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Rated TEEN for implicit and/or infrequent depictions of blood, injury, and/or violent deaths.
Sing, O divine engine, of the pride and folly of man, that pride which struck down the valiant princeps for his hubris and brought disaster upon the Legio Alastor. Thus were the servants of the Machine God humbled, and the will of the Omnissiah made manifest.
The first time he saw her, he knew it was meant to be.
She was dressed in a sea-green dress uniform, with silver-grey piping and epaulettes the colour of beaten copper. Some women looked handsome in military uniform, competent, even stern. Princeps Gabriela Helicent didn’t. She looked like a girl dressed in her father’s uniform. She had large, dark eyes, full lips, generous breasts with matching hips. Her spinal ports shone chrome where they peeked out from beneath her collar. Gabriela stalked rather than walked, with the distinctive shoulder-sway that characterised a princeps of a Warlord-class titan.
The hangar smelled of oil and incense. The sonorous sound of tech-priests singing psalms rose up to the ceiling. They were blessed with bionically enhanced larynxes that gave them flawless pitch, and perfect endurance from machine lungs. Princeps Henryk trailed behind Gabriela, his uniform quartered sea-green and white. Curvaceous Princeps Gabriela couldn’t look more different to the tech-priest walking beside her. Ptolomaeus was forty-two percent bionic, the only Archmagos in the archimandriture who was below the hallowed fifty, and touchy about it.
<Never forget, Helicent, Mars designated me Taghmata Strategos. The supreme command is mine. I shall make or unmake captains as I see fit,> Ptolomaeus insisted. Even speaking in binaric he sounded petulant. Gabriela ignored his bluster. The Red Planet had only the vaguest idea of who the hell he was. The Taghmata was an army of the Martian priesthood – almost everyone, from the lowliest servitors, the red-robed tech-priests, the commanding magi, the knight houses, to the warships that brought them to this planet, all were bound to Archmagos Ptolomaeus through sacred oaths and feudal obligations.
But Gabriela was not a tech-priest. She was Collegia Titanica. The stark truth was that the Taghmata was a mere auxiliary to her titan war maniple.
“The Legio Alastor made me Megas Princeps,” Gabriela reminded him. She never used binary code when unplugged. Her voice echoed in the vastness of the gloomy hangar, the size of the place reducing them to the scale of animate dolls. Equally vast alcoves lined the walls. And in the alcoves, the titans.
Armoured giants, soaring to terrible heights, liveried in satin black and oceanic green. There were seven of them. They’d been waiting here all those long months from Optimates, waiting for their principes. There, the Reaver-class Angelus Adamantine. There, Tisiphone Titanicus, Gabriela’s engine. Optimas Devastator, one of the maniple’s two Warhounds. It was a rare thing to be a princeps. Through the technological miracle that was the mind impulse unit, the princeps controlled a titan by thought alone. There were other crew, also linked to the MIU, but it was the princeps who mattered. Only raw ability could elevate a man to pilot such a war machine as a titan – birth, connections, patronage, all were irrelevant.
Sir Henryk of House Pumayyaton had never wanted to be a princeps. For a scion of a knight house there was no greater honour. Every boy dreamed of it, and half the girls. But Henryk was a third son on a junior branch of House Pumayyaton. He’d always assumed his fate was to marry some girl he didn’t like and generate children he didn’t want. He’d had experience with the simpler MIUs of knight engines, ever since he’d come of age, but knight engines were closer to walking tanks than the terrible glory of a true titan. Anyway, the third son on a junior branch was in line to be a mere reserve pilot.
But the Collegia had noticed his affinity with the MIU. So he was sent to join the Legio Alastor: the vaunted Avenging Furies.
<I deduce, and the Lord Castellan agrees, that our engines must deploy in full maniple strength and conduct a flanking manoeuvre through the solar desert. The hereteks will have no choice but to retreat en masse or be encircled.>
“No,” Gabriela replied, “that will not serve. My engines require a secure base to refit and rearm.”
They weren’t paying attention to him. It wasn’t an unfamiliar situation. For as long as he could remember he’d felt like a supporting character in someone else’s drama. Henryk suppressed the urge to rub his itching eyes. He never slept well away from her embrace.
<This war has lasted for eight years!>
“Then it can withstand a few more months,” Gabriela said flatly. “We would devastate all in our path, and then when we are low on munitions, the Tellurians would counterattack. They have twelve engines. We have seven.”
<My data indicated that you are fearless. Are you so reluctant to plug into your engine, princeps?>
“Megas Princeps, Archmagos,” Gabriela warned. “Never.”
Never. Henryk remembered being sixteen, listening to the others rhapsodising about the transcendental joys of plugging into a titan’s MIU, joys they’d never actually experienced. There were none. His first engine had been Amadeus Furiosa, Reaver-class. Seven years linked to her MIU as her speculor, and he’d felt nothing.
No, he’d never wanted to be a princeps – until he saw Galatea Magnificat.
There she stood, facing her sister titan Tisiphone Titanicus. Her demeanour was powerful, majestic, a lady of war, like a knight in armour. Where all other Legio Alastor engines were satin black and oceanic green, she was liveried in milk white, like the fabled moonlight of ancient Terra. Her left poleyn displayed the emblem of the Legio – a bat-winged woman, hands curled into talons. Her right, the T-and-cogwheel of the Collegia Titanica. Holographic banners hung from her weapon limbs, displaying her proud roll of battle honours and kill tallies. And such weapons! Her left weapon limb was a six-barrelled, 120mm gatling cannon; the right, a 150 megathule ‘Belicosa’ volcano cannon. On each shoulder mount, triple-barrelled, rapid discharge turbo-lasers.
When she fired her gatling cannon, the firepower of dozens of tanks blazed in seconds. When she fired her turbo-lasers, battalions of enemy were scorched from the face of the planet. When Henryk first saw Galatea he knew he had to be a princeps, he had to be her princeps. Galatea Magnificat was something great – and with her, Henryk was greater, too. Linked to Galatea, he finally felt something. He finally understood. It was a beautiful thing. On Calamander, they’d single-handedly razed the Ork fortress-factory of Mekkslagg to the ground. On Adonai, they’d held the line as one million men of the 9th Army Group evacuated behind them, and annihilated the enemy vanguard. On Havilah, they’d unleashed their volcano cannon on the Red Empire’s daemon engines and sent them screaming back to hell.
“Dear Eliza,” he’d whisper to her MIU after every victory. No-one else called her that.
Soon, Eliza, he willed, as if his unplugged cortex could reach her. Soon.
The vox link was squawking in his ear, but he could barely hear it. Three Leman Russ battle tanks were grinding down the street line abreast, tracks clattering, engines growling. 3 and 5 Platoons followed in column, sheltered by the bulk of the tanks, Commissar Bohrman in his black trenchcoat and cap at their head. Every few seconds a Russ would thunder a high-explosive round over the crossroads at the attacking Tellurians, driving them down into cover. Sporadic anti-tank fire lashed desperately back at them - a missile splashed against a turret. The crew didn’t seem to notice, firing off another round as if nothing had happened.
Lasfire spattered from the floors above him. On the other side of the street, past the advancing tanks, 1 Platoon’s sharpshooters were sniping from an eight-storey hab block. The lieutenant shouted something about preparing to move on the next objective over the vox. That would be the gaunt, burned out librarium on the opposite corner. The commissars had found it easier to burn the building than haul all the books out for destruction. Part of the fourth floor had fallen in after the roof did.
The noise was so intense he almost missed the ground shuddering. The wall of the librarium groaned and fell into the street in a thick cloud of debris. Some type of quadrupedal walker loomed out of the veil of brick dust, its vast silhouette recognisably elephantine in shape, mounting two huge gun turrets on its back like a howdah. It must have been twenty-five metres tall, almost as tall as the librarium. The ground was shuddering beneath its tread.
They’d deployed a titan against them.
Its fore gun turret depressed smoothly. High-megathule laser screamed down and peeled open a Leman Russ like a tin can. The force of the blast shunted its neighbour aside, sixty tonnes of plasteel, and blitzed off its starboard treads in a confetti shower of shrapnel. Markos could taste blood and dirt. His ears were ringing. A Thunderbolt fighter streaked overhead, the roar of its passing sounding almost muffled. A heartbeat later three Hellstrike missiles smacked into the titan. They didn’t even reach it, a barrage that would have killed most tanks three times over bursting harmlessly against its void shields.
Then titan took some ponderous, almost leisurely steps forward, casually shouldering aside what was left of the librarium wall. Markos realised its tusks were actually weapons, an autocannon and some kind of flamer. The crew of the crippled Russ began to abandon their tank. Commissar Bohrman shot the commander in the face before he could clear the turret hatch.
They wouldn’t have got far anyway. The titan fired its turbo-laser again. One tank disappeared in a spout of flame and greasy smoke, the other burst open and kicked over onto its roof. Overpressure shook the walls – plasteel shrapnel cut men down in the street. 1 Platoon refused to stop shooting from their hab block strongpoint. Someone defiantly, impotently, fired a lascannon at the titan’s legs. Its aft turret rotated round. A jet of plasma blew out the third floor. The upper floors collapsed in a thundering avalanche of bricks.
The titan crew hadn’t finished. Autocannon fire blazed down the street. 2 and 5 Platoons, caught in the open, were cut to pieces. That was too much for them. They broke, and ran, leaving a daisy chain of broken bodies where the cannon shells overtook them. Where men took cover in the rubble and buildings, the flamer washed them out with sheets of chemical fire. Bohrman cursed and threatened, trying to rally them – until a gout of fire engulfed him.
Rejoice! you children of Mars, for the terrors of Old Night are passing,
And know this: the Omnissiah has made wondrous the Machine!
It was finally time.
The ammunition had been loaded, the plasma reactor sanctified, the enginseer boarded, the holographic banners furled, the binary hymns sung. The tech-priests were now reverently silent. Princeps Sir Henryk’s heart fluttered with the anticipation, as he stood at the end of the boarding bridge to the small of Galatea’s back. No dress tunic or epaulettes now – Henryk was in well-worn engine fatigues, green and white beneath a matte-steel cuirass. No princeps needed to advertise their rank when plugged into their own engine. Ahead, Galatea’s lumbar doors remained half-open, stencilled with the Legio Alastor’s bat-winged fury.
Galatea’s cockpit was gloomy and claustrophobic, dominated by the three seats in the chin, and the command throne at the back. His crew were waiting for him, standing awkwardly by their seats. By millennia-old tradition the princeps was always the last to board, but Henryk insisted he always be the first to plug in. He took a moment to study his crew. Macharrian, the steersman. Leksander, the speculor. By the rightmost seat, Beron Kethua. Moderati. The right-hand man, literally. Kethua might be up for a princepture of his own in a few year’s time, if he had the ambition for it.
“Be seated.”
Henryk gently lowered himself into the command throne, savouring the moment. The fine white leather upholstery was soft and supple as cream. The salikawood arms were studded with auxiliary manual controls, inlaid with mother-of-pearl from distant Nereus. A sheaf of cables draped lazily over the back of the throne. Henryk gathered them up with practiced efficiency. One-by-one, he ritually slotted the plugs into his spinal ports. The cerebellar adductor. The parietal relay, subordinate parathesic interface. And the prefrontal metacortex.
The Manifold opened for him. Delicious, warm data bathed his brain. It had been so long … he’d almost forgotten how deaf, how blind, how isolated he’d been without it. A princeps was never whole without his engine. The Manifold was what the Collegia called the operation of the MIU. It was the gestalt of her sensors, the potency of her cogitator, the data in her memory vaults, the mental landscape through which Henryk perceived and piloted Galatea Magnificat.
I’ve missed you, Eliza.
There was a coquettish bounce in the processor rate, like a skipping heart. Eliza had missed him too. Through the Manifold he could feel the minds of his crew as they plugged in. The link was harder for them, every time an effort.
“I am installed and hard-plugged,” moderati Kethua formally announced. “Do I have navigation?”
“Aye,” Macharrian confirmed.
“Auspex and sensors?”
“Aye,” Leksander said.
“Reactor and systems?”
“Aye!” the enginseer voxed from his cabin in the sternum.
“Princeps, Galatea Magnificat stands ready to walk.”
<Very good, moderati,> Henryk said. Binaric commands now, given via the Manifold. He pulled a lever on the right arm-console of his throne. It snapped heavily into place.
<active …>
<Princeps Sir Henryk Pumayyaton, Legio Alastor. I am linked to the mind impulse unit of the Warlord-class titan Galatea Magnificat. Is my authority recognised?>
<recognised …>
Henryk punched in the initial log details: 3.709863.M41. Gilead. Regions of Einore, Ultima Segmentum. <Commencing Operation Jericho. Begin log recording.>
<recording …>
“The Manifold is yours, princeps,” Kethua announced. “What is your word?”
<Disengage all scaffolds, open hangar door. Clear for egress,> Henryk ordered. He looked out through his biological eyes and saw the gloomy cockpit, crewmen hunched in shadowed seats, no glow from any pict-screens to illuminate their faces. He looked out through the Manifold and saw the hangar bay doors rolling open. He saw the methodical precision of a Taghmata encampment. The parathesic interface let him see data transfers flashing like lasers. He could smell the smoky spiciness of infra-red and hear the insectile hiss of radio waves.
“I see green, princeps,” Kethua confirmed. Henryk blinked away the excess data. Some principes ended up with random bouts of synaesthesia from trying to integrate too many senses, too often.
<Reactor to combat status. Drive start.>
“Drive start, aye, in three … two … one. Drive start, drive start.”
“Inloading tactical cartography,” Macharrian reported.
“Full gain on all auspex elements,” Leksander said.
Princeps Sir Henryk twitched a leg, and Galatea Magnificat took one mighty stride forward.
Galatea Magnificat emerged from the snowstorm like the ghost of a machine. Vesperland was always cold, this close to Gilead’s nightside. Its days were unchanging grey twilight. 61.3 kilometres west rose the 70° Massif, a mountain range named by the dullest of military cartographers. Between the mountains and sea the Tellurian League and Imperium had fought over long years to bloody, inconclusive stalemate. Henryk carefully watched the Manifold. The enemy had twelve engines. They had seven. Princeps Gabriela intended to discover how the Tellurian League would deploy them. So far Galatea’s patrol had gone unchallenged, but the Tellurians could not disregard her forever.
“Coming up on waypoint fifty-eight,” Macharrian said. 18.7 kilometres north-east the town of Angel’s Roost occupied a strategic crossroad. The outlying villages were partially fortified. It had withstood siege three times in two years – plainly the Tellurians were determined to hold it. The falling flakes covered the scars of old battlefields in crisp, featureless white. It was an oddly serene sight. Until the war caught up with them.
Artillery smacked down around them, thudding against the shields.
<Arm weapons! Shields to full!> Henryk ordered. He felt a hot rush of power flowing to the volcano cannon, his fingers twitching as the autoloader fed the first shells to the gatling cannon. The bombardment shook them hard. Howitzers chewed up the pristine snow, siege mortars gouged out muddy craters. Henryk could see the heat-glow of barrels on the landscape like faint starlight. He closed the distance aggressively. The Manifold tagged artillery positions as fast as Leksander identified them, simplifying and integrating sensor returns into cold data. Galatea spontaneously began overlaying their view with tactical data from the last siege.
Thank you, sweetheart. <Moderati! Turbo-lasers.>
He yielded control of the shoulder guns, immersing himself in thoughts of battle tactics and target mathematics. Kethua loosed the turbos, raking the hidden defence line, sending up bursts of panicking radio transmissions like smoke. Henryk snatched it up as new data for his firing solutions.
“Shields holding,” Kethua reported tersely.
<Firing solutions complete,> Henryk replied. <You may relinquish the guns, moderati.>
“With pleasure, princeps.”
Galatea’s turbos screamed. Her volcano cannon sent spears of laser over ten kilometres of battlefield to touch off howitzer batteries with almost surgical delicacy. Siege mortars exploded like firecrackers. Eliza’s gatling cannon smothered a village in high-explosive shells, tearing apart the buildings and the artillery sheltering behind.
Something was amiss. The gatling cannon was firing at 3,000 rounds per minute. Henryk never fired it that slowly. Eliza would never alter one of his firing solutions. Then why?
He could feel something. An intrusive presence in the MIU. A word drifted up from the Manifold. Princeps. Princeps, princeps.
Her former princeps? But … why, Galatea? An anomaly. It must be. Was it an anomaly, Galatea Magnificat?
“Shields down, shields down!”
<What?> Henryk snapped.
Artillery rounds battered at Galatea’s armour. One of them struck her starboard turbo-laser – Henryk bit back a cry of pain. There would be a psychostigmatic bruise on his shoulder later.
“Barrel misalignment, starboard turbo-laser,” Kethua reported. “Gamma barrel offline.”
<Relight shields!> Henryk demanded. <Speculor!>
Henryk really screamed then. A high-megathule laser beam explosively punctured Galatea’s port cuisse. It felt like he’d been stabbed through the leg with a scalding hot knife.
“Super-heavy armour! Bearing three-oh-one, five point eight-eight kilometres!” Macharrian sang out.
Henryk rounded on it, snarling, and Galatea’s warhorn sounded in response. A super-heavy tank destroyer, a titan hunter. He could see the radiation of its void shields glimmering in a shelled-out barn. He aimed the gatling cannon and deluged it with fire. Falling snow and smoke imploded as its shields blew in. Henryk selected volcano cannon. Galatea knew what he wanted – she gently guided his aim down.
<Laser for laser.> The barn erupted in a mushroom cloud of smoke and fire.
There was a sudden auspex bloom in the outskirts of Angel’s Roost. Heat bleed, shield radiation, a mess of code noise and radio transmits.
“Engine, engine, engine!”
<Exload situation, Galatea!> Princeps Gabriela demanded via Manifold link.
The enemy titan was advancing, steering round south-south-west bearing 145 to present its broadside. It called itself Eirikr Spear-thegn, Mastodon-class battle titan. The Tellurian League typically built elephantine engines. The Mastodon-class mounted a pair of super-heavy weapons in fore-and-aft howdah turrets. Tactical briefings said Tellurian engines were heavily armoured for their size. Henryk could almost taste the thickness of its void shields. Eirikr was smaller than Galatea, though it was not advancing alone. A demi-maniple of bipedal walkers marched from Angel’s Roost in escort. Leksander was reading eight of them, burbling code to one another. At first glance they could be knight engines, but there was no mistaking that soulless, plodding gait. Battle-automata. Abominable Intelligence. Galatea was already supplying him with firing solutions, urging him to turn the volcano cannon on the unholy machines.
<Respond to that hail, moderati,> Henryk said. <Begin data streaming.>
Eirikr sounded its own warhorn in defiance. There was a turbo-laser mounted in the fore turret, some type of plasma cannon aft. Henryk pushed Galatea to flank pace – she was limping on her left leg, sending stabbing pains shooting through his thigh. The Mastodon opened fire. A stream of plasma bolts stippled across Galatea’s shields. Its turbo-laser flashed, rapid fire. The automata were closing in, running, Deus Machina, firing their cannons, trying to bracket them. Henryk returned fire with Galatea’s turbos, trying to pop their void shields. They crackled and sparked, but they held.
What do we do, Eliza? Henryk inconclusively debated competing firing solutions. How many megathules would down an automaton’s shields? How many cannon shells to destroy one?
“Weapon misfire, port turbo-laser!”
How many megathules to down a Mastodon’s shields? Which should be engaged first? Mastodon or automata?
“Suspected shield misalignment detected!”
Did Galatea have enough cannon rounds in the magazine? How many firings could the volcano cannon sustain, could they risk being flanked, it was too much, it was too much!
He let the Manifold fully enter his mind. He gasped, and muttered a broken verse of prayer. The union was intense. No start of one, no end to the other, man and machine alloyed together. It was a beautiful thing. All inhibitions fell away. They bore down on the nearest automaton – ignoring the pain in their leg they disdained all weapons and trod heavily on it. Traversed their torso around twenty degrees to port as the first soulless machine crumpled and died underfoot. Bracketed the second with both turbo-lasers and threw it off its feet. The third – gatling cannon, 4,500 rpm. Shields overloaded, main gun torn away, code scream. Traverse to starboard. The fourth – volcano cannon, 1.25 second burst, blew the shields, annihilated the machine. He did not need to calculate any of this, any more than he needed to calculate breathing. Tactics and targeting were as autonomic as an eyeblink.
Henryk’s heart raced. The minds of the crew assimilated into the gestalt of the Manifold, leaving just a princeps and his engine. It was a beautiful thing. The sensory backwash was intense, wonderful. The shields sizzling with radiation, the data running up his brain stem, the racing processor, the glory of destruction. Endorphins bathed his brain, washing out fear and doubt.
Eirikr’s firepower relentlessly seared at their shields. Galatea hammered it with a hail of turbo-laser. Her fusillade revealed its weakness as the void shields distorted under the onslaught – a slight disjuncture at the midline emitter. Her gatling cannon blazed in response.
The air between the duelling engines blistered, snow flashed into steam, fire wash scoured the ground. Windows smashed and walls collapsed in Angel’s Roost eleven kilometres away.
Eirikr’s shields blew in milliseconds before Galatea’s did. They were ready for it. Galatea unleashed her full arsenal. Armour plating puckered and shredded apart. Subsystems failed and caught fire. The volcano cannon sheared its aft turret away. Its turbo-laser sputtered and died.
“Engine kill! Engine kill!”
The voice floated up through the Manifold. Henryk was dimly aware of his crew chattering back and forth. He hardly cared. He finally felt properly whole, content, fulfilled.
“Dear Eliza,” he whispered. He realised he was panting. Reluctantly he let the Manifold withdraw from his mind.
“Hail from Princeps Gabriela, princeps,” the moderati said.
Kethua. His name is Kethua, he remembered. He connected to the chirping Manifold link.
<They now have eleven engines, ma’am.>
<First blood to Galatea Magnificat,> Gabriela replied. <Retire to co-ordinates 41°N, 68°E.>
<I don’t ->
<You do. If they had had any more engines they would have deployed them. Retire, repair, and rearm.>
Awake, O divine engine! When the enginseers rouse your reactor to action and the princeps links to your mind impulse unit, do you remember, great engine? When your footsteps once again thunder upon Megiddan fields, what do you remember?
What secrets do you keep?
<Run diagnostics.>
<running …>
Princeps Sir Henryk was immersed in the Manifold.
Princeps, Henryk thought. Princeps, princeps. Who had interfered with his firing solution? Who had come between him and Galatea Magnificat?
<no faults detected …>
<Run diagnostics.>
<running …>
Her memory went back more than eight thousand years. She remembered all her – she remembered the principes. Their names, their faces, their victories. A line of principes looked back at him from the deeps of the MIU, thousands of men and women in identical quartered sea-green and milk white. Foremost, hollow-eyed Princeps Procyon. Behind him, plump Princeps Selene. Behind her, golden-bearded Princeps Laurens -
<no faults detected …>
Princeps Procyon, hero of the Battle of Omicron Persei VIII. Princeps Selene, who had walked with Galatea on cold graphite deserts beneath the plateau of Leng. Princeps Laurens, who with Galatea slew -
Enough! They had no place here. He was Galatea Magnificat’s princeps, no other.
<Is my authority recognised?>
<recognised …>
<Purge memory cache: Procyon.>
<denied …>
<Run diagnostics.>
<no faults detected …>
<Run diagnostics!>
<no faults detected no faults detected no faults detected …>
Isn’t it amazing that a man like me could feel this way?
Tell me, how much longer? Will it grow stronger every day?
Archmagos Ptolomaeus was still agitating for a decisive battle. Megas Princeps Gabriela had reiterated that the Tellurian League still had eleven engines; they had seven. Princeps Li’s notion broke the deadlock. 750 kilometres east of Angel’s Roost, where the climate turned temperate, the Ornett Wall defended the approach to the armoury city of Gunnsheim. Over six years of occupation the trenches, casemates, minefields, and bunkers had all run together like mercury. No man’s land was a corridor of battle-scarred agricultural land - Henryk could see fields of trans-manioc going feral.
Three Imperial divisions formed the attack; twelve Guard regiments and three Taghmata cohorts, sixty thousand men. Twenty knight engines from House Tyrinth led the vanguard, Galatea Magnificat advancing with them at flank stride. Accompanying the right flank was Princeps Sabitha Li’s Angelus Adamantine, Reaver-class. Calipyges Gloriosa held the reserve. A shame; she was a fine engine, always a pleasure to walk behind.
A salvo of rockets impacted their shields. An irrelevant attack – Henryk was more concerned with the Mastodon lurking opposite Angelus, about a kilometre behind the Tellurian front line. It hadn’t yet done anything beyond light its void shields.
<Exloading firing solutions,> Li reported.
<inloading …>
Henryk speed-reviewed them. Counter-battery fire, delivered via Angelus’ carapace-mounted missile launcher. Fire for effect, minimum ammunition expenditure – Li had always been conservative.
<Approved. Recommend you prepare solution for that engine.>
<Aye, Galatea.>
High-megathule las scissored across the vanguard. One of the las beams mistakenly struck a Crusader-class knight engine, blowing away half its torso and throwing the nine-metre tall walker onto its back.
<Source that discharge! Is it super-heavy armour?>
“Negative, princeps,” Leksander said. “Casemate guns!”
Target lock pealed in the Manifold. Galatea’s auspex tracked the target beams back to their source, a heavy casemate 4.8 kilometres away, bearing 82. Henryk hit it with a one second burst from the volcano cannon. The casemate gunners defiantly fired back. He fired again, holding the cannon firmly on target till the metre-thick reinforced plascrete melted and ran like wax. He was sure he detected a snarl of disapproval from the edge of the MIU.
Disapprove all you like, Procyon.
<Engine, engine, engine!> Li announced. Henryk looked across the battlefield, striated with the ochre contrails of rockets, duelling artillery raising black candyfloss puffs of smoke. He could see muzzle flashes as House Tyrinth engaged the line. The Mastodon and Angelus Adamantine furiously volleyed fire at each other, Angelus blitzing las from twin arm-mounted turbo-lasers, the Mastodon blazing gatling cannon. Via Manifold view Henryk could see the void shields flaring and distorting behind the pall of smoke and debris. Henryk recognised that game. It was trying to pop her shields so as to expose Angelus to killing turbo-las.
<Speculor, spectrum analysis on those voids. Moderati, run diagnostics.>
“Apologies, say again, princeps?”
<Diagnostics, moderati, diagnostics,> Henryk repeated testily. <Signal Tyrinth: Galatea Magnificat steering to attack, bearing three-two-zero.>
<no faults detected …>
Are you really here with me, Eliza? Henryk asked, melting down another casemate to a glowing crater. Are you thinking of Procyon? Or Selene?
He levelled both turbo-lasers at the enemy titan. Caught in a crossfire of four super-heavy laser cannons the Mastodon’s shields faltered and collapsed. Angelus raked its howdah till its gatling cannon fell to pieces. Queen Eliza burned into its neck joint with the volcano cannon. At the edge of the Manifold Henryk could see Tellurian reinforcements racing from the north-west, six super-heavy battle tanks and a swarm of medium armour.
Deltoid armour panels blew apart as Angelus’ lasers found a magazine. The auspex registered a sudden violent surge of energy from the heart of the engine.
<Brace for impact!> Princeps Li advised.
<Power to voids, dim auspex!>
The Mastodon’s reactor went nova, the engine disintegrating in a ball of plasma. The Manifold almost whited out.
<We destroyed an engine the same way on Ultima Misericordia. Wasn’t it gorgeous?> Selene commented.
<Moderati, run diagnostics, damn you!>
“Princeps Henryk, I cannot find the fault -”
<Look into the Manifold! Selene’s Misericordia campaign! Purge it!>
“Engine!” Leksander broke in. “Apologies, princeps, engine approaching, Mammoth-class.”
Oh, Galatea, dear engine, can’t you understand? Only together can we win the greatest glory …
<Angelus, hold the flank. Deny the enemy. We will destroy the engine.>
The princeps, adrift in liquid data. Faintly dancing glimmer, as of deep water. The glorious waking dream of the Manifold.
Gabriela floated naked in her amniosis. Her spinal plugs tethered her oh-so loosely to the roof of the tank – wrist and navel cannulae looped down to the floor. She never felt mightier than when she was naked. She was Princeps Gabriela Helicent, and she wore Tisiphone Titianicus as a lesser woman wore power armour. Even in amniotic interface, the union was intense, no start of one, no end to the other, alloyed together.
<Cancel autonomic targeting.>
But not a marriage. The ancient MIUs of battle titans were irascible, aggressive and resentful of instruction. The tech-priests didn’t really understand them, though they pretended otherwise. A princeps understood better. An engine was an engine. Its machine spirit was not truly aware. Sentience is the ability to learn the value of knowledge: the Third Universal Law.
It was only alive when she was plugged in. Life is directed motion: the First Universal Law. In her cockpit, she was mistress of the Manifold, no other.
<My princeps? Enemy engine approaching engagement zone. Optimas requests permission to retire,> moderati Kayode said. After two years as Gabriela’s moderati, he’d learned to speak only when strictly necessary. Once plugged in, she wasn’t quite safe any more.
<Granted.>
Day 3 of her Vesperland offensive. The shock of her stride dislodged blankets of snow from the branches of the scaly, purplish trees. The few navigable roads through the sector were defended by the ubiquitous Tellurian field fortifications. Deep snows and forest was hard going for infantry and impassible for armoured vehicles – but no impediment to engines, least of all Tisiphone Titanicus. She’d sent the Warhounds ahead to relentlessly harass the Tellurians in their own fortifications. They’d taken the bait.
The enemy engine declared itself to be Agmundr God-hammer, Mammoth-class. An apt name. A Warlord-class titan mounted four weapon systems rated super-heavy. The Mammoth-class mounted six. Agmundr thudded over the horizon in pursuit of Optimas. A whole maniple of battle-automata followed in its wake.
<Moderati, calculate hypothetical firing solutions. Steersman, signal to battlegroup. Optimas Devastator to co-ordinates 42468°N 67111°E and re-engage. Canicula Superbus to converge on position.>
Gabriela flexed a bicep. Her quake cannon answered. The autoloader lifted a three-megaton nuclear siege shell from the ammunition carousel and pressed it into the breach.
She would not give battle anonymously. Warhorns would not do. Select all frequencies. General code broadcast. Her hands curled into talons.
<TISIPHONE TITANICUS!> she screamed.
She shone lustrous white as she destroyed, majestic and beautiful as a queen of the battlefield should be. Defence line that had withstood six years of repeated siege could not withstand Galatea Magnificat.
Her turbo-lasers swept the ridge, smashing pillboxes and tank traps like dry biscuit. Razorwire vaporised or else melted into splashes of steel. Mines cooked off en masse, throwing up starchy spouts of manioc pulp. If a heavy gun emplacement revealed itself, Galatea converted it into a smoking crater. They fell silent, gunners disobeying their orders rather than risk her wrath. Unnoticed by the engine abhumans simply disappeared, burned to ash, blown to fragments, blinded by the retina-searing flash of laser, deafened by the thunderclap of detonations, pounded apart by walls of overpressure.
Galatea climbed the hill in two strides as the chivalry of House Tyrinth stormed the breach, Sir Tetramund at their head. Helverin-class knights prowled the foot of the ridge, winkling out survivors with their autocannons. Galatea ignored the knights and strode onwards. The Mammoth was advancing at full stride.
<What does that thing name itself?>
“Code broadcasts Brinjar God-of-Hosts, princeps.”
Henryk watched it carefully. At ten kilometres it looked like a fortress striding across the plain. A huge plasma cannon mounted in the aft turret, twin volcano cannons in the fore turret, 100mm autocannons in the flank embrasures. It was steering in south-west, a heading that would take it between Galatea and Angelus Adamantine – and thus present all its broadside guns.
<Enemy engine in engagement range,> Procyon interjected.
<I am aware.>
<You should make full stride to your left flank.>
<You as well, Laurens?> Henryk replied, watching the power surge as Brinjar armed its turrets. <No.>
<If their engine captain knows about Galatea’s congenital shield weakness, then two volcano cannon could.>
<No!>
<You are taking an unconscionable risk!> Procyon insisted.
<She is mine, Procyon! My Galatea!>
“Princeps? What is your word?” Kethua asked.
Brinjar God-of-Hosts opened fire. 100mm cannon rounds streaked the air. Its plasma cannon hammered Angelus and instantly blew in her shields. Volcano cannon annihilated a Tyrinth knight engine.
<Engage, engage, full arsenal!>
Her quake cannon turned another battle-automaton into a hundred tonnes of shrapnel. The soulless sentience is the enemy of all: the Twelfth Universal Law. Scale trees wore cloaks of flame. Torrents of snow flash-melted by weapons fire surged down valleys, uprooting bunkers and drowning trench lines. Thready stalks of mushroom clouds sprouted above the stygian miasma of steam and smoke. Optimas emerged from the burning trees, shields parting the flames, and abruptly shot a battle-automaton through the back.
Princeps Gabriela’s heart burned with a cold fury. A chained star throbbed in the marrow of her arm. She loosened its bonds and a solar flare squirted from her knuckles.
Breathing in liquid data, Gabriela fired her plasma annihilator again and channelled targeting data to her missile launcher. She kept thirty percent of her cognition focused on command awareness, monitoring the telemetry from the Warhounds, the Reavers, her sister Warlord-class. The Manifold began babbling memories of firing solutions from battles past. Gabriela cancelled them. Every MIU accumulated clots of old data, no matter how thoroughly the memory was washed. It was an unacceptable distraction from the Ornett assault, which -
What is he doing? What is that fool doing?
<Moderati, take haptic command.>
<Haptic command, aye!>
Gabriela focused on the data stream from Galatea Magnificat. Tisiphone complained at the sudden command transfer. She overruled it. Princeps Henryk was trying to duel a Mammoth-class engine solo; half a dozen knight engines were dead; the Tellurian reserves were attacking the left flank, 50+ medium tanks and 4 super-heavy; Angelus Adamantine’s shields were flickering on and off like a faulty light-bulb.
<Exload situation, Angelus!>
<Apologies, Megas Princeps,> Princeps Li replied crisply. A tank abruptly disappeared from the tactical view. <Positive kill! Angelus Adamantine experiencing systemic void shield failure. Enginseer doesn’t know why. Five missiles remaining.>
<Remain ataraxic, Sabitha,> Gabriela said. <I am going to order the reserves to engage.>
She unceremoniously cut the link. Li would want to concentrate.
<Steersman! Signal Calipyges Gloriosa. She is to relieve Anglus Adamantine and facilitate a general retreat.>
Now, Henryk, what do I do with you?
The union was as intimate as it was intense.
They steered in to less than five kilometres. Killing range. The searing impact of the volcano cannons was brutally violent – every hit threatened to put out their shields. But Galatea Magnificat was reigning queen of the battlefield. They held, though the stress on them was savage. Henryk adored the petawatts of energy she resisted as much as he raged at the impacts marring the silken texture of her shields.
Eliza unleashed her full arsenal. Her delight in destruction washed back through the MIU, as her turbo-lasers pumped at maximum discharge rate and her gatling cannon roared its bellicose music. The Mammoth captain realised he’d made a serious error in trying to engage Angelus and Galatea simultaneously. Its aft plasma cannon swung round to face them. The first incandescent shot blew in her shields, the second explosively splashing against her breast armour like a miniature sun, buckling the plating and scorching half a dozen subsystems. 100mm autocannon shells beat a staccato cadence on her armour.
Brinjar’s port shield emitters overheated and caught fire. The shields suddenly died, the starboard voids rapidly weakening and unravelling. Eliza’s turbo-lasers hammered in armour plating; her volcano cannon carved a hole in its fore turret barbette. Within the wonderful embrace of Eliza’s Manifold, her delight was his delight. And no fucking rival principes were there, where they had no right to be. Procyon, Selene, Laurens, Li, all of them had shut up. Whether they were locked out of the Manifold or he just couldn’t hear them, he neither knew nor cared. Henryk and Eliza, as it was meant to be.
Her shields recohered. They loosed a storm of high-explosive shells at the volcano cannon tear in the fore barbette. Fire swirled promiscuously from the wound. Something internal detonated and partially ripped the turret off its mount.
Brinjar God-of-Hosts’ warhorn sounded mournfully.
<Engine kill! Oh Eliza, engine kill!>
<engine kill engine kill …>
A black iron harpy snarled voicelessly at him from her perch above the iris hatch. Henryk pressed his hand to the gene-lock. A tiny needle slid out and pricked his finger to sample his biometrics.
“Enter, princeps,” it coldly buzzed.
The observation deck of the crawler was almost deserted. The glare shutters were half-lowered against the intense blue of the planet’s sky. A few cowled tech-priests lurked in the shadows. Princeps Gabriela was waiting, partly silhouetted, flanked by dim holo-tapestries, her expression unreadable.
“Madam Princeps, I -”
The slap almost knocked him off his feet.
“They had eleven engines! We had seven! What part of that did you not understand?” Gabriela demanded. “Kneel!”
Clutching his burning cheek Henryk hurriedly dropped to one knee. “But I killed two engines! You yourself killed one -”
“Leaving them with eight! We have five! Galatea will walk again, but thanks to you Angelus won’t!”
“We still breached the line. Another attack to exploit that breach -”
“Really? How do you suppose we will do that with one operational engine?”
Henryk remained silent, staring resolutely at the deck plating.
“Congratulations! Now we have no choice other than to deploy in maniple strength! I cannot censure you, since we shall have need of every engine, but you will not give another order while I remain Megas Princeps. You will walk with Galatea Magnificat and you will do nothing that will bring dishonour on the Legio Alastor!”
“The glory of my engine is my first concern,” Henryk said, starting to rise to his feet.
“Kneel!” Gabriela snapped. “If you do not, you will learn that I do not need Tisiphone Titanicus to unleash my wrath. Understand, princeps, this is not a threat. It is a forecast.”
My true love hath my heart, and I have hers,
By just exchange one for the other given.
My heart was wounded by her wounded heart;
Both equal hurt, in this exchange sought our bliss.
When the Tellurians started their drives on the stroke of 742863, they all knew it was time. High-altitude recon flights had confirmed two Tellurian engines were delayed in reaching the theatre. Six were mustered for battle behind the Ornett Wall.
Less than one hour later the Legio Alastor engine crews were plugged in and prepared to quit the laager. The Warhounds Canicula Superbus and Optimas Devastator were first to leave the safety of the support crawlers circled like wagons on the plain. Each was comparable to a hab block in size. Despite their metres-wide treads, their void shields and super-heavy cannons, they were not so much engines as mobile bunkers providing shelter for titans as they rearmed. Nikothoe Encarmine, Calipyges Gloriosa, and Galatea Magnificat filed out next, flanked by the massed ranks of the Taghmata. The majority of the thousands of legionaries, tech-priests, and battle-servitors would be of no more use in an engine battle than a crossbow in an artillery duel. Tisiphone Titanicus brought up the rear.
Princeps Gabriela watched the engines plod out into their assigned formation. Tisiphone’s flow rate was jumpy, inconveniently betraying her own nervousness. As calculated risks went, this was a knife edge. The Tellurians were methodical, not critical strategists. The Ornett Wall drew a very obvious, apparently secure, line of retreat across the map – sufficiently obvious and reassuring to give the Tellurian general confidence to advance understrength. But the Wall had been designed to repel conventional attacks. Galatea Magnificat had proven it was not proof against an engine assault. It was also always easier to counterattack with engines than to attack. The advance was therefore not a bold, decisive move to smash the Legio, but impetuous and overhasty.
In theory. Their only meaningful reserves were the Tyrinth knight engines, and fewer of them than Gabriela would have liked. Tyrinth should never have been placed in the vanguard. Four of the mustered engines were Mammoth-class. She had not lied to Henryk – both Warlords were critical.
The Manifold hummed with data streaming back from the Warhounds scouting the wide Decuman Field. Decuma had once been rich meadowland, and a major river had once run through it. Then development happened. Imperial or Tellurian, it made no difference. The meadow was now a 50,000 square kilometre grid of fields latticed with irrigation canals. Most of it was kilohectares of neglected autorice paddies trying to prepare itself for harvest, fiercely competing for space with the planet’s orange ferns.
Princeps Henryk brooded on his command throne. He hadn’t told anyone about the rebuke at the hand of Gabriela, but somehow the mood in the cockpit was tense. Galatea Magnificat was deployed on the far right of the maniple, the position of honour in ancient days. She was repaired and refitted for engine duels, her gatling cannon rearmed with armour-defeating sabot rounds. Nikothoe Encarmine walked 1.9 kilometres behind to port, Calipyges Gloriosa beyond her, and finally, 10 kilometres away, Tisiphone Titanicus on the left. The enemy engines were advancing in echelon, well beyond visual range, but Alastor could see them clearly on auspex.
Procyon kept staring at him. He’d manifested in the cockpit about an hour after plugging in. He didn’t seem to have a presence in the Manifold. The crew didn’t appear to notice him. Now he loomed, vulture-like, over the command throne as if Henryk had stolen his seat at a staff dinner.
“Galatea Magnificat,” he said scathingly. “Following on like a good little Reaver. I never thought I’d live to see it.”
<You didn’t live to see it, you sour old bastard. You died on Gildas Theta,> Henryk retorted, but his heart wasn’t in it. The suspicion was beginning to sink in that this was not normal MIU function.
All the more reason to purge him from the MIU.
<Full stop, all engines,> Princeps Gabriela ordered on the master channel.
<Full stop, aye,> the other principes chorused.
<Full stop, aye,> Henryk repeated reluctantly.
The enemy engines didn’t break stride, advancing bearing 176, echeloned out to the west. Four Mammoth-class titans, sheltering the two smaller Mastodons in the centre of the formation. They’d placed their heaviest guns at the van- and rearguard. Hard to break through, impossible to flank.
Fire bloomed on auspex as two Tellurian engines launched missiles. It was not difficult for Leksander to calculate their targets.
“Auspex lock, Mastodon-class Hallr Iron-mask.”
“Brace for impact,” Laurens advised.
Missiles criss-crossed Decuman Field as the battle lines narrowed. Billows of exhaust smoke, dimly smouldering in infra-red, drifted south-east like banks of thundercloud. The second barrage of missiles fell on the Warhounds. Canicula Superbus caught the worst of it, a brace of missiles momentarily popping her shields and forcing Princeps Arctophonos to take her towards the shelter of the centre; while Optimas Devastator ran west, Princeps Samson determinedly exloading auspex data to the maniple. The Reavers Calipyges and Nikothoe responded in kind, kicking out flights of cruise missiles from their carapace-mounted launchers.
Princeps Gabriela watched the Manifold like a cat, dissecting the curt, curated reports her moderati and speculor were supplying her. Alastor had the greater weight of ordnance in missiles, but she wasn’t looking for significant damage. She was hunting for weaknesses. Any impact might reveal a shield misalignment. A seam weakness. A tension fault.
<Lead engine at thirty-seven kilometres and closing,> her steersman reported. <Identified from archive: Haakon Glad-of-War.>
<Calipyges Gloriosa, Nikothoe Encarmine, cease fire,> Gabriela ordered. <Maniple to advance, bearing five-seven.>
The lead Mammoth kept its fore turret fixed on Galatea, quad-barrelled turbo-lasers blazing. Nikothoe smacked missiles into it again and again, trying to stress its shields into overloading. Further down the line Calipyges was doing the same, targeting the following Mammoth’s fore shields.
<Firing solution rejected,> Moderati Kayode replied. <Target following Mammoth calling itself Ingvar Wyrmbane. Exloading solution.>
“Call me unorthodox, but I think Galatea deserves a princeps empowered to calculate his own firing solutions, wouldn’t you agree, Laurens?” Procyon said.
<Shut it, Procyon!>
“Say again, princeps?”
The cockpit was populated only by the the living. Ingvar was sniping at Nikothoe with its aft cannons. A mushroom cloud was rising from the centre of the Tellurian echelon. Kayode’s firing solution blinked insistently in the Manifold.
<Henryk! Why aren’t you firing?>
<Madam Princeps,> Henryk floundered.
<Open fire, damn you! Come about bearing six-two, full stride!>
Henryk implemented Kayode’s firing solution just as Nikothoe opened fire, their volcano cannons adding to the continuing missile barrage till its shields glowed as brightly as the laser beams. Canicula Superbus prowled up from the centre, Arctophonos inloading data from Nikothoe as he loaded Canicula’s twin vulcan mega-bolters. Ingvar’s cannons snuffed her shields like a candle flame. And then it fired its plasma bombard.
The plasma smashed one leg into a molten ruin and severed the other at the knee joint. Canicula crashed onto her face in a crater of steaming mud. The crew’s code-screams were abruptly silenced when the left mega-bolter magazine cooked off.
Ingvar Wyrmbane lurched sideways from a volcanic amalgam of fireballs. A pair of cruise missiles violently burst its shields, the shredded voids dragging overpressure east, the fire wash shrivelling a hectare of autorice. Milliseconds later a plasma annihilator shot stove in its flank armour and destroyed its flank guns.
Tisiphone Titanicus had struck.
Gabriela kept hammering at it with the nuclear fury of her quake cannon. It ponderously limped out of line bearing 163, firing its cannons wildly in an attempt to cover its retreat.
Haakon Glad-of-War emerged from the thick pall of smoke, apparently unfazed by its crippled brother, still obstinately firing its quad turbo-lasers. The engine was liveried in a rich, deep red, the hammer-and-globe sigil of the Tellurian League wrought in adamantium on its brow. Its aft turret mounted a pair of 120mm gatling cannons, the flank embrasures, heavy plasma cannons.
<Galatea to engage. Nikothoe to support. No quarter,> Gabriela ordered curtly. Tisiphone was steering in to engage the two Mastodons, behind harassing fire from Optimas Devastator.
“Shields holding,” Kethua said.
“Engine at seven kilometres and closing,” Macharrian added.
Nikothoe seared a two-second burst of volcano cannon into Haakon’s starboard voids. Henryk could see the aft turret with its gatling cannons swivelling to target them.
<Pattern analysis on those plasma cannon, moderati.>
“Clearly they aren’t unhallowed lambda-class cannon,” hollow-eyed Procyon commented acerbically.
Henryk retaliated with Galatea’s own turbo-lasers. Strong though Haakon’s shields were, Galatea’s turbos were mightier. He couldn’t help but steal a glance at her via Nikothoe’s auspex feed, to admire the voluptuous, pneumatic curve and swell of her armour, luminous milk-white and beautiful in the midst of war. What a noble thing it was, to love such an engine! What a glorious fate, to link to such an MIU!
<Taghmata to decamp,> Gabriela ordered on the master channel.
Selene twisted round in the moderati’s seat. “We saw similar plasma cannon on Bersheba. Galatea can withstand them, can’t you, sweetheart?”
<Get your fat arse out of my cockpit, Selene.>
Haakon sounded a baleful bellow from its warhorn and unloaded its full weight of ordnance. A storm of high-megathule laser and 120mm shells blitzed across Galatea’s shields, embrasure guns spitting plasma fire at Nikothoe. Henryk unleashed the volcano cannon in revenge and felt Galatea’s joy in unbridled power. At above thirty degrees torso traverse her gyros were getting twitchy.
“Your princeps would do better to traverse torso four degrees to starboard and come about six-two,” golden-bearded Laurens told Leksander.
“Shields at sixty-five percent integrity,” Leksander reported, oblivious., “fifty-seven percent, forty-three percent -”
Galatea’s forward shields blinked – Henryk cried out as hundreds of cannon shells ripped across their shoulder. A single missile darted out from Nikothoe, the last of her load.
“Fourteen percent. Shields down, shields down.”
An explosion vented from its shoulder embrasure as Nikothoe’s volcano cannon cauterised off the plasma cannon. Ingvar Wyrmbane was 9.2 kilometres ahead, coming about 88 to retire from the field, limping and shieldless, but weapons functional. The other principes had seen it, too.
<I don’t need your help, or your critique. Moderati!> Henryk barked. <Firing solution for Ingvar Wyrmbane!>
“Say again, princeps? Our orders are -”
He let Eliza in fully, let her Manifold flood his brain. The union was as intense as it was intimate.
“Princeps? Princeps!”
Legio Alastor’s assault was breaking the Tellurian echelon in two. Gabriela slammed a quake cannon shell into the lead Mastodon. Princeps Samson saw his chance, running Optimas Devastator in to execute it with a burst of laser fire into its flank. The engine screeched to a shuddering halt.
<Engine kill, engine kill,> Kayode chanted.
<Compliments,> Gabriela signalled tersely.
Its brother Mastodon Hallr Iron-mask shifted into reverse pace. At the back of the echelon the rearguarding Mammoths were coming about to form a new battle line. Gabriela could taste victory – the kill ratio was 2:1 in Alastor’s favour. Unsustainable for the Tellurian League. If she brought Calipyges up to her left, then Nikothoe could tale the right once Galatea had killed Haakon -
Galatea was not engaging Haakon. She was striding off east in pursuit of the crippled Invgar Wyrmbane. Haakon was completely ignoring her, deluging Nikothoe with plasma fire, turbo-laser, and cannon shells. Her shields distorted grotesquely and blew in. 120mm cannon shells chewed her volcano cannon arm into a twisted ruin. Laser punctured holes in her sternum armour and finally trepanned her.
Tisiphone Titanicus’ cockpit crew winced and glanced at one another as they felt anger surge through the Manifold like acid.
<Omnissiah vult!> Gabriela screamed as if it were a weapon. Set it to repeat broadcast.
Within 2.16 seconds she’d formulated a new firing solution. Her flurry of gunfire hammered Hallr’s howdah into several hundred tonnes of semi-molten metal gobbets. Shrapnel splattered into the paddy field over a kilometre away.
<Tagmata to engage! Muster the knights!>
<The battlefield is insecure,> Archmagos Ptolomaeus objected.
<I am aware of that, Ptolomaeus! Do you suppose I would require the Taghmata after victory?>
She fired her plasma annihilator, one shot into Hallr Iron-mask’s guts.
<You do not issue the Strategos orders ->
Gabriela cut the link. She opened up a direct link to Sir Tetramund. <Sir. I require your knights.>
<Truly, Tisiphone?>
<On the honour of the Legio.>
<Tyrinth en route. Ave Omnissiah!>
Gabriela came about to face down Haakon Glad-of-War. Perfunctory plasma fire spat from its flank guns. Its aft turret, traversed right round to its rear quarter, blazed tight bursts of cannon fire at Galatea while she brawled with Ingvar Wyrmbane. Her shields were flickering and bursting repeatedly. Ingvar was slowly shredding apart under Galatea’s guns – but it had nothing to lose and nowhere to go.
<Henryk Pumayyaton! Disengage!>
Princeps Gabriela Helicent’s rage was terrible to behold.
Immersed in amniosis Gabriels snarled and clawed at the fluids, eyes squeezed shot, blood spiralling from a leaking cannula. Missiles speared from Tisiphone’s launcher and impaled the retreating Hallr Iron-mask. She simultaneously raked Ingvar with plasma fire from her annihilator, smashing in armour plating, crushing the motive systems in its hind leg. She steered in on Haakon with quake cannon thundering, ignoring Hallr when its reactor went nova. Superheated steam geysered from the louvres around her plasma annihilator barrel, swelling mushroom clouds rising in a dense forest. Her shields shrieked and sang with radiation.
In the centre of the typhoon of destruction that was Princeps Gabriela was a calm void that calculated as she destroyed. Five kilometres was killing range. Tisiphone was at 2.5 kilometres and closing fast, retasking her plasma annihilator. She held back her quake cannon only to unleash her shoulder melta cannon. The intense microwave stream melted down its aft turret like a blowtorch on copper. Haakon retaliated with its remaining weapons, as if trying to beat her away. With neither mercy nor inhibition Tisiphone slaughtered it.
<Omnissiah vult! Omnissiah vult! Omnissiah vult! Omnissiah vult!>
Henryk ignored Procyon screaming at him to disengage. It was unnecessary. It was unbearable. They were wounded in a dozen places. Their port turbo-laser had failed. Their volcano cannon was fluctuating power. The effort of maintaining shield integrity ached to the bone. But that was ok. His racing heart, the endorphin glow, the flood-rush of data … they would win glorious victory together or fail in each other’s embrace.
She would not fail. She was Galatea Magnificat.
A stab of pain lanced through his abdomen as her shield generator burned out.
Oh.
Ingvar’s plasma bombard flared like the birth of a star. Incandescent, squeezing pain flamed through the Manifold. Princeps Henryk went into violent cardiac arrest as the plugs insisted his ribs and arms were smashed.
If they failed, they failed together. He always knew it was meant to be.
“This is moderati Beron Kethua, Legio Alastor. I am linked to the mind impulse unit of the Warlord-class titan Galatea Magnificat. Is my authority recognised?”
<recognised …>
Sing, O Galatea Magnificat, of the pride and folly of man.
Do you ever really sleep? In the long between-times, in the silences wasted in oily hangars and scaffold frames, do you sleep then? When the enginseers reduce you to dormancy, is that sleep for you? Do you dream then, great engine?
What do you dream about?
MACHINA EST AMOR
< 0 >
< 0 >
Sing, O divine engine, of the pride and folly of man, that pride which struck down the valiant princeps for his hubris and brought disaster upon the Legio Alastor. Thus were the servants of the Machine God humbled, and the will of the Omnissiah made manifest.
< 1 >
The first time he saw her, he knew it was meant to be.
She was dressed in a sea-green dress uniform, with silver-grey piping and epaulettes the colour of beaten copper. Some women looked handsome in military uniform, competent, even stern. Princeps Gabriela Helicent didn’t. She looked like a girl dressed in her father’s uniform. She had large, dark eyes, full lips, generous breasts with matching hips. Her spinal ports shone chrome where they peeked out from beneath her collar. Gabriela stalked rather than walked, with the distinctive shoulder-sway that characterised a princeps of a Warlord-class titan.
The hangar smelled of oil and incense. The sonorous sound of tech-priests singing psalms rose up to the ceiling. They were blessed with bionically enhanced larynxes that gave them flawless pitch, and perfect endurance from machine lungs. Princeps Henryk trailed behind Gabriela, his uniform quartered sea-green and white. Curvaceous Princeps Gabriela couldn’t look more different to the tech-priest walking beside her. Ptolomaeus was forty-two percent bionic, the only Archmagos in the archimandriture who was below the hallowed fifty, and touchy about it.
<Never forget, Helicent, Mars designated me Taghmata Strategos. The supreme command is mine. I shall make or unmake captains as I see fit,> Ptolomaeus insisted. Even speaking in binaric he sounded petulant. Gabriela ignored his bluster. The Red Planet had only the vaguest idea of who the hell he was. The Taghmata was an army of the Martian priesthood – almost everyone, from the lowliest servitors, the red-robed tech-priests, the commanding magi, the knight houses, to the warships that brought them to this planet, all were bound to Archmagos Ptolomaeus through sacred oaths and feudal obligations.
But Gabriela was not a tech-priest. She was Collegia Titanica. The stark truth was that the Taghmata was a mere auxiliary to her titan war maniple.
“The Legio Alastor made me Megas Princeps,” Gabriela reminded him. She never used binary code when unplugged. Her voice echoed in the vastness of the gloomy hangar, the size of the place reducing them to the scale of animate dolls. Equally vast alcoves lined the walls. And in the alcoves, the titans.
Armoured giants, soaring to terrible heights, liveried in satin black and oceanic green. There were seven of them. They’d been waiting here all those long months from Optimates, waiting for their principes. There, the Reaver-class Angelus Adamantine. There, Tisiphone Titanicus, Gabriela’s engine. Optimas Devastator, one of the maniple’s two Warhounds. It was a rare thing to be a princeps. Through the technological miracle that was the mind impulse unit, the princeps controlled a titan by thought alone. There were other crew, also linked to the MIU, but it was the princeps who mattered. Only raw ability could elevate a man to pilot such a war machine as a titan – birth, connections, patronage, all were irrelevant.
Sir Henryk of House Pumayyaton had never wanted to be a princeps. For a scion of a knight house there was no greater honour. Every boy dreamed of it, and half the girls. But Henryk was a third son on a junior branch of House Pumayyaton. He’d always assumed his fate was to marry some girl he didn’t like and generate children he didn’t want. He’d had experience with the simpler MIUs of knight engines, ever since he’d come of age, but knight engines were closer to walking tanks than the terrible glory of a true titan. Anyway, the third son on a junior branch was in line to be a mere reserve pilot.
But the Collegia had noticed his affinity with the MIU. So he was sent to join the Legio Alastor: the vaunted Avenging Furies.
<I deduce, and the Lord Castellan agrees, that our engines must deploy in full maniple strength and conduct a flanking manoeuvre through the solar desert. The hereteks will have no choice but to retreat en masse or be encircled.>
“No,” Gabriela replied, “that will not serve. My engines require a secure base to refit and rearm.”
They weren’t paying attention to him. It wasn’t an unfamiliar situation. For as long as he could remember he’d felt like a supporting character in someone else’s drama. Henryk suppressed the urge to rub his itching eyes. He never slept well away from her embrace.
<This war has lasted for eight years!>
“Then it can withstand a few more months,” Gabriela said flatly. “We would devastate all in our path, and then when we are low on munitions, the Tellurians would counterattack. They have twelve engines. We have seven.”
<My data indicated that you are fearless. Are you so reluctant to plug into your engine, princeps?>
“Megas Princeps, Archmagos,” Gabriela warned. “Never.”
Never. Henryk remembered being sixteen, listening to the others rhapsodising about the transcendental joys of plugging into a titan’s MIU, joys they’d never actually experienced. There were none. His first engine had been Amadeus Furiosa, Reaver-class. Seven years linked to her MIU as her speculor, and he’d felt nothing.
No, he’d never wanted to be a princeps – until he saw Galatea Magnificat.
There she stood, facing her sister titan Tisiphone Titanicus. Her demeanour was powerful, majestic, a lady of war, like a knight in armour. Where all other Legio Alastor engines were satin black and oceanic green, she was liveried in milk white, like the fabled moonlight of ancient Terra. Her left poleyn displayed the emblem of the Legio – a bat-winged woman, hands curled into talons. Her right, the T-and-cogwheel of the Collegia Titanica. Holographic banners hung from her weapon limbs, displaying her proud roll of battle honours and kill tallies. And such weapons! Her left weapon limb was a six-barrelled, 120mm gatling cannon; the right, a 150 megathule ‘Belicosa’ volcano cannon. On each shoulder mount, triple-barrelled, rapid discharge turbo-lasers.
When she fired her gatling cannon, the firepower of dozens of tanks blazed in seconds. When she fired her turbo-lasers, battalions of enemy were scorched from the face of the planet. When Henryk first saw Galatea he knew he had to be a princeps, he had to be her princeps. Galatea Magnificat was something great – and with her, Henryk was greater, too. Linked to Galatea, he finally felt something. He finally understood. It was a beautiful thing. On Calamander, they’d single-handedly razed the Ork fortress-factory of Mekkslagg to the ground. On Adonai, they’d held the line as one million men of the 9th Army Group evacuated behind them, and annihilated the enemy vanguard. On Havilah, they’d unleashed their volcano cannon on the Red Empire’s daemon engines and sent them screaming back to hell.
“Dear Eliza,” he’d whisper to her MIU after every victory. No-one else called her that.
Soon, Eliza, he willed, as if his unplugged cortex could reach her. Soon.
< 10 >
Angel’s Roost was falling to the Imperium, but at a high price in blood. The Tellurian League was not giving in easily. The smell of wet ashes, and sweat, and gunsmoke hung in the air, laced through with the ozone tang of laser discharge. Guardsman Markos skulked in the lee of a sandbagged window, trying to keep out of the way. One of the Tellurian dead stared at him with one eye. A bullet had taken the other one. Their enemy was abhuman. They were almost two-thirds the size of a proper human, but stocky, with thick limbs and a thick neck. Their plated armour over broad shoulders made them look a bit like walking eggs.
The vox link was squawking in his ear, but he could barely hear it. Three Leman Russ battle tanks were grinding down the street line abreast, tracks clattering, engines growling. 3 and 5 Platoons followed in column, sheltered by the bulk of the tanks, Commissar Bohrman in his black trenchcoat and cap at their head. Every few seconds a Russ would thunder a high-explosive round over the crossroads at the attacking Tellurians, driving them down into cover. Sporadic anti-tank fire lashed desperately back at them - a missile splashed against a turret. The crew didn’t seem to notice, firing off another round as if nothing had happened.
Lasfire spattered from the floors above him. On the other side of the street, past the advancing tanks, 1 Platoon’s sharpshooters were sniping from an eight-storey hab block. The lieutenant shouted something about preparing to move on the next objective over the vox. That would be the gaunt, burned out librarium on the opposite corner. The commissars had found it easier to burn the building than haul all the books out for destruction. Part of the fourth floor had fallen in after the roof did.
The noise was so intense he almost missed the ground shuddering. The wall of the librarium groaned and fell into the street in a thick cloud of debris. Some type of quadrupedal walker loomed out of the veil of brick dust, its vast silhouette recognisably elephantine in shape, mounting two huge gun turrets on its back like a howdah. It must have been twenty-five metres tall, almost as tall as the librarium. The ground was shuddering beneath its tread.
They’d deployed a titan against them.
Its fore gun turret depressed smoothly. High-megathule laser screamed down and peeled open a Leman Russ like a tin can. The force of the blast shunted its neighbour aside, sixty tonnes of plasteel, and blitzed off its starboard treads in a confetti shower of shrapnel. Markos could taste blood and dirt. His ears were ringing. A Thunderbolt fighter streaked overhead, the roar of its passing sounding almost muffled. A heartbeat later three Hellstrike missiles smacked into the titan. They didn’t even reach it, a barrage that would have killed most tanks three times over bursting harmlessly against its void shields.
Then titan took some ponderous, almost leisurely steps forward, casually shouldering aside what was left of the librarium wall. Markos realised its tusks were actually weapons, an autocannon and some kind of flamer. The crew of the crippled Russ began to abandon their tank. Commissar Bohrman shot the commander in the face before he could clear the turret hatch.
They wouldn’t have got far anyway. The titan fired its turbo-laser again. One tank disappeared in a spout of flame and greasy smoke, the other burst open and kicked over onto its roof. Overpressure shook the walls – plasteel shrapnel cut men down in the street. 1 Platoon refused to stop shooting from their hab block strongpoint. Someone defiantly, impotently, fired a lascannon at the titan’s legs. Its aft turret rotated round. A jet of plasma blew out the third floor. The upper floors collapsed in a thundering avalanche of bricks.
The titan crew hadn’t finished. Autocannon fire blazed down the street. 2 and 5 Platoons, caught in the open, were cut to pieces. That was too much for them. They broke, and ran, leaving a daisy chain of broken bodies where the cannon shells overtook them. Where men took cover in the rubble and buildings, the flamer washed them out with sheets of chemical fire. Bohrman cursed and threatened, trying to rally them – until a gout of fire engulfed him.
< 11 >
Rejoice! you children of Mars, for the terrors of Old Night are passing,
And know this: the Omnissiah has made wondrous the Machine!
< 100 >
It was finally time.
The ammunition had been loaded, the plasma reactor sanctified, the enginseer boarded, the holographic banners furled, the binary hymns sung. The tech-priests were now reverently silent. Princeps Sir Henryk’s heart fluttered with the anticipation, as he stood at the end of the boarding bridge to the small of Galatea’s back. No dress tunic or epaulettes now – Henryk was in well-worn engine fatigues, green and white beneath a matte-steel cuirass. No princeps needed to advertise their rank when plugged into their own engine. Ahead, Galatea’s lumbar doors remained half-open, stencilled with the Legio Alastor’s bat-winged fury.
Galatea’s cockpit was gloomy and claustrophobic, dominated by the three seats in the chin, and the command throne at the back. His crew were waiting for him, standing awkwardly by their seats. By millennia-old tradition the princeps was always the last to board, but Henryk insisted he always be the first to plug in. He took a moment to study his crew. Macharrian, the steersman. Leksander, the speculor. By the rightmost seat, Beron Kethua. Moderati. The right-hand man, literally. Kethua might be up for a princepture of his own in a few year’s time, if he had the ambition for it.
“Be seated.”
Henryk gently lowered himself into the command throne, savouring the moment. The fine white leather upholstery was soft and supple as cream. The salikawood arms were studded with auxiliary manual controls, inlaid with mother-of-pearl from distant Nereus. A sheaf of cables draped lazily over the back of the throne. Henryk gathered them up with practiced efficiency. One-by-one, he ritually slotted the plugs into his spinal ports. The cerebellar adductor. The parietal relay, subordinate parathesic interface. And the prefrontal metacortex.
The Manifold opened for him. Delicious, warm data bathed his brain. It had been so long … he’d almost forgotten how deaf, how blind, how isolated he’d been without it. A princeps was never whole without his engine. The Manifold was what the Collegia called the operation of the MIU. It was the gestalt of her sensors, the potency of her cogitator, the data in her memory vaults, the mental landscape through which Henryk perceived and piloted Galatea Magnificat.
I’ve missed you, Eliza.
There was a coquettish bounce in the processor rate, like a skipping heart. Eliza had missed him too. Through the Manifold he could feel the minds of his crew as they plugged in. The link was harder for them, every time an effort.
“I am installed and hard-plugged,” moderati Kethua formally announced. “Do I have navigation?”
“Aye,” Macharrian confirmed.
“Auspex and sensors?”
“Aye,” Leksander said.
“Reactor and systems?”
“Aye!” the enginseer voxed from his cabin in the sternum.
“Princeps, Galatea Magnificat stands ready to walk.”
<Very good, moderati,> Henryk said. Binaric commands now, given via the Manifold. He pulled a lever on the right arm-console of his throne. It snapped heavily into place.
<active …>
<Princeps Sir Henryk Pumayyaton, Legio Alastor. I am linked to the mind impulse unit of the Warlord-class titan Galatea Magnificat. Is my authority recognised?>
<recognised …>
Henryk punched in the initial log details: 3.709863.M41. Gilead. Regions of Einore, Ultima Segmentum. <Commencing Operation Jericho. Begin log recording.>
<recording …>
“The Manifold is yours, princeps,” Kethua announced. “What is your word?”
<Disengage all scaffolds, open hangar door. Clear for egress,> Henryk ordered. He looked out through his biological eyes and saw the gloomy cockpit, crewmen hunched in shadowed seats, no glow from any pict-screens to illuminate their faces. He looked out through the Manifold and saw the hangar bay doors rolling open. He saw the methodical precision of a Taghmata encampment. The parathesic interface let him see data transfers flashing like lasers. He could smell the smoky spiciness of infra-red and hear the insectile hiss of radio waves.
“I see green, princeps,” Kethua confirmed. Henryk blinked away the excess data. Some principes ended up with random bouts of synaesthesia from trying to integrate too many senses, too often.
<Reactor to combat status. Drive start.>
“Drive start, aye, in three … two … one. Drive start, drive start.”
“Inloading tactical cartography,” Macharrian reported.
“Full gain on all auspex elements,” Leksander said.
Princeps Sir Henryk twitched a leg, and Galatea Magnificat took one mighty stride forward.
///
Galatea Magnificat emerged from the snowstorm like the ghost of a machine. Vesperland was always cold, this close to Gilead’s nightside. Its days were unchanging grey twilight. 61.3 kilometres west rose the 70° Massif, a mountain range named by the dullest of military cartographers. Between the mountains and sea the Tellurian League and Imperium had fought over long years to bloody, inconclusive stalemate. Henryk carefully watched the Manifold. The enemy had twelve engines. They had seven. Princeps Gabriela intended to discover how the Tellurian League would deploy them. So far Galatea’s patrol had gone unchallenged, but the Tellurians could not disregard her forever.
“Coming up on waypoint fifty-eight,” Macharrian said. 18.7 kilometres north-east the town of Angel’s Roost occupied a strategic crossroad. The outlying villages were partially fortified. It had withstood siege three times in two years – plainly the Tellurians were determined to hold it. The falling flakes covered the scars of old battlefields in crisp, featureless white. It was an oddly serene sight. Until the war caught up with them.
Artillery smacked down around them, thudding against the shields.
<Arm weapons! Shields to full!> Henryk ordered. He felt a hot rush of power flowing to the volcano cannon, his fingers twitching as the autoloader fed the first shells to the gatling cannon. The bombardment shook them hard. Howitzers chewed up the pristine snow, siege mortars gouged out muddy craters. Henryk could see the heat-glow of barrels on the landscape like faint starlight. He closed the distance aggressively. The Manifold tagged artillery positions as fast as Leksander identified them, simplifying and integrating sensor returns into cold data. Galatea spontaneously began overlaying their view with tactical data from the last siege.
Thank you, sweetheart. <Moderati! Turbo-lasers.>
He yielded control of the shoulder guns, immersing himself in thoughts of battle tactics and target mathematics. Kethua loosed the turbos, raking the hidden defence line, sending up bursts of panicking radio transmissions like smoke. Henryk snatched it up as new data for his firing solutions.
“Shields holding,” Kethua reported tersely.
<Firing solutions complete,> Henryk replied. <You may relinquish the guns, moderati.>
“With pleasure, princeps.”
Galatea’s turbos screamed. Her volcano cannon sent spears of laser over ten kilometres of battlefield to touch off howitzer batteries with almost surgical delicacy. Siege mortars exploded like firecrackers. Eliza’s gatling cannon smothered a village in high-explosive shells, tearing apart the buildings and the artillery sheltering behind.
Something was amiss. The gatling cannon was firing at 3,000 rounds per minute. Henryk never fired it that slowly. Eliza would never alter one of his firing solutions. Then why?
He could feel something. An intrusive presence in the MIU. A word drifted up from the Manifold. Princeps. Princeps, princeps.
Her former princeps? But … why, Galatea? An anomaly. It must be. Was it an anomaly, Galatea Magnificat?
“Shields down, shields down!”
<What?> Henryk snapped.
Artillery rounds battered at Galatea’s armour. One of them struck her starboard turbo-laser – Henryk bit back a cry of pain. There would be a psychostigmatic bruise on his shoulder later.
“Barrel misalignment, starboard turbo-laser,” Kethua reported. “Gamma barrel offline.”
<Relight shields!> Henryk demanded. <Speculor!>
Henryk really screamed then. A high-megathule laser beam explosively punctured Galatea’s port cuisse. It felt like he’d been stabbed through the leg with a scalding hot knife.
“Super-heavy armour! Bearing three-oh-one, five point eight-eight kilometres!” Macharrian sang out.
Henryk rounded on it, snarling, and Galatea’s warhorn sounded in response. A super-heavy tank destroyer, a titan hunter. He could see the radiation of its void shields glimmering in a shelled-out barn. He aimed the gatling cannon and deluged it with fire. Falling snow and smoke imploded as its shields blew in. Henryk selected volcano cannon. Galatea knew what he wanted – she gently guided his aim down.
<Laser for laser.> The barn erupted in a mushroom cloud of smoke and fire.
There was a sudden auspex bloom in the outskirts of Angel’s Roost. Heat bleed, shield radiation, a mess of code noise and radio transmits.
“Engine, engine, engine!”
///
<Exload situation, Galatea!> Princeps Gabriela demanded via Manifold link.
The enemy titan was advancing, steering round south-south-west bearing 145 to present its broadside. It called itself Eirikr Spear-thegn, Mastodon-class battle titan. The Tellurian League typically built elephantine engines. The Mastodon-class mounted a pair of super-heavy weapons in fore-and-aft howdah turrets. Tactical briefings said Tellurian engines were heavily armoured for their size. Henryk could almost taste the thickness of its void shields. Eirikr was smaller than Galatea, though it was not advancing alone. A demi-maniple of bipedal walkers marched from Angel’s Roost in escort. Leksander was reading eight of them, burbling code to one another. At first glance they could be knight engines, but there was no mistaking that soulless, plodding gait. Battle-automata. Abominable Intelligence. Galatea was already supplying him with firing solutions, urging him to turn the volcano cannon on the unholy machines.
<Respond to that hail, moderati,> Henryk said. <Begin data streaming.>
Eirikr sounded its own warhorn in defiance. There was a turbo-laser mounted in the fore turret, some type of plasma cannon aft. Henryk pushed Galatea to flank pace – she was limping on her left leg, sending stabbing pains shooting through his thigh. The Mastodon opened fire. A stream of plasma bolts stippled across Galatea’s shields. Its turbo-laser flashed, rapid fire. The automata were closing in, running, Deus Machina, firing their cannons, trying to bracket them. Henryk returned fire with Galatea’s turbos, trying to pop their void shields. They crackled and sparked, but they held.
What do we do, Eliza? Henryk inconclusively debated competing firing solutions. How many megathules would down an automaton’s shields? How many cannon shells to destroy one?
“Weapon misfire, port turbo-laser!”
How many megathules to down a Mastodon’s shields? Which should be engaged first? Mastodon or automata?
“Suspected shield misalignment detected!”
Did Galatea have enough cannon rounds in the magazine? How many firings could the volcano cannon sustain, could they risk being flanked, it was too much, it was too much!
He let the Manifold fully enter his mind. He gasped, and muttered a broken verse of prayer. The union was intense. No start of one, no end to the other, man and machine alloyed together. It was a beautiful thing. All inhibitions fell away. They bore down on the nearest automaton – ignoring the pain in their leg they disdained all weapons and trod heavily on it. Traversed their torso around twenty degrees to port as the first soulless machine crumpled and died underfoot. Bracketed the second with both turbo-lasers and threw it off its feet. The third – gatling cannon, 4,500 rpm. Shields overloaded, main gun torn away, code scream. Traverse to starboard. The fourth – volcano cannon, 1.25 second burst, blew the shields, annihilated the machine. He did not need to calculate any of this, any more than he needed to calculate breathing. Tactics and targeting were as autonomic as an eyeblink.
Henryk’s heart raced. The minds of the crew assimilated into the gestalt of the Manifold, leaving just a princeps and his engine. It was a beautiful thing. The sensory backwash was intense, wonderful. The shields sizzling with radiation, the data running up his brain stem, the racing processor, the glory of destruction. Endorphins bathed his brain, washing out fear and doubt.
Eirikr’s firepower relentlessly seared at their shields. Galatea hammered it with a hail of turbo-laser. Her fusillade revealed its weakness as the void shields distorted under the onslaught – a slight disjuncture at the midline emitter. Her gatling cannon blazed in response.
The air between the duelling engines blistered, snow flashed into steam, fire wash scoured the ground. Windows smashed and walls collapsed in Angel’s Roost eleven kilometres away.
Eirikr’s shields blew in milliseconds before Galatea’s did. They were ready for it. Galatea unleashed her full arsenal. Armour plating puckered and shredded apart. Subsystems failed and caught fire. The volcano cannon sheared its aft turret away. Its turbo-laser sputtered and died.
“Engine kill! Engine kill!”
The voice floated up through the Manifold. Henryk was dimly aware of his crew chattering back and forth. He hardly cared. He finally felt properly whole, content, fulfilled.
“Dear Eliza,” he whispered. He realised he was panting. Reluctantly he let the Manifold withdraw from his mind.
“Hail from Princeps Gabriela, princeps,” the moderati said.
Kethua. His name is Kethua, he remembered. He connected to the chirping Manifold link.
<They now have eleven engines, ma’am.>
<First blood to Galatea Magnificat,> Gabriela replied. <Retire to co-ordinates 41°N, 68°E.>
<I don’t ->
<You do. If they had had any more engines they would have deployed them. Retire, repair, and rearm.>
< 101 >
Awake, O divine engine! When the enginseers rouse your reactor to action and the princeps links to your mind impulse unit, do you remember, great engine? When your footsteps once again thunder upon Megiddan fields, what do you remember?
What secrets do you keep?
< 110 >
<Run diagnostics.>
<running …>
Princeps Sir Henryk was immersed in the Manifold.
Princeps, Henryk thought. Princeps, princeps. Who had interfered with his firing solution? Who had come between him and Galatea Magnificat?
<no faults detected …>
<Run diagnostics.>
<running …>
Her memory went back more than eight thousand years. She remembered all her – she remembered the principes. Their names, their faces, their victories. A line of principes looked back at him from the deeps of the MIU, thousands of men and women in identical quartered sea-green and milk white. Foremost, hollow-eyed Princeps Procyon. Behind him, plump Princeps Selene. Behind her, golden-bearded Princeps Laurens -
<no faults detected …>
Princeps Procyon, hero of the Battle of Omicron Persei VIII. Princeps Selene, who had walked with Galatea on cold graphite deserts beneath the plateau of Leng. Princeps Laurens, who with Galatea slew -
Enough! They had no place here. He was Galatea Magnificat’s princeps, no other.
<Is my authority recognised?>
<recognised …>
<Purge memory cache: Procyon.>
<denied …>
<Run diagnostics.>
<no faults detected …>
<Run diagnostics!>
<no faults detected no faults detected no faults detected …>
< 111 >
Isn’t it amazing that a man like me could feel this way?
Tell me, how much longer? Will it grow stronger every day?
< 1000 >
The Tellurians had sited their defence line on the high ground. Rocket artillery rattled the Imperial advance hard. Through the Manifold Henryk saw a battery of four Earthshaker howitzers light off. He paid it a few milliseconds attention. The Tellurian rockets outranged almost everything the Imperials could field. Gunners often claimed artillery was the queen of the battlefield. They were wrong. You’re the queen, aren’t you, Eliza?
Archmagos Ptolomaeus was still agitating for a decisive battle. Megas Princeps Gabriela had reiterated that the Tellurian League still had eleven engines; they had seven. Princeps Li’s notion broke the deadlock. 750 kilometres east of Angel’s Roost, where the climate turned temperate, the Ornett Wall defended the approach to the armoury city of Gunnsheim. Over six years of occupation the trenches, casemates, minefields, and bunkers had all run together like mercury. No man’s land was a corridor of battle-scarred agricultural land - Henryk could see fields of trans-manioc going feral.
Three Imperial divisions formed the attack; twelve Guard regiments and three Taghmata cohorts, sixty thousand men. Twenty knight engines from House Tyrinth led the vanguard, Galatea Magnificat advancing with them at flank stride. Accompanying the right flank was Princeps Sabitha Li’s Angelus Adamantine, Reaver-class. Calipyges Gloriosa held the reserve. A shame; she was a fine engine, always a pleasure to walk behind.
A salvo of rockets impacted their shields. An irrelevant attack – Henryk was more concerned with the Mastodon lurking opposite Angelus, about a kilometre behind the Tellurian front line. It hadn’t yet done anything beyond light its void shields.
<Exloading firing solutions,> Li reported.
<inloading …>
Henryk speed-reviewed them. Counter-battery fire, delivered via Angelus’ carapace-mounted missile launcher. Fire for effect, minimum ammunition expenditure – Li had always been conservative.
<Approved. Recommend you prepare solution for that engine.>
<Aye, Galatea.>
High-megathule las scissored across the vanguard. One of the las beams mistakenly struck a Crusader-class knight engine, blowing away half its torso and throwing the nine-metre tall walker onto its back.
<Source that discharge! Is it super-heavy armour?>
“Negative, princeps,” Leksander said. “Casemate guns!”
Target lock pealed in the Manifold. Galatea’s auspex tracked the target beams back to their source, a heavy casemate 4.8 kilometres away, bearing 82. Henryk hit it with a one second burst from the volcano cannon. The casemate gunners defiantly fired back. He fired again, holding the cannon firmly on target till the metre-thick reinforced plascrete melted and ran like wax. He was sure he detected a snarl of disapproval from the edge of the MIU.
Disapprove all you like, Procyon.
<Engine, engine, engine!> Li announced. Henryk looked across the battlefield, striated with the ochre contrails of rockets, duelling artillery raising black candyfloss puffs of smoke. He could see muzzle flashes as House Tyrinth engaged the line. The Mastodon and Angelus Adamantine furiously volleyed fire at each other, Angelus blitzing las from twin arm-mounted turbo-lasers, the Mastodon blazing gatling cannon. Via Manifold view Henryk could see the void shields flaring and distorting behind the pall of smoke and debris. Henryk recognised that game. It was trying to pop her shields so as to expose Angelus to killing turbo-las.
<Speculor, spectrum analysis on those voids. Moderati, run diagnostics.>
“Apologies, say again, princeps?”
<Diagnostics, moderati, diagnostics,> Henryk repeated testily. <Signal Tyrinth: Galatea Magnificat steering to attack, bearing three-two-zero.>
<no faults detected …>
Are you really here with me, Eliza? Henryk asked, melting down another casemate to a glowing crater. Are you thinking of Procyon? Or Selene?
He levelled both turbo-lasers at the enemy titan. Caught in a crossfire of four super-heavy laser cannons the Mastodon’s shields faltered and collapsed. Angelus raked its howdah till its gatling cannon fell to pieces. Queen Eliza burned into its neck joint with the volcano cannon. At the edge of the Manifold Henryk could see Tellurian reinforcements racing from the north-west, six super-heavy battle tanks and a swarm of medium armour.
Deltoid armour panels blew apart as Angelus’ lasers found a magazine. The auspex registered a sudden violent surge of energy from the heart of the engine.
<Brace for impact!> Princeps Li advised.
<Power to voids, dim auspex!>
The Mastodon’s reactor went nova, the engine disintegrating in a ball of plasma. The Manifold almost whited out.
<We destroyed an engine the same way on Ultima Misericordia. Wasn’t it gorgeous?> Selene commented.
<Moderati, run diagnostics, damn you!>
“Princeps Henryk, I cannot find the fault -”
<Look into the Manifold! Selene’s Misericordia campaign! Purge it!>
“Engine!” Leksander broke in. “Apologies, princeps, engine approaching, Mammoth-class.”
Oh, Galatea, dear engine, can’t you understand? Only together can we win the greatest glory …
<Angelus, hold the flank. Deny the enemy. We will destroy the engine.>
///
The princeps, adrift in liquid data. Faintly dancing glimmer, as of deep water. The glorious waking dream of the Manifold.
Gabriela floated naked in her amniosis. Her spinal plugs tethered her oh-so loosely to the roof of the tank – wrist and navel cannulae looped down to the floor. She never felt mightier than when she was naked. She was Princeps Gabriela Helicent, and she wore Tisiphone Titianicus as a lesser woman wore power armour. Even in amniotic interface, the union was intense, no start of one, no end to the other, alloyed together.
<Cancel autonomic targeting.>
But not a marriage. The ancient MIUs of battle titans were irascible, aggressive and resentful of instruction. The tech-priests didn’t really understand them, though they pretended otherwise. A princeps understood better. An engine was an engine. Its machine spirit was not truly aware. Sentience is the ability to learn the value of knowledge: the Third Universal Law.
It was only alive when she was plugged in. Life is directed motion: the First Universal Law. In her cockpit, she was mistress of the Manifold, no other.
<My princeps? Enemy engine approaching engagement zone. Optimas requests permission to retire,> moderati Kayode said. After two years as Gabriela’s moderati, he’d learned to speak only when strictly necessary. Once plugged in, she wasn’t quite safe any more.
<Granted.>
Day 3 of her Vesperland offensive. The shock of her stride dislodged blankets of snow from the branches of the scaly, purplish trees. The few navigable roads through the sector were defended by the ubiquitous Tellurian field fortifications. Deep snows and forest was hard going for infantry and impassible for armoured vehicles – but no impediment to engines, least of all Tisiphone Titanicus. She’d sent the Warhounds ahead to relentlessly harass the Tellurians in their own fortifications. They’d taken the bait.
The enemy engine declared itself to be Agmundr God-hammer, Mammoth-class. An apt name. A Warlord-class titan mounted four weapon systems rated super-heavy. The Mammoth-class mounted six. Agmundr thudded over the horizon in pursuit of Optimas. A whole maniple of battle-automata followed in its wake.
<Moderati, calculate hypothetical firing solutions. Steersman, signal to battlegroup. Optimas Devastator to co-ordinates 42468°N 67111°E and re-engage. Canicula Superbus to converge on position.>
Gabriela flexed a bicep. Her quake cannon answered. The autoloader lifted a three-megaton nuclear siege shell from the ammunition carousel and pressed it into the breach.
She would not give battle anonymously. Warhorns would not do. Select all frequencies. General code broadcast. Her hands curled into talons.
<TISIPHONE TITANICUS!> she screamed.
///
She shone lustrous white as she destroyed, majestic and beautiful as a queen of the battlefield should be. Defence line that had withstood six years of repeated siege could not withstand Galatea Magnificat.
Her turbo-lasers swept the ridge, smashing pillboxes and tank traps like dry biscuit. Razorwire vaporised or else melted into splashes of steel. Mines cooked off en masse, throwing up starchy spouts of manioc pulp. If a heavy gun emplacement revealed itself, Galatea converted it into a smoking crater. They fell silent, gunners disobeying their orders rather than risk her wrath. Unnoticed by the engine abhumans simply disappeared, burned to ash, blown to fragments, blinded by the retina-searing flash of laser, deafened by the thunderclap of detonations, pounded apart by walls of overpressure.
Galatea climbed the hill in two strides as the chivalry of House Tyrinth stormed the breach, Sir Tetramund at their head. Helverin-class knights prowled the foot of the ridge, winkling out survivors with their autocannons. Galatea ignored the knights and strode onwards. The Mammoth was advancing at full stride.
<What does that thing name itself?>
“Code broadcasts Brinjar God-of-Hosts, princeps.”
Henryk watched it carefully. At ten kilometres it looked like a fortress striding across the plain. A huge plasma cannon mounted in the aft turret, twin volcano cannons in the fore turret, 100mm autocannons in the flank embrasures. It was steering in south-west, a heading that would take it between Galatea and Angelus Adamantine – and thus present all its broadside guns.
<Enemy engine in engagement range,> Procyon interjected.
<I am aware.>
<You should make full stride to your left flank.>
<You as well, Laurens?> Henryk replied, watching the power surge as Brinjar armed its turrets. <No.>
<If their engine captain knows about Galatea’s congenital shield weakness, then two volcano cannon could.>
<No!>
<You are taking an unconscionable risk!> Procyon insisted.
<She is mine, Procyon! My Galatea!>
“Princeps? What is your word?” Kethua asked.
Brinjar God-of-Hosts opened fire. 100mm cannon rounds streaked the air. Its plasma cannon hammered Angelus and instantly blew in her shields. Volcano cannon annihilated a Tyrinth knight engine.
<Engage, engage, full arsenal!>
///
Her quake cannon turned another battle-automaton into a hundred tonnes of shrapnel. The soulless sentience is the enemy of all: the Twelfth Universal Law. Scale trees wore cloaks of flame. Torrents of snow flash-melted by weapons fire surged down valleys, uprooting bunkers and drowning trench lines. Thready stalks of mushroom clouds sprouted above the stygian miasma of steam and smoke. Optimas emerged from the burning trees, shields parting the flames, and abruptly shot a battle-automaton through the back.
Princeps Gabriela’s heart burned with a cold fury. A chained star throbbed in the marrow of her arm. She loosened its bonds and a solar flare squirted from her knuckles.
Breathing in liquid data, Gabriela fired her plasma annihilator again and channelled targeting data to her missile launcher. She kept thirty percent of her cognition focused on command awareness, monitoring the telemetry from the Warhounds, the Reavers, her sister Warlord-class. The Manifold began babbling memories of firing solutions from battles past. Gabriela cancelled them. Every MIU accumulated clots of old data, no matter how thoroughly the memory was washed. It was an unacceptable distraction from the Ornett assault, which -
What is he doing? What is that fool doing?
<Moderati, take haptic command.>
<Haptic command, aye!>
Gabriela focused on the data stream from Galatea Magnificat. Tisiphone complained at the sudden command transfer. She overruled it. Princeps Henryk was trying to duel a Mammoth-class engine solo; half a dozen knight engines were dead; the Tellurian reserves were attacking the left flank, 50+ medium tanks and 4 super-heavy; Angelus Adamantine’s shields were flickering on and off like a faulty light-bulb.
<Exload situation, Angelus!>
<Apologies, Megas Princeps,> Princeps Li replied crisply. A tank abruptly disappeared from the tactical view. <Positive kill! Angelus Adamantine experiencing systemic void shield failure. Enginseer doesn’t know why. Five missiles remaining.>
<Remain ataraxic, Sabitha,> Gabriela said. <I am going to order the reserves to engage.>
She unceremoniously cut the link. Li would want to concentrate.
<Steersman! Signal Calipyges Gloriosa. She is to relieve Anglus Adamantine and facilitate a general retreat.>
Now, Henryk, what do I do with you?
///
The union was as intimate as it was intense.
They steered in to less than five kilometres. Killing range. The searing impact of the volcano cannons was brutally violent – every hit threatened to put out their shields. But Galatea Magnificat was reigning queen of the battlefield. They held, though the stress on them was savage. Henryk adored the petawatts of energy she resisted as much as he raged at the impacts marring the silken texture of her shields.
Eliza unleashed her full arsenal. Her delight in destruction washed back through the MIU, as her turbo-lasers pumped at maximum discharge rate and her gatling cannon roared its bellicose music. The Mammoth captain realised he’d made a serious error in trying to engage Angelus and Galatea simultaneously. Its aft plasma cannon swung round to face them. The first incandescent shot blew in her shields, the second explosively splashing against her breast armour like a miniature sun, buckling the plating and scorching half a dozen subsystems. 100mm autocannon shells beat a staccato cadence on her armour.
Brinjar’s port shield emitters overheated and caught fire. The shields suddenly died, the starboard voids rapidly weakening and unravelling. Eliza’s turbo-lasers hammered in armour plating; her volcano cannon carved a hole in its fore turret barbette. Within the wonderful embrace of Eliza’s Manifold, her delight was his delight. And no fucking rival principes were there, where they had no right to be. Procyon, Selene, Laurens, Li, all of them had shut up. Whether they were locked out of the Manifold or he just couldn’t hear them, he neither knew nor cared. Henryk and Eliza, as it was meant to be.
Her shields recohered. They loosed a storm of high-explosive shells at the volcano cannon tear in the fore barbette. Fire swirled promiscuously from the wound. Something internal detonated and partially ripped the turret off its mount.
Brinjar God-of-Hosts’ warhorn sounded mournfully.
<Engine kill! Oh Eliza, engine kill!>
<engine kill engine kill …>
< 1001 >
A black iron harpy snarled voicelessly at him from her perch above the iris hatch. Henryk pressed his hand to the gene-lock. A tiny needle slid out and pricked his finger to sample his biometrics.
“Enter, princeps,” it coldly buzzed.
The observation deck of the crawler was almost deserted. The glare shutters were half-lowered against the intense blue of the planet’s sky. A few cowled tech-priests lurked in the shadows. Princeps Gabriela was waiting, partly silhouetted, flanked by dim holo-tapestries, her expression unreadable.
“Madam Princeps, I -”
The slap almost knocked him off his feet.
“They had eleven engines! We had seven! What part of that did you not understand?” Gabriela demanded. “Kneel!”
Clutching his burning cheek Henryk hurriedly dropped to one knee. “But I killed two engines! You yourself killed one -”
“Leaving them with eight! We have five! Galatea will walk again, but thanks to you Angelus won’t!”
“We still breached the line. Another attack to exploit that breach -”
“Really? How do you suppose we will do that with one operational engine?”
Henryk remained silent, staring resolutely at the deck plating.
“Congratulations! Now we have no choice other than to deploy in maniple strength! I cannot censure you, since we shall have need of every engine, but you will not give another order while I remain Megas Princeps. You will walk with Galatea Magnificat and you will do nothing that will bring dishonour on the Legio Alastor!”
“The glory of my engine is my first concern,” Henryk said, starting to rise to his feet.
“Kneel!” Gabriela snapped. “If you do not, you will learn that I do not need Tisiphone Titanicus to unleash my wrath. Understand, princeps, this is not a threat. It is a forecast.”
< 1010 >
My true love hath my heart, and I have hers,
By just exchange one for the other given.
My heart was wounded by her wounded heart;
Both equal hurt, in this exchange sought our bliss.
< 1011 >
When the Tellurians started their drives on the stroke of 742863, they all knew it was time. High-altitude recon flights had confirmed two Tellurian engines were delayed in reaching the theatre. Six were mustered for battle behind the Ornett Wall.
Less than one hour later the Legio Alastor engine crews were plugged in and prepared to quit the laager. The Warhounds Canicula Superbus and Optimas Devastator were first to leave the safety of the support crawlers circled like wagons on the plain. Each was comparable to a hab block in size. Despite their metres-wide treads, their void shields and super-heavy cannons, they were not so much engines as mobile bunkers providing shelter for titans as they rearmed. Nikothoe Encarmine, Calipyges Gloriosa, and Galatea Magnificat filed out next, flanked by the massed ranks of the Taghmata. The majority of the thousands of legionaries, tech-priests, and battle-servitors would be of no more use in an engine battle than a crossbow in an artillery duel. Tisiphone Titanicus brought up the rear.
Princeps Gabriela watched the engines plod out into their assigned formation. Tisiphone’s flow rate was jumpy, inconveniently betraying her own nervousness. As calculated risks went, this was a knife edge. The Tellurians were methodical, not critical strategists. The Ornett Wall drew a very obvious, apparently secure, line of retreat across the map – sufficiently obvious and reassuring to give the Tellurian general confidence to advance understrength. But the Wall had been designed to repel conventional attacks. Galatea Magnificat had proven it was not proof against an engine assault. It was also always easier to counterattack with engines than to attack. The advance was therefore not a bold, decisive move to smash the Legio, but impetuous and overhasty.
In theory. Their only meaningful reserves were the Tyrinth knight engines, and fewer of them than Gabriela would have liked. Tyrinth should never have been placed in the vanguard. Four of the mustered engines were Mammoth-class. She had not lied to Henryk – both Warlords were critical.
///
The Manifold hummed with data streaming back from the Warhounds scouting the wide Decuman Field. Decuma had once been rich meadowland, and a major river had once run through it. Then development happened. Imperial or Tellurian, it made no difference. The meadow was now a 50,000 square kilometre grid of fields latticed with irrigation canals. Most of it was kilohectares of neglected autorice paddies trying to prepare itself for harvest, fiercely competing for space with the planet’s orange ferns.
Princeps Henryk brooded on his command throne. He hadn’t told anyone about the rebuke at the hand of Gabriela, but somehow the mood in the cockpit was tense. Galatea Magnificat was deployed on the far right of the maniple, the position of honour in ancient days. She was repaired and refitted for engine duels, her gatling cannon rearmed with armour-defeating sabot rounds. Nikothoe Encarmine walked 1.9 kilometres behind to port, Calipyges Gloriosa beyond her, and finally, 10 kilometres away, Tisiphone Titanicus on the left. The enemy engines were advancing in echelon, well beyond visual range, but Alastor could see them clearly on auspex.
Procyon kept staring at him. He’d manifested in the cockpit about an hour after plugging in. He didn’t seem to have a presence in the Manifold. The crew didn’t appear to notice him. Now he loomed, vulture-like, over the command throne as if Henryk had stolen his seat at a staff dinner.
“Galatea Magnificat,” he said scathingly. “Following on like a good little Reaver. I never thought I’d live to see it.”
<You didn’t live to see it, you sour old bastard. You died on Gildas Theta,> Henryk retorted, but his heart wasn’t in it. The suspicion was beginning to sink in that this was not normal MIU function.
All the more reason to purge him from the MIU.
<Full stop, all engines,> Princeps Gabriela ordered on the master channel.
<Full stop, aye,> the other principes chorused.
<Full stop, aye,> Henryk repeated reluctantly.
The enemy engines didn’t break stride, advancing bearing 176, echeloned out to the west. Four Mammoth-class titans, sheltering the two smaller Mastodons in the centre of the formation. They’d placed their heaviest guns at the van- and rearguard. Hard to break through, impossible to flank.
Fire bloomed on auspex as two Tellurian engines launched missiles. It was not difficult for Leksander to calculate their targets.
“Auspex lock, Mastodon-class Hallr Iron-mask.”
“Brace for impact,” Laurens advised.
///
Missiles criss-crossed Decuman Field as the battle lines narrowed. Billows of exhaust smoke, dimly smouldering in infra-red, drifted south-east like banks of thundercloud. The second barrage of missiles fell on the Warhounds. Canicula Superbus caught the worst of it, a brace of missiles momentarily popping her shields and forcing Princeps Arctophonos to take her towards the shelter of the centre; while Optimas Devastator ran west, Princeps Samson determinedly exloading auspex data to the maniple. The Reavers Calipyges and Nikothoe responded in kind, kicking out flights of cruise missiles from their carapace-mounted launchers.
Princeps Gabriela watched the Manifold like a cat, dissecting the curt, curated reports her moderati and speculor were supplying her. Alastor had the greater weight of ordnance in missiles, but she wasn’t looking for significant damage. She was hunting for weaknesses. Any impact might reveal a shield misalignment. A seam weakness. A tension fault.
<Lead engine at thirty-seven kilometres and closing,> her steersman reported. <Identified from archive: Haakon Glad-of-War.>
<Calipyges Gloriosa, Nikothoe Encarmine, cease fire,> Gabriela ordered. <Maniple to advance, bearing five-seven.>
///
The lead Mammoth kept its fore turret fixed on Galatea, quad-barrelled turbo-lasers blazing. Nikothoe smacked missiles into it again and again, trying to stress its shields into overloading. Further down the line Calipyges was doing the same, targeting the following Mammoth’s fore shields.
<Firing solution rejected,> Moderati Kayode replied. <Target following Mammoth calling itself Ingvar Wyrmbane. Exloading solution.>
“Call me unorthodox, but I think Galatea deserves a princeps empowered to calculate his own firing solutions, wouldn’t you agree, Laurens?” Procyon said.
<Shut it, Procyon!>
“Say again, princeps?”
The cockpit was populated only by the the living. Ingvar was sniping at Nikothoe with its aft cannons. A mushroom cloud was rising from the centre of the Tellurian echelon. Kayode’s firing solution blinked insistently in the Manifold.
<Henryk! Why aren’t you firing?>
<Madam Princeps,> Henryk floundered.
<Open fire, damn you! Come about bearing six-two, full stride!>
Henryk implemented Kayode’s firing solution just as Nikothoe opened fire, their volcano cannons adding to the continuing missile barrage till its shields glowed as brightly as the laser beams. Canicula Superbus prowled up from the centre, Arctophonos inloading data from Nikothoe as he loaded Canicula’s twin vulcan mega-bolters. Ingvar’s cannons snuffed her shields like a candle flame. And then it fired its plasma bombard.
The plasma smashed one leg into a molten ruin and severed the other at the knee joint. Canicula crashed onto her face in a crater of steaming mud. The crew’s code-screams were abruptly silenced when the left mega-bolter magazine cooked off.
Ingvar Wyrmbane lurched sideways from a volcanic amalgam of fireballs. A pair of cruise missiles violently burst its shields, the shredded voids dragging overpressure east, the fire wash shrivelling a hectare of autorice. Milliseconds later a plasma annihilator shot stove in its flank armour and destroyed its flank guns.
Tisiphone Titanicus had struck.
Gabriela kept hammering at it with the nuclear fury of her quake cannon. It ponderously limped out of line bearing 163, firing its cannons wildly in an attempt to cover its retreat.
Haakon Glad-of-War emerged from the thick pall of smoke, apparently unfazed by its crippled brother, still obstinately firing its quad turbo-lasers. The engine was liveried in a rich, deep red, the hammer-and-globe sigil of the Tellurian League wrought in adamantium on its brow. Its aft turret mounted a pair of 120mm gatling cannons, the flank embrasures, heavy plasma cannons.
<Galatea to engage. Nikothoe to support. No quarter,> Gabriela ordered curtly. Tisiphone was steering in to engage the two Mastodons, behind harassing fire from Optimas Devastator.
“Shields holding,” Kethua said.
“Engine at seven kilometres and closing,” Macharrian added.
Nikothoe seared a two-second burst of volcano cannon into Haakon’s starboard voids. Henryk could see the aft turret with its gatling cannons swivelling to target them.
<Pattern analysis on those plasma cannon, moderati.>
“Clearly they aren’t unhallowed lambda-class cannon,” hollow-eyed Procyon commented acerbically.
Henryk retaliated with Galatea’s own turbo-lasers. Strong though Haakon’s shields were, Galatea’s turbos were mightier. He couldn’t help but steal a glance at her via Nikothoe’s auspex feed, to admire the voluptuous, pneumatic curve and swell of her armour, luminous milk-white and beautiful in the midst of war. What a noble thing it was, to love such an engine! What a glorious fate, to link to such an MIU!
<Taghmata to decamp,> Gabriela ordered on the master channel.
Selene twisted round in the moderati’s seat. “We saw similar plasma cannon on Bersheba. Galatea can withstand them, can’t you, sweetheart?”
<Get your fat arse out of my cockpit, Selene.>
Haakon sounded a baleful bellow from its warhorn and unloaded its full weight of ordnance. A storm of high-megathule laser and 120mm shells blitzed across Galatea’s shields, embrasure guns spitting plasma fire at Nikothoe. Henryk unleashed the volcano cannon in revenge and felt Galatea’s joy in unbridled power. At above thirty degrees torso traverse her gyros were getting twitchy.
“Your princeps would do better to traverse torso four degrees to starboard and come about six-two,” golden-bearded Laurens told Leksander.
“Shields at sixty-five percent integrity,” Leksander reported, oblivious., “fifty-seven percent, forty-three percent -”
Galatea’s forward shields blinked – Henryk cried out as hundreds of cannon shells ripped across their shoulder. A single missile darted out from Nikothoe, the last of her load.
“Fourteen percent. Shields down, shields down.”
An explosion vented from its shoulder embrasure as Nikothoe’s volcano cannon cauterised off the plasma cannon. Ingvar Wyrmbane was 9.2 kilometres ahead, coming about 88 to retire from the field, limping and shieldless, but weapons functional. The other principes had seen it, too.
<I don’t need your help, or your critique. Moderati!> Henryk barked. <Firing solution for Ingvar Wyrmbane!>
“Say again, princeps? Our orders are -”
He let Eliza in fully, let her Manifold flood his brain. The union was as intense as it was intimate.
“Princeps? Princeps!”
///
Legio Alastor’s assault was breaking the Tellurian echelon in two. Gabriela slammed a quake cannon shell into the lead Mastodon. Princeps Samson saw his chance, running Optimas Devastator in to execute it with a burst of laser fire into its flank. The engine screeched to a shuddering halt.
<Engine kill, engine kill,> Kayode chanted.
<Compliments,> Gabriela signalled tersely.
Its brother Mastodon Hallr Iron-mask shifted into reverse pace. At the back of the echelon the rearguarding Mammoths were coming about to form a new battle line. Gabriela could taste victory – the kill ratio was 2:1 in Alastor’s favour. Unsustainable for the Tellurian League. If she brought Calipyges up to her left, then Nikothoe could tale the right once Galatea had killed Haakon -
Galatea was not engaging Haakon. She was striding off east in pursuit of the crippled Invgar Wyrmbane. Haakon was completely ignoring her, deluging Nikothoe with plasma fire, turbo-laser, and cannon shells. Her shields distorted grotesquely and blew in. 120mm cannon shells chewed her volcano cannon arm into a twisted ruin. Laser punctured holes in her sternum armour and finally trepanned her.
Tisiphone Titanicus’ cockpit crew winced and glanced at one another as they felt anger surge through the Manifold like acid.
<Omnissiah vult!> Gabriela screamed as if it were a weapon. Set it to repeat broadcast.
Within 2.16 seconds she’d formulated a new firing solution. Her flurry of gunfire hammered Hallr’s howdah into several hundred tonnes of semi-molten metal gobbets. Shrapnel splattered into the paddy field over a kilometre away.
<Tagmata to engage! Muster the knights!>
<The battlefield is insecure,> Archmagos Ptolomaeus objected.
<I am aware of that, Ptolomaeus! Do you suppose I would require the Taghmata after victory?>
She fired her plasma annihilator, one shot into Hallr Iron-mask’s guts.
<You do not issue the Strategos orders ->
Gabriela cut the link. She opened up a direct link to Sir Tetramund. <Sir. I require your knights.>
<Truly, Tisiphone?>
<On the honour of the Legio.>
<Tyrinth en route. Ave Omnissiah!>
Gabriela came about to face down Haakon Glad-of-War. Perfunctory plasma fire spat from its flank guns. Its aft turret, traversed right round to its rear quarter, blazed tight bursts of cannon fire at Galatea while she brawled with Ingvar Wyrmbane. Her shields were flickering and bursting repeatedly. Ingvar was slowly shredding apart under Galatea’s guns – but it had nothing to lose and nowhere to go.
<Henryk Pumayyaton! Disengage!>
Princeps Gabriela Helicent’s rage was terrible to behold.
Immersed in amniosis Gabriels snarled and clawed at the fluids, eyes squeezed shot, blood spiralling from a leaking cannula. Missiles speared from Tisiphone’s launcher and impaled the retreating Hallr Iron-mask. She simultaneously raked Ingvar with plasma fire from her annihilator, smashing in armour plating, crushing the motive systems in its hind leg. She steered in on Haakon with quake cannon thundering, ignoring Hallr when its reactor went nova. Superheated steam geysered from the louvres around her plasma annihilator barrel, swelling mushroom clouds rising in a dense forest. Her shields shrieked and sang with radiation.
In the centre of the typhoon of destruction that was Princeps Gabriela was a calm void that calculated as she destroyed. Five kilometres was killing range. Tisiphone was at 2.5 kilometres and closing fast, retasking her plasma annihilator. She held back her quake cannon only to unleash her shoulder melta cannon. The intense microwave stream melted down its aft turret like a blowtorch on copper. Haakon retaliated with its remaining weapons, as if trying to beat her away. With neither mercy nor inhibition Tisiphone slaughtered it.
///
<Omnissiah vult! Omnissiah vult! Omnissiah vult! Omnissiah vult!>
Henryk ignored Procyon screaming at him to disengage. It was unnecessary. It was unbearable. They were wounded in a dozen places. Their port turbo-laser had failed. Their volcano cannon was fluctuating power. The effort of maintaining shield integrity ached to the bone. But that was ok. His racing heart, the endorphin glow, the flood-rush of data … they would win glorious victory together or fail in each other’s embrace.
She would not fail. She was Galatea Magnificat.
A stab of pain lanced through his abdomen as her shield generator burned out.
Oh.
Ingvar’s plasma bombard flared like the birth of a star. Incandescent, squeezing pain flamed through the Manifold. Princeps Henryk went into violent cardiac arrest as the plugs insisted his ribs and arms were smashed.
If they failed, they failed together. He always knew it was meant to be.
< 1100 >
“This is moderati Beron Kethua, Legio Alastor. I am linked to the mind impulse unit of the Warlord-class titan Galatea Magnificat. Is my authority recognised?”
<recognised …>
< 1101 >
Sing, O Galatea Magnificat, of the pride and folly of man.
Do you ever really sleep? In the long between-times, in the silences wasted in oily hangars and scaffold frames, do you sleep then? When the enginseers reduce you to dormancy, is that sleep for you? Do you dream then, great engine?
What do you dream about?
