by Guy Haley
Another item on my list of things to cover was Chaos Titans. These don’t appear until after Beta-Garmon. Andy and I decided that the one that appears in my short story ‘The Laurels of Defiance’ was an early example, unique even, so I thought it would be very exciting to look into the origins of those that were at Terra, and the Mechanicum adepts responsible for their creation. A literal birth, you might say, for a scourge that still afflicts the galaxy.
I might write quickly, but I write too much. As is my way, I’ve run out of space. Again. I’ll sign off by saying, for those of you who have been with the series since the beginning, rest assured, this book is one of the very last before the siege commences. The gates to Terra have been forced. The end draws near.
Now I must go, because I’ve just had another call…
Guy Haley
Yorkshire, 2018
About the Author
Guy Haley is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Wolfsbane and Pharos, the Primarchs novels Corax: Lord of Shadows, Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia, and the Warhammer 40,000 novels Dark Imperium, Dark Imperium: Plague War, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Baneblade, Shadowsword, Valedor and Death of Integrity. He has also written Throneworld and The Beheading for The Beast Arises series. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.
An extract from Heralds of the Siege.
The Martian soil trembled. Beneath the Temple-Tarantyne assembly yards, something was rising.
Once a glorious spectacle of magna-machinery and Titan production, the southern installation had produced the mighty god-machines of the Legio Excruciata. Now its great production temples glowed with the unholy light of corruption. Chittering constructs went to work on towering perversions – looming monstrosities that should have been Warlord Titans but instead were metal monsters of daemonic infestation and heretek weaponry.
Row upon row of such beasts stood silent in the storage precincts, waiting for the orbital mass conveyers that would take them to bulk freighters destined for the Warmaster’s forces.
But those mass conveyors would not come.
With the Forge World Principal blockaded by the VII Legion, nothing was leaving Mars. Like the monstrous tanks, fevered warrior-constructs and ranks of empty battleplate sitting in storage bays across the surface, the Chaos Titans gathered Martian dust.
Dust that now rained down about the towering abominations as the bedrock quaked beneath them.
A Warlord Titan was a walking fortress of thick plate and powerful shielding. As any who had ever faced such an apocalyptic foe understood, it had few weaknesses. As a former princeps of the Collegia Titanica, Kallistra Lennox had the distinction of both piloting and felling such god-machines. She knew that one of the few vulnerabilities the Mars Alpha-pattern Warlord had was a weak point on its command deck, but the deck was almost impossible to reach for ground troops.
Standing in the gyroscopic interior compartment of the Mole burrowing transport Archimedex, Lennox felt the adamantium prow drilling a phase-fielded tunnel through the Martian bedrock and soil, then finally breaking the surface into the assembly yards. While the large tunnelling vehicle emerged upright, like a rising tower, the crowded troop compartment maintained its rolling orientation within, which would make disembarkation a smooth affair. The princeps had directed the translithope to rise up next to a Warlord Titan identified as Ajax Abominata. Loyal constructs had been watching the installation for weeks from the scrap-littered sides of the surrounding mountains. The construction of Ajax Abominata was all but complete, although its armoured shell was still covered in a scaffold, complete with mobile gantries.
It was a target ripe for sabotage – and the princeps knew exactly how to do it.
Not that she looked very much like an officer of the Collegia Titanica any more. While she still wore her uniform amid scraps of flak and carapace, it was tattered and stained with oil. The black leather of her boots was scuffed and her gloves crudely cut to fingerlessness. She wore an eyepatch where her ocular bionic had been torn out, and a short chainblade sat heavy upon her belt where a ceremonial sabre used to hang. Grenades and hydrogen flasks dangled from a bandolier while in her hands the princeps clutched the chunky shape of a plasma caliver.
‘Stand by,’ she said, sternly.
The loyalist Mechanicum cell to which Lennox belonged had been dubbed the Omnissian Faithful. Like all its adherents, Lennox was a Martian survivor. Left behind in the exodus to Terra, she had become a rebel on her own world. While the scrapcode tore through the Forge World Principal, corrupting everything it touched, there had been some Martians and constructs who had followed their instincts. As part of a disgust response – like a person making themselves sick after ingesting a toxin or poison – some true servants of the Omnissiah had had the strength to mutilate themselves. They tore bionics from their bodies, severed hardlinks and burned out wireless receivers. Ports and interfaces were gouged out, their bodies and minds cut off from the code-streams of the Martian networks. They had saved themselves from the infected data that brought madness, spiritual pollution and the warping of flesh and form.
It was a corruption that had claimed nearly all who had not escaped the Red Planet, even the Fabricator General himself: Kelbor-Hal, now no more than a withered bundle of polluted workings. Like the magi below him and the constructs below them, he had become a slave to darkness. A puppet controlled by the renegade Warmaster Horus, light years distant.
In the Mole’s troop compartment stood a motley collection of blank-faced adepts, battle-smashed skitarii, liberated tech-thralls, indentured menials, gun-servitors saved by their masters, vat-engineered work-hulks, harnessed ferals and bastardised battle-automata. All were pledged to the Omnissian Faithful but had needed a leader in the field. Someone of a tactical mind and destructive disposition to help the rebels in a campaign of sabotage and subversion.
When Lennox had joined them, they had found just such a leader.
‘Ten seconds,’ the princeps told the rebel constructs about her. Her seconds, Omnek-70 and Galahax Zarco, waited either side of the bulkhead. Omnek-70 was skitarii – a Ranger who carried the length of a transuranic arquebus. Zarco, meanwhile, was a hulking enginseer who hefted a power axe in the shape of an Omnissian cog. Lennox listened for the sound of the drill and phase fields on different materials. She stamped on the deck.
‘Ratchek,’ she called to her former moderatii and the Mole’s goggled operator. ‘Kill the main drive. Open outer doors.’
The layered bulkheads sighed hydraulically, and slipped aside to reveal the shadowy interior of the scaffold complex.
Lennox nodded. ‘Go.’
The structure was swarming with afflicted constructs going about their duties, and before long Lennox and her rebels found themselves fighting up through the blind spots and gauntlets of the scaffold interior. Meanwhile, heavily armed security forces – drawn from their perimeter posts by the Mole’s emergence – were running across the assembly yards and converging upon the Titan.
The compartments and ladderwells of the towering complex were filled with the cacophony of gunfire. The Omnissian Faithful had to make use of whatever untainted weaponry they could scavenge and could not afford god-pleasing uniformity. Laslocks blasted bolts across the darkness of the decks. Shells from stub-carbines tore up through catwalks. Arc rifles threw streams of lightning along gantries. Lennox anticipated the arrival of the rebels by tearing grenades from her bandolier and throwing them up through the ladderwells and into the levels above.
Ajax Abominata, even in the final stages of its dread assembly, was what she had come to expect from a corrupted god-machine, swarming with twisted artisans prattling scrapcode and in
sanity.
The rebels moved up at speed and with merciless gunfire delivered at point-blank range. The corrupted army of constructs tending the monstrous Titan were ill-equipped to repel such a direct attack. The assembly yard’s security forces and shock troops hadn’t entertained the possibility of an assault on Temple-Tarantyne coming up through the installation’s foundations. While they babbled and ran towards the towering scaffold, Lennox and her rebels hauled themselves up through the structure. Heavy servitors and cyborg corruptions shrieked as they were blasted aside. Chainblades opened up the traitor constructs in fountains of blood and oil before sending them flailing off the scaffold’s edge.
The rapid advance was not met without resistance. About them the very metal of the Titan’s outer hull and the surrounding scaffolding warped with daemonic presence. Infernal eyes opened in the walls. Hatches opened explosively to vomit acidic ichor or shoot grasping tentacles at the rebels. Deck openings became fang-lined mouths that cut insurgents in half. The fighting got close and tangled on a platform crowded with strapped-down stores and cargo nets. They were rushed by servitors with black filth bubbling from their mouth-grilles and a fell light behind their eyes. Lennox ordered her expendable ferals with their limb-fused weaponry into the fray, supported by engineered hulks who tore the traitor servitors limb from corrupted limb.
Higher up, the rebels became caught in a furious exchange of fire as a twisted member of the Titan crew took charge on the scaffold deck, joined by sentries running up the mobile gantries. The stairwell turned into a horrific kill-zone. Lennox didn’t have time or bodies to spare in pushing on through and so cut up through the mesh flooring with her chainblade. Sending a small group up through the hole with Galahax Zarco, she watched the enginseer swing his power axe about him. With heavy footfalls he took apart possessed servitors and buried the crackling weapon in the Titan crewmember with a sickening thud. With the gauntlet broken, Lennox ordered the rebels onwards and upwards.
The compartments about the Titan’s command deck had been locked off by the time the rebels reached it. Engineering constructs gargled corruption at them through the metal.
‘We don’t have time for this,’ Lennox said to Omnek-70 and Zarco. Levelling his arquebus at the doors, Omnek-70 punched round after transuranic round through the bulkhead and into the cavity compartment beyond. As the sound of the tainted constructs died away, the enginseer buried the crackling cog of his axe in one of the round-punctured doors and heaved it aside. Lennox slipped through, her plasma caliver hugged in at her chest.
The compartment stank of corruption and was wreathed in a lead-coloured smoke. There were warped bodies on the floor with gaping holes through their polluted workings where Omnek-70 had shot them through. A tech-adept came at the princeps, wielding a heavy multi-tool like a club. Leaning into the kick of the caliver, she blasted the thing into oblivion, before turning to face another filth-spewing construct, burning it from existence.
‘Open it up,’ Lennox said to Galahax Zarco as they strode through the compartment and climbed up onto the outer shell of the Titan’s head. From there they could see many other Titans in the gloom of the colossal assembly yard. They were all in different stages of completion, some surrounded by warped scaffolding. Lennox looked down at the corrupted hull of Ajax Abominata beneath her boots. The princeps could feel the suffering of the afflicted machine-spirit within.
‘Princeps,’ Omnek-70 called from the scaffold exterior, his optics whirring through different filters. He pointed out across the assembly yard. ‘The Ventorum is powering up.’
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First published in Great Britain in 2018.
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Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.
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