by Guy Haley
‘He does not care,’ Harrtek said giddily. ‘He does not care whence the blood flows!’
Alarms sounded all over the Imperial defences, the rising-falling wail that had heralded destruction since the dawn of machine-aided wars. A squadron of tanks edged around a bastion and opened fire. Harrtek slew them all with a volcano shot. The minor spirits of the gun squealed in anguish. Coolant levels flashed at near depleted. It did not matter.
The guns on the upper levels had yet to begin firing on the lowest line, but that would not be long coming. Nuntio Dolores screamed up at them in challenge.
A war-horn answered.
Down the road from the second line a loyal Warlord strode. Rain pounded from its carapace, soaking its banners. Lightning and gunfire flash lit up its livery: blue and gold. A black sun was the principal device on its badge, that of the Legio Astorum, the Warp Runners. Water ran over its nameplate, Hegemon. Like Nuntio Dolores, it was equipped for close-quarter fighting; a claw the match of Harrtek’s own hung at its right side, and a sunfury cannon was its left hand. It swung off the road and marched towards Harrtek’s machine in direct challenge.
War-horns blaring, Hegemon opened fire. Rockets roared from the arrays atop the carapace, slamming into Harrtek’s voids. Alarms sang from every quarter as the first two shields collapsed. Harrtek made to fire with the volcano cannon, but it would not respond. A hot pain burned his fingers. He remembered himself a little, pulled back from the glorious, angry heat of the Titan’s new soul and saw that the cannon’s coolant was depleted. The laser blasters too had shut down for emergency cooling. He screamed impotently as more rockets weakened his third shield. Nuntio Dolores voiced scorn for its foe, a cry cut short when the sunfury fired.
A broad beam of electric white light slammed into Harrtek’s final shield and took it down. The plasma stream splashed against his left arm, bringing forth a cry of sympathetic pain from Harrtek. He bit hard, drawing blood from his tongue. Nuntio Dolores roared. Molten metal hissed from the wound. The upper arm section was weakened. Voices and tocsins in the czella yammered for his attention. Through a mouth full of blood he tried to speak.
‘Open fire. Open fire.’
For a moment he was within his own skull again. The czella was full of smoke. His moderati lolled in their chairs, seemingly dead, though none had a mark on them. He blinked, and for a split second he saw an organic chamber of pulsing membranes filled with dark blood.
He blinked again. The room was as it should be. His moderati worked. He moved his hand to his helm, and stopped. Viscous matter coated his sleeves and the throne’s arm, only reluctantly letting him move. He stared at it, suddenly feeling lost.
An impact rocked the Titan. Hegemon had closed. Bolts exploded all over Nuntio Dolores’ front plating as it drew back its fist for a final strike.
Harrtek let out a wordless roar, and Nuntio Dolores reached out from the fresh-minted hellscape of the manifold and dragged him back in.
Bound together in sacred union once more, the entity that was Nuntio Dolores and Harrtek combined lunged forwards. Its own arioch reached, and grabbed, closing on Hegemon’s fist as it descended for the killing blow. Disruption fields crackled and banged as loudly as the artillery as they meshed. For a second, the Titans were locked together, neither gaining advantage over the other. The sunfury rotated towards Nuntio Dolores’ midriff, charging coils lighting for a kill-shot, but Harrtek leaned into it, blocking it out with his volcano cannon. It fired anyway, the stream streaking past him harmlessly.
Slowly, slowly, Nuntio Dolores forced Hegemon’s claw backwards. There should have been little disparity between the Titans. They were of the same mark, and similar patterns, but though damaged, Nuntio Dolores was undoubtedly stronger. Hegemon’s arm was forced away. The Titan pressed its feet into the ground and leaned into its foe, but Nuntio Dolores pushed it back, its claw toes ripping up the paved surface of the defences.
A stealthy chime sounded, informing him the laser blasters were ready to fire again.
Harrtek shouted. Nuntio Dolores roared. With a great shove, he rammed the enemy Titan backwards, and yanked down hard.
Hegemon’s claw came free in his fist.
Harrtek took a step back. Laser blasters swivelled down to point directly at the enemy’s faceplate.
With a thought, he fired, and as the bolts of light smashed into his foe, he saw an axe descending over and over again.
Hegemon stumbled backwards, and tripped, going down hard. Harrtek left its corpse steaming in the rain.
‘Engine kill,’ said a voice that no machine could make, a dark and daemonic growl full of pleasure at the slaughter. It rang throughout the Titan, but it was loudest in the pits of Harrtek’s soul.
‘A skull for the Lord of Skulls,’ said the voice.
‘A skull for the skull throne,’ it said, and Harrtek whispered along with it. Blood from his tongue ran down his chin.
‘Blood, blood, blood!’ it growled, then Harrtek took up its chant and shouted.
‘Blood for the Blood God!’
The Titan screamed its victory to the world. The remaining possessed engines added their voices to the song. The first line had been breached by Legio Vulpa’s mechanical berserkers. The time was now, they signalled. Victory was nigh.
Out in the wastes, war-horns answered.
A hundred god-engines of the Warmaster’s most favoured Legio advanced in line, their pennants soaked by the downpour. Red and black they were, their liveries unmarked by months of war that had consumed their sibling orders by the dozen. Saved for the final, destructive task of bringing down the Carthega Telepathica, they had spent time others filled with fighting regrouping, repairing and preparing. They were fresh where others were exhausted, supplied where others carried empty weapons. Maniple after maniple of them emerged from the storm, ready and eager for the test ahead. Guns rippled out a hasty response from all tiers of the mountain’s defences. It would not be enough.
Legio Mortis, kept out of battle for many months, strode out of the rain in its entirety.
Twenty-Eight
Striking the Anvil
Explosions ripped through another bulkhead, tearing wide an entrance in the wall with flame and flying shrapnel.
‘Into them!’ Azkaellon cried. He stormed through the gap, taking three glancing rounds to his left side, then ignited his jump pack and jetted over the heads of the Sons of Horus in the shaft on the other side of the wall. The central power conduit for the entire fort, the shaft was a kilometre across, and many more times deep. Railless walkways ringed the well every few hundred metres. The flash and roar of close-fought battles occupied many. Glow from the Anvil’s powerful reactors shone up from the bottom, uplighting the war masks of the traitors, and making their armour’s barbarous embellishments appear even more savage. Two dozen Blood Angels were forcing their way in after Azkaellon, pushing back the traitors. Corpses of warriors killed by the explosion made for treacherous footing, but they came through fast, assailing a position the foe had thought secure until then. They had been firing upwards, pinning down another group of Azkaellon’s brothers. Once their threat was dealt with, the attack on the upper levels could continue to plan.
But first, the group had to be defeated.
Azkaellon dodged through bolts speeding from the companionway. His wide, artificial wings held him up, enhancing the jump pack’s capabilities and granting him something close to true flight. He looped about in the wide shaft and came back down, sword drawn back to strike at the traitors. A pair of bolts detonated on his plastron, marring the gold of the plate with carbon starbursts, but the artificer armour held. His sword descended, severing the arm of one Sons of Horus legionary and carving deep into the side of another, where it stuck fast.
He came down hard, using his blade to swing the wounded Space Marine to the brink of the shaft. With a
hard kick, he shoved the traitor from the end of his blade, sending him plummeting to his death. The one-armed Space Marine was reaching awkwardly across himself to draw his bolt pistol left-handed. Azkaellon raised his sword to cut him down, but a volley of boltgun fire from behind blew out the traitor’s reactor pack, and he fell dead.
‘Level secured,’ a Blood Angels sergeant voxed.
Azkaellon let his sword point drop. The last few traitors on the walkway were dying. Sea-green armoured bodies cluttered the grillwork floor, but there were more than a few red suits of battleplate lying among the dead.
He looked up. The pressure removed, the warriors on the upper floors were redoubling their attack. The shaft would soon be theirs.
‘Too costly,’ said Azkaellon. ‘We cannot afford more casualties of this scale.’
‘They fight like cornered animals. They have become reckless,’ said the sergeant.
‘That is what concerns me.’ He looked down the shaft to the reactor glow. As yet it burned steadily. ‘Then we must be quick if we cannot be careful. Onwards,’ he said.
Boots clattering, the Blood Angels ran on to their next encounter.
Battle raged all across the Anvil, from the flat top where walled citadels challenged the stars to the daggered bottom pointing its threat at Nyrcon City. The starfort had been a target in every conflict for the capital. Though it had been attended to by the Warmaster’s engineers following its capture some months before, still much of it was ruinous. Huge holes left decks by the hundred exposed to the void. Few of its ship-killing batteries remained, but although many of its teeth had been pulled, the Anvil was still of high strategic importance. If the Anvil remained in enemy hands, Nyrcon City would forever be at risk.
The Blood Angels warred to take it, with Azkaellon’s group heading to secure the reactors. The Sons of Horus infested every cranny. At first Azkaellon took the enemy’s numbers as confirmation of how highly Horus valued the Anvil, but as the fight wore on, the manner of his foes raised concerns. They were a ragtag army with little in the way of unit coherency. They fought with great energy but little coordination. Their support units were understrength, seemingly gathered at random from traitor regiments and Dark Mechanicum clades. Beta-Garmon had been the death of so many that this was not unusual – scarcely a unit of any sort remained without casualties – but even taking that into account, the Sons of Horus seemed less like a formation to him than a rabble.
He slaughtered the traitors as he pondered their nature. Their unit markings were obscured, in some cases their armour blackened in soot. Their trophies and fetishes were even more outlandish than those he had seen elsewhere. They were punishment battalions, so far as he could tell, and such penal troops were expendable.
You do not garrison a key strategic fortress with expendable troops, he thought.
His fears were borne out when they finally emerged into the reactor halls. They were immense, dozens of voidship-grade plasma hearts serial-linked to power the station. He fought through the desperate guardians of a major gate, impaling the last upon his crackling blade and allowing the traitor’s weight to pull the corpse free of the sword.
Seeing his prize so close, Azkaellon ordered his Techmarines to force the locks of the armoured gates while arranging his men for the last elements of resistance that would surely await them on the other side.
Locking pins disengaged with rolling booms. The doors hissed apart, opening up the first of the reactor chambers to view. Azkaellon raised his sword, ready to charge. A hundred bolters trained upon the gate.
Searing light flooded out from the naked balls of plasma dominating the chamber, which were held back only by invisible, magnetic fetters.
Azkaellon lowered his weapon. There were no more troops beyond. His misgivings grew.
He walked forwards.
‘My lord!’ cautioned one of his lieutenants.
‘I have to be sure,’ said Azkaellon, holding up his free hand. ‘Stay back.’
He walked to the edge of the gateway. Still no one came to attack him. To his right, huge tiered galleries of machines rose up opposite the reactor core. They were all unattended. All were smashed. His heart sank as he faced the lowest level of consoles, and saw the readings the machines displayed on their few undamaged screens.
‘By the Blood,’ he said. He turned back to his men. ‘Priority command, immediate evacuation. Everybody off the station!’ His vox officers went to work before he had finished speaking, their supplemental equipment cutting through the enemy’s denial broadcasts.
Azkaellon turned back to the displays. Red lines crept upwards. Soon, the reactor containment fields would fail, unleashing the energies they contained and turning the Anvil into a city-killing bomb.
‘Horus never intended to hold it,’ he said. ‘Nyrcon City is a trap.’
Twenty-Nine
Against the Walls of Nyrcon
They were attacking the walls again.
Five times the loyal Legio of Mars had made their assault against Nyrcon’s walls. Five times they had been thrown back. Mohana Mankata Vi walked with the last of her myrmidons, the Warlord Sagitta Auri. The rest were gone into death. Some time before, she had joined a party of six others, all of different Legios. Five deferred to her command. The last refused and walked away to his own demise.
The fates of her daughters were unknown, but she suspected the majority to be dead. Casualties on the traitor side were near total. Those of the Imperium were not far behind. The wastes around the city walls were a vast junkyard of dead engines. Machines venerated by the Cult Mechanicus were broken into pieces, their nameplates obscured, crews ash, ancient technologies mashed to junk. It dazed Mohana Mankata Vi to witness god-engines lying like the lowly dead of an infantry formation, with no one to salvage their secrets.
Too much knowledge had been lost. She looked upon that scene and saw ahead an age of darkness every bit as grim as the one the Emperor had saved them from.
Her senses were becoming unreliable. Fatigue accelerated her mental deterioration. She fancied, at times, that she fought a war of giants from obscure mythologies, and not a battle between war engines. At other times the world appeared to be constructed entirely of machined parts and gleaming metal. But she could still fight, though she sobbed silently in her tank at the roll of the dead, and the machine’s soul leached more of herself away.
Her mongrel maniple were ordered forwards by a servant of the primarch who had neither name nor rank. He was only a voice that must be obeyed, voxed out from the Red Tear somewhere high in orbit. For the final time Mohana’s group approached the fortifications, their remaining Titans raking the defences with savage energies.
Piles of dead Titans made makeshift ramps to battlements equally littered with brutalised machine parts. The hive skin smoked from a hundred thousand impact points. Fires burned from every hole. Surely the inhabitants were dead by now. The hive was worthless, and yet still the war raged for Nyrcon City.
The defences were reduced from their previous strong state, the towers brought down and the weapons within silent. But though the strength of the hive had lessened, so had that of the besiegers. Of a force hundreds strong, less than two hundred remained, and of that number only a handful had escaped damage. They relied on energy cannons. Ammunition for their projectile weapons was uniformly depleted, and no resupply could be made in that awful, hellish melee.
Yet even with this reduced portion of their armaments usable, the Titans remained fearsome. Their reactors were limitless sources of energy. If husbanded carefully, their lasers and their plasma cannons would fire for many months.
Sagitta Auri and the Warlord Dei Deus moved ahead of the siege Titan Atranican, a heavy model equipped for battery, with a wrecking ball for one hand and a multi-headed drill on the other, both shimmering with disruption fields. The two smaller Titans shielded the heavier engine with their bodies, firing a
s they walked. Mohana Mankata Vi ordered it to be so. Atranican’s delivery to the wall was all that mattered, if her part in the siege was to have any meaning at all.
She walked at Atranican’s shoulder, her volcano cannons primed. All the fire they drew came from the hive now, and its garrison, like its assailants, was low on ammunition.
‘Forwards, to the wall,’ she said. She highlighted a weak point nearly breached. The princeps voxed their agreement. Though she was a Grand Master of a Legio, she commanded this group of strangers by their consent only.
The Titans marched under fire, as stalwart as a testudo of the ancient Romanii. Their voids took the worst of the bombardment. The shots coming in at the maniple lacked coordination. The hive had barely a single battery intact.
‘Spread,’ she commanded. ‘Direct all fire on my target. Then Atranican is to engage the fabric of the wall.’
The Titans opened up their formation, though Atranican remained sheltered between Sagitta Auri and Dei Deus. Mohana Mankata Vi took the foremost position, and set Luxor Invictoria’s stance for the firing of its cannons.
As she moved into position, the view wavered. Memory intruded, and she witnessed the plains of her youth before her. Against a rising of dismay she engaged the Titan’s biomonitors to seek out the problem in her brain and adjust her neurochemistry. The outside world returned with an accompaniment of warnings. Her mental architecture was at the limit of reparability. Her mind was entering the first stages of decoherence.