Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [123]
This was no way to fight a war. No communication between any forces? Madness!
Smoke and flames were on the horizon ahead, but that indicated next to nothing of any use in determining direction or destination. Smoke and flames were on every horizon. Smoke and flame was all each of the horizons had become.
Andrej was not laughing. This did not amuse him, no sir.
He changed gear with a nauseating grind of metal hating metal. A chorus of complaints jeered from the back as the Chimera juddered in protest and shook his passengers around some more. He heard someone’s head clang off the interior wall. He hoped it was the fat priest’s.
Andrej sniggered. At least that was funny.
‘…ckr… sn… tl…’ declared the vox.
Aha! Now this was progress.
‘This is Trooper Andrej, of the–’
He closed his mouth as the transmission crackled into a semblance of clarity. The burning district ahead, through which he’d need to pass to reach the distant Temple… it was the Rostorik Ironworks. The vox told of a Titan’s death-wails.
‘Hold on,’ he called back, and accelerated the battered transport along the Hel’s Highway, towards the emerging shape of Stormherald above the surrounding industrial towers.
The link was savaged by Bound in Blood’s mortis-cry. Zarha twisted in her coffin, trying to filter the empathic pain from the influx of sensory information she needed to focus on.
Her fistless arm pushed forward in the milky fluid, and the Titan obeyed her furious need.
‘Firing,’ Valian Carsomir confirmed.
In the centre of the industrial sector, ringed by burning towers and crushed manufactories, the Imperator Titan weathered a hail of enemy fire from scrap-walkers that barely reached its waist. Its shields rippled with searing intensity, corona-bright and almost blinding.
The plasma annihilator amassed power, sucking in a storm of air through its coolant vanes and juddering as it made ready to release. Around the god-machine’s legs, the waddling ork walkers blared sirens and howling warnings to one another. Burning vapour clouded around the shaking plasma weapon as it vented pressure, and with a roar that shattered every remaining window in a kilometre-wide radius, Stormherald fired.
Three of the lesser scrap-Titans were engulfed in the flood of boiling plasma that surged from the weapon, melting to sludge in the white-hot sunfire.
Zarha’s arm was aflame with sympathetic agony. She did her best to blank it from her mind, focusing instead on the rattling crawl of insects over her body. Her shields were taking grave damage now. Stormherald could not linger here for much longer.
‘Bound in Blood isn’t rising, my princeps.’
Zarha knew this. She’d heard its soul scream across the Legio’s princeps-level link.
He is dying.
‘He is dying.’
‘Orders, my princeps?’
Stand. Fight.
‘Stand. Fight.’
The Titan shuddered as another wreck-walker staggered closer, its shoulder cannons booming. Standing above the downed Reaver-class Titan Bound in Blood, Stormherald returned fire with its incidental weapon batteries, flash-frying the lesser machine’s void shields in a hail of incendiary fire.
Zarha pushed her other arm forward through the ooze, laughing as she moved. Stormherald’s other arm, the colossal hellstorm cannon, thrummed as its internal mechanics chambers and drive engines cycled up to firing speed.
‘My princeps…’ Lonn and Carsomir warned in the same breath. Zarha cackled in her tomb of fluid.
Die!
‘Die!’
The enemy scrap-Titan was shredded by five energy lances blasting from Stormherald’s hellstorm cannon. In less than three seconds, its plasma core was breached and critically venting, and in less than five it had exploded, taking the bulk of the fat-bodied gargant with it. Shrapnel shards the size of