Helsreach

already died to its guns. In her prison of fluid, Zarha felt the stump at the end of her arm aching with a dull heat.

Once, she thought with an ugly smile, I had hands.

She aimed her next thought with care.

The annihilator is overheating.

'

The annihilator is overheating.'

'Understood, my princeps,' replied Carsomir. He twitched in his restraint throne, accessing the status of the weapon through his hardwired link to the Titan's heart-systems. 'Confirmed. Chambers three through sixteen show rising temperature pressure.'

Zarha turned in her milky coffin, feeling instinctively what every other soul on board needed to perceive through calculations on monitors or slower hardwire links. She watched Carsomir twitch again, feeling the orders pulsing from his mind through willpower alone, reaching into the cognitive receptors at the Titan's core. 'Coolant flush, moderate intensity,' he said. 'Commencing in eight seconds.'

Zarha moved her right arm in the ooze, feeling pain in fingers that no longer existed.

'Flushing coolant,' said a nearby adept, hunched over his wall-mounted control panel.

The relief was immediate and blissful, like a sunburned hand plunged into a bucket of ice. She cancelled the vision feed from her photoreceptors, immersing herself in blackness as relief washed through her arm.

Thank you, Valian.

'

Thank you, Valian.'

Her vision flickered back into existence as she reactivated her optical implants. It was the work of a moment to readjust her perceptions, filtering out the immediacy of her surroundings. She took a breath, and stared out across the city with a god's eyes.

The enemy, ant-like and amusing, swarmed in the street around her ankles. Zarha lifted her foot, feeling both the rush of air on her metallic skin and the swirling of fluid around her footless limb. The aliens fled from her crushing tread. A tank died, pounded into scrap.

Incidental fire from

Stormherald's

leg battlements spilled into the road, cutting the orks down in droves.

'My princeps,' Moderati Secundus Lonn was twitching in his throne as he spoke, his muscles spasming in response to the flood of pulses from his connection to the Titan.

Speak, Lonn.

'

Speak, Lonn.'

'We are venturing ahead of our skitarii support.'

Zarha was not blind to this. She hunched her shoulders, wasted muscles tensed and trembling, striding forward through the street.

I

know. I sense… something.

'

I

know.

I

sense something.'

The hab-towers on either side of the marching Titan were abandoned - this sector was one of the few lucky enough to be within easy range of the city's scarce subterranean communal bunker complexes.

Inform Colonel Sarren I am pressing ahead with phase two.

'

Inform Colonel Sarren

I

am pressing ahead with phase two.'

'Yes, my princeps.'

This sector, Omega-south-nineteen, had been one of the first to fall when the walls came down the day before. The aliens had been crawling through the area for many hours, but significant scrap-Titan strength was - as yet - unseen. It represented the perfect opportunity to slaughter legions of the enemy while their gargant groups were engaged elsewhere.

A feeling grew in the back of her head - something invasive and sharp, blooming through the webbing of veins in her brain. It was something she had not heard in many, many decades.

Someone was weeping.

Zarha felt her face locked in a rictus as the feeling blossomed and grew fangs. The sharpness was jagged now, an acidic pulse through her skull.

'My princeps?'

She didn't hear at first.

'My princeps?'

Yes, Valian.

'

Yes, Valian.'

'We're receiving word from

Draconian.

He's dying, my princeps.'

I know… I feel him…

A moment later, Zarha felt the full shock grasp at her senses. The mortis-cry slashed through her cognitive link like a hurricane, shrieking at a soundless pitch of pain.

Draconian

was down. The princeps aboard her, Jacen Veragon, was screaming as the aliens scuttled over his corpse, pulling at his armoured metal skin as he lay prone.

How had he fallen?

And there it was. In the screaming cry was the memory she sought. The lurching of vision as the Reaver-class engine was dragged to its knees. The sense of infuriating immobility. He was a god… How could this happen… Why would his limbs no longer function…

Everywhere around was rubble and smoke. It was impossible to see clearly.

The scream was fading now.

Draconian's

reactor-heart, a boiling cauldron of plasmic fusion, was growing cold and still.

'We've lost contact,' said Valian, a second after Zarha sensed it herself. She was weeping, though the saltwater secreted from her tear ducts was immediately dissolved in the fluid entombing her.

Lonn had his eyes closed, accessing an internal hololithic display within the cognitive link. '

Draconian

was in omega-west-five.' His dark eyes flicked open. 'Reports show the site is the same as here: evacuated habitation towers, minimal engine resistance.'

The adept manning the scanning console, his mouth replaced by a scarab-like vocaliser, blurted a screed of machine code across the cockpit.

'Confirmed,' Carsomir said. 'We're getting an auspex return to the south. Significant heat signature. Almost definitely an enemy engine.'

Zarha heard almost none of this. Images of

Draconian's

death played out behind her false eyes like scenes from a play, coloured by the stinking taint of black emotion beneath. She sobbed