Through the bloody fluid and maddening pain, she raised her shivering arms.
mirrored the gesture as it was pummelled under
guns. Jagged metal fell from the Mechanicus giant like rainfall, ripped from its body and crashing to the ground below. Many of the Imperator's crew that had the sense of self-preservation to flee were killed by the falling chunks of armour plating.
Zarha put the last of her strength, and the last of her life, into throwing both her arms forward. The plasma annihilator did not fire. Neither did the hellstorm cannon. Both were locked in the time-consuming process of recharging from depleted power generators.
Both towering weapon-arms speared forward, hammering through the fat hull of
and impaling it in place. The cry of tearing scrap metal was cacophonous as
cannons pushed deeper, stabbing like daggers through meat, seeking to grind and crush the enemy's heart- reactor.
Oberon.
Perhaps her thoughts echoed across the empathic link to her moderati, for one of them voiced something of her sentiments.
'We're dead,' Carsomir murmured. He wanted to rise from his throne, but the restraints and connection cables bound him too completely. He settled for closing his eyes.
Lonn had sensed the Crone's intent. He leaned all his weight on the control levers, adding his demands to Zarha's, plunging the arms deeper into the enemy Titan's chest with scraping, grinding slowness. He felt sick to stare up through the darkened viewports to see the bestial, tusked aliens clambering along the impaling arm-cannons, using them as bridges to board
as they bled from the wounds in their own Titan's body.
With no peaceful fade or foreshadowing, the power died, leaving him in darkness. He eased up on the levers, knowing without needing to look that the Crone was gone.
was a statue, joined to the war machine that was slowly carving it to pieces with great chops of its bladed limbs. As endings went, Lonn mused, this was neither grand nor glorious.
As the command deck shook with rhythmic violence from the
of
many weapon-arms, Lonn drew his laspistol, and watched the sealed doors, ready for the aliens to eventually breach them. His skin crawled at the gentle sound of Zarha's corpse bumping against the glass front of her coffin, in time to the Titan's shaking.
'
I…
I had the shot,' Carsomir stammered from the adjacent throne as he waited to die in the dark. 'I had the shot…'
The side of his head burst open as a las-beam slashed through his skull.
'You bastard,' Lonn said to the twitching body. Then he lowered his pistol, took a deep breath, and began the laborious process of disengaging himself from the control throne.
T
here was something
human in the way
died. The way it went slack, the way it staggered, the way it crashed to the ground, its heart-core cold, swarming with enemy bodies like insects feeding upon a corpse.
The god-machine shook the earth when it finally toppled. The spined, spiked cathedral tumbled from its back in a spillage of priceless architecture, left as no more than rubble and scraps of armour plating in a mountain of wreckage by the Titan's head.
arms were wrenched from the torso, squealing free of the ruptured shoulder joints when the ancient engine hammered into the ground with enough force to send tremors through the entire city.
The head itself was torn free before the main body fell, leaving a socket of trailing power cables and interface feeds, like a nest of a million snakes. Gripped in the lifter-claw at the end of one of
many arms, the Titan's head was clamped and crushed, then hurled aside as a twisted ball of scrap metal. Its landing flattened a small manufactorum, as the armoured command chamber weighing several dozen tonnes blasted through the building's side wall and pulverised several support pillars.
On board
the bestial creature in charge ranted at its subordinates for destroying and discarding the Titan's head in such a way. To the beast's mind, it would have made a very impressive trophy to mount on their own god-machine.
The few Legio crew members, skitarii defenders and tech-adepts that survived
fall scrabbled from exits and breaks in the behemoth's skin. In the midday light of Armageddon's weak sun, they were cut down by the ork reavers around the dead Titan.
Miraculously, Moderati Secundus Lonn was one of these. He had managed to break free of the bindings and interface cables linking him to the dying god-machine, and make it out of the bridge by the time
decapitated
In the following fall, he broke his leg in two places, earned a concussion as the tilting corridor sent him falling down a flight of spiral stairs, and busted several of his teeth clear out of his gums when his head smacked off a handrail.
On hands and knees, dragging his dead leg and half-drunk with concussion, Lonn hauled himself out of an emergency bulkhead to lie on the warm armour plating of
torso. There he remained, panting and bleeding in the thin sunlight for several seconds, before starting to crawl his slow way down the ground. He was killed less than a minute later by the marauding greenskins swarming over the downed Titan.
Through the pain, he was laughing as he died.
G
rimaldus came at
last to the inner sanctum.
He was no longer a warrior here, but a pilgrim. Of this he was certain, though in the wake of his words with Nero, he felt certain of little else.
It had taken very little time within the Temple of the Emperor Ascendant to bring about this certainty within him, but the feeling was undeniable. He felt home, on familiar and sacred ground, for the first time since he had left the
It was purifying.
The cool air didn't taste of fire and blood on a world he had no wish to walk upon. The silence wasn't broken by the drumbeat of a war he had no stake in.
Augmented infants - the lobotomised bodies of children kept eternally young
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