Iron Corpses

by David Annandale

  ‘I understand. Once I open the seal, there is no going back.’

  There never is, Koparnos thought. Everything is irrevocable.

  There was a metallic clunk and a hiss of air as the circular hatch parted in the middle. The two halves slide aside. There was little room for the warsmith to enter the compartment.

  The two moderati majoris sat in thrones to the rear of the space, flanking the one occupied by the princeps in the forward section of the Titan’s skull. The armourglass eye ports looked out over the broken landscape. The wind had dropped a little more since he had entered the Titan. Obscuring dust clouds still billowed over the field, but he could see further now. The graveyard of gigantic corpses was endless. On and on and on went the ranks of iron monuments, preserved in their rage.

  But he also saw flashes of distant gunfire amidst all the death. He was not the only one seeking to bring the corpses back to a semblance of life.

  He had won time for himself. He wasn’t dying any more, but he had stopped one countdown only for another to begin. A new battle was coming. The embers of the war for Tallarn were struggling to reignite.

  He would not be found wanting.

  He checked the moderati. They were unconscious, their breathing laboured, but there was enough life there to suit his purposes.

  ‘Are you there?’ Benrath asked.

  Koparnos could see the top of her shaved skull above the back of her throne, and her hands resting on the ornate arms. She didn’t move. Her paralysis was as extensive as she had said.

  ‘I am here,’ Koparnos told her.

  He began his work. It took time, and he had precious little of that. Even so, he shut that concern from his mind and focused solely on the task. He had a foundation upon which to build: the interface cables connecting Benrath and the moderati to the Titan’s manifold were still viable.

  He moved back and forth between the Warlord’s skull and the workstations of the engineering deck. He never set foot beyond the moderati stations. He never saw Benrath’s face. The princeps was a voice behind a throne, growing ever weaker. He required her consciousness a bit longer, though, and prepared the diagnostics to track the flow of neural data. The machine-spirit was there, silent but raging. To give it a voice, he had to find the point where the communications had been severed.

  ‘Speak to it,’ Koparnos urged Benrath over the vox when he was ready.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I know. Your failure will be instructive.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  She fell silent. A moment later, traceries of power lit up the workstation’s screen. A few seconds later, Benrath gasped and the screen dimmed.

  ‘Princeps?’ Koparnos asked.

  No answer. She was unconscious. Not dead – her life still registered on the screen in the form of faint pulses from her cerebral cortex. They barely registered, their paths fading into darkness almost immediately, but her effort had shown him the problem. Strong as her mental command had been, it had run into a damaged interface tangle one level down from the skull.

  Koparnos found a maintenance hatch not far from the location of the interface. He opened it, expecting to find a crawlspace much too small to accommodate him. Instead, there was a narrow catwalk that twisted into the gap around the Titan’s reactor housing. Koparnos moved inside, surrounded by pistons the size of pillars, cables as thick as a Thunderstrike’s cannon. The connections stretched into the gloom above and below him.

  ‘I am coming for you,’ he called out to the raging machine-spirit. ‘The princeps bent you to her will. I will do the same. You seek to vent your wrath? Good. You will do so at my command.’

  The damage was not hard to find. Above his head, to the right of the catwalk, was a cluster of torn and fused cables. With the tools he had salvaged from above, he cleared the pathways as best he could. Some lines were torn beyond repair. Some connections had melted together in a mass that could never be differentiated.

  He was satisfied when he made his way back to the primary workstation and examined the new energy tracks that appeared. He had not expected to restore all the pathways between Benrath and the machine-spirit to their original state. Nor did he wish to. He had merely created the possibility of communication. Now he would shape the nature of that dialogue.

  He would shape the battlefield.

  It took him another day to make his preparations. It was now the seventh since the blast. On this day, there would be no more rest for the dead.

  In the skull of Ostensor Contritio, the princeps and the moderati majoris were still unconscious. They did not stir as Koparnos amplified their life-support and performed rough intubations. The mechanism that had kept them alive this long would now preserve the spark of life in their bodies for as long as the Titan survived. It would also hold them prisoner.

  He was most careful as he worked on Benrath. He would have rejected the word gentle to describe the operation. It was precise. It was calculated. Unnecessary and premature shocks could easily defeat his purposes. His approach was as tactical and merciless as any siege he had ever led.

  In truth, what he was attempting was a siege.

  Little by little, he embedded her into the machinery. He could not install more ports into her skull and spine, but he jacked more cables into the existing ones. The resulting drain on her mind could shatter the body, so he increased the energy load even as he reduced its need.

  He augmented.

  He cut away.

  He made the princeps one with the god-machine.

  And when he was ready to open the links between Benrath’s mind and the machine-spirit of Ostensor Contritio, she awoke. He was standing between her and the window ports, and she saw him for the first time.

  She saw the colours of his armour, and her eyes widened. ‘Traitor!’ she hissed.

  Koparnos leaned in, savouring this fragment of justice reclaimed from the inferno of defeat. Corrupting a loyalist Titan was a fine act of reshaping, and a successful siege. But he wanted the princeps to know.

  His victory would have its witness. An eternal one.

  ‘You trusted blindly,’ he snarled. ‘So did we, once. But we learned our lesson in time. Have you? I think not.’

  She was too weak to struggle. Even so, she tried. The skin around the sunken orbits of her eyes tightened as her will raged against a body withered and bound. Koparnos waited. With his task on the verge of completion, now he did have the luxury of time. He wanted to see Benrath realise the full extent of her powerlessness. He did not regard his triumph over a single loyalist as petty. His wrath was as justified as hers was futile.

  ‘You will be defeated,’ Benrath whispered.

  ‘Not by you,’ Koparnos grunted. ‘No, not by you.’ He completed the last of the connections. ‘And so I keep my promise,’ he added, then restored the neural link between the princeps and the machine-spirit.

  Benrath screamed as her consciousness flowed away down into the manifold. It left her body behind. The flesh became nothing more than an organic bag, a conduit of fuel to keep the mind alive. She was cocooned in cables, vanishing into the mechanism of her throne, and only her face was visible.

  Its final expression, before it fell into the slackness of living death, was one of utter horror.

  Koparnos knew why. He could not experience the fusion that Benrath was undergoing. He could not conceive of it. But he understood exactly what he had set in motion. Before the blast had shut the Titan down, the machine-spirit’s fury had been forced into compliance by the great will and discipline of the princeps. But she had been weakened, and he had stripped away the manifold defence mechanisms, leaving Benrath vulnerable to a machine-spirit so maddened by its injuries that its sole purpose was nothing more than unceasing, indiscriminate destruction. Given free rein, however, it would send Ostensor Contritio on a rampage as uncontrolled and unpredictable as the win
ds of a hurricane.

  Benrath was now immortal whether she liked it or not. She was locked in a perpetual struggle against the anarchic rage of the machine. Koparnos had linked her mind to those of the moderati majoris, comatose but still neurologically viable. She retained just enough strength to channel the power of the Titan. She could direct the Warlord’s movements, but she could not choose their purpose or their target.

  Koparnos had reserved that power for himself.

  He stood at the rear of the bridge space, looking beyond the thrones, through the armourglass eyes. The control mechanism he held was crude, little more than a collection of electronic prods, each with a different function. It would be sufficient.

  He depressed a trigger, delivering a synaptic shock to Benrath. He impelled her to walk.

  And so Ostensor Contritio walked.

  The Warlord lurched with the bone-shaking growl of an iron city on the move. For the first time in seven days, the Titan’s earth-cratering steps resounded throughout the machine. Ostensor Contritio began its march through the land of corpses. In the twilight distance, appearing through the curtains of dust, other half-glimpsed giants were moving. Koparnos saw the flash of giant guns. Death had not had its fill on this battlefield.

  And nor had he.

  The vox was still consumed by static, but Koparnos had confidence that he would know brother from enemy. He depressed triggers to the left and right, and the Titan’s great arms rose, weapons cycling up.

  He had no illusions. He was entombed within the Warlord as thoroughly as Benrath was. He would never leave this cursed place. But his war was not over. He was in command of a terrible wrath indeed.

  This was a triumph, of a kind. It was the one that he had sought.

  And so he wondered about the new dread that descended over him as a battle lost and finished now lumbered once more into a grey, nightmare un-life. He felt the shadow of the future fall over him – the shadow of a war as futile as it was eternal.

  About the Author

  David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos. He also writes the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novels Imperial Creed and The Pyres of Armageddon. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. He has also written several short stories set in the Age of Sigmar. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

  The Iron Warriors descend upon the world of Tallarn to wage a war of terror upon the Imperium.

  A Black Library Publication

  First published as an audio drama in Great Britain in 2015.

  This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,

  Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.

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  ISBN: 978-1-78572-443-5

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  sp; David Annandale, Iron Corpses