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  The way in which the relative positions of the three “brothers” mimicked the old hierarchy of Trazior became ruefully evident to Yeremi as they pressed their way upward. Compression of the guts caused inevitable farting. D’Arquebus vented through his tunic and his silks virtually into Yeremi’s face. Nor did Yeremi have much option but to gas Tundrish in turn.

  Yeremi at least gasped out an apology to the body below him.

  “Pardon me, brother.”

  “S’all right,” panted Tundrish. “Reminds me of home in the underhive…”

  “Did you just stand on his face?” piped a nonchalant voice from above. Was d’Arquebus oblivious to the reason for Yeremi’s courtesy?

  Ah, d’Arquebus was the bold trailblazer, was he not? Right in the lead, where the air was stale but not otherwise malodorous.

  Peeved, Yeremi’s attention lapsed. He slipped. He butted down upon Tundrish – who in turn slumped heavily upon Akbar, who lost his adhesion. For a moment it seemed as though everyone but d’Arquebus would career back down fifty metres to the base of the tube.

  But the Scouts fell no further. “Brace, you limp bastards!” roared a voice from below. With a Herculean effort, Juron had stemmed the little avalanche of bodies.

  “Brace and squeeze! Brace and squeeze!”

  They did; oh they did.

  The steep ascent continued.

  Yeremi found himself thinking passionately of that anonymous slave abandoned in the pitch-dark tube, with none of the superhuman muscle power of a Scout to help him, and fetters to mock his efforts. Had the death-dust breathed in by Yeremi conveyed a molecular message into his brain?

  What if that slave could have triumphed over the tube that confined him? What if he could have emerged from the summit of this chimney?

  How could he possibly have done so? The slave had enjoyed no real hope. Even less, after he broke his first bone. Yet how his spirit had yearned upward, despairingly. Now the slave’s ghost was helping push Yeremi upward…

  Yeremi would avenge that victim on those who roosted at the summit. He would bring justice to them.

  AT LAST THEY emerged between two giant ventilator gargoyles with dinosaurian mouths. Massive gantries illuminated by electroflambeaux jutted from a high balustraded parapet-deck. This harboured an array of towering, rune-painted servicing machines, and piles of ordnance: racks of macro-cannon shells and multi-launcher rockets. A spare chainsword-fist the size of a Land Raider dangled from the chains of a jib crane…

  Beyond deck and gantries and derricks yawned the darkened abyss of the arena – where the Blood Drinker Marines had met their fate.

  Between catwalks loomed the stooped carapaces of the Titans. Those rugged plasteel islands of black and purple flew Lord Sagramoso’s vermilion volcano banner, and bore dire bulky weapons.

  Yeremi recognised plasma cannons, macro-cannons, defence lasers – artillery which could melt fully armoured Marines, which could blow them away in scraps like chaff.

  Overtopping the six waiting Titans of the Warlord-class stood the solitary Emperor Titan – turtle head protruding, one plasma cannon held rampant.

  Juron whistled softly at the sight.

  Just then the high deck vibrated. Servomotors whirred. One of the Warlords took several thudding steps forward.

  A party of techs hastened past the Wolverines’ hiding place. They wore helmets suggestive of the heads of flies, and their black silks were embroidered with arcane silver hieroglyphics.

  Herded by a robed priest, other techs decamped from the catwalks. A second Warlord thundered forward, and halted. It swung an autocannon arm to left then right underneath its ratcheted neck, as if executing a derisive menacing bow.

  The main flambeaux along the deck all died out suddenly so as not to backlight the fighting machines.

  The techs’ eyes would take far longer than any Wolverine’s to accommodate to the profound gloom. Moreover, those techs were kneeling and bowing their heads – while the priest began to cant, his eyeballs rolling up whitely as though to stare inside his own skull.

  “The Emperor!” snapped Juron. He meant Him on Earth. He also meant that tallest of the Titans. Seizing their opportunity, the Wolverines sprinted, scrambled, ducked.

  Now they were on the catwalk, deep underneath the carapace.

  Now they stood beside the adamantium hatch. Gabbling a canticle as he tore loose a bundle of eerie fetishes knotted from dried ligament, Juron undogged that door.

  THE BACK OF the Titan’s head housed a red-lit escape chamber, equipped with anti-gravities. From this chamber, short fat tunnels led to the control bubbles in the shoulders and in the forward head-cabin. In emergency those bubbles could be hurled back pneumatically, and the whole head would blast clear. The air reeked of sweet resinous balm, no doubt sprayed by that priest as a prophylactic against battle injuries.

  Yeremi crept into the leftward shoulder-bubble, where a Moderatus sat strapped in his fire-seat, staring ahead, waiting. The earphones of his mind-impulse helmet blotted out any whisper of intrusion.

  Thick metal cables curved up from that helmet into the ducted roof as though the man had sprouted banded antlers. Similar cables writhed from the sockets in his sheathed left arm. Those, to direct the servo-motorised fibre-bundles which were the muscles of the Titan’s gargantuan arm. His gauntleted right hand rested on the gimballed firing handle.

  Before him, tell-tales winked in a dance of fireflies. Ikons marched across data screens, processions of iridescent beetles. A gridded forward viewscreen, framed with bronze bones, displayed in subdued ginger hues – metamorphosis of infra-red – the expanse of the arena and the vast closed petals of the dome which presently would unfold to let monsters out of its cave.

  Conical pauldrons, from which yet more cables coiled like the tentacles of a cuttlefish, protected the shoulders of the Moderatus. He was padded and armoured.

  BELOW HIS GOGGLE-visor his nose and mouth were exposed, though.

  The first he knew of his death was when Yeremi plunged the monomolecular knifeblade up his severing nostril through bone into his cerebrum.

  The dying man’s right hand spasmed open. Yeremi snatched it clear of the firing handle. The plasma gun slewed askew, however, obscuring part of the rusty view.

  A moment later, the whole massive body of the Titan itself lurched and tottered. The shock threw Yeremi against a luridly graffitied bulkhead. Somewhere below, angry serpents of stabilising jets hissed as automatics restored the balance. The Princeps in the head, whose thoughts impelled the Titan into motion, had obviously met his death.

  Yeremi began stripping the corpse, whose face was a gash of blood…

  IN THE CONTROL-head two great slanted eye-screens scanned the arena. Sergeant Juron was slurring lies into a helmet microphone torn from the head of the dead Princeps as Yeremi returned.

  “Problem,” he mumbled. “Plasma reactor… Tryin’ to fix the flux… Evacuate area now… Power’s goin’…” He switched off.

  “They comprend?” Akbar asked.

  “Karks use standard ImpGoth,” Tundrish told him impatiently. “Weren’t you heeding when we skragged that chapel?”

  “We grenaded ’em all so fast.”

  “Listen, you all,” snapped Juron, “these controls—” he gestured at the slumped mind-impulse suit with its spaghetti of cables, “they mean shit right now. So get to your posts and open those guys’ heads up and eat! And figging concentrate on controls!”

  Of course. But of course.

  Use your Omophagea organ.

  The remaining Warlord Titans were moving out from their berths alongside, striding away from the Emperor in lumbering haste.

  “Pray we can all learn enough, soon enough!” Juron held his knife to the dead man’s brow and began sawing the monomolecular edge through bone.

  YEREMI SOON DISCOVERED that while a monomolecular blade was excellent for bisecting a skull as such, when it came to dissecting the contents the knife was, if anything, too keen a
scalpel – its cuts so wafer-thin that the warm brain matter seemed to seal together again as if glued. Nor could he safely convey tissue to his mouth on such a blade; which could easily sever his own tongue.

  So he ungloved, and rummaged with his fingers, sucking vigorously on those till the lower half of the skull, still attached to the spinal column, was quite empty. Then he supped hastily from the bone cup of the cranium.

  Even in his haste he noted subtle distinctions of taste between cerebellum and cortex, between frontal lobes and limbic system. Here was a hint of bitter almond, and here of truffle. This glob of tissue tasted of boiled mushroom; and that of bland fish roe…

  Concluding his hasty feast, he tossed the bone cup aside. It fell where a chained skull-amulet lay forlornly, having utterly failed to protect its wearer from radical craniotomy.

  He wriggled into the impulse-suit, ducked his head into the helmet. Strapping himself into the vacated chair, he entreated Rogal Dorn to guide him – then emptied his mind of all but Titanic tech thoughts.

  My plasma gun, he thought, and his muscles twitched. It works by… by…

  …by a discharge of super-heated ionised matter in its fourth state, as in the inferno of a blazing sun. The accumulator vanes within the hood energise the conductors and insulators of the capacitor to power this incandescent discharge. After each venting, this ancient capacitor recharges its energy briefly while the frontal hood ventilates. During that short pause I am vulnerable unless I draw booster power from our Titan’s plasma reactor and opt for maximal fire. But then I may fuse my gun…

  Thoughts were welling up like globules of oil through water to form a glutinous slick upon the surface of Yeremi’s consciousness.

  He ignored all intruding hints of the personality whose thoughts those had been. He let such irrelevancies disperse, cracking the discharge for useful data, refining it.

  Much was murky and indistinct, confused by those very irrelevancies. Really, he could use half an hour to digest the gobbets of this person.

  He only had minutes. Combat-cannibalism wasn’t a gastronomic indulgence.

  …and my right-hand Moderatus controls a power-fist for close quarter work, for scooping and crushing those miniscule Marines whose explosive bolts will be like stings…

  However, the Moderati of the Clavicles between them control a macro-cannon riding high on our carapace, and a defence laser too…

  Still, our body is relatively exposed…

  This deployment of weapons, with the fast-fliers mounted high, is because we are the tallest Titan, and will aim over the Warlords’ shoulders…

  Yeremi’s sheathed left arm unflexed. He felt power pulse through the hydroplastics by way of the actuators to the fibre-bundle muscles – and outside, the great plasma gun swung aside.

  Yes, ah yes… This must be a taste of how it was to be a Marine in armour, whose servo-suit responded to the motions of his body, magnifying these…

  The scene without shimmered faintly.

  And Yeremi knew without question that void shields were up, to cushion the impact of any hostile fire.

  …If incoming fire shall overload our void shields and damage our Titan, if the feedback dampers shall fail too, then a Moderatus will suffer the intense agony of pseudo-injury. He will experience his own body as broken, ruptured, or burned…

  These Titans are old. Old.

  Reconditioned, but old. The systems are old.

  We are not the maniac Moderati of the vile Imperium with their Mars-made machines – though maybe ours were assembled on fabled Mars millennia ago. We are Lord Sagramoso’s claws, talons of the New God who will tear loose a great sphere of space and stars for Himself, and for us…

  Our plasma reactor is old, though…

  So Sergeant Juron’s excuse might indeed have seemed only too plausible…

  For a moment, Yeremi felt a spark of hope.

  “Internal command radio,” Juron’s voice said in Yeremi’s ear, startling him with the recognition that they were all parts of one united body now. “All acknowledge. State capacity and battle readiness.”

  “Valence. Left arm plasma cannon. I think I got the hang of it.”

  “D’Arquebus in the left shoulder. Carapace macro-cannon. Tasty brain. Sweet, sooo sweeeet to me.”

  “Tundrish. Right arm. Power fist. Feels mega!”

  (“Though not much use in the circumstances!” d’Arquebus cooed softly.)

  “No firing till I say, d’you hear! When I do say, open up on the one Warlord I designate. Figging full salvo. Overload its shields – that’s how to cripple it. Then we’ll target another. Let’s sell ourselves dear.”

  (“And what will Tundrish do, poor thing, but clench his great big fist in frustration?”)

  “Tundrish: your turn will come if all the other weapons go down. If we’re still alive. D’Arquebus: cut the chatter. Imperial Fists do not succumb to frustration. Akbar!”

  “Right shoulder. Carapace defence laser. I’m not… sure. Feels… cramped, heavy. Can’t get the feel. Can’t swivel easily.”

  (“Why not nip up top and grease it?”) Only Lyman’s Ear could have detected such a sly whisper.

  “I don’t feel… merged properly.”

  “Just try to fire where your brothers fire, Akbar.”

  In the distance, one of the Warlords half-turned…

  …as the Emperor Titan jerked, its spastic tremors caused by an untrained, amateur Princeps. A rocket atop the Warlord tracked tentatively towards the shuddering Emperor.

  Vortex missile…

  …creates a whirlpool of seething energy…

  …our only vortex missile. Will it work?

  “Oh Dorn, dawn of our being, be with us, illuminate us,” prayed Juron.

  Engines thrumming now, the Emperor Titan lurched forward roughly, crashing its right foot down, then its left, so that Yeremi’s seat bounced violently on its hydraulic suspension, and he almost fired plasma prematurely. The corpse of the rebel Moderatus rolled to and fro, and somehow the amulet had slid into the rocking skull cup.

  How the giant machine swayed and staggered – until Juron gained a semblance of proper rhythm.

  The far end of the arena was opening, however. Vast vitrodur panels pistoned upward to reveal a battle-torn vista beyond. The inquisitive Warlord turned to realign itself with its mechanical peers – which strode onward together in line abreast, to massacre Marines.

  CHAPTER TEN

  BIFF’S WHOLE RIGHT arm was encased in a flexible sleeve of slim sensor-studded steel hoops embedded in flexiplast, and his hand in a glove of the same. The weight of the ensemble was counterbalanced by the tug of transmission cables snaking up into the ceiling. In repose Biff’s arm hung in mid-air; he might have been recuperating in a wing of the Apothecarion with his limb in traction… He clenched his fist in frustration.

  On a light-amplifying side-screen, the huge power fist outside – the size of an assault tank – obediently clenched itself too, becoming an adamantium wrecking ball. The outline of its fibre-sinews flickered in viridian, while diagnostic ikons marched across the bottom of the screen. The system was checking itself, though Biff was unsure what answers it was coming up with.

  Limit to what you can get by gobblin’ a guys raw brain.

  Wearing the fist felt mega indeed. The previous user had painted a snarling beast’s mouth across the palm. Big teeth dripping red goo.

  Felt bad, too. Frustrating.

  ’Cos when was he going to get to use it?

  The Warlords had already marched right out of the arena. But so far Sergeant Juron had done nothing except walk the Emperor along, swaying, in their wake.

  Heave, thump; heave, thump.

  “We don’t want the arena closing up afore we’re out of it, lads,” he explained.

  Sure. Of course not.

  Even when their Emperor did emerge into the fire-streaked gloom, Juron let the Warlords cross right over that plaza.

  Warlords shoulder to shoulder, u
nmissable targets. The inlaid phoenix silhouettes seemed to be their great golden, alchemical footprints.

  (“Sir,” d’Arquebus spoke up from his control bubble. “How soon, Sir?”) The swank sounded to be on a knife edge, barely controlling himself.

  (“Not yet!”)

  Deliberately, Biff relaxed his fist.

  In his main screen, on high magnification, he saw beyond the Warlords to where squad upon squad of Imperial Fists were advancing, some under cover of Land Raiders and Rhinos, others leapfrogging squad by squad from one hard-fought nook to the next.

  A whole zone of the city had flattened itself into a vitrodur plain. Slim spires still soared to support the ebon umbrella shields. Otherwise, architecture was largely reduced to stubby tower-tops, inky and indigo, from which hostile fire poured. Local troopers crouched in ambush in a maze of low black glassite trenches – wrinkles in the telescoped city’s jointed carapace – and emerged from armoured hatches in what had previously been rooftops.

  The defending troopers were being beaten back steadily. Momentarily, in the jolting muzz of magnification, Biff thought he glimpsed the battle standard of the Fists.

  Commander Pugh would be right there in the thick, tasting the heart-fires of battle – he who could taste nothing else.

  (“But their backs are to us!”)

  (“And their void shields are overlapping because they’re so figging close together! I don’t know whether that multiplies the shielding – I can’t regurge that info – but sure as hell they’ll cover for each other! They must move apart. They must!”)

  “Can’t we charge inside the shielding?” Biff asked without quite realising he clenched his fist again, crushing empty air.

  (“If they open fire without moving apart, we shall.”)

  (“Our sergeant’s being a tactician,” d’Arquebus commented wryly.)

  (“Pain-glove for that comment! Afterwards… Understood?”)

  If there was any afterwards.

  Which seemed unlikely.