Siege of Castellax Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Maps

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Epilogue

  About The Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  Chapter I

  I-Day Minus 15

  Obedience. Labour. Fidelity.

  The three words stretched across the cyclopean wall, each letter ten metres high and stamped in steel. Lines of corrosion bled downwards from each word, scarring the ferrocrete blocks to which they were bolted. At the base of each wall, a narrow gutter carried the oxidised runoff into drainage pits, where it mixed with the waste of the smelters to create a slither of toxic steam that danced in the hot susurrus of the foundry’s machinery.

  Yuxiang stared up at those words, feeling them pressing down upon him in all their corroded malignance. From no point in the mammoth processing plant was it possible to escape the steel letters. Like watchful gods, they glared down upon the slaves chained beside the conveyor belts, pneumatic presses, industrial ovens and bubbling slag pits. Every time the great blast furnaces vented a sheet of flame from their stacks, the steel letters reflected a hellish glow, the light of mirrored fires rippling along their length.

  Above the din and roar of the conveyors, the fiery growl of the furnaces and the shriek of steam leaving the ovens, it was impossible to escape the low snarl being vomited by the vox-casters scattered about the plant. An endless litany of dry, grim voices chanting the same mantra stamped upon the factory wall.

  Obedience. Labour. Fidelity.

  The slaves in Processing Plant Secundus Minorus lived by the words that had been drilled into their very souls. Very often, they died by them.

  Across the face of Castellax, there were millions who slaved to feed the war machine of their oppressors. Hour after hour, day after day, without rest or respite, they toiled to spread tyranny and destruction across the galaxy. Their only reward was the continuance of life, but for men like Yuxiang, it was enough. They had seen what became of those who defied the lords of Castellax.

  Work had halted in Yuxiang’s section. Sometimes the machinery would require maintenance or some fault in the processors mandated a shut down. Such occasions were cause for cheer among the slaves. The reason for the current break, however, didn’t make even the most jaded labourer happy.

  Yuxiang watched the whip-thin figure of Prefect Wyre, supervisor of Processing Plant Secundus Minorus, pace along the steel gantry above his section. Wyre’s face was lean and hard, his features stamped with callousness and cruelty. Among the thousands of slaves in the factory, there wasn’t one who hadn’t felt the burn of Wyre’s shock baton against his ribs. As he paced, the prefect slapped the deactivated baton against his palm, the hollow thwack making a menacing accompaniment to the click of his boots against the metal grating.

  Kneeling before the prefect was a dishevelled, emaciated man, his scrawny frame draped in the coveralls of a factory slave, the brand of Secundus Minorus etched across his forehead. Blood streamed from the man’s broken nose and with each breath a bubble of blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. The black-clad overseers who flanked the prostrate slave hadn’t been gentle when they subdued him.

  ‘Who is that?’ The question came in a whisper, uttered by Chingwei, Yuxiang’s alternate at the pneumatic press.

  ‘Mendes, from Blast Furnace Gamma-four,’ Yuxiang whispered back.

  ‘An off-worlder,’ Chingwei sighed, a trace of envy in his tone. Yuxiang could understand the sentiment. Whatever fate awaited Mendes, at least the man hadn’t been born into servitude on Castellax. At least he had known some kind of life before he was condemned to the factories.

  ‘What did he do?’ Chingwei hissed. Despite the horror of the situation, the slave couldn’t restrain his curiosity about the reason for this break in routine.

  Yuxiang hesitated before answering, glancing about to make sure none of Wyre’s overseers were near. ‘He made the sign of the aquila,’ he said.

  ‘Poor, stupid off-world bastard,’ Chingwei said. ‘Wyre will have him shot for that. When will these off-worlders learn?’

  The gaunt prefect was launching into a harangue now, his voice raised in a caustic hiss that was amplified into a fiery roar by the factory’s vox-casters.

  ‘When will you vermin learn?’ Wyre asked. ‘When will you understand that your superstitions will not help you?’ The prefect leaned in, activating his baton and driving the butt of the weapon against Mendes’s midsection. The slave cried out as electricity crackled across his body. He writhed in the grip of the overseers who held him, his captors safe inside their insulated uniforms.

  ‘You are no longer a man,’ Wyre snapped, turning away from the slave and pacing along the gantry. ‘You do not think. You do not dream. You do not hope.’ He rounded on Mendes, smashing the baton across his mouth. Lightning sizzled through the captive’s clenched teeth. ‘You do not pray!’

  Yuxiang watched the torture, impotent rage boiling inside him. He longed to do something, anything to stop the hideous tableau. But he knew there was nothing that could be done. He had seen Wyre at work too many times to hold any delusions that the prefect could be stopped. Any gesture of defiance and he would simply join Mendes in his suffering.

  ‘Did you really think anyone would answer you?’ Wyre sneered, stabbing the butt of his baton into Mendes’s shoulder. The slave’s body twisted and jerked in a spasm of agony as the shock scorched his flesh. ‘What did you pray for, scum? Did you pray for freedom? Did you pray for justice? Did you ask for revenge?’ The baton crackled a
gainst the man’s thigh, searing through the leg of his coverall as Wyre intensified the strength of its discharge. The smell of burned meat drifted down from the gantry.

  ‘There are none of those things here,’ Wyre announced, turning from his victim and glaring across the upturned faces of the factory’s slaves. He raised his baton, jabbing it over his shoulder, pointing at the steel words on the wall. ‘Obedience. Labour. Fidelity. Those are the only things here! And when you forget that… there is pain.’

  Wyre spun around, thrusting the baton into Mendes’s gut. The slave screamed, thrashing wildly in the grip of the overseers. The prefect grinned sadistically as he held the activated shock baton in place, watching it burn into the slave’s body.

  ‘God-Emperor have mercy!’ Mendes shrieked.

  Wyre’s face turned crimson with rage. He drew back the baton, revealing blackened skin where it had rested on the captive’s body. His gloved hand seized the slave’s hair, forcing the man’s face upwards, forcing him to look into the prefect’s blazing eyes. ‘There is no God-Emperor here,’ he spat. His finger ran across the power stud of his shock baton, pushing it to maximum intensity. Electricity danced from the head of the weapon. ‘There is only me!’

  Wyre raised the baton to jab it into Mendes’s face, but before the prefect’s blow could land, a thunderous voice called out, ‘Restrain yourself, peon.’

  The red rage drained from Wyre’s face, replaced by an ashen pallor. He turned slowly, facing in the direction from which the booming voice had sounded. Immediately, the prefect deactivated his shock baton and dropped to his knees, bowing his head in abject submission.

  From the shadow of a loading elevator, a giant stalked out onto the gantry, the steel grates groaning under his armoured weight. The huge figure towered over the black-clad overseers, men chosen for their size and ferocity. His dimensions were superhuman, two metres from crown to toe, as broad as an ore-cart. The ornate armour he wore was a masterwork of ceramite plates, deeply engraved with gilded flames. The giant’s helmet encased his head completely, red optics glaring out from a mask of iron. The face of the helm was pulled forwards in a long beak, its sides carved into the image of a fanged, snarling mouth. Upon one bulky shoulder pauldron, a leering metal skull glowered down at the slaves of Processing Plant Secundus Minorus.

  A thrill of terror swept through the assembly. Chains clattered as men covered their eyes, moans of horror rose unbidden from stunned spectators. For once, even the overseers were taken aback, staring with outright fear as the giant marched towards Prefect Wyre.

  Yuxiang’s body trembled like a leaf in a storm. He longed to hide his face from the armoured nightmare but found himself as transfixed as a sump-rat watching an ash-viper.

  Wyre was nothing. His brutality was nothing. His cruelty was nothing. The prefect was little better than a slave himself, a vassal to the masters of Castellax, a clever pet to the monsters who ruled over Yuxiang’s home world.

  Among the slaves, particularly the off-worlders, there were whispers about the warrior angels who defended the Imperium, the semi-divine Adeptus Astartes, supermen who brought battle to the enemies of mankind and enabled the spread of humanity across the stars. They were demigods, sons of the God-Emperor Himself, protectors of His faithful children.

  The masters of Castellax were a profane mockery of that holy image. They were angels defiled and corrupted, twisted into things monstrous and obscene.

  They were the Iron Warriors.

  ‘My Lord Rhodaan,’ Wyre addressed the armoured giant, his voice little more than a frightened squeak. ‘You do Processing Plant Secundus Minorus great honour with your presence.’

  Rhodaan stopped his march only a few metres from the cowering prefect. When he spoke, his voice was deep and malignant, infected with a metallic snarl by the amplifiers in his helmet. The Iron Warrior didn’t deign to look at the prefect when he spoke, instead fixing his gaze upon the tortured Mendes.

  ‘Why have you halted production?’ Rhodaan demanded. ‘Why is this Flesh not at its work station?’

  Shivering with terror, Wyre risked a look at the slave he had been punishing. ‘I-I was making a-an example of this one.’ He pointed his baton at the slaves below. ‘I felt th-that the others n-needed discipline...’

  The Iron Warrior stood in silence for a moment, still staring at Mendes. ‘What did this Flesh do?’ he asked at last.

  The question brought beads of sweat dripping down Wyre’s forehead. He swallowed nervously. ‘He was ca-caught making the sign of the aquila.’

  Rhodaan’s head turned, the lenses of his helmet boring down upon the trembling prefect. ‘That is unfortunate.’

  ‘I-I was making a-an example… Reminding th-the rest…’

  The Iron Warrior was no longer listening to Wyre. With two steps, Rhodaan reached Mendes. The giant’s ceramite gauntlets closed around the slave’s scrawny forearms. With a single wrenching motion, he broke both of the man’s arms and dropped the screaming wretch at the feet of the overseers.

  ‘Hang this animal above one of the smelters,’ Rhodaan ordered Wyre as he began to march away. ‘Every minute the creature fails to make the sign of the aquila, you will lower him one centimetre. It will be interesting to see if his faith in the False Emperor sustains him when he feels the kiss of molten titanium on his toes.’

  Yuxiang held his gaze on Rhodaan until the Space Marine vanished once more into the shadows around the loading elevator. Only then did he look back at Mendes, watching with horror as Wyre ordered his overseers to secure the mangled man to one of the chains suspended above the closest smelter. With his broken arms, there was no chance Mendes could make the gesture demanded of him. Centimetre by centimetre, he would be lowered towards the molten metal and hideous death.

  Truly, the off-worlder would have been better left to the brutality of Wyre. Compared to the Iron Warrior, the prefect’s punishment would have been an act of mercy.

  Captain Antares leaned back in his grox-hide command throne and watched as the icy grey globe grew steadily smaller. At this distance, he could just barely make out the superstructures of the transfer stations orbiting the moon. If not for the guide-lights mounted to their docking arms, he doubted if he’d have been able to pick them out from the black starscape which stretched across the bridge’s viewscreen.

  Impex V, outermost of the vagabond moons of the Castellax system. For an interplanetary tanker like the Stardrinker, it took two weeks to make the voyage, take on cargo and return. Two weeks of unrelieved monotony and boredom. Impex V to Castellax. Castellax to Impex V. Back and forth, week in and week out. An unbreakable pattern that had ruled Antares’s life for the past seven years, ever since he’d had the misfortune of surviving an Iron Warriors slave raid and become one of their thralls.

  Antares rose from his throne, hearing the heavy grox-hide adjust itself to his vanished weight. Idly the captain descended the short flight of stairs separating the command dais from the main deck of the bridge. He filed past the technicians labouring at their displays, sometimes pausing to look over a shoulder and study the information scrolling across a screen. Antares didn’t understand half of what he was looking at, but it was more important that his crew thought he did. Efficiency through encouraged paranoia was something the Iron Warriors used to dominate their fleet. Antares found it worked just as well for him on his own bridge.

  The captain looked up from the terminal of a sandy-haired officer, frowning at the younger man. ‘Don’t you think we can do better?’ he asked the lieutenant. Antares didn’t wait for an answer, but continued walking the bridge. Any questions might have proved awkward. He wasn’t sure if better meant an increase or decrease.

  The black sprawl of the bridge’s pict screen stretched before Antares as he reached the last of the terminals. He paused a moment, staring out at the grey blob which marked Impex V’s position. Two weeks, he thought, and then I’ll be staring at the exact same thing all over again.

  It was a problem that had pl
agued Castellax for a hundred years. Even before the world fell to the Iron Warriors, it had been a desolate place. If not for its vast mineral resources, the Imperium would have bypassed the planet. But Castellax was rich in promethium and heavy metals, so the Imperium had established a colony on the world to exploit the planet’s wealth.

  That same wealth had drawn the Iron Warriors. They needed the resources of Castellax to feed their great war machine, to build new warships for their raider fleets, tanks and guns for their marauding armies. After seizing control of the planet, they had instituted a policy of savage exploitation that made the Imperium’s industry pale by comparison. Such rampant ravaging of the planet had not been without its consequences. The seas were drained to feed the factories and strip mines, the water table under the planet’s surface was hopelessly corrupted by industrial waste. After a century of occupation by the Iron Warriors, there wasn’t a spoonful of freestanding water left on Castellax that wasn’t nine-parts toxic sludge.

  The Iron Warriors had been forced to look elsewhere to feed Castellax’s thirst. In the frozen outer moon of Impex V, they found their solution. Orbital stations were brought to surround the moon, each station deploying hundreds of small barges which would fly down to harvest the ice. A fleet of tankers like the Stardrinker would then collect it, ferrying the huge frozen blocks back to Castellax, a continuous chain of supply to keep the fires of industry burning.

  ‘Captain Antares!’ one of the officers suddenly cried out, breaking Antares’s contemplation of the ice-moon. He turned towards the excited crewman, marching over to his station and staring at the pict screen.

  ‘These objects just appeared in our starboard quadrant,’ the officer reported. Antares did not know much about the actual operation of his ship, but he was able to recognise the fast-moving blips whose trajectory put them on an intercept course.

  ‘Could they be elements of the supply fleet?’ Antares asked. The officer shook his head.

  ‘No, sir. They are too far from Castellax to be fighters and too small to be destroyers.’