Titandeath

by Guy Haley

  ‘Hard right,’ she ordered, mentally forcing the head to turn as she issued the command.

  They would follow the signal. She chose a roundabout path around the newborn coast, and let herself blend further into Cursor Ferro’s being.

  Cursor Ferro’s neural jack dragged at the back of Jehani’s skull. Her neck muscles ached with the effort of supporting it. Her thoughts strayed to Legio Vulpa more and more often. The day at Biphex when Vulpa had given them a glimpse of their true nature had been a foretaste of what was to come. She had known from the moment the Legios met each other that Vulpa were callous.

  In the aftermath, it was not only relations with Legio Vulpa that had been poisoned. The crews had changed. The machines had changed. God-machines were engineered for war, but though their souls were aggressive, every engine took on the imprint of its pilots, and over time, as echoes of dozens of women were left upon them their personalities were shaped one way or another. The war machines of Legio Solaria had been as disgusted at Vulpa’s actions as the crews.

  Emotions were intensified and reflected back onto their crews by the manifold. The moment Vulpa showed their true colours, Jehani Jehan’s friendship with Esha Ani Mohana had come to an end.

  Jehani told herself she was ashamed to have shown weakness in front of her princeps. She had panicked when Vulpa walked into Biphex. But the real reason was Abhani Lus. It was always Abhani.

  When she had found out about the pregnancy, she had been glad for her friend. Things were different then. Before Biphex.

  ‘I’m with child,’ Esha had told her. She came straight out with it one evening.

  It had been a day of sunlight, a few months before their transit to Dendritica, and the first steps on the path that led them to Biphex.

  ‘Are you serious?’ Jehani said. She was reading in an alcove of a high window looking out over the tiered paddy fields of Barcan’s World. There had been time for leisure, once upon a time.

  ‘Absolutely.’ Esha’s face glowed with the news. Jehani smiled. Her friend might have looked ecstatic but Jehani had been around women when they had discovered they were unexpectedly pregnant. Shock was the first emotion, every single time; whether they hid it or not, they felt it.

  ‘How?’ said Jehani. She laid her book face down on the cushion. Barcan’s World was a pretty planet, or rather, what was left of it after compliance was pretty. Light reflected off the stepped fields in sinuous bends over the moulded plaster ceiling.

  Esha smiled.

  Jehani’s eyes widened. ‘No! That princeps with Vulpa? Harr­tek?’

  ‘You needn’t say it like I’m about to elope. It was but the once. He is too sure of himself for me to pursue the relationship.’

  ‘Coming from a Titan princeps, that is a statement rich in irony,’ Jehani said. She picked up her book again.

  ‘No congratulations?’ said Esha.

  Jehani looked over the top of the book. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘You’re not happy for me,’ said Esha. She sat down beside her friend.

  ‘Now that’s your hormones talking. Machine, Force and Omnissiah alone knows what they’ll do to Bestia Est. Have you ever been aboard a broody war engine?’ She shook her head. ‘I have.’

  ‘Jehani, please,’ said Esha. She was upset. That was not like her.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Jehani reached out a hand and clasped Esha’s. ‘Seriously. I meant it.’

  ‘Then you are pleased?’

  ‘So long as I don’t have to help you raise the thing, I am very pleased.’

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘Some religious tract I found on one of the duluz. Lectitio Divinitatus. It’s very ornate. A hard read.’

  ‘Is it interesting?’

  ‘In a disturbing kind of way. These people believe the Emperor is a god in his own right. Not the Omnissiah, something else. Completely against the Cult Mechanicus and the Imperial Truth.’

  ‘Really?’ Esha frowned.

  ‘Really,’ Jehani said.

  ‘You better get rid of it.’

  ‘I suppose.’ She looked at the cover. ‘What are you going to do with the child?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Come on, you have to think about it. Will it remain with us or go to them? What agreement did you reach?’

  ‘No gene-contract was exchanged,’ said Esha. ‘It really was unexpected.’

  ‘I don’t know, something was exchanged,’ said Jehani with a smirk. ‘So this is totally unofficial?’

  ‘Completely. A spur of the moment tryst.’

  ‘Will she join us?’

  ‘If it is a she. If not, then he’ll go to the priesthood.’

  ‘Cog and tooth! You didn’t even choose the sex?’ said Jehani.

  ‘I did not plan for this to happen, I keep saying.’

  ‘Then tell me,’ Jehani said. ‘When did it happen? Where?’

  ‘Before the greeting banquet,’ she hesitated. ‘At the Moment of Exchange. In the Hall of Armaments.’

  ‘Esha!’ said Jehani, mock scandalised. ‘And where the god-machines could see. You should be ashamed.’ She was joking, mostly.

  Esha laughed. ‘What use is life if you don’t live it a little every now and then?’

  Now, years later, Jehani Jehan reflected on those words. There was no time to live any more, only fight to survive. Esha’s quiet joy at the child’s imminence turned to shame when ties were broken with Legio Vulpa. Jehani had grown cold towards her when she had decided to carry the baby to term. She admitted it freely. It seemed harsh, but it was as it was. A friendship forged in the manifold was among the strongest of all. Their estrangement had hurt them both, but she could not countenance welcoming the genes of that Legio into the Imperial Hunters. She still struggled. Ironically, she had nothing personal against Abhani. She was a good princeps, if a little headstrong. It was the principle of the thing.

  Esha had put herself before the Legio. She could never forgive that.

  ‘Legio first,’ she said to herself. ‘Always, Legio first.’

  ‘Princeps,’ Natandi Fahl spoke tersely. ‘Princeps. Ahead. Princeps! You are drifting.’

  ‘All halt.’ Natandi Fahl spoke out, and brought the Titan to a stop. Cursor Ferro reluctantly complied. It set its legs firm against the surging of the ocean.

  ‘What is happening?’ Jehani Jehan dragged her attention away from her memories.

  ‘You were machine-lost. Cursor Ferro requires guidance here – he would have walked on into danger were it not for me.’

  Natandi Fahl was too sure of herself. She had her sights set on Jehani’s throne.

  ‘I am in control,’ Jehani said.

  ‘See for yourself, princeps. Ahead. Our way is blocked.’

  The visual feed was never deactivated, but a princeps was fed so much information they were trained to compartmentalise it. To see what the Titan saw though her eyes, she had to focus; her attention had to be active. She looked within herself. Through Cursor Ferro’s auguries she saw a cliff extending upwards into the sky. There was a slight curve to it, but besides that it was featureless, a single, giant slab of plasteel bonded rockcrete. Part of the outer shell of the fallen hive.

  ‘Your orders, princeps?’

  Jehani had Cursor Ferro pace around to face the coast. The wall-cliff sliced through the debris that made up the new shoreline, laying down a mighty headland. Water sucked itself into churning eddies around skerries of metal and shattered rockcrete. Within the compacted mass of the cliff was evidence of cavities, machine halls and great conduits crushed down to the size of ration tins. There was no way through in that direction.

  The water was deepening by the moment. Waves rocked Cursor Ferro as the tide came in.

  ‘Go out.’

  ‘Princeps?’

  ‘Deeper. Go out
into the sea. Take us around the obstruction.’

  ‘The water will cover us over,’ said Kalis Nen, Cursor Ferro’s moderati oratorius.

  ‘The cliffs are impassable. This machine is proof against the void. Water cannot harm it. Eighty degrees right. Now.’

  ‘As you command, princeps,’ said Natandi Fahl.

  Jehani let Natandi Fahl pilot the Titan without her direct input. She kept her mind above the manifold, watching as much through the Titan’s cockpit windows as through its eyes. The mist was thinning. The cliff was visible intermittently through the oculus. Now seen with human sight, the view was as grey and miserable as it had appeared in monochrome heat vision.

  ‘Turn executed.’

  ‘Relinquish control,’ Jehani ordered Fahl. She pushed her mind deeper into the link with the machine. The Titan and she came close to full union, and together they walked into the ocean.

  The seabed shelved off quickly. The new cliffs had forced the coast far out into the water, and though the Chymist’s Sea’s sublittoral region had a gentle slope, the edge of the continental shelf was close. Within a hundred steps the water rose to Cursor Ferro’s waist. As it waded forwards it collected the rubbish of industry ejected into the water over millennia. Long-lived plasteks yellowed by exposure to the sun joined together with the carbonised debris of the hive’s demise into a raft of rubbish around the Titan.

  ‘Soundings indicate the shelf ends close to the edge of the barrier,’ said Kalis Nen.

  ‘We have seen it,’ said Jehani Jehan. Her eyes were closed. Her primary sensory input was that of the Titan. Cursor Ferro’s simple soul merged with her own. ‘We proceed.’

  The water came up to the Titan’s head. The cliff seemed no more negotiable. Waste-choked water slapped at the Titan’s canine muzzle. The waves touched the base of its viewports.

  ‘Seal atmospheric vents,’ ordered Jehani. ‘Prepare cooling systems for density change.’

  The bigger waves washed over the windows, getting higher and higher. The top of the armourglass showed clear air near the top, a submarine view in the rest; the clear, well-defined line of the water’s meniscus divided the two. Then that sliver of air was gone. The head plunged beneath the surface, and only the curved back of the Warhound remained above water.

  The sound of the reactor shifted as its cooling systems took on water instead of air. The shimmer of exhaust heat was replaced by a blast of roaring steam that subsided to a bubble as it submerged completely. Now entirely underwater, the Titan leaned forward to better push against the resistance of the sea.

  ‘The edge of the shelf is close. Water depth increases greatly nine hundred and thirty metres from our position, increasingly more so thereafter,’ said Kalis Nen.

  ‘I am aware,’ said Jehani Jehan. The clouded water was opaque even to the infrared, and she was forced to rely on high intensity sonar bursts. The contours of the seabed raced through her mind with each pulse. The seabed had buckled with pressure ridges under the weight of the hive, making the going difficult. Debris from the hive collapse worsened the situation. Cursor Ferro pushed on, unperturbed by the change in medium it moved through. The machine’s swaggering walk was exaggerated in the water, though it had ceased to swing its head back and forth, but pointed its nose in the direction of travel, changing the whole feel of the Titan’s motion.

  The great, black guillotine blade of the hive section reared high beside them, its leading edge cutting the water as far as the machine could see. To their right the prospect was hardly lighter. A shift from black-brown to grey-brown was all that defined what was obstacle and what was open sea.

  ‘Edge of continental shelf forty metres,’ warned Kalis Nen. She too was deep in the manifold, and her voice was quiet.

  ‘We see the end!’ said Jehani. The artificial cliff ended abruptly, the top part sheared off by some apocalyptic starship weapon. At the surface, where the sun shone off the rolling waves, brighter metal glinted.

  A narrow ledge ran in front of the wall, no more than fifteen metres wide. Beyond that the seabed plunged into the inky blackness of the mesopelagic zone.

  ‘We go forwards,’ said Jehani Jehan.

  The Titan saw the danger, and moved cautiously. The blackness to its right seemed to move upwards from the deeps, poised to swallow them all.

  Cursor Ferro walked in front of the promontory with a somnambulist’s slow gait. To their left the strata of the hive shell were laid open for them to see. Six metres of plasteel bonded to rockcrete, then a thick ferrocrete layer honeycombed for strength and lightness, its cavities already being colonised by Beta-Garmon III’s aquatic life. What remained of the world’s native ecosystem was hardy enough to tolerate the polluted sea. The toxic corpse of the great hive posed it no difficulties.

  ‘Steady,’ said Jehani Jehan. Natandi Fahl lent her mental strength to guide the Titan.

  Beyond the hive casing, scraps of the internal structure clung on, a briar patch of tangled metal that projected beyond the shell limit. Strong currents welled up from marine depths, mixing with the shore drift to create a mess of vortices. Thickets of metal swayed like weeds in the flow. Cursor Ferro slowed.

  ‘Steady!’ Jehani Jehan ordered.

  The inferno cannon caught on a projecting spar and squealed along it. The Titan’s foot slipped. The impact of metal on metal resounded up the Titan’s left leg. Cursor Ferro tilted to the right. Through the right eye, the ocean waited. Jehani Jehan brought Cursor Ferro to a halt before it could topple over. Half a dozen tocsins sounded at once.

  ‘Fouling around the left claw,’ reported Ophira Mendev.

  ‘We didn’t see it,’ said Jehani, speaking for the machine as much as herself. ‘Kalis, integrate with the sensorium. Aid me.’

  ‘Yes, princeps.’

  With Kalis’ help, the radar image sharpened enough for Jehani Jehan to see the snag of metal caught around Cursor Ferro’s ankle.

  ‘I’ll pull us out,’ she said. ‘Increase reactor output.’

  The machine song deepened. The Titan tensed. The left leg pulled hard against the snare. Something gave, and Cursor Ferro lurched. Jehani brought her machine to another halt.

  The right foot was at the edge of the abyss. Freedom lay fifty metres further on.

  Machine-God, I beg of you, preserve your servants and your devices, she thought into the manifold. ‘Full power to locomotors!’ she commanded.

  The whine of climbing power output sang in the cockpit, joining the trill of alarms in holy chorus.

  The Titan leaned. Its left foot moved. Jehani took a step with the right, moving the claw away from the edge of the cliff. Machinery pushed to its limit howled its anguish through the Titan’s structure.

  Without warning, the snag gave way. Cursor Ferro lunged in the water, tottering out to the cliff edge again. It hung at the point of disaster as upwells of water buffeted it, before Jehani Jehan forced the machine back from the edge, and around the last of the obstacles.

  Cursor Ferro picked up speed. The transponder signal throbbed in Jehani Jehan’s mind. Aligning herself directly with the source, Jehani Jehan pushed the Titan back inshore.

  Cursor Ferro emerged into a bay of metal. Brighter light, then air, appeared at the top of its oculi. A body banged into the armourglass. Cursor Ferro’s eyes revealed many more.

  The water was carpeted with corpses. Thousands of them had been corralled by the currents in the new bay. They lolled on the waves, turning the ocean’s churn into a lazy rolling. They were bloated by submersion, eaten at by the corrosive nature of the water. The ocean teemed with tiny crustaceans nibbling at this bounty. The water had become a soup.

  While Cursor Ferro had been submerged, visibility had improved to several hundred metres. The carpet of corpses stretched into the distance.

  Jehani Jehan ignored the dead, and marched onwards towards the shore of broken rockcrete an
d shorn metal. Waves threw corpses up onto the debris and plucked them back down. Cursor Ferro waded through the water and the flesh. Bodies thumped onto the czella. Water cascaded down its sides.

  ‘The signal is ahead,’ said Jehani Jehan.

  They rounded a jagged island of tangled industrial machinery, into another bay full of corpses, and towards another headland. They turned back out to sea to pass it, facing out over an ocean sealed beneath human flesh, then back inshore again.

  Passing the headland, they cleared the major part of the spire wreckage. The last shreds of mist were scudding away under a rising breeze. Sunlight broke through clouds of smoke. The greater body of the city was a black heap in the distance, studded with raging fires. Foothills of piled hablocks and outlying industrial facilities climbed up to the wreck. The remains of docks reached out into the sea.

  Carefully, Cursor Ferro picked its way through the ruins of millions of lives. The streets were choked with bones stripped of flesh by bio-weaponry. Cursor Ferro’s feet crushed them to powder. The signal of the missing Legio Defensor Titan squealed in the cockpit. They turned a corner, and the dead Titan was ahead, sprawled into the side of a warehouse, a greater corpse in a world of corpses.

  Cursor Ferro stalked over to its fallen kin. The machine was a Rapier class scout, a lighter, swifter machine than even a Warhound.

  ‘I’ve not seen one of these for a while,’ said Fahl.

  ‘The Alacrity of Thought. This is the missing engine. The transponder signal is standard Imperial recognition pattern,’ said Kalis Nen.

  ‘When did that start to mean something again?’ asked Fahl. ‘It could still be a trap.’

  Jehani Jehan shut her eyes and reached through the maniple into Cursor Ferro’s extensive auspex suite. ‘No sign of life, no mechanisms active. We are in the land of the dead. Bring us around it,’ said Jehani Jehan. She shucked off her princeps harness and payed out the neural link cable so she could get close to the window. ‘Halt.’

  The Rapier was so much twisted wreckage. There was no chance its three moderati could have survived. The devastation was total. The weapon that had brought it low left little more than blackened adamantium bones and a portion of the torso.