Chapter 237: The Heat Vents (Patreon)

"This Iron World burns in the fire I have brought upon it!"

From atop a colossal, cube-shaped structure, one of the many titanic Cooling Vaults regulating the machine-planet’s heat and pressur, Abaddon the Despoiler looked out across the endless metallic plains. Though far from the front, the battlefield stretched before him in its entirety, every clash and every blaze of artillery reflected in his warlord’s gaze.

A surge of dark, vindictive pride welled up within him.

The war for this Iron Planet had begun with treachery. The surprise assault from its planetary-scale arc weaponry had forced his fleet into retreat last time, dragging him down in humiliation. But now, at last, the fires of the Long War had come home to this accursed planetary engine.

Abaddon did not think himself a flawless conqueror. Flawless men stagnate, and stagnation is death. No, he was far more dangerous than perfection. He was the kind of warlord who, when cast down, rose again, more ruthless, more patient, with ashes with vengeance in his grasp.

“There remain two more of these Iron Planets to scourge,” rasped Typhus, Herald of Nurgle, his voice like the buzzing of corpse-flies. “Best not waste time savoring this one.”

“You celebrate too soon,” growled Kossolax the Foresworn, “The foe has Titan Legions of their own.”

Abaddon’s scowl darkened, though he could not deny the truth in their words. Standing here as a spectator or even as a warrior, was not enough. To cripple the Celestial Engine itself, that was the true objective.

To that end, Typhus had called upon his warlocks to craft a grotesque artifact: the Augury Bird-Engine

The contraption, swollen with pustules and writhing tendrils, was part-organism, part-daemonic machine. A pulsing maw served as its vox-horn, and within its warped, cyclopean eye swirled visions of possible futures. One need only whisper a goal into the flesh-shaped speaker, and the daemon-thing would vomit forth the path to that objective. To Typhus, it was a treasured servant.

“Take us to the heart of this Iron Planet. To its engine-core,” Typhus intoned, his voice thick with corruption, as he leaned toward the gaping maw. “Show us the path to unmake its motion, to silence its turning, until the world itself unravels.”

The daemon-engine shuddered, meat-tentacles flailing. Then, upon a twitching display of metal and skin, a glyph of sickly green light flared, sketching a winding descent into the depths.

Without delay, Abaddon gave the order and the warband advanced.

Kossolax led but twenty of his personal Chosen, berserkers honed to razor perfection. Abaddon and Typhus were accompanied by over a hundred Veteran Astartes, warriors of the Black Legion, ancient killers clad in baroque, rune-scarred armor, flanked by their personal lieutenants and warband sergeants.

Guided by the daemon-engine’s discordant hum, they descended into the Cooling Vault. Within, they found a service artery plunging down, a maintenance conduit lined with cooling pipes and humming plasma veins, leading ever deeper into the Iron Planet’s subsurface.

“Strange, isn’t it?” Kossolax muttered as they marched. “No sentries. No defenses.”

“Excluding the armies locked above in battle, there are none,” Abaddon replied grimly, his gauntleted fingers flexing around the hilt of Drach’nyen, the daemon-sword at his side.

Typhus said nothing. His pitted helm remained angled toward the Augury, the glow of its eye painting his armor in sickly greens as he lumbered forward, silent and patient as rot.

“This plays to our advantage,” Abaddon continued. “While the foe wastes its might on the surface, we carve out the heart beneath. Once this Iron Planet dies, we move on to the next…” His gaze hardened, his lip curling in cruel anticipation. “Or perhaps,” he allowed himself a thin, cold smile, “we attempt something even greater.”

Kossolax’s eyes gleamed. “Greater? Speak, Warmaster.”

“Not merely destroy it,” Abaddon growled, “but hurl this Iron Planet itself into Cadia. Let it become our spear against the Imperium’s heart.”

He cast a glance behind him. In the middle of their column, guarded by over two hundred Chaos Astartes like precious cargo, trudged two black-robed Magi of the Dark Mechanicum, their mechadendrites twitching like nests of serpents. They were his insurance, his architects of doom.

Kossolax chuckled. “Why shatter it, when you could wield it?”

“Exactly.” Abaddon’s smile was a promise of ruin.

....

“Fool’s dream.”

From within the sanctum of a monitoring chamber, Grey tore his eyes away from the hololithic projections, his face a mask of cold calculation.

Abaddon and his warband did not realize the truth: they had never been “undetected.”

The satellites of the Celestial Engine was no mere world of steel. Every wall, every corridor, every strut of this Celestial Engine was laced with sensors, that witnessed all. From cogitator nodes to the floor beneath their boots, the Warmaster’s every movement was observed and transmitted.

To Grey, Abaddon’s march was an open book.

"Since you know where they are, why haven’t we just struck him down already?" growled Grot, newly promoted commander of the 44th Regiment. His voice carried the hard edge of a man who had watched too many of his own burn.

Barely minutes earlier, Lord Castellan Creed had redeployed the 44th from Cadia itself, hurling them via teleportarium into the Celestial Engine satellite’s battle.

But fate had been cruel. As the regiment materialized, stray fire from the Titans’ colossal duel had rained down upon their drop zone. Volcano cannons, hellfire missiles, blasts of apocalypse. In a heartbeat, nine thousand Talon soldiers had died before even lifting their lasguns. Only Grot and a hundred men of his command regiment endured, and then Chaos Astartes fell upon them like wolves.

Had it not been for Grey, executing his own decapitation mission, Grot’s forces would have been obliterated. Instead, the Thunderborn had cut through the Chaos ambush, dragging Grot and his surviving men back from the jaws of death.

Now, the two marched together toward the greater prize: Abaddon himself.

“You saw it yourself,” Grey snapped back. “The enemy commander had marched beside a Titan Legion. Am I to charge alone into the guns of Warlord-class Titans, just to satisfy your bloodlust?”

Grot bared his teeth in a savage grin. “Hnh. I thought His hand-picked Thunderborn were supposed to be unstoppable.”

The Thunderborn ignored the jab, striding forward into the depths. "Enough. We move.”

Grot turned to his remaining men. “You heard him. Advance!”

The path they followed resembled a corridor, but it was no man’s passageway. It was a heat-vent conduit, vast ducts filled with slotted release ports. When the planet’s weapon arrays fired, their thermal fury was drawn into these arteries and bled into the void.

Walking the conduit, Grot risked a glance through one of the vent-grilles. To his shock, he could see the surface of the battlefield mere neck-height above him, war unfolding directly overhead.

The Legio Blade of the Omnissiah had just felled two enemy Warlords. Mountains of living metal strode above, each footfall shaking the surface as their weaponry carved reality itself apart.

The Blades of Omnissiah Titan Legion had just felled two enemy Warlord-class Titans, their god-machines striding like moving mountains, smashing the battlefield forward toward the Defenders’ position.

A massive shadow eclipsed the vents. Grot flinched as something titanic smashed into the ground above, then another. Only when he pressed close did he realize what they were: severed Titan legs, hurled aside like broken toys.

The god-machine Glory of Agripinaa advanced in majesty, a walking mountain bristling with energy-shields and annihilation beams. More Titans thundered in its wake.

Behind it thundered the might of the Astra Militarum armored columns. A Shadowsword super-heavy tank roared across the battlefield, its engines howling, slamming through debris with unstoppable momentum. It crashed against the shield barrier of a traitor Reaver Titan with the shriek of tortured metal, its primary volcano cannon discharging point-blank in a sun-bright inferno.

“For the Throne! For Cadia!” voices howled above.

“For the Omnissiah!” the Skitarii ranks answered, their binary shrieks harmonizing with the booming warhorns of their god-machines.

Regiments of Cadian Shock Troopers and Skitarii surged above, their war-cries cut short as traitor Knight missiles tore them to rags.

Grot shook his head in grim awe. The war was raging just meters above their heads, separated by nothing more than half a meter of plasteel. And yet the fury of Titans, the shock of massed bombardment, it did not touch them. Not a tremor of heat or shock reached them. The  Celestial Engine’s arteries were inviolate.

They moved beneath the apocalypse, untouched.

The group pressed deeper until they reached a corner, one that sloped down into the abyssal underworks.

The Thunderborn spoke a word as they entered the descent, but the thunder of Titan warhorns swallowed it whole. No one else heard what he said.