Titandeath
Page 8
The Imperial Hunters did not favour immersion tanks for their princeps unless absolutely necessary. Their way of coping with machine disassociation was to immerse themselves in the physical whenever out of the manifold. While on-planet they hunted according to the habits of their ancestors. Aboard ship they sparred, or undertook military training. They held modest recreations of Procon’s lordly feasts. They remembered the ways of their kind.
Distraction kept them sane between battles. None of it was enough when the machines began to wake. The moment the first rites of activation were performed, Esha Ani Mohana felt Domine Ex Venari calling to her. Shooting pains afflicted her extremities. Her palms were constantly damp. She could not sit still. A mix of maternal yearning and narcotic withdrawal ran electric pains through her nervous system.
Each of the human components of the god-machines had to deal with these feelings in their own way. They supported one another, and that helped, but the help only went so far. Everyone suffered according to their own habit.
After awakening, the machines were tested for mental soundness by the Vox Omni Machina. The priests kept their secrets close, but Esha knew the Vox Omni Machina linked with his charges directly, and that added an outraged sense of jealousy to the turbulence in her soul.
The princeps were allowed in to see their machines during the second phase, but not to interface. It was dangerous to rouse the spirits of the war gods without good reason. They were swords that could not be sheathed until blooded.
During this period of maintenance, Esha stalked the hangar deck, nervous energy forcing her to take step after step until she exhausted herself. The Titans’ bodies were infested with probes. Neokora crawled all over their innards. Premedius orchestrated a thousand petty indignities. Servitors trudged around every part of the interior, doggedly swapping out damaged or worn components. She had become adept at not getting in the way. The deimechanics and their crews worked around her and the others, though she knew her presence was barely tolerated.
It was a time of showers of sparks and whining power tools, of grumbling engines and hissing plasma torches, while hammers rang and priests chanted and the servitor choirs sang the same hymns on endless loop. The drop-ship hangar at that time smelled of oil and hot metal, sweat, paint and polish. There were support machines everywhere, crates, barrels, and spillages of sacred unguent. Plastek sheets hung over areas of maintenance. Scaffolds encased the Warhound Os Rubrum to the waist to allow the replacement of a malfunctioning hip gyro. Half the priests were as busy chanting as the rest were with their tools and datalinks.
She hated this time. The link with a Titan was familial. While Domine Ex Venari was helpless it felt like her child, ill in the hospice. She was the Titan; it was her. It was her father, she its mother. There was no division in these emotions. They made a complex set of chains, binding her to her machine in ways unfathomable to those outside the Collegia Titanica.
After maintenance, the Titans’ load-outs were changed for the coming battle according to the wishes of the princeps, under guidance from the princeps majoris and Legio strategos. Their reactors were spooled up from maintenance power to pre-combat draw. The crews went aboard themselves at this point to run their own tests and calibrations, and limited mind impulse linkage was permitted under the eyes of the ever-present tech-priests. The joining was insufficient to blunt the crews’ cravings. The engines’ beings were not fully raised to wakefulness, and the mind blend was deadened by intervening monitoring machinery. If anything, the fleeting contact made Esha’s sense of isolation worse. Her feeling of panic increased.
Only twenty-four hours before the final approach to Theta-Garmon V were the final services held for the machine-spirits, the Titans thoroughly blessed and their honour banners attached. The human contingent of the Legio was present completely for the rites, moving in solemn procession from drop-ship to drop-ship aboard the Tantamon, then to the Artemisia, and at last to the smaller conveyors and their stacked ranks of coffin ships, where the assembled officers and priests passed through fragile plastek corridors linking the smaller drop-ships to one other. Other Legios possessed conveyors that combined the advantages of coffin drop pod and large hangars. The Tigrian priesthood did not favour them.
After the blessings the crews waited in arming rooms close by the boarding jetties to their Titans. And waited. And waited. Their combat uniforms were close-fitting environment suits of void-resistant grade, topped with integrated shoulder, chest and back armour to which were locked large square helms. Armourglass face plates allowed them to look out. They were claustrophobic, heavy items where the hiss-click of oxygen provision, bleeps of machinery assuring continuous air supply and the thunder of one’s own breathing shut out most of the sound from outside. At any other time, Esha would have found the sense of isolation soothing. As she waited for battle, she felt trapped by her need to link with Domine Ex Venari. Each hissing burst of the air unit spiked the pains running up and down her arms and legs.
Esha forced herself to look outwards, past her suit visor and the presence of the six women around her, out into a far wider world, as she would when linked. By comparison to those too-long delayed moments of union, she was limited, but not blind. The vibrations of the ship’s metal told her much. Through the pain singing in her skin, she felt the lifters propel House Procon Vi to their defensive positions. She felt the void shields collapse and the oversized clunks and bangs as their capacitors were swapped. The fire of point defence weapons added a delicate trill to the punch of big guns shaking the fabric of the craft. Hard hits sent the predictable pulse of the ship’s reactors into arrhythmia. The chaotic vibrational patterns of surface combat came soon after.
‘They have started without us,’ said Fenina Bol, one of Esha’s moderati bellatus. She craned her neck as much as she was able to look above, though there was nothing to see but the ceiling, and the fight was on both ventral and dorsal spines of the ship.
‘You’ll get your turn,’ said Odani Jehan, Esha’s second bellatus. She was like her blood-sister Jehani in lots of ways, though more inclined to tension. Whether this was because of her youth or her character was not yet clear to Esha; she was relatively new to the crew.
Nepha Nen, the third weapons operator, sniggered nervously.
‘Be quiet. The wait is bad enough and you are making it worse.’ The command of Yeha Yeha, moderati primus, silenced them. The weapons moderati studied the floor. No one would go against the primus’ word. Esha relied on her to keep the others in line.
The remaining members of her crew were Mephani Ohana, oratorius, whose role as communications officer was vital to the far-ranging Imperial Hunters, and Jephenir Jehan, who fell between her siblings Jehani and Odani in years, but whose preternatural abilities in coaxing the Titan to move suited her well to her role as Esha’s steersman. Neither of these two spoke. Reavers in other Legios might take a further two moderati, but the Legio Solaria were mistresses of the hunt, and the princeps had no need of additional crew in either the navigatorial or sensorium positions. By their ethos, a huntress should be a master pathfinder and reader of spoor. Any princeps who required help in these areas was not worthy of the name.
Esha’s legs ached savagely. She forced herself not to jiggle them. Only the ready klaxon saved her from an undignified bout of fidgeting.
It was not until the first shots trembled the exposed hull of the Tantamon, and the roaring of the ship’s reactor rushed cataract-loud down every access way, that the order was given for Esha Ani Mohana and her maniple to join with their Titans.
Lumens turned from yellow to green. An urgent tocsin sang a call to arms.
‘Move!’ shouted Yeha, on her feet before all the others. Esha was next, eyes on the airlock door. She slammed her palm onto the activation plate, the door spirit’s announcement of her name a barely heard string of nonsense sounds. Blood roared in her ears. At last, she thought, at last!
The airlock outer door admitted them all and slammed closed. Air whomped out, and the inner door whisked itself away. A third door, this one the dull orange of the drop-ship exterior, opened a microsecond after. They passed from the Tantamon into the maniple drop-ship, running along the short pier leading to the rear door between the massive heat exchangers mounted on the Titan’s back.
The hangar was already depressurised. A passionless machine counted down the seconds to combat drop over their voxbeads as they ran within the Reaver. They had to duck through the low door into the machine. The engine had no airlock, and the whole machine began to repressurise with atmospheric mix as soon as they were all in and crossing the cramped atrium to the armoured head. Servitors stared sightlessly at them from their alcoves. The small door leading to the command deck slid aside. Jephenir Jehan, Yeha Yeha, Mephani Ohana and finally Esha Ani Mohana clambered into the tight space, long practice preventing them cracking their large helms against the interior. Fenina Bol, Nepha Nen and Odani Jehan waited for Esha to pass into the head before splitting left and right to pass through the doors leading to the gunnery chambers set within the shoulders.
Dim light filtered through the tiny window set about the Reaver’s augur eyes. The head was broad, but sloped down sharply to the front, and much of its muzzle was taken up by the socket points for the massive, armoured cables that curled away and back from the machine’s face like extravagant moustaches. They could see very little out of the windows. A large vid screen display gave a view outside, but they would not need that once they were linked to the manifold.
They were all talking, all at once, flicking switches and punching buttons as they slid into their seats. Esha took to the cracked leather of her command throne with the voice of her crew and her maniple yammering at her. They were all excited, eager to be off on the hunt.
The term ‘command throne’ was overblown. The seat was little more than a pilot’s couch, and its meagre cushioning was uncomfortably divided by a line of metal housing the interface spikes for the MIU. Even in a machine the size of Domine Ex Venari, there was barely room for the four women of the command team. It was hot, and cramped. In seconds, none of that would matter.
‘Good afternoon, princeps.’ Magos Deimechanic Omega-6’s cheerful tones spoke into her vox. He was the only full sentient aboard not wired into the manifold, and so always spoke with her this way. His station was on the reactor deck, and its rising output jagged his words with static. ‘I have my orchestra ready to play a fine symphony to greet the rising of the sun.’
‘Greetings, magos. You have a bizarre love of imagery for a tech-priest.’
‘You’d be disappointed if it were otherwise.’
‘That is so. Bring the reactor up to two thirds power. Prepare for combat level output.’
‘All indicators are within green parameters. I shall pray it remains so.’
‘Do. This looks like a hard fight.’
‘Hard fights mean hard use of my reactor.’
‘You know so,’ she said. She put a genuine grin into the words. She smiled so rarely now it was pleasant to remember how.
She locked her hands and feet into the control gloves and stirrups, calmed her breathing, closed her eyes, and with a sense of delicious anticipation said:
‘Interface.’
The stab of the neural spikes into the sockets set in her skull was unbelievably painful.
It was worth it every time.
Elated calm took hold of the crew. Their horizons expanded beyond the realm of flesh as their minds raced out through the MIU to mesh with piston and gun.
To outsiders, the members of the Collegia Titanica appeared very different to their tech-priest masters. They did not pursue augmentation so ruthlessly as the Martian priesthood, taking bionics only to continue service after injury, or to better interface with their machines. They did not deny their humanity. This, along with their uniforms and manners, made them seem more Imperial than Mechanicum, like naval or army officers. To other men and women they were fellow humans where the tech-priests were frightful cyborgs. The Titan crews were approachable, although they piloted the most awesome instruments of war to tread soil in mankind’s name. Not like the priests. Their obsessive need to grub up the meat of their bodies and rethread themselves with wire seemed a most terrible pathology.
These outsiders were wrong. The Titan Legio were as devoted to the machine cult as the most flesh-hating magos. They did not replace blood with oil, but this was simply because they did not need to. They were closer to their god than any other worshipper of the Omnissiah could ever be. In battle they were its avatars, the bellicose saints and angels of the three-who-was-one, and the pains they underwent to achieve such holy transformation – going back and forth between immortal, metal might and transient organic being – taught them the value of both states. One could be man or machine, but not both at once. They alone achieved the heavenly union of humanity’s sacred form with the body of the Machine-God incarnate, and found a measure of equilibrium there. Suffering was the border between the MIU manifold and the living world. By crossing it they purified their souls, so that even in their flesh form they became the apostles of the Omnissiah himself.
So the Magos Principia Militaris, the order’s bishop-prince, said in his sermons. For herself, Esha did not believe a word of it. All she recognised from his words was the bliss of neuronic union, the pain of divorce from the mechanism, and the power the change gave her.
Frustration left the crew. While battle reigned in the void, calm held sway in the hangar. Second Maniple joined with their machines at a measured pace. Theoretically, the Titan should be ready for war as soon as the linkages were made, but after so long deactivated it was not. Domine Ex Venari’s machine soul was sluggish with long inaction, and Esha struggled to rouse it.
‘Come on, Domine,’ Esha whispered to herself. The minds of her moderati brushed against her psyche. In return, her sense of self spread outwards through them. The mind link was not and could never be entire, but enough of themselves entered each other that sometimes it was hard to tell who pulled the trigger or who saw the target first. The operation of the Titan depended on this human network. Moderati minds supported her, a pyramid of human souls with her at the apex, helping her bear the burden of cowing the indomitable soul of so mighty a war machine.
The princeps role was hardest of them all. She could not lose herself in the Titan as the moderati could. At one and the same time, she must maintain close links with her crew while retaining enough of herself to order and direct them. She had, in short, to be in two places at once.
Esha was very good at that. Although the link was still weak, already she experienced the doubling of identity granted by the manifold as she saw from the Reaver’s auspexes as well as her own eyes. On the one hand she looked through the murky oculus at the hangar, a woman inside a tower peering through a small window; on the other, she stared imperiously down from twenty-five metres high, through lenses of charged crystal at the ant-like humans scurrying around her feet. They meant nothing. Her peers were other giants. There was a second like herself, a crouched monster, whose back and shoulder joints were covered over by a mottled white-and-green armoured carapace from under which projected a wide, coleopteran head. Besides this were four other monsters, smaller, but still titanic, with dark red heads cast in the likenesses of snarling hounds, perpetually bent double as if casting for a scent. Her pack.
Esha was Domine Ex Venari, and it was her. A giant of legend wrought of adamantium, ceramite, plasteel, glassite and exotic alloys, brought to life by the wonders of a captive star and the power of the motive force.
Only, not entirely. Not yet. She still felt herself as a distinct being within the giant’s head, not limited by her mortal state any longer, but not free of it either. This overlap was uncomfortable. It was not her fault. The final component in the machine was not yet engaged. Domine Ex Venari
’s soul would not be woken. She chided Domine gently as it turned over at the touch of its mistress’ mind, a dog by the fire, only half willing to leave for the rain of the forest and the joy of the kill.
The drop count was rattling down at too fast a pace. Esha kept half an eye on the battle data transferred via the Legio infospheric link to the Titan manifold. The machine’s cogitators were meshing with her brain, lending her their speed. She calculated faster than any data savant ever could. Her god gave her abilities beyond mere destruction. His gifts were many.
Iridium was rapidly nearing. Still Domine Ex Venari sulked at her. It had waited too long since first awakening. It was angry.
Esha had no time for this.
‘All crews, report in status.’
‘Velox Canis, standing by,’ reported Soranti Daha. Her words had an eager, aggressive edge to them. She yearned to run and fight.
‘Cursor Ferro anticipating full readiness in twenty seconds,’ relayed Jehani Jehan.
‘Procul Videns is ready to hunt,’ said Toza Mindev. ‘All praise to the Machine-God.’
Abhani Lus Mohana reported similarly from the Os Rubrum. ‘All praise. We are ready to walk.’ Abhani Lus’ voice raised conflicting emotions in Esha, as it always did. She put aside her feelings. Her daughter was a good princeps.
‘Second Maniple respectfully requesting status of attached Fourth Maniple engine,’ Esha voxed to Durana Fahl.
‘We are ready,’ Fahl said. The dreamlike savagery in her voice suggested she had already achieved union with her Reaver Titan, Steel Huntress. ‘We walk to your command.’