Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine
Page 24
Even seconds mattered.
The hoplites reached the knees before the Feral could exterminate the peltasts. There were no massive plates at the joint, and the armour was weaker here. Trigerrix coordinated one more hammer-shot barrage just before Venterras reached the target. The shots struck a single location on each joint, cracking open the rippling, distorted, adamantine flesh of the Titan. The repeated blasts left smoking holes just big enough for the hoplites to pass through, one at a time, to the interior of the machine.
Venterras pushed his way through the rent in the armour. He entered a realm that was all the more monstrous for just being recognisable as a Titan’s interior. But everything was tainted. The machinic had been fused with the flesh. Pistons were indistinguishable from bones. Cables were veins. Musculature covered the walls, and the pulse of the power plant was the beat of an infernal heart. Acidic slime coated the surfaces. It poured down Venterras’ armour, sizzling and gnawing at its surface. Light the colour of blood and throbbing anger rose and fell.
Venterras was inside an abomination. This was a mockery of the purity of the machine. It was a perversion of every tenet of the Omnissiah. The machine here had been plunged into the deepest corruption of the flesh. The machine was infused with the instincts and irrationality of the unthinking beast. The metallic had become porous, its nature indeterminate.
And there were voices. They whispered and shrieked and echoed. They were a choir of damnation, oozing from the walls, falling down the squelching shaft of the leg and twisting about the bones. Their words, chanted and snarled, were beyond human understanding and beyond human articulation. No mouth with a single tongue could pronounce those syllables. The voices clamoured for Venterras to listen, to know them, to understand them, to embrace a totality of anger. To become the machine that raged, and so fall into the damnation that was the worst of the flesh.
He and his squad attacked in concert. They stabbed arc lances into the thick of the nexus where the huge bone pistons met. They sawed through sinew and iron, shocking the muscle with repeated jolts of electricity. The voices screamed their outrage. Blood spouted from severed hydraulics. Shimmering faces, contorted with rage, formed in the tissues and spat acid and hate at the hoplites. Venterras’ kyropatris field flashed an angry blue. It could not keep all the foul liquid out. Tinged with the madness of the warp, it fell on him and sought the seams of his armour and the weakness of his soul.
The movement inside the leg was violent as the Feral stamped back and forth, trying to shake off the attackers stabbing it from within. The space rose and fell, the angle shifting to change walls into floor and then back again. Venterras dug into the roaring mass of the joint, driving his arc lance deeper, charring his way through cabling and sinew. Gravity tried to pull him away. The shaking battered the hoplites. The flesh of a wall came away and swallowed two of his comrades, crushing them beneath tonnes of suppurating, hungry metal.
Metal parted. Choking smoke blackened the shaft. Blood and obsidian ichor spurted against the attackers. The voices screamed, and so did the foul material of the Titan’s being.
A greater roar of anger than any before boomed. It climbed the octaves of outrage and pain, and then the movement of the shaft stopped. Ichor-spewing cables snapped and whirled like electrocuted serpents. Immense bone gears spun uselessly against each other, spitting out shrapnel. Dark flames licked up and down the walls.
‘Withdraw,’ Venterras ordered, and he followed the surviving squad members through the rent and out into the air once more. The Feral’s legs were motionless, frozen at awkward angles. The torso rotated back and forth on its axis, as if it might somehow force movement back into its limbs. Hoplites were scrambling out of the left joint too, and climbing down the leg as fast as they could. Internal fires burst from the wounds, and the war-horn of the Feral blasted its helpless anger.
Venterras slid down the leg, grabbing handholds just long enough to slow his descent to a speed he could survive. The ground below was shattered, a smoking upheaval of shell impacts. He saw very few peltasts. Trigerrix was still there, though, her binaric acknowledgement of his emergence greeting him with welcome purity.
The Feral fired at the ground and into the night. There was no discipline to the shots. Whether crew or god-machine was the guiding intelligence of the monster, the Titan now reacted with unreasoning, chaotic wrath. It was fighting fate, but its paralysis doomed it.
The Pallidus Mor barrage arrived as Venterras hit the ground. A hail of shells flew, streaming fire, into the upper portions of the Feral. It fired its guns one more time, and then it came apart, the blasts from the shells setting off a greater explosion from the inside. Its cannons flew cartwheeling into the night, its torso parted like the blossoms of a dark flower. The head disappeared in a fireball.
The legs began to buckle as Venterras pounded away from them. He looked up at the blooming explosion. For a moment, the fireball shaped itself into a maw howling in agony. Then the voices were still.
Medina swerved Bastion of Faith over the broken ground. The tank responded with a surprising nimbleness. Deyers hung on to the hatch to keep from being thrown out. The stream of huge bolter rounds from the Feral passed over his head. The impacts hurled geysers of mud and stone skywards. Heart of Creontiades jerked to the right, also evading the attack. General Passevas was not as lucky. The cannon fire cut the Leman Russ in half.
The Feral backed up again, but its earlier manoeuvres to keep the 66th in its range no longer served it as well. The Spears had it surrounded. They pressed in, a spiral noose closing around the Iron Skull. It had shattered and melted several tanks on their approach. Now it could target only a few at a time.
‘Stay close,’ Deyers voxed. ‘And keep the lines ragged! Don’t give it a cluster of targets.’
Battle, demolisher and vanquisher cannon shells slammed into the Titan on all sides. Its void shields collapsed again, and a plasma destroyer blast hit its cowling. The Feral jerked forwards in a stumble. Smoke billowed out of a score of rents in its armour. It was a giant at bay. It was more terrible than any one of its attackers, but it could not take out the entire swarm of tanks that hemmed it in. Every time it fired, it destroyed another Leman Russ, another Basilisk, another Manticore. Deyers’ regiment eroded. It was a shadow of the force he had led to Khania. But it fought on, and he would see it fight to the end of Katara’s last stand.
And he would bring this monster down.
Platen fired the battle cannon again. The shell hit a growing wound in the Feral’s midsection. The effect was greater than the explosion. The Titan shuddered as if stabbed in the heart. Its arms jerked, their aim uncertain. It marched forwards now, its movements a shuddering, running lunge for freedom.
‘Back!’ Deyers ordered. ‘Keep it surrounded!’
As if scenting blood, the Spears’ bombardment enveloped the Iron Skull. Plasma and shells burst against it without a pause, a score of daggers striking its front and flanks and back and head, exploding against its legs in mid-stride. Twin fountains of flame, majestic as solar flares, jetted from the Titan’s chest and back. The flames met above its head. It staggered two more steps, cannons firing madly in one final, lethal burst. This time Heart of Creontiades was not as lucky. It died with its victim, erupting as the Feral fell. The monster’s shadow stretched ahead of it. Medina pushed Bastion of Faith’s engine to its limits, racing against the collapse. The Feral crashed to earth. Dust clouds rolled over the retreating tanks, then sank back, covering the inert mass of the Titan.
The Leman Russ was heading north, towards the howling intensity of the central clash. Deyers shielded his eyes. He could barely make out the shapes of any of
the god-machines. They were so close to one another now. Two collective fists of unimaginable power were smashing against each other.
‘Slow down,’ Deyers told Medina. To the surviving tanks he voxed, ‘Form up.’ The Spears and the secutarii had completed their missions.
‘What now?’ Platen called up.
Deyers looked towards Therimachus, then at the holocaust to the north. If the Pallidus Mor broke the Iron Skulls’ line, a new phase of the battle could begin. He saw an opportunity. Even though to look at Therimachus was to feel the approaching culmination of a horror he could not name, he saw a chance of hope. It was frail as a fading dream. He had to seize it now before it vanished in the terrible waking of the night.
‘Princeps Krezoc,’ he voxed. ‘At your signal, we will begin to draw the enemy out of the city.’
He didn’t expect an answer. He acted as if he had received one, and that it confirmed his strategy. Lure them back to the plains, he thought. Spare Therimachus and finish this in the wastes. ‘Make for the city,’ he told Medina, and the gathering line of tanks began its turn east.
But Krezoc did answer. ‘Attack at will,’ she said. ‘But you will not draw them out.’
‘Are you forbidding–’
‘I am stating, captain,’ she snapped. ‘The Iron Skulls will not follow. Attack. Bombard them. Hit them with everything. Disrupt their ritual. That is all.’
Hope frayed and vanished. Krezoc would have him turn his guns on the city. She would have him destroy, not save.
He hesitated.
‘Captain?’ Platen asked.
Then, from the north, nuclear flashes, five of them. Deyers fell back, blinded, as the shock waves seized the regiment in their jaws.
Chapter 13
Salvation’s Pyre
Tempestas Deorem. The Imperial Hunter Canis Imperio. Two of the Iron Skulls’ Ravagers. A traitor Banelord. Their power plants went supercritical at virtually the same moment, but Princeps Makthal’s Reaver was the first. It was the trigger, and Makthal was granted the boon of realising what was about to happen and the moments to knowingly speak his last.
‘We are the pride of Death,’ he voxed to Krezoc, a farewell and a warning.
That was the end of mercy. Krezoc did not have time to acknowledge the farewell. Though she heard the warning, there was nothing to be done to prepare.
She had known from the start what might happen. She had done the cold arithmetic of nuclear explosions in close quarters. She had known it was probable. She had known the possible cost. And she accepted it.
They might even purchase a victory. Tempestas Deorem exploded, triggering the chain reaction. The cataclysm enveloped both forces. There was no escape, no shelter. The god-machines would survive, or they would not. A simple binary. One or zero.
And so she marched Gloria Vastator through the fire, to encounter the one or the zero. The five blasts came in the time it took for the god-machine to take a single step. The adamantine shutters slammed down over the eyes of the Warlord, blocking out the destroying light. The manifold was a scream of data, an overload flare that almost blinded all her senses. Her mind swam through fire, yet the deaths of the Titans were so immense that she knew and felt each new explosion, each new apocalypse that led to the next. A single step, because there was no choice. There was only, as ever, the fate of the Pallidus Mor to walk through the flames, and so Gloria Vastator walked. It took that step, into the enemy and through annihilation.
The moment of the blasts passed and became the time of the fireballs, and Gloria Vastator had not become zero.
The binary was resolved. Now the damage warning klaxons sounded, and the damage reports flooded in through the manifold. Radiation spiked, and kept spiking. The Warlord led the demi-legio through a crucible that only destroyed. It embraced the Pallidus Mor and the Iron Skulls, and tried to melt them down to ore. Krezoc pushed the knowledge of the fires racing through the god-machine to the back of her mind. She shut out the klaxons. They were the concern of Thezerin. Even the radiation levels were irrelevant. They would kill her or not, but right now, she still felt the linked wills of her moderati, and she could make the Titan walk, and she could make it fight. No other truth mattered.
The guns were charged. The shutters withdrew from the armourglass. The killing light had passed, but the world beyond the Warlord was nothing but the rage of the fireballs. Gloria Vastator was moving from the core of a star towards its surface. And there was a target, little more than a vague mass registered by the overwhelmed auspex array. Krezoc’s body was the Warlord. Its pain was hers. The machine-spirit’s fury was hers. She and god-machine were fused into transcendent unity. She snarled, low in her throat, and in the midst of flame unleashed still more. The volcano cannon fired at the same moment the Banelord came into view through the holocaust. The las-beam hit point-blank. Gloria Vastator walked its own inferno, a burning juggernaut ramming into the Iron Skull. The traitor’s arms jerked mindlessly, their fire going wild. The Belicosa’s las-beams melted the Banelord’s head. It stretched and liquefied, a waxen death mask that ran down the monster’s torso. Gloria Vastator struck the standing corpse and hurled it to the ground. Her snarl turning into a roar, her flesh riven by the searing agony of the god-machine, her spirit exalted by the Warlord’s annihilation of its foe.
Forwards, then, forwards through the firestorm that at last was fading, through the shattered line of the Iron Skulls. The traitors had only lost one Titan to the chain reaction, but with Gloria Vastator’s kill, all the Banelords of the barrier had fallen. The Irons Skulls that survived the blasts were lesser, and were more badly damaged than the engines still marching with Krezoc’s battle group. The Pallidus Mor advanced through them, a blade heated to red slicing through weakened metal.
Forwards still, through the thickened night of dust and smoke, and then Therimachus lay before Krezoc. The near suburbs were gone, scraped from the earth by the nuclear vortex. After a mile or so, the stumps of buildings burned. Further on, in the heart of the city, the Iron Skulls drew their great rune in blood and flame.
The extent of Gloria Vastator’s injuries became clear as Krezoc tried to increase the pace of the march. Its right leg resisted her commands, dragging forwards with great reluctance. Looseness pervaded the Warlord’s body. Her will seemed to take longer to reach its limbs. She felt its struggle as groans of data in the manifold. There was silence from Thezerin, though. The magos understood the priorities of the battle. Krezoc cursed the wounds and ignored them, forcing the machine on.
For the first few steps into the outer ruins of Therimachus, Krezoc concentrated on the enemy Titans. They no longer outnumbered the battle group, but these god-machines were strong. If they had suffered in the struggle with the Imperial Hunters, they showed little sign in their movements and their weapons fire. Krezoc guessed that the Hunters had managed to kill every Iron Skull they had wounded. If so, Syagrius’ small victory was even more pyrrhic. He had left a strong enemy behind. The traitors had not deviated from their task. They showed no interest in the apocalypse on the south-eastern fringe of the city, nor in the fall of their brothers. Krezoc plotted targeting solutions, and then the implications of the Iron Skulls’ single-minded focus sank in.
‘Banelord in the north quadrant,’ Vansaak said. ‘Acquired.’
‘No,’ Krezoc said. ‘There isn’t time.’
Vansaak and Grevereign’s confusion thrummed through the manifold.
‘Their task is almost done,’ Krezoc said. She looked hard at the city and not just the enemy now, and the danger hit her with soul-withering force. Reality over Therimachus was turning brittle. The air flickered, like a stutter in the world. Near the top of the hill where the governor’s palace had been, two Ravagers faced each other across a distance of about a mile and were pouring their fire onto the ground between them. There were few buildings there. Instead, there were wide avenues and squares. Krezoc cou
ld easily guess what was being burned and what the source of the clouds of black smoke was. The sacrifice was reaching its climax. The ritual was about to bear fruit.
The veil of the materium trembled. Immense hunger pressed against the other side, eager for its release.
The totality of the battlefield clicked into place for Krezoc. Only a few, miserably frail seconds remained before the veil was rent. She saw the precision in the destruction the Iron Skulls had caused in the city. She saw the machinery of the ritual.
And where there was precision, there was another sort of frailty.
Markos had thrown himself down on instinct at the first flash. So had his guards. He huddled next to a low mound of rubble, his eyes squeezed shut against the light, his hands over his ears in a futile effort to blot out the thunder of the explosions. His ears and nose were bleeding when he rose, his head stuffed and ringing. His skin burned from the passage of the hurricane wind.
Five mushroom clouds blotted out the sky to the south east. They were darkening pillars, disappearing into the night as the furnace of the blasts faded. The massive shapes of the Pallidus Mor, outlined by fires guttering on their armour and lit by the flashes of void shields struggling for stability, marched from the site of the blasts. Iron Skulls fell before them, the defensive line becoming a new ruin. Further to the south, Markos could still see the lights of the Kataran Spears. Something of the regiment had survived. He stumbled after Sorren, barely seeing the dying city around him. He lost sight of the 66th as he ran downhill, taller wreckage blocking his view. He saw them in his mind. They were the goal.
Sorren led the way through back lanes, fleeing the Iron Skulls and their butchery. The massacre of the herded civilians began, and the smell of burned flesh filled Markos’ nostrils. The ashes of the martyred population spread over Therimachus.