Titandeath by Guy Haley

Author:Guy Haley [Haley, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781780308722
Published: 2018-11-06T15:36:30+00:00

Sixteen

To the South

The summons came in while Domine Ex Venari, Velox Canis and ­Os Rubrum were striding the sodium deserts west of the Jinsu ruins. The smoking remains dominated one horizon. In the other direction Hansu Hive reared high, its void shields sparkling against the attacks of the Warmaster’s armies. The fierce battle engulfing the lower levels was out of sight below the horizon, but the hive was so huge its heights soared well clear of the planet’s curve, and its vast, termite mound irregularity could be seen for hundreds of kilometres in every direction as a blued-out mass between the clouds.

Legio Defensor took the brunt of the attacks at Hansu, standing behind walls made from broken buildings, while the Imperial Hunters roved the Hanjin Wastes in lone maniples, on the hunt for enemy infiltration units threatening the rear of the Hansu enclave. Each to their own strengths, thought Esha. Hunting was theirs.

Giant metal feet kicked up clouds of pulverised salt and sand. The flats were subject to the whims of the planet’s erratic weather. Every six years or so the sea surged up over the dunes separating the wastes from the ocean, flooding them with water that remained for years before it evaporated. In those times the wastes were sodium lakes, transforming slowly into desert crusted with valuable precipitates and wide deposits of evaporite. The changeable nature of the wastes discouraged construction, and they made for a natural border between Hansu and Jinsu.

In peacetime the Hanjin Wastes were empty but for tribes of chem-processors riding giant harvesters back and forth across the waste, ploughing up the surface before the next super tide inundated the plains.

Domine Ex Venari and its sisters were passing the blasted wreck of one such harvester when a priority signal punched into the maniple infosphere, its urgency-coding alone half-dragging Esha from meditative immersion in the manifold.

‘Legio Solaria wide call. All princeps majoris respond. Hololithic conference to ensue in seven minutes.’

Esha Ani Mohana pulled herself a little further from Domine Ex Venari’s mind weave. Her soul separated into a discrete object and floated up out of the deep machine bond. She used the Titan’s view­screens to sweep the area for auspex contacts as she came back into the realm of flesh. The screens inset into the Reaver’s czella showed there was nothing for hundreds of kilometres.

To use the hololithic communications table, Esha had to bring Domine Ex Venari to a stop and manoeuvre herself out of the czella into the small atrium above the reactor chamber of the Titan.

‘All halt,’ she voxed the maniple. ‘I must communicate with the Great Mother. Standard defensive encirclement. Await my orders.’

She put Domine into a stand-by trance, trusting to the others on the crew to manage the Reaver while it was semi-dormant. She unclicked the neuro-tether from the back of her skull, wincing as the data spikes dragged out of the socket. Getting out of her chair and into the atrium without kicking her moderati in the back of the head always posed a challenge, even after years of practice.

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