Legacies of Betrayal

by Various

  ‘Let them see,’ Jo’phor muttered. ‘Let them see that the shadows of Isstvan harbour the flames of vengeance, and that those flames will burn them all.’

  Then he departed, following his brothers away from the traitors’ inevitable pursuit.

  Across the plain they march, the Titans of the Legio Praesagius, the mechanical giants of the True Messengers. The shadows of the behemoths pass over low buildings, eclipsing the marshalling yards on the outskirts of Ithraca as Titan after Titan follows in single file. The ground shakes to the thud of their ponderous steps.

  Battle Group Argentus brings up the rear of the long line, the third such formation in the column. At the fore strides Evocatus, great Warlord, largest of the machines, whose adamantium skeleton was first raised a thousand years earlier.

  After the Warlord come Victorix, Deathrunner and Firewolf. Classed as Scout Titans, the Warhounds are still many metres tall, capable of obliterating entire battle companies, pack-hunters that are a match for even the largest war engines.

  Next is Inculcator, a Reaver-class engine, stalwart of the line, whose weapon systems can level city blocks and lay waste to lesser foes in a heartbeat.

  Ancient war engines, old even when the Great Crusade began, striding purposefully towards the mustering field. Old save for one machine – Invigilator brings up the rear of the battle group. Newly commissioned, the Reaver Titan’s blue and gold livery is freshly painted, the threads of the banners hanging from weapon mounts coloured bright, metal gleaming with recently applied unguents and blessed oils.

  Invigilator’s commander leads the battle group. Princeps Senioris Mikal, veteran of many battles, hears the general order to halt. He eases his consciousness deeper into the mind impulse unit of his war engine to survey the scene, his senses moving from sight and sound and touch to thermal optics, frequency audit and tactile resonance.

  For a moment he feels weak, a man of flesh and bone with a slowly beating heart trying to tame a colossus of metal driven on by the unimaginable energies of a plasma reactor. Invigilator’s crude awareness defies him briefly, almost petulant as Mikal imposes his will upon the machine-spirit.

  Several kilometres ahead, the ships of the Mechanicum wait for the Titans to board. With magnified vision, Mikal sees the war engines of the Legio Infernus – the Fire Masters. Through the haze he sees dozens of Titans, black enamelled hulls decorated with yellow flames. Their column is breaking, spreading out between the super-lifters that will transport the Titans to orbit.

  ‘Order to Argentus,’ Mikal transmits. ‘General halt. There seems to be some delay ahead. Our friends in the Fire Masters are being laggards. Princeps Maximus, what are our comrades doing? They are blocking our path into the mustering zone.’

  There is no response, only static and a few seconds of garbled voices.

  ‘Calth command, this is Princeps Mikal of the Legio Praesagius. Reporting communications fluctuation. What is the status of Ithraca embarkation?’

  Still there is no reply. Only the hiss of a dead channel.

  ‘Moderati Lockhandt, run full track diagnos–’ The order becomes a gasp of shock. ‘By the Omnissiah!’

  The cloudy sky reddens with a false sun. Scarlet shadows dapple the landing field as miniature stars seem almost to descend from the heavens, their ruddy light glinting from the transports waiting for the Titans.

  There is a moment of perfect silence.

  Then the stars strike the landing field, smashing into armoured hulls, searing through drop craft in blossoms of devastating fire. The thunder of detonations is picked up by Invigilator’s audio relays. Aghast, Mikal is speechless as great beams of energy lance down from orbit, obliterating temporary worker blocks and overseers’ villas as they rip across Ithraca. In moments the city is aflame, bright and harsh in Mikal’s artificial sight.

  Half a kilometre above the landing field a lance beam slices through an ascending transport, carving its engines in a plume of escaping plasma. The ship’s climb stalls, its momentum carrying it over the city in a declining arc.

  A rough voice breaks through the crackle of transmission static.

  ‘...no control at all. Coming down in Ithraca, close to the admin... Repeat, this is Eighty-Three-TA-Aratan. We have been struck by orbital fire. No contr...’

  Mikal would look away but every sensor of the Invigilator is fixated upon the crashing ship, making him a reluctant witness as it ploughs through towering hab-blocks, trailing debris and wreckage.

  As he tries to process this flurry of information, new sensor readings crowd Mikal’s thoughts from the systems of Invigilator. Energy spikes erupt into life amidst the ruin of the landing site. The Fire Masters are powering their void shields. Miraculously, it appears that their Titans were unharmed by the extraordinary bombardment.

  Yet the miracle is soon proven to be complicity.

  War horns blare. Plasma destructors, volcano guns and gatling blasters unleash their fury against the Praesagius Titans at the head of the column. The distant sound of cannon fire and the snap of lasweapons seems muted and unreal. With their own void shields inactive, the True Messengers are easy targets, and dozens are executed in the space of a few heartbeats.

  Invigilator responds more swiftly than its crew as alarm chimes and threat warnings ring across the bridge of the Titan.

  ‘Raise shields!’ Mikal snaps the order without thought, sending the command through the systems of his machine. ‘All power to shields and locomotion.’

  He feels the strength of Invigilator surge through him, the energy of the plasma reactor like fire in his blood as it crackles through void shield generators and flows into the Titan’s legs.

  The impetuous young machine, stirred from near-dormancy, wants to fight. The instinct to return fire is almost overwhelming, but Mikal cuts through the urge with cold reason. The True Messengers are outnumbered. Badly outnumbered. The Aratan was carrying much of their strength and the Fire Masters have a superior position.

  ‘Battle Group Argentus, fall back to the city. All engines that can heed my command, fall back and regroup!’

  Even as he says the words, Invigilator responds, swinging ponderously away from the devastation unleashed at the Titan fields, heading for the sanctuary of Ithraca.

  Unable to believe their eyes, the people packing the third floor balcony stare in amazement and horror at the destruction being set free across their city. The wrath of giants is being unleashed in a blinding display of fire and shell, laying ruin to great swathes of Ithraca’s skyline. Most of the observers are wives and children of the Imperial Army regiments called to the Calth muster, their gasps and cries of fright lost in the tumult.

  There is one whose eyes are not directed at the Titan battle, but instead her gaze is in the opposite direction, towards the centre of the city where the transport ship fell. Varinia’s thoughts are of her husband, Quintus, stationed with his regiment. They said their goodbyes only hours before, and she knows he was at the government plaza to receive his company’s muster order. She cannot see the buildings but the tower of fire and smoke rising from the crash site fills her heart with anguish.

  A detonation close by, less than a kilometre away, rips her attention from thoughts of her husband. A Titan, a Reaver in black and red, stumbles at the far end of the avenue, its void shields flaring as it tramples across ground cars and topples into a five storey housing block.

  The battle is getting closer.

  ‘Pexilius,’ she whispers. She dashes back into the stairwell landing from the balcony, thoughts turned to her infant child in the nursery two floors up.

  She reaches the first landing at a full run, almost slipping in her haste as she turns at the next flight of steps.

  Then the front of the hab-block explodes, showering glass and chunks of plascrete down the stairwell, the fire of the detonation billowing over Varinia as she dives into a corner. Roof beams and ceiling panels fall.

  Dust clogs her mouth and nose, coating her pale skin and clingin
g to blond curls of hair. Her clothing is tattered in places, her face and arms scratched. There is a pain in her side and warm blood soaks her dress.

  ‘Pexilius!’ Her voice a scream, ignoring the agony of her wound, she clambers over a fallen beam and scrambles up the rubble-choked stairway. ‘Pexilius!’

  There are bodies, and parts of bodies, crushed in the tangle of fallen masonry. Someone croaks a cry for help, a broken-fingered hand reaching from the depths of the debris. She pushes past, heaving aside a fallen beam to get through. Varinia cannot stop to help. She has but one thought in her mind.

  Three whole floors have been smashed by the stray missile. Reaching the floor of the nursery, Varinia sees the flimsy door hanging by one hinge. She pushes through.

  ‘Pexilius!’ She stops, coughing hard in the dusty haze, the pause giving sense a chance to return. Her son cannot reply; he is only a few weeks old. Instead she calls for the nurse. ‘Lucretia? Lucretia? Anybody?’

  The nursery is in ruins, the brightly painted walls covered with black blast marks. Half the ceiling has fallen in, completely burying the area where the cots had been lined.

  Varinia screams again at the sight, every worst fear brought to stark life by the grim scene. She throws herself at the fallen tiles and plaster, cutting her hands and breaking her fingernails as she tears away lumps of masonry.

  ‘Lucretia! Is anybody alive? Is there anyone here? Make a noise. Oh, please, someone be alive. Please let my little Pexilius be alive.’

  Her tears wash into the caked dust on her face as she continues to dig.

  A cough attracts Varinia’s attention and she redoubles her efforts, aching limbs finding new strength. She hears rasping breath and pulls away a cracked ceiling tile to reveal the blood-covered face of old Lucretia. The nurse is twisted unnaturally, hunched over something.

  There is a wide gash down the side of her head, her face slick with blood.

  ‘Pexilius?’ Varinia whispers the word, in dread more than hope.

  ‘…just got him up… to feed…’

  Varinia does not know whether this is good or bad, but then poor Lucretia shifts her weight, pain contorting her face, to reveal a blue-swathed bundle underneath her.

  ‘My son! Lucretia, you saved him.’

  Varinia nearly snatches the dazed child from Lucretia’s weak grip, lifting his cheek to hers, holding him tight.

  Another explosion mere blocks away reminds her that they are not safe. Cradling tiny Pexilius in one arm, she tries to move the pillar pinning down the nurse but it will not move. The old woman’s eyelids flutter and she slumps, her chest unmoving.

  ‘Thank you, Lucretia. Thank you, thank you, thank you…’

  Varinia’s tears of gratitude spill onto the dead woman as she leans forward to kiss her wrinkled brow. Then she composes herself, for the sake of her son.

  ‘Right, Pexilius, let’s get you out of here.’

  Her forced jollity cannot hold back the dismay she feels. Varinia heads back to the stairwell, picking through the rubble with her child clasped to her chest. She reaches the floor below and stops, suddenly wary.

  The building shudders, more debris clattering from the ruined floors above. Again and again, something pounds the earth close by, slow and methodical. Varinia screams as an immense shadow looms beyond the broken windows and stops. With a rising whine, massive multi-barrelled cannons spin into motion, directed at some distant target. Knowing what is to come, Varinia dashes into one of the rooms adjoining the landing, shielding her son with her body.

  The Titan opens fire.

  The noise is deafening; the rapid boom of ignited shells, the shockwaves shattering what glass is left in the windows, causing a fresh storm of shards to hurtle around Varinia as she hugs Pexilius tight and throws herself against a wall.

  She cries wordlessly, trying to cover her son’s ears as best she can, her own eardrums throbbing with pain, the primal scream drowned out by the Titan’s cannonade.

  And then, numb silence.

  Its mighty footsteps shaking the building, the Titan sets off once more, pitching the interior of the hab-block into darkness for a moment. Varinia sees a table, upended but intact. She seeks shelter behind this flimsy barricade.

  ‘We’ll stay here, little one, my precious son. We’ll stay here and they’ll come for us. Father is fighting now. But he’ll be thinking of us. Yes he will. He’ll be coming. He knows where we are and he’ll come for us.’

  As the din of the Titan’s passing fades, Varinia curls into a protective ball around her child.

  ‘We’ll be safe here until father comes home.’

  The screams of the fleeing crowds can barely be heard over the incessant blare of the Fire Masters’ war horns. Their Scout Titans lead the attack, fast and mobile, driving the populace of Ithraca before them like cattle.

  There is a harsh logic to their clamour: targets on the street are easier to destroy. The purpose of this cacophony is to rout the people of Ithraca from their homes and workshops, sparing the renegade regiments following in the Titans’ wake the miserable task of clearing the buildings. There are tens of thousands of soldiers flooding into Ithraca now, on foot and in transports, the way paved by the terror unleashed by the Fire Masters.

  Speed is essential. With surprise, the Word Bearers and their allies have gained the upper hand. With speed, they will seize victory.

  At the head of the chase is Princeps Tyhe in his Warhound, Denola. Thousands pour through the streets in front of him, surging like waves down boulevards and alleys. He is one with his Titan, weapons spewing explosive rounds into the midst of the panicked crowds, gouging the ferrocrete roadway and shredding grounded civilian skimmers trapped by the press of the throng.

  ‘Is it not beautiful, my sweet?’ He caresses the interface of the mind impulse unit. ‘See the ants spilling from their nests to be crushed. So weak and pathetic. But kill them we must! Our comrades in the Word Bearers require deaths, and deaths we shall give them. Deaths by the dozen! Deaths by the hundred, by the thousand!’

  With Denola are two more Warhounds, splitting through the streets to herd the civilians of Ithraca to their doom, but Tyhe pays them no heed. He will not share the glory of battle. His is a world that consists only of hydraulically powered limbs and heavy servos, plasma cores and weapon systems, targeting arrays and autoloaders.

  ‘Yes, yes! The death of this rabble will make us stronger. The Princeps Maximus swore to that. Fortunate was the day he heeded the call of Kor Phaeron and swore us to this cause. Have you ever known such freedom, such power? We have become one with the Machine-God through destruction! Gone are the shackles of the Emperor! The Machine-God is set free from the bonds of servitude to Terra. Horus has shown us the way and we follow gladly!

  ‘They thought to make us a slave, glorious Denola. They muzzled us and told us when we could hunt. Yes, I feel the same savage glee that roars in your plasma heart. It beats as my own. When we are done clearing out the vermin, the true hunt will begin.

  ‘Remember how the True Messengers fled from our guns? That will not save them. They will be shown the lie of their name, for there is no message more true than the one we bring. We are the harbingers of a new dawn, the heralds of death! We are the Fire Masters, the bringers of woe! And as we set the sorrow of our foe upon the fires of battle, it will raise us up beyond all–’

  ‘Tyhe, you are moving out of formation.’

  The warning from his fellow princeps is meaningless, just syllables barely understood through the pounding of blood and the thump of pneumatics. Tyhe laughs. He can feel piles of corpses underfoot as Denola strides along the street, the bodies pulped beneath the weight of its tread.

  ‘The enemy are massing around the crash site of the Aratan. Legion command is issuing orders to regroup. We cannot attack piecemeal.’

  The words irritate Tyhe, like the buzzing of a gnat. He simply ignores them, stalking further into the city, guns blazing.

  The undersides of the smoke
clouds shrouding Ithraca are lit by the flare and flash of explosions and searing las-blasts. Two battles rage, both desperate in their own way. In the buildings and streets the traitor regiments of the Imperial Army sweep through Ithraca in long columns of tanks and transports. Artillery and self-propelled guns pound the city blocks from the outskirts, paving the way for the infantry with a creeping barrage. Street-to-street, the scattered forces still loyal to the defence of Calth sell their lives for every metre the enemy advance; each life expended to buy time for the shock of treachery to pass and the defenders to organise.

  Aboard Invigilator, the ground battle pales into insignificance compared to the mighty rage of the Titans. The men and women hurling themselves at the traitor advance with desperate abandon, the horde of rebels pushing into the Ithraca – they are as nothing compared to the war engines that stride through the city. They crash through buildings and stomp across plazas, cracking ferrocrete underfoot as they manoeuvre to catch one another in deadly crossfires. Flights of rockets and hails of shells rip through the choked air. The crackle of overloading void shields shatters windows and sets fire to tree-lined avenues.

  The battle group have extricated themselves from the immediate threat of the Infernus assault, but several mighty Warlords of the Legio Praesagius have been brought down in the withdrawal. Their sacrifice has allowed Mikal and others time to get their war engines to full battle readiness.

  Though outnumbered, the True Messengers will not surrender Ithraca meekly.

  Away from the landing fields communications are better, though patchy, and Mikal can speak with the rest of Argentus. The traitors must have employed some kind of damping screen, and there is still no contact from Legion command or the other battle groups. For the moment Mikal must lead Argentus without any grander strategy to follow.

  The Aratan becomes the focus of his efforts. Trapped on board are the principal engines of the Titan Legion, and if they can be salvaged then they could well turn the tide. The Fire Masters have apparently come to the same conclusion, and enemy Titans are also moving through the city towards the crash site. Battle Group Argentus were the least mauled by the traitor ambush, and lead the way for the six surviving Warlords of the True Messengers. If the Battle Titans can secure the Aratan and guard the area from infantry assault, there may still be a chance of blunting the enemy attack.