Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine

by David Annandale

  Second to second, the changes.

  Hold them off, hold them off, Krezoc thought. The god-machine stepped backwards and its carapace weapons sent missiles and mega-bolter shells into the path of the Ravagers. The Banelord’s plasma bursts cut deeper into armour. Krezoc felt the Warlord’s movements slipping away from her grip. The machine-spirit roared, its coherence eroding.

  Second to second…

  ‘Rheliax,’ Krezoc voxed as the weapons readied again, rising to aim at the Banelord’s upper body and head. ‘Status.’

  He never answered. Instead, the west exploded. Fatum Messor died, its final cry annihilating the entire sector of Therimachus, the shock wave and heat sending the ocean into new paroxysms. Waves built upon waves, rage upon rage, and a two-hundred-foot monster crested to the west, swallowing the floating rafts of the city as it roared eastwards.

  Second to second…

  The first Banelord was doomed when Krezoc turned from it. It was falling to molten depths. There was no recovery possible. It died, but in its last burst of anger, its tail whipped above the waves and blasted Gloria Vastator’s back.

  The Warlord fired its primary weapons. The advancing Banelord stopped in its tracks. Flame burst from its chest and fissured carapace. But the light of its eyes blazed undimmed. The Ravagers caught the Warlord in a plasma crossfire. Its void shields struggled, fading and surging erratically. Krezoc still shut out the damage warnings, but there was one she could not ignore. The radiation levels throughout the god-machine were climbing rapidly, even in the brief moments when it was not being hit.

  The pain of the machine-spirit was so intense that her body arched, mirroring its agony.

  ‘Thezerin,’ she voxed.

  ‘Rupture in the power plant,’ the magos said, confirming what she knew. ‘It is past containment.’

  ‘How long do we have?’

  ‘Minutes. Perhaps less.’

  ‘Can you accelerate it?’ Krezoc had come to the final equation. She worked through the variables and the constants in an instant. She saw the inevitable, and she saw the path to the end of the war.

  ‘I can.’ Thezerin did not ask why.

  ‘Do. And reach the head if you can.’

  Weapons powering up again. More salvoes smashing the Ravagers. The one on Gloria Vastator’s left flank slowed, its left arm exploding. The Warlord took its final steps towards the Banelord. Krezoc writhed with the effort of trying to move the god-machine’s legs. Grevereign and Vansaak’s bodies trembled with the same pain. Krezoc fought through it to vox the moderati minoris. ‘Abandon your posts,’ she said. ‘Make for the head. Evacuation is imminent.’

  ‘Negative,’ Konterus said. ‘The fire is outside my pod.’

  ‘My route is blocked too,’ said Haziad.

  ‘It has been an honour to serve with you.’ Konterus spoke with the proud fatalism of the legio.

  ‘Glory to the Omnissiah,’ said Haziad.

  ‘Your duty will be remembered,’ Krezoc said.

  The moderati had the luxury of making farewells. That made them unusually fortunate.

  Less than a hundred yards separated Gloria Vastator and the Banelord. The traitor’s power claw snapped open and closed. Monstrous, sorcerous light built up in a corona around the claw.

  ‘Brace for emergency launch,’ Krezoc told Vansaak and Grevereign. The manifold registered the power plant’s intensifying crisis. Energy slipped its reins. The chain reaction began. She saw the precise second of the end approach. She saw how long she could give Thezerin. Her awareness split evenly between Gloria Vastator’s final blows and the count towards zero. For the Warlord, the binary could no longer resolve into the one.

  There was no grief yet. There was no room for it. There was no anticipation of pain when all was agony. Rather, there was the supremacy of cold fury. Krezoc joined with the Warlord’s machine-

  spirit as it gave vent to its full wrath, hurling itself forwards to take down its final prey. Krezoc sounded the war-horn with the last blast of the weapons. Gloria Vastator roared, indomitable, undefeated. The barrage blew open the traitor’s front armour. Burning promethium and ichor poured down the Titan, but it only came on faster, as if enraged by pain.

  There was no energy left for the weapons. Gloria Vastator took one more step and then stopped, motionless on the heaving slab of city. The Ravagers hit it again, scavengers closing in on the fallen apex predator.

  The monster wave came closer.

  The Banelord arrived, its war-horn taunting, triumphant. It raised the claw.

  The door to the command pod slid open to admit Thezerin. She closed it again and sealed it fully three seconds before Krezoc’s deadline passed.

  ‘Launch,’ Krezoc said.

  Explosive bolts severed the head’s connection from the body of Gloria Vastator. Its rockets fired, and it shot upwards, arcing to the preset coordinates. Krezoc gasped. The manifold vanished. Void swamped her. She was barely conscious of the G-forces of the climb and the bone-shaking rattle of the engines. The pain of the separation went deeper than any physical sensation. The mechadendrites still held her to the throne, but they were linked to nothing. Her mouth was open in a tendon-straining silent howl. Through the eyes of the head, as the slab rode up the towering wave, she had a last glimpse of Gloria Vastator, motionless, its massiveness standing its ground to the last.

  Then they were out of sight. All she could see was the wave.

  And then there was the light.

  The void behind Krezoc’s eyes shattered. She fell through its savage fragments, and they bled her. The pain of every separation from Gloria Vastator she had ever experienced was devoured by the greatest agony. Since she had become princeps over half a century before, the irreducible constant of her life had been the existence of the Warlord. Now it was gone. The pole star of her existence winked out.

  Far away, in another reality, the faint awareness of the blast, so huge it decapitated the wave, evaporating magma, disintegrating the raft of the city, the Warlord taking its killers to oblivion with it.

  The shards of absence stabbed into her being, shredding it, pulling every sense of self into bloody tatters. Meaninglessness engulfed her. She fell into endless cold.

  No.

  There was duty still.

  She was Pallidus Mor, and for the Pallidus Mor, there was never release from pain or duty. In the end, they were always the same. In the void, there was cold, the cold of death, and it was her birthright and her strength. She seized it, made it ice, and made the ice the foundation of her being once more.

  She dragged air into her lungs and gave voice to her pain. One long howl of grief, her entire soul issuing bloodily from her lungs. Then she opened her eyes to the world and to necessity.

  The head of Gloria Vastator sailed over the Kataran 66th. It came in at a hard angle towards the ground. Retro-rockets fired a single blast just before impact, and the pod came down with a jarring crash.

  Krezoc rose from her throne the instant motion stopped. She detached the inert mechadendrites. Her moderati were stirring, too, their eyes hollowed out. ‘Keep moving,’ she told them. Keep ahead of the despair.

  Thezerin opened the door and they jumped out of the head to the ground. Tremors almost threw them off their feet. The long death of Therimachus continued to shake the land. Half a mile to the south stood a dark colossus. The walls of its drop coffin surrounded Ferrum Salvator.

  Krezoc looked back towards the city. The explosion of Gloria Vastator had destroyed the rogue wave unleashed by the death of Crudelis Mortem. The ocean’s upheaval was more violent than ever, but there was no more combat on the few slabs of the city that remained. Near the edge of the sea, what was left of the battle group had gathered. Krezoc made out the silhouettes of one Reaver and two Warhounds. Coming ashore, the rockcrete raft it rode washed inland by the waves pushed out by the great blast
s, was the last Banelord. It was wreathed in flame and glowed with red corruption. If Rheliax had managed to damage the traitor, it showed no sign of its injuries. It strode ashore, the god of the battlefield, walking into the Pallidus Mor’s barrage, contemptuous of its dwarfed foes.

  Krezoc spoke into her vox-bead as she led the run towards Ferrum Salvator. ‘Pull back,’ she ordered. ‘Keep the enemy busy, but do not engage directly.’

  She ran faster over the trembling ground. Cracks snaked through the stone. She leapt over widening gaps. Vansaak, Grevereign and Thezerin kept pace.

  ‘Your course of action presents considerable risk of failure and death,’ Thezerin said, the electronic voice as flat and affectless as if she had been walking.

  ‘It is this or defeat,’ Krezoc answered.

  She kept her eyes on the goal. The thunder of battle to the rear had nothing to do with her. She did not look back until they were at the feet of Ferrum Salvator. When she did, she saw the Banelord was making directly for Balzhan’s Warlord. It fired to the left and right, disdainfully annihilating tanks and blowing the right arm off Nobilis Arma. The intelligence guiding its path recognised the last possible threat on the field. It would reach Ferrum Salvator in a matter of minutes.

  From the exterior, the Warlord was dark as a sepulchre. But the power plant was running, and the interior glowed the sombre red of the god-machine’s slumber. As they took the grav lift up the right leg, Krezoc wrestled with the conflicting sensations of familiarity and alienation.

  ‘You were moderati here, weren’t you?’ Vansaak asked.

  ‘I was,’ said Krezoc. So long ago now, and the road of her return was paved with loss.

  They left Thezerin in the operations centre. A crew of serfs and servitors awaited her there, sent down from the Nuntius Mortis. It was her task to awaken the machine-spirit fully. Thezerin paused at the threshold to a second grav lift, the one that would take princeps and moderati to the Warlord’s head. ‘The machine-spirit will resist,’ she said. ‘It is injured. It is bereaved.’

  ‘So am I,’ Krezoc said, and the doors closed.

  They reached the head. Krezoc paused before the throne. Balzhan’s throne. For a moment, the decades fell away, and her instincts rebelled at the trespass she was about to commit. Her place was in the throne that Vansaak was about to occupy. Her responsibility was the Mori quake cannon. Ferrum Salvator, mightier and more ancient even than Gloria Vastator, was not hers.

  Except it would have to be.

  She sat in the throne, bracing herself. ‘I will begin alone,’ she told Vansaak and Grevereign. ‘Wait for my signal.’

  The figure of the Banelord was drawing closer. It left a wake of explosions and burning wreckage. It might turn its weapons on Ferrum Salvator at any moment.

  Mechadendrites extended from the back of the throne. They plugged into Krezoc’s ports.

  She plunged into the manifold, and into the howling, raging outrage and grief of the machine-spirit. Its loss surrounded her, it battered her, it was a tempest to level mountains. She was an invader, and she would be destroyed.

  Remember me! Krezoc commanded. Ferrum Salvator had known her once. It must again. Remember me! She poured her memories into the manifold, memories of her service in the Warlord, of the battles fought, of its corridors, of the jerk of recoil from the Mori, of her fusion of wills with Balzhan.

  The machine-spirit circled her mind, uncertain. It yanked away when she tried to seize the reins. It was too consumed by its grief. It was hollowed, bereft of meaning and purpose. The winds of sorrow caught Krezoc in their anguished spiral.

  She opened herself up to them. She met Ferrum Salvator’s loss with her own.

  We are the same. We are the bereaved. Let our grief become vengeance.

  The raw wound of Gloria Vastator’s end bled in torrents. Its psychic artery was severed, and her pain was a storm in its own right. The vortices of princeps and machine-spirit met. They fused.

  A new pain began. Krezoc had joined with a god-machine with no ceremony, no preparation. Ferrum Salvator recognised her and their losses were the bridge. If it had not, the link would have been fatal. As it was, the bioelectric feedback jolted her body hard enough to make her spine crack. Her teeth clamped tight, slicing through her tongue. She felt as if blood were boiling inside her skull.

  She held to the ice of duty and the necessity of sacrifice, and worked her way back to awareness of the outside world. She held it and the manifold in her will. Less than a second had passed since the mechadendrites had linked her to the god-machine.

  ‘Now!’ she shouted to the moderati. ‘Do it now!’ They had run out of time. The Banelord had turned its attention away from the distractions. It brought its tail and right arm cannons to bear. The barrels glowed as they charged. Ferrum Salvator’s void shields flickered into being. It took its first step as its arms began to rise. Moving the Warlord was pain. Krezoc felt as though she were pushing a marble statue uphill. Vansaak’s will was in the mani­fold, assisting. So was Grevereign’s. But they were distant, the connections rough, irregular like slipping gears. Without moderati minoris, she could barely touch the carapace weapons.

  The Banelord fired. Ferrum Salvator marched into its barrage. The burning impact focused the anger of the machine-spirit. It hungered for the death of the Iron Skull. It would make the traitor pay for its new pain and for the totality of its grief. Krezoc barely had to command the Titan to walk. The weapons slipped into her control, eager for retribution.

  ‘Charged,’ Grevereign said.

  ‘Loaded,’ said Vansaak.

  End this now, Krezoc thought. Her consciousness was spread thin throughout the Titan. The effort of keeping the machine-spirit from descending into the rage of insanity was shredding her. She had the weapons now. On the carapace, the Apocalypse missiles and plasma blastguns responded to her commands. Their aim was rough. It didn’t need to be precise.

  End it.

  Fury tore the night in two. Krezoc’s fury. The god-machine’s fury. Fury shaped by loss, directed by ice. Ferrum Salvator was death. It had surged from its tomb to send the traitor to the dark. Four weapons drilled into the Banelord at the same point. It had shrugged off the attacks of the smaller Titans, but the minor damage mattered now. Its shields collapsed. The centre of its armour split wide. Burning plasma roiled from its midsection.

  It did not stop. It marched on, weapons firing again, its power claw reaching forwards.

  End it.

  Ferrum Salvator’s war-horn thundered over the blasted landscape, answering the Banelord’s challenge. The Warlord moved through the energy and shells of the Iron Skull, mounting damage merely a goad. It blasted the traitor again. A Titan could not stumble, but its movements jerked. It was no longer a juggernaut. Even so, it came on.

  The god-machines slammed together in their wrath. The Banelord’s claw seized the volcano cannon. It began to crush the barrel. Explosions rippled down the gun’s length.

  End it!

  Krezoc was Ferrum Salvator. Its body was hers. She reached forwards. Her arm was a quake cannon. She plunged it into the heart of the Iron Skull. She fired.

  She was Pallidus Mor. She was the scythe of the Omnissiah. She was death itself, and before her judgement of bone, the enemy’s form shattered.

  Epilogue

  Redemption’s Ashes

  The Company of the Bridge began the executions while the mountains still swayed and fell. As the world cracked, Ornastas smashed Darroban’s skull. Then he and his followers began a methodical extermination. The heretics could not fight back. A thousand died in the first minute. Soon the plateau of rubble was clear of their foulness. The faithful of the company moved on, as far and wide into Deicoon as they could, killing with blade and club and rifle. The streets of the city that were not red with lava were red with blood. Ornastas did not know if Katara would survive the next hour, but th
e world’s fate did not change his duty.

  Katara did not end. At last, the ground calmed. Aftershocks still toppled buildings, and the day was hidden by ash and smoke and dust. But the war was over. His lungs burning, his breath coming in gasps, Ornastas led the company in hymns of thanks as they purged the ruins of Deicoon.

  The executions went on for days. They were not done yet when the new landings began. Regiments of the Death Korps of Krieg came to Katara, bringing with them the judgement of the Imperium. Creontiades was razed. Therimachus was gone. Deicoon would be rebuilt, after a fashion. The world’s heresy had been too widespread. The resistance was enough to spare Katara from being subject to Exterminatus, but that was all.

  Katara would became a penal world.

  Ornastas gave thanks for this judgement too. He saw its righteousness. His internment was punishment for the mistakes he had made. His life was a reward for his small efforts in the war. He wept with gratitude.

  He saw Deyers once, early in the construction of the cell blocks at Deicoon. There was no thanks in the former captain’s eyes. There was regret, bitterness, failure, hopelessness. They were assigned to the same detail for a few days. Ornastas tried to speak to him, but Deyers did not respond. He did not see Deyers speak to anyone. He toiled in silence, a man who had died at Therimachus, but for his failures was denied the rest of oblivion.

  Carrinas approached Krezoc and Drahn in the loading bay of the lifter shortly before it was scheduled to launch. It had taken weeks to establish the most primitive space port in the region between Therimachus and the Klivanos Plain. The god-machines were as they had been at the end of the battle. No repairs were possible on Katara. Fatum Messor and Ferrum Salvator were secured in their immense bays. Their injuries were profound. So were those of their princeps. Krezoc saw that Carrinas favoured his right arm, mirroring the wound his Reaver had taken.

  ‘We will be returning to the Currus Venatores within the hour,’ Carrinas said.

  Krezoc nodded. ‘Then we shall consider the battle group dissolved.’