Ra Endymion exemplified this. He would parry twice or thrice, whether it was sword, axe, fang or claw, following his enemy’s movements with brief flickers of attention, then lashing back to impale, to cleave, to sever. According to the Archimandrite’s datastreams, no legionary had yet lasted more than three blows against his advance.
Bodyguards, the Archimandrite mused. Praetorians. This was their purpose, after all. Not to win wars, but to know their master’s enemies and destroy them before they could do Him harm. How many thousands of hours of pict-footage did the Ten Thousand study from each conquered or compliant world? Their lives surely consisted of an eternity of preparatory devotion, studying enemy after enemy in case they ever faced them in battle, atop the physicality of their standard training.
Their preternatural reactions allowed them to block bolts and lasfire alike, deflecting it from their spinning spears, but they could still be killed. The Archimandrite had witnessed that itself. They could be overwhelmed by foes and dragged down, or gunned down while already engaged.
The machine advanced at Ra’s side, its shoulder cannons tracking independently of its primary attention, groaning with the ear-straining choooooom of Martian volkite beams and the heavier staccato crashing of Avenger bolt cannons. Ammunition feeds and power indicators decorated the edges of the Archimandrite’s vision. They flashed with sacred depletion; a prayer to the Unmaker God itself. The armoured energy reactor bound to her back seethed with continually replenishing plasma. The heart of an artificial sun powered her weapons and intellect alike. War had never felt so holy.
A particularly brave legionary launched himself at the Archimandrite from the back of a careening Rhino. The machine plucked the screaming sword-bearer out of the air, holding him as the flamer jets in its wrist incinerated the captive fool. All the while, the Archimandrite fired with its free hand, the double-barrelled energy weapon mounted there – one of Arkhan Land’s more precious gifts – streaming with the fires of artificial fusion.
<For Sacred Mars!> it canted, projecting its exaltation through the noosphere. <Home!>
They fought along the rising promenades, between the impossible towers. Silhouettes of extinguished daemons showed against the eldar architecture, their images burned onto the wraithbone by the Archimandrite’s weapons.
They came from the sky as often as they surged from the ground – creatures falling from the cityscape above onto the advancing Imperials. Diseased things climbed the towers to leap and fall, bursting as biological bombs with smacks of ruptured skin; feathered wreckages of avian mimicry descended on flyblown wings to be lanced through by grav-Raider lascannons and the massed fire of guardian spears. Around the Archimandrite, the wraithbone spires thrummed with an almost metallic resonance each time their smooth walls were struck by errant fire.
The machine calculated as it killed, noospherically assigning more battle-servitors and skitarii to begin the journey into the tunnels beneath the city. The numbers of withdrawing Mechanicum warriors rose subtly, quietly higher than the projected figures the Archimandrite had offered to the Ten Thousand. There were no inloaded questions to mark this discrepancy. No outrage or curiosity at the alterations in the figures. The Custodians and the Sisters of Silence battled on, oblivious.
‘For the Omnissiah,’ it augmitted aloud. ‘For the Unmaker God.’
<Home!> the Archimandrite canted. <For Sacred Mars! For Fabricator General Kane!>
The Scion stood alone.
She swayed on legs blighted by ruptured stabilisers. She leaned askew, the pistons and pressure junctions of her left leg shattered beyond repair. Oil-blood sluiced from severed pipe-veins, gushing fluid and life and coolant onto the bone bridge beneath her. Torsion-bundle cabling hung from her iron guts, a spillage of intestines.
The bridge was hers.
Inside herself she felt fire and death – the former licking at her internal systems and weakening her bones, the latter resonating in the lost and mournful dirges of dispersing mortal consciousnesses. Her crew were dead or dying, their souls fleeing damaged husks, fading away into whatever nothingness awaited their frail and fleshly kind.
But the bridge was hers.
<Scion of Vigilant Light!> she furiously canted across the falling city. <Scion of Vigilant Light!> The outcry was laden with desperate code: let one of her brothers and sisters hear her, let them absorb that coded cry into their datastreams and carry it with them when they fled this place. Imprinted within the code was the pict-feed footage, weapon reports and crew-linked experiences of her last battle and greatest triumph.
The bridge was hers, and her final wish was that her kindred would remember her like this, as a victor, not as a martyred sacrifice.
Duels between engines rarely lasted long. She had walked towards this last battle amidst a breaker of vox noise. The Warhound closed fast. Both of its gunlimbs were given over to anti-infantry mountings, they screeched up with the explosive rage of several hundred bolt shells per second, lighting the Scion’s shields in prismatic shimmers, rippling them like a lake in a hailstorm. It scampered ferally aside from her own opening salvo, compacting itself at full sprint to run beneath the Warlord’s right gunlimb. This was the way of the Warhounds in battle: to scout and ambush, to harass and to distract.
Indecision tore at her. Behind her, the Warhound might work its evil unmolested, streaming fire upon her rear voids with impunity. Worse, it might even chase the fleeing Black Sky, rendering the Scion’s sacrifice worthless.
She let it go, trusting in the simple hatred of its princeps. The Scion had wounded this engine; she wagered with her life that the Warhound’s commander would hunger for the satisfaction of vengeance, not chase the tactical prize of harrying the wounded Black Sky.
The first missiles shattered and burst against the layered aegis of her void shields. Their impacts did no harm beyond stripping the first shield-skins away, but the occlusion of dirty black smoke across her cockpit windows was an irritant. She blind-fired in reply, an expression of disgust more than anything else, yet felt an immediate stab of gratification when the modest rocket salvo from her right shoulder set off the discordant jangle of abused voids.
In the same second, alarms and flashing runes within her crew’s helms declared the punishment her rear voids were taking. The first Warhound had loped around for an attack after all. She had been right to trust in its stupid hatred.
<Daughter of the Red Star!> the Warhound brayed up at her. Her abused voids screeched under its ceaseless clawing.
The Scion twisted in a half turn. She began to lower herself, forcing her protesting hydraulics down by venting pressure from her pistons and setting her joints into neutral-passive. An ungainly hunch at best. At worst, a shameful bowing of her head before death. As expected, the Warhound darted away from her firing arc just as before, even as the Scion’s gunlimb tracked around at maximum extension.
This time she held nothing back. With every safeguard unlocked and shut down, her shoulders erupted with trailing smoke as her missile pods roared themselves empty. As she purged herself of her munitions, her volcano cannon breathed its magma blast – this combined, flaring payload aimed entirely at the ground around her.