CRUOR VULT
FLEEING THE GIANT
A TERRIBLE LONG SHOT
Its name was Cruor Vult. It weighed two and half thousand tonnes and stood sixty metres tall. Like all the great Warlord-class Battle Titans, it was a biped, almost humanoid in its proportions. Hooved with immense three-toed feet of articulated metal, its massive legs supported a colossal pelvic mount and the great, riveted torso that housed its throbbing atomic furnaces. Broad shoulders provided ample space for turbo-laser batteries. Beneath the shoulder armour, the Titan’s arms elevated the machine’s primary weapons: a gatling blaster as the right fist, a plasma cannon as the left. The head was comparatively small, though I knew it was large enough to contain the entire command deck. It was set low down between the shoulders, making the monster ogrish and hunched.
I have seen Titans before. They are always a terrifying sight. Even the Imperial Battle Titans are awful to behold. The Adeptus Mechanicus, who forge and maintain the war machines for the benefit of mankind, regard them as gods. They are perhaps the greatest mechanical artefacts the human race has ever manufactured. We have made more powerful things – the starships that can cross the void, negotiate warp space and reduce continents to ashes with their ordnance – and we have made more technically sophisticated things – the latest generations of fluid-core autonomous cogitators. But we have made nothing as sublime as the Titan.
They are built for war and war alone. They are created only to destroy. They carry the most potent armaments of any land-based fighting vehicle anywhere. Only fleet warships can bring greater firepower to bear. Their image, bulk, their sheer size, is intended to do nothing except terrify and demoralise a foe.
And they are alive. Not as you or I would understand it, perhaps, but there is an intellect burning inside the mind-impulse link that connects the drivers and crew to the Titan’s function. Some say they have a soul. Only the Priests of Mars, the adepts and tech-mages of the Cult Mechanicus, truly understand their secrets and they guard that lore ruthlessly.
Perhaps the only thing more terrifying than a Battle Titan is a Chaos Battle Titan, the infamous metal leviathans of the arch-enemy. Some are manufactured in the smithies and forges of the warp, their designs copied and parodied from the Imperial originals, sacrilegious perversions of the Martian god-machines. Others are ancient Imperial Titans corrupted during the Great Heresy, traitor legions that have lurked in the Eye of Terror for ten thousand years in defiance of the Emperor’s will.
Which this was, frankly I cared little. It looked deformed, blistered with rust, draped with razorwire and covered with blade-studs that sprouted like thorns. What I first took to be strings of yellow beads hanging from its shoulders and blade-studs were actually chains of human skulls, thousands of them. Its metal was a dull, dirty black and inscribed with the unutterable runes of Chaos. Its head was a leering skull plated in glinting chrome. Its name was wrought in brass on a placard across its gigantic chest.
It stepped forward. The ground shook. The ruptured roof panels of the hangar squealed as they tore and caved in around its swinging thighs. It strode through the fabric of the hangar like a man wading through a stream. The building’s front burst out and fell away with a tremendous crash as the Titan broke its way through.
And then it howled.
Great vox-horns fixed to the sides of its skull blared out the berserk war-cry of the monster. It was so painfully loud, so deep in the infrasonic register, that it reflexively triggered primal fear and panic in us. The earth shook even more than it had done under the weight of its footsteps.
It was coming our way. Now it was clear of the hangar, I could see the long segmented tail it dragged and whipped behind it.
Move! I said, directing my will at my colleagues in the hope of snapping them into some sort of rational response. Every few seconds, the rock under our feet vibrated as it took another step.
We started to run through the streets of the deserted station, trying to keep as much of the buildings as possible between us and it. Our one advantage was our size. We could evade it by staying hidden.
With a metallic screech of badly lubricated joints, it slowly turned its head and waist to look in our direction and then stomped heavily round to follow us. It walked straight through a longhouse, shattering it like matchwood.
‘It knows where we are!’ Rassi cried, desperately.
‘How can it?’ Haar whined.
Military grade sensors. Heavy-duty auspex. Devices so powerful that they could overcome the island’s magnetic distortions. This beast had been made to fight in horrifically inhospitable theatres, resisting toxins, radiations, vacuums, bombardments. It needed to be able to see and hear and smell and target in the middle of hell. The local magnetics that had bested our civilian instruments were nothing to it.
‘It’s so… big…’ Bequin stammered.
Another crash. Another longhouse kicked over and splintered. A squeak of protesting metal as a derelict troop truck was pulverised underfoot.
We turned back, running back almost the other way now, passing south of the chapel and the command centre. Again, with an echoing grind of engaging joints, it came about and renewed its inexorable pursuit.
I felt a spasm, a pulse on a psychic level. I was feeling the surge and flicker of its mind-impulse link.
‘Get down!’ I yelled.
The gatling blaster opened fire. The sound was a single blur of noise. A huge cone of flaming gases flickered and twitched around the blaster muzzles.
A storm of destruction rained around us. Hundreds of high-explosive shells hosed the street, blitzing the fronts of the buildings, pulping them. Firestorms sucked and rushed down the street. Billions of cinders and debris scarps sprayed all around. The stench of fyceline was chokingly strong.
I got up in a blizzard of ash and settling sparks. We were all still alive, if chronically dazed by the concussive force. Either the Titan’s targeting systems were off-set, or the crew were still getting used to its operation. The sensors might be capable of tracking our movement, but the Titan still had to get its eye in. Perhaps it could only sense us in a general way.
‘We can’t fight that!’ said Fischig.
He was right. We couldn’t. We had nothing. This was so one-sided it wasn’t even tragic. But we couldn’t run, either. Once we left the cover of the station’s buildings, we would be in the open and easy targets.
‘What about the gun-cutter?’ blurted Alizebeth.
‘No… no,’ I said. ‘Even the cutter hasn’t got enough kill-power. It might make a dent, but it wouldn’t stand a chance. That thing would shoot it out of the sky before it even got close.’
‘But–’
‘No! It’s not an option!’
‘What is then?’ she wanted to know. ‘Dying? Is that an option?’
We were running again, away from the burning zone of devastation. With another overwhelming blurt of decibels, the blaster cut loose again. A longhouse and part of the command centre to our right disintegrated in a volcanic flurry of spinning wreckage and fire. There were walls of flame everywhere, gusting yellow and bright into the grey gloom.
Begundi led us down a side street between the ends of longhouses, Fischig and Kara Swole almost carrying the exhausted Rassi. We ducked down in the shadows against the rotting side wall.
Hiding, we could no longer see the Titan. There was silence, interrupted only by the crackle of blazing fibre-ply and the creak of prefab frames slowly slumping.
But I could feel it. I could feel its abhuman mind seething malevolently through the deepest harmonics of the psyk-range. It was north of us, on the other side of the chapel and the store barns, waiting, listening.
A vibrating thump. It was moving again. The rate of the footsteps increased as it picked up speed until the ground no longer had time to stop shaking between thumps. Pebbles skittered on the ground and loose glass dislodged from the broken windows of the nearby longhouses.
‘Go!’ growled Fischig. He broke and started to run east across the main street. The others began to follow his lead.
‘Fischig! Not that way!’ I leapt after him, grabbing him in the middle of the roadway. There was a groan of tortured metal and the Titan itself appeared at the end of the street, traversing its mighty upper body to face us.
Fischig froze in terror. I threw us both forward behind the rusted hulk of an old PDF troop carrier.
Blaster fire ripped down the street, kicking up a wild row of individual impacts that pitted the rocky ground, demolished the edge of a barn and filled the air with greasy flame, smoke and powdered rock.
A flurry of shots sliced through the shell of the troop carrier, splitting its fatigued armour wide open and hurling rusty shrapnel in all directions. The force of the hits actually lifted the carrier’s mouldering bulk and spun it around, end to end. I dragged Fischig behind a longhouse and just prevented us from being crushed under the lurching metal shape. The carrier came to rest against the side wall of the prefab, stoving in the wall panels.
The earthshaking footsteps resumed. The Titan was advancing down the street. I looked at Fischig. He was dazed and pale. A ragged chunk of shrapnel had embedded itself in his left shoulder. It would have decapitated him if it hadn’t been for the motion tracker unit strapped there. As it was, the tracker was a smouldering wreck and blood poured from the hunk of metal projecting from his trapezius.
‘Holy Throne,’ he murmured.
I hoisted him up and glanced back across the street. Begundi and Swole had managed to get everyone else back into cover before the barrage. I could see them through the smoke, huddled in the shadows.
I raised my free hand and made gestures that were as clear as possible. I wanted them to back off and regroup. We would have to split up. There was nowhere we dared cross the open street in either direction.
Fischig and I blundered off in the opposite direction, coming out in a drain gully behind the row of longhouses where a stream emptied down through the station to the lake. We crossed it using a small wire-caged footbridge and then fell into cover on the far side of a machine shop.
‘Where is it?’ Fischig wheezed in pain.
I checked. I could see the huge machine towering above the prefabs two hundred metres back, shrouded in the black smoke that was roiling up from its last onslaught. It had reached the old troop carrier and was standing there. It looked for all the worlds as if the giant war-engine was sniffing the air.
It turned again suddenly, filling the air with the sound of whirring gears and clanking joints, and smashed through the longhouse as it moved off after us.
‘It’s coming this way,’ I told Fischig. We started to run again, across the levelled rockcrete apron of the machine shop and then down the gently sloped street towards the command centre.
Fischig had slowed right down. It was gaining on us.
There was a distant, booming roar that echoed around the entire lake basin. A ball of flame rose into the air from the very western end of the station area.
‘What the hell was that?’ Fischig growled.
The Titan clearly wanted to know too. It adjusted its path and moved away from us, striding towards the site of the unexplained blast, oblivious to the collateral damage it was leaving in its wake.
‘That,’ said a voice behind us, ‘was the best diversion I could come up with.’
We looked around and there was Harlon Nayl.
Nayl was a good friend and a respected member of my team. I hadn’t seen the old bounty hunter since he had set off for Durer with Fischig’s party to conduct the audit. He was a big man, dressed as always in a black combat-armoured bodyglove. With his heavy skull shaved and polished and his grizzled face, he looked a fierce brute, but there was a grace to his movements and a nobility to his stature that always set me in mind of Vownus, the rogue hero of Catuldynus’s epic verse allegory The Once-Pure Hive.
He held a vox-trigger detonator in his hand.
We followed Nayl into the shelter of a storebarn and the bounty hunter immediately began to field dress Fischig’s wound. The Battle Titan was still prowling around west of us, investigating the mysterious blast.
‘I tried to raise you on the vox, but the channels were screwed,’ Nayl said.
‘Magnetics,’ I said. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘Since first light. I rented a speeder to follow Thuring. It’s hidden up in the hills on the far side of the lake.’
‘What have you found?’ Fischig asked, wincing as Nayl sprayed his wound with antisept.
‘Apart from the obvious, you mean?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Thuring’s got backing. Serious capital support. Maybe a powerful local cult we don’t know about, more likely an off-world cabal. He’s got manpower, resources, equipment. When I first arrived, I poked around, got a glimpse of what was in the hangar… that took my breath away, I can tell you. Then I “borrowed” one of his men and asked some questions.’
‘Did you get any answers?’
‘A few. He was… trained to resist.’
I knew Nayl’s interrogation techniques were fairly basic.
‘How long did he last?’
‘About ten minutes.’
‘And he told you–’
‘Thuring has known for some time that the Titan was here. Probably information received from his backers. It seems no one knew that Miquol was used by the arch-enemy as a Titan pen during the occupation. The bloody PDF were stationed here for years and never realised what was hidden just up there in the mountains.’
I peered out of the barn door. The Titan had come about and was plodding back in our direction. I could taste its bitter psychic anger and feel the earth quivering under my feet.
‘Harlon!’
He leapt up and came to join me. ‘Damn,’ he hissed, viewing the Titan. He took out his detonator again, selected a fresh channel and thumbed the trigger.
There was a flash, a rolling report, and another mass of fire blossomed from the western shore of the lake. The Titan turned immediately and stomped towards the fresh blast.
‘It’s not going to fall for that many more times,’ said Nayl.
‘So there was a Titan… that damn thing… abandoned and dormant in the mountains?’
‘That’s about the size of it. Left behind in the mass retreat, never found by Imperial liberators. Sealed in a shielded cavern… along with two more like it.’
‘Three Titans?’ snarled Fischig.
‘They’ve taken this long to get just that one working,’ said Nayl. ‘Thuring’s aboard that thing, commanding it personally. He’s delighted with his new toy, even though it’s not up to optimum. You’ll notice it’s only used its solid munition weapon. I don’t think its reactors are generating enough juice yet to power up its energy batteries.’
‘Lucky us,’ I said.
‘What I can’t tell you is why Thuring is restoring a monster like that.’
There could be many reasons, I thought. He could be doing it on the behest of his rich sponsors, which seemed likely. He could be intending to sell it to the highest bidder. There were cult groups in the Ophidian sub-sector that would love to own that sort of power. He could even be working for some higher power, perhaps enlisted by the actual legions of the arch-enemy.
Or he could be doing this for himself. That idea chilled me. Thuring was evidently a more significant player than I had estimated. He could have designs of his own, and with a Battle Titan at his command those designs could be very bloody. He could hold cities to ransom, here on Durer or elsewhere. He could raze population centres, slaughter millions, particularly once the turbines of Cruor Vult were operating at full power.
Whatever the truth, the dismal fate of the ekranoplane’s crew told me he wasn’t intending to leave the island the way he had come in. A bulk lifter could easily land here, pick up the Titan and be away before the frankly paltry watch forces of Durer could react. Thuring was planning to leave here with the Titan. I knew that as a certainty. It didn’t matter where he was going after that. Imperial blood would be spilled as a result. We had to stop him.
Which brought me back to my original problem.
How the hell were we going to fight that?
Frantically, with the Titan now turning back from the second diversion, I considered the tools at our disposal. It was hard to concentrate, because the angry flutter of the Titan’s mind link was interfering with my mind. I suppose that’s what gave me the idea. The desperate idea.
I reached to key my vox link and then paused. The behemoth would detect vox transmissions effortlessly. Instead, I stretched out with my mind, trying to find Rassi.
‘Nayl?’ I asked. ‘What’s the most secure structure here?’
‘The chapel,’ he said. ‘It’s reinforced stone.’
I opened my mind fully. Thorn enfolds kin, within a seal, the worshipful place. If Rassi could hear me, he wouldn’t understand Glossia, but I figured he’d have the sense to consult the others.
After a long pause, the answer came.
Kin come to Thorn, in sealed worship, abrupt.
‘Let’s move!’ I told Nayl and Fischig.
We reached the chapel first. The dread Titan had begun to stride our way again by then, but Nayl fired the last of his diversions and distracted it east.
We tumbled into the ancient church. It was generally stripped bare and full of slimy black mold. A few remaining wooden pews were sagging with damp corruption. The double-headed eagle from the altar lay trampled on the floor. I noticed that its dented wings were polished brightly. Dronicus had tended this place fervently until Thuring’s men had arrived and smashed up his diligently maintained shrine. It was a heartbreaking sight.
I bowed to the altar and made the sign of the eagle across my chest with both hands.
The others arrived in a hurry, weapons drawn, slamming the door shut behind them: Bequin, Haar, Begundi, Swole and Rassi.
Rassi was panting hard. Bequin was pale. Both Haar and Swole had cuts and contusions from near misses.
‘You have a plan?’ asked Rassi, almost immediately.
I nodded. ‘It’s a terrible long shot, but I don’t know what else to do.’
‘Let’s hear it,’ said Fischig.
I do not pretend, as I have already reflected, to have any specific understanding of the workings of a Battle Titan. No man does, unless he be a priest of Mars or, like Thuring, the owner of illicitly transmitted lore. Aemos probably knew a thing or two. I knew for certain he had seen Adeptus Mechanicus mind-impulse units firsthand, for he’d told me as much, long before, in the cryogenerator chamber of the tomb-vault Processional Two Twelve on Hubris.
But he was not with me in that chilly, ransacked chapel, nor was a decent conversation with him viable.
However, I knew enough to understand that the function of a Titan depended on the connection between man and machine, between the human brain and the mechanical sentience. That was achieved – miraculously – through the psychic interface of the mind-impulse unit.
Which meant, in very simple terms, that the root of our problem was essentially a psychic one. If we could disrupt or, better still, destroy, the mind link…
‘This runestaff was made for me by Magos Geard Bure of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ I told Rassi, letting him feel the weight of the weapon. It was a long, runic steel pole with a cap-piece in the form of a sun’s corona, fashioned in electrum. The lodestone at the cap’s centre was a skull, a perfect copy of my own, marked with the thirteenth sign of castigation, that had been worked from a hyper-dense geode of tele-empathic mineral called the Lith that Bure had found on Cinchare. It was a psionic amplifier of quite devastating power.
‘We use it to boost our collaborating minds. Force a way into the machine’s consciousness.’
‘Indeed. And then?’
I glanced over at Alizebeth. ‘Then Madam Bequin takes hold of the runestaff and delivers her untouchable blankness into the heart of it.’
‘Will that work?’ Kara Swole asked.
There was a long pause.
Bequin looked at me and then at Rassi. ‘I don’t know. Will it?’
‘I don’t know either,’ I said. ‘But I think it’s the best chance we have.’
Rassi breathed deeply. ‘So be it. I don’t see another hope, not even a remote one. Let’s get on with it.’
Poul Rassi and I took the runestaff between us, our hands clamped around the long haft.
He closed his eyes.
I tried to relax, but the instinctual barriers of self protection that exist in every mind kept mine from letting go. I didn’t want to get inside that thing. Even from a distance, it stank of putrid power. It reeked of the warp.
‘Come on, Gregor,’ Rassi whispered.
I concentrated. I closed my eyes. I knew the Titan was treading nearer, because I could feel the chapel floor shaking.
I tried to let myself go.
It was like clinging to a precious handhold when you are dangling over a pit of corrosive sludge. I couldn’t bear to submit and slide away. What waited for me down there was cosmic horror, a broiling mass of filth and poison that would dissolve my mind, my sanity, my soul.
Chaos beckoned, and I was trying to find the courage to jump into its arms.
I could feel the sweat dribbling down my brow. I could smell the rotten odour of the derelict chapel. I could feel the cold steel in my hands.
I let go.
It was worse than anything I could have imagined.
Drowning. I was drowning, face down, in black ooze. The sticky, foetid stuff was filling my nostrils and my ears, trying to pour like treacle down into my mouth and choke me. There was no up, no down, no world.
There was just viscous blackness and the unforgettable smell of the warp.
A hand grasped me by the back of the jacket and yanked me up. Air. I spluttered, puking out filmy strings of phlegm stained black by the ooze.
‘Gregor! Gregor!’
It was Rassi. He stood beside me, knee deep in the warp mud. God-Emperor, but his mind was strong. I’d have been dead already but for him.
He looked drawn and weak. Warp-induced pustules were spotting his face and crusting his neck. Blowflies billowed around us, their buzzing incessant in our ears.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ve come this far.’ His words came broken up as he was repeatedly forced to spit out flies that mobbed around his dry lips.
I looked around. The sea of black ooze went on forever. The sky over our heads was thickly dark, but I realised that the billowing clouds were impossibly vast swarms of flies, blocking out the light.
Firelights, distant, flashing, reflected across the slime.
We were in the outer reaches of the Chaos Titan’s mind-link.
Swathed in films of ectoplasmic ooze, we struggled forward, holding each other for support. Rassi was moaning. His psychic self had brought no cane to support him.
Flames underlit the horizon and the sea of sludge rolled nauseatingly. I had not encountered a mental landscape this abominable since my first dreams of Cherubael, years before.
Cherubael.
Just the thought of him in my mind brought the flies rushing around me. The slime reacted too, popping and bubbling about my knees. I felt a keening, a sharp need, that filled the polluted air around me.
Cherubael. Cherubael.
‘Stop it!’ wailed Rassi.
‘Stop what?’
‘Whatever you’re thinking about, stop it. The whole world is reacting.’
‘I’m sorry…’ I suppressed the notion of Cherubael in my mind with every ounce of my will. The tremors subsided.
‘Throne, Gregor. I don’t know what you’ve got in your head, I don’t want to know…’ said Rassi. ‘But… I pity you.’
We trudged forward, first one of us slipping over, then the other, then one bringing the other down. The deep slime licked at us, hungry.
Thousands of kilometres ahead of us, a source of power throbbed. I could dimly make out the silhouette of a man. But it wasn’t a man. It was Cruor Vult. ‘Blood wills it’, that would be the simplest Low Gothic translation. The Titan stood there, distant, the master of this psychic realm.
Daemonic forms ghosted around us. Their spectral, screaming faces were madness to behold. They were like smoke, like shadowplay. They snarled at us.
Another few hundred metres and images began to flash into my mind. We were breaking into the edges of the Titan’s memory sphere.
I saw such things.
May the God-Emperor spare me, I saw such things then.
I stood on the brink and peered into the abyss of the Titan’s memories. I saw cities die in flames. I saw legions of the Imperial Guard incinerated. I saw Space Marines die in their hundreds, scurrying around my feet like ants.
I saw planets catch fire and burn to ashes. I saw Imperial Titans, proud warlords, burst apart and die under the onslaught of my hands.
I saw the gates of the Imperial Palace on Terra through a blizzard of fire. I saw down through many thousands of years.
I saw Horus, vile and screaming out his wrath.
I saw the whole Heresy played out in front of my eyes.
I saw the Age of Strife, and witnessed first hand the Dark Age of Technology that preceded it.
I fell, plummeting through history, through the stored memory of Cruor Vult.
I saw too much. I started to scream.
Rassi slapped me hard around the face.
‘Gregor! Come on now, we are almost there!’
We were at the heart of it all now, frail as whispers. We were in the bridge of the Titan, seeing the multiple, overlapping spectres of the men who had commanded it, all sat in the princeps’s throne, all dead.
Daemons crouched on my back, writhed on my shoulders, gnawed at my ears and cheeks.
I saw horror. Absolute horror.
Beside me, Rassi reached out and touched the mind-impulse unit built into the floor of the bridge.
‘Now, I think…’ he said.
‘Alizebeth!’ I yelled.
In the rank confines of the chapel, Bequin leapt forward and grabbed the runestaff from the hands of two inquisitors who were quivering with power, stress and terror, our eyes rolled up blankly so that only the whites showed.
She gripped the runestaff, focused her untouchable force and–