God machines, p.135
God-Machines, page 135
Asander cried out, his MIU cables snapping taught as he fought to regain control and bring Ruber Captrix back online. It felt as though he were pushing a mountain of razors and broken glass off his chest. The spirit of his engine howled in primal rage, and he plunged his mind into its fury. It numbed his pain, granting him strength, and the cockpit shivered as consoles and lights began flickering to life.
‘Status,’ Asander hissed through clenched teeth, eyes screwed shut in pain and concentration. ‘Report.’
Berowne cuffed his nose, smearing blood across the back of a gloved hand. ‘Targeting systems back online. Weapons live, ready to fire in one hundred and eighty seconds.’
‘Locomotive systems resetting,’ Vyola called back to the princeps. ‘Re-spinning the power couplings. At minimum output, we can walk in seventy seconds.’
‘The heart of Ruber Captrix has returned to balance,’ voxed Komnena. ‘Her core is conciliated with the requisite rites, and its fire beats in union with the Omnissiah – praise be.’
Asander grunted, angling a pain-clawed hand to tap at his vox and open a channel to Domina Mortis.
‘Are you with me, Cynna?’
The reply came after a moment, the other princeps’ voice tight and breathless with pain.
‘Domina Mortis endures. We are with you.’
Asander voxed Argentum Sororis and Regina Verum, receiving similar affirmations from their commanders. He raised his right arm, feeling his hand twitch as autoloaders filled the chambers of his Vulcan mega-bolter.
‘Then with me, we hunt!’ Asander killed the link, glaring down at his moderati. ‘Forward, running speed! I want firing solutions, and now!’
As Ecce Bellum plodded ponderously into the hive, it was Regina Verum who struck first. Pressed against the inner walls of the Imperial fortifications, the Warhound waited for the Warlord to stride past her position before spinning up its powerplant from idle. She pounced from concealment, loosing sheets of flaming gel from her inferno cannon and saturating the back of the enemy engine with clinging fire. The massive engine’s void shields flared star-bright as the burning slick popped and spattered on its multi-layered surface.
Ecce Bellum halted, her torso grinding with abused cogwork and hydraulics as she traversed to bring her weapons to bear on the threat, but she was too slow. Regina Verum flashed past her, sprinting at full speed deeper into the industrial park surrounding them. The Warlord’s pained screams spiked from her war-horns in rage, trudging after Regina Verum in pursuit. Fire slashed down from her weapon batteries, but the nimble Warhound weaved a serpentine path, dodging all but glancing shots that sparked from her void shields.
As the Warlord strode deeper into the complex, another signal appeared on her sensors as Argentum Sororis attacked, strafing behind the larger engine and raking her legs with mega-bolter and turbolaser fire. Ecce Bellum reeled, and the engine was forced to engage stabiliser locks to arrest her stumble. As her void shields burned, two more contacts appeared at close range on her flanks.
Ruber Captrix and Domina Mortis leapt forward as one, skidding to a halt to fire their plasma blastguns together. Steam burst from the glowing weapons as they loosed comets of blue-white energy, before lunging forward again at a sprint. The plasma blasts struck the forward shielding of Ecce Bellum in the same instant, concealing the Warlord behind a blinding flash as they succumbed to the onslaught and overloaded with a thunderclap.
Asander felt a tooth crack as Ecce Bellum’s screams rose in volume. Warnings filled his vision as the missile pods on the Warlord’s carapace snapped open. Twin plumes of smoke burst across the giant’s shoulders as she emptied her missile tubes. Dozens of warheads corkscrewed out on trails of supersonic exhaust.
‘Evasion stride!’
Ruber Captrix wound through the forest of industrial piping and cooling towers as missiles smashed down all around in a deafening barrage. Asander felt Cynna cry out through the manifold as a direct hit broke through her voids and sheared away her plasma blastgun. A warhead impacted on his right side, and he bit into his lip as he felt his collarbone snap.
The Warhounds returned fire from their mega-bolters, stitching fire across the twisted carapace of Ecce Bellum. Her once-pristine armour was now blackened saurian hide soaked in grotesque scales of congealed blood. Spikes of rusted iron and horn thrust up through it in random clusters, jagged and weeping straw-coloured fluid as they burst from the strike of heavy mass reactives. Domina Mortis peeled away on the Warlord’s left, trailing smoke from her crippled left arm. Asander sprinted past on the right, dipping low but not fast enough to avoid a glancing slash from Ecce Bellum’s power claw. The energised talons pierced the void shields as they raked across the back of Ruber Captrix.
In the moment they touched, Asander felt Demaratus at the monster’s heart. He felt the memory of a man he had found as a child, he felt–
–corruption slither over his tongue, crawling with clawed legs down his throat. Filling his lungs with swelling larvae, quivering as they burst to send their poison spiralling into his blood–
Asander hissed, thrashing his head and shaking his MIU cables like a gorgon’s crown. Blood pooled at his seat from the deep claw wounds in his back. The shouts of his moderati blurred, sounding as distant as another man’s dream. Another missile smashed into the back of Ruber Captrix, and it took everything for Asander to keep the Warhound on her feet as she was hurled forward. He heard Argentum Sororis crash into a manufactory complex, her leg a crippled mass of twisted metal, still firing her turbo defiantly from her knees. He couldn’t see Regina Verum or Domina Mortis. He knew that Ruber Captrix was still standing, but he couldn’t feel his legs.
Psycho-stigmatic wounds ripped open across Asander’s face as his voids collapsed under the firestorm of Ecce Bellum’s close defence batteries, the claret mask feeling as cold and distant as the screaming klaxons within the Titan’s cockpit, and the panicked shouts of his crew. Ecce Bellum was rounding on him, lumbering with glacial, inevitable malice to swing the barrel of its volcano cannon to bear. The devastating weapon trembled, gathering annihilation into itself, poised to fire.
Asander reached up toward Ecce Bellum through the manifold, using the instant of their contact to anchor his mind and scream out into the Warlord.
Ecce Bellum hesitated. The engine paused for a moment, the barrel of the volcano cannon wavering. Asander coughed, and warmth spilled down his lips as he stared up at the colossus poised to murder him.
Through the ever-present scream, Asander could barely make out bursts of choking, trembling words.
<…left me… abandoned me… left me for them to take me…>
The voice rose, anger tainting the words as the daemon possessing the engine poured in. Asander felt heat sear his face as the volcano cannon primed.
LEFT ME ABANDONED ME LEFT ME LEFT ME LEFT ME
The scream eclipsed everything. Twin voices, man and daemonic machine, rising to swallow all other sound. The machine and daemon cried in anger and outrage, the man in agonised defiance, as the cannon refused to fire.
<…Roan…>
<…can’t hold it back… much longer…> The volcano cannon of Ecce Bellum spasmed as her princeps grappled with the daemon infesting the engine’s heart.
The volcano cannon dipped, its servos smoking as it ground down and levelled at Ruber Captrix’s head. Asander’s world shrank to the barrel of the enormous weapon, as pinpricks of light gathered deep within it. He cried out, raising his left arm, feeling the faint tickle of static raise the hair on his forearm as he made a fist.
Ruber Captrix fired her plasma blastgun at point-blank range. The shot struck Ecce Bellum directly in the faceplate, obliterating her iron skull in a welter of aerosolising blood-oil and spinning armour splinters. The screams ceased, shrinking back to echoes and afterimages across the manifold.
Decapitated, the Warlord wavered for a handful of heartbeats, swaying back and forth, before falling back to crash with a meteor’s force into the streets of the hive.
The few remaining forces of Iron Warriors and Dark Mechanicum not crushed in the Titan’s fall were routed by a blistering counter-attack by the Agripinaa skitarii, hounded from the hive city to be destroyed in a protracted chase across the plains of Tophet VI.
Asander felt his vision curdle and blur as it narrowed into blackness.
Moderati Vyola grunted as she dragged Asander down from Ruber Captrix’s cockpit. She looked up at the Warhound from her splayed feet. She was savaged, and Vyola was amazed that she had remained standing. It would take months of extensive repairs before she could hunt again. Vyola couldn’t bear to look upon what had been Ecce Bellum, nor would she bring herself to consider the fate of the other legio engines she had walked with into the Eye.
Asander stirred, and Vyola adjusted his arm around her neck to keep her princeps upright. His legs dragged limp behind him.
‘Berowne?’ Asander asked in a whisper.
Vyola paused. ‘His last act was firing the blastgun,’ she answered quietly, remembering her comrade’s slumped form in the throne beside her.
Asander didn’t respond, his glassy eyes staring absently into the ground. ‘Set me down.’
Carefully, Vyola lowered him down, propping him up against Ruber Captrix’s foot. Asander gazed at the broken rockcrete and burnt soil of Tophet VI, before gathering a handful into his hand. He gave silent thanks for his hunting ground, looking up at his venerable Warhound as the earth fell between his trembling fingers. She was always the most beautiful in the quiet moments after the hunt.
Ruber Captrix was unbowed. She would hunt, she would stand, and she would walk again.
Even if Asander would not.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
David Annandale is the author of many Warhammer 40,000 novels, including Ephrael Stern: The Heretic Saint, Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine, the Yarrick series, and several stories involving the Grey Knights. His work for the Horus Heresy series includes the novels Ruinstorm and The Damnation of Pythos, and the Primarchs novels Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar, Vulkan: Lord of Drakes and Mortarion: The Pale King. He has written the Warhammer Horror novels The House of Night and Chain and The Deacon of Wounds, as well as the novella The Faith and the Flesh, which features in the portmanteau The Wicked and the Damned. For Warhammer Age of Sigmar he has written A Dynasty of Monsters and the Neferata titles Mortarch of Blood and The Dominion of Bones. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.
Andy Clark has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Steel Tread, Fist of the Imperium, Kingsblade, Knightsblade and Shroud of Night, as well as the Dawn of Fire novel The Gate of Bones and the novella Crusade. He has also written the novels Gloomspite, Bad Loon Rising and Blacktalon: First Mark for Warhammer Age of Sigmar, and the Warhammer Quest Silver Tower novella Labyrinth of the Lost. He lives in Nottingham, UK.
Ian St. Martin is the author of the Horus Heresy: Primarchs novel Angron: Slave of Nuceria and the audio drama Konrad Curze: A Lesson in Darkness. He has also written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Of Honour and Iron, Lucius: The Faultless Blade and Deathwatch: Kryptman’s War, along with the novella Steel Daemon and several short stories. He lives and works in Washington DC, caring for his cat and reading anything within reach.
Graham McNeill has written many titles for The Horus Heresy, including the Siege of Terra novellas Sons of the Selenar and Fury of Magnus, the novels The Crimson King and Vengeful Spirit, and the New York Times bestselling A Thousand Sons and The Reflection Crack’d, the latter of which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now seven novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written the Forges of Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the Warhammer Horror novella The Colonel’s Monograph. For Warhammer, he has written the Warhammer Chronicles trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award.
Gav Thorpe is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The First Wall, Deliverance Lost, Angels of Caliban and Corax, as well as the novella The Lion, which formed part of the New York Times bestselling collection The Primarchs, and several audio dramas. He has written many novels for Warhammer 40,000, including the Dawn of Fire novel The Wolftime, Indomitus, Ashes of Prospero, Imperator: Wrath of the Omnissiah and the Last Chancers series. He also wrote the Rise of the Ynnari novels, the Path of the Eldar and Legacy of Caliban trilogies, and two volumes in The Beast Arises series. For Warhammer, Gav has penned the End Times novel The Curse of Khaine, the Warhammer Chronicles omnibus The Sundering, and, for Age of Sigmar, The Red Feast. In 2017, Gav won the David Gemmell Legend Award for his novel Warbeast. He lives and works in Nottingham.
An extract from Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son.
‘I was there at the Siege of Terra,’ Vitrian Messinius would say in his later years.
‘I was there…’ he would add to himself, his words never meant for ears but his own. ‘I was there the day the Imperium died.’
But that was yet to come.
‘To the walls! To the walls! The enemy is coming!’ Captain Messinius, as he was then, led his Space Marines across the Penitent’s Square high up on the Lion’s Gate. ‘Another attack! Repel them! Send them back to the warp!’
Thousands of red-skinned monsters born of fear and sin scaled the outer ramparts, fury and murder incarnate. The mortals they faced quailed. It took the heart of a Space Marine to stand against them without fear, and the Angels of Death were in short supply.
‘Another attack, move, move! To the walls!’
They came in the days after the Avenging Son returned, emerging from nothing, eight legions strong, bringing the bulk of their numbers to bear against the chief entrance to the Imperial Palace. A decapitation strike like no other, and it came perilously close to success.
Messinius’ Space Marines ran to the parapet edging the Penitent’s Square. On many worlds, the square would have been a plaza fit to adorn the centre of any great city. Not on Terra. On the immensity of the Lion’s Gate, it was nothing, one of hundreds of similarly huge spaces. The word ‘gate’ did not suit the scale of the cityscape. The Lion’s Gate’s bulk marched up into the sky, step by titanic step, until it rose far higher than the mountains it had supplanted. The gate had been built by the Emperor Himself, they said. Myths detailed the improbable supernatural feats required to raise it. They were lies, all of them, and belittled the true effort needed to build such an edifice. Though the Lion’s Gate was made to His design and by His command, the soaring monument had been constructed by mortals, with mortal hands and mortal tools. Messinius wished that had been remembered. For men to build this was far more impressive than any godly act of creation. If men could remember that, he believed, then perhaps they would remember their own strength.
The uncanny may not have built the gate, but it threatened to bring it down. Messinius looked over the rampart lip, down to the lower levels thousands of feet below and the spread of the Anterior Barbican.
Upon the stepped fortifications of the Lion’s Gate was armour of every colour and the blood of every loyal primarch. Dozens of regiments stood alongside them. Aircraft filled the sky. Guns boomed from every quarter. In the churning redness on the great roads, processional ways so huge they were akin to prairies cast in rockcrete, were flashes of gold where the Emperor’s Custodian Guard battled. The might of the Imperium was gathered there, in the palace where He dwelt.
There seemed moments on that day when it might not be enough.
The outer ramparts were carpeted in red bodies that writhed and heaved, obscuring the great statues adorning the defences and covering over the guns, an invasive cancer consuming reality. The enemy were legion. There were too many foes to defeat by plan and ruse. Only guns, and will, would see the day won, but the defenders were so pitifully few.
Messinius called a wordless halt, clenched fist raised, seeking the best place to deploy his mixed company, veterans all of the Terran Crusade. Gunships and fighters sped overhead, unleashing deadly light and streams of bombs into the packed daemonic masses. There were innumerable cannons crammed onto the gate, and they all fired, rippling the structure with false earthquakes. Soon the many ships and orbital defences of Terra would add their guns, targeting the very world they were meant to guard, but the attack had come so suddenly; as yet they had had no time to react.
The noise was horrendous. Messinius’ audio dampers were at maximum and still the roar of ordnance stung his ears. Those humans that survived today would be rendered deaf. But he would have welcomed more guns, and louder still, for all the defensive fury of the assailed palace could not drown out the hideous noise of the daemons – their sighing hisses, a billion serpents strong, and chittering, screaming wails. It was not only heard but sensed within the soul, the realms of spirit and of matter were so intertwined. Messinius’ being would be forever stained by it.
