Sanguinius: The Great Angel (The Horus Heresy Primarchs Book 17) by Chris Wraight

Author:Chris Wraight [Wraight, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2022-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

NINE

Ever seen a Titan? Any marque, any size. A Warhound. A Warlord. Any of them.

If you have, you’ll never forget it. You’ll know just what I mean when I try to describe what it is to see them at war.

A Space Marine is bad enough. They were bred to scare, and they do. But a Titan… Where do I even start? They tower over the battlefield. And they’re human-shaped. They didn’t need to be. You could have designed a war machine for the purpose they fulfil in any shape – given it wheels, or tracks, maybe even grav-plates. You could have fashioned the cockpit with layers of shield-scales, given them a dozen gun-arms, filled out the central chambers like a super-heavy tank or a core flyer.

No. They made Titans in the shape of men. They gave them two legs, two arms, a single death-mask head. They gave them talons, they made them hunched and stooped, they gave them two illuminated eyes. They knew what they were doing.

You see one for the first time, and do not quite believe your senses. You see the clouds of smoke roll back – from the barrage it has already unleashed – and see it striding. It is a lopsided movement, a limp, a heavy hauling of limbs that weigh tonnes and tonnes, but it is nonetheless like a human’s. You see the low-slung head emerge out of the haze, its rictus jawline, its gouts of steam, its glowing cockpit windows. For a moment, you think it must be right on top of you, because you can barely make out anything else, but then you see that it is still distant, though lumbering closer, closer, eating up all the light from the sky until only the great vast body remains above you – the stink of Martian reactors, the armour plates clanking and sliding, the blare of war-horns that make the earth crack and the skies shake.

It’s more than intimidating, this way. It’s terrifying. You understand the term god-machine. You know why they named them that way. Because a god is shaped like a mortal. They are us, but greater, more powerful, more enduring. We created gods from metal and fire, and breathed life into them, and bade them walk. And now these new gods do what we order them to, across a thousand battlefields, and we can only gape at them, and feel the fear, the fear that says, we have made this. We did it. What else, given sufficient cause, could we also do?

I simply stared at it. It was a Warlord, one of the larger examples. A Warlord of the Legio Mortis, no less, one of the original trinity of machine legions, created on Mars before the Age of the Imperium had even begun. Feared and distrusted as much as they were relied upon and respected, this was an ancient order of killer giants, each one stained with strange rites and echoing with the drone of languages none of us understood.

At its feet were its train of support troops: skitarii, Auxilia, some mobile armour.

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