Helsreach Read online

  Andrej was not laughing. This did not amuse him, no sir.

  He changed gear with a nauseating grind of metal hating metal. A chorus of complaints jeered from the back as the Chimera juddered in protest and shook his passengers around some more. He heard someone’s head clang off the interior wall. He hoped it was the fat priest’s.

  Andrej sniggered. At least that was funny.

  ‘…ckr… sn… tl…’ declared the vox.

  Aha! Now this was progress.

  ‘This is Trooper Andrej, of the–’

  He closed his mouth as the transmission crackled into a semblance of clarity. The burning district ahead, through which he’d need to pass to reach the distant Temple… it was the Rostorik Ironworks. The vox told of a Titan’s death-wails.

  ‘Hold on,’ he called back, and accelerated the battered transport along the Hel’s Highway, towards the emerging shape of Stormherald above the surrounding industrial towers.

  The link was savaged by Bound in Blood’s mortis-cry. Zarha twisted in her coffin, trying to filter the empathic pain from the influx of sensory information she needed to focus on.

  Her fistless arm pushed forward in the milky fluid, and the Titan obeyed her furious need.

  ‘Firing,’ Valian Carsomir confirmed.

  In the centre of the industrial sector, ringed by burning towers and crushed manufactories, the Imperator Titan weathered a hail of enemy fire from scrap-walkers that barely reached its waist. Its shields rippled with searing intensity, corona-bright and almost blinding.

  The plasma annihilator amassed power, sucking in a storm of air through its coolant vanes and juddering as it made ready to release. Around the god-machine’s legs, the waddling ork walkers blared sirens and howling warnings to one another. Burning vapour clouded around the shaking plasma weapon as it vented pressure, and with a roar that shattered every remaining window in a kilometre-wide radius, Stormherald fired.

  Three of the lesser scrap-Titans were engulfed in the flood of boiling plasma that surged from the weapon, melting to sludge in the white-hot sunfire.

  Zarha’s arm was aflame with sympathetic agony. She did her best to blank it from her mind, focusing instead on the rattling crawl of insects over her body. Her shields were taking grave damage now. Stormherald could not linger here for much longer.

  ‘Bound in Blood isn’t rising, my princeps.’

  Zarha knew this. She’d heard its soul scream across the Legio’s princeps-level link.

  He is dying.

  ‘He is dying.’

  ‘Orders, my princeps?’

  Stand. Fight.

  ‘Stand. Fight.’

  The Titan shuddered as another wreck-walker staggered closer, its shoulder cannons booming. Standing above the downed Reaver-class Titan Bound in Blood, Stormherald returned fire with its incidental weapon batteries, flash-frying the lesser machine’s void shields in a hail of incendiary fire.

  Zarha pushed her other arm forward through the ooze, laughing as she moved. Stormherald’s other arm, the colossal hellstorm cannon, thrummed as its internal mechanics chambers and drive engines cycled up to firing speed.

  ‘My princeps…’ Lonn and Carsomir warned in the same breath. Zarha cackled in her tomb of fluid.

  Die!

  ‘Die!’

  The enemy scrap-Titan was shredded by five energy lances blasting from Stormherald’s hellstorm cannon. In less than three seconds, its plasma core was breached and critically venting, and in less than five it had exploded, taking the bulk of the fat-bodied gargant with it. Shrapnel shards the size of tanks hammered off the Imperator’s void shields, leaving distortions of bruising while the generators struggled to compensate.

  ‘Secondary impact from the turbolaser batteries… Cog’s teeth, we struck the G-71 orbital landing platform. My princeps, I implore you to use caution…’

  Engine kill. She licked her cold, wrinkled lips. Engine kill.

  ‘Engine kill.’

  Half a kilometre behind the dead enemy walker – its foundation struts destroyed by the laser salvo from Stormherald’s hellstorm cannon – a sizeable landing platform crashed down to the ground, sliding on fouled gantries to smash through the roof of a burning tank manufactorum. An avalanche of rockcrete, broken iron and steel was all that remained of both installations, at the heart of a cloud of grey-black smoke and rock dust.

  The ironyard had played host to the pitched battle between Titans and infantry for several days. Little was left, yet neither side was giving ground.

  ‘My princeps…’

  No more lectures. I do not care.

  ‘No more lectures. I do not care.’

  ‘My princeps,’ Valian repeated, ‘new contact. Behind us.’

  She spun in the fluid, fish-like and alert. Stormherald followed with ponderous slowness, its fortress-legs thudding down onto the ground. The cityscape view through the Titan’s eyes panned, showing nothing but devastation.

  ‘The scanner blur is either several walkers together, or a single engine of our size.’

  The adept hunched by the auspex console turned to regard the pilot crew with three bionic eyes, each with a lens of dark green glass. A blurt of machine-code disagreed with Lonn’s appraisal.

  []Negative. Thermal signature registers distinct single pulse.[]

  One enemy engine.

  That isn’t possible, she thought, but never let it reach her vocalisers. An uneasy tremor was running through the Titan’s bones, and she felt it as keenly as she’d once felt the wind on her skin in another lifetime.

  ‘My princeps, we must disengage,’ Lonn said, staring out into the burning ironyard. ‘We need to rearm and cool the plasma core in standard sustained venting procedure.’

  I know that better than you, Lonn.

  ‘I know that better than you, Lonn.’

  But I am not abandoning a district I have spent four nights fighting to hold.

  ‘But I am not abandoning a district I have spent four nights fighting to hold.’

  ‘My princeps, there’s precious little left standing to defend,’ Lonn pressed. ‘I repeat my recommendation to withdraw and rearm.’

  No. I am sending Regal and Ivory Fang north to hunt the inbound enemy engine and confirm with visual scanning.

  ‘No. I am sending Regal and Ivory Fang north to hunt the inbound enemy engine and confirm with visual scanning.’

  Lonn and Carsomir shared a glance from across the command deck. Both men were restrained in their control thrones, and both men wore the same expression of frustrated doubt.

  ‘My princeps,’ Carsomir tried, but he was cut off.

  ‘See? They move.’ On the hololithic display screen, the runes denoting the scout Titans Regal and Ivory Fang broke away from their perimeter-stalking patrol to the west, and strode northward in search of the incoming thermal pulse.

  ‘My princeps, we do not have the ammunition reserves required to inflict destruction-level damage on an enemy engine of comparable size to us.’

  ‘I am venting the heart-core’s excess fusion matter and flushing the heat exchangers.’ Even as she vocalised the orders, she was sending empathic pulses through her links to make it so.

  ‘My princeps, that is not enough.’

  ‘He is right, my princeps,’ Carsomir had turned in his throne, and was looking back at her fluid tank now. ‘You are too close to Stormherald’s wrath. Return to us and focus.’

  ‘We are defended by three Reavers and our own scout screen. Be silent.’

  ‘Two Reavers, my princeps.’

  Yes. Two. She pulled back from the immersion of rage. Yes… two. Bound in Blood was silent and dead, its power core cooling and its princeps voiceless. In her confused thinking, she did not mean to vocalise her next words.

  ‘We have lost seven engines in one week of battle.’

  ‘Yes, my princeps. Prudence would serve us best now. If the auspex is true, we must withdraw.’

  She floated in her coffin, hearing the curious humanity
in their voices. Such emotion. Such curious intensity, affecting their speech tones. She recognised it as fear, without truly recalling what the sensation felt like.

  ‘We have killed almost twenty of the foe’s engines… but I concede. Sound the withdrawal as soon as the Warhounds have confirmation.’

  The first Imperial engine to bear witness to the Godbreaker was Ivory Fang. It stalked fast and low on its backwards-jointed legs, the side-to-side pitch of its stomping gait adding a feral, if mechanical, grace to its dawn hunt.

  Warhound-class. And it suited the name, lone wolfing its way through the wrecked industrial sector, striding around the shells of tanks destroyed in the week-long struggle for the Rostorik Ironyard. Sometimes, its hooved feet would crunch down on the soft meat of burned bodies and render them into pulped smears along the ground. Dead skitarii, Guardsmen, factorum workers and greenskins littered the district.

  Ivory Fang was commanded most ably by a princeps by name of Haven Havelock. Princeps Havelock dreamed, as did most of his ilk, of one day mastering a great battle-Titan, and perhaps even one of Invigilata’s precious few Imperators. His fellow princeps – equals and superiors alike – spoke well of him, and he knew his place in the Legio as a solid, reliable scout-Titan commander was assured, valued, and deserved.

  Patience was foremost among his virtues – patience and cunning. That reasoned, meticulous hunting instinct bled through the mind-bond into Ivory Fang. Twinned, man and machine were past masters at the kind of deep-urban stalks where Warhound Titans most excelled.

  The rough link between Titan commanders maintained throughout the city had suffered just as Imperial vox had suffered, but Havelock was reassured by the fragments of meaning that pulsed through the chaos. If there truly was an enemy scrap-Titan out there, it was nothing the battle group could not deal with. Stormherald was no more than two kilometres to the south, and with it were Danol’s Retribution and The Ghoul, both Reavers with victory banners descending from their armour plating that would put mid-range Titan princeps from any other Legio to shame.

  Nothing the beasts could hurl at them would break such a formation. Even the largest gargant would fall to Stormherald.

  I see nothing, came the aggravated spurt of machine code from his fellow princeps, Feerna of Regal.

  Havelock spent a quarter of a second consulting his internal tracking runes. The link to his Titan’s auspex sensors formed a rough, instinctive knowledge of his kin’s locations in his mind.

  Regal was a half-kilometre to the north-east, moving at speed through a small cluster of iron smelteries. It would have been in visual range, had the space between the two Titans not been obstructed by ruined manufactories.

  I see nothing, either.

  It’s the heat, she complained. Hunting for thermal signatures in this inferno is like seeking black in the night sky. My auspex readers show nothing but thermal disruption. Horus himself could be hiding in here, and I would not kn–

  Feerna? Feerna?

  ‘Registering energy discharge of significant size to the north-east,’ Havelock’s moderati called out.

  ‘Confirmed,’ murmured the tech-adept that hunched in a station behind the princeps throne.

  Feerna? Havelock tried once more. ‘Bring us about and move north-east at aggressive intent speed. Everyone be ready.’ He twitched in his restraint throne as the Titan obeyed his pilot’s urgings. The connection feeds were alive with subtle static, itching at his nerves. Ivory Fang was keen. It had sensed something.

  And then it hit Havelock, too.

  ‘Hnnngh,’ he drooled through clenched teeth, shuddering against the leather bindings that restrained him in place. ‘Hnn… Hvv…’

  The pain of Regal’s mortis-cry faded, and Havelock breathed again. Feerna was gone, as was her Titan. She’d been a Warhound, and her link to the others was tenuous and weak in comparison to the strength of a bond to the greater god-machines. The pain bled away fast, bringing relief in its wake.

  The Titan clanked its way down a subsidiary alley, its weapon-arms rising in readiness. Havelock sent several mental urgings in quick succession, triggering autoloaders, coolant valves and bracing pistons into activity. Ivory Fang rounded the corner at the alley’s end, stalking out into the main street. As it had been since this morning, this sector was still aflame because of the destroyed refineries and petrochemical stores, with about half the buildings finally quieting into smouldering ruins.

  But the fighting was done here.

  ‘Where is the bastard?’ Havelock whispered.

  The auspex chimed – once, weak.

  ‘We have movement,’ the tech-adept grumbled, not looking up from his scanner console. ‘There is–’

  ‘I see, it, I see it. Back away now!’

  It came from the black clouds, rumbling forward on a clumsy mess of tank treads and crushing feet. Its body was slanted, tapering to a head that was all brutal jaw and piggish, alien eye-windows. Every metre of its scrap metal torso bristled with tiered weapons platforms.

  It was quite the ugliest and most offensive thing Havelock had ever seen, and that was more than simply because it was an affront to the purity of Mechanicus god-machine creation. No, more than that, it offended him because its manifestation before him made no sense. It… dwarfed Stormherald.

  It seemed impossibility given form, striding, limping from the oily smoke that blanketed the district.

  Havelock pulsed a digitally-translated pict of the enemy gargant across the mind-bond to Princeps Zarha and any other Titan commander in range. It was all the warning he would be allowed to send, for Godbreaker opened fire the very moment its main armaments cleared the smoke.

  Ivory Fang was pulverised beneath enough solid, laser and plasma weapon fire to level a city block. Its demise, and the end of Havelock’s mediocre career, was marked by a vast crater that would remain for decades after the war had bled the whole world almost dry.

  Godbreaker moved onward.

  CHAPTER XXI

  Stormherald Down

  The two engines faced one another across the burning ironyard, as alike in power as they were unlike in dignity. Both were ablaze, both bleeding fire and smoke into the clouded air.

  The air between them was a blizzard of weapon fire as secondary turrets and battlement guns spat anti-infantry firepower at each other in the hopes of inflicting as much damage as possible. Inside both Titans, it sounded like a flood of pebbles clattering against the armour-plated hulls.

  Inside Stormherald, the sirens were wailing long and loud.

  Zarha writhed in her fluid-filled tomb, her limbs pushing through the blood-pinked water. Psychostigmata was ravaging her, as Stormherald’s wounds played out in a map across her naked body. Where the Titan was battered, she was discoloured by bruising or bent by broken bones. Where the god-machine was rent and torn, her flesh smiled and bled in open wounds. Where Stormherald burned, she was haemorrhaging internally.

  The Titan’s command deck smelled of burning oil and rancid sweat.

  ‘Primary shield layer restored,’ Carsomir announced, his hands working at his console with a near-furious focus. ‘Core containment holding.’

  Raise… raise shields…

  ‘Krrrsssshhhhh.’

  RAISE THE SHIELDS.

  ‘Raise the shields.’

  ‘Already done, my princeps.’

  She was slowing down. The pain stole so much of her attention now. With a moan that was swallowed into silence by the water, she pulsed orders to the various decks and pushed both of her arms forward through the pinkish ooze.

  Nothing happened.

  She tried again, screaming into the oxygen-rich fluid, the stumps of her hands thumping against the front of her coffin.

  Nothing.

  ‘Plasma annihilator venting for sixteen more seconds, my princeps. Fourteen. Thirteen. Twelve.’

  Fire the… the… other arm. Fire it.

  ‘Krrrsssssshh.’

  FIRE THE HELLSTORM CANNON. Her stunted righ
t limb thudded over and over against the glass side of her amniotic tank.

  ‘Fire the hellstorm cannon.’

  ‘As soon as it has recharged, my princeps,’ Lonn replied, half-ignoring her now. She’d given the order to fire at will several minutes before. Drifting in her pain as the Titan fell to pieces, she was barely trustworthy now. Carsomir and Lonn worked almost independently of their princeps’s wishes. They only had one more shot at walking away from this – the enemy Titan was already advancing over the mangled body of The Ghoul, which had lasted less than a minute beneath the Godbreaker’s initial volleys.

  The scrap-Titan was capable of a merciless amount of firepower. None of Stormherald’s command crew had seen anything like it before, let alone suffered on the receiving end. Only a few minutes into the god-machines’ duel, and the Imperator was wreathed in flame, temperature gauges whining and warning lights flashing throughout the confined corridors threading through the giant’s steel bones.

  The multitude of layered energy screens that served the Titan as void shields had been torn apart with insane, laughable speed by the ork walker.

  ‘I’m ready,’ Carsomir announced. ‘Firing.’

  ‘Wait for the stabilisers to come back online!’ Lonn yelled. ‘They only need another minute.’

  Carsomir thought his fellow pilot’s faith in the tech-crews working in the shoulder joints was admirable, but unbelievably misguided given the circumstances. He blinked once, wasting precious seconds to even think about listening to Lonn’s plea.

  ‘The arm isn’t badly damaged. I’m taking the shot. I can make it.’

  ‘You’ll miss, Val! Give them thirty seconds, just thirty more seconds.’

  ‘Firing.’

  ‘You son of a bitch!’

  Stormherald’s knees locked in preparation and the plasma annihilator tower that served as its left arm began its air-sucking inhalation of coolant.

  ‘You’ve killed us,’ Lonn breathed, watching the enemy Titan through the steamed-up view windows. An unremitting torrent of incidental fire rained against Stormherald’s shields, turning them violet with strain.