Eye of Terra
Page 31
///ACCESSING EAGLE’S TALON INCIDENT, VOX FRAGMENT (V).///
///RECORD PROCEEDS. THE MACHINE IS ETERNAL. THE ETERNAL IS AN EXPRESSION OF THE MACHINE.///
GA-739: Squad Gammus in position. All units confirm readiness and location.
TH-144: <
AR-502: <
GA-739: On your word, Arcad.
AR-502: <
TH-144: <
AR-502: <
GA-739: Arcad?
AR-502: <
TH-144: <
AR-502: <
TH-144: <
GA-739: Permission denied.
TH-144: <
GA-739: Arcad, advance on the primary objective.
AR-502: <
GA-739: Move for the objective. You must reach it.
AR-502: <
GA-739: No, you will reach it. I will give you an opening.
AR-502: <
GA-739: Because my squad is about to hit the servitor controls for your sector.
///RECORD ACCESS PROCEEDING.///
The advantages of a force operating covertly against a more powerful enemy are few, but chief amongst them are the twin elements of surprise and confusion. If one individual can visit destruction across a large area in a short space of time, then that individual is not merely one in the minds of their foes – they are many. With planning and aggression they can seem to be everywhere.
Though the attached records are only auditory, it can be simply deduced that the three squads of the strike force were spread at different locations through the decks of the Eagle’s Talon. Squad Arcad, having taken casualties and under fire, had been attempting to reach the mission’s primary objective. Squad Gammus, the command squad for the mission, is located in the machine spaces of the higher decks. Squad Theophon is standing ready to cut the primary route by which enemy reinforcements can move into Arcad’s location.
///ACCESSING EAGLE’S TALON INCIDENT, VOX FRAGMENT (VI).///
///RECORD PROCEEDS. KNOWLEDGE AND THE MACHINE ARE ONE. THE MACHINE IS THE CHILD OF KNOWLEDGE.///
AR-502: <
GA-739: Detonating!
TH-144: <
GA-739: Arcad, move now!
AR-502: <
GA-739: Arcad! Arcad, what is your status?
AR-502: <
GA-739: You are wounded.
AR-502: <>
GA-739: Estimate time to target.
AR-502: <
GA-739: Theophon, close the chokepoint.
TH-144: <
AR-502: <
GA-739: Keep moving!
TH-144: <
GA-739: Strength, and direction?
TH-144: <
///RECORD ACCESS PROCEEDING.///
At this point, the probability of the mission succeeding without the loss of all forces was zero-point-zero. This fact would have been known to the Imperial Fists, but it would not have inhibited their ability to function. They, like all of us raised by the gene-seed of our sires, are not bound by the weaknesses of lesser beings.
They would have known that they would not survive. The only question would have been whether or not they could still succeed.
///TIME ELAPSED FROM PREVIOUS RECORD: 00.00.24.///
///ACCESSING EAGLE’S TALON INCIDENT, VOX FRAGMENT (VII).///
///RECORD PROCEEDS. THE MACHINE IS ALPHA. THE MACHINE IS OMEGA.///
TH-144: <
GA-739: How long until they are past you?
AR-502: <
TH-144: <
AR-502: <
GA-739: All units, this is Gammus. I am cutting prime arterial corridor. Charges firing in five, four, three, two... Detonate.
TH-144: <
GA-739: Theophon, how long until they bypass the wreckage?
TH-144: <
GA-739: Arcad, are you at the bridge atmosphere control?
AR-502: <
GA-739: Arcad?
TH-144: <
GA-739: Arcad, what is your strength and status?
AR-502: <
TH-144: <
GA-739: Arcad, what is your strength and objective status?
TH-144: <
GA-739: Arcad?
TH-144: <
GA-739: Arcad!
TH-144: <
GA-739: Arcad, can you hear me? Arcad, you have to reach the target.
TH-144: <
GA-739: If Arcad can reach the target-
TH-144: <
GA-739: I will not do it, Theophon. You were right. We do not slaughter our own allies for victory. I am a son of Rogal Dorn. I will not be the bringer of such annihilation.
TH-144: <
GA-739: We all die as we were meant to.
TH-144: <
GA-739: Better to be no more, than to betray what we once were.
TH-144: <
GA-739: Brother, no!
TH-144: <
TH-144: ///TRANSMISSION TERMINATED.///
GA-739: ///TRANSMISSION TERMINATED.///
///FILE ERROR.///
///VOX CAPTURE RECORD ENDS.///
The Eagle’s Talon fell from Tallarn’s sky. The blast wave from the initial impact travelled over three hundred kilometres. Winds
of over a thousand kilometres an hour spun debris from the ground, and scattered into the burning air. The engagement on the southern continent was ended in an instant. Earthquakes split the ground, and tidal waves surged across the sludge-clogged seas. Nucleonic fallout from the reactor failure rose up and spread across the atmosphere.
On any other planet this one event would have doomed all life to a slow death, smothered beneath a blanket of ashes. But this was Tallarn, and the dead planet could not die twice.
The consequences of this one incident are difficult to judge. Would events have unfolded differently if these few scraps of valour and foolishness had taken a different shape?
Perhaps.
For our purposes, it is enough to know that it happened. Will this split in character repeat within the Imperial Fists? Can advantage be taken from it? The questions remain open, but one thing can be certain – for this intelligence to be useful to our Legion it must remain unknown.
I tender my advice to you, my lord father, that once you have reviewed this record you consign it to oblivion.
///INITIATING RECORD PURGE.///
///ENTER THE WORD OF OBLITERATION TO PROCEED.///
///PURGE PROCESS COMPLETE.///
///SEEKING ALL ARCHIVE RECORDS DESIGNATED “EAGLE’S TALON”…///
///NO RECORDS FOUND.///
///THE MACHINE KNOWS ALL. ALL IS KNOWN IN THE MACHINE.///
Iron Corpses
David Annandale
The blast was a roar beyond all storms. It was bigger than sound. It shattered coherence. It was war in paroxysm, and it tore the battlefield apart.
It brought no triumph, only loss. And it stole a victory that had been in sight. The warsmith had seen it. Koparnos had seen the enemy falling.
But then had come another fall. An immense shape from the skies. Fire lighting the clouds. A shadow falling over the battle.
And then the blast.
The roar.
After the roar came only the shriek of the wind. It scoured the murdered land, kicking up dust clouds so thick that day and night were indistinguishable. Five days of wind. Five days of the unending howl of a war’s collapse into madness.
On the sixth day, the wind dropped just enough that day returned in the form of a deep, withered twilight.
It was time to abandon the Rhino. Koparnos was the only survivor. The troop hold had been breached. Sealed in the driver’s compartment, he had held out this long, but the poisons of Tallarn were working their way inside even here. His body temperature rose as his system fought to keep the weakened viruses out. There was no real shelter in the Rhino’s blasted shell, only a more prolonged end. Koparnos could hear the wind whistling through the rents in the armoured hull.
It was taunting him. It was the sound of defeat and death.
And it could outwait him.
For those five days, he had fought with the Rhino’s systems, trying to coax life back to its engines. His struggle was futile. The tank was as dead as his brothers. But during those days of night, there had been nothing else to attempt. Now he had a choice of endings.
He chose to go. Doing so would hasten his death, but he would act as though there were a real chance of shelter. His war was not over. Not yet.
Koparnos slid the driver’s door back and entered the troop compartment. His brother Iron Warriors were seated on the benches – they created an illusion not of life, but of discipline. Though their bodies had turned to sludge, their power armour remained upright, as if their corpses were still ready to march into battle at his command.
The dust and ash of Tallarn spiralled around their boots and fell upon their shoulders. It had already turned the iron gleam of their armour to a dun shadow. There was strength in the silhouettes, but it was slowly being buried. The wind would blow the dust into the Rhino until it filled the interior completely.
Koparnos climbed through the torn side hatch and out of the tomb.
The wind greeted him with its full howl. The dust clouds swirled around and past him, revealing and concealing the landscape. From one moment to the next, visibility went from zero to a thousand metres, and back to zero again. He saw the battlefield through shifting veils – huge, tortured shapes were a deeper black against the grey.
Those shadows were Titans.
Some had been melted into slag. They were now low, jagged hills. Others still stood, frozen in mid-combat. Allied and enemy alike, they had all died in the great roar. Between the motionless colossi were the tanks. The blast had hurled them across the plain. They lay variously upended, on their sides, and torn open. Koparnos had been lucky, then. Not many had landed intact.
The dust swirled over a portrait of a single moment of war, arrested in time. Koparnos was surrounded by towering gravestones. They were an iron cry of agony, preserved, extended, and given voice by the mindless shriek of the wind.
Koparnos’ visor display flashed its warning runes. The radiation levels were extreme. Even protected by his power armour, prolonged exposure would be lethal. The blast had also scoured the land of the worst of the viral toxins that had killed this world, but the contamination was still present. It was still reaching through his rebreather. His fever spiked, but his body was holding fast. The deliquescence had not yet begun. The clash of poisons had bought him some time. Not long. A few minutes, he guessed.
He would spend every second fighting, and he would fight for a few seconds more.
The situation was no different, except in degree, to any number of suicidal campaigns that his Legion had faced. That was what the Emperor, in all his perversity, had decided the Iron Warriors were good for. How many times had Koparnos and his battle-brothers struggled through impossible sieges and over the landscapes of death worlds, leaving a wake of their own blood, only for Dorn or Guilliman or one of the other pampered favourites to swoop in and claim credit after the fact? If Koparnos died now, his end would have no substantial difference from the rest of his life.
At least he was free of the Emperor’s hypocrisy.
‘Do you call this a victory?’ he shouted to absent enemies, and a demigod as distant as he was false. ‘You choose to destroy your own forces along with ours? That is weakness. That is why you will lose.’
He started walking. He had a vague impression of a great shadow not far to his right. It was a destination. It was a goal to strive for, futile though it might be. He would have a purpose even as his organs disintegrated.
His boots kicked up puffs of ash that flew off in the wind. As he walked, he switched though the vox-channels. He had been doing so for days, and the results were the same: nothing but static, an electronic echo of the wind. Death in the air, on the ground, in the vast and tortured shapes, and in the aether beyond.
The wind pushed against him, mocking. It shouted at him that he was alone, the last thing moving across the ruined battlefield.
‘Look at me!’ he cried back. His voice sounded too thick. His breath rasped. There was liquid in his lungs. It grew thicker. They were beginning to disintegrate, turn into fluid, seeking to drown and suffocate him at once. Speech was difficult, but he would give voice to his defiance. ‘Look at me! I live. I fight on. You will not stop us. You made us too well. We will march until… until we crush you!’
He coughed, straining for more of the deadly air beyond his suit’s reserves. He marched faster. The huge shadow gathered definition and mass. He could distinguish the gigantic limbs from the trunk. Then the way before him cleared for a moment, revealing the Titan.
It was a Warlord-class, named Ostensor Contritio. Over thirty metres tall to the carapace, and almost as wide, it was a hulking mass of immobilised destruction. Its arms bore great cannons, pointed forwards. Koparnos glanced in the direction the Titan was facing. Some distance away, there was wreckage. A battalion of tanks. Ostensor Contritio’s final kill.
As the dust rolled back in
, Koparnos saw a faint red flicker in the viewports of the Warlord’s head. Just one weak flash, but that was enough.
A trace of power. Koparnos could use that.
He wasn’t marching out of bitter defiance now. He was racing against his death. He had a hope of survival. More importantly, he had a hope of vengeance.
He reached Ostensor Contritio’s left leg. Overhead, above the Titan’s waist, the lower access hatch was partly open. What was left of a Mechanicum acolyte lay halfway across the threshold – robes in a vaguely human form were drenched in black, organic soup. A pair of limp mechadendrites hung beyond where the head had been, as if trying to reach an imagined salvation. Death had reached into the Titan, and this fool had been panicked into thinking that it did not also await him outside.
A fluid, multiplying pain was spreading out from Koparnos’ core and into his limbs. His movements were becoming sluggish. His joints felt loose, and burned with acid pain. He didn’t have much longer. Scaling the seized pistons of the leg, he hauled himself upwards towards the hatch, seeking hand and footholds wherever he could.
Once inside the Warlord, he slid the hatch shut. Adamantium armour many times thicker than the Rhino’s hull now shielded him from the poisoned world outside. All that remained was to purge the viral taint from the interior.
His helmet lamp lit the confines of the dark space. There were more biological remains here. He guessed they had been servitors from the limited, specialised tool limbs that sat in the sludge.
Further in was another door. He grasped the wheel at its centre, turned it and hauled it open.
He crossed the threshold into the engineering deck. There were more Mechanicum dead here, tech-priests who had stayed at their posts until the end. Their servo-skulls littered the floor, eyes dark and wide as though in shock. Koparnos staggered to a workstation that faced the core of the Titan. It was beside a large cluster of ducts running to and from the Warlord’s reactor shields. The station’s screen was dark, and one of the liquefied operator’s servo-arms was still resting against the keyboard. Koparnos moved the limb aside and examined the controls.
The pulse from the blast could well have shut down the Titan’s systems – perhaps the priest had been in the process of restarting the mechanical heart of the god-machine. Something had begun, or at least survived, for that light in the Titan’s head to have been possible.