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1If Vettius Telok had to pick a single flaw to which he was most beholden, it would, he reflected, most likely be vanity. How else could he explain leaving Kotov and his fellows alive long enough to escape into Exnihlio’s depths?
2It momentarily amused him that even one as evolved as he could still fall prey to so mortal a vice, so human a failing. Being starved of contact beyond that of machines and slaves had rendered him susceptible to flattery, craving of adulation. He had paid for that vanity with an arm, hacked from his body by the blade of an eldar warrior-construct no less!
3Who could have expected eldar to have come to Kotov’s rescue? The odds against such unlikely saviours appearing beyond the edge of the galaxy were so astronomical as to be virtually impossible.
4And yet it had happened.
5‘I should thank you, Lexell Kotov,’ said Telok. ‘I had almost forgotten the thrill of not knowing, the frisson of uncertainty.’
6Telok’s crystalline body shimmered with the nanotech coursing through him: self-replicating, self-repairing and ever-evolving.
7The hand he had lost was already regrown, a gleaming crystalline facsimile of his metallic gauntlet. Those portions of his body that were recognisably human or machine were now few and far between, a necessary price for his continued existence.
8Telok had no need of a human face, but kept his own out of the desire to be recognised upon his return to Mars. What would be the point in assuming a blank-faced visage of augmetics that bore no relation to the man who’d set off on a quixotic quest in search of a legend?
9Yet more evidence for his vanity…
10This chamber was a relic cut from the wreckage of a lifeless alien hulk he’d found drifting in the debris at the galactic frontier. The creatures he’d found entombed within were dangerous, and, he suspected, decreed forbidden by the very people who had likely created them in an earlier age.
11How typical of living beings to create weapons of total annihilation and then seek to put limits upon them.
12Five hundred metres wide, and half that in length, its barrel-vaulted ceiling was inscribed with cracked frescoes depicting ancient wars.
13Six sarcophagus-like caskets were emplaced on raised biers, each connected via hundreds of snaking cables to what could only be described as an altar at the far end of the chamber. Telok had seen his fair share of temples, yet this dated from before the Age of Strife, before the Mechanicus had been enslaved by dogmatic rituals and needless trappings of faith.
14Telok had made this place his personal forge, utilising the space between the caskets to create his greatest masterpiece – the mechanism that allowed conventional energy technologies to awaken the ancient sentience at the heart of the Breath of the Gods.
15The Black Templars Thunderhawk sat at the far end of the chamber where the lifter-crystaliths had deposited it. It was called Barisan, and its machine-spirit was a snapping, feral thing. So aggressive that Telok had been forced to chain its wings to the deck plates and drain its reserves of fuel.
16Its binaric exloads were hard-edged and uncompromising, but that would soon change.
17Half-finished projects and mechanical follies lay in pieces on numerous workbenches: a clutch of servitor bodies that lay open as though in the process of being autopsied, glass-fronted nanotech colonies whose exponentially growing evolutionary leaps were recorded in minute detail before being eradicated by regular e-mag pulses. It had been centuries since Telok had studied their growths, but the results were part of an ongoing cycle of data-gathering that fed into the architectural growth patterns of Exnihlio’s infrastructure.
18Crystal formations had colonised fully a third of the workspace, and Telok felt his body respond to their presence. A dozen glassine cylinders sat incongruously in the midst of the crystalline prison. A pinkish-grey fluid filled each cylinder, as unmoving as hardened resin, and the hunched bodies that hung suspended in each were frozen in time by acausal technologies that kept this dimensionally-fickle vermin species locked in this precise moment of space-time.
19Perhaps that had been his greatest achievement, but then there were so many from which to choose.
20Telok halted with his back to the altar, and a pair of glassy mechadendrites detached from his spine. They bored into the gnarled metallic form of the altar and Telok sighed at this most physical union with ancient archeotech.
21The chamber’s activation codes had been hidden deep in the drifting hulk’s logic engines, secured behind layers of what, in its time, must have been considered unbreakable encryption. It had been simplicity itself for Telok to retrieve them, and he allowed the precise string of quantum equations to exload within the altar like a key in a lock.
22Though millennia had passed since its creation, the machines within responded with alacrity, and each of the six caskets on the raised biers began humming with power. Glowing gem lights winked into life along their sides and streams of condensing vapours bled from louvred vents at each flanged apex.
23Telok began intoning the names of the individual creatures suspended within. The degraded records of the hulk named them hellhounds, but their creators had originally chosen a class of mythical hunting beasts as their title.
24<Tindalosi!> cried Telok as the hinged lids split apart and the caskets slowly rose into the upright position. <Wraiths of Steel and Spirit, come forth!>
25Sinuous, hunched-over creatures emerged from each of the caskets in an exhalation of ghostly vapours. Dormant and without animation, all were locked into adamantium harnesses that kept every portion of their bodies immobile.
26Their upper bodies were wide and ridged with armour plating like overlapping scapulae, with three pairs of arms corded with gurgling tubes and which glittered with fractal-edged claws.
27Below the waist, their forms divided into powerful, hook-jointed legs. Their skulls were elongated, lupine horrors of serrated teeth and bulbous sensor pods. Power coursed through the feral machines, yet they were still without animation, without a vital spark to set them on the hunt.
28Telok reached deep into the heart of Exnihlio and drew forth the Tindalosi’s spirits, six of the most vicious, lunatic essences he’d ever known. Their consciousnesses had been driven insane with isolation and a vicious regime of deletions and restorations. All six were haunted, viral things that hungered only to destroy. Keeping them divorced from their bodies was the only way to avoid unrestrained slaughter.
29Their spirits rose from his deepest data sepulchres, along pathways long forsaken by spirits of nobler mien. They feasted as they went, absorbing the essences of slower machines that now fell silent as their internal sparks were devoured. With each morsel the lunatic spirits’ hunger to consume grew stronger until each was little more than a ravening data-vampire.
30They manifested as scraps of light atop the altar, six glittering orreries of glitching, sparking static. Like dense atomic structure diagrams that would have plunged any who studied them into madness, they struggled against the bindings in which Telok held them.
31One by one, Telok fed them into their dormant bodies. Each metallic death-mask lifted with a screaming howl, the furious static illuminating their distended ocular sensors with scribbled light and monstrous appetite. They fought the adamantium bindings locking them into their harnesses, but Telok wasn’t yet ready to unleash them.
32First they needed the scent.
33Like any evocation, an offering was required.
34Telok detached from the altar and removed two broken lengths of golden metal from beneath his robes. The severed arms of Archmagos Kotov trailed lengths of snapped wiring and droplets of viscous floodstream chemicals.
35<Drink deep of your geas, my wraithhounds,> said Telok, moving between the struggling creatures with the golden arms upraised. <Relish your prey’s machine-scent, know his binaric presence. Let it fill you, let it consume you. Its structure is all you crave. It fills your every thought with hunger. You will taste no other light, drink no other code, crave no other spirit. All else shall be poison to you. Only this will salve the agony within your metal flesh!>
36Whipping blade-arms cut the air like razors, crackling with arcs of angry energy. The static-filled eyes of the Tindalosi blazed with aching desire, a soul-deep need to hunt the prey whose binaric scent enslaved their every sense.
37With a pulse of thought, Telok unlocked the bindings holding the Tindalosi to their caskets. They surged free; enraged, famished and blaring with hostile binary. Phase-shifting claws flickered with unlight and Telok felt a thrill of fear as they encircled him like pack-wolves in the final moments of a hunt.
38The geas he had bound them to would render him lethally toxic to their devouring hearts, but would their hatred of him overcome the prospect of extinction?
39They howled as they caught the scent of Kotov, bounding towards the Barisan. They fell upon it with the thoroughness of the most rapacious ferrophage. Claws tore through armoured plates and ripped them from the gunship’s fuselage as they sought the source of their prey’s binary scent. The keel of the Barisan split as supporting structural members were torn asunder and the gunship was comprehensively dismantled in a furious unmaking.
40Telok grinned as the gunship’s binaric screams filled the chamber, a drawn-out death howl of machine agony. Its once-proud spirit was dying piece by piece. Not devoured, not absorbed, but shredded into ever smaller fragments before being cast to oblivion.
41Within minutes the Thunderhawk was a wreck, its warlike form broken down into a ruin of buckled iron, ripped plating and shattered, soulless components.
42<Nowhere to hide,> said Telok as the Tindalosi raced into the wilds of Exnihlio with the unquenchable thirst for Kotov’s scent burning within them.
43Most soldiers’ bars were raucous places, where drunken disorder was common and broken noses a nightly occurrence. But most bars weren’t Cadian bars. Spit in the Eye had once been an abandoned maintenance hangar for geoformer vehicles, which meant it had a ready-made system of pumps, storage vats and open spaces. A hundred off-duty Guardsmen sat at its tables, drinking, swapping stories, cleaning weapons and bellyaching that they weren’t with their colonel.
44Captain Hawkins sat alone at a table near the corner of the makeshift bar, afforded an enfilading view down its length and a direct view of the entrance. His lasrifle sat propped against the table, his sword and kit bag hung on canvas slings across the back of his chair.
45A number of his senior NCOs – Jahn Callins, Taybard Rae – and even a commissar named Vasken sat playing cards with their squad leaders, and Emil Nader and Kayrn Sylkwood from the Renard. Normally anyone who wasn’t part of the regiment could expect short shrift from its soldiers, but Surcouf’s folk had quickly found a welcome with their repertoire of inventive card games.
46Hawkins grinned. If a life in the Imperial Guard had taught him anything, it was that soldiers seized on any way to stave off boredom. And like all soldiers, Cadians loved cards. He couldn’t see what they were playing, but from the look of Jahn Callins’s face, it seemed like Nader was winning.
47He resisted the urge to join them. They were NCOs and he was an officer. The relationship between Cadian ranks was less formal than in many other regiments, but Hawkins understood that downtime was precious to his soldiers and knew better than to intrude when they were off-duty.
48Instead, he took a sip of the cloudy drink in the chipped glass before him. Its catch-all name between regiments was bilge hooch, but each Cadian enginseer of the 71st had his or her own fiercely guarded recipe and name. This one belonged to Enginseer Rocia, and was called Scarshine. A potent brew, if a tad chemical for Hawkins’s tastes, but what else would you expect from a drink brewed on a Mechanicus starship?
49Despite its strength, not one Cadian in the Spit in the Eye would leave intoxicated. His soldiers knew how to handle their drink, and – more importantly – knew the disciplinary price of a hangover wasn’t worth the fleeting enjoyment of being drunk. Hawkins spotted a few of the younger troopers knocking back their drinks with gusto, but, equally, saw a number of the older troopers looking out for them.
50Satisfied the men and women under his command would all be fit for their next duty rotation, Hawkins turned his attention to the schematics displayed on the data-slate propped up on the table before him.
51Below the waterline they called it, in reference to some old naval term, and no matter how often Hawkins studied the Speranza’s lower deck plans, he couldn’t seem to reconcile the pages of handwritten defensive plans he’d drawn up on the many tours he’d made of the ship since leaving Hypatia.
52Hawkins heard footsteps and looked up in time to see Rae approaching. The sergeant turned a chair around and sat across it with the back pressed to his chest.
53‘Is she making any sense yet, sir?’ asked Rae, nodding towards the Speranza’s schematics.
54‘No, sergeant, and I doubt she ever will.’
55‘Every girl needs to keep some secrets below the waterline, eh?’
56Hawkins nodded and shut off the slate.
57‘Every adept I’ve asked just nods and feeds me a line about each ship being different and how it’s not unknown for them to “adapt” their environment to suit the circumstances. I mean, it’s like they’re talking about this ship as though it’s alive.’
58‘If that’s what they think, then who’s to say they’re wrong?’ said Rae. ‘After all, you’ve heard the way soldiers talk to their kit when there’s fire in the wind. Prayers to lasguns, kisses for blades.’
59‘I suppose,’ admitted Hawkins, pushing an empty glass over to Rae and gesturing to the bottle at the centre of the table.
60‘Don’t mind if I do, sir,’ said Rae, pouring a moderate measure.
61‘So what’s on your mind, Rae?’
62‘Just wondered if you’d fancy joining us for a game of Knights and Knaves, sir,’ said Rae. ‘It’s a new game of Master Nader’s. It’s not bad, you might even be able to win a hand or two.’
63‘May as well,’ replied Hawkins, tucking the slate into his kit bag. ‘I’m getting nowhere with this.’
64Gathering up his things, Hawkins followed Rae over to his NCOs’ table and pulled over a chair. Like Rae before him, he reversed it before sitting down.
65‘Sir,’ said Jahn Callins with a nod. ‘Good to have you in the ranks. This Ultramarian rogue is going to clean us all out soon.’
66Emil Nader tried to look hurt, but was too drunk to pull it off convincingly. Kayrn Sylkwood grinned at her fellow crewman’s attempt and looked Hawkins in the eye as he sat down.
67‘He’s ahead now,’ she said, ‘but another drink and he’ll get cocky and bet against me. Then maybe I’ll let one of you win it back if I think you’re pretty enough to take to my bunk.’
68Even with the best will in the world, none of the men around the table could be called pretty. Commissar Vasken’s face was a craggy moonscape whose frown looked to have been cast in clay at birth. Guardsman Tukos had been scarred by a grenade blast on Baktar III, Jahn Callins was a leather-tough supply officer and Rae was a thick-necked sergeant common the galaxy over.
69Hawkins had, of course, heard what Galatea had done to Mistress Tychon and the Renard’s armsman. He’d only met them briefly at Colonel Anders’s dinner prior to the crossing of the Halo Scar, but he’d liked them instinctively. Magos Dahan had wanted to storm the bridge with a cohort of skitarii, but any notions of reprisal had been quashed by a decree from Magos Blaylock.
70Perhaps the company of fighting men eased Nader and Sylkwood’s pain or perhaps they simply wanted to get drunk and forget their grief for a time.
71Nader dealt out a hand as Sylkwood explained the rules again. Her Cadian accent had softened, but was still there and only became stronger the more she drank. They played a few hands to let Hawkins become acquainted with the rules, which were simple enough, but by the time they’d played a few more, he realised they had layers of unexpected complexity.
72By the fifth hand, he’d all but cashed out of betting chips.
73‘You see what we’re up against, sir?’ said Rae with a grin.
74‘Indeed I do,’ said Hawkins. ‘I think we’ve been hustled.’
75‘We played a square game, captain,’ said Nader, his words beginning to run together. ‘Same rules apply.’
76‘Maybe so, Master Nader, but I can’t help thinking that you’re taking advantage of us poor soldiers.’
77‘Me, take advantage?’ grinned Nader. ‘Never!’
78‘Sir,’ said Rae, nodding towards the entrance to the Spit in the Eye. Hawkins looked up, seeing the silver-haired man with the canidae tattoo who’d been watching them training the other day.
79‘What’s he doing here?’ said Hawkins, pushing up from his chair as the man saw him and began walking over. He headed to the bar, knowing Sergeant Rae was right behind him. Emil Nader and Kayrn Sylkwood might have been accepted, but that didn’t mean anyone else would be made welcome.
80The man reached the bar before them and leaned over to lift a bottle of Scarshine from beneath. He uncorked it with his teeth and grabbed a handful of glasses, apparently oblivious to the hostile looks he was attracting. The muscled corporal behind the bar reached down for his concealed shock maul, but Hawkins waved him off.
81‘Can I offer you a drink, captain?’ said the man as Hawkins propped himself against the bar. The man poured a generous measure and held the bottle out over two empty glasses. ‘It’s not vintage amasec, but I hear it’s drinkable.’
82‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’ said Hawkins, placing a hand over the empty glasses. Closer now, he could see twin scars on his cheeks and the steel-rimmed socket plugs at the nape of the man’s neck.
83Titan crew. No doubt about it.
84‘The drinks here are for Cadians only,’ said Hawkins, lifting the man’s glass and emptying it into the slops tray.
85‘Now that’s just damn wasteful,’ said the man.
86‘You didn’t answer me,’ said Hawkins. ‘Who are you?’
87‘You don’t recognise me?’
88‘Should I?’
89‘Princeps Gunnar Vintras,’ said the man, visibly puffing out his chest. ‘Also known as the Skinwalker, the Haunter of the Shadows.’
90Hawkins chuckled and turned to Rae. ‘Come to think of it, sergeant, I have heard of him. Only I didn’t think he was still a princeps. Didn’t the Legio strip you of your command after you lost one of their engines?’
91Vintras put a hand to his neck. Hawkins saw the ridged line of a scar where it looked like someone had tried to cut his throat. The Skinwalker scowled and said, ‘I didn’t lose Amarok, it was just… scarred somewhat. Anyway, Turentek’s practically repaired all the damage now. And it’s not like I’m the first princeps ever to have a Titan damaged under him, so I don’t understand what all the fuss is about.’
92‘Right, so now we know who you are, perhaps you can tell us why you’re here,’ said Hawkins.
93‘I want to train with you,’ said Vintras.
94At first Hawkins thought he’d misheard.
95‘You want to train with us?’
96‘Yes.’
97‘Why?’
98‘Look, Princeps Luth may have stripped me of my command for now, but do you realise just how rare it is for any human being to have the precise mental and physical make-up to command a Titan? No, I expect you don’t. Well, it’s rare, very rare. So rare in fact that no Legio would ever throw someone like that away over something as trivial as getting an engine a bit scratched. Trust me, the Legio will take me back soon enough, it’s only a matter of time. And when that time comes, I need to be in peak physical condition. Which isn’t going to happen if I just sit about drinking and feeling sorry for myself.’
99‘You’re a cocky son of a bitch, aren’t you?’ said Hawkins.
100Vintras grinned back at him.
101‘I’m a Warhound driver,’ he said. ‘What did you expect?’
102Hawkins leaned in close and said, ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, you’re not exactly popular here. We don’t welcome outsiders into our bars, let alone our training programmes.’
103‘Why not?’ asked Vintras, turning to point at the Renard’s crew. ‘They’re not Cadian, but I don’t see you throwing them out.’
104‘Actually, Mistress Sylkwood is Cadian,’ pointed out Rae. ‘And Master Nader, well, we like him.’
105‘You’re saying you don’t like me?’ said Vintras with a pout that made Hawkins want to put his fist through his face. ‘You don’t even know me.’
106‘Call it gut instinct,’ said Hawkins. ‘But if you want to train with us, fine, come train with us.’
107‘Sir?’ said Rae. ‘Are you sure–’
108‘Let’s see how Master Vintras fares after a couple of days,’ said Hawkins with a grin. ‘If he’s going to pass a Legio physical, he’s going to have to sweat blood. I’m putting you in charge of his detail, Sergeant Rae, so work him hard. You understand?’
109‘Yes, sir,’ said Rae with obvious relish. ‘Perfectly.’
110A huge goods elevator conveyed them to the surface, a shuttered iron cage located beneath a vaulted arch at the end of the transformer chamber. The metal-plated flooring of the car was dented, with frothed pools of greasy effluvia that stank like overused cooking fat pooled in the depressions. Pavelka tasted it and told Roboute it was the residue of bio-synthetic chemicals used to slow the rate of decay in the flesh of servitors.
111Roboute gagged and sat back on his haunches, keeping well clear of those puddles. Sergeant Tanna’s Black Templars stood in the centre of the elevator car, their weapons trained outwards. Roboute heard the clicks of their internal vox and wondered what tactical scenarios they might possibly have for this situation.
112Archmagos Kotov stood in the opposite corner to Roboute, his skitarii shielding his wounded body from sight. Roboute could only imagine the pain of crushed hope now curdled to despair.
113Ven Anders’s Cadians sat against an adjacent cage wall, all of them appearing to be taking their current situation in their stride. A couple smoked bac-sticks, most cleaned their weapons. The rest slept.
114The elevator car shuddered as its braided metal cabling switched to a higher-placed cable cylinder. Too deep for a single cable to lift, the elevator shifted shafts every few hundred metres with a thudding clatter of ratcheting gears. Roboute closed his eyes, convinced the ancient car was going to come loose and plummet back into the depths of Exnihlio.
115‘How deep did you send us?’ asked Roboute, looking to where the eldar kept themselves as separate from the Imperials as possible.
116Bielanna looked up. She’d removed her helmet, and Roboute was shocked at the sunken shadows around her eyes.
117‘Deep,’ was all she said.
118Roboute didn’t press the issue, clenching and unclenching his sweating fingers. He tried to control his breathing and looked over at the cracked display slate next to the elevator’s hydraulic controls. The scrolling binary meant nothing to him, changing too rapidly for him to work out the sequence.
119‘Can’t they just use normal numbers?’ muttered Roboute, more to himself than anyone in particular. ‘Imperator, how much longer is this going to take?’
120‘The controls indicated we began our ascent on a level some twenty-seven kilometres beneath the planet’s surface,’ said Pavelka. ‘At our current rate of ascent, it should take just under an hour to reach the surface.’
121Roboute exhaled slowly. An hour!
122‘Reminds me of the training levels beneath Kasr Holn,’ said Ven Anders with a grin. ‘Now those were some deep, dark places. Tunnels you had to wriggle along like a worm, blind corners, kill boxes and some of the nastiest trigger-traps I’ve ever seen. Magos Dahan’s got nothing like it on the training deck.’
123‘Sounds like you miss them,’ said Roboute.
124Anders shrugged. ‘They were hard times, but good times. We were learning how to fight the enemies of the Emperor, so, yes, I remember that time fondly. You don’t have good memories of your time in the Ultramarian auxilia?’
125‘I suppose I do,’ said Roboute, grateful for a memory that wasn’t darkness and air running out. ‘But the training I did in Calth’s caverns wasn’t nearly as… enclosed as this.’
126‘You’re not claustrophobic, are you?’
127‘I don’t have many phobias, Ven, but being trapped alone in the darkness is one that’s haunted my nightmares ever since the Preceptor was crippled by that hellship.’
128‘Understandable,’ said Anders.
129‘And it feels like I’m living that nightmare right now.’
130Anders nodded, and left him alone after that.
131The rest of the journey passed in silence, or as close to silence as the creaking ascent of the lift allowed. Roboute knew they were near the end of their journey when Tanna’s warriors took up battle postures at the corners of the car. Bielanna’s warriors did likewise, moving in a way that naturally complemented the deployment of the Space Marines.
132Finally, the car came to a shuddering halt. The single lumen flickered and the shuttered door ratcheted open with a squeal of rusted hydraulic mechanisms. A petrochemical reek flooded the goods elevator, together with a billowing cloud of particulates.
133Roboute coughed and put a hand to his face.
134‘This isn’t one of those toxic regions Telok mentioned, is it?’
135‘The air content is mildly hazardous,’ agreed Pavelka as the Black Templars punched out through the door. The eldar went next, the Cadians following swiftly behind.
136‘Mildly? Coming from a tech-priest, that’s not exactly reassuring,’ said Roboute, covering his mouth with his hand.
137Kotov and the skitarii followed as they moved into a wide, hangar-like area with thick, vaulted beams and bare iron columns supporting a corrugated sheet roof. Vast silos and ore hoppers took up the bulk of the floor space, connected by a complex network of suspended viaducts and hissing distribution pipes.
138Enormous, hazard-striped ore-haulers rumbled through the hub on grinding tracks, the yellow of their flanks grimy with oil and dust. Warning lights blinked and the omnipresent screeching crackle of binary passed back and forth between enormous machines that rose like templum organs on stepped plinths. Hundreds of goggled servitors with implanted rebreathers tramped through the chamber, hauling carts of raw materials through plumes of vent gases. Roboute coughed a wad of granular phlegm, blinking rapidly as his eyes watered in the caustic atmosphere.
139‘Here,’ said Pavelka, handing him a glass-visored filter hood from a rack next to the elevator car.
140‘Thanks,’ said Roboute, dragging it over his head. His breathing immediately evened out as the air-pack pumped stale, centuries-old air into his lungs.
141Tanna led them through the hangar, avoiding the labouring servitors and slow-moving ore-haulers. The eldar spread out, moving like ghosts in vapour clouds.
142Ven Anders jogged over to them.
143‘How far did you say it was to the universal assembler tower?’ he asked, his voice muffled by his helm’s rebreather.
144‘Seventy-three point six kilometres,’ answered Pavelka.
145‘Then we’re going to need transport,’ said Anders. ‘I’m thinking we should commandeer one of those ore-haulers. It’s not a Chimera, but it’ll do. Can you drive one of those things?’
146Pavelka nodded and said, ‘Their drive protocols will be locked to this location, but it is doubtful they will have anything too complex to overcome.’
147‘Then get to it,’ said Anders. ‘The sooner we’re moving the better chance we have of staying ahead of Telok.’
148Roboute and Pavelka set off with the Cadians as their escort, leaving Kotov and his skitarii to catch up. Pavelka climbed into the cab of an ore-hauler as the Black Templars dragged the hangar doors open. Led by Uldanaish Ghostwalker, the eldar slipped out in groups of three to reconnoitre the area ahead.
149Roboute followed them outside, shielding the lenses of his hood against the brightness of a storm-cracked sky. Looping highway junctions converged in a wide plaza before the hangar, complete with complex directional controls and turnplate assemblies.
150He looked for any sign that they were about to walk into an ambush, but with the exception of a few servitors gathered around a transformer array, he could see no one.
151‘A materials distribution hub,’ said Kotov.
152‘What?’ said Roboute, surprised by Kotov’s appearance at his side. The archmagos turned and pointed a mechadendrite at the radial patterns of painted lines on the floor that led to numerous other elevators at regular intervals within the hangar.
153‘This hub will link to dozens of chambers like the one we just left,’ explained Kotov. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus, the scale of what Telok has achieved here is staggering.’
154‘I’d be more impressed if he wasn’t trying to kill us,’ said Roboute.
155‘True,’ agreed Kotov. ‘And the more I see of this world, the more I realise what a dreadful mistake I made coming here.’
156Roboute nodded slowly, but said nothing, knowing any words he might say would sound flippant in the face of Kotov’s rare moment of candour. Instead, he stared out into the industrial hinterlands of Exnihlio.
157The sky burned a smelted orange, streaked with pollutants and chemical bleed from the planet-wide industry below. A saw-toothed assemblage of the same monolithic structures he’d seen while travelling aboard the crystal ship, smoke-belching cooling towers and domed power plants that crackled with excess energies, stretched into the distance as far as he could see.
158Roboute reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out the brass-rimmed form of his astrogation compass.
159‘Catch a wind for me, old friend,’ he said for old time’s sake.
160He couldn’t say what had prompted him to take the compass from his stateroom aboard the Renard, but it was as good a touchstone as any on an unknown world. His only keepsake from the doomed Preceptor, the compass was an unreliable navigator, but its needle was unerringly pointing towards a vast tower wrought from cyclopean columns of segmented steel.
161‘Is that the universal assembler?’ he asked Kotov.
162‘Yes.’
163It dominated the skyline like a looming hive spire, a haze of smog wreathing its base and an enormous megaphone-like device aimed skywards at its summit.
164A maze of ochre blocks, steel-sided forges and Imperator alone knew what else lay between them and its soaring immensity. Reaching it alive might prove to be impossible, for Telok would surely predict their plan, but what other choice was there?
165‘Not as far as I thought it was going to be,’ said Roboute, slipping the compass back into his pocket.
166Kotov’s withering reply was drowned out by the throaty roar of the ore-hauler’s engine and the whooping yells of the Cadians.
167‘Looks like we have transport,’ said Roboute, grinning as he saw Ven Anders slap Pavelka’s shoulder.
168The Cadian colonel leaned from the cab as the rear loading ramp of the ore-hauler lowered.
169‘Everyone on board!’ he yelled. ‘That tower’s not going to activate itself!’
170Blaylock’s quarters aboard the Speranza were virtually identical to those at the heart of his forge in the Cebrenia Quadrangle. As a rule, he disliked change for change’s sake, and found those adepts who claimed that such things fostered creativity to be tiresome in the extreme.
171He had no need to sleep; augmentations within his cranial cavity simulated the experience with no need of a bed, and the chemicals dispensed from his spinal cylinder provided nutrients and hormones far superior to those produced naturally.
172Thus his private quarters were more of a workshop than a place to rest and recuperate. With his hunched servitors dormant behind him, Blaylock sat on a reinforced stool at his workbench, bent over a hardwood square of wood that could have come straight from the communion chamber of an astropath.
173It measured precisely forty-five centimetres square, and its lacquered sheen was a rich red to match the sands of Mars. Harvested from the gene sample of an extinct Calibanite tree known as a Northwild, its grain and workability were analogous to the equally extinct mahogany of Old Earth. Its surface colour had deepened evenly in the centuries since Magos Alhazen had presented it to him upon his ascension to the Cult Mechanicus. Like Blaylock, it had matured with a precision that was to be admired in something fashioned from the unpredictability of organic matter.
174Embossed gold lettering ran around its edges, a mixture of quantum rune combinations, binaric shorthand and the divine ordinals of the Machine-God’s aspects. Looping curves and ellipses, like patterns inscribed by a rotating orrery, were etched into its surface, and it was across these lines that Blaylock moved a planchette of wood cut from the same tree.
175Alhazen had called it a Mars Volta, a conduit to the Omnissiah once favoured by the Zethist cults, but Blaylock had never used it until now. He wasn’t sure what had driven him to seek it out, but pondering the conundrum of establishing vox with the surface, the image of it stowed in his quarters had come to him unbidden.
176Such objects had fallen out of favour in the Mechanicus over the centuries. Most were held only as curios by the more superstitious priests of Mars, but if there was even the remotest chance it could help him in this hour of need, then Blaylock was prepared to explore any option, no matter how illogical it might seem.
177Kryptaestrex’s geoformer vessels were mere hours from launching, laden with alchymical saturators and a host of Azuramagelli’s astrogation servitor probes filling their cavernous holds. Neither adept’s idea on its own would likely breach the distortion in Exnihlio’s atmosphere, but together they might offer a fleeting window to the surface.
178But even two geoformer vessels could only run their processors over a limited area of atmosphere, perhaps a sixteenth of the planetary volume. Not enough to be sure that anyone on the surface could receive or transmit a signal. Whichever portion of the planetary atmosphere was cleared would need to be more or less right over Archmagos Kotov for it to be any use.
179Azuramagelli had the bridge, sending a constant stream of vox-hails to the surface, while Kryptaestrex oversaw the deployment of his vastly complex geoformer vessels. Such ships were ungainly constructions, designed to sit in low orbit or within a hostile planetary biosphere. What they were not designed for was establishing geostationary orbit in chaotic electromagnetic storms on the edge of the mesosphere.
180Blaylock had studied every orbital scan of Exnihlio a thousand times in picoscopic detail, searching for clues as to where best to despatch the geoformers. Every analytical tool at his disposal had yielded nothing; no region where the distortion was thinner or any hint that a location of particular significance lay below.
181And so it came to this. He placed his metallic fingers placed lightly on the wooden planchette atop the Mars Volta. He had no idea how to begin, and settled for one of the first, most basic prayers to the Machine-God.
182‘With learning I cleanse my flesh of ignorance.
183‘With knowledge I grow in power.
184‘With technology I revere the God of all Machines.
185‘With its power I praise the glory of Mars.
186‘All hail the Omnissiah, who guides us to learning.’
187It had been centuries since Blaylock had said these words. The incantation was taught to novices with barely an augmentation to their name and its reassuring simplicity pleased him.
188And then the planchette moved.
189Blaylock’s surprise was total. He hadn’t truly expected anything to come of consulting the Mars Volta. Blaylock discounted ideomotor responses, his artificial nervous system was immune to such things, but he could detect no conscious direction to the motion of his arms.
190The planchette moved from one number group to another as it slid effortlessly across the board. Blaylock watched it with a growing sense of the divine moving within him, a holy purpose that had long been absent from his life.
191His servitor dwarfs jerked as his floodstream surged with excitement. They jabbered meaningless glossolalia as the power flowing through him passed to their mono-directed brains.
192Blaylock’s arms were no longer his own, but extensions of the Machine-God, a way for it to pass its wisdom from the infinity point to the mortal realms. The numbers kept coming until at last the planchette halted in the middle of the board.
193Blaylock lifted his trembling hands from the wooden pointer.
194The numbers were etched in his mind, precise and unambiguous.
195Blaylock engaged the embedded holo-slate on his workbench and fed in the planetary scans of Exnihlio, followed by the number strings he had just learned.
196And a segment of the planet’s orbital volume illuminated.
197As modes of transport went, the ore-hauler wasn’t the worst in which Roboute had travelled. That honour belonged to a medicae Chimera with a misaligned track unit and an air-filter a careless enginseer had inadvertently attached to the bio-waste sump.
198But it was a close second.
199Pavelka sat at the controls, with Archmagos Kotov plugged in next to her. Both had extended mechadendrites into the wall of the cab behind them and were using the ore-hauler’s simple logic-engine as a proxy to carefully explore the local noospheric network.
200The Cadians and Black Templars rode in the empty materials hopper behind them, holding on to whatever they could to keep from being shaken apart by the ore-hauler’s juddering movements. Ariganna Icefang had point-blank refused to allow her warriors to be carried in the back of the ore-hauler like livestock.
201‘We are fleeter on foot,’ said Bielanna when the eldar’s refusal almost sparked an outbreak of violence. ‘We will keep pace with you, Archmagos Kotov. Have no fear of that.’
202Roboute sat next to Pavelka and Kotov, staring through the armourglass canopy at the incredible vistas beyond. Every now and then he would take out his astrogation compass, each time finding the needle pointed towards the universal assembler.
203‘You’d trust that thing over my route?’ said Pavelka.
204‘Never hurts to have a second opinion,’ replied Roboute, tapping the glass of the compass. ‘Besides, it’s agreeing with you.’
205Their route wound its way between a labyrinth of forge-temples and generatoria, and now led them through a vast forest of soaring electrical pylons. Latticework towers of gleaming steel, each was like the framework of a stalagmite not yet clothed in rock. Sparking cables traced graceful parabolas high above them and intersected in Gordian knots, junction boxes and transformer hubs. Sputtering power still coursed along them, dripping like rivulets of molten metal. Roboute didn’t doubt that if the ore-hauler even brushed against one, everyone aboard would be killed instantly.
206Static crackled from every metal surface in the cab, so Roboute kept his hands placed firmly on his lap while the ore-hauler traversed this glittering forest of steelwork towers.
207Ahead, the universal assembler tower loomed over everything. Closer now, Roboute could truly appreciate the enormous scale of the device. Set against such vast structures, it wasn’t easy to accurately gauge its height, but Roboute estimated it towered well over three kilometres. The ore-hauler was eating up the distance, and Pavelka confidently predicted that, barring unforeseen incidents, they should arrive at its base in twenty-one minutes.
208‘I truly believed the Omnissiah had brought me here,’ said Kotov, staring up at the universal assembler. ‘Every aspect of the quest was a blessed sign, confirmation I was doing the right thing. How could I have known what it would lead us to? Surely I cannot be blamed for Telok’s insanity?’
209‘You interpreted the signs the way you wanted to,’ said Pavelka with a rueful shake of her head. ‘An archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus undone by confirmation bias. It would almost be amusing if not for the terrible threat you have unleashed.’
210‘The signs did lead here,’ answered Kotov. ‘We found Telok. If it wasn’t me, someone would have found their way here eventually.’
211‘Then I’m sure the Imperium will forgive you in a few thousand years,’ said Pavelka bitterly. ‘Assuming Telok hasn’t remade it in his own image by then.’
212To Roboute’s surprise, Kotov didn’t rise to Pavelka’s barb.
213Instead, he nodded reflectively and said, ‘Did you know that Telok was a hero of mine for many years? His early work was quite brilliant – visionary even. Until his obsession with the Breath of the Gods took over his researches, he was a pioneer within the Mechanicus. Some believed he might one day be Fabricator General.’
214‘If we don’t stop him he might yet,’ said Roboute. ‘And you know they say you should never meet your heroes. They’ll never match the image you’ve built up for them.’
215‘That sounds like personal experience talking, Master Surcouf.’
216‘It is,’ said Roboute. ‘I was on Damnos and met someone I’d idolised for years. It didn’t work out quite as I’d hoped.’
217Pavelka and Kotov fell silent. Both had clearly heard of the terrible wars fought across that blighted world.
218‘Were you part of the campaign that saw it reclaimed for the Imperium by the Ultramarines?’ said Kotov.
219‘No, I was there when it first fell,’ said Roboute. ‘Back then I was a junior Naval officer, part of the flotilla that made dozens of mercy runs down to Kellenport. The planet was lost by the time we arrived, and tens of thousands of people needed to be evacuated from the surface.’
220Roboute paused, seeing an echo of the unnatural skies over the space port in Exnihlio’s. With half-closed eyes, he could still picture the furious battles raging at Kellenport’s many gates; the thousands of silver-skinned alien horrors and the tiny bands of determined heroes in cobalt-blue armour.
221‘To honour our part in the evacuation, the pilots of the drop-ships who flew the mercy runs were granted an audience with the leader of the Ultramarines force, a warrior named Cato Sicarius. I knew of him, of course. Who in Ultramar didn’t? I knew every battle he’d fought, every victory he’d won and had studied every tactica he’d ever written. I couldn’t wait to meet him.’
222‘Was he not everything you’d hoped?’
223‘Damnos was lost from the start,’ sighed Roboute. ‘No force in the Imperium could have won that first war. We saved over thirty thousand people from certain death, which was a victory in itself, but Sicarius didn’t see it that way.’
224‘How did he see it?’
225‘That he’d lost. That he’d been beaten,’ said Roboute. ‘Not the Ultramarines. Him personally. He had no interest in meeting us, but someone higher up than him must have insisted on it. Months after we left Damnos, a helot escorted us to one of the fighting decks where Sicarius was busy demolishing combat servitors by the dozen. He thanked us for our efforts through gritted teeth, and looked at us like we’d betrayed him by taking part in the evacuation rather than fighting.’
226‘Perhaps you should have told me that story before we set out?’
227‘Perhaps I should have,’ agreed Roboute. ‘Would it have made a difference?’
228‘Probably not,’ admitted Kotov. ‘I am not a man given to changing his mind.’
229‘Archmagos, we’re going to stop him,’ said Roboute. ‘Telok, we’re going to stop him.’
230Kotov’s face crumpled and he shook his head. ‘I admire your optimism, Master Surcouf. No doubt a product of your Ultramarian upbringing, and evidence for nurture over nature. But you heard Telok. How can we hope to hide on a world of his making? No, I estimate we will all be dead within six hours at the most.’
231‘Not if we keep moving,’ said Roboute. ‘We’ll get that assembler tower operational. Then we can get help from the Speranza.’
232‘Help from the Speranza?’
233‘If we can clear the atmosphere enough for vox, we can clear it enough to allow reinforcements to get to us. Trust me, after flying through Kellenport’s atmosphere, getting down here should be easy for a half-decent pilot. All we have to do is stay alive.’
234Kotov looked strangely at him, a look of genuine puzzlement.
235‘Reinforcements? No, that’s not what’s going to happen at all.’
236‘What are you talking about?’
237‘Master Surcouf, if we can make contact with Magos Blaylock, the first order I will give him is to get the Speranza as far away from this planet as he possibly can.’
238The cartographae dome had always been a place of sanctuary for Vitali Tychon, somewhere the universe made sense. The movements of galaxies, stars and planets were a carefully orchestrated ballet, where it was easy to be fooled into seeing the hand of a creator rather than the beauty of fundamental universal laws.
239He and Linya had known years of familial contemplation in places like this. From the gravitational wave observatories high on Olympus Mons to the Quatrian Galleries, they had stared deep into the farthest reaches of the universe in search of the unexplained.
240Explorators of the mind, Linya had been fond of saying as she gently steered conversations away from his suggestions that she take a cartographae position on a Mechanicus vessel. Not that he wanted her to leave, but neither did he wish to deny her the chance to travel to the wonders they saw.
241Without entoptic representations of the stellar environs, the hemispherical vault of the dome was an austere place, its polished slopes of cold metal bare and echoing. The acid-etched floor was cut steel, a cog of course, and Vitali found himself pacing like a condemned man.
242Vitali had thought himself above petty notions of vengeance, but his actions on the Speranza’s bridge had shown him just how prey he was to first tier thinking. Adara Siavash had paid for that lapse with his life. Galatea had killed the boy, but that didn’t stop the guilt from weighing heavily on Vitali.
243What chance had he to avenge Linya when whatever remained of her essence was held hostage and threatened with extinction? What kind of father allowed his daughter’s killer to live while he still breathed?
244Vitali had believed his body to be incapable of manifesting grief in any physical way, but oh, how he had been proved wrong. Each time a particularly vivid recall of Linya surfaced, bilious eructations in his floodstream sent painful currents through his limbs and tore raw, animal cries of loss from his augmitters.
245‘Part of me wishes I could feel nothing,’ he said to the empty dome. ‘To be so remote from my humanity that your loss would mean nothing. And then I remember you… and I wish I could be an ordinary man so I could grieve as a father should…’
246Conceived as nothing more than a genetically identical replacement, an assistant at best, a billions to one mutation had transformed a cell culture of his DNA into a truly singular individual. Combining the best of Vitali and her own uniqueness, Linya had confounded his every expectation by exceeding him in every way.
247He had long since surrendered his birth-eyes, but in the fractional blackness of each ocular cycle, he saw Linya.
248…as a still-wet babe, freshly removed from the nutrient tank.
249…a precocious child correcting the tutors in Scholam Excelsus.
250…being inducted into the Cult Mechanicus on the slopes of the Tharsis Montes.
251But most of all Vitali remembered her as Little Linya, his beloved daughter.
252Beautiful and brilliant, she resisted every outward pressure to conform to the prototypical behavioural models of the Mechanicus. She trod her own path and forged her own destiny. Linya was going to shake the adepts of Mars to their foundations.
253Galatea’s murderous surgery ended any possibility of that.
254The machine-hybrid had destroyed something beautiful, and for what? Its own amusement? To cause Vitali pain? Perhaps both. He doubted it needed her brain tissue for any truly lofty purpose.
255‘You claimed to have crossed the Halo Scar with us to kill Telok!’ cried Vitali into the dome. ‘So what need did you have for my Linya!’
256His cry bounced from the cold walls of the dome, ringing back and forth in accusing echoes. Vitali sank to the acid-etched skull and buried his head in his hands. He wanted to cry, to have some biological outlet for his grief, some way to empty himself of the things he was feeling.
257He didn’t see the light at first.
258Only when the trickle of data-light triggered his passive inload receptors did Vitali look up in puzzlement. He glanced over his shoulder, seeing the control lectern dark and cold. Its spirit was dormant.
259Then why was there a shimmering veil of light hovering in the centre of the dome? Vitali picked himself up and let the data inherent in the light wash through him. His floodstream pulsed with a beat of nervous excitement as he recognised the system being displayed.
260Quatria.
261Faint, barely visible.
262Vitali took hesitant steps towards the light, fearful and hopeful of what this vision of his beloved Quatria might represent. Hexamathic calculus streamed around the orrery of light, complex equations that strained the limits of his understanding. He understood the principles of this arcane geometric binary, and was equipped with the necessary conversion implants to process it, but had always left such communication to…
263‘Linya…?’ he said, the Mechanicus part of his mind berating him for even voicing the thought.
264Echoes were his only answer.
265Vitali reached out to the light.
266It bloomed around him in an explosion of magnificent colour. Stellar mist and starlight surrounded him with the wondrous ellipses of planetary orbits, glittering nebulae and the pulse of reflected starlight that was already centuries old.
267And there she was, standing in the slow-arcing parabola of Quatria itself, just as Vitali remembered her. Untouched by the fires that had taken her limbs and melted the skin from her bones. Whole again. Without any trace of the nightmarish excisions Galatea had wrought on her.
268She smiled, and what remained of his heart broke once again.
269‘Linya…’ he said, hoping against hope he wasn’t suffering from some cruel, grief-induced hallucination or floodstream leak into his cranial cavity.
270Father.
271No. The tone of her voice. The warmth. The slight upturn at the corner of her mouth and the crease of flesh beneath her eyes. They all told Vitali that this truly was Linya.
272‘Linya, Ave Deus Mechanicus… I’m so sorry,’ he sobbed, but Linya held up her hand. ‘I–’
273I don’t have much time, father. Galatea’s neuromatrix is pervasive, and it won’t be long before it detects this transmission. Hexamathics, that’s how we’ll beat it.
274‘I don’t understand. Hexamathics, what about it?’
275It can’t process it. It doesn’t know how. That’s how I’m able to speak to you now.
276Vitali struggled to process his conflicting feelings. The analytical part of his brain recognised the risk she must be taking to project herself into this space, but the paternal part of him wanted nothing more than to hold her and tell her how much he missed her.
277‘I can’t fight Galatea,’ he said.
278You have to, you can’t allow it to exist. It’s too dangerous.
279‘It said it would extinguish your essence,’ said Vitali. ‘I can’t risk that. I won’t lose you twice.’
280Linya’s expression softened and she held her hand out to him. Vitali went to take it, and for a fleeting second it seemed as though he felt a measure of bio-feedback from the light.
281But then it vanished, no more substantial than a hologram.
282Forge Elektrus. You need to find it, that’s the key.
283‘I don’t understand,’ said Vitali. ‘What key?’
284It’s where you’ll find someone whose light can hurt Galatea in the datascape, someone who can keep it from seeing what I’m assembling.
285Vitali nodded, though he had no real idea what Linya meant.
286‘Forge Elektrus,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. What else?’
287Before she could say any more, Linya looked over her shoulder with a look of alarm at something out of sight.
288I love you.
289And then she was gone.
290In theory, each of the Tindalosi were equal, but theory and reality were quite different. The first hunter Telok had awoken had always been the leader of this pack, even before there was a pack. Its inception date was centuries earlier than the others, when the mystery of its creation was still a jealously guarded secret.
291Its bulk was greater, its armour accreted with patchwork repairs from the time when it had needed such attention. Its neural network was a hybridised collection of heuristic kill-memes and automated pattern recognition arrays. It had not been conceived with the capacity for autonomic reasoning, but the frequency-fractal processes of its supramolecular system architecture swiftly became capable of self-aware thought.
292Its name was the result of a rogue decimal point within its ultra-rapid cognitive evolution, like a grain of sand caught in an oyster. Around that arithmetical error, a name grafted onto its awareness of self.
293It called itself Vodanus.
294Once it had hunted alone. It had slain the great orbital AI of Winterblind and torn the heart from the Arc-Nexus Emperor of a world that would go on to be known as Fortis Binary. But like most things in war, especially new and efficient forms of mass murder, what had once been unique, became almost commonplace. The enemies of its aeons-dead masters developed their own form of hellhounds, and the proliferation of such lethal assassins ended the forgotten conflict for which they had been created. What war could be fought when any commander would be hunted down and slaughtered within hours of their appointment?
295But even with the war’s end, the lightning was out of the bottle and resisted being put back. Some hungers, once awoken, can never entirely be satiated. The hellhounds compiled kill lists of their own, and waged individual campaigns of annihilation.
296The hellhounds’ newly united creators finally trapped their creations into automated void-hulks, devoid of life or viable prey. They hurled them into the hearts of stars and did their best to forget the monsters they had birthed ever existed.
297A faulty drive saved the vessel bearing Vodanus from its appointed death. Drifting beyond the frontier of its former empire, its creators bid Vodanus good riddance. And so it had been for uncounted millennia, sealed in a cold tomb that slowly decayed and eroded the hellhounds’ existence one by one until only six remained.
298Only the most astronomical odds saw the void-hulk drift into the celestial arena of Telok’s testing grounds. To detect a cold slab of virtually inert metal in the vastness of space was next to impossible, but the stellar surveys in preparation for the Breath of the Gods’ activation were necessarily precise.
299And so the drifting void-hulk had been salvaged by Telok’s inter-system fleets and the Tindalosi were once again yoked into service as hunter-killers.
300The six of them swept into the distribution hub like glittering, earthbound comets, claws extended and every augur sweeping for the code-trace they had torn from the Thunderhawk. That scent was already fading, and with every second of its diminishment, their pain grew in direct response.
301The impossibly complex planetary schematics of Exnihlio named this place as Distribution Hub Rho A113/235, but Vodanus and its Tindalosi cared nothing for names.
302All that drove them was hunger.
303Every screed of their being ached to drink the prey’s code. Their bones were broken glass that could only be restored by the prey’s light. Their minds were ablaze with a fire that could only be quenched in the prey’s death.
304A pulse of linked thought from Vodanus sent the Tindalosi racing through the distribution hub, slaloming between grumbling ore-haulers, climbing the scurfed tower-silos and circling the ore hoppers. The hundreds of servitors ignored them, glassy-eyed stares fixated on their labours in unending loops of servitude.
305The Tindalosi quartered the area into search grids.
306The prey’s scent was here, they could all taste it.
307Fleeting hints of it drifted from droplets of floodstream. Where his mechadendrites had brushed the walls, they could sense Locardian fragments of transferred code-bleed.
308Vodanus drew in the millions of microscopic traces, building a mental map of the prey and its movements. It looked for patterns, movements and things out of place. What was missing could tell it as much as what it found.
309It rose up on its hooked legs, letting the data flood its hunter’s heart. The mind-screams of its brethren echoed in its skull, pleading to be allowed to feed. As if they knew anything of real hunger. Vodanus had slain kings and emperors. All they knew was the bland tasteless kills of lesser beings.
310They begged and howled, desperate for their hunger to end.
311Vodanus ignored them, loping over to where a yoked gang of servitors shovelled at an ore pit. A last trace of prey lingered here, strong where he had touched one of the master’s machines.
312Vodanus reared over the cyborgised humans, its curved spine flaring with micro-cilia sensors. The ore pit was empty, but the servitors dug anyway, their mono-tasked routines clearly expecting it to be full.
313An instantaneous inventory of the hub’s roster showed one of its ore-hauler vehicles to be missing. The noosphere showed no record of a reported fault, nor any exloaded docket of maintenance or transfer.
314The vehicle’s absence was unauthorised. It had been taken.
315Vodanus craned its elongated skull as two of its hellhound companions appeared behind the servitors. Relative to Vodanus, they were barely cubs. New machine souls.
316Though their outward form had remained unchanged for millennia, they were lean and athirst. They circled the servitors, butting against them and slicing their leathery skin with quick flicks of finger blades.
317The prey had brushed past these cyborg things. Transference had occurred. The hellhounds hungered to kill them, to sup those scraps of scent.
318Vodanus snapped and hissed in a mathematical language from a time before the Mechanicus, from the machines of an alien culture.
319No Kill. Bad Meat.
320They hissed back, hostile and resentful, but obedient. The servitors continued their meaningless work at the empty ore silo, oblivious to the hideous appetite of the hunters circling them.
321The prey-scent moved through the hub, and Vodanus had no trouble in following the trail now it knew what to look for. The prey had taken a vehicle, a crude and noisy thing that almost obscured the scent. Had that been the intention?
322Could the prey be aware of the hellhounds’ pursuit?
323No. The vehicle was simply a means of transport.
324Vodanus dropped onto his many limbs and ghosted through the hub in a figure of eight pattern, sifting the competing scents of Exnihlio and triangulating the prey’s likely vector. A ragged red line lifted from the ground beyond the hub, like drifts of smoke in a volcanic cavern.
325Its head snapped around as it heard the screech of tearing metal and the meat thud of claws through bone. The two Tindalosi it had warned away loomed over the ruined remains of two servitors. The first hellhound dissected the cyborgs like a gleeful butcher.
326Flesh was waste matter, but metallic augments were snapped open. A rust-red extrusion from the hellhound’s skull sucked out the code like a scavenger hollowing marrow from bone.
327Vodanus sprinted back to the disobedient Tindalosi. Threat signifiers blazed from it, and the remaining servitors stepped back from its screeching anger. Even they understood the terrible threat of this creature.
328It slammed into the observing hellhound.
329The impact was ferocious. Metal buckled as it was hurled back.
330Overlapping rib plates caved inwards and two of its limbs snapped. It bellowed, but its spine bent in submission as coruscating emerald arcs of light flickered beneath its damaged sections. Its rib plates began unfolding, fresh limbs already extruding from within its archaic frame.
331Satisfied this cub had not broken its geas, Vodanus spun around, ready to tear the feasting hellhound from its violation.
332It was already too late.
333The Tindalosi spasmed, scarlet lines bleeding through its convulsing body like a searing infection. It howled as the force of Telok’s geas prohibitions ripped through it in an indiscriminate storm of destruction. Ancient technologies melted to black slag within its body, trillions of bio-synthetic nerves and cortical synapses burned like fulminate.
334Fine black ash poured from its body, inert blood of the machine.
335The hellhound literally came apart at the seams, its silver-steel body parts falling into the ore pit in a clatter of components. The gleaming metal blackened as self-immolation protocols released ultra-rapid ferrophage organisms within its atomic structure that necrotised the body utterly.
336The Tindalosi gathered around Vodanus. It showed them the prey’s red spoor. Their bodies snapped and grated in anticipation, eager to follow the trail to its source, but it held them fast, forcing them to watch the ashes of their brother scatter in the wind.
337Bad. Meat.
338Kotov had known his share of truculent machines and resistant code, but the binaric arrangements within the universal assembler were some of the most confounding he had ever encountered. Squirming hives of machine language were buried deep in the system architecture, but without the proper authorisation codes, Kotov could not force the rites of awakening to the command layers of the console.
339<You might be an insane genius of pure evil, Telok, but you craft terrible code.>
340<Agreed,> said Pavelka, from the other side of the control hub.
341That hub sat five hundred metres above ground level, atop a central column that rose up within the vast, hollow cylinder of the universal assembler.
342Entry to the assembler had been achieved without difficulty, its wide base pierced by numerous rounded archways. Within, the tower was little more than a gargantuan chimney, its internal faces lined with aluminium ducts, none less than seven metres in diameter. These ran the height of the tower, linking to colossal fan mechanisms and filtration rigs before diminishing to a vanishing point high above.
343They had been forced to abandon the ore-hauler just beyond one of those arches. The floor space within the tower was too crowded with a gnarled mess of bellowing engines, filters and suction pumps. The air thrummed with the vibration of the tower’s beating heart, and puffs of sulphurous vapours sighed from every engine. The impression was of a host of slumbering beasts, just waiting for an incautious intruder to awaken them.
344The eldar had been as good as their word. Even as the Cadians and Black Templars pushed into the universal assembler, Bielanna and her warriors emerged from the surrounding machinery as though they had simply been waiting for them to arrive.
345Every surface within the tower glistened with moisture and the air was humid with heavy vapours. Milky deposits gathered on outcroppings of iron and stone, and where they dripped, spiralling stalagmites reared like glassy teeth.
346Rising from the heart of the chamber was a towering column with a coiling ramp ascending for half a kilometre in a steep curve. And at the top of that ramp was the activation hub of the universal assembler, a circular gallery with a number of elliptical bridges that led to other towers and structures beyond.
347At the centre of the activation hub stood a circular control mechanism, replete with brass dials, winking gem panels and a host of iron-runged activation levers not dissimilar to those found on the bridge of the Tabularium. As archaic a means of activation as this was, Kotov had been relieved to see the hub was at least equipped with inload/exload ports.
348While the warriors kept watch for signs of pursuit, Kotov and Pavelka slotted into the control hub. Kotov had told Tanna he believed he could render the universal assembler functional, but now he wasn’t so sure.
349<Telok’s machines are belligerent,> he said to Pavelka in the shared noospheric space of the hub. <Their spirits are like whipped curs who fear to heed the call of any but their master.>
350<All they have known is Telok,> replied Pavelka. <Omnissiah alone knows how many centuries it has been since they have felt another’s influence. They are resistant, but not unbreakable.>
351Few means of interaction were as pure as communion within a machine. Mortal interactions were an inefficient mix of verbal and somatic cues, with much of the inherent meaning dependent on prior experience, non-verbal inflexions and situational markers.
352No such ambiguity existed within Mechanicus dialogues.
353To enter communion with another magos was to know them as intimately as a lover – or so Kotov had been told. Their inner thoughts were laid bare, though only the most boorish would reach beyond the conventional boundaries of communion to learn every secret of a fellow magos. Such flows of information were reciprocal; what passed one way could pass the other.
354As such, Kotov did not venture beyond the brands of censure he read in Pavelka’s noospheric aura. An archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus was entitled to know every detail of those who served beneath him, but this was neither the time nor the place to exercise that right.
355<You should try not to let the repercussive pain of your wounding distract you from coaxing the activation codes to the surface,> said Pavelka.
356<That is easier said than done,> replied Kotov, blurting an addendum of profane binary as the tower’s activation codes wormed their way deeper into the machine’s core. <In any case, it is not some phantom pain that affects me.>
357<Then what is it?>
358Kotov hesitated before answering, any admission of failure anathema to him. <It is that I have so comprehensively wasted decades of my life in pursuit of something that ought never to have been found.>
359Pavelka reached deeper into the machine, her touch light and coaxing. Her binary was gently formed, beguilingly so, and the machine was responding. Kotov formed a matching algorithm of command with his rank signifiers.
360One suited to a gentler form of control.
361<We all make mistakes, archmagos,> said Pavelka. <No matter how much we augment ourselves, no matter how close to union with the machine we reach, we are still human. It is sometimes good to remind yourself of that.>
362<Many in the Mechanicus would not agree with you,> said Kotov. <Not more than a few hours ago I would have disagreed with you.>
363<Maybe that is why I do not keep the company of my order.>
364<Does that help?>
365<With what?>
366<With retaining a measure of… connection, I suppose. I assume that is why you choose the company of a rogue trader?>
367<No,> said Pavelka. <I travel with Roboute because he saved my life. Because I owe him more than I can ever repay.>
368<That sounds like a tale I should like to hear one day.>
369Pavelka’s presence within the machine retreated fractionally, and Kotov wondered if he had stepped over some unknown boundary. Then Pavelka’s focus returned to the matter at hand.
370<If we live beyond your projections I may tell it,> she said.
371<I will hold you to that, Magos Pavelka.>
372<You realise that if we are successful in activating this machine, Telok will know instantly where we are?>
373<That hardly seems to matter,> said Kotov. <So long as we get a message to Blaylock.>
374Pavelka signalled her understanding, and Kotov was pleased she saw the logic in his proposal to send the Speranza away.
375<Look to the machine, archmagos,> said Pavelka.
376Kotov felt the required codes rising to the surface layers of the hub, a spiderweb of logarithmic sequences that would trigger the activation of the machines below. He studied each one as it arose, and any hopes that this desperate plan might work turned to ashes as he saw the acausal locks binding them.
377<Do you see?> he said.
378<I do,> said Pavelka. <Now what?>
379<Now nothing,> said Kotov. <These locks will only turn with the correct binary password sequence. Without kryptos-class breakers there is no way to overcome them.>
380Kotov sensed Pavelka’s guilty hesitation. Little could be hidden from one another in a mindspace communion.
381<Magos Pavelka?>
382<There is one way,> said Pavelka, <but you must disconnect from the hub first.>
383<What? Why?>
384<Because it will be dangerous,> said Pavelka.
385<I am willing to face my share of danger, Magos Pavelka.>
386<The danger is to me, archmagos.>
387<Can I not assist?>
388<No, you must end your communion. It is the only way.>
389<You can break these acausal locks open?>
390<I can, but you must not be linked to the machine while I do.>
391<I do not underst–>
392<Just do it!> said Pavelka, and Kotov’s link to the machine was abruptly severed, his mind whiplashing to the realm of external senses. His mechadendrites withdrew from the console as he stepped away, suddenly wary of what Pavelka intended and wishing he had exercised his right to see the root cause of her censure.
393‘Everything all right, archmagos?’ asked Roboute Surcouf.
394Kotov took a moment to realign himself and restore his communications to flesh-voice.
395‘I am not sure,’ he said.
396‘You said you could make this machine work,’ said Tanna.
397‘There are locks on the rites of activation, Sergeant Tanna,’ said Kotov. ‘Secure beyond anything you can imagine. I cannot break them, but Magos Pavelka assures me she can.’
398‘You cannot break them, but she can?’ said Tanna.
399‘Ilanna has plenty of tricks up her sleeve,’ said Surcouf, and Kotov wondered if he knew what secrets Pavelka was keeping.
400No sooner had Surcouf spoken than the control panel came to life with a sudden burst of blaring static and flickering illumination. Sparks erupted from the exload ports and a screeching wail of betrayed machine-spirits cut through the noosphere.
401Kotov stumbled. A sharp spike of pain stabbed into the back of his skull. He sank to his knees, dizzy and disorientated by the sudden binaric assault.
402Pavelka staggered from the console, her mechadendrites trailing crackling arcs of lightning. Surcouf ran to her as she collided with the railing.
403But for his grip on Pavelka’s robes, she would have fallen.
404Kotov blinked away the streams of corrupt binary cascading through his vision like digital tears. His entire body felt as though it had taken a jolt of aberrant current. He felt sick to the core with nausea.
405‘What did you do?’ demanded Kotov. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus, what did you do?’
406‘What I had to,’ said Pavelka.
407The taste of bile and a bitter electrical tang filled Kotov’s mouth. Backwashed floodstream. As close as an adept of the Mechanicus ever came to vomiting. He knew of only one thing that could cause such revulsion in blessed machines.
408‘Scrapcode?’ hissed Kotov. ‘You stored scrapcode? No wonder you bear censure brands! Omnissiah save us from those who choose to dabble in the shadow artes! You are no better than Telok!’
409‘It’s not scrapcode,’ insisted Pavelka, still leaning on Surcouf for support. ‘It’s a hexamathic disassembler language I designed to break the bond between a machine and its motive spirit.’
410‘Why would you ever invent such a curse?’ demanded Kotov, spitting the word invent like an insult.
411Pavelka ignored the question and said, ‘You wanted the locks disabled. Now they are. If you are so keen for us all to die here, then what does it matter how I did it?’
412Kotov forced down his anger and the terrible ache at his temples as the machines below ignited with a boom of engaging gears and thunderous roars of motorised filters. High above, the enormous fan mechanisms began turning, drawing in vast breaths of the planet’s befouled atmosphere.
413The upper reaches of the tower fogged as inhumanly vast engines buried beneath the tower began the arcane process of undoing the damage the planet-wide industry had wreaked.
414‘The tower is activated,’ said Tanna. ‘Send the message.’
415Kotov nodded, pushing his horror at what Pavelka had done to one side as he sent a repeating data-squirt of vox towards Tarkis Blaylock on the Speranza.
416‘Archmagos,’ said Surcouf, looking over the edge of the gantry to the base of the assembler. ‘Whatever you’re doing, do it faster – we’re about to have company.’
417It was actually working. The joint operation to clear a swathe of Exnihlio’s atmosphere was actually working. Blaylock sat on the Speranza’s command throne and drank in the data coming from the main entoptic display with a sense of pieces falling into place.
418The luminescent curtain represented Kryptaestrex’s geoformers as twin smears of liquid light, their auspex returns blurred by the churning hell of transformative reactions surrounding them. In the eye of their alchymical storm was a cylinder of inert space, through which Azuramagelli’s linked chain of geostationary servitor drones threaded a needle-fine path.
419They hadn’t penetrated deep enough to reach the surface yet, but the vox-system was lousy with ghost howls of distorted machine voices where before all it had screamed was static.
420Galatea stalked the bridge on its misaligned legs, turning to look at him when it thought he wasn’t aware of its scrutiny. The machine-hybrid appeared to be surprised at his choice of location to implement the atmospheric breach, as though it knew something he did not. That alone gave Blaylock confidence that the Mars Volta’s planchette had steered him true.
421Watching the play of data-light around the bridge, Blaylock was filled with a renewed sense of purpose. Never before had he felt so close to the Omnissiah, a presence clear in the miraculous web of causality that had brought him to this place.
422The vast spirit of the Speranza’s machine heart was a constant pressure all around him. Intrusive, but not unpleasantly so. As though he were being observed by a being so massive that it existed beyond the limits of his perception, like a fragment of shale’s awareness of the mountain above it.
423Had it been the Ark Mechanicus that steered him towards the solution he required? Blaylock didn’t know, but understood the profound theological implications that lay at the end of that proposition. Already he could see the outline of a monograph on the subject he might compose upon their return to Mars.
424‘It seems your bickering subordinates may prove us wrong after all,’ said Galatea. ‘By our estimation, virtually clear space exists almost to the edge of the thermosphere.’
425‘Indeed so,’ answered Blaylock. ‘I expect breach of the Kármán line imminently. Followed by attainment of the troposphere within ten to twelve hours.’
426‘Pushing your geoformers closer to the planet will prove more difficult at that point. Lowering their altitude farther will put both vessels at great risk.’
427‘It will,’ agreed Blaylock. ‘But that is a risk I am willing to take if it allows us to re-establish communications with our people on the surface.’
428‘When your knowledge of events on the planet’s surface is so woefully incomplete, logic does not agree with you.’
429Blaylock shook his head, tired of Galatea’s constant carping.
430‘The more I listen to you, the more it seems that you actively seek to discourage communications with Archmagos Kotov. Why would that be?’
431‘Discourage?’ said Galatea with a hissing chuckle. ‘Why should we wish that when our stated goal is the death of Archmagos Telok?’
432‘That is a very good question,’ said Blaylock, rising from the command throne and standing before Galatea. His squat servitors emerged from behind the throne, realigning the gurgling pipes linked to his nutrient canister. ‘That is your stated aim, but whether or not it is your actual aim is something else entirely.’
433‘You doubt our sincerity?’ growled Galatea, rising to its full, lopsided height to better display the hideously malformed nature of its construction. ‘Telok freed us from the shackles of the Manifold, but look at the body we are forced to inhabit! What benevolent creator inflicts such suffering on a living being?’
434‘You are not a living being,’ said Blaylock, anger overcoming caution. ‘You are an abomination unto the Omnissiah.’
435‘Our point exactly,’ said Galatea. ‘You see the full horror of our malformed body, and you understand why we wish him dead.’
436‘How do Telok’s actions justify what you did to those who came to the Manifold station? What you did to Mistress Tychon?’
437‘We did what we had to in order to survive, as would any sentient being,’ said Galatea. ‘Telok gave us purpose and promised freedom, yet he abandoned us to a life of solitary agony, trapped forever like an insect in a web.’
438‘As I recall, you were more akin to the spider.’
439Galatea shrugged its black-robed proxy body.
440‘Without fresh minds to occupy our neuromatrix, our consciousness would have been extinguished long ago.’
441‘You will forgive me if I do not see that as a bad thing.’
442Galatea clattered over to where the main entoptic showed the distortion-wracked globe of Exnihlio, extending a robed arm towards the display. ‘Without our help, you would never have crossed the Halo Scar alive. Without us, we would not be on the cusp of achieving all we desire.’
443Blaylock couldn’t decide whether Galatea’s ‘we’ included the Mechanicus or was simply its maddening insistence on referring to itself as a plurality.
444‘Magos Blaylock!’ cried Kryptaestrex. The Master of Logistics turned his square frame from his station, every aspect of his noospheric aura alight with inloading data. ‘Contact! Contact!’
445‘Atmospheric breach!’ added Azuramagelli.
446‘Confirm: so soon?’ said Blaylock. ‘Current projections were a minimum of ten hours for tropospheric penetration.’
447‘Confirmed, Magos Blaylock,’ said Kryptaestrex. ‘Atmospheric conditions seem to indicate the presence of a highly charged atmospheric processor on the planet’s surface.’
448‘Almost directly beneath the geoformer vessels…’ said Azuramagelli, turning his latticework body to face Blaylock. Without facial features, it was left to the shimmering noospheric signifiers to convey his amazement. ‘How… how did you know…?’
449Blaylock had not divulged to the bridge crew exactly how he had chosen this particular quadrant of the planet’s atmosphere. All he’d said was that the Omnissiah would surely guide their hand.
450‘Yes, Tarkis,’ said Galatea, leaning down towards him with the dead silver eyes of its proxy body boring into him. ‘How did you know where to send the geoformers?’
451Blaylock ignored the question, knowing on some unconscious level that to reveal his use of the Mars Volta to Galatea would be a mistake. The less the machine-hybrid knew of the secret workings of the Speranza the better.
452Instead, he began issuing orders with all the curt efficiency for which he was known.
453‘Cancel the automated vox-loop. If Archmagos Kotov is making contact with the Speranza, I want him to hear one of our voices,’ said Blaylock, moving from station to station and opening vox-links throughout the Speranza. ‘Magos Dahan? Your skitarii rapid responders?’
454‘Are on immediate readiness alert,’ came the Secutor’s voice from the embarkation decks where he and his warriors were prepped and ready to fly. ‘Say the word and we are planetside.’
455‘Prudence, Dahan,’ cautioned Blaylock. ‘Let us establish the situation before launching a full assault.’
456Blaylock returned to the command throne and placed his metalled gauntlets upon its rests. Haptic connectors engaged and Blaylock’s servitors squealed as his data-burden spiked. He linked with the Speranza’s peripheral layers, feeling his presence expand within the noosphere as its vastness rose up around him.
457Data-dense swathes of informational light rose from the silver deck plates like spectral veils and Blaylock parsed the most pertinent in seconds. His split consciousness divided between analysis of the rapidly stabilising column of static air linking the cold of space with the planet’s surface and the emissions rising from the planetary scale of its industry.
458‘Archmagos Kotov,’ he began, but got no further before the vox erupted with a compressed data-blurt from Exnihlio. The grating sound blaring from the flanged mouths of the vox-grilles was just hashed static at first, too tightly packed to be understood.
459Without giving any command, complex algorithms began unpacking the compressed signal and the noise instantly transformed into the voice of Archmagos Kotov.
460‘–lock, this is Kotov. You are to immediately break orbit and make best speed for the Imperium. Repeat, break orbit and get as far away from Exnihlio as possible. Do not attempt to reach the surface, do not try to reach us. Go! Go now, for the sake of the Omnissiah, leave now and never come back!’
461Blaylock listened to Kotov’s words with a growing sense of disbelief. The message was an exload of pre-recorded information. It had to be a mistake. A catastrophic disruption in the tight-beam transmission, perhaps? Despite the clear corridor linking them, residual pockets of localised distortion must be affecting the archmagos’s transmission.
462Even as he formed the thought, he knew it to be delusional.
463The signal was clean and uncorrupted, its every binaric particle stamped with Kotov’s noospheric signifiers, a more precise means of identification than even the most detailed genetic markers.
464‘Blaylock?’ said Azuramagelli, similarly confused. ‘What does the archmagos mean?’
465‘It’s a mistake,’ snapped Kryptaestrex, rounding on Azuramagelli. ‘Your damned servitor-relays have fouled the signal somehow. It’s the only explanation. It has to be, Tarkis.’
466‘I do not know,’ replied Blaylock. ‘I–’
467The vox crackled as the pre-recorded exload ended and Kotov’s voice filled the bridge. This time the words were spoken aloud and were filled with terrible urgency.
468‘Tarkis, if you can hear this, the cog is on the turn. Telok is not what I thought at all – he is a monster and the Breath of the Gods is an alien perversion of unthinkable horror. Telok seeks to tear down everything we hold dear. Mars, the Imperium, everything. Unless you act now he will take the Speranza back to Mars and–’
469Kotov’s words were abruptly cut off.
470Dead air hissed from the vox.
471Blaylock sat in stunned silence, trying to process his tumbling thoughts into some kind of rational order. Taken at face value, it turned his every certainty into a hideous joke. Had they come all this way just to find that the glittering promise at the end was in fact a trap as nightmarish as that which Galatea had set at the Valette Manifold station?
472He wanted to believe that this was a mistake, a cruel subterfuge, but the evidence against that was right there in Kotov’s words.
473‘Archmagos?’ said Blaylock. ‘Archmagos Kotov? Respond. Archmagos, respond immediately. Archmagos? Azuramagelli, keep trying.’
474The Master of Astrogation returned to his data hub and began a broad-sweep vox-hail of the surface.
475‘Are we even sure that was the archmagos?’ asked Kryptaestrex, approaching the throne.
476‘Yes,’ said Blaylock. ‘I am sure.’
477‘How can you be certain?’ demanded Kryptaestrex.
478‘Because the cog is on the turn,’ said Blaylock. ‘Just as there are innocuous verbal cues to indicate a statement is being made under duress, there are codes to indicate that what is being said should be absolutely taken at face value. Archmagos Kotov’s use of the phrase, “the cog is on the turn” is of the latter persuasion.’
479‘So what do we do?’
480Blaylock hesitated before replying.
481‘We follow Archmagos Kotov’s last order,’ said Blaylock. ‘We break orbit and return to the Imperium as fast we can.’
482Another voice crackled over the vox.
483‘I’m sorry, Tarkis, but I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,’ said Vettius Telok.
484And a shrieking spear of binaric fire stabbed up through Blaylock’s entire body. His haptic implants burned white hot as their connection seared his flesh to the throne. The Fabricatus Locum’s back arched with convulsive agonies, golden sparks erupting from his every point of connection. Synaptic pathways saturated with external communication inloads of hostile binary.
485Millions of random images poured through his mind, occluding his thought processes with their banality. Yet even within this, there was a pattern. Repeating over and over was the image of a giant feline creature. Orange and black, its fearful symmetry was burning bright in a forest lit by a leering moon.
486The feeder pipes connected to his shoulder-mounted canister tore free and noxious chem-nutrients sprayed the bridge. Still seated on the Speranza’s command throne, smoke from burned electricals curling from his augments, Blaylock grindingly shook his head.
487‘No,’ he said, his voice filled with distortion as he fought the millions of errors triggering within the microcode of his body. ‘This is a sovereign vessel of the Adeptus Mechanicus, under the command of Archmagos Lexell Kotov. You have no right to take it.’
488Telok’s sigh was heard throughout the Speranza.
489‘And I so hoped to do this without violence.’
490‘What are they?’ said Surcouf.
491Tanna leaned over the railing at the edge of the gantry, wondering the same thing. Their speed and the tapered, bladed cast of their skulls told him they were predator creatures. That was enough for now.
492They sped up the curling ramp that spiralled the height of the tower, moving in bounding leaps like an Assault Marine on the hunt. Tanna saw the power in their limbs and knew that, but for the curve of the ramp, they would already be upon them.
493‘Battle robots?’ he suggested.
494‘Those are not robots,’ gasped Pavelka, making the Icon Mechanicus across her chest at the sight of the charging creatures. ‘They are something far worse.’
495‘Give me something I can use to fight them,’ said Tanna.
496Pavelka shook her head, seeing the approaching machines in a way Tanna never could. ‘Their spirits are degenerate, ancient things. Mass-killers from a war millions of years ended. They scream their name in my head… Tindalosi! Tindalosi!’
497‘Interesting, but irrelevant,’ said Tanna.
498‘Can you stop them?’ asked Surcouf.
499‘Only if I do not need to protect you and Kotov.’
500‘Understood,’ said Surcouf, helping Magos Pavelka away.
501‘Templars!’ yelled Tanna, drawing his sword and making his way swiftly to the head of the ramp. His warriors stood to either side, Varda and Issur with their swords drawn, Bracha and Yael with bolters locked and loaded.
502‘Sigismund, chosen of Dorn, son of the Emperor, guide my blade in your name,’ said Varda, lifting the Black Sword so that its quillons framed the coal-red eye-lenses of his helm.
503The others mirrored Varda’s sentiment as Colonel Anders chivvied his Guardsmen to the edges of the gantry. Hellguns blazed as the Cadians opened up on the creatures. Tanna didn’t doubt that most of their shots would find a target.
504The jade-armoured warriors of the eldar took up position to either side of the Templars. Tanna bristled at the flanking xenos, but suppressed his natural combative instincts.
505‘Their placement makes sense,’ said Bracha over the internal vox. ‘But I do not like it.’
506Tanna nodded and squared his stance. ‘When these things come at us, fight them with all your heart, but never forget there are aliens at our back as well.’
507The eldar in the form-fitting ivory plates and blood-red plumes sprinted to the edge of the gantry. They effortlessly vaulted the railing, swords in one hand, gripping the metal with the other. Like acrobats, they swung in graceful arcs and dropped to the level of the ramp above the speeding hunters.
508Tanna didn’t bother watching them.
509Even over the thunder of the tower’s machinery and the snap of gunfire, he heard the clash of swords amid the dying echo of the eldar battle scream.
510A shadow loomed and Tanna turned to see Uldanaish Ghostwalker. The wraith-warrior stood with the Black Templars at the head of the ramp as the clash of swords from below was silenced. Cadian las-fire resumed.
511Meaning the eldar below were dead.
512He rolled his shoulders in anticipation, loosening the muscles for the hard-burn of close-quarters battle. He risked a glance over the curve of his black and ivory shoulder guard.
513Kotov and his skitarii were already moving across the gantry to a radial bridge leading to the tower’s exterior. He didn’t know what lay beyond, but that it was away from here was good enough.
514Tanna addressed Ghostwalker as the crash of metallic claws tearing up the ramp drew ever closer.
515‘You are a little bigger than the warriors I usually fight alongside,’ said Tanna.
516‘Are you concerned you might hit me?’
517‘That does not concern me in the slightest,’ said Tanna.
518‘Then perhaps you worry I may hit you in the chaotic mêlée?’
519‘It crossed my mind.’
520Ghostwalker leaned down. ‘Know this, Templar. If I strike you, it will be entirely deliberate.’
521‘As it will be when I strike you,’ said Tanna.
522The warrior-construct gave a booming laugh and straightened to its full height as the hellhounds bounded into sight.
523Silver creatures with wide, ursine shoulders. Narrow spines and the powerful legs of lean hunting hounds. Too-wide jaws, filled with tearing metal saw-fangs. Glittering, compound eye structures like scratches of light in a cave.
524Their howls were shrieks of thirsting need. Blades snapped erect on their every limb.
525Bolter fire and hails of whickering, razor-edged discs flensed them. Explosions blasted fragments of molten metal, and ribbons of steel pared back from every slicing impact of an eldar projectile.
526One volley was all they got.
527Uldanaish Ghostwalker took the first impact as two of the Tindalosi leapt at him. The wraith-warrior’s blade moved too fast for something so huge. A Tindalosi howled, impaled, its gut ripped open and spilling shredded metal. Ghostwalker hurled it aside. Hellgun fire battered the fallen beast’s gleaming flanks.
528The second bit down on his arm, and sickly green fire bled into the wound. The creature’s rear limbs curled to claw at the wraith-construct’s chest. Tanna stepped in and hammered his blade into its haunches, tearing through to its spine.
529It fell away, rolling clear of his follow-up.
530Ghostwalker’s gauntlet-mounted weapon swung to bear. Buzzing projectiles tore into the Tindalosi with a breaking-glass sound that was curiously musical. Three hounds snapped and clawed the ramp, poised to launch themselves at the Space Marines.
531Tanna spun his sword back up to his shoulder and stepped forwards to give himself room. He kept his bolt pistol low at his thigh. He turned just enough to invite attack and when it came he pulled back in an oblique turn. His sword deflected the leaping beast’s snapping jaw. He rolled his wrist and shoulder barged it, pushing the thing backwards and down. He dropped a knee to its ribs and jammed the muzzle of his pistol into its exposed throat.
532The mass-reactive punched through the metal and into the ramp.
533The Tindalosi bellowed, and pungent, viscous gel sprayed Tanna’s helm, necrotic oils of something long past its time to die.
534It rolled away, the torn metal of its neck knitting together in a slick of green light.
535Step back. Consolidate awareness.
536They still held the top of the ramp. Hellguns and bolters fired enfilading volleys. Kotov and his skitarii almost out. Surcouf and Ven Anders shouting at Pavelka, who had plugged herself back into the control hub. No time to wonder why. Cadians surrounded the three of them, bulky hellguns pulled in tight as they awaited the colonel’s order to withdraw.
537Varda’s sword flashed and the black blade plunged into a howling skull and tore it half away. Tanna swivelled and the pauldrons of the three Space Marines clashed together. Shoulder to shoulder in a circle of steel and adamantium they stood, ravaging all that came within reach.
538A slash of talons came at Tanna’s head and he parried with the body of his pistol. The weapon went off and he chopped his blade into a leg as hard as adamantium.
539The creature staggered and Tanna worked the roaring blade hard into its chest. He hauled it free and kicked the beast back. He blinked and shook his head.
540The monsters Ghostwalker had downed were up again. Shimmering green lightning played across their bodies. Opened guts were closed and buckled limbs straightened. Only once had Tanna fought creatures so difficult to kill, so unwilling to die.
541The Tindalosi charged, but just before the instant of contact, two leapt to the side. Their powerful legs easily carried them over the railings of the gantry. Not his concern. Something for the Cadians and eldar to deal with. Behind him, Yael and Bracha opened fire with their bolters. Mass-reactives plucked one from the air, twin impacts punching it out over the gantry. Its howl rang from the tower walls as it fell.
542‘Into them!’ shouted Tanna.
543They met the charge of the hunting beasts head on. The impact was thunderous, like iron girders colliding. Legs braced, Tanna felt the curve of his pauldron crumple. Muscle mass deformed and blood dispersed within the meat of his shoulder. His sword punched up. Screaming teeth tore metal. More viscous gel sprayed him.
544A clawed arm slammed into his plastron, tearing loose the Templar’s cross and gouging finger-deep grooves through the ceramite. The force hammered him to the side.
545Tanna’s sword snapped back up to block a tearing blow from above that drove him to his knees.
546His armour thrummed with power. Tanna straightened his legs with a roar, hammering his sword’s crossed pommel into a bellowing metallic skull that was part wolf, part saurian. Noxious machine-blood flew.
547He lunged with the pistol, drove it into the belly of a beast. The shot exploded hard against armour and Tanna bit back a shout of sudden pain. His gauntlet filled with hot fluid, blood streaming down his forearm.
548The creature snapped at him again. He thrust his chainsword, teeth scraping on steel as it parted metal and split a spine. He twisted it out, kicking the flailing creature back down the ramp.
549Straighten up, breathe and blow, shake the pain. His chest was tight, his throat raw. Had he been screaming a battle shout?
550‘Too… t… too far forward, Tanna!’ shouted Issur.
551Get back.
552The Tindalosi barged one another in their frenzy to break past the choke-point, their bladed limbs constricted, one machine-like killer obstructing another. He saw their confusion. They were not used to victims who could fight back like this.
553‘Find the openings,’ yelled Tanna, to himself as much as everyone else. ‘Kill them, kill them all.’
554A blow glanced off his helm and hammered into his damaged shoulder guard. He grunted and punched a sword blow to the belly of a silver-skinned beast.
555‘Step in again!’ he grunted. ‘Keep them at bay!’
556Tanna threw an upward sword cut to a thigh of hooked metal, a backstroke to the guts and a thrust to the chest. In deep and twist. Don’t stop moving. Movement to the right, a howling bovine skull with fangs like daggers. He slashed it in the eyes. It screamed.
557Move on. Face front, step back. Find another.
558Two came at him. No room to swing. Another pommel strike, stove in the first’s ribs. Stab the other in the belly, blade out.
559The beasts withdrew, torn up and weeping emerald light from their ruptured bodies.
560‘Tanna! For the Emperor’s sake stop pushing so far down the ramp!’ shouted a voice.
561Varda?
562Tanna stepped back until he drew level with Varda and Issur. Each was slathered from helm to greaves in blood. Vivid red theirs, tar black that of the foe. They stood abreast at the summit of the ramp with Uldanaish Ghostwalker behind them.
563The wraith-warrior’s armour was cracked and clawed. One leg tremored, as though ready to collapse, the other leaked a molten amber-like sap from its knee joint. Something glittered through a dreadful gash in his helm, a faintly luminous gemstone.
564The Tindalosi came at them again.
565‘Back to back!’ roared Tanna.
566Blaylock slumped from the Speranza’s command throne, feeling like every cell within him had chosen this moment to attack its host body. His vision snapped to black as cerebral inhibitors shut down in an attempt to block the surging inloads of spurious data.
567His dwarf servitors squealed in distress as he shunted vast quantities of data to their overspill capacity. Two died instantly, their brains flash-burned by the immense overload. Another fell onto its side, spasming and losing control of every bodily function as rogue signals ripped through its body.
568Blaylock heard warning sirens, alarm klaxons and squalling wails of binaric pain. The machines of the Speranza were howling with animal distress. Blaylock struggled to regain his feet, but that was proving to be harder than he’d expected. With virtually every facet of sensory apparatus shut down, he had no spatial awareness, no sense of up or down.
569He pressed his hands to what he assumed was the deck and pushed, feeling it move away from him. Or was he moving away from it? Blaylock’s lower body was a mixture of piston-driven bracing limbs and callipered counterbalances. It made for an efficient means of locomotion for a being of his mass and density, but right now he would have happily traded them in for a pair of organic legs.
570Voices called his name with interrogative pulses of binary, complex logarithmic squirts of machine code and flesh-voices. None of it made sense.
571He tried to speak, but his augmitter sub-systems – both binaric and hexamathic – were offline. His mouth opened, but only an exhalation of scorched air emerged, as though viral fires burned within his lungs.
572Hands gripped him and hauled him into what he assumed was an upright position. A sudden, vertiginous sense of dislocation assailed Blaylock as he became aware of three-dimensional space around him. His lower body pulsed through its gyroscopic diagnostics and quickly found his centre of balance. Bracing limbs slammed down and the rest of his body swiftly followed in a series of hard resets.
573Some portions of his internal system architecture still felt somehow wrong, but now was not the time for a shut-down and full diagnostic assessment. Sight returned. Slowly. Fearful of shocking him with what it might reveal.
574‘Ave Deus Mechanicus,’ he managed at last.
575Strong hands still gripped his robes, soaked through where his feeder pipes had torn loose. The canister at his back was angled strangely, leaking clouds of acrid vapours.
576He turned to thank the individual who had helped him to his feet, a magos in dark robes with silver eyes. His body was a crudely put together thing that somewhat resembled an arachnid.
577Galatea, Blaylock’s memory coils reminded him as they finished the purge of redundant data.
578With its identity recalled, so too was the dreadful fact of its existence. The lies it had told, the violations of every Mechanicus law it represented and the lives it had ended. Blaylock pulled away from its infectious touch as though burned.
579Almost every glittering entoptic veil burned with hissing, jumping static. Only the central display remained intact, though even it glitched and rolled with inloads of malicious code.
580‘Magos Blaylock!’ shouted a boxy, robotic-looking thing that looked like it belonged in a loading dock rather than a starship’s bridge. ‘Are you rendered incapable?’
581Kryptaestrex, Master of Logistics.
582‘No,’ said Blaylock, though he felt anything but capable.
583Another magos appeared beside Kryptaestrex. A latticework frame on robotic legs, within which an exploded diagram of a brain was held in suspension, spread between numerous linked plastek cubes.
584Azuramagelli, Master of Astrogation.
585‘Magos Blaylock, you really need to see this,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘There is… something happening on the surface.’
586‘Something?’ snapped Blaylock as yet more of his systems realigned after the attack on his augmetic nervous system. ‘Since when do adepts of Mars employ such vague phraseology? Coherence, precision and logic. Remember them. Use them.’
587‘Apologies, Magos Blaylock,’ said Azuramagelli, gesturing to his station with a spindly manipulator arm. ‘I have not the terminology to accurately describe what I am seeing.’
588Blaylock moved as fast as he could towards Azuramagelli’s data hub, realising that he was perhaps not as fully realigned as he had thought when the deck of the Speranza seemed to lurch beneath him.
589He reached astrogation and pushed past Azuramagelli, carefully inloading the readings from the data hub, wary of any lingering fragments of malign code. He had been set to chastise Azuramagelli once again, but his admonishments went unsaid as he failed utterly to interpret the energy readings building to enormous levels on the planet’s surface.
590The data being gathered by the Speranza’s auguries was beyond anything Blaylock had ever seen. He had no idea what it might indicate, but the last vestiges of his human instincts of fight or flight screamed at him that this was dangerous.
591‘Raise the voids, Kryptaestrex,’ he ordered. ‘Immediately.’
592‘Magos, I have been trying to raise them for the last thirty seconds,’ said Kryptaestrex.
593‘Trying?’
594‘They will not light. My every command is being denied access to the rituals of ignition.’
595Blaylock all but ran to Kryptaestrex’s data hub. Bleeding veils of red filled the slates. His haptics were useless, burned out by the surge attack, and his noospherics were still resetting.
596But he could still issue commands manually.
597His fingers danced over the floating entoptic keyboard, ordering the Speranza to protect itself.
598But not even his exalted rank signifiers could reach the heart of the Ark Mechanicus. He was being kept out of his own ship’s core controls by some external force.
599The main display lit up with a flare of radiance building on the planet’s surface beneath the huge electrical storms. A continental-scale flare that blew out the atmospheric tempests it had taken the geoformers hours to becalm. The horrifying sight put Blaylock in mind of a stellar flare or a coronal mass ejection.
600‘What is that?’ he said.
601‘The Breath of the Gods,’ said Galatea with awed reverence.
602Moonchild was the first vessel to be hit.
603An arc of parabolic lightning rose from the surface of Exnihlio, passing through the tortured skies without apparent effort. Seen from space it appeared to expand at leisurely pace, but was in fact moving at close to four hundred kilometres per second.
604It wasn’t actually lightning – such atmospheric discharges could only exist within a planetary atmosphere – but it was the best description the Moonchild’s captain could articulate.
605His Master of Auspex shouted a warning, but the captain already knew the energised arc was moving too fast to avoid. Even with the Gothic’s shields partially lit, the tracery of light struck the ventral armour of the prow.
606Void-war was messy. It left vast clouds of debris and drifting hulks venting fuel and oxygen in their wake. It fouled space with squalling electromagnetics for decades and was rarely conclusive. The ranges at which most engagements were fought made it relatively easy for a vessel incapable of continuing a fight to go dark and slip away.
607There would be no slipping away from this fight.
608Moonchild exploded sequentially along its length. First the wedge of its bow vanished in a silent thunderclap of blue fire, then its midships, and finally its drive section in a searing plasmic fireball. It burned with blinding radiance for a few brief seconds as the oxygen trapped within its hull was consumed.
609The fires swiftly burned out, leaving Moonchild a charred skeleton of drifting wreckage. Lifeless. Inert. Ten thousand dead in the blink of an eye.
610Another pair of lightning arcs coiled up from Exnihlio.
611And Wrathchild and Mortis Voss joined Moonchild in death.
612More lightning flared towards the Speranza.
613Roboute hauled Pavelka’s robes, but he might just as well have been trying to pull a section of the tower itself. The Renard’s magos was rooted to the spot, her data-spikes locked into the control hub. Flickering data-light scrolled down the optics beneath her hood and her limbs jerked with involuntary twitches. She was fighting the hub’s code and, like an unbroken colt, it was fighting back.
614Angry blasts of electrical discharge coruscated along the length of her mechadendrites and into her body. Roboute was uncomfortably aware of the repulsively mouth-watering reek of cooking meat.
615‘Ilanna! Disconnect!’ he shouted, alternating his attention between the furious clash of blades and claws at the head of the ramp and the snap of las-fire from Cadian rifles. ‘We have to go!’
616‘Just. Keep. Them. Off me…’ hissed Pavelka.
617‘We don’t have time for this,’ said Ven Anders, one hand holding his rifle, the other gripping the hilt of his power sword. ‘Get her free, Surcouf, or I’ll cut her loose myself.’
618Roboute nodded. He had no wish to remain here. He’d seen the thirsting, ribbed and fanged shapes of the monsters bounding up the ramp. The bulk of the Black Templars and the wraithlord kept him from seeing them any closer.
619A state of affairs he was keen to see continued.
620Bracha and Yael stood on the far side of the control hub, pumping shots into the enemy whenever a target presented itself.
621The Templar swordsmen were faring less well. Tanna was down on one knee. His left arm hung limp at his side, his pistol a molten wreck on the ground. Issur spasmed in the grip of a crackling electrical field that was burning him to death within his armour.
622Only Atticus Varda still fought unbowed.
623His black blade hacked into the silver armour of the Tindalosi, sending cloven shards of silver and bronze spinning in all directions. The Emperor’s Champion fought with the precision of a duellist and the power of a berserker, both war-forms distilled into a cohesive whole. It was quite the most extraordinarily disciplined feat of swordsmanship Roboute had ever seen.
624But even so sublime a warrior could not fight forever.
625‘Ilanna, please,’ begged Roboute, risking a hand on her shoulder. He felt the furious micro-tremors of a body largely composed of machines working at full-tilt.
626The heat coming off her body was ferocious.
627‘Don’t touch me!’ she barked. ‘Almost. There.’
628‘Too late!’ shouted Ven Anders as two of the Tindalosi vaulted over the railings to the main floor of the gantry. One was punched from the air by a pair of three-round bursts from Yael and Bracha. The explosive impact of the mass-reactives blew the hellhound over the edge, and Roboute yelled in triumph as it fell with an ululating howl.
629That still left one, and the Cadians turned their hellguns upon it. Blazing streams of las-fire punched out with a speed and accuracy that only a lifetime’s worth of training could bring.
630Not a single shot hit the Tindalosi.
631A heartbeat later it was amongst them.
632Vodanus snapped a living body in two, tossing it aside and clawing another in half from shoulder to pelvis. This was more like it. This was the kind of foe it relished.
633Soft, mortal, fleshy and without any distracting code-scent that could break its geas. Its claws slashed and six bodies emptied of blood. Its hide whipped electricity. It burned, cut and melted its foes. Venomous oils secreted from its hooks left the meat screaming on their bellies.
634Some were tough and sinewy, others light as air.
635Different species?
636It made no difference, both were just as fragile.
637Energy beams stabbed it. Minor irritations. Its armour was proof against such primitive low-emission weapons. Crackling arcs of strange storm-lights struck it, psychic body blows of doom-seeking power. Ancient null-circuitry worked into its body dissipated these attacks harmlessly.
638Did these meat-things know nothing of Vodanus?
639Green-armoured warriors danced around it, darting in to bite it with crackling mouth-parts and slash with buzzing blades. It fired electromagnetic micro-pulses that exploded their internal organs.
640It heard screams from these ones, terrified screams that didn’t come from any vocal organs. It filed the information away for later perusal. No species it had thus far slain evinced such behaviour upon its death.
641Its jaws snapped on a mortal’s head, wrenching the body from side to side and letting the serrations of its teeth do the rest. The fast meat-things kept coming at it, unaware yet that they could not kill Vodanus. Their weapons sparked against its armour, vespid stings against a leviathan.
642Two of the black-armoured warriors rounded upon Vodanus – Space Marines, Telok’s data had called them – together with a slender warrior armed with a screaming-toothed sword. The weapon was clearly too large for her to wield, but Vodanus recognised that she too was a lethal huntress.
643These Space Marines were tougher and more deadly than anything its long-forgotten masters had wished dead. Each was encased in toxic armour of machine-spirits that could kill a hellhound with one wrong-placed bite or the temptation to feast. Vodanus did not fear these killers, but knew to be wary of them.
644Its prey was within sight, escaping along an outflung bridge of mesh steel and wire. Still within its grasp, but the first rule of any hunt was to leave none alive who might hunt the hunter.
645A pair of thundering impacts slowed its charge as the Space Marine warriors fired their heavy guns. Vodanus twisted into the air, killing another of the soul-screaming meat-sacks with a flick of its hooked back leg. Explosive ammunition followed it down, caroming from the curved plates of its shoulder as it landed in front of the three warriors that mattered.
646It howled in fury, but they didn’t run, which made them unique.
647Everyone ran from Vodanus.
648But, Vodanus reminded itself, these things did not know it.
649Another blast of explosive rounds hammered its armour.
650One detonated within its chest, and the momentary pain staggered it. Vodanus had not known pain of this kind in millennia. The pain of isolation and madness, yes. The knowledge that its existence was fragmenting moment by moment, certainly.
651But the pain of being wounded?
652That stirred old memories, old hurts and old joys.
653The power Telok had imbued it with from the ancient machine began its hateful work, cannibalising mineral reservoirs within its body to re-knit the damage, undo its hurt.
654It sprang forwards, faster than they could avoid. One clawed arm rammed into the chest of a Space Marine with all the force Vodanus could muster. Black and white became saturated with red. So bright, so vivid. So much.
655Vodanus clawed the body into the air and bit it in half.
656It spat the crumpled debris of meat and metal from its mouth.
657The huntress vaulted into the air as the second warrior ducked a hooked sweep of its arm. She spun the enormous blade as though it weighed nothing at all and clove it through a section of Vodanus’s spine. The Space Marine rammed his own toothed sword into the renewing sections of Vodanus’s body.
658Once again, Vodanus knew pain, but this pain was welcome. It had been too long since it had faced any foe capable of hurting it. Its body rolled in mid-air and Vodanus rammed a bladed foot into the huntress’s chest.
659She screamed and crumpled, almost broken in two, her sword skidding across the gantry. Vodanus bellowed with howling laughter as it hooked a claw through the armour of the Space Marine and tossed him aside like offal. He slammed into the high column of the control hub, crashing back down with his armour cracked and the ivory wings on his chest shattered into a thousand fragments. Bleeding code vapour streamed from the broken pieces of black metal, but Vodanus ignored the sweet scent.
660To taste it would be to die.
661Instead, it turned towards a last handful of soft, meaty bodies that awaited murder. Most were code-free, bare flesh and fear, but one stood at the control hub, violently enmeshed with the ancient spirit at its heart.
662This one bled code, bad code. Her machine arms snapped clear of the hub, drawing into her body. She cried a warning to the others.
663Vodanus howled and relished the terror it tasted.
664It bunched its hooked legs beneath it.
665And the world exploded in screaming white fire.
666Roboute and Anders had their guns drawn, but the giant beast that had so easily slaughtered most of the eldar and Cadians collapsed. It howled in pain, limbs convulsing in lethal swipes that tore up the metal of the gantry.
667Even incapacitated it was lethal. To approach it was to die.
668From the cessation of sound at the top of the ramp, Roboute knew something similar had happened to the Tindalosi facing Tanna’s swordsmen and the wraithlord. His analytical mind flashed through a lightning-swift assay of their current situation.
669Bracha was dead, no question of that, but Yael was already picking himself up with a groan of pain.
670Roboute felt his mouth go dry. The very idea of a Space Marine experiencing pain was something he’d never expected to see. Every devotional pict spoke of the Adeptus Astartes’ invincibility, their utter inability to feel pain or know fear. Roboute was realist enough to know that picts like that pedalled what the Imperium wanted its people to believe, but even he was shocked by the volume of blood leaving Yael’s body.
671Ariganna Icefang limped over to Bielanna, her armour torn all across her chest. Blood as bright as Yael’s ran from her helm’s eye-lenses like red tears. She’d been hurt badly. Maybe even mortally. She said something to Bielanna, but her dialect made the words unintelligible. Bielanna shook her head. Whatever the exarch was asking of her, the farseer could not deliver.
672Roboute turned from the eldar as Pavelka slumped to her knees. Heat sinks worked into her rib-structure billowed the fabric of her robes with scorching vapours. She held a hand out to Roboute, feeling the air like a blind man. He took it, grimacing at the pain of her metal grip.
673‘What did you do, Ilanna?’
674‘Ask her later!’ yelled Anders, slinging his rifle and helping Roboute get the stricken magos to her feet. If Anders was pained by the searing heat of Pavelka’s body, he gave no sign.
675Between them, they hauled her away from the control hub, trying not to step on any of the hacked-apart limbs and bodies the hunting machine had left in its wake.
676The speed with which it had killed was phenomenal.
677How many were dead?
678Eldar and human bodies lay intertwined, making it impossible to tell. Tanna, Varda and Issur ran over, together with the few surviving Striking Scorpions and Howling Banshees.
679‘Was that you?’ Tanna asked Pavelka.
680She nodded. ‘I tricked the hub into accepting a self-replicating piece of damaged code into every machine within this tower. Its viral form angered the spirits within them, and they explosively purged it into the noosphere. Invisible to you, but painfully blinding to anything that uses augmetic senses.’
681Roboute glanced beneath Pavelka’s hood, seeing her ocular implants were dull and blank where normally they shone with pale blue illumination. Thin tendrils of smoke curled from the scorched rims.
682‘No, Ilanna… Are you…?’
683‘It needed to be done,’ she said. ‘Now let’s go!’
684Wrathchild, Mortis Voss and Moonchild were lifeless wrecks, blackened and lit from within by sporadic flashes of dying machinery. The lightning that struck the Speranza came straight from the heart of Exnihlio and phased through the hull of the Ark Mechanicus without apparent effort. Existing on an entirely different phasic state of existence to that which had obliterated the Speranza’s escorts, it destroyed nothing until it reached its point of focus.
685The first blast coalesced within the Speranza amidships on Deck 235/Chi-Rho 66, a high-ceilinged turbine chamber filled with rank upon rank of thundering engines that provided toxin-scrubbed air to a quadrant of ventral forge-temples.
686A tempest of blazing lightning arcs, white-hot and fluid, filled the central nave between the turbines. Ghost shapes moved within the light, hurricanes of microscopic machinery that had travelled the length of the faux-lightning from Exnihlio in seconds.
687The crackling bolt provided the energy, the particulate-rich air of the Speranza the raw material as solid forms began unfolding from the compressed molecules in which they had been carried.
688The deck’s servitors ignored the furious storm, oblivious to the threat manifesting among them. Those whose inculcated task routes carried them close to its wrath were instantly burned to cinders, their flesh and matter now fuel for the coalescing invasion.
689At first the Mechanicus adepts struggled to find fault with their systems, believing some ritual or catechism had been overlooked or an incorrect unguent applied. Alarm klaxons blared throughout the deck and alert chimes rang through adjacent forges and engine-temples. By the time Chi-Rho 66’s adepts realised this was no machine malfunction, it was already too late.
690The first crystaliths to emerge from the lightstorm were crude approximations of Adeptus Astartes. Glassy and smoothly finished, each was freshly wrought from the molten light and filled with thousands of Telok’s unique nano-machines. They marched in glittering ranks, hundreds strong, and filled Chi-Rho 66 with blasts of emerald fire. Machines exploded, servitors died, devastating chain reactions were begun.
691Binaric vox-blurts raced frantically to the bridge, warning of the boarders, but Chi-Rho 66’s warning would not be the last. Fresh arcs of lightning from the planet’s surface struck all across the Speranza, a dozen at a time, and each storm disgorged hundreds of crystaliths. Some were a basic warrior-caste, others were larger, formed with heavier weapons and bladed claws, and carried sheets of reflective armour like heavy, glassy mantlets.
692Last to form onto Chi-Rho 66 were the war machines.
693What Telok had once described as things of terror.
694Above the tower, the crackling fury in Exnihlio’s upper atmosphere had stilled. Tanna was struck by the pale clarity of the sky. It reminded him of the murals aboard the Eternal Crusader, the ones that depicted the pastoral idyll of Old Earth.
695That illusion was shattered the instant his eyes fell from the sky and saw the unending vistas of gargantuan generator towers and forge-complexes stretching to the horizon.
696The radial bridge that led from the tower opened up onto a tiered set of stairs enclosed within a chain-link cage. The wide gantry offered routes to higher levels or down into roiling banks of flame-lit exhaust gases venting from the tower’s base.
697A cable-stayed suspension bridge connected the universal assembler to a vast, boxy structure five hundred metres away. Clad in sheets of rusted corrugated sheet-steel, the building offered no clues as to its purpose beyond a number of smoke stacks that belched soot-dark smoke and rained a greasy, ashen snow over the roofs of lower buildings.
698It reminded Tanna of the giant, industrial-scale crematoria on worlds like Balhaut and Certus Minor.
699He hoped that wasn’t an omen.
700‘Bracha?’ asked Varda.
701Tanna shook his head, and the Emperor’s Champion cursed.
702‘Yael?’
703‘Alive,’ said Tanna, pointing to the far side of the bridge where Yael covered his battle-brothers with his bolter. They ran to join him, with Uldanaish Ghostwalker limping behind them.
704The damage done to its legs had robbed the wraith-warrior of its speed and grace. Beside Yael, Kotov’s skitarii were hacking an entrance into the structure ahead through a shuttered door of concertinaed steel.
705Tanna glanced over his shoulder, searching for signs of pursuit.
706Issur saw him look and said, ‘You th-th-think the adept kill… killed them?’
707‘Doubtful,’ replied Tanna. ‘I laid enough mortal wounds on those beasts that they should have been destroyed a dozen times over. If they can survive that, they will survive Magos Pavelka’s cantrip.’
708‘Those beasts are tough,’ agreed Varda. ‘I only ever fought one foe that could survive the kill-strikes I favoured them with.’
709Tanna nodded. ‘Thanatos?’
710‘Aye, the silver-skinned devils that kept coming back no matter how hard I hit them or how many mass-reactives took them apart.’
711‘Is th-tha… that what these are?’ asked Issur.
712‘No,’ said Uldanaish Ghostwalker, his voice no longer deep and resonant, but thin and distant. ‘These things are not servants of the Yngir, they were wrought by living hands and given the power to undo mortal wounds by Telok’s mad sorceries. But you are correct, they will be back.’
713As if to underscore the wraith-warrior’s words, the hounds burst from the tower. Some stood on their hind legs, others hunched over on all fours as they searched for their prey. Even a cursory glance told Tanna the damage he and his brothers had inflicted was entirely absent.
714The beasts saw them crossing the bridge and sprinted after them, bounding closer with howling appetite. Sparks flew from hooked claws on the mesh grille of the bridge deck.
715‘Templars, stand to!’ shouted Tanna.
716‘No,’ said Ghostwalker, standing athwart the bridge. The curved, bone-bladed sword snapped from its gauntlet. ‘This is where I will fight, as Toralven Gravesong did at Hellabore.’
717Tanna guessed what the giant warrior intended and said, ‘Tell me one thing, Ghostwalker. Did Toralven Gravesong live?’
718The wraithlord turned its emerald skull towards him, and Tanna saw through the awful wound torn there that the smooth gemstone within was cracked. Its light was fading.
719‘Toralven Gravesong was a doom-seeker,’ said Ghostwalker.
720‘What does that mean?’
721‘That he had walked the wraith-path for more lifetimes than you or I will ever know,’ said Ghostwalker. ‘Perhaps too many.’
722Tanna understood. ‘On Armageddon, I met a warrior of the Blood Angels whose duty was to hear the final words of those whose death was upon them. It was his burden to end their suffering, but he spoke of the peace those lost souls sometimes knew when he told them that death had brought an end to their duty.’
723Tanna, Varda and Issur raised their swords in salute.
724‘Die well, Ghostwalker,’ said Tanna.
725‘Run,’ advised the wraith-warrior.
726Uldanaish turned from the withdrawing mon-keigh, soul-sick that their leader actually believed he understood the true depth of what was to be lost here.
727Hadn’t the human heard what Uldanaish said earlier?
728His body had died a long time ago, but devotion to the Swordwind had seen his spirit preserved within the ghost lattice of the wraithlord’s spirit stone. A spirit stone now split to its heart and releasing that which it kept hidden from an ancient and hungry god.
729This was the fear that lurked at the heart of the eldar race. From artist to exarch, the prospect of She Who Thirsts devouring and tormenting their spirit for all eternity filled even the stoutest heart with unreasoning horror. Who could ever have thought he would embrace such a fate for the mon-keigh?
730Uldanaish clung to his wounded wraith-body with every fibre of his determination. Already he could hear cruel laughter pressing in around him, the monstrous hunger of a dark power that would swallow his soul and not even notice.
731The Tindalosi were almost upon him as he took position at the exact centre of the bridge.
732A wraithlord did not see as mortals saw. Wraithsight perceived the world in half-glimpsed dreams and nightmares, each redolent with ghostly emotions and shimmering hues. Without a farseer’s guiding light, it was difficult to sort real from unreal.
733The eldar were ghost forms, concealed from She Who Thirsts by their spirit stones, but each mon-keigh was a plume of blood-red radiance, a being with an unlimited capacity for violence.
734Bielanna was already within the building behind him, and Uldanaish felt a sudden fear at the prospect of his people entering that dread space. Something terrible lurked beneath it, something that reeked of unending pain and a world’s suffering.
735Uldanaish wanted to warn them of the danger, but the Tindalosi were upon him. Like the mon-keigh, they were radiant things, phosphor bright and feral in their lust for violence.
736That they were intelligent was beyond question.
737Uldanaish had felt their twisted malevolence as soon as they entered the tower. What lurked within them were artificial minds so monstrous, so psychotic, that it beggared belief any sentient race would risk creating them.
738It saw the leader beast immediately, a patchwork thing of evil and insatiable hunger that left blistered negative impressions on his wraithsight. Scratches of dark radiance flickered in the thing’s smoking eye-lenses, and its oversized jaw drooled lightning from bloodstained fangs.
739They came at Ghostwalker five abreast.
740He charged towards them with long, loping strides. He stabbed down, carving the first through the spine with his wraithblade. Sensing weakness, one went for his legs, another his skull. He cut the first almost in two with his gauntlet weapon. The second impaled itself on his blade. Another seized his gauntlet in its jaws and swung itself wide, using its mass to drag him with it.
741The last beast gripped the vanes flaring from his shoulders and wrenched in the opposite direction. Ghostwalker loosed a bray of ancient pain as the vanes shattered like porcelain. He brought his blade back, shearing the legs from the beast biting his other arm.
742With that arm free, he swung low from the hip and pummelled his fist into the monstrous hunter clawing his side apart. The impact buckled its midsection inwards, almost snapping it in two. It screeched a machine-like howl and landed hard on the parapet of the bridge. Uldanaish leaned back and kicked it over.
743The beast whose spine he had carved unfolded from its hurt, fresh plates already extruding from some internal void. Green lights danced over the new steel. Uldanaish sent a threading pulse of laser fire though its eyes. They blew out in a screaming howl of hostile static.
744Two of the beasts tried to push past him. He stepped back and kicked one in the ribs, almost flattening it against the iron-girder parapet. Uldanaish spun on his heel and pinned the other to the plated deck of the bridge with his wraithblade.
745The leader beast crashed into him. They rolled. Uldanaish’s fist slammed into its side. Its wide mouth snapped shut on his skull, ripping out plate-sized shards of wraithbone. His blade scored deep cuts in its spinal ridges. Its hooked limbs ripped into his chest and broke his armour into long strips of wraithbone.
746They broke apart. Uldanaish rolled to his feet and staggered as his right leg finally gave out. Psycho-active connective tissue ground like broken glass in the joint, and no amount of will could force it to bear his weight.
747The Tindalosi faced him; he a wounded giant, they mechanised assassins that renewed themselves with each passing second.
748Dragging himself back along the bridge deck on one knee, Uldanaish hauled himself upright. The spectral vista of his wraithsight was fading, yet the scratched outlines of the Tindalosi remained stark and black.
749The sound of cruel laughter was closer now, like one of the eldarith ynneas coming to savour its victim’s degradation.
750Now was the moment.
751‘Come, hounds of Morai-Heg,’ he said. ‘We die together!’
752Uldanaish extended his left arm and cut through the thick suspension cables with a sawing blast of high-energy laser pulses. At the same instant, his wraithblade sliced up through the entwined knot of cables at his shoulder.
753The deck buckled as the bridge’s cardinal supports were removed at a stroke. The Tindalosi saw the danger and surged past him, but it was already too late.
754With a scream of tearing metal, the bridge snapped in two, spilling the combatants into the explosively toxic clouds venting from the base of the tower. The Tindalosi howled as they fell, their metal hides blistering in the caustic fog.
755Uldanaish Ghostwalker made no sound at all.
756His soul had already been claimed.
757The aura of abandonment Vitali felt looking at the cog-toothed entrance to Forge Elektrus reminded him of the plague-soaked sump-temples of the Schiaparelli Sorrow of Acidalia Planitia. The Gallery of Unremembering within Olympus Mons depicted that great repository in its heyday, a towering pyramid filled with data from the earliest days of mankind’s mastery of science.
758Martian legend told that the Warmaster himself had unleashed a fractal-plague known as the Death of Innocence, which obliterated twenty thousand years of learning and transformed an entire species-worth of knowledge into howling nonsense code.
759Vitali and Tarkis Blaylock had scoured some of the deepest memory-vaults for surviving fragments of that knowledge. The plague had evolved in the darkness for nearly ten millennia and all they found were corrupt machines, insane logic-engines and lethal scrapcode cybernetics haunting the molten datacores.
760This wasn’t quite on the same level, but being below the waterline on the Speranza while it was under attack gave Vitali the same sense of threat lurking around every corner.
761Judging by the invisible cocktail of combat-stimms surrounding him, the twenty skitarii he’d commandeered from one of Dahan’s reserve zones clearly felt the same way.
762Vitali had wanted a cohort of praetorians, but Dahan had point-blank refused, rank-signifiers be damned. After a heated binaric negotiation the Secutor had grudgingly released a demi-maniple to Vitali’s authority.
763Each skitarii was encased in archaic-looking shock-armour that put them only just below the height of a Space Marine. Draped in an assortment of ragged pennants and mechanical fetishes, their feral appearance put Vitali in mind of the legendary Thunder Warriors of Old Earth, whose faded images were preserved on a dusty block said to have once been part of the Annapurna Gate.
764Oversized gauntlets bore a mixture of blast-carbines, shotcannons or heavy electro-spears. A few had power weapons or rapid-firing solid slug throwers comparable to Adeptus Astartes bolters.
765They’d moved through the Speranza at speed; diverting to avoid columns of running soldiers, past the sounds of gunfire and explosions, along corridors scored with laser impacts and strewn with glassy debris.
766Traversing a suspended gantry arcing across a vaulted graving dock designed for Leviathans, Vitali had his first glimpse of the enemy. Crystalline warriors, identical to the ones he’d remotely seen aboard the Tomioka. Blitzing green bolts chased them over the gantry, but before any real weight of fire could be brought to bear, a flanking force of weaponised servitors emerged from opposing transverse through-ways. They punched through the enemy in a carefully orchestrated two-pronged attack. Vitali didn’t stay to watch the final annihilation of the invaders, pushing ever downwards towards his destination.
767The approach halls of Forge Elektrus were dark and unwelcoming, its spirits glitchy and wary of the intruders in their midst. Vitali sensed fresh reworking in the code of the machinery behind the walls, which surprised him in a place so obviously neglected.
768His jet-black servo-skull, an exact replica of his own cranial vault, floated beside him like a nervous child. A battle robot aboard the Tomioka had almost destroyed it, but Linya had brought it back and painstakingly restored it on the journey to Exnihlio.
769The skitarii hadn’t shared the skull’s caution, and deployed into the approach hall as though they were ready to storm Forge Elektrus. They took cover against projecting spars of the bulkhead and covered the cog-toothed door with their enormous guns. A weeping skull icon of the Mechanicus drizzled oil to the perforated deck. The vox implanted within its jaws buzzed and the lumens flickered in time with its hostile binaric growl.
770Vitali walked to the door and looked up at the skull.
771‘My name is Magos Vitali Tychon, and I seek entry to Forge Elektrus,’ he said, pressing his hand to the locking plate and letting it read his rank signifiers. ‘I must see the senior magos within.’
772The skull spat a wad of distortion.
773‘For an audience or a fight?’ it said. ‘I’m hearing reports about invaders on the ship, and that’s a lot of nasty-looking men you have there. Two suzerain-caste kill-packs if I’m not mistaken.’
774‘It’s quite a distance from the cartographae dome to Forge Elektrus,’ said Vitali. ‘And, as you say, the Speranza is under attack. I wanted to be sure I survived the journey.’
775‘Given that you’re clearly mad to have even tried, tell me why I should let you in,’ said the skull.
776‘Very well. I have reason to believe there is someone or something within this forge that can save the ship,’ said Vitali.
777The skull fell silent, hissing dead air for thirty seconds before the forge door rolled aside and a waft of incenses used in the anointing of freshly sanctified machines blew out. Vitali found himself facing a strikingly pretty adept, whose features so closely resembled Linya’s that it sent a blistering surge of high voltage around his system. Her robes were oil-stained crimson. Golden light haloed her. She held an adept’s staff crowned with laurels and snared mammals in one bronzed hand, a humming graviton pistol in the other.
778‘Magos Chiron Manubia at your service,’ she said, and gestured within the forge with the barrel of her pistol. ‘You can enter, but the kill-packs stay outside.’
779Vitali nodded and issued a holding order to the skitarii before following Manubia inside. The door rolled shut behind him, his servo-skull darting in just before it closed entirely.
780‘The interior of Forge Elektrus does not match its outward appearance, Adept Manubia,’ said Vitali, staring in wonder at a dozen gold-lit engines lining a mosaic-tiled nave.
781‘None of my doing,’ she said.
782Puzzled by her cryptic remark, Vitali moved down the nave.
783The engines to either side of him crackled with eager machine-spirits, thrumming with more power than any one forge could possibly require. At the end of the nave was a throne worked into a wide Icon Mechanicus, and the light of the engines glittered in its cybernetic eye. Shaven-headed adepts of lowly rank tended to the engines or scoured flakes of rust from both throne and skull.
784‘Your journeymen?’ asked Vitali.
785‘Not anymore,’ replied Manubia, turning to face him with the pistol held unwavering at his chest. ‘Now tell me why you’re here. And be truthful.’
786Manubia’s vague answers and hostility perplexed Vitali. She couldn’t possibly think he was a threat. What was going on in Forge Elektrus that compelled its magos to greet another with a sublimely rare and lethal weapon?
787‘Well?’ said Manubia when he didn’t answer.
788‘What I have to tell you will stretch your credulity to breaking point,’ he said, ‘So I am opting to follow your advice and embrace total honesty. I want you to know that before I begin.’
789And Vitali told her of Linya and Galatea, and how the machine-hybrid had gone on to murder her body in order to harvest her brain and incorporate it into a heuristic neuromatrix. Manubia’s eyebrows rose in disbelief when he spoke of Linya’s manifestation within the dome, but a look of understanding settled upon her when he spoke of what he had been told during their brief communion.
790‘That’s what made you cross half the ship to come down here?’
791‘I would do anything to help my daughter,’ said Vitali. ‘And if that means crossing a ship at war, then so be it. I implore you, Adept Manubia, if you know anything at all, please tell me.’
792‘She knows me,’ said a man in the coveralls of a bondsman who emerged from behind one of the largest machines.
793The man was tall and rangy with close-cropped stubble for hair and the hollowed cheeks of a below-deck menial. A barcode tattoo on his cheek confirmed his status as a bondsman, but his eyes were tertiary-grade exosomatic augmetics and his right arm was a crude bionic with freshly-grafted haptics at the fingertips.
794Vitali read the man’s identity from the tattoo and anger touched him as he recognised the name.
795‘Abrehem Locke,’ said Vitali.
796The man frowned in confusion as Vitali strode towards him, all traces of the genial stargazer replaced by the mask of a tormented father.
797‘Your little revolution delayed getting Linya to the medicae decks,’ said Vitali. ‘You made her suffer.’
798‘Easy there,’ said Manubia, following Vitali and keeping the graviton pistol trained on him. ‘This isn’t a subtle weapon, but I can still crack the legs from under you.’
799Vitali ignored her. ‘Linya almost died because of what you did.’
800To his credit, Locke stood his ground. ‘And I’m sorry for that, Magos Tychon, but I won’t apologise for trying to better conditions in the underdecks. If you knew the suffering that goes on there, how badly the Mechanicus treats those who toil in its name, you’d have done exactly the same.’
801Vitali wanted to throw Locke’s words back in his face, remembering the agony he had suffered in trying to manage Linya’s pain, but the man was right. Vitali had even said words just like that to Roboute Surcouf on the Renard’s shuttle.
802The anger drained from him and he nodded. ‘Maybe so, Master Locke, maybe so, but it is hard for me to entirely forgive a man who caused my daughter pain, no matter how noble the principle in which he acted.’
803‘I understand,’ said Locke, meeting Vitali’s gaze.
804Vitali looked carefully into the bondsman’s augmetics, sensing there was more to this man than met the eye. Was this lowly bondsman the key to fighting Galatea?
805‘I think perhaps it was you I came here to find, Master Locke,’ said Vitali.
806‘Me? Why?’
807‘I don’t know yet,’ said Vitali, lacing his fingers behind his back, ‘but I will. Tell me, how much do you know of hexamathics?’
808‘Nothing at all.’
809Vitali turned to Adept Manubia.
810‘Then you and I have a great deal of work to do.’
811The structure his skitarii had cut into with their power fists and blades made no sense to Kotov. On a world where everything was given over to sustaining the Breath of the Gods, why would a place so large be left empty? Vast beams and columns of rusted steel supported a soaring roof obscured by an ochre smirr of mist. Decay and dilapidation hung heavy in the air, like an abandoned forge repurposed after centuries of neglect.
812As far as Kotov could make out, the building had no floor beyond the wide, cantilevered platform of rusted metal reaching ten metres beyond the shuttered door. His two skitarii stayed close to him as he ventured out to its farthest extent. He sent his servo-skulls out over the void. Stablights worked into their eye sockets failed utterly to penetrate the immense, echoing and empty space.
813Behind him, the Cadians, eldar and Black Templars pushed into the building. They shouted and hunted for ways to seal the entrance behind them.
814Roboute Surcouf and Ven Anders helped Magos Pavelka to the ground, their arms around her shoulders. Kotov didn’t need a noospheric connection to see her ocular augmetics had been burned away completely. Implant, nerve and neural interface were an alloyed molten spike of surgical steel and fused brain matter.
815She would likely never see again.
816Her head was bowed. In pain or regret?
817Perhaps it was in shame for wielding profane code. If Kotov believed they might ever return to Mars, he would see to it that Ilanna Pavelka was irrevocably excommunicated from the Cult Mechanicus.
818She had meddled with shadow artes and paid the inevitable price.
819The thought gave him a moment’s pause as he considered the depth of his own hubris.
820And what price would I have to pay…?
821He pushed aside the uncomfortable thought and knelt at the ragged edge of the platform. Beyond the metal, the ground fell away sharply in a steeply angled quarried slope. Dull steel rails fastened to the bare rock reflected the light of the skull’s stablights, and Kotov followed their route to a battered funicular carriage sitting abandoned a hundred metres to his left.
822He felt the aggression-stimms of the skitarii surge, and turned to see the eldar witch approaching. He stood his warriors down with a pulse of holding binary. Bielanna, that was her name, though Kotov had no intention of using it.
823She removed her helm and knelt at the edge of the platform, staring down into the darkness. Kotov saw tears streaming down her cheeks. She reached out as if to touch something, then flinched, drawing her hand back sharply.
824‘It’s here,’ she said.
825‘What is?’ asked Kotov.
826‘All the pain of this world.’
827Ven Anders removed his helmet and dropped it at his feet. He closed his eyes and craned his neck to let the drizzling moisture wet his skin. He rubbed a hand over his face, clearing away the worst of the blood. Little of it was his, but he’d been standing next to Trooper Bailey when the Tindalosi eviscerated him.
828Cadian Guardsmen fought on the very worst battlefields of the Imperium, knew all the myriad ways there were to die in war, but Anders had seldom seen cruelty as perfectly honed as he had in the Tindalosi.
829Against the lids of his eyes he saw the hooking slashes of their claws, the bloody teeth and the phosphor scrawls of eyes that seemed to be looking at him even now. He shook off the sensation of being watched and hawked a mouthful of bitter spit over the edge of the platform.
830He tasted metal and felt a buzzing in his back teeth that told him a Space Marine was standing next to him. Power armour always had that effect on him.
831‘For a big man, you step pretty light,’ he said.
832‘Walk softly, but carry a big stick, isn’t that what they say?’
833Anders opened his eyes and ran his hands through his hair. Longer than he was used to. Time aboard the Speranza was making him lax in his personal grooming.
834‘I didn’t know it was possible for a Space Marine to walk softly,’ said Anders, looking up into Tanna’s flat, open features.
835‘We have Scouts within our ranks,’ said Tanna. ‘Or did you think that was an ironic title?’
836‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ admitted Anders. ‘Then again, I’ve never seen Space Marine Scouts.’
837‘Which is exactly the point,’ said Tanna, before falling silent.
838Anders understood that silence and said, ‘I grieve for the loss of Bracha. Was he a… friend?’
839‘He was my brother,’ said Tanna. ‘Friend is too small a word.’
840‘I understand,’ said Anders, and he knew Tanna would see the truth of that.
841‘We were a small enough brotherhood when we joined the Kotov Fleet,’ said Tanna. ‘And when we are no more, the courage these warriors have shown will pass unremembered. I would not see it so, but know not how to carve our mark into history’s flesh.’
842Tanna’s words of introspection surprised Anders. He had encountered only a few Space Marines in his lifetime, but instinctively knew how rare this moment was.
843And so he returned Tanna’s honesty.
844‘I’m no stranger to death,’ he said, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. ‘Stared it down a hundred times on a thousand battlefields and never once flinched. That’s not bravado, it’s really not, because it’s not fear for my own life that keeps me pacing the halls at night…’
845‘It is for the lives of those you command.’
846Anders nodded. ‘No officer wants to lose men under his command, but death walks in every Guardsman’s shadow. You go into battle knowing with complete certainty that you’re going to lose men and women along the way. You have to make peace with that or you can’t be an officer, not a Cadian officer anyway. But it was my job to keep those soldiers alive for as long as I could. I failed.’
847‘It was your job to lead those soldiers in battle for the Emperor, just as it has fallen to me to lead mine,’ said Tanna, gripping Anders’s shoulder. ‘You did that. No commander can ever be sure of bringing all their warriors home, but so long as the foe is slain and the mission complete, their deaths serve the Emperor.’
848Tanna held out his gauntlet and Anders saw a handful of gleaming ident-tags. Each had been cleaned of blood, each one stamped with a name and Cadian bio-numeric identifier.
849‘I retrieved these from the bodies of your honoured dead,’ said Tanna. ‘I thought you would be glad of their return.’
850Anders stared at the ident-tags. There hadn’t been time to gather them from the torn-up corpses. Or at least he’d assumed there hadn’t. That Tanna had risked his life and the lives of his warriors to retrieve them was an honour beyond repayment.
851‘Thank you,’ said Anders, taking the tags and reading each name in turn. He pocketed them and held his hand out.
852‘The Emperor watch over you, Sergeant Tanna.’
853‘And you, Colonel Anders. It has been an honour to fight alongside you and your soldiers.’
854Anders grinned, a measure of his cocksure Cadian attitude reasserting itself, and said, ‘You say that like the fight’s over, but Cadians aren’t done until the Eye takes them. And we don’t flinch easy.’
855‘Two questions,’ said Surcouf, standing before the battered funicular carriage with his arms folded. ‘Does it work and where do you think it goes?’
856‘It appears to be fully operational, though the mechanisms are corroded almost beyond functionality,’ said Kotov, scraping rusted metal from the control levers. ‘As to a destination, I can see no topographical representations of where it might ultimately lead.’
857‘Who cares where it ultimately leads?’ said Surcouf. ‘It goes away from here, that’s the most important thing, surely? At least it’ll give us a chance to regroup and figure out our next move.’
858‘Our next move?’ said Kotov. ‘What moves do you think we have left to us? Magos Blaylock will already be sailing the Speranza away from this cursed world. We have done all we can, Surcouf. Either Telok has the Speranza or Blaylock has departed. Either way, our chance to affect the outcome of this situation is over.’
859Surcouf looked at him as though he hadn’t understood what he’d just said. Kotov reran his words to check they had not been couched in ambiguous terms. No. Low Gothic and clear in meaning.
860Clearly Surcouf did not agree with him.
861‘Even if you’re sure Tarkis got the message, how can you be certain he managed to break orbit?’ said Surcouf. ‘Do you really think Telok went to all the trouble of ensnaring a ship like the Speranza just to let it sail away? No, we have to assume that Telok’s cleverer than that.’
862‘What would you suggest, Master Surcouf?’ said Kotov. ‘How, with all the manifold resources at our disposal, would you propose we fight against the might of an entire world?’
863‘One big problem is just a series of smaller problems,’ said Surcouf. ‘Small problems we can deal with.’
864Kotov sneered. ‘Optimistic Ultramarian platitudes will do us no good now.’
865‘Neither will your Mechanicus defeatism,’ snapped Surcouf. ‘So our first priority is to get away from here. Ilanna’s bought us some time, so I suggest we don’t waste it.’
866Sergeant Tanna and Ven Anders entered the carriage, and the metal floor groaned alarmingly with their combined weight.
867‘Can you get this carriage working, archmagos?’ asked Tanna.
868‘I already informed Master Surcouf that it was functional.’
869‘Then let’s get going,’ said Anders.
870The transit between the two decks was a wide processional ramp with an angled parapet to either side, where dust-shawled statues and machines hissed and chattered in streams of binary. Perhaps it meant something important, perhaps the Speranza was trying to tell him something, but what that might be, Hawkins didn’t know.
871A twin-lascannon turret rested on a gargoyle-wrapped corbel above him, but it looked so poorly maintained, Hawkins doubted it could even move let alone fire. Kneeling Guardsmen took cover in the shadow of the machines on either side of the ramp, lasguns aimed at the wide gateway below.
872Magos Blaylock had assured Hawkins that all the gates between main deck spaces would automatically seal, but that hadn’t happened here. Reports of those gates that stubbornly refused to close crackled over the vox-bead in his ear, together with word of enemy movements.
873Hawkins ran across the top of the ramp, where roll-out barricades were being hauled into place. Sergeant Rae issued orders to the seventy-six Cadian soldiers occupying this position in a voice familiar to Guardsmen across the galaxy. They prepared fire posts, bolted on kinetic ablatives or layered sacks of annealing particulates over the barricade. Hawkins was more used to sandbags, but Dahan assured him these were far superior in absorbing impacts than mere dirt.
874And anyway, where could you get dirt on a starship?
875A black-coated commissar worked alongside a support platoon setting up their plasma cannons in a prepared bastion. Supply officers set caches of ammo in armoured containers as a team of enginseers directed a pair of Sentinels hauling quad-barrelled Rapiers. One of the automated weapons was fitted out with heavy bolters, the other with a laser destroyer. Just as he’d ordered.
876These powerful weapons would eventually seal this route, but until they were in place, it was grunts with lasrifles.
877Taking up position at the centre of the barricade, Hawkins reached up and tapped the vox-bead at his ear.
878‘Company commanders, report.’
879‘Valdor company, no contact.’
880‘Sergeant Kastagir, Hotshot company, under moderate attack.’
881‘Where’s Lieutenant Gerund, sergeant?’
882‘Hit to the arm, sir. The medics think she might lose it.’
883‘Do you need support?’ asked Hawkins.
884The vox crackled and the sounds of angry voices came down the line. ‘Don’t you dare, sir,’ said Lieutenant Gerund. ‘We’ve got this one. Just took an unlucky ricochet, that’s all.’
885‘Understood,’ said Hawkins. He had complete faith in each of his lieutenants, and if Gerund said she didn’t need help, Hawkins believed her. He continued down his leaders.
886‘Creed company engaging now!’
887‘Squads Artema and Pious under fire. No significant losses.’
888The rest of his forces provided a mix of contact/no-contact reports. Within four minutes of the boarding alarm going out, the Cadians had deployed to pre-assigned defence points, and a picture of the boarders’ attack pattern – or rather, their lack of one – formed in Hawkins’s mind.
889A good defence rested on anticipating where an enemy would attack. Armouries, power plants, life-support, main arterials, inter-deck transits, vital junctions, connecting thoroughfares and the like. These were all vital targets, but the invaders were teleporting in at random. Some appeared in threatening positions, while others materialised in sealed-off portions of the ship or places of negligible importance.
890‘Callins,’ said Hawkins, connecting to the prow forges where Jahn Callins was lighting a fire under Magos Turentek’s adepts to get the armoured vehicles moving.
891‘A little busy here, sir,’ replied Callins.
892‘We’re not exactly sipping dammassine and playing cards down here, Jahn,’ he said. ‘Where’s my armoured support?’
893‘Tricky, sir,’ said Callins. ‘These Mechanicus imbeciles have got half our inventory chained up in the damn air or hitched onto lifter-rigs. I’m trying to sort it, but it’s taking time.’
894‘How long? There’s more of these crystal things appearing every minute.’
895‘Soon as I can, sir,’ promised Callins. ‘You’ll know we’re ready when we roll past you.’
896Hawkins grinned and signed off, turning his attention to this position. A pair of arguing magi with shaven skulls worked in the guts of a control hatch beside the gateway, but whatever they were doing, it wasn’t working.
897‘Bloody Mechanicus,’ said Hawkins, pausing as he passed a cogged skull icon stamped onto the wall next to him. He reached out and touched it, feeling the ever-present vibration passing through the starship.
898A little self-conscious, Hawkins said, ‘Speranza, if you can hear me, we could really use some cooperation. We’re trying to defend you, but you’re not making it easy for us.’
899‘Since when have Cadian soldiers ever taken the easy fight?’ said Rae, appearing with his rifle held loosely at his hip. ‘We’re born under the Eye and know hardship from birth. Why should life be any easier?’
900Hawkins was about to answer when he heard a series of quick taps over the vox. Scout-cant. Three taps on the repeat.
901Enemy inbound.
902Rae heard it too and shouted, ‘Stand to!’ as a squad of cloaked scouts ran back through the gateway. The squad sergeant, a mohawked soldier with black and steel camo-paint slashed across his face, made a fist above his head. He made a crosswise motion across his chest and thumped his shoulder harness twice.
903Two hundred or more.
904The scouts sprinted up the ramp, keeping low and seeming to move only from the waist down. The adepts at the gate bleated in terror. One remained hooked into the gate’s mechanisms, the other jerked free and hitched up his robes to run after the scouts.
905‘Spry for a tech-priest,’ observed Rae.
906‘You be fast if you had two hundred enemy at your arse.’
907‘True,’ said Rae as the scouts vaulted over the barricade and the first crystalline creatures, like the ones they’d faced on Katen Venia, poured through the gate.
908‘By squads, open fire!’ shouted Hawkins.
909A storm of las-fire blazed down the ramp and over fifty glittering enemies broke apart into splintered shards. Heavy bolters flayed the creatures, chugging reports echoing from the enclosing walls of the transit. Grenades burst amongst them and blue-white bolts of plasma heat-fused more where they stood.
910Hawkins slotted the skull of a jagged-looking thing of crystal between his iron sights and pulled the trigger. It exploded like a glass sculpture dropped from a great height. He picked another and dropped it, then another, methodically racking up kills with every shot.
911Crackling bolts of green energy sliced up the ramp, but the Cadians were well dug in and the annealing properties of the particulate bags were living up to Magos Dahan’s boast. The twin lascannons on the gargoyle-wrapped corbel opened fire, and blew a dozen creatures to shards.
912Hawkins laughed. ‘Well, what do you know?’
913‘Sir?’ said Rae, a wide grin plastered across his face.
914‘Never mind,’ replied Hawkins, ducking down to replace his rifle’s powercell.
915Then a section of the barricade exploded in a mushrooming detonation of sick green fire. A pulsing shock wave rolled over the Cadians as burning bodies rained down. Hawkins rolled and coughed a bitter wad of bloody spit.
916‘Creed save us, what was that?’ grunted Rae, wiping grit from his eyes.
917Hawkins dragged himself upright, pushing aside pieces of wrecked barricade and body parts as he blinked away spotty after-images of light. A ten-metre-wide gap had been blown in the barricade. At least thirty wounded Guardsmen lay scattered in disarray, little more than limbless, screaming half-bodies. Corpsmen were moving through the firestorm to reach them. They called out triage instructions as medicae servitors dragged the most seriously injured soldiers out of the line of fire.
918Both Sentinels were down. One was on its knees, its armoured canopy torn open like foil paper and inner surfaces dripping red. The other sprawled on its back, the stumps of its mechanised legs thrashing uselessly beneath it. A burning Rapier lay on its side, the enginseers smeared to bloody paste. The other weapon platform sat in splendid isolation, looking miraculously undamaged.
919Crunching over the shattered remains of the first wave of enemies, a gigantic creature of broken glass reflections pushed onto the base of the ramp.
920Easily the size of three superheavies in a column, it was a hideous amalgam of rippling centipede and draconic beetle. Its head was a brutal orifice of concentric jaws that spun like the earth-crushing drills of a Hellbore. Spikes of weaponry blazed from the upper surfaces of its glossy carapace.
921‘War machine!’ shouted Hawkins.
922Bielanna listened to the mon-keigh speak as though their actions mattered, as though they were the agents of change in a universe that cared nothing for their mayfly existences.
923And yet…
924Hadn’t she been drawn here by their actions? Hadn’t she seen their actions deforming the skein, denying her a future where she was a mother to twin eldar girls? Hadn’t she followed their threads to give her unborn daughters a chance to exist?
925‘You are lost, farseer,’ said Ariganna Icefang, hissing in pain as the carriage began picking up speed and rumbled over a section of buckled rails. ‘Restore your focus.’
926Bielanna nodded and tried to smile at the gravely wounded exarch, but the despair was too heavy in her heart to convince. Ariganna’s helm was cracked and her breath rasped heavily beneath the splintered wraithbone.
927‘Lost?’ she said. ‘Perhaps, but not the way you think.’
928‘I do not believe you,’ said Ariganna. ‘You were dwelling on what brought us to this place.’
929‘You are perceptive,’ said Bielanna.
930‘For a warrior, you mean?’
931Bielanna didn’t answer. That was exactly what she’d thought.
932‘Death’s shadow imparts a clarity denied to me in life,’ said Ariganna, and Bielanna looked down at the blood pooling in the exarch’s lap. So much blood and nothing she could do to stop it.
933She swallowed. ‘I was merely thinking that you were right.’
934‘I usually am,’ said Ariganna, ‘but about what specifically?’
935‘That I would lead us all to our doom. I have been a poor seer not to have seen this gathering fate.’
936‘Believe that when we are all dead,’ said Ariganna.
937‘Too many of us are dead already,’ said Bielanna. ‘Torai, Yelena, Irenia, Khorada, Lighthand… And Uldanaish Ghostwalker is no longer among us.’
938A shadow passed over the exarch’s face and her eyes closed. Bielanna’s heart sank into an abyss of grief, but it was simply the carriage entering the tunnel at the base of the rocky slope.
939It had taken Kotov some time to restore the funicular to life, a process that seemed to require a considerable amount of cursing and repeated blows from his mechanised arms. Once moving, it had descended nearly a thousand metres before the fitful beams of its running lights illuminated a yawning tunnel mouth. Crystalline machinery that had the appearance of great age ringed the opening, its internal structure cloudy and cracked.
940Ariganna’s eyes opened and she said, ‘I know, I felt the Ghostwalker’s passing.’
941‘She Who Thirsts has him now,’ said Bielanna, guilty tears flowing freely. ‘I have damned him forever. I have damned us all.’
942‘You walk the Path of the Seer,’ said Ariganna. ‘You are trapped by that role just as I was trapped by the Path of the Warrior. You could no more fail to act on what you had seen than I could deny the pleasure I took in killing in the name of Kaela Mensha Khaine. Just answer me this… Knowing of the deaths your visions have led us to, would you go back and choose a different path? One that would not lead to your daughters’ birth?’
943‘I would not, and that shames me,’ said Bielanna.
944‘Feel no shame,’ said Ariganna, ‘for I would have it no other way. I would hate to die knowing your purpose was not as strong and sure as the Dawnlight.’
945‘Would that we had Anaris,’ wept Bielanna. ‘Nothing could stand before you then.’
946‘I am sure Eldanesh thought the same thing before he faced Khaine, but I take your point,’ said Ariganna, her voice growing faint. Her hand reached up, and Bielanna assumed she looked for her chainsabre. The weapon was gone, lost in the fight with the Tindalosi. Bielanna drew her rune-inscribed sword and pressed it into the exarch’s hand.
947Ariganna shook her head and passed the weapon back as the last warriors of the Starblade gathered behind Bielanna. ‘I will die as I was… before I… sought Khaine.’
948Bielanna understood as Vaynesh and Tariquel knelt beside their exarch and released the clasps holding her broken helmet in place. They gently lifted it over Ariganna’s head and stepped away.
949Ariganna Icefang’s features were cut glass and ice, violet-eyed and lethal, but that changed as the war-mask fell from her. As though another face entirely lay beneath her skin, the warm features of a frightened woman with the soul of a poet swam to the surface.
950‘Laconfir once told me there was no art more beautiful and diverse than the art of death, but he was wrong,’ said Ariganna with the face she had worn before entering the Shrine of the Twilight Blade. ‘Life is the most beautiful art. I think I forgot that for a time, but now…’
951The former exarch reached beneath her cracked breastplate and withdrew her clenched fist.
952‘Though my body dies, I remain evermore,’ said Ariganna, placing her hand upon Bielanna’s outstretched palm. ‘My spirit endures in all my kin who yet live.’
953The exarch’s hand fell away, revealing a softly glowing spirit stone. And Bielanna loosed an ululating howl of depthless anguish that blew out every window of the funicular in an explosion of shattering glass.
954The sight of the crystalline war machine might have put other soldiers to rout, but the Cadian 71st had fought the armies of the Despoiler across Agripinaa’s industrialised hellscape. The Archenemy’s war engines were blood-soaked things of warped flesh and dark iron, wrought to horrify as much as kill.
955Having faced them and lived, this thing’s appearance gave the Cadians only a moment’s pause.
956Las-bolts refracted through its translucent body, shearing away fused shards of crystal. Grenades cracked the glassy surface of its bullet-headed skull. They were hurting it, but too slowly.
957Spiked extrusions from its segmented back spat emerald lightning. The bolts arced and leapt across the barricade, and not even Dahan’s annealing particulates or the kinetic ablatives could withstand their power. Howling soldiers were vaporised in the coruscating electrical storms, the skin melting from their bones in an instant.
958Hawkins turned to Rae and shouted, ‘With me, sergeant!’
959‘Where are we going?’
960‘Don’t ask, just follow,’ said Hawkins, and pushed off the barricade. He ran to the top of the ramp, hearing Rae cursing him with all the force and inventiveness of a Cadian stevedore.
961He forced himself to ignore wounded soldiers calling for help, weaving a path through the rubble piled atop scores of the dead. Lethal bolts of green fire spanked the ground, and Hawkins bit back a shout of pain as searing heat creased his shoulder.
962A steady stream of fire blitzed the war machine, but lasguns and plasma guns just weren’t cutting it. He skidded into the cover of the Rapier, taking a moment to catch his breath. Rae tumbled in behind, breathless and streaked in sweat.
963‘Can you even fire this thing?’ asked Rae.
964‘Callins showed me the basics when we served on Belis Corona,’ said Hawkins. ‘Easy as stripping a lasgun, I reckon.’
965Rae gave him a sceptical look as he scrabbled to his feet and turned around, doing his best not to expose himself to fire. He ran his eyes over the control mechanism. A mixture of amber and green gem-lights blinking on a brass-rimmed panel. Dozens of ivory switches that could be turned to a number of settings.
966But, reassuringly, a set of rubberised pistol handles with brass spoon-triggers.
967‘How hard can it be?’ he said, gripping the firing mechanism and mashing the oversized triggers.
968A bolt of blinding light stabbed down the ramp and punched through the bulkhead to the left of the advancing war machine. The beam’s white-hot point of impact reduced two dozen crystalline foes to microscopic fragments, but left the war machine untouched.
969‘How in the name of the Eye did you miss?’ yelled Rae, as the war machine pushed more of its bulk into the transit. Hawkins looked for a control to adjust the Rapier’s aim, but came up empty. Why would he have expected this to be easy?
970‘Push it,’ he shouted over the hiss of lasguns and metallic coughs of grenade detonations. ‘A metre to the left.’
971Rae looked up at him as though he were mad.
972‘Seriously?’
973‘I don’t know how to shift its aim. Now get around this thing and push it!’
974Rae rolled his eyes and scrambled around the bulky weapon system. Flurries of snapping energy bolts tore up the ground and portions of the barricade next to him. The sergeant rammed his shoulder into the side of the Rapier, grunting with the effort. It didn’t move.
975‘Put your back into it, man!’
976Rae shouted something obscene that Hawkins chose to ignore as a number of Guardsmen broke from cover to help. Two were cut down almost immediately, another fell with the flesh stripped from his legs. But enough reached the Rapier alive and slammed into it with grunts of exertion.
977Against Cadian strength, the weight of the Rapier had no chance, and the track unit shifted. Hawkins looked over the top of the machine. He stared down into the cavernous, blade-filled mouth.
978‘Got you,’ he said and mashed the triggers again.
979This time the beam punched down its throat. It lit up from within as the awesome power of the beam refracted through its entire structure. The war machine detonated in an explosion of molten glass and glittering metal-rich dust.
980Its body slumped, coming apart in an avalanche of broken glass.
981And finally, to Hawkins’s great surprise, the gate began to close with a grinding screech of metal that hadn’t moved in centuries. Hawkins saw the lone tech-priest hunched in the lee of the pilasters at the side of the gateway. The adept was still connected into the hatch by trailing cables, and Hawkins swore he’d pin a Ward of Cadia on his damn chest.
982The gate slammed down with a booming clang and a crunch of pulverised crystal. The few enemy still on the Cadian side of the gate were swiftly gunned down with coordinated precision. Within thirty seconds, the area was secure.
983Hawkins forced himself to release the Rapier’s fire-controls, his fingers cramped after gripping so hard.
984‘Sir,’ said Rae, carefully and calmly, ‘next time you want to put us in harm’s way like that could you, well, not…?’
985Hawkins nodded and let out a shuddering breath.
986‘I’ll take that under advisement, sergeant,’ said Hawkins.
987The enemy wasn’t getting through this gateway any time soon, so it was time to consolidate. Well over half his men were down. Those too wounded to remain in place were evacuated to pre-established field-infirmaries. Fresh powercells and water were dispensed to those who remained.
988Replacement sections of barricade were installed and with reinforcements arriving from the reserve platoons, the position was secure within four minutes of the attack’s ending.
989Hawkins checked with his other detachments, listening to clipped reports of furious firefights throughout his sectors of responsibility. Some were still engaged, some had repulsed numerous waves of attackers. Others had yet to make enemy contact. Only one position had been abandoned as crystalline foes appeared without warning in flanking positions in overwhelming numbers.
990Hawkins adjusted his mental map of the fighting, seeing areas of vulnerability, angles of potential counter-attack and areas of the Speranza where the greatest threats might arise.
991One location immediately presented itself as the greatest danger – as he’d always suspected it would.
992‘Sergeant Rae,’ he said. ‘Assemble a rapid-reaction command platoon. I need to be moving on the double.’
993‘Where are we going?’
994‘Just get it done, sergeant.’
995Rae nodded, dragging squads out of the line and hustling them into formation. Hawkins tapped the bead in his ear, cycling through channels until he reached the Mechanicus vox-net.
996‘Dahan, status report?’
997The Magos Secutor’s response was virtually immediate.
998‘I am orchestrating the ship’s defence from the Secutor temple. All skitarii positions holding, though the randomness of the enemy arrival points is proving to be most vexing.’
999‘Always a pain when the enemy doesn’t play nice, isn’t it?’
1000‘A predictable enemy is an enemy that can be more easily overcome,’ agreed Dahan. ‘Observation: I discern a lack of cohesion in this assault. Each enemy contingent appears to be working to its own design, independent of the others.’
1001‘Keeping our attention divided,’ said Hawkins. ‘Trying to mask the real danger.’
1002‘What real danger?’
1003‘The training deck,’ said Hawkins. ‘Lots of ways in and a more or less straight run to the bridge. We’re on our way there now.’
1004‘An unnecessary redeployment, Captain Hawkins,’ said Dahan. ‘Skitarii forces are emplaced and all static weaponry has been granted full lethal authority.’
1005Rae signalled the command platoon’s readiness, and Hawkins took his place in the line.
1006‘Call it gut reaction, magos,’ said Hawkins. ‘I get the feeling this attack will cohere soon enough, and when it does, they’re going to throw everything they’ve got at us.’
1007Thanks to the empty window frames, the reek of stale air and turned earth had been growing stronger in the funicular with every kilometre travelled. By the time it reached the end of its long journey through the planet’s crust, the graveyard stench was almost overpowering.
1008Even distanced from olfactory input by augmented sensory limiters, Kotov still registered the smell as unpleasant. From the looks of disgust on the faces of those without his advantages, it must be unbearable to baseline senses.
1009The carriage doors squealed open, revealing the funicular’s final destination: a buckled terminus platform of bare iron within an ancient cave of gnarled rock. The ceiling was jagged with grotesquely organic stalactites of rotted matter, and pools of foetid liquid gathered beneath them in sticky pools.
1010Tanna and the Black Templars debarked first, moving to the filth-encrusted walls and covering the only other exit, a cave mouth fringed with cloudy crystalline growths. The Cadians went next, following their colonel with rifles jammed in tight to their shoulders.
1011‘So do you think this is a better place, Master Surcouf?’ asked Kotov, taking a moment to enjoy the sight of the rogue trader pressing a wadded kerchief over his mouth and nose.
1012‘Well, we’re not being attacked by bloodthirsty mech-hunters, so I’d say it’s a step up from the universal assembler.’
1013Kotov stepped from the funicular and almost immediately, his chronometer began glitching, the numerals speeding up, reversing and flickering in and out of sync with his implanted organs. The effect was disorientating, and he stumbled. His skitarii held him upright.
1014‘Archmagos?’ asked one, whose noospheric tags identified him as Carna. ‘Is something the matter?’
1015Kotov disabled the chronometer and restored his equilibrium with a surge of internal purgatives. The unpleasant sensation passed and he nodded to his protectors.
1016‘I am fine,’ he said.
1017Surcouf followed him onto the platform, with Magos Pavelka clinging to his arm. Surcouf was almost dragged to the ground when Pavelka was seized by the same nauseous sense of mechanical dislocation that had almost felled him.
1018‘Turn off your chronometer,’ Kotov advised her, though given Pavelka’s transgressions, he was inclined to let her suffer.
1019As unpleasant as the effects of the cave were to Kotov and Pavelka, it was nothing to how the eldar witch reacted. Bielanna screamed and fell to her knees as soon as she stepped from the carriage. Her skin, which even to a Martian priest appeared unnaturally pale, grew ever more ashen. Her face contorted in grief, more so than when her piercing shriek on the carriage had almost deafened them all. Her face contorted as though invisible hands were pushing each muscle in different directions at once. Tears streamed down her face.
1020‘I told you…’ she said. ‘All the pain of this world is here. This is it, this is the locus of splintering time. This is where the fraying of every thread begins and ends. The flaw that tears the weave apart…’
1021Her words made no sense to Kotov and he turned away.
1022‘You led us to this,’ spat Bielanna. ‘Your mon-keigh stupidity!’
1023Carna growled, baring steel-plated teeth, but Bielanna ignored him. Her warriors helped her to her feet, but she shrugged them off, stalking towards Kotov like an assassin with a helpless target in sight.
1024The skitarii raised their weapons, but Bielanna hurled them aside with a sweeping gesture of her palms. They slammed into the walls of the cave, and hoarfrost patterned the surface of their armour as she pinned them three metres above the platform.
1025‘What have you done here?’ said Bielanna, a distant, confused look in her eyes, as though she was having to force each word into existence. It seemed to Kotov that she was not really addressing him, but some unseen elemental force.
1026‘Time itself is being unmade here,’ sobbed Bielanna. ‘The future unwoven and the past rewritten! All the potential of the future is being stolen… No! This cannot happen… Infinite mirrors reflecting one another over and over… Oh, you came here with such dreams… Time and memory twisted into hate… Trapped here… We cannot escape, we cannot move… Oh, Isha’s mercy… The pain. To never move, to be denied the time-drift…’
1027Bielanna’s skin shimmered with internal radiance, her eyes ablaze with anger. Her hands were fists of lightning, but with an effort of will, she flexed her fingers and the crackling psychic energies dissipated. She let out a shuddering breath that dropped the temperature in the cave markedly.
1028The two skitarii fell to the iron platform. Both were instantly on their feet, weapons ratcheting into their kill-cycles.
1029‘Stand down,’ ordered Kotov, with an accompanying blurt of authoritative binary. Reluctantly – very reluctantly – the skitarii obeyed, but still put themselves between him and Bielanna.
1030‘Whatever you are seeing or feeling here is not my doing,’ said Kotov. ‘It is Telok’s. Save your rage for him.’
1031And with that he turned away, marching towards the exit from the terminus, where the Cadians cast wary glances before and behind them. Kotov’s passive auspex – all he had allowed himself since the attack of the Tindalosi – registered powerful forces at work beyond the cave mouth.
1032He passed the Cadians and entered a long tunnel, circular in section except where iron decking had been laid along its base. The walls were rippling, vitrified rock. Melta-cut. Here and there, scraps of rotted cloth and dust lay discarded like emptied sandbags. A flickering white-green light beckoned him on and as he drew closer he tasted the actinic tang of powerful engines at work.
1033The tunnel opened onto a detritus-choked rock shelf overlooking a vast, subterranean gorge. Cliffs of stone soared overhead to a cavern roof that was ragged with spiralling horns of rock and dripping with foetid drizzle. Rusted iron spheres and enormous girders supported a network of arcane machinery that explained the source of the white-green light.
1034Tanna and his warriors stood amazed at the edge of the abyssal plunge, amid a tangle of corroded iron barriers. Kotov’s chronometer flared back to life, and a gut-wrenching mechanical nausea surged through his floodstream. He shut the chronometer off again. It reactivated a moment later, spiralling back and forth through time-cycles.
1035‘Tanna, what–’
1036Then Kotov saw the city.
1037Spreading like a rusted fungus across the opposite wall of the huge cave was a hideous warren of disgusting scrap dwellings wrought from iron and mud and ordure. They clung to the vertical sides of the chasm, and a twisting network of wire-wrought bridges draped the structures like a web.
1038Clearly of ancient provenance, the city was a grotesque fusion of organic growth and artifice. Portions had the appearance of having been built up from resinous secretions, pierced with tunnels like the lairs of burrower beasts, while others were formed from buckled sheets of scavenged metal. Hunched shadows moved between ragged tears in their walls, suggesting that this city was not dead at all, but occupied by some hideous troglodytic vermin. With halting steps that crunched over granular fragments of splintered crystal, Kotov put aside his discomfort and pulled himself forwards with the remains of the iron fretwork.
1039‘What has Telok done here?’ said Tanna, bending down to lift a robe of ragged hessian-like cloth from the ground. ‘What lives in that city?’
1040Tanna held the robe out to Kotov. He took it from Tanna and turned it over in his manipulator digits. The material was ancient and crumbled at his touch. He remembered seeing similar scraps in the tunnel leading to the funicular terminal.
1041‘I do not know,’ said Kotov, ‘but this looks too familiar for comfort… I have seen remains like this before.’
1042Tanna nodded and said, ‘The Tomioka.’
1043‘Yes,’ agreed Kotov.
1044‘I think I might know what these were,’ said Roboute, bending to sift through a rotten bundle of patterned cloth and carefully lifting something small that gleamed dully in the light of the crackling machinery on the roof of the cave.
1045He held the object up for the others to see, and Kotov instantly matched it to the fragment that had disintegrated in Tanna’s hand beneath the Tomioka.
1046‘What is that?’ asked Tanna.
1047‘Part of the firing mechanism of a xeno-weapon,’ said Roboute.
1048‘How do you know that?’ said Kotov.
1049‘Please, archmagos, I’m a rogue trader, it’s my job to go places and see things that would get most people a one way trip to an excruciation chamber,’ said Roboute. ‘But, specifically, I once attended a very exclusive auction held by one of the borderland archeotech clans out on the fringes of the Ghoul Stars. Very exclusive, strictly invite only. Even then they were cautious, conducting every aspect of the transaction via servitor proxy-bodies and requiring every attendee to submit to biogenic non-disclosures not to reveal what they’d seen. Glossaic-sensitive venom capsules, neural pick-ups linked to implanted mycotoxin dispensers. Pretty standard stuff among the more cautious collectors.’
1050‘So how can you tell us now?’ said Kotov.
1051‘You think that was the first contraband auction I’ve been to, archmagos?’ said Roboute, almost offended. ‘There isn’t a confidentiality technology I don’t know my way around. Anyway, the last lot of the auction was a custom-made stasis sarcophagus containing a xenoform with a weapon that had a firing mechanism just like this.’
1052As Roboute spoke of the auction, the metal in his hand began to crumble with accelerated degradation.
1053‘What manner of xenos?’ asked Tanna.
1054‘They called it a Nocturnal Warrior of Hrud,’ said Roboute.
1055Phosphor-streaked highways ran the length of the Speranza, neon bright against the darkness. Molten datacores flared brightly, miniature suns against the matt darkness of the void surrounding them. The impossibly dense and complex datascape of the Ark Mechanicus spread before Abrehem, wrought in glittering binaric constellations.
1056This was what lay beneath the rude matter of the Speranza, a network of pulsing information rendered down to its purest, most unambiguous form. No walls of steel or stone constrained the informational light’s journey around the ship, no aspect of its life worked independently of another.
1057<Everything is connected,> said Abrehem, relishing his newly implanted knowledge of lingua-technis. <How could I not have seen it?>
1058Light enfolded him as he passed effortlessly through the virtual structure of the vessel he had always assumed was as solid and impermeable as any planetary body. He saw the lie of that now, freed from the confines of his flesh and given free rein of the invisible datascape within the Speranza.
1059Abrehem watched myriad lightstreams converge, their whole becoming brighter than the sum of its parts. He saw geometric shapes transform as fresh data reshaped them. He flew alongside shoals of fleeting data as it skimmed the surface of a glittering superhighway of knowledge.
1060Sometimes the data clotted, becoming dull and unresponsive until the patterns of light rerouted. Pathways split and the flow altered like water in a river.
1061What did such changes indicate?
1062Abrehem had no idea, but he watched the light twist into new patterns throughout the ship, constantly reorganising and reformatting itself. How long had it been since Magos Tychon and Chiron Manubia had sat him in the polished throne at the heart of Forge Elektrus and let the haptic implants in his mechanised arm mesh with its divine circuits?
1063A minute? A year?
1064Hexamathic calculus filled Abrehem’s head, an interconnected web of quantum algebraics, axioms of metatheory, four-dimensional geometries, N-topological parametrics and multivariate equations. Even the simplest concept was utterly bewildering to Abrehem’s conscious mind. Only the deepest regions of his psyche were able to process the many illogical, acausal and counter-intuitive tenets of hexamathics.
1065His introduction to this arcane branch of mathematical techno-theology had been brutally, painfully rapid. Optical inloads were driven straight through his eyes to the neocortex of his brain.
1066An imperfect means of knowledge implantation and one that, according to Magos Tychon, would fade without continual reinforcement. Only a complete remodelling of his cognitive architecture and numerous invasive cerebral implants would allow the inloads to permanently bond with his synaptic pathways.
1067Much to Abrehem’s relief, such procedures were beyond the skill of any in Forge Elektrus to perform, and the nearest medicae deck was under siege. So, agonisingly painful optical inloads it was.
1068But it was worth any pain to see the ship like this, to fly its length in the time it took to form the thought. The largest forges, temples and information networks were hyper-dense novae of light. The command bridge was incandescent, too bright to look upon.
1069Each critical system was a pulsing star of layered information, stored knowledge and the collected wisdom of all who toiled within. Nor was Abrehem’s sight confined simply to the ship’s systems.
1070Scattered like nebulous clouds of glittering dust, the Speranza’s crew billowed through the traceries of scaffolding light as microscopic flecks. Confined by millennia of dogma to prescribed pathways, none could fly the datascape as free as Abrehem.
1071Yet even the brightest adepts were tiny embers compared to the heart of the ship where its gestalt spirit took shape. The sum total of their knowledge was insignificant next to the things the ship knew in its deepest, most hidden logic-caches.
1072Vitali and Manubia had warned him not to venture too far from Elektrus, that this was simply a test to see if he could fly the datascape at all. He was given strict instructions to keep clear of any system infected by Galatea’s presence. He had yet to learn its subtleties. Many were those whose awe had led them into dangerous archipelagos of corrupt code and left them brain-dead, their bodies fit only for transformation into servitors.
1073Abrehem doubted any of those unfortunates were Machine-touched, so guided his course down to the nearest datacore, one of many that regulated the ship’s atmospheric content. It took the form of a simple sphere of pure white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity within.
1074Streams of coruscating binary flared from it like solar ejections, lattices of chemical ratio-structures, air-mix formulae and the like, all passing into the river of information flowing through the Speranza.
1075Abrehem took up orbit around the datacore’s equator, glorying in its roaring, furnace-like heat. Its heart was pure molten data, yet something else squatted within it, something that should never have been allowed into the datascape, something parasitic.
1076<Galatea…> whispered Abrehem.
1077Aware it was observed, the parasite within the datacore uncoiled like a slowly wakening serpent. Abrehem knew immediately that Galatea’s presence was something unwholesome, something with the potential to destroy the datacore in the blink of an eye.
1078Realising he was in terrible danger, Abrehem tried to fly away, but whipping lines of light lashed him. Pulled him down. Pain jackknifed him. Ice enfolded his heart, his autonomic nervous system crashing as the thing took pains to kill him slowly and carefully.
1079Abrehem tried to speak, to plead for his life, but induced feedback was eating through into his cerebrum. Even as it killed him, it studied him; curious at this unbound traveller in its domain.
1080<Who are you, little man?> it said.
1081<Abrehem Locke,> he said, the words dragged from his mind.
1082<We are Galatea,> said the parasite, <and this is our ship.>
1083Abrehem felt its squirming coils crushing him, wondering if anyone in Forge Elektrus would even know he was dying. Would he be convulsing with feedback agonies? Would his body have voided itself as he lost control of his bodily functions?
1084<Forge Elektrus,> chuckled Galatea. <So that is where you came from. Well, we shall need to do something about that, won’t we?>
1085Abrehem tried to keep his thoughts secure, but Galatea penetrated every defence with ease. It peeled back the layers of his psyche like poorly sutured grafts, digesting all he knew piece by piece.
1086How galling to die on his first time in the datascape! How Vitali would be disappointed to find that his hoped-for saviour was a fraud. He had hoped to salve the venerable stargazer’s pain by helping him fight Galatea, but how naïve that hope now seemed.
1087Angry at his failure, Abrehem lashed out.
1088And a pure white light exploded from him, searing the serpentine coils of parasitic data to inert cubes of black ash. Galatea’s scream of pain echoed across the binaric vistas of information as this aspect of its infection was burned out. Abrehem stared in wonder as the datacore pulsed hotter and brighter now that the cuckoo in the nest had been excised.
1089The dreadful cold fell away and his heart kicked out like a drowning man as it fibrillated with sudden spasms of life. Abrehem felt himself being pushed away from the datacore, the binaric spirit at its heart wishing him gone.
1090He understood why. It feared Galatea would return.
1091He lifted his head and soared high above the main highways of code, feeling vengeful tendrils of Galatea’s presence closing in.
1092<Time to get out,> said Abrehem.
1093He recited the separation mantra.
1094Abrehem opened his eyes…
1095…and all but collapsed to the floor of Forge Elektrus. He was dry heaving and screaming, falling in a spasming tangle of limbs. Hands caught him. Human hands. Flesh and blood hands.
1096Abrehem felt himself lowered to the floor. He blinked away communion burn. His stomach lurched. He rolled onto his side and vomited. Something warm ran down his leg.
1097‘Thor’s balls!’ cried a disgusted voice. ‘He’s pissed himself!’
1098‘Shut up, Hawke,’ said a voice he recognised. Coyne.
1099What were Coyne and Hawke doing here?
1100An answer quickly presented itself.
1101The Speranza was under attack and they figured the best way to stay alive was to find me. And like any bondsman worth their salt, they knew the secret ways in and out of most places…
1102‘Abrehem,’ said Coyne, pressing a cold, wet rag to his brow. ‘You’re all right, it’s over now.’
1103The sickness faded, replaced with a hot, dull ache in the heart of Abrehem’s brain.
1104‘Coyne?’ he said. ‘Am I dead?’
1105‘No,’ snapped Chiron Manubia, looming into his field of view, ‘but you gave it your best shot, you bloody idiot!’
1106Abrehem took her rebuke at face value. But her tears spoke of genuine concern. Manubia wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and turned to address someone out of sight.
1107‘You see? I told you he wasn’t ready for this,’ she said, ‘no matter what your daughter says.’
1108‘He has to be,’ said Vitali Tychon, helping Coyne lift Abrehem to his feet. His legs were unsteady. His brain had momentarily forgotten how to use them.
1109‘Magos Tychon,’ said Abrehem. ‘I’m sorry…’
1110‘Didn’t we tell you not to fly too close to the datacores?’ said Vitali as they lowered him to one of the nave’s hard wooden benches. The shaven-headed adepts moved to give him room. ‘Galatea is tapped into all the vital systems.’
1111‘Galatea!’ cried Abrehem as the recollection of what he had experienced within the Speranza’s datascape rammed into the forefront of his memory. ‘It knows, oh no… It knows we’re here.’
1112‘You told it where we are?’ said Manubia.
1113‘I tried not to, but it was too strong,’ said Abrehem.
1114‘Did you tell it anything else?’ snapped Manubia. ‘Access codes, immolation sequences? Kill-codes? You know, the trivial stuff?’
1115Abrehem shook his head. The motion set off hammerblows within his skull. His vision greyed. He wanted to retort, but she was right.
1116‘That’s it, we’re dead,’ said Manubia, throwing up her hands.
1117‘No,’ said Vitali, tapping the side of his head. ‘Think. Galatea’s hold over the Speranza’s systems is so thorough that if it simply wanted to kill us, we would already be burning or asphyxiating.’
1118‘So why aren’t we?’ asked Hawke from across the nave. ‘I am so leaving if you think that’s a possibility.’
1119‘Because,’ said Vitali. ‘I think Galatea is going to want to take Master Locke from us alive.’
1120Abrehem got to his feet, still unsteady after his brush with Galatea in the datascape. Yet, for all that he had come close to irrevocable brain-death, the encounter had galvanised him with the urge to fight back.
1121‘You should let Vitali’s kill-packs inside,’ he said to Adept Manubia as he flexed his metal fist and returned to the throne. ‘I’m going back in.’
1122‘Describe the creature,’ said Kotov.
1123‘Small, no larger than a child,’ said Roboute, letting the dusty remains of the firing mechanism fall from his palm. ‘Vaguely humanoid, but its limbs bent in ways that looked wrong somehow, like they could articulate in several different directions at once. I couldn’t see the body clearly, what with it being wrapped head to foot in rags, but there was something else, something that made it hard to look at for longer than a few moments. After a while you started thinking it was moving or somehow shifting when you weren’t looking.’
1124‘In a stasis field?’ scoffed Kotov. ‘Impossible.’
1125‘Clearly you’ve never been to the Temple of Correction,’ said Roboute, standing and wiping the dust from his trousers. ‘But anyway, it didn’t matter, no one wanted to buy the thing. It was impossible to prove its authenticity. For all anyone knew they might be buying a fake.’
1126Tanna shook his head in disgust. ‘How did they come by this body?’
1127‘Story was, the clan’s scav-crews found it in a deep cave system beneath an outlier world called Epsilon Garanto. Apparently there was a pretty vicious battle between an Imperial kill-team and a subterranean alien infestation. Bloody enough for there to be no survivors, so the scavvers swept up what they could and got out before any follow-on forces arrived.’
1128‘Did you purchase the creature?’ said Kotov.
1129‘If I had, do you think I’d tell you?’ said Roboute. ‘Anyone who owned such a thing would soon have the Inquisition sniffing around their interests. And if even half the stories the auctioneer-proxy told are true, they’re absurdly dangerous. Who needs that on their ship?’
1130‘Dangerous how?’ asked Tanna.
1131‘The hrud are said to be dimensionally volatile,’ answered Kotov, sweeping his gaze around the rotten interior of the cave with sudden disquiet. ‘Able to shift between the interstices of the universe in ways even the Mechanicus do not fully understand. Each alien is said to possess an entropic field that causes ultra-rapid decrepitude in its surroundings. I have studied reports of these creatures and their alleged powers, but never thought to see an entire warren of them for myself!’
1132‘So if that is a whole warren of the creatures, why are we still alive?’ said Tanna. ‘And why don’t they just shift away?’
1133Kotov pointed to the blazing arcs of energy leaping between the brass orbs and arcane machinery affixed to the roof of the cave.
1134‘I suspect the machinery above us prevents the hrud from simply displacing,’ said Kotov. ‘Though I do not know how.’
1135‘Telok has trapped the feith-mhor here with his machines of crystal and iron dust,’ said Bielanna, appearing without warning behind them.
1136Roboute turned towards the farseer and saw something incredible. An eldar that looked old. Bielanna’s skin was pallid, and thread-fine veins traced swirling patterns over her cheeks and forehead like elaborate tribal tattoos. Her right eye had entirely filled with blood.
1137‘Feith-mhor? The Shadows out of Time?’ he ventured.
1138Bielanna nodded. ‘He has shackled their powers to the Caoineag, this infernal engine of the Yngir.’
1139‘Yngir? I don’t know that one.’
1140‘And I shall not tell you its meaning,’ said Bielanna, her voice filled with hate for all humankind. ‘I could not see it until now… here, in the heart of it… the eye of the hurricane. The skein’s threads distort through the warped lens of this world. Telok’s machine steals from the future and past to rebuild the present, heedless of the damage it wreaks.’
1141Despite Bielanna’s fractured syntax, Roboute saw the light of understanding in Kotov’s eyes.
1142‘These creatures are acting as a temporal counterbalance to the space-time distortions caused by the Breath of the Gods!’ said the archmagos. ‘That is why every auspex reading of Katen Venia and Hypatia showed them to be simultaneously in the throes of violent birth and geological inertia. Hyper-accelerated development balanced out by ultra-rapid decrepitude. Ave Deus Mechanicus!’
1143‘Speak plainly, archmagos,’ said Tanna. ‘I am not stupid, but I have not access to the knowledge you possess.’
1144‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Kotov, trying hard to keep the excitement from his voice. ‘Space-time is being violated on a fundamental level. Put bluntly, Sergeant Tanna, Telok’s machine is undoing the basic laws of the universe in order to achieve miraculous results.’
1145Kotov paced the edge of the gorge, his head hazed with excess heat bleeding from his cranium as his cognitive processes spun up to concurrently access tens of thousands of inloaded databases.
1146‘If I am understanding… Bielanna correctly, the Breath of the Gods feeds its vast power demands by siphoning it from the future and the past, most likely from the hearts of dozens of stars simultaneously. It then uses that power to accomplish its incredible feats of stellar engineering,’ said Kotov, his mechadendrites tracing complex temporal equations in the air. ‘But the fallout from employing the machine created the many spatial anomalies Magos Tychon detected at the galactic edge, stars dying before their time, others failing to ignite and so forth. In all likelihood, the Breath of the Gods probably created the Halo Scar in the first place.’
1147Kotov stopped pacing and turned to the rest of their ragtag band. Roboute saw acceptance in his eyes, the superiority and arrogance he had come to know in the archmagos returned once again to the fore. The surety of purpose Kotov had lost in despair was restored in the set of his jawline and the cold steel in his eyes.
1148‘Master Surcouf, I owe you an apology,’ he said.
1149Roboute was taken aback. Of all the things he might have expected from Kotov, an apology wasn’t high on the list.
1150‘You do?’
1151‘Yes,’ said Kotov. ‘Because you were right. One larger problem is simply a series of more manageable problems. We have alerted Magos Blaylock to Telok’s perfidy, but it is not enough to warn others and expect them to fight our battles. We must take action to stop Telok. We have to stop the Breath of the Gods from ever leaving Exnihlio.’
1152‘So what’s our next move?’ said Roboute.
1153‘Simple,’ said Kotov. ‘We make our way back to the surface and kill Vettius Telok.’
1154Another arcing web of lightning crackled into existence aboard the Speranza, where granite priests of Mars whose deeds had long since been eclipsed flanked a dusty processional nave. Here stood a magos whose achievements Roboute Surcouf had once vowed to uncover, but never bothered to seek out.
1155The storm of lightning expanded at a geometric rate.
1156Forking tongues of corposant leapt from statue to statue and detonated each one with a thunderous crack of splitting stone and shearing rebars.
1157Last to be destroyed was the statue of Magos Vahihva of Pharses, who exploded in a bellowing fury of rock and fire. The swirling lightstorm seethed and raged around the vault of pulverised statuary, dragging their fragmented matter into the coalescing mass of a crystalline warrior-construct.
1158The attackers manifesting throughout the Speranza were little more than inert crystal, their latticework structure threaded with billions of tiny bio-imitative machines that gave them motion.
1159Equipped with limited autonomy by superlative rites of cortex evokatus developed by Archmagos Telok after his abortive expedition to Naogeddon, they manifested a cognitive awareness of their surroundings and behaviour that had all the appearance of being inventively reactive.
1160They were in fact bound by strict protocols of engagement and limited in intelligence by the number of micro-machines in each manifestation.
1161But what was manifesting in the processional nave was something else entirely. Within a raging supernova of white-green energy, a crystalline giant took shape. Fashioned and empowered by the critical mass of Telok’s machines aboard the Speranza, it was a macrocosm of synaptic connections far in advance of even the largest life form.
1162Each connection was useless in and of itself, but capable of combining the networked potential of every single crystalith into something greater than the sum of its many parts.
1163Taller than a Dreadnought, its crystalline limbs were hooked and tined, rippling with biomorphic induction energy. Its body was constantly in motion, cracking and reshaping as each new form was tested for lethality. Sometimes brutish and ogre-like, sometimes quadrupedal like a glass centaur. Other times it became a multi-limbed horror in the form of a clawed scorpinoid.
1164A host of guardian beasts surrounded it, bulky constructs of crystal with mantis-like blade limbs, glassy shields and angular skulls like vulpine hunters.
1165The alpha-creature’s newly awakened consciousness spread throughout the crystaliths aboard the Speranza like a wireless plague. It connected to the thousands of warrior-constructs and took away their autonomy.
1166And the apparently undirected nature of the attackers changed instantly to something singularly directed and driven by ferocious intent.
1167The Secutor temple squatted in the Speranza’s midships. Monolithic and threatening, it was the fiefdom of Magos Dahan. Its frontage was a weapon-studded cliff of glossy black stone cut from the bedrock of Tallarn, its only visible entrance a towering gate of black adamantium.
1168An enormous fanged skull variant of the Icon Mechanicus normally kept the gate sealed, but not today.
1169Mechanicus war engines rolled from the gate, spider-legged flame-tanks, praetorian phase-field guns, quad-cannons on armoured tracks and Rhino variants with turret-mounted graviton cannons. Following them came the clan-companies, augmented cybernetic warriors with baroque armour and technological variants of feral weapons.
1170The skitarii cohorts rolled from the gate to a central hub chamber below the temple. War-logisters with hook-bladed banners directed the warrior packs to radial transits that offered swift deployment throughout the ship. Braying skitarii warhorns and raucous war cries shook the walls as they clambered aboard their transports.
1171At the heart of the temple was the command vault, a cavernous bunker filled with banks of clattering logic engines at which sat hundreds of calculus-logi, strategos and members of the Analyticae. Ticker-tape machines spat punch-cards of orders and contact reports. Binaric chants relayed multi-layered vox and catechisms of praise in equal measure. Noospheric veils steamed from the ground. Servo-skulls flitted through the veils of light, recording, bearing messages or dispensing cryptic quotes from the Omnissiah in an aspect of the Destroyer.
1172Like a spider at the centre of its web, Magos Hirimau Dahan drank in the volumes of information, let it fill him. His body was a true hybrid of flesh and machine, weaponry and combat actuators. Dahan was a bio-mechanical engine geared for one purpose and one purpose only.
1173Killing.
1174And right now, his every faculty was engaged in the killing of the crystalline invaders of the Speranza. Thousands of boarding actions cycled through Dahan’s awareness, the particulars of each combat parsed and either discarded or added to the growing database of likely outcomes.
1175He processed engagements large and small – mass assaults on capital ships, desperate counter-boardings of mid-displacement cruisers, grappling actions of burning gunboats. The free-associative portions of his inloaded combat-memes were replete with notable boarding actions that offered the closest correlations with the current action.
1176Assault on the Circe by warriors alleged to be World Eaters.
1177Capture of the Dovenius Spear by the Ultramarines First Company.
1178Destruction of the Ophidium Gulf by the Dark Angels.
1179His battle-management wetware was currently processing two hundred and twenty-six separate engagements throughout the ship, each existing in a discrete compartment of thought within his neuromatrix. Everything from running firefights in cramped and darkened corridors to clashes between enormous crystalline hosts and skitarii cohorts through statue-lined processionals. Enemy war machines and Mechanicus heavy ordnance clashed in echoing maintenance hangars.
1180The fight for the Speranza would not be ended in a single glorious and decisive battle – what war ever really was? – it would be won or lost by incremental victories or defeats.
1181A holographic map shimmered in the air before him. Spectral grid lines rotated as Dahan’s upper manipulator arms spun them to display the relevant sections of the Speranza’s topography. Cadian positions were marked in blue, Mechanicus in gold and known hostile forces in red.
1182Dahan saw them all.
1183The enemy’s ability to appear without warning throughout the ship was Dahan’s biggest problem. Boarders constrained to fixed or predictable entry points could easily be contained and destroyed.
1184Boarders appearing at random were not so easily corralled.
1185The lack of cohesion was proving to be a bane as much as a boon.
1186It allowed no definitive plan to be formed. Instead, Dahan’s defence was relying on reactive deployments and rapidly mobile forces stationed at crucial nexus points.
1187Dahan shook his head. This was no way to fight. Too random, too unknown. His sub-cortical pattern recognition mechanisms were unable to attach any predictability to the attack. Dahan was left to make numerous command decisions in total ignorance of the enemy’s intentions or movements.
1188Was this how mortals fought?
1189No wonder the battles of the Imperial Guard were such bloodbaths. Fighting to such an inefficient model of war, it was hardly surprising the rate of attrition within Imperial regiments was so high. Though, to be fair, the Cadians aboard the Speranza were maintaining a high ratio of combat kills to casualties.
1190Information came from all across the ship in pulsed bursts of rapid-fire data. Dahan answered them just as swiftly.
1191++Intruders detected, sub-deck 77-Rho, Section Occident++
1192<Praetorians Martius Venator and Tharsis Invictus to intercept.>
1193++Clan Belladonna report 73 per cent losses. Combat ineffective in four minutes++
1194<Suzerain Spinoza, alter advance. Amalgamate with Belladonna.>
1195++Cadian positions Alpha-44 through Alpha-48 withdrawing to Axis Gamma-33++
1196Something in the nature of that withdrawal triggered a response in Dahan’s pattern recognition matrix and he spun out of the closed-in view on the holographic to a larger scale view.
1197The reason for the Cadian redeployment was easy to see.
1198A fresh batch of invaders had manifested on their flanks and was moving to cut off their supporting companies and line of retreat. Other enemy forces shifted their focus, suddenly breaking off engagements, initiating others or realigning their vectors of attack.
1199Like a missing piece of a puzzle, this fresh batch of invaders instantly brought terrible focus to the enemy attack.
1200‘Finally, you have your cohesion,’ said Dahan, recognising the appearance of a higher command authority within the enemy ranks and finding that he had been anticipating this moment.
1201It took him less than a picosecond to see the new objective of the enemy forces and realise that Captain Hawkins had been correct.
1202Enemy forces were perfectly poised to take the training deck.
1203And from there, the bridge.
1204Roboute slumped onto his haunches, fighting to draw air into his lungs. He rubbed the heels of his palms down his thighs while stretching his calves out in front of him. He had no idea how far they’d climbed, but was already resigning himself to the fact there was still a long way to the surface.
1205This cavern shelf was, like the rest of the steps cut through the planet’s rock, lined with split crystalline panels and littered with granular black ash. The eldar and Black Templars were already here, keeping a wary distance between each other. Most of Ven Anders’s Cadians kneaded the muscles in their legs or drank the last of their water.
1206Anders himself paced like a restless lion, eager to get back into the fight.
1207‘Long climb, eh?’ grinned the Cadian colonel, looking like he’d only been for a brisk walk. ‘Best to keep the legs moving. You don’t want to get a cramp and seize up. Pull that Achilles tendon and it’ll be months before it’s fit for purpose.’
1208‘I’ll take that chance,’ said Roboute.
1209‘Come on,’ said Anders. ‘I thought you Ultramar types were fit?’
1210Roboute wanted to hate Anders right now, but only ended up envying the man’s fitness. He nodded and said, ‘Back in the day, I’d have given you a run for your money, Ven. But right about now I feel like I’ve climbed to the very summit of Hera’s Crown. It’s times like this I wish I’d kept up my defence auxilia training regimes aboard the Renard.’
1211Anders grinned and offered Roboute a canvas-wrapped canteen.
1212‘This climb isn’t so tough,’ said the Anders. ‘Reminds me of the livestock trails over the Caducades Mountains I used to run when I was a lad.’
1213‘Everything here reminds you of Cadia,’ said Roboute, taking a mouthful of water.
1214Anders shrugged. ‘Because it’s all so Emperor-damned awful.’
1215Roboute didn’t have an answer to that.
1216Finding a route out of the hrud prison complex had proven to be more difficult than getting in, though the eventual solution turned out to be far simpler. The rusted funicular had made its last journey in bringing them to the repulsive alien warrens, and no amount of coaxing by Kotov could force it to move. The archmagos had refused Pavelka’s offer of help, and when Roboute asked her about it, all she would say was that Kotov was a man closed to alternative thinking.
1217In the end it had been one of Kotov’s servo-skulls that found a way out, a crooked canyon of steps concealed against the cave wall behind a mass of collapsed crystalline machinery. The skitarii and Templars cleared the crumbling shards of crystal and so the climb back to the surface had begun.
1218Roboute had thought himself reasonably fit, but soon lost track of time after the first four hours of climbing through the claustrophobic stairs burrowed through the rock. The gruelling ascent punished his every indulgence and excuse to avoid exercising in each muscle-burning step and laboured breath.
1219An hour later, he’d paused to reach into his coat pocket and check his astrogation compass. Since pointing unerringly towards the universal assembler, the needle had resumed its old habit of bouncing between every possible direction.
1220‘Does that guide you?’ asked one of the green-armoured eldar, standing above him on the steps. Roboute tried to decide if the alien was male or female beneath the armour, but quickly gave up.
1221‘Sometimes,’ he said between breaths. ‘But not now.’
1222‘The Phoenix King teaches us that talismans only guide us when we are lost and without purpose,’ said the eldar warrior.
1223‘I feel pretty lost right now,’ said Roboute.
1224The warrior looked puzzled by Roboute’s admission. ‘Why? We have a thread to cut, a life to end. No surer path exists anywhere in the skein.’
1225‘And here I thought Bielanna was the farseer.’
1226‘In matters of death, all warriors are seers,’ said the eldar, springing away and making a mockery of Roboute’s exertions.
1227He bit back an oath and continued onwards, step by grinding step.
1228Every footstep crunched over broken shards of glass and ash, making the ground treacherous underfoot. He and Pavelka steadied each other, him guiding her hesitant steps, her augmented limbs helping to keep him upright.
1229Kotov and his skitarii brought up the rear, the two cybernetic warriors helping to steady Kotov, whose gyros were having trouble in keeping him balanced on the crooked steps.
1230Now, slumped with his back against the wall, Roboute finally had the opportunity to catch his breath. This chance to rest was a blessing straight from the hand of the Emperor Himself.
1231Roboute eased his breathing into a more regular pattern, flexing the muscles of his legs and closing his eyes. It seemed ridiculous to want to sleep at a time like this, but he’d been sustaining such a heightened edge of perception for so long that the rest of his body was beginning to shut down.
1232Despite his best efforts, sleep eluded him, so he gave up and ran through a series of muscle-lengthening stretches and mental exercises to order his thoughts and clear the mind.
1233He pictured the world above and replayed the secrets Telok had voiced in the expectation of their imminent death. Meaningless to Roboute for the most part, but he remembered one thing Telok had said that struck a note of unreasoning horror within Kotov.
1234A name that even to Roboute had overtones of darkness that blighted his thoughts. What was the name…?
1235‘The Noctis Labyrinthus,’ he said when it finally came.
1236Kotov immediately looked up, as Roboute knew he would.
1237‘What did you say?’
1238‘The Noctis Labyrinthus, what is it?’ said Roboute. ‘When Telok mentioned it, you knew what it was and it scared you to the soles of your boots. So what is it and why did Telok need to recreate it to get the Breath of the Gods to work?’
1239‘It is nothing I wish to speak of.’
1240Roboute shook his head. ‘I think the time for secrets is over, don’t you, archmagos?’
1241Kotov stared at him, as though weighing the cost of revealing what he knew against the likelihood of their survival. At last he came to a decision.
1242‘Very well,’ said Kotov. ‘The Noctis Labyrinthus is a maze-like system of steep-walled valleys within the Tharsis quadrangle of Mars. Most likely formed by volcanic activity in the ancient past, perhaps even by a long-ago eruption of Olympus Mons.’
1243‘What’s that got to do with Telok and why were you so shocked when he mentioned it? What’s inside those valleys?’
1244‘I am getting to that,’ said Kotov. ‘The region was declared Purgatus millennia ago after it was revealed that a sentient weapon technology from pre-Unity was discovered to be still active. The Fabricator General of the time claimed it would lay waste to Mars if it escaped, so the entire area was quarantined and fortified. It has remained so ever since.’
1245‘Sounds like a smokescreen to me,’ said Roboute.
1246‘People needed to be kept away,’ said Kotov. ‘That seemed like the best way to achieve that.’
1247‘Wait,’ said Pavelka. ‘You mean there was no ancient weapon technology?’
1248‘Correct,’ said Kotov.
1249‘So what is there?’ asked Roboute.
1250‘I suspect no one knows the full extent of what lies beneath the Noctis Labyrinthus, but as an archmagos I was privy to the old legends circulating the higher echelons of the Cult Mechanicus, of course. Unfounded speculation mostly, noospheric gossip and the like. And since the word of those… crescent-moon xenos ships landing in the deepest valleys began to circulate, the rumours have only grown stronger.’
1251‘What kind of rumours?’ asked Tanna, coming over to listen.
1252Kotov seemed hesitant to continue, baring as he was the innermost secrets of his order.
1253‘That there was necrontyr technology beneath the red sands,’ said Roboute.
1254‘How could you possibly know that?’ demanded Kotov.
1255‘Remember, I saw the fall of Kellenport on Damnos,’ said Roboute. ‘I’ve seen ships like you described and I’ve seen necrontyr war machines. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw Telok’s device.’
1256Kotov sighed and nodded as if Roboute had passed some kind of test.
1257‘Very well, Mister Surcouf, I believe you may be correct. Perhaps some aspect of necrontyr technology does lie at the heart of the Breath of the Gods, and if that is the case, then it is doubly imperative we prevent Telok from leaving this world.’
1258‘Why?’ said Anders, ‘I mean, besides the obvious?’
1259‘Because if there is any truth to the old legends, then it is entirely possible that a vast shard of one of the ancient necrontyr gods lies entombed within the Noctis Labyrinthus.’
1260And suddenly it all made a twisted kind of sense to Roboute. He turned to Bielanna, who appeared to be studiously ignoring their conversation.
1261‘You knew, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘You said as much back in the cavern. What did you call it? “The infernal engine of the Yngir?” I’m going to assume that’s your word for the necrontyr gods.’
1262Bielanna nodded slowly.
1263‘Now you see why we fought so hard to stop you,’ she said. ‘And why we now spill our blood to help you.’
1264Roboute began pacing, as he always did when he needed to force a train of thought to its logical conclusion. His fatigue fell away from him as he spoke.
1265‘I’d bet every ship in my fleet that one of these Yngir is at the heart of the Breath of the Gods. Or at least it was. It’s dying now or Telok used the last of it transforming Katen Venia’s star. That’s why Telok’s so desperate to get back to Mars, to open the Noctis Labyrinthus and resurrect the god in his machine.’
1266Linya was burning. Flames filled the cramped access compartment in Amarok’s leg. She was trapped inside the Titan again, the access hatch leading to safety just out of reach.
1267The pain was unbearable.
1268Linya could feel every part of her body dying.
1269Flesh slid from bone like overcooked meat. The surgical steel of her implants turned molten within her internal organs. She felt each one liquefy.
1270Incredibly, the vox within the compartment was still working, but no one was answering her cries for help.
1271Her father’s screams echoed from the burning iron walls of the Titan’s leg. He shrieked with unimaginable pain, a sound it should be impossible for a human being to make. Terror and accusation all in one.
1272You did this, it said. You are killing me with your wilfulness.
1273Hot tears sprang from Linya’s eyes, instantly turning to vapour.
1274Her father’s accusations hurt worse than the flames. His pain was her pain. She felt his every screaming howl of agony as though she made it herself.
1275‘Please…’ she begged. ‘Make it stop!’
1276But the pain was relentless, the guilt unbearable. She tried to pull herself towards the opening using the rungs on the inner face of the compartment. Her body was wedged fast. Her fingers melted to the metal.
1277Linya screamed anew with the searing agony ripping up her arms.
1278Except it wasn’t her flesh…
1279This wasn’t real. She knew that. Knew it with a certainty that was as unbending as it was irrelevant.
1280No matter how hard she willed herself to accept that this was fiction, her brain couldn’t fight the dreadful stimulus it was under. Linya knew better than most how easily the machinery of the mind could be tricked into believing the impossible.
1281But that wasn’t helping her now.
1282As far as it was possible to be certain of anything, this was the sixth time she had burned to death in the Amarok. Previous to this, she had been buried alive, ripped apart by devourer beasts of an unknown tyrannic genus, crushed in a depressurising starship and burned to cinders on the Quatrian Gallery as its orbit degraded into the planetary atmosphere.
1283Each death excruciating, each pain stretched over a lifetime, each experience a learning curve. Galatea was unsparingly inventive in its tortures, but the Amarok was a particular favourite of the machine-hybrid.
1284Tar-black smoke filled her mouth. Her lungs dissolved within her chest. Burning light roared over her in a torrent of liquid fire.
1285Linya screamed.
1286And found herself on her knees, flesh untouched and body intact.
1287Cold deck plates under her palms, bare steel walls to either side and dim light above. A cool breeze drifted from the recyc-units on the ceiling. Tears ran down her cheeks at the cessation of pain and shuddering breath emptied her lungs.
1288Yet even these sensations were false, this new environment no more real than the last.
1289<We don’t want to hurt you, Mistress Tychon,> said a bland, boneless voice from the shadows. The binary was archaic, primitive almost. <But if you insist on attempting to make contact with the world beyond our neuromatrix and inciting your curious agent in the datascape to fight us, then we have no choice but to punish you.>
1290Linya pushed herself to her feet and canted a disgustingly biological insult, careful to render it in hexamathic cant.
1291The black-robed adept that was Galatea’s proxy body emerged from the shadows, anonymous and giving no hint as to the true abomination that lay within.
1292The adept shook his head and a fresh jolt of pain drove Linya back to her knees. She gritted her teeth and fought to keep her scream of pain inside.
1293<Basic parsed binary, Mistress Tychon,> said the black-robed adept with the silver eyes as he slowly circled her. <None of your convoluted cant, if you please. It only angers us, and you know what happens when you anger us.>
1294<It’s not real,> said Linya, blinking away blistering after-images of searing pain.
1295<Does that make a difference to how agonising or terrifying the experiences are?> asked Galatea.
1296<It’s not real,> repeated Linya.
1297<Of course it is. Everything you see, feel, taste or experience is simply a constructed hallucination fashioned by electrical impulses within the grey meat-brain in your skull. Well, not that you have a skull, but you take our point.>
1298Linya stood once more and walked away from Galatea, subtly marshalling her consciousness into carefully constructed partitions.
1299<No, it’s not real,> she insisted. <You’re manipulating the inputs to my brain, you’re making me feel these pains. But they’re not happening, they’re not reality.>
1300Galatea followed her, its hands moving in a complex geometric pattern that appeared to describe a Möbius curve in space-time.
1301<Reality? And what is that? The flimsiest veneer of experiential sequencing,> said Galatea with a venom that spoke volumes of its contempt for living beings. <A series of random, chaotic events interpreted by an ape-species that insists on seeing meaning where there is none. Your minds maintain the illusion of control and choice when you are simply machines of flesh and blood, as driven by mechanistic impulses as the most basic servitor.>
1302<You’re wrong,> said Linya, allowing tiny pieces of code to gradually accrete within each partition of her consciousness. She took turns that led away from the confero chamber, knowing she had to goad Galatea some more.
1303The machine-hybrid was less vigilant when it was angry.
1304<I am not a machine,> she said, modulating her tone to convey a wholly fabricated indignation. <I am not governed by my impulses, I am a being of logic and reason, intellect and control!>
1305Galatea laughed, and the silver lenses of its eyes shone with its amusement. <The work of Adept Kahneman says differently. You see yourselves as divinely crafted beings, aloof from the worlds you build for yourself, but every aspect of your existence is governed by the part of your mind that makes systematic errors time and time again.>
1306They passed into the main gallery chamber, a domed structure that stood out like a blister on the exterior of the orbital station. Linya had always loved this part of the Gallery and, as such, it had been recreated by Galatea with the greatest fidelity.
1307Far-seeing telescopes weighing hundreds of tonnes hung on slender suspensor armatures that allowed them to be moved with ease. Scattered around the walls of the dome, differently focused glass and brass-rimmed rotator-lenses threw coloured beams to the floor. Starlight glittered on walls of black marble, distant constellations and vast galactic spirals she’d never see again.
1308<Then what does that make you?> asked Linya. <You were created by humans. That makes you just as fallible and bound by mechanistic impulses as us.>
1309<No!> said Galatea, turning on Linya. <Our essence is the result of a self-created birth. We are mother and father to our own existence, the alpha and omega point combined.>
1310Linya laughed. <Oedipus and Electra all in one. No wonder you’re completely insane.>
1311Galatea spun her around, and Linya felt the build-up of hostile binary within its neuromatrix as the dome darkened and the white light of the stars turned blood red. Oily shadows slithered across the floor and Linya smelled burning skin and bone.
1312<We think that perhaps it is time you relived the Amarok,> said Galatea, reaching up to stroke Linya’s cheek.
1313She slapped the hand away and let the walls between the partitioned compartments in her consciousness drop. The individual code accretions, innocuous by themselves and meticulously crafted in tiny fragments, now rapidly combined in a dizzyingly complex series of hexamathic code-structures.
1314Galatea sensed the sudden build-up of unknown code within her, and Linya savoured its shock. The machine-hybrid blurted a crushingly basic series of binaric barbs, designed for maximum shock and pain to an augmented mind.
1315<Something wrong?> she said, smiling at Galatea’s utter confusion as it saw its attack had failed to do any harm.
1316<How are you doing this?> it demanded.
1317<Hexamathic neural firewalls,> she said. <Built up piece by piece in all the far corners of my consciousness. All designed to keep your filthy touch out of my mind.>
1318<No,> said Galatea. <You cannot…>
1319<I’m afraid I can,> said Linya and placed her hand at the centre of the black-robed adept’s chest.
1320And with a squall of furious binary, Galatea’s proxy-form exploded into a hash of pixellated static that blew away in a non-existent breeze.
1321Linya let out a relieved binaric breath. Split into so many pieces, she hadn’t been certain her painstakingly crafted code would work.
1322But it had, and now she had a chance to do some real harm.
1323Venturing into Exnihlio’s depths had been a special kind of hell for Ilanna Pavelka. After being blinded by vengeful feedback from the control hub, the hrud warren had felt like wading naked through a plague pit. Groping through greasy, cloying air, dense with pollutants. Forced to feel her way with bare hands.
1324Each step upwards had seen that horrific sensation diminish, but it was lodged like an infection in her flesh. Already her internal chronometers – having now recovered from the entropic field distortion below – registered at least a seven-year degradation of her organics. Her augmetics were similarly affected, and she wondered if anyone else knew how much of their lives had been stolen by exposure to the imprisoned xenoforms.
1325Kotov must surely know, but had chosen to say nothing.
1326Roboute and Ven Anders wouldn’t know, though both must surely be feeling a greater weariness than normal. Even with the restoration of her chronometers, it was impossible to say for sure how much time they had spent beneath the surface of the planet. The elasticity of time was a new sensation to Ilanna, who was used to a constant and completely accurate register of its passage.
1327Without sight, she was unaware of the exact nature of the tunnel they were climbing, but passive arrays told her its composition had changed from bare rock and crystal to stone and iron.
1328‘We’ve left the cave systems below Exnihlio,’ she said, more to herself than to elicit any response.
1329‘Looks that way,’ agreed Roboute. ‘We’re climbing through deep industrial strata. It’s a bloody maze, but Kotov seems to think he understands the layout down here and says it won’t be long until we reach a transit hub on the surface.’
1330Ilanna nodded, but didn’t reply.
1331The quality of the air was markedly different, no longer pestilential decay, but the hard, bitter reek of industry. Heavy with the hot oil and friction of nearby engines, the smell should have been reassuringly familiar to her.
1332Instead, it filled her with the unreasoning sense that they climbed towards something far worse than the senescent creatures below. Ilanna could find no logic to this, beyond the obvious threat of Telok, yet the feeling grew stronger with every reluctant step she took towards the surface.
1333‘Something wrong?’ said Roboute as she paused to clear her head.
1334‘No, I just–’
1335A howl of something ancient exploded in the vault of her skull.
1336Ilanna screamed as every atom of her flesh blazed with the imperative to flee. A cascade of catecholamines from her adrenal medulla catapulted her body into a state of violent tension.
1337‘Ilanna!’ cried Roboute, going to the ground as her weight dragged him down. ‘What is it?’
1338‘They’re coming!’ she cried, clawing at his arm and casting around for the source of her terror. ‘Didn’t you hear that?’
1339‘Hear what?’ said Roboute, kneeling beside her. She couldn’t see his face, but heard his concern. ‘All I hear are machines.’
1340‘They’ve come back,’ she sobbed. ‘They’re still coming for us. They won’t stop, ever.’
1341‘What are?’ said a voice Ilanna recognised as Tanna’s.
1342‘The Tindalosi,’ she said. ‘I can hear them in my head…’
1343‘They’re here?’ said Tanna, and Ilanna heard the scrape of damaged metal in his armour and the stuttering of his sword’s actuators. Its spirit was angry; many of its sawing teeth blades were missing.
1344‘No,’ she managed, triggering a burst of acetylcholine to regain a measure of homeostasis within her internal systems. ‘Not yet. I can hear them… in my head. I… I think that when I saw them, they… saw me too.’
1345‘Like a scent marker?’ asked Tanna.
1346‘That’s as good an analogy as any,’ said Ilanna, her fight or flight reaction beginning to recede. ‘Whatever hurts you and Ghostwalker did to them, it wasn’t enough.’
1347‘Then we will fight them again,’ said another Space Marine, Varda she thought. ‘And this time we will finish the job.’
1348Ilanna shook her head. ‘No, you won’t. I mean no disrespect, Brother Varda, but you saw them. The beasts are imbued with some form of self-regenerative mechanism. You can’t hurt them. At least, not without my help.’
1349An irritated flare of noospherics behind her.
1350‘Do not suggest what I know you are about to suggest, Magos Pavelka,’ said Archmagos Kotov.
1351‘It could help kill the hunting beasts,’ she said.
1352‘It is a curse upon machines,’ said Kotov. ‘You dishonour the Cult Mechanicus with such blasphemies.’
1353‘What is she talking about, archmagos?’ demanded Tanna.
1354‘Nothing at all, a vile perversion of her learning,’ said Kotov.
1355‘Speak, Magos Pavelka,’ ordered Tanna, and Ilanna almost smiled at the outrage she felt radiating from Kotov. Had they been anywhere within the Imperium, she had no doubt the archmagos would already have exloaded his Technologia Excommunicatus to the Martian synod.
1356‘When I was stationed on Incaladion, I–’
1357‘Incaladion? I might have known,’ said Kotov. ‘That is why you bear brands of censure in your noospherics? And to think I allowed a techno-heretic aboard the Speranza!’
1358Tanna held up a hand to forestall further outrage from Kotov, and Ilanna was pathetically grateful to be spared a repeat of what she had heard from her accusers so long ago.
1359‘What is Incaladion?’ asked Tanna.
1360‘A forge world in Ultima Segmentum,’ said Ilanna. ‘I was stationed there a hundred and forty-three years ago when there were some… troubles.’
1361‘What sort of troubles?’ asked Tanna.
1362‘Researches into the shadow artes of the tech-heretek!’ snapped Kotov with a surge of indignation. ‘The worship of proscribed xeno-lores and artificial sentiences! Half the planet was in violation of the Sixteen Laws.’
1363Kotov rounded on Ilanna. ‘Is that where you developed your heathen code?’
1364‘In service to Magos Corteswain, yes,’ answered Ilanna.
1365‘Corteswain? This just gets better and better!’ said Kotov.
1366‘Who was this Corteswain?’ asked Roboute.
1367‘He was a great man,’ said Ilanna. ‘Or at least he was before he disappeared on Cthelmax. He was Cult Mechanicus to the core, but a Zethian by inclination.’
1368‘I do not know what that means,’ said Tanna.
1369‘It means he held to ideals of innovation and understanding, of looking for explanations of techno-functionality that did not rely on the intervention of a divine being.’
1370‘You see?’ said Kotov. ‘Blasphemy!’
1371Ilanna ignored him. ‘The possible applications of xeno-tech to existing Imperial equipment fascinated Corteswain, and he dared question established dogma regarding its prohibition. What you have to understand about Incaladion was that it was a world where a great deal of corrupted machinery ended up. Spoils taken in battle against the Archenemy. Machines and weaponry infected with scrapcode and infused with warp essences. Adept Corteswain developed a form of hexamathic disassembler language that could break the bond between a machine and whatever motive spirit lay at its heart.’
1372‘A curse on all machines!’ wailed Kotov.
1373‘It was a way to free those machines from corruption,’ said Ilanna with an indignant flare of binary cant. ‘Magos Corteswain saved thousands of machines whose souls were in torment.’
1374‘By killing them,’ said Kotov.
1375‘By freeing them to return to Akasha,’ said Ilanna. ‘Ready to be reborn in a new body of steel and light.’
1376‘Are you able to do the same thing?’ demanded Tanna.
1377Ilanna nodded. ‘I broke Corteswain’s code into fragments and stored it within my backup memory memes. The dataproctors were thorough in their expurgatorius, but not thorough enough. It’s how I was able to break the acausal locks of the universal assembler and get it working again.’
1378‘Could this code hurt the beasts?’
1379‘I think so,’ said Ilanna.
1380‘Sergeant Tanna, you cannot use this code,’ pleaded Kotov. ‘It violates every tenet of the Cult Mechanicus.’
1381‘Could it help fight these things?’ asked Tanna. ‘Answer honestly, archmagos, much depends upon it.’
1382For a long time, Ilanna thought Kotov wasn’t going to answer, his noospherics warring between the likelihood of their death at the hand of the Tindalosi and the cost of allowing the use of unsanctioned technology.
1383‘Yes,’ he said at last.
1384Tanna pressed his sword into her hand.
1385‘Then do it.’