‘Everybody out,’ he ordered.
Varda was first through, quickly followed by Issur and Bracha. Auiden went next, then Yael and finally Tanna dropped from the canted deck.
He landed on the ground, which was just as he’d imagined it to be from the air; a vast plateau of ice. Where the gunship had smashed down was powdered like fine snow, but brittle like metal shavings. The Thunderhawk’s impact had ploughed a deep furrow, and Tanna knelt as he saw what looked like tendrils of frost reaching up from the ground along the hull of the downed flying machine.
Like condensation on a pane of glass, it looked like the ice was reaching up to enfold the Barisan’s fuselage. Tanna looked back down to where the gunship’s nose was buried in the ice… except he saw now that it wasn’t ice at all, but some form of parasitic crystal. When he had recovered consciousness, he remembered seeing the vapour-struck sky through the crazed armourglass canopy, but the entire frontal section was now almost completely enclosed. As if the ‘ice’ had begun to swell and freeze instantly upon the gunship, like the planet was trying to drag it down into the crust.
Even as Tanna watched, he saw the crystalline structure of the ground spread glittering fronds further over the body of the gunship. He scraped a hand over the fuselage, scattering the ice like sugar crystals that fell to dust as soon as they were no longer part of the whole.
‘What is this…?’ he wondered aloud, but no sooner had he removed his hand than the crystalline fronds renewed their attempt to engulf the Barisan.
‘Brother-sergeant,’ said Bracha from above. ‘You need to get up here now.’
Tanna backed away from the strange crystalline growths attaching themselves to his gunship, and scrambled back along the length of the impact trough. Yael offered him a hand up, but Tanna ignored it and hauled himself onto the plateau.
‘Situation?’ he asked.
No-one answered, and Tanna was about to repeat his question when he turned to see what his men were all staring at. He recalled his last sight before the gunship had gone down. He had seen the Tomioka with his own eyes, but the actuality of it rendered him speechless, unable to look away from the logic-defying, impossible sight before him.
‘Imperator,’ hissed Varda. ‘It’s impossible.’
Tanna shook his head. ‘It is the Tomioka, no doubt about that.’
A retrofitted Oberon battleship, the enormous vessel stood vertical along its long axis on the surface of Katen Venia like the last few kilometres of a towering hive spire. Such vast starships were never meant to enter the gravity envelope of a planet. Their superstructures were built to endure the multi-directional forces of void war and withstand pressures of acceleration and enormous turning circles.
What they were manifestly not designed to do was cope with the titanic forces of re-entry.
Tanna guessed that the ship’s engine section was buried at least two kilometres in frozen nitrogen, while the remaining five kilometres of its monolithic superstructure jutted into the sky, almost vanishing in a forced perspective that defied human scale. Its hull was as gothically ornamented as any Imperial ship of the line, redolent with cathedrals, crenellated battlements, rounded archways of gun batteries, ice-encrusted processionals of statuary and the bladed prow of a fighting vessel.
Glaciers of buttressing ice surrounded the base of the ship, rising from the planet’s surface to a height of around five hundred metres, obscuring any obvious means of entry and helping to stabilise the towering edifice. Above the ice, vast swathes of the ship were encrusted with bizarre crystalline structures of intricate design, but which bore the clear hallmark of Mechanicus origin. Some had the look of power generators, others of communications relays, but the more Tanna looked, the more he understood that the Tomioka had been completely redesigned to be something other than a starship.
‘How could anyone… ngg, have done… nggh, this?’ asked Issur, the synaptic damage he’d suffered aboard the Manifold station making every word a struggle.
‘I do not know,’ admitted Tanna. ‘The ship should have torn itself apart.’
‘Do you think this was what the archmagos was expecting?’ asked Varda.
‘I don’t think it’s what anyone was expecting,’ said Tanna.
An eruption of ice crystals to either side of the Black Templars had them snap guns to shoulders and swords to en garde. Scores of detonations plumed like geysers of ice, except that Tanna knew the glassy substance on which they stood was not ice at all. Glittering particulates hung in the air, and Tanna saw a host of figures climb from each of the holes blasted through the planet’s surface.
They had the bulk of Space Marines, but their bodies were formed from a translucent crystalline material with its own bioluminescence. A pulsing network of green veins threaded their bodies, like an illuminated nervous system or a map of blood vessels in a human body. Tanna saw they were not coming from beneath the ground, they were part of the ground. At least forty of the creatures surrounded them, and as the glassy dust of their arrival settled, Tanna saw they didn’t just have the bulk of Space Marines, their bodies were somehow formed in a crude imitation of Adeptus Astartes.
Each crystalline form had the bulky curvature of auto-reactive shoulder guards, the broad sweep of a plastron and an elementary form of a helmet. They were like a child’s representation of Space Marines, crude and ill-fashioned, but recognisable enough.
‘What in the Emperor’s name are they?’ hissed Varda as the crystal creatures closed in.
‘The enemy,’ said Tanna, sighting down his bolter and pulling the trigger.
If there was a lesson to be learned here, it was that he not doubt Amarok’s sense for something amiss. Gunnar Vintras walked the Warhound backwards through a thicket of tall crystalline spires, keeping the damaged side of his engine facing the canyon wall. His turbolaser was jammed, the servitor dead and the Titan’s machine-spirit desperately trying to find a workaround to get it firing again. Phantom agonies from his left arm kept Vintras from blacking out, and a constant flood of stimulants fought the effects of the pain-balms.
‘If I survive this fight, I’m going to have one hell of a chemical come-down when they flush me out,’ he hissed through pursed lips. ‘That’s a Manifold purge I’m not looking forward to.’
No sooner had he initiated a full-threat auspex sweep, the kind of blaring announcement of presence a Warhound princeps was loath to initiate, than the enemy had attacked. He still wasn’t sure where they’d come from. One minute he was striding over a series of fallen stalagmites of prismatic glass, the next, four engines of comparable displacement to Amarok were attacking him.
The Warhound took the first shots on her voids, but in keeping him alive they blew out with a screaming detonation. Only Vintras’s natural reactions had kept a second volley of streaking bolts from gutting his Titan. As it was, the turbolasers had taken the brunt of the barrage.
He returned fire with the mega-bolter, feeling the pounding reverberations through the bones of his arm as he unleashed a salvo of high-explosive rounds. Like most Warhound princeps, the joints at his elbow had been replaced with shock-absorbent materials to better withstand the constant pressure of bio-feedback from his engine’s weaponry, and he was able to bear the brunt of such punishing recoil from an arm that wasn’t even his.
Something shattered into a million pieces in front of him, but a cascade of billowing ice prevented him from seeing what it was as it fell. Vintras knew better than anyone the perils of staying still in an engine fight, and pushed Amarok to striding speed. A Warhound wasn’t a gross-displacement engine that could dish out vast amounts of fire and take it at the same time, it was a hunter that thrived in high-speed war.
A flensing blast of fire blew a smoking crater in the canyon wall, and Vintras traced the shot back to its point of origin. He danced the Warhound through the crystal growths and saw another three engines striding towards h
im. His eyes narrowed as he took the measure of his opponents.
‘What the hell are you?’ he murmured, seeing a dreadful familiarity in their appearance.
They were Warhounds, but ones that looked like the atavistic ice sculptures left outside the fortress of the Oldbloods by the savage tribes that called Lokabrenna home.
Though these statues were moving and fighting.
But they were stupid.
They came straight at him, like ranked up regiments of Imperial Guardsmen on a parade ground. Vintras grinned and pushed the reactor to full power as he bolted for the cover of a fallen slope of rubble farther along the valley side. Shots chased him, but his control over Amarok’s movement was faultless. Even the pain of his wounded arm and the pain-balms couldn’t dull the pleasure of this moment.
A Titan commander relished a good fight, but to find yourself engaged against a foe you hopelessly outmatched was a very special pleasure.
The crystalline Titans followed him like hounds on a hunt, and Vintras led them a merry chase through the spires; darting back and forth, weaving around them and leading them just where he wanted them. Billowing clouds of glassy dust choked the canyon, but Vintras had memorised every move he’d made, like a virtuoso dancer flawlessly performing his greatest work.
The pain in his left arm faded and the Manifold surged with readiness data.
Even his voids had reset.
Amarok burst through a curtain of bright fragments, and there ahead of him were the three counterfeit Warhounds with their backs to him.
‘Imperator, I love these moments,’ he said, striding forwards at combat speed.
Instead of scattering, the enemy engines began turning on the spot like novice moderati playing at being a princeps. Vintras was on them before they were halfway rotated. He stepped between the rightmost engines and thrust his arms out to either side. The mega-bolter was primarily an infantry killer, but at point-blank range against an unshielded enemy it was an executioner’s weapon. Explosive shells ripped into the upper section of the first crystal Warhound and blasted it apart from the inside. Turbolaser fire cored the middle engine, shattering its canopy in a superhot explosion of molten fragments.
Amarok kept going, and Vintras pivoted around the falling carcass of the headless Titan to face the last remaining crystal engine. He bared his steel fangs and brought his hands together as though aiming a pistol down the firing range.
‘You might look like a Warhound, but you don’t fight like one,’ snarled the Skinwalker, unleashing both weapons into the glittering faux-Titan’s head.
Kotov had switched to a body better suited to hostile environments, an archaic robotic chassis with ray-shielded internal workings and heavy armoured plates that put him level with his skitarii escort and made him look like a ceremonial knight. His head was encased in a shimmering integrity field that sent an irritated buzzing through his aural implants, but which was still preferable to an enclosing helm.
He stepped down from the converted skitarii Rhino and looked back the way they had come. The crevasse at the end of the valley was being bridged by pioneer units disgorged from the construction decks of the Tabularium. The Cadian engineer units had nothing capable of bridging so a wide a gap, and their vehicles were forced to wait along with everyone else. Judging by the vox passing between Captain Hawkins’s Chimera and Colonel Anders’s Salamander, that delay sat ill with the men of Cadia.
A thousand servitors, load-lifters and construction engines were manoeuvring heavy, girder-braced spars of plasteel into place, and robed adepts on suspended platforms drilled bracing struts onto the inner faces of the crevasse.
But it was going to take time to construct something capable of bearing the unimaginable mass of a Land Leviathan, and Kotov couldn’t wait that long. He wanted to taste his moment of triumph first-hand, not filtered through a pict-capture or hololithic representation.
He would see the Tomioka with his own augmetic eyes.
Lupa Capitalina stood immobile behind the Tabularium, a towering representation of the Omnissiah in his aspect of war. Occasional puffs of ejected vapour and thermal bleed from its armoured reactor gave the lie to its dormancy. The Warlord was a warrior on hair-trigger, taut and poised for action. Under normal circumstances, the reassurance a fully armed Warlord Titan imparted would be welcome, but after the incident in the training decks, everyone was understandably skittish around the mighty war machine. Legio Sirius adepts had assured Kotov that the Wintersun’s lapse could never happen again, but as Kotov well knew, the Mechanicus never deletes anything.
The Warhounds that had accompanied the Wintersun to the surface were nowhere to be seen, but that wasn’t unusual; the princeps of such engines were wilful and preferred to remain unseen.
Satisfied all was proceeding as fast as could be expected, Kotov set off to the opening of the valley, where Roboute Surcouf and two members of his crew awaited him.
‘You should let my skitarii scout this place out first,’ said Dahan, emerging from a second Rhino and marching to join him with a loping, mechanical gait. ‘We don’t know what’s up here, and if Surcouf is to be believed, the Tomioka might still have active defences in place.’
The fleshy part of the Secutor’s face was encased in an oxygenated membrane gel that rippled across his skull like a thin coating of water. All four of his arms were extended, his digital scarifiers crackling with sparking lightning and his Cebrenian halberd held at the ready in his upper limbs.
‘Even after nearly four thousand years?’
‘Mechanicus tech isn’t fragile,’ Dahan reminded him. ‘It’s built to endure.’
‘You’re right, of course, Hirimau,’ said Kotov, ‘but I think we are well protected, don’t you?’
‘Better to know than to think,’ grunted Dahan.
‘Spoken like a true priest of Mars,’ said Kotov without any trace of irony.
Twenty skitarii followed the archmagos, armoured in non-reflective carapace that seamlessly shifted in sync with their movements. Cog-toothed Mechanicus skulls were rivet-stamped to each shoulder, alongside scaled scorpions and azure spiders. Dahan’s warriors normally eschewed the wearing of barbaric totems, but Kotov noted that two had fashioned leathery-looking cloaks from what passive receptors told him was human skin. It was the work of a picosecond to match its DNA profile with that of the batch-grown skin curtains found in the Valette infirmary.
Most of the skitarii came armed with solid-slug weapons, though two were implanted with flame units and a last warrior was equipped with twin meltaguns, one as a replacement arm, the other as a shoulder mount. All carried a variety of close-combat weapons; a mix of sabres, axes and falchions with energised edges and saw-blade teeth. Their faces were obscured by tinted visors that had darkened to a deep bronze.
Galatea had elected to remain aboard the Tabularium, which struck Kotov as strange, given its stated desire to kill the Lost Magos. Not that Kotov wasn’t grateful to be away from the abominable creature, but he couldn’t shake the niggling suspicion that the hybrid machine intelligence wasn’t being entirely honest with them.
Whatever the truth of Galatea’s ultimate agenda, it would have to wait.
With Dahan at his side, Kotov clambered through the nitrogen-wreathed rocks to the top of the fissure. Surcouf climbed down from his grav-sled and held out a hand to him.
‘You made it, archmagos,’ he said. ‘It’s quite a sight, isn’t it?’
Kotov didn’t answer the rogue trader, his gaze drawn to the dizzying height of the starship standing on its ice-encased engines in the centre of the glassy ice plateau. Of all the things he had expected, this had featured in none of his dreams of finding the Tomioka. Far from being a victim of atmospheric poisoning or rampant exaggeration, Surcouf had, if anything, undersold how incredible the sight of the landed starship would be.
‘Ave Deus Mechanicus…’ he said, hi
s mouth hanging slack at the impossible sight of a seven-kilometre starship standing proud like a hive starscraper.
‘I know,’ said Surcouf, understanding his awe. ‘I still have a hard time believing it’s real.’
Kotov tried to find some frame of reference to bring the idea of a landed starship into some kind of focus, but the sight of it standing so incongruously in the landscape was one that fitted no model of reality.
‘I have never heard of a vessel this size surviving atmospheric transit, let alone being successfully landed,’ said Dahan.
‘Telok must have brought it in exactly perpendicular to the surface,’ said Kotov, finally imposing a measure of order on his cascading thoughts. ‘Or else it would have broken its keel and spread itself all over the surface.’
‘Is that even possible?’ asked Surcouf, unlimbering a pair of magnoculars and training it on a glittering cloud of mist a kilometre or so ahead of them.
‘The ship’s plasma engines allowed the ship to penetrate far enough into the ice for it to remain upright,’ said Kotov, more to himself than in answer of Surcouf.
‘What is that?’ asked Dahan, training his own combat optics on the mist cloud Surcouf was examining. ‘Is that the Barisan?’
‘It must be,’ agreed Surcouf. ‘It’s right at the end of what looks like an impact gouge in the ground. I think the Templars crashed, but it’s hard to make anything out.’
‘The umbra is damping all auspex readings and hexing the blessed workings of machines within the limits of this plateau,’ said Kotov, suddenly realising that the dimensions of this encircled plateau were a virtually perfectly match for the diameter of the distortion Linya Tychon had detected.
‘We’re within it, and the grav-sled is still functional,’ said Surcouf. ‘If it’s being generated from the Tomioka, then it looks like it doesn’t extend all the way to ground level.’
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 48