by Various
‘If such a thing were contemplated…’ Zagreus Kane said.
‘We are contemplating it,’ Malcador told him with steely assurance.
‘Lord Dorn,’ the Fabricator General implored, looking for support from the primarch.
‘What would you propose?’ Dorn asked gravely.
‘The Carrion,’ the Sigillite said, ‘has consented to return to Mars as my agent. No one, even among the ranks of my own Knights Errant, is better qualified for such an undertaking. He will liberate Bool and his silica animus and facilitate them, if possible, in enacting their dread plan.’
Rogal Dorn thought on what the aged regent had told him. His grim visage was a nest of rankling uncertainties. They were not a natural fit for the primarch’s dauntless features.
‘There are so many factors,’ Dorn admitted finally. ‘How can you know that the traitors on Mars haven’t already neutralised such a threat – or sought out the collaboration of such hereteks and constructs?’
‘All knowledge of Octal Bool and his researches was wiped from the infotombs,’ the Raven Guard reminded him.
‘And what of this abominable technology, should it succeed?’ Dorn asked. ‘Won’t we be exchanging one enemy for another?’
‘My study of heretekal history and the dread employment of such intelligences is that, despite early successes, deviant technology ultimately fails. It is one of the strongest arguments the Cult Mechanicum has in refusing to embrace such technology. Who would you rather face on the field of battle, Lord Dorn? In the long term, the Tabula Myriad will fail, as it has done before. Can you say the same about Horus Lupercal?’
‘And this sits well with you, Knight Errant? These… unconventional strategies?’ Dorn challenged.
‘Short of sending half of your Legion to secure Mars,’ the Carrion said, ‘any strategy is going to be unconventional. The fact is, my lord, that my primarch – your brother – taught me well. The Raven Guard do not engage in a frontal assault unless they have to. Infiltration and sabotage are weapons to be wielded against the enemy. In my mind, turning heretek against heretek is no different to collapsing a bridge, detonating a reactor or blowing up a building. The Raven Guard are as one with the shadows when we need to be. We are masters of the unseen – and believe me, Lord Dorn, our enemies on Mars will not see this coming.’
Rogal Dorn looked to Zagreus Kane. ‘Fabricator General?’
‘You are asking me to visit the devastations of Old Night once more upon the Red Planet,’ Kane said.
‘For Mars now, there are but three futures,’ Malcador told the Mechanicum overlord. ‘It can be a decimated rock of soot and ruin. It can be a swarming stronghold for traitors and deviant filth. Or, Fabricator General, Mars can be cleansed of the treachery that festers on its surface like a cancer. It can be returned to a prouder moment in its illustrious history and begin again, with its materiel, infrastructure, sovereign soil and its secrets intact.’
The Fabricator General nodded his hooded head in slow shame. Rogal Dorn looked to Malcador and his Knight Errant.
‘Purge the unclean,’ the primarch told them.
The Carrion turned to his master, the Regent of all Terra. Malcador wasted on the Carrion what remained of the kindness in his misty eyes.
‘Do your solemn duty,’ the Sigillite ordered.
‘My lords,’ the Carrion said and walked off towards the upper ward where one of the Sigillite’s unmarked shuttles was waiting for him on a concealed landing platform. As he walked he willed his cogitator to filter out the light hiss of his hydraulics and the background bustle of patrolling sentries and slate-burdened administrators. He heard what he expected to.
‘What if he fails?’ the Fabricator General asked.
‘Whatever Malcador wishes him to be now,’ the primarch rumbled, ‘he is a warrior of the Legiones Astartes. It might be difficult in these darkening days but try still to have some faith in the Emperor’s angels.’
‘Many lives depend upon his success,’ Malcador said finally. ‘For if he fails, Lord Dorn has a difficult decision to make.’
To that, there was no reply.
MARS
Locate/Isolate
The Invalis Region. There were few places on the Forge World Principal that the Carrion – Son of Corax, Martian-trained and Knight Errant of Terra – considered more suitable for insertion.
Recollection commencing…
‘The whole region is a dead zone,’ Archelon had told him. ‘Even the Titanica avoid these highlands.’
The Carrion guessed that the irony of his new visit to the region would have been lost on his humourless mentor. The Artisan Astartes Gnaeus Archelon had taken him there once, during his Genetoris rotation, to teach the Carrion the technical wonders of the flesh over the weakness of iron.
He had showed the Techmarine-in-training the polyhedral structures of smoky, red quartz that littered the valleys and mountainsides. The Carrion had felt it then as he did now – an automotive exhaustion. His vision blurred. His reactor felt like ice in his flesh. The bionics of his limbs felt like the deadweight of plasteel and adamantium that they were. The Artisan Astartes had told him that the material had not originated on Mars and had likely been brought to the planet by a meteorite impact. The material resisted all attempts to scan or analyse it and gave off some kind of field or exotic form of radiation that interfered with anbarics and power systems. The priests of Mars were superstitious about the region, declaring it circumlocus expedientum. From the dreadful draining sensation within his systems, the Carrion had seen why. ‘It will pass,’ Archelon had said, suffering similar sluggishness. ‘Run compensations and proceed.’
‘Run compensations and proceed,’ the Carrion ordered.
The interior of the orbital arklighter was a haze of stuttering lighting. The cargo vessel had only a rudimentary bridge with basic systems intended to be run by a small servitor crew. The Carrion had been assigned two servo-automata – gifts from the Fabricator General. Techmarines leaving Mars were often assigned servitors as part of their final covenance – constructs to provide technical aid and cover during combat, when they would be at their most vulnerable.
The Carrion assumed that Zagreus Kane was sending him a message in such a gift. They were called Di-Delta 451 and Eta/Iota~13 – ‘the Null’ and ‘the Void’, as the Carrion had come to call them, for their complete absence of warmth and conversation; a reminder of Mars indeed. The pair were vat-feminine, with light battle chassis and slight limbs. Armaplas plates were embedded directly into their bare flesh, allowing the servo-automata to move swiftly and carry out orders without impediment. Their clone-identical faces were set in cybernetic crania, busy with service scopes and augurs. Their eyes were alive and urgent but beneath their noses there was only smooth flesh. Instead of mouths, they had small vox-grilles set in their throats. They were armed with rotor guns that they held snug to their shoulders like rifles. Tool belts sat across their hips, including a chainblade that doubled as a last-resort weapon. Like the Carrion they had been port-stripped to protect them from the code-contagion that was sweeping through Mars.
If the Null and the Void felt the drain of the Invalis, they said nothing. Uncoupling himself from the cockpit-cradle, the Carrion willed himself to move. It was a hydraulic effort almost akin to pain, but one by one, the Space Marine moved his limbs, fighting the strange effects of the highlands. Uncoupling from her own cradle, the Void powered down the remaining arklighter systems, leaving the barest reactor traces for detection.
&nbs
p; The Null was already up and manually cranking the emergency access-port set in the roof of the tiny bridge. With a pressurised pop, the hatch blew off, allowing the servitor to climb out onto the hull of the arklighter. Grabbing his weapons, and with effort, the Carrion followed, with the Void bringing up the rear.
Standing on the re-entry-scorched hull, the Carrion could see the scar of the arklighter’s landing running across the Martian earth. The Void had used flaps, airbreaks and purged cargo sections to bring them in shallow and put the Mechanicum transport down in a broad valley. A trail of red dust marked their path, with the arklighter partially buried in the ground and its servoderricks, hoist-claws and haulage rigs hanging mangled from the hull.
It had been no accident that the vessel had put down in the Invalis Region, although it was meant to appear that way. It had been an orbital workhorse confiscated as part of the tender flotilla belonging to a Martian blockade runner. The Munitoria Logis arkfreighter had been captured by the Imperial Fists destroyer Pugnacitas and the attendant lighter requisitioned under Lord Malcador’s authority for the Carrion’s insertion. It had little trouble returning through the blockade. It bore all the appropriate Basilikon Astra identicodes and its runebanks bounced transit readings and cantmissions off shipyard traffic-towers, Mechanicum augur-buoys and orbital defence monitors that still reeked of scrapcode corruption. The Carrion had ordered the screeching servitor crew executed but had made no attempt to purge the arklighter of its ruinous taint. While data buffers protected the Carrion and his servo-automata, the code-corruption made an excellent camouflage for the vessel, drifting past the beleaguered Ring of Iron – glowing with strange, sickly balelight and shrieking with tortured voxmissions.
The Carrion was glad to be out of the infected transport. The vessel was ailing, its systems stream-sick, its superstructure haunted. Standing on the blackened hull exterior, the Carrion’s infravision fixed on the moon Phobos above. The shadows of traumatic fractures afflicted the satellite. The planetoid was followed through the night sky by a flotilla of colossal bergs and rubble: remnants of some apocalyptic event on the surface or within the fabricator moon. From the devastation, the Raven Guard Space Marine estimated the void forges of Cratera Reldressa and the Skyre City all but destroyed, the drydocks of the Kepler Dorsum no longer present at all.
The Raven Guard looked at the red Martian peaks reaching for the bleak heavens. They were littered with stripped wreckage and rusted vessels that had also suffered the curious effects of the region. The area was regarded as one of several vile vortices that afflicted the Red Planet, triangles and quadrangles where craft and constructs routinely went missing. Kelbor-Hal’s traitor priests were no less superstitious about the Invalis than their Mechanicum predecessors, and the Carrion was confident that landing the arklighter here would garner little interest from the monitoring stations.
The Carrion heard the flap of wings. His cyber-raven Strix flew from the open access hatch, circling the crash site and adjusting to the Martian gravity. Swooping in, the construct creature extended the delicate hydraulics of its silver claws. It too felt the strange drain of the region. With a light prang, the cyber-raven landed on one of the Carrion’s node-columns, the twin power cells set in its nape like afterburners humming ominously. Closing its wings, the creature’s bionic eye cycled through different colour spectra and the interface pin of its beak whirred and turned. It had been Strix that had kept the Carrion sane during his detention on Luna. On the Sigillite’s orders, tools, parts and the clone-bird, still in its vat, had been supplied for the legionary’s distraction, and as a gesture of good will. The Carrion had spent many hours on the creature’s intricate augmentations, taking his mind off disturbing revelations of galactic rebellion, Legion fratricide and distant massacre.
‘South,’ the Knight Errant ordered, prompting the Null and the Void to climb down through the melted antennae and haulage rigging of the arklighter and down onto Martian soil, where they obediently trudged through the sands and up the crystal-strewn valley. Feeling every step like the crushing tug of high gravity, and with his hydraulic arm like a dead weight hanging from his side, the Carrion willed himself on through the draining flux of the Invalis Highlands. By the time the sun had set on the horizon and with many hours of dust-dragging footsteps behind them, the strange power-sapping effects of the region had dissipated. Engaging the grainy-grey of his night-vision filters, the Carrion led the Null and the Void at a rhythmic, hydraulic run across the ash wastes of the Terra Cimmeria, with Strix circling above and alerting its master of distant dangers with a canting caw.
It required all of the Carrion’s XIX Legion training to traverse the code-corrupted madness of Mars. On the horizon, forge temples burned with the ominous glow of unnatural industry. In the darkness, with the stars twinkling harshly above in a cold, empty sky, constructs and vehicles passed them – the caterpillar trundle of freightway traffic, humming gravcraft, gaggles of indentured labour units and cable-gangs of Munitorum servitors, driven on by their transmechanics. The sound was unbearable. The thin air of Mars carried the voxmission madness and shrieking scrapcode of polluted constructs far.
As the sun came up, traversing the open ground of the red wastes, the terrace-excavations and ash heaps unseen became a challenge. The screech of Avenger strike fighters seemed ever present in the skies above them, crisscrossing the heavens like angry insects. The slopes of the Scamander Ridge were swarming with feral servitors, and the Carrion and his servo-automata had to be careful not to alert the power-famished cannibals to their presence, using a swooping Strix to lead hordes of the torpid constructs away from their path. At Eridania they almost ran afoul of a Warhound Scout Titan, the towering monstrosity booming madness that could be felt in the pit of the stomach as it chewed up the slagscape and depots with predacious abandon.
The manufactoria, industriascapes and hab-hives reaching out into the frosted desert from about great forge temples and assembly yards offered more opportunities for concealment but also more danger of discovery. The dead eyes of servo-automata and whirring optics of engine-overseers were everywhere. Picters and augurposts monitored output. Sky-talons, articulated tractors and convoys of tracked cargo haulers dragged raw materials and production-grade weaponry, armour, vehicles and combat-constructs intended for orbit and the Warmaster’s futile blockade runners. The curtains of red dust kicked up by the tug-engines and trains provided much-needed cover and even short-haul transport for the Raven Guard and his attendant automata.
Behind a colossal depot swarming with technomats, drone machinery and servo-limbed slave constructs, the Carrion led the Null and the Void up an assemblyway and into the Promethei Sinus container yard. Circling above them, Strix had a view of thousands of damaged giga-containers in a state of utter disarray. Strikes from the air or stationed artillery had toppled container towers and the lofty robot hoist-rigs that attended upon them, creating a sea of cluttered, battered cargo-contents. Surveying the gargantuan shambles, the Carrion began to worry about the dungeon-diagnoplex situated secretly below the surface of the container yard. It was an ancient and integrated network connecting the forge temples, datagrids and constructs of Mars in which the Prefecture Magisterium and Divisio Probandi had to prosecute their ongoing war against techno-heresy. Only high-ranking priests, principia and their trusted guests – like the Techmarines covenant – were allowed knowledge of such places.
The Carrion dropped down onto the buckled roof of a crate before clambering down into the topsy-turvy mess of the container yard. At first he was concerned that the yard had been hit by an orbital strike or aeronautic bombing run in the schism hostilities and that the installation below might have been damaged. Indeed, as they pushed on, it appeared that the container yard had taken a series of devastating hits. Where the detonations had landed, giga-crates had been decimated, container stacks had collapsed and the very rockcrete of the gargantuan depot yard had been shattered and cracked a
bout deep craters and hollows. Why the Promethei Sinus container yard should present such a tactical target to loyalist or traitor forces, the Carrion could only guess. Perhaps Mechanicum tacticians on each side were attempting to deny their counterparts the supplies there. Perhaps the Imperial Fists had targeted the site on the insistence of the departing Mechanicum. Perhaps it was a purely accidental strike, a victim of garbled coordinates. Either way, the craters and trail of destruction through the depot yard certainly made the path through the jumbled giga-containers an easier one.
Flanked by the Null and the Void, their rotor guns held tight in at their shoulders with the multi-barrels sweeping the labyrinthine path ahead, the Carrion moved through the gaps and spaces between the containers. Strix weaved through the jumble too, the cyber-raven swooping above and through the rubble. Pounding on through the colossal expanse of the depot yard, ducking beneath crates, bounding up slopes of disgorged cargo and sliding down the roofs of toppled containers, the Carrion led the way towards the hidden entrance to the dungeon-diagnoplex.
The first sign that there was something seriously wrong was the reappearance of Strix from a shadowy underpass.
‘Halt,’ the Carrion ordered, bringing his pair of servo-automata to a dead stop on the shattered rockcrete surface of the yard at the centre of a blasted hollow. As the cyber-raven flew back at him, its canting caw told of a threat ahead. It seemed that they were walking straight into an ambush. The Carrion brought up the baroque bulk of his graviton gun and set it to a rumbling charge.
‘Pattern Imbrica,’ the Raven Guard ordered, prompting Di-Delta 451 and Eta/Iota~13 to move. ‘Form up and close fire arcs.’
A drone ocularis suddenly hummed from the darkness of the underpass, all scopes, augur vanes and aerials. As its pursuit of the cyber-raven brought it face-to-face with the Carrion, its pictcorder whirred into focus and a jabber-cant of code erupted from the drone, echoing harshly about the perverse architecture of the jumbled container yard. Pumping the weapon, the Space Marine blasted the drone with a graviton pulse. As if struck by an invisible giant fist, the construct was smashed back into the corrugated wall of a container and shattered apart in a shower of workings and splattered interior organics. The thing gave off the foul stench of something spoiled and corrupted from within.