A low-grade auspex ping rippled outwards, bleakly blind. Her heat-maps showed cold. The Scion panned along her waist axis, staring into the golden mist.
Her pilots worked the controls, not only watching but listening to the calls and cries of their kindred in the skull-cockpits of the Scion’s brothers and sisters.
At her ankles, her hoplites engaged the phantasms, laying in with spears and shields and brief eruptions of volkite anger. The Scion sounded her war-horn once more and moved on. She followed the calls of her siblings.
Onwards. Onwards. Onwards.
She felt her brother die. His agony and fury vented across the communion-link that existed outside any general vox-web. By the time she reached him, he was gone.
Ilmarius Novus lay dead in the street, the Warhound’s shattered form driven face-forwards into the ground with a supreme lack of dignity. The thousand punctures of overwhelming bolt penetration/detonation told the tale of how he had fallen.
His core was still lit; that a critical detonative event hadn’t occurred was something of a grim miracle. Not that it mattered to Ilmarius Novus one way or the other. His armour plating was a blackened ruin. His gunlimbs were reduced to bent wreckage. The last and truest indignity had come after his killer had left; his head had been cracked open with power weapons and hand-held meltas, in order for enemy infantry to drag the soft and vulnerable crew away from their hardplugged thrones.
They hadn’t gone far. Their bodies lay like spilled tears by the Warhound’s cheek, their own cranial wounds showing the manner of their execution. She knew this because her crew knew this. Hardplugged together, they were her and she was them.
Which of the foe had done this? Was the murderer still here? The answer was swift in coming. Engine! She yearned with her flawed sensors, staring into the mist. The foe!
The enemy saw her first; it was already fleeing as she rounded the corner, striding around a cluster of wraithbone spires. A Warhound, sprint-stalking in the customary hunched run of its kind. Evidently it had detected the approach of bigger prey and sought to evade.
Cheers sounded from the Scion’s feet. The enemy Warhound had turned from its kill and had been savaging the surviving Unifiers with massed fire. Now the tide had turned.
Weakling fire streamed up from the divided packs of enemy infantry brave enough to show their faces. Tanks were scattered among the rabble, these vomited hard shells that hammered rippling tremors across her voids. She returned fire from her hull turrets, streaming lascannon beams and high-calibre bolt shells back in return. The weaklings fell silent.
She strode down the avenue, crunching monuments of wraithbone beneath her heavy tread. Her cockpit-head swung on heaving pistoned hinges, expelling air and sucking it back in as she tracked left and right, left and right.
I can’t see it. I can’t see… There!
Her war-horn augmitted a wrathful bellow. There in the mist, half hidden by the domes of buildings that barely reached the Scion’s waist, the enemy engine was flanking around at a joint-rattling pace. Its predatory lean gave it a hungry cast. Its stabilisers must have been straining fit to rupture with the pace it set.
Her gunlimb rose on too-slow joints. The Warhound was faster, clanking its way around the final building and spitting up a twinned torrent of macro-bolter fire from its gunlimbs.
<Die!> it canted up at her in broken code. There was more in the confused mess of its decree: a mishmash of rage and zealotry and loyalty to the Warmaster. Little of it made sense beyond its evocation of hatred.
She was turning to bring her own weapons to bear, turning into the blizzard of burning metal shells. Her voids rippled. Shuddered. Flickered.
Held.
<Die!> the Warhound emitted again, half pleading now, weaving away and striding beneath the arc of her volcano cannon…
…and into her reaching fist. She was too slow, too tall, too wounded to catch the engine that sprint-hunched away, half her height. Her grasping metal fingers clawed great gouges across the beast’s back, stealing its balance but failing to hold it in place. She heard its relieved spurt of exalted, shattered code as it lurched towards escape. Its three-toed feet crashed through a regiment of her skitarii. They discharged small-arms fire at its retreating back. Amazingly, one of her hoplites even threw a spear that bounced from the Warhound’s carapace. It stuck there, wedged between two armour plates.
A heroic cast, her crew were saying. And yet useless, she thought, even as she admired the skitarii’s valour.
She knew the Warhound wouldn’t return again. Even injured as she was, slowed by grievous wounds, she would see it dead if it showed itself once more.
The Scion waited. Trickles of her worshippers began to make themselves known, riding conveyors or journeying on foot, making their way in safety now the demigod stood watch over them.
And here she would remain. She panned on her waist axis, staring, staring. Her motions were industrial thunder. The mist hid all.
Then, a signal. Another of her brothers calling to her. Black Sky! One of her noblest kindred. She had precious few siblings left.
Black Sky! I come.
‘My princeps?’ one of her crew asked, turning in his forward throne. ‘Word from the tribune. Ilmarius Novus was the only engine on-station to guard the Unifiers’ evacuation in this district.’
Princeps Nishome Alvarek opened her eyes for the first time in uncounted hours. ‘Ra wishes us to remain?’
‘Aye, my princeps.’
‘Inform Ra that it is with regret we cannot fulfil his desires. Tell him that we have received word that the Black Sky suffers. If we are to die here, my moderati, then we will ensure the escape of as many of our brother and sister engines as possible. Black Sky calls,’ she said with finality. ‘We walk to his aid.’
The Scion walked. One of the phantasms danced before her – one of the creatures that sent shivery unease through her crew and hurt their eyes to look upon, yet simply didn’t exist to her instruments. Winged, feathered, like some carrion crow warped into spindly humanoid form, it beat the air with great wings, vomiting blue fire upon the infantry below.
She shredded it with turret fire, sending its charred skeleton to the ground. Walking on, she saw engines in the mist. Their hump-backed silhouettes spoke of size and class and weapon loadouts as surely as any scan report. The fog was thinner in this part of the city.
Black Sky stood alone, facing two of the foe. Smoke streamed from his hull, greying the pervasive golden mist. The Reaver retreated in halting strides, backing across a wide bridge over an expanse of golden nothingness. The other engines followed, moving between domes and towers. One Warhound. One Warlord. A hunting cadre, like a primitive king and his faithful dog.
She recognised the excited bleats of code from the lesser engine as the same garbled nonsense of the Warhound that had fled from her before. Of course. Sending a lone Scout Titan ahead to draw prey in pursuit was a common enough tactic.
The Scion took position at the bridge’s end, raising her gunlimbs on ponderous hydraulics. Aware of her now, the enemy engines remained on the far side of the span. She sensed their weapon locks slipping, thrown loose by the mist. She heard their spurts of aggravated code and knew the frustration well. Her long-range targeting systems had refused to focus since the first day she walked within this realm.