unpleasant.
The Discord told him many interesting things: what the other slaves were thinking, that the overseers were afraid of him and that his power was growing. It talked of the early years of an ancient hero who had been turned into an immortal godling and lived on in a great palace far away, and the warriors that he had trained to spread his word. He wondered if it was the Emperor, but his head had begun to hurt when that thought had crossed his mind and he quickly dismissed it.
Yet even as he had come to bear his hellish existence, he prayed for release. Not death, no, he had lived through too much to simply perish. He was filled with a new vitality and fervour that made him determined to cling to life for as long as he was able, to see this through one way or another.
He prayed for deliverance and tears ran down his face as he felt himself becoming lost. Had the Emperor forsaken him? Did His light no longer shine upon Tanakreg? Had he been abandoned to his fate? For the first time since the occupation, Varnus felt true despair pull at him. He prayed vainly to the Emperor, but felt no comfort in his soul. No, he felt nothing but emptiness.
The next moment he had forgotten why he had been crying and wiped away his tears in bafflement. Shrugging, he continued his work. The Gehemehnet needed tending.
The slaughter had been immense and the valley was filled with the dead and dying. A cloying stink rose as the temperature soared, the hot-white sun overhead baking the earth. The wreck of the Titan was like the discarded shell of some giant colossus and scattered debris littered the ravine floor. The battle had been intense. The Word Bearers advanced into the confused Imperial lines after the Imperator's fall, killing thousands of their foes as they tried to realign their battle line and draw support up past the massive frame of the
The enemy had inflicted a terrible blow and had retreated once the Imperial reinforcements were brought forward. They had suffered relatively few casualties.
A day had passed and the giant Ordinatus
A dozen, giant, spiked stabiliser legs unfolded to either side of the titanic vehicle, steam hissing out into the hot air as their mechanics were engaged. They reached out to either side of the massive structure and drove down into the ground.
The air tingled with power as giant energy cores were readied and the massive ribbed cone of the Ordinatus's main gun was raised. A sound like a thousand jet engines began to whine, soon reaching a screaming intensity that reverberated through the earth. Elysians within a kilometre of the giant machine clutched hands to their ears as the giant creature made ready to unleash its power.
The air around the ribbed cone-tip of the giant weapon began to shimmer and waver and then the Ordinatus fired.
A deafening, sharp crack like the sound of a planet ripped in two resounded through the valley. Pre-warned, all the Elysians in the vicinity had engaged the sound mufflers within their helmets, but even so the blast of sound was deafening, making Havorn's eardrums vibrate painfully. An ungodly silence followed as if all noise had been sucked out of the valley by the focused blast of sonic energy, and the air between the gun and the valley wall wavered and reverberated.
The effect was astounding. Where the centre of the focused beam of sound struck the wall the rock was turned to dust, exploding outwards in a massive blast as it was shattered down to the molecular level. A wave seemed to spread from the epicentre and the rock rippled as if it were liquid, huge cracks appearing in its wake. Vibrating and shattered, the entire rock face broke apart and fell to the valley floor with a crash that rumbled along the entire mountain range. A huge cloud of salt dust rose up into the air.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The battle for Tanakreg had ground down into a brutal war of attrition. Within five days, the ravine had been levelled by the sheer power of the Ordinatus machine. Its sonic disruptor had reverberated through the mountains, shattering stone to powder and causing vast avalanches that could be felt halfway across the continent. Laron had only ever read about such a weapon and to see it in action was awe-inspiring.
The steep cliff walls had been reduced to dust and the valleys were filled with crumbled salt rock, creating a vast expanse that the Imperial Guard and Mechanicus forces rolled across. The going was difficult, but with the steep ravine walls reduced to nothing, they were able to attack on a wide front. The enemy was unable to contain the sheer number of the Imperial troopers and they were relentlessly pushed back.
The enemy had launched several vicious assaults to destroy the potent weapon, but Havorn had charged Laron with the protection of the Ordinatus and he had coordinated effective battles to stall the attacks. He had used his Valkyries effectively, rapidly redeploying units of his 72nd to launch counter-attacks into the flanks of the foe as they advanced, while the tech-guard of the Mechanicus had taken the brunt of the frontal attack. As he dropped more troopers into the flanks of the enemy, Havorn had directed heavier support forwards. Assailed on all sides, the enemy advance had been quashed time and again. He relished these battles. Now that the terrain had been levelled out, he had found the enemy much easier to deal with.
He snorted, easier to deal with indeed. He had fought the traitor Astartes only once before and they were the toughest and deadliest foes that he had ever encountered in all his days of soldiering. Still, without having to advance up narrow defiles, the small number of the enemy meant that the vast Imperial war engine could grind on. Though their attacks on the traitors became more directed and hate fuelled, they were unable to close on the Ordinatus
Tens of thousands of Imperial troopers had been slaughtered and, wherever the enemy dug in for a concerted battle, they inflicted horrendous casualties. But it was not enough to halt the never-ending tide of Guardsmen, Skitarii warriors and vehicles. The foe was spread too thin and their flanks were surrounded and overrun. It was simply too wide a front for them to cover and there were too few of them to fight the type of war that suited the massed ranks of the Imperial Guard so well.
Laron had capitalised on this and had ordered hundreds of Valkyries ahead of the main Imperial entourage. Already his storm troopers had assaulted and destroyed several of the enemy anti-aircraft guns emplaced on the foothills of the mountains and he knew that the time would soon come when the Imperials would be able to push forwards and take the fight onto the plains.
Vast lines of siege tanks ground inexorably forward behind the infantry, pounding the enemy with ordnance outranging anything they had.
Slowly the enemy had been driven back, pushed out of the mountains and onto the salt plains that spread out like a rippling blanket towards Shinar. If they could push the foe back to the peninsula on which Shinar sat then they would eventually grind them down and destroy them utterly. Though he saw that the old brigadier-general grieved for every soldier that they lost, he could also see that the Imperial commander was confident of their eventual victory.
It was not the type of war that Laron liked, for it was more suited to the style, or lack of it, of other Imperial Guard regiments. His soldiers of the 72nd were drop-troopers, and in this war of attrition, the unique skills and talents of his units were not being utilised to their full capacity. As soon as the battle reached the plains though, it would be a different matter.
The sheer number of casualties amongst the tech-guard had been staggering, but ever more of the mindless tech-soldiers marched from the vast facto-rum crawlers that ground over the earth in the wake of the army.
Laron had seen the mechanised enhancements and weapons of fallen tech-guard servitors being recovered as the Imperials pushed ever forward and he knew that they were used to create more lobotomised, unfeeling soldiers. Brigadier-General Havorn had spoken of what became of the flesh of the fallen tech-guard and Laron had been horrified.
It was like some archaic necromancy, he thought, to reuse the flesh and armaments of the dead to create new soldiers to throw thoughtlessly at the enemy. It was morbid and repugnant, and he tried as best he could to keep his men away from them. What was it that the magos called them? Skitarii? They were unnatural and they made his
