Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [126]
The Titan clanked its way down a subsidiary alley, its weapon-arms rising in readiness. Havelock sent several mental urgings in quick succession, triggering autoloaders, coolant valves and bracing pistons into activity. Ivory Fang rounded the corner at the alley’s end, stalking out into the main street. As it had been since this morning, this sector was still aflame because of the destroyed refineries and petrochemical stores, with about half the buildings finally quieting into smouldering ruins.
But the fighting was done here.
‘Where is the bastard?’ Havelock whispered.
The auspex chimed – once, weak.
‘We have movement,’ the tech-adept grumbled, not looking up from his scanner console. ‘There is–’
‘I see, it, I see it. Back away now!’
It came from the black clouds, rumbling forward on a clumsy mess of tank treads and crushing feet. Its body was slanted, tapering to a head that was all brutal jaw and piggish, alien eye-windows. Every metre of its scrap metal torso bristled with tiered weapons platforms.
It was quite the ugliest and most offensive thing Havelock had ever seen, and that was more than simply because it was an affront to the purity of Mechanicus god-machine creation. No, more than that, it offended him because its manifestation before him made no sense. It… dwarfed Stormherald.
It seemed impossibility given form, striding, limping from the oily smoke that blanketed the district.
Havelock pulsed a digitally-translated pict of the enemy gargant across the mind-bond to Princeps Zarha and any other Titan commander in range. It was all the warning he would be allowed to send, for Godbreaker opened fire the very moment its main armaments cleared the smoke.
Ivory Fang was pulverised beneath enough solid, laser and plasma weapon fire to level a city block. Its demise, and the end of Havelock’s mediocre career, was marked by a vast crater that would remain for decades after the war had bled the whole world almost dry.
Godbreaker moved onward.
CHAPTER XXI
Stormherald Down
The two engines faced one another across the burning ironyard, as alike in power as they were unlike in dignity. Both were ablaze, both bleeding fire and smoke into the clouded air.
The air between them was a blizzard of weapon fire as secondary turrets and battlement guns spat anti-infantry firepower at each other in the hopes of inflicting as much damage as possible. Inside both Titans, it sounded like a flood of pebbles clattering against the armour-plated hulls.
Inside Stormherald, the sirens were wailing long and loud.
Zarha writhed in her fluid-filled tomb, her limbs pushing through the blood-pinked water. Psychostigmata was ravaging her, as Stormherald’s wounds played out in a map across her naked body. Where the Titan was battered, she was discoloured by bruising or bent by broken bones. Where the god-machine was rent and torn, her flesh smiled and bled in open wounds. Where Stormherald burned, she was haemorrhaging internally.
The Titan’s command deck smelled of burning oil and rancid sweat.
‘Primary shield layer restored,’ Carsomir announced, his hands working at his console with a near-furious focus. ‘Core containment holding.’
Raise… raise shields…
‘Krrrsssshhhhh.’
RAISE THE SHIELDS.
‘Raise the shields.’
‘Already done, my princeps.’
She was slowing down. The pain stole so much of her attention now. With a moan that was swallowed into silence by the water, she pulsed orders to the various decks and pushed both of her arms forward through the pinkish ooze.
Nothing happened.
She tried again, screaming into the oxygen-rich fluid, the stumps of her hands thumping against the front of her coffin.
Nothing.
‘Plasma annihilator venting for sixteen more seconds, my princeps. Fourteen. Thirteen. Twelve.’
Fire the… the… other arm. Fire it.
‘Krrrsssssshh.’
FIRE THE HELLSTORM CANNON. Her stunted right limb thudded over and over against the glass side of her amniotic tank.
‘Fire the hellstorm cannon.’
‘As soon as it has recharged, my princeps,’ Lonn replied, half-ignoring