful jet engines and lightweight frames let them close on Lin's Archaeopter fast.

Occam tried to knock them down with the onboard bolters, but the Pteraxii, whose wings were controlled directly by their nerves, moved faster in the air than an Astartes could track. They wove a great net across the sky, binding the Archaeopter tight with flechette blaster pistols and Taser Goads.

"Can't you fly any faster?" Occam urged, barely managing to return fire. "Much more of this and we're going down!"

"Actually, we have a problem."

Lin was clearing errors out of the operating system at speed, but his efforts were a cup of water against a burning cart of faults.

The Archmagos's final preparation surfaced here — a digital virus implanted in the Archaeopter's systems came alive, jamming Lin's control of the Ornithopter.

Lin had assumed that an Archmagos consorting with daemons would have stuffed a digital daemon in there. Instead it was a pure data attack.

Flying while splitting his attention to fight the virus meant he did neither well, and everyone aboard the Archaeopter was in trouble.

The aircraft that had been dodging so nimbly grew sluggish, and the Pteraxii soon tore a hole in one of its wings.

Robbed of lift, the Archaeopter began to spiral down. The Pteraxii closed in on the Ornithopter, and Augustus took over the one nearest the cockpit. Through the canopy glass, the Archmagos met Lin again for the first time since Cath Maximus.

"Was this reunion within the calculations of your prognostication engine, Magos Lin?"

"It was. Though I'd rather that probability hadn't existed."

Lin was still trying to purge the virus from the operating system, but a logic bomb an Archmagos had prepared with care was beyond the reach of a man whose brain remained unmodified and who was therefore at a natural disadvantage in data processing. "You seem to know an awful lot about me. All I did was take one ball off you. Was that worth this much trouble?"

"I do not care about Cath Maximus. It was merely one component of my plan. You walked out onto the stage yourself and dug your own grave."

"You've got a grand plan too?"

"Of course. But you will never have the chance to learn what it is."

Augustus had the Pteraxii raise its Taser Goad and drive it down onto the cockpit with crushing force. Lin dodged the goad as it punched through the glass, but he could not stop the high-voltage current from wrecking the control assembly.

Lin tried one last negotiation. "Do you really have to kill me? Maybe I could be an asset to this grand plan of yours."

The Omnissiah did indeed require more assets, but the string of small variables so far had left Augustus wanting nothing more than to crush this endlessly slippery Magos flat.

"Your death is a component of the great plan."

He pulled back and destroyed the Archaeopter's propulsion entirely.

"Be honoured to become a footnote of the age. Your death will open the door to Mars's future!"

The Ornithopter, which had barely been holding its attitude, could hold nothing any longer and fell straight toward the ground. Occam forced his way into the cockpit; even this habitually unflappable Alpha could no longer keep his calm.

"Tell me you've got something ready!"

Lin didn't answer. Occam sucked in a breath through his teeth.

"Man!"

He locked his power armour rigid and braced for the impact of the crash — but the impact never came. Occam rebooted his armour's systems in confusion and discovered that the Archaeopter was, somehow, sitting steady on the ground.

He recognized the spot. It was exactly where he had left the Solar-Powered Warblade.

"How did you do that?" he asked, genuinely curious.

"Please address me as the legendary flight captain."

Lin picked the Solar-Powered Warblade up off the ground. The blade, driven by its soulstone, had gone dark. He hefted his old companion with regret, aware that he wouldn't be able to use it again until he found a new soulstone.

Nothing to be done about it. His Protoss teleportation technology was still crude and could not tell friend from foe, and it could only be run through a soulstone. It was only because there was nothing at all around him before the crash that he had been able to teleport here alone.

Lin prised the soulstone out of its setting in the warblade and found, to his surprise, that it had not been squeezed completely dry. The dimmed stone was straining to give off one final glimmer, as if trying to convey some emotion or message.

Lin, as always, had no idea what it meant. He handed the soulstone to Occam and gestured for him to contact Koda.

"Have your witch take a look at what this bean sprout is fussing about."

Occam did as asked.

"The soul-force inside is already very weak. There's nothing useful to get out of it," he relayed Koda's words. "But you can tell the Eldar in there is agitated. What's left of its consciousness just keeps repeating one thing — death."

"Huh?"

Had he tortured this bean sprout into a masochist?

There was no time for Lin to look into it now. He took the soulstone back, and Occam confirmed with him: "What do we do next?"

"We take our revenge, obviously."

Escaping with their lives didn't mean they were safe. A teleport made far too much noise; Augustus certainly knew he was alive.

Lin understood that this fight was unavoidable.

"We could just leave. Mars is clearly still being kept in the dark by that Archmagos, and going up against him means going up against all of Mars. I don't think that's wise."

"Occam, you might be right. But that isn't what I want."

"And what do you want?"

Occam didn't follow. Lin stood on the horizon of the Martian desert, gazing at the chaos spreading through Magma City in the distance.

"What I want is very simple."

He pointed toward the heart of the city Augustus was guarding so carefully, a brilliant smile spreading across his face.

"Let's burn this city to ashes!"

Augustus, his face black with fury, swept the ground again and again.

He knew perfectly well he would never find Lin's remains down there. He simply could not accept that Lin had escaped alive.

"How does he have a psyker? How could he possibly have a psyker capable of teleportation!"

No one around him dared answer.

Invoke the Fabricator-General's authority to hunt Lin down, make enough noise about it, then have Lin die where everyone could see — under Augustus's original design, that would have turned the Ultimate Wall and Mars against each other. A Mars thrown into chaos by war between the two would have been a stage on which he could accomplish a great deal.

But Lin had escaped Magma City faster than he had projected. He had wanted to kill Lin to compensate for the earlier variables, and instead his target had slipped away.

With that, his plan lay in pieces.

Augustus flushed coolant through his logic circuits and forced himself calm. He ran through every possibility, then let out one long, heavy breath of foul air.

"It is not over yet, Master Forger!"

The senior Magos was summoned to his side. He looked at his right-hand man and gave his instruction. "You will deliberately leak news that Mars moved against Lin to the Ultimate Wall."

"But Lin isn't dead. Even if the Ultimate Wall confronts Mars over it, as long as they find Lin alive they probably won't actually break with us…" the Master Forger pointed out the flaw, hesitant.

Augustus glared at him. "You think I don't know that?"

"We keep it from the Fabricator General first. When the Ultimate Wall takes the initiative and sends people to force their way onto the Martian surface to collect Lin, we will have men in place to attack them directly. If Mars does not wish to be their enemy, then we will make Mars their enemy!"

[Author's Note 1: I know that when Battle-Automata come up, everyone pictures "Baymax" — the Kastelan Robots. But there are actually plenty of other types of Battle-Automata besides the Kastelans (the Kastelans are the mainstay, of course).]

[Author's Note 2: The Mechanicus's signature units are genuinely accomplished in bionics. It feels like that line of development is a science fiction direction in its own right.]

[Author's Note 3: The teleportation technology was mentioned back in Chapter 115, "Unexpected Visit" — if you're interested, feel free to go back and take a look.]

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