Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

Karkes faltered, then answered, "We received your emergency redeployment order, Lord Fabricator General. Magma City needed reinforcement, so we—"

"My order?" Kubik's voice rose sharply. "I never issued any order!"

Karkes went pale. Set against the battered Fabricator General standing in front of him, his logic circuits raced toward a terrible conclusion.

He didn't dare accept that conclusion as true, and could only ask again, trembling, "But… we did receive your authorization cipher and your command, demanding we reinforce Magma City with all speed."

"Augustus! That traitor! He has forged my identity!"

Kubik had no idea how it had been done, but the truth was plain enough. He took over command of the Skitarii at once. "Where are the rest of our forces?"

"Three hundred thousand are still holding the line. They're exchanging fire with an enormous mass of rogue Servitors." Karkes had no way of knowing what fate had already overtaken those three hundred thousand.

"Rogue Servitors?"

Kubik knew this had to be Vashtorr's work as well, though he refused to believe three hundred thousand Skitarii could be broken so easily.

"Turn around. We link up with those three hundred thousand, and then we withdraw."

"Why, my lord? Shouldn't we strangle the unrest in Magma City in its cradle? With your Battle-Automata supporting us—"

He never finished. A low rumble rolled in from the distant horizon. Kubik and Karkes turned as one and saw a black tide of shapes surging toward them from the direction of Magma City.

It was Kubik's Battle-Automata legion.

They no longer belonged to Kubik. The same bloodthirsty red glow that burned in the rogue Servitors' eyes now flickered in the optics of those automata, and Karkes understood all over again how serious this was.

"Fall back! Fall back!" He bellowed the order in his lord's place.

Karkes's Skitarii formations struggled to wheel about among the dunes outside Magma City.

Fabricator General Kubik lay curled inside his cobbled-together chassis. Cold fury churned through his logic core — Augustus's betrayal, Vashtorr's manifestation, his own Battle-Automata legion turned rogue. Every one of them gnawed away at his dignity as king of Mars.

I must retake control of Mars, he calculated. If only the Titan Legion will march…

Their retreat did not go smoothly.

They had barely passed out of sight of Magma City when another black tide boiled over the horizon — directly across their line of withdrawal.

It was the army of the dead, led by Viktor.

Countless twisted steel ghouls came flooding in, rusted war engines rising among them like gravestones, and a blasphemous binary hymn detonated across every Skitarii comms channel:

"Gears rust, conduits run dry — this is the ending the Omnissiah grants you!"

The unexpected enemy threw the wholly unprepared Skitarii into chaos. Still advancing in march formation, they took the ghoul army's charge head-on.

"Where did these things come from now?!"

No one had an answer, but everyone understood what it meant: the three hundred thousand left behind had already met their end. Out on the Martian wastes, a hopeless battle began.

It did not last long. The corrupted Battle-Automata racing in from Magma City closed the pincer alongside Viktor's army of the dead.

Karkes tried to fight on, but the blasphemous hymn Viktor used to steer his ghouls drowned out his command channel. Lacking the incense and sacred oils prepared to ward off such interference, the Skitarii had no way left to turn the battle around.

The bionic skin of Karkes's face twitched as he wrenched open Kubik's makeshift chassis. "My lord, we must—"

He found it empty. At some point Kubik had vanished without a trace.

"Where is he?! Where's my Fabricator General?!"

Kubik had recognized a lost cause and had no intention of being buried alongside the Skitarii. He was the first to flee, and once the remaining Magi and Priests saw it, whatever fight was left in them died.

Every one of them began plotting a way out for himself, and the battlefield turned into a slaughterhouse.

Viktor saw them running, of course. He had no intention of stopping them.

Let those life-clinging Magi scrape out a little more borrowed time. His target had been the Skitarii from the very beginning.

"Increase the pace. Leave nothing alive," he commanded grimly.

"Let us welcome the coming of my master's ally!"

Watching the collapse of the battlefield, Kuber realized with some astonishment that all of it had unfolded exactly as Lin expected.

"Nine hundred thousand Skitarii, wiped out just like that?" He could hardly believe it.

"When every move you make has already been anticipated, an entire army can be reduced to ash between one breath and the next," Lin answered.

Still, he hadn't worked out why the ones who had demonstrated the power to corrupt machinery weren't gathering up the abandoned Skitarii for themselves.

It was Admidel, who had come along on the close reconnaissance, who noticed something out of place.

"Those Skitarii. The rate of their counterattacks is speeding up."

Lin looked closer. Stripped of their Magi, the leaderless Skitarii were indeed fighting harder the longer it went on — but the way they fought had drifted far from the cold rationality the Mechanicus was supposed to embody.

In formations that should have shattered, more and more Skitarii optics kindled with a strange red glow.

They threw away damaged weapons and tore open ghoul throats with bare metal finger-bones. Soldiers whose legs had been sheared off crawled forward and detonated their own reactors, like some frenzied sacrifice.

"Something's wrong with their machine-spirits," Kuber said.

"Not the machine-spirits." Lin knew this pattern well enough; he had seen a similar summoning scene at Port Sanctus not long ago. "That's some hungry thing drooling at the dinner table."

As if in answer to him, when the eight hundred and eighty thousandth Skitarii fell, the sky above the battlefield split apart.

A warp rift crossed the heavens like a crimson scar, and the blare of brazen horns shattered the cloud layer.

A Bloodthirster forced its way out, too impatient to wait, and set both feet on the soil of Mars.

The daemon legions of Sadistic Terror poured out behind him: "Skulls! Skulls! Skulls!"

The ally Vashtorr had recruited had finally taken the stage, and with a Greater Daemon on the field there was no suspense left in the battle.

Even standing clear of the fighting, the Iron Hands and Soul Drinkers at Lin's side went tense.

Kuber no longer had to worry about Mars settling accounts with him — matters had escalated well past any question of accounts.

He turned to Lin and asked, testing the waters, "When are you planning to head back to the Shanzheng?"

"No hurry. A show like this doesn't come along every day."

Lin watched with genuine interest as the Greater Daemon of Sadistic Terror carved a swath through the Skitarii with a two-handed axe. The wings the Blood God had stripped from him were nothing but charred skeletal frames now — and it was those wings that let Lin put a name to him.

The former first among Greater Daemons, who could never return to Sadistic Terror's service: Skarbrand the Exiled.

"And here I was wondering who'd turned up. Just this stray cur. Makes sense, though. Sadistic Terror has no appetite for Skitarii skulls with barely a scrap of meat on them. He's the only one who'd choke down offerings that reek of rancid engine oil."

If anyone had tried to tell Lin that Skarbrand devised this plan, he wouldn't have believed a syllable of it.

If the brute had possessed even a scrap of sense, Tzeentch would never have talked him into taking an axe to the dog-faced god. On Mars he was, at best, a first-rate thug. There was certainly someone else standing behind Augustus.

He intended to lie low a while longer and see whether the shifting battle would give up any more information.

Skarbrand's great axe split the last Onager Dunecrawler open. Oil sprayed from the Skitarii serving as wetware inside the crawler, ran down the blade, and dripped onto the Martian grit.

He roared at the sky, his ruined bat-wings shuddering and stirring a reeking gale. From the mountain of Skitarii wreckage under his feet came an unending keening of grinding gears.

It reminded him of the glorious moments before his exile, when he had offered skulls to Sadistic Terror — the same searing heat, the same coppery sweetness.

The only pity was that these oil-blooded things carried none of the blood he craved.

"How much more time are you going to waste?"

The voice at his ear cut straight through the din the Exiled One had been savoring. Vashtorr's phantom image rose out of a shattered war engine.

His augmetic eyes swept the oil pooling across the ground. "Is this heap of scrap worth a Greater Daemon of the Blood God's time?"

"Silence!" Sulphurous sparks jetted from Skarbrand's nostrils. "A feeble lesser god dares lecture the Blood God's champion? I'll take those gears of yours and shove them—"

"Into Sadistic Terror's forge? That would require you to be able to set foot in the Blood God's realm."

Vashtorr — like every Greater Daemon — knew every detail of the exile's history, a tale that had long since become a joke. "Eight hundred and seventy-four attempts. Eight hundred and seventy-four times turned away at the gates of the Blood-Grinder Fortress. Shall I play back the footage of you kneeling before the brass gates, gnawing at the chains?"

Warp-fire blazed along Skarbrand's axe blade; he wanted nothing more than to hack this smart-mouthed god of craftsmen into eight pieces. Vashtorr simply tossed out a contract, and the sight of it froze Skarbrand where he stood.

"Clear-headed now? Per the agreement, you are to plunder no fewer than twelve forge temples on my behalf."

"Twelve? You said all I had to do was stop anyone who tried to interfere while Mars was being teleported away!"

"The plan has changed. And these conditions were written into the supplementary clauses." Vashtorr pointed to the last few pages, where the print was the size of sesame seeds. "I always do business by the contract."

Skarbrand went berserk. "Don't stand there talking shit just because I never read the damned thing!"

Vashtorr could of course have invoked the contract's binding force and compelled Skarbrand to keep serving. He preferred, first, to properly stimulate the work ethic of his employee of the year.

"By our agreement," he purred, "every production line you seize for me grants you thirty percent of its output afterward, delivered to Sadistic Terror's forge by your own hand. Think on it. When the Blood God's daemon engines carpet the galaxy, who will have earned back his place at the foot of the Brass Throne?"

Skarbrand went still, and the fantasy unrolled behind his eyes of its own accord.

Axes of Sadistic Terror forged from Martian adamantium, splitting Custodes armor. Profane Knights and Chaos Titans grinding statues of the Emperor into powder. Best of all, every one of those creations would be branded with Skarbrand's name — his hymn of praise offered up to the Blood God!

"Done."

Skarbrand drove his axe blade hard into the ground. "Which hive city do we start with?"

"No rush on the hive cities. We start with the small forge temples on the outskirts and let it snowball."

Vashtorr's aim was precise. He conjured a map and traced the route for the Exiled One. "The Macarius Forge Station. Part of Mars's vehicle production lines are there, and I need them turned into daemon engine lines of my own. More important still, I've received intelligence that an Archmagos named Cawl is conducting experiments there that he'd rather no one saw."

"You'd stoop to mortal technology?"

"Why not? Every concept we embody was born in the material universe. Mind your strength — do not smash that Archmagos to paste. If it can be managed, bring him to me."

Skarbrand snorted his displeasure. "You're not coming with me?"

"Until you seize more production lines, my true body cannot descend into the material universe. Besides, I have business of my own in the Warp. There's a Magos called Lin — his reinforcements are already on their way. I'll join with another Greater Daemon and bottle them up inside the Warp."

"Another Greater Daemon? Who?"

"You'll know the name. M'Kachen."

"You're actually working with one of Tzeentch's lapdogs!"

Skarbrand nearly exploded, then remembered that winning the Blood God's forgiveness mattered more. He let it drop, hefted his axe, and set off for the Macarius Forge Station.

Vashtorr wasn't about to let his star enforcer run entirely unsupervised. At his instruction, Viktor took his army of the dead and marched with Skarbrand.

Watching the Bloodthirster's retreating back, Vashtorr was well pleased with himself.

"Take enough production lines, and I'll build a forge world of my own. With that much starting capital, I can wrest the Warp essence of forging from Vulkan's hands, and use it as a foundation to reach for more…"

A grand tapestry was unfurling before him, and he was already dreaming of the splendid future painted on it.

"I will ascend as the fifth god of the Warp!"

Vashtorr's form was a phantom Lin could not see.

He was too far from the battlefield to make out anything more than Skarbrand conversing with something. When the conversation ended, the Bloodthirster and the ghoul army set off together in a different direction.

"Looks like someone's in more of a hurry to take Mars apart than we are," he remarked.

Admidel took it for the opening Lin had been waiting on. "Magma City's rear defenses are hollow now. We have six hundred Astartes — enough to launch a strike."

It was a genuine opening. With both forces departed, the city seemed to have very few defenders left.

But Lin turned the proposal down.

"Magma City matters, but I'm not going there yet."

He sent for Occam. Since escaping Magma City, this Alpha and his warband had been handed no combat duties whatsoever, drawing on Lin's supplies day after day and living very comfortably indeed.

Lin had no interest in keeping them on the payroll for nothing. "Occam. Magma City is your assignment. Scout it or infiltrate it, that's your business. What matters is that you determine the current situation inside. Your intelligence will be the basis for my next move."

"And the payment?"

"That depends on what you bring back."

Occam shrugged and accepted the job. Only once he and his warband had vanished in the direction of Magma City did Lin turn back to the Soul Drinkers and the Iron Hands.

"Rather than gamble on unknown risks assaulting Magma City, we should go help out at someone else's party."

A party?

Help out at whose party?

Neither Kuber nor Admidel followed at first. They assumed Lin meant to help Mars fight off Sadistic Terror's daemon legions, and were startled that he'd set aside old grievances so readily.

Then Lin began preparing the weapons built specifically for killing Tech-Priests, and it became clear exactly who he intended to fight.

"You're going after the Mechanicus too? Alongside those daemons?" Kuber couldn't believe it.

"This is called sensible allocation of resources. Better those things end up in my hands than get destroyed by daemons."

Occam's transmission cut in. "Picked up something interesting on the way to Magma City. Sadistic Terror's daemon legions are moving toward the Macarius Forge Station. That should be their objective."

"Look at that. See how fast the competition works."

Lin clapped his hands and pressed the Astartes to hurry. Led by their veterans, the Soul Drinkers fell in without hesitation. Kuber stayed where he was, wavering.

"Are we really throwing in with a lunatic like that?" one of the Iron Hands asked.

Kuber's jaw tightened. "Staying with Mars has no future in it either way."

In the end he led the Iron Hands after them, and Lin, satisfied, gave his orders.

"Once the daemons launch their attack, we cut in from the other side. Remember: our objectives are the production lines and the manufacturing STCs. Nothing else."

[Author's Note 1: Skarbrand: I'm fantasizing again. Fantasizing that the Blood God takes me back, that I'm the first Greater Daemon at Sadistic Terror's side once more. No more chewing on spoiled souls while everybody uses me as a doormat…]

[Author's Note 2: A forge temple, or forge-station, is the private domain a Magos establishes for himself on Mars. Think of it as a miniature forge hive; on the map they look something like the one marked No. 7.]

____

Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 50 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter

________________________________________

If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)

👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉