The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Sensible commanders avoided being anywhere near engines at war, but sometimes there was no escaping their monstrous presence. Like giants among ants, the Titans crashed and battered one another and their deaths took hundreds of warriors on both sides with them.

Gryphonicus’s complement of Titans was primarily Warhounds, and they had harried the flanks. At least four were gone, either buried in the mountain’s ruin or surrounded and gunned down by Legio Vulcanum’s more numerous Reavers.

The enemy Titans had started the day with the numerical advantage, but Paragon of Terra had steadily eroded that advantage to the point where the engine forces were more or less at parity. At the current rate of attrition, the Imperial engines would soon outnumber those of the Warmaster.

‘More Chimeras and mass-transit carriers coming through on the right,’ observed Naylor. ‘We can’t ignore it any longer. Soon they’ll have enough massed to pose a serious threat there.’

‘Crucius and Gryphonicus aren’t stopping them?’ asked Kourion.

‘They’re wreaking bloody murder on the Mechanicum war machines and their superheavies, but they’re ignoring a lot of the infantry carriers.’

‘They’re beneath them,’ replied Kourion.

‘They’ll be right on bloody top of us unless we push them back before they’ve enough numbers to threaten that flank.’

‘Agreed,’ said Kourion, pulling the battle-inload from the right flank to her main slate. Her eyes scanned the dozens of icons there, quickly assessing their worth and combat effectiveness.

Nothing left alive there with the strength to mount an effective counterattack. She haptically swept up the centre and reserves.

One force icon stood out above all others.

‘There,’ she said, jabbing a finger. ‘That’s our best chance to throw them back. Get them in the damn fight.’

Naylor nodded. ‘Good choice. No combat degradation and perfectly positioned to support the Titans.’

‘Send the orders,’ said Kourion, turning her attention to the confusing haze of gross-displacement weapon discharges on the left where Castor Alcade’s Ultramarines were deployed. She didn’t know what was happening there and that was unacceptable.

Naylor dialed into the local vox-net.

‘Lord Devine,’ said Naylor, exloading a series of engagement vectors. ‘You and your knights are ordered to immediately engage the enemy at the following grid-sectors.’

Vox-static hissed in reply.

16

The multi-tiered command bridge of Paragon of Terra smelled of oil and incense, hot circuitry and anger. Two hundred calculus logi, servitors and deck crew were plugged into tactica-engines and command consoles, reviewing encrypted vox from every element of Tyana Kourion’s battle-net. A constant drone of low-level binary and hushed voices blended with hot, grainy static and clicking prayers. Heat bled into every system, the anger of the Titan’s machine-spirit rendering every system with a red haze.

Angled slates projected news from all over Molech, hanging in drifting entoptic veils of light. Each one only served to stoke the nuclear heart of the Titan’s rage.

An Imperator Titan was a land-bound starship, as powerful and as demanding a mistress as any void craft. Crewed by thousands throughout its towering height, it was as complex a machine as had ever been built by the hands of man. Only the secret designs of the Ark Mechanicum dared approach the complexity of an Imperator.

To give life to so immense a machine and set it to motion was an entirely different thing to setting a ship in space. Zero gravity forgave a great many things that planetary environments did not.

Its Manifold was a proud, regal thing. An apex predator without rivals, a lord of battle with fangs no other could match and a fury equalled only by its commander.

Princeps Kalonice stood at the jutting prow of the strategium, hands braced on her hips as she drank in the data inloads feeding into the Manifold. She swiped a mechanical hand through the various projections, parting them like smoke and inloading them instantaneously.

Encased in the body-carapace of a Lorica Thallax, all that remained of Etana Kalonice was her skull and spine, fused within the mechanised body of meticulous construction. With reverse-jointed piston legs and wheezing, clicking mechanical joints, she was a robot in all but consciousness.

Contoured plates of porcelain-white armour encased her organic material, and hair-fine copper mind impulse unit cabling allowed her to interface with the fiendishly intricate mechanisms of Paragon of Terra without a gel-filled casket. To be so bound to a machine body was exquisite agony, but Kalonice would rather face a lifetime of pain than permanent entombment.

she said.

Algorithmic resonators translated synaptic activity into sounds and allowed Kalonice’s voice to sound virtually human. It almost took away the edge of pain, but not quite.