Chapter 404: The Titan Temple
Major Noa filled Kian in as she drove toward the Titan Temple.
"Fifty years ago, my lord, a Mechanicus fleet delivered a Reaver Titan to our world. Over forty meters of divine machinery. For reasons no one's ever fully explained, the war engine arrived heavily damaged. It was originally meant to continue on to a Titan forge world for repair, but through a combination of circumstances, our Magos managed to have it kept here instead."
Kian thought it over. "Sounds like the Magos wanted to turn this Forge World into a Titan-building world in its own right, and figured keeping a damaged Titan here for repair might be the opening he needed."
A world with this kind of industrial output, capable of building warships outright, had exactly the kind of foundation Titan construction demanded. Kian had no idea what the Mechanicus's actual process for building a Titan looked like, but it was obvious this world's Magos had been angling that direction for a long time.
Major Noa continued. "When that war engine first arrived, my grandfather was still a boy. Every tech-priest on the planet fell into religious ecstasy, binary hymns echoing across the whole world. My grandfather's generation spent twenty years building the Titan Temple, and with over sixty billion people watching, the divine machine was finally moved inside. My grandfather, my father, and now my brother, all of them have devoted their entire lives to its restoration. When it arrived, its armour was shattered nearly beyond recognition. Now, after thirty years of repair, magnificent adamantium plating covers the war engine once more."
Kian said, "Sounds like the Magos is using the repair process itself to study Titan engineering firsthand, while building up the Titan Temple's infrastructure at the same time. Get this one fully repaired, train up enough qualified tech-priests along the way, and the Temple's set up to build entirely new Titans afterward. This world could become a proper Titan world.
That said, if you've got a Reaver Titan sitting right here, how did the Ork situation ever get this bad? A forty-meter walking fortress bristling with hundreds of guns should turn every Ork it walks past into paste. How'd the greenskins get away with this much?"
Major Noa let out a long sigh.
"The Titan's pilot, our great Princeps, is dead. Through the fifty years of repair work, the Princeps chose to enter suspended stasis. A life that valuable couldn't be wasted simply waiting around, and a stasis pod slows the passage of a life to its bare minimum. The pod was installed deep beneath the primary hive, guarded by the Ecclesiarchy's own militants and the Planetary Governor's own honor guard.
But twenty years ago, the Orks arrived, and those xenos bastards drove a twenty-kilometer warship straight into the primary hive. It was a catastrophe. Twenty billion people died instantly. That generation's Planetary Governor, the world's senior leadership, and the Princeps sleeping deep beneath it all, every one of them died in an instant."
Fire burned in Major Noa's eyes, her teeth grinding audibly.
Kian understood now. No wonder sixty percent of the planet's surface had fallen to the greenskins while a Titan sat motionless in its own temple. A Titan's pilot was an irreplaceable asset, in some ways even more precious than the Titan itself. Piloting one required a neural link similar to a Knight suit's, only far more extreme. Once linked, the sheer volume of data flooding through a Titan's colossal frame would liquefy an ordinary mind on contact. Mental fortitude, neural compatibility with the specific machine, successfully surviving the arcane rites of the binding ritual, every single requirement had to be met to become a Princeps.
The bar was brutally high. Testing candidates for Titan compatibility was essentially an assembly line of death, one candidate after another, dying one after another. A hundred years running, a hundred deaths a day, and still no suitable pilot found, who could even stomach that? Some declining Titan worlds had war engines sitting untouched in their temples for centuries, still waiting for the right pilot to come along.
They kept talking as the jeep reached the lower levels of the hive, boarded a vacuum-transit train, and arrived at the Titan Temple, over a thousand kilometers away, within minutes.
Kian and Major Noa stepped off the transit platform. Noa's face lit with unmistakable fervor as she pointed ahead.
"Look, my lord! There it is, the Titan Temple! The great divine machine itself rests inside!"
Kian looked out and saw, sprawled across the endless desert, an entire city built from steel. Factory after factory, smokestack after smokestack, and rising above them all, a colossal pyramid.
Over five hundred meters of steel pyramid, an entire mega-factory in its own right, every piece of equipment inside it dedicated solely to the construction of the divine machine within.
Around the pyramid's base, red-robed tech-priests moved back and forth in constant traffic, most of them bent low, censers swinging in hand. A great bell atop the pyramid tolled, and its ringing echoed out across the entire industrial city.
Everyone stopped at once. Tech-priests, human labourers, servitors, every last one of them paused their work and bowed their heads in prayer.
Beside Kian, Major Noa clutched the pendant at her throat, two dog tags hanging alongside a mechanical skull and a double-headed eagle, and murmured her own prayer with genuine devotion.
"111, 000, 1010110..."
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