V2 Chapter 13: The Giant War Engine
In an instant, Duvette and the 112th found themselves in an impossible position.
The dull thunder transmitted through the lower hive's steel framework in every direction. Duvette had his eyes fixed on the strategic map in his vision, and in the wake of that blinding plasma-blue light, a large section of the dense blue markers representing Imperial forces near the breach had been erased.
The remaining friendly markers in the surrounding area had clearly registered what they were dealing with. They were breaking contact with the enemy at maximum speed, falling back toward the site of the explosion.
For the 112th, deep in enemy territory, this was a genuinely difficult choice.
If they fell back now, it meant abandoning the battle sector they had paid dearly to tear open. The enemy frontline command system that Stroud and Anderson had risked everything to decapitate would be given critical breathing room. New commanders would be sent in, the enemy would regroup and consolidate. Everything Stroud's team had accomplished — and every drop of blood Anderson had spent buying that decapitation — would amount to nothing.
But if they refused to fall back and kept pushing forward, the 112th would be completely cut off from the main force's flank cover. In this lower hive labyrinth, they would face tens of thousands of maddened Khorne-faithful completely alone, with nothing coming to help them from any direction.
Is this the hive city killing war? Duvette bit down and kept moving, the question turning over in his mind without releasing him. In his memory, the Battle of Formal Prime had been brutal, but conventional — room by room, floor by floor, a grinding attritional advance. There had been no point in the history he knew where a Titan had been easily destroyed this early in the campaign. The battle had moved in a direction his transmigrator knowledge hadn't accounted for.
The sudden shift disrupted every plan. Duvette stood in place for only a moment before reason won out over the temptation to press on. The decapitation strike had created chaos in the enemy's ranks and bought a precious tactical window. If they didn't use that window to disengage, encirclement became a genuine possibility.
"Withdraw! Fall back and provide support!" His voice came through the channel without hesitation or ambiguity.
The young cadet commissar Ibram Gaunt heard the order and paused, visibly.
But watching the 112th's veterans turn their advance around immediately and without a word of objection, he grasped the strategic reasoning behind it quickly enough.
They stopped fighting for ground. They moved across the carpet of bodies underfoot and headed back in the direction the explosion had come from.
Six kilometres outside the outer wall, at the Imperial forward position, the atmosphere was oppressive.
Major General Petrov Duval stood in the hastily constructed command post with an expression that could have been used as a weapon.
Four days since breaching the outer wall, and their advance had not reached ten kilometres. The lower hive's core zone, where the connecting passages to the upper levels were located, was still nearly a fifth of the total assault distance away. Against that incomplete progress, a hundred thousand soldiers had already taken heavy casualties, the injury and loss reports had accumulated to fill every logistics officer's desk in the position.
And just now, a sacred Warhound-class Titan had been completely destroyed in an enemy ambush.
"You have got to be kidding me," he bellowed, and hit the hololithic tactical projector. "What was that thing?!"
The image juddered and flickered. According to the last data feed transmitted by the Warhound before it was destroyed, the attacker was a twisted multi-limbed mechanical construct at least the size of a Reaver-class Titan. Its hull was rust-covered, welded over with blasphemous brass runes and grotesque spikes at every joint.
More alarming than its size was how it had operated.
It had not moved into the open streets and exchanged fire with the Warhound directly. Instead it had used the lower hive's complex terrain to climb — like a spider — to the height of a massive load-bearing column. Concealed in the shadow above, from a blind spot the Warhound could not cover, it had fired a single fully-charged heavy Warp cannon shot that drove precisely through the Titan's weakest armour at its topmost point and accomplished a cold-blooded kill.
Then, to avoid being targeted by the Warlord-class Titan providing fire support outside the outer wall, it had used its extraordinary agility to withdraw rapidly, leaving the blindly charging heretics behind it as cannon fodder.
"Which direction did it go?" Petrov Duval's hands were flat on the table surface, his voice a blade.
A senior staff officer stepped forward with visible reluctance, cleared his throat, and answered.
"General, regardless of its size, even the smallest Warhound-class Titan cannot enter the lower hive's dense streets. We still don't fully understand how that... that twisted construct moved across structurally unstable surfaces. But if our Titans pursue it inside, the tonnage involved would almost certainly cause total structural collapse of the entire zone."
Petrov was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, the words came through his teeth. "I still need to know where it went."
His staff officers exchanged a brief look. One of them, speaking quietly, said: "Sir, the auspex trajectory data confirms the construct's withdrawal direction as Attack Route Six. That sector is the operational responsibility of the 8th Hyrkan Regiment and the Ash Watchers 112th."
Deep in the lower hive along Route Six, Duvette led his soldiers through the heretics who materialised from the shadows like weeds drawing on instinct alone.
The Khorne-faithful without their commander had completely devolved into mindless beasts. The 112th's veterans maintained fire-team scale and kept advancing, thick laser beams weaving lethal fire networks in the dark, harvesting these cheap lives in a continuous cull.
Then Duvette's steps stopped sharply. His eyes went wide.
On his retinal strategic map, at the edge of the display, an enormous red marker had appeared, moving at high speed in a straight-line path, cutting directly toward their position.
"Everyone, combat readiness! Heavy weapons teams, armoured company! Two o'clock direction, weapons on target!"
No hesitation. The order erupted through the channel.
The soldiers' absolute trust in the Commissar had the Leman Russ turrets rotating in the same instant, heavy weapons teams snapping their weapons into position, every dark muzzle locking onto the ruins in the right-front direction.
Before the echo of his command had cleared the channel, the darkness ahead produced a sound that registered in the jaw before it reached the ears — the particular sound of metal being torn out of shape under enormous applied force.
The impact that followed: a several-storey residential building, already half-collapsed, was struck and dismantled entirely. Through the billowing smoke and cascading debris, a massive, twisted multi-limbed mechanical construct came into Duvette's field of vision, moving across those fragile structures with a weight that should have demolished them on contact.
Eight thick, spike-covered mechanical limbs moved in alternating rhythm across the surface, each footfall radiating crimson daemonic fire.
What struck Duvette was not the size of it — though the size was extraordinary. It was that this construct, carrying immeasurable tonnage, crossed the suspended walkways it moved over with complete ease, and the load-bearing structures beneath it, structures that should have been crushed flat on contact, remained intact.
That physics-defying manner of movement confirmed what it was before anything else did.
This was without any question a Daemon Engine.
"I have to fight this thing?!"