by Guy Haley
‘Cog and gear, what by Mars have they done to that engine?’ said Yeha Yeha.
‘Get me all weapons online, now,’ Esha said.
Nuntio Dolores broke into a charge. It was so close, Esha was still bringing her weapons to bear when it crashed bodily into Domine Ex Venari. Its shoulders rammed into the czella, jarring the crew violently as the head snapped back against its neck cowl. One of the mandible pipes tore free as Nuntio Dolores pushed against the Reaver, inching it back towards the drop. As he pushed, Harrtek swiped clumsily, attempting to grip the smaller Titan with his power claw, but his hold came free, ripping off Domine Ex Venari’s left-hand lasblaster in the process. A second swipe crushed Domine’s void shield blisters, and they gave out with a spectacular burst of violet light.
The Reaver was rocked back by the greater power and weight of the Warlord. If Harrtek succeeded in having Nuntio Dolores seize Domine Ex Venari, then it was over. She needed to get him at range. Knowing she could not beat Harrtek hand to hand, Esha stepped back and around, turning the impetus of Nuntio Dolores against it, pitching it forwards. The larger Titan stumbled, stopping its trip from turning into a complete fall by grabbing at the mountain with its power claw. Harrtek was jammed against the rock at the point the corrie sheered off four hundred metres. Snow-whipped darkness lay before him, the mountains’ lower reaches lit by the flashes of ongoing conflict.
Esha staggered aside. Alarms trilled from every quadrant. Superchilled gases vented into the cockpit from the machine’s ruptured coolant system. The crew were shaken from their unity with the MIU and were speaking all at once, delivering verbal reports of imminent doom.
Esha let the systems notifications flow over her in that strange machine copy of pain a princeps shared with her engine. There was damage throughout. ‘We won’t survive another charge like that. All power to volcano cannon!’ Esha ordered. Mechanisms clunked inside the machine as power was shunted to the giant laser array. Domine Ex Venari’s right hip gyroscopes had been unseated, and Esha and Odani Jehan struggled to keep a constant lock on its enemy. The focal distance of the gun changed as it wavered about, the irises about the main crystalline array constantly shifting as the machine’s spirits tried to get a steady lock.
She gritted her teeth and fired just as Harrtek was pushing himself off the rock. Bits of the Titan caught on the stone tore with the huge force it applied to stand.
‘Missed!’ Odani swore.
The volcano beam sliced into the cliff twenty metres to Harrtek’s right. Molten rock dribbled down the cliff face. Nuntio Dolores stood upon the brink of the precipice and screamed towards the sky.
‘By the Omnissiah,’ Esha breathed. ‘What have you done to yourself, Harrtek?’
This time, he replied.
‘Esha, Esha,’ said Harrtek. His voice was cracked, teetering on the edge of incoherent rage. ‘Look upon my power. I am so glad you have seen it. It was fated that we meet again, don’t you think? Now you will know the glory of Chaos before you die. Now you can see how weak your Legio is, how misguided in its loyalty to the False Emperor. Still you follow the tyrant of Terra. Look at what he denied us! Witness your mistake before you perish, my dear.’
The lasblasters upon Harrtek’s carapace swivelled down and locked on. Slowly, the Titan brought up its volcano cannon.
‘Your friends have abandoned you. I never would. You could have become one of us, and together we could have raised my son to the heights of power. But you denied me. You denied him. You gave him to them, the scryers of oil and mumblers of knowledge. How I hated you for that.’
‘Listen to me!’ Esha said. ‘I lied to you. I didn’t want you to think about me or about the child. I wanted you out of my life. What your Legio did to Biphex I could never forgive.’
In her auspex senses, Esha saw a flicker in the Warlord’s power flow. Harrtek paused.
‘What do you mean?’ Harrtek’s voice was still strangled with rage, but a measure of the man he had been was evident in his words.
‘I mean–’ began Esha.
‘She means you had no son, you misbegotten traitor scum.’ Jehani Jehan’s voice cut across the vox. ‘You have a daughter, and she serves the Legio Solaria, the Emperor and Mars with pride.’
‘Jehani!’ said Jephenir.
‘Where is she?’ said Esha, who could still see no sign of the scout through the Titan’s senses.
‘All the little loyal daughters of the Emperor are here. Good, I can kill you all.’ Harrtek pivoted to find her, too slow, too late.
Jehani’s signum burst back into life. Across multiple machine sensors Esha witnessed the Warhound’s reactor ramping suddenly up to full output.
‘She’s worked herself around the other side of Harrtek on low power!’ said Yeha Yeha. ‘She’s coming in fast!’
The ground vibrated with Cursor Ferro’s rapid stride as it burst out of the swirling snowstorm, running directly at the traitor Warlord. Harrtek redirected his weapons towards the charging scout. Flickers of destruction burst past Cursor Ferro and the snapping bangs of displaced air echoed round the corrie. A triple hit from the lasblasters burst the small Titan’s void fields, and it stumbled, but recovered, and ran full tilt into Nuntio Dolores.
The impetus of her charge rocked the Warlord back. They stood upon the edge of the precipice a moment, framed by fire-glow refracted through the snow and rain.
‘Legio first,’ said Jehani Jehan.
The Titans fell away into silence.
Domine Ex Venari took a faltering step towards the drop.
‘Jehani,’ Esha said. Alarms wailed all around her. Fire licked from shattered panels. Yeha Yeha had disconnected herself from the manifold, and was jetting fire suppressant over the damage, yelling at the others to help.
‘Jehani Jehan, respond.’
There was no reply, and no time to mourn. A tremendous, world-ending rumble sounded across Beta-Garmon III.
The Carthega Telepathica was falling.
Domine Ex Venari swung around and looked up. A vast, molten bite had been taken out of the Diviner’s Needle by the traitors’ bombardment. The mountainsides echoed to the war-horns of the enemy as they beat a hasty retreat.
Domine Ex Venari had nowhere to go.
The astropathic temple swayed. The giant hawsers holding it steady creaked, sang a sawing whine, and parted. Cables whipped free. Like a felled tree, the needle turned away from its weakened point, and dropped.
‘Get us out of here! Now! Drop shields, decouple weapons. All power to locomotors!’
The Titan lurched into a run. The needle ripped itself up by the roots, demolishing the mountain. Domine Ex Venari made the entrance to the corrie as boulders the size of Land Raiders roared down from the heights, only to find the road down full of rocks flowing liquidly to the plains. The needle was toppling in the other direction to them, an endless line of rockcrete and plascrete descending from the heavens. As it fell, it bent, the indestructible destroyed by gravity’s violent pull. A rising pressure radiated from the top, pushing at the crews’ inner beings, the psychic screams of a thousand astropaths plummeting to their deaths.
Falling cables sliced into the mountain like garrottes into throats. They fell so fast and hard they glowed with heat, and their impacts set off more landslides.
Esha turned the Titan hard away from a falling hawser. Yeha Yeha was disconnected. Jephenir was insensible with shock at the death of her blood-sister. The burden of piloting the Titan was Esha’s alone. She felt effort crushing her. A headache was building like a wave, the kind that threatens apoplexy and death.
Domine Ex Venari turned straight onto the mountainside. The machine skidded and stumbled down the slope, slamming into outcrops to slow itself, each hit impairing its function more. The weight of the machine pulled at it, and in short order it was falling faster than it could run. A rush of
pulverised stone flowed down the hillside, engulfing the Reaver’s ankles. The Titan tripped, and fell.
Esha activated the salvator protocols. Explosive bolts blew around the neck ring. Rockets fired, and Domine Ex Venari’s head flew free in a lofting arc as the Titan’s body crashed down hard. Odani Jehan, Nepha Nen, Omega-6 and Fenina Bol were left behind in the disintegrating machine. Limbs scattered down the mountainside, half swallowed by rushes of following stone. The carcass tumbled over three times, then came to a sliding halt.
The head, meanwhile, was in greater trouble. The engines were short burst, limited fuel, intended to carry the command crew clear of a reactor breach, nothing more. Firing from the side of the mountain, it flew further and faster than it should, descending with a cannonball’s parabola to certain destruction. It hit the ground four hundred metres down, bouncing, picking up speed, tumbling with no more control than the boulders racing down the mountain beside it. Esha’s world was a centrifuge whirl of screams and sharp pain. Her restraints saved her from immediate death as the head hurtled down the mountain, holding her in place and preventing her from being dashed to pieces on the sides of her own cockpit. The czella came crashing down onto a boulder that acted like a ramp, bowling it high again and then, with one bone-crushing impact, Domine Ex Venari’s head came to rest.
Blackness swallowed Esha.
Esha knew she wasn’t dead because she dreamed. She dreamed she saw the Warmaster himself. Full of daemonic majesty, he surveyed the field of battle in the drear light of day. His dread lieutenants surrounded him, men who had once been noble and wise, great heroes of the Imperium. That had left them. They were cruel warlords now, with no trace of kindness remaining, only the burning need for conquest and power.
They spoke words she could not hear over the ringing in her ears, but they gestured clearly enough, showing off the scene of triumph for the edification of their master. They showed him maps and pict captures of how very clever they had been. Horus waved them away. They showed him these things only to justify their continued existence, but he was the Warmaster. He did not need such crude aides to see the scope of his victory.
Fell lights were threading the clouds. The warp had broken through the veil of reality. Under this light, Horus seemed at home amid the destruction. Esha watched this disembodied, so it seemed, staring from above onto a burned-out gun platform on the second line, but she was convinced, should she move, that he would see her. She held her breath. She willed her heart to be still. Nothing in the universe could frighten her more than the thought of looking into those burning red eyes.
He didn’t look at her. He turned to his lieutenants and raised a clawed hand. He began to speak.
A curious thing happened. As he spoke, his face creased. His hand went to his side. It came away covered in blood. A wide wound had opened in his armour where there had been no mark before. Beneath it the flesh parted like a smiling mouth, and vitae by the litre gushed from it.
The Warmaster fell.
Consternation exploded in the silent tableau. Guns were pointed. Some were fired. Less than half a minute passed before teleport light engulfed them all.
The Sons of Horus bore their father bleeding from the field.
More blackness.
Bright light ended it. It was shining straight in her eyes. She grimaced and shut them. She wanted to sleep.
‘She’s alive,’ said a voice she didn’t know.
‘Mother!’ said her daughter. ‘Mother! Can you hear me?’
Saws rasped metal. Weight pulled away from her chest, replaced with stabbing pain. Bigger lights blinded her.
‘Mother! Mother! Stay with us!’
‘She is gravely wounded,’ said the other voice.
‘The rest?’ said Abhani Lus.
‘Dead.’
‘Quickly. We’ve got minutes at best before the enemy find us here. Get her to the shuttle.’ A third voice. Also unknown. She felt she should know, but she did not. Her mind was full of holes. None was bigger than that left by Domine Ex Venari.
‘We are trying our best, princeps,’ said the third voice.
‘Then try harder!’
She was lifted out of her throne. Bones ground on bone. She screamed.
‘Careful!’
‘We have to be fast! Get her aboard.’
She was taken outside. The whine of idling plasma jets greeted her. Cold wind blew off the plains.
‘It’s not raining,’ she said.
‘She’s speaking!’ said Abhani Lus. ‘Mother!’ A warm hand rested on her arm. ‘What did you say?’
Esha’s head rolled to one side as they lifted her into the shuttle’s open hold. Before the doors were shut, she saw Domine Ex Venari’s battered czella resting upon a small cliff faced with plascrete, part of the roof sawn away. By chance the Titan’s augur lenses had come to rest pointing at a blasted gun platform a hundred metres below.
She recognised it. Her heart beat fast. She tried to sit. Her hand groped for her daughter’s arm.
‘What is it? What is it?’ said Abhani Lus.
The cold nozzle of a dispenser pressed into her neck.
‘My daughter!’ she managed to say before the drugs hissed into her bloodstream and took her away once more from the waking world. ‘Terra is saved! Horus has fallen!’
Thirty-One
No Kind of Victory
Sanguinius stood upon the fractured walls of Nyrcon City. He stood against a backdrop of a hundred legionary banners, and a mountainous city ablaze from peak to base.
The hive burned from ten thousand places. Before the shattered bastions of the fortifications the broken bodies of hundreds of god-machines lay. They were so numerous they covered the ground, hiding the wind-scoured wasteland from sight. Leaking plasma reactors, still burning, sent out streamers of violently hued gases that changed colour as they cooled. Every now and then, an explosion issued from the battlefield as unfired munitions cooked off, or a reactor gave out completely, and in those cases there was also a flash of baleful false lightning that lit the dust and smoke from within. From Nyrcon City too came detonations close enough to the surface to be heard, wrenching notes of metal tearing, and the thunder of avalanches as spires and halls collapsed. Where the Anvil had struck the city’s side, a vast hole, alight with the glow of molten metal, vented black smoke in endless amounts into the sky. It spread an oily cast across the world, blocking out the light from the sun, so it seemed that Nyrcon and its neighbours were trapped in a deep cave of smoke and flames.
There was danger where Sanguinius stood atop the ramparts. The whole of the western plain was rucked up in a fresh impact crater, wide as a sea. His advisory enginseers told him he must get away from there, lest the hive come down in its entirety and bury him under its weight. Not even he, they implored, could survive that.
He sent them away.
‘I do not die here today,’ he told them.
He would not move, so nor did his men. His command cadre waited patiently, their red armour lit with orange highlights by the world of fire, while Sanguinius looked upon all he had done.
Handfuls of loyalist Titans stalked the scrap grounds, filling the heads of enemy machines that showed signs of life with sprays of bullets, or misericord-bursts of las-light. There were Blood Angels down there, around the Titans’ feet, hunting escaped crewmen, or offering aid to those loyal to the Throne where they were found. There were precious few among the Titan crews left alive. Mostly they hunted, executing with murderous efficiency every traitor they came across.
At the edge of the battlefield the salvaging of the god-engines’ remains was already under way. Adeptus Mechanicus crawlers were set down by mighty lifters. Giant, dome-backed machines sorted through the dead metal of once awesome engines of war, sifting scrap for what could be used again, a weapon here, a head there, a limb or armour plate. They crushed that which
could not, sorted the materials internally, and poured them up long conveyor belts that stood proud of their sides into attendant foundry leviathans.
Tainted air burned his primarch’s throat as he watched the spectacle of the Cult Mechanicus’ automated funeral. The machines were impressive, but what touched his soul were the lesser processions that wended their way between the dead; long trains of robed priests bearing banners and wailing sad music went from engine to engine, loyalist and traitor, to offer final benedictions to their extinguished souls. Such misery they exhibited. Sanguinius felt it on the air, his psyker’s sensitivities leaving him open to it, and therefore he suffered a measure of what they suffered. The Great Angel was a noble being, and affected by the pains of others, even those of the Cult Mechanicus. Although they forswore humanity for the sake of the machine, their sorrow was all too human, for all their protestations of disdain for emotion and all things of the flesh.
‘I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,’ said Sanguinius softly.
‘My lord?’ said Raldoron. He was at the head of the Legion’s Chapter Masters. Other heroes of note waited there: the Sanguinary Guard Azkaellon and his comrade Amit, lord of the Flesh Tearers Chapter, wise M’Kani Kano of the Librarium, and others.
A new voice answered, rich and powerful as Sanguinius’, a primarch’s voice, heavily accented and beautiful with foreign poetry.
‘It is a line from a text of an ancient religion that said all things are one, First Captain. That there is no beginning and no end.’
‘Jaghatai. You came,’ said Sanguinius. It was a statement wearily delivered, without joy at reunion.
‘As soon as your request for aid was received. It appears I am too late.’
‘It is I who was in error. The failure of this campaign is my guilt to bear.’
‘You said yourself, it was never meant to be won.’
Jaghatai Khan walked through the throng of Blood Angels, followed by a company of his own elite, their white armour lit ruddy by the fires consuming the hive.