Vengeful Spirit
Page 38
Albard wept to see strong thighs with well-defined quadriceps. His belly was flat and cut with abdominal muscles. His pectorals were the very epitome of sculpted perfection. He was a god among men, as perfect as the gilded statues of the Emperor’s sons that flanked the approach to the Sanctuary.
The years since his failed Becoming were wiped away and all that he could have been was revealed. This was what he should have been, this was what Raeven and Lyx had stolen from him.
This was what the Serpent Gods had offered Raeven and what he had selfishly thrown back in their faces. He would not make that mistake. Albard would live up to the promise of all he had been raised to expect. His would be a life of glory lived for the Serpent Gods.
What they offered was everything he had been denied.
The broken psyche that was Albard Devine had no chance against such blandishments and the force of his own ambitions.
‘I am yours...’ he whispered, and the lamprey-like mouths of the snake fronds fastened on his limbs once again. The pain of their teeth upon his perfect body was a welcome pain. He convulsed as the heady mix of daemonic elixirs coursed around his body. The sensation of bliss was unstoppable, matched only by his horror at the crippled thing he had once been.
Albard blinked and the interior of the pilot’s canopy was wiped from his sight.
The Stormlord’s warhorse rode towards the towering beast of black and white as it turned its killing fire on a host of brave foot knights making a last stand by a flame-belching crater where once had stood a mighty fortress.
‘Vajras!’ he bellowed. ‘Ride with me to victory!’
In the end, it wasn’t natural Cthonian ferocity or hot-as-hell-in-the-heart resilience that saved Aximand’s Sons of Horus. Nor was it any small-unit tactics of uncommon brilliance or heroic leadership from a charismatic officer.
In the end it was Titans that saved them.
Mourn-it-all had reaped a fearsome tally, its edge as sharp as the day the Warmaster had restored it. But a sharp sword and an arm to swing it weren’t enough. The Sons of Horus fought a desperate retreat through the maze of shattered blocks that was all that remained of the flanking wall, harried at every turn by vengeful Ultramarines.
Hundreds of warriors grappled and stabbed and shot one another in the fog of explosions and burning propellant. Wrecked vehicles lay strewn in the rubble. Random rounds cooked off and crackled in the flames. Mortal soldiers unlucky enough to be caught in the middle were killed within moments, crushed in the fray, hacked open or shredded in withering crossfire.
This was Legion war. Mortals had no place in it.
Bolter shells caromed off Aximand’s armour, swords gouged the bonded ceramite and explosions battered him with debris. All semblance of purpose and control among the combatants was eroded in the smoking, flame-lit nightmare. Even in the chaos, Aximand knew the Ultramarines held the upper hand. With every hacking sweep, every snatched pistol shot, the Sons of Horus were a step closer to defeat.
Aximand had killed seventeen Ultramarines.
An admirable ratio, but not without its cost.
Aximand’s right shoulder guard was gone, torn away by the heavy blast of an emplaced autocannon. The flesh beneath was burned black and every movement of the arm brought a hiss of pain to his lips. His plastron was cracked and the coolant pipes crossing underneath spewed chemicals down his legs in oily sheets. Regrown vertebrae protested at his sudden movements, the grafted bone not yet fully bedded in.
But the fight wasn’t lost.
For all their damned practical, for all that they held the upper hand, the Ultramarines couldn’t put the Sons of Horus to rout. Almost any other foe would have broken in the face of such a relentless killing machine of war, but the Sons of Horus were weaned on blood. They gave ground only in blood.
And that had earned them a reprieve.
Unimaginably powerful weapons discharged behind Aximand. The kind that would kill you without you even knowing it, the kind that would atomise every molecule of your body before the brain even registered the muzzle flash.
Now that weaponry was turned on the warriors of the XIII Legion.
A column of incandescent light erupted in the heart of the blue-armoured warriors. Plasma washed up like a geyser as the white heat of a blastgun turned its heat on the enemy infantry.
A one-armed Warhound climbed to the top of the rubble, its hull pitted with stubber impacts. Void shield haze clung to its ripped carapace like corposant, and oily blood streamed from its underside.
Bloodveil.
Its remaining arm unleashed a withering fan of turbo fire. Ultramarines were hollowed out, sliced open and boiled within their armour. Killing light speared through the ruins. Five metre spurts of vapour and fragmented armour stitched through the rubble. Two dozen warriors were cut down in the blink of an eye.
The white-heat of the laser weapon’s discharge burned the fog and Aximand punched the air like the old days when he saw the limping giant, Silence of Death, approaching. The Reaver had been taken apart, its armour in tatters and both its arms destroyed. The Knights had almost brought the Reaver down, but going head to head with a Battle Titan, any hope of victory had always been slender.
The Reaver’s apocalypse launcher filled the sky with dozens of missiles. Then a dozen more. Streaking darts of light arced overhead and slashed down in a hammering series of explosions that merged into one continuous roar of detonation.
Atop the rubble, Bloodveil threw back its head and loosed an ululating blast of its warhorn. A bellow of victory or a paean of loss? Aximand couldn’t tell.
Silence of Death crashed down onto its knees, its upper carapace swaying as flames erupted from the princeps canopy. The Interfector engine had turned the fight around, but it would take no further part in the battle.
The thunder of explosions shook the earth and Aximand gripped a bent iron girder jutting from the ruins to take a breath.
In the precious moment he had, Aximand reloaded his bolter.
Last magazine.
Then he saw he wouldn’t need it.
Withdrawing in good order from battle was one of the most difficult manoeuvres a formation could make. Doing it under fire made it next to impossible.
Yet that was what the Ultramarines had done.
Yade Durso staggered through the smoke, looking as though he’d gone toe-to-toe with the Knights himself.
‘You made it,’ said Aximand.
‘Lupercal helped me,’ said Durso, holding up his hand.
The golden Eye of Horus that Durso had carried was melted into his palm, forever to be part of his gauntlet. Its outline was heat softened, but still clearly recognisable.
‘I was bolter dry and sword broken,’ said Durso. ‘A Thirteenth Legion bastard had me dead to rights.’
‘So what happened?’
Durso clenched his fist. ‘I had to punch his damn head off.’
The hololith filled with multiple inloads coming from orbital survey tracks. A wealth of data filled the slate. New icons, new force vectors. Unknown contacts.
Unknown to the battle cogitators, corrected Horus.
Not unknown to me.
‘You are a wonder, my indomitable brother,’ said Horus. He stood and his presence filled the pavilion with bellicose intent.
Maloghurst bent to the slate, his eyes darting between the multiple inloads.
‘Send word to the Legion,’ said Horus, lifting Worldbreaker from the nearest weapon rack. ‘Full advance. It’s time to end this.’
‘Is that...?’ began Maloghurst, his finger tracing a line of sigils advancing from the south.
‘It is,’ said Horus. ‘Right where I need him to be and just when I need him.’
‘How could you know he would arrive right at this moment?’
‘I’m the Warmaster,’ said Horus. ‘It’s not just a pretty title.’
Tyana Kourion fought the Battle of Lupercalia from the interior of her Stormhammer. Even protected by many centim
etres of layered adamantium and steel plating, the sturm und drang of the apocalyptic conflict was still a symphony of thunder and hammer blows on the side of the superheavy.
The roar of its engine and the world-shaking crash of its multiple weapon systems made ear-defenders a necessity. It was cramped, deafening and stank of oil and sweat and fear. Each second this battle raged, hundreds of her soldiers were dying. It was her job to win this battle quickly.
Half a dozen data-slates parsed inloading information from vox-reports, pict-capture, auspex feeds and visual tagging.
No battle ever went according to plan, and today was no exception. The loss of the Blood Angels had horrified her, but their suicidal charge had bowed the enemy line, giving her guns more chance to savage the advance.
Was that worth the deaths of a hundred Legion warriors?
No, but better to make use of it than lament it.
The fighting had evolved naturally into a shifting tide of heady charges, strategic withdrawals, outright routs and flowing thrusts. Imperial and traitor tanks duelled in their own miniature battlefields, each one a tiny piece of a greater whole; hooking flanking manoeuvres, pincer traps and staggered echelons.
The Titans of Gryphonicus and Crucius waged war on a plane far removed from that of the mortals fighting in their colossal shadows. They fought with weapons whose venting could burn an entire company to death. It was war on a scale where ejected shells could crush a squadron of armoured transports and a misplaced step could destroy an entire battalion.
Sensible commanders avoided being anywhere near engines at war, but sometimes there was no escaping their monstrous presence. Like giants among ants, the Titans crashed and battered one another and their deaths took hundreds of warriors on both sides with them.
Gryphonicus’s complement of Titans was primarily Warhounds, and they had harried the flanks. At least four were gone, either buried in the mountain’s ruin or surrounded and gunned down by Legio Vulcanum’s more numerous Reavers.
The enemy Titans had started the day with the numerical advantage, but Paragon of Terra had steadily eroded that advantage to the point where the engine forces were more or less at parity. At the current rate of attrition, the Imperial engines would soon outnumber those of the Warmaster.
‘More Chimeras and mass-transit carriers coming through on the right,’ observed Naylor. ‘We can’t ignore it any longer. Soon they’ll have enough massed to pose a serious threat there.’
‘Crucius and Gryphonicus aren’t stopping them?’ asked Kourion.
‘They’re wreaking bloody murder on the Mechanicum war machines and their superheavies, but they’re ignoring a lot of the infantry carriers.’
‘They’re beneath them,’ replied Kourion.
‘They’ll be right on bloody top of us unless we push them back before they’ve enough numbers to threaten that flank.’
‘Agreed,’ said Kourion, pulling the battle-inload from the right flank to her main slate. Her eyes scanned the dozens of icons there, quickly assessing their worth and combat effectiveness.
Nothing left alive there with the strength to mount an effective counterattack. She haptically swept up the centre and reserves.
One force icon stood out above all others.
‘There,’ she said, jabbing a finger. ‘That’s our best chance to throw them back. Get them in the damn fight.’
Naylor nodded. ‘Good choice. No combat degradation and perfectly positioned to support the Titans.’
‘Send the orders,’ said Kourion, turning her attention to the confusing haze of gross-displacement weapon discharges on the left where Castor Alcade’s Ultramarines were deployed. She didn’t know what was happening there and that was unacceptable.
Naylor dialed into the local vox-net.
‘Lord Devine,’ said Naylor, exloading a series of engagement vectors. ‘You and your knights are ordered to immediately engage the enemy at the following grid-sectors.’
Vox-static hissed in reply.
The multi-tiered command bridge of Paragon of Terra smelled of oil and incense, hot circuitry and anger. Two hundred calculus logi, servitors and deck crew were plugged into tactica-engines and command consoles, reviewing encrypted vox from every element of Tyana Kourion’s battle-net. A constant drone of low-level binary and hushed voices blended with hot, grainy static and clicking prayers. Heat bled into every system, the anger of the Titan’s machine-spirit rendering every system with a red haze.
Angled slates projected news from all over Molech, hanging in drifting entoptic veils of light. Each one only served to stoke the nuclear heart of the Titan’s rage.
An Imperator Titan was a land-bound starship, as powerful and as demanding a mistress as any void craft. Crewed by thousands throughout its towering height, it was as complex a machine as had ever been built by the hands of man. Only the secret designs of the Ark Mechanicum dared approach the complexity of an Imperator.
To give life to so immense a machine and set it to motion was an entirely different thing to setting a ship in space. Zero gravity forgave a great many things that planetary environments did not.
Its Manifold was a proud, regal thing. An apex predator without rivals, a lord of battle with fangs no other could match and a fury equalled only by its commander.
Princeps Kalonice stood at the jutting prow of the strategium, hands braced on her hips as she drank in the data inloads feeding into the Manifold. She swiped a mechanical hand through the various projections, parting them like smoke and inloading them instantaneously.
Encased in the body-carapace of a Lorica Thallax, all that remained of Etana Kalonice was her skull and spine, fused within the mechanised body of meticulous construction. With reverse-jointed piston legs and wheezing, clicking mechanical joints, she was a robot in all but consciousness.
Contoured plates of porcelain-white armour encased her organic material, and hair-fine copper mind impulse unit cabling allowed her to interface with the fiendishly intricate mechanisms of Paragon of Terra without a gel-filled casket. To be so bound to a machine body was exquisite agony, but Kalonice would rather face a lifetime of pain than permanent entombment.
Algorithmic resonators translated synaptic activity into sounds and allowed Kalonice’s voice to sound virtually human. It almost took away the edge of pain, but not quite.
A flurry of topographical images bloomed at her senior moderati’s station. Maps, threat vectors, combat prognoses. Paragon of Terra’s preferred targets jostled for his attention, but Sular suppressed them in favour of answering his princeps.
‘The Warmaster has fatally underestimated the resistance he would face, ma’am,’ said Sular, a torso with mechanised arms fused with the battle-logister. ‘The Imperial line has collapsed in a number of places, but not enough for a breakthrough. A good defence in depth and numerous flanking sallies have allowed General Kourion’s reserve forces to meet each breakthrough and contain it.’
‘With respect to General Kourion, the destruction of Iron Fist Mountain was unthinkable.’
The Legio Crucius fortress was gone, reduced to a seething, volcanic ruin by orbital fury. All their history, all their connections to their sister Legios gone. In one fell swoop, the Warmaster had brought Legio Crucius to the edge of extinction.
‘And we’ll make them pay for that,’ said Carthal Ashur, pacing the deck like a man on a crowded stage with no role to play.
‘Apologies ma’am,’ said Ashur, forcing himself onto a vacant supplicant’s bench.
She’d met Carthal Ashur many years ago, had even once bedded him when there was still enough of her to make such a prospect tenable. He’d been a disappoi
ntment, but his talent with words and mortals had persuaded her to keep him around as Calator Martialis.
‘Multiple targets inbound,’ reported Moderati Sular. ‘Two dozen main battle tanks. Six superheavies. Supporting infantry, battalion strength.’
‘Any Titan killers?’ asked Ashur.
Kalonice could taste his sweat over the scented oils of the bridge, a mix of eagerness and unfamiliarity. He’d been part of Legio Crucius for decades, but this was only his third time aboard a Battle Titan. His first in battle.
Moderati Sular looked to Kalonice, and she nodded her assent for him to answer Ashur’s question.
‘Shadowswords, aye,’ said Sular, sweeping the data over to the strategium. ‘Some traitor Mechanicum elements too. Highlighting.’
The local area around the Imperator was rendered in cascades of binary, illuminating forces both friendly and enemy. Tanks, infantry, Knights, artillery.
Each of the enemy icons already had a target solution plotted, the Mechanicum elements and superheavies assigned kill-priority.
Paragon of Terra was anticipating her, and Kalonice let it.
Ten Shadowswords with volcano cannons. Unidentified Mechanicum battle-engines – a mix of Ordinatus and Titan, each armed with weapons capable of wreaking great harm on her.
If they could be brought to bear.
‘Information – five seconds,’ answered Magos Surann from the raised gallery behind her, where plugged Mechanicum adepts sat in rows like a binary choir.
She felt stabbing prickles all across her body. Her void shields were taking hits, scrappy and uncoordinated, but hits nonetheless. The infantry she’d stepped over had heavy weapons. Nothing individually capable of harming her or taking out a void shield, but irritating nonetheless.