by Guy Haley
Esha felt it. Power was slipping from her grasp. She forced her mental grip tighter and Domine Ex Venari bridled at her. The reactor whined in resistance.
‘Domine has slept too long, and she is angry at us for making her wait for war,’ said Esha. ‘But she will rise to my command!’ She pushed herself against the machine’s resistance, down towards its blazing heart. ‘Domine Ex Venari!’ Esha voiced in her mind and aloud at the same time. ‘Awake! Your hounds are ready. The hunt awaits.’
The Titan had no voice of its own, but it could make itself understood.
Esha constructed a mental image within the manifold. She saw herself floating in the air over a lake of fire. The dress and unbound hair of her avatar whipped about in the heat. The Titan was too powerful to be represented by a human form; it was the lake of fire.
She stared at a vortex of molten iron turning below her feet. The heat of Domine Ex Venari’s being was tremendous, but fearlessly she looked into the axis of the vortex, and through it into the eye of the Machine-God himself.
‘I command you, great one. Awake! War comes! War is here!’
Domine Ex Venari’s soul stirred. She felt it within her head. Her hands twitched involuntarily in the emergency manual handles. In her mind she saw Domine’s waking state as an increase of speed to the vortex’s rotation. The Titan was rousing, not yet awake, but Esha had saved the best for last.
‘The old foe is near. Legio Vulpa walks.’
A bellow of rage issued from the Titan’s soul, represented as a pillar of fire that jetted from the vortex. Esha experienced a sensation of something huge moving beneath her skin, turning over within her bones, like an earthquake, or water pushed up by a rising behemoth, if those feelings could be internalised within a human body. The pressure grew, pushing the mentally constructed image of herself upwards. The lake of fire rose quicker than she. Its fire licked at her feet, and devoured her.
She was laughing as her mind was subsumed into the Titan’s.
Esha snapped back into her body. The power of the Machine-God slammed into her. She arched her back and cried out with pleasure that edged into pain. Notification chimes sang joyfully all over the cockpit.
‘Domine has woken!’ shouted Mephani Ohana, possessed by the machine’s eagerness to fight. ‘We’re ready!’
‘A little more respect – use the correct cant,’ said someone. The tone was snappy, like Yeha. But it didn’t sound like her, and the words were slurred. Esha, in her new state of ecstasy, could not tell who had spoken. It could have been several of her crew speaking as one. The drifting link surged into coherency, bringing them all into union.
Domine Ex Venari shuddered. Pistons extended in joints. Fibre muscles contracted under armoured plates. Gyroscopes spun faster and faster. Pipes tautened with pressurised fluid. The machine shifted in its berth clamps, standing tall, setting its shoulders. Lights came on all over its body. Its defence lascannons and heavy bolters stood erect in their cupolas, the subsidiary machine-spirits controlling them suddenly, murderously alert, panning back and forth for minor threats to neutralise.
Esha’s back relaxed. She sank into her chair with a groan. Domine Ex Venari shared her pleasure; metal squealed as the Titan shifted in the restraints of its maintenance cradle.
‘Reactor at one hundred per cent efficiency,’ voxed Omega-6. ‘All systems are running to the perfect fulfilment of sacred equations. All praise the Machine-God. All praise his Omnissiah who walks among us. All praise the Motive Force which moveth all things.’
Only a minute had passed while she summoned the spirit of the god-engine. Hours had been compressed into those sixty short seconds. Esha looked through her own eyes and the Titan’s eyes at one and the same time, and nothing felt amiss. A heart beat within her that was many times larger than her body, and hot as the core of a sun.
She was in full union with her machine.
Alarms howled in the Titan. The ground crews were scurrying for the exits. Lights flashed. There was no air in the hangar, and the tiny people moved about in silence.
By the time the enemy burned their way through the hull, Esha was no longer quite herself.
A fall of molten metal pattered down from the drop-ship ceiling, followed by a streak of colour. Domine Ex Venari’s eyes caught the falling object, slowed it to visibility for Esha to see. A Mechanicum oniscidari drop-tank, its legs wrapped around itself for impact protection, bounced onto the floor, rolled to a stop and uncurled. Three more followed. They raised gun rigs like scorpions raising their tails. Mandible doors splayed wide, disgorging racks from which a dozen thallaxii dropped like seeds ejected from a pod. They too unfolded with mechanical precision, and marched towards Steel Huntress.
‘I’ll take care of them,’ voxed Jehani Jehan matter of factly. Her Titan, Cursor Ferro, was moving dangerously in its drop lock, straining to be off the leash.
‘Negative. Leave them,’ Esha voxed back. Docking clamps were disengaging all around the drop-ship, the force of the decoupling enough to be felt through the plasteel of the ship. ‘Do not engage. Twenty seconds to drop.’ She should not have to say that to Jehani. The Titans could not fight in the hangar. Her second was letting herself be dragged under by her machine’s anger.
A writhing beam of blue and white energy licked out from the drop-tank, slashing a black line over Steel Huntress’ livery. The void shields were inoperative, the Titans bound. But they were not powerless. The point defence guns mounted around their bodies stabbed beams at the thallaxii, skewering them as neatly as a magos biologis would pin an example of some alien insect to a board. Lascannons were not an anti-infantry weapon, but when fired by the dozen they did a passable job.
Domine Ex Venari took part in this clinical slaughter. Esha experienced the Titan’s annoyance. She shared its desire to stamp forward and crush the invaders flat, to erase them from existence with its primary weapons and move out to fight a worthy foe. Esha pushed back.
No, not now. You know not now.
There was a lurch. The Titans banged against their restraints. The thallaxii staggered. The firing of the massive engines on the underside shook the craft. Even against so feeble a gravity well as generated by the Theta-Garmon V orbitals, landing so much mass was complex and required enormous expenditure of energy.
Doors opened all along the drop-ship. Cyborg troops poured from the barracks built into the hull where they slept like bees in cells. The light of these interstitial spaces flickered rapidly as the troops were awakened by massive bursts of combat stimms, and deployed directly into battle from suspension pods which dropped down from storage to doors in the walls. The first dozen were cut down, but the ship carried a thousand, and they poured in. A battle unfolded about the Titans’ feet. Plasma trails criss-crossed the floor as the thallaxii’s attentions were diverted from their targets. The fight was of no more interest to Esha than the wars of beetles, though Domine Ex Venari was irritated by them.
‘Let the auxilia take care of them,’ Esha said, as much for Domine Ex Venari’s benefit as for her maniple’s princeps. ‘Prepare for combat.’
The drop-ship angled slightly. It shook to the pounding of unseen guns. Domine Ex Venari’s centre of gravity shifted as the ship took a long, wide curve towards its landing zone.
There was a steep descent. Titan battleplate squealed against padded clamps. The great machine shook, blurring both sets of Esha’s perceptions. A rumbling made itself heard through the fabric of the craft. The ship pitched.
A great hole blew through the wall, sending debris cutting through the tiny combatants still warring around Os Rubrum and Cursor Ferro. Luckily, neither Titan was hit. Through the breach the dazzling pyrotechnics of void war blazed. The ship shook with conflicting graviti
c forces, and Esha’s teeth rattled, but she was calm. This was a long way from the worst drops she had experienced.
And then, it was over. An impact jarred everyone aboard. The Titans sank to their knees, and the cyborg combatants were sent sprawling. The doors on the prow and aft of the drop-ship began to open on vast, curved hinges.
The maniple had to move quickly. They were vulnerable now to counter attack. Titans died in their landing craft, but the doors moved so slowly.
The doors finished their painful opening. Restraints fell away from arms, legs and torsos. Cable linkages dropped. Outside, a fearsome bombardment rained down from the Legio fleet, keeping whatever enemy was out there back from the landing zone.
‘Legio first!’ Esha said. ‘Legio Solaria walks!’
The maniple exited the craft, kicking their way through the insignificant melee taking place on the deck. The Warhounds ran free, Os Rubrum, Cursor Ferro, Procul Videns then Velox Canis last. They filed out, already spreading into a hunting pattern, gathering speed, the low gravity exaggerating each pace into a bounding stride.
Esha needed no words to set her Titan going. She simply walked. She felt Jephenir Jehan’s psyche below hers, like a ledge on a rock face, holding her up as she climbed for the heights of victory. The sensation was fleeting. She was Domine Ex Venari. Jephenir Jehan was simply another part of her.
Rockets already streaking from the apocalypse launcher set upon her carapace, Domine Ex Venari marched to war with Steel Huntress at her side.
Seven
Legio Vulpa Walks
Through the senses of the Warlord Titan Nuntio Dolores, Terent Harrtek of the Legio Vulpa tracked the incoming Imperial Hunters. There were twelve drop-ships and two dozen more single coffin craft, starting as a close-packed cloud of ships, splitting widely into two task forces. Beams of destructive light and sparkling ribbons of tracer fire followed them as they came sinking down. As they veered apart their engines sent out hundred-metre long plumes of fire and gas.
Two thirds of them were heading for the moon’s surface, but the rest were coming towards the habitation and processing rings. His position.
The Hunters are coming in strength, he thought. Excitement quickened his pulse.
One of the drop-ships took dozens of hits. Fire trailed behind it and it began to fall out of formation with its sister craft. Other weapons switched targets as the defence batteries of New Mechanicum-held orbitals near the contested moon saw its plight and sought to bring it down. All of a sudden the drop-ship was ensnared in a web of destruction. Spots of hot metal glowed on its hull, spread, and gave, allowing the beams that created them to punch through and out of the other side in sprays of debris. The ship’s engines guttered out, and it pitched to the side, trailing fire before coming apart several hundred kilometres over the surface of Iridium.
Broken Titans spilled out, so huge they distorted the scale of the scene, like mariners pitched from a fishing boat. Harrtek’s mouth twisted behind the large bevor jutting up from his chest. Such a shame he could not fight them all and prove his Legio’s superiority, but he didn’t need tactical doctrine to tell him gunning down the enemy before they got to the field of battle was a sound plan.
He was not alone in his attentiveness to the Imperial Hunters. The vox squalled in his ears, cutting into his union with Nuntio Dolores like a knife wound.
‘Legio Fureans Fourth and Twentieth Maniples offering support, Princeps Majores Harrtek.’
‘Support declined,’ he said. He used his human voice. His jaw felt ridiculously small and distant from him. Momentarily shaken out of holy unity with his god-engine by the Tiger Eyes’ communique, he saw he was two beings, not one. His human self felt like a cancer in the pure metal of his Warlord. It sickened him to be reminded of his frailty. ‘The Hunters are ours.’ He paused. ‘Fureans Maniple Four, I demand usage of direct datapulse machine telepathy link from this point forward.’ He considered a small lie to save their pride, but honour dictated truth. ‘The vox is the tool of lesser beings. All hail the machine. All hail the god of war.’
He cut off any reply. His mouth shut tight. From now on, he would communicate only via the mechanisms of the machine, as was right. Nothing should distract him from the manifold.
The oratorius obeyed silently. He was not expected to reply, and no comment would have been welcome. The disconnection clicked in Harrtek and Nuntio Dolores’ joined souls. Blessed data washed through his mind, mercifully free of the crippling fallibility of human speech.
Nuntio Dolores’ senses crowded out Harrtek’s own, and yet he remained dimly aware of the czella around him, and the people he shared the space with.
Steersman, navigator, sensorius, oratorius, maximus – he knew them only by their station; he never learned their names, that was not the Legio Vulpa way. He was not even sure of their sexes. Nuntio Dolores was a Warlord class god-engine, and commanding it required all of Terent Harrtek’s concentration. Names got in the way. His moderati were helmed bodies, components in an organism of which Harrtek was the governing mind. He paid them no more attention than he did his fingernails. They retained their capacity for independent thought, but it was a distant, fuzzy thing while the crew was linked by the manifold. Harrtek felt their beings beneath his, working in concert with the machines they watched over.
The mind impulse unit was a sublime link to the divine. Harrtek’s soul blended with the avatar of their deity, his mind taken up by the red, wrathful roar of Nuntio Dolores’ fiery soul. It thrashed beneath him, yearning to be free of his command, although ironically it could do nothing without Harrtek bridging the realms of crude matter and motive force. Harrtek forced it to his obey his will, revelling in his power as it fought fruitlessly back.
To be immersed in a machine like Nuntio Dolores was to bathe in pure rage. The moderati had their data blocks and neural gates and so felt none of what he did, what Nuntio Dolores truly was. Where they were the cowering men-at-arms sheltered behind their shields, he was the knightly lord striding forth to best a dragon by force of will alone. Will it had to be, for what sword could subdue so huge and mighty a force of mechanisms as a god-engine? Nuntio Dolores was a literal Titan, thirty-five metres of technological mastery given form, a demonstration to teach all that humanity’s time had come, and that he carried mighty instruments of instruction.
His left fist spat the wisdom of the ancients in columns of destructive light, for on that arm he carried a belicosa-class volcano cannon, reckoned the finest of its classification in the galaxy. The tech-priests said parameters of function were all the same among different patterns of the same weapons designs, equating guns from forge worlds on opposite sides of the galaxy with one another, but they were lying. The holy men of the machines often lied to their Titan crews, Harrtek thought. Nuntio Dolores’ cannon was better than most, a five hundred terawatt lance of pure fury. Nuntio Dolores’ powerful plasma reactor could supply only limited shots to the belicosa before good function was compromised. It was a killing weapon made to deliver the coup de grace.
His right hand seemed brutal by comparison to this rapier of light, an ursine claw wrought of plasteel and weighted with ferromite. Though it lacked the technological arts of the left weapon, it was no less deadly, and Harrtek preferred its direct brutality over the belicosa’s reach. An arioch power claw was a weapon for close combat. Charged disruptor fields surrounded its armoured fingers, and the back of the hand mounted a pair of mega bolters that fired explosive, self-propelled bullets as large as a man’s torso. The gauntlet was made to rend the foe face to face. Harrtek doubted the long-dead creator of the Titans saw the machines brawling in that way. They were purely firing platforms once, but melee was a form of war Harrtek loved far more than the distant duelling of energy weapons. At close quarters he felt alive, the thrill of m
etal crumpling beneath his giant fingers, the electric jag of atoms broken by disruptor fields; these things made his heart soar. He enjoyed most of all the moments when the Titans were pressed against each other visor to visor, and he saw into the eyes of his rival princeps through the glass of the oculi, such incredibly rare split seconds, when his foes knew they were dead and he saw it on their faces. There was no finer feeling than to witness another man realise he was beaten.
Nuntio Dolores’ destructive capabilities did not end with the fist. Upon its broad back it carried twinned Titan laser blasters. Not so potent as the belicosa, but fired in concert their six barrels were devastating nonetheless, spitting out a hail of fire, and far less energy hungry. Giant versions of the lasguns carried by lowly Imperial army troopers, they could gouge up the earth into molten furrows, vaporise a heavy tank, or shake the roots of a hive city.
The Titan thought about all these things the same way Harrtek did. Whether the thoughts originated in man or machine was not clear, but the composite being they made when linked had a limitless appetite for destruction. Death it saw in myriad ways, the cogitators that housed its brutal soul endlessly playing out scenarios. The contemplation alone of destruction’s nature had the Titan increase its pace in its eagerness to reach the drop site, at risk to itself. The only gravity upon the station exterior was that granted by mass, and even on such a huge construct as the shipyard that was a paltry amount. Too much downward pressure in its strides, and Nuntio Dolores could launch itself into space, or stumble and break itself open upon the towers studding the yard: the cranes, lifters, docks and transportation rigs that made a city of machines in the airless void.
The Warlord wanted to run; it hungered to engage with its estranged kin. Though Harrtek shared the urge, he knew it for folly, and was fully occupied fighting Nuntio Dolores’ desire to engage. His interface ports warmed in his skull. His mouth tasted of metal, and he could not tell if it was his own blood or a sensory phantom brought on by stress. He could not guide the Titan. He was so fully invested in keeping the Warlord from overwhelming its crew, he was reliant on his steersman to keep the Titan’s gait steady, and that angered him. He was princeps, and he was not in control. Nuntio Dolores’ anger gave it the strength to contest his will. Shame nipped at the machine’s spirit, goading it, as it remembered a time when the engines of the Legio Solaria stood against the will of the Legio Vulpa.