by Guy Haley
‘Shall I lead my daughters one final time into battle? Or do you wake me only to bid me farewell?’
‘You are combat capable,’ said Goten Mu. ‘While you are awake. Alas, we can no longer disconnect you completely from the MIU. If we were to attempt it, you would be subsumed into Luxor Invictoria for good.’
‘No human can remain perpetually attached to the machine in this way,’ she said. ‘I am surprised you have not already sent me on my way.’
‘Great Mother, your strategic insight is invaluable,’ said Goten Mu.
‘Do you find my daughter unworthy?’
‘She is worthy,’ said Chrysophane. ‘Continuity is important in these terrible times. We value you, that is all.’
‘And there I thought I was the inconvenient nub of flesh required to bring your idols to life,’ Mohana said. ‘I sense nothing in the Legio infosphere indicating battle approaching. The ship does not move.’ She paused, reaching further into the invisible web of data linking the Legio together. ‘We are still upon Beta-Garmon III. There is some other reason you have woken me. The question is, what?’
‘You are perceptive as ever,’ said Goten Mu with a small bow. ‘A little over a month ago, the primarchs Sanguinius and Jaghatai Khan arrived at Beta-Garmon. The Khan has committed himself to a hit and run campaign throughout the subsector. Sanguinius of the Ninth Legion has assumed control over all other Imperial forces.’
‘Has he succeeded?’ asked Mohana Mankata Vi.
‘To an extent,’ said Goten Mu. ‘You appreciate the level of disorganisation here better than most.’
‘I do,’ she said.
‘He has had some success in bringing together Imperial war efforts,’ continued the Magos Principia Militaris. ‘His vision for the campaign is taking hold. There are, however, difficulties he must contend with, not least dissension between the Titan Legios.’
‘Dissension over what?’
‘Sanguinius has commanded that the Beta-Garmon system be purged of traitors. He wishes to retake Nyrcon City as the first action in stabilising the war. If Beta-Garmon II can be returned to the Imperial fold, then Horus may be driven back to the edges of the cluster,’ said Chrysophane. ‘The Legios Titanica are split between those who wish to bring the conflict to a head and force a rapid conclusion in order to halt the attrition we have been suffering these last months, and those who wish to continue the campaign as it is. This latter group fears the scale of the attack Sanguinius proposes will result in their Legios’ destruction.’
‘You have woken me to decide what Legio Solaria’s course will be.’
‘It is not a decision I can make,’ said Magos Principia Militaris Goten Mu. ‘Not without contravening the agreement between Tigris and the Legio Solaria.’
‘Typically, you magi cannot control that which you create.’
‘With good reason,’ said the Vox Omni Machina. ‘The Legio should remain apart from the factionalism inherent to the cult.’
‘I will not transgress these sacred oaths,’ said Goten Mu. ‘What is your decision?’
‘More data,’ she said.
Goten Mu’s cowled head nodded at one of the tech-priests manning a station on the maintenance cradle. He inserted a mechadendrite into an interface port, and twisted.
A most audacious plan unfolded in Mohana Mankata Vi’s mind.
‘This is Lord Sanguinius’ plan? A score of Legios, hundreds of Titans, massed together to take back Nyrcon city?’
‘The third battle for the system capital will be costly in blood and oil,’ continued Chrysophane. ‘God-engines were not made to fight each other this way, as infantry in an army of giants. The destruction unleashed will be unprecedented. Our Legio is particularly ill-suited to this form of battle.’
Plans, maps, diagrammatical representations and more flooded Mohana’s strategic senses. A scarred, ugly orb swelled in her mind. Beta-Garmon II was ancient, inhabited by mankind for tens of thousands of years, and bore the scars of careless stewardship. Sanguinius’ armies had the traitors boxed into various kill zones on the planet. The greatest concentration held the capital.
‘His Legion will take the Anvil,’ said the Magos Principia Militaris. ‘We shall storm the walls.’
As Goten Mu spoke, specifications of the city defences unspooled in the Great Mother’s mind. Nyrcon City’s mountainous hive soared up through Beta-Garmon II’s polluted skies. Its irregular base was followed with exactitude by a high, encircling wall. Graphical flourishes indicated many stretches had been repaired and enhanced by the Warmaster. The hive was heavily damaged from the previous two battles fought over it, but the wall had been strengthened with emplaced heavy guns torn from dead god-engines. Her view expanded, taking in the star fortress of the Anvil locked in geosynchronous orbit with the hive. At three hundred kilometres above the peak, from the ground it would appear as nothing but a shape among many others, it being but one of hundreds of orbitals crowding the sky. But its armament could level the city, or destroy any attacker who dared to chance the defences.
‘If the primarch fails to secure the star fortress, then we shall be helpless,’ said Mal-4 Chrysophane. ‘We will die.’
‘It is a glorious plan,’ said Mohana. ‘Filled with risk, but bold.’
‘As to be expected from the Great Angel,’ said Goten Mu.
‘It is ruinous,’ said Chrysophane, his machine warble becoming stridulous. ‘The projected toll in machines and personnel is staggering. We risk not only a few engines here – we risk the whole of the Legio.’
‘Wars are not won through timidity,’ she said. ‘How many other Legios have pledged their support?’
‘Of the twenty-seven in this sector of the cluster, twenty. Three are unable, four refuse.’
‘You suggest, Vox Omni Machina, that we join this timid quartet?’
‘I suggest prudence,’ Chrysophane rejoined.
‘Magos Principia Militaris Goten Mu, you are the strategist of your binary. What say you?’
‘I defer to your judgement, Great Mother,’ he said. ‘I will gladly calculate the best disposition of Legio support troops to enable you to achieve your end, for that is the role the Machine-God has allotted to me. But I cannot and will not make this decision.’
She allowed the play of data to run through her. It reinvigorated her, fresh as cold water, bracing as the rain, but in the back of her mind she still saw metallic skies and trees of steel.
‘I accept the primarch’s command. But a portion of the Legio will remain here under the command of Princeps Majoris Esha Ani Mohana.’
‘The number?’ asked Goten Mu, glad to be relieved of the burden of decision.
‘Two maniples, no more. I see the primarch requires defensive forces to be stationed around the hives of this world.’
‘A precaution,’ said Goten Mu. He allowed his enthusiasm for the primarch’s strategy to show now he was no longer responsible for following it. ‘The Season of Vitriol is on us. All non-Legio forces are reducing their operations. Only void-shielded units can operate. Caustic fogs blanket the coast day round. Alkaline squalls are building into persistent storms inland. These have been known to trouble the world for months at a time. The meteorological conditions alone provide us with a fine defence, and will last for the next half year.’
‘The Warmaster has the majority of his Titans defending Nyrcon city,’ said Mohana.
‘Therefore he has very little offensive capability he can use on this sphere,’ Goten Mu said.
She surveyed the information again. The two magi retreated from her consciousness for a time. She brought herself back before she was lost.
‘Send Esha Ani Mohana and Second Maniple to join the forces guarding the Diviner’s Needle. Sixth Maniple will merge with the remnants of Tenth Maniple and add to the garrison of Caldera City.’
‘As you will it, Great Mother
.’ Goten Mu bowed deeply. Chrysophane less so. The Magos Principia Militaris’ infospheric profile broadcast his satisfaction. Mohana saw now that Goten Mu had been lying about his reluctance to make a decision. They had argued. Had the two been in agreement about the matter in the first place, they would never have woken her.
‘Make the rest of the Legio ready for transit to Beta-Garmon II,’ she commanded. ‘We walk for the primarch. I shall lead my daughters into the greatest and most challenging battle we have ever faced. It is fitting I should end my tenure as Great Mother this way.’
The Vox Omni Machina and the Magos Principia Militaris bowed again. A choir began to sing an exultant song of ultimate victory.
Messages passed out through the Legio telling all that the Great Mother marched to war one final time.
Beta-Garmon II was an ugly world. Though the capital of the system and the entire sub-sector, it was not the most populous – that honour belonged to Beta-Garmon III – nor was it the most culturally significant, or even the most productive. A blasted, irradiated wasteland when the great Principia Imperialis found it at the beginning of the Great Crusade, it had latterly been given over to weapons testing. Every instrument of destruction below Exterminatus grade had been unleashed upon its surface, from the humblest lasgun to the mightiest Mechanicum Ordinatus weaponry. Giant craters riddled its plains. Away from the inhabited equator in the desolation zones, destabilisation of tectonic plates had opened vast chasms. The planet’s orbits were a crowded graveyard of decommissioned hulks employed for target practice. The only orbital of any strategic worth was the Anvil.
It was a chilly, inhospitable planet, warmed unenthusiastically by the Beta-Garmon star. The population clustered around its swelling middle in enormous fortress hives, the only legacy of the Dark Ages to have survived intact. But it was upon this inhospitable orb that power had come to rest. From Beta-Garmon II, mankind had fought back against the cataclysms of the Age of Strife.
Two great battles had already been fought over the fortress hive: the first under forces despatched by Lord Dorn at the start of the war, when the Imperium had seized control from a small traitor garrison, the second when Horus’ massed armies had taken it back. And now, in the true spirit of relentless escalation, Sanguinius’ armada came to take it again.
Blood Angels fleet vessels cleared a descent corridor through the fields of debris surrounding the world. It was slow work, hampered by the danger of void junk impact as much as by the enemy. Defence laser fire spitting up from the hive fortresses obliterated more wrecks than it did active ships, and the Anvil, whose presence alone was once a deterrent against invasion, was silent, much of its capability lost earlier in the war. Suppression strikes against the largest batteries were launched from multiple craft in the Imperial Fleet. Explosions flowered across the planet’s dayside. Hives burned. The risk to civilians was paid little consideration.
From orbit the bodies of god-machines brought low earlier in the war were visible against the uniform drabness of the surface, like the bodies of crushed insects. Towards these corpses hundreds more war engines came, fresh recruits fed into the slaughter, in a desperate push reminiscent of mankind’s first, bloody forays into industrialised warfare, millennia ago.
The Great Mother’s drop-ship was down first among the Legio. All six drop-ships from the Artemisia deposited their cargoes gently upon the surface, their void shields sparkling under fire as they descended, and then again as they returned to the metal-choked anchorages of Beta-Garmon II.
Mohana Mankata Vi needed no time at all to interface fully with Luxor Invictoria. She slipped into its mind without making a ripple in its being, as unconsciously as an elderly human couple, long pair-bonded, might join hands as they walked. The idea of Mohana Mankata Vi was a ridiculous thing to her now. Only the Titan truly existed, her soul and its machine-spirit together, as one, though the sensation of control she had over the twain was an illusion. She was the iridescent film of oil upon a wide lake, soon to be stirred away into nothing, and lost.
For the time being, Mohana Mankata Vi remained the guiding consciousness of the god-engine. To the honking blare of alarms and the spinning of warning lumens, drop-ship wargates fore and aft swung wide. Sickly yellow daylight battled the artificial glow of the transit beacons, followed by a far more aggressive spill of fine dust. It was already drifting inside the ship by the time, only seconds later, the retaining clamps snapped open, fuelling and data lines fell away from the Titans, and Mohana Mankata Vi’s myrmidons exited with practised efficiency. The Great Mother was last out, stepping into the gap behind her lead two bodyguard machines, as the others came around the drop-ship to take up position behind her, framing her in a box of plasteel and ceramite.
‘My daughters, look!’ she proclaimed. ‘Is this not glorious?’
Through lemon-yellow skies the might of Mars’ empire descended. Scores of Titan drop craft were putting down under the cover of a suppressive bombardment that shook the planet. They floated down serenely, the effortless appearance of their landing belying the immense efforts needed to keep them aloft. Gravity engines put out a constant thrumming that, when produced by such a number of vessels, created a complex web of noise that wrong-footed the senses and shook the bones. Plasma jets roared with the outrage of captive dragons. Exhaust vents glowed hot. Daggers of blue fire stabbed into the earth when the ships came into land, turning it to steaming glass that landing claws shattered as the weight of the craft sank into the earth. Titans stepped from individual drop coffins, in maniples from larger ships, and in some rare instances en masse as full demi-Legio from the maws of giant, atmospherically capable conveyors bigger than the Artemisia or the Tantamon.
There was debris upon the plain from millennia of war. Wind-scoured outcrops nearby could have been natural formations, but a cursory scan showed the reinforcement built into them; they were the pilings from long-vanished structures of which now nothing else remained. Masses of metal beneath the ground were the buried remnants of battles fought at the height of the Age of Strife, while upon the surface, already being swallowed by snaking tendrils of sand and dust, were the blackened shells of armoured vehicles, fallen voidships and Titans, all dead in the battles for Nyrcon City.
The landing zone was well out of the range of the city’s artillery batteries and so far away even the void-scraping height of Nyrcon was lost to the haze choking the air. Nothing but the passage of defence laser blasts was visible – dazzling flashes in the sky, heard as the sharp rolling of artificial thunder, felt through the inconstant fall of microbeads glassed from the dusty air.
The Legio ships were under fire. Laser blasts chased them all the way down from orbit to the ground. Imperial Army and Legiones Astartes fighters raced among them, hunting down missiles aimed at the drop craft. Further out, more aircraft duelled with enemy fighters, keeping them back from the landing zone. The defence could not be flawless. There were casualties. A coffin ship fell burning through the sky, slightly too fast, outpacing its stately, undamaged fellows and breaking apart like a crumpled rations-can on impact. The doors burst outwards, and the machine inside, already dead, toppled out.
The greatest of all the Titans were the great Imperators. Of the many hundred god-engines present there were but three on the loyalist side, war machines so huge they made the mighty Warlord class seem small and pathetic. They were too large to be landed by standard craft. Two came down in drop-ships custom built to house them. Though of differing designs, they were similar in appearance, bristling with weapons and decorated with the utmost care to glorify the machines within.
The third Imperator had no ship large enough to bear it, so instead was suspended in a web of cables and brought down by a dozen labouring freight shuttles whose engines screamed in complaint at their burden. When the Titan’s feet put down, explosive bolts attached to its limbs, akropoliz, weapons and head blew. The cables slackened, whipped back under the shuttles, and w
ere severed at the other end so that they fell like plummeting snakes to the sand, freeing the freight craft to ascend back into orbit.
The last Imperator down was thus the first to walk. Its movement was saluted by a growing wave of war-horn song that repeated and strengthened as the immense doors to the other Imperators’ drop-ships swung wide, and they too stepped out. These machines were the gods of the god-engines, and were greeted as such. A path was cleared rapidly to the front so they might walk by and be feted: Magna Bellifica, Warscorn and Terra’s Calling, of the Legios Astorum, Gryphonica and Osedax respectively. Whose colours they wore was irrelevant. Where they went, the Machine-God strode the universe in person.
War-horns sang different songs and different pitches for the Legios. Vox communications were disrupted by the storm and enemy action, and the melancholic calls of the machines were as much use as more sophisticated means of communication in calling units together. As the Imperators passed, the vocal salute broke up, and the Titans sang to others of their order to bring them into formation.
First Maniple’s drop-ship let out a pained roaring and began to lumber into the sky, its door shutting completely only when it was a hundred metres overhead. The voids glittered in the sandstorm.
Other ships from the Artemisia were revealed by its departure. Five more maniples stepped out, each one reinforced by survivors of lost formations. Coffin ships disgorged more. At fifty god-engines, Legio Solaria’s presence was a mighty force by the reckoning of the crusade, but having so many there was a painful reminder to Mohana Mankata Vi of what they had lost; the machines on the field accounted for most of the Legio’s depleted strength.
The stressed voxcasts of landing marshals urged Mohana Mankata Vi to clear the landing zone, and she obeyed. She was walking as the last of the Legio Solaria were still putting down, leading her daughters to their muster point and a gathering of Titans like no other before.