Aravain dipped his head.
'We have the onslaught on the bridge checked for now, brothers, and for the most part our defences are holding' said Duriel, breathlessly. 'Thrall armour continues to push us hard, but it is the khrave themselves who are the real threat.’ Again, Aravain experienced a palpable wave of bitterness and failure from the mind of the iron castellan. 'Nothing but fire or blade will touch them, and even then... even then they take more to kill than anything so insubstantial has a right to endure. If not for them then I am sure I could hold their slave warriors at bay indefinitely.'
'And what of the Dreadwing?' said Trigaine.
'The khrave have learned to fear their flame, but they have learned it well. The interemptors of the Dreadwing are too few, and the khrave too cunning to manifest where they can be found in force.'
'What of these Warhounds?' said Aravain. 'You cannot let two god-machines stand idle while our brothers perish.’
'I dare not do otherwise,' said Duriel. 'The khrave would twist their princeps’ choler against us the moment they were plugged into their cockpits.'
Aravain turned to his preceptor. 'That xenos-controlled Titan must be the psychic foci for a hundred khrave minds. Destroy it and the feedback will undoubtedly shatter their collective overmind more completely than the deaths of a million thralls. That will satisfy our duty to the Lion.'
'Then that is what we will do,' said Trigaine.
'The khrave will fall if you hit them with sufficient force, but that thing?' Duriel shook his head. 'Nothing I have yet brought to bear has even left a mark. I would have pulled my warriors off the road and into the keep to reinforce Redloss and his interemptors but. Lion forgive me, they are all that is slowing it down."
'What can you do to aid us, brother?' Trigaine asked Duriel.
'I will hold this ground for the Lion. Neither man nor khrave will trouble you while I stand.’
Trigaine nodded his thanks, ejecting a spent mindphage canister from his Strife-era proto-shotcannon and slotting another into the breech. 'Knights of Santales, to me. For the Lion, and for Caliban, we go to slay a beast.’
V
The glimmering of the teleportation beams faded, motes of incorporeality bleeding back into the ether from which they had stolen through. Cone were the buttressed walls and lead-jacketed power reservoirs of the teleportariunv In its place was a corridor of such implausible tenuity and length that it seemed to warp the adjoining dimensions of width, depth and time. The material was of a kind that magos explorators attached to the 2003rd had found all over Maripose and the Vaniskray: cold like metal, pliable like plas-tek, devoid of any colour or reflection as though it existed beneath even the narrowest wavelengths of light. The brief exhalation of teleported air dispersed into the corridor, and in its place a disturbing odour arose from the xenos ship: it was akin to decomposing insect matter and leaf mould, like shrinking oneself to the microscopic and venturing into a spider's nest
The Lion remained where he stood as Holguin, Herodael and the Deathwing Companions spread out to secure the teleportation site. The veteran warriors were avatars of the real in their Tactical Dreadnought plate, anchors of hyper-solidity in a maddeningly pan-dimensional space. The curved plates of gloss-finished ceramite and adamantium were richly embossed and filigreed, oath scrolls affixed with blobs of wax bearing the lion rampant of the primarch's seal. Their long white surplices were specifically tailored to such gargantuan frames, and breathed with the rumbling exhalations of the immense powered suits.
The Lion too had come girded for battle. The Leonine Panoply stood as proof against the khrave ship's temporal contortions. Whether that lay in the artifice of the Emperor or the being of the Lion was unclear. The curved plates of ebon ceramite gleamed like polished jet. Gilt scrollwork glittered more brightly than it had mere moments before aboard the Invincible Reason. The forest reliefs seemed to be set more deeply. The sole modification he had made to his raiment was to his cloak, which he had underlain with a thin, psychically dampening etherium plaid that he had personally drawn from the Santales armourium. He wielded the Lion Sword in one hand. The Fusil Actinaeus was drawn, ready, firmly gripped in the other.
A pace ahead, shielding his liege with his own bulk, Holguin surveyed the teleportation site. The action required the complete rotation of his upper body, his helmet so deeply embedded within moulded plates of ceramite and flexsteel rings that it could not move independently of his chest. 'We are aboard one of the khrave ships.' His voice growled, cracked and metallised by his helm's augmitter grille.
The khrave ship,' the Lion corrected. "We have been shadowing it for several hours.'
'I low have they been unaware of us?’
They think too highly of their mental powers. It does not occur to them that their strength might be turned against them, but what my crew does not see, the khrave too do not see.'
It is so quiet,' said Holguin.
'It will not long remain so.'
The lord of the khrave was aboard this ship. The Lion fell it. Ever since his first, stolen insight through Savine's eyes into the Segmentum-spanning collective of the khrave he had fell the presence of their master. The so-called autochthonar. The first. The Ender of Worlds. He felt it still, lodestones pushing against one another, the force of their negative attraction growing ever more irresistible as the distance between them shrank.
He was certain the autochthonar must feel it too.
With senses as attuned to subtle pulls and vibrations as those of a primarch, one could reliably judge the speed, posture and battle readiness of an Imperial vessel, and even the position and distance of the nearest gravity well. Here though there was only silence. If external sources of gravity had any purchase on the matter of the khrave ship then it did not penetrate this deeply into its structure. Whatever arcane force powered the ship's passage through the materium, it was silent and it was still, wholly unknown to the sciences of mankind. To humanity's betterment.
'We destroy the foe by any means possible. Move swiftly and strike hard - let no trick or show of strength delay our judgement now, my sons. Battle has been joined, and there can be no stay of execution. This ends on my blade.' With the instinct of a hunter, the Lion pointed down the corridor. That way.'
The Terminators drew into files, two by two: however the dimensions of the corridors appeared to fluctuate they were never wide enough for three to move abreast. They ordered themselves relative to the Lion even as the primarch strode between them, equal numbers before and behind, lightning claws and storm shields forward, rotor cannons and cyclone launchers to the rear. Holguin and Herodael stayed close to their liege's side. The former wielded a crackling power fist and the brick-like machinery of a combi-bolter. The latter held a Terranic greatsword clasped between two immense gauntlets.
They broke into a run.
Even given the psychic baffling of his own disciplined mind, coupled with the null-effects of the etherium veil, the Lion knew they would not have long before the khrave became alerted to their presence.
The passage constricted like an intestinal wall. To those at the rear of the column, their brothers ran across the ceiling Sounds trembled through the alien material. Scratching. Gnawing. Muttering. Doggerel gibberish that each warrior's sensorium systems translated into curses and threats to be endlessly recycled across their helmplate displays.
Die. Die. Die. Die. Die.
'Dark Angels,' cried the Lion, and for a moment his raised voice calmed the warp-craft of the xenos ship. 'To arms!'
A gangling khrave-form flopped through the substance of the wall like some manner of pre-term reptile through the shell membrane of an egg. It materialised a third of the way down the Terminator column, rendering a veteran knight and his armour to an organic-base ceramite slush before a blistering return salvo of combi-bolter fire riddled its psy-shield. Ricochets burst against Terminator plate and strange xenos plastics, but the sheer volume of fire was enough to penetrate the psy-shield. Mass-reactive
explosions threw off lumps of carapace and brackish haemolymph. The khrave flailed in mute agony, pinned to the wall by the hail of bolter fire until a dousing with lit promethium from a Terminator's heavy flamer finally put it down.
The corridor quivered with the khrave's psychic death shriek.
The Lion drove his Companions on.
From that point forward there would be no respite. Khrave crawled through the walls. They dropped from the ceiling. The ship's very state of matter answered to its masters' abominable collective will. Psychic blasts reduced hulking champions to subatomic particles or soups of glowing plasma. A knight bellowed, unloading his combi-bolter into the floor as tenebrous claws reached up from below to drag him down, the stoic warrior screaming as the ground again became solid with his legs inside.
The Deathwing's answer was as it always was, a hail of automatic fire and righteous flame.
In the midst of every onslaught the Lion was their rock, the steadfast core of every defence and the leading edge of every sally. Where he held fast the khrave's powers wavered and the Deathwing gunned them down. Where he drove forwards they fell before him like moths before a burning torch, the Lion Sword moved as if it were an extension of his will, the vengeance of Terra given a bladed edge and a killing halo. It severed clawed limbs and eyeless heads. It crunched through exoskeleton and kinetic shields. Khrave warrior forms, all claws and spines and weaponised aggression, swept at him with banshee shrieks and died to the last. Fiery blasts of the Fusil Actinaeus turned those his blade could not reach into glowing ectoplasm. Every death sent a shiver through the invisible web that bonded the xenos and their vessel, every one stoking them to greater heights of ferocity in defence of their nest. His armour had been gouged to bare ceramite. His cloak was torn. His hair fell from its circle! of jewelled ceramite. splotched like oath scrolls to armour with the wax of transhuman blood. But always the Lion pushed on. I le was an unstoppable force, impossible to deflect from his course even as his Companions struggled to match him.
By the time the primarch had carved his way through the xenos hordes, the nearest Companion to him was Herodael, battling the warp claws of a warrior khrave a hundred metres away Or so it looked. Time and distance aboard this ship were mutable, and not to be relied upon.
Alone, he advanced into an ovoid chamber, fudging the vessel solely on its exterior aspect, it might have been the only such feature of note in its entire twenty-kilometre needle-length span. Instinct told him that this was all a vessel of the khrave required. It was enginarium, sensorium, aegis, weapons: the heart of the web from which a sufficiently powerful nexus of minds could be oriented and control all things.
A throne of shadow hovered, unsupported, above the chamber's medial point.
The Lion was a singular being, accustomed to the potency of singular beings. What he sensed from the creature installed upon that throne was not the golden luminosity of the Emperor, nor even the thinly veiled aura of the Crimson King. It was a subcutaneous bleed of warp energy, a bruise under the skin of the materium. It was an abomination that had risen to kingship over abominations.
Holstering the Fusil Actinaeus, he took the Lion Sword in a two-handed grip.
The lord of the khrave.
The autochthonar.
The xenos lord was cracked and skeletal, mummified by incalculable age and incredible power. Force enough to flay the souls of ten thousand men crackled unspent across withered carapace. Its enlarged cranium was fringed with backswept horns. A crown of trigonometric shapes and unknowable glyphs sat a centimetre above its sunken brow on a crackling cushion of psychic repulsion. Its face was eyeless, featureless, like metal smoothed by acid, and yet the impression it forced on the eyes of the beholder was of colossal, devastating awareness.
Here, it said, is a feeing that has outlived younger galaxies, and the power of its proclamation overrode even the lion's resolve.
The primarch staggered as the khrave tore into his mind, plundering it of every secret and probing at every point of weakness, inflaming every remembered insult and half-feigned rivalry' into a self-aggravated ulcer in his soul. T his was an entity that predated even the star-empires of old, spawned by evil, a living weapon for the spread of anguish and terror amongst the sentient races. It had learned to reproduce, outlived its long-forgotten creators, and thrived in a galaxy ripe with chaos and strife.
The apogee of humanity's evolution was, it promised, but a footnote in the long gestation of its existence.
The Lion gritted his teeth, tightening his grip on his sword. The autochthonar's mummified husk emitted an arachnoid click as, with strength of will, the Lion slowly forced its tendrils back into its own mind.
Strike off the head and the body would perish. What was true of all creatures was true doubly of the khrave. They were inextricably connected, independent thinking entities but with minds fused into a hierarchy that answered to one being alone.
The autochthonar lifted its shrivelled body from the throne as though drawn upwards by the magnetic attraction of an electrical cloud.
'To the Lion!' bawled Herodael.
A violent shockwave pulsed from the autochthonar's mind. It struck the Lion with the force of a thunder hammer between the eyes. The Lion reeled back The aftershocks were still firing through his skull as Holguin and the Deathwing, breaching the command chamber in his wake, were tossed aside like saplings before an atomic blast.
The chamber's dimensions contracted to a sword's point as the mind of one accustomed to conducting its thoughts across thousands of light years and through billions of minds focused its intellect solely and squarely upon the Lion. The autochthonar descended through a halo of sparking warp energies. Clawed feet touched the ground. Drawing one age-stiffened limb across its body, it summoned a blade of shivered realspace as, silently as stalking insects, ten, fifteen, then twenty-five warrior khrave leapt through the curtain of ether and into the attack.
VI
The Knights of Santales ran towards the khrave-Titan.
The warriors streamed between crippled and abandoned tanks like an uprushing wave through rocks l ire rippled, popped and cracked. Uncanny beams and projectiles stabbed up at the giant war machine. Missiles and rocket-propelled grenades packed with mind-shredding compounds burst against its wavering form. Its shape bent and contorted like burnt elastic, a tortured whine passing out through the realms of the psychic.
Blood trickled from both of Aravain's nostrils. Hyper coagulants clogged his nose. He breathed through his mouth, the recycled air in his helmet as cold as void ice, and pointed his pistol upwards.
He emptied the magazine with the thoughtless frenzy of a startled huntsman unloading his weapon into the dark. Were he to stop and think he would decry the ludicrosity of assaulting a Titan with a pistol, but it was having an effect. The gun chipped at its physical armour as effectually as if he attacked a glacier with a knife, but he was hitting armour. Somehow, the onslaught of witch-denying firepower from the Saniales had dragged the war machine's form more fully into the corporeal.
The massive wall-guns of the Vaniskray thundered. Neutron lances speared across prismatic skin. Battle cannon shells exploded in psychedelic patterns. The cherry glow of thousands of wall-mounted beam weapons refracted off its multifaceted shell, oranges, yellows and reds splitting off into a thousand beams of infinite black. In spite of its immensity, its emergent solidity, the Titan twisted and squirmed under the battery
Aravain fell into cover. It was a pillbox, a trapezoidal block of prefabricated rockcrete that had been deposited onto an artificial promontory. Mineral-veined lumps of rock armour surrounded it, and a hissing moat of seawater as transient as the waves that delivered it. Aravain reloaded, wincing at the psychic-null touch of the charge cells as he exposed them. Shaking his head, he looked out onto the esplanade. Two full battle companies of Dark Angels lay strewn over the road, the waves working patiently to line them up into ranks as they dragged the heavy bodies slowly towards the rocks. Divorced from t
heir companies, glitching machine-spirits sought to resist: tanks rolled jerkily backwards, firing fitfully on the roiling Titan. Aravain flinched back into cover as a Deimos-pattern Predator Executioner exploded, a catastrophic overheat ripping its turret-mounted plasma destructor apart in a geyser of crystal-blue plasmic fire.
Waves of disillusionment and dread rolled from the khrave-Titan as it shrugged off the Vaniskray's firepower. Its motions now were unsubtle, moving not in the manner of a dishonoured warrior's shadow but as something planktonic, propelling one limb ahead of itself before oozing after it Aravain fended off its psychic attacks, reaching for the old Northwilds prayers he had memorised as a child, as he watched Brigaine and the rest of the Santales continue their assault. Before him, a stasis missile looped out from behind a wrecked Malcador. It exploded against the Titan's forward tendril. I*he god-engine swayed into the blast, its pedicel forced out of temporal alignment, but continued to advance.
Aravain stepped fully out of cover and emptied another magazine.
A Titan was a god on the battlefield, capable of obliterating entire armies unless opposed by another of its awesome kind. But Titans were not inviolate. They could fall to assault like any super-heavy vehicle or enemy fortress. Access hatches could be blown or forced. Moderaii could be killed. In this task, crack dose-combat troops such as the Legiones Astartes excelled. For this reason, the Imperium's Titan Legions were invariably escorted into battle by huge cohorts of corpus secutarii hoplites.
But the khrave-Titan offered no ports of access that Aravain could discern. If it had what a human princeps would recognise as a crew then it was far from the Sheitansvar, a conclave of unutterably inhuman minds directing their engine of annihilation from the reaches of high orbit.
Aravain continued to fire, those knights who had surged ahead of him now falling back as the near-solid Titan pressed its advance Me looked up as Dark Steed thundered in low from the direction of the ocean. Its twin-linked psionic beamers blasted parallel, hundred-metre-long tracks out of the esplanade before chewing up the Titan's lower anatomy. Trigaine gave hoarse voice to a cheer as the Storm Eagle rocketed over the Titan's shoulder. The Titan oozed its upper aspect to track it, and contemptuously returned fire. The witchlight of the empyrean seeped through its prismatic armour, and then snapped between it and the Storm Eagle like lightning. The gunship broke apart in mid-air, hitting the sea with a hissing spume.
Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Page 15
