Helsreach (31 page)

‘The honour was mine. Know that fifty of the enemy died by my blade the day I heard of his passing. Throne, but he was a warrior to quench the fires of the stars themselves. I miss him fiercely, and the Eternal Crusade is poorer without his sword.’

‘You… do great honour to his memory,’ Nero’s voice is choked with emotion.

‘Tell me, brother,’ Bayard’s tone lowers, as if the refugees standing and staring at us outside the great gates have no right to hear of what we speak. ‘I heard his death-wound was in the back. Is this so?’

Nero’s nod comes with reluctance. ‘It is.’

‘I also heard he killed nine of the beasts alone, before succumbing to his wounds.’

‘He did.’

‘Nine.
Nine.
Then he died facing his enemy, as a knight must. Thank you, Nero. You have brought me comfort this day.’

‘I… I…’

‘Welcome, brothers. It has been too long since we stood united.’ There are general murmurs of assent, and Bayard looks to me.

I smile behind my mask.

They rode in the back compartment of a trundling Chimera armoured personnel transport, their backs thumping against the metal walls with each sharp turn. It had been parked on the highway itself, riddled with bullet holes and las-burns, but still very much fuelled and ready to roll. Andrej and the others had dragged the bodies of dead Legionnaires out onto the road, and the storm-trooper had forced the dockers to say a short prayer over the corpses before he would, as he put it, ‘steal their ride’.

‘Manners cost nothing,’ he told them. ‘And these men died for your city.’

The troop section in the back of the Chimera was a typical slice of Guard life, smelling of blood, oil and rancid sweat. On creaking benches, Maghernus and his dockers, along with Asavan Tortellius recruited to their cause, sat and waited for Andrej to get them all the way down the Hel’s Highway.

He was not a good driver. They had mentioned this to him, and he professed not to know what they were talking about. Besides, he’d added, the left tank tread was damaged. That was why he kept skidding.

Also, he’d amended last of all, they should shut up. So there.

Andrej cycled through vox-channels, still getting no luck on any frequency. Whether every vox-tower in the city was gone or the orks had some intense jamming campaign going on was beside the point at this stage. He couldn’t get in touch with his commanders, and that left him to his own devices. As always, he would
go forward.
It was the way of the Legion, and the creed of the Guard.

The way he saw it, the Reclusiarch owed him a favour. In this case,
going forward
meant making a stand with the black knights until he could find someone, anyone, from his command structure.

There’d been a particularly galling moment when he’d managed to contact elements of the 233
rd
Steel Legion Armoured Division, but they were in the middle of being annihilated by an enemy scrap-Titan formation and had no time for pleasantries. Fate was laughing at him, Andrej was sure of it – the one Imperial force he’d been able to reach were minutes from being wiped out anyway.

This was no way to fight a war. No communication between any forces? Madness!

Smoke and flames were on the horizon ahead, but that indicated next to nothing of any use in determining direction or destination. Smoke and flames were on every horizon. Smoke and flame was all each of the horizons had become.

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.