by Guy Haley
From the dead zone strode four more engines, already firing. Three Warlords and the enemy maniple’s second Reaver marched out of the avenues between the magnetic forge’s towers. They came to a halt and braced. Their carapaces sparkled as they unleashed a salvo of rockets.
‘They are bad at this kind of war,’ said Akali Netra. ‘They reveal themselves too soon.’
Esha magnified the image with a thought.
The Death Stalkers had shed their old livery as a serpent sheds its skin. They had kept the dark red and cream colours that had given them a regal appearance in the past, but the balance had changed in favour of the red, and was now accentuated with purple panels. The cream had darkened to the yellowed ivory of old bone. Together, purple, scarlet and bone gave the Titans the appearance of slabs of butchered meat.
She thought quickly. The other axiom maniple would be on them in moments. Even with so many Titans on her side, she did not rate their chances against two battleline units. She had an idea, spectrum-tested the gases spurting from the ruptured tank, and smiled.
The outer hull was breached. Oxygen was leaking from the pressurised sections of the deck below the broken tank. Not much, but enough.
‘Warhound packs are clear. Reavers return fire,’ thought Esha. ‘Fire select seeker arrows on my target. Rocket volley, now.’
The Reavers under Esha’s command were equipped with carapace-mounted apocalypse launchers. Exhaust blasted from venting ports as the rockets fired. Seeker arrows were particular to their Legio, a product of their way of war. The missiles burned across the dark, guided by the disembodied brains of human beings. Each missile cost a life to make, to ensure its one, vital task was undertaken correctly.
The rockets slammed into the first rank of the hydrogen tanks at precisely spaced intervals. They exploded with immense violence, each impact triggering a chain reaction that blew up the tanks in sequence until half the field was erupting. The explosion lofted metal high out beyond the reach of the gravity well of moon and orbitals. Fire rushed out, forcing attack craft to take evasive action.
The enemy Reaver was engulfed by the storm of metal and flame. When it rolled back, extinguished by the void, the Reaver was down, void shields offline and struggling to stand. Its chainfist tip skidded on the structure beneath it as it attempted to force itself upright. Where the hydrogen tanks had been was a mass of twisted metal. The area of devastation was broad, and had opened up an even larger section of the dock’s pressurised decks to the open void. Seemingly limitless atmosphere rushed outwards, thick and white as a waterfall run in reverse.
‘Third Maniple, double back, avenge your fallen sister.’
The Warhounds obeyed eagerly, wheeling about to strafe the fallen engine with vulcan megabolter fire and lashes of incandescent plasma. The fallen machine fired back in panic, its rockets stripping the shields from one of the Warhounds. The Reaver’s maniple mates were quick to target the naked scout, and a hit from a volcano cannon tore off the Warhound’s blast gun. The damaged engine fell back under fire, out of the battle, but its sisters continued, riddling the Legio Vulpa machine until it collapsed completely and lay dead, its hull punctured by dozens of smoking wounds.
Despite the loss of the Howl of Fire, Esha felt a surge triumph.
‘Tenth and Sixth hunting packs, envelop. Second stay wide, Third join them, outflank and destroy,’ she said. The infosphere jittered. The enemy were attempting to disrupt their communications. Tech-priests aboard the Metallo Mutandis and the Legio strategic staff on the Tantamon and Artemisia would be attempting to do the same to the Death Stalkers. Broken communications destroyed the effectiveness of a Legio. Comms disruption was an old trick, and easily countered, but like a customary greeting it had to be carried out.
‘Reavers, target enemy maniple, fire on my command.’
She checked the position of the second enemy maniple coming around the tower cluster. They would round it at a position well wide of the blind spot and hydrogen firestorm. They would be easy to hit. Conversely, so would her Reavers. The field was roughly even. Fourteen Warhounds, five Reavers against six Warlords and three Reavers. The Legio Solaria had the numbers, but the power disparity between a scout Titan and engine like a Warlord more than made up for it. Legio Vulpa would outmatch them if they were allowed to join their maniples.
If she allowed them.
The enemy maniple were standing steady in the magnetic forge complex, trusting to the confusion of emanations to spoil their foes’ aim. Their void shields were as close to each other as they could be, forming a wall of energy, and they were firing every weapon they had at Esha’s group of Reavers. Stripes of coherent light blasted across the space between them. In space, volcano cannons were even deadlier than planetside, suffering no refractive weakening from the atmosphere.
Domine Ex Venari took a solid hit. Alarms wailed. Sparks fountained from an energy buffer as the first shield went down violently. More shots came streaming in from the carapace laser blasters of two Warlords. The first void shield lasted precisely a third of a second. Esha logged that. That was too fast. All across her group, voids were sparking, coming down. In moments they would be suffering real damage. She waited to fire back. Legio Vulpa were aggressive. If they thought their enemy helpless, they would neglect their own defence.
‘They do not think we can hit them,’ she thought to her comrades. ‘We shall prove them wrong.’
Tenth and Sixth Maniples were running obliquely through the storm of atmosphere blasting up through the ruptured skin of the docks. Though obscured, targeting data streamed in from the scouts. The linked minds of engine, servitor and crew digested it effortlessly, turning half-obscured pict glimpses into solid firing solutions. Enhanced targeting images shone in her mind’s eye. Domine Ex Venari shifted, already bringing its weapons to bear. By now, the Death Stalkers would have slaved their reactors to their weapons systems for maximum destruction, neglecting their shields. They knew no other way.
‘Open fire,’ she said. ‘All weapons.’
The Reavers emptied their rocket pods of missiles in one cataclysmic barrage. The magnetic forges suffered several stray shots. In her machine sight, Esha witnessed loops of intense magnetism lash out, powerful enough to perturb the path of the plasmic gases vomiting from the Titans’ weapons. Their discharges bent around themselves into complex knots as one of the towers toppled sideways and crumped to ruin on the surface. More rockets slammed into the void shields of Legio Vulpa. Silent fire burst around them and was sucked away to nothing by the vacuum the instant it appeared. Chimes informed the crew that the enemy were shedding their energy protection under the fury of the attack and were slow to replenish it. The notifications were not needed. Esha felt it as a prickling under her skin.
‘Advance!’ she commanded. Still firing their energy cannons, the Reavers moved forwards. They planted their feet carefully, legs bent for walking under fire, bracing themselves against the recoil from their guns, their formation allowing them to fire all of their weapons with ease. Legio Vulpa thought themselves stronger, and stood in the full fury of the Reavers’ onslaught. By the way they were adjusting their positions, it seemed they also anticipated that the Imperial Hunters’ Warhounds would emerge to attack their rear.
Tenth and Sixth Maniples’ hunting packs obliged. They burst through the gases venting from the dock city and came in at a run, all guns blazing. Eight Warhounds were a threat, and the enemy maniple adjusted itself further to this new vector of attack. Their line bent back, the left-hand Reaver turning a full ninety degrees and directing all its fire at the attacking scouts, bringing welcome respite to the Legio Solaria’s advancing group.
The situation hung on a thread. Legio Vulpa were inflexible, but their stubbornness made them deadly. Esha pressed ahead aggressively only because she saw
little other choice. A single mistake would see her attack plan undone.
This was not the form of war she had been raised to. During the crusade, it was unusual to see more than a single maniple on a battlefield. The services of the Legios were called only to address the gravest threats, the hardest or most intransigent foes. Where the Legios walked, xenos and humans alike trembled. There were societies with greater technical knowledge than the Imperium, but few of them had the industrial might of the rising empire. It was a rare machine that could match a Titan, and the metal gods of Mars had walked invincibly wherever they chose.
Horus and Kelbor-Hal had changed that. When the Fabricator General took the cause of the Warmaster, more than half the Titan Legios had followed him into the madness of betrayal. Now Titans fought Titans, and the effects were devastating. Nothing could have prepared Esha for war like this. In the distant days of the Age of Strife, when the forges of Mars tussled for dominance, then the Titans had traded blows, but all was done to a strict code of war. There was no such restraint in this conflict. Thirty Titans were involved in this battle, and it was reckoned a skirmish by the standards of the day.
One of the charging Warhounds went down in flaming pieces that scattered among the legs of its pack mates and threatened to trip them. The others pounded on, twisting their torsos about to fire as they raced past the enemy maniple. The enemy Titans paced around, keeping their vulnerable rears out of the Warhounds’ weapons arcs while raking their assailants with return fire, but the Warhounds were fleet, and ran past out of danger before circling back for another strafing run.
Those Warlords still firing on the Reavers concentrated on the Odercarium, hunt leader of Third Maniple. Las-fire smashed void shields like they were made of glass. No fewer than fifteen lances of energy slammed into its legs simultaneously as the last void blinked out, shattering the locomotors and sending the upper part of the Reaver spinning helplessly off into the void. The crew and engine lived, but were in growing danger from enemy fighter craft as they floated away. Already a retrieval vessel was sailing from out of the vast maw of Metallo Mutandis’ principal docking slot, tight fusillades of gunfire clearing its way through the press of enemy ships, with servitor attack drones speeding in to escort it.
Esha felt all this information in multiple ways, but she cared only for her targets. Concerted fire from her Reavers hammered down the voids of a Warlord. More cut into its carapace. An explosion ripped through the top of its hull, and the right arm fell slack in its mounting. The triumphant shrills of Domine Ex Venari’s autosenses predicted imminent reactor failure. It limped backwards. Seeing their position compromised, the others formed up around their wounded comrade and began to fall back to meet with the approaching maniple.
Now that more fire was directed at the scouts, two more Warhounds were crippled, forcing their withdrawal. One tripped as it fled, its leg shattered; the other sprinted free, dragging its broken inferno cannon behind it.
‘We have them,’ voxed Esha to her demi-Legio. ‘Push forwards. Do not allow them to link up with the second enemy maniple. Third and Second packs, your time is now.’
The enemy fell back, right into the path of Second and Third Maniples’ hunting packs. They came stealthily from opposite diagonals, Second emerging round the last of the magnetic forges as the enemy maniple entered the main avenue leading through the complex. It was a risk. Timed wrongly, they would have been wide open to the fire of the coming enemy. But they timed it to perfection.
Hails of bolter fire raked the rear of the leftmost Warlord, leaving rippling splashes on its voids as the rounds were shunted into the warp. With so much warp tech active, the fabric of space itself seemed to ripple, and the combatants danced like reels of vid flimsy projected onto a sheet stirred by a draft.
Esha’s Reavers were now close enough to read the nameplates of their foes and see the grisly trophies adorning them. Along the pediments of the grand carapaces were set hundreds of spikes, each fixed with a skull.
‘Target Warlord Omnia Sangui,’ Esha ordered. The Reavers paused, reoriented, and let fly in unison. Omnia Sangui’s shields came down with blinding flashes. The Warhounds ranged at the end of the avenue riddled its back with Vulcan fire. It tried to turn to present the heavier armour of its front to the scouts, but its mighty guns caught on one of the giant forge towers. Bolt rounds firing ten thousand a minute chewed metal to pieces as it tried to drag its limbs free.
Esha felt it, like a growing heat, a sun rising.
‘Fall back,’ she said.
The Legio Solaria Reavers came to a slow halt. Locomotor units shuddering, they reversed course. The Warhounds scattered like dogs chased from a carcass.
‘Faster!’ Esha shouted aloud. ‘Warhounds divert all power to the locomotor units. Weapons off line. Run!’
The Reavers walked backwards as quickly as they could. The rising scream of an alarm sang out the collapse of the enemy reactor. Its maniple kin were moving fast to get clear. Plasma gushing from holes all over Omnia Sangui’s back bent around the lines of magnetic force emanating from the forge. It was a glorious sight to see, a living idol of the Machine-God wreathed in holy fire.
The Titan slammed a fist into the side of a foundry tower and pushed itself backwards. The head ejected from the body, taking the princeps and primary moderati to safety.
The rest were left to die.
The Warlord cracked open like an egg hatching a star. A hemisphere of silent light rushed across the surface, engulfing the towers of the magnetic foundry to half their height. An area a kilometre across was vaporised in an instant. A moment later, a second explosion burst upwards as the Warlord damaged earlier detonated. Blinding light rushed over the Reavers’ void shields.
The light faded. Domine Ex Venari’s machine eyes recovered before Esha’s human sight.
‘Two Warlords and a Reaver down for a handful of Warhounds. A good tally, princeps senioris,’ said Durana Fahl. ‘My respect to you.’
‘It is not over yet,’ Esha replied. ‘Second enemy maniple incoming.’
The foundry was a wreck. The enemy maniple was falling back as fast as they could, pursued by the Warhounds, but the second enemy maniple’s energy signatures were dangerously close.
‘Hunting packs, return!’ Esha ordered.
The other enemy maniple finally rounded the mass of starscrapers at the centre of the battlefield. They were arrayed for maximum fire spread, and opened up as soon as they came into range.
There was a Warlord at the centre which Esha recognised, even at ten kilometres distance.
‘Nuntio Dolores,’ she said. ‘It’s him. The Butcher of Biphex.’
A Warhound of Sixth Maniple took a dozen direct hits and collapsed to the steel ground.
‘Fall back now!’ she commanded again. ‘Get me range on Nuntio Dolores. Priority target! Bring it down!’
‘That’s it. No more. All ammunition depleted in apocalypse launcher,’ voxed Nepha Nen. Esha knew this; she felt the voided missile slots as painfully as an empty belly.
‘Sunfury and lasblaster, prepare to fire!’ she shouted. Her agitation pulled her out of the manifold. Domine Ex Venari’s movements lost their smoothness.
‘Plasma reactor is undergoing emergency venting, princeps. We have less than twenty per cent capacity available at this time, barely enough to power the locomotor units,’ Omega-6 voxed from the reactor.
‘Why?’ she spat.
‘Void shield regeneration,’ responded Omega-6.
‘Esha, we have multiple target locks,’ said Yeha Yeha. ‘Harrtek’s savages are powering up their volcano cannon. You know he will target you. We have limited opportunity to get out of their fire line.’
; She swore loudly, pulling her further out of true union. ‘Take us away. Now. Get us behind cover.’
‘As you command, mistress.’
The void was filled with Battlegroup Solaria attack craft by now, and so Harrtek’s unit did not advance to continue the engagement, but awaited the survivors of Maniple Eighteen before falling back themselves.
Esha kept her eyes on Nuntio Dolores until Domine Ex Venari had moved into the geometric canyons of a heat sink, and Harrtek was lost to sight.
The battle was over.
Nine
A Passing Home
A short-range heavy lifter dropped Nuntio Dolores upon a plain of metal. The Titan stepped free of its portage claws. Giant pistons took the brunt of the impact; it hit the ground walking and strode on towards the Legio Vulpa’s temporary home.
The Death Stalkers had taken over the Gardoman Hub, a hive-sized construction facility and once sovereign domain within the greater Theta-Garmon V shipyards. Though it comprised hundreds of interlinked docks and manufactoria, the main body of the hub was a number of cylindrical void units clustered upon a long axis mast thirty kilometres from top to bottom, and encircled about the middle by a broad habitation ring twenty kilometres across. The ring carried a city of some hundred thousand souls. Each of the cylinders housed extensive dockyard facilities. Most of those still in working order were producing materiel for the Warmaster’s armies, but those at the centre, where the medial ring was joined to the station axis by a hundred soaring bridges, were now the domain of Legio Vulpa.
Nuntio Dolores paced a broad road delineated by slit lumens that cut across the top of the ring city. Gardoman Hub had taken heavy damage during capture, and the city had borne the brunt of the destruction. Many of its pinnacles were hollowed out. The exterior was riddled with holes. Whole sections of hull plating were peeled back, opening the spaces beneath to the vacuum, and the road ahead of Nuntio Dolores was broken by a wide fissure. The lattice of voided decks beneath the armoured skin glinted like bones in a charnel pit. It was a trap for anything less than a god-machine, but Harrtek drove the Titan onwards, and Nuntio Dolores strode over the chasm as easily as a man might cross a crack in the path.