Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [128]
To Lonn, the reason was obvious. Like the savages that acted as the gargant’s puppeteers, the scrap-Titan was built to kill with its hands. Several of the thing’s weapon mounts were taken up by crude arms that ended in spears and claws of salvaged metal. It wanted to savour Stormherald’s death, like some many-armed daemon from the impure millennia of pre-Imperial Terra.
Zarha’s augmetic eyes flicked back to active as the chamber grew dark. She awoke, seeing the doom bearing down on her, feeling secondary fire devastating her armour plating like she was being skinned alive.
Through the bloody fluid and maddening pain, she raised her shivering arms. Stormherald mirrored the gesture as it was pummelled under Godbreaker’s guns. Jagged metal fell from the Mechanicus giant like rainfall, ripped from its body and crashing to the ground below. Many of the Imperator’s crew that had the sense of self-preservation to flee were killed by the falling chunks of armour plating.
Zarha put the last of her strength, and the last of her life, into throwing both her arms forward. The plasma annihilator did not fire. Neither did the hellstorm cannon. Both were locked in the time-consuming process of recharging from depleted power generators.
Both towering weapon-arms speared forward, hammering through the fat hull of Godbreaker and impaling it in place. The cry of tearing scrap metal was cacophonous as Stormherald’s cannons pushed deeper, stabbing like daggers through meat, seeking to grind and crush the enemy’s heart-reactor.
Grimaldus. I stood until the end, as promised. Awaken Oberon. Awaken it, or die as we have.
Perhaps her thoughts echoed across the empathic link to her moderati, for one of them voiced something of her sentiments.
‘We’re dead,’ Carsomir murmured. He wanted to rise from his throne, but the restraints and connection cables bound him too completely. He settled for closing his eyes.
Lonn had sensed the Crone’s intent. He leaned all his weight on the control levers, adding his demands to Zarha’s, plunging the arms deeper into the enemy Titan’s chest with scraping, grinding slowness. He felt sick to stare up through the darkened viewports to see the bestial, tusked aliens clambering along the impaling arm-cannons, using them as bridges to board Stormherald as they bled from the wounds in their own Titan’s body.
With no peaceful fade or foreshadowing, the power died, leaving him in darkness. He eased up on the levers, knowing without needing to look that the Crone was gone.
Stormherald was a statue, joined to the war machine that was slowly carving it to pieces with great chops of its bladed limbs. As endings went, Lonn mused, this was neither grand nor glorious.
As the command deck shook with rhythmic violence from the pound, pound, pounding of Godbreaker’s many weapon-arms, Lonn drew his laspistol, and watched the sealed doors, ready for the aliens to eventually breach them. His skin crawled at the gentle sound of Zarha’s corpse bumping against the glass front of her coffin, in time to the Titan’s shaking.
‘I… I had the shot,’ Carsomir stammered from the adjacent throne as he waited to die in the dark. ‘I had the shot…’
The side of his head burst open as a las-beam slashed through his skull.
‘You bastard,’ Lonn said to the twitching body. Then he lowered his pistol, took a deep breath, and began the laborious process of disengaging himself from the control throne.
There was something human in the way Stormherald died. The way it went slack, the way it staggered, the way it crashed to the ground, its heart-core cold, swarming with enemy bodies like insects feeding upon a corpse.
The god-machine shook the earth when it finally toppled. The spined, spiked cathedral tumbled from its back in a spillage of priceless architecture, left as no more than rubble and scraps of armour plating in a mountain of wreckage by the Titan’s head. Stormherald’s arms were wrenched from the torso, squealing free of the ruptured shoulder joints when the ancient engine hammered into the ground with enough