Guided by the daemonlord, Severus’s attempts had gone beyond determination. But their final obstacle remained — one last exquisite delay to leave him stamping and raging uselessly for a few hours more, counting out every split second until the sun set over the eastern mountains of Dolumar IV’s principal continent. The cage had been erected beneath the waning light of the sun; only beneath parallel conditions could it be dismantled.
Two hours. Two hours until, with no more ceremony than a splatter of blood, he’d throw off his shackles and, in the name of the Changer, murder the galaxy.
And that would be just the start...
The scale of the building was impossible.
Kais stared up from the floor of the hangar, picking his way past construction equipment and cable bundles thicker than a clonebeast, and mused in lightheaded awe upon the sense of constructing a palace of such massiveness within the confines of the flimsy (albeit vast) warehouse.
Its architecture was positively bizarre: a chapel-fortress rising up sixty storeys or more, vaulted windows and defensive emplacements pocking every square tor’lek of stone and metal. Its external complexity outdid even that of the Imperial warships which, similarly striated by obsidian buttresses and tiered alcoves, it resembled. The conventions of a sturdy, durable edifice, so typical amongst the buildings of the city beyond, were somehow forgotten in favour of a fantastical, exotic aesthetic. No wide foundations based the structure, rather a pair of vast towers flared upwards, joining in a gaggle of enormous tensile brackets and load-bearing machinery. Thus twinned, like prehistoric monoliths supporting a keystone load, the tower struts bore the remainder of the building’s bulk.
But the strangeness went on. Way above — almost occluded in the clouds of moisture lurking in the shadows of the hangar’s upper reaches — the broad ramparts of the palace’s roof extended way beyond the sensible limits of the central stack. The flared top-heaviness created a sense of unwieldy clumsiness; an impression compounded by an apparently random outcropping of curved chambers and sensory outlooks from the forward facing facade. Stranger still, suspended from beneath the limits of the palace’s outermost reaches like enormous stalactites, a pair of vast heavy weapons hung immobile, house-sized joints like elbows inert and silent.
Kais frowned.
Like elbows...
He closed his eyes and mentally adjusted his frame of reference before looking upwards once again. His breath caught in his throat.
Not monolith-towers; legs.
Not building-stalactites; weapon-tipped arms.
Not an over-wide series of ramparts and spires; shoulders.
Shoulders supporting a curved head, no less, complete with mournful eye sockets and a sweeping jawline.
“By the path...” he hissed, his ability to restrain himself from exclamations long since forgotten...
A dataload burst in his memory, didactic information implanted during his training swimming unbidden to the fore of his consciousness. He’d examined it before, this one, reading through the artificial memories like data wafers inside his head during some sleepless night in the battledome. He hadn’t fully believed it, back then.
An Imperial titan, haloed by the harsh floodlights of the gigahanger, cast its hunchbacked shadow across him and reduced him to microscopic ineffectuality, deep shaded eye sockets filling his world with vast, godlike mournfulness. Such things were little more than a whisper to his race. City-sized war machines: the stuff of untaulike fancy and legend. Completely absurd, the Shas’ar’tol said, an irrational propaganda item dreamed up by some gue’la administrator to terrify those races less focused than the tau into submission.
Just make-believe.
Looming over.
If it were alive; if its machine parts were muscle and bone and sinew; if its overshadowed view ports were eyes; if its portcullis vents were nostrils and ears; if in fact it were a giant, crouching massively within its oubliette dwelling, it wouldn’t even have noticed him.
“Ardias?” he commed, still feeling light headed. The Ultramarine’s instructions had been characteristically vague: the gue’la fleet had detected some sort of war vehicle being powered up in Lettica’s eastern districts and — in the absence of any friendly units confirming their involvement — had decided it had been hijacked by Chaos forces. Kais’s task was, simply, to stop them. He might as well cast grains of sand at a mountain.
Far, far above, he thought he could hear laughing. An unhuman, untau cackle scatter-echoing on the uneven surfaces of the titan and flitting around the hangar. Mocking him. A sequence of lights rose up from nowhere in the monstrosity’s central core with a whine, making his heart race. Somewhere inside the colossal shell the twisted minions of the Dark Powers, those Mont’au devils made flesh, were powering up, settling in, preparing themselves.
Kais’s didactic memories lacked any footage of a titan in action but... One didn’t need the imagination of a fio’la to anticipate the horror. Street-sized strides. Warship-strength weapons. Crushing. Obliterating.
Without finesse, without grace, without subtlety: a walking engine of mass-destruction. Wholesale murder.
“Ardias?”
Still no answer. In contacting him aboard the Enduring Blade, the Space Marine had altered his helmet communicator somehow, pushing aside the detector tightbeam he shared with his tau comrades and imposing some sort of unshiftable gue’la code. Since then, Kais had been unable to raise Lusha or the Or’es Tash’var, despite repeated attempts. The ugly holes and dents covering his helmet — not to mention the unexploded bolter shell still lodged deep within the fio’tak — were not, he suspected, helping.
Abstractly, he wondered if the Or’es Tash’var was still there at all. He wondered where Lusha was; whether he was still riding on the optic signals; how disappointed he felt at his pupil’s loss of control. He wondered about Ju and Vhol and where they were — fighting or injured or dead. He wondered about Ko’vash and the grey-haired admiral and the governor with his feral smile and his gaudy robes. He wondered where in the name of the One Path he fitted into any of this madness.
But more than anything else, above all things, he wondered about how Ardias could have been so colossally stupid to imagine that he, a lone tau, could possibly hope to stop a titan. And now he couldn’t even contact the grizzled snae’ta to tell him what he thought of him.
Focus.
We’re all cogs in the machine.
He realised with a twinge of guilt that he was chuckling beneath his breath at the thought of his father’s famous “machine” oratory. It had been intended as a cunning metaphor: a fitting symbol of unity, of all parts relying on all others. Cogs and chains and pistons and levers, all as important as one another. A stirring speech and a resounding, enduring allegory for the tau’va.
Kais wondered what his father might think of him now, standing before the most colossal machine of all and seriously contemplating its destruction.
The gun felt heavy in his hands, its unfamiliar balance more than made up for by its usefulness. The journey to the hangar had not been without incident.
The weapon was vaguely reminiscent of a pulse rifle: a long barrel and squat stock with little obvious room for firing mechanisms. It was almost completely smooth but for a long groove running the length of the muzzle on either side. Unlike its rifle counterpart, it was black, a glossless matt darkness that made it seem unreal — a lance of shadows obstructing the paleness of his gloves. He’d seen weapons like it before: vast things slung to the stalwart undersides of Moray-class gun-ships, or else mounted massively on the wide shoulders of Broadside battlesuits.