Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine

by David Annandale

‘Magos Tsenzhor,’ Syagrius voxed, ‘confirm the functionality of the auspex.’

  ‘There are no anomalies,’ the tech-priest answered. Speaking from the engineering nerve centre deep within the torso of Augustus Secutor, Tsenzhor was infuriatingly calm, as if he were beyond the reach of the tides of war.

  ‘The readings are confirmed by the other princeps,’ Rekorus said.

  ‘How can they be disappearing?’ Syagrius demanded.

  The question was rhetorical, but Tsenzhor answered anyway. ‘Our extrapolations being unsatisfying and impractical, we must await answers provided by on-site experience. This will not be long in coming. We calculate the distance–’

  ‘I know,’ Syagrius snapped. ‘Thank you, Magos Tsenzhor.’

  Every mile the Imperial Hunters covered towards the target saw the auspex readings diminish. The biomass was shrinking. The signal was less than a third of its original size.

  And now it changed again.

  ‘Marshal…’ Princeps Lukretus voxed.

  ‘I see it,’ Syagrius said. The biomass was moving, heading for the maniples of the Imperial Hunters, and closing fast. Syagrius would have his answers soon. He already knew he would not like them.

  He was right. When the silhouettes of the enemy appeared over the horizon, rushing across the stony plain towards the Titans, Syagrius saw nothing larger than carnifexes again.

  Another false promise. More prey unworthy of the time it would take to destroy the beasts.

  ‘Marshal,’ Rekorus said, ‘we are still receiving requests from the Pallidus Mor to reinforce the war effort at Gelon.’ The moderati kept his voice carefully neutral.

  ‘I’m sure we are,’ said Syagrius. He considered turning back after dealing with the coming wave of tyranids. He could no longer justify chasing a mirage. But something different had happened this time. ‘Maintain course for the initial coordinates of the biomass,’ he said. ‘I want to know what happened.’ If the auspexes of the demi-legio had not malfunctioned, then something more had been present.

  The tyranids arrived, a horde of snarling, clacking monstrosities that would have turned regiments to mulch and cities to ash and bone. Before the god-machines of the Imperial Hunters, they were nothing. In answer to Syagrius’ will, flame engulfed the land. Warlords, Reavers and Warhounds marched on the xenos horrors, ponderous machinic steps closing with the clawing, scuttling monstrosities. With plasma and missiles, bolt-rounds and las, the Imperial Hunters scoured the land of tyranids. Majesty confronted the alien abomination, and destroyed it utterly. Syagrius’ march forwards did not slow. The Titans passed over the tyranids, as if they weren’t there, and when the Titans moved on, the only signs that remained of the invaders were smoking shards of chitinous limbs scattered between the new craters.

  Syagrius watched the horizon. The auspex was no longer reading any enemy movement in the vicinity, and it was with his human eyes more than the data stream of the manifold that he took in the landscape and waited for answers. The plain continued for several more miles, growing more arid, its surface scarred by the tyranid advance. It began to rise, becoming more rocky.

  He suspected what he was going to find just before the wound in the land became visible. The plain became a wide expanse of rock, the slope became steeper, and then it stopped abruptly. Augustus Secutor arrived at the lip of a huge crater. It was misshapen, an ancient impact made larger by the activity of the tyranids. The bowl was deep, the sides high and steep. The crater was empty, as the auspex had indicated.

  ‘Throne,’ Syagrius swore.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Moderati Trovalis said. ‘Where did they go?’

  ‘Look at the walls on the near side,’ Syagrius said.

  The caves were difficult to make out from this angle. Their entrances looked like shadows in the crevasses of the rock walls. It had taken Syagrius a moment to realise what he was seeing.

  ‘Marshal,’ said Tsenzhor, ‘we are beginning a full scan of the geology of the area.’

  ‘No need,’ Syagrius said. ‘We already know what we’ll learn.’ There was a cave system running west. The prey he had been seeking had gone underground. ‘We make for Gelon,’ Syagrius announced. ‘Forced march.’

  He turned his mind to the needs of reaching the hive as quickly as possible. He pushed aside the thought of being too late. He would not dwell upon the ideas of self-doubt, or on errors of judgement.

  But as Augustus Secutor backed away from the lip of the crater, and began the ponderous steps of its turn, he felt the treacherous gnawing in his chest.

  The warning came, and there was nothing they could do.

  ‘We have word from Marshal Syagrius,’ Balzhan voxed to the demi-legio. ‘He warns us that a large concentration of tyranids, with possible bio-titan elements, is making a subterranean approach to Gelon.’

  ‘What action are the Imperial Hunters taking?’ Krezoc asked.

  ‘They are returning.’

  About time, she thought.

  Balzhan ordered full auspex scans of the terrain. From Gelon, Lord-Governor Albrecht Fleiser sent all available geologic data of the region streaming to the Pallidus Mor. Krezoc soaked up the new intelligence as it reached the manifold, and it was useless. The records in Gelon were too fragmentary. The marshy sector had been deemed unpromising for mining centuries ago, and ignored since. Their auspex sensors were unable to get any coherent readings from beneath the surface due to the tectonic vibrations set off by the heavy steps of so many Titans, the mass of the tyranid swarms and the explosions of missiles and bioweapons.

  We know they’re coming, Krezoc thought, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

  Nothing except fight. Nothing except burn the ranks of the enemy, and brace for the unavoidable ambush.

  In the end, there was no bracing for what came. The eruptions were sudden. The warning from the Imperial Hunters might as well have been no warning at all. It was like trying to prepare for an asteroid strike. The event could not be stopped. Its form could not be anticipated. The earth shuddered and gave violent birth to monsters. Towering claws thrust from the ground, immense spikes that cast long shadows of terror upon the humans below. They folded down, stabbing new wounds into the earth, and heaved arched bodies into sight. One hierophant bioform after another burst open the battlefield.

  A single colossus had almost been the doom of Gelon in the initial attack. Gloria Vastator had fought it alone after luring it away from battered Augustus Secutor. Krezoc’s god-machine was not alone now, but the hierophants kept emerging. Two, then three, then more. Soon there were six of the monsters, immense variants of their type, near matches for the Warlords in size. They disrupted the Pallidus Mor formations with their arrival. They were in front, and they were in the middle of the maniples. Two clambered out of the ground in the wastelands near the hive gates. They shook free of hillsides of refuse and scrambled through the wreckage, lunging after the Reavers. In the wake of the hierophants came the carnifexes, a swarm of giants that fell upon the secutarii and the Kataran Spears.

  The two hierophants near the front lines went after the Warhounds. The Titans had been a match for the bioforms present until that moment. They still dwarfed the carnifexes, but the hulking predators went after them in hordes, overwhelming the secutarii squads, hammering the legs of the Warhounds, slowing them down, as the supreme horrors closed in.

  The destruction of the first Warhound reverberated through Gloria Vastator’s manifold as a long, tearing, multi-layered scream. It was the building howl of ruined metal, out-of-control energy release and auspex feedback. It was also the voices of its crew on the vox. Barked orders became shouts of anger, of desperation, and then shrieks of pain. The end came quickly – too quickly for a weapon thousands of years old, a sacred embodiment of the Imperium’s martial history. It was also slow, the agony of mortals and machine spearing through Krezoc’s consciousness, infla
ming the wrath of Gloria Vastator’s machine-spirit. The end was so fast, there was nothing any of the other Titans could do. Their helplessness turned the death into an unendurable torture that went on and on and on.

  It ended with a burst of white noise. And that explosion blended into another death-cry.

  Two Warhounds lost in the first seconds of the attack.

  Chaos swept over the battlefield. Krezoc felt the Pallidus Mor’s strategy disintegrate. A collective machine became a tattered web. Mortal crises unfolded on all sides. Her comrades were under threat. But so was she. There was no option except to deal with the immediate threat.

  One of the hierophants appeared to Gloria Vastator’s rear. It fired its biocannons as soon as it had pulled itself out of the earth. A storm of acid-spewing organisms blasted against the void shields just below the head of the Titan. The flare of shields was blinding. Some of the attack came through, scarring adamantium armour. The Warlord’s machine-spirit snarled in anger at the desecration. Krezoc reined the god-machine in long enough to time her attack. She countered the animalistic charge with discipline, though against instinct. The mega-bolter pounded at the hierophant, chipping away at its armoured legs, but this was not her true attack. Gloria Vastator’s great arms rose together, the muzzles of their guns focused on a single point. The volcano and quake cannons fired at once. The force of the simultaneous recoil thrummed through the Warlord’s frame like a hymn of power. The power plant took the strain, though the void shields flickered. City-destroying laser and shell struck the head of the hierophant. Shell smashed armour and laser burned through xenos exoskeleton and flesh. The shots tore half the monster’s head away. Its enormous mandibles spun off in opposite directions.

  The hierophant staggered. It swayed to the left and right, but it did not fall. Huge bioelectric charges flashed along the beast’s spine. Its forelimbs flailed, their cannons firing wildly. The tyranid weaved from side to side, legs hammering the ground arrhythmically. If it was dead, the xenos’ nervous system did not know it yet. It came on, an uncontrolled juggernaut, but still dangerous. It was approaching fast, and Gloria Vastator was too slow to move out of its path.

  Apocalypse missiles streamed from its shoulder launcher. The range was insanely close, tantamount to a point-blank explosion. The rockets detonated inside the wound carved out by the cannons. All traces of the tyranid’s head vanished. The blasts punched deeper and deeper inside its thorax, blowing the hierophant open from the inside. The armour fragmented outwards. Waves of acid and boiling fluids erupted across the space between the tyranid and the Warlord. The concussions rocked the void shields. The maelstrom of fire and actinic energy filled Krezoc’s vision.

  ‘Brace for impact!’ she shouted.

  The corpse of the tyranid burst through the flame. It had lost one of its legs and it was burning along its entire length. Momentum and the final spasms of its nervous system kept it going, though much of its speed had bled away. It collapsed against Gloria Vastator. The burning bio-wreckage hit like a tumbling mountain. It tore itself open around the legs of the Titan, spreading a sea of acid on the ground before it. Krezoc felt the vibration of the hit, but the god-machine stood sovereign and unmoved above the ruin of its foe. Princeps and machine-spirit shared the same fusion of triumph and contempt. There was no dividing line between the emotion of the human and that of the Warlord.

  Krezoc trained the mega-bolter on the carnifexes in the near vicinity. She detached herself partly from that attack, turning it over to Moderati Haziad. She looked out over the wider battlefield. No other hierophants had been destroyed yet. The struggles were hard, and everywhere she saw moments of crisis. Gloria Vastator was momentarily in a position where it could lend support, but it could not be everywhere at once. Fatum Messor and Crudelis Mortem were fighting a single hierophant and had the measure of their enemy. The Reavers were doing less well, and though the Warhounds were managing to converge and combine their strengths against the monster, they were still hard-pressed. The demi-legio’s vox-traffic burned with the urgency of a war caught in the balance between victory and disaster.

  It was when she looked north that Krezoc saw more than a crisis. She saw a turning point. This was the fulcrum on which the battle would pivot. Two hierophants were attacking Ferrum Salvator. They had closed with it on both sides. Balzhan’s Warlord could not bring its full force to bear on two fronts. Its armament was similar to Gloria Vastator’s, though instead of a mega-bolter, the venerable god-machine’s left-shoulder hard point was armed with a plasma blastgun. The Titan’s torso pivoted back and forth between the two hierophants. Its fire was constant, but it could not hit either with the concentrated fury that was needed. The hierophants scuttled around and around the Warlord, their biocannons unleashed, a xenos storm pounding the Titan’s void shields, straining them past their limit. Both tyranids had been hit. Alien blood coursed down their legs. Fluid bubbled and steamed from rents in their carapaces. But they had not slowed. They circled, advanced, jabbed with claws long as chapel spires and both kept blasting their acid. They were two animals taking down their larger prey. Brute instinct was winning over human battlefield skills.

  The entire ambush was a war of gigantic insects, yet Krezoc could feel, now, more acutely than ever, the sense of something larger directing the attacks of the tyranids. It was not an intelligence in any way that she could recognise, yet it was a presence, a shadow, the hint of something beyond human measure and comprehension. Perhaps it was a form of sentience, but if it was, it recognised nothing of the sort in the human animal. There was only prey.

  Krezoc turned Gloria Vastator to the north. The Titan’s great steps seemed too slow. The marshal of the Pallidus Mor was under attack, and his salvation was the priority. Balzhan was her mentor, her former princeps. Ferrum Salvator had been where she had served as moderati. She could not let Balzhan fall.

  ‘Marshal,’ she voxed, ‘hold fast. We are coming.’

  The channel crackled as if Balzhan were starting to answer. Krezoc thought she heard strained breathing. Then there was only static.

  Ferrum Salvator swung to the left, and its quake cannon boomed. The shell smashed into the hierophant’s armour just behind its head. The tyranid staggered.

  ‘Target the enemy on the right,’ Krezoc told her moderati.

  ‘Acquired,’ said Konterus. The Apocalypse missiles were ready now. The big guns were still building up their charge.

  ‘Kill it,’ Krezoc ordered. The rockets flew. They arced high, and their descent was true. The upper plating of the hierophant flashed with multiple strikes.

  Krezoc hoped the damage already done by Ferrum Salvator would make the impact of the missile barrage all the more telling. At the very least, she wanted to pull the hierophant’s attention towards Gloria Vastator. The principle had worked to save Augustus Secutor. Krezoc needed to see the same success now, when the stakes were much higher.

  The hierophant ignored the missiles. Perhaps the battles with Balzhan’s Warlord had already gone on long enough for the bioform to adapt its defences to the attacks. Perhaps some form of species memory recognised Krezoc’s tactic. In the end, the reasons did not matter. The hierophant charged forwards again, reared back, and stabbed both its forelimbs into the back of Ferrum Salvator.

  The void shields flared a blinding violet and collapsed. At the same moment, the god-machine’s volcano cannon fired. It struck the other hierophant in the same wound as the quake shell, and cut the beast in half.

  Krezoc felt a surge of hope as her volcano cannon came online and the first hierophant fell in two pieces. But the other monster was still on the back of Balzhan’s Warlord, still stabbing through adamantium with its forelimbs, and it was too close for Krezoc to risk a shot. Even a perfect hit would do catastrophic damage to Ferrum Salvator while its void shields were down. Ferrum Salvator leaned forwards. It leaned too far.

  ‘Throne, no,’ Krezoc whispered.
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  The hierophant stabbed. It fired its biocannons. Acid smoke roiled up from the armour of the god-machine in a black, venomous cloud. The mass of the monster and the ferocity of the attack pushed the Titan past the centre of its gravity.

  The unthinkable became the inevitable.

  The vox burst into life, and Krezoc heard Balzhan’s voice. It was ragged from pain. She could hear the marshal’s life bleeding away, and, in the background, the roar of flame and the distant crump of internal explosions. ‘The Pallidus Mor is strong,’ Balzhan said. ‘Its leader is strong.’

  ‘Marshal,’ Krezoc called, pleading with the fates.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ Balzhan whispered.

  The vox went dead. With smoke and flame billowing from the gaping wounds in its armour, Ferrum Salvator fell with awful grace. A monument crashed to the earth, and the earth trembled with horror. The hierophant scrabbled forwards over the Titan. It fired its biocannons through the back of the god-machine’s armour, dissolving the weakened plating still further, then plunged its forelimbs down. They passed through all the way to the Warlord’s head. A new explosion shook the Titan.

  It was a death throe.

  The response from Confessor Jethen Vilkur was not encouraging.

  ‘You’re letting the more primitive elements of your parish get the better of you,’ Vilkur said when Ornastas spoke to him from the holo-link in Saint Kaspha’s sacristy. The other confessor ministered to the wealthier sector of Creontiades. He moved among the spires of the city. He preached in the Chapel of Human Supremacy. He saw the city’s glory and its riches. Vilkur’s face was well fed, bordering on bloated. He enjoyed his position and the benefits that came with it, and Ornastas had not expected him to welcome news that warned of upheaval and war. He had hoped Vilkur would listen.

  ‘I was attacked by heretics,’ he repeated. ‘I have seen runes that–’

  ‘Runes that you cannot produce as evidence,’ Vilkur said.

  Ornastas stopped himself before he objected. There was nothing he could say that would convince Vilkur of the danger. He stared at the jerking image of the confessor and wondered if Vilkur had been corrupted. No, he decided. The face before him was venal, comfortable, too lazy to have been consumed by the dark passion he had seen in the alley. Vilkur was puffy-eyed from having been dragged out of bed. He was dismissive of Ornastas. He was not a heretic.