Vengeful Spirit
Page 25
She and Lieutenant Kjell had pulled the soldier from the wreck of a Baneblade whose engine exploded ninety kilometres south of Avadon. Tags said his name was Nyks, and his youthful eyes reminded her of her son serving off-world in the 24th Molech Firescions.
Those same eyes begged her to save his life, but Noama didn’t know if she could. His belly had been opened by a red-hot shell fragment and promethium burned skin slithered over his chest like wet clay.
But that wasn’t what was going to kill him. That particular honour would go to the nicked coeliac artery in his abdomen.
‘He’s not gonna make it, Noama!’ shouted Kjell over the roar of the engines. ‘I need help over here, and this one might actually live.’
‘Shut up, lieutenant,’ snapped Noama, finally grasping the writhing artery. ‘I’m not losing this one. I can get it.’
The glistening blood vessel squirmed in her grip like a hostile snake. The Galenus rocked and her grip slackened for a fraction of a second.
‘Damn it, Anson!’ she shouted as the artery slid back into the soldier’s body. ‘Keep us level, you Throne-damned idiot! Don’t make me come up there!’
‘Trying, ma’am,’ said Anson over the vox, ‘but it’s kind of hard travelling at this speed and with all this traffic.’
Hundreds of vehicles were fleeing the carnage at Avadon, heading for the armed camp forming six hundred kilometres south around Lupercalia. Regiments from bases along the edges of the Tazkhar Steppes and the hinterlands of the east around the Preceptor Line were already congregating on Lupercalia, with more on the march every day.
All well and good. Assuming they made it that far.
Scuttlebutt from vox-fragments and the lips of wounded men said enemy Titans were pursuing them. Noama put little faith in such talk. More than likely the rumours were typical grunt pessimism.
At least she hoped so.
‘Are we going to make it, captain?’ asked Kjell.
‘Don’t ask me such stupid questions,’ she snapped. ‘I’m busy.’
‘The Sons of Horus are going to catch us, aren’t they?’
‘If they do I’ll be sure to let you know,’ said Noama.
She’d heard a man with no arms and legs claim the Titans of the three Legios were on the march to save them, but didn’t know whether that was a dying man’s fantasy or the truth. Knowing what she knew of the things men and women said in their most pain-filled moments, Noama inclined to the former.
‘Get back here, you slippery little bastard,’ said Noama, pressing her fingers into the soldier’s body. She grasped for the artery. ‘I can feel the little swine, but it’s making me work for it.’
Her fingers closed on the torn blood vessel, and hair-fine suture clamps extruded from her medicae gauntlet to seal it shut.
‘Got you,’ she said, pinning the artery in place with deft twists of her fingertips. Noama stood straight and, satisfied the worst of the boy’s life-threatening injuries was dealt with for now, brought over the implanted nursing servitor with a sub-vocal command.
‘Seal him up and wrap those burns in counterseptic gels,’ she said. ‘I’m not getting the bleeding stopped just for him to die from a damned infection, you understand? Right, now watch his blood pressure too, and let me know if he starts spiking. Clear?’
The servitor acknowledged her orders and set to work.
Noama moved onto the next hideously wounded soldier.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Been in the wars have we?’
The twin Warlords of Legio Fortidus strode from the gloomy caverns of the Zanark Deeps side by side followed by the last of their Legio. Princeps Uta-Dagon’s force numbered two Warlords and four Warhounds. On most battlefields that would be enough firepower to easily carry the day.
Against the force on Uta-Dagon’s threat auspex it would be spitting in the eye of the tempest.
When word had come of the civil war on Mars, Uta-Dagon had assumed his Titanicus brothers would be at the heart of the fighting, standing with those loyal to the Emperor. Only later, as more details emerged of the catastrophe engulfing the Red Planet had the truth emerged.
They were all that remained of Legio Fortidus.
In the end, though, it changed nothing.
Molech was at war, and the architect of his Legio’s doom was before him.
Uta-Dagon floated within his amniotic casket within the head section of Red Vengeance, the Warlord Titan he had piloted for eighty years and whose name he had changed after a vivid waking dream in the Manifold. His sister-princeps, Utu-Lerna had likewise been compelled to rename her engine, a Warlord whose new designation was Bloodgeld.
Uta-Dagon had long since sacrificed his organic eyes to the service of the Legio, but Red Vengeance’s auto-senses interpreted the sky a vivid crimson.
said Utu-Lerna, reading his thoughts through the Manifold as she so often did. Twins whose cords had been cut in the rains of Pax Olympus, their birth was seen as auspicious. And so it had proved when both were taken as babes by the Collegia Titanicus.
Burning starships streaked the sky. Had his brothers on Mars seen skies like this before they died? He hoped so, for it had been under such a sky the Legio had been born, fighting in the Dyzan Valley against the resurgent Terrawatt Clan.
said Utu-Lerna. Bloodgeld’s warsight was keener than that of Red Vengeance and Uta-Dagon had learnt to trust his twin’s interpretations of her engine’s senses.
Moments later Uta-Dagon saw them too. Fifteen engines on the static-laced horizon, striding south in pursuit of the survivors of Avadon. A great column of armoured vehicles swarmed the Titan’s feet. Scavengers following apex predators.
In three minutes or less, the enemy Titans would be in range of the retreating Imperial forces. Thousands would die unless the pursuers could be given a more tempting target.
Uta-Dagon heard an intake of breath behind him and twisted his withered form around in the fluid-filled casket. Ur-Nammu had seen them too, her almost human face underlit by the soft glow of the threat auspex. Like Uta-Dagon, the Warmonger was Mechanicum. She was not engine-capable, yet had chosen to die with her brothers and sisters.
‘I do not fear death, my princeps,’ said Ur-Nammu, before correcting herself and presenting her answer in the Manifold.
The princeps returned his attention to the approaching battlescape, its vector contours and salient features forming in the interface within his skull. Manifold records quickly identified the traitor engines.
Reavers: Dread Wake, Hand of Ruin and Myrmidion Rex of Legio Mortis; Silence of Death and Pax Ascerbus of Legio Interfector, dubbed the Murder Lords after Isstvan III. Nightmaw of Legio Vulcanum.
Warhounds: Kitsune and Kumiho of Legio Vulpa, Venataris Mori and Carnophage of Vulcanum.
And then the Warlords: Mask of Ruin, Talismanik, and Anger’s Reward, also of Vulcanum. Xestor’s Sword and Phantom Lord of Legio Mortis.
Data on the enemy engines flowed around Uta-Dagon, engagements fought, engine kills, maintenance profiles and damage records. In a straight up fight, such details could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Here they were unnecessary. The chance to perhaps do a little more damage before being destroyed.
ing the ground and smashing maglevs where there wasn’t enough clearance to avoid them.
Uta-Dagon felt intense heat swell his phantom limbs as his weapon systems spooled up to fire. His right arm was the searing power of a volcano cannon, his left the clenched fist of a hellstorm cannon. He felt the passage of scores of missiles moving through his body of iron and sinew to the launchers at his carapace.
It called itself the Teratus, though the Manifold of Red Vengeance had identified it as Pax Ascerbus, a Reaver of Legio Interfector. Blood was its new oil, the sentience of a million warp scraps its marrow and its corrupt machine-spirit was a howling, warp-stitched thing of murder-lust.
With four Warhounds at its feet, it strode with grim purpose towards Legio Fortidus. Talismanik and Phantom Lord marched at its back, and the Teratus dredged power from its every system to keep ahead of the larger engines. They howled at it to slow its advance, to let them dispatch the doomed Legio, but the Teratus ignored them.
The engines of Fortidus were running at barely half power, woken too soon and without the proper consecration. Too long at rest had reduced their reactor fires to embers. Void shields were still sparking from emergency ignition and their walk was the leaden shuffle of a condemned man en route to his execution.
The Warhounds circling the two Warlords were poor specimens. Wary, where they ought to be aggressive. Keeping close to the larger engines where they should be duelling with their opposite numbers.
He sent his own Warhounds out to engage the Fortidus Scout Titans with a pulsed order through the Manifold. Warhorns braying, the eager pups surged forward. They wove in and out of each other’s path, eager to claim the first kill.
The Teratus increased its stride, unconsciously trying to match the pace of the smaller engines. The gap between it and the following Warlords grew wider.
Ranging fire snapped between the Scout Titans. The Teratus ignored it. A baring of fangs, nothing more. Warnings shimmered at the edge of its perception. Power surges, fusion warnings. Emission flares. At first they made no sense.
Then, with a sudden pulse of awareness, he realised how it had been misled, its own sense of righteous superiority causing it to see what it wanted to see.
Neither of the Fortidus engines was as enfeebled as they first appeared. Their reactors surged to life with high-volume plasma injections. A terminally-risky manoeuvre that would end a reactor’s useful life in one final sunburst of searing brilliance. Weapon systems blazed with power and opened fire in the same instant.
Kitsune and Kumiho suffered first. Shrieking salvoes of Hellstorm fire stripped them of their void shields. Pinpoint volcano cannon shots incinerated their princeps’ compartments and left their thrashing limbs pawing the earth. Venataris Mori and Carnophage scattered at the first barrage of shots, but not fast enough. Venataris Mori fell with a leg blown off and Carnophage ploughed a hundred metre furrow with its canopy as its gyros overcompensated for its princeps’ desperate evasive manoeuvres.
While the Warlords of Fortidus were killing the Teratus’s Scouts, theirs were sprinting forward, heads down and weapons blazing. Jackals hoping to bring down a land leviathan. Turbo fire, gatling fire and streaking missiles stripped the Teratus’s void shields in squalling flares of discharge.
But Scout Titans didn’t take on a Battle Titan and live.
The Teratus turned the gatling blaster on its nearest attacker. Warhounds were fast and agile, but nothing could outrun gunfire.
A storm of incendiary shells burst its voids and staggered it in a ferocious cannonade. Stripped of its shields and speed it was dead in the water. A shock-pulse of melta reduced its princeps canopy to subatomic slag.
Self-guiding missiles streaked from the Teratus’s upper carapace and swatted another Warhound into the ground. Its legs flailed as it tried to right itself. The Teratus slammed its vast foot down. The Warlord’s enormous bulk crushed it flat.
The Teratus fed on the death scream of its victim, drawing the binaric energy into its corrupted Manifold. Its horns blasted a triumphal roar. Its shields were failing, peeled back by niggling fire from the two remaining Warhounds. The Reaver took a backward step as a combined barrage of Hellstorm cannon from the advancing Warlords blew out the last of its protection.
Warhounds were consummate lone predators, but they were also superlative pack hunters. They darted in, weapons punishing the Reaver’s vulnerable rear section. The armour on its reactor housing began peeling back.
Warning sigils flashed through its mind. Coolant leaks, plasma venting. It took another backward step, knowing it needed to link with the Warlord Titans it had tried so hard to outpace. Its right leg locked up, fused by repeated fire from the two Warhounds. The joints and servos there were on fire, and no amount of damage control would free it.
The Teratus watched the two Warlords of Legio Fortidus close.
It felt their weapons lock Pax Ascerbus in their sights, felt the power that had infused it in the blood-soaked hangar temples flee its iron flesh.
It locked its own weapons in return.
The threat of two Warlords in the flank now became too serious to ignore, and the traitor Titans broke off their pursuit of Avadon’s defenders to crush the Imperial engines.
Leaving the blazing corpses of the Teratus and the Warhounds in their wake, Red Vengeance and Bloodgeld limped into the teeth of Talismanik, Phantom Lord, Myrmidion Rex and Mask of Ruin.
In the end, it took another three hours for the last engine of Legio Fortidus to fall.
Red Vengeance and a red sky.
For the Red Planet.
Cebella Devine had long since lost any pleasure she might once have taken in tormenting her stepson. Albard’s hope had died first, then his expectation of death. He knew they could keep him alive indefinitely.
The nightmare of his continued existence eroded his sanity to the point where her icily-constructed barbs fell on deaf ears. She would have killed him long ago, but a firstborn son carried the bloodline. Shargali-Shi’s treatments would only work with the vital fluids of the bloodline.
Cebella dismissed the Sacristans at Albard’s door.
Some intimacies were for a mother alone.
The holographic fire burned in the hearth, casting its fictive heat and illumination around the gloomy chamber. She had come here so often she could pick out individual flame shapes and tell how long remained before the cycle would repeat.
She turned from the phantom light as a line of blood teared in the corner of her eye. Brightness hurt, and only regular injections of complex elastins and glassine meshes within her eyeballs allowed her to see at all. The droplet ran down the drum-tight skin of Cebella’s face, but she didn’t feel it. Her skin had been grafted, stretched and injected so many times it was deadened to virtually all sensation.
The stench within Albard’s chambers was undoubtedly noisome, but like her tactile perceptions, her olfactory senses had also atrophied. Shargali-Shi had promised to restore and enhance her faculties, and each procedure brought her closer to the perfection she had once possessed.
The silver of her exo-skeleton glittered in the firelight, and Albard looked up from his chair o
f furs and putrescence. Saliva leaked from the side of his mouth and matted his unkempt beard, but his organic eye was clearer than it had been for a long time.
Raeven’s visit had galvanised him.
Good. She had need to vent the pain of her grief upon another.
A blunt, wedge-shaped head rose from behind Albard’s chair and a forked tongue tasted the air. Shesha, her former husband’s naga. It hissed and sank back to its slumbers, as decrepit and useless as its current master.
‘Hello, Cebella,’ said Albard. ‘Is it that time already?’
‘It is,’ she replied, kneeling beside him and placing her augmetic-sheathed hands on his lap. The encrusted filth on his coverlet revolted her. It looked like he’d soiled himself, and for once she was glad she could no longer smell things.
‘Where’s Lyx?’ he asked, his voice cracked and brittle. ‘It’s normally her that plays the vampire.’
‘She is not here,’ said Cebella.
Albard gave a dry, hacking cough that turned into snorts of laughter.
‘Standing at her husband’s side as he fights for Molech?’
‘Something like that,’ said Cebella, producing a trio of amethyst vials and a hollow naga fang from the folds of her dress.
Albard’s wheezing laughter died at the sight of the vials, and had it not carried the risk of ripping the skin all the way to her ears, Cebella would have smiled.
She moved the coverlet aside to reveal Albard’s scrawny, wasted legs. Pressure sores and puncture marks ran the length of his inner thigh, the skin around them scabbed and raw.
‘Are the Sacristans cleaning these?’ she asked.
‘Scared I might get an infection and poison you?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The bloodline must be pure.’
‘Even the word pure sounds dirty in your mouth.’
Cebella lifted the naga fang and pressed it to what little meat remained in Albard’s leg. The skin dimpled like cured vellum, and purpled veins stood out like roads on a map.
Albard leaned forward, and the movement was so unexpected that Cebella flinched in surprise. It had been years since she’d seen her stepson move more than the muscles of his face. She hadn’t been sure that he could move at all.