Throw truck

In among the pipework now, Erasmos Squad waded through drifts of hot ash up to their knees, in gloom so deep that they kept pace and formation by the shuffle and crackle of their steps, not sight. The silos and pipes gave off a scalding heat that filled their heat-sight with glare, and the dust and shadows distorted the light-intensifier filters to the point that they were a supplemental sense, nothing more.
That heat was their shield and concealment for the next stage of their mission, intense enough to mask the signature of an Adeptus Astartes reactor pack and lethal enough that no fragile human guard could fight in it. Unarmoured, it would have given the Iron Snakes some trouble, but inside their steel-grey warplate the only sign of it was the warning prickle through their neural links, the sensation their armour used to warn them when external conditions passed particular thresholds. Above them were chemical refineries, metal forges and enormous geothermal arrays drawing the heat from the volcano’s core and turning it into the lifeblood of all the mountain’s machines. That was their target, and here was their ladder.
…
Anysios was in the lead when the explosions started. As with the little flying spy, he heard the thing before he saw it. It was a little ridged metal cylinder, wrapped and nested in twitching, wire-fine limbs, tap-tap-clinking towards him through a face-level gap in a tangle of pipes and conduits. Then he registered what it actually was, and he jerked back from the gap and was shouting a warning into the vox when the grenade blew.
…
Something rattled and scrabbled in among the pipes and then a bizarre little thing with a fat, round, metal body and powerful rear legs like a locust’s leapt out from the silo, caromed off Anysios’ pauldron and detonated in the air between them, sending Anysios swinging and scrabbling for purchase again. It didn’t hurt Iacchos in the slightest, but it ruptured the flume he was anchored to, which had already been groaning under the weight of an armoured Snake suddenly concentrated through just the soles of his feet.
…
Through the pipes came a squeak of metal on metal. Anysios locked his boots to the piping and risked a lean around the vertical strut he was concealed behind. It only took a second to pick the fine metal thread lowering down through a gap in the works, something twitching and wriggling at its tip like live bait on a fishing lure. A blinked command brought it into magnified focus: a clumsy bundle of body scraps and metal fragments wrapped around another grenade. As he watched, the thread stopped and jolted, setting the thing free: it had been anchored to the grenade’s pin. The ugly little fetish dropped half a metre and then suddenly unfurled four rattling insectile wings, which immediately fouled one another. Within seconds one was knocked loose and limp and one broke off completely. The thing dropped out of sight just before the grenade that made its abdomen went off. Shrapnel whickered and chimed all around him.
‘They’re lowering on lines and releasing,’ he reported.
…
Anysios grabbed the strut, swung around it and walked forward down a square conduit casing just as the next bug came down.
This one had a thick circular body with a small curving handgrip jutting from its back, some kind of melta bomb or krak charge designed to be planted by hand. Human fingers had been stuck around the edge of it, hanging down like spider legs or medusoid tendrils. Two of them fell off as Anysios grabbed the thing’s line and severed it with a quick sawing stroke of his combat blade. He twisted and flung the bomb-spider backhand, sending it arcing out past where he had just been hanging, spinning blur-quick to grab the dangling end of the line before it could retract. In the cavernous space outside the silo superstructure, he heard the hissing thud of a detonation and a brief yellow light shone off the metal around him. Melta, then, he thought absently as he slammed the blade back into its scabbard and grabbed his bolter off its mag-clamp in the return motion. The whole operation had taken less than two heartbeats.
…
Clink-clink-clang from above, and a thrashing starfish of jointed plastic and ceramite arms came scampering through the pipes above, a red light winking at its centre where a shaped mining charge nestled in a ring of wires and actuators. It weaved as it came, seeming unsure of where Anysios actually was, so he put an end to its doubts by hurling the broken winch into it, then stepping into a striding kick that sent the thing bouncing away through the silos with its front limbs smashed in. It detonated somewhere out of his vision, at the same time as another frag grenade went off not far over his head, peppering the back of his helm, some of the shrapnel hitting hard enough to trigger amber flickers in his vision and warning twinges through the haptic link. Faint noises from above him told of more on the way.
…
As he went up his next two would-be attackers shot down past him, taken by surprise by his speed. First, a rattling centipede-analogue whose segmented body was a mix of frag grenades and human vertebrae with the gristle still wet on them, its uneven legs barely keeping their grip and rhythm; second a scorpion-thing whose triangular body was a shoulder blade, a krak grenade clenched in its wire claws, the little propeller in its tail struggling to hold it aloft. As Anysios began climbing again it lurched in the air, broke its propeller against a support and fell, wriggling, onto a gas pipe. There was the diaphragm-jolting implosive report of a krak charge, and suddenly Anysios was engulfed in an expanding white fog of superheated steam.
‘Advancing.’ Anysios was already fairly confident that the enemy’s senses were less keen than his own, and this was too good an opportunity to miss. Navigating on memory and on-the-fly triangulation, he zigzagged up through the silo again, circling around the chute as more creations swarmed down it. He could hear detonations beneath him and all around him as the grenade-bugs came faster and faster, the shrill metallic notes of frag ricochets, the heavy thud of kraks and meltas. Twice the steam cloud he was climbing in turned dazzling white from a flare, and once was shot through with hot, grainy puffs of black when a thing made of a blind grenade lashed to a steel frame with strands of human hair spied him and raced to detonate before he could climb past it.
…
In sights.’ The confirmation from Symeon was blurred by static but Anysios hadn’t waited for it. His first shell was already in the air.
It flew at the pyramid of mutilated flesh and misshapen metal that crouched on a pallet truck in the centre of the lowest viewing platform. The front of the pyramid was made of two corpses, headless sacks of carrion in torn and blood-saturated menials’ overalls, held up by metal girders rammed through their torsos from neck-hole to rectum. Beneath them was a bizarre tangle of whirring machine parts, mazes of glass tubes and retorts churning with sickly fluids, and twitching fragments of more human bodies. Twitching and working. In that assembly, hands gripped and turned and manipulated, in concert with bundles of awkward mechanical claws. Neon-yellow fluid pumped through transparent lines between them. A rack of eyeballs of half a dozen sizes and colours, kept moist by a constant mist of water from overhead nozzles, turned back and forth to watch the hands and the claws and the work they were doing. A mechanical eyepiece glowed green at the pyramid’s peak and an auspex dish wobbled back and forth on a mast above it.
Some of the flesh was already dead, some of the metal was lifeless and broken. Some of it looked as though it had never been functional at all, but was simply crammed into the construction from the sheer glee of ornamentation. But the two cranes that extended out over the edge of the platform lowering their cargo on fine metal cords were working, and a scorched wound on the obscene thing’s chassis showed where Anysios’ shot had blasted off a third. In the cavity of its innards, in among the wriggling of fingers and twirling of dendrites, two more little bomb-bugs could be seen taking shape.
The first bolt-shell ploughed into the floor of that cavity and blew it into a crater. The whole edifice rocked and shuddered and the pallet truck’s engine coughed into life, but before its thick rubber treads could start to move, Anysios’ second shot whipped through the hole the first one had made and obliterated the drive cell. His third and fourth shots blew the top off the pyramid and then made wreckage of its centre. The structure started to fall in on itself as fragments of meat, bone and machinery pattered onto the platform around it. Rivulets of bright yellow blood began to drip over the edges of the platform.
Once he judged the thing to be fatally ruined, Anysios loaded a full magazine and moved to a safer spot at the corner of its platform, where the floor didn’t give under each step and he could keep all the walkway approaches in his vision at the same time. He wanted nothing more than to kick over the little cart he could see hitched to the back of the pallet truck, paw through the spilled mound of grenades and munitions the thing had been using as its raw materials, and find enough meltas and incendiaries to reduce the thing to a puddle of bubbling fat and molten slag. He didn’t, of course, because his brothers were trusting him to hold the lead point and be alert for more enemy while they climbed up to join him.
…
Has anyone else across the front reported anything like this?’ Agenor asked. He was standing where the obscenity had sat on its truck until a minute before. Symeon, as repulsed by the thing as Anysios had been but unwilling to spend flamer fuel on incinerating it, had Menoetios and Serapion pick the truck up and throw it bodily over the platform’s edge, down to the distant rock floor.
…
If these things, these…’
‘Things is fine,’ Anysios said. ‘We all know what we saw.’
‘I don’t think the Archenemy brought these things in with them when they took Old Ourezhad,’ Agenor said. ‘They’re new. Completely new, I think they’ve barely fought outside this mountain, if they’ve even been outside this mountain at all. I think this place is making more than just fabricatory jobs and refined chem and power for the island strings. I think it’s been given over to making…’ He trailed off again.
‘Monsters,’ Anysios said, and the vox carried a ripple of softly hummed agreements, the voxed equivalent of nodding. ‘The forge levels are making monsters.’ He turned as he walked, scanning behind them again as if the very word had conjured something into their trail, but there was nothing.