Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine

by David Annandale

  The western end of the bridge was only a hundred yards away. Land was within reach. The land was burning. Flames roared up into the night. Ruined tanks were falling into sea. Yet it was land. If only… If only…

  He had no sense any longer of the maelstrom above. The storm of blasts and coruscating energy was at its height. It could not continue. The catastrophe was playing out on a stage that could no longer support it.

  Ornastas ran, ignoring pain, carrying the faithful in his wake. The goal was so close, so close.

  The Emperor protects. The Emperor protects.

  The storm erupted with absolute fury. The bridge jerked with fatal suddenness. It moved to the left.

  It kept moving.

  Another Warhound died. It was Nobilis Canem, one of the Imperial Hunters. Rheliax was reporting major damage to Crudelis Mortem. Gloria Vastator walked backwards. Krezoc’s consciousness swam in the manifold, seeing each step. She was at one with the Titan; its body was her body, and the auspex sensors were eyes that looked behind and forwards at once. She saw everywhere. She saw what she had to do. She saw how many steps remained before Gloria Vastator was on land again. The rest of her maniple had obeyed her orders to retreat at speed. Her Warlord was the last one on the bridge.

  The void shields were failing. The Iron Skulls concentrated their fire on Gloria Vastator. In the background of her consciousness, Thezerin was reporting mounting damage.

  The Titan still walked, and its weapons still worked, that was all that mattered.

  Now, Krezoc thought in the manifold, and the command became Now! – a galvanic shout to the moderati, and the roar of the machine-spirit unleashed. Every weapon fired. The target was just in front of the advancing Iron Skulls. The target was the bridge.

  Missiles, quake shells, volcano las and mega-bolter rounds struck the roadway and the superstructure. The holocaust swallowed the front ranks of the Iron Skulls and their cultists. Metal ran molten and then vaporised. Rockcrete disintegrated. The trusses exploded into a flight of incandescent spears. On either side of the blasts, the bridge reared upwards as if it would take flight from its pyre. Then it fell, and kept falling, the collapse spreading back along its length. Gloria Vastator took another step backwards, and then another. The bridge surface was still solid for the first one, but it was moving with the second. The Warlord’s motions were unnatural; the colossus was always steady – that was the nature of its huge mass. The sudden shift, like a ship at sea, was irregular, and it was the sign that time had run out.

  The conflagration at the centre began to dim. The trusses collapsed. With the groan of a slain beast, the east and west spans of the bridge dropped forwards.

  Gloria Vastator took one more step. Its foot crunched down onto the clifftop roadbed. The surface of the bridge fell away just as Krezoc brought the other foot up. If there had been any weight on that leg a second longer, the Warlord would have pitched forwards.

  Krezoc held Gloria Vastator at the cliff edge and watched the end of the Kazani Bridge. The engineering wonder of Katara died in a cataract of rockcrete, iron and flame. The waves foamed as they swallowed the prey they had battered for so many centuries. Enemy Titans fell with it, vanishing into the depths. Krezoc saw at least five god-machines dropping into the fiery darkness, their war-horns howling despair. On the far side, the rest of the Iron Skulls maintained their bombardment of the west, but the Kataran Spears had pulled back now too. Their work was done. There was nothing more to be gained from this night.

  The wreckage fell into the sea and vanished. Not everything disappeared, though. The supports, wonders in their own right whose bases had been constructed on the seabed hundreds of yards below the surface of the waves, projected like broken bones from the cauldron. One of the Banelords had landed against a pillar. It had punched its doomfist into the rockcrete, embedding its arm in the support. It was held there above the waves. Its tail and jaw cannons fired at Gloria Vastator. Las burned through the Warlord’s struggling shields, and a shell collided with its chest plating. The blow rocked the Titan back. Dark smoke billowed upwards, obscuring Krezoc’s view. She cursed, and acquired the target through auspex readings. When Gloria Vastator fired in retaliation, a dozen more weapons from the rest of the demi-legio joined it. The Iron Skulls monster lived for only a few seconds before it exploded. Its reactor went critical, and the nuclear blast swept across the Kazani Strait, a sun rising from the waves. A void opened in the sea, where countless tonnes of water had evaporated on the instant. The waves rushed in to fill the void, monstrous in their wrath, and they rose almost as high as the clifftops. The terrible fire dimmed, and when the waves dropped at last, nothing remained above the surface.

  Chapter 6

  The Light of Truth

  They clung to the side of the cliff, sheltering in its fissures from the destroying light that filled the strait. Two more of Ornastas’ followers died, burned by that infernal dawn. Then came the winds, and the churning of the sea, the waves reaching so high they almost swept the mortals from their perch. At last the wind calmed, and Ornastas led the climb up the cliff, past the twisted, hanging ruins of the bridge, and to level terrain once more.

  After the night of fury, the calm over the land seemed like an aftermath, rather than a mere pause in the war. The group moved up the road, beginning the long walk towards Deicoon. Past the approach to the bridge, the land began to rise again, and at the top of the first slope, lines of Leman Russ tanks barred the way. Ornastas shouted a prayer of thanks, and his followers joined him. There were fewer than twenty of them left. They were drenched, numb with cold and shock. Deafened by the war, they had to shout so they could hear their own voices. But they sang to the glory of the Emperor, and they were still singing as they approached the line of the Kataran 66th. His staff raised, Ornastas slowed down, then stopped a dozen yards from the nearest tank. Given the ragged condition he and his flock were in, they might be mistaken for cultists.

  They kept up the singing, displaying their loyalty to the God-Emperor, until the commanding officer dismounted from the central Leman Russ and approached. Once more, Ornastas offered his thanks to the Father of Mankind. The Emperor protected. Ornastas knew this man.

  ‘I am glad to see you, Captain Deyers,’ he said.

  Deyers stared at him for a moment. Between the grime, the blood and the ragged conditions of his robes, Ornastas knew he was barely recognisable. ‘Confessor Ornastas?’ Deyers asked.

  Ornastas smiled and came forwards. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘We escaped the corruption of Creontiades. We crossed the bridge.’

  Deyers’ eyes bulged. ‘Last night?’

  Ornastas nodded. ‘It was the Emperor’s will.’

  ‘Who are these people with you?’

  The answer came to Ornastas with the force of revelation. Whatever identities they had had in Creontiades, those roles had fallen away. They had joined with him to fight the forces of heresy, they had crossed the cauldron of the Kazani Strait, and they had survived the crucible of the night. They were a new thing now, and they deserved a name. ‘They are…’ he began, then corrected himself. ‘We are the Company of the Bridge.’

  Deyers nodded, accepting the plain truth of Ornastas’ words. ‘What are you planning to do?’

  ‘Fight. In whatever way the Emperor will have us do so.’

  ‘Will you join us here?’ Deyers asked.

  Ornastas looked beyond the captain and the tanks, up the road to Deicoon. The Titans had departed hours ago and were no longer in sight. He could still feel their presence on the world, though. He could feel this great counterbalance to the evil that had come down upon Creontiades. Where the god-machines were is where his company must go. ‘Thank you,’ he said to Deyers, ‘but we are called to Deicoon.’

  Deyers nodded, accepting what Ornastas said without question. Ornastas had not served with th
e captain, but Deyers was part of his congregation. They shared bonds of mutual respect for the other’s skill at his calling. ‘I’ll see that you have transport there,’ he said. ‘Is there anything else you need?’

  ‘Better weapons,’ said Ornastas, glancing at the collection of crude machetes and hatchets his company carried. ‘Rations, if you can spare them.’

  ‘I can do that too,’ Deyers said. ‘And your company’s wounds – you’re not above having them seen to?’

  Ornastas smiled. ‘We are not.’

  They dragged him from the cell in which he’d been kept. They marched him down the corridors of the governor’s palace. Hallard Eukrolas knew this was the palace because he had not been allowed to leave it since the start of the uprising, but he would not have recognised it. The paintings and tapestries had been burned from the walls. Blood, dried and still fresh, pooled on the floor. Runes had been carved and scorched into every surface. He could not look at the markings without feeling something malign reach into his head.

  He was brought out of the tapering spire of the palace into the great square before it. The surviving members of his entourage were there too, as ragged and battered as he was. One of the twisted god-machines of the enemy stood in the centre of the square. It was the size of a Reaver, but so distorted it was no longer a machine. It was a supernatural monster that had emerged from humanity’s suppressed nightmares to wound the day.

  At the feet of the Titan was a large metallic structure. It was built from wreckage and was a creation of jagged, sheared metal. There was brass in there, too; a lot of it. The structure conveyed both strength and agony. Small cages hung from poles that jutted at odd angles. A rough dais rose from the centre of the metal. On it stood a robed figure. Wailing heretics danced around the dais.

  Hallard’s captors hauled him and his staff towards the structure. He knew he was going to be sacrificed, but at least, he thought, he would learn who was behind the uprising. He would see the face of the leader, and know who had betrayed him and his world. The figure wore a hood, and did not push it back as Hallard was carried onto the structure and hauled by ropes up to one of the cages. The cultists shoved him inside and locked him in. The cage was too short for him to stand and too narrow for him to sit. He had to crouch, his head and knees brushing against the bars. There were seven more cages, and soon they, too, were filled with sobbing, moaning prisoners.

  There was a huge gathering in the great avenues that stretched out from the square, running between the blackened tombstones that had been the jewels of Creontiades’ crown. At first, Hallard had thought this was more of the mob of heretics, larger than his worst imaginings, come to jeer at the sacrifice. Then he saw that, though there were thousands of cultists present, most of the crowd was made up of more prisoners, herded together to this location, and this time.

  The figure on the dais came to stand beneath Hallard’s cage. It pulled back its hood.

  Now, Hallard thought. Show me your face.

  The man looked up.

  Hallard had expected revelation. If he was to die, there should be some meaning in death. He should have a target for his last curses. He should be granted the knowledge of who had orchestrated this vast treason.

  He was given nothing.

  The man had branded and scarred and mutilated his features until he was barely human. He had peeled away all the skin below his eyes, exposing the muscle. He had cut off his nose. A brass plate, shaped into the rune of the stylised skull, was embedded in his scalp. The monster looked at Hallard and laughed. The voice was strange to him too. This was no one he knew. There was no close confederate who had betrayed him. This was someone who had always been invisible to him, and to so many others. He had been beneath notice, and so had done his work without fear of discovery. Now, in his time of glory, his old identity was gone forever.

  ‘Well, lord-governor,’ he rasped, his words guttural and malformed as they passed through a lipless mouth. ‘Are you ready?’

  The Titans were in the great Viokania forge of Deicoon, midway between the keep and the city walls. As many repairs as could be made quickly were under way. In the keep, Nevaeh Eukrolas received the princeps and moderati of the Pallidus Mor and Imperial Hunters, congratulating them on their victory. Krezoc did not like the hubris that went with the ceremony, but she understood its value to the morale of the crews and of the citizenry, so she accepted its necessity. In the reception hall, Eukrolas and her lieutenants were hosting the Titanicus officers. Krezoc left them there and walked to a communications room a short distance down a corridor from the hall. Eukrolas had given her the use of it and the privacy for the unpleasant conversation she had put off until now.

  She contacted Syagrius on the vox.

  ‘I will have you tried,’ the marshal said without preamble.

  ‘For doing my duty?’ Krezoc asked.

  ‘You abandoned your post.’

  ‘I protected Deicoon by stymying the enemy’s advance.’

  ‘Your losses–’ Syagrius began.

  You mean your losses, Krezoc thought. She did not believe Syagrius cared for any of the fallen Titans except the Imperial Hunters. ‘Our losses were much less severe than those the Iron Skulls suffered. The operation was a success, marshal. I’m sorry that disappoints you.’

  Syagrius sputtered something incoherent, then said, ‘I suppose we must now consider what to do about Creontiades, since we can no longer approach it.’

  Which you never meant to do, Krezoc thought.

  ‘Since the enemy is contained,’ Syagrius mused, ‘orbital bombardment is a possibility.’

  Krezoc was glad Deyers was not present to hear this. The total destruction of Creontiades would not sound like salvation to him. But there was a grim logic to Syagrius’ calculation. If the corruption was stopped there, Katara’s losses would be much reduced overall. Even so, Krezoc was reluctant to jump to the most extreme solution immediately. ‘There may be an alternative,’ she said, doubting that Syagrius would listen.

  ‘And that would–’ Syagrius began. His voice was drowned out by a blast of static. The disruption went on and on, and Krezoc thought she heard the echoes of screams and chants worming through the white noise. She tried other channels. There was nothing but the rotting static on all of them.

  Krezoc ran from the communications chamber. There were shouts coming from the reception hall. She stormed down the hall, ready for battle and fearing the worst.

  She was also angry at herself. She was Pallidus Mor. She should have known disaster was coming.

  The earth shook. Gantries broke away from the Titans and hurled their work crews to the ground. From his position at the feet of Gloria Vastator, Venterras could see through the gates to the forge’s work yards. The road on the other side collapsed. A huge cloud of dust rose, billowing into the grounds, obscuring everything in a wash of grey. The tremors continued and the gates fell, jarred loose from the wall. Dark shapes emerged in their hundreds from the crevasse in the road. Las-beams cut through the dust, burning the scrambling enginseers and manufactorum serfs.

  The enemy kept pouring out of the fallen road. There were hundreds of them, all converging on the work yards. They were coming for the Titans.

  Hoplite and peltast secutarii laid down a broad field of fire with arc lances and galvanic casters. Concussive blasts and bursts of flechettes smashed and tore the attackers. But they kept coming, rushing to overwhelm the defenders with a huge crowd.

  Magos Xura Thezerin ordered from within Gloria Vastator.

  The secutarii responded as if possessing a single, collective mind. Thezerin’s doctrina imperative slaved all of their strategy to the overriding purpose of protecting the god-machines. Noospheric links switched their perceptions to binaric omniscience. Venterras experienced the entire battlefield reduced to digital components. The foe was a series of data streams, equat
ions to be solved, then cancelled. The most efficient arc of fire, coordinated relative to that of every other secutarii, appeared before him. His response and his perception were simultaneous. The same was true of all the hoplites and peltasts.

  The results were devastating. The heretics ran into a wall of precision destruction. The front wave of the mob went down, not a single attacker making it through the wall of explosions and energy discharges.

  As the dust settled, something large and bulky emerged from the crevasse. It looked like a corrupted Onager dunecrawler. A bulbous mass sat atop four spined, insectoid legs. It did not appear to be armed. It crawled forwards slowly, led by a group of cultists fastened to it with long chains. In Venterras’ vision, it was an incomplete equation of ones and zeroes. It was a threat, but its nature and scope were undefined. Nevertheless, its presence alone dictated a response, and he aimed his arc lance at the machine.

  As it reached the entrance to the yards, secutarii fire converged on the crawler. Energy crackled around its upper mass. Its legs stabbed craters into the rockcrete as it dragged itself forwards like a dying beast. The cultists strained on their chains, pulling it further into the yards. There was still no sign of attack, but its binaric threat vector grew. The flashes and energy bursts circling it became blinding.

  It exploded.

  The physical blast was not large. It did not reach beyond the ranks of the cultists. Metal shrapnel tore through their ranks, and the fireball incinerated those closest to the device. The other burst went much further. The electromagnetic wave slashed across the work yards. Venterras’ binaric perception flared white, then winked out. A shrieking whine filled his senses. His limbs twitched and jerked. Neuro-electronic impulses misfired across his frame. For several seconds, he had no control over his body.

  That was enough time for the tide of cultists to crash against the secutarii and bring them to the ground.

  From the panoramic windows of the reception hall, Krezoc saw the wounds open in Deicoon. The fissures in the roads were connected, and created a pattern. A menace had risen from the depths of the city to carve huge runes into its face. She turned to glare at Eukrolas. The governor had turned pale. Her mouth was hanging open, aghast.