Titanicus

A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL
TITANICUS
Dan Abnett
(v1.0)

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred
centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden
Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will
of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of
his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing
invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology.He
is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand
souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his
eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested
miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars,
their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic
manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vastarmies give battle in
his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his
soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines,
bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are
legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence
forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the
Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few.
But for all their multitudes, they arebarely enough to hold
off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics,
mutants’and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst
untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime
imaginable. These arc the tales of those times. Forget the
power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress
andunderstanding, for in the grim dark future there is only
war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of
carnage and slaughter, and the laughter
of thirsting gods.







TITANICUS

0

Gristle-faced and lipless, the regiments of the dead howl out their awful calumny as your footfall
passes. Dun smoke fills the massive cavity of space. Oh machine! Oh divine engine!Furnace hot the
welter of your combustion, buckling the rancid air of heaven’s arch and fusing the mould of the ground
to glass. The princeps in his amniosis, drinking liquid data, broken by the beautiful agony of being so
mighty, feels the burden of your great walk as surely as if he had carved the mausoleum plaques of
your every last victim alone, by hand, until finger bones peep through erodedflesh. Oh metal god! The
union is fierce, like a maelstrom in black water, like a seething cauldron on a fire in which you boil and
cook together, no start of one, no end of another, but both admixed, like an alloy. To be clutched by
god! To feel the incendiary hunger ring in your marrow! Oh lucky man!
Do you ever really sleep? In the long between-times, in the silences wasted in oily holds andscaffold
frames, do you sleep then? When the enginseers reduce you to dormancy, is that sleep for you? Do you
dream then, great engine?
What do you dream about?

1

The auspex returns seemed to suggest that the engine had retreated behind the burning shell of the
tannery and moved away, but the auspex had been dropped several times and had taken at least one las
deflection that had crazedits screen. Its main display kept milking out, and Goland trusted it about as
far as he could sling it.
Goland had a nasty feeling he would end up slinging it. When the moment came, he and his men would
have to throw everything they had at the enemy, literally everything.
It was the middle of the day, but it felt like the middle of the night. The sky was low and filthy black,
and the onlyillumination came from the burning ruins around them. Acid rain sheeted down,
transmuting the thick brick dust underfoot into a squelchy paste. Though torrential, the rain was failing
to quench the firestorms. There was a constant, pressurised sizzle as water met fire, and veils of steam,
rolling like fog, further occluded their visibility.
This was what hell looked like, Goland decided. He...