第三楼的原文。:‘Too late!’ screamed Koskinen as Lupa Capitalina’s plasma destructor unleashed the power of a star’s heart at one of their own.+Engine. Kill.+.....The Sirius Warhounds skulked behind the mighty engine, loping in confusion as they blared alarm from their warhorns. The Reaver faced off against the Warlord, caught with nowhere to run to and stripped of any cover by their very thoroughness in the exercise. Its carapace sparked and squealed as its crew raced to bring voids back online, and squalling interference wavelengths created a shimmering rainbow around its frontal armour plates. Its guns were raised, and the rotating barrels of its gatling blaster were spinning up to firing speed.What had possessed Sirius to fight each other?What manner of slight could bring two such awesomely powerful war machines to blows?Without full access to the Legio Manifold, Dahan could not communicate directly with either princeps. The best he could do was transmit through the shared command network frequencies to demand answers. His hindbrain kept up a barrage of demands for the Legio to pull back from its war footing, while he linked with the Speranza’s noospheric network and warned the archmagos of what was happening.The Warhounds took note of him and the smaller of the pair, Vilka, broke away from its maddened prowling to rack the loaders of its guns and loose a howl of warning. Encoded in every scrap of that howl was one clear imperative.Stay away!Dahan brought the Iron Fist to a skidding halt before the Warhound.‘What is the Legio doing?’ he voxed, hoping that someone, anyone, in Sirius might answer him. ‘You must stop this madness now!’Stay away!‘For the love of the Omnissiah, stand down!’ yelled Dahan in the vocal, binaric and noospheric spheres. ‘Put up your weapons, I beg of you!’A fiery haze of superheated light built along the length of Lupa Capitalina’s arm, the plasma destructor’s firing vents squealing as they prepared to bleed off the volcanic excesses of heat. Knowing what was to come next, Dahan dropped into the Iron Fist and slammed the hatch down after him, hoping it would be enough. Inside the tank, Dahan closed the Iron Fist off from the outside world, disabling its auspex, vox and pict feeds.He slammed the vehicle into full reverse, and even through the armoured hull and over the roar of the engine he could hear the plasma destructor draw in a screaming intake of breath.‘Bracing,’ he said, shutting down as many of his own extraneous systems as he could manage in the microsecond he had left before the engine’s gun reached optimal firing temperature.And a thunderclap of pulverising thermic energy slammed into the tank, burning through its refractor fields in an instant and melting through a handspan of ablative plating. The internal temperature of the tank’s crew compartment flashed to that of a blast furnace, and what little skin Dahan had left peeled off in an instant.Before he could even register the pain, the kinetic blast wave of the Titan’s weapon discharge plucked the Iron Fist from the deck and swatted it like a troublesome insect.Hawkins heard the Titan’s enormous weapon screaming as it drew breath to fire, and hurled himself into the lee of a fallen building. Rae and a score of soldiers rolled into cover with him, while others ran for shelter behind armoured vehicles, piles of debris or whatever else might protect them from the backwash.Imperial Titans were a welcome sight on any battlefield, but you didn’t want to be anywhere near them when they fired plasma weapons. The heat bleed would scour the ground for hundreds of metres in all directions, and the thermal shockwave would give anyone caught in the open a damn nasty flash burn. He didn’t want to think what might happen in the pressurised, oxygenated atmosphere of a starship...‘What in the Eye’s going on, captain?’ shouted Rae.‘Damned if I know,’ said Hawkins, risking a glance through the shattered brickwork of the building. Dust clouds from the manoeuvring Titans billowed around them, making precise details hard to come by, but Hawkins saw the largest engine with a searing lightning storm chained to its arm. Another Titan stood with its back to him, fighting to keep itself out of the firing line, but even a relatively agile Reaver couldn’t evade a Warlord forever.‘What is he doing?’ whispered Hawkins.Warhorns blared; threat, challenge and supplication all in one.Whatever the Reaver was doing to try and defuse the larger Titan’s anger, it wasn’t working.