Titandeath

by Guy Haley

  ‘Search! Search!’ commanded Ardim Protos as each disappointment was revealed, fearing all eight of his abominable children would be found dead. ‘The final act was performed here! Find one alive, and the keys to power shall belong to us!’ He powered his grav impellers to maximum. Their motors drew energy from the warp, and he flew about the battlefield, berating his acolytes to greater effort wherever he passed.

  A fifth engine was found under a slope of rockcrete rubble. It was intact, and the mechanisms were functional. Protos’ spirits rose, but a few minutes of testing told them the being imprisoned within had escaped, tearing out the souls of its crew as it passed from the materium into the empyrean, and leaving them as husks.

  The day turned to night. The caustic rains returned, washing the land into a quagmire as slick as potter’s slip. The water was black now with atmospheric debris, and more poisonous than ever before. Progress slowed. Day returned. Morning passed, then noon, a slight shifting of Beta-Garmon’s feeble sunlight through the clouds of smoke showing the passage of time. Deluges came and went, leaving the metal of the Mechanicum’s vehicles pitted by powerful corrosives.

  Then, something. By the western flank of the mountain, near the crater made by the uprooting of the Carthega’s foundations, an unnatural heartbeat was found.

  Green and yellow lightning crawled across the sky with unnatural slowness. Protos made with all speed to the new site, and hovered over the heads of his servitors and priests.

  ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Yes! Here, dig! Dig!’

  Attention was diverted to the intermingled mound of rock and ’crete.

  Something stirred beneath.

  Terent Harr­tek walked bloody fields of battle that stretched into infinity. Red-skinned horrors made eternal war upon one another, commanded by giant generals wielding whip and axe. He fought with them, striking against anything that came within his reach. At times he was a man, at others a ghost raging impotently above the throng. Sometimes, he was with one of the greater entities, inside its mind, looking out through its eyes as it lashed its whip and slew foes by the thousand.

  To awake to the taste of blood was no surprise.

  He came to, still within his throne. Everything was black; he could see nothing. His heart thundered loudly in his chest and the room smelled of spilt gore. Blood caked his face from a gash across his forehead. The mind impulse unit was still in place in the port at the back of his skull, but he could make no connection to the soul of his machine.

  ‘Moderati,’ he said. His voice was hoarse, barely a whisper. He tried to move his hands to activate the manual vox switch, but could not. He suspected a broken back, though the lack of pain suggested neural feedback damage from the Titan was more likely. Neither concerned him. Both could be treated, and would be, for he was a princeps of a Warlord Titan, and a lord among men.

  For a long time he sat there, unable to move. He was buried alive.

  ‘Trapped in a dead Titan, all my crew slain. So much for your promises of power, Ardim Protos,’ he said. His tongue was sore and thick, but his arrogance remained.

  Time passed. He slept. The anger he had felt these past few months was absent. Strangely, he felt at peace.

  He came awake to the scrape of stone on stone. Engine noise sounded high above. He looked up, but still he saw nothing.

  ‘About time,’ he said. He refrained from shouting, though he wished to. Rationally, he knew nobody could hear him. He must only be patient, and then he would be free.

  The noise of drills and mechanical shovels came nearer, and his spirits rose. Soon, there was hammering on metal. There were people outside, coming for him. He grinned. His service to the Legio would continue. The Titan might even be salvaged. His war was not over yet. Perhaps he might even find this daughter of his, and teach her a lesson in violence.

  The sounds retreated. He waited for his rescuers to come in through the back of the machine, or cut into the head. They would know he was alive, surely? Even the most basic of bio-augurs would pick up his heartbeat, or his mental activity.

  Cold fear gripped his heart. They weren’t coming.

  There was a shift. The machine was moving! They were digging it out. He laughed at his own foolishness. It took him a moment to realise that the Titan was not being moved.

  It was moving itself.

  A deep, throaty growl sounded behind him, so close that it could have come from behind his head. He craned his neck around towards the czella door, but saw nothing in the dark.

  The machine lurched again. Metal screeched on stone. The head jerked, throwing Harr­tek’s head forwards, and he feared further nerve damage. A rushing booming started up, like the thunder of a monstrous heart.

  He could hear the reactor. All the lights were off. No device functioned.

  ‘This is impossible,’ he said.

  The machine heaved. He recognised the motion as readily as if it were his own. It was trying to stand, pushing against something heavy. It moved again, then again, each movement more violent, flinging its head, sending Harr­tek’s own head whipping back and forth. The cara­pace banged on something, and again there was that terrible growl.

  The Titan lunged. Metal screeched. The growl turned into a roar. Slowly, with great effort, it rose.

  Rubble fell from its shoulders, banging loudly off the head. It lifted its face from the dirt, and the debris fell from the machine’s eyes, uncovering the small window set behind the augur lenses. Pale light flooded in, allowing Harr­tek to see.

  His body was encased in a shell of ridged bone. The czella had transformed into a semi-organic abomination. Veined membranes covered the equipment and thick liquid oozed from everything. Fat arteries pulsed over instrument boards. The forward display was embedded in a film of flesh that looked to him very much like a retina, veined and iridescent. The clear images it had shown were replaced by watery reflections. The Titan was looking across the landscape. Members of the Mechanicum prostrated themselves at its feet. It looked down at its mangled limbs.

  The armour plates were flowing like melted wax, changing shape. Skull runes rose into them like corpses surfacing from the sea. Elsewhere the machinery cracked like the shell of a moulting crustacean. The volcano cannon lengthened, sprouting a moist mouth that clacked arm-long fangs against metal. The fingers of the arioch power claw split wetly, talons emerging from ceramite that became bony, then soft, turning into whipping tentacles that dripped with potent acid. A tail of raw, exposed bone forced itself from the rear pelvic assembly, growing a blade of horn from the tip.

  Harr­tek watched with horror. When the head changed, he began to weep. The organic mess of it pushed inwards. The back lengthened, the front shook, bent aside, and stretched outwards. Through the last vestiges of the MIU, Harr­tek felt the change from noble armoured helmet to leering, semi-metallic machine-face sporting swept-back horns.

  He thrashed against the bony cage holding him in place, but it would not let him go. His MIU cable mutated from banded metal to long, tubular organ that pulsed and sucked at his mind and soul. Each attempt to free himself prompted bony needles to force themselves into his flesh, pinning him in a state of permanent, immobile agony. He tried then to push his way into the MIU, but he had no influence over the being that inhabited his Titan. He could see it, but it spared him no attention.

  He was trapped in the skull of the beast.

  When eyelids blinked over the augurs and oculus, his mind cracked.

  Terent Harr­tek screamed unashamedly, every vestige of military control rinsed out of him in an instant and replaced by howling insanity, as the newborn Chaos Titan raised its head to the sky and roared out its hatred of the universe.

  Thirty-Three

  Malcador’s Message

  A river’s gurgling symphony played over the garden. Thick rhododendrons hosted clouds of blooms. Malcador’s retreat was in equal parts lie, memory an
d hope. It was a memory because it presented a version of Terra that no longer existed: lush, wet, verdant and teeming with life. It was a lie because it pretended things were still this way beyond the confines of the small valley it occupied; a small sun shone in the air, concealing the hard, rockcrete underbelly of the Imperial Palace. It was a hope that Terra might again be this way, and the sky might one day be open.

  All three of those things were under threat. Malcador supposed that now, even if the Emperor were to win, Terra could never be rejuvenated the way He and Malcador had intended. The Imperium as it could have been was already dead.

  The garden and a handful of similar places were Malcador’s sole indulgence, and that place was his favourite. As he could block out the ceiling roofing over the valley, and the pumping station at the foot of the river that moved the water up the hill to flow back down again, he could shut out the war. There was peace in the garden; he enjoyed it for that. It was one of the few locations in all the galaxy where that claim could be made with any truth. It would not be the case for much longer.

  The enemy were on their way.

  Malcador’s powerful mind received and interpreted Sanguinius’ message hours before the astropaths did the same, and the parchment bearing fell tidings had been brought by solemn Astra Telepathica agents to his garden. It mattered only to him that he knew before he had been informed. He felt a little guilty about not acting immediately, but the pretence of not knowing bought him a few hours to sit in quiet and think.

  The Emperor would know, of course. The Emperor would have seen and understood what His angelic son had to say before he had said it. The Emperor would forgive Malcador a small, white lie to himself – a last indulgence to them both.

  Malcador smoothed out the scrip of paper again, though it was already creaseless and flat, and read it one more time. Once it had been distilled from the cloud of conflicted imagery sent by the astropaths, the message from Beta-Garmon was very short. The anguish of the ­pri­march ­Sanguinius was imprinted upon it. Within the body of the sending itself, his pain was even greater and more affecting, a rare moment of psychic resonance strong enough to touch the soul of the galaxy.

  Malcador looked up at the soft yellow sun, an echo of a younger Sol that was itself memory, lie and hope. ‘The gates are broken. The way to Terra is clear,’ he said into the gentle light. ‘The end game comes at last, my lord, after so long.’

  Malcador closed his eyes and bowed his head. It had been such a long and punishing journey, he thought he might never see the end of it. His body ached with age, but his heart ached more. He was not meant to be, and yet he was: aged beyond the span of mortals, apart from his kind, the last fragment of an ancient power, the last of the Sigillites.

  His eyes screwed tight with the knowledge of what was to come, but remained dry. He had no tears for himself. Humanity must survive no matter the cost. Through his brief meditation he drew strength into himself. There was no time for self-pity.

  With a weary sigh, Malcador stood from the marble table where he had hosted so many of his infamous interviews. High lords and the primarchs themselves had sat there under his inscrutable gaze, daring to guess what lay behind Malcador’s smile. So many times he had been there, too many to count. This was the last time, he knew. That saddened him more than he expected, and he took one last look around his sanctuary, allowing himself a few extra seconds of pleasurable melancholy before he took up his staff of office, and headed for the winding stone steps that led up beside the river, through a metal door and into the Imperial Palace.

  As Malcador walked past the river’s rush, he reached out to his subordinates, the lords of mankind’s crumbling empire, heroes and demigods all, and every one beholden to him. His message was sent by thought alone. Malcador had no need of vox or other means of communication. If he wished a thing be known, then it was known.

  Simultaneously his mind touched a dozen others, halting them in mid action, mid sentence, mid thought. He repeated what he had discerned from the warp and had read from the paper. Simple, direct, and, now the moment was upon them, terrifying.

  ‘Horus is coming,’ he thought. And the thoughts of the greatest men and women in the Imperium were his thoughts, and they shared his consternation.

  Malcador reached the garden portal. It opened silently and let him out. When he left the garden the river ran on. The false sun shone. They would do so, forgotten for centuries, until the power ran out, the water dried, and the plants and insects died. Another small piece of humanity’s dream lost to treachery, it would become a dusty corner to add to all the other abandoned works of mankind.

  Far above, in the palace that smothered a mountain range, bells began to toll.

  The beginning of the end was upon them all.

  Afterword

  The book that you hold in your hands very nearly didn’t happen.

  Let’s go back in time, not far. A few years, that’s all. It’s about 2015 or so. The Horus Heresy was due to enter its final phases. The walls of the Imperial Palace were looming upon the horizon. Legions of loyal readers eagerly awaited the attack on Terra. A decree came down from on high that it was time to give it to them.

  Beta-Garmon is an important waypoint on that road. Only it wasn’t supposed to happen in this book, and so it almost didn’t happen at all.

  The first time I’d heard the phrase ‘The Great Slaughter at Beta-Garmon’ was back when I was first pencilled in to write ­Wolfsbane. ‘What’s that?’ I said in all innocence. ‘It’s what happens in your book, Guy!’ John French replied to me, sotto voce. An embarrassing moment only outdone by the time I suggested Lion El’Jonson was present at the final battle for the Imperial Palace to a packed seminar. Ahem. Moving on.

  But as it turned out the climactic battle of Wolfsbane did not take place during this pivotal conflict. Mere days before I commenced writing, the histories of the future were consulted and it was decided that actually, Russ’ fight must have taken place before Horus made his move, otherwise stuff did not make sense. So it proved, with the brothers’ duel occurring at the little known system of Trisolian instead, immediately prior to the Beta-Garmon campaign.

  Unfortunately, there was no room for another book. In the desire to bring about the conclusion to the saga of Horus’ betrayal, the small matter of Beta-Garmon was put to one side, an unfortunate casualty of scheduling as much as of war.

  Time moved on. Things changed. In due course it was decided that, perhaps, the conflict of Beta-Garmon should be detailed after all. Beta-Garmon is the fight that flings open the doors to Terra. Had Horus lost there, then the Emperor might never have fallen, and the galaxy would be a different place. The Great Muster. The Titandeath. The Great Slaughter. The Sea of Fire. These are names that resonate throughout the background. They had to be covered, surely? Yes!

  Only, now the end was even nearer. Black Library’s publication plans were already set. A space had to be found.

  A tight space.

  That’s when I got the call.

  I think it’s fair to say, and not too egotistically, that I have a reputation for writing quickly. Imagine the Black Library authors as very feeble primarchs, each with their own suite of modest gifts. I’m like a really rubbish Leman Russ. When there’s a tricky job that needs doing fast, I’m first into the drop pod. Come on! I do have a Viking wife and a very big dog, okay? However much you believe that, I get the call quite often.

  By the time it came to pen Titandeath it was 2018, and I’d become much more expert on the Horus Heresy than I once was. Even so, the thrill of excitement of writing a Horus Heresy novel is outdone by the watery fear that you’ll mess it all up, and I had limited time to act, so as usual I set to reading.

  At the same time, work on the Adeptus Titanicus game was well underway. The game is set during the Horus Heresy, and naturally one of the largest theatres of war is the one covered by this novel. Working with A
ndy Hoare and his compatriot Owen Barnes, the writers of the game, was one of the great pleasures of Titandeath. My career began working in small teams of creative people, and I miss being able to bounce ideas and concepts back and forth. That was immensely satisfying – thank you, chaps, and I mean it.

  Beta-Garmon had grown somewhat since its first mention in the lore. For the longest time, it was assumed that Beta-Garmon was a single world, whereas it is in fact a cluster of inhabited planets spread across a subsector of its own: a pocket empire that survived the terrors of Old Night and came into the Imperium gratefully. The scope of the fight there is truly epic; it is not a single battle, or even a campaign, but a war in its own right that runs right the way through the Horus Heresy.

  It became pretty obvious pretty quickly that we couldn’t cover every aspect of this warzone in a single novel. Therefore, I decided to write about Titans. In fact, I cockily suggested I’d write the definitive Horus Heresy Titan book. The Imperial Hunters and the Death Stalkers were given to me to work with. Granted access to awesome artwork, notes and incomplete previews of the game (I do love this job!), I set to work filling in the blanks.

  One of the biggest decisions I took was to make the Heresy-era Imperial Hunters entirely female. The Horus Heresy, being a war of Space Marines, is naturally skewed towards the male perspective. When we do meet female characters they are mostly individuals surrounded by men. I wished to avoid that and try something a bit different. I could bang on about the inherent narrative tensions of female characters negotiating male power structures, but suffice it to say, having female characters with real power was great to write about in the setting, and you don’t get more powerful in Warhammer 40,000 than the Grand Master of a Titan Legio.