Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine

by David Annandale

  The Thunderstrike macrocannons of Deicoon entered the war with a terrible shout. A multi-kilotonne shell burst through the towers between the keep and Viokania. Though walls exploded, and streaks of flame erupted at its passing, nothing it hit was substantial enough to slow it down or trigger its blast. Then it hit the Reaver Imperio Carnificis, marching behind Rheliax’s Crudelis Mortem. The explosion shattered glass for miles around. It lit the forge yards with a blinding, destroying light. The Reaver’s shields had just taken a hit from the Traitor Titans in the east. They were straining, and the Thunderstrike shell shattered them. It blew out the Titan’s entire midsection. The Reaver stood for a few moments more, as if surprised by the absence in its torso. Then the upper portions of the god-machine collapsed. It fell in on itself, shaking with secondary explosions, flames bursting from its ordnance holds. Princeps Landredd must have lived another moment, his will miraculously linked to the dying manifold and the motive force of the Titan, because Imperio Carnificis took one more step, its arms slumping towards the ground, its entire frame rocked with tremors. The fires reached higher, and the Reaver became its own pyre from the legs up. It walked no more. The god-machine fell, internal blasts consuming it. The wreckage that smashed to earth was no longer recognisable as the war engine that had fought through millennia of battles. It was a grandiose ruin. The shattered, burning metal was the broken bones of a fallen giant.

  ‘Forced march!’ Krezoc yelled into the vox. There was no space for grief in war. She cauterised the wound left by the death of Imperio Carnificis. She crushed the loss beneath the weight of hard necessity. ‘Deprive the guns of targets,’ she ordered. The range of moment of the macrocannons was limited, and they were not on turrets. Krezoc angled Gloria Vastator away from the broad avenue that ran parallel to the forge yards and went directly to the gate. That was in the direct line of fire of the Thunderstrikes. From what she had seen of the keep’s armament, the guns did not have a full three hundred and sixty-degree arc of fire.

  What they had was bad enough. Another shell screamed into the yards. It missed the last of Rheliax’s maniple. It hit the ground, and its sunburst sent a storm of flaming metal and pulverised rockcrete over Deicoon. It left a crater where the forge yards had been.

  The strategy of the Iron Skulls was what Krezoc had feared. They were not entering the city, because they did not have to. When she saw another energy beam cut through the skyline from the east, she turned into its path. ‘Use the enemy’s fire,’ she ordered. ‘Advance into it. They’re trying to force us into the sights of the macrocannons.’

  The Pallidus Mor would last longer against the weapons of other Titans than against the Thunderstrikes. But the solution was a poor one. She did not think they would be able to march all the way to the wall without falling victim to a lethal attrition.

  They had to take out the guns.

  The vox was working again. It had cleared shortly after the rise of the brass causeway. Deyers didn’t know if the creation of that ghastly miracle had used up the sorcerous energy that was blocking communications, or if something had happened at Deicoon to kill the interference. It was a small mercy, but he was willing to take any he could get at this point.

  The Spears had driven straight into the city. The gates were down, and the Pallidus Mor Titans were beginning to move. The Iron Skulls were closing in, and Deyers’ hope of establishing a line of defence with Krezoc’s maniples to protect the city had died when the smoke became visible on the horizon. Even if there was something to defend, there would not have been time for the Pallidus Mor and the Spears to join up outside the walls. So he led the regiment into the city, and he did not know the thing it had become. He had left an industrial powerhouse, proud in its loyalty to the Emperor. He had returned to a burning slaughterhouse. Many of the streets were impassable to the tanks, their lengths torn into ragged canyons. Down others, heretics and citizens tore at each other. The cultists had more weapons, and the battles were turning into massacres. Deyers had no choice. The Kataran 66th opened fire, shells and streams of burning promethium gutting the roads ahead. Deyers saw many loyal citizens killed in the waves of destruction he sent before him, and he winced at their sacrifices.

  He wasn’t the only one. ‘Our shells don’t discriminate,’ said Platen.

  ‘Would the faithful live any longer if we did nothing?’ Deyers asked her.

  ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘Not much.’

  ‘Then it’s an act of mercy.’ A quick death, not a ritualistic one. Bastion of Faith rode up over a heap of masonry and shattered bodies, and roared on through the street. The 66th had barely entered the city, but Deyers was fighting the despair that threatened to clamp its claws around his chest. How had this happened to Deicoon? How had no one seen this coming?

  What is worth saving here?

  He tried to bury the thought. It kept surfacing. The mission on Khania, and all the losses there, had been more than duty to the Imperium. They had been in the name of preserving the home world. Then Katara had called, and every moment between the call and the landing had been torture. But Deyers and his Spears had returned, they had answered the call. And now Katara was falling to pieces before his eyes. Creontiades was lost, Deicoon was aflame, and how long before Therimachus suffered the same fate?

  What are we saving?

  He had to make himself believe there was something worth fighting for here. Hook up with the Pallidus Mor. Defeat the Iron Skulls. Then take the city back.

  The barrage from the traitor god-machines began, and with it the levelling of Deicoon. Everything over fifty feet in height was suddenly a target. The skyline began to topple, hurling immense masses to the ground, crushing the struggling insects below. Then there was the shriek and crack of monstrous thunder. Searing annihilation erupted from the Viokania yards. Blinded by the fireball, Deyers feared for several seconds that the Pallidus Mor had been destroyed. The towering shapes of the god-machines emerged from the flames, and then there was another blast, just as immense.

  ‘Thunderstrikes!’ Platen yelled, awed.

  Deyers had grown to know the shape of those guns as a characteristic of Deicoon’s cityscape. He had never imagined he would witness them fire.

  The crossfire of destruction became clear to him. The Titans were the target, and the city would be levelled completely to get at them.

  ‘Rahl,’ Deyers voxed the communications officer, ‘can you raise Princeps Krezoc?’

  ‘Trying, captain.’ Rahl came back on the line a moment later. ‘I have her, sir.’

  ‘Captain Deyers,’ Krezoc said. ‘The macrocannons must be silenced.’

  ‘Agreed. How can we assist?’ Then, remembering, he added, ‘The keep is void-shielded.’

  More infernal beams from the Iron Skulls shot across the city above him. A flight of missiles followed. Before his eyes, the gothic spires of Deicoon became a landslide of rockcrete. Thick dust clouds, tinged red by fire, rolled down the streets and over the lines of tanks.

  ‘I know,’ said Krezoc. ‘We need to split their focus. Even a small distraction might be sufficient. If the Iron Skulls remain outside the walls, your regiment will not be in their sights. Close in on the keep, Captain Deyers. Do what you can.’

  ‘We will, princeps,’ he said.

  He could not hear his own answer over the city-shaking boom of another macrocannon shell. More followed, too quickly to be from the same gun.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Platen yelled.

  ‘They’re firing all the guns,’ Deyers said. Whether they had targets or not, the heretics were unleashing Deicoon’s greatest strength against itself. They were going to destroy the city with its own defence.

  ‘Turn west,’ Deyers called to Medina. ‘Get us to the keep as fast as possible.’ He thought through the geography of the city for a moment. ‘Head for the Avenue of the Holy Vigilant.’ It ran parallel to the shattered thoroughfare leading
from the gate. It had not collapsed, and it was wide enough that the rubble of buildings might not block it entirely.

  Medina acknowledged.

  Two intersections later, the Spears were turning onto Holy Vigilant. The dust was so thick, Deyers could barely see two blocks ahead, but the surface of the street was still intact this far. Thousands of silhouettes fought savagely in the choking air. There was room here for the tanks to advance four abreast.

  ‘Full speed,’ Deyers ordered the regiment, and a mechanised wall rolled up the slope of the avenue, crushing anyone who did not flee beneath its treads. The blurred shapes of a mob rushed the Leman Russ lines. Cannon shells and turret bolters tore them apart. Deyers spotted a massive crowd gathering outside a chapel not far ahead. The building had been desecrated with runes, and smoke roiled from its gutted interior. ‘Platen,’ he said, ‘the chapel. Drop it on them.’ Bastion of Faith’s battle cannon roared. The shell hit the façade just above and to the right of the doorway. The explosion destroyed the building’s structural integrity. The front half of the chapel collapsed, the façade toppling into the street and the roof following in a slide of rubble. Hundreds died, and the mob scattered from the fall. The wreckage reached across half the street. New clouds of dust and smoke made the air even harder to breathe.

  Is this salvation? Deyers wondered as the tanks manoeuvred around the ruin of the chapel, grinding more bodies into the pavement. All we have left is the razing of our own cities. Is this salvation?

  He didn’t feel like anything was being saved. Katara was dropping into an abyss of darkness and flame, and all he could do was bring more darkness, and more flame.

  The regiment rode on, heading for the keep, spreading destruction at street level while the air above screamed with the energy beams and the flight of monstrous shells. The keep came into view at the top of the Avenue of the Holy Vigilant, its shape an indistinct mass of black in the dust. There were flickers of brighter visibility when attacks from the Pallidus Mor struck void shields, and then bright flashes from the barrels of the macrocannons. A shadow moved, like the hand of a sundial. It pointed down the avenue at the Spears.

  ‘I think we’ve been spotted!’ Platen called.

  ‘Medina!’ Deyers shouted. ‘Faster!’

  The command was pointless. There was no way to get beneath the gun’s arc before it fired. The Thunderstrike flashed. The limbo howled. The shell hit the road towards the rear lines of the regiment. Deyers whirled in the hatch and looked back at the immense fireball. Tiny objects that had been Leman Russ tanks hurtled over the broken roofs of the city.

  The heat baked the skin of Deyers’ face. Blocks away from the centre of the strike, but still within the area of the blast, a promethium reservoir exploded. In the space before another shot from the macrocannon, a firestorm engulfed entire square miles of the city. Its rage kept spreading, manufactorum complexes going off in a chain reaction, the destruction reaching out with blazing hands to consume more and more and more of the city, and the street, and the regiment outlined by the hungry flames.

  There would be no evasion. There was nothing left to do but fire.

  The Company of the Bridge struggled through streets choked with smoke and rubble and death. Directions became vague. The dust clouds turned the city into a red twilight. It was hard to breathe, and Ornastas’ eyes watered from the stinging grit. He kept his bearings from the slopes. As long as he was going downhill, he was heading towards the walls.

  Three times since the battle at the cathedral he had been asked what the company must do next. Three times, explosions nearby had prevented him from answering. It was all he could do to speak without coughing now, but for the fourth time he made the effort. The company had to have a mission, and its members had to know there was one. ‘We will leave the city,’ Ornastas shouted. ‘Our mission here is complete. We are called elsewhere now. We march to Therimachus. There we will be guided again. Be certain of that.’ He managed to get through the speech before he bent over, coughing as if he would expel his lungs. His chest grated when he breathed. Velatz and Aldemar stood beside him, ready to help, coughing too. Ornastas held himself up with both hands clutching his staff. Then he nodded and walked on.

  They journeyed through a confusion of shapes and struggles. The flames of the city mounted higher and higher at the same time as more and more of its towers came tumbling down. Ornastas could see nothing beyond the next intersection. Phantoms clawed at each other in the clouds of grey and brown and red. The roads the company travelled were narrow, away from the grumbling roar of tanks and the colossal explosions unleashed by Titans and macrocannons. The route went over and between heaps of rubble, and into clusters of fighting. Cultists lunged out of the dust fog, their silhouettes suddenly becoming clear, shadowed features turning into snarling masks. The company gunned down the ones who came near. Firefights impeded the progress of the march. The battles were short, and though the company took some casualties, it kept moving.

  It also began to grow.

  Ornastas called to the faithful of Deicoon. He held his staff high through every battered street and while crossing every field of rubble. Though his coughing grew worse, he shouted prayers to the God-Emperor. He cursed the faithless who had turned from the true path. He praised the loyal and the faithful, and those willing to die for the Imperial Creed. ‘Join us!’ he cried. ‘Join us! We are the Company of the Bridge! We have fought since Creontiades, and we will fight until Katara is once again in the light of the Emperor!’ Another coughing fit silenced him. He spat out a wad of black phlegm, breathed raggedly, and repeated his exhortations.

  Individuals and small groups of citizens worked their way through the crimson-and-grey murk to join him. They came cautiously, the movements of their shadows pious and hopeful. The warriors of the company were able to distinguish them from the cultists, and not kill them as they drew near. The train of marchers behind Ornastas grew longer. A few enforcers of the Adeptus Arbites, those who had lost all their comrades, became part of the company. They added their combat skills to the grouping’s strengths. One, a brutally scarred, greying veteran named Brennet, walked near the front, just behind Velatz and Aldemar, stepping forwards to support Ornastas when breathing became just too hard and he started to sag. Brennet did not try to lead, though. None of them did. They seemed to recognise they had become part of something other than a military formation. The company fought for Katara and the Emperor, but it was a movement. It was the rejection of corruption. It was the light of the Kataran spirit that refused to be extinguished.

  This truth was visible in the range of citizens who joined. Few had training. They came from the undercity, where they had fought, and then hidden from, the rising cult. They came from the manufactoria. They came from the towers of administration and wealth. They were the people of Deicoon who said no to the heresy, and no to defeat. They were the people who were desperate not for survival, but for the chance to do their duty to world and Emperor, who asked for nothing more than to show their faith to the last of their breath.

  They came, and they marched, and many died, but they died with pride. Ornastas’ voice grew hoarse. His lungs felt like ragged bellows. But he kept up the call, and the people sang with him, spreading his words, calling to still more. The Company of the Bridge grew and grew, and it snaked its way through the erupting city to the walls and the land and the destiny beyond.

  Terrible cannon fire sounded. Not far behind, entire sectors of the city disappeared in a wall of flame. Ornastas did not look back. He clung to the hope that there might still be a way forwards.

  Krezoc pivoted as soon as Gloria Vastator’s shields started taking hits from Iron Skulls fire. She angled the Warlord’s trajectory towards the keep, in a line with the traitor’s aim. Its thunderous steps leaned left, then right. The Titan was too immense to duck and weave, but the sinuous course Krezoc established took the Pallidus Mor in and out of the partial shelter
of the city’s rapidly vanishing towers. The pall of dust and smoke was so thick, line-of-sight targeting was impossible. Visibility was next to zero. Even auspex-controlled fire was being affected by blooms of heat from the explosions and conflagrations raging in all directions. As Krezoc had surmised, the Iron Skulls were not really shooting at the Pallidus Mor any longer. Their barrage was intended to push her forces into the arc of the Thunderstrikes.

  ‘Princeps Rheliax,’ she voxed. ‘Cover our rear flank. Concentrate your fire towards the wall. Give the traitors something to think about.’ Any interference at all with the enemy’s salvoes would provide that much more time to manoeuvre towards the keep.

  ‘Acknowledged,’ said Rheliax. ‘And I’m sending my Warhounds forwards.’

  ‘Good.’ Until the keep was within reach, the smaller Titans were the most vulnerable and the least able to act.

  Gloria Vastator strode onwards through the burning murk. The streams of energy and shells hit on all sides. More of Deicoon exploded with every step. Soon Krezoc could see the keep above the broken skyline before her. Her maniple and Drahn’s began their barrage. ‘Missile launches,’ Krezoc ordered. ‘Don’t give them a clear line back to us yet.’

  Flights of Apocalypse missiles streaked from the launchers of multiple god-machines. The missiles hammered the keep’s shields, a chain of explosions illuminating the gloom. The energy sphere surrounding the building flickered and pulsed with angry violet light. A moment later, the Thunderstrike on the near side of the keep fired, but it was aiming to the left of the Pallidus Mor formation. The shot angled downwards into an avenue and set off a colossal chain reaction. An answering barrage rose from the street. The tanks of the Kataran 66th were invisible to Krezoc, hidden by the slumping, burning masses of rockcrete. Their cannon fire seemed pathetically small next to what they were fighting. The blasts barely strained the void shield.