‘If you stay here, then you’re right – you’ll die,’ he said. ‘They’ll get down here eventually, and no excuses will be enough to save you when they do.’
He turned to the other figures in the room.
‘You all know what’s happened here,’ he said. ‘The spires have been taken by traitors, and the Emperor’s Angels won’t stop until this whole place is cleansed. We have a choice: we can hide from them, hoping that – somehow – they’ll overlook us, or we can join them and fight.’
He looked back at Khadi. She looked vulnerable suddenly, standing with her grimy cheeks and dilated pupils. He no longer found her irritating. A strange feeling of protectiveness, of needing to take charge again, came over him.
‘I have codes,’ he said. ‘If we still have working comms, I can use them. We can link up with the other cells, find a way to get together. And then, back to the front.’
Khadi snorted.
‘You’re in no condition to fight,’ she said.
‘I will be,’ he replied, hoping that was true. ‘How about you?’
Khadi looked back at him, defiant but brittle, and said nothing.
Chapter Nine
Princeps Lopi was still in a good mood. He strode forwards, locked within the throne at the heart of Terribilis Vindicta, crushing piles of charred metal beneath his enormous tread housings.
Ahead of him ran the Warhounds, their snouts held low, their weapon-arms cocked to fire. They loped across the ruined cityscape of the Gorgas, striding through all but the most persistent ruins. Vindicta came along behind at a more stately pace, walking in tandem with Castigatio.
The immense, ruined pillars of the south-facing Rovax Gate loomed before them, crowned with wrecked turbo-laser housings and a vast ranked battery of disabled heavy bolters. The gate housing reared up over three hundred metres into the sky, a riot of gothic statuary and Imperial iconography. The words Imperium Gloriam Orbis Terrae could be made out over the lintel, set in iron amid panels of red-veined marble. Below that banner were the words Shardenus Primus Ostium Rovax.
The gate was open. Colossal doors, each fifteen metres thick and nearly two hundred high, had been drawn back fully to allow the triumphal entry of the god-machines to the battle-front. The devastation beyond was visible through the portal. Some flames still clung stubbornly to the edges of the gateway, rippling like hot banners in the wind.
‘My princeps, should we call the hounds back?’ asked Yemos, sounding a little embarrassed to ask the question. ‘It is general precedence–’
agreed Lopi, shunting a general stop order to the Warhounds.
The Warhounds came to a halt, pausing before the sweeping walls of the hive cluster and lowering their snouts further in deference.
Vindicta strode on, eating up the ground. Lopi could feel the perfection of its systems, the enormous energies humming from its central reactor towards the motive and weapon arrays. He flexed his fingers, and the Warlord’s cannons swivelled on their mountings.
Lopi canted, knowing that every member of the crew was already straining at the leash to get into action. The days spent fitting, servicing and blessing the mighty engine had been a trial to endure; now, at last, the work would find its reward.
Vindicta drew closer to the gates, walking with its ponderous, lurching gait. A Warlord Titan in motion was a curious mix of grace and awkwardness. Gravitic stabilisers locked in the lower leg segments struggled heroically to limit the damage done by the machine’s unimaginably heavy tread, but still the earth beneath its feet was annihilated with each movement. Every heavy step made the upper torso sections sway in recoil, so much so that the Warlord’s progress looked more like the infirm tottering of an old man than the confident progress of a warrior in his prime.
Lopi said.
Vindicta strode through the gates, chewing up the remnants of traitor armour under its heels. At the moment the threshold was crossed, Yemos let off the war-horns in celebration. The braying noise exploded out from the amplifiers, ringing out across the interior of the hive complex.
A vista of desolation opened up before the crew. Immediately ahead of them was a wide open area known as the Maw, a kilometres-wide expanse of empty parade grounds, low-profile manufactoria and disused generatoria. A wide avenue ran directly between the gates and the closest of the hive spires, cutting through the urban tangle, clad in ferrocrete slabs and lined with iron pillars. Statues of Imperial saints and heroes had been interposed between the pillars, some of them reduced to little more than rubble by the fighting, some of them more or less intact.
Imperial standards bearing the marks of the Ferik Tactical Guard units dotted the landscape, marking points where objectives had been taken. Lopi knew that the entire Maw had been cleansed following pinpoint raids by Iron Hands squads, and that the real fighting lay ahead – in the two gigantic Melamar hives and beyond.
He raised his head, and the entire cockpit of the Warlord inched a little higher on its pistons.
Melamar Primus dominated the northern horizon, a steep pyramidal structure of towers, walls and interconnective buttresses. The whole spire was burning, locked in the agony of a thousand firefights across its many hundreds of levels.
Killan complied, zooming in on the reeling structure ahead and picking out the key battlegrounds. The noise of weapons fire, repetitious and echoing, rang out across the Maw. The cracks and booms were dulled by distance, but the effects of the detonations were plain to see. Beyond Melamar Primus nothing was clearly visible – a huge pall of oily smoke curtained the buildings beyond.
canted Lopi, assessing the terrain ahead. He felt the machine-spirit of Vindicta growling at the back of his mind, stung into life by the smell of promethium and cordite on the air.
The Titan lurched onwards, demolishing whole rows of shattered buildings as it came. Behind it, the similarly domineering profile of Castigatio lumbered through the gates, followed shortly afterwards by the three roving Warhounds. The smaller war engines pulled ahead again, driven to seek out the nearest action by their restless MIUs.
‘Incoming transmission,’ reported Killan. ‘Medusan origin. Do you want to take this now?’
A hololith pillar rose from the floor in front of Lopi’s casket, atop which a ghostly image rippled into solidity. It was a Space Marine helm, as black as night and covered in metallic implants. It didn’t move.
canted Arven Rauth in perfectly inflected binaric.
Lopi smiled again. For some reason, he couldn’t seem to stop smiling. His spirits sang with the thrilling, overwhelming power at his fingertips, and the blunt greeting of the Iron Hands’ commander only amused him further.
he transmitted back.
He didn’t say orders. The Mechanicus didn’t take orders from Imperial factions, not even if they came from the Adeptus Astartes. The bonds between them were at once stronger and weaker than those between commander and commanded, and as subtle and ancient as the Imperium itself.