by Guy Haley
More ships were coming in spiralling descents behind it, like scavenger birds riding thermals down to a carcass. The Titans built up to full speed, scattering before the onslaught, never still, but their movement gave only a small degree of protection from weapons designed for the high-speed intensity of void war. A running Warhound took seven successive cannon hits, the first two ripping out its shielding, each impact driving it into the ground like a hammer hitting a nail. It lumbered on, knees bent, one arm coming loose, but the assault did not let up, and it crashed down. Broken components scattered from its flaming wreckage.
The first ship was on the ground. Its primary ramp descended, a wide, broad mouth full of warriors bearing lasguns. Thousands of men charged out into the conflict. The Titans attacked as they emerged, finally bringing the drop-ship’s shields down. A wall of fire leapt up from Warhound inferno cannons, immolating hundreds of the soldiers. The enemy ran on without fear, hurling themselves into the fire in their attempts to get to their foe. Lances of Knights ran into them, culling them by the dozen. Blades of las-fire burst from the ground; thousands of beams of light rebounded off the Knights’ ion shields. There were too many to be resisted. The first Knight went down a moment later to a raging storm of man-portable heavy weapons fire.
‘Tenth, Sixth, Ninth and Fourth Maniples concentrate fire on the second incoming drop-ship,’ Esha voxed. ‘Warhound packs form from Second and Ninth Maniples, broad sweep. Herd the infantry into the arms of House Procon Vi. We must clear this area and break out!’
Two more drop-ships were nearing the ground. While the central ships disgorged their warriors, the others continued to head to positions that would put them out of the immediate attentions of the Legio Solaria, where they could form a perimeter. From there they would tighten the noose, move in and annihilate the Legio.
‘More sacrifices,’ Abhani Lus said. Her voice had a feral edge to it as her personality was subsumed by the spirit of her engine.
‘The Warmaster spends the lives of his men freely. This reckless disregard for humanity is what we are fighting against,’ Durana Fahl added.
Their voices were stuttered by power spiking as their weapons drew on their reactors to fuel the play of destruction.
The second drop-ship settled into the earth and began opening its holds. Under the patina of carbon and accreted dust the vile symbols of wicked gods were painted. They were fighting against more than recklessness, thought Esha; they were fighting madness itself. She despatched half the Knights and a single Warlord to attack the enemy as they emerged.
Three maniples moved to intercept the third drop-ship. Its minimal laser batteries were inadequate to the task of breaking the Titans’ void shields. Its aegis weakened, allowing more strikes against the armoured hull, then gave out with a bang that sent a wave-front of displaced air rushing outwards in all directions. The noise heralded the ship’s demise. The Titans switched to their most powerful weapons, shunting power to their volcano cannons and unleashing a web of thick, white-hot beams of light. They tore into the craft, punched through multiple layers of armour and burst from the other side. Something volatile caught in the giant ship’s hold. Plates blasted from the sides as it exploded. The back broke, and the ship dropped the final hundred metres to the ground, spilling burning men from its interior.
The Titans turned as it fell, building up to running speed, the princeps knowing full well what was to come.
The drop-ship hit the ground. Its fusion reactor slipped its bonds. A hemisphere of light scoured the craft from existence, the shockwave blasting men from their feet, shattering plasteel. Many soldiers did not rise, their organs pulverised by overpressure. The expanding wave-front slammed into another drop-ship, sending it wallowing in the air as its grav impellers broke open. Raining sparks, it slid sideways towards the ground, crash-landing gracelessly.
Domine Ex Venari stalked a desert transformed into a garden of fire. Esha scoured the field for targets while keeping a portion of her mind fixed upon the wider situation. Chunks of debris fell from the heavens, roaring with heat. Burning liquid rained through skies crossed with smoke trails. She almost missed the whip-sharp cracks of artificial thunder generated by defence laser fire.
Hansu Hive had finally seen the ploy, and was firing upon the subfleet bombarding Legio Solaria. She hoped this aid did not cost the defence of Hansu Hive too dearly.
Still the bombs fell. Still lances punched from low orbit, branding the ground like lit lho-sticks pressed into skin. By luck rather than Esha’s skill, Domine Ex Venari was not hit, but other Titans were not so fortunate. In the czella, passionless machine voices announced the names of slain god-engines. Esha and Domine Ex Venari mourned them in tandem.
The initial landing at the central point was nearing an end. The fifth and final drop-ship was coming down, more or less unmolested now the Legio was committed to destroying the troops who had already touched down. The area Esha had chosen for the landing zone was a blazing tangle of wreckage. The Fasadians were hardy, well armoured and well equipped, but they were horrendously outmatched. They had brought in no mobile armour or larger fighting machines to the makeshift landing field. Esha nervously checked over the ring of drop-ships setting down about the Legio. If she were to make a wager, she’d bet all she had on there being significant armour contingents in the surrounding force. Tanks were rarely much of a problem for a god-engine, a few specialist Titan-hunter classes aside, unless deployed in significant numbers. The ships could carry enough.
Domine Ex Venari kicked its way through a hillock of burning metal. Its guns blasted at the tiny figures running all over the desert.
The Legio Solaria rallied quickly, turning their heavier guns on the surrounding drop-ships and raking the field with high calibre fire. The Warhounds came into their own at the central landing zone, chasing down whole formations of troops and cutting them to pieces with vulcan megabolters, hails of mass reactives leaving semi-circular ditches full of blood carved into the desert floor. But this was not the real fight, she reminded herself. That was to come. Esha turned her head, and Domine Ex Venari turned its head with her. Through mechanical eyes they looked out towards the sea.
The sea was the key.
‘Legio, cease hunt. Converge on my mark.’
‘We’re breaking through?’ Esha didn’t catch who spoke. Her MIU data feed was overburdened with detail. Gallia, maybe, one of the princeps in Sixth Maniple.
‘We are. All engines converge on this point.’ Upon the demi-Legio’s cartolith, she indicated the drop-ship nearest the shore, and took stock of her remaining forces. Ten engines down. Over thirty left. More than enough. They had been caught by surprise, but that moment was over.
‘We get through there, we’ll be caught between their guns and the ocean,’ said Jehani Jehan, dissenting as usual.
‘Our alternative is to be surrounded on all sides. The ocean will be our guard. Third, Sixth and Ninth Maniples, range on formation right. Prepare to turn back, come around and…
‘…we surround them, and drive them into the sea.’
‘You almost sound like you approve, Jehani,’ she said grimly.
‘Legio first,’ said Jehani.
‘Legio first. Unto the hunt.’
Three dozen Titans sounded their wrath. Time to turn the battle.
Moving to maximum speed, the Titans converged. Hanto rallied his banners and bade the swift Knights come into an arc before the god-engines. The entirety of Procon House Vi’s bond-Knights were present on the field, filling Baravi Hanto’s heart with well-deserved pride. They ran ahead of the Titans, picking up speed, heavy stubbers and battle cannons felling the traitors wherever they were found. The Knights swayed as they ran, swaggering brawlers fixed on mayhem. They sprinted through slicks of burning fuel, and past piles of wreckage. Thick bands of smoke rolled across the cracked plains, hugging the ground. Salt and grit pattered on Falcon’
s leg plating. The battlefield was awhirl with competing air currents, ocean wind, gusts of fire and overpressure blasts, mixing ash, smoke, salt and sand into a concealing screen.
Leading from the front, the baron was first out of the brume, bursting into bright sunlight. Seven drop-ships squatted on the horizon behind veils of heat shimmer. Smaller shapes clustered around their bases. The range finders in his warsuit’s sensorium ticked down the metres as he ran, five thousand and closing. There was no cover, just dead flat, heat-cracked salt plane all the way to the ships. Feeble dunes banked behind them, not high enough to hide the twinkle of the ocean. His Knights came quickly behind him, reforming into a mighty chevron nearly a kilometre across. Fallen in, they jogged in formation towards their foe.
At two thousand nine hundred metres, the enemy opened fire. The line of black shapes flashed with muzzle discharge. Hundreds of tanks awaited the Knights.
‘Ion shields front!’ Baron Baravi Hanto bellowed. The air shifted around the line as every energy field was rotated to cover the front aspect of the Knights. Ordinarily invisible, the fine salts in the air revealed the fields, disrupting the passage of daylight and hazing the Knights behind a wave-front of sparkling energy.
‘Charge!’ he screamed. His Knights and their warsuits answered him with the lowing battle hymns of their war horns.
It was a charge from out of history’s dim past, when Knights had ridden horses and their warsuits were simple armours of metal. Nigh on a hundred Questoris-pattern Knights of all types thundered towards the enemy line. Their feet pounded up a shawl of fine sand that trailed behind the Knightly line. Las-beams blew molten trails through the dust. Shells screamed through the air on supersonic, flat trajectories. Ion shields flared as they took the hits. Their technology was different to that of the void shields carried by the Titans, more primitive but less temperamental, casting an adaptable screen of highly energised ions in a single direction that was solid enough to steal the momentum from projectiles or turn them aside completely. Tank shells caromed from the shields or slowed to a halt and fell to the ground. Las-fire flattened across the barriers and winked out. The space before the Knights’ charge became a churning storm of fire and shrapnel. Not every blast was stopped; not every one could be. Shots got through. Shrapnel pinged off Falcon’s armour. Las-beams struck, some still possessing enough power to scorch its paint.
A Knight exploded a score of metres along the line. It was running one moment, the next it was a column of smoke and debris spreading fingers outwards. A leg crashed down in front of Hanto. The baron increased his speed, sending Falcon into a bone-jarring leap over the tumbling wreckage.
‘Legio first!’ he screamed. ‘Open fire!’
Battlecannons held forward like lances belched smoke and flame. Sliding barrels recoiled into their sleeving, pumped forward again by trapped gases, preparing the guns for the next round that slammed into the breech. Missile pods spat flocks of death towards the foe. Cones of debris blasted skywards along the enemy line. Men and machines were lofted up almost playfully, as if all were involved in a game to see who could leap the highest.
Hanto could see the tanks clearly now, geometrical shapes tall in the sand, infantry ranged between them. Squads of heavy-weapons troopers unleashed their fury. The drop-ships fired with their anti-personnel weapons. Ion shields sparkled and roared with explosions. The Knights fired back. More of Hanto’s retainers went crashing down, reactors giving out with ferocious explosions.
The Knights’ shorter-ranged weapons came into range: avenger gatling cannons, and Hanto’s own thermal cannon. He zeroed in on a Malcador battle tank and fired the gun with a thought. A shimmer of agitated air marked the passage of his thermal spear. It struck the tank’s glacis, vaporising it. The crew inside would have cooked to death before exploding ammunition blew it apart, the shrapnel slaying dozens of men around it.
The Knights crashed home. Their chainswords swung in bloody arcs. Anti-armour weapons took their toll, bringing low the flower of House Procon Vi. Adhesive explosives lobbed at legs blew out joints. Knights were dragged from cockpit hatches and butchered, or burned alive in their warsuits.
Hanto strode through his foe, his mind absorbed with the task of multiple target acquisition and despatch. It occurred to him the enemy were behaving oddly. Their fire line had been disciplined, but they reacted sluggishly to the Knights’ charge when it hit, neither reorganising themselves nor fleeing, as most sane men would.
The triumphant wails of Titan war-horns at his back distracted him from the problem. A drop-ship was hit multiple times, collapsing in on itself. A second was ablaze. The Knights had played their role, screening the Titans as they moved in to break through.
Legio first, he thought, and continued to kill.
‘All ahead full, into the sea,’ Esha ordered. The Legio was arranged in a tight block, the Titans kicking their way through the shattered centre of the enemy encirclement. Ahead, the glittering poison of the Chymist’s Sea enticed her onwards. A portion of Hanto’s Knights loped off, sweeping the rising dunes for threats. The remainder held their ground, pinning open the gap through the enemy lines for the god-engines.
The enemy were collapsing their flanks inwards, funnelling men and machines towards the break-through point and advancing from the rear. Their encirclement was drawing noose tight. Weapons fire slammed relentlessly into the void shields of Domine Ex Venari, but she would not turn the engine to fire back; she could not afford to slow the Legio by having them present weapons to the enemy and walk backwards to the water. Then they would be trapped.
Elements of the Fasadian armour were abandoning their attack and accelerating towards the sea in a race with the god-engines. If they arrived on the beach in any appreciable numbers before the Titans then Esha’s plan might fail.
‘All power to locomotors,’ she said. In her mind’s eye, barred power indicators showing the weapons’ reactor draw dropped away. The Titan lurched as it picked up speed.
The rest moved with her. Pilum Aurae, of the Warlords, was limping badly on a leg whose knee had locked and was falling behind as a result. Its dragging foot carved a trench in the wastes. As they reached the edge of the dunes, it stopped, and began to turn about.
Esha voxed the princeps. ‘Gophan Niri, what are you doing?’
‘Legio first, princeps senioris,’ came the reply. ‘I will delay them.’
The Warlord swung ponderously around, guns raking the enemy forces before it had completed its turn. The rest walked on past their wounded sibling. Void shields fell. Titans took damage, some of it serious, but none debilitating. Men ran around their feet like rodents; they scurried to and fro, impotent in the face of the god-machines’ wrath. Domine Ex Venari trampled them under its feet, its point defence weaponry killing them where they presented themselves as targets. Esha swept her mighty metallic head back and forth, seeking priority targets, marking them for machine and moderati, letting their will guide the righteous vengeance of the Machine-God while she scanned on further, her huntress’ sensibilities bound to the sight and senses of the machine. She walked in the presence of god. She was the Omnissiah’s displeasure manifest.
She passed over the thin line of dunes that held sea back from land. They were a pattern on the floor to her, not a real obstacle, and she stepped through them in three swift strides that left footprint-craters metres deep.
From the dunes, the land sloped a little more steeply to the water. She plunged on, beating the tank outriders to the surf, just. Squadrons of them were rearing up over the last sand hills, skidding down the far sides. A few turned hasty turrets towards her, flinging their ire at her majesty. With a thought, Esha swung out the Titan’s left arm and obliterated them.
Men floundered into the waves before her. They ran oddly, not fleeing, it appeared, but directionless, or aiming weapons that could do her no harm. They passed under the void shields as she swept by. Their lasg
uns burned fine tracks into her skin, no more an inconvenience than the brush of a fly’s wings. They died under her feet, their passing staining the water red, but they were not afraid, and that was curious. Some fired magnetic grapnel lines up at her hips, fifteen metres over their heads. She laughed a symphonic war-horn blurt at their efforts, and strode over them. Other Titans followed her, the water building up around their ankles, then to their knees. Their pursuers could come no closer. The open ocean lay ahead.
A sonorous alarm sounded. The first void shield was close to failure.
‘Turn about face!’ she commanded.
Domine Ex Venari turned around. The first void went down, causing an expanding, foaming ring to form in the water’s surface, and sending a shockwave of rainbow spray outwards in a perfect circle. Her sister Titans passed by her ocular sensors, taking the water in a line with quiet dignity, while a horde of insects upon the shore attempted to discomfit them.
A trail of wreckage led down from the dunes and the path beaten through them by the Legio. Domine Ex Venari was tall enough to see clearly over the dunes to the broken drop-ships on the far side. Thick black clouds of smoke rose from their ruin. The bodies of men lay everywhere, crushed into the sand, blasted to scraps by Titan weaponry. Tanks burned. There were casualties from the Legio, of course. A Warhound lay face-down in the dunes. A Reaver rolled upon its back, trying the impossible feat of rising. The enemy were still coming. Pilum Aurae’s last field went out, and shots began to hammer into his armour. The Knights splashed along the water’s edge, turning to Domine Ex Venari’s left, accelerating away from the enemy so they could come about and get around the enemy’s rear. Already Third, Sixth and Ninth Maniples were ploughing deeper into the water, beginning their own slow arc that would see them follow the Knights and outflank the enemy.
