The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Angled slates projected news from all over Molech, hanging in drifting entoptic veils of light. Each one only served to stoke the nuclear heart of the Titan’s rage.

An Imperator Titan was a land-bound starship, as powerful and as demanding a mistress as any void craft. Crewed by thousands throughout its towering height, it was as complex a machine as had ever been built by the hands of man. Only the secret designs of the Ark Mechanicum dared approach the complexity of an Imperator.

To give life to so immense a machine and set it to motion was an entirely different thing to setting a ship in space. Zero gravity forgave a great many things that planetary environments did not.

Its Manifold was a proud, regal thing. An apex predator without rivals, a lord of battle with fangs no other could match and a fury equalled only by its commander.

Princeps Kalonice stood at the jutting prow of the strategium, hands braced on her hips as she drank in the data inloads feeding into the Manifold. She swiped a mechanical hand through the various projections, parting them like smoke and inloading them instantaneously.

Encased in the body-carapace of a Lorica Thallax, all that remained of Etana Kalonice was her skull and spine, fused within the mechanised body of meticulous construction. With reverse-jointed piston legs and wheezing, clicking mechanical joints, she was a robot in all but consciousness.

Contoured plates of porcelain-white armour encased her organic material, and hair-fine copper mind impulse unit cabling allowed her to interface with the fiendishly intricate mechanisms of Paragon of Terra without a gel-filled casket. To be so bound to a machine body was exquisite agony, but Kalonice would rather face a lifetime of pain than permanent entombment.

<Mister Sular,> she said. <Assessment?>

Algorithmic resonators translated synaptic activity into sounds and allowed Kalonice’s voice to sound virtually human. It almost took away the edge of pain, but not quite.

A flurry of topographical images bloomed at her senior moderati’s station. Maps, threat vectors, combat prognoses. Paragon of Terra’s preferred targets jostled for his attention, but Sular suppressed them in favour of answering his princeps.

‘The Warmaster has fatally underestimated the resistance he would face, ma’am,’ said Sular, a torso with mechanised arms fused with the battle-logister. ‘The Imperial line has collapsed in a number of places, but not enough for a breakthrough. A good defence in depth and numerous flanking sallies have allowed General Kourion’s reserve forces to meet each breakthrough and contain it.’

<Except this one,> said Kalonice.

‘With respect to General Kourion, the destruction of Iron Fist Mountain was unthinkable.’

<The Warmaster thought it,> she said, feeling the spike of the Imperator’s desire for revenge through her spine like a shank.

The Legio Crucius fortress was gone, reduced to a seething, volcanic ruin by orbital fury. All their history, all their connections to their sister Legios gone. In one fell swoop, the Warmaster had brought Legio Crucius to the edge of extinction.

‘And we’ll make them pay for that,’ said Carthal Ashur, pacing the deck like a man on a crowded stage with no role to play.

<That we will, Mister Ashur, but please sit down. You are distracting me, and I do not need distractions now.>

‘Apologies ma’am,’ said Ashur, forcing himself onto a vacant supplicant’s bench.

She’d met Carthal Ashur many years ago, had even once bedded him when there was still enough of her to make such a prospect tenable. He’d been a disappointment, but his talent with words and mortals had persuaded her to keep him around as Calator Martialis.

‘Multiple targets inbound,’ reported Moderati Sular. ‘Two dozen main battle tanks. Six superheavies. Supporting infantry, battalion strength.’

‘Any Titan killers?’ asked Ashur.

Kalonice could taste his sweat over the scented oils of the bridge, a mix of eagerness and unfamiliarity. He’d been part of Legio Crucius for decades, but this was only his third time aboard a Battle Titan. His first in battle.

Moderati Sular looked to Kalonice, and she nodded her assent for him to answer Ashur’s question.

‘Shadowswords, aye,’ said Sular, sweeping the data over to the strategium. ‘Some traitor Mechanicum elements too. Highlighting.’

The local area around the Imperator was rendered in cascades of binary, illuminating forces both friendly and enemy. Tanks, infantry, Knights, artillery.

Each of the enemy icons already had a target solution plotted, the Mechanicum elements and superheavies assigned kill-priority.

Paragon of Terra was anticipating her, and Kalonice let it.

Ten Shadowswords with volcano cannons. Unidentified Mechanicum battle-engines – a mix of Ordinatus and Titan, each armed with weapons capable of wreaking great harm on her.