Chapter 182: Pilot
A week had passed since the Plague Scrapcode was loosed, and the crisis Vashtorr had brought with him began to ferment.
The Magos who had first dismissed these enemies as no real threat learned in battle exactly how hard they were to put down.
They had assumed the ghoul host assembled out of discarded Servitors held nothing but a numerical advantage. It never occurred to them that the things could spread the Plague Scrapcode buried in their bodies simply by biting.
The firewalls inside the low-ranking Skitarii were helpless against the scrapcode's corrosion. One wound was enough. Within moments the victim was hollowed out and rose again as one more body in the ghoul horde.
The Magos, who had weighed raw combat power and concluded their Skitarii would hold their own even at close quarters, were suddenly trapped between two impossibilities.
They could not let these strange enemies get close to them, but with production running at less than a tenth of normal, neither could they sustain the ammunition that ranged warfare demanded.
And even when they emptied their vaults and fed everything into the guns, the daemon legions of Sadistic Terror charging at the forefront soaked up the overwhelming majority of that fire, which meant the battle would inevitably collapse into hand-to-hand fighting.
Folding the Rune-Monks who chanted the litanies among the lower Priests, and the Datasmiths who fought off scrapcode intrusion, into the battle order would have countered that corruption well enough. The awkward truth was that the Priests holding the line against Vashtorr's army did not have the hands to spare.
Even with production halted, the Skitarii still left on Mars amounted to a full ten million. But those ten million were parcelled out among every Priest and Magos on the planet, a few hundred here, a few tens of thousands there.
Unable to unite, they could not consolidate those Skitarii into a single force, and by the same logic could never assemble enough Priests in one place either.
So they pinned their hopes on the reinforcements Kubik had promised. But under the Fabricator General's deliberate indulgence, the only organized Skitarii force on Mars never once met the enemy head-on.
And so the Magos could only watch in despair as Skarbrand roared, "Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!" and tore away the work of their entire lives, while they lacked the strength to resist at all.
"Skarbrand is coming! Another city is about to fall!"
Magos who had lost their holdings could do nothing but gather up their tools and throw themselves on the Fabricator General's mercy. The Skitarii answering to Kubik extended shelter only to those who, for the sake of their own miserable lives, submitted to the Fabricator General body and soul.
With these Magos "joining up," Kubik's power swelled once more.
Now that all Mars understood the crisis demanded far greater effort, and Kubik stood as the one reliable option on the front line, even the Fire Wasps Legion, which had refused to commit before, was willing to detach a Titan maniple of three Reaver-class and six Warhound-class engines to support him.
All Kubik had to do was lead that strength to victory over Vashtorr, and his seat as Fabricator General would be secure again.
Everything had developed exactly as Kubik anticipated. But he was in no hurry to march, because over that same span the enemy's strength had multiplied several times over.
Thanks to the Magos being picked off one by one, the ghoul host, which had started with nothing but the discarded Servitors of the Rust Wastes, now counted armed Skitarii among its ranks. It had made a leap in quality, not merely numbers.
Once roughly a million strong, they now stood at five million, and to that had to be added the Battle-Automata legion they had captured from Kubik's own hands, along with eighty-eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight daemons of the Sadistic Terror legions. Most of them were cannon fodder, but stacked together the total was staggering.
Bearing in mind that the Magos under his command who handled the direction of the Skitarii, Karkes chief among them, had already been buried beneath the walls of Magma City, the Fabricator General had learned his lesson, and judged it necessary to arrange his campaign with care.
So he and Vashtorr slid into a delicate stalemate. The Fabricator General, busy rebuilding Mars's productive capacity, felt no urgency at all. Vashtorr, on the other hand, was growing restless.
"Lasguns, heavy bolters, a radium carbine or two at best..." Vashtorr picked through the production lines he had seized and found nothing to satisfy him.
In the Eye of Terror, where a single plate of ceramite armour could set two warbands tearing at each other, these were prized goods. Simply hauling the lines back to his own domain would have been enough to make Vashtorr a fortune.
But Vashtorr's ultimate goal was to become the fifth god of the Warp. Measured against material profit, he had far higher aspirations.
"These production lines hold no creation, no innovation. They offer nothing, not one idea capable of elevating my concept!" He flung the lines aside like so much rubbish, his voice thick with disgust.
For abstract beings of the Warp, concept was the thing that mattered most. Nurgle answered to decay and life; Sadistic Terror answered to slaughter and courage. So long as those concepts endured, so did they, deathless and undying.
For Vashtorr to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Four Chaos Gods, that was the kind of fundamental elevation he needed.
The domain he had chosen for himself was "Malefic Craft," a twisted and profoundly destructive form of creativity. To advance any further along that road, what Vashtorr required was forbidden technology of genuinely ruinous power, not fire-pokers fit for children playing house.
But where was such technology to be found?
Vashtorr turned his gaze toward the great hive cities of Mars. Those were the true heart of Martian production.
The private forge stations of Magos scattered across the surface no longer satisfied his appetite. Only by storming into the hives and looting them wholesale could he accomplish his aim.
But Kubik's forces held the approaches to the hive cities in a tight cordon, and more than three million Skitarii and a Titan Legion were packed along that narrow front.
Vashtorr's strength and Kubik's were closely matched. Both stood at the precise point where whichever side attacked first might lose everything.
Vashtorr knew perfectly well that the force at his disposal would struggle to break into a hive city. But dragging it out any longer, until Mars restored its production, would leave him with even less chance of winning.
Fortunately, having taken a great many production lines, he now held bargaining chips. He promised a portion of them to the Chaos Knight houses of the Eye of Terror in exchange for their support of his enterprise.
Those Chaos Knights would arrive on Mars in waves through the ork teleportation device. Vashtorr decided that once they were in position, he would launch his final assault on Mars.
So he too went to ground, and both sides of the conflict settled in to wait for the last battle to come.
Unlike the oppressive, storm-gathering mood between Mars and Vashtorr, Lin had been in fine spirits lately.
Getting his hands on new technology after so long had him glowing, and the Priests who had begun to come over to him only added to his good humour.
Not everyone wanted to seek shelter with the Fabricator General. Lin's existence gave a small number of Priests a second choice.
The Exemplary Fists, the Iron Hands and the Soul Drinkers. Three Astartes contingents, close to a thousand warriors between them. That was more than enough to protect a single forge station.
Quite a few Martian Priests saw Lin's potential. Those who judged that siding with a third party like him would better preserve their interests poured fresh energy into the Moravec Forge Station.
Lin did not demand the technology they held. He asked only that they work the assembly lines he already had, tightening bolts, or haul concrete alongside the Exemplary Fists.
Using his own peculiar nature he purged the Plague Scrapcode that had spread into the forge station and reorganized production. His current priority was the ion and melta lines he had acquired.
He was expanding output of those weapons not only to prepare for the coming clashes on Mars, but also for the assault on the moon that would follow.
He had not forgotten the orks still perched on that moon hanging over Terra.
Refusing to strip the Priests of the knowledge they treasured earned him their goodwill. When he occasionally took them along on a raid to shake loose some easy plunder, he found they went after production lines even harder than he did.
"This way, my Lord. I used to tighten bolts on lines like this one for a Magos. I know exactly where its most critical components are!"
Watching these Priests use his hand to take savage revenge on the Magos, Lin could only sigh. The galaxy had suffered under the Mechanicus for a very long time.
The Adeptus Mechanicus's brutal ladder of advancement, and the way it sealed off every route to knowledge, guaranteed that nobody felt any affection for it, the Tech-Priests themselves included.
That realization made it clear to Lin that founding his own Forge World later would not be as simple as owning enough production lines.
A Forge World where every Tech-Priest nursed his own private schemes was not what he wanted. If each of them made hoarding his personal knowledge his purpose, the whole Forge World would end up as scattered and fractured as Mars.
And yet even so, the Adeptus Mechanicus remained the Imperial organization that spread knowledge the widest.
The greed of the oil-drinkers, tangled together with the inherent toxicity of knowledge in this universe, was exactly what had produced something as warped and knotted as the Mechanicus. Reforming it would take more than weapons.
He would have to begin with industrial and civil technology and put forward an entirely new system for distributing knowledge. He would also need to find some way to eliminate, or at least reduce, the Warp's contamination of knowledge.
Of course, before any of that, he still had to produce weapons and make a name for himself on Mars.
Contrary to Kubik's assumption that Lin was merely scavenging low-value production lines, Lin had raided everything in reach without simply chasing volume. With his capacity for innovation, he took the stolen lines apart one by one, picked out the components that were useful to him, and reassembled them into something else.
In the end, what emerged from those production lines was a hulking machine with no connection whatsoever to whatever they had originally been built to make.
Lin studied the masterpiece his own hands had produced with deep satisfaction.
"The name may already be taken, but as far as I'm concerned, this thing is what a real Titan looks like."
The machine before him stood roughly eight metres tall, its shell cast from dark grey alloy and sheathed in sharply angled armour plates, the head tapering to a rounded dome. Beneath that dome sat the vehicle's actual cockpit.
Unlike a Knight mech, which builds a separate head to serve as the cockpit, this machine carried its cockpit set directly into the body.
Add the two banks of vector thruster nozzles on its back, and this subtractive approach to design gave a mech on par with a Questoris-class Knight far less weight than any Knight mech, along with agility beyond imagining.
To make full use of that agility, Lin adopted the independent hand structure of the Cerastus-class Knight.
That Mechanicus-exclusive Knight mech carries the only design in Warhammer with a separately articulated elbow built for gripping, rather than treating an entire weapon as the arm itself. It became the last piece of the puzzle in Lin's reconstruction.
With that design folded in, what Lin obtained was a light ground-combat mech: the Atlas-class Titan.
This machine, drawn from Titanfall, was exactly the kind of proper science-fiction aesthetic Lin had always dreamed of.
Compared with the Knight mechs of Warhammer, a pair of hands as ordinary as a man's let the Atlas-class Titan freely wield any weapon scaled to its size. The lighter frame and the thrusters at its back also gave it explosive burst sprints no Knight mech could hope to match.
Into the space up top where a Titan battery would normally be mounted, Lin had crammed a thermonuclear fusion reactor and an ion shield generator. The reactor's abundant output meant that even after all that weight-saving, the Titan retained defensive capability that gave nothing away to a Questoris-class Knight.
None of these choices came free. Compared with a Knight carrying a weapon on each arm, and even allowing for additional armaments hung on its frame, an Atlas-class Titan that could hold only a single weapon was inherently half a rank weaker in firepower.
And the radiation from a thermonuclear fusion reactor was not something just anyone could master.
Lin had kept the original Knight neural-link cockpit in the Atlas-class Titan, but if ordinary Knight pilots were actually put inside one, sustained high-intensity combat would kill them by radiation soon enough.
But Lin had never designed this Titan for Knights in the first place.
He summoned Kuber, Captain of the Iron Hands, to his laboratory and showed him the brand-new Titan.
"What do you make of this machine?"
Looking at the thing Lin had refurbished out of a heap of Knight wreckage, Kuber fought to keep his composure, yet the shock in his eyes ran too deep to hide.
His gaze roamed over every inch of armour on the frame, scanning every detail of the Atlas-class Titan with something close to hunger.
As an Iron Captain of the Iron Hands, fit to lead an entire clan company, Kuber had seen countless war machines. But from the heavy Knight mechs to the towering Titans, not one of them had ever pulled at him the way the Atlas-class Titan did, an attraction that felt almost instinctive.
"This... this is beyond belief. How did you do it? In such a short time, out of a pile of Knight wreckage, you created a Knight like this. Nothing like it has ever been seen."
He wanted to call it a miracle. Lin answered his wonder with complete gravity.
"It is science, Captain. We must have faith in science."
To the Iron Captain, whose face said plainly that no power in the galaxy could make that count as science, he asked, "In your professional judgment, what role could this war machine play on the battlefield?"
Kuber stayed silent a moment, apparently assembling his words. His eyes never left the Titan, as though he feared the machine would vanish the instant he looked away.
"It is... light. Agile. The design overturns every conventional principle of the Knight mech. That thruster arrangement is nothing short of genius. A Knight mech simply cannot achieve mobility on that level."
"And the arm structure. Independent hands let it use all manner of weapons freely, instead of being shackled to a fixed weapon system the way a Knight is. That design makes this Titan feel less like a machine and more like a warrior, the same as we are."
Kuber's voice grew steadily more animated. However hard he worked to suppress it, the longing and envy the Titan stirred in him were beyond concealing.
But alongside the excitement came confusion.
"Its power system defies all reason, though. No Knight could endure that radiation grinding at him for long. And we have no Knight houses. How is this vehicle meant to be used?"
"I never designed this Knight for Knight pilots to begin with, Captain Kuber. They are not the only ones capable of driving these Titans."
Lin patted the Atlas-class's armour plate and looked at the uncomprehending Kuber.
"Captain Kuber, how would you and the Iron Hands under your command like to become its pilots?"
[Author's Note: PS1: The Atlas-class Titan comes from Titanfall 1. It will be upgraded step by step later on.]
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