The Beast Arises

The robes of her disguise made a whip-like crack with every punch and kick, and five augmented warriors were already down. Number six dropped, neck twisted around until it snapped, and she leapt over him, sliding her foot between the legs of the unit alpha as he swung a spitting taser goad. A flick of the knee sent the skitarii alpha crashing down. His weapon skittered across the floor. Yendl was already up, hooking the other leg over his shoulder and punching his arm in half at the elbow.

The alpha gave a vox-synth shriek.

With a glance over her shoulder, she ripped off her rebreather mask and took out a charging skitarius with a discus throw. Long braids of greying hair tumbled free. Blood trickled down her face from the mask’s intramuscular attachment sites. Her eyes burned with a destructive focus.

A bolt from her arc pistol sent a red-robed skitarius shivering to his knees with blue-white tendrils of electricity coursing through his body. A cyborg soldier ran at her with the stock of his rad-carbine raised like a club. She turned it on the angle of her forearm, took it from him, then spun on her knees and gutted the skitarius with a swipe of her manipulator arm. Bile and battery acid jetted from his midriff in an arc as he was spun aside.

Urquidex had never seen anything like the Assassin in his life.

An entire squad of skitarii vanguard, the techno-elite of Mars, and she had dispatched them in the time it had taken him to turn around. He almost dared to believe that they would make it to her ship and off-world after all. Almost. His mind didn’t even have the time to trigger the necessary endorphin release to let him feel it.

A stream of hyper-velocity white phosphor burned up the space where Yendl was standing. Indiscriminate shot melted through the corridor walls, the floor around her and the ceiling above. One incandescent missile punched through the right side of her chest and shattered the console. Metal and plastek erupted into white fire. Urquidex dropped to the ground, screaming, bringing up his digitool to protect his face.

Even to his own ears, his screams were nothing compared to Yendl’s.

The wound in her chest sizzled. Molten fat dribbled. She beat madly at the chemical fire and threw herself against the wall, pink smoke billowing from her mouth until her lungs were gone and there were no more screams. She flopped to the ground, eyes horrifically wide, twitching like a tortured fish.

Several seconds of agony later, Clementina Yendl died.

Through optics smeared with flesh vapour, Urquidex watched the immense cyborgised construct that had killed her rumble into view. A Kataphron Destroyer. It grumbled forward on a pair of huge tracks, the amputated head and torso of an armour-plated battle servitor providing the basic neural guidance it needed to move and kill. Its eyes were dull, mindless, its lips sutured into a rictus grimace of unfelt pleasure. The heavy weaponry grafted to the stumps of its arms pivoted from Yendl’s smouldering corpse to Urquidex.

The magos narrowed his optic apertures and pleaded with the Omnissiah for a swifter end.

‘Not him.’

The Kataphron growled to a halt and from behind it, gliding under a stinging swarm of mechadendrites, came Artisan Trajectorae Van Auken. As always, Urquidex found himself cowed by the adept without the need for anything so evolved as words or threats. He looked furious, the physical embodiment of machine power. A squad of skitarii vanguard marched in lockstep to his extended stride, red-robed, the arisen shades of the comrades they uncaringly stepped across. Their eyes glowed like coals behind their steel masks.

‘You disappoint me, magos,’ the artisan trajectorae sneered, his servo-harness adding its own snapping words of contempt. ‘You will never know how much.’

From somewhere, Urquidex found the courage to stand.

‘The soul is the conscience of sentience.’

‘The Tenth Universal Law,’ said Van Auken. ‘The misinterpretation of the Omnissiah’s wisdom is a common failing amongst the Adeptus Biologis, and no excuse for treason against the blessed machine.’

With a brusque flick of a mechadendrite, the artisan trajectorae summoned the skitarii. They surged forward. Two claimed Urquidex by either arm and pinned him back over the still-sputtering console. He could feel the heat against his back, then on his face as an augmeticised hand pushed the side of his head into the plastek.

‘The Imperium will be coming,’ he hissed through the metallic fingers covering his mouth.

A smile parted the artisan trajectorae’s Neanderthal jaw.

‘Magos Biologis Eldon Urquidex, the Adeptus Mechanicus sentences you to servitude imperpetuis. I will personally ensure that only the very heaviest of armaments be grafted to whatever the metasurgeons deign to leave of you. It would be undesirable for your body to perish too swiftly.’

Urquidex struggled against the augmetised grips that restrained him, screaming for the clemency of white phosphor. Van Auken glided back.