Which of the foe had done this? Was the murderer still here? The answer was swift in coming. Engine! She yearned with her flawed sensors, staring into the mist. The foe!
The enemy saw her first; it was already fleeing as she rounded the corner, striding around a cluster of wraithbone spires. A Warhound, sprint-stalking in the customary hunched run of its kind. Evidently it had detected the approach of bigger prey and sought to evade.
Cheers sounded from the Scion’s feet. The enemy Warhound had turned from its kill and had been savaging the surviving Unifiers with massed fire. Now the tide had turned.
Weakling fire streamed up from the divided packs of enemy infantry brave enough to show their faces. Tanks were scattered among the rabble, these vomited hard shells that hammered rippling tremors across her voids. She returned fire from her hull turrets, streaming lascannon beams and high-calibre bolt shells back in return. The weaklings fell silent.
She strode down the avenue, crunching monuments of wraithbone beneath her heavy tread. Her cockpit-head swung on heaving pistoned hinges, expelling air and sucking it back in as she tracked left and right, left and right.
I can’t see it. I can’t see… There!
Her war-horn augmitted a wrathful bellow. There in the mist, half hidden by the domes of buildings that barely reached the Scion’s waist, the enemy engine was flanking around at a joint-rattling pace. Its predatory lean gave it a hungry cast. Its stabilisers must have been straining fit to rupture with the pace it set.
Her gunlimb rose on too-slow joints. The Warhound was faster, clanking its way around the final building and spitting up a twinned torrent of macro-bolter fire from its gunlimbs.
She was turning to bring her own weapons to bear, turning into the blizzard of burning metal shells. Her voids rippled. Shuddered. Flickered.
Held.
…and into her reaching fist. She was too slow, too tall, too wounded to catch the engine that sprint-hunched away, half her height. Her grasping metal fingers clawed great gouges across the beast’s back, stealing its balance but failing to hold it in place. She heard its relieved spurt of exalted, shattered code as it lurched towards escape. Its three-toed feet crashed through a regiment of her skitarii. They discharged small-arms fire at its retreating back. Amazingly, one of her hoplites even threw a spear that bounced from the Warhound’s carapace. It stuck there, wedged between two armour plates.
A heroic cast, her crew were saying. And yet useless, she thought, even as she admired the skitarii’s valour.
She knew the Warhound wouldn’t return again. Even injured as she was, slowed by grievous wounds, she would see it dead if it showed itself once more.
The Scion waited. Trickles of her worshippers began to make themselves known, riding conveyors or journeying on foot, making their way in safety now the demigod stood watch over them.
And here she would remain. She panned on her waist axis, staring, staring. Her motions were industrial thunder. The mist hid all.
Then, a signal. Another of her brothers calling to her. Black Sky! One of her noblest kindred. She had precious few siblings left.
Black Sky! I come.
‘My princeps?’ one of her crew asked, turning in his forward throne. ‘Word from the tribune. Ilmarius Novus was the only engine on-station to guard the Unifiers’ evacuation in this district.’
Princeps Nishome Alvarek opened her eyes for the first time in uncounted hours. ‘Ra wishes us to remain?’
‘Aye, my princeps.’
‘Inform Ra that it is with regret we cannot fulfil his desires. Tell him that we have received word that the Black Sky suffers. If we are to die here, my moderati, then we will ensure the escape of as many of our brother and sister engines as possible. Black Sky calls,’ she said with finality. ‘We walk to his aid.’
The Scion walked. One of the phantasms danced before her – one of the creatures that sent shivery unease through her crew and hurt their eyes to look upon, yet simply didn’t exist to her instruments. Winged, feathered, like some carrion crow warped into spindly humanoid form, it beat the air with great wings, vomiting blue fire upon the infantry below.
She shredded it with turret fire, sending its charred skeleton to the ground. Walking on, she saw engines in the mist. Their hump-backed silhouettes spoke of size and class and weapon loadouts as surely as any scan report. The fog was thinner in this part of the city.
Black Sky stood alone, facing two of the foe. Smoke streamed from his hull, greying the pervasive golden mist. The Reaver retreated in halting strides, backing across a wide bridge over an expanse of golden nothingness. The other engines followed, moving between domes and towers. One Warhound. One Warlord. A hunting cadre, like a primitive king and his faithful dog.
She recognised the excited bleats of code from the lesser engine as the same garbled nonsense of the Warhound that had fled from her before. Of course. Sending a lone Scout Titan ahead to draw prey in pursuit was a common enough tactic.
The Scion took position at the bridge’s end, raising her gunlimbs on ponderous hydraulics. Aware of her now, the enemy engines remained on the far side of the span. She sensed their weapon locks slipping, thrown loose by the mist. She heard their spurts of aggravated code and knew the frustration well. Her long-range targeting systems had refused to focus since the first day she walked within this realm.
They must not be allowed to cross the bridge. A Warlord would wreak untold havoc among the evacuating Mechanicum. But wounded and drained, she knew her chances of survival were at best insignificant. Even with Black Sky aiding her, it would be two gravely wounded Ignatum engines against two fresh foes.
So be it. The Scion would make her last stand here.
The very heart of the Great Work. As fine a place as any, and far finer than most.
Missiles streamed past the withdrawing Reaver, leaving smoke trails in the mist. Launched in haste by unlocked targeting systems, they had precious little hope of impacting at such a range. None of them even brushed Black Sky’s voids.
Across the span, the first of the enemy engines began its approach. The Warlord was undamaged, its sloping and scaled armour typical of forge world Omadan’s engines. The open hand of the forge’s symbol showed scarification upon the palm, runic scarring in patterns that resembled no known language for the Scion to process.
The Warhound loped past and ahead of its slower brother, its hunchback swaying, gunlimbs rising. It crossed the bridge far faster, and the Scion noted the riven markings of its own power fist gouged along the second engine’s back.
You die first.
She was destined to be left here, but she would choose her own death. With hydraulic majesty, the Scion of Vigilant Light rose to her final challenge, war-horn blaring.
The Archimandrite lifted its fist. The rebel legionary t
hrashing in its one-handed clutch barely even strained the hydraulics of the war machine’s grip. Two bolt shells hammered against the durabonded thickness of its facial armour, causing its visuals to grey out for a fraction of a second. With no more ammunition, the Space Marine hurled the pistol with an impact that would have broken a human’s spine. It spanked off the side of the Archimandrite’s faceplate, as harmful as a kindly caress.
The machine applied pressure, closing its fist by degrees. Purple armour warped, then cracked, then the meat beneath began to bleed through the ravaged ceramite. Bones cracked, then crumbled. Only then did the warrior cry out, as his torso and thighs were reduced to shards of bone and mangled flesh barely held together by a layer of metal. The ruination no longer resembled a man at all.
‘You bore me,’ the Archimandrite told the Space Marine. After dropping the crippled mess to the ground, it silenced the warrior for good with a press of its clawed foot.
To untuned and untrained senses, the evacuation looked much the same as the rest of the siege. The grinding of opposing forces across the city had changed little on the surface. Only in the catacombs was the evidence of flight more profound, as the Mechanicum’s adepts who formed the first wave filtered into the hazy tunnels. War servitors went with them. A carefully cogitated number, a subtle exodus alongside the true evacuation, dispersed almost to the point of being hidden. The Archimandrite oversaw this second dispersal with the same precision it had arranged the first.
A heavy chainsword slammed against the machine’s knee joint, the kind of brute weapon that found easy homes in the more savage Legions, capable of rending an armoured man in two. Sparks arced from where the racing, revving teeth met Martian metal. The Archimandrite didn’t even have time to kill its attacker. The red-plated World Eater collapsed, headless, beneath a sweep of a Custodian’s spear.
The machine, Executor Principus of the Martian Mechanicum’s forces here, approached its role with calculating fervour. In its flesh-life it had wrought weapons, infusing them with spirit and purpose before sending them away to wage holy war. Now it was a weapon in its own right. With each kill, Magos Domina Hieronyma of the Ordo Reductor died a little more inside her own mind. She went willingly, subsumed by the cogitations and mathematical processes of annihilating her foes.
The Archimandrite was in ascendance. No longer a high priestess of the Unmaker God, but an avatar of it.
The Archimandrite was only doing as it was made to do. It had joined the Great Work and in-linked to the entirety of the Mechanicum’s army. Now it saw through their eyes, accessed their thought patterns, and led them into battle.
It canted the word into the noosphere, that metadigital network of datastreams accessible only to those born of the Red Planet and subsequently fitted with high-grade augmetics. Its transmissive was laden with codes and equations and coordinates of birth-foundries and manufactories, of plateaus where great battles were fought between forges.
Many of them canted back replies of their own –
The Archimandrite paid special heed to the Custodians. It was increasingly evident that the Legio Custodes was no unified army. Its warriors fought without formation or Legion-scale order, even at the squad level. Each one was an individual among other individuals, trailed by his own artificers and arsenal thralls, the latter of whom reloaded the Custodians’ guardian spears each time a warrior called out.
Their ranks seemed informal, like gestures of respect towards veterans and gifted individuals rather than a command structure to be rigidly adhered to. Few of them, even Tribune Endymion or those who shared Diocletian Coros’ rank of prefect, ever gave orders.
They simply immersed themselves wherever the fighting was thickest, slaughtering in silence.
And yet, there was unity. Unity of purpose, if nothing else. Despite the lack of order and the length of their spinning blades, they never burdened one another or blighted the paths of the other warriors around them. Consummate reflexes far in advance of a legionary’s own genhanced grace gave them a talent that required years for human soldiers, even Space Marines, to learn through repetitive discipline. Yet the Ten Thousand were masters of it. The Archimandrite watched them whirling and killing, their energised blades passing within a hand’s breadth of another golden warrior, yet never once threatening the other Custodian’s life. Each one of them existed within his own sphere, a warlord unto himself.
Nor was that all. The Archimandrite’s observation revealed an inherent defensiveness in the initial blows of each duel. At first this seeming passivity during the first seconds of engagement made little sense, but further analysis showed the truth. Each Custodian spent those precious moments studying his foe, adjusting his fighting style to compensate, then delivering a killing blow. They could simply overpower their enemies immediately with superior strength, speed and armament. Instead, they learned from each and every fight.
Ra Endymion exemplified this. He would parry twice or thrice, whether it was sword, axe, fang or claw, following his enemy’s movements with brief flickers of attention, then lashing back to impale, to cleave, to sever. According to the Archimandrite’s datastreams, no legionary had yet lasted more than three blows against his advance.
Bodyguards, the Archimandrite mused. Praetorians. This was their purpose, after all. Not to win wars, but to know their master’s enemies and destroy them before they could do Him harm. How many thousands of hours of pict-footage did the Ten Thousand study from each conquered or compliant world? Their lives surely consisted of an eternity of preparatory devotion, studying enemy after enemy in case they ever faced them in battle, atop the physicality of their standard training.
Their preternatural reactions allowed them to block bolts and lasfire alike, deflecting it from their spinning spears, but they could still be killed. The Archimandrite had witnessed that itself. They could be overwhelmed by foes and dragged down, or gunned down while already engaged.
The machine advanced at Ra’s side, its shoulder cannons tracking independently of its primary attention, groaning with the ear-straining choooooom of Martian volkite beams and the heavier staccato crashing of Avenger bolt cannons. Ammunition feeds and power indicators decorated the edges of the Archimandrite’s vision. They flashed with sacred depletion; a prayer to the Unmaker God itself. The armoured energy reactor bound to her back seethed with continually replenishing plasma. The heart of an artificial sun powered her weapons and intellect alike. War had never felt so holy.
A particularly brave legionary launched himself at the Archimandrite from the back of a careening Rhino. The machine plucked the screaming sword-bearer out of the air, holding him as the flamer jets in its wrist incinerated the captive fool. All the while, the Archimandrite fired with its free hand, the double-barrelled energy weapon mounted there – one of Arkhan Land’s more precious gifts – streaming with the fires of artificial fusion.
They fought along the rising promenades, between the impossible towers. Silhouettes of extinguished daemons showed against the eldar architecture, their images burned onto the wraithbone by the Archimandrite’s weapons.
They came from the sky as often as they surged from the ground – creatures falling from the cityscape above onto the advancing Imperials. Diseased things climbed the towers to leap and fall, bursting as biological bombs with smacks of ruptured skin; feathered wreckages of avian mimicry descended on flyblown wings to be lanced through by grav-Raider lascannons and the massed fire of guardian spears. Around the Archimandrite, the wraithbone spires thrummed with an al
most metallic resonance each time their smooth walls were struck by errant fire.
The machine calculated as it killed, noospherically assigning more battle-servitors and skitarii to begin the journey into the tunnels beneath the city. The numbers of withdrawing Mechanicum warriors rose subtly, quietly higher than the projected figures the Archimandrite had offered to the Ten Thousand. There were no inloaded questions to mark this discrepancy. No outrage or curiosity at the alterations in the figures. The Custodians and the Sisters of Silence battled on, oblivious.
‘For the Omnissiah,’ it augmitted aloud. ‘For the Unmaker God.’
The Scion stood alone.
She swayed on legs blighted by ruptured stabilisers. She leaned askew, the pistons and pressure junctions of her left leg shattered beyond repair. Oil-blood sluiced from severed pipe-veins, gushing fluid and life and coolant onto the bone bridge beneath her. Torsion-bundle cabling hung from her iron guts, a spillage of intestines.
The bridge was hers.
Inside herself she felt fire and death – the former licking at her internal systems and weakening her bones, the latter resonating in the lost and mournful dirges of dispersing mortal consciousnesses. Her crew were dead or dying, their souls fleeing damaged husks, fading away into whatever nothingness awaited their frail and fleshly kind.
But the bridge was hers.
The bridge was hers, and her final wish was that her kindred would remember her like this, as a victor, not as a martyred sacrifice.
Duels between engines rarely lasted long. She had walked towards this last battle amidst a breaker of vox noise. The Warhound closed fast. Both of its gunlimbs were given over to anti-infantry mountings, they screeched up with the explosive rage of several hundred bolt shells per second, lighting the Scion’s shields in prismatic shimmers, rippling them like a lake in a hailstorm. It scampered ferally aside from her own opening salvo, compacting itself at full sprint to run beneath the Warlord’s right gunlimb. This was the way of the Warhounds in battle: to scout and ambush, to harass and to distract.
The Master of Mankind Page 27