Rauth found himself wishing then that Telach was close, and not closeted away with his three Codiciers in preparation for the main assault through the tunnels. He couldn’t confide in Khatir – the Iron Father was little more than a weapon.
He cast his mechanical gaze across the bodies of those slain under his orders, and felt the ghost of the past whisper to him, just as he had been promised that it would. Its voice was comforting even as it mocked him.
You have become a monster.
His comm-feed crackled into life. Rauth’s thoughts abruptly broke off, and he let his gauntlet fall.
‘Lord,’ said Khatir.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘Melamar Primus is secured,’ said Khatir. Rauth could hear the crash of bolter fire in the background, tinny and obscure. ‘Tunnel approaches are now under assault. I assume you wish to lead the attack beyond.’
‘I do,’ Rauth replied. ‘I will be at your position shortly.’
‘Very well. Interim orders?’
Rauth hesitated. His thoughts, normally so acute, felt sluggish. Telach’s words about the presence in the spires being something they had fought before preyed on his mind. The Chief Librarian had been unable to give him any further insight on what that meant, but it was clear that the normally stoic Telach had been unnerved by what he’d sensed.
Under Rauth’s immense, unmoving shadow, the dead Guardsman stared up at him with empty eyes.
‘Ensure the heavy support is in place,’ he said finally. ‘And contact Princeps Lopi.’
Rauth began to walk again, striding through the layers of mingled gore and bone. As his limbs moved once more, he felt some of that sluggishness recede. His boot crushed the skull of the man he’d given the Emperor’s Mercy to, and he barely noticed it.
‘Telach has warned us of what lies in those tunnels, and I will not enter them unprepared,’ said Rauth, pulling up tactical overlays on his helm display as he walked. Activity helped him, and he felt his blood stirring. ‘I want all claves assembled, and I want the Librarians deployed, and most of all – and this is what you must impress on Lopi – I want the Titans.’
Rauth contemplated the destruction that would bring, and something within him almost smiled.
‘We will send the Warhounds in,’ he said. ‘Right under their feet. If that doesn’t break their spirit, nothing will.’
Lopi sank deeper into the pseudo-world of the Manifold, soaking up the streams of symbolic data as they flooded towards and over him. He was satisfied, and still buoyed by the sheer thrill of sharing consciousness with Vindicta.
The Warlord Titan had made its way across the open space of the Maw and through the narrow gap between the Melamar Primus and Secundus hives. Striding through the valley between sheer walls on either side, it had waded through whole detachments of heavy armour, crunching the wreckage beneath its feet and grinding the smoking remnants into the ash-soil.
The enemy had nothing with which to fight back. Their tanks were too slow and too bogged down in the morass of semi-derelict buildings to respond adequately. Only its ferocious wall-mounted artillery packed a big enough punch to trouble the war machines of Astorum.
He shouldn’t have worried about Remona. Castigatio’s princeps was as capable as he was, and seemingly impervious to fear. She had a kill-tally far in excess of what would be expected of one her age, and she knew her machine well.
Still, he worried. He worried about all the men and women in his formation, just as he fretted over the spirits of the god-machines they inhabited. They were like family to him; like his children, or his siblings. When they suffered harm, he felt the pain of it.
‘Engine Castigatio is seven points to rear-left,’ replied Killan, his fingers busy at his console. ‘Bogged down with fire-lines still lodged in the flanks of Melamar Primus, but making progress towards our position. The blessed machine is intact and moving well.’
Lopi shook his head, trying to loosen his tight organic muscles.
Vindicta slewed round, rocking on its central axis. Its left leg planted firmly, crushing an abandoned industrial building as if it were made of rotten synthwood. The soaring edges of Melamar Secundus filled the forward viewers, laced with promethium fires. As ever on Shardenus, the air was thick with smog and ash, cloaking everything in a dirty haze. The Warlord’s sensoria picked out the sources of the heavy las-fire – seven separate positions high up on the hive’s exterior battlements – and presented Lopi with a range of firing responses.
The rocket hit Vindicta just below the neck-joint. It screamed out from a position high up on Melamar’s north-west facing terraces, trailed by a thick line of ink-black smoke. It came in fast, curving slightly as guidance cogitators locked on, and exploded in a riot of colour and noise across the forward voids. For a second, all views were replaced with a fuzzy hail of static. Vindicta staggered backwards, reeling from the detonation.
Lopi was hurled against the side of his throne, and the distinction between the real world and the Manifold blurred uncomfortably. Klaxons went off from somewhere deep in the Titan’s innards, and he sensed the sharp tang of engine oils suddenly loosed into the cockpit’s atmosphere.
Some of the sensor screens flickered back online. Lopi righted himself, pushing back against the throne’s iron arms. The Manifold hurled information at him, and he could feel Vindicta’s machine heart growling away in outrage.
‘Frontal voids down,’ reported Yemos. ‘I need a few moments, my princeps.’
‘Came in too close,’ muttered Jerolf, struggling to retain traction as the Warlord’s massive drive systems absorbed the blast-wave of the rocket. ‘Should pull back.’
He unleashed the multi-barrelled gatling, pouring the Warlord’s latent anger into the assault. As he did so, he felt Vindicta’s spirit surge up within him, roaring and raging.
The engine rocked back on its stabilisers, juddering from the torrent of fury pouring from the rotating barrels of the immense gun-mount. Heavy projectiles hammered into the sides of the hive spire ahead, scything through the outer armour and ripping it into a hail of torn-up ferrocrete.
Lopi suddenly became aware of the full presence of the Titan within him. The ancient, vengeful soul of the machine swam up from the murky depths, taking control of its weapon systems and powering them up.
He was losing control. The sensation was wonderful.
The gatling blaster cut a swathe across the hive walls, tearing through whole hoppers of ammunition in seconds. Lopi felt fresh loops being shunted up through the auto-loader systems and slamming into place. Every crashing impact sent new shivers of sensation rippling through him.
The rest of the Warlord’s wea
pons broke into action. Beams lanced out from the shoulder-mounted turbolasers, streaking through the roiling clouds of smoke and smog like starship contrails. The enormous quake cannon powered up, whining with accumulated energy before sending its payload thundering out into the atmosphere. When it struck the hive edges, the whole structure seemed to shudder. Gantries collapsed, walls were demolished, buttresses blew apart in cataclysmic eddies of destruction.
Vindicta disappeared behind a maelstrom of colossal energies. Everything opened up, flinging terrifying levels of power out at enemy fire-positions high up on the walls. The noise was deafening even within the confines of the cockpit, and several sensoria panels overloaded with sharp, fizzing pops.
Yemos sounded alarmed. Lopi could have laughed. Rooted deep within his consciousness, he heard the echo of Vindicta’s soul chuckling away. The sound was semi-human, as if the imprint of some long-dead mortal princeps had been stamped onto it in ages past.
It is alive. It thirsts for destruction. It is alive, and I am its avatar.
The sound of his deputy’s voice amused Lopi as much as it irritated him. He continued to unleash hell on the spire-flank, watching as the outer layers dissolved into a cascade of dust.
Then he stopped.
Lopi slumped a little, panting. The aftershocks of the barrage died away slowly, resounding out across the industrial wasteland between the spires. Smoke rolled down the artificial cliffs of the hive spire, lined with the angry red of incendiaries going off. A huge pall of dust and debris sank to earth with eerie slowness, gradually revealing what Vindicta had done.
Lopi became aware of the silence within the command chamber. With some difficulty, he extracted his awareness from the Manifold. Vindicta’s spirit clutched at him, trying to drag him back into the embrace of rage. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to power the weapons up again, to keep firing, to destroy everything in his path.
Yemos was looking at him, aghast. Jerolf was still muttering away at his station, and Killan was busy trying to bring a whole bank of sensoria online.
Yemos looked unconvinced. He bowed his head slowly, never letting his eyes drop from Lopi’s.
‘We are now low on solid ammunition, princeps,’ he said. ‘I shall make arrangements for early resupply. We cannot do that again any time soon.’
Lopi didn’t feel sorry. His only regret was that the glorious devastation had to end. With the withdrawal of the god-machine’s bellicose presence, though, it was easy enough to see that the moderati was right.
The pict screens gradually cleared of dust and smoke, driven east by the hot wind. Lopi gazed out on what he’d done, and allowed himself another a brief frisson of pleasure.
Melamar Secundus was a pyramid of fire. Huge rents had been gouged out of the hive’s protective plating, exposing layers of hab-units within. Flames the size of Thunderhawks rippled up the precipitous edges, fed by the wind and spilled promethium. Secondary explosions rocked the spire from within, spewing out gobbets of smoke and sparks. The fire positions, including the location from which the missile had been fired, were black holes gouged deep into Melamar’s heart.
The spire had been ravaged. No las-beams now flickered from its turrets. Across whole swathes of its outer surface, it was as charred and dead as a lump of carbon.
Witness the hand of the Omnissiah, traitor, mouthed Lopi, casting his gaze across the horrific damage. Deep down now, almost beyond his ability to detect, the soul of the machine was still chuckling.
He enjoyed hearing that sound. Vindicta was precious to him. All the engines of the battlegroup were precious to him – if they suffered harm, then his retribution would be terrible.
Lopi couldn’t wipe the smile from his face. Vindicta’s metallic laughter thrummed at the back of his head.
Chapter Eleven
Morvox heard the las-discharge first, and blink-clicked an audio copy into his helm’s scratch buffer.
Out of all the warriors in the clave, Morvox always heard things first, despite the fact his aural implants had never been properly upgraded. One day, he supposed, he’d report to the apothecarion and request the removal of his Lyman’s ear for an iron-banded replacement from the forges. Until then he used the organs he’d been gifted upon Ascension. For the time being, he was proud of his aptitude, though he knew that at some point in the future he wouldn’t be.
‘One of ours?’ Morvox voxed to Fierez.
Fierez’s helm was distorted by a bulbous mass under the left cheek: an inbuilt long-range auspex, lodged like a tumour amid the cabling of his battle-plate.
‘Negative,’ Fierez replied. ‘We are the only clave still in Secundus. All others are heading for the muster zone in Primus.’
Morvox ran a basic check on the audio recording, filtering the faint sounds through his suit’s cogitators and digesting the results.
Las-fire, concentrated bursts, several hundred signals, closing fast.
For a moment, he hesitated. He had orders to return to the access points north of Melamar Primus and join the muster for the coming tunnel assault. He was itching to follow those orders, since he knew the real fighting would soon take place there – chasing down bands of heretics in the fringe hives had become of peripheral importance.
The hesitation was only slight – four seconds, as recorded by his armour chronos.
‘We purge this, then go,’ Morvox said, gunning his chainsword into life.
The clave started moving. They strode out, going quietly and shifting into standard formation: Morvox at the apex, flanked on either side by three boltgun-wielding battle-brothers, with Sulzar and Gergiz bringing up the rear.
The chamber around them was much the same as every chamber they had fought through over the past few days – dark, cramped, stinking, decrepit. The few working lumens were covered in a layer of grime and threw out barely enough light for a mortal to see by. Ruined equipment was strewn across the narrow floors, smashed and trampled in some earlier engagement. Blast marks ran across the metal-mesh walls, the signs of las-fire or solid-round impacts.
Morvox paid his surroundings little attention. For him, the interior of Melamar Secundus had ceased to be anything other than a backdrop to a series of forgettable, dismal battles. He didn’t mind the endless gloom, or the hot air that wheezed arthritically through clogged filtration units, or the perpetual stink of human sweat and faeces, or the pools of blood on the floor, oozing gently into the overloading san-trenches. Such things were little different than his upbringing on one of Medusa’s titanic land engines – if anything, the claustrophobic, sepulchral surroundings made him feel at home.
He minded the tedium of the combat, which he knew was nothing more than a place-filler for the fighting to come. Nethata’s Guardsmen were more than capable of mopping up the resistance remaining in the twin Melamar hives; the blades of the Iron Hands, by contrast, should have been reserved for sterner tests.
‘Mo
re signals closing,’ reported Fierez, shunting a schematic of the chamber layout ahead into the clave’s internal grid. ‘Six hundred, all concentrated in the upcoming node.’
Morvox glanced at the summary display, quickly taking in all he needed to know. He strode all the while, passing from the narrow chamber into a long, semi-ruined corridor with a shattered ceiling and sewage frothing across the floor. His shoulder guards scraped against the walls on either side as he stomped through the slurry.
‘What are they firing at?’ he voxed, already assessing how best to bring the coming slaughter to a quick conclusion.
‘Each other,’ said Fierez.
The corridor terminated in a locked doorway. Long bloodstains ran down from the top of the frame to the floor. Noises of battle were clearly audible from the far side. Morvox heard a single human voice, louder than the others, roaring with anger.
He pointed his bolter at the lock mechanism.
‘Let’s get this over,’ he said, and fired.
Even before the shell had hit, he was moving.
The door exploded away, hurled through the air and into a close press of bodies beyond. Morvox followed it in, bolter in one hand, chainsword in the other. A mortal soldier stumbled into his path, blinded by flying shrapnel from the door’s implosion, and was cut down by his spinning chainsword blades. Another tried to get to his feet in front of Morvox, hurriedly bringing a lasgun to bear. Morvox backhanded him, hurling him five metres away before the man landed with the crack of breaking bones. Several more troops staggered away, covering their eyes and scrambling to get clear. Morvox loosed three rounds into their retreating backs, felling them instantly, before stalking after more.
By then the other Iron Hands were through the door. They fanned out into the chamber, laying about them with calm, methodical precision. Muzzle flare from their bolters lit up the scene ahead of them in angry flashes.
Morvox never stopped moving. He soaked up the detail of his surroundings in precise stages, killing all the while, using his bolter sparingly and cutting broad swathes with his chainsword.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 226