Ammunition shunts fed explosive shells into the vulcan, while the heavy duty capacitors of the turbolasers siphoned energy from the surging reactor. Vintras felt his arms swell with lethal power and the heat in his belly spread through his flesh-limbs.
Keeping the Titan moving, he panned the snarling, lupine snout of his engine from left to right, searching for targets or anything that might have provoked such a response. Vapour bleed from the melting nitrogen ice made visibility a joke, but Vintras wasn’t seeing anything hostile.
A few hundred metres away, a cluster of crystal spires crashed to the ground as the bedrock cracked open and they tore loose. Shards fell in glittering mineral rain, throwing back myriad reflections of his war-engine.
Vintras let out a pent-up breath. There was nothing out here but him.
‘Seismic activity,’ he said. ‘That’s all it was, my beauty. Falling spires and shifting rock.’
Boulders of ice fell from the lip of the canyon, and he danced his machine back to avoid the largest. The voids would spare him the worst of the impacts, but it never paid to antagonise a Titan’s spirit with needless damage. The ground cracked as the boulders landed, each one tens of metres across, and Vintras sidestepped away from the unstable ground.
He dismissed the threat auspex and pushed forwards through the crystal spires once more, satisfied there was nothing out there to cause him concern. He felt Amarok’s displeasure in the rumble of the engine core and the resistance in its limbs.
‘Easy there,’ he whispered. ‘There’s nothing out there.’
But still the Titan fought him, keeping its weapons armed and once again calling the threat auspex to the fore.
Vintras cancelled it. ‘Enough,’ he snapped. ‘You’re getting as jumpy as the Wintersun.’
The Manifold growled at his casual dismissal, and he felt the great machine’s ire in a surge of painful feedback through his spinal implant. Amarok was not an engine to patronise, its spirit that of a lone predator, the killer that lurks in the darkness and strikes without warning.
Such an entity did not jump at shadows, and he had been foolish to forget that.
‘You want to hunt?’ he said. ‘Then let’s hunt. Full auspex sweep.’
Katen Venia’s surface was painfully bright, even through the protective filters of Roboute’s helmet. Cold, ultraviolet-tinged illumination fell in shimmering, auroral bands, the red light of the star shifted along the visible spectrum by a cocktail of released gases surging in the temporary atmosphere that imparted a shimmering, undersea quality to their surroundings. Towering mountains of frozen nitrogen were visible through the drifting banks of vapour streaming from their jagged peaks as the heat from the dying star stripped the icy crust from the planet’s surface.
Dazzling refractions of variegated light shone through the prisms of the ice mountains, and Roboute had never seen anything as grandly terrible in all his life. He felt as if he had been shrunk to microscopic size and was navigating a passage through the grooves and ridges on the surface of a cut-glass decanter. His earlier disappointment at the planet’s appearance had melted away as surely as the nitrogen icecaps in the face of what lay beyond the Mechanicus landing fields.
This was the death of a planet, and like war, it was a beautiful thing to see from a distance.
There was majesty in this global annihilation event, an inhuman level of destruction whereby mountain ranges were being abraded before his very eyes, continents unseated from their molten beds and the world’s metallic core being rendered down to its composite elements.
Up close, it was even more beautiful and even more dangerous.
Waterfalls of liquid nitrogen poured down razor-edged canyons. Boiling lakes expanded with every surge of melting chemically-rich ice then shrank back as they bled toxic vapour into the void. Under colossal geological upheaval, the planet was undergoing stresses it had not known since its birth in the star’s powerful gravitational tug-of-war. From orbit the planet’s crust had been a reticulated mess of random scoring where tectonic plates had been ripped apart. On the surface that translated to gorges hundreds of kilometres wide and who knew how many deep.
The planet was in a heightened state of activity, and only the precision of Magos Blaylock’s calculations – married to inloads from adepts of the Collegium Geologica – had allowed the fleet’s Fabricatus Locum to plot a route to the Tomioka. The snaking, zig-zagging course offered the forces on the ground the best chance of reaching their goal, but Blaylock had been quick to point out that it was based purely on statistical probability rather than actual measurements.
An inset slate on the control panel fizzed with static, but had just enough resolution to show the position of the grav-sled, together with the corridor of acceptably stable ground they were to follow. Widened out to maximum zoom, that corridor was still frighteningly narrow and allowed little margin for error. Roboute didn’t know what might happen if Blaylock’s calculations were awry or he strayed from the marked corridor, and was in no hurry to find out.
Occasionally, they saw the remnants of servitor drones, buried in the sides of glaciers or smashed to a thousand pieces on the valley floor. Smoke trailed from their shattered canopies, and Roboute tried not to notice the ruptured bodies that spilled from them. A brief inload from Linya Tychon had mentioned an umbra of interference and distortion centred on the Tomioka, which went some way to explaining why they’d seen so many downed drones and were forced to rely on the workings of Tarkis Blaylock instead of precise route information.
The Tabularium pounded the ice and rock with its multiple iron feet as it trudged after them like a relentless city that had managed to uproot itself from its foundations and give chase. The other Land Leviathans were arranged behind it, nose to tail, a caravan of steel that reached back nearly five kilometres. The Cadian armoured vehicles, a mix of transports and tanks, clustered around the mobile temples like scavenger creatures stalking a dying herbivor, and Roboute was glad at least one other element of this expedition would likely be feeling a sense of amazement at this exploration of a new world.
Even over the enormous height of the Tabularium, Roboute could see the loping form of the alpha engine of Legio Sirius. Lupa Capitalina held station at the centre of the convoy, a mobile fortress protecting the Leviathans with its city-levelling firepower.
‘Can you see the Warhounds yet?’ asked Adara. ‘My da once said he saw one on Konor, but it ran off before he got a proper look at it.’
Before now, Roboute would have poured scorn on the idea of a Titan running off, but having seen the speed with which Amarok and Vilka had deployed from their coffin ships, he was less inclined to laugh at Adara’s tale. Even the speed of the Warlord had shocked them, and the impatient brays of its warhorn echoed from the walls of the glittering ice valley.
‘No,’ answered Roboute, craning his neck around. ‘I haven’t, but that doesn’t surprise me. Warhounds are Scout Titans, ambush predators, and they don’t like you seeing them until it’s too late.’
Adara nodded, but still kept looking.
‘Your father is certainly well travelled,’ said Pavelka, her voice sounding in Roboute’s helmet via subvocalised vibrations. ‘Calth, Iax, Konor… Is there any part of Ultramar he has not visited?’
Pavelka’s dripping sarcasm was evident, even over the helm-vox and the thrumming bass note of the grav-sled’s repulsors.
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘Ilanna’s just teasing you,’ said Roboute, knowing how defensive the lad got if anyone dared to question the truth of his father’s tales.
‘Well she shouldn’t,’ said Adara. ‘My da served as an armsman to Inquisitor Apollyon on Armageddon, and you don’t go mouthing off about someone like that.’
Roboute knew Pavelka wouldn’t be able to resist pulling that particular declaration apart, and gave the control column a shake to discourage her from p
icking holes in it.
‘Easy, Roboute!’ cried Adara, gripping the restraint bar on the door.
The ground beneath the grav-sled was a mixture of frozen nitrogen and bare, metallic rock, like the surface of an oil-streaked glacier. The sled’s repulsor field reacted badly to patches of exotic metals and the ride was bumpier than Roboute would have liked. The controls were oversized to accommodate the inherent clumsiness in void-suit gloves, but even so, it felt like the machine was fighting him every step of the way, slewing left and right despite his best attempts to keep level.
‘I can control the sled through my MIU if you would prefer,’ said Pavelka. ‘It appears you are having some difficulty, captain.’
‘No,’ said Roboute, wrestling with the control column. ‘I’m fine taking us in.’
Their route was winding a path through a steep-sided canyon that Roboute’s eyes were telling him rose to around a hundred metres or so, but was probably at least a couple of kilometres. The eye was easily tricked into forming manageable scales when denied any quantifiable points of reference. When he’d first eased the sled into the mountains, his mind had reeled at the sheer vastness of each canyon’s ice-blue walls, and without the measurable scale of the landing fields, it was impossible to define distances or perspective with any reliability.
‘How soon till we reach the crashed ship?’ asked Adara, his neck craned back as far as the gorget arrangement on his helmet’s collar would allow. Roboute risked narrowing the magnification of the slate, but gave up looking when the screeching, squalling distortion pattern didn’t let up. Only the slender thread of Blaylock’s route through the labyrinth remained unwavering.
‘Impossible to say through this interference,’ answered Pavelka, reading the same information instantly. Even through the imperfections of the vox-units, her excitement was palpable. ‘According to our distance travelled, we should be within sight of the Tomioka within seven minutes, assuming the current rate of advance continues.’
‘And assuming I don’t crash us,’ said Roboute.
‘A possibility I did not care to raise.’
‘Listen,’ said Roboute. ‘A grav-sled isn’t a precision instrument of manoeuvre, but I think I’m finally getting its measure. It just takes a little finesse and a little nerve.’
‘I suppose how much nerve is required depends on where one is sitting.’
Adara sniggered. ‘And Mistress Tychon said the Mechanicus don’t have a sense of humour…’
‘She’s right,’ snapped Roboute. ‘They don’t.’
Despite Pavelka’s commentary on his piloting skills, Roboute steered them with greater confidence with every passing metre. His Ultramarian ethic would not let him attempt a task without then mastering it, and curbing the vagaries of the grav-sled’s control was no exception.
Their course evened out over the next few kilometres, and as Roboute eased around a sheer spur of violet-tinged ice that shed streamers of vapour like an industrial smokestack, the valley widened noticeably towards a cascade of smoking liquid nitrogen. It poured down through a fissure that glittered in the blue-shifted light, before vanishing into a gaping crevasse that cut the valley almost in two.
Roboute guessed the crevasse was at least thirty metres wide.
According to Blaylock’s path, the Tomioka lay on the opposite side.
And the Black Templars, he thought, trying to keep a lid on his irritation.
Where the crevasse didn’t quite reach the valley walls, cascading spumes of freezing gases collected in swirling eddies and whirlpools of shimmering liquid.
‘Will the Land Leviathans be able to get across that?’ asked Adara.
‘Not a chance,’ said Roboute. ‘Though the Tabularium might fall in and wedge itself tight to make a bridge for the others.’
‘You think there’s room enough for us to go round the edges?’
‘Just barely,’ answered Pavelka, blink-clicking measurement datum points and exloading them to the Mechanicus pioneer vehicles behind them.
‘Well, the Black Templars may have beaten us to the Tomioka, but I’ll be damned if anyone else is getting there before us,’ said Roboute, hauling the grav-sled around towards the edge of the valley, where vortices of nitrogen translated from gas to liquid and back again with alarming frequency.
The pitch of the grav-sled’s engines increased, and the repulsor field skittered at the abrupt change in ground density. Roboute heard Pavelka mutter a whispered prayer to the Machine-God and felt her subtle imprecation to the engines’ magnetic field compensating for the unusual terrain.
Buoyed up by Pavelka’s devotion, the grav-sled negotiated the foaming, streaming edges of the liquid nitrogen waterfall with aplomb and skirted the edges of the vast crevasse with only centimetres to spare. Roboute risked a glance over the edge and felt his stomach lurch as he saw the rift cut right into the heart of the planet. He switched his gaze back to what lay ahead of him as a nauseous sense of vertigo threatened to sweep over him. Roboute gunned the engine and the grav-sled surged to the jagged summit of the fissure.
At long last, Roboute saw what had become of Magos Telok’s flagship, though it took him a moment to realise that was what he was seeing. He shielded his visor from the billions of points of light reflecting from the glassy plateau before him.
‘I thought the ship we were looking for was a wreck?’ asked Adara, tilting his head to the side.
‘So did I,’ said Roboute.
‘It didn’t crash?’ said Pavelka, her incomprehension turning her words into a question.
‘No,’ said Roboute in wonderment. ‘It… landed.’
Smoke filled the pilot’s compartment, and Tanna tasted the reek of burning propellant, scorched iron and blood in the back of his mouth. He blinked away the disorientation of the crash, and checked his visor to see how long he had been unconscious. Four seconds. To a mortal, such a span was negligible, but to a Space Marine, it was an eternity. Angry with himself, he shook off his momentary weakness and pushed himself from the pilot’s chair. The angle of the Thunderhawk’s impact had driven the nose into the plateau, and Tanna was forced to use dangling straps and cables to haul himself back into the crew compartment.
The warriors in the back had weathered the crash with relative ease, thanks to his managing their angle of descent and the grav-harnesses.
‘Anyone injured?’ he asked, pulling himself along the centre-line of the gunship.
‘Everyone is unhurt,’ said Auiden. ‘That was some landing, brother-sergeant.’
‘Some kind of interference blew out the engines,’ said Tanna. ‘I was lucky to get us down on our belly and in one piece.’
‘I know,’ said Auiden. ‘I meant no reproach.’
Tanna shook his head. ‘Of course.’
The grievances felt against him since Kul Gilad’s loss had made Tanna find fault in every word spoken to him, veiled insults in every comment. He took a moment to purge himself of that suspicion and moved to the fuselage doors of the gunship. With the nose of the Barisan buried in the ice, the side and rear exits were the only way out.
‘We need to get out of here,’ he said, kneeling beside the fuselage door and pulling open the keypad hatch. He tapped in his command codes, but – as he’d expected – the door remained stubbornly shut.
‘Why is the… ngg, ngg… door not opening?’ asked Issur.
‘There is no power to the mechanism,’ answered Tanna. ‘It will need brute force to get us out.’
The Barisan creaked and lurched with a squeal of tearing metal. Seams burst farther down the fuselage, and hissing streamers of escaping gas vented from cracks in the hull. Tanna grabbed onto a stanchion as the gunship shuddered, as though some giant beast had it locked in its jaws and was slowly trying to digest it.
‘Yael, Issur, help me,’ ordered Tanna. ‘Get the edge of the door.’
‘I can shoot us a way out,’ offered Bracha, unlimbering his implanted plasma gun, but Tanna shook his head.
‘I would rather not risk angering the Barisan by shooting it from the inside,’ he said.
The three Black Templars took hold of the door and braced themselves against stanchions, struts and bench seats. More seams burst along the line of the fuselage. Tanna had a worrying image of the gunship caught in a wreckage compactor, being slowly crushed until it and they were nothing more than an ultra-dense cube of iron and meat.
‘Auiden, as soon as you see the locking mechanism, cut it.’
The Apothecary nodded and bent before the lock-plate of the fuselage door. A painfully bright light spat into life from an extended blade, a fusion cutter for field amputations, and he pulled it back like an executioner ready to strike a killing blow.
The Barisan groaned, like a beast in pain, and Tanna cursed that he had brought so fine a machine to so ignoble a fate. Glass shattered in the cockpit and the avionics panel blew out with a whooping electrical bang.
‘Now,’ yelled Tanna, and the three of them hauled back on the door. The fuselage of a Thunderhawk gunship was designed to be airtight during spaceflight and atmospheric insertion, but it wasn’t designed to withstand the combined strength of three Space Marines trying to haul it open from the inside.
Tanna felt the door shift, millimetres at best, but here the deformations crushing the hull worked in their favour and a portion of the hull buckled inwards at the lock-plate. He saw the flash of Auiden’s fusion cutter and heard the hiss of dissolving metal. For a fraction of a second, the heavy door held firm, but then the cutter finished its work and it rumbled back along its rails.
‘Forgive us, great one,’ said Auiden as he sheathed the energised blade.
Tanna nodded in agreement. The Barisan had carried them faithfully into battle and out of trouble more times than he could remember. To have wounded it just to escape seemed a poor way to repay its strength of heart, but he felt sure its machine-spirit would forgive them.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 47