Indecision tore at her. Behind her, the Warhound might work its evil unmolested, streaming fire upon her rear voids with impunity. Worse, it might even chase the fleeing Black Sky, rendering the Scion’s sacrifice worthless.
She let it go, trusting in the simple hatred of its princeps. The Scion had wounded this engine; she wagered with her life that the Warhound’s commander would hunger for the satisfaction of vengeance, not chase the tactical prize of harrying the wounded Black Sky.
The first missiles shattered and burst against the layered aegis of her void shields. Their impacts did no harm beyond stripping the first shield-skins away, but the occlusion of dirty black smoke across her cockpit windows was an irritant. She blind-fired in reply, an expression of disgust more than anything else, yet felt an immediate stab of gratification when the modest rocket salvo from her right shoulder set off the discordant jangle of abused voids.
In the same second, alarms and flashing runes within her crew’s helms declared the punishment her rear voids were taking. The first Warhound had loped around for an attack after all. She had been right to trust in its stupid hatred.
The Scion twisted in a half turn. She began to lower herself, forcing her protesting hydraulics down by venting pressure from her pistons and setting her joints into neutral-passive. An ungainly hunch at best. At worst, a shameful bowing of her head before death. As expected, the Warhound darted away from her firing arc just as before, even as the Scion’s gunlimb tracked around at maximum extension.
This time she held nothing back. With every safeguard unlocked and shut down, her shoulders erupted with trailing smoke as her missile pods roared themselves empty. As she purged herself of her munitions, her volcano cannon breathed its magma blast – this combined, flaring payload aimed entirely at the ground around her.
To the credit of the Warhound’s crew, the lithe engine veered away from the discharging volcano blast, avoiding the certain death of its fusion heat. To the credit of the Scion’s crew, however, the unleashing of its primary weapon had merely been a way to shepherd the Warhound to where it wished it to go. Dodging the inferno sent the Daughter of the Red Star striding directly into the rain of falling missiles.
The first impacts arrested its evading stride, forcing it to brace back on its own hydraulics to prevent itself toppling over. It was already dead, dead the moment it weaved away from the volcano cannon: the Warhound’s voids rippled, blistered, sundered, burst in the span of a human heartbeat. The missiles were dozens of falling blades, each one knifing into the Daughter’s carapace and gouging away great chunks of blackened ablative metal. One rocket shattered its knee joint, another hammered into its sloping canine forehead and ripped away half of its cockpit-head, leaving its crew’s burning corpses dangling from its halved skull, still connected to their thrones by their hardplug cables, hanging like executed criminals.
She was rising again, forcing pressure back into depleted hydraulics. Restoring pressure to vented metal bones took time, and she had precious little of it. A barrage from the enemy Warlord struck her front shields with punitive whip-cracks.
Alarm chimes became wailing sirens as her voids thinned and buckled. She silenced her internal warnings with a thought; she knew how much pain she was in and the danger surrounding her. She didn’t need automated systems caterwauling to drive the point home.
She was at half-extension when her voids went dark. She braced, leaning into the punishment striking her forward arc, shaking even before the sonic boom of her voids finally giving out. Hard las-fire raked and gouged her armour plating, cutting into her, rending her apart while she still stood.
Mercifully, the battering ceased almost at once. The approaching Warlord had expended itself in shattering the Scion’s shields. Both engines strained to reload, fresh rockets racking into place, plasma generators roiling as they recharged.
She was deeply wounded now, sparks lighting up the inside of her cockpit-skull through the windows of her eyes. Fire suppressant sprayed through her insides in soothing rushes. Half of her missile racks had jammed, their mechanisms fouled by damage.
Closer the enemy Warlord came, an executioner’s confidence in the shieldless tilt of its wounded prey, needing to be within a kilometre to trust the accuracy of its webway-misted firing solutions. Spraying blind-fire and estimating trajectories was no longer enough. The time had come for the killing blow.
The Scion started walking. Bleeding fluid and streaming smoke, the way she still rose on her resetting hydraulics gave her a distinct, shoulder-charging hunch. The enemy Warlord ceased locomotion at an approximate kilometre, unwilling to draw closer. No doubt its crew was trying to ordain a hasty, coolant-dump weapon recharge.
She started running. A stabiliser-wrenching, metal-stressing lean as her ugly, stomping stride gained speed. She dumb-fired, systemless and trusting her gunners’ eyes, volleying every missile that had managed to reload and lancing a beam from her volcano cannon. Her assault hammered into her foe’s void shields in the precious seconds before the enemy Warlord fired. The Scion felt the brief, electric sweetness of vindication as her foe’s voids stuttered and snap-died with the telltale thunder-crack of overloading generators. Failed shields could be swiftly relit, but overloaded systems required a more lengthy restart. The two engines were as defenceless as each other.
A moment later the return barrage took the Scion high in the torso, exploding along her shoulder, detonating the cache of unloaded rockets in a cacophonic fireburst. Stabilisers braced and held. Others braced and tore free of their housing. She was barely a skeleton now, blackened and stripped of a third of her hull-bulk. Where two immense missile arrays had stood proud of her shoulders there now burned a halo of flame. She left her gunlimb on the bridge where it had fallen, blown free of her carapace by the detonations ripping through her.
The Scion’s overburdened ankle shattered, spraying iron and fire across the bridge. She stumbled, grinding down on the stump of a clawed foot, and strode forwards another step.
Lexarak recognised that its backwards retreat was too slow and risked heading into a turn. Too late now, as well as too slow. Incidental, instinctive fire spat from its defensive turrets, too little, too late.
The Scion crashed forwards on its final step, her power fist slamming against opposing armoured metal and clenching closed. Lexarak fired its volcano cannon at terminal range, careless of the consequences in its need for panicked retaliation. For several seconds the Scion stood motionless, disembowelled by the last shot, lightning snaking its way through her innards, beating out from her critical core.
Fortune was with her for a few moments more. Between the Hexarchon’s momentum and her own weight, she pulled her fist back on squealing hydraulics, wrenching her prize free of the enemy Titan’s body.
The most glorious Titan-kills, and accordingly rare, involved the close-combat taking of an enemy’s head, severing it or dragging it from an engine’s still-living form. The cockpit-heads of eldar Titans made for the finest trophies in a forge’s halls. Lexarak had turned aside, preventing such a triumph. Instead, the Scion’s armoured hand had plunged through the damaged plating of its upper rib armour, just beneath the armpit of its left gunlimb. When she drew her hand back, in her scorched fingers was the hourglass-shaped, cable-strewn heart of the plasma reactor, leaking with fireflash containment breaches.
She held to it, fingers locked. She couldn’t drop it. Her digital gearings had melted and
seized.
Lexarak began to topple, unpowered, unbalanced. It fell forwards in a painfully protracted pitch, first shattering the lip of the wraithbone bridge beneath the weight of its legs, then falling – sluggishly, end over end – into the abyss.
The Scion watched it eaten by the golden mist.
As if her words were a signal, the reactor in her fist went critical, the resulting detonation peeling away the armour on her left side and tearing away her remaining arm at the elbow.
She stood stunned and ruined on the precipice of the chasm, weaponless and unarmed, crowned by fire with sparks raining from her joints.
The bridge was hers.
Wounded unto death, the Warlord Titan stood alone now, leaking life and streaming with the smoke of internal injuries.
She canted the code-laced cry again, again, again. All the details of her last, best victory. She prayed for them to reach the data-halls of proud Ignatum.
Who?
The gutted Titan began to turn on ponderous, failing mechanisms. The industrial pistons and pneumatics of her waist axis were locked, the failsafe seals the only thing keeping her upright in a ballet of fragile harmony. If they unlocked now and left her at the mercy of her broken stabilisers, she would overbalance and fall.
Slowly, so slowly, Black Sky hove into view. The Reaver Titan had returned. It stood ankle-deep in the wreckage of Legion vehicles and slaughtered war servitors, watching the Scion with the dark panes of its cockpit-eyes.
Her reactor-core churned. Her heart lifted.
The Reaver’s returning cants were hollow and dispassionate. Even through her dying agonies, the Scion felt a battle-queen’s righteous anger at her forge-kin’s lack of awed respect.
I have slain two engines with my last act. My death ensures your continued life. By what right do you stand in near silence?
Another thought pressed through the melting sludge of her thoughts. Eject. Eject. Eject.
She could live. Her princeps could yet live if she could just reach the Black Sky, but the ejection manifolds were fouled along with everything else inside her.
The Reaver began to stride closer.
His moderati were dead. Both of them slouched in their thrones in front of him, their slack features staring lifelessly through Black Sky’s eyes, both of their uniforms blossoming in red flowers where the blood of their murders had dried hours ago. The female crewmember had reclined into her throne almost innocently, seemingly asleep. The male, who had seen his companion’s death and struggled to react, had bled significantly more after being shot through the back of the neck. He’d died halfway out of his throne and now slumped against one side of the seat, his head still bouncing unnaturally with every step the Reaver took.
The daemon that had hollowed out Princeps Enkir Morova and now nestled within the meat of his mortal form was beginning to resemble the proud Ignatum veteran less and less. His eyes were raw and red, having not blinked in several hours. Bony protrusions bubbled beneath his flesh in living, crawling lumps, seemingly searching for places to break through the skin. His lap was full of his own teeth, which had pushed themselves from their sockets in a slow squeal reminiscent of nails scratching porcelain.
In the hours since it had claimed Black Sky as its weaponised sanctum, the Reaver had sustained no small damage from enemy infantry and other engines. The daemon lacked the precision and training of the Titan’s true crew. Now coming to the end of its skin-claiming ride, the daemon struggled to contain Enkir’s mortal knowledge, and though it could feel the creeping temptation to dive deeper into the Titan itself and wrap its essence around the machine’s sentient core, even power such as this would feel limiting to the ancient creature after a time. It had no desire to cage itself, even in such a mighty form.
Its lure had worked to perfection, drawing the Scion to its aid, then feigning flight. Now all that remained was the moment of cold-blooded vindication, one that even the flensed spiritual remnants of Enkir would enjoy, for the princeps himself was a man of war and no stranger to murder. Countless men and women had fallen beneath his gunlimbs, each one capable of levelling hive spires.
The daemon felt him now, the shredded tatters of the man’s soul, screaming in the back of its thoughts as the Reaver Titan drew close to its taller, expiring sister.
The daemon felt Princeps Nishome Alvarek’s dying thoughts, translated into emotion through the code-laced transmissions. The exhausted pride in her meaningless triumph. The more honest desperation she couldn’t quite swallow, of all mortal beings unwilling to accept their own death. And yet she ached for one thing more than even her own survival: to be remembered, for these deeds to be spoken of by those that knew her name. That was all. What fortune that Black Sky had returned.
How much truer and purer this hunt was. How much more satisfying than simply breaking machine-men apart with its claws or duelling the hateful Golden.
The daemon’s answer came in a rise of gunlimbs. The shattered Scion was too wounded and joint-locked to even turn aside.
Rooting through Enkir’s hind-thoughts kept dredging a single word to the surface. The daemon canted it unthinkingly in the moment before both weapons fired.
The Scion of Vigilant Light stood motionless as she was speared through the chest with an inferno blast, killed through shameful execution. The Titan followed the falling form of its last kill, its ravaged silhouette plunging into the mist. The daemon, watching, savoured every moment of Nishome’s screams.
Its entertainment ended abruptly when, rather than vanish into the gold of oblivion, the Scion’s detonating reactor core went nova, sending flashes of thunderstorm light flickering through the mist beneath the bridge. The last of the Scion’s living crew died, consumed in sacred plasma fire.
Black Sky turned in a ponderous arc, and strode off in search of other prey.
Nineteen
A thousand souls
Just another tunnel
The pernicious spectre of hope
Kaeria felt precious little awe at the sight of the throne room, or at the labyrinthine dungeon that led to it. Even the bannered avenue that so inspired the souls that ventured this far into the Sanctum Imperialis left her cold; she would look at the army of standards and wonder which of these loyal regiments would be next to cast its oaths into the dirt and stand with the Arch-traitor.
She walked with her sisters now – precious few of them, given their deployment within the web and their dispersal across the galaxy – entering the throne room at the head of the phalanx. Coffins followed in their wake, anti-gravitic caskets with reinforced transparisteel facings, revealing the motionless occupants within. A parade of sorts, if one with most of its participants slumbering in chemically induced stasis.
Kaeria had expected a higher-ranking member of her order to be present in the throne room itself and awaiting her arrival, yet she was the senior Sister here. To be met with nothing more than the nervous gazes of Imperial scientists and the dispassionately expectant stares of Martian priests made her skin crawl. Was the Sisterhood really so depleted that this vile duty fell to her?
Well, so be it.
Coffin after coffin thrummed into the chamber on cheap anti-grav suspensors. Each sarcophagus was wrapped in chains, pushed along by the ever-patient guiding hands of a mind-locked s
ervitor. Kaeria let her gaze wander around the vast chamber, where the roar of unknowable machinery was an unchanging song, and the spitting cracks of lightning arcing between generators no longer made any of the labourers recoil.
How swiftly the human mind attunes to madness.
She kept her distance from the Golden Throne. She could see it upon its raised dais, though she chose to scarcely look at it. Kaeria and her Sisters were forbidden from approaching too closely – their presences sucked at the machine’s power and destabilised any psychically resonant machinery. She considered it a grim reflection of the way other humans treated her; the way they cringed or looked away or even bared their teeth on instinct, often without knowing they were doing so. Enslaved to the most animal of reactions, responding on some primal level to the presence of a woman without a soul.
What made her useful, what made her strong, also rendered her an outsider to her own species.
Similarly, past experience told her that the blinding majesty and stupefaction others felt in the presence of the Golden Throne were wholly absent for Kaeria and her Sisters. She saw a man on a throne, no more, no less. No radiant halo. No psychic corona.
She would have preferred the majestic ignorance. Better to feel everything and see almost nothing rather than stare upon the naked truth: the enthroned Emperor was just a man in pain, His suffering etched plain, His mouth open in a silent scream. The agonies He endured for the sake of the species had wrought lines upon His features, somehow bringing the passage of time to an ageless face.
The Master of Mankind Page 28