by Guy Haley
Three of her four myrmidons fought alongside her yet. Two were undamaged, but the third, Adamantine Heart, was badly battered. Its pelvic gyroscopic arrays had taken a hit, and it moved with a cripple’s walk. One arm terminated in a tangled mess of blackened plasteel and wire. The loss of a void shield projector made it more vulnerable still. Under normal circumstances, Mohana would have ordered Adamantine Heart away, and it would have been retrieved. There was no chance of that on the plains of Nyrcon.
They moved through broken hills of twisted metal. Not only god-machines littered the plain, but also massive pieces of debris blasted from the hive or fallen from orbit. The four Titans stalked their prey like a pride of lions hugging the scrub. The battle had fragmented into a thousand smaller confrontations, ideal hunting for the likes of the Legio Solaria.
An auspex return pinged in Mohana Mankata Vi’s mind.
‘Contact,’ she said. ‘Nine hundred metres and closing.’ Her words were carried as impulses to her myrmidon princeps, tagged to the auspex feed. The bright pulse of a heat source glowed on the far side of a mound of wreckage come down from the hive. All of them shared it.
Without needing to be ordered, the Titans spread out, Adamantine Heart holding back to cover Luxor Invictoria’s rear. The other two Warlords, Sagitta Auri and Astra Venator stalked forward.
‘Power profiles to low,’ Mohana Mankata Vi ordered. To her practised eye the target was probably a lure. ‘Supposition of probable ambush. Make them think we are incautious, then counter and destroy.’
With Sagitta Auri and Astra Venator out in front, the maniple moved forward towards the end of the hill of metal and broken rockcrete. They trod nimbly over lesser piles of debris and heaps of earth thrown up by the impact.
Mohana remained alert for other contacts. She was not disappointed.
As the maniple neared the end of the broken hive spire, a dozen fresh contacts sprang into life.
‘Fifteen engines minoris. Knights, three banners. Engaging,’ communicated Sagitta Auri’s princeps, Catarin Mej.
Inaccurate fusion and battle cannon fire streaked past the lead Titans. Their void shields shone.
‘Forwards into them. Adamantine Heart, about and hold the rear.’
Mohana Mankata Vi swung her Titan to the left, so that they were facing the mess of metal. Their minds conjoined; she had no need to order her crew to perform a deep auspex sweep of the ruin. It simply happened, easy as blinking. Cavities and densities shone in contrasting colours in her mind’s eye.
A Knight’s reactor detonated with an underwhelming, sucking bang. Sagitta Auri and Astra Venator’s void shields whooped. Their weapons arms swept across the field, striking out at the nimble Knights. The lesser engines were attempting to get around the back, to surround the lead pair of Warlords and bring down the void shields by attacking from all sides. Gatling cannons chewed up the ground. Rounds deflected from ion shields. The Knights were good but some were inexperienced. One was a little slow swinging his ion shield around to cover his side, earning a direct hit and spectacular death from Sagitta Auri’s laser blasters.
The Knights scattered, their formations melting and reforming. All their actions were distraction. More reactor signs were igniting on the other side of the ridge. A full maniple of traitor god-machines lay in wait. Standard engagement tactics dictated they would come around both sides of the obstruction and catch First Maniple in a crossfire while they were dealing with the Knights.
Mohana Mankata Vi was not going to allow that to happen.
If they had weathered the battle with a full number of engines, she surmised the enemy to be skilled. Even if they were an ad hoc formation of survivors, that still implied a certain level of intelligence when so many other Titans fought alone. It would pay to be cautious. Before she acted, she let the enemy maniple split, three of them heading around the near end towards Sagitta Auri and Astra Venator, two back towards the rear where Adamantine Heart waited. Her lead Titans’ void shields suffered for the pause, but if she moved too soon, her counterattack would be spotted and Legio Solaria would likely lose.
‘Hold ground. On my command, push through. Adamantine Heart, maintain position.’
As she spoke she was already searching out a weak spot in the metal wall before her. Finding it swiftly, she discharged all her weapons, bringing down a section of crumpled hive skin in an avalanche of plasteel.
The enemy would have seen that. Time was of the essence.
Luxor Invictoria bowed its head and charged into the gap. Metal screeched on the carapace. The Titan jarred as a sheet caught on its laser blasters. Mohana forced it through, ignoring the sympathetic pains of jagged edges slicing into Luxor Invictoria’s armour plating.
The Titan burst through into a void and quickly crossed, then smashed through feeble interior walls into an insect hive of rooms. The partitions were paper thin to the giant machine, and posed no more resistance to it than a wasp’s nest would to a wrecking ball.
Mohana felt her foot snag. The Titan staggered, but her crew were the best in the Legio, and her steerswoman corrected the error. The skin of the spire’s far side was near.
‘Now,’ she ordered. Luxor Invictoria’s plasma reactor rumbled as the twin volcano cannons charged.
Outside, Sagitta Auri and Astra Venator lumbered forwards, breaking their way through the darting banners of Knights. They swatted a couple to pieces with their weapons but otherwise paid them no heed. Their true quarry was ahead.
The myrmidons emerged around the point of the fallen spire into a punishing barrage. The Imperial Hunters opened fire themselves with every weapon at their disposal, but with three Warlord Titans against two, their void shield banks dropped rapidly.
Now was the moment. Luxor Invictoria blasted a hole in the outer wall, stepped back, and barged through.
She came out firing. The three enemy Titans had their backs to her. The other two were rounding the far end of the ruin. With a skill born of years of service, she had her engine target the enemy nearest to her daughter engines. Its void shields were already on the verge of collapse, and her laser blasters took the last down.
‘Volcano cannon,’ she commanded.
The gargantuan laser weapons fired once, their discharge twinned burning scalpels of photonic might that sliced neatly into the Titan’s back, laying open its reactor. Fortune was with her, and the power plant gushed roaring gas over the two Titans still facing Sagitta Auri and Astra Venator, spoiling their aim and taxing their void shields. The damaged Titan collapsed, plasma boiling from its broken back. A concentrated volley from her laser blasters brought down one of the other Titan’s void shields.
‘Recharge weapons!’ she commanded.
Mohana’s laser blasters were at full power within seconds. The volcano cannon took much longer to charge. She could not tarry, so had her engine walk backwards, playing the multiple shots of her blaster over the leftmost Titan. Belatedly, the enemy split and began to pace away from the conflict. Sagitta Auri and Astra Venator moved up, Knights still snapping at their heels. The left-hand enemy’s final shield went out as the volcano cannon’s ready notification sang clear and high in the manifold.
‘Left-hand engine, right leg,’ she commanded.
Again the spears of light were cast. They slammed into the knee, melting the thigh armour and welding the joint solid. The Titan wobbled, thrown off balance as it attempted to take a step. Shots from First Maniple’s engines in front of it sheared off its right arm, before a splash of plasma from a sunfury annihilator took off its head, and it stopped dead, ablaze from carapace to waist.
Now there was one enemy Titan remaining, Mohana left it to Sagitta Auri and Astra Venator. Luxor Invictoria swung around. Mohana thought-ordered the reactor to full output, rerouting her energy supplies to the locomotors, and urged her Titan to pursue the remaining pair of the enemy maniple around the far end of the spi
re.
She found them venting fire at the damaged Adamantine Heart. The Legio Solaria Warlord fared badly, and had taken more damage. Surrounded by void displacement and the tremendous energies of Titan weapons firing, the enemy were blind to Mohana Mankata Vi’s approach. Luxor Invictoria opened fire directly behind them. Although the Titan the Great Mother chose was possessed of a full complement of voids, the potency of her weaponry was so great it overwhelmed the shield’s ability to dissipate the shots, and the Titan was carved in two.
Outgunned, the second Titan retreated. Luxor Invictoria traded fire with it until it was out of sight in the dust-clogged wastes.
Knights of House Vi had emerged from the sand and were aiding Sagitta Auri and Astra Venator in finishing off the last engine of the enemy maniple. But the engagement was not won without cost.
Adamantine Heart was crippled.
Energy spikes from its damaged reactor core provoked loud warnings from Luxor Invictoria’s systems, imploring her to back away, but the Great Mother held her ground.
‘My daughter,’ she said.
Gehana Amana was the princeps. Her voice came over the vox clear and free of the influence of the machine. She had come out of the manifold.
‘Great Mother, Adamantine Heart is critically damaged. We must beg your permission to abandon the hunt.’
‘Permission granted,’ the Great Mother said. Adamantine Heart’s reactor surges were growing wilder by the moment. ‘Go. Live.’ The crew’s chances of survival outside of the machine were slim. The environmental conditions were awful, and men died where god-machines fought.
‘Evacuation under way,’ Amana voxed.
Mohana Mankata Vi fearlessly strode past the crippled engine. As they passed, Luxor Invictoria lowed a mighty vocal salute to his wounded sister.
Explosive bolts blew all around the head, and it flew free on a short-lived burst of propellant, carrying the command crew away. Tiny figures rappelled down from the rear balcony and began to run.
Mohana Mankata Vi wished them well in her heart.
Adamantine Heart’s reactor blew as the remainder of the maniple drew away. The yellow glare of its detonation lit up the battlefield as bright as a day on Old Earth, before war drew its curtains of dust across the plains again.
Twenty-Seven
Eye of the Needle
Nuntio Dolores had a new voice. The old music had gone. Its war-horns growled and spat sounds too close to words for Harrtek’s comfort, articulating the bloody desires of its new and furious soul.
Outwardly little seemed different about Nuntio Dolores. Its mechanical motion was supplanted by a more organic fluidity, but this was not something that would be obvious to someone not deeply familiar with the operation of god-engines.
It was within that Ardim Protos’ ritual had made the greatest change. Like any Titan, Legio Vulpa’s war machines took on the personality imprints of their masters, and as a result they were belligerent, impatient and revelled in destruction. Nuntio Dolores’ old soul was well known for its fury. It was nothing compared to the thing that occupied the engine now.
None of the machine readings made any sense. According to the infosphere’s monitoring systems, the networked cogitators, logic engines and servitors that supported the Titan’s machine-spirit were malfunctioning. They no longer spoke to one another. Detailed breakdowns of logic-engine traffic showed nonsensical bursts of high activity that dropped to nothing and rose again, repeatedly stressing the components. Nothing but gibberish code emanated from them.
It was as if they were screaming.
The servitor brains were dying. Wafts of spoiling meat drifted through the czella from the containment jar arrays deeper in the machine. Where the servitors possessed more of their bodies, they were muscle-locked rigid, the remains of their faces a rictus of howling rage. Their eyes, once dead and stripped of intelligence, rolled in their faces with a lunatic’s anger.
The landscape of the manifold had altered beyond recognition. If Harrtek attempted to visualise the machine-spirit, he was confronted by a standing wave of boiling blood in whose red surface flensed skulls appeared and were sucked back in. Behind it was the new soul of the machine. Furious, truculent, yet bound to Harrtek’s will. It would not let itself be seen, but he felt its immortal might, far greater than anything that could be called forth by science alone. It possessed an awareness the old machine-spirit did not.
Into this deadly being Terent Harrtek’s soul slotted.
The Harrtek of the crusade would have been appalled by this perversion of his war machine, but he revelled in his stolen power. Never had the term ‘god-engine’ seemed so apt.
New power surged through him as the Titan approached the defences ringing the base of the Carthega mountain. The peak had lost its name, subsumed by that of the structure that was built upon it. The bare rock of the mountain’s base was the needle’s footing, and though remade by mankind into a neatly tiered array of defences, its natural origins remained evident, here and there.
Harrtek and the other altered Titans marched directly at the defence lines alone. Protos had arrogantly committed them to this fight as a demonstration of their power. They were the line breakers, sent to open a way up the mountain for those that came behind. Eight Warlords were inadequate for the task. Before the ritual Harrtek would have refused, but a bloody recklessness had him. The result of the battle didn’t matter to him, only the fight, the chance to spill blood and take heads. Such pleasure filled him as the Titans neared the lines, wild, uncaring and free of thought.
The storm hid them until they were ten kilometres out. Thereafter, the defences of the Carthega Telepathica opened fire.
Thousands of guns spoke. Wide shots slammed into the water sheeting over the lower slopes. Many hit home, but the void shields held, shining with a new, ruddy light where they were struck. Leering, daemonic faces scudded over the energy skin, jaws wide to consume the ordnance falling through the rain.
The Titans built up to a run, pounding up the steepening incline, their feet gouging giant prints into soft shale. The rains had turned the mountainside into a riverine playground. Streams sped down rockcrete channels. Water leapt in muddy arcs from gutter spouts in the walls. It oozed from strata of rock. It poured off the Titan’s carapaces. The Titans spread out. Even so their massive weight caused slips in the land that would have felled less nimble machines, but against all odds they climbed upwards towards the lowest line, surrounding the first set of gates and towers that barred the needle’s principal road.
Harrtek was raging, shouting nonsense. There was no coordination between the eight. They were no maniple, but a collection of mighty machine champions. They held their fire until they were close, but when the first let fly with a barrage of rockets, the rest followed suit, and the space between the Titans and the wall was filled with violent light traded between towers and god-engines.
Nuntio Dolores was angered that it was not the first to fire, and increased speed to be the first at the walls. Laser blasters and volcano cannon fired simultaneously at a tower. Alarms blared all over the czella as the reactor spiked dangerously, but neither Harrtek nor the Titan cared about the stress. Void shields collapsed around the bastion, and it trained its own guns on the approaching Warlord. Harrtek screamed violent words from languages he did not know. As soon as the volcano cannon was charged again, he fired it, though more tocsins blared, warning of overheating and the damage it could cause the gun.
The cannon’s beam bored through the rain, turning precipitation to roiling steam and carving its ionisation mark into the air. The
tower’s base evaporated. Laser blaster shots riddled it, tearing the breach wider, and the tower slumped down, falling from the wall, tearing out a hole in the reinforced rockcrete. Pathetic streaks of lasgun shots stabbed out from the walls either side where desperate men waited to die.
Harrtek sidestepped the tumble of rubble slipping down the hill, leaning his machine into the rising slope. There was no divide between he and the creature bound to the Titan. They were one, and he felt the body of the machine as his own: every drop of rain that hit his armour, the slip of the mountainside as he climbed upwards, the pressure in the Titan’s hydraulic tubing and play of the motive force down every cable. He knew it better than his own body. He laughed madly, carried away with the sensations filling him, urged on by the need to spill blood.
‘Protos! Protos!’ he cackled. ‘Had you told me what you had for me, I would have said yes immediately!’
He reached the wall. With his mighty fist he gripped the breach left by the fallen tower and heaved, pulling the Titan through the line. The disruption fields surrounding the arioch’s fingers rent the atomic structure of the fortifications apart, and he was forced to dig deeper and deeper as he hauled himself up.
As he passed through, his cockpit head was level with the rampart. Terrified men in sealed rainwear fired into his face. They were within the aegis, and their shots bored into armour, but they could not harm him. Harrtek laughed; it emerged from the Titan’s war-horns as a diabolical sound that froze the soldiers or sent them fleeing. He shouldered his way further in, swivelling his laser blasters to gun down the men as they ran.
Then he was into the ring, on the inside of the walls. The ground had been planed flat to allow god-engines to bolster the defences, and the going became easy. He stalked around the ring towards the access road, firing at will, targeting shield generators and munitions dumps, blowing out the backs of towers and mowing down infantry by the score. His brothers in blood were making their own ingress points, tearing and blasting through the walls. Only one of their number had succumbed to the enemy. It burned as it walked under heavy fire, before finally succumbing and falling down. For a moment it lay still, and then something in it gave. A sheet of fire roared skywards. For a moment it was a face screaming out a mix of frustration and joy at release, then nothing but scattered lightning, racing off through the yellow cloud.