Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine

by David Annandale

  You shame your calling, Ornastas thought. Where is your vigilance? This is how we let the evil through. This is how it spreads unnoticed. I am guilty too. At least I recognise that.

  ‘You are right,’ he said, ‘I cannot.’ There would be no help from Vilkur, and Vilkur was the senior ecclesiarch of the capital, and thus of Katara. He had the ear of Lord-Governor Eukrolas. Ornastas did not. If Vilkur was going to do nothing until events forced him to, the struggle was going to be all the harder. And Ornastas would gain nothing by wasting his time with a blind fool. ‘I will not trouble you any further, Confessor Vilkur,’ he said, and shut down the holo-link.

  He left Saint Kaspha’s a short time later. He would have to speak to Eukrolas himself, and he would have to do it in person. It was a few hours before dawn, and he doubted he could browbeat any functionaries of the palace by holo-link to haul the governor out of bed. They were too insulated from the lower streets to be intimidated by the ecclesiarch of that region, particularly if their confessor had dismissed his concerns. He would go to the palace. They would have to eject him bodily to prevent him from speaking to the lord-governor. He did not think their nerve extended that far.

  He travelled in a servitor-powered transport. The servitor’s lower body had been fused with the forward portion of the vehicle, and its arms extended into the driving mechanisms. Ornastas entered the coordinates of the palace into a data-slate built into a low lectern in the passenger compartment, programming the servitor’s directional instincts. The purpose of the transport was to increase his visibility to his flock. The passenger compartment was elevated, its wrought-iron framework holding an armourglass cube. Riding inside, Ornastas would present himself to the streets, engaging in mobile proselytising as vox-speakers broadcast his words to every­one he passed. This time, he said nothing. He sat in silence as the vehicle moved through the dark streets and the night crawled towards dawn. On this journey, he was the one witnessing. He watched the city, vigilant and anxious.

  The main thoroughfares of Creontiades were crowded. They always were. The work of the city never ceased. The manufactoria ran from shift to shift, pouring out the material of war, industry and commerce. With hundreds of thousands of citizens always on their way to or from their duties, the marketplaces were always open, as were the tabernae where the people ate to prepare for their shifts, or drank to forget them. The closer Ornastas came to the palace sector, the brighter the streets became. Ahead, the skyline transformed. Soon the manufactoria would give way to the towers of the great trading concerns, and dingy, cramped habs would become glittering sky-needles of luxury.

  Even as the lumen standards multiplied, though, there was still darkness. The shadows were deep between the buildings, and along the narrow cross-streets. Even in the centre of the wide avenues, Ornastas could feel the weight of the dark. It was more than the absence of light. It was summoned by a turning away from the Emperor and the calling of something to which he could not give a proper name. It was draped over the city like a veil. Ornastas feared he would not have the strength to tear it. But he gazed into it with determination. He would know the extent of the danger.

  It was worse than he thought. In the industrial districts of Creontiades and beyond, the shadows were boiling with heresy. Figures lurked in the recesses of doorways, their features shrouded, their heads turning to watch his passage with hidden, hostile eyes. In narrow alleys, silhouettes contorted. They left Ornastas with the impression of self-mutilation, of people tearing their own faces, transforming themselves into bloody grotesques, the distorted apostles of a monstrous creed. The heresy was even reaching into the light. Brawls were breaking out on the main avenues. The first ones Ornastas saw were fights between individuals. If he had not known better, he might have dismissed them as nothing unusual. Soon, though, he was seeing clusters of combatants, and the fights were savage, gouging affairs. Blood spread on the rockcrete pavement. These were battles to the death. Citizens passed the fights without reacting, and that was a cause for concern in and of itself. Others stopped to watch. Still others joined in. At one intersection, at least a score of citizens were locked in brutal frenzy. It was the beginning of a riot. Enforcers were running towards the fight. Ornastas’ transport drove past the struggle before he saw whether the enforcers ended the chaos or became part of it.

  Two blocks further on, as the first hints of dawn greyed the sky, the vehicle reached a large marketplace. It took up a wide area on both sides of the avenue. It was even more crowded than Ornastas would have expected. The roar of the people shook the transport’s armourglass. The sea of people heaved and frothed, the loud business of the market broken by spreading whirlpools of conflict. The transport had almost reached the westernmost edge of the market when a woman ran out on the right side. She tore across the avenue, leaping over vehicles, and jumped onto Ornastas’ servitor. Her clothes were as ragged as those of the cultists he had fought earlier, but though she was wiry, she was not emaciated, as they had been. Whether she was a recent convert or not didn’t matter. She was a sign of how brazen the cult was becoming, and how strong. The flesh was gone from the lower half of her face, leaving teeth and musculature in a perpetual snarl of rage. She appeared to have shaved her head with broken glass then carved the skull rune into her forehead. Limp tufts of hair still clung to the sides of her head. It shook and waved with her fast, jerking movements.

  She clawed at the armourglass, staring at Ornastas with mad eyes. Her jaw opened and closed, as if she intended to chew her way through the shield. She pounded on the window, howling. Then she turned on the servitor, sinking her teeth into the top of its head.

  Ornastas pressed a stud next to the lectern and the forward shield slid down. He struck at the heretic with his staff. She growled and clutched at the winged head. Ornastas jolted her with shocks of electricity, but the attack only increased her fury. Howling, her flesh burning, the cultist held tight to the staff. She yanked with maddened strength, hauling Ornastas out of his seat and halfway out of the passenger compartment. He lay across the framework, un­able to rise or find leverage to fight back. He would not let go of the staff. He would not release a sacred symbol to have it defiled by the wretches in the street. He could do nothing except trigger the shocks again and again. The servitor drove on, oblivious to the struggle and to the blood running down its head. The transport bucked up and down. It had run over something. Ornastas heard more furious screams heading his way. He saw rapid movement in the corners of his eyes. More heretics. One had gone under the wheels. In another few moments they would drag him from the transport.

  He shocked the heretic again. She finally released the staff. She reared back, shrieking syllables he wished were nonsense, and whose sounds lacerated his mind. He scrabbled back as she pounced. She missed her grab and collided with his head, knocking him backwards. The blow knocked the air from his lungs, but he managed to haul back with the staff and strike forwards, catching the cultist in the chest as she crawled towards him. She jerked from the shock and lost her grip on the canopy. She tumbled off the transport. The rear wheels bounced up a second time.

  Breathing hard, Ornastas fed a command for greater speed to the servitor through the lectern. He looked back at the market place as the transport accelerated. The movements of the crowd seemed to be growing more violent before his eyes. The virulent heresy was spreading faster and faster through Creontiades. What had been hidden was now unveiling itself. A block further on, he saw the skull rune splashed across a hab façade in blood.

  There was no time left.

  He turned back to the nav-slate in the lectern. There were still miles to go before he reached the palace. Too far. He needed an alternative.

  The local barracks for the Kataran 66th was a few minutes away. There was only a skeletal force left. He had no doubt any more that this was why the cultists had waited until now to reveal themselves. Nevertheless, the Spears and the Adeptus Arbites were the ones who would
mount an armed response to the cultists. There was an enforcer station not too far from here as well, but the uniform Ornastas had found worried him. He did not know how far the heretics might have infiltrated the Arbites. Quick action was needed, too, and if the incipient riots had not yet reached that far, there might be a delay while someone with official jurisdiction was sought. He had to speak to someone who would listen to him.

  Before his induction into the Adeptus Ministorum, Ornastas had served in the 66th. Later, he had returned to his regiment as preacher, marching across the battlefields of numerous worlds with his comrades, wielding the words of the Imperial Creed instead of a lasgun. Since becoming confessor at Saint Kaspha’s, he had not lost his ties to the Spears. There was a good chance the officer commanding the reserves would remember him.

  Ornastas changed the servitor’s programming, redirecting it to the barracks.

  Krezoc aimed the volcano cannon high. She would not risk the total destruction of Ferrum Salvator. The god-machine must be preserved and reclaimed. And she would not abandon the hope that someone had survived inside.

  The laser seared the upper plates of the hierophant’s carapace, cutting through armour weakened by the missile barrage. The tyranid hissed, the sound scraping across the battlefield like the surf of a steel ocean. It lunged away from the fallen Warlord, biocannons firing at Gloria Vastator. Krezoc advanced head-on towards the monster. Her furious grief was a storm in the manifold. The Titan’s machine-spirit responded to her hate. The howl of its war-horn was a cry for vengeance.

  The acid streams hit the void shields. ‘Full power to the forward shields, magos,’ Krezoc voxed to Xura Thezerin. ‘We march into the enemy’s worst to give it our own.’

  ‘So ordered,’ Thezerin acknowledged.

  ‘Quake cannon loaded,’ Vansaak said.

  ‘Fire,’ Krezoc said before Vansaak had finished speaking, word and thought and action coming together. Flaming gases vented from the weapon’s arm as the gun launched its shell.

  The hierophant had begun an encircling move to the right. The quake shell hit a forelimb at the upper joint. Chitin exploded. The leg shattered in an explosion of fluid. The hierophant swerved to its wounded side, then limped to the right, still circling, still firing biocannons.

  ‘Void shields are approaching critical,’ Thezerin warned.

  ‘Thank you, magos,’ Krezoc said. ‘I am aware of that.’ Her lips moved at a remove from her awareness. The bare minimum of her consciousness animated her body. She ranged ahead on the battlefield, her senses projected by the auspex network. She inhabited the vast body of Gloria Vastator. She was the Warlord, avenging its fallen kin, tracking the movement of the hierophant, ignoring the beast’s attack because all that mattered was the immediate and total destruction of the foe. The mega-bolter tracked the hierophant’s movements, hammering it with a steady stream of shells. The hierophant was slower. Gloria Vastator’s upper frame was able to rotate fast enough to keep up with its awkward, sideways scuttle.

  The forwards march of the Warlord ceased. With ground-shaking steps, it changed its orientation, always working to keep its front towards the hierophant. Far below, carnifexes charged the legs. The secutarii met their attack. They could not hope to defeat the monsters. They could slow them down, and that was all Krezoc asked at this moment.

  The Apocalypse launcher locked on to the target. The quake cannon loaded another shell. The volcano gun charged up.

  ‘Burn,’ Krezoc said.

  With a long wail of the war-horn, Gloria Vastator unleashed the great storm of its warpower on the hierophant. Quake and bolt shells, las and missiles struck the centre mass of the tyranid. The fireball mushroomed skywards, swallowing the hierophant in a cataclysm of flame. The horizon vanished in the conflagration. Explosions built on explosions. They left a crater in their wake. At its centre lay the curled, jagged remains of the tyranid. The corpse bubbled and smoked. Fragments of limbs were scattered across a land turned to glass.

  The thunder of the hierophant’s destruction was still rolling over the battlefield when there was another sunburst to the west. The light was terrible in its burning purity. It flashed over the marsh, then faded to the glowering orange of flame. The shock wave followed with a hurricane blast of wind that flattened humans and tyranids on the ground.

  Krezoc turned Gloria Vastator towards the west, but she already knew what had happened. The light was unmistakeable. It was the death cry of a Titan’s reactor going critical. One of the Reavers had fallen to the hierophants.

  ‘Which one?’ she asked.

  ‘Superbus Falce,’ Thezerin answered after a moment.

  The wastelands of Gelon still glowed with a false sunset. Effluent canals and streams had ignited. The firestorm spread over miles. It was difficult to make out the Reavers and hierophants in its midst. They were black shapes within the crimson flame. The sea of fire billowed with their motions. It flashed with muzzle flare and the launch of missiles. It grew stronger, fed by ever more explosions. Its edge drove the Kataran Spears forwards, into carnifexes eager for more prey.

  Krezoc began to march towards Gelon. A moment later, a second Reaver died in another reactor blast.

  ‘Manus Mortuis,’ Thezerin said.

  Krezoc said nothing. She saw the scuttling movement of a hierophant in the flames and sent a missile flight in its direction.

  The naming of the dead must stop. Only she knew it would not. No matter how quickly she responded, more comrades would fall on this day.

  She accepted two certainties. The Pallidus Mor would suffer more losses. And the Pallidus Mor would triumph. Hardened to the reality, she gave herself up to the march of cold inevitability and took Gloria Vastator towards the greater fire.

  ‘It’s still on us,’ Deyers said. He stared up into the throat of the mawloc. The monster’s teeth ground through the plating. The beast’s enormous jaws were locked around the sides of the turret. It was trying to eat its way through to the soft prey inside.

  ‘I’m doing what I can,’ Medina called. Bastion of Faith roared over uneven ground, Medina steering for the hardest jolts. Platen was still pounding at the enemy with the tank’s gun, but the shot that mattered most was the one she could not manage.

  Deyers’ back ached from the fall. He had plunged through the hatch when the monster attacked, narrowly escaping being bitten in half. The serpentine tyranid had seized the Leman Russ. It had been chewing its way through the armour ever since. Medina was trying to jar it loose. Deyers emptied another magazine of bolt shells into the monster’s throat. He ducked out of the way as acidic juices poured from the maw and sizzled on the compartment’s deck. The pulsing, black-and-pink muscle of the throat was torn with wounds, but the beast would not let go. The stench was overpowering. Deyers breathed through his mouth, and he still felt dizzy from the smell. It was thick as rotting meat, and rich as the interior of an insect hive.

  ‘Carnifexes!’ Medina called.

  ‘Where?’ Deyers reloaded. Above him, the throat pressed forwards, as if the mawloc would turn itself inside out in its eagerness to devour him.

  Medina’s answer was drowned out by an explosion that rocked the tank so hard it almost upended it.

  ‘What–’ Deyers began.

  The wind came, and the fire. The mawloc spasmed. Its jaw clamped down with convulsive strength, and the sides of the turret buckled. Curved teeth the size of Deyers’ forearm stabbed through the plating. The mawloc shuddered once, then stopped moving. The interior of the throat blackened. It began to smoke. The tyranid was burning.

  The heat inside the tank became intolerable. ‘Silas!’ Deyers said to Medina, ‘Tell me something!’

  ‘A Reaver,’ the driver answered, sounding shaken. ‘It blew up. There are flames everywhere.’

  ‘Get us out before we cook,’ Deyers ordered.

  ‘Yes, captain. That will take us towards
the carnifexes.’

  Medina’s comment did not come from cowardice. It was an observation rooted in realism. If Bastion of Faith could coordinate with other tanks, they could challenge the bioforms one at a time. Against a horde, an isolated tank had no chance, and Bastion of Faith had been separated from the rest of the formations by the mawloc.

  ‘We’ll fight what we have to fight,’ Deyers said. ‘Find our comrades.’ He fired into the tyranid corpse. At last, the bolt shells blew through the carcass, knocking a large portion of it from the turret. Flames roared over the opening, holding Deyers back as he tried to climb up again. The ladder was hot to touch, even through his gloves.

  He had to see, though. The moment the worst of the flames receded, he made his way up top. He winced from the heat and turned his back to the furnace in the west. Ahead, his regiment was escaping incineration and rushing towards an army of monsters. The land swarmed with bioforms of every size. Further out, Titans clashed with xenos colossi. Wherever he looked, he saw a war playing out on a scale that dwarfed the human.

  The east was burning, too. Gloria Vastator was walking away from the conflagration of its making. The Titan was marching west. Backlit by flames, it was a shadowed vastness the colours of bone and night, hellish light streaming from its weapons. It came closer, crushing tyranids with every step. Its walk was earthquake and thunder, and it brought a new inferno to the east.

  ‘Maintain course,’ Deyers shouted to Medina. They would soon join the bulk of the regiment in the struggle against the carnifexes.

  ‘What is happening, captain?’ Platen asked. She could see her next target but not the wider panorama of the war.