Mechanicum

Zeth fought to control her breathing as her augmented nervous system assessed the damage to her body. One of Remiare's bullets had severed her spinal cord and she could feel nothing below the waist, but her metallic limbs were more than capable of supporting her for long enough to finish what she had begun. Pain-balms and stimulant drugs flooded her body to keep her conscious and she smiled as the agony of her chest wounds faded.

It was temporary, she knew, and her body was dying even as it eased her pain.

'I'll kill you!' hissed Remiare, fighting unsuccessfully to raise her pistols.

'No you won't,' said Zeth, before turning to address the primitive-looking servitor. 'Polk.'

The servitor moved to stand before the assassin, and Remiare let out a gasp of recognition as it drew back its hood.

'You remember Polk, don't you?' asked Zeth. 'You made sure my apprenta's mind was damaged beyond repair, but even a damaged mind can be rendered into something useful. Oh, he's a crude and ugly thing, I know, but his very crudity is what's protecting him from the trip-code that's affecting you.'

The servitor that had once been Kantor Polk bent down and lifted the limp form of the assassin from the ground, her struggles feeble as she tried to fight off Zeth's debilitating code streams. Polk's crude, piston-augmented muscles held Remiare immobile, and Zeth read her terror and incomprehension of the situation in the flaring spikes of her bio-electric field.

'Dispose of her,' ordered Zeth, pointing with a free hand to the shaft in the centre of the chamber that dropped through the forge to the magma beneath. 'And hold her tight all the way down.'

Zeth turned away, focusing her attentions on the steel control columns that linked her to the vast and complex structure of the Magma City's core systems. She looked up at the glowing schematic of her forge and with heavy heart issued the last of her macroinstructions.

Tharsis Hastatus, an engine that had marched to victory on a hundred worlds, was obliterated in a single salvo. A punishing volley from Aquila Ignis's hellstorm cannon stripped her of her shields in an instant, and a devastating impact from its plasma annihilator reduced it to smoking, white-hot debris.

Cavalerio felt the death of his friend and comrade, Princeps Suzak, like a knife to the heart, and fought to control his anger and grief as they threatened to swamp him. The Manifold held him in its grip and his attention was firmly dragged back to the battle.

'Situation report!' he barked. 'Who's still standing?'

Palus sent out an active pulse of auspex energy to burn through the interference caused by so much powerful weapon discharge and reactor explosions. 'I'm only getting returns from Metallus Cebrenia and Raptoria,' he said, his voice heavy with disbelief. 'Aeschman's skitarii are still fighting, but they're almost gone.'

So caught up in the furious combat was he, Cavalerio had quite forgotten that an equally bloody conflict had been raging beneath him on the ground. In an engine war of such ferocity, infantry was virtually an irrelevance, but it never paid to forget the courage of those who fought beneath the battling leviathans.

he canted, sorting through a morass of data feeds, replaying inloads from his brother princeps to piece together the battle beyond his immediate concerns.

Before his engine's horrifying destruction, Suzak had fought like the killer he was, dispatching a Reaver and a Warlord before the Imperator had slain him. On the right flank, Princeps Sharaq and Metallus Cebrenia had, together with Princeps Kasim and Raptoria, taken down the last Reaver, which left only the Imperator, Aquila Ignis.

The Mortis engines had come expecting an easy victory, and no matter what happened next they would leave the bulk of their force burning on the Martian sands. Tempestus had earned themselves a legendary place in the history of Mars.

'It's firing!' shouted Kuyper.

Cavalerio opened a Manifold link to his surviving warriors. 'All Tempestus engines, this is the Stormlord—'

Princeps Cavalerio never got a chance to finish his order as a thunderous series of impacts smashed into his engine. Searing pain, worse than the death of his beloved Victorix Magna, surged through his body as the weakened shields collapsed under the barrage of missiles from the Imperator's upper bastions.

Deus Tempestus's shield emitters blew out in a cascading series of explosions, and the Stormlord's body spasmed in its tank as the feedback blitzed through his mind, fusing his synapses with those of the Manifold.