The First Heretic

Dagotal weaved between his brothers’ bikes, effortlessly outpacing them. His jetbike hovered two metres above the road, bucking forward with engine wails and bursts of acceleration at the merest pressure from his hands on the throttle. The jetbike ran cleaner than its grounded cousins, its power generator venting much less exhaust than the wheeled bikes in Dagotal’s squad.

The Word Bearer leaned to his right, sliding around another of the glass city’s insane spiralling corners. He slowed – if only a little – allowing his brothers to keep pace. From between two spires ahead, another immense artificial came forward on six legs, lightning ringing its faceless black skull in a radiant halo.

‘Another artificial,’ Dagotal voxed. He used the name already being cried out by Word Bearer squad leaders over the vox. ‘It’s another one of the Obsidians.’

‘We’re being boxed in,’ said Korus, drawing alongside. ‘Do we engage?’

‘For what? To waste shells?’ Dagotal accelerated, feeling the drag in his arms as the jetbike’s thrumming engine wailed louder. ‘Follow me.’

He veered left, taking another corner into a secondary street.

‘We can’t keep running,’ Korus growled. ‘Our fuel’s going to give out if we keep this up.’

Dagotal heard the whine of thirsty engines as his men took the corner behind him. Korus was right – their bikes’ growls were getting dry, and the squad had been playing a game of cat and mouse through these streets for hours now, scouting ahead of the Serrated Sun’s main forces.

‘We’re not running,’ he replied.

A shadow darkened the street, eclipsing the sun and filling the air with the grind of powerful engines. The sleek craft hovering overhead bore the bionic skull symbol of the Martian priesthood on its wings.

Dagotal smiled behind his faceplate. ‘We’re looking for somewhere Carthage can land.’

From beneath a red hood, three green eye lenses peered out at the burning city. This triad of visual receptors continually turned and refocused, each lens tuning to degrees of acuity that went far beyond the capacity of human sight.

‘Processing,’ the owner of the three eyes said. And then, after a pause of several seconds, during which the lenses continued to tune and retune, he added ‘Acknowledged’ in the same tone.

Dagotal’s outriders were using this chance to refuel, each Astartes filling their bike’s tanks with canisters of promethium taken from the Mechanicum lander’s hold.

Dagotal remained on his jetbike, the humming gravity suspensors pulsing quieter now they weren’t suffering strain.

‘Two Obsidians,’ he said to the three-eyed man, ‘coming this way.’ The vox was on fire with squads falling back, summoning help from the Carthage Cohort, requesting armour battalions... ‘The artificials are brutal, Xi-Nu.’

‘I am cognizant of the details, Sergeant Dagotal.’

Xi-Nu 73 was a stick-thin being, human only in the loosest sense. His red robe flapped in the heated wind, revealing an augmented body of lustreless iron bound together by industrial cabling. His arms, which he now raised in order to lower his hood, were a skeleton’s limbs constructed from contoured armour plating, ending in bronze hands with too many fingers. His face, such as it was, appeared from the lowered hood as a mess of thin wires and a noisy respiration mask, with no other discernible features beyond the green eye lenses that formed a triangle’s cardinal points.

Xi-Nu 73 had been human once – almost a century ago in the short, fragile two decades after his birth. Like all of the Mechanicum of Mars, he’d had to endure those early years living in a shell of warm meat and wet blood, until he gained the skill to purify himself.

He’d improved himself a great deal since then.

The tech-priest stood by the Mechanicum lander’s cargo ramp, overseeing the ungainly march of several towering figures. Each one was clad in dense armour plating painted in chipped coats of crimson. They stood almost five metres tall, their mechanical joints not even attempting to mimic human motion. The first two down the clanging ramp were gangly Crusaders, their long bladed arms swinging as their shoulders rocked side to side in awkward motion. Circuitry, thick and crude, was etched along the arm-swords’ edges, linking the blades to power generators in the robots’ bodies.

–Sanguine– said the first, vocalising in tinny machine tones, –standing ready–.

–Alizarin– the second intoned, –standing ready–.

The third figure to stomp down the ramp was twice the width of the first two, bulky where the Crusaders were gangly, great fists of riveted metal fused to form siege hammers. Even more than its kin, it reeked of greased machine parts and the earthy scent of lubricating oils. The Cataphract-class machine was hunched, made dense by sloping armour, and moved with even less claim to grace than the others.

–Vermillion– it droned as it clanked in line with the Crusaders, –standing ready–.