The vibration started in the enamel of Marcus's teeth.
It traveled down his jaw, humming through the cold sweat on his neck, until it buried itself deep in the black volcanic ash beneath his boots.
THUD-THUD-THUD-THUD.
The smell hit next. A sudden, overwhelming wave of burnt ozone and thick, sulfurous propellant washed over the beach, carried by the cold ocean wind. It tasted exactly like biting down hard on a live copper wire.
Marcus looked back at the ocean.
The USS Prometheus—the massive, rusted aircraft carrier they called the Styx—was no longer a dead tomb floating on the water. It was a waking titan. Its massive, automated CIWS deck guns were aggressively tracking the sky.
Long, continuous streams of bright red tracer rounds tore upward, violently shredding the low-hanging clouds.
They were shooting at sleek, black geometric shapes descending rapidly from the upper atmosphere. Board orbital gunships. High-tech, heavily armored, and entirely indifferent to the rusted iron of the world below.
The illusion of the Emperor shattered instantly.
Ten seconds ago, the five hundred scavengers on the beach were kneeling to Marcus in silent, absolute reverence. They had watched him conquer the bunker and secure the water. They thought he was a god.
Gods didn't matter when spaceships started falling from the sky.
The scavengers broke.
It wasn't a coordinated tactical retreat. It was the desperate, mindless stampede of starving refugees. Men and women holding rusted pipes and jagged pieces of scrap metal turned and sprinted blindly toward the burning, hyper-oxygenated jungle behind the beach. They trampled over the bodies of the dead Board clone-troopers. They shoved each other into the hot ash.
Marcus couldn't chase them.
He shifted his weight forward, and his mangled right knee completely gave out. The dislocated joint screamed in agonizing protest. The thick rubber of his combat boot squished loudly, entirely filled with the warm, pooling blood from the Leviathan's bite.
He caught himself heavily on the Warlord sword. The polished steel blade sank three inches deep into the black sand.
He didn't yell. He didn't issue an epic command to hold the line. He simply didn't have the breath for it.
Marcia didn't wait for him to find it.
She stepped directly into the path of the stampede. A young scavenger, clutching a rusted truck suspension spring like a club, was sprinting blindly toward her. He was terrified, looking over his shoulder at the tracer fire.
Marcia didn't raise her hands to calm him. She didn't offer a speech about Roman bravery.
She held a heavy, scavenged Board shock-spear in her right hand. She didn't activate the stun charge. She just violently slammed the blunt iron shaft horizontally down into the ash, directly between the running boy's feet.
The scavenger tripped hard over the iron barrier. He hit the sand, scrambling backward like a cornered animal.
Marcia stepped over the spear. She stared down at him.
Her face was a horrific mess of blistering chemical burns from the toxic lake. Patches of dead skin were peeling off her cheekbones. Her soaked wool coat dripped black, diluted sludge onto her combat boots. Her posture was completely rigid.
She spat a thick wad of dark, acidic phlegm into the sand directly next to the boy's hand.
She didn't say a single word. She didn't have to.
The kid looked at the terrifying, scarred face of the Warlord's general. He scrambled backward, dragging his suspension spring, entirely too intimidated to push past her.
Decimus saw the interaction. The loyal Legionnaire immediately dragged three dead clone-troopers by their armor straps, piling their corpses into a makeshift barricade. He stood behind it, holding his own spear horizontally.
The panic hit the silent wall of Warlord iron and stalled.
"The water," a voice rasped over the deafening rhythm of the guns.
Lucilla slid down a small embankment of loose ash, her knees hitting the sand hard. She didn't brace her fall. She kept both hands wrapped tightly around her scavenged datapad, shielding the cracked glass screen from the falling, burning cinders of the jungle.
She scrambled over to Marcus.
"The water valves," Lucilla said again. She was breathing entirely through her mouth.
Marcus looked down at her. He leaned his left forearm heavily against the pommel of his sword. "Loud?"
"Massive," Lucilla said. She aggressively chipped at a hardened piece of toxic black sludge stuck to the bottom corner of her screen with her thumbnail. "When the lock opened, the main turbines spun up to suck the reservoir dry. The displacement caused a massive thermal bloom."
Marcus stared at the descending black ships. "They aren't shooting at us."
"They're shooting at the thermal signature," Lucilla confirmed. She swiped a dirty finger across the cracked glass. The green loading bar that had signaled their victory in the bunker was entirely gone.
It was replaced by a cascading waterfall of rapidly depleting red numbers.
"The Carrier's telemetry," Lucilla said. Her voice didn't waver, but her thumb picked harder at the sludge on the casing. The plastic snapped. "The deck guns are firing blind."
Marcus wiped a thick smear of black, toxic rain off his forehead with the back of his burned wrist. "Define blind."
"JARVIS is still jammed," Lucilla said. She finally looked up from the screen, staring directly at Marcus's blood-soaked boot. "The ship's targeting radar is dumb. It has no predictive algorithms. It can't calculate the atmospheric drag or the ablative plating of the dropships."
Marcus watched the red tracer rounds hit the bottom of the lead Board gunship. The bullets sparked violently against the heavy black armor, harmlessly ricocheting into the clouds.
"It's just spraying lead at the sky," Lucilla muttered. She tapped the red numbers on the screen. "Ammunition reserves."
"How long."
"Twelve minutes."
Marcus did the Warlord math.
It was cold, brutal, and entirely devoid of hope. The Board gunships weren't taking evasive maneuvers. They were heavily armored dropships built for atmospheric reentry. They were simply dropping in a straight line, taking the dumb, inaccurate hits from the Carrier's guns, waiting out the storm.
When the Styx ran out of bullets in twelve minutes, the gunships would hover directly over the beach. They would deploy their heavy laser batteries. They would glass the five hundred scavengers, and then they would sink the Carrier.
You couldn't fight a spaceship with a rusted pipe. You couldn't stab a laser with a sword.
Marcus needed his God-Tier AI.
He needed JARVIS online, plugged into the Carrier's mainframe, calculating the exact millimeter-perfect firing arcs to slip the tracer rounds straight into the unarmored thruster vents of the Board ships.
He needed to break the jammer.
Marcus turned his back on the ocean. The violent, rhythmic booming of the guns was starting to make his skull ache.
He dragged his ruined right leg forward. The shredded rubber of his boot flapped wetly against his ankle, slick with fresh blood. He pointed the heavy steel blade of the sword toward the massive, burning tree line of the terraformed jungle.
The heat radiating off the burning vegetation physically pushed against the cold sea breeze.
"Where is the static thickest," Marcus asked.
Lucilla tapped the screen. The display immediately glitched. Heavy, horizontal lines of white distortion tore across the topographical map.
"Two kilometers north," Lucilla said. She pointed a shaking finger directly into the densest, blackest smoke rolling out of the canopy. "Right in the middle of the burn zone. The signal is localized. It's terrestrial."
Marcus didn't hesitate. He didn't look at Marcia to confirm the plan. He didn't look at the sky to calculate their odds.
He just started walking toward the smoke.
He took two agonizing, uneven steps in the soft ash.
A horrific sound cut through the relentless, deafening rhythm of the ship's guns. It was a high-pitched, agonizing mechanical shriek, like two massive sheets of rusted iron being violently torn apart by an industrial press.
Marcus stopped. He turned around.
Narcissus was falling.
The massive, twelve-foot Dreadnought didn't stumble. He didn't trip. The right side of his massive, cherry-red battleship armor simply ceased to exist as a functional, weight-bearing structure.
A heavy, pressurized main hydraulic line, buried deep behind the rusted steel plates of his right knee joint, violently ruptured.
Hot, thick hydraulic fluid sprayed outward in a violent, horizontal arc across the black sand. It hit the cold, damp air and instantly flashed into a thick cloud of toxic, pink steam.
Narcissus hit the ground hard.
He didn't put his hands out to brace his fall. The sheer, two-ton weight of his compromised iron body dragged him straight down into the ash. The impact was heavy enough to physically shake the ground beneath Marcus's boots.
The scavengers standing near the giant immediately scrambled backward, coughing and shielding their faces from the burning, pink chemical steam hissing off the sand.
Narcissus lay completely still on his side.
Thick, dark fluid steadily pooled into the black ash beneath his shattered leg. The heavy, metallic groaning of his armor echoed over the gunfire as the massive steel plates slowly buckled inward, entirely crushed by the loss of internal hydraulic pressure.
Marcus stared at his brother.
The red numbers on Lucilla's datapad silently ticked down to eleven minutes.
The Vanguard's unbreakable shield was dead in the sand.