‘This is Torgal of the Word Bearers Seventh. Request for reinforcement acknowledged.’
Khârn cracked off a single shot with the stolen bolter. It burst an Academy Guardsman apart as he struggled to scramble over the rubble and into cover.
‘What does acknowledged mean? Does it mean you’re actually coming this time?’
The vox fell back to static.
‘Cowards.’ Skane was still grinning. He holstered both of his empty pistols and looked around for a weapon he could scavenge, coming up with a lightweight lasrifle, almost comically small in his armoured hands, complete with a human forearm still gripping it. After throwing the hand away, he still couldn’t fit his finger in the trigger guard. Skane tossed the useless gun in the same direction as the severed hand. ‘And tell them to bring ammunition,’ he grunted.
More shadows became silhouettes, and the silhouettes became enemy soldiers emerging from the haze. The Armaturan Guard wore rebreathers to block out the dust. The Ultramarines led them in implacable, defiant dignity. More walkers – Warhounds – lurched out of the dust and into the desecrated plaza, blaring their warhorns as a wolf would howl.
‘It’s been an honour serving with you, sir.’ Now Kargos was chuckling.
Khârn swallowed the acrid taste of his corrosive saliva. World Eaters humour – always the guilty, black laughter at the eye of the storm. He smiled back.
‘Shut up, Kargos.’
The Warhound Titan Ardentor swung its weapon arms down, panning over the craters torn in the violated ground. Headlights on its muzzle cracked into life, carving this way and that, as the canine Titan snuffled the dirt for prey. Its void shields sparked with incidental fire from nearby World Eaters in the ruins, but with its energy barrier active, it stalked on in defiance of their meaningless gestures.
Another of the iron beasts bathed a nearby building in a spray of explosive vulcan fire, chewing through the stone to dice the legionaries within. Spent shells the size of a man’s arm rained onto the road: hundreds of them in a clattering fall, spilling across the street.
Ardentor’s horns blared as it crunched its first step down on the rubble slope. A cry of protest and a call to arms, all in one. Its vulcan bolters whined in throaty starvation, ammo-dry from hours of fighting without resupply. Secondary weapon mounts, good for little more than spitting at light infantry, chattered from its chin. Tracer fire slapped across the dusty ground, eating into the crater.
Princeps Maxamillien Delantyr leaned forwards in his throne, the attachment cables straining at his spine.
‘I sense something down there. Maintain defensive fire.’
His Moderati Secundus emitted a binaric spurt of disagreement. ‘Auspex still registers nothing.’
‘Sighters confirmed this is the crater made by the enemy’s psychic release event, whatever it was. There is something down there.’ Delantyr scratched beneath his itching rebreather mask. ‘Fire the primary plasma arm into the crater.’
‘My princeps, we have no more than three unleashments remaining before reactor hypovolaemia.’
‘We will rearm and recharge when Valika is cleansed, Kei. If our guns starve and our reactor goes thirsty, then I will grind these traitors beneath our feet. Now fire as commanded.’
‘Aye, my princeps.’
As the helmeted moderati worked, bringing the right arm to bear, emergency lighting dimmed the cockpit into half-gloom.
‘Core hypovolaemia threat,’ crackled the tech-priest’s emotionless tones from the plasma reactor chamber, housed in the armoured room behind the cockpit pod.
‘I’m aware.’ Delantyr forced a smile. ‘Just give me one shot.’
‘Accruing lethality,’ called Moderati Kei. He rotated seven dials in quick succession, and squeezed his left trigger. ‘Brace for unleashment.’
‘All brace, all brace.’
The Warhound’s heels locked tight as it fired, and a second sun was born at Valika.
Imperial plasma technology combined elemental gases to form the fire that licked across the skin of stars. In ancient ages, the process was better known as fusion – the ionising of hydrogen at a hundred million degrees – to recreate the heartbeat of a sun through human ingenuity. Cooking the plasma was half of the ritual. ‘Unleashment’ was the rest. Among the hallowed halls of the Legio Lysanda and the various Collegia Titanica, unleashment of their god-machines’ plasma weaponry came with a wealth of prayers, invocations, benedictions, and the burning of a specific scent of incense.
The Warhound fired, its comet-tailed bolt of raw plasma contained within an engineered magnetic field to prevent the projectile’s dissipation from the ionised atoms flying apart. Venting began at once, ghosts of coolant steam slashing from the relief ports along the Titan’s weaponised arm.
The unleashment incinerated the dust, burning the air clear, and splashed a sun’s core into the crater for the fraction of a second. The World Eaters caught at the blast’s edges dissolved into bones and armour shards spilling through the air, eroding to powder, and then to nothingness.
In the crater’s pit, Lorgar stood with his peaceful eyes raised to the staring Titan. Ash drifted away from his armour, the last remnants of the holy parchments bound to the ceramite. The air rippled with the force of his focus, and the kine-shield he kept raised with his outstretched hand. The ground by his boots, in a spread of several metres, was unharmed rock. Everything else was burned into sludged, black glass.
All three crew members leaned forwards in their thrones. Kei raised his targeting visor.
‘What am I seeing?’ he asked. ‘It can’t be.’
The Moderati Primus, Ellas, narrowed his eyes to squint. ‘Is that…?’
‘Fire, damn you!’ Delantyr was yelling. ‘Fire again!’
‘Brace for–’
‘Just fire!’
Lighting failed in the cockpit as power bled from the reactor. The tech-priest’s voice snapped over the vox with uncharacteristic urgency.
‘Core hypovolaemia threat,’ he practically whined. ‘And we aren’t br–’
Ardentor fired again.
The discharge sent the Titan rocking back two steps, its splayed claw-feet crunching into the avenue to avoid falling. In the wake of its release, the weaponised arm hissed steam from its coolant vanes, like a forged blade quenched in water.
The lights reactivated. Kei’s targeting visor came back online a moment later, and the control consoles followed.
‘He must be dead,’ Delantyr whispered. ‘He has to be dead. We’ve killed a primarch. Walk us closer.’
The Warhound realigned, coming around to stare back down into the crater.
Kei’s eyes flickered between the annihilation below and the pulsing chime of auspex contact. ‘Inbound engines,’ he said. ‘Legio Audax. And gunships – declaration signatures marking them as Seventeenth.’
Delantyr spoke through clenched teeth. ‘They’re too late.’
The primarch of the Word Bearers had fallen. His armour, once red and engraved with scripture, was an ashen husk of charred plate. Cracked and weeping skin showed around the patchwork spread of bleeding burns. Not a patch of skin was left untouched. He didn’t rise from his knees. He didn’t lift his head. He did nothing at all.
‘He’s dead.’ Ellas spoke softly.
‘Fire again.’ Delantyr breathed the words. ‘Fire again.’
‘You bled the core,’ Kei replied. ‘We’re plasma-starved.’
‘Fire the suppressing tracers. Three bursts.’
Ardentor’s anti-infantry bolters spat their tracer fire at the prone primarch. The first burst chewed glass, spraying fragments everywhere. The second two punched home in the scorched armour, blasting the fallen Emperor’s son onto his back – a vessel of cooked, punctured meat.
‘We just killed a primarch.’ Kei swallowed. ‘We just killed a primarch.�
��
Delantyr’s grin showed almost every tooth he had. ‘Crush him. Leave them nothing to bury.’
Ardentor walked. Its backwards-jointed legs hammered down on the steaming, downsloping glass, breaking it underfoot as it staggered down into the crater. When it reached the primarch’s body, Ellas raised the right claw-foot, and steered both control levers to slam the limb back down.
The Warhound shook, unbalanced with one leg in the air. Great gears in the war machine’s knee and hip protested with rough, mechanical coughs.
‘Get the leg down,’ Delantyr ordered. ‘Finish it.’
Ellas gave the control levers another wrenching shove. ‘Something’s obstructing us.’
Kei lifted his targeting visor again, looking out of the Warhound’s left eye-windshield. He took a slow breath, and glanced back at his princeps.
‘My princeps? The World Eaters in the ruins… They’re cheering.’
The bleeding demigod had torn his way through the ground, giving voice to his resurrection with a bellow nothing short of ursine. Gore sheeted him, painting him in dark, rich red wetness. He threw his axes away, ruined and never to be wielded again, and breathed freedom into his lungs. It smelled of melted glass and felt like sunburn.
‘Lorgar.’ He spat blood as he said the name, rising to his feet at last.
The Word Bearer lifted a scalded hand, not for aid, but in warning. Angron had no time to lift his mutilated brother, sprawled at his feet. The sun went dark, as dark as night falling in an instant.
He turned, raising his arms, and took a god-machine’s weight on his shoulders.
Every muscle in his body locked tighter than the iron trying to crush him. Drool stringed through his metal teeth, skinned knuckles white as he defied the will of a Titan. He gave a bear’s roar as the foot lowered another half-metre. Sinews crackled in his shoulders. His broken boots skidded back on the patch of unglassed rock; something cracked in his spine, something else cracked in his left knee. The compression of his bones sounded like twigs breaking underfoot, which was a vivid burst of imagination he didn’t appreciate.
But he could hear his men cheering. He could hear them howling as they killed, and crying his name.
He blinked to clear away his sweat’s greasy sting, and dug his boots into the ground. With a smile slitting across his broken-angel face, he shifted his slipping, blood-slick grip on the Titan’s clawed foot, and started pushing back.
‘Lorgar.’ Angron spoke in something that wasn’t quite a growl and wasn’t quite a laugh. ‘Get up. I can’t hold this forever.’
SIX
Ursus Claw
Respite
Gorechild
Syrgalah limped into Valika, sparks spitting from its violated mechanisms, with its armour plating scarred by bolt shells and oil bleeding from ruptured cable-veins in its knees. Armatura wasn’t kind to Scout-class Titans forced to fight on the front line.
Keeda and Toth both kept half an eye on their respective auspex consoles as Syrgalah stalked around the half-buried wreck of a World Eaters Land Raider. The junction was ripe with heat signatures, matching the hulking silhouettes of other Titans in the dusty murk. Toth read at least two Reavers at the junction’s edge. The Legio Audax excelled in pack tactics to bring down bigger prey, but Syrgalah had arrived alone, and reinforcements were still inbound.
‘We’re outgunned,’ he said, ‘unless the rest of the Legio arrives before I finish this sentence.’
‘Funny.’ Keeda sighted an Ultramarines gunship in the dust cloud. ‘I’ve got the shot,’ she called back to Solostine.
His face was bloody; small-arms damage to the cockpit had hit him in the arm, but chemical pain nullifiers injected into his throat rather took the edge off that, yet allowed him to stay sharp.
‘Fire at will,’ the princeps replied. He indulged a moment’s distraction to tongue a loose tooth. Must have happened when he cracked his head against the throne’s side. It amused him to think that this was how the degeneration started, now they were so far gone from safe space and easy resupply. Rejuvenat surgery had replaced every tooth in his mouth with compound substitutes indiscernible from the real thing, but if he kept this up out here on the Galactic East, he’d have to consider the quicker, cheaper iron replacements favoured by the Twelfth Legion. He’d never met a single World Eater without at least one metal tooth jammed into his gums, and most sported whole sets from their time in the gladiatorial pits.
He felt the tremor of Syrgalah’s wrath as Keeda brought the gunship down in flames. Then he felt the tremor of something worse, something that stabbed little needles into the space between his vertebrae.
‘Taking fire from behind,’ he said. ‘Bring us about.’
Toth turned them in a snarling lurch, and Keeda panned the vulcan arm in a whirling, fire-spraying arc. An enemy Predator tank rolled into view, spewing heavy bolter fire up at them.
Solostine hissed in empathic pain – sympathy wounds darkening his skin in stigmatic bruising, even as Keeda punctured the tank and left it a hollow, steaming shell.
‘Do you hear that?’ Toth interrupted Solostine’s muttered praise.
‘Tell me it’s a resupply lander,’ Keeda noted, tapping a display screen drowning in red runes. ‘Our vulcan is starved.’
‘It’s not that,’ Toth replied. He was holding a hand to his earpiece. ‘It’s this.’
He brought the hololithic generator between their pilots’ thrones to life with a cranked lever.
The face that appeared in the air was female, in profile, her blue-white holofeatures speaking out of time with her crackling voice.
‘Ember Queen?’ she said.
‘The lovely flag-captain.’ Solostine inclined his head to the image. ‘How goes the war in the heavens?’
Keeda occupied herself with the muzzle-bolters, one of many minor modifications their tech-priests had made in recent years. She hammered tracer fire through the dust at the blotchy shadows of Academy Guards fleeing from the turning tide.
‘Walk us,’ she whispered to Toth. He complied, letting Keeda chase the running soldiers, cutting them down.
The image of Captain Lotara Sarrin wavered. ‘Venric? Contact is flawed. I can scarcely hear you. My scrying shows you at Valika.’
‘Confirmed,’ the princeps replied. ‘With twenty engines inbound.’
‘Can’t see a damned thing, though,’ muttered Keeda.
Sarrin turned her head, addressing an officer on her warship’s bridge. Her voice was a hurried crackle when she returned.
‘Listen to me, Venric. We’re working through sighters on the ground, so I can’t be much help, but you have to find the Lysanda Warhound Ardentor. Kill it. Kill it now.’
Toth and Keeda didn’t need the order relayed. They started working their consoles, bringing Syrgalah into a limping run.
‘Got her,’ Keeda called.
Solostine tasted blood from the loose tooth. Not a good sign. ‘Count on us, Lotara.’
She smiled. ‘I always do, old man.’
Sweat rained from him.
Angron stood defiant, the weight of the world on his shoulders. He’d been braced against the Titan’s claw for less than thirty beats of his heart. It felt like an age. It felt like two ages.
‘Lorgar,’ he said through teeth clenched hard enough to squeal. ‘Get clear.’
The Word Bearer lifted an immolated hand. He couldn’t speak, could scarcely move, but he added the dregs of his psychic push to his brother’s strength. The raised hand trembled – where it wasn’t cooked bloody, its burn-sores were weeping.
Angron knew plasma wounds well enough, and Lorgar was fortunate to still be alive. As he breathed in dust and oil fumes, panting against the weight, he managed to shake his head.
‘Now you decide to be brave?’ he growled, salivating in thick strings. ‘Just get clear.’
<
br /> Lorgar lowered his ruined hand, and started crawling.
‘Finish it,’ Delantyr yelled.
Ellas was trying. The servos in the knee and ankle were locked and unyielding, refusing to obey his controls. He couldn’t lift the leg back up for a second try, either.
‘Engine behind us,’ Kei warned. ‘An Audax engine.’
‘Get the leg down!’
‘My princeps–’ Ellas started to object, but Kei interrupted, staring at his scanner.
‘It’s armed with… I can’t even tell what that is. Something with magnetic accelerators, cycling up to charge. You need to turn us, fast.’
‘I can’t. The knee is–’
‘Ellas,’ Delantyr said, with sudden, cold calm. He had a service laspistol aimed at his steersman’s head. ‘Get us turned around.’
Ellas felt gooseflesh rise on his skin. ‘Aye, my princeps.’
Keeda sighted Ardentor in the crater and the surreal vision of the two bleeding primarchs mere moments from destruction. Lorgar was ravaged by burns, lying to the side. Angron stood beneath the Warhound’s foot-claw, holding it up, braced against its final fall.
She knew the strength – in exact measurable power and force – in a Warhound’s towering musculature, for she’d served Audax since childhood: first as a tech-menial and later as a member of two Titans’ command crews. At fifteen, she’d been inducted into the slave maturation process to determine how well she’d acclimatise to cockpit interface and react in combat scenarios. At nineteen, she was weaponmistress aboard Hanumaan. At twenty-four, Princeps Ultima Venric Solostine selected her for his own crew aboard the command Titan Syrgalah.
Her first operation as Syrgalah’s gunner had been referred to in Legio briefings as Walk: CC00428al-0348.Hne. History was already coming to call it the Isstvan Atrocity, when four Space Marine Legions purged their own ranks in the annihilated streets of Isstvan III’s Choral City.
Valika was the first time she’d ever fired without permission.
The muzzle-bolters would do nothing, the vulcan arm was dry, but she had the last ace in her deck. Keeda had her spear, and her spear was forged to bring down the biggest prey.
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