Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine

by David Annandale

  Backlist

  More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

  The Beast Arises

  1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

  11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

  12: THE BEHEADING

  Space Marine Battles

  WAR OF THE FANG

  A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  An Astral Knights novel

  DAMNOS

  An Ultramarines collection

  DAMOCLES

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

  OVERFIEND

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

  ARMAGEDDON

  Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

  Legends of the Dark Millennium

  ASTRA MILITARUM

  An Astra Militarum collection

  ULTRAMARINES

  An Ultramarines collection

  FARSIGHT

  A Tau Empire novella

  SONS OF CORAX

  A Raven Guard collection

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Space Wolves collection

  Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Duty and Pride

  Glory

  The Feasts

  The Grand Alliance

  The Kazani Strait

  The Light of Truth

  The Run

  The Guns of Deicoon

  Flames and Ashes

  The Call of the Hunting Horn

  The Klivanos Crossing

  The Last City

  Salvation’s Pyre

  Redemption’s Ashes

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Kingsblade’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  chapter 1

  Duty and Pride

  Does he really believe this is almost over? Ferantha Krezoc thought. He can’t. He isn’t stupid and he isn’t mad. He has to know better.

  But he’s proud, she reminded herself.

  Cursing the blindness of Adrel Syagrius, the princeps senioris of the Warlord Titan Gloria Vastator lashed out. The Belicosa-pattern volcano cannon of the god-machine’s right arm burned trenches through the enemy. Las so powerful it could melt armour and fortifications blasted monsters to steam.

  Moments later, the trenches filled and the tyranids came on.

  The land before Hive Gelon crawled and heaved. Destruction surged towards the walls of the city in waves of terrible life. The land had become a thing of claws and acid, of chitinous armour and swarming, monstrous hunger. There was nothing left of the marshlands that had stretched out before Khania’s capital city. Their entire biomass had been consumed, and now the tyranids came to devour the millions of lives within Gelon. The legio of the Pallidus Mor and the 66th Kataran Spears held the line.

  While the legio of the Imperial Hunters chased trophies and glory.

  The sky over Gelon flashed and burned. In orbit around Khania, an Imperial Navy fleet fought the tyranid bio-ships. Vox-traffic to the surface was fragmentary, transmissions broken up by the fury of ship-to-ship fire and the maelstroms of burning plasma left by the destruction of once-mighty vessels. The signs of the void war reached the combatants on the ground in the form of bright scarlet bursts, silver lightning and clouds that roiled like slow eruptions.

  The fifteen Titans of the Pallidus Mor’s demi-legio blunted, then tore through, the mass of tyranids. They disrupted the flood while the 66th armoured regiment of the Kataran Spears created a blockade. The latter’s tanks had formed up along the ragged line where the industrial wastelands outside Gelon’s walls gave way to the sea of mud that had been the marsh. Warhounds loped along the flanks of the tyranid swarm and launched raids into the elements still miles from the front lines. Reavers patrolled the wastes, towering sentinels striding over hills of refuse and through rivers and lakes of toxic effluent. They were the rearguard, mobile annihilators taking down the xenos horrors that got through the Spears.

  The Warlords pushed deep into the tyranid assault. Theirs was not a defensive manoeuvre. They were the counter-attack, the storm that had come to purge the tyranids from the face of Khania. They were the immense majesty of righteous war, high peaks that moved across the battlefield, their weapons obliterating the crawling, scuttling, lumbering monsters.

  The land heaved, and the Warlords burned it back to the bedrock.

  ‘Krezoc,’ voxed Toven Rheliax in Crudelis Mortem, ‘there’s an energy spike to the west.’

  In the manifold, Krezoc shifted her focus. Gloria Vastator had been incinerating swaths of ’gaunts and warrior bioforms, easing the pressure on the Spears’ blockade and on her secutarii, who were keeping the smaller tyranids from trying to climb the legs of the Titan. Krezoc looked west with the eyes of the auspex array and saw the spike. Gloria Vastator was closest to the position, still miles away, where bioenergy readings had surged red.

  ‘Incoming exocrine barrage,’ she told her moderati. The tyranids had hit the Pallidus Mor and Imperial Hunters with long-range artillery bioforms when the legios had first walked on Khania. Krezoc and her fellow princeps kept a sharp lookout for another such attack. ‘Pre-emptive st
rike west,’ Krezoc said. She fed the coordinates from the manifold to the moderati. Their wills were linked to hers and to Gloria Vastator’s machine-spirit, and the Titan turned its weapons to the new targets as if they were an extension of Krezoc’s body. On her right, Brennon Grevereign worked the volcano cannon with her. On the left, Agara Vansaak unleashed the Mori quake cannon. On the right shoulder of the carapace, Moderati Minoris Doran Konterus was linked to the Apocalypse missile launchers, while on the left shoulder, Ferrek Haziad kept the Vulcan mega-bolter trained on closer enemies. Missiles, shells and las-beams seared the gloom of the day. The massive recoil of the launchers thrummed through the body of the god-machine. The distant landscape lit up with explosions wide enough to engulf entire hive sectors. The bioenergy spikes vanished from the auspex, the readings overwhelmed by the cataclysm.

  From within the firestorm, the barrage of burning bio-plasma arced up. There were large gaps in the attack, but comet flights of destruction soared towards Hive Gelon. And though the Pallidus Mor turned the battlefield into an ocean of flame, the tyranids pushed forwards, their numbers and hunger too great to stop.

  ‘Marshal,’ Krezoc voxed, ‘any word from the Imperial Hunters?’

  ‘Nothing new,’ said Eras Balzhan in Ferrum Salvator. ‘But Marshal Syagrius is aware of the situation.’

  Perhaps so, Krezoc thought. Perhaps he even understood it. But his pride wouldn’t let him respond as he should. ‘He is still reporting bio-titans?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Balzhan spoke again after a moment, cutting off her curse. ‘That is his task, princeps senioris. This is ours. We shall complete it.’

  ‘So we shall,’ she said. The Pallidus Mor’s history was a saga of grinding conflicts, not a hymn of battle glory. Gloria Vastator fired into the distance again, this time joined by Merys Drahn’s Fatum Messor. As the western reaches of the battlefield erupted a second time, the bio-plasmic barrage came down. Shouts and reports across numerous vox-channels filtered their way into the manifold, and Krezoc registered the damage done with the edge of her conscious mind. The plasma balls struck a wide area of the wastelands. Kataran tanks exploded and chunks of the hive’s walls crumbled beneath the blasts.

  ‘Close up the formation,’ Balzhan voxed. ‘Concentrate on the centre of the mass. Smash the forward advance.’

  Before Krezoc could begin Gloria Vastator’s turn, Vansaak warned, ‘Harpies!’

  A large flight of the winged monsters descended from the flame-ridden clouds. They launched tentacled missiles ahead of them.

  ‘Vulcan,’ Krezoc ordered as the view beyond the control chamber’s armourglass was filled with wings and the flashes of void shields straining from the electromagnetic shocks of the bio-missiles. The tyranids were attacking with a massive swarm, multiple bioforms striking at once. The Warlord entered its slow turn, spraying massive bolter shells into monsters whose reptilian forms were delirious echoes of humanity’s ancient nightmares.

  ‘South,’ Grevereign called. ‘Large movement to the south.’

  There were too many attacks from too many directions. The mega-bolter took down enough harpies to ease some of the shocks to the void shields and for Krezoc to turn a portion of her focus to the new threat. Massive squat shapes shouldered through the cauldron of warrior forms. The auspex spiked again with a surge of bioenergy.

  Biovores, Krezoc realised. Another artillery force, a short-range one this time.

  There was no chance to hit them first. Before Krezoc and the moderati could bring the weapons to bear, the air of the battlefield was filled with a green gaseous cloud, spore mines making their lethal, floating descent.

  Krezoc cursed Syagrius and his pride as she braced for the explosions.

  Harth Deyers dropped into the interior of the Leman Russ Bastion of Faith and pulled the turret hatch shut just as the bio-plasma barrage hit. The firestorm swept over the wastelands. A monster roared outside the tank. A hurricane of flame shook the hull. The front of the Leman Russ bucked as it struck an obstacle.

  ‘Are we blind?’ Deyers called to his driver.

  ‘No, captain,’ Silas Medina answered. The tank levelled off again. ‘Just running some xenos into the ground.’

  At the controls of the tank’s battle cannon, Lehanna Platen said, ‘Targets still visible,’ and fired. The recoil of the gun was reassurance that they were still in the fight. So was the vibrating shudder of the sponson heavy bolters.

  The worst of the storm’s roar faded. Deyers slapped a new magazine into his bolt pistol and climbed back up. He trusted Medina and Platen, but he felt useless when he could not see the battle himself. He heaved the hatch back and raised himself into waves of heat. The initial devastating blasts had passed, but the fires still raged. Rivers of promethium had ignited. Ammunition in destroyed vehicles cooked off, setting off secondary explosions across the battered line of the blockade. Some of the tyranid bioforms caught in the barrage blew up as the flammable gases in their bodies ignited. Some of the tall hills of waste metal and rockcrete had melted. The bubbling, industrial lava spread everywhere, swallowing infantry and tyranids. Ahead, another wave of the enemy tide surged forwards. Bastion of Faith was near the centre of the Kataran Spears’ formation. Cannon and bolter fire was constant along the line to Deyers’ left and right. Shells slammed into the chitinous wave. The devastation the Titans were wreaking further ahead had thinned the swarm, and there had been a moment, before the artillery had hit, when Deyers had thought the tanks might hold the enemy, that the wave could be defeated. But there were gaps in the blockade now. The tyranids charged the tanks, and they raced between them too. The cannons did their work, and it was not a sea of the foe that swept into the wastelands.

  Even so, the numbers were high.

  Deyers opened up with his bolt pistol, punching through the armoured head of a hormagaunt that leapt over the sponson fire. The creature’s skull exploded, and its twitching corpse landed across the turret. Deyers fired around the body at more of the bounding horrors. The cannon swivelled right as Platen took aim at a cluster of larger monsters, and the body slipped to the smouldering ground. Bastion of Faith had to keep moving now, growling across wreckage and bodies on a short patrol running north to south. There were no longer enough tanks for anything like fixed positions, and any vehicle that was not constantly in motion was a target for the xenos beasts. The vox-traffic snarled with overlapping commands and cries. A hundred yards ahead of Bastion of Faith as it made its way north, the Leman Russ Cardinal Renhorn was covered in warrior forms. They stabbed into its armour with talons as tall as a man and blasted it with bio-plasmic cannons. The tank’s sponson bolters destroyed the monsters that came before their barrels, but there were several of the warriors riding the top of the hull, out of reach of the guns.

  ‘Platen,’ Deyers voxed.

  ‘Already on it, captain,’ she answered, and Bastion of Faith’s cannon rose slightly. There were few gunners Deyers had encountered that he would trust to attempt the shot, especially with the Leman Russ in motion. But if Platen thought she could make it, then she had to take it on. Cardinal Renhorn was helpless, even as its battle cannon still fired heroically into the rest of the enemy mass. Bastion of Faith fired. The shell screamed into the warriors, striking just above Cardinal Renhorn’s turret. The explosion ripped the tyranids apart. Jagged, smoking remains fell from the top of the hull.

  The freed tank roared forwards, crushing ’gaunts beneath its treads, its weapons sending a torrent of fire into the horde. Then it exploded. The warriors had done their work, rupturing too many critical systems. Its last charge had been a dying stab at a foe that had already killed it. Deyers winced from the glare of the fireball. Cardinal Renhorn’s momentum carried the flaming wreckage deeper into the tyranids, adding more of its killers to its pyre. Burning fuel spread the inferno still wider, and then there was yet another gap in the blockade.

  In the sky, there was a h
uge flare. Another ship had met its end. No way to know if that was a Navy victory or not. Deyers choose to believe it was. ‘Hope in the skies!’ he voxed to the regiment. ‘The fire of victory for Khania and for Katara!’

  He had to be right. A few days ago, there had been the illusion of triumph. The orbiting bio-ship had been destroyed. The Pallidus Mor and the Imperial Hunters had destroyed an enormous bio-titan, and the remaining tyranids had been pushed back from Gelon. Marshal Syagrius, in overall command of the campaign, had declared the war was almost over.

  Then more bio-ships had come. The void war had begun in earnest, and the second wave of the ground war had erupted, more savage than the first. In the first day, there had been more bio-titans. They had since become fewer and were landing in more distant locations, and the Imperial Hunters had moved off in their pursuit. The apparent mercy had been a false one. The waves of smaller bioforms were as ferocious as before, and larger. The marsh was gone, and the tyranids were hungry for the life of Gelon. Deyers felt like he’d been fighting inside the maw of a devouring beast without surcease for months.

  He had not. The war was only days old. And the casualties of the Kataran Spears were mounting. The regiment still had fight in it. It was still holding fast for Gelon, but even with the terrifying strength of the Pallidus Mor in the field, Deyers could imagine the destruction of the 66th. And if they fell on Khania, what of Katara?

  The home world. In the neighbouring Sevasmos System. As Bastion of Faith’s battle cannon fired again, blasting apart a cluster of warrior forms at such short range the heat of the blast cracked Deyers’ skin, his last sight of the city of Creontiades flashed before his inner eye. He fought for Gelon and for Khania, but his defence of this world was also in the name of protecting his home. The tyranids were closer to Katara than they had ever come before. He did not know what would be left of Khania by the end of this war. He would die before seeing the same fate reach Katara.

  The thought came to him that he very likely would.

  Further out on the battlefield, the immensities that were the god-machines shook the earth with the intensity of the fire they directed at the ground. Entire cities would have been razed to the earth by now, but the tyranids kept coming. Flying bioforms swarmed around the heads of the Titans, and the day pulsed with the discharges of clashing energies. Then a green cloud burst across the battlefield, rising high up the legs of the Warlords. Bright orbs floated down.