Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

As the figures drew closer, the Iron Hands finally made out what they were. Discarded Servitors, yes — but unlike their kin rotting in the scrap-yards, these ones moved with an eerie purpose, and crimson light flickered in their mechanical eyes, as though they hungered for blood and slaughter.

Kuber read the threat in them and raised his weapon. A single bolt round dropped the nearest Servitor.

No one took any comfort from how easily it died.

Kuber looked up. Out toward the Rust Wastes, countless more of the malfunctioning Servitors had appeared, surging forward like a tide, moving far faster than he had expected.

"Open fire! Open fire!"

Bolter fire poured out at Kuber's command, tearing the front rank to pieces. The machine-things showed no fear. The wreckage of the leaders was still tumbling across the sand when those behind trampled over it and came on.

The Iron Hands emptied magazine after magazine, and still the rogue Servitors kept coming. They drew their chainswords — only to find that these non-combat, production-pattern units had welded hydraulic shears and industrial chainsaws onto their own limbs. What should have been simple butchery turned into a real fight.

"Where the hell did these things come from?" one of the Iron Hands shouted over the comm-channel. "They're evolving!"

Sheer numbers told. The self-arming Servitors closed a ring around the Iron Hands. The warriors looked to Kuber, waiting for their Captain to decide — punch forward and break out, or hold and wait for relief?

Kuber read the anomalies and understood that these Servitors were more than simply out of control. He tried to raise Mars again, but the channel was choked with Skitarii redeployment orders.

Mars's Priests had no more grip on this sudden chaos than he did. Scrambling to meet the attack, they had stopped caring whether the Iron Hands lived or died. Even if his squad cut its way back to the Skitarii lines, Mars would only spend them as slightly better-grade cannon fodder.

Kuber glanced back. Through the blowing dust he could just make out the Soul Drinkers' line.

There was a third option, and the time had come to take it.

"We fall back."

"Fall back? But behind us is—"

"This is no longer a standoff between Mars and the Ultimate Wall. In this new war we have to find where we stand."

With Kuber leading, the Iron Hands moved slowly toward the Soul Drinkers' line.

Unease sat in him the whole way; he had no idea how the Soul Drinkers would react. Fortunately they understood well enough that these Iron Hands were coming for shelter, and held their fire. They only watched, cold-eyed, as the Iron Hands entered their position. When the two sides stood close enough to read each other's faces, Kuber raised a hand and signalled his warriors to halt.

He drew a deep breath and walked forward, toward Lin.

"I am Iron Captain Jack Kuber. Magos Lin, I apologize to you and to the Ultimate Wall for our earlier hostilities. We… we were forced into it."

Lin did not answer at once. His gaze rested on Kuber's face for a moment, as though weighing the man's sincerity.

Tension coiled through Kuber. He had run through every possible response — anger, mockery, even an immediate volley. What he had not expected was for Lin, his measure taken, to simply give a small nod.

"I understand your position. Whether you're forgiven depends on what you do from here."

Kuber stared at him.

He had assumed Lin would demand proof of loyalty on the spot, or set brutal terms — he had braced himself for all of that. As long as it wasn't Mars's method of shoving them straight onto the front line as cannon fodder, he was ready to accept whatever came.

"We… we'll prove ourselves." There was iron in Kuber's voice, and something close to a catch in his throat. Behind him the Iron Hands said nothing, but the same complicated look sat in their eyes.

"Your capacity for feeling is exactly what I like about you."

Lin waved a hand, and the Soul Drinkers opened a path. The Iron Hands walked slowly into their position, and much of the tension between the two forces bled away.

Kuber did not go to reassure his brothers first. Everything in Lin's manner told him the Magos had seen the shape of this coming a long time ago. He stepped up beside Lin and asked quietly, "Magos Lin, did you expect this uprising?"

Lin gave him a sideways glance. "From the moment your people simply had to have me dead, I knew someone behind Mars was weaving a conspiracy."

Kuber shifted, uncomfortable. "I only want to know what's controlling those rogue Servitors."

"That, I don't know either. I knew something would go wrong on Mars. I just didn't know what shape it would take."

Lin had watched the puppeted, malfunctioning Servitors as well. The corruption of each Dark God left its own unmistakable marks, and none of those marks matched what he was seeing.

Chaos Undivided, then? Something outside the Four Chaos Gods?

Lin released his Servo-skull and sent it toward the Skitarii lines to scout the state of the battlefield.

As the wave of rogue Servitors closed in, the Skitarii line fell briefly into disorder. The Priests' orders overlapped and contradicted one another across the comm-channels, tearing the Skitarii in half a dozen directions at once, so that they could not settle into any workable defensive position.

Fortunately, for all their numbers, the rogue Servitors were little threat to a properly organized army. Without ranged weapons they could only charge the Skitarii line on foot, and the time that charge took was time enough for the Priests to reorganize.

Calm returning, the Priests began issuing orders that actually worked.

Onager Dunecrawlers were pushed up to the front. Bristling with advanced weaponry, the battle platforms simply steamrollered the fragile rogue Servitors. Eradication beamers and heavy phosphor blasters fired together, blowing an obvious gap through a tide several hundred thousand strong.

Kataphron Breachers used those gaps to plant themselves at the leading edge of the position, their heavy plate and hydraulic claws blunting the enemy advance, while the Rangers and Vanguard seized the moment to fall back into firing positions.

With command restored, the Skitarii unleashed the terrifying firepower that set them so far above ordinary troops; with Mars's supply lines at their backs, they spent ammunition without a second thought. Under that systematic weight of supporting fire, the line steadied.

The rogue Servitor assault stalled — and those resurrected digital zombies began to shrink back.

Lin doubted the Servitors could think at all. That hesitation meant only one thing: whoever was steering them could not afford losses at this rate either.

Watching from the line, Kuber saw it too. "Mars is going to win this."

Half a day, start to finish, and this bizarre uprising looked ready to end as abruptly as it had begun. Kuber worried that once the crisis passed, Mars would come back and settle accounts with him — but Lin told him not to trouble himself.

"Wait and see. There's more than rogue Servitors out in the Rust Wastes."

The Priests were roaring "For the Omnissiah!" and preparing to carve their way into the Rust Wastes and wipe out every last rogue Servitor when a redeployment order bearing the Fabricator General's personal authorization arrived at the Skitarii position.

"The main force is to reinforce Magma City at all speed?"

Karkes, who held command, exchanged blank looks with the other Priests.

They were the closest force to Magma City, and they knew Kubik himself had gone there. They had registered the sound of gunfire inside the city earlier, but with no order from the Fabricator General they had never investigated.

Magma City was running a top-secret project, after all, and everyone unconnected to it had been warned to stay away without cause.

Besides, Kubik had taken an entire Battle-Automata legion in with him. On Mars, aside from the Titan Legion, what could stand against a force like that?

But this order told them that something had gone wrong inside Magma City.

Driving deep into the Rust Wastes to annihilate the Servitors was no longer realistic. How to relieve Magma City, though, split the Magi.

"It comes from the Fabricator General himself. We commit the whole army and break the siege at once!"

Karkes, Kubik's own man, was desperate to save his master, and was cut off at once. "And abandon a fortified position, leaving our army with nothing to anchor on?"

"We still have to go — unless you'd like the Fabricator General to render you down into wetware afterward."

Every one of them knew that splitting the force was unwise. Kubik's tyranny drove them to the unwise decision anyway.

Roughly three hundred thousand Skitarii were left behind to watch the malfunctioning Servitors, while the remaining six hundred thousand marched for Magma City under Karkes.

Lin knew they were finished.

Once the column had confirmed distance from the field, the black mass rose again on Mars's horizon.

The Priests left behind had expected as much and made ready to fight. What they had not expected was that something far more terrible had come onto the field this time.

"What is that?"

Before them stood misshapen things, flesh and steel forced together by the desecrating power of the Warp. Their torsos looked like flayed corpses, gears and bearings threaded through rotting muscle.

One half of a face kept its human jaw; the other half was plated in rusted metal. Reverse-jointed bionic hooves let them scuttle across the ground at frightening speed, and the saw-blades that had replaced their hands told every Priest present that these ghoulish creations were a far greater threat than any Servitor.

Unlike the malfunctioning production units, these were Viktor's masterwork, rebuilt from discarded Skitarii and servitors.

Behind the ghouls came hundreds upon hundreds of war engines. The vehicles had been dumped in the wastes long ago and left to rot with rust, but Vashtorr's might drove them across the ground once more.

"Prepare to engage!" the Magos in command shouted, and the confidence had gone out of his voice.

The Skitarii shifted formation fast and opened up on this new army of the dead. But their firepower, far weaker now than before, could not begin to clear an enemy of this quality.

The war engines, unable to fire their own guns, took the lead and soaked up most of the shooting. The occasional stray round punched past them and killed a ghoul or two.

Then a hymn rose, and it made the skin crawl — prayers to the Omnissiah that should have poured strength into steel, now eaten through by some unnameable echo out of the Warp.

Under that hymn the shattered ghouls began to couple back together. Out of the scattered wreckage and loose components each one pieced itself a fresh body and came on at the Skitarii again.

If the place where the Omnissiah dwelt was the heaven every one of them longed for, then this enemy had come out of the hell that stood opposite it!

The Skitarii line began to collapse. Rangers and Vanguard gave ground step by step as the ghouls closed.

"We can't hold!" Despair ran raw through the Priest's voice.

"We have to warn the main force!" another Magos ground out. "We can't go on like this!"

He opened the comm-channel, trying to get word of the situation to the column marching on Magma City. What came back was a warped snarl of static, as though some power were smothering the transmission.

"What's happening?"

The Magos frowned and worked the control panel, trying to filter out the interference. No matter how he adjusted it, the noise only grew stronger — strong enough to begin bending his thoughts.

"Give it up, Magos." A voice he did not know spoke across the channel.

The Magos went rigid. He swept his surroundings for the source and found only the churn of the battlefield and the ghouls and war engines grinding closer.

"Who are you?" he asked, low.

"I am Viktor, servant of the Omnissiah," came the cold reply. "Your resistance is meaningless, Magos. Your Omnissiah abandoned you long ago."

"Bullshit! The Omnissiah you name and the Omnissiah we serve are one and the same!"

Viktor did not answer. At his command hundreds of ghouls converged to throttle the Magos. For all his formidable personal combat power, no one fights that many hands at once, and the cyber-zombies tore him to pieces.

The Magos's internal resurrection subroutine triggered. If all had gone well, it would have "revived" him in a spare body by passing on his memories. Viktor's blasphemous, Psychic-laced hymn blocked the process from ever running.

Exactly the way Lin had once blocked his own resurrection protocol.

He still harbored doubts about Vashtorr. But this power over machines was real. Twisted, certainly — and beyond any question of his.

Viktor regarded the thoroughly dead Magos without expression, then tapped his staff once. Vashtorr's power ate into the corpse, and before long a ghoul shaped like the Magos, and utterly empty of intelligence, was born out of his remains.

That sight shattered whatever will the others had left to hold the line. They fled screaming from Viktor and his army of the dead.

The line of three hundred thousand Skitarii had officially broken.

Viktor turned his gaze to one side. He could sense Lin over there, and more than six hundred Astartes with him.

When he had learned that Lin had not died in Augustus's plan, delight had outweighed his surprise.

The chance to repay the man who had cut him down by hand stood right in front of him, and Viktor could barely hold his impulse in check. Augustus's earlier warning was what finally made him let the opportunity go.

"Wait for me, Lin. That head of yours comes off by my hand and no one else's!"

He led his army onward, and their heading was Magma City.

Wholly unaware of the horror at their backs, the six hundred thousand Skitarii kept marching on Magma City.

They had heard the sounds of battle behind them, though the interference kept them from learning anything about it. Most of them refused to believe three hundred thousand Skitarii could lose to those Servitors — let alone be routed that quickly.

But High Magos Karkes, commanding the column, was deeply uneasy. Several times he tried to reach the Fabricator General who had sent the call for aid. Every time, no one answered.

Magma City came into view wrapped in what looked like a pall of dark cloud, and his instincts told him something terrible was brewing inside it.

He could only grit his teeth and press on.

Then the scouting element ahead sent an emergency signal.

"Unidentified contact! Repeat, unidentified contact!"

Karkes patched into the scout Skitarii's vision and saw a huge mechanical construct moving toward them, with several dozen battered Battle-Automata clustered around it.

He recognized what he was looking at, and the cry burst out of him.

"Lord Fabricator General!"

The Kubik before him bore no resemblance to the imperious Fabricator General he remembered.

His mechanical body was pocked with impact scars and the black scorching of overloaded logic conduits. The data-throne was nowhere to be seen; in its place was a crude chassis thrown together from whatever had been at hand.

"Magos Karkes…" Kubik's voice came out as a rasp as he questioned his own retainer.

"Why are you here?"

[Author's Note: P.S. The motor-oil crowd may be cold and calculating, but they actually have a great deal of respect for corpses — their own people's corpses, at least.]

[Author's Note: The remains of Priests and Magi do get buried on Mars, usually beneath Olympus Mons — they hold that to be the place closest to the Omnissiah, where they return to the Omnissiah's embrace. (And in fact it really is the closest an ordinary Priest is ever going to get to the Void Dragon.)]

[Author's Note: So having a corpse desecrated is a genuinely horrifying thing to them.]

[Author's Note: Of course, anything that never even made it to Priest doesn't count as one of their own. Apprentices and everybody else can tidy themselves up and meet again in the Corpse-starch grinder.]

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