Titandeath

by Guy Haley

  The link cut. The three Warlords of Legio Vulpa Maniple Seven began to walk again. The two Reavers paced after them slowly, waists rotating to keep the pack of Warhounds covered.

  Nuntio Dolores’ foot crushed the flood wall into powder as it strode directly into a tower. A bright line shone off the glass where the void shields touched it. The next stride sent Nuntio Dolores’ left shoulder right through the building. The building’s face deformed; glass burst into uncountable shards that bounced in shining rain from the Titan’s armour. Its volcano cannon punched through the building to the other side, dragging out supports as the Titan waded into the city. As the Titan pulled free, the building’s top slumped into itself. Floors slid down and scattered into the streets like skidding cards from a dropped deck. The weight broke the tower, and the whole edifice collapsed.

  Nuntio Dolores’ power claw swung into another tower block, taking out the mid-section in a cloud of dust that danced with disruption lightning. Its maniple brothers followed. Together, they carved an avenue of destruction through the towers of glass.

  They had not even fired their weapons yet.

  For five minutes, they continued their slow, methodical path of destruction. A collective scream rose from Biphex, loud enough for Esha to hear through the Warhound’s hull.

  Shortly after that, Legio Vulpa began to shoot.

  Esha rested her hand protectively on her belly. The child within turned over, pushing against her palm.

  ‘Stop replay,’ she said.

  Nuntio Dolores’ back was trapped in a slice of time within the data-slate. It jumped slightly in the feed, its carapace shrouded in dust. Esha fancied she could still hear the screams issuing from the flickering image.

  ‘Deactivate,’ she said. The image collapsed into a single point of light.

  She stared at the blank glass display for a long time. Everything had changed after that. Relations deteriorated with Legio Vulpa to the extent that the Legio were separated and assigned to different expeditionary fleets. She had seen Terent Harr­tek one final time before they parted, and not since until she faced his Warlord upon Iridium’s docklands.

  She had known he was capable of that kind of atrocity the day they met. What could she say? The women of the Legio were free to find their own bonds, if they wished. Harr­tek’s arrogance had attracted her. The first time she saw him, she wanted to get close to him, to antagonise him, to make him snap. She wished to humble him. A sad smile curved her mouth. A princeps was prideful on and off the field. The desire to prove their Legio best infiltrated everything. She really wasn’t that much different to him. They lost so much, joining with the machines. Sometimes she felt like she was but an extension of Domine Ex Venari, her needs and moods too closely aligned with that of the machine to call herself truly human.

  The last casualty of that miserable day was her friendship with Jehani Jehan. They continued to fight well together, but the closeness they had once shared was weakened, and finally broken with Abhani Lus’ birth. No matter how many moderati of the Jehan bloodline Esha surrounded herself with, she could not recapture their lost friendship. Something else to hate Harr­tek for.

  Durana Fahl had been there at Biphex too, as princeps on Red Claw. The effect on their relationship was the opposite, the shameful memory binding them together. The rest of her sisters from that time were dead or on the other side of the galaxy. Two and a half decades had gone by. She could scarcely believe it.

  Esha rested her chin in one hand and tapped her nails on the table. They were short, lined with oil, not particularly feminine by the standards of many worlds. She wondered what kind of woman she would have been if she had been born elsewhere, on Procon for example, living out her life in the gilded cage of a noblewoman.

  Biphex was when everything had changed. It was the time the dream of the Great Crusade had died for her. If she could trace her path into this violence that ripped apart the Imperium to a moment, it was when Harr­tek stepped through the wall. The fault for the war against the Emperor rested with his demigod sons and their wounded egos, but they were not solely responsible.

  The war had so many beginnings. Its roots lay in every bitter thought about an ally, every gun raised in anger on a friend, every imagined knife plunged into a brother’s back. Each man and woman engaged in the war had a moment like Biphex.

  If only it had not been so.

  She sighed and kicked back in the chair. No use dealing in what-ifs or whys. No alternative path that she could dream up or hopeless wish would stop the fighting.

  ‘I’ll try to sleep,’ she promised herself. She leaned forwards to get up, believing that perhaps she could rest.

  She was denied the chance to find out.

  The grating buzz of the hardline vox set into the wall kept her from bed. She got up, picked up the handset with one hand, and silenced the alarm and its accompanying red light with the other.

  ‘Esha Ani Mohana,’ said the Vox Omni Machina. ‘The Great Mother wishes to see you.’

  Twelve

  The Great Mother

  Esha was joined by Abhani as she walked the long port-side corridor of the mass conveyor. She was surprised to see her daughter, but did not show it, maintaining instead her superior officer’s aloofness. Legio first, their motto ran. Esha was Abhani’s commander before she was her mother.

  ‘Why does she want to see us?’ asked Abhani. She was still young and possessed of youth’s talkativeness. She reminded Esha of herself that age. ‘Just you and I? That’s unusual. Has something similar happened to you before?’

  ‘It has,’ said Esha. ‘But it is unusual,’ she added after a moment.

  ‘What do you think she wants?’ Abhani asked. She frowned. ‘Have we erred?’

  ‘Do not attempt to guess, my daughter. The Great Mother does as the Great Mother will. You should learn restraint. Speculation leads to restlessness. A good huntress must take the situation she finds and exploit it to her best advantage, not waste her time wishing for it to be otherwise.’

  Abhani was chastened. Esha felt a pang of guilt. Had she not been speculating herself only half an hour before? The early days with Abhani had been wonderful, but they were long gone. The age gap between them was much smaller than between the vat sisters and daughters of the Legio. Esha was a hundred years younger than her own mother. The naturalness of Abhani’s birth made the situation harder rather than easier. It baffled her that humans had reproduced in this way for so long; many still did. The biology made a kind of sense, but the relationships were awkward.

  They fell into an uneasy silence. It took fifteen minutes of walking through long corridors and a ride in a low pressure express tube before they reached the other end of the Tantamon, and the way into First Maniple’s drop-ship.

  What they found there concerned Esha greatly. The sally tunnel through the great war gates had been filled with votive images and incense sticks. The walls were covered over with neatly printed repeating mathematical formulae. The calculations were incomplete, of the most sacred kind. She recognised them though she was not indoctrinated into the higher mysteries, for they were a central part of the cult, the closest any tech-priest of any forge world had come to rendering the Prime Equation, the incantation by which the Machine-God had called his Machina Cosma into being.

  A reverent hush filled the hangar. The Great Mother’s Warlord Luxor Invictoria stood in gleaming majesty at the far end of the drop-ship. There were identical sets of gates at prow and stern of the craft to allow rapid deployment into battle, but those the Great Mother stood against were hidden by a banner made from a single piece of cloth fifty metres high. Around Luxor Invictoria’s broad, beweaponed shoulders the edges of the emblem of the hegemaarkhus were visible: Tigris’ badge, a towering, pyramidal forge complex framing the sacred flame of knowledge, superimposed over a cog.

  A million candles moulded from used oils turned the centr
al access road running down the centre of the ship into a river of light. The myrmidons of First Maniple, all Warlords, faced the door Esha and Abhani entered by, standing guard over their order’s leader. They were active, and their anti-personnel weaponry tracked the women as they walked into the ship.

  The drop-ship had been turned into a shrine. This was not normal, even for the Great Mother. Ordinarily the tech-priests showed their respect in the naoz. The drop-ships were kept clear of clutter. Worse still was the silence. No tech-priests or servitors were working. No hymns or sacred equations were being sung.

  Abhani came to a halt, open-mouthed. ‘What’s going on?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing that need concern us.’ But Esha was just as discomfited by the solemn signs of piety on display.

  A premidius, a senior tech-priest deimechanic, came to them and wordlessly beckoned them to follow him to the foot of a curling spiral stair of brass and onyx that had been built around Luxor Invictoria’s left leg. He pointed upwards, bowed and withdrew.

  ‘Come with me, daughter,’ said Esha.

  The stairs wound round and round the leg, allowing them to come close to the holy mechanisms of motion. Esha suspected the steps were intended to induce a feeling of humility, and they certainly worked in that regard. She felt insignificant beside the monstrous pistons at the back of the Titan’s knee. When they came around again to the front, the Titan’s head jutted over them, immense as a cliff, engulfing them in its shadow.

  The steps leaned out on extravagantly arched cantilevers, allowing them to pass over the Titan’s hips and the giant gyroscope housings. From there the steps headed up and further out to connect with the balcony at the rear of the machine. Access to a Warlord was above the waist, anatomically lower than a Reaver’s boarding portal, which was set between the shoulders. On the balcony they were level with the rear portions of the god-machine’s immense weapons. The Great Mother was a firm believer in pinpoint kill shots at range, and Luxor Invictoria was equipped with twinned volcano cannons.

  The door did not open. The opus machina on the door, resplendent in lacquered black and white, stared at them judgementally. They took their places before it.

  ‘What now, mother?’ said Abhani.

  ‘We wait on the Great Mother’s pleasure, my daughter.’

  Abhani sighed and turned away to lean on the balcony rail, where she stared at the emblem of their forge world on the flag. The Titan’s defensive weapons were alert and tracked her movements. The whining servos of the ball mounts cut through the silence.

  Esha remained facing the symbol moulded into the doorway. Steady heat radiated from the Titan’s reactor within.

  The rattle of heavy bolts retracting in sequence had Abhani returning to her mother’s side and Esha standing straighter to attention. The doors split apart, dividing the holy skull and cog in two.

  The green glass eyes of the Vox Omni Machina glowed in the dark entrance.

  ‘Greetings, Princeps Majoris Esha Ani Mohana, Princeps Abhani Lus Mohana, the Great Mother is expecting you.’

  He stood aside.

  Abhani moved. Esha stopped her with a hand.

  ‘What is the meaning of all this, holy father of machines?’ Esha asked. ‘Why is the drop-ship dressed as a temple?’

  ‘This is a solemn time, daughter of war,’ said the Vox Omni Machina.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ she said.

  ‘I know you well, princeps majoris. You possess the necessary mental acuity to deduce the current situation from the visual implications before you. It is not my place to say. The Great Mother will discuss it with you, if that is her will.’

  Esha sighed in dissatisfaction, and entered Luxor Invictoria. The door was large enough to pass through without stooping.

  A spiral stair went up at the right-hand side of the deck, taking them past cramped, open subdecks crammed with servitor alcoves and stations for the tech clade who maintained the Titan. The reactor occupied a sealed, central cylinder that ran the whole way through the Titan’s torso. Its power output was much larger than the one on Domine Ex Venari, and its working even while idle electrified the air and made the metal shake.

  In the atrium at the top of the torso, behind the head, two neokora worked under the supervision of a premidius. They attended to their tasks in respectful silence. A shrine occupied the rear wall, thick with papers bearing equations, the wax from old candles and offerings of minor components and sacred trinkets. The tech-priests ignored them, but turned respectfully away as the door to the head opened so they would not profane the Great Mother with the touch of their eyes.

  The Great Mother’s tank was immediately visible, for it took up most of the czella, the place of command. The higher the Titan class, the holier the czella, and Luxor Invictoria’s was holy indeed. Abhani gave a little gasp. Both of them felt the warning prickle of hairs rising as they trespassed on sacred ground.

  The czella was dark. The status lights of dormant machines glinted on the tank’s armourglass in smeared patterns of red, amber, blue and green. Amnion filled the tank with blue shadow. Darker lines could have been feed lines or neural connectors or perhaps the limbs of the Great Mother herself.

  Within that prison of armourglass and sustaining fluid was Esha’s mother.

  One of the neokora in the atrium depressed a button. A mechanism filled with the motive force and engaged loudly. Lumens blinked on in the czella and around the base of the tank. Blue shadow became blank white. A human shape moved with liquid slowness inside.

  Vox emitters crackled on.

  ‘Esha Ani. Abhani Lus,’ said the Great Mother, her voice filling the czella. ‘Welcome, my daughter and my granddaughter. Come within the holy place of command.’

  The two princeps entered the head of Luxor Invictoria. The door slid shut behind them. There was hardly any room with the tank in there, and they were forced to stand with their backs to the door and their faces close to the glass.

  ‘It has been too long, daughter,’ said Mohana Mankata Vi.

  ‘It has,’ said Esha.

  ‘And you, my granddaughter.’

  ‘Thank you, Great Mother, I… I… this is such an honour,’ stammered Abhani.

  ‘You have been to this place once before.’ The words were addressed to Abhani, but the omnidirectional nature of the vox emitters made them seem impersonal.

  ‘I don’t remember,’ said Abhani.

  ‘You were a babe in arms,’ said the Great Mother.

  ‘You brought me here?’ Abhani asked Esha.

  ‘I desired to see you myself,’ said the Great Mother.

  ‘I am sorry to have forgotten the honour, forgive me,’ said Abhani. She bowed her head.

  ‘Not everything in life is a matter of honour,’ said the Great Mother. ‘The first time was the privilege of family, and my pleasure. Though this time, now you are a woman and a princeps, you may account it an honour, and I am sure you shall remember it.’ Despite the strange electronic modulation, Mohana Mankata Vi’s voice was full of humour.

  ‘What might I do for you, Great Mother?’ said Esha. The head of the Warlord was as cramped as that of her Reaver. A narrow gap had been left for Mohana Mankata Vi’s moderati to squeeze past the tank to their stations. Otherwise the front of the czella was completely obscured by the Great Mother’s life support systems.

  ‘So quickly to the point, my daughter. Very well. We are to be relieved by the Legio Atarus and redeployed to the core system.’

  ‘But, but, this is our fight,’ said Abhani in consternation. ‘We have held this place for weeks. We should have the honour of retaking Theta-Garmon.’

  Abhani’s attitude flipped from meek to outraged in a moment. This was why their relationship was difficult. She had too much of her father’s aggression. Esha gritted her teeth.

  ‘Silence,’ said Esha. ‘Do not question the G
reat Mother’s will.’

  ‘The decision has been taken,’ said the Great Mother. ‘Beta-Garmon screams for help. The capital world has fallen to the Warmaster. Nyrcon City is once again in his hands. The subsidiary planets of Beta-Garmon are in deadly peril. We shall acquiesce to the requests of Lord General Bollivar of Fasadia, and bring our engines to Beta-Garmon III.’

  ‘What about all we’ve done? What about the fight here?’ said Abhani. ‘Loyalist forces reach critical mass. The offensive will begin soon! We cannot abandon this glory. We have rightly won our place here.’

  ‘Remember who you address!’ hissed Esha.

  ‘A princeps should speak her mind,’ said Mohana Mankata Vi to her daughter, ‘though never so insubordinately,’ she said to her granddaughter. ‘It is my decision. We are to be replaced by the Legio Atarus. We do not possess enough heavy maniples to contest this warzone. The Firebrands have more engines, and a greater proportion of battle-line units. Wars are won by the application of appropriate levels of force. This is not a fight that is favourable to our order. Our talents are required elsewhere.’

  Esha placed a hand on Abhani’s arm. Abhani tried to tug away, but Esha’s grip was firm.

  ‘So that’s it? We’re running to heel like hunting dogs?’ said Abhani. ‘Who is this man to command us to obey? Great Mother, please. We should remain to see our task here completed. Don’t listen to them!’

  Mohana Mankata Vi’s voice sounded loudly. ‘Obey? A Legio of the Collegia Titanica does not have to obey anyone, Abhani Lus. We are the wardens of the god-machines. We are the iron fist of the Machine-God. We are above all. Above the orders of Terra, and of Mars. We are beyond the command of our forge worlds. By ancient design, we are independent, to avoid ensnarement in the politics of men. We safeguard the domains of the Cult Mechanicus as we see fit. We agree audience for petitions for aid, and grant our might according to our own will upon the petitioners’ merits. We are not told. The Titans of the Imperial Hunters walk at my decree, no one else’s. If we go to Beta-Garmon, then it is because I command it to be so. A month of negotiation is behind this decision. I do not act on impulse. Ever.’