A Senju in the Stars, Chapter 16

A large door eased shut behind him and the dark swallowed the corridor.

Hashirama rolled the scroll tight and slipped it back into his sleeve. Batu stood beside him, eight feet of iron and oath-bound fury. The Astartes said nothing. He dipped his chin once and turned down the left-hand passage, boots grinding sparks from the grated decking. Hashirama went right.

The air inside the titan tasted of hot metal and stale incense. It hummed with buried engines, a steady throb that pressed against the bones like surf. Crimson lumen strips burned in broken intervals along the walls. Between them stretched panels of tarnished brass. Faces bulged from the metal—men and women melted waist-deep into the plating, mouths open in a frozen howl, eyelids welded shut. A faint keening leaked from them, part breath, part machine noise, impossible to split.

Hashirama kept the Chameleon Jutsu maintained over himself. The world around him warped and blurred, light sliding off him like water off glass. He moved with bare footfalls, a kunai in one hand, a tanto in the other. 

He passed a vent that exhaled green vapor. The mist hissed where it touched the brass, etching it with crawling sigils that bled light. Within the cloud hung runes shaped like broken vertebrae, tumbling end over end. He skimmed below them, lungs held shut, and felt the vapor sear faint lines across his veil before it drifted on.

Ahead, the corridor forked. A pair of robed figures dragged a crate the size of a coffin. Their bodies were rotted thin, skin shredded by hooks stitched through shoulders and hips. Warp-tats crawled across their flesh like ink set living. They muttered litanies to gears and gods. Hashirama slipped between them. One soft blow pierced a throat, the next the base of a skull. They folded without sound. He dragged the corpses into a gap between pipe trunks and pressed on.

A ladder shaft yawned to his left. Steam belched upward. He climbed. The rungs trembled with distant recoil each time the titan shifted its vast weight. Thirty meters up he found a maintenance deck choked with hanging cables. A cult-gunner knelt at a splayed console, fingers jointed with copper wire. Hashirama stepped across the grate and let the kunai kiss the cultist’s exposed spine, severing the cord. The body pitched forward. Sparks flared and died. Screens dimmed.

Did that do anything? Hashirama wondered briefly, before moving on. 

He worked room by room, hall by hall. Junction boxes pried open and gutted. Optic links carved apart. Power conduits severed. Each sabotage marked silent on a map in his head. Lights flickered. Some machines he did not recognize at all, such as strange boxes that were filled with wires and other strange things that looked important enough; he destroyed those too.

Through a porthole of obsidian glass he glimpsed the outside theater: storm clouds bruised purple, trench lines glowing with muzzle-flash, distant titans wading through curtains of dust. Or stumbling over the roots of the forest he’d grown from chakra and slept with all the other titans who’d fallen victim to the chakra-induced sleep. A gun-tower on the titan’s shoulder spat lances of plasma into the dark, each shot hammering a drumbeat beneath his feet. He filed the tower’s rhythm away for later.

Some doors opened onto things no longer human. A swollen priest, torso fused to a column of bone and rust, chanted into a vox horn that fed the titan fresh lies of glory. Hashirama left him gutted at the waist. A machine-seer floated on skitter limbs and laughed high like glass breaking. The shinobi’s blade slipped between vox grill and jaw. The laughter gurgled out and the body wheezed oil until it stilled.

A shrine blocked one passage—a simple niche carved into the hull, yet alive with rot. Melted candles bled tallow that crawled uphill, gathering into twisted human shapes that reached for him with waxen arms. He stepped back, flung a trio of kunai etched with null sigils. Light swallowed the wax. The arms collapsed into smoke.

Past the shrine, a cargo bay opened like a wound. Catwalks overlapped in crooked tiers and servitors dragged pallets of organ parts toward a maw of grinding gears. The gears sang—a dirge in iron—chewing flesh into pulp that streamed away in glass pipes. Hydraulic fluid colored the slurry crimson. Hashirama slid along the top rail, slipped a tag between the power couplings, and left without a ripple.

— —

Batu moved deeper along the core spine. The metal deck groaned under his tread. He tore open mag-locked doors with gauntleted hands. Servitors twitched in their charging racks as he passed. He smashed skulls with the pommel of his blade, then crossed furnace causeways lit yellow by reactor slag. He counted bulkheads, remembered schematics graven into the vaults of the Legion’s libraria: where cooling veins ran, where void shields nested in concrete coffers, where the heart of the machine lay beating behind meters of adamantium.

Steam clouds draped him in shifting banners. His lenses cut through the haze, marking hostiles in runic red. A skirmish line of cult storm-troopers formed at the far end of a coolant bridge, autoguns braced. Batu quick-stepped forward, bolt pistol snapping. Each shell exploded inside armor, ripping torsos to smoke. A grenade bounced off his pauldron, rolling under a rail. He kicked it on. The blast took half the bridge. He jumped the gap and landed among the survivors. One swing of the blade sheared a man from collarbone to hip. Another cleaved two at once.

A door slid aside ahead of him—hydraulic hiss drowned by the pounding of reactors. From it stalked a sarcophagus fused to daemon plate, claws dripping fission glaze. It roared with the voice of a caged legionary driven mad by unending warsong. Batu holstered the pistol. Astartes met engine-beast. Steel rang. The brute hammered down; Batu ducked, punched a crack into the breastplate, bit in with a power knife, ripped wires free. The brute staggered. Batu caught the claw on his pauldron, forced it wide, and drove his blade through the sarcophagus faceplate. Sparks roared out with the trapped scream. The bestial abomination sagged. Batu heaved it off the bridge, watched it tumble into shadows, sparks trailing like dying stars.

He forged on.

Where the spine narrowed, servo-cherubs fluttered—skinless infants welded to wings of brass—each cradling a bomb. They giggled static. Batu fired a single shot. The shell burst in their midst. Limbs spattered the overhead. Shrapnel pinged his armor, scratched ceramite.

— —

Hashirama descended an elevator shaft, shinobi wire paying out behind him. Halfway down, the cable snagged. A turbine had chewed it. He cut loose, dropped fifteen meters, landed in a crouch beside a maintenance tram. A servitor pilot slumped dead at the lever, skull hollowed for circuitry. He pushed the corpse aside, keyed the tram, and let it coast along a rail through a conduit artery.

The tunnel’s walls were clear crystal in places. Beyond them he saw cogitator banks stacked like termite hives. Millions of green lights winked in silent argument. Warp-echoes rippled across the glass, faces surfacing and vanishing. Whispered formulas tapped against the pane. Hashirama placed a palm on the glass; the formulas recoiled as if scalded. He drew a spiral seal. The lights inside browned out section by section until the whole bank lay dead.

The tram halted before a hatch lined with breathing tubes. Each tube ended in a mouth, lips stitched, vents exhaling cinnamon smoke. He slid through them, found himself in a gravity-null chamber. Corpses drifted in slow coils—pilots flensed open, hearts plucked out and replaced with crystalline engines. The engines beat faintly, each pulse feeding data into black cables that ran toward the command node. He hung among them, weightless, and laid charges on every crystal he could reach.

A caretaker servitor emerged from a wall recess. Its head was a cage of copper lattice inside which knelt a child, eyes blindfolded, whispering coordinates. The child’s voice directed the servitor’s steps. Hashirama floated behind, cut the cables, lifted the child free. The servitor stiffened, then wilted, limbs sagging in the null field. He tucked a rebreather over the child’s face, set him into a sealing scroll. Not every life here would end in fire, though he wasn’t sure if a child in such a state would still live.

— —

Gunfire stitched from an upper mezzanine. Cult sentries, eyes black with augmetics, poured rounds from slug rifles. Batu raised the bolt pistol once, fired twice. The first shell shredded two torsos. The second tore through a stair and dropped the last gunner screaming into the slag pit below. He strode on.

Three more decks down he found the coolant atrium—an echoing gulf bisected by vertical rivers of glowing aqua fluid. Catwalks circled each stream. Daemon-bound servitors steered cages of reactor fuel along the rails. Batu stepped onto the nearest catwalk. Alarms shrilled now in earnest. From overhead gantries swung igniter-guardians: half-man, half-flamer cannons, jet nozzles for arms. They spat gouts of chem-fire the color of venom. Batu ducked beneath the first burst, felt paint blister on his pauldrons. He sprang to the next gantry, slammed the guardian’s nozzle upward. Fire carved the ceiling, slag rained. He head-butted the guardian’s soft face, crushed cartilage, booted him over the rail.

He smashed an emergency valve wheel. Coolant geysered out, a freezing cascade that clashed with the chem-flames, birthing a storm of scalding vapor. In the cloud he moved unseen, blade tasting grease and flesh until the gantries fell quiet. Then he pushed on toward the terminus vault.

— —

Hashirama emerged onto a long spinal artery that ran the titan’s height. Lenses dotted the ceiling, each an unblinking eye. He formed a single seal. The lenses fogged white as frost coated them inside. They cracked. Shards rattled down.

Opposite the artery stood a chamber sealed by living bronze. The surface writhed with embossed bodies, hands clawing, mouths crying prayers in silence. Hashirama traced a glyph upon the door. Bronze parted like clay beneath water. He stepped into a library of algorithm scrolls, each suspended in stasis fields. Data-priests hunched over lecterns, copying sigils onto strips of skin flayed from their own forearms.

He crossed the space, sword whispering. Blood spattered scrolls. In the center stood a cylinder tank filled with pale gel. Within the gel floated a cluster of brains wired to filaments of gold. The brains throbbed in unison, casting waves of psychic static through the chamber. Hashirama sensed the static skim his chakra like insects. He drew a seal across the cylinder wall. Gel boiled. The brains burst. Silence dropped like a curtain.

With the static gone, he felt Batu’s presence ring through the corridors—thunder of ceramite against deck, hymnal clamor of war. Time to end it. He mapped the route to the bridge in three breaths, then ran.

— —

At the terminus of the core Batu found a vault door three meters thick, sigils of the Dark Mechanicum seared into its face. He set his fist to the seal and cracked the lock like glass.

Beyond lay the plasma heart, a sphere of white light chained in place by prayer-iron and cabling. Tech-priests scurried about its base, spines plugged direct to data currents. Batu stepped into the glow. Plasma washed his armor, painting shadows like ribs across the walls. Priests turned, mouths open. He hewed them down. The caliban blade howled through air grown molten. He ripped conduits from the sphere’s cradle, slammed them together, watched arcs of raw sun leap chain to chain. The heart shuddered. Containment fields hiccupped. Batu rammed a grenade into the primary coil and walked out as the timer ticked.

— —

Hashirama angled through a vent crawl and dropped to a gantry ringing the command sanctum. The room lay wide as a temple nave. Brass columns reached into black. Candles guttered on skull-hewn sconces. Incense swirled with data vox smoke. In the center stood a throne welded to the deck. Copper veins ran from its plinth through the floor, feeding farmland circuits that lined the walls in sick patterns.

And on that throne, a man.

What remained of one. Flesh sloughed down to nerve wire. Tubes pierced bone. Eyes sewn open by golden pins. He writhed, mouth torn wide around a scroll of barbed scripture. Each breath vibrated through vox amps nested at the base of the throne, spilling binary shrieks into the bridge. His fingers no longer ended in nails but in data spikes plunged into the throne’s armrests. The throne twitched with him, vast servo arms translating his spasms into steering impulses that whispered down the titan’s spine.

He did not command. He suffered, and the machine moved with his suffering.

Hashirama stepped across the floor, each footfall quieter than ash. The candle flames bent but did not break. He drew a roll of parchment from his belt. Explosive tags. Seventy—each one brushed with his blood, each one sealed with the glyph for cessation.

He laid them upon the tortured man. One against the sternum. One against the brow. One tucked beneath the ribcage. He worked with the cold efficiency taught to children of war. The man writhed, but no voice rose above the mechanized moan fed through the vox. When the last tag was set, Hashirama whispered a single word.

“Rest.”

He turned and crossed the deck. At the threshold he formed a seal with two fingers. The tags ignited in a rippling bloom of white light. A sound like tearing silk followed after. Then the bridge cracked wide, bulkheads bending outward, fire churning from the throne’s heart. Hashirama dropped into the corridor below as the ceiling peeled apart like fruit skin.

The klaxons began. Steel voices rang through every hall. Binary alarms splashed red across lumen strips. Pressure doors slammed in sequence. Somewhere deep, coolant lines burst like arteries. The titan staggered. Hashirama felt the deck tilt under his feet.

He sprinted through tightening corridors. Fire chased along the ceiling, licking paint to ash. He flipped through a hatchway as it irised shut behind him, then leapt an elevator shaft blown open by some interior blast. The world inside the titan was dying by degrees, heat rising, systems shearing from the sabotage.

When he reached the external gangway the wind outside punched at him, hot with engine exhaust and rising flames. He skidded along plating now canted at a savage angle. Down below, the battlefield swam in haze. He unrolled the scroll and struck it open with a snap of the wrist. Symbols flared.

Batu re-formed in a shimmer of blue. Armor steaming from the heat within. He saw the fire breaking from vents across the titan’s back and gave a short laugh.

“You found the heart,” Hashirama said.

Batu nodded once. “And you?”

“The head.”

They leapt together, chakra and grav-units flaring. They fell through black smoke as Dies Irae bowed to its wounds, great plates shearing from its frame. It knelt once like a penitent and then folded in upon itself. An orange bloom blew through its chest. Towers of its back cracked and toppled. The giant came apart in a rolling thunder of ruptured metal and imploding reactors. Shock-waves rippled out across the field, bending the new forest flat for a heartbeat.

They landed on shattered ground half a kilometer away. Hashirama let the chameleon cloak drop. The wind ripped through scorched trees, carrying sparks and burning pollen high into the overcast sky.

The remaining titans saw their king fall. Engines stalled. Some turned in wide, uncertain arcs. The battlefield held its breath.

Batu drew in air thick with ash. 

“More work ahead,” he said.

Hashirama slid the tanto back into its sheath. “I know.”

They set off across the ruin, two figures walking beneath the slow rain of burning iron, while behind them the colossus guttered out and lay still, a mountain of cooling metal beneath a sky that had lost a god. The Dies Irae was dead.