‘Ready,’ Grevereign and Vansaak told Krezoc at the same moment. And she knew, already. Their eagerness had spiked their vital signs in the manifold, and Krezoc had felt the deep energy thrum that indicated both of Gloria Vastator’s primary weapons were prepared to fire again.
The quake cannon fired a beat before the volcano cannon. The Banelord’s shields were trying to come back online, but the Warhound assault was enough to disrupt them. The Mori shell struck the traitor’s torso on the right. The explosion set off tremors in the earth that even Krezoc registered. The Banelord rocked back and to the side, in time to take the second volcano las hit. The energy beam sheared through the weakened armour. The Banelord’s arm fell off, blowing up as it hit the ground. The Titan staggered forwards, a machine of pain and anger now. Energy discharges crackled from its shoulders, blue lightning flashes reaching far into the dusty air. Its carapace launchers flared again. The missile flights were erratic. They came down wide, the hits scattering over Krezoc’s maniple. The Banelord’s targeting was damaged. The foulness inside the machine was hurt, perhaps dying. Its corrupted war-horn issued a raging howl. It walked into the ruins of the hab block between it and Gloria Vastator. It waded into rockcrete that slumped down further against its legs, slowing its charge. The monster seemed to waver.
‘Quake cannon, lower torso,’ Krezoc said. Her words and her will, Vansaak’s will and Gloria Vastator’s actions fused. There was no distinction between them. Krezoc spoke, and the shell struck the target, hitting deep into armour. The explosion was as much inside the Banelord as outside. The monster trembled, its war-horn turning to a disbelieving wail, and fell.
To the left, Crudelis Mortem and Fatum Messor had the second Banelord in a crossfire. It struck back wildly. A coruscating energy beam hit Crudelis Mortem’s head. Rheliax grunted in pain on the vox, but his Warlord kept hitting the traitor machine. Drahn drew more of its fire towards Fatum Messor. The two Warlords began to circle the Banelord. It was a slow, majestic dance of war, and it was an inevitable execution. Plasma blasts and massive shelling took the enemy apart.
The Ravager and Feral Titans had lost their leaders. They tried to rally, closing together to concentrate all of their firepower on Gloria Vastator, now closest to the wall.
‘They’re forming a pack,’ Vansaak said.
‘They should know better,’ said Krezoc, pleased that they did not.
In the flame and dust that swirled and roared over all of Deicoon, targets were harder to zero in on. To the naked eye, the city was a phantasmagoria of explosions and hulking shadows. Many of these shadows moved, but they might only be buildings surrendering to their deaths and crumbling to earth. Titans moved between and through the ruins. What seemed to be a tower might suddenly reveal itself as a god-machine. The firestorms were generating their own winds, and the dust whirled itself into blasting cyclones. The chaos of the city made auspex readings suspect. There were heat blooms everywhere, concealing the enemies from each other. The actual battles between the Titans were taking place at what was almost point-blank range.
If the lesser Iron Skulls had kept apart, strafing targets of opportunity and avoiding direct confrontations with the organised maniples of the Pallidus Mor, they might have survived until the arrival of the rest of the force. By grouping into a pack, they showed themselves and made themselves vulnerable.
Krezoc made out the pack half a mile ahead, just before the ruins of the wall. ‘Target acquired,’ she said, and sent a flight of Apocalypse missiles to light the way for the other Warlords.
‘I see them,’ said Rheliax.
‘Confirmed,’ Drahn added.
‘Take out the road in front of them,’ she told Grevereign. To the rest of her maniple, she said, ‘Target at will.’
Volcano las-beams cut the street open. The fissure gaped wide, molten, a sudden abyss of fire going down into the smouldering undercity. Two Ferals, rushing forwards, could not arrest their momentum and tumbled into the gorge. Upended, they were helpless. The Pallidus Mor barrage hammered down on the others. The battered regiment of the Kataran Spears, moving at the feet of the Titans, gave their own measure of punishment to the traitors. Ravagers and the other Ferals, realising their error, fought back with the full measure of their ferocity. For almost a minute, the eastern edge of Deicoon was brilliantly lit by the fury of las, plasma, missiles and shells converging on a single, contained area, and lashing out from the same point. A snarling, soiled dawn broke in the city, strobing and throbbing with the endless percussion of the explosions. The dawn became a howling brightness as reactors went critical and ruptured god-machines became their own annihilating pyres.
Then the day died once more, fading back to the crimson-and-black storms, and what remained before the Pallidus Mor was a heaving, boiling pit. Much more of the road had fallen in during the battle. Krezoc had been forced to march Gloria Vastator back several paces as the fissure had lengthened and widened, sucking down buildings and Titans. The destruction in the undercity, begun by whatever force it was that had been granted to the heretics for their uprising, had continued and escalated since. As above, so below. What Krezoc could see of the undercity looked like the interior of a volcanic cone. Combustible gas and liquids flowed like lava. Layers were collapsing upon layers, forcing everything further and further down. Already the pit was hundreds of feet deep.
‘We have a bit of a detour to make,’ Rheliax voxed.
‘When we leave,’ Krezoc answered. ‘And we aren’t going yet.’
The rest of the Iron Skulls were much closer. As the firestorms had increased, the long-distance barrages had diminished in intensity and accuracy. The traitors had no more of an idea of where their targets were than did the Pallidus Mor. But they were close now. The shadows were falling across the auspex data streaming through the manifold. The positions were still vague. Even the precise composition of the force was hard to scry. It was larger than the Pallidus Mor.
And this is a splinter of the main force, she thought. The Iron Skulls had mustered a colossal showing for this invasion.
She took Gloria Vastator back another few steps from the pit as more of the edges crumbled in. Tremors continued. A web of cracks spread over the avenue, racing outwards until they vanished from sight in the murk.
‘Head south,’ she voxed to the demi-legio and to the Spears. ‘Face west, towards the centre. The moment of our stand approaches.’
‘What is our strategy?’ Drahn asked.
‘To send the enemy to perdition.’
Krezoc rotated Gloria Vastator’s torso on its axis. Its guns pointed upslope, ready for the enemy to appear. The Warlord moved south, away from the pit, its ponderous steps shaking the fragile being of the city. Deicoon’s strength had always been a shell, and everything hollow was coming to its end.
The Spears drove between the feet of giants. Coughing, Deyers lowered himself down through the turret and closed the hatch for a moment. He wiped the dust from his eyes and breathed the dank but comparatively clean air of the tank for a few breaths.
‘What is she planning?’ Platen asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Deyers. He could see no course ahead except one form or another of annihilation. He could not keep the despair at bay. The victory over the first detachment of Iron Skulls did nothing to hold it back. What he retained from the fall of the enemy Titans was the vision of the city destroying itself from within. There was nothing in Deicoon except destruction. He had no fear of death or sacrifice. He would follow his duty to the end. He would have the Spears follow Krezoc’s lead. She had earned that on Khania. And yet the burning storm of Deicoon filled his mind and soul.
He could hear echoes of that destroying wind in Platen’s voice. The Spears had all come to save Katara, and there was less and less left to save.
Krezoc’s voice came over the vox. ‘Enemy in sight. Prepare for massed fire. Captain Deyers, I suggest you c
ontinue to pull your forces back.’
‘We will not abandon the fight,’ he said.
‘I am not asking you to. You will engage as you see fit, of course. But I strongly urge you to pull back. We all will presently. We are leaving Deicoon. You must too.’
‘I understand, princeps,’ he said, only he didn’t. He was confused. He did as she said, however. ‘Guns on the enemy and fire at will,’ he voxed. ‘And make for the walls at all speed. We’re getting out.’ The road to the gate was destroyed, but so much of the wall was now down that it would not be difficult to break out of the city.
‘That sounds like a retreat,’ said Platen.
‘Somehow it isn’t,’ Deyers said, dreading the truth.
‘Here they come!’ Platen shouted, all her focus now on taking down the overwhelming foe.
Deyers opened the hatch and climbed out into the suffocating dust again. Uphill from his position, the monstrous giants had appeared. Their distorted shapes were made even more terrible in the half-light of the shrouded firestorm. They were tall as death, twisted as nightmares. The city shook with their tread. The spined, horned masses rocked back and forth as they advanced. They were the unholy given form. They seemed to have sprung from the underworld of lost mythologies. They rose up from the burning city, and their armour of crimson and black made them things of flame and shadow. The towering Banelords were escorted by the foothills of the Reavers and Ferals. The Iron Skulls approached in a cluster, a new city of blood and brass marching through the death throes of Deicoon. Opposing them, the god-machines of the Pallidus Mor were no less awe-inspiring, but fewer in number.
The guns of the Kataran 66th opened up against the nightmare invaders. The shelling seemed pitiful to Deyers, a child’s ignored cry.
Then the Titans of both sides unleashed their wrath, and the world began to come apart.
The Company of the Bridge was more than a thousand strong by the time it crossed the wall and moved out onto the rocky terrain beyond Deicoon. The ground was trembling with greater and greater violence. Ornastas kept marching, looking back all the while, until the company reached a zone of jumbled boulders and dry gullies. Immense energy discharges from the city cast jagged shadows over the ground.
Ornastas hesitated. His initial impulse had been to march for Therimachus, but the distance involved now sank in. The company had neither transport nor supplies.
How do you plan on getting there? he wondered.
An inner voice said, Wait.
It said, Witness.
‘Take cover!’ Ornastas called to his followers. He coughed again, but not as violently as before. The air was a little cleaner here.
‘Are we fighting?’ Velatz asked, puzzled.
‘We are watching!’ Ornastas announced. ‘We pause here to see the history of Katara unfold, and learn what our role in its next chapter will be!’
He led by example. He chose a boulder the size of a Chimera and stood with his hand against its side, ready to duck behind the rock when the need arose. He looked towards Deicoon and felt the overwhelming event approach. He needed guidance, and it was coming. Once again, he would see destiny take form. When it did, the Emperor would speak to his soul, and he would know what path he should take.
The war in the city hurt his eyes with the brilliance of devastation. He was already moving his lips in a prayer of thanks when a cracking boom, deep and fatal, announced the moment of destiny.
The foul energy burst against Gloria Vastator. The barrage was unending, concentrated, an explosion of violence from mad gods. Krezoc felt the pain of the Warlord. Its shields could not withstand so massive an assault. Thezerin channelled power to the forward shields, bringing them back online almost as quickly as they went down. They pulsed in and out of existence with the stutter of an arrhythmic heart. The energy to power or destroy a city burst into life and imploded a moment later, disrupted by forces even stronger. The enemy attacks reached deeper and deeper into the being of the god-machine, burning through plating, crackling along power lines. In the manifold, Krezoc felt the wounds to the body of the Warlord. Severed power cables were burned nerves. Burst conduits were cut veins. Gloria Vastator’s pain was her pain. Its anger was her anger. Her determination was the machine-spirit’s.
She did not let the growing damage distract her from the objective. She kept to her target, and demanded the same of every princeps in the demi-legio. No matter how ferociously the instinct of the machine-spirit tried to bring the weapons to bear on the Iron Skulls, she used nothing except the mega-bolter to fire directly on the Traitor Titans.
Everything else smashed Deicoon in a vast swath before the Iron Skulls.
In the region of the barrage, cultists still fought with loyal civilians. The struggles were pointless, the combatants on both sides doomed to be crushed or burned by the disintegrating city. They were invisible to Krezoc, except in brief glimpses when the wind cleared the dust for a moment. There was no meaning in those battles any more. They were violence that fed itself. It raged for its own sake.
Krezoc could have rationalised the death she brought as a mercy. She did not. She accepted that she was killing the innocent and the loyal along with the heretic. She took on the cost to her soul. And she did what was necessary. This, too, was the culture of the Pallidus Mor. The road to victory was bloody. To travel it meant leaving behind the hopes of forgiveness. To travel it well, and not be among the corrupt, meant seeing the cost. It meant knowing the harm done. It meant never turning away from the ugliness she unleashed.
It meant never blinking.
If Deicoon could have been saved, Krezoc would have given her life to do it. But it was doomed, and so Deicoon must give its life for the greater cause of the salvation of Katara.
Every primary weapon of the demi-legio hit the same region of ground. Citizens and heretics vaporised along with the hollowed-out shells of manufactoria. No structure survived beyond the first seconds of the bombardment. Rockcrete and bedrock melted. A fist with the impact of an asteroid shattered the crust of the city.
For seconds that lasted an eternity, the Iron Skulls battered the Pallidus Mor, and the Pallidus Mor punished the earth onto which the Skulls advanced. The seconds were the time of Krezoc’s gamble. She wagered the Titans under her command were stronger than the surface of the city.
She won.
The great pit opened, a maw gaping wide to swallow Deicoon. The bombarded region fell away suddenly, taking three Iron Skulls at once. Millions of tonnes of stone, rockcrete and corrupted metal plummeted, crushing all below, smashing into levels, many of which were already on the verge of collapsing themselves. The city fell and fell and fell, the depths of the plunge increasing as the maw widened.
‘Keep firing,’ Krezoc commanded. ‘Send everything to the core of this planet!’
Somewhere to the right, there was the devastating blast of another god-machine dying. The blast shook the other Titans, overloaded void shields and sent dangerous tremors through the ground.
‘We may fall with the enemy,’ Drahn said.
‘We will not,’ said Krezoc. She would not allow it.
The chain reaction set in. The great plunge was so sudden, so absolute, Krezoc grunted in unwanted awe. The entire slope between the Pallidus Mor and the crater that had been the keep disappeared. The Iron Skulls dropped into the darkness of flame. Explosions gouted from the maw. Fountains of burning gas reached upwards like the hands of a drowning man. Volcano las and quake shells followed the traitors down. The torrent of destruction turned the abyss into an erupting crater. A Titan exploded. The blast was nuclear, and in the confined quarters of the pit it annihilated everything that might have slowed the fall. It punched all the way through the depths of the undercity and deeper into the crust of Katara.
‘Keep firing,’ Krezoc said again. ‘Keep firing. We do not stop until there is nothing left of them.’
The monsters of the Iron Skulls landed on each other. Some fell hundreds of feet and shattered their limbs with the impact of their own mass. They were prone. They collided with each other. Many still blasted upwards with their weapons. Rockets rose from the pit and arced down onto the Pallidus Mor.
These were the attacks of desperation. They were last gasps. What Krezoc had begun could not be arrested.
Fortress-destroying las melted the earth. Shells blew the wounds of the crust wide. Now direct fire on the Iron Skulls was useful. Tangled, damaged, enraged beasts hurled their rage up at their executioners. Distorted limbs emerged from dark seas of flame to blast violet lightning one last time. Uncontrolled bursts ushered the end closer. Metal skeletons wrestled against the formation of their grave. Each explosive death pushed the fall deeper.
Deicoon’s roots went down far. So very far, it was as if their construction were nothing more than a foreshadowing of the form of their annihilation. The holocaust cracked through the crust until the even greater heat of the mantle rose to meet it.
The greatest explosion came then. The true eruption. The pit became a caldera. Gloria Vastator ceased fire as the wall of magma and incandescent clouds roared to the sky.
Chapter 10
Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine Page 17