Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [66]
Hundreds of them swarm the streets now, climbing onto the defeated god-machine’s back with grappling hooks and boosting up there on burning thruster packs. They crawl across its dust-coated armour like insectile vermin.
‘Grimaldus,’ the Titan hails me, and suddenly it is so obvious why the voice is pained. Not from agony. From shame. She has advanced ahead of her skitarii phalanxes, and is undefended against this massed infantry assault.
‘I am here, Zarha.’
‘I feel them, like a million spiders across my skin. I… cannot stand. I cannot rise.’
‘Make ready,’ I vox to my brothers. Then, to the humbled princeps, ‘We are about to engage the enemy.’
‘I feel them,’ she says again, and I cannot tell from her machine-voice if she is bitter, delirious, or both. ‘They are killing my people. My prayer-speakers… my faithful adepts…’
I am not blind to the meaning in her words. To the Machine Cult, each death was more than a mortal tragedy – it was the loss of knowledge and perspective that might never be recovered.
‘They are inside me, Grimaldus. Like parasites. Violating the Cathedral of Sanctuary. Climbing inside my bones. Drilling toward my heart.’
I do not reply to her as I watch the crumbled cityscape below. Instead, I tense myself for a moment’s sensory dislocation, and hurl myself out into the sky.
Grimaldus was first to leap from the circling Thunderhawk.
Artarion, ever his shadow and still bearing his banner, was only seconds behind. Priamus, his blade in hand, came next. Nerovar and Cador followed, the first of them leaping into a dive, the latter merely stepping out in an uncomplicated plummet. Last of all was Bastilan, the sergeant’s insignia on his helm catching the dull evening light. He voxed to the pilot, wishing him well, and drew his weapons before falling into air.
Altitude gauges on retinal displays showed fast-falling numbers, the digital readouts a blur as the knights dropped from the sky. Beneath them, the kneeling god-machine presented a huge target. The multi-levelled cathedral on its shoulders was like a city in miniature – a city of spires – bristling with weapons batteries and crawling with alien vermin.
The knights saw the aliens as they descended: the beasts clambering up on tethered lanyards, or flying up on primitive rocket packs, laying siege to the stricken Titan. Stormherald itself was a pathetic statue depicting its own failure. It was driven to one knee, buried to the waist in the debris of six or seven fallen hab-block towers. The avenue was in ruin around it, where the detonated buildings had collapsed and levelled the city flat. The Titan’s arm-guns, as large as some habitation towers themselves, were grey-white with dust and resting on the mounds of broken brick, twisted steel supports, and rockcrete stone.
Grimaldus held off firing his boosters to slow his freefall.
‘Come down in the courtyard in the centre of the cathedral,’ he voxed to the others. Their acknowledgements came immediately. In turn, each of them engaged their jump packs, arresting their dives into more controlled descents.
Grimaldus was the last to fire his boosters, and the first to hit the ground.
His boots thudded onto the paved courtyard, smashing the precious mosaics into gravel beneath his feet. Immediately, he leaned to the side, compensating for the angle of the ground. Stormherald’s defeated posture was tilting the entire cathedral forward almost thirty degrees.
The courtyard was modest, ringed by nine plain marble statues that each stood four metres tall. In each of the cardinal directions, a set of open doors led into the cathedral itself. The mosaic tiles on the floor depicted the black and white bisected, cyborged skull of the Machine Cult of Mars. Grimaldus had come down onto the dark eye socket of the skull’s human side, crushing the black tiles to powder underfoot.
Nothing moved nearby. The sounds of battle, of looting, of desecration – these all came from within the surrounding