Priests of Mars
Page 21
Luth swam out of sight, swallowed by the viscous liquid of his tank.
‘He’s too far gone, Hyrdrith,’ said Koskinen. ‘He’s going to take the shot.’
‘No use, she’s drawing power from the shields,’ said Koskinen, wiping away firing solutions as quickly as they appeared at his stations. More were being generated every second, and he saw it was just a matter of moments until he would be overwhelmed and one made it through to the plasma destructor. He felt a burning pressure in his arm as the battle-engine brought its mighty weapon-limb to bear. Koskinen fought against it, desperately trying to keep his arm immobile, but against the strength of the Capitalina’s ancient wolf heart he was a mote of dust in a hurricane.
‘What do you think I’m bloody trying to do?’ grunted Koskinen, sweat pouring down his face.
Koskinen glanced through the canopy as Lupa Capitalina took another step forwards and his panel lit up with too many firing solutions for him to dismiss them all. Canis Ulfrica filled the canopy, but fire control warbled with a positive lock on a holographic outline Koskinen recognised from Sulphur Canyon.
A tyranid bio-titan that had almost outmatched them in the final moments of the battle.
‘Omnissiah forgive us...’ he said, searing heat enveloping his fist. ‘We have a lock!’
‘Too late!’ screamed Koskinen as Lupa Capitalina’s plasma destructor unleashed the power of a star’s heart at one of their own.
+Engine. Kill.+
The Iron Fist slammed down over a berm of rubble, roaring at maximum capacity towards the Titans. What little had been left standing after their war walk was little more than crushed debris beyond salvaging. Dahan tried to fathom what was going on, but could make no contact with the princeps of Lupa Capitalina. The Warlord braced its legs, and its right arm came about in fits and spasms, as though suffering from actuator damage.
The Sirius Warhounds skulked behind the mighty engine, loping in confusion as they blared alarm from their warhorns. The Reaver faced off against the Warlord, caught with nowhere to run to and stripped of any cover by their very thoroughness in the exercise. Its carapace sparked and squealed as its crew raced to bring voids back online, and squalling interference wavelengths created a shimmering rainbow around its frontal armour plates. Its guns were raised, and the rotating barrels of its gatling blaster were spinning up to firing speed.
What had possessed Sirius to fight each other?
What manner of slight could bring two such awesomely powerful war machines to blows?
Without full access to the Legio Manifold, Dahan could not communicate directly with either princeps. The best he could do was transmit through the shared command network frequencies to demand answers. His hindbrain kept up a barrage of demands for the Legio to pull back from its war footing, while he linked with the Speranza’s noospheric network and warned the archmagos of what was happening.
The Warhounds took note of him and the smaller of the pair, Vilka, broke away from its maddened prowling to rack the loaders of its guns and loose a howl of warning. Encoded in every scrap of that howl was one clear imperative.
Stay away!
Dahan brought the Iron Fist to a skidding halt before the Warhound.
‘What is the Legio doing?’ he voxed, hoping that someone, anyone, in Sirius might answer him. ‘You must stop this madness now!’
Stay away!
‘For the love of the Omnissiah, stand down!’ yelled Dahan in the vocal, binaric and noospheric spheres. ‘Put up your weapons, I beg of you!’
A fiery haze of superheated light built along the length of Lupa Capitalina’s arm, the plasma destructor’s firing vents squealing as they prepared to bleed off the volcanic excesses of heat. Knowing what was to come next, Dahan dropped into the Iron Fist and slammed the hatch down after him, hoping it would be enough. Inside the tank, Dahan closed the Iron Fist off from the outside world, disabling its auspex, vox and pict feeds.
He slammed the vehicle into full reverse, and even through the armoured hull and over the roar of the engine he could hear the plasma destructor draw in a screaming intake of breath.
‘Bracing,’ he said, shutting down as many of his own extraneous systems as he could manage in the microsecond he had left before the engine’s gun reached optimal firing temperature.
And a thunderclap of pulverising thermic energy slammed into the tank, burning through its refractor fields in an instant and melting through a handspan of ablative plating. The internal temperature of the tank’s crew compartment flashed to that of a blast furnace, and what little skin Dahan had left peeled off in an instant.
Before he could even register the pain, the kinetic blast wave of the Titan’s weapon discharge plucked the Iron Fist from the deck and swatted it like a troublesome insect.
Hawkins heard the Titan’s enormous weapon screaming as it drew breath to fire, and hurled himself into the lee of a fallen building. Rae and a score of soldiers rolled into cover with him, while others ran for shelter behind armoured vehicles, piles of debris or whatever else might protect them from the backwash.
Imperial Titans were a welcome sight on any battlefield, but you didn’t want to be anywhere near them when they fired plasma weapons. The heat bleed would scour the ground for hundreds of metres in all directions, and the thermal shockwave would give anyone caught in the open a damn nasty flash burn. He didn’t want to think what might happen in the pressurised, oxygenated atmosphere of a starship...
‘What in the Eye’s going on, captain?’ shouted Rae.
‘Damned if I know,’ said Hawkins, risking a glance through the shattered brickwork of the building. Dust clouds from the manoeuvring Titans billowed around them, making precise details hard to come by, but Hawkins saw the largest engine with a searing lightning storm chained to its arm. Another Titan stood with its back to him, fighting to keep itself out of the firing line, but even a relatively agile Reaver couldn’t evade a Warlord forever.
‘What is he doing?’ whispered Hawkins.
Warhorns blared; threat, challenge and supplication all in one.
Whatever the Reaver was doing to try and defuse the larger Titan’s anger, it wasn’t working.
‘Cover your ears and don’t look up!’ shouted Hawkins. ‘Here it comes!’
He pulled back from the gap in the wall and pressed the heels of his hands against the side of his head. He put his head in his lap, exhaling as the colossal plasma weapon fired and filled the training hangar with a deafening thunderclap of igniting air. The temperature spiked and a flashbulb image was burned on Hawkins’s retinas. Instantaneously a seething wave of heat billowed over them, a blistering desert wind of dust and debris. Walls crashed down throughout the ruined city, blown down by the force of the recoil-blast in a confined space.
Despite his own orders, Hawkins looked up in time to see the enormous blue-white bolt of incandescent plasma as it streaked overhead. Too bright to look at, it was the blinding radiance of an eclipse and a supernova all in one. Scads of molten metal trailed from its outer edges as it flashed the length of the training hall and slammed into the vast, skull-faced bulkhead at its rear.
Hawkins braced himself for an explosion, but the vast, super-heated plasma bolt simply punched through the heavily-plated bulkhead as though it wasn’t even there. He tried to blink away the painful neon afterimages, but they wouldn’t go away and he cursed his foolishness in looking up. A shrieking cloud of wind-borne matter blew past, and the wall behind him groaned as the hammerblow of the thermal shockwave slammed into it.
‘Move!’ shouted Hawkins, pushing himself to his feet as the building that had sheltered them from the blast now threatened to come down and bury them alive. He and Rae scrambled away as the building came apart i
n an avalanche of steel and stone. A piece of broken stone clipped Hawkins on the shoulder, and the force of the impact cracked one of the bones there. He grunted in pain as randomly falling pieces of connective steelwork and modular plates rained down on him and his men. Choking dust clouds surged and swayed in the riotous thermal vortices, tugged this way and that as the venting systems fought to dissipate the heat build.
Hawkins rolled to his side, clutching his damaged shoulder and spitting a mouthful of bloodstained dust. His ears rang with noise and his vision still wouldn’t properly clear, but he could still see that many of his soldiers hadn’t been so lucky. Most had gotten out from beneath the building in time, but Hawkins saw several arms and legs protruding from the debris, and a soldier whose torso lay buried in the rubble. A number of dust and blood-covered soldiers tried to free him, even though it was obvious the man was dead.
Hawkins held up his good arm and said, ‘Help me up, Rae. And be careful about it, I think my collarbone’s broken.’
Lieutenant Rae, almost unrecognisable under a patina of pale ash and black dust, took his arm and hauled him to his feet. Hawkins bit back a cry of pain and wiped blood from his forehead as he tried to gain some measure of the situation. Warning lights flashed overhead and emergency klaxons bellowed in anger as emergency teams of medicae servitors were deployed from recessed chambers. Wounded Guardsmen shouted for medics, while revving Chimeras, Hellhounds and Leman Russ tanks formed defensive laagers on the far side of the ruins. Dazed Guardsmen stumbled through the wreckage, some missing limbs, others with horrific flash burns they would likely not survive, and still more with skin scorched red by the heat wash of the plasma weapon.
‘Holy God-Emperor...’ breathed Rae.
The little that had been left standing of the ruined city was gone, its prefabricated structures and multiple blocks flattened beneath the plasmic pressure wave radiating from the centre of the devastation. Lupa Capitalina shimmered in a distorting heat haze, wreathed in clouds of steam as its weapon arm vented super-heated plasma discharge. Its warhorn blared a scream of triumph, but even as Hawkins picked out its towering form through the smoke and dust, the sound changed to one of anguish as it beheld the destruction it had unleashed.
Canis Ulfrica swayed in front of the larger battle Titan, its right arm and much of its shoulder carapace simply burned away. Flames and drooling cables that spat arcs of lightning guttered from the wound. With the aching slowness of a wounded Guardsman who’d only just realised the gunshot in his chest was mortal, Canis Ulfrica sank to its knees with a booming crash that reverberated around the training halls. She fell no further, and a shrieking wail of grieving binary issued from the augmitters of every member of the Cult Mechanicus.
Despite the losses his own men had suffered, Hawkins felt tears prick the corners of his eyes to see so mighty a machine humbled. The two Warhounds circled the fallen Reaver, their heads thrown back and their warhorns blasting out howls of primal loss.
As destructive as the plasma bolt loosed by Lupa Capitalina had been in the training halls, it was nothing compared to the devastation yet to come. Confined in an oxygen-rich environment without the vastness of an atmosphere in which to dissipate its heat and ionising electrons, the plasma burned volcanic as it streaked the length of the Speranza. It burned its way through the starboard solar collector arrays, shattering millions of precision-finished mirrors and melting support struts machined to nanoscopic tolerances. The brittle detonations of countless looking-glasses sounded like a glassy sea crashing on a steel shore, and the reflected heat boiled the flesh from the bones of the floating servitors whose lives were spent in keeping the mirrors free of imperfections.
Another bulkhead was sliced through with horrifying ease, the superstructure around the chamber sagging as a central tension bar snapped like overstretched elastic. In the vaulted chambers behind the solar collectors, vast capacitors, long since beyond the reach of any in the Adeptus Mechanicus to reproduce, were reduced to thousands of tonnes of scrap metal as the plasma bolt bored through machines dreamed into existence in a past age. Irreplaceable technology melted to molten slag and a thunderclap of electrical discharge exploded from the mortally wounded machinery as it screamed in its death-throes. Every metal structure within five hundred metres became lethally charged with thousands of volts, and hundreds of ship-serfs died as they were electrocuted in leaping arcs of red lightning.
The hangars of titanic earth-moving machinery fared little better, with a hive-dozer five hundred metres tall cored by the bolt. Fuel cells detonated explosively and the complex machinery at the heart of its engineering deck was flooded with volatile electro-plasma backwash. Hard rubber wheels melted in the heat, and every transparisteel panel shattered with thermoplasmic bloom. A giant crane mechanism, capable of lifting starships between construction cradles, was struck amidships, and the entire upper assembly crashed down into the hold, smashing itself to destruction on the way down and doing irreparable damage to three Goliath lifters and a Prometheus-class excavator.
And the rogue plasma bolt was still not spent.
The command deck shone with a blood-red light as alarms, damage reports and emergency subroutines flickered to life. The Speranza shook from end to end, and Archmagos Kotov felt her pain as it reverberated through his connection to the vast machine-spirit. Crackling arcs of power wreathed the archmagos, earthing through microscopic dampers worked into his cybernetic body as he fought to keep control.
His senior magi were meshed with their stations, each one relaying news of the effects of the disastrous weapon malfunction on the training deck. Magos Saiixek’s multiple arms danced over the engineering consoles, rerouting engine power from the bolt’s path, while Magos Azuramagelli charted potential exit points for an emergency warp translation. Magos Blaylock co-ordinated the ship’s emergency response as Kryptaestrex ran damage control.
None of the news was good.
‘Any more from Dahan?’ asked Kotov, already knowing the answer.
‘Negative, archmagos,’ said Kryptaestrex. ‘His floodstream is offline. He is likely dead.’
The inload from Magos Dahan had come to the command deck incomplete, and further requests for clarification remained unanswered. The fragmentary data the Secutor magos had managed to exload before going offline suggested that one of the Titans of Legio Sirius had fired on another, but what had driven it to do so remained unquantifiable.
Was is treachery? Had the rot of betrayal and corruption touched one of Sirius the way it had with Legio Serpentes on Uraniborg 1572? The thought sent a shudder of dislocative current through his body, and the Speranza groaned as it felt his fear. Was he to be forever cursed and tormented by the Omnissiah? Was this crusade into the unknown not penance enough to restore him in its infinite graces and binary glory?
‘Starboard solar collectors are gone,’ said Tarkis Blaylock, restoring his focus. While Kotov was connected to the ship’s Manifold, Blaylock remained apart from it. To have both senior magi plugged in while such a disastrous turn of events was playing out was against procedure, but Kotov desperately needed Blaylock’s statistical expertise to aid him in co-ordinating the emergency response of the Speranza.
If Kotov could not have Blaylock, then he would have the next best thing. He exloaded a series of code-frequencies and brevet rank protocols through the noosphere to Linya Tychon, together with a data-squirt of what he required of her. She answered almost immediately, already aware of the danger facing the Speranza. Her inload/exload capacity adjoined his own and the burden of processing the vast ship’s needs eased with another to help shoulder the load.
Throughout the ship, every magos able to link with the Manifold added their own capacity to calming the wounded vessel’s pain. Entire decks echoed with binary prayers and machine code hymnals, echoing from prow to stern as the Cult Mechanicus bent its logical will to the restoration of pure functionality.
‘Is the Geller field holding?’ asked Kotov, diverting a measure of his
attention to bridge control.
‘It’s holding,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘The field generators are situated in the prow, but with the capacitors offline, their continued operation will burn through our reserves much quicker.’
‘Have you calculated an exit point?’
‘Working on it now,’ said Azuramagelli, managing to convey his irritation even through the expressionless vista of his brain jars.
‘Construction engine Virastyuk reports ninety per cent degradation of functionality,’ reported Magos Kryptaestrex, his sonorous voice like that of a mother listing her dead children. ‘Lifter Nummisto is destroyed. Rigs Poundstone and Thorsen are damaged too. Badly.’
‘Where is the plasma fire now?’ demanded Kotov. ‘How far has it burned?’
‘It is in the aft decks, burning through the transport holds,’ answered Blaylock. ‘Integrity fields have failed, and the loss of atmosphere has helped bleed off 102K of plasmic energy, though the tesla strength of the bolt remains unaffected. Thirty-two per cent of our drop-ship fleet has been blown into the warp, together with forty-five per cent of the Guard’s armoured vehicles.’
Kryptaestrex grunted, his multiple arms and wide body jerking with the force of his displeasure.
‘The Cadians aren’t going to like that,’ he said.
‘If we cannot dampen this fire, then their dislikes will be the least of our concerns,’ said Kotov. ‘When this is over, I will build them replacements in the prow manufactories. Now where are my containment doors?’
‘Blast containment shields are raising between sections Z-3 Tertius Lambda and X-4 Rho,’ said Blaylock, reading the damage-control inloads from noospheric veils of light. ‘There is an eighty-three point seven per cent chance they will not halt the blast and it will breach the main plasma combustion chamber.’
‘But they will at least dampen its force?’
‘To some degree, yes,’ agreed Blaylock. ‘But given the enhanced conditions for plasma burn aboard ship, they will not stop it.’