Warlord: Fury of the God-Machine Read online

  Deyers saw the new attack only for a moment. Then something exploded from the ground in front of Bastion of Faith. Briefings on the enemy forces gave him its name. Mawloc. Before the horror of its reality, the name ceased to be a means of classification, an imposition of nomenclature and of control. It became sounds. The hissing roar of a split-jawed maw spreading wide. The clacking chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk of six huge talons jabbing into the armoured flanks of the Leman Russ. The serpentine length towered over the tank, and then the monster lunged down to swallow Deyers.

  Hoplite Alpha Venterras recognised the signs of an imminent spore mine attack before the first of the orbs began their descent. So did the rest of his squad assigned to guard Gloria Vastator. The Warlord had begun to turn, but now it stopped, its massive legs as immobile as the foundations of the world, as the crew of the god-machine braced for the impact of the barrage. The legs were colossal pillars, dozens of yards in circumference.

  Venterras sent the order in binaric. His order was received and obeyed in a fraction of a second, as if every member of the hoplite squad had taken the same initiative at once. Alpha Trigerrix’s peltasts moved with equal purpose. Five toe-like supports, each larger than a man, jutted from the base of both of the Warlord’s legs. The hoplite and peltast squads of secutarii ducked into the spaces between the supports. The hoplites raised their mag-inverter shields. Both squads had respected proximity discipline, and their kyropatris field generators amplified each other. The interlocked harmonic fields created a protective sphere around the secutarii squads. The air hummed with holy energy.

  The blasts came at every elevation from twenty feet in the air to just above the ground. The spore mines sprayed the dead marshlands with acid and chitinous shrapnel. The sound was jagged and wet, hail in a typhoon. The biovores’ assault was huge, spreading over the battlefield as far as Venterras could see. When the orbs in the green cloud exploded, Gloria Vastator’s lower void shields flared with the strain of repelling hundreds of blasts in cascading succession, and the shredding kinetic energy of the shrapnel. The shields could not stop the acid. It splashed against the adamantine armour. It rained down on the secutarii. Protected by the base supports from the worst of the corrosive’s horizontal flight, the hoplites angled their shields upwards to deflect more of what came from above. Venterras heard the hiss of dissolving metal. Streams ran down the Warlord’s leg, scoring the sacred metal. The energy of the kyropatris fields stuttered and spiked from the strain. Rivulets of acid fell upon Venterras’ helm and pauldrons, triggering warning runes in his helm’s lenses. Cogitators in his armour and his reconstructed body began calculating the rates of damage he could sustain and still act. There was very little organic weakness left in him. Beneath the armour, even those patches on his face and chest that resembled leathered flesh were bioplastic. The readings satisfied him. Despite its ferocity, the attack had failed.

  He rose as the blasts lessened. The secutarii had kept the tyranids from scaling the legs of the Warlord, and now the spore mine explosions had scoured the area. For a few seconds, the illusion of emptiness reigned in a land of lingering fog and bubbling, smoking mud. Tyranids shredded by the shrapnel lay everywhere. They were lesser bioforms, common as insects, no sacrifice at all for the Devourer. In the distance, Venterras heard a terrible grinding. Somewhere, hidden from him by the corrosive gas, a Titan had suffered great injury. Machinery was crying out in anger and in pain. The grinding accompanied a limping rhythm of thuds. With some difficulty, the god-machine was walking. One of the Warhounds, Venterras judged by the speed of the footsteps. It was moving faster than a Reaver, but had been slowed badly, and would be that much more vulnerable to further attacks.

  Above Venterras, Gloria Vastator’s void shields still flashed arrhythmically as the generators fought to re-establish stability.

  The moment of emptiness passed, and a new wave of termagants snarled out of the mist. They raced for the bases of the legs, straight into the secutarii’s fire. They were a scuttling horde, their fleshborer forelimbs sending a hail of insects against the defenders. The vermin were tiny, their mandibles fierce. They sought to chew through armour to get at the flesh below, but the greatest mass of them hit the mag-inverter shields of the hoplites’ forward line. Half of Venterras’ squad hit the termagants with frag launchers while he and the others marched on the tyranids with arc lances at the ready. The fields of the shields repelled the foe’s attacks, hurling the bulk of the swarms back. Some of the burrowing vermin made it through the physical and energy barriers, yet there was little flesh for them to eat. Their jaws could eventually damage circuitry and cables, but there was no nourishment for them here. They were an assault on the wrong kind of foe.

  Behind the hoplites, the peltasts fired their galvanic casters. Laser-guided projectiles arced overhead and dropped with murderous precision into the tyranid hordes. Bursts of explosive flechettes shredded the termagants, and then the short-range blasts of the hoplites’ arc lances ate further into the charge. Gloria Vastator walked again, and the secutarii advanced with it.

  Yet the field of battle was wide. The secutarii were few. The Pallidus Mor had only a single echelon to defend the entire demi-legio. The enemy’s numbers dropped, but they were still legion. The centre of the swarm broke under the secutarii advance, and its flanks circled the feet of the god-machine.

  Hoplite Krightinus warned.

  A handful of termagants had leapt onto the left leg when it came down, and they were moving up, clinging fast as it took another step.

  Venterras said. He ran hard for the leg. His omnispex overlaid vectors of speed and angles of approach on his view of the landscape, breaking down his next moves to calculations of physics and efficiency. It projected his path to every target on the leg. This was a war between the purity of the machine and the organic at its most pestilential. It turned every arithmetical breakdown into a sacred act.

  Venterras shouldered his shield, mag-locking it to his back as he covered the last few yards to the leg. His arc lance fired a concussive blast ahead of him, hurling bioforms out of his way. The leg came down, shaking the ground. Venterras leapt. He landed on the top of the foot’s central toe. He held his arc lance in his right hand and jumped again, seizing a pitted handhold in the leg with his left. Cables contracted. With a movement that would have dislocated a biological arm, he hurled himself upwards. He followed the red-lined path from handhold to handhold. Where there were none, he sent an electrical charge through his palm, magnetising himself to the leg long enough to leap again. He came up fast behind the termagants. They were scrambling towards a service hatch a few yards past the Warlord’s knee.

  Venterras fired the arc lance. The coruscating energy skimmed the surface of the adamantium. The burning impact was enough to jolt two bioforms free of their grip, and they hurtled to the ground. Three others turned and scrambled back down to attack Venterras. Two more kept climbing.

  Three streams of fleshborer vermin blasted against him like sand whipped up in a hurricane. He could not use his shield, and he was too far from the squad for the kyropatris field to link with the others. His lone generator could do little to blunt the attack. Xenos jaws, minuscule but ferocious in strength, ground away at his plate. Venterras launched himself upwards again and stabbed with the arc lance, striking with it instead of firing. He hit one of the termagants directly. The explosion consumed its forelimbs as it fired again. The beast disintegrated in a storm of fire and bioelectricity that swallowed Venterras and the other termagants. Venterras channelled a draining burst of his own power to keep his hold on the leg. Two more tyranids fell.

  Gloria Vastator took another step. Venterras clung to a vertical world, and it swung with majestic impassiveness, the movement alone almost enough to shake free the insects fighting on its surface. Venterras climbed again. He moved past the knee, his bionic auditory sense filled with the thunder of e
normous pistons. The last two termagants had almost reached the hatchway. Venterras lunged and fired again. The blast jarred the tyranids loose. They fell, cartwheeling as they bounced against the side of the leg. One of them sailed past Venterras and dropped into the void. The other slammed into him. It knocked him back, jerking his magnetised palm from the leg. It scrabbled at him with its claws. They fell in a tangling struggle. The leg sloped away from the vertical as the Warlord took a step, and the combatants slid down the adamantium cliff. Venterras’ arc lance became a liability. He could not strike the tyranid with it, he could not use his right hand to arrest his fall, and to release the arc lance would be an unforgivable mark of shame.

  The termagant’s jaws snapped in his face. The teeth gouged the front of his helm. The wind of their slide shrieked. In another moment, they would fall past the knee and into mid-air.

  Venterras fired the arc lance at zero range as the tip struck the Warlord’s armour. The blast was point-blank. A ball of lightning lashed at him and the termagant. A galvanic spasm shook the tyranid’s limbs, its chitin armour smouldering. The beast lost its grip on Venterras and dropped away. His optics buzzed in and out of focus, warning runes overlapping as the damage to his armour and machined body mounted.

  But he was a servant of the Omnissiah, and a secutarii of the Pallidus Mor. Nothing except his complete destruction would prevent him from fighting in the defence of the god-machines of his legio. Though his internal circuits were beginning to misfire, sending micro-tremors down his arms, he sent a powerful energy spike through his left hand once more. His palm smashed against the leg just as he fell past the knee, and the angle of the Warlord’s leg returned to the vertical. The yank would have wrenched an organic shoulder from its socket.

  Venterras paused long enough to calculate the trajectory of his descent. The pause lasted a fragment of a second. Then he was dropping back down the limb of the colossus, rushing back to the cauldron of the ground war.

  ‘These are poor game,’ Adrel Syagrius muttered.

  ‘Their destruction still burnishes the glory of the Imperial Hunters,’ Princeps Messina Lukretus voxed from the Warlord Primum Victor. ‘And we are gutting their numbers.’

  The marshal grunted. He kept his attention on the advancing cluster of carnifex bioforms. They were huge specimens. They could have hurled Leman Russ tanks through the air. Against the maniples of Syagrius’ demi-legio, though, they were hardly more than an irritant.

  They were a greater irritant for not being the targets he sought.

  ‘Sunfury barrage,’ Syagrius voxed to the entire demi-legio. ‘Banish these vermin from my sight.’

  The command was also a warning. Three of the Warlords were equipped with the Sunfury-model plasma annihilator. The simultaneous firing of the full complement of the guns was an event the other Titans had to be ready for, as did the secutarii on the ground. The plasma annihilator was not a precision armament. Its function was total obliteration. Every shot carried risks. Every shot was an enormous drain on a Titan’s power plant. And every shot was the act of a wrathful god.

  Three shots were the divinity of flame.

  Augustus Secutor, Primum Victor and Eximius Gladio fired. Three suns burst upon the carnifex advance. The arc of the horizon flashed with devouring brilliance. A firestorm engulfed the land. Entire cities would have vanished into its maw. The flames rose to the clouds, a towering wall of roiling crimson. The silhouettes of the tyranids disintegrated. Monsters that were the nightmares of full regiments of the Astra Militarum were burned to ash in seconds. The maniples of the Imperial Hunters halted their march until the devastation faded. Before them, the land was a smoking plain of cracked, melted rock.

  Syagrius looked at the wasteland he had created. His mood did not improve. The extermination of the bio-titans had been an act of frustration more than a tactical decision. When he had seen the nature of their quarry, he had been unwilling to waste a second longer than necessary on their destruction. The long-range auspex readings of a huge, concentrated biomass had given him false hope yet again.

  There had been no hierophants, no true bio-titans since the one that had appeared during the initial tyranid attack. He had taken Augustus Secutor into single combat against the hierophant before the gates of Gelon. He had almost lost. Ferantha Krezoc and Gloria Vastator had intervened. The Pallidus Mor Warlord had inflicted severe damage on the colossal tyranid. It was true that the mortally wounded monster had seized Krezoc’s Titan in a lethal embrace. It was true that Syagrius had fired the shot that had destroyed the hierophant. It was true that, technically, the trophy kill was his. The mark of the victory had been added to the upper torso of Augustus Secutor.

  Syagrius did not feel any triumph in that outcome. The battle was a canker on his pride. He could not think of it without seeing his errors of judgement. He could not stop reliving the helplessness he had felt in the moments just before the arrival of Gloria Vastator, when the hierophant had overwhelmed his god-machine, and he had seen doom reach for him. The memory ate at him, and he could not turn from it. Honour demanded redemption. The only way of lancing the boil was to prove to himself and to others his supremacy as a hunter. He needed more kills on the same scale. He had to crush the spectre of the hierophant. That victory would come only when Augustus Secutor stood over the ruins of bio-titan bodies.

  The Imperial Hunters had travelled hundreds of miles from Gelon, and exterminated scores of biovores and carnifexes. The promise of greater prey drew Syagrius on, but the promise had been an illusion so far.

  ‘Marshal Balzhan is on the vox,’ Rekorus said.

  Syagrius glanced down and to the right at the moderati. He had redirected all vox-feeds not originating from within his maniples to Rekorus. He was tired of the endless hectoring of the Pallidus Mor marshal and the insubordination of Krezoc.

  Syagrius had assumed supreme command of the Khanian campaign from its inception. He had done so with full justification, due to the larger force fielded by the Imperial Hunters. Balzhan had not protested. Yet he was constantly second-guessing Syagrius’ decisions at the strategic and the tactical level. Balzhan concerned himself even with battles at which he had not been present.

  Such as the one against the hierophant.

  ‘You used your Sunfury on the enemy?’ Balzhan had asked afterwards. He had caught up to Syagrius outside the Mechanicus dry docks of Gelon, where the wounded Titans were being repaired. This was during the false dawn before the coming of the second wave of bio-ships. Skyscraping gantry cranes clustered around the motionless god-machines. Tech-priests, enginseers and mono-tasked servitors swarmed over them, healing the bodies of the Titans and soothing their machine-spirits. The air was filled with the sound of industry and ritual chanting.

  ‘Yes, I used it,’ Syagrius said.

  Balzhan’s eyes were bionic, and so impossible to read. His bald head, enclosed by a metal brace, looked like a bronze skull in a cage. ‘You felt that was necessary?’

  ‘Are you in the habit of using weaker weapons against more powerful foes?’ Syagrius asked, looking down at the squat, wide-shouldered marshal. He intended the contempt in his tone to be all the answer Balzhan would require. It was impossible not to see crude, proletarian stock in the leader of the Pallidus Mor. Syagrius’ family was nobility, and traced its service to the Imperial Hunters back millennia.

  ‘I deploy the weapon the moment calls for,’ Balzhan said. ‘The hierophant’s wounds were already severe. It did not require a plasma cannon to finish it off. You put Gloria Vastator at risk.’

  ‘My aim was true. I’m surprised, marshal, that you aren’t thanking me for having saved Princeps Senioris Krezoc and her Warlord.’

  He knew, as he spoke, that he was leaving himself open to the unpleasant reminder that Krezoc had lured the hierophant away from Augustus Secutor before launching her attack. The truth was that Gloria Vastator had come close to sacrificing itsel
f to save Syagrius’ Titan. As he waited for Balzhan to point out his shame, Syagrius tried to think of a satisfying answer. He failed. Balzhan regarded him impassively, and said nothing. The awkward silence stretched out.

  Ferantha Krezoc chose that moment to walk by, on her way back from inspecting the work on Gloria Vastator. She glanced towards the two marshals. She and Balzhan exchanged slight nods, the understated greeting of old comrades. Her eyes were still organic, but the look she gave Syagrius was as machine-like in its cold neutrality as Balzhan’s. She was much taller than her marshal, and perhaps an inch or so taller than Syagrius. She walked with a slight hunch forwards, like a bird of prey on the hunt. Where Balzhan was built like a wall, Krezoc seemed made of cable, a narrow, coiled silhouette in her princeps’ greatcoat. Her scalp, like Balzhan’s, was clean-shaven. A line of mechadendrite ports ran up the back of her neck to her crown. She was not much younger than Balzhan, and though she moved with the ease granted by juvenat treatments, her face bore the experience of many decades of war. It was a thing of gaunt stone, fractured by deep canyons. Her eyes looked out from their sockets as though from the bottom of wells. They were a blue so pale they were almost white, and were hard as shell casings.

  The look she gave Syagrius was just long enough for him to think he felt judgment, but too brief for him to be sure and demand Balzhan call his subordinate to order.

  Krezoc was, Syagrius thought, a perfect, grim match for the god-machine she controlled. He glanced up at Gloria Vastator. The Warlord, like all the Pallidus Mor Titans, was an engine of death, not of glory. He assumed there was pride in the legio, but it was not the one he knew in the Imperial Hunters. The green, white and red panoply of the Hunters was resplendence itself. What he saw in the Pallidus Mor, though, was a dark embrace of the fatality of war. The bone colour beneath the black of Gloria Vastator’s primary armour plates was the shade of an old skeleton. Even the silver trim was cold and pale, turning the glint of sunlight into the shine of ice. Its heraldry showed the same darkness. On the Warlord’s right-hand tilt plate, a skull floated in the black void. The left plate was a shield of gold and black, upon which a skeletal arm raised a scythe. Three drops of blood fell below the blade, through the gold. On the banner that hung between the colossal legs, a sun in eclipse glared over golden wings.