He licked his lips, half-ashamed, half-aroused. He could still see the girl’s face from an hour ago in his mind’s eye, the one from the foundry level – pleading, incredulous, terrified.
No mortal man was perfect.
He felt a twinge as the secure comms bead at his neck throbbed. He took a quick look up and down the corridor, checking that it was empty. Once certain, he withdrew a tiny communicator from his collar.
‘Valien,’ he said.
‘Heriat,’ came the reply. ‘What’s your status?’
‘Melamar Secundus, Level 451, north-east sector.’
‘Update?’
‘Not much,’ Valien said. ‘Seven cells ready to go. I can disable another tower myself, so you should get a clear run.’
‘Negative,’ replied Heriat. ‘Give the cells free rein and switch to secondary tasking.’
Valien paused, calculating what he’d need to rearrange to make that possible. He was still embedded deep in the Melamar spires, and hadn’t computed exit routes in detail.
‘Understood,’ he said. ‘Timing?’
‘Move as soon as the cells are primed.’
‘What’s the rush?’
‘Nethata’s finalising attack plans,’ said Heriat. ‘He wants our agents away from the front before we come in.’
‘Fine by me.’
‘What’s it like in there?’
Heriat sounded genuinely curious, and Valien smiled to himself.
‘You’d like it,’ he said. ‘They’re scared. Lots of traffic between here and the central spires.’
‘Marks of corruption?’
‘Increasing. Melamar’s only partially tainted, but the closer you get the worse it becomes. Plenty of mutants coming through the transit tunnels. Unit cohesion’s still good in the garrisons, so you’ll get a fight.’
‘Oh, we know that,’ said Heriat, wearily. ‘So how are you?’
‘Me? I’m fine.’
‘Physical condition? Anything you need to report?’
Valien paused.
What is he talking about?
‘Uh, no. Absolutely not.’
The feed gave out for a moment, as if Heriat had muted it. A few seconds later he broke back in.
‘Then you have new orders,’ he said. ‘Shunted into your system – study them and signal back if anything’s unclear.’
‘I’ll take a look,’ he said, intrigued. ‘Anything fun?’
‘I doubt that,’ said Heriat. ‘Good luck.’
‘I didn’t think you believed in–’ said Valien, before realising the link had been cut.
He turned the communicator over and flicked a switch. His tasking scrolled across a holographic field in front of him, spelling in out in precise, military-format detail what Nethata expected of him.
Valien absorbed the order stream quickly, realising immediately what it meant.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I see.’
Rauth stood in the hexagonal audience chamber within the Iron Hands’ command headquarters. The space was empty, just as it had been when he’d briefed Telach. A low snarl of machinery thudded away under his feet, buried somewhere in the forges and armouries on lower levels. The light in the chamber, as ever, was set low, mimicking Medusa’s harsh environment.
Medusa and Shardenus shared certain characteristics. Both worlds were shrouded from the warmth of their suns by thick layers of cloud cover. Both had been formed from dark, unforgiving soils. For an Iron Hand, coming to such a place felt like coming home.
Rauth was not immune from such feelings. Over centuries of near-constant warfare he’d managed to purge almost all vestiges of sentiment from his semi-mechanical frame, but he still took a degree of pleasure in Shardenus’s smog-dark skies and acrid air. His long service had taken him to all manner of worlds, some with water-clear skies, some covered in sparkling oceans, others bursting with vegetation, but it was the dark worlds that spoke most clearly to his soul.
When Rauth had been a mortal child, back in the twilight depths of his long memory, he’d heard tales of the Immortal Emperor and His infinite realm. Sitting in the interior of his clan’s land engine, Rauth had imagined all of the Emperor’s worlds as other Medusas – frost-cold, steel-hard, shadow-dark.
It had seemed to him then that the default state of humanity was to exist amid such scouring winds and clutching shadows. Only later had Rauth discovered that his home world was regarded by most of the Imperium as a place of dread and obscurity. Back when he had possessed greater human facility, that knowledge had stung his pride. Now that his emotions had been bled out of him by the slow working of his augmetics he cared very little what the ignorant masses of humanity thought of his heritage.
Nothing changed the truth: Mankind, as guided by the Emperor and the example of Manus, flourished in the face of hardship and became flaccid in the face of comfort. Medusa bred humans capable of achieving perfection, of transcending their structural weaknesses, and the Imperium would be a better, stronger place if all its worlds were Medusas.
A light flickered on top of the pillar in front of him. Rauth extinguished it with a gesture, and the doors to the chamber slid open.
Nethata walked in and the doors closed behind him. He came across to the pillar and stood facing Rauth. He was in full dress uniform, as he always was when responding to a summons.
Perhaps he thinks I’ll be impressed, thought Rauth. Or perhaps it is to bolster his courage.
Rauth took in the rows of medals on the man’s chest, the iron skulls marking valour in battle, the expensive sword and the marksman’s pistol.
He can have no idea how little I care. He could come here naked and we would discuss exactly the same things.
‘Clan commander,’ said Nethata, bowing.
Rauth could sense the man’s unease. His shoulders were tense, his jawline tight, his knuckles a fraction less dark than the rest of his skin.
‘Lord General,’ said Rauth. ‘Thank you for coming.’
‘We don’t have long before the main assault.’
‘No, we do not.’
As ever between them, the conversation was awkward. Rauth didn’t deliberately make their meetings difficult, but it had become hard to remember how humans lubricated their dialogue with courtesies and irrelevances.
‘I wished to see you for this reason: a change to the plan will be made,’ said Rauth. ‘My brothers are to be deployed on the Gorgas. Your troops will form the spearhead against the hives.’
Nethata blinked at him, taken back.
‘Without support?’ he asked.
‘Without support,’ confirmed Rauth.
Rauth studied Nethata’s reactions carefully, in the same way a magos might study the flow of electrons across a transmission wafer. The man was struggling to remain cordial.
‘Our assault plans have been made with the expectation of your involvement,’ Nethata said, speaking carefully and guarding his language. ‘There is little time to change them.’
‘I know,’ said Rauth. ‘That is why I asked you to come as soon as things changed.’
‘What has changed?’
‘The threat level from the remaining Gorgas bunkers is higher than calculated. They must be purged before we advance.’
Nethata couldn’t hide the disbelief from his face.
‘Bunkers? How many can there… Lord, I do not–’
‘Once that work is done, the Iron Hands will join you in the hive.’
‘Then the assault must wait,’ said Nethata. ‘Until your strength can be deployed, it must wait.’
‘It will not wait,’ said Rauth.
For a moment, the two figures stood facing one another, silent, staring into each other’s eyes. Rauth was implacable, immovable, massive. In contrast Nethata looked as frail as a skeleton, but he held his ground.
&n
bsp; ‘The Titans, then,’ he said. ‘We must have heavy support.’
‘The Titans are not ready,’ said Rauth. ‘You have two battalions of drop-troops – the Harakoni – plus ample artillery cover.’
‘Ample?’ Nethata shook his head as he snorted out the word. ‘My lord, I do not–’
‘You can debate this all you wish, Lord General; the decision will not alter. As we speak, my brothers are moving across the Gorgas, rooting out residual resistance and saving your men from that dangerous task. When their work is done they will return to the main assault, and we shall recalibrate.’
Nethata drew in a deep breath, looking like he was considering objecting further, just as he had done over the choice of landing sites, over the timetable of the advance, over the tactics of frontal assault rather than siege. Eventually, though, his square shoulders slumped a little.
‘I see that your mind’s made up,’ he said. Rauth noticed that Nethata’s fists were still clenched, and that the veins on his neck were as tense as machine cords. ‘You will forgive me, lord, if I leave immediately. If this assault is not to be a bloodbath – a farcical, terrible bloodbath – then I must make changes.’
‘By all means,’ said Rauth calmly. ‘But do not delay the assault. Its timing must remain as previously determined.’
‘You ask too much,’ said Nethata, bitterly. ‘I will record a formal protest in the campaign logs.’
‘And what will you protest about?’ asked Rauth. ‘That warfare was conducted? That men died?’
Nethata let slip a grim smile.
‘That men died needlessly,’ he said. ‘That they could have gone into battle supported by the might of your warriors, but were instead thrown at the enemy alone.’
‘Nothing I do is needless,’ said Rauth, ‘but your language is becoming intemperate. You have your orders. Go now, and ensure the assault is a success.’
Nethata glared back, holding his position for a moment longer.
‘It will be,’ he said, his eyes glittering darkly. ‘You will see the mettle of my men, and perhaps, once you have seen what they are capable of, you will be less free with your demands and remember that they are human. Like you used to be.’
Rauth felt his eyebrow, the organic one he still retained, raise. He didn’t have a ready answer to that.
Nethata didn’t wait for one, but turned on his heel and stalked out of the chamber. The doors opened and closed for him.
Rauth stood silently once he was gone, pondering the mortal’s words. Then he stirred himself and activated a private channel to Khatir.
‘Iron Father,’ he voxed. ‘Are the transports prepared?’
‘They are, lord,’ came the reply.
Rauth extended his left gauntlet, feeling the artificial sinews within slide smoothly across one another. Even mechanical limbs needed to be flexed.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘Then come with me – we shall hunt together.’
Chapter Five
Lopi looked across the wastes of the Helat through eyes that were, and yet were not, his own.
He smiled, but only his organic lips moved. The gigantic frame of Terribilis Vindicta could not smile, though it registered and fed back the emotions of its princeps in other subtle ways – a flicker across motive sensoria, a brief tremor in the drive feeds.
Yemos, the moderati plugged into the station in front of him, ran pudgy fingers over the manual controls. A thicket of iron rods protruded from the back of his shaven head, each one connected to input nodes dotted around the frame he sat in.
‘Drive system integrity normal,’ Yemos said, speaking out loud in Lucius-dialect Low Gothic. ‘Powering nicely.’
Lopi gripped the sides of his command throne, feeling streams of information flow into him through the jacks. Cables extended from his hands, his feet, his chest, the back of his neck. He noticed a residual soreness from the connection under his left ear, and rolled his head around trying to shake it off.
Killan, plugged into his station just like Yemos, swung his pedestal seat across the semicircle of his array station, scanning the multitude of signals coming into the Titan’s battery of auspices.
Killan shook his head, and the bundle of wires attached to his skull wobbled.
Lopi felt a glow of warm satisfaction. As soon as he did so, the immense, sunken presence of Vindicta’s machine-spirit made itself known. It rolled up into Lopi’s consciousness like some beast of the oceans gently rising through layers of frigid water.
Awake again, Lopi thought, not bothering to shield it from the consciousness pressing up against his own. Alive again. Together again.
He shifted focus, slotting more explicitly into the pseudo-visual world of the Manifold. The Titan’s own perceptions merged with his, folding into an amalgam of real-world visual stimuli and overlaid battle-data.
I feel you.
Vindicta’s engines, buried somewhere far below in the war machine’s vast torso, drummed in response, making the bronze-inlaid walls of the cockpit tremble.
Lopi held his left hand up before his face, watching as the real flesh, as insubstantial as an x-ray, passed through the miasma of targeting information, engine-health feedback and other sundry aspects of his host’s mechanical life.
Lopi chuckled. He liked Remona. She was young for a Warlord-class princeps but was as gifted as he liked to think he had been at the same age. Even as he recalled her chestnut hair and coral-pink eyes in his imagination, he saw her engine, the Meritus Castigatio, striding into his visual field.
Castigatio was a handsome machine, barely three hundred years old and as trim as a starship’s prow. Everything about it was pristine, glistening, rigid. The flames of Legio Astorum’s livery adorned the thick plates of its armour, vivid against the dreariness of the ash around it.
It stood seven hundred metres away from him, surrounded by swarms of skitarii and servitors. A towering cage of scaffolding rose up around it, dotted with cranes and weapon-hoists. Gradually, moving slowly, the battle-engine was leaving it behind. Signal lights winked from its cockpit and gun-mounts, piercing through Shardenus’s dirty skies.
Lopi felt Vindicta’s frame vibrate then, as if the spirit of the Titan had heard the jibe and responded to it.
Jerolf tutted irritably, shaking his head.
‘I could use another hour,’ he said in his thick Martian accent. Jerolf was a strange one, and hard to deal with, but his origins on the Red Planet gave him a certain cachet among the crews. ‘I was not aware this business was some kind of race.’
As he spoke, as if to emphasise the point, war-horns from the formation’s three Warhound battle-engines – Ferus Arma, Quis Odio, Gaius Thyrsus – blared out across the Helat. They were moving in formation, less than two kilometres away, rolling in their distinctive lupine fashion across the plains. Lopi noticed, with some satisfaction, that they were already travelling at something close to battle-pitch. Once armed, blessed and provisioned, they would be rea
dy for deployment.
The vigour of the war machine infected him. He could sense the staggering levels of power coiled up in the engine’s limbs. Even before the weapons had been charged and loaded he felt the potential for extraordinary violence vibrate from every rivet and bulkhead. Having served with the Legio for nearly two hundred years, ninety of those as princeps of a Warlord, he knew just what a god-machine like Vindicta was capable of.
‘No, it’s fine,’ said Jerolf, shunting a series of brusque commands into the Warlord’s core instruction buffer. ‘Take it out. Show them how it’s done.’
Lopi shunted a confirmation query to Yemos.
Lopi sank deeper into the Manifold, blurring the distinction between himself and the machine.
You heard them. Stretch your legs.
A shudder ran through the structure of the cockpit, triggered by immense energies suddenly being released. Somewhere a long way down from Lopi’s position, the last of the gantries retracted. He had the fleeting impression of a gaggle of tech-priests scurrying away from the Titan’s heavy treads before his pseudo-visual field resolved into a three-dimensional cacophony of target-runes, approach vectors and proximity indicators.
Down on the plain, a single tread lifted, trailing ash behind it as it rose into the air. The movement was stiff, arthritic, as hundreds of tonnes of adamantium and steel were propelled upwards in the stately simulacrum of a human foot moving.
Lopi felt the movement as if his own body were shifting, and a thrill of pleasure shuddered through his system.
Vindicta’s right tread crashed back down to earth. The Titan’s entire structure rocked forwards into the stride.
One step; the first step taken by the Titan since landing on Shardenus. The earth under its huge foot cracked open, and the ash settled over its enormous splayed metal toes.
Cheers rose up, from the crew in the cockpit, from the skitarii stationed in the engine’s echoing chambers, from the tech-priests clustered around the cyclopean scaffolds. Lopi could hear Remona’s clear laughter and the blares of acclamation from the distant Warhounds.
Wrath of Iron Page 7