by Various
Koparnos found the circuit controls. One of them was open. He turned the others on one by one. A groaning, hissing life returned to Ostensor Contritio. Lumen orbs strobed, then settled at a dull crimson glow. The deck and walls shook, as the Titan’s heart struggled to beat once more.
He would grant it life, and in return it would gift him the same.
The hollow, automated voice of the machine crackled from the emitters.
‘Primary systems activating. Reactor failsafes engaged. The blessings of the Omnissiah be upon us. Warning. Warning. Malfunctions in secondary and tertiary nodes. Locations One-One-Seven to One-Three-Five...’
Koparnos examined the tech-priest’s servo-arms, found a plasma cutter, and fired it up.
He examined the ducts, eventually tracing one that vented the power plant’s heat upwards into the exchange system at the rear of the carapace. He deactivated the failsafes and cut though until a rush of superheated, radioactive steam burst from the pipe. Within seconds it had filled the engineering chamber.
‘Warning. Warning. Extreme hazard. Heat spike detected. Coolant system failure imminent.’
Alarms howled. Koparnos dropped the cutter and began to remove his armour.
‘Warning. Warning. Radiation levels in excess of working maximums. Evacuation advised for all organic personnel.’
‘Poison… against poison…’ he gasped as the scalding death hit his exposed skin.
He stood in the middle of the cloud, a fresh clash of pain erupting in his body as his genhanced biology absorbed the radiation. His melanchromic organ went into overdrive, his skin pigments blackening instantly. He breathed deeply, and the burn reached into his lungs. It scoured the slow rot from him with an even more deadly agony.
Poison against poison.
He stood in the lethal cloud for a full minute before the dose overwhelmed his ability to process toxins. The virus was dead, and he began to die in a new way.
He dropped to his knees and vomited out a black, stinking mass that began to eat its way through the deck. Then he stood again. Little more than the force of his own will kept him conscious. The steam was damaging him much faster than he could heal, but he waited another full minute before he reached for his battleplate once more. If even a trace of the virus remained, he would be done.
His mucranoid began a last-ditch attempt to preserve him. A waxy shield oozed from his pores, sealing him off from the lethal atmosphere of the chamber. He fumbled with the armour, his fingers growing slick. Carapace. Chestplate. Power pack. One piece at a time, he took sanctuary from the radiation. His vision greying from exhaustion and pain, he closed the manual redirect valves to reroute the exchange system leak.
When he was done, the radioactive fog lingered. He felt as though it had penetrated his skull, and his senses were overwhelmed by a grand mosaic of pain. He was one shock away from falling into a sus-an coma, but he stood still and tried to force the darkness from his mind.
His work was not done. He had shelter, but it would serve no purpose if he could not fight...
‘Iron within, iron without,’ he muttered. Both had carried him this far. They would see him back into war. The loyalists no doubt thought that they had turned the Iron Warriors’ victory into a mutual defeat. All they had done was throw more of the same hopelessness at the Legion that it had battled and surmounted for centuries.
He would show them their error. He would show them his Legion’s iron.
The vow made, his pain took him into the night. He fell, unconscious even before he hit the cold deck.
‘Enginseer Meridius?’
Crackling woke him. An electronic scrape in his ear. The internal vox was active. There was a gasp, someone drawing a deep breath before finding the strength to speak again.
‘Enginseer Meridius, we have power again. Are you well?’ The woman’s voice was that of a mortally wounded warrior.
Koparnos dragged himself back to the workstation in silence. He was no adept of the Mechanicum, but he was a warsmith. Though he was not privy to the most arcane mysteries of the Titans, he knew how to shape a battlefield. He knew how to shape war itself. So he would make Ostensor Contritio answer to his will. One way or another.
‘Meridius?’ the voice called again.
Koparnos was surprised by the strength of it. The speaker was dying. The alchemy of desperation and hope was the fuel for the cry.
He would answer, but not yet.
He succeeded in running a rough diagnostic of the Warlord. Power appeared to be reaching most quadrants. The potential for movement and attack was there. That left the most important motive force: the princeps. If this woman was only one of the moderati, there would be little he could do. He would be stuck in an immobilised shelter, no better off in the long term than in the Rhino.
He worked his way to the upper levels of the carapace. He found the pods of the moderati minoris. They were closed, but they had not been sealed from the contamination of the virus. The gunners were dead. They left behind ruined uniforms and the stinking slurry at the bottom of their pods. Koparnos wrote off the secondary weapons.
‘Meridius! Why don’t you answer?’
Koparnos reached the reinforced hatchway to the Titan’s head. Outside it were the remains of another tech-priest, twin servo-arms slumped against the door, and the metal marred with scratches and burns. Another sign of mindless panic. What had the adept hoped to accomplish? The bridge space beyond was a sanctuary only as long as the door did not open.
Koparnos turned to the comm-link on the wall to the right of the door. ‘Meridius is dead,’ he said.
At first there was only silence. Then the voice spoke again. ‘Who is this?’
‘I am Koparnos, and I am your only hope. Identify yourself.’
‘Princeps Benrath,’ she answered without hesitation, recognising the deep reverberations of his voice. ‘You are of the Legiones Astartes.’
‘Are the moderati majoris still alive?’ Koparnos asked.
‘I’m not sure. They were an hour ago, but they haven’t spoken since. They don’t answer any more.’
‘You are unable to confirm one way or the other?’
‘I can’t move,’ she said. ‘When the pulse hit us, there was a surge before the power went down. The neuro-feedback was... devastating. I am paralysed.’
‘What about your connections to the Titan?’
‘I’m not sure. Until the power returned, I was linked to a void. I can feel its life now, but not the machine-spirit. Ostensor Contritio is as paralysed as I am.’
The fact that Benrath was severed from the machine-spirit was to be expected. Koparnos had seen the system breakdowns in the diagnostic. The machine-spirit was still alive, but isolated.
‘I saw light in the cockpit earlier,’ he said.
‘The head has enough reserve power to function in isolation for an extended period.’
‘You didn’t eject.’
‘What purpose would that have served?’
‘None,’ he agreed. Good. Benrath was fully conscious of her situation. Separating the head from the crippled body of the Titan would only have shifted the position of the survivors in the blasted land. There were no retrieval teams coming. Not for anyone. Whatever events remained to play out here, they would do so cut off from the rest of the planet.
‘Princeps,’ Koparnos said, ‘I can end your paralysis. I can give you back your purpose.’
The phrasing did not come naturally. To offer rather than to command went against his training and his being. But he needed her consent, along with that of the moderati majoris, assuming either was still alive. If they were this close to death, a struggle of any kind could be lethal.
‘You can restore Ostensor Contritio to us?’ She sounded understandably sceptical.
‘Not exactly. I can restore you to it.’
He w
aited for Benrath to deduce what he meant. He gave her some space to approach the idea on her own, to assimilate its reality and its implications. He was standing still but, all the same, he was reshaping the battlefield.
‘We have no neural bus, no amniotic tank,’ Benrath said. She knew what was coming, then, and was already halfway to acceptance.
‘I am aware of that.’
‘You are able to proceed without one?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the process is irreversible?’
‘Would you ask that of a Legion Dreadnought, honoured princeps?’
‘No. Forgive me. The weakness of my body is not the weakness of spirit.’
‘Then I will begin. Know this – the interior is highly radioactive.’
‘I understand. Once I open the seal, there is no going back.’
There never is, Koparnos thought. Everything is irrevocable.
There was a metallic clunk and a hiss of air as the circular hatch parted in the middle. The two halves slide aside. There was little room for the warsmith to enter the compartment.
The two moderati majoris sat in thrones to the rear of the space, flanking the one occupied by the princeps in the forward section of the Titan’s skull. The armourglass eye ports looked out over the broken landscape. The wind had dropped a little more since he had entered the Titan. Obscuring dust clouds still billowed over the field, but he could see further now. The graveyard of gigantic corpses was endless. On and on and on went the ranks of iron monuments, preserved in their rage.
But he also saw flashes of distant gunfire amidst all the death. He was not the only one seeking to bring the corpses back to a semblance of life.
He had won time for himself. He wasn’t dying any more, but he had stopped one countdown only for another to begin. A new battle was coming. The embers of the war for Tallarn were struggling to reignite.
He would not be found wanting.
He checked the moderati. They were unconscious, their breathing laboured, but there was enough life there to suit his purposes.
‘Are you there?’ Benrath asked.
Koparnos could see the top of her shaved skull above the back of her throne, and her hands resting on the ornate arms. She didn’t move. Her paralysis was as extensive as she had said.
‘I am here,’ Koparnos told her.
He began his work. It took time, and he had precious little of that. Even so, he shut that concern from his mind and focused solely on the task. He had a foundation upon which to build: the interface cables connecting Benrath and the moderati to the Titan’s manifold were still viable.
He moved back and forth between the Warlord’s skull and the workstations of the engineering deck. He never set foot beyond the moderati stations. He never saw Benrath’s face. The princeps was a voice behind a throne, growing ever weaker. He required her consciousness a bit longer, though, and prepared the diagnostics to track the flow of neural data. The machine-spirit was there, silent but raging. To give it a voice, he had to find the point where the communications had been severed.
‘Speak to it,’ Koparnos urged Benrath over the vox when he was ready.
‘I can’t.’
‘I know. Your failure will be instructive.’
‘I hope so.’
She fell silent. A moment later, traceries of power lit up the workstation’s screen. A few seconds later, Benrath gasped and the screen dimmed.
‘Princeps?’ Koparnos asked.
No answer. She was unconscious. Not dead – her life still registered on the screen in the form of faint pulses from her cerebral cortex. They barely registered, their paths fading into darkness almost immediately, but her effort had shown him the problem. Strong as her mental command had been, it had run into a damaged interface tangle one level down from the skull.
Koparnos found a maintenance hatch not far from the location of the interface. He opened it, expecting to find a crawlspace much too small to accommodate him. Instead, there was a narrow catwalk that twisted into the gap around the Titan’s reactor housing. Koparnos moved inside, surrounded by pistons the size of pillars, cables as thick as a Thunderstrike’s cannon. The connections stretched into the gloom above and below him.
‘I am coming for you,’ he called out to the raging machine-spirit. ‘The princeps bent you to her will. I will do the same. You seek to vent your wrath? Good. You will do so at my command.’
The damage was not hard to find. Above his head, to the right of the catwalk, was a cluster of torn and fused cables. With the tools he had salvaged from above, he cleared the pathways as best he could. Some lines were torn beyond repair. Some connections had melted together in a mass that could never be differentiated.
He was satisfied when he made his way back to the primary workstation and examined the new energy tracks that appeared. He had not expected to restore all the pathways between Benrath and the machine-spirit to their original state. Nor did he wish to. He had merely created the possibility of communication. Now he would shape the nature of that dialogue.
He would shape the battlefield.
It took him another day to make his preparations. It was now the seventh since the blast. On this day, there would be no more rest for the dead.
In the skull of Ostensor Contritio, the princeps and the moderati majoris were still unconscious. They did not stir as Koparnos amplified their life-support and performed rough intubations. The mechanism that had kept them alive this long would now preserve the spark of life in their bodies for as long as the Titan survived. It would also hold them prisoner.
He was most careful as he worked on Benrath. He would have rejected the word gentle to describe the operation. It was precise. It was calculated. Unnecessary and premature shocks could easily defeat his purposes. His approach was as tactical and merciless as any siege he had ever led.
In truth, what he was attempting was a siege.
Little by little, he embedded her into the machinery. He could not install more ports into her skull and spine, but he jacked more cables into the existing ones. The resulting drain on her mind could shatter the body, so he increased the energy load even as he reduced its need.
He augmented.
He cut away.
He made the princeps one with the god-machine.
And when he was ready to open the links between Benrath’s mind and the machine-spirit of Ostensor Contritio, she awoke. He was standing between her and the window ports, and she saw him for the first time.
She saw the colours of his armour, and her eyes widened. ‘Traitor!’ she hissed.
Koparnos leaned in, savouring this fragment of justice reclaimed from the inferno of defeat. Corrupting a loyalist Titan was a fine act of reshaping, and a successful siege. But he wanted the princeps to know.
His victory would have its witness. An eternal one.
‘You trusted blindly,’ he snarled. ‘So did we, once. But we learned our lesson in time. Have you? I think not.’
She was too weak to struggle. Even so, she tried. The skin around the sunken orbits of her eyes tightened as her will raged against a body withered and bound. Koparnos waited. With his task on the verge of completion, now he did have the luxury of time. He wanted to see Benrath realise the full extent of her powerlessness. He did not regard his triumph over a single loyalist as petty. His wrath was as justified as hers was futile.
‘You will be defeated,’ Benrath whispered.
‘Not by you,’ Koparnos grunted. ‘No, not by you.’ He completed the last of the connections. ‘And so I keep my promise,’ he added, then restored the neural link between the princeps and the machine-spirit.
Benrath screamed as her consciousness flowed away down into the manifold. It left her body behind. The flesh became nothing more than an organic bag, a conduit of fuel to keep the mind alive. She was cocooned in cables, vanishing into the mecha
nism of her throne, and only her face was visible.
Its final expression, before it fell into the slackness of living death, was one of utter horror.
Koparnos knew why. He could not experience the fusion that Benrath was undergoing. He could not conceive of it. But he understood exactly what he had set in motion. Before the blast had shut the Titan down, the machine-spirit’s fury had been forced into compliance by the great will and discipline of the princeps. But she had been weakened, and he had stripped away the manifold defence mechanisms, leaving Benrath vulnerable to a machine-spirit so maddened by its injuries that its sole purpose was nothing more than unceasing, indiscriminate destruction. Given free rein, however, it would send Ostensor Contritio on a rampage as uncontrolled and unpredictable as the winds of a hurricane.
Benrath was now immortal whether she liked it or not. She was locked in a perpetual struggle against the anarchic rage of the machine. Koparnos had linked her mind to those of the moderati majoris, comatose but still neurologically viable. She retained just enough strength to channel the power of the Titan. She could direct the Warlord’s movements, but she could not choose their purpose or their target.
Koparnos had reserved that power for himself.
He stood at the rear of the bridge space, looking beyond the thrones, through the armourglass eyes. The control mechanism he held was crude, little more than a collection of electronic prods, each with a different function. It would be sufficient.
He depressed a trigger, delivering a synaptic shock to Benrath. He impelled her to walk.
And so Ostensor Contritio walked.
The Warlord lurched with the bone-shaking growl of an iron city on the move. For the first time in seven days, the Titan’s earth-cratering steps resounded throughout the machine. Ostensor Contritio began its march through the land of corpses. In the twilight distance, appearing through the curtains of dust, other half-glimpsed giants were moving. Koparnos saw the flash of giant guns. Death had not had its fill on this battlefield.
