Titandeath

by Guy Haley

  The battle faltered. Las-beams still struck, shells still flew. Void shields thrummed and crackled. Nothing could stop the war of men-machines; there were too many devices on board the Titans dedicated to the continuation of violence: half-minds and mental extensions that performed tasks with near autonomy. But if weapons did not fall silent and slip from slackened grips as would have been the case when war was closer and more personal, the men and women whose souls the god-machines borrowed were still affected. Awe and fear entered the hearts of them all.

  The light changed, like a bright sun moving behind a cloud and casting the world back into daytime shadow. Sanguinius returned to what he was, a being created by the pinnacle of humanity’s genomic arts, godlike, but not a god. A storm of missiles rushing at the traitor warlords from the wings of the Stormbirds took the vision’s place, with Sanguinius and his escort of false angels at their centre.

  Sanguinius folded back his wings, sending himself into a steep, rapid dive. The Imperator Axis Mundi grew before him. It wore a face that boldly proclaimed the sensibilities of its new masters – a skull, weeping tears of blood carved from faceted gemstones the size of a Space Marine.

  Las-beams flicked blind needle-jabs. Graceful arcs of tracer bullets curved towards him. A single hit to his wing and he would fall into the broil of fire and death. There were none, though projectiles filled the space around him.

  I do not die here today, he thought. Within his helm he gritted his teeth. Welters of data spread themselves over his helmplate. Most urgent to his suit cogitator was the strength of Axis Mundi’s void shields, and it presented the facts of this front and centre, ornamented with red runes that promised imminent disaster, with pertinent numerical details in large amber digits to prove the warnings’ veracity. According to the systems of his golden plate, the void shields were still engaged, and at high levels of potency. Sanguinius was coming in too fast. He would trip their displacement reaction. If he were fortunate, he would be atomised as his being was displaced into the warp. If he were not, he would arrive there alive.

  ‘I do not die here today,’ he whispered.

  The combat chatter of his Legion rattled in his ears. His sons were terse, to the point, never boasting, never jibing. They were efficient killers. The Anvil was taking too long to capture. If it were not wrested from the traitors’ hands, the battle on the ground would be for nothing.

  ‘I do not die here today,’ he said again, louder.

  He knew where he would die. He was going to die at the hands of his brother upon the Vengeful Spirit. Horus’ grinning, exultant face dogged his every waking moment. The pain of his death seeped backwards down the timeline, polluting the present, hurting him now, becoming more tangible as he approached that final breath. And beyond that fateful moment, in the future, the pain grew, as his death unleashed in full the terrible twin curses locked up in his sons’ geneseed.

  His geneseed.

  But not today, not now.

  ‘I do not die here today!’ he said. He held his sword out, point forwards. Axis Mundi was too mighty a being to concern itself with something as inconsequential as a primarch, and ignored him. Its defenders shot at him from the towers of the fortress akropoliz that clung to its back. The Titan concerned itself with its god-sized equals, unleashing apocalyptic weaponry at the foe machines. It carried the same armament on each upper limb, vast cannons capable of slaying Warlords with a single shot. They spat electric blue rivers of plasma into the Imperial ranks that crackled and buzzed and beat at Sanguinius with stellar heat. When they shut off, they left broad, glowing tunnels of ionisation through the air. Every discharge was accompanied by a deafening whooping, and a shock-front of incandescent gas. Each eruption consumed thousands of litres of coolant; the waste gases whooshed out of the weapon vents ranged towards the rear, bleeding out the weapons’ heat with it. Then the process began again, the individual cells in the charging coils lighting in sequence, preparing to unleash death. It fired again. The heat was near enough to singe the primarch’s feathers, and when the streams shut off he was buffeted by the overpressure of a reactor detonation.

  Axis Mundi deigned to see him. The head moved. The eyes on an Imperator were large enough to serve as true occuli. Tiny figures moved on the command deck behind them. The Titan might hold him in contempt, but its crew deemed him a threat. The fire coming from the fortress intensified.

  ‘I do not die here today!’ Sanguinius shouted at Axis Mundi in open challenge.

  The Titan was ahead of him. He would be on it in seconds. Its immensity was all too apparent so close. From its bastion feet to the top of the tallest tower, it was nearly twice the height of a Warlord Titan, and much heavier. A small army was garrisoned within. Tech-thralls and skitarii lined the ramparts, adding their fire to that of emplaced guns. Bullets streaked past that tingled Sanguinius’ inhuman senses with the buzz of radioactivity. The alarms of his helm were blaring at him. The void shields were visible as a thin skin of purple-blue – not quite there in a real sense, they looked out of place upon reality, like pressed flowers slipped into a book of technical blueprints. They presented great danger.

  ‘I do not die here today!’ he roared.

  Missiles loosed by his gunships slammed into the void shields, together with a concentrated barrage from his ships in orbit. Lances boomed through heat-shocked air. Fire rolled around the machine. The voids gave out with squealing pops, but when the fire cleared and the last of the lances snapped off, Axis Mundi was unscathed. More warnings sang at him. The Titan’s reactor would have the void shields online again in seconds.

  Other god-engines were taking the chance to attack the unshielded Imperator. Its armour was thick. Paint blistered, metal ran, but no damage was done, and power signatures building in the reactor heart informed Sanguinius that his opportunity was limited.

  ‘I do not die here today!’

  He flew in fast, his warriors boosting their winged jumppacks to keep pace with him. He alighted on the akropoliz battlements amid a blizzard of las-light and bullets.

  Then the killing began.

  The cyborg warriors of the Mechanicum felt no fear. Not as the Space Marines were fearless, whose alterations and conditioning enabled them to discount the emotion, or funnel it into more productive uses, but who still experienced it, no – the cyborgs could not feel it at all. The parts of the brain responsible for this most preservative of emotions were excised or bypassed. Even if they experienced fear, most of them could be brought under the complete control of their masters at the flick of a switch, and be sent to their deaths whatever their sentiments on the matter.

  Between them, the Blade Encarmine and the Spear of Telesto oblit­erated every warrior who came against the primarch. Gobbets of flesh spattered his battleplate. Blood sprayed up the rampart walls. Oil ran freely from the rampart guttering. Metal rang off ceramite armour. A hulking myrmidon clad in black ran from a tower doorway as Sanguinius despatched a brace of tech-thralls. He spun about and levelled the spear, its arcane energy projectors vaporising the cyborg into mist.

  His sons were landing amid the wrathful bombardment of the loyal Titans, guns blazing, jets roaring, alighting on the wall-walk and the towers between eruptions of fire. They landed scrabbling on the dome of the head; they arced gracefully down onto the walkway between akropoliz and czella as god-weapons carved out scars on the Titan’s thick hide. Death was around them, but they did not care. They were death. Their bolters banged death’s drumbeat, each lick ending in a catastrophic crash that sundered the organic from the artificial, and rendered the question of the weakness of the flesh moot.

  Sanguinius’ teeth itched. An annoying whine clawed at his ears. With an otherworldly note halfway between music and a shout of triumph, the Imperator’s voids sprang back into life. Most of his sons had landed, but not all. Three passed through the raised voids without harm. Two more were displaced by the warp tech defences; one
vanished in a clap of orange light, the other disintegrated, a severed golden arm crashing down in front of Sanguinius, bolter emptying itself in the dead man’s grip.

  He paused a moment. The arm reminded him of the wound inflicted upon Azkaellon by Curze. It reminded him of all the insults inflicted on his sons by the traitors. His anger grew. Red, strong, atavistic.

  ‘Into the Titan! Kill them all!’ he bellowed. His warriors were happy to obey, slaughtering the so-called New Mechanicum’s slaves like helpless livestock and disappearing within the many portals that led inside the akropoliz. Sanguinius cast around for a swift solution the problem of Axis Mundi. He glanced down, to his left, to where the mighty head swung across the field seeking new victims between the sheets of fire and energy blazing off its void shields. Within his helm, Sanguinius’ eyes narrowed and fixed upon his target. He turned, opened wide his wings, and leapt.

  Borrowed glimpses of the chaos inside the Imperator played over Sanguinius’ helmplate. He could, if he wished, view the autosenses feed of a hundred men at once, each vid image smaller than a new-born’s fingernail, though perfectly clear to his Emperor-made sight. Five Sanguinary Guard followed him down to the command head; the rest fought their way into the engine. Working in twos and threes, they scoured the fortress of hostiles, then began the long descent into the machine’s interior, towards its downdecks and the vulnerable mechanisms they housed.

  A laudable strategy, but Sanguinius was set on a literal decapitation strike, something that would be seen, something that would be noted. As he plummeted to the head, he couched the Spear of Telesto under his left arm and let fly with its energy burst. How the weapon generated the pulses was unknown; it was a thing of high science, a relic of greater days, and little in the current diminished age could resist its power.

  Where energy blast met the head, it disintegrated a perfectly round hole, neat as trepanation. Ceramite-plasteel alloy, honeycombed plascrete and adamantium skull plate vanished together. The gap seemed too small for the primarch’s body, but he stretched his wings high over his head so that his primary feathers touched, while his feet threaded the needle’s eye of the hole. From leap to blast to ingress to the command deck took two seconds, far too little time for the crew to react.

  Golden boots clanged hard on deck plating. Sanguinius was moving before the ringing impact died, allowing five of his sons to follow him. Moderati started in their command thrones. Lesser servants of the neokora goggled at this avatar of vengeance come into their midst.

  Their princeps was the first to react, understandably so. He stood upon an elaborate dais, encased in a full haptic harness and his blinded eye sockets plugged directly into the great machine’s senses, but still he saw.

  ‘Bring him down!’ he roared, the Titan’s war-horn blare voicing his panic simultaneously.

  The command czella of the Imperator was impressive, not like the cramped spaces that accommodated the crew of smaller Titans. It had many commonalities with a void ship command deck, though the architecture bore the signs of religious expression absent from those of the Emperor’s forces. It was as much a temple to the living Machine-God as a control room, its systems adorned with multiple iterations of the glowering, half-cybernetic skulls of the Opus Machina. These had been defiled, the foreheads branded with the eye of Horus and the unclean octed symbol of Chaos that, though executed with great art, seemed to have a crudeness that lessened the character of the entire deck.

  Myrmidons in the black of the Dark Mechanicum lurched into sudden life from sentry alcoves about the bridge’s upper deck. They came for the primarch with fearless purpose. All were armed with wicked close-combat attachments sheathed in disruption fields; the potency of the Mechanicum’s ranged weapons rendered them unsuitable for use in so sacred a place.

  Mechanicum myrmidons were warrior-priests, dedicating their lives to the Machine-God through battle. They had four arms, or six. Their brains and remaining organs were protected by centimetres of armour plating. Every one of them had a century of practice backed up with terabytes of inloaded combat engrams. Those selected to guard the holiest of holies were the most elite, and were a match for the Sanguinary Guard.

  Furious combat erupted as the two forces met. Bolts scored the air and burst on armoured walls. Disruptor fields roared as they clashed. Moderati attempted to pilot their giant charge while battle raged around them. The princeps howled imprecations. The armoured gates to the Titan’s antae opened and tech-guard streamed within, raising uranium carbines and volkites against the Blood Angels. A Sanguinary Guard died, then a second. Four myrmidons fell in return. A moderati steersman slumped over his desk, his back blown out by a stray bolt. Servitors jerked in their alcoves as they were hit. The movements of the god-machine became erratic.

  ‘The primarch, slay the primarch!’ shouted the priests.

  Sanguinius rose up to his full height. He cast the veil of mortality aside, giving the false prophets of the Machine-God a clear view of his full and terrifying power.

  ‘I do not die here today!’ he roared.

  With the Blade Encarmine he cleaved a myrmidon in twain, spun around, knocked another back with a blow from his wings as he brought the Spear of Telesto up, levelled it, and fired.

  The cone of energy burst over a Sanguinary Guard battling two myrmidons. He was preserved. The emissions of the spear would harm none of the Blood, and the Sanguinary Guard was not even staggered, but the myrmidons were shattered into scrap. The blast slammed into the princeps and consumed him also.

  Having lost the lynchpin of the god-engine’s neural architecture, the moderati were subjected to the full force of the Imperator’s mighty soul. They began to scream.

  Sanguinius was a living golden wind. His blades whirled and descended, leaving nought but ruin in their wake. The tech-guard were slain, driven back, and held in the door. The myrmidons died. The great Titan lumbered drunkenly, tipping sideways, setting the deck at an angle. Bodies and machine parts skidded over the ground.

  ‘Finish it!’ ordered Sanguinius, as he stood alone in the gate and held back the engine’s frantic garrison.

  Two of the five Sanguinary Guard that had come with him into the czella remained. They put up their weapons and unclasped melta flasks from their thighs. They had only one apiece, but their keen minds identified the most vulnerable parts of the machine’s command systems, and they clamped the fusion charges in place there.

  The moderati were screaming without drawing breath. Bright fires shot from their eye sockets as they jerked like the victims of electrocution. Alarms blared from every quarter. Panicked shouts came from deep within the god-machine.

  ‘Evacuate,’ ordered Sanguinius. Still slaughtering the skitarii coming to the door, he aimed his spear behind him, and blew out one of the great cathedral windows that served the god-engine for eyes.

  The sounds of metal giants at war roared in from outside. Dust, smoke and the smell of burning filled up the czella.

  ‘Withdraw, my sons! Withdraw!’

  The two guard ran for the broken eye, jump packs igniting. They spread their metal wings, and soared away.

  Sanguinius backed away from the door, killing the men-machines that spilled after him. Their fury was so great at his desecration of their temple that they threw their lives away thoughtlessly.

  Step by step, he moved across the heaving deck, sword and spear spinning about him, every move calculated to end a life. Anger that was equal to his brother Angron’s, and as much a part of him as Angron’s was, rose through his body, empowering his strikes, pushing his engineered reflexes to supernatural speeds.

  The Titan was staggering about, hardly under control at all. Its war-horns howled the moderati’s pain.

  The last of the tech-guard fell. The melta bombs neared the end of their countdown.

  Sanguinius strode to the broken window. Before he leapt, he looked behind him to the broken bod
ies tumbling over the canting deck, and the moderati thrashing in agony within their bonds.

  ‘So shall perish all who defy the will of the Emperor, whether mortal man, or mighty engine.’

  As he dropped from the window, the meltacharges blew.

  A contained fusion reaction slagged the central MIU interface altar. The second burned through the power balancing relays, then sank through the molten hole it had made into the lower deck of the head.

  Sanguinius was soaring through the air, mighty wing-beats carrying him upwards towards his circling Stormbird, when a secondary explosion tore off the Imperator’s face. Void shields blew out in a catastrophic chain reaction. Fire pouring from its shattered neck, metal groaning, men screaming, the Titan toppled forward. Its knees bent, and its guns gouged at the earth as it kneeled. It came to a rest in a half bow, as if honouring its vanquisher.

  Imperial Titans greeted the sight of the fallen traitor with a mighty fanfare.

  The battle raged on.

  Sanguinius attacks Axis Mundi

  Twenty-Five

  Ill News

  Gales howled around the position of the Legio Solaria. There were only the nine of them up in their mountain eyrie, Esha Ani Mohana’s maniple and a handful of Titans orphaned by the destruction of their own units. Arrayed around the sides of an ancient landslip like votive statuettes placed on haphazard shelves, they rocked in the moaning wind. The gale called strange voices from the machines’ limbs, leaving the crew, trapped in the claustrophobic confines of the god-engines, with the eerie feeling of a haunting. Esha listened to the voices wail. They disquieted her not at all, but the same could not be said for all her warriors.

  ‘They are ghost voices,’ said Jephenir Jehan into the sepulchral quiet of the czella. ‘The lost souls of god-engines slain in the conflict have attached themselves to the living. They want the warmth of our reactors.’