War Canto - Panzerkampfmarchen

Or in the common tongue - armoured fighting walkers

Royal Demesne, Novy Moskva

Eden, Edenstar System

Pentagram Cluster, Solar Hegemony in Exile

Two near identical, shadow draped giants bowed to each other, before drawing and striking in one single smooth and organic motion. Shimmering, singing, high-frequency blades clashed into spark-sputtering bind, casting flickering lights on the otherwise silhouetted giants, hidden in their own shadows, black against the great, blood-red lidless eye of the dawning Edenstar. Each titanic combatant was twelve yards from cap to pie if it was an inch and the armoured plates of each of the two custom Pz.KpfM.112.Ausf.R 'Royal Hippogriff' panzerkampfmarchen - armoured fighting walkers - was enamelled in the bone-white with pink and gold trim of the royal household retinue. The kampfmarcher on the sinister shifted its’ mass forward with a half-step, while pivoting the long blade of its’ two-handed HF great-sword over the top of the bind, moving with the slow deliberateness required to pass a Kajita-Holtzman barrier without resistance. The KH barrier of the threatened kampfmarcher on the dexter slowly became visible to the naked eye due to ripples of air and dust suddenly compressed by the redirected kinetic forces bled away from the passage of the vibrating mono-molecular high-frequency edge. The pilot of the threatened machine engaged his jump-jets in a brief burst backwards while re-chambering his freed blade up into a high roof guard, allowing his opponent's blade to crash down into the dirt, suddenly unopposed.

Swarms of chattering startled local pseudo-birds, launched then from trees and bushes surrounding the practice field, flying past the two titans. Each great war-golem seemed to pause and study his opponent, as if each giant was caught up in the momentary beauty. In form, the giant combatants resembled men-at-arms in full Gothic plate harness, with bladed wings sprouting from each harness's back plate, alluding to the famed winged lancers of ancient Poland, left behind on Old Dirty itself. Both sallet-helm shaped head's single cyclopean sensor-slits glowed in the infra-red spectrum as the warmachine's sensor suites probed on full-active. The pilots of the machines each searching to find the weakness his opponent's defence as, if by unvoiced agreement communicated by minute motions alone, the two kampfmarchen begin to circle each other in gliding, gathering steps, carefully maintaining a supported centre of balance at all times, lest a momentary unbalanced weakness of stance provoke an attack. Faster and faster they circled, until jump-jets kicked in, turning steps into jet assisted leaps, suddenly swerving and closing in at times to exchange a flurry of blows, only to jet-bound apart again nearly as quickly. Thus the fighters began the tell-tale dance of experienced marcherkampfers - walker warriors - testing the rhythm and timing and distance of this particular fight and his opposing fighter.

A key component of the small feudal armies of the Successor States and the Great Houses of the Human Sphere is the Ritter and his Biomechanoid CyberCharger ‘Armored Fighting Walker’ or Panzerkampfmarcher. The CyberCharger itself is a massive living armoured warmachine that carries the aristocratic Ritter forth into battle. Ritters, also called marcherkampfers - walker-warriors - are ideally a landed aristocracy forming the warrior class elite of human society, although this an ideal, many walker warriors are commoners, mercenaries, free lances, second and third sons without inheritance, or otherwise masterless and landless, ronin of the Human Sphere.

Based on the living arcanocyberxenobiological lobotomized remains of ancient alien cyborg subterranean sandwyrm war-gods known as Dholes, the synthetic vat-grown CyberChargers that the warriors of man ride forth into battle are just one example of how far man has deliberately rejected technological progress, especially when compared to the massive and aidol directed OGRE and BOLO class Assault Vectors of the Technomancers of the Old Republic; war machines capable of shrugging off repeated point blank atomic detonations and levelling cities in return, one of which was considered sufficient force to take or hold an entire planetary colony.

The Ritter himself is often clad cap-a-pie in heavy personal micro-talos war-plate supported by a powered exoskeleton and shielded by the best man-scale Kajita-Holtzman effect kinetic barriers that gold crowns can buy. Such that, thusly armed, should he be forced to eject by enemy action, the Ritter can continue the fight quite effectively and safely afoot. In fact the war-plate armed retainers of the marcherkampfer, his Serjeants, make quite formidable heavy infantry, capable of using the boarding claws built into their micro-talos suits to ‘ride along’ a panzermarcher as dragoons.

Cyberchargers themselves are protected from the attacks of lesser foes by terrible sanity-bending ‘void fields’, high energy KH effect fields of a type usually reserved for starships, or Old Republic grav-tanks and attack-vectors. Simply unavailable for lower class ground-pounders in their wheeled and tracked vehicles, the warped meta-physics of void shields pop like soap bubbles on any sustained contact with the ground.

Armed with a collection of directed energy lances, particle beamers, auto-cannon, rail guns, auto-mortars, barrage rockets, and guided missiles; and protected by reactive and ablative armour, glittering KF fields, air defence beams, and point defence guns, the Ritter and his Charger dominate the battlefields of late 30th century warfare.

Hobelars mass 10 - 20 tonnes and are the scouts and light quick reaction forces. Rounceys mass 25 - 35 tonnes and are the medium-weight, general purpose workhorses of the armies. Coursers weigh in at around 40 - 50 tonnes and function as the light-heavyweights, most often mounted by the professional men-at-arms backing up the elevated chivalry on their massive Destriers.

The fully ennobled landed, and hereditary Von-Ritter usually mounts a Destrier that tips the scales at around 55 - 65 tonnes that are the heaviest forces commonly seen in battle. Higher nobles; counts, barons, dukes, and such, push the limits with stupendously massive Great-Chargers -- Engels (70 - 80), ArchEngels (85 - 95), and the class all their own, the KonigsEngels (100-200 tonnes). -- but these are only rarely seen on the campaign, more often than not being too expensive to risk in open battle.

And then, on the fifth such pass, the cyber-charger whose holographic heraldry and transponder codes identified it as the mount belonging to the Count of Landing, Lord Ulysses 'Ollie' Williams Walker, sometimes called Red Knife, after his flame red hair and affectation of always carrying a great seax knife of meteoric iron and ancient heritage, failed to concede the pass and withdraw, instead he pressed on, chasing after the other kampfmarcher as it attempted to jump away, matching the other machine's backwards hop with a forward leap of his own, launching a spread of short range mini-missiles from a pair of six-cell box launchers mounted on the marcher’s thighs as he came bounding in. The withdrawing kampfmarchen, whose own displayed arms proclaimed it to be the ride of Sir Father-Brother Ignatius, Hieromonk-knight of the Order of the Shield of Saint Benedict Militant brought its’ two large twenty-four-inch pulse-photonguns, mounted over the armpits like besagew rondels, and single medium twelve-inch pulse-photongun mounted between the legs, like unto a plate harnesses' cod-piece, into play in full missile defence mode. Invisible infra-red beams pulse into the air, creating thundering sounds and lightning flashes against the local atmosphere and leaving wispy dissipating lines of ionised super-heated air in their wake. The beams strobe forth from rapidly gimbaling ball mounted electro-optical lens arrays to stab at the incoming ordinance, splashing four of the twelve incoming threats. The remaining missiles detonate in the air instead of crashing into Father Ignatius’s warmachine, spreading a rapidly expanding cloud of vision and telemetry obscuring smoke.

In his cockpit, Father Ignatius gives a short ejaculation of frustration as forward active infra-red, passive thermal, and radar sensor returns are all blotted out by the micro-machine filled ‘smoke’ but, as he wisely and automatically, in reaction made unthinking by long hours of training, picks up his visual scanning through back-up physical vision blocks of armoured transpariplas, and therefore misses the warning light and buzzer that signal the sudden cascade failure of his machine’s layered KH barriers for a spare handful of crucial seconds. It’s only as Ollie’s charger punches through the obscuring smoke into a flying tackle initiated grappling take-down that connects, unopposed by any sparking barrier, that he realises that both combatant’s protective barriers have been shorted out by aerosolised neutronium particles. At the last moment, a hurried and desperately sloppy sprawling takedown defense initiated by Father Ignatius fails to fend off the completed grapple and his inner ear and sense of balance scream at him as Ollie's machine lifts his own into a suplex and he clenches his jaw to open a radio channel to his opponent.

“Ollie! You cheating son of a bitch!”