by Ian Watson
At least they would die in a disciplined mood.
The previous user had also daubed the ducts along the roof of Biff’s control bubble with vermilion slogans. Ego Atrox. Ego Ferox.
Whatever those meant.
The author of those words lay slaughtered beside the gimballed plasteel chair. Brainless now. Dumb, speechless, senseless, blind. Biff had swallowed his eyes too, as an afterthought.
But yes, yes… now the Warlords were angling away from one another as they tramped thunderously towards the Marines – who could certainly see them now through veils of smoke in the darkness riven by the lightning of explosions. No, dear Marines, these aren’t mobile buildings looming out of the obscurity – but six of the mightiest war machines ever crafted! With one other lagging behind… That’s what the Imperial Fists would be seeing, staunch horror in their hearts.
And what would Lord Pugh, that purified man, be feeling? Surely, a certain consternation.
Biff sympathised.
And he raged because he could not reach out to interpose his power fist.
And he sought to still his soul with a prayer.
Many of those stubby towers out on the field of battle were recessing further to sink flush with the surface. All those that could. A few were damaged, their mechanism jammed or their power supply shorted out.
Many Kark troopers and vehicles were left exposed, yet what of that? The advancing Imperial Fists, and their surviving Land Raiders and Rhinos, were soon likewise denuded of any significant cover – whereupon the Warlord Titans opened fire from their lofty eminence to rake the terrain with laser beams, heat-beams, plasma, and cannon shells.
(“That Titan with the missile! Destroy it!”)
At last Juron had given the order.
As their striding Emperor quivered with the unleashing of its weaponry, Biff sat impotently for only a few moments.
Rotating his power fist, he gave the finger to the Warlords: an adamantium finger bigger than any armoured Marine.
He hoped some of the Fists might perhaps behold that gesture with joy.
WHISTLING A HALF-forgotten high-hab melody, Necromundan Nightclub, Lexandro pumped cannon shells at the arse of the Warlord swaying there in the cross hair graticule of his aiming screen. Explosion followed explosion. Damnably, gouts of plasma from Valence often interfered, detonating shells before they even reached the target’s void shield. Valence the void-brain, Valence the virtuous valet. Why couldn’t the figger choose his own portion of Titanic anatomy to shaft? Did he think he was helping? Akbar the sand-flea at least was pulsing laser beams at that missile atop the carapace.
Still, the Titan’s void shields were starting to flush visibly. Blotches of orange and electric blue energy coruscated, mantling the monster in wraiths of electro-magnetic disease.
The Titan was turning back, its missile swivelling.
A neighbouring Warlord was turning too…
The great splayed fairings of their target’s legs were painted with ochre volcanoes spraying hot scarlet lava like blood from an artery. It sought to steady itself amidst plasma and shell-blast…
…and the missile erupted. More than one of the void screens had at last been overloaded. Just before the missile could be launched Akbar’s laser had tickled it to detonate.
Lexandro’s eyes ached as energy whirlpooled. A local region of space itself seemed to writhe in superheated paroxysm, tearing the Titan apart into a maelstrom of spinning vapour.
The nearby Titan lurched askew, its banner on fire, the multi-melta of its right arm warped and sputtering. Its left arm aimed a lascannon at the Emperor’s carapace. Lexandro’s vision blurred momentarily as their void screens fluoresced, soaking up incoming lances of light.
Yet another Titan was turning to confront the enemy at their backs.
And a third.
A fourth hesitated.
Obviously they must destroy this threat which was so much more puissant than that posed by the Land Raiders.
However, those assault tanks were now concentrating lascannon fire on the other Titans, raking upwards as high as they could – at fairings, legs, and belly – so that those Titans marched through a dancing aurora of writhing spider-lightning.
One Titan’s lower shield flared and failed.
Land Raiders closest to the exposed Warlord redoubled their efforts, scalpelling away at its right knee-joint just above the fairing.
The offended Titan lumbered forward and stamped upon one Raider, crushing it underfoot. It gushed plasma at a small knot of Marines who were storming a trench crowded with troopers. Suited bodies were thrown head over heel.
Yet then the Titan began to lurch arthritically; its right leg had locked up…
Its Princeps still tried to walk it, thrusting the rigid leg out – in vain. The Warlord toppled backwards – slowly at first, then avalanching down on to the vitrodur surface. Marines raced at power-speed to empty their boltguns into its heavy weapons, now laid low, so as to pierce casings and blast actuators lest the Moderati recover from the stun and injuries of the fall…
Even before Juron ordered the targeting of the Titan that had been touched by the vortex implosion, Lexandro wrenched his attention back to the immediate peril. He pumped cannon shells at the lascannon on that Titan’s carapace – while searing light pulsed from it towards theirs.
From other quarters too. Those other Titans which had turned were hurling shells and plasma and bolts of heat.
Exhilaration pulsed through Lexandro’s being.
“Though you fly through the ultimate fire” – he seemed to hear…
Yes, he was almost flying – so high above the ground was he. Explosions and convulsions of heat clawed at the energy shields – an unending succession of ravenous monsters springing into existence just outside, only to die because they could not feed yet, yet being born again instantly.
Lexandro wasn’t going to die in this battle. Not die, but be transfigured. Soon his shield must fail. Soon those eruptive, blinding spasms of violence outside must reach in to snatch him, to tear him apart, and vaporise his fabric. His flesh would become boiling plasma.
Yet his spirit, united with Dorn’s in that exquisite agonising pang, in that orgasmus of death, would transmigrate into a being of boiling ionised gas. In this form he would hover over the battlefield, dipping down to engulf enemy troopers, to consume these like fat in a furnace so that their smoke would rise up as incense into Dorn’s amber nostrils and by way of that conduit across time and space – beyond mortality itself – into the God-Emperor’s seared olfactory lobes so that the Divine Person would pause for a microsecond in his eternal scrutiny of the cosmos from his Golden Throne and would exclaim inwardly, “What sweet fragrance is that? Why, it is the odour of the enemies of the human Imperium, blazing.” For a moment the Emperor would notice at least the aftermath of Lexandro’s existence… before what had been Lexandro dispersed.
Reality reasserted itself as, in Lexandro’s headphones, a voice screamed in torment. Or was it in sheer surprise?
The screech died away to a strangulated hissing as though the victim had clamped his lower lip with his teeth, biting with all the force of a steel beast-trap.
“Right dorsal shield collapse,” announced Juron bleakly. “Feedback damper failure. Defence laser is slag. Cutting Akbar out of circuit.”
The strident, static-like hiss ceased abruptly.
Though that did not mean that, in his bubble chamber, Akbar was not still writhing in the agony of pseudo-injury – terrible burns and blindness – as he struggled to master such huge referred pain. He was feeling what the laser would have felt, had it been of flesh and bone. He was enduring. Unless he was already dead.
The caustic reek of smouldering insulation…
The bitter lemon tang of melted plasteel…
Fishy whiffs of liquefied adamantium… The bite of ozone from air molecules fused by fierce discharges of energy…
And the heat, the scorching heat. The remain
ing void shields were doing their best to bleed hostile energies away as heat, but there wasn’t time for it to radiate away. The interior of the Emperor was beginning to resemble a hell.
A ceiling gargoyle sucked in furnace breath. A floor gargoyle exhaled air that was cooler, yet the refrigeration unit was thumping in distress. Lexandro coughed and spat at the partly crippled Titan on his target-screen. His gob of saliva dribbled down then clung, warping the image of the turtle head as though the corresponding section of the enemy Titan was bubbling, rheum leaking from its right eye.
He fired again and again at that phantom weakness, divined by spuomancy, targeted by phlegm.
The Titan with the blazing banner shook its head from side to side like some grazing beast tormented by stinging flies, by the hornets of his cannon shells.
Abruptly one slanted eye exploded.
The Titan gyrated, swinging around in spasm. Its injured Princeps must be convulsing. Bright spears from its lascannon and plasma from its carapace cannon washed briefly across its neighbouring Warlord before the erring Moderati realised.
The metal giant danced then crashed over.
Lexandro’s macro-cannon must have overheated and jammed. In his hooded hand he felt a terrible clutching cramp that would not allow him to move his fingers.
Maybe there were no more shells left in the cannon’s magazine. He had been prodigal with them. “Macro-cannon dead,” he reported.
Targeting the nearest Warlord, he spat again vehemently at the screen. And sat.
Awaiting the dying of his void shield.
And his own dazzling transfiguration into plasma.
YEREMI PEERED AROUND for weapons which might be aiming at the now-inactive macro-cannon on their carapace, or at their left shoulder where d’Arquebus was ensconced.
D’Arquebus mustn’t die prematurely.
Oh no.
Inspired, Yeremi sprayed a stream of incandescent rainbow plasma gobbets at a defence laser which was tracking in that forbidden direction, and rejoiced to see its shield fail and the shark-snouted gun warp and drip like a lugubrious runny nose.
“Ha! Saved you there, Lexy!” he exclaimed to himself, forgetful that he was on an open channel.
(“Saved me?” came an ethereal voice. “What, from my golden transmigration?”)
What on Necromunda was d’Arquebus rhapsodising about?
(“You villain! You varlet!”) Those insults were virtually meaningless nonsense – yet at least it seemed that d’Arquebus had been stung.
(“Lucky shooting, Valence,” snapped Juron. “Ain’t enough, though. We’re down to your gun alone. I’m gonna run. Try to get inside the next one’s shields. Wake up, Tundrish. Time to earn your living.”)
GIVEN THE BULK of the Emperor and the weight of its weaponry, it could not actually run, yet it could certainly lumber forward more quickly. Some onboard klaxon wailed as though in pain at the effort. Rocking buffetingly in the gimballed seat, Yeremi returned fire wildly to divert attention away from d’Arquebus.
Missing, missing alas because of the lurching, even if the target loomed vaster by the moment.
“Drawing booster power for max fire,” Yeremi shouted to warn his sergeant. “Good plasma cannon,” he prayed, “best ever weapon, do not quit on me! Artifex armifer digitis dextris oculis occultis!” he chanted.
(“What you doing?” shouted Juron.)
“Drawing booster power for max fire, Sir.”
The heat in the control bubble was almost unbearable. Sweat slicked Yeremi’s flesh within his servomech sleeve. It was as though his hand and his whole arm were plunged deep within the hot tight birth-canal of some angry animal to manipulate the contents of a packed, pulsing womb.
(“What you doing? We’re slowing. Gotta be some override… Dorn, the reactor’s red-line already! I can blow it… Set it to figging explode!”)
(“Incandesce us,” prayed d’Arquebus. “Oh holy light, oh holy heat.”)
Many things were happening at once. Yeremi’s stream of plasma ceased abruptly as his hand cramped within that fervid womb. On the small monitor screen his great external weapon was white-hot, seething, dripping molten metal on to the carapace below. Doom-ikons flashed in panic. Tell-tales glared red. Pushed to the limits, their remaining void shields failed. Fumes from the charring generators swirled to choke the filters in the gargoyles’ throats.
Then their Emperor collided with the Warlord in a teeth-jarring, bone-shaking impact of metallic mountains which teetered, rocking back on their adamantium heels.
Had the Emperor Titan been moving any more swiftly – had Yeremi not drained power and slowed the lumbering charge – both great robots might have toppled over devastatingly.
This did not happen.
And in that moment of recoil from collision…
“It’s biffing time!”
Biff swung his power fist upwards into the turtle head of the Warlord, staving in its slanted eyes, crushing through adamantium into the Princeps’ cabin, pulverising the softer contents within.
His power fist was locked in wreckage… as Juron swung the body of the Emperor about so that its carapace faced the fury of the surviving Warlords. Some shells caromed off their back. Others erupted on it, while hostile lances of light sought the gaping wounds those explosions had opened…
Their turtle head strained clear of the almost decapitated Warlord.
(“Emergency evac! Overloading reactor!”) All of a sudden Biff was propelled sidelong then forward in his bubble, to crash into the escape chamber.
YEREMI, IN HIS bubble, likewise cannoned askew into the occipital portion of the head.
AND LEXANDRO WAS hurled from dreams of incandescence into that now sooty cavity.
BLIND, BURNED AKBAR was not salvaged, though. Some guidance unit must have failed. And perhaps this was a blessing.
A MOMENT LATER the head blasted free.
It soared close past another Titan which was already turning around again – limping mightily – to answer the las-pulses of the Land Raiders.
Over the vitrodur battlescape the Emperor’s detached head veered. It rocked and yawed.
(“Brace yourselves! Brace!”)
Presently, the flying head touched down in a crash which was at least semi-controlled. Onwards it skidded on its side across sleek vitrodur through corpses and burning husks of vehicles for almost half a kilometre before finally coming to rest…
With the exception of the sergeant in the Princeps’ seat, those inside the head had not been able to notice the fireball behind them, though the blast wave contributed somewhat to their sway.
WITHIN THE HOUR, from the Fists’ rearguard, the bruised and battered Scouts were to watch a greater detonation – when the ziggurat of Lord Sagramoso’s besieged palace erupted volcanically.
The explosion hurled a black ship upwards on a tail of fire. Simultaneously, coaly umbrellas flew apart so that smoky sunlight bathed the devastation below.
The fleeing ship shrank as it climbed a column of billowing grey cloud. It become a mote, a shining point.
Then this point blossomed silently.
An orbiting Imperial battleship must have noted the attempted escape.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE CRUSADERS HAD returned to their interstellar castle – which flew onward from nowhere to nowhere just as it had done for many millennia, and must continue to do for many millennia more.
The Sagramoso dynasty had been duly expunged from Karkason ad extremum fetum. The cult of that false god was purged and all of its images and statuary pulverised. A new loyal planetary governor of the Capreolo clan had been installed to supervise the export of power crystals and psycurium; and perhaps even more importantly, the offering up of devout prayer.
So the battle-brothers gathered in the Assimularum to feast on a tithe of succulent smoked blindfish from the warm subterranean culture lakes of Karkason.
All of those who had travelled through the warp to Karka’s Sun and returned alive cro
wded the carved benches; and Lord Pugh partook too – enthroned at high table on a dais in front of the enamelled rood-screen – even though the pink piscine flesh was less than ashes in his mouth. On either side of his own silver plate, like some massive array of bone cutlery, were ranged the amputated hands of those who had died in the campaign, shorn of flesh and muscle and tendons.
Many more Brothers had returned than might otherwise have been the case, had the Wolverine Squad not commandeered that Emperor Titan.
Fresh from punishment in the pain-glove, glowing pink himself, Lexandro sat with his brother Scouts, regarded with some awe by those not of Wolverine Squad.
The feast proceeded in dainty silence until a bare fish skeleton the size of a heavy bolter lay on the platter before each celebrant, and their stone steins stood empty.
Then Chaplain Lo Chang preached…
…and Lexandro heard of such incidents of the campaign as the Battle of the Glass Bell Temple, and of the Sixty Suicide Skaters who had swooped on brothers of the Fourth Company clutching melta-bombs, and how the Fifth and Seventh and Eighth Companies had found themselves confronted, to their astonishment, by Titans…
…which Wolverine Scout Squad led by Sergeant Zed Juron had proceeded to savage, at the cost of one dead Scout – a sacred event which must forever be commemorated. Even now a master artificer was engraving a wall-tablet to be mounted in the Teuton Chapel. After twenty years’ exposure to religious scrutiny, if deemed worthy and untarnished, this votive tablet would be transferred to the Reclusiam itself.
Stern, ascetic Lord Pugh signalled to Lo Chang, and the Chaplain’s cratered moon-face shone with joy.
Chang proclaimed: “Nos honoremus mortuum Omar Akbar, cuius osses sunt perditos, in pleno grado Pugni Imperatorii.”
In his death the sand-flea had been raised to the status of a full Marine…
The Brothers banged their steins upon the tabletops in a quickening rhythm till the fish skeletons quivered and seemed about to swim.
Lexandro grinned wildly, for within but a few more weeks he was to have holes drilled through his carapace so that he could jack in to power armour. Whereupon he would be enrolled forthwith as a tyro Marine of full status.