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Ghosts of Iron – Marc Collins

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Titanicus’

A Black Library Publication

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Ghosts of Iron

by Marc Collins

The dream of Mars was dead.

The thought haunted Calliope as they fled across the desert, clawing at her as they braved the storm. The wind and oxide grit could scour her implants and sully her robes, but the thought lingered. It harried her as surely as the hereteks. She did not know, as it cycled with memetic frequency, whether it was truly hers or not. The sky had birthed horror, misrule and unreason before. Why should this be any different?

She attempted to still her mind, looking instead to the storm that surrounded them. Dust plumes leapt and broke apart in impossible patterns of crimson and ochre, tinted through with the hell-light of the Rift. Her entire life she had been spared the indignity of choking in dried chemical effluent, sheltered beneath the great void shields of Forge Avarna. Those shields no longer burned in their silent majesty, and now swathes of forge-complexes were steadily being reclaimed by the caustic tides of the dying world.

Focus, she thought. The mission demands it.

The crackle of binharic communion broke her from her mournful reverie, and she turned to see her companions stumble out of the haze. Their normally sure-footed passage was marred by battle damage, their crimson raiment torn and dirtied. She offered a canted prayer, but knew the comfort was cold.

<Be at peace in the service of the Omnissiah, for you serve the great design in your every forward step.>

Tyr 4-2 nodded curtly as he finally matched Calliope’s pace. His right arm was a shredded ruin, silvered circuitry alive with erratic discharge. The crackle of electricity lit the pale green bionics that replaced his eyes, and the respirator sutured to his lower face.

<You honour us, Magos Vartothex. Mission parameters hold. We yet serve the true course of the Omnissiah.>

For how long? The poison data circled in her mind through feedback loops of doubt and strife. She had pared away much in her own Quest for Knowledge, ridding herself of her flesh weakness. With the sky torn open she felt frail in ways she had long since thought consigned to memory. She stretched, her internal reactor whining as her four legs braced against the storm. Her trifold occularis rotated, clicked and realigned, till she could see Kappa-Ix drawing closer through the gale. The last skitarius of their number stumbled through the dunes, dragging the heavy bulk of his radium carbine. He stopped periodically, jerking and spasming, before continuing his tortured march.

As a magos domina, in more civilised times, she would have rendered him down for parts and protein. In this desecrated epoch she was loath to part with any advantage or protection. They were the last now, after all. The last of her cell, perhaps the last loyal souls upon Sareme. Her hand brushed the data-repository that hung from her robes, iron against silver, and past philtres of oils and unguents. That they lived meant that their allies had not died in vain. They yet had purpose.

<Do you endure, Kappa-Ix?> Tyr 4-2 canted, watching as his fellow drew nearer.

<I. ENDURE.> The binharic was coarse, forced through stuttering relays. <AWAITING. ORDERS.>

This war will break us. Yet we still fight. We still resist. Iron, in the service of the Machine-God.

Their destination leered out of the gloom, like some ancient pagan fane. There was defiance in its grim countenance, a Warlord unbroken by the storm winds. Static discharge whipped and cracked like lightning, framing the cyclopean monolith of its being, picking out the kill-marks upon its fluttering banners. FURORE MARTIS, it proclaimed, Fury of Mars.

<Omnissiah’s bounty.> The utterance slid from her as a prayer and a curse, her head bowed reverently. She cross-referenced her own inloaded data with the markings of the Titan. Confirmation runes flickered green. <We have found it. But a little further – the Machine-God provides.>

There was no motion from the machine, no signs of life. She looked down as they passed, her feet nudging at debris that the dust had coated. They were bodies. The lifeless bodies of secutarii, blanketing the ground around the stationary Titan. Dead eyes stared up, transfixed upon the roiling heavens, and Calliope did not allow herself to share their morbid sight.

They pushed on haltingly, uncertain, into the shadow of the great engine until they found an access hatch. Calliope hunched over, sheltering the panels from the wind and dust as she began to interface with the Titan’s subsystems, mechadendrites coiling as they extruded into the waiting ports. Chill crept along her iron spine as her reactor bled power and awakened the mechanisms. Her life was being siphoned, moment by moment, essence sacrificed that their mission might yet be fulfilled. Her prayers were low and soft, soothing the machine-spirits as they woke from pain and dormancy.

The door hissed open, creaking with hydraulic effort as they forced their way into the gloom. Around them the bastion fane was still and silent, dust slowly being displaced by the creeping dirt they had trailed in with them. Even the lumens were dead.

<Let there be illumination,> her binary whispered out, and the shoulder-mounted stablights of the skitarii flickered on in answer.

The base of the leg was as much temple as fortress, gateway and guardhouse. The walls were inscribed, laser-etched with the binary rotes of victories. When the crew marched into Fury of Mars, they looked upon these walls, dwelt upon its history and basked in its glory; but for their small band the weight of the place felt curdled, their own failings an insult to the vaunted past.

<Area secure, magos.> Tyr 4-2 had moved up and ahead of her, hoisting his sword in his working hand as he scanned the room. Kappa-Ix lumbered further back, a glacial presence of whining feedback. Their lights split the darkness in crisscrossing arcs, picking out the disarray of the once pristine chamber. Oily runoff streaked the walls, tarnishing the recorded battles with the wear and the rot of the abandoned. There were burn marks, faded, yet speaking of the urgency of battle. She imbibed the air, atmosphere processors hissing in her chest as they analysed.

Rust. Rot. Burnt flesh. Stagnation and death.

It is a refuge. She allowed herself the thought. The Machine-God works by strange circumlocution, but it yet orders the universe. There was opportunity here, to tend their wounds and to consecrate anew the spirit of the great engine.

<We are safe, for the moment. Our trials have been many, but necessary for the fulfilment of our mission. We failed at Avarna. Archmagos Groal, Magos Vaznek, so many others dead that we might live. That we may still make a difference. We push on, so purity might endure, even here. Even now.>

Behind her, Kappa-Ix pushed the door back into place, dislodging the piling sand as he heaved it shut. Darkness closed in around their islands of light. The dream of Mars might be dead, she thought, but we are not.

In the close darkness of the chamber, their lights played over another great door, inlaid with the crown-and-cog symbol of the Legio Arconis, the Iron Kings of Sareme. It was broad enough that two Kastelan war automata could march shoulder to shoulder through it, and a full three feet taller. She walked past the barricades and pressed her fingers to the metal, as though will alone could force it open.

<Hypothesis – the Titan is abandoned, magos. Advise defensive pattern until such time as you might appease the machine-spirits and disengage the locking mechanism.> The binharic medium did not parse resignation well, but Calliope could tell by Tyr’s slumped aspect that the skitarius had expected more. Brothers at his back, perhaps, or the Titan’s wrath to be kindled against the foe. That had always been the outlying probability, however. She had known that when she had accepted the mission from Archmagos Groal’s ailing hands.

‘If it cannot serve the will of the Machine-God, then it must be denied to the enemy. There is no greater insult than the despoliation of such a weapon.’

The archmagos would be dead now, with the rest of them. She did not like to think of those who had been left behind, their fate to join the choir of the crucified, their binharic suffering echoing out across the wastes.

<We cannot be sure that Fury of Mars is indeed abandoned, Tyr 4-2. Though the signs are poor, there are variables we cannot account for. Battle damage disrupting communications, reactor venting necessitating shutdown of primary systems, a tank-bound princeps devoid of bridge crew. We must consider every possibility, lest we fall into error. Errant data is disservice to the universal equations of the Omnissiah.>

<And purity of information is validated in the actions it generates,> Tyr finished. He had drawn level with her before the door, and Calliope allowed herself to scrutinise his damage. The arm would never function again, though he maintained an acceptable level of combat efficiency. There were no other major defects, unlike Kappa-Ix. She turned, watching as the stockier skitarius hefted his carbine and trained it upon an exterior hatch. Tremors rattled through him, the calculations of his hypothetical accuracy shifted incessantly across her vision. 65%. 60%. 62%. She moved towards him, holding out a hand as though in benediction.

<We shall soon have the opportunity for maintenance, Kappa-Ix. Your stalwart service shall be rewarded. You held the hereteks back, at great cost to yourself. We would not have escaped the breaking yards if not for your defiance.>

<DEF-DEFIANCE IS. IS. SERVICE.> He shook himself to dismiss the cascading errors. <I DO. MY DUTY.>

<Indeed you do. Know that the Machine-God watches over you, and such actions are judged worthy in His great calculus.>

A whine drew her attention. A minor thing, a shift in the environmental conditions. The air pressure had changed, but there was something else beneath that, like the slow beating of an arrhythmic heart.

<Something has changed.>

The chamber’s lights flickered, their illumination fitful and diffuse. Calliope turned back towards the door, one hand around the haft of her axe and the other locked on her phosphor serpenta. Loath as she was to unleash such killing fury within these holy halls, not least for fear of damaging the Titan and insulting its machine-spirit, she had to be prepared for what might lie beyond. Kappa-Ix stood to her left, carbine trembling, while on her right Tyr engaged his powerblade with a whisper of blue-white fields.

Artfully crafted locks spun and clicked in the door, cog becoming crown becoming cog again. There was a growl of redistributing pressure, and the door began to slide sideways to reveal…

Nothing.

The path ahead was empty, a set of stairs leading steadily up and towards the body proper of the Titan. Each tier was engraved with litanies of war, lessons imparted with every step of the ascent. Calliope crossed the threshold, tentatively, and her clawed feet clattered on the iron-rimmed steps.

No one. No allies in welcome, nor enemies poised to strike. What, then, opened the way?

The base of her axe tapped against the stairs, again and again. She stilled her agitation, almost surprised that she had not noticed it. The air had drawn in around her, hot and close, and she felt what remained of her flesh-self shudder.

This was a sign, though she knew in her core that it was a contrary one.

She drew herself up to her full height, and canted on every frequency of which she was capable. <I am Magos Domina Calliope Vartothex, bearing the express missive and authority of Archmagos Groal of Forge Avarna. The strength of the Great Enemy grows daily, their works despoil and infect the once unimpeachable purity of Sareme. Servants of the Legio, holy warriors of the Iron Kings and the Collegia Titanica, I beseech thee for aid. Let true disciples of the Omnissiah be in concord, and face the foe together.>

Only silence greeted her. Not even the background radiation of the Titan altered at her pronouncement. She turned back towards her companions, nodded, and then moved up the stairway. Tyr was already at her back, a familiar rattle at his approach. Kappa-Ix advanced slowly, almost gingerly, as he hefted his weapon and stoically forced himself forward. They were ahead of him when they heard the whine of the door servos engaging, and turned just in time to see him look up.

<MAGOS–>

The door slammed, so suddenly that even her augmented vision struggled to keep up. It moved too fast for Kappa-Ix to avoid, or even to reach out. There was a crash as it drove him into its workings, the crunch of armour as it yielded, and the rush of co-mingled fluids. There was only a smear of blood and oil remaining, like an afterthought.

<By the Omnissiah!> Tyr had rushed forward, canting a continual stream of agonised binary. It seemed to her that he was caught in his own tortured cycle, pinned and ruined in his own way. He scrabbled at the door, impotently, his sword forgotten.

<Tyr 4-2.> Her hand lay on his shoulder, and he stiffened, his struggles ceasing. <Whether by accident or design, we cannot linger. Seek clarity, seek vengeance. By either equation only our forward progress will deliver answers. He has died as he lived, in stalwart service to the God of All Machines.>

Tyr’s hand pressed flat against the door, before he clenched it into a fist and drew it back against his chest. He turned back to her, nodded once, and then strode past her and up the stairs. Too eagerly. Too angrily. She watched him go impassively. Even the greatest gifts of the Omnissiah could not always still the extremes of mortal emotion.

This serves a purpose. We must believe that.

The gilt and glory of the stairway faded into metal gantries, strung around the great machinery which facilitated the leg’s movement. They lay quiet and neglected. The corridors were not alive with the hydraulic song of motion, the thunder of war, the cogitator’s subtle click. It pained her to see it; to watch a grand edifice of the Machine-God’s might fall into ruin. They deserved so much better than this. To walk the galaxy again and fight for their Imperium, not to moulder forgotten and neglected.

She quickened her pace. The Titan had proven itself an uncaring, even malicious host. Their path wound upward, the platforms ringing with the sound of metal on metal, but no doors barred their way. None threatened them with sudden death. Tyr’s blade was held ahead of them, casting its pale light. His fingers were locked around the hilt, instincts sharpened by loss and hatred.

When they finally emerged it was into an austere chamber, the gantries rising into the centre of a room that was bare and functional. They had passed from the storied past of the Titan into the present of its bellicose heart. One that was set against them. Lumens flickered at their approach, as though a blossoming awareness moved through them. She knelt, allowing herself a moment of prayer and rest.

<Almighty Lord of Machines, vouchsafe your noble servants who serve in motive function and those who have moved beyond disrepair.>

<Kappa-Ix served well, magos. Why would the great engine take such affront at his presence? Have we displeased the machine-spirit? Has madness claimed it, in the storm and chaos?> Tyr had knelt with her, but there was none of the peace of prayer. His body trembled with constant agitation. The fingers of his remaining hand clenched and unclenched. His optics struggled to retain focus.

<I cannot say. Perhaps the enemy is already within. We must–>

She paused. Pressed this close to the metal floor she could feel the tension building, the slow shudder as it rose from within the core of the vast machine. It spoke in the slow growl of the kindling engine as it struggled to engage, and then found its voice in the bellow of the Titan’s war-horns. She braced herself, fully expecting the world around her to lurch with sudden motion; for all the clamour of war to crash in around her. But it did not. The reactor snarled and grumbled, and fell silent. Chastened it seemed, like an unruly child.

She let her sensorium roam free, tasting the electromagnetic spectra of the air with a thousand subtle tongues. The Titan had not simply given voice with its horns, but with every broadcast medium at its disposal.

<The bridge!> Her hissed binary drove Tyr up again, his sword raised. <If we do not wrest control of the situation, then we are lost. This will draw attention, even through the storm.> Her left hand was locked on the data-repository at her waist, protecting the precious knowledge held within as a mother guards her progeny. Questing data-conductors slithered from her wrist and adhered to the communion ports, and she let the purity of data flow through her.

Her mind whirred with the inload of information, a tide of uncorrupted data that invigorated her synapses and circuits. It was an almost narcotic rush, and she understood how frail unaugmented biology could succumb to the innumerable vices which plagued them. We can excise every last iota of flesh, and our weakness will still find new places to hide. Again, the voice of poisoned logic tried to resurface, but it was nothing against the sanctified understanding in which she basked. She remembered more coherent times, when she had truly served as a magos domina. The prospect of war had been glorious then, and she had been lauded for her service to the Omnissiah-Destroyer. Not this anaemic guerrilla war, this base resistance. She could lose herself in the flow of uncorrupted data, free from the half-life existence which had been forced upon her.

Calliope tore herself away, reluctantly, the Titan’s exact schematics now fully present within her mind. A simple thought illustrated the most efficient route to the command levels within the engine’s skull and overlaid across her visual display.

<We must trust in the Omnissiah, as the dead of Forge Avarna have trusted in us. Salvation or destruction, our cause is just.>

She led the way deeper into the Titan, through iron-rimmed doorways whose edges were engraved with the cog, crown and crossed spears. The warlike apertures seemed to gape at her like consuming mouths, or like the open ends of veins. It was as though they were truly in the viscera of some great beast; that the holy technology of the Legio had become a profaned and living thing. Unnatural, like the horrors of the Great Devourer, or the excesses of the Archenemy.

They were beyond fear. They were consecrated for the moment, shaped for this by their entire existence. Sareme was not a kind world, and neither of them had shirked from the service of war. Each step forward, each clang of her axe against the floor, was another token of defiance in the name of duty.

Other noises rose in the half-light of the interior. The Titan groaned in odd ways, the sounds echoing throughout it. Every part of it seemed to clench and flex. Behind that, though, were different utterances. Something wet and gelid, moaning like a wounded beast. Tyr drew nearer to her, protectively. They both knew the truth. They were not alone.

They turned a corner, the sound growing louder about them, and something crunched under their feet. Calliope looked down, and saw the floor littered with debris. Graceful, priceless bionics were strewn on the ground – each one gleaming with greasy discharge. They were scattered haphazardly, spread out amongst robes and uniforms. Discarded. No. Extruded. She shuddered to look upon it, to think of the implants being forced from the flesh of the crew.

Something snuffled like a beast at the end of the hallway, presiding over the crew’s leavings. It tore at something wet and meaty, body hunched over it. It pricked up as they tentatively approached, and turned to reveal its horrific bulk in full.

It had been human once; it had been the crew. Flesh had run like wax, pooling together and reforming. It was a thing of flux, the worst excesses of the flesh, and it glared at them with too many eyes. Each of them seemed a different colour, like an echo of the diseased skies above. When it moved it was with surprising speed, like something of the deep oceans or void-born. Split tongues slithered from its mouth, coiling around mismatched teeth; some blunt pegs, others sharpened canines.

It lunged for them, and Calliope spun about, her axe before her. She canted her prayers loud and fearless as the ignition rune depressed and the chamber was bathed in the light of her axe’s power field. The mutant clattered against the haft, driving it back against her body even as Tyr pivoted to stab at its flank. Blood and other fluids ran, stinking and unidentifiable. Its eyes flared and it lashed out with a fleshy barb, knocking the skitarius against the wall.

Calliope drove forward and her rear legs braced as she drove the axe down towards the creature’s broad, undulating back. The thing surged up, pseudopods coiling about the axe’s grip; the vague impression of hands roiled within it, clinging and pushing even as the blade pierced it. It screamed, a hideously mingled shriek of multiple voices, and drew back. Bony spurs flashed as it retreated, scraping at her augmented form.

She slammed one of her iron-shod feet into its trailing skin, and it reared forward, desperate to dislodge her. It screeched in its warbling tongue, teeth flashing and eyes wide as it dragged itself along the floor with barely formed claws. She pushed down on it with her weight, servos burring as they stabilised. She brought the axe down squarely on what passed for a head, and the thing came apart in a rush of bone and ichor. For a moment she contemplated unholstering her serpenta, but such a discharge would be dangerous to the Titan’s machine-spirit. She yanked the blade from the creature and looked up at Tyr.

<The crew?> Disgust coloured his cant. He could barely look at the thing before them as it slowly mouldered. <What could have done this so quickly?>

<The Archenemy’s works are the works of discord and entropy. Madness. In the great forges it came for their minds. Here it has come for their flesh. They are denied union with the machine or noble service to their god-engine. There can be no greater schism than the flesh rampant – denied surety of form and purpose.>

<Flesh is clay in the forge of the god-machine, yet it must be shaped.>

<Control must be as iron.> She reached out for Tyr and he helped to steady her as she rose from the midst of the corpse. <As must we.>

More growls echoed through the corridors, and they moved swiftly away from them.

<This way!> Calliope canted, directing them into a side chamber. Tyr drove his shoulder against the door, forcing the stalled mechanisms till the room was sealed.

They were in a secondary data node, the walls lined with conduit fibres and piping, bundled like human muscle. In a series of alcoves, servitors waited. They stared with dead eyes, jaws locked in the rictus of bio-feedback. They had died in whatever pain their lobotomised forms could experience, as their minds burned out from within. Tyr tapped his sword against the half-metal skull of one, then stopped at Calliope’s fixed stare, and her low cant of disapproval.

<Irreverent.>

<Forgive me, magos. Situational security demanded it.> Tyr bowed, and she turned away to place her hand upon the towering machinery before her.

<If we do not honour the Omnissiah in all things, even the smallest of considerations, are we any different to the scavengers, hereteks and degenerate cultures who have gone before us?> Her artificial lungs wheezed in what could have been a sigh. <We have lost so much, Tyr 4-2.>

<We shall rebuild, magos. Even if we do not endure, the Mechanicus will reclaim this world. New gods of iron shall walk it. New forges shall ring out their obeisance. The Omnissiah does not forsake, nor forget, loyal servants. In data are all things sanctified, and ordered in the great design of the universe.>

In data…

She looked at the processing conduits and her fingers trailed down the exterior. In a system as complex as a Warlord, there were many redundancies. Here there was one: a port which would allow limited access to the Titan’s systems. If she could engage with them, she could attain some control over their environment.

<Tyr. I will require your protection.>

<Magos?>

<I will interface with the Titan directly. I will apprise myself of the situation in the local datasphere and I shall force open the way, if necessary.>

<Forgive me, magos, but is that wise? You are not schooled in the sacred mysteries of the Collegia Titanica. If Fury of Mars’ soul is set against us, what hope have you of survival, let alone triumph?>

<The alternative is to do nothing. The crew are lost. If I do not risk this, then we risk everything.> She moved her hand up from the repository and tugged at her sleeve. Her fingers closed around the questing tendrils of her own data-conductors. <Only I have communed with the data Archmagos Groal provided. In the end only I will save or destroy this holy engine. Thus must I attempt all avenues provided to me. Should I fail…> She paused. <Then I trust you will do what is needful.>

The spiked conductors met with the ports. Her occularis whirred, and her head tilted upwards as though in religious awe. There was a moment of configuration, of communion, and then she was–

Elsewhere, elsewhen, everything in motion like the tug of immense gravity. She was falling, drowning, borne aloft, burning, dying, truly alive for the first time in her existence. Understanding as a god understands, and yet surviving. Too much. Too much. Tearing her apart and knitting her together again. She screamed, and it was the thunder of horns that roared from her. She felt the scrutiny of the infinite fall upon her, like the attention of binary suns. Forces tugged at her, in one direction and then the next. Caught between the inferno and the abyss. With all her might she forced herself forward, out of their competing grips. The rush abated, became vacuum, and then there was a new sensation. The world opened, yawned before her as the vast tide receded. She could see light, the sky, she could see Sareme. She could see as Fury of Mars saw. Remember. Oh, Omnissiah, no.

The sky was burning.

Torn open and falling in around them, it gaped like a vast eye, a maw ripped in the surface of creation. The death plumes of stars glistened sharply there, red with the blood of empire. The engine stared into the heart of oblivion, and insanity stared back, until the great booming of the war-horns became a tortured binharic scream. Digital fear and machine desperation crested her in a new wave, driving her back from the inferno of the Rift, forcing her out of the datasphere as–

Reality reasserted itself with a cold shudder and the stench of burning augmetics. One hand had locked, caught in rictus about the console, her other arm hanging useless at her side. Half of her optical array was crazed by static, and the inconstant readouts informed her that a neural logic grid had burned out from the trauma of communion.

There was no time for silence as the memory faded. Calliope allowed her senses to realign, and realised too late that the situation within the chamber had changed.

Emergency lighting had rendered everything down to an arterial smear, and she struggled to focus even as a silhouette stumbled forward. The servitor had been lifeless, but now it moved with some infernal purpose. The light of the Maledictum glimmered in its eye-lenses, inhabiting and infecting its simple purity. A twisted puppet. Another two grappled with Tyr, boxing him into the corner as he slashed with his blade. His efforts had likely spared her their infernal attention.

She reached for her axe with a palsied hand, forcing it to move from where it had seized, but she was too slow to stop the puppet’s advance. With what little motive force remained, she lashed out with her mechadendrites, coiling them about its neck. The construct gave a screech of effort, struggling against her already weak hold. It reached for her with corroded hands, scrabbling against her robes. She pushed again, swinging the haft of her axe round inelegantly and forcing the servitor back with a clatter. It protested in a burble of rasping scrapcode. She winced to hear this incarnate corruption, the coherent blasphemy.

<By the Omnissiah, you shall not claim me. I am a true servant. I have stood before the end of all things. I have not been found wanting.>

The cant rang with a strength she did not feel, yet the ruinous thing did not falter. It did not even acknowledge her communication. It simply clawed at her, dumbly, its movements spasmodic.

Her axe came up and round, the chamber lit blue by its actinic ignition. She braced herself and channelled her remaining strength into a single blow. The thing came apart in a welter of oily blood and machine parts. Calliope slumped down before it. She struggled to breathe, her atmospheric processing units heaving to siphon oxygen into her body.

We cannot despair. Not now.

She rose, forcing herself to move. One of the servitors fell back, gouting congealed fluids from a sword wound, as the other pushed past Tyr’s guard and locked a claw around his throat. The thing jerked and sparked, and for a moment she thought of Kappa-Ix in his agonies. Like a cruel mirror. Like a shade, returned to claim a loyal soul. She swung at it, though her aim was unsteady, and the thing burbled with corruption. Nonsense utterances poured from it as she drew back and struck again and again. Its claws trailed their way down Tyr’s chest as it slumped and finally died.

Calliope collapsed to her knees. She lowered her trembling hand to one of the philtres at her waist and dipped into it reverently. Her iron fingers trailed sacred oil beneath her augmetic eyes, tears of ritual mourning she could no longer shed.

<It knows we are here.>

<Magos?>

<The Titan. Fury of Mars. It knows we are here. I touched its mind, and the mind came for us.> Her cant was a whisper of binary, almost a babble of confused data. <It stared into the opening of the Rift. It saw the infinite, the abyss. The Titan knows us. It hates us. It hates. It is still fighting, still at war, and it is losing. I felt their struggle, their tumult. The Rift has poured into this vessel. The crew warped quickly, but the engine itself does not yield so easily.>

Tyr hesitated. The sheer blasphemy of it seemed to overwhelm him, and for once the noble skitarius seemed to diminish. He suddenly seemed to feel all of his battle damage and war-weariness. <What can we do?>

<The bridge is a lost cause. The princeps and moderati will be dead, or degenerated. Were they capable, they would already have marched the Titan into treachery. The enginarium is the key now. There we will be able to force a reactor overload, and purify it in death. It must be denied to the enemy.>

Tyr nodded, and then stopped. The bestial growls had faded and instead there were new noises. The Titan shook with the sound of engines, with the clatter of metal against metal. There was a breathy rush of air as the interior pressure of the Titan altered, as though a great many doors had opened.

<Intruders,> Calliope broadcast knowingly. <The engine has drawn attention, and now they come for us. The hereteks will not rest until it serves darker designs.> She placed her hand upon his shoulder. <Come with me, Tyr 4-2. Let us end this with some semblance of honour.>

Her visual display glitched several times as they followed the programmed pathway. The trail was ephemeral, drifting in and out of focus or spasming with static. She had run self-diagnostics as they made their way deeper into the innards of the Titan, but they had been inconclusive. The damage within her was subtle, but extensive. Without maintenance, she had no doubt that her vital function would cease. She realised that this prospect did not faze her, as once it might. If I die, I die with my duty done. I have given my all to the Machine-God.

<Beyond the next chamber, we should enter the primary enginarium. There we will find what we require,> Calliope canted as she passed into the chamber, and then stopped. This was not as it should be. <Strange. This is not correct. There must be some error in the schemata.> She thought to reach again for the data-repository, but stopped. It could not have lied to her, its purity was beyond suspicion.

What, then? Could she no longer trust her own mind?

She froze as she considered it. The warring spirits of the datasphere had touched her mind as surely as she had touched theirs. Logic loops blossomed and died within her skull, circuitry ablaze with the very consideration of it. She was so lost in her addled thoughts, so riven by doubt and suspicion, that she did not even notice the low hiss.

Tyr looked up, and hurled himself forwards. He turned, and pushed Calliope back, so that the magos stumbled. Her legs shot out to brace herself, her head snapping up ready to blurt remonstrance. Yet when she looked up, she was face to face with the heavy steel-faced door of the chamber, with its window of hardened armourglass.

Tyr’s free hand pressed against the window, and his pale face stared out from it. There was no fear in his demeanour. He seemed calm. Focused, where she was disordered.

<Magos.> He spoke, and the door could not stop their binharic communion. <Forgive me for my trespass, magos. There was precious little time.> He looked around him, and hung his head. <Mine grows shorter still.>

<Tyr 4-2. What have you done?>

<This chamber’s ambient radiation has altered substantially since we arrived. I detected an uptick as soon as you entered. It is being subjected to coolant venting.>

<How much longer?>

<I anticipate that the venting will commence in the next few minutes. Not even my construction could survive exposure. It matters not. My contribution to the Omnissiah’s great works is concluded. I have served in war and peace. I have done so with faith and fidelity to my code. You though, Magos Vartothex, yet have services to perform.>

<I wish this could have been otherwise, Tyr. You have given your all that I might survive. You have been as steel. We have lost so much, we have had so much taken from us. I do not know if it will make any difference.>

<It must, magos.> Fitful light built at the corners of the room. There was a constant hiss, a building wind. Tyr tried in vain to lift his ruined arm, and to form the holy cog symbol with his fingers. Calliope reached out, and let her own iron digits complete the pattern.

<Go into the light of purity everlasting, for no data ever ceases to be. The Omnissiah knows all. The Omnissiah is all.>

There was a pulse of heat and light as the chamber flooded. The burning fluid struck Tyr, driving him against the armourglass. Cracks spiderwebbed it, his fingers scrabbled and clawed at it. The cog lost cohesion, and then Tyr’s body followed suit. There was the clatter of his armour against the ground, and then nothing. Calliope sagged against the door, her orisons fading, unable to look up at the spiteful light beyond the glass.

She was ailing as she shuffled into the enginarium. Calliope no longer trusted the data within her own mind; she second-guessed her every action, and idled at every doorway as though it might lead inexorably to doom. Her vision continued to stutter, or to flash with damage notifications. She was broken, within and without. She was the intruder, and the Titan’s fracturing mind had set to destroying her. It could not work her from the flesh like a shard of metal or glass, and so instead it would crush her. Devour her. Kappa-Ix and Tyr had sacrificed themselves so that she might get this far, but so too had they primed the thing against her as surely as a biologis’ inoculant.

The Titan rang with noise. She heard the scrape of scaffold and the burr of plasma cutters. Doors were being found, tried and forced throughout the superstructure. From below she could detect the burbling scrapcode of their communication. She felt soiled simply from being aware of it.

<Do you know what comes for you?> she asked the machine that surrounded her. <Do you no longer care? You fought me as though I were a violation.>

She was not sure if Fury of Mars could hear her but canted regardless, pausing only to interface with another panel. She felt the cold in her bones again, haemorrhaging power more acutely each time she had to force a door. The war had finally caught up with her.

<I know your heart. I know your dreams and memories. Do not abandon the Machine-God now.>

The silence was its only reply. There was the hiss of disengaging seals, and she heaved the door open, struggling like an invalid. She paused as she stepped through, half across the threshold. There was a scrabbling click somewhere behind her, and she turned just in time to see her attacker lunging.

It was a lithe thing, pared down to sleek steel bones and mangled flesh. Its eye-lenses flickered crimson, and it jerked its head from side to side as if caught in some mania. Ruined black robes hung from its emaciated body, and it was scarred where implants had been removed or crudely jammed into place. Its charnel stink preceded it, and she barely had time to stagger into the enginarium chamber than it was upon her. A mouth full of corroded needle-teeth snapped against her shoulder, tearing at her robe and scraping across armoured plates. She forced it back, her hand grasping at the thing’s flailing head. She scarcely had the strength to lash out with her axe, but pushed it up and against the thing anyway. Her finger found the ignition rune, and she depressed it.

There was a flash of light and the stink of burning flesh as the thing was hurled backwards, its face a seared ruin. Calliope grabbed the door handles and pulled it shut, and the locks engaged again. She looked at the panel on her side, and brought her axe down till it burst apart. That would buy her time.

The enginarium seemed cavernous, the ribbed chamber framing the heart of the Titan, enfolding it beneath a silvered dome. In motion it would have rung with litanies of true service and smooth operation. Now it was hollow, silent and dead like an abandoned cathedral. She eased herself down the central walkway and stood before the primary ignition console. The cogitator keys were thick with long-congealed unguents and dust, and she brushed them away reverently.

You will serve again. Even if it is for the last time.

Outside she could hear the scratch of tools against the door. Sparks flared in the corner of her vision as they began to cut into the chamber. Her hands moved swiftly, as though the rites were ingrained in her. As though she had been forged for this task alone. She pushed the last runic key, and pulled a lever. The overload should begin now. Soon all would be light and sound and fury. Then peace. She allowed her vision to idle, as the whirr of the caged sun built up around her.

And failed.

Calliope stared at the console as readouts streamed and repeated. Failure. She could not bring herself to believe it. She had double-checked the rituals. The logic was sound and self-contained. There was nothing that ought to be able to interfere with the process, beyond–

<The machine-spirit itself.> The realisation breathed from her, and she forced her palsied hand against the console. <At this last juncture? After all I have suffered to bring you but a modicum of honour? How dare you.> She closed her hand into a fist and slammed it against the console.

Only one solution presented itself.

She let the conduits flow from her wrist again, and found the waiting ports on the console. The Machine-God works by strange circumlocution. She had thought that once before, and felt the hand of destiny heavy upon her. There is no other way. There was the bite of communion again, her spirit caught in the sudden gravity of the Titan’s warlike essence. She resisted as she braced herself, primed herself, for the inevitable surrender. And then the great soul of the war engine enfolded her, and its will became her world.

<WALK>

The utterance rattled through their iron bones, pulsing with the thrum of an ancient engine heart. It was the command that drove the great machine on through the aeons. From the fires of Strife, to the lightless depths of the Heresy. They had strode the galaxy, waged holy war in Mars’ name, and they felt the weight of every century of service. The inferno of their machine soul radiated outwards, more indomitable than the adamantium of their skin or the furious rhythm of their reactor.

This was how it felt to walk as a god.

They bestrode the battlefield, not in the symbiotic struggle of princeps and war engine, but yoked to the glory of the moment. Logic pathways burned anew, seared open by the pure might of the god-machine. Perceptions bled into it, even as their memories ran together, molten and ecstatic.

Greenskins died by their thousand upon an icy world, not deserving of a name. They screamed with the war-horns as they advanced, shattering bestial lines, tearing down savage defences. Even the xenos’ stunted engines could not harm them. But she sees something, lurking behind their lines, the hulking shadow, like a bleak reflection. If she focused, she could almost see, almost know–

A different war. The sleek machines of the aeldari slid past them, outpacing their guns with sinuous grace. They moved like living things, like flesh dancers instead of ponderous sculptures of sacred metal. Missiles screamed, las-blasts split the ceaseless night, and still they moved on. Mocking, they would–

<DIE>

The great cadence rose from the maelstrom of memory, and they were one in its ascension. Not one. She was drowning in its mind. She saw the shadow again, and it loomed forward, the aeldari gone like lesser shadows. It was not dark, she realised. It burned with its own curdled light. It was Fury of Mars, broken beyond comprehension and rendered monstrous. Blasphemous runes burned on its hull. She quailed before it.

<Remember,> she begged. <Remember what you fight for!>

She remembered her fear and desperation as the world burned and friend became foe. She relived watching as Magos Vaznek was carved apart by the horrors her priesthood had become, the black-robed fiends chittering with laughter as they took him to pieces. Her hand as it lay upon Archmagos Groal’s, trembling with the effort of mass-processing so much data through his bulk. Not with fear, though. Never with fear. They had all faced death with zeal.

<You are the Fury of Mars.> She felt her fist clench, her arm aflame, and heard the now familiar whine as the volcano cannon blazed hot. When she screamed her rage, the Titan bellowed with her. Light and sound crossed the tormented fractal of the memory datascape, a bolt of pure energy that seared through the pretender Titan’s armour. Black filth poured from the wound, daemonic shapes writhing in the pollution, and the simulation shuddered with their immaterial agony.

Ghost images rushed at them in their remembrance, and they fired again. The sleek phantom engines of the aeldari broke apart like ice. The greenskins’ grinning idols burst in showers of pig iron and offal. She watched Magos Vaznek pull at the pin of a grenade, a canticle on his lips as his sacrifice tore apart the hereteks who would lay him low.

<There is still a way! We can fight, we can have our victory!> The memories were collapsing now, forced together unto breaking point. She could feel the Titan in her mind, and knew but a fraction of a princeps’ peace. Fragile unity held as understanding blossomed, like calling to like. They knew each other. They understood. There was nothing else but the tranquillity of defiance; war’s serenity.

It fractured. Information subsumed her like floodwaters, and she was pushed from the collapsing construct. Not as it would evict an intruder, but as it would safeguard a child.

She returned to the physical with a rush of contradictory sensations that seemed adjacent to agony. She could sense burning flesh, and the warning runes upon her visual display flashed unceasingly. Everything was tainted sanguine, but she did not care. There was a new strength in her core, the mingled understanding of tech-priest and Titan. I thought I understood war before. I was a mere novice.

The door blew in with a rush of air and the babble of the corrupt and insane. A gaggle of hereteks slipped into the chamber, the low light seeming to bend around their darkness. They had crowned themselves with the scraps of butchered machines, and their robes were hung with grisly trophies from the meagre flesh of adepts. One of them grinned, his teeth shards of broken data-crystal, and spoke with his flesh voice in a wet rush of toxic words.

‘No god-talker, you. Alone, lost, running from glory. We are the storm, and we are the change supernal, and we will bow to no iron priest. Rejoice, sister, for we bring illumination. The false Omnissiah’s light has gone out in the galaxy. Mars is a dream, dead now. The truth has killed it.’

<The dream of Mars? It is not dead. I know that now.> She pushed against the console till she left indents, forcing herself up to look upon them. She would not die cowed and broken. <The dream of Mars is war. War to preserve knowledge, war to safeguard what we have remembered. It is the war that built the iron skeleton of the Imperium, around the forges which burned through the darkness of Strife. It is carried in the heart of every magos, and every war engine.> Behind her every utterance was the growl of Fury of Mars.

Her hands moved as deftly as they could. She pulled the lever again, and twisted dials. The reactor crackled and spat behind her, aglow with lambent energy. The hereteks were moving too slowly, brazenly opening fire in the heart of the great machine, not caring what their casual idolatry would break.

Too late, anyway.

The power of the Titan’s core was directed at her command. Motive force flooded back through the engine, and it moved, breaking its frozen stride. She cut the power, though it pained her to do so, and the engine lurched. Everything shook, but she was prepared, braced against the console and the decking while the foe tumbled. The light was blinding behind her now, the wail of alarms deafening. Her arm was locked upwards, serpenta ready, and she fired without hesitation. The heretek leader was caught in the inferno of her shot, his body detonating in a shower of offal that coated his already panicked devotees.

<Behold the Omnissiah’s fury!> Calliope spat. <He is judgement and He is glory. He is a bulwark of cold iron against those who break faith.> She dropped the serpenta and took up her axe. The light of its ignition was a cleansing thing, at one with the building detonation behind them. She swept it before her even as the heathen tide descended. She felt black blood and oil on her face as she hewed them apart. Knives nicked her skin, but she felt only elation.

<So die in service those who serve Him! So die in purity those who do not forsake Him!> The war-horns and the alarms were one with her, defiant.

Beyond the Titan’s iron skin, the scaffolds of the hereteks fell away, dislodged by the great engine’s sound and fury. For one glorious second, Fury of Mars roared louder than the gale. The light pouring from its smoking armour drove back the storm, and eclipsed the flickering madness of the Rift-light. The Titan gloried in its own destruction, and no natural force or unnatural power could stand against it.

The hereteks dragged Calliope down, even as she lashed out with nothing but her fists. The light was everything, absolute. As they looked up, the walls caught fire and tore apart, blown out by the shockwave that knocked them sprawling. The roaring of the horns became the birth cry of a newborn sun. The enemy host had no time to disperse, and could only be consumed in the final fury of the Titan. Meagre vehicles were fused to glass and cinders, hereteks in their multitudes atomised in the rush of purifying flame.

Calliope was still fighting, even as her mission was fulfilled in fire, and the explosion freed them both.

About the Author

Marc Collins is a speculative fiction author living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. ‘Ghosts of Iron’ is his first published work for Black Library. When not dreaming of the far future he works in Pathology with the NHS.

An extract from Titanicus.

The auspex returns seemed to suggest that the engine had retreated behind the burning shell of the tannery and moved away, but the auspex had been dropped several times and had taken at least one las deflection that had crazed its screen. Its main display kept milking out, and Goland trusted it about as far as he could sling it.

Goland had a nasty feeling he would end up slinging it. When the moment came, he and his men would have to throw everything they had at the enemy, literally everything.

It was the middle of the day, but it felt like the middle of the night. The sky was low and filthy black, and the only illumination came from the burning ruins around them. Acid rain sheeted down, transmuting the thick brick dust underfoot into a squelchy paste. Though torrential, the rain was failing to quench the firestorms. There was a constant, pressurised sizzle as water met fire, and veils of steam, rolling like fog, further occluded their visibility.

This was what hell looked like, Goland decided. He corrected himself. This was hell.

Daric Goland knelt down in the mire and fumbled with the auspex set. His wet fingers kept slipping on the handheld’s fascia. Somewhere behind him, a man was shrieking long, awful screams into the rain. There was no pain relief left, no ampoules of morphine, no medics, no hope.

The auspex started to give Goland a partial bounce, a freak return. He cursed quietly. What did that mean? Was there something lurking behind the tannery or not? He shook the device, and slapped it against his thigh, hoping the bounce was just an imaging artefact conjured by the cracked display.

Some heavy structure, possibly an arch or a retaining wall, suddenly fell in a few hundred metres to his left. It made a noise like an avalanche as it toppled into the inferno that had brought it down. Sparks burst up like a swarm of fireflies, and the rain consumed them. The shivering crash set his men off.

‘Settle. Settle!’ Goland yelled. ‘It’s just fire-damage! Hold your places!’

Their nerves were shredded. It was a wonder most of them hadn’t run already. They had been mobilised against an enemy that outclassed them in every detail and dimension. This was no infantry war. This hadn’t ever been an infantry war.

To them, and to Goland, the collapsing structure had sounded like the doom-step of an engine. In these tight, high-walled manufactory streets, as they had learned to their cost, a collapsing wall was often the only warning they got of an engine steering in to attack.

A noxious odour began to drift down the narrow sub-street. Goland gagged slightly. The fire in the tannery had reached the hide stores, and the air started to reek of burning flesh and melting fat.

Goland rechecked the auspex. The bounce had vanished. The damaged screen was now only showing topographic solids and the energy wash of the fires. Was that the truth, or just another display error?

‘So, do we move, leader?’ Trooper Kiner asked. Goland looked over at him. Kiner was huddled in a broken doorway, corrosive rain streaming off his helmet, his slicker and his weapon. Six days earlier, in the friendly warmth of PDF company barracks, they had celebrated Maki Kiner’s twentieth birthday. To Goland, Kiner’s pinched, white face looked no more than twelve years old.

‘I want to be sure that bastard monster has gone before we advance,’ Goland told him. ‘Hold tight, all right?’

Kiner nodded.

Somewhere to their left, a kilometre away, an engine cannon licked off. Despite the distance, it shook the ground with its thunder. Goland and Kiner flinched.

‘Shitting hell!’ Kiner yelped.

‘Hold tight,’ Goland said. ‘Trust me, Maki, just hold tight and I’ll get you out of this.’

‘Vox. Vox!’ a lost voice called out behind him.

‘I’m over here!’ Goland yelled, rising to his feet and waving through the rain. Tertun, the squad’s caster man, ran up, and dropped to the ground beside Goland.

‘Signal from Principal!’ Tertun spluttered, wiping the rain off his face as he proffered the speaker horn of his set to Goland.

Goland took it and crouched down beside his caster man. ‘Xeres Five PDF, come back.’

‘Xeres Five PDF, this is Principal. Report your position.’

‘South of Gynex Subhive, Principal. I daren’t send you the precise co-ordinates because they’re listening.’

‘Query, Xeres Five PDF?’

‘The enemy. They’ve synched into all our comms and systems. They’re listening to us!’

‘We are advised. Is this Major Kairns?’

‘Kairns got killed about an hour ago. This is Sergeant Goland, acting. We’ve got three, possibly four, engines busting up through the agro-burbs. Serious collateral damage. Nothing’s slowing them.’

‘What is your strength, sergeant?’

‘Stand by, Principal.’ Goland looked up, blinking the scalding rain off his eyelashes. ‘Sound off!’ he called into the downpour. Eighteen voices answered him, some distant and muffled, just eighteen. That morning, walking behind Kairns, Goland had marched out with seventy-five PDF troopers.

‘One eight, eighteen,’ Goland rasped into the vox. ‘We’re getting hammered down here. Please advise, Principal, where is Legio Tempestus? We were told to expect Tempestus.’

There was a long pause. ‘Tempestus is unavailable at this time. We are routing six Vultures to your position.’

‘Vultures?’ exclaimed Goland. ‘Vultures aren’t worth a damn! We’ve got engines here! Three Reavers, maybe four Reavers, and a Warlord too! I’m not joking, Principal, we’re getting steamed and we need engine support!’

‘Stand by, Xeres Five PDF,’ the vox chattered.

It went to dead air.

They tell me to stand by, Goland thought, and I tell the boys to hold tight. We’re all caught in a holding pattern, waiting for hell to claim us and suck us down.

‘Frigging idiots,’ Goland told his caster man, tossing the horn back to him. ‘They haven’t got a clue.’

He got up, and looked back down the demolished street. The surviving members of his unit were cowering in rat-holes and craters behind him, clagged with mud and pissing themselves with fear.

‘Xeres Five, listen up.’ Goland called out. ‘Cannon? Any cannon left? No? Any demolition? Any plasma?’

No one answered.

‘A flamer, at least? Anyone?’ Goland asked desperately.

He waited in vain for a reply, but instead of an answer, he heard the terrible, drawn-out thunder of collapsing stone.

‘Oh shit!’ Tertun squealed.

Goland turned.

The burning tannery’s high walls and chimneys were falling down. They were falling down because they were being knocked down.

It hadn’t gone. The auspex had lied.

Brickwork, stone blocks and reinforcing girders spewed down into the street like a rockslide, bouncing and tumbling, swirling with flames. Mud and sparks sprayed into the air, and the pelting rain turned the up-churned dust into falling beads of liquid tar.

As the walls came down, the searing fires inside the tannery sucked in oxygen and gleefully gusted up, yellow and white, sixty metres and more into the black air. Something loomed in the sheeting flame. It had the rough shape of a man, a man magnified until it was over thirty metres tall.

The engine stood behind the curtain of fire like a silhouetted god and stared out at them.

‘Run! For frig’s sake, run!’ Goland cried.

The men of Xeres Five PDF were already running.

Giant hydraulics hissed, vast gears engaged, massive metal joints groaned and clanked. The engine took a step, and the ground quivered. Masonry debris scattered like shingle off a shin with an eight-metre girth.

‘Move! Find cover!’ Goland yelled as he ran. He glanced back.

Emerging from the fire, the great engine remained a silhouette. It was caked black with carbonisation, the patina of its hull thick with surface soot. Residual combustion crackled and fluttered in the cavities and joints of its structure. It took two more reverberative steps, and then seemed to stoop slightly, as if noticing the tiny, fleeing men for the first time. It paused. It swung down its smouldering right limb, locked it out, and opened fire.

A turbo-laser on auto sounded like the death scream of a sun. The hailing, incandescent blast pattern overtook Xeres Five PDF like a surge tide as they ran for their lives down the back street. Caught in the rolling blitz, fleeing troopers ignited and evaporated almost instantly. The onslaught levelled the entire length of the thoroughfare and ripped the ground down to fused bedrock.

Maki Kiner disintegrated mid-stride in a puff of ash flakes that billowed like confetti. The last thing Goland saw of Tertun was a cooked spine, skull and single shoulder blade, tumbling out of the chasing fire-wash like part of a puppet, still articulated, thrown on by the roasting fury of the attack.

Goland turned, screaming, and hurled the treacherous auspex like a discus at the great engine treading down the street behind him.

He didn’t live long enough to see if it had struck its mark. Mass laser discharge vaporised the flesh off his bones, and then, a millisecond later, over-pressure scattered his skeleton like twigs into the rain.

Click here to buy Titanicus.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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