Dark Imperium: Plague War

by Guy Haley

  Titans of the Legios Oberon, Atarus and Fortis stood in a chessboard formation, each in front of their coffin ships. Behind them washed the waters of Parmenio’s ribbon-thin River Sea. The island city of Tyros stood battered sentry over the narrow channel separating it from the Hecatone shore. The mainland docking grounds had been cleared, bulldozed down to rockcrete, and dozens of coffin ships stood like starscrapers in a temporary city. The rails for the Titans’ maintenance gantries had been laid, allowing the cranes and ammo lifts that tended to the metal giants to roll forth from the coffin ships into the open air, where they might more easily perform their duties. Guilliman’s plan of attack had been kind to the legios; there was no perilous drop into combat, no desperate fight free from their conveyances. The Collegia Titanica would march in good order.

  The ultimate line of Guilliman’s new defence network ringed the Titans about. Three demi-legios amounted to one hundred and two of the towering war machines, of all classes, and so required a wide bailey of their own. The Titan grounds were the Adeptus Mechanicus’ headquarters on Parmenio, and the full might of the Machine-God was on display. There were thirty-six of Legio Oberon’s white and sable engines present alone, a great gathering. Many were heroes upon the field, engines that had fought for dozens of centuries, princeps and crew whose reputations were won in the desperate fighting following the opening of the Great Rift. Scores of Knights of the Questor Mechanicus and Questor Imperialis lined a road wide enough to allow the passage of the great engines out of the fort, their banners stirring in the breeze.

  Around the Titans’ feet waited tens of thousands of skitarii in robes of several forge worlds; red, ochre, white, black and grey. Next to them three thousand war robots of the Legio Cybernetica waited in neat ranks. Beyond the line of the freshly cast curtain wall were other fortifications, other centres of martial power; the regimental headquarters of the Astra Militarum and the drop-castella of the Ultramarines and the White Scars. There were flags of other worlds, forces representing might drawn from across the sector, but the majority were of Ultramar and its affiliated forge worlds. This war was an affair of the Ultramarines and the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  Hundreds of thousands of warriors. Wherever they were from, they were waiting, waiting for the Emperor’s steel gods to walk.

  The primarch made a speech. Dunkel heard it and didn’t hear it. The words he understood, he forgot the moment they were said. He was in thrall to the sluggish belligerence of God’s Wrath, and God’s Wrath cared nothing for talk.

  Orders were given, passed on from the primarch’s high command through to the various heads of the divisions on Parmenio. Dunkel’s commands came from Princeps Seniores Urskein, the maniple commander, aboard the Warlord Titan Retribution.

  The words were simple, more felt than heard.

  ‘Death Bolts,’ he said, using the legion’s Low Gothic name, ‘walk.’

  The Warhounds were off first, warhorns howling, beetled backs swaying side to side with their excitement at the hunt. When the last of the Scout Titans loped beyond the perimeter, the remainder set out.

  God’s Wrath chafed while his brothers God Sworn, God’s Doom and Mercy of Fire stomped out. His rising frustration threatened to drown Princeps Dunkel, and he had to assert his will strenuously to tame the machine’s heart. Finally, his turn came. Dunkel responded to the need of his engine to walk rather than Urskein’s spoken command.

  With ponderous majesty, the Reaver’s splay-toed foot took its first step on the road to battle. Unable and unwilling to blunt the engine’s excitement, Dunkel shouted a wordless war cry in time with God’s Wrath’s hooting wail.

  God’s Wrath’s iron brothers joined their voices to the choir of slaughter, venting machine-made wrath and their earnest intent to wipe the traitors from the surface of Parmenio.

  Legs swung, ponderous as wrecking balls, mighty as towers. The shattered lands of Hecatone swept by God’s Wrath’s feet in a blur of mustard yellows and drab greens. Shell holes from the Death Guard’s initial attack made the land a moonscape. In the sucking wilderness stood shattered trees and stepped triangles of bricks, broken free from their service as the corners of buildings. Fertile lands had become slurried bogs, a marshland born of bombardment breeding sicknesses of all types. Shreds of mist steamed from metal-skinned mires. No road remained whole, no building without damage. Death’s silence crushed all life away. Parmenio’s creatures had perished or fled, and the Plague God’s daemonic offspring had yet to replace them. Guilliman’s army came, the squelching of a hundred thousand feet and the frustrated roar of tank engines fighting through mud filling Hecatone with life again.

  Tanks by the hundred beat a path for the infantry. They carried walkways of wire and wood in rolled bales, unspooling them from spindles welded to their rear facings. The wood had been taken from elsewhere upon the planet, manufactured from trees felled in those untainted lands where the Death Guard had yet to tread, leaving wastes of stumps where forests had grown. The taint of Nurgle spread far by diverse means. Oftentimes, the cure was as bad as the disease.

  The legios walked at quarter speed at the fore of the hordes of men and machines. They were the warlords of the armies of ants scurrying at their feet. For all their size and heft, the Titans moved quietly, each step far spaced, their reactor hum and gear noise modest components of the advance. Only when each step terminated and met the ground with heavy impact tread, shaking ripples in water smeared with rainbows of pollution, did the Titans’ might make itself known. Each footfall was the compression of thunder into the earth, pounding out the slow drumroll of armageddon.

  They pushed on into the wasted lands, and Dunkel’s view – God’s Wrath’s view – became of a sea of curling fog. The further they advanced, the denser it became, rallying itself after its earlier breaking. As surely as an army regroups after a minor defeat, Mortarion’s poisonous airs thickened. God’s Wrath ploughed through it. With no comparator for scale, the machine seemed a man wading a vaporous sea. The hunching Warhounds carved impermanent paths ahead like the backs of large fish cutting the water. The greater Titans, the various marks of Warlord and others, were larger men, perhaps fishermen pushing into the shallows to cast their nets, their vast carapaces like coracles balanced upon their backs. Space Marine attack craft roaring overhead were seabirds. The horde of men beneath the roof of mists were an army of stealthy crabs.

  Augur readings poured into Dunkel’s mind as readily as the sights of his own eyes. Radar pulses sketched out contours in fleeting washes of light. Dark light and heat sight gave their own, different views, all mingled with Dunkel’s native vision, and the sharp, high resolution machine sight of God’s Wrath. For one unaccustomed to the blending of sensory input, the experience would have been nauseating; to Dunkel it was as if he was ordinarily blind, and only when he sat in the command throne of his engine were his eyes suddenly, gloriously opened.

  Vox chatter and data squirt intruded into the serenity of walking. He made himself pay attention, lest he forget his duty was war, and not solely to exult in the piloting of his engine.

  Huge numbers of voices competed for attention. God’s Wrath’s cogitators helped order them according to importance. His own superiors in the Legio were given priority, those of high command next. The rest, all the generals, colonels and clade leaders, hung about at the edge of his awareness, waiting for him to think of them and bring their chatter into mental focus.

  ‘Death Bolts Maniple Quintus, come to a halt,’ commanded Princeps Seniores Urskein. His order was an echo of one delivered a second before from Legio command, direct from the primarch’s liaison. ‘Battle formation. Three-line defence in depth. Execute.’

  God’s Wrath obeyed before Dunkel could. A mighty foot planted itself firmly in the ground, pushing up a rim of mud around its square toes. The back leg adjusted. God’s Wrath sank into a firing stance, braced against the recoil of its gargantuan weapons. Mercy of Fire came
to a halt five hundred metres away to the left, God’s Doom and God Sworn off to the right, making part of a line that curved off in the direction of the shores of the River Sea fifty kilometres away, where its narrow gulf was widened briefly by a series of bights. The Titans of other maniples were looming shapes cut off at the waist by the fogs. Beyond them, the other Legios were smears of shadow in mustard vapour.

  The entire Legio arrayed itself similarly to Urskein’s maniple. Princes escorted by their royal guards, the Warlords took up their positions three hundred metres back from the gaps between the smaller Reavers, forming a deep regicide board pattern.

  Order chatter decreased, became more localised as each part of the Imperial war machine looked to its own business. Tension grew.

  The entity that was Dunkel and brutal machine soul combined swept its gaze across a sea of mist. There was no sign of the enemy, but they were close. God’s Wrath felt it. Always before combat the meshing of men with machine was at its most heightened. At those times, the princeps came close to forgetting their individuality. Dunkel fought to save himself from dissipating into God’s Wrath’s soul. It happened, sometimes, princeps immersed so far in their engine’s being they were lost, and disconnecting them broke their minds. In the hard places of his eternal being, all that was separate from God’s Wrath, he knew this, but it was hard to resist. He wanted to go deeper, to taste power at its source, join with the spirits of those who had come before and become one with the machine. One day, perhaps, he would be placed into an amniotic tank and enjoy the pleasure of the annihilated self. But not yet.

  The Warhounds moved further off. They strutted through the fog silently, eager hunters capable of ambush and surprise despite their enormous size.

  More orders pulsed out, spreading down informational pathways with the flicker jump of electronic projection. Dunkel supposed if he could see it, it would resemble the tree of life, described by the sacred flow of the motive force.

  Fifteen Knights of House Konor loped past to support their larger cousins. They were slower than the Warhounds, and their shorter legs put them at risk in the difficult terrain. They wove complex courses to stay upon the firmest ground. One misstep would see them mired. They made not one.

  Along down the line, the Warhound packs of the other legios were advancing, supported by their own allied Knightly houses. In the shadow of the walking engines the men and lesser machines of the army drew themselves up into battle lines, refusing to let the heaved up earth of Hecatone break the strict tenets of the Tactica Imperialis. No man would want that in view of the primarch, whose own writings had done so much to inform the sacred text.

  Tanks drew up in a shallow delta formation. Infantry sheltered in their lee. At the centre of the army, behind the line of Titans, a large cohort of Ultramarian super-heavy tanks deployed in a formation dictated directly by the primarch. By sheer weight and engine power they forced their way through the mire, massive dozer blades levelling ground that would not submit. Such a number in that configuration had been seen only rarely since the days of the Heresy, so it was said. Moving steadily but at a safe distance behind them came Roboute Guilliman’s command crawler.

  The Imperial army waited as the skirmish line of giant machines scouted ahead.

  Urskein sent out a number of alternative deployment patterns across the datanet codified by single words chosen specifically for that engagement. Dunkel knew them all by heart. The fog was rising up in a wall as tall as the god-machines to the west. The mountains slipped back into invisibility. Soupy murk obscured the plains. The sunlight at his back reflected off the mist brightly.

  Detonations flashed in the fog. The bright glare of plasma discharge silhouetted one of Legio Oberon’s war hounds and a supporting pair of Knights a mile out in the murk. A squall of vox-communications burst out from the advance.

  ‘Engine contact! Engine contact!’

  A volley of three giant rockets whooshed overhead, narrowly missing the Titan Ultimate Fortitude. One was interdicted and brought down by the fire of the army’s rearward air defences. The others plunged down through the ceiling of the mist, blasting up towering cones of debris where they impacted; mud, men and machines intermixed. The explosion rocked God’s Wrath.

  ‘No atomics. No chemical. No plasma. Standard warhead configuration,’ voxed Urskein. Harsh garbles of higher-level vox traffic overlaid his voice. ‘Stand easy.’

  Datasquirts pulsed between the Titans, carrying the rapid binary talk of machines. Picter feed flashed through Dunkel’s head. Shadowy shapes snatched by the scout Titans. Enemy engines shrouded in mist.

  The flashing of high energy weapons was joined by the delicate tremble of shell detonation some way ahead.

  ‘Prepare for immediate engagement. Seventeen engine contacts and rising. Attack pattern escutcheon,’ said Urskein. He was calm and measured, no sign of the machine’s soul he shared at that moment impinging upon his words. ‘Prepare to receive retreating scouts. Cover and protect.’

  A dozen of the Legio’s scout engines loped back behind the stacked line of Titans, coming about in a wide arc to shelter at the heels of the Warlords. From there, they could strike out again to outflank the enemy when the heavier engines were engaged. Fires guttered along molten scores on their backs. The Knights remained embattled. Their combat chatter distracted Dunkel, and he shunted their terse exchange to the back of his awareness.

  An orange flare smeared the thickening fog, then another. Knight reactor death. The small, one-man engines were in trouble.

  God’s Wrath shifted under him. ‘Steady, steady,’ said Dunkel, as if he were soothing a flesh and blood mount. At the same time, he exerted control via the mind impulse link over the machine’s processing centres, damping down its atavistic need to kill.

  More Warhounds came back in ones and twos between the spread line of the Legio Oberon. One of Urskein’s maniple, World Pain, was missing. Dunkel spared a moment for the strategic cartolith displaying the state of the rest of the line; the same was happening up and down the front.

  The racket of war grew closer. The enemy harassed the retreating skirmish line, but were too battle wise to come into optimum engagement range. Only a few shots blazed through the air towards the engine line.

  ‘Adept Sine, keep shields to maximum replenish rate in case those strays catch us,’ Dunkel spoke into the hardline vox. Using his mouth felt strange. God’s Wrath’s urge to hoot along with his speech was a bubbling need in his heart. ‘Take us into combat at maximum aegis.’

  ‘As you command, princeps,’ Sine voxed back from his station in the reactor room. The hum of the engine deepened.

  As the fight became closer and more intense, the Knights broke off and followed the Warhounds. They moved past Dunkel at a run, their stooped backs hiding their heads from his view. The lesser machines came only up to God’s Wrath’s chest. Dunkel read thirty per cent losses for their support household. The Knights always paid to keep the larger engines safe. Fast and small compared to their larger cousins, their role was to divert fire away from the Titans, relying on their speed to stay safe. But agility saved nothing from a direct hit of a god-weapon.

  ‘Where are the enemy’s support?’ voxed Princeps Gugglhem of Mercy of Fire.

  ‘Contacts made,’ voxed Urskein. ‘Forty-seven enemy engines majoris, circa two hundred engines minoris in support.’

  The flash of weapons cut out as the last of the House Konor Knights straggled back behind Oberon’s lines. The steady tread of advancing war machines took the place of the armament roar.

  ‘They’re coming. Visual contact,’ voxed Gugglhem.

  ‘Prepare for engagement. All weapons charge. Hold formation, break on my command,’ responded Urskein.

  Dunkel saw them then, looming out of the mist. They were the same in many respects as Oberon’s engines, but the character of their souls altered their appearance, making them crookbac
ked and ominous where the Imperial Titans seemed stooped with the weight of duty. A crowd of them advanced in right-hand echelon, a pair of Warlords on the leading edge bristling with close combat fittings. Linebreakers.

  The badges of a Legio were unique, and every Titan’s markings were as individual to it as a man’s fingerprints. Not even the traitors were cowardly enough to hide their sins. They proclaimed their allegiance and identity proudly.

  ‘The Legio Mortis,’ said Fantorp, princeps of God Sworn. ‘Death’s Heads.’

  ‘Pride. They still have that, when all other virtues of honour have deserted them, they remain proud,’ said Moscov of God’s Doom.

  ‘Confirm. Confirm,’ voxed Urskein. ‘Legio Mortis traitoris. Transmitting enemy idents now.’

  Names and numerical designations for the Titans entered the noospheric datanet. Dunkel’s mind filled with a litany of atrocity stretching back through history in the starkness of Lingua Technis.

  Where the Death Bolts’ defensive grid was grouped maniple by maniple, the Death’s Heads attacked in a demi-Legio strength formation, all its heaviest machines at the leading edge. There was no cover for either force, and the weight of the enemy was coming right at Dunkel’s position.

  ‘They’re seeking a way through. Do not let them break the line,’ said Urskein.

  The enemy line let out wails of challenge from their warhorns.

  Oberon responded, as did Fortis and Atarus.

  Mortis opened fire. The loyalists returned the favour.

  Instantly, the space between the two lines was a kill zone inimical to life. Titan weapons were awesome in their destructive capabilities, outmatching all but the greatest voidship armaments. The air ignited around energy spikes. Supersonic shockwaves of hauler-sized shells ripped up sprays of water from the ground. Linear thunder cracked off las discharge, shaking cones of mist into rainbursts. Fog was boiled into multicolour plasmas.