But the Apothecary’s face was a ruin of scorched meat and boiled blood. His noble features were obliterated and even as Tanna watched, the molten bone structure of his skull sagged inwards to form a sloshing pool of steaming brain matter.
Tanna’s grief swelled around him, but he quashed it savagely as the Barisan lurched down into the plateau once again. He heard the shouts of his warriors, but ignored them as he saw a way out of their entrapment racing towards them.
Emil would be calling him a lunatic right about now and Roboute would be hard-pressed to disagree with that assessment. He swung the grav-sled around a knot of embattled skitarii as they fought in a diminishing shield wall against the crystalline monsters that broke free of the glassy plateau like creatures rising from uncounted millennia frozen beneath the planet’s surface.
Beside him, Adara fired his laspistol with pinpoint accuracy, decapitating a crystal warrior with every shot. Pavelka had no dedicated weaponry, but her mechadendrites were equipped with fusion cutters, ion beamers and las-saws, and they served as fearsome combat attachments. The grav-sled wasn’t armed, but Roboute was using it as a weapon, barrelling through the overwhelming numbers of enemy like an Adeptus Arbites urban pacification vehicle.
Of course he tried to avoid that, but the closer he got to the Barisan, the harder it became. For the most part, the crystal-forms were directing their lethal attentions on the skitarii and Space Marines, but that was about to change.
‘This is insane and illogical,’ said Pavelka, neatly snipping the head from a crystal-form about to deliver the death blow to the exposed cortex of a downed battle robot. ‘I should wrest control of this vehicle from you.’
‘You wouldn’t dare,’ said Roboute.
‘I would if I thought you wouldn’t just jump out and keep going,’ she replied.
Despite the unimaginable danger, Roboute felt nothing but a towering sense of invulnerability as he slewed around the gunship’s partially enveloped engines. He shattered more of the enemy with the sled’s bull-bars, hauling the controls back to bring him down the starboard flank of the gunship where its wing was now completely enveloped by the ground.
Around thirty of the crystalline Space Marines hauled their way up the listing side of the Barisan, like a horde of plague victims trying to break into a sealed medicae structure.
‘Hold on!’ shouted Roboute and gunned the engine.
The collision was ferocious, a splintering series of shattering impacts as dozens of bodies went under the grav-sled. Its engines screeched and the rear section heeled sideways as the machine-spirit howled in protest at such cavalier treatment. Roboute’s harness split along its centre-line, and only one of Pavelka’s snapping mechadendrites kept him from falling from the sled.
She pulled him upright and he waved his arms to attract the attention of the Black Templars.
A Space Marine with an augmetic arm implanted with a seething hot plasma gun dropped onto the cargo bed, followed by a warrior with a crackling energy blade. Between them, they carried the body of a fallen warrior, but Roboute couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. Another Templar dropped onto the sled after them, until only Tanna and the warrior with the white-wreathed helm remained. Though it was surely ridiculous, it looked as though the two of them were arguing over who should be the last to abandon their position.
‘For the Emperor’s sake, just get on the damn sled!’ shouted Roboute, though there was little chance they would hear him.
But his words had the desired effect, and the two warriors leapt together, landing on the sled with enough force to drive the back end into the ground. The repulsor engine flared, but miraculously stayed lit.
‘They’re aboard!’ shouted Pavelka. ‘Now get us out of here!’
Roboute nodded and wrenched the controls around with a whispered prayer to the Omnissiah to forgive him for his rough treatment of the grav-sled. The sled’s controls were sluggish, but Roboute had the measure of them now, and compensated for the added weight of the Space Marines as he gunned the engine hard. The sled shot away from the downed gunship, every dial on the panel in front of him tapping into the red.
The crystal-form creatures weren’t about to be denied their prey and turned their attack from the gunship to the grav-sled. One wrenched Adara’s door off and received an armoured boot in the face. The creature fell away as Roboute wove a path through the battling skitarii. Bolts of emerald light streaked around him. Explosions stitched across the heavy plates of the engine cowling, and the sled lurched as some internal mechanism blew out.
A voice blasted into his helmet. ‘Get us out of here!’
Roboute flinched. Adeptus Astartes. Tanna.
‘I’m trying,’ said Roboute, skidding around a pack of crystal-forms as they tried to box the grav-sled in. ‘These things are everywhere. And we’re not exactly travelling light.’
‘We will secure you a path,’ said Tanna.
Seconds later, blazing trails of bolter fire streaked overhead, ripping through the crystal-forms and clearing a path of broken glass. Adara added his pistol fire to the scouring barrage, and Roboute could just imagine the stories he’d get out of this. Fighting alongside the Black Templars!
Though he’d caution the youth not to use the word rescue in his tales.
A flat bang of electrical discharge blew out on the grav-sled, and Roboute’s heart sank as a number of the dials on the control panel dropped rapidly to zero.
‘Shit, shit, shit…’ he muttered, banging a palm against the panel: the universal repair panacea.
He risked a glance over his shoulder, seeing the Black Templars kneeling or standing on the cargo flatbed with their bolters roaring.
But behind them, the grav-sled’s engine was billowing twin plumes of tarry black oil smoke.
The atmosphere aboard the Tabularium was one of control. Despite the sudden reversal of fortune suffered by Magos Dahan’s skitarii, there was no panic on the command bridge. Magos Kryptaestrex had assumed command of the Land Leviathan, and though the pioneer units had not yet certified the temporary structures bridging the crevasse, his experienced optics had adjudged them capable of taking its weight.
Cadian units were already streaming across, but only a reckless vanguard, for the Tabularium now occupied the centre of the newly-built span. Its stomping feet shook the bridge and dislodged debris from the inner faces of the crevasse where the supporting corbels and inset supports were drilled. Portions of the vast machine’s width hung over the edge of the bridge, and Linya tried not to imagine what would happen if Magos Azuramagelli strayed but a little from its centre-line.
She kept a tight rein on her terror, partitioning the innate synaptic responses to tumbling thousands of kilometres behind walls of logic. She would pay for that later, but for now she needed to function without the debilitating handicap of fear.
She’d launched more drones, but capped their altitude to forty metres to keep them below the umbra, assigning them figure of eight orbits around the towering spire of the Tomioka. Visual feeds coming in from the embattled forces on the plateau had shocked everyone, but they were Mechanicus, and encountering the inconceivable was part of their mandate.
‘Magos Dahan will learn a valuable lesson in humility,’ said Galatea, its mismatched legs walking it around the surveyor table, where flickering icons and veils of binary bloomed from the hololithic surface in multicoloured bands. ‘The Tomioka is well defended.’
‘Is that why you didn’t go with them?’ asked Linya. ‘Did you know these things were here?’
Galatea looked up, and the cold silver of its dead optics made Linya’s skin crawl.
‘No, but the presence of automated defences was a logical possibility.’
‘A possibility you neglected to mention.’
‘We saw no need,’ replied Galatea. ‘We believed Archmagos Kotov would come to the same conclusion.’
Though Linya knew it was an absurdly organic notion, she would have sworn on a stack of STC fragments that it was lying.
Warnings broadcast in binary and Gothic blared from vox-horns and Linya gripped the surveyor table as the Tabularium shuddered, the deck angling minutely downwards.
‘We are at the midpoint of our crossing,’ Magos Kryptaestrex intoned, and Linya’s heart beat a little faster at the thought of the Land Leviathan’s vast, monolithic feet breaking through the temporary bridge’s weakest point with thunderous hammerblows.
‘Then let’s hope your pioneer crews have been thorough in their work on the far side,’ said Azuramagelli from the steering station, his deconstructed brain portions flickering in the light of his electrical activity.
‘If you keep us straight, instead of weaving us about like you have so far, then there will be no issues,’ returned Kryptaestrex, plugged into the controls for motive power as he attempted to reduce the impact force of the Tabularium’s twin banks of enormous feet.
‘If you wish to switch assignments,’ said Azuramagelli, his artificial voice still managing to convey his irritation at Kryptaestrex, ‘then I will be only too happy to take command of motive power.’
‘It would be conducive to operations and my mental equilibrium if the two of you would shut up and concentrate on your assigned tasks,’ said Linya with a blurt of admonishing binary. ‘That way we might actually make it across this crevasse in one piece.’
Neither Kryptaestrex nor Azuramagelli replied, but both signalled their contrition with noospheric messages of assent.
The attenuated reverberations echoing through the Land Leviathan changed in pitch as the vast machine moved to a descending latticework support of adamantium struts, interlocking deck plating and bored-in suspensors. Linya brought up a drone optic feed and watched the Tabularium crossing the bridge, a million-tonne leviathan perched on an absurdly slender-looking structure that any rational eye would see as utterly incapable of supporting something so massive.
But, as impossible as it might look, Kryptaestrex’s bridge was holding firm and they were almost across. The pitch of the Land Leviathan’s feet returned to normal, and Linya let out a breath, the primal part of her brain having taken over her physiological functions despite her best efforts to self-regulate. They were across – though would, of course, have to return the same way – and the Tabularium canted upwards as Kryptaestrex poured power into the propulsion decks and they climbed the last hundred metres to the plateau.
Linya switched between the dozens of visual feeds coming from the drones, studying multiple inloads at once. Dahan’s skitarii were falling back in good order, extricating themselves from overwhelming odds by means of mutually supporting mobile shield walls. The plateau was awash with the ice creatures, a glittering army assembled in their thousands from the crystalline bedrock of the world. Against so numerous a foe, most mortal armies would already have been destroyed, overrun and slaughtered as they fled the field in panic.
Skitarii were not like a mortal army. Their courage held in the face of insurmountable odds, their cool detachment and unbreakable discipline keeping them in the fight. Linya saw Dahan in the thick of the hardest fighting, breaking enemy thrusts that might interfere with the skitarii’s retreat.
Linya did not like Dahan, but had to admire his tenacity and devotion to his warriors.
One feed caught her eye, and she zoomed in on it with a spike of disbelief.
Roboute Surcouf was in the midst of the fighting, his grav-sled fleeing the field of battle in spurts and starts as its engine burned out. That it had got them this far was a miracle of the Omnissiah, but Linya saw its machine-spirit was close to extinction. Hundreds of crystal-forms surrounded them, and even with the Black Templars fighting from its back, she estimated they had less than a minute before being overrun.
‘Magos Azuramagelli,’ said Linya. ‘Exloading a course change to you.’
‘Understood.’
‘Magos Kryptaestrex, deploy the docking clamp.’
‘It’s too far,’ said Moderati Marko Koskinen. ‘No way we can make it.’
Have faith,+ said the Wintersun. +I know this engine. I know what she is capable of.+
‘As do I, princeps, and that crevasse is too wide for us,’ said Koskinen, bringing up the schematics of a Warlord Titan from the Manifold. A three-dimensional image of the towering god-machine appeared over the central display hub of the command bridge, rotating slowly with reams of data listing its tolerances and capacity cascading alongside. ‘We should wait until the bridge is clear.’
Though Princeps Luth had no need – or mortal eyes – to see the schematic, his withered, bifurcated wraith-form drifted from the milky grey suspension within his amniotic tank to press against the armourglass. Silver feed-cables plugged into his truncated waist and spinal implants trailed from his back like the hackles of a roused wolf.
Schematics are for the scholam,+ said the Wintersun, +We are at war, Koskinen. Lupa Capitalina waits for no man.+
‘Hyrdrith, back me up here,’ said Koskinen.
‘Princeps,’ said Magos Hyrdrith from her elevated station at the rear of the bridge. ‘As ever, I accept your wisdom as Omnissiah-given, but I must agree with Moderati Koskinen. Once the Tabularium and its attendant vehicles are clear, we can–’
Mechanicus warriors are dying,+ snarled Luth. +We can save them from the beasts.+
‘My princeps,’ said Koskinen, frowning as swarming ghost images flickered through the Manifold for the briefest instant. ‘Even if you’re right and we can make it across, there’s no telling if the ground on the far side is strong enough to take our mass. We–’
‘If your princeps gives you an order, you question it?’ snapped Joakim Baldur on the opposite moderati station to Koskinen’s. He shook his head. ‘No wonder Moonsorrow challenged for alpha.’
Joakim Baldur served as Moderati Primus on Canis Ulfrica, but had been assigned to Lupa Capitalia in the wake of Lars Rosten’s death. He was Reaver through and through, which made him belligerent at the best of times, but now serving on the engine that had almost killed his own princeps only sharpened his viper’s tongue. The burns he had suffered aboard Canis Ulfrica had healed, but the skin around his eyes and ears still had the rugose texture of vat-cultured skin.
‘You crew a Reaver,’ snapped Koskinen, his fraying temper – worn thin by Baldur’s constant carping and obvious reluctance to be aboard Lupa Capitalina – finally snapping. ‘What the hell do you know about this engine?
Be silent! Lupa Capitalina’s anger burns hot,+ said Princeps Luth. +Would you feel that anger through your Manifold interface?+
‘No, princeps,’ said Koskinen, pushing the motive systems out and trying not to let his disquiet at what he thought he’d seen in the Manifold show. Lupa Capitalina set off at combat pace towards the crevasse. Its strides were long, the Warlord moving faster than was prudent in such icy conditions. Koskinen heard Hyrdrith’s prayers to the Machine-God as the crevasse yawned before them.
Koskinen’s heart dropped at the sight of it, knowing in his bones it was too wide for them and too impossibly deep to survive if they plunged into its bottomless depths. The Warlord was walking faster than it had walked in months, its mighty legs slamming into the ground and throwing up vast chunks of dislodged ice and rock.
They were practically sprinting, which was dangerous for such a towering war machine at the best of times, but they needed all the momentum they could get. That might be all that saved them from toppling back into the crevasse, so Koskinen set to scavenging every ounce of reactor energy from the voids and any secondary system he could think of to boost the gyro-stabilising mechanisms at the heart of the vast machine.
Angry red icons flared in the Manifold, stamped with inload signifiers of the Tabularium. The magi aboard the Land Leviathan saw what they attempted and were warning them
of the dangers.
They think we will fail,+ laughed the Wintersun. +I will show them what Sirius can do.+
Roboute was trying every trick he knew to keep the grav-sled in the air, from prayers to threats, but the machine was dying. Thick smoke and streamers of random gravity fluctuations poured from the engine cowling, and they were leaving a black and oily train in their juddering, weaving wake. Sergeant Tanna and his Black Templars had expended their ammunition reserve and were keeping the crystal-forms at bay with swords and fists.
‘Come on,’ said Roboute, finally seeing the cliff face of the Tabularium as it stamped onto the plateau, accompanied by a host of steeldust Cadian tanks. The vast machine was around three hundred metres away, but it might as well have been on the other side of the planet. Skitarii units were falling back either side of them, some on foot and some in badly damaged Rhinos, but they were fighting to their own plan.
A plan in which Roboute and the Black Templars didn’t factor.
The grav-sled dropped, and Roboute felt the ventral fin kiss the ground.
‘Can you coax any more life out of this bloody sled?’ he shouted back to Pavelka.
‘Don’t you think I am trying?’ she replied. ‘Clarification: employing pejorative terms on machines that might save your life is not recommended by the adepts of Mars.’
‘Good point,’ said Roboute, as yet another onboard system died. ‘Right, listen up, sled. If you get us out of here alive I promise to repair every dent, burn and tear in your hull. I will replace every damaged component and never again put you in harm’s way. Now will you bloody well get us to the Tabularium!’
‘Not quite what I think she had in mind, captain,’ said Adara.
‘Best I’ve got, son,’ said Roboute. ‘Best I’ve got.’
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 50