Titandeath

by Guy Haley

  Harr­tek’s moderati sensorius reported, prompted, no doubt, by Nuntio Dolores’ own frustration at the lack of activity.

  Harr­tek thought-pulsed to his crew, though he was not concerned with them. He could feel the Titan’s eagerness to engage. Its soul tensed under his mind like it was about to bolt.

  Bavin’s fresh firing plan cascaded through the infosphere. Harr­tek dismissed it.

  he said.

  His crew hesitated.

  Harr­tek’s rage at his weapons moderati lashed through the manifold like a whip. He felt the man’s mind buckle under his fury.

  ‘I am princeps of Maniple Seven!’ he shouted into the czella. ‘This is my domain. You will do as I say. Target volcano cannon as commanded.’ He slipped back into the manifold.

  Harr­tek highlighted a section of the station skin where a dip in his gravity map suggested a large void close to the surface. The data passed into the minds of his crew and Titan as if there were no barrier between their souls.

  Power built in Nuntio Dolores’ weapons feeds. Harr­tek felt it as a rising of pressure along his arms and back. Together he and the Titan trembled in anticipation of release.

  Bavin commanded.

  Legio Vulpa let fly with every weapon they possessed. Bavin utilised a standard Titan versus Titan fire pattern, matching larger engines against weaker in an attempt to wear down void shields across the front and bring down large portions of the enemy simultaneously. It was a tactic Harr­tek disapproved of greatly. His preference was for certain engine kills that eroded the enemy’s forces gradually but certainly. The same tactic that the Legio Atarus were currently employing.

  The effect of Bavin’s plan was admittedly spectacular. A wall of fire and energy flare leapt up along the leading edge of Atarus’ advance. Void shields gave out in dazzling displays of discharge. One of Atarus’ Titans stopped dead, its head destroyed by a lucky hit. In response, scything volcano cannon beams amputated the arm of Benediction of Blood.

  Harr­tek commanded.

  Nuntio Dolores’ reactor pulsed hotly. Harr­tek’s eyes slid closed with pleasure. A searing beam ripped out from the volcano cannon, slamming into the left of the Nightgaunt. Its voids rippled but held. Predictably, the Nightgaunt swung to its right to throw off Nuntio Dolores’ aim, just as Harr­tek anticipated.

 

  The Warlord leaned forwards, aiming its carapace weapon at the ground in the Nightgaunt’s path. The gestalt of Titan and crew released the building power of the guns at precisely the right moment, smashing open the hull of the orbital as the lighter Titan was raising its foot. It had no time to react; the crew probably didn’t even see the pitfall until it was too late. The foot descended into a gaping hole, and the Titan crashed down hard. Void shields glared with power overdraw. Sections of metal around the cavity exploded into sparks as their matter was displaced into the immat­erium, widen­ing the hole further, until it was big enough to swallow the Titan completely. The last of its shields burst, leaving the edges glowing like the embers of burned paper. The head slammed into the lip of the chasm, snapping it back into the carapace. A botched ejection sent it skidding across the surface of 103-4 while its body, limbs limp, fell into oblivion.

  A servitor bonded to the wall spoke the words over and over again.

  he thought out to the Legio.

  Vulpa had the advantage for the moment: sheltered, given extra protection by the defence turrets, and able to better aim their weapons. That would not last. As soon as the lines drew nearer, being stationary would become a disadvantage. Bavin saw this, and issued the order to withdraw. The Legio fell back as one group, still hammer­ing at the line of the advancing Legio Atarus. One of the foe stumbled when its foot passed over a habitation section where the gravity plates were still online, leaving it wide open to enfilading fire. To Harr­tek’s annoyance, Bavin did not order a retargeting, and the machine recovered for the loss of one paltry void shield.

  Alarms were suddenly ringing everywhere. Servitors moaned in their alcoves.

  they mumbled.

  Harr­tek forced Nuntio Dolores’ sensorium wide. At the far edge of his detection range, a tumbling mass of ruined metal was hurtling towards them, closing fast. The first elements were coming in already, too fast to see, punching neat, round holes in the surface of the orbital. The approach of the artificial meteor storm had been masked by the void war. It was one of thousands kicked up by the grinding siege of Theta-Garmon V, broken orbitals and dead ship pieces whirling around the gas giant at hundreds of thousands of kilometres an hour. They came raining in with murderous force, smashing up more debris to add to their swarm as they battered the orbital. Void shields on both sides pulsed with high energy impact splash patterns.

  Atarus moved in for the kill under the cover of the storm, targeting god-engines being stripped of their shields. A chunk of annihilated orbital slammed down directly on one of the Firebrands, smashing its void shields out and punching it flat into the metal. The impact wrinkled up the surrounding area as if it were ripples on water, and the maniple mates of the dead Titan were sent staggering. One fell. Another was turned about. Obstructions around Vulpa’s position broke up their coherency, but the meteor fall did the same to Atarus. Electromagnetic interference from the storm cut into the infosphere as easily as the meteors speared into the dead section of the station. The defence turrets went into overdrive. There were far too many pieces of debris, ranging from metal fragments to whole modules – so many they blocked out the sun as they sped overhead.

  Bavin sent. His thought patterns were breaking up. The wider connections between the Legio’s engines were failing.

  thought Harr­tek.

  ‘Seventh Maniple turn about!’ he yelled. ‘Prepare to engage flanking force!’

  Nuntio Dolores swung its left leg wide, turning its torso hard at the same time, and its right foot dug into metal as the impetus swivelled the giant war machine around. Harr­tek’s intuition was correct. Using the cover of the storm, four maniples of Legio Atarus had come upon them unawares. Harr­tek suspected they’d dropped through the meteors. He almost respected them for that.

  Already the outflankers were firing. Screaming his anger, Harr­tek urged Nuntio Dolores into a run. The reactor burned hot with the effort of forcing the Warlord’s mass into action. Cumbersome at first, the Titan built up speed, its awkward jog turning into an unstoppable charge.

  Chunks of debris slammed into the orbital in a constant rain. Void shields flared with such frequency the battlescape was lost to streamers of energy. Tocsins blurted terrified mewling beeps, and Harr­tek’s MIU displays were crowded with swarms of dots. A veil of shining purple light skinned rippling bubbles that encased each Titan. Hundreds of thousands of minute displacement flares prickled every shield from the impact of micro fragments. Weapons fire added to the effect, the void shields smearing plasma and las-light into glorious display.

  The other maniples were slow to respond. That nearest Harr­tek’s was occupied with the enemy to the front. Under fire from two sides, void shields collapsed in rapid succession, exposing the vulnerable, poorly armoured rears of the great machines. The static-crazed sensorium input ceased altogether for a moment as the reactor of Death’s Monument went critical, swamping the shields of its fellows and scooping out a shallow hemisphere from the skin of the orbital. A rush of expanding gaseous metal slammed into Nuntio Dolores. Hi
s outer shield collapsed, and the war engine staggered. Sparks showered from systems blown by the violent overload. Servitors moaned from their cocoons of wires.

  Nuntio Dolores ran into the teeth of the enemy, its maniple brothers close behind. Ultimate Sanction took a series of withering hits to the front, blasting out its shields. Quick to exploit the collapse, two of the outflanking Warlords hammered the Reaver Dust of Ages. Its armour held, but it peeled away from the assault, its princeps Maklaren using the vox in panic, shouting about loss of atmosphere.

  Durant brought Tenebris Vindictae close to Nuntio Dolores, so the Warlords were shoulder to shoulder. Proximity alarms bleated both in the MIU infoscape and within the czella. Harr­tek rebuked the lesser systems for their fear, and they fell silent.

  His Reavers and Warlords fell back, cutting short their runs towards the outflanking force to provide covering fire. They followed Harr­tek’s preference, picking on the leading Atarus engine and lambasting it with everything they had. Its shields burst quickly. The armour followed. Harr­tek had a fleeting glimpse of its name and history. A roll of honour stretching back seven hundred years was cut short, and the smoking remains of the Titan fell down in ridiculous, low gravity slow motion.

 

  A spray of laser-shot lit up Harr­tek’s forward aspect, and the enemy loomed suddenly gigantic before him. His voids slammed into those of a rival Warlord bearing the name plate Exultant across its chest. Violent emissions of energy enwrapped both machines as Harr­tek forced his way through the shields. The fields pressed into one another, until with a blinding flash they merged into one bulging, squirming spheroid. Tenebris Vindictae plodded past the embattled pair, seeking its own prey, as Harr­tek made ready to kill.

  Brazen horns sang in his mind.

  Exultant swung about and stepped back, trying to bring its primary weapons to bear as Harr­tek raised the arioch power claw and drove forwards hard. He roared with ecstasy as the fist contacted, skidded free, then grabbed, taking hold of the enemy Titan’s volcano cannon. Ignoring the many impacts rattling off his armour from Exultant’s defensive guns, with a mighty wrench Nuntio Dolores yanked the cannon free. Gas and fluids gushed out from severed feed lines. Sparks played around the stump of the arm.

  The enemy machine was not down yet. It took two steady steps back, carapace and remaining arm-weapon swivelling to come to bear on Nuntio Dolores. Harr­tek fought against his Titan’s battle rage to send it to the side as a spear of light a metre wide slammed into Nuntio Dolores’ thigh. A scatter of false pain crawled across Harr­tek’s own leg, so intense it threatened him with a manifestation of machinic stigmata. He bit hard against it, and some small, insignificant part of the blended man-machine tasted blood in its mouth. Victory was in his grasp.

  he ordered.

  Nothing happened.

  he ordered again. Still nothing happened. He felt the unity of mind and machine part, fraying like cut rope. Nuntio Dolores was rebelling against him, pushing him out. It was raging, desperate to grapple with the machine that had wounded it. As a furious steed bucks its rider, Harr­tek was cast from the Titan’s embrace.

  He came out gasping, a migraine splitting his brain with the force of an axe. It was all he could do not to rip out the neural shunt.

  ‘What’s happening?’ shouted the moderati steersman.

  ‘All controls are down!’ shouted the primus.

  The Exultant was drawing back for another shot. Its cannons levelled.

  ‘Get us out of here!’ shouted Harr­tek.

  ‘I can’t!’ responded the moderati steersman.

  Nuntio Dolores was moving forwards. Without the aid of its human crew, its motions were uncoordinated. It raised its volcano cannon and fired, the shot going hopelessly wide. It built up speed, power fist raised. The Atarus machine was moving back, guns on them, matching Nuntio Dolores pace for pace.

  The charging coils of Exultant glowed a dangerous blue.

  ‘Brace!’ yelled the moderati sensorius.

  Exultant opened fire with all of its remaining weapons. Beams of devastating energy crashed into Nuntio Dolores’ front. The first void shield evaporated, then the second, each failure sending lumens dancing within the czella and burning out circuits with feedback surges.

  The third shield fell, brought down by a combination of the meteor storm and Exultant’s guns. A laser blaster beam burst through the last shield and hit Nuntio Dolores square where its heart would have been, if it were a man. The Titan shuddered. Secondary explosions banged off like stubber fire in the lower decks. One of the moderati screamed and clawed at his helmet.

  Fire flickered inside the cabinet of a burned-out cogitator.

  Exultant began powering its weapons for the final kill.

  ‘No,’ said Harr­tek. ‘No.’

  He shut his eyes, forcing himself to ignore the situation outside, and dived deep into the manifold. Nuntio Dolores had been shocked into quiescence. Wasting no time, Harr­tek pictured himself as a slayer of gods, and enveloped the machine-spirit in his soul.

  Neural interfacing realigned. When he opened his eyes again, he was looking back out of the machine’s augury arrays.

  ‘Forwards!’ screamed Harr­tek.

  He had no time to wait for the others to rejoin the manifold. The strain of dominating the Titan on his own threatened to burn out his mind, but he forced the machine into a headlong charge. The others rallied, their mental presences floating into the manifold and conjoining with the machine and the princeps. Nuntio Dolores rammed into the enemy, knocking it hard.

  Their minds once more locked in total synchronisation, Harr­tek, the arioch weapon’s moderati and the Titan punched forwards like a pugilist in the ring. The arioch’s inbuilt megabolters chewed up the metal flesh of Nuntio Dolores’ foe, then slammed into the cockpit head.

  Augur lenses burst. Half the shell of the head was annihilated. Harr­tek caught a most satisfying glimpse of moderati flailing in fires fed by ruptured oxygen piping as the Titan reeled backwards, and fell into a slump. It attempted to rise, and was still, its face still burning.

  the Titan’s tallying system announced.

  Harr­tek’s Titan thrust forward its mighty chin and let out a silent bellow. War-horns worked without effect in the vacuum, but the cry was heard in every other machine of the Legio Vulpa, and they responded in kind.

  Stepping back from his victim, Harr­tek-Nuntio Dolores took stock. The debris storm was racing away, taking its deadly hail with it and leaving a field of wrecked god-machines in its wake. Many were dead on both sides, small fires burning in their shells where atmospheric cyclers still worked to feed the hungry flames. Bavin’s machine still stood, but was silent. No response could be drawn from the princeps seniores.

  The war raged on. Harr­tek came back into himself.

  Atarus were gaining the upper hand. The Firebrands’ charge had broken the Death Stalkers’ formation, and combat had devolved into a series of one-on-one fights. This was war as fought by gladiators. Atarus outnumbered them. Enemy engines paced around those of Legio Vulpa, raking them with weapons fire from multiple angles. The outflanking manoeuvre under the cover of the storm had been unexpected, bold, and very nearly disastrous for the Death Stalkers.

  There remained one last card to play.

  The counter in the MIU ticked down to zero.

  he shouted in his mind, sending his and Nuntio Dolores’ combined will out into the demi-Legio as an undeniable command.

  Harr­tek was past caring if he was obeyed or not. He shut down his own sensorium. Three terrible, sightless seconds crept by, a darkness rocked by weapons impact, while Nuntio Dolores bridled again at his control, and then there was light.

  Somehow it penetrated through the shuttered windows.
A searing luminance that outshone even the blinding glare of engine death sent wounding shards into the czella of Nuntio Dolores. The blades of light moved around, and passed.

  Harr­tek commanded.

  Nuntio Dolores opened its eyes.

  The sun had joined their struggle. Pulsing aftershocks of radiance washed over the battlefield. The void and everything in it was lost to a haze of white. Harr­tek could barely see, and these little storms were but the following waves of a stellar tsunami, a discharge of highly energised photons bullied out of Theta-Garmon by the arcane sciences of the New Mechanicum. It hurt his very being to look into the brilliance, but he could see.

  Legio Atarus were blind. So too were the fleets of the Imperial Army and Navy. Many of the great ships warring in the void drifted powerless, overwhelmed by the flare’s electromagnetic pulse. But fewer of the Warmaster’s forces were affected. Through the backwash of interference, a coded signal burst on all frequencies, conveyed to voidship, machine, man and all things in between.

  Execute.

  Harr­tek grinned wolfishly behind his many masks. Behind the face of the Titan, behind the collar of brass, behind the stretched facsimile of humanity he wore on his face, something savage snarled.

  He singled out a staggering Reaver Titan in Atarus’ gold, red and black, and moved in to attack.

  Slaughter was upon the Firebrands, Harr­tek at the fore.

  Twenty-One

  An Offer Re-evaluated

  Three days passed as Harr­tek wrestled with his decision. During that time his headache tortured him to the point of madness. It was a pain he would have gladly endured, if it would bring him back the mastery of his war machine. The moment Nuntio Dolores had slipped free of his guidance tormented him. First, accusations of cowardice, now this. He didn’t think the lapse had been noticed, but if it happened once it could happen again. He would be finished.

  In the end he could see no other way. He had to approach the magos.