Priests of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Emil whispered to him out of the corner of his mouth. ‘Even when they’re apologising they can’t resist a barb.’

  Roboute rubbed a hand across his face to hide the grin that threatened to surface.

  ‘Perhaps I should try to learn your language,’ said Roboute. ‘To avoid future misunderstandings.’

  ‘That could be arranged with some simple augmetic surgery,’ agreed Blaylock.

  ‘That was a joke,’ said Surcouf, returning to the bottom of the crew ramp.

  ‘I see,’ said Blaylock. ‘It is all too easy to forget the ways of those not joined to the Machine.’

  ‘Then I suggest you reacquaint yourself with our illogical ways,’ snapped Roboute. ‘Otherwise this is going to be a very short expedition.’

  Blaylock nodded. ‘I shall endeavour to rectify my understanding of our differing ways.’

  ‘That would be a start,’ said Roboute, as Blaylock turned his attention to the stasis chest being carried between Emil and Adara. The green lights beneath his hood narrowed their focus.

  ‘May I see the item?’ he asked – with a casual tone, but even one so transformed by mechanical additions to his biological form couldn’t quite conceal the all-consuming desire to examine what lay within the chest.

  ‘I think not,’ said Roboute. ‘As commander of this expedition, it seems only fitting that Archmagos Kotov be the first to examine the device, don’t you think?’

  ‘Of course,’ replied Blaylock, quick to hide his bitter disappointment. ‘Yes, absolutely. The Archmagos Explorator should have that honour.’

  ‘Then you’d better take us to him,’ said Roboute. ‘Immediately.’

  After being shunted along mass-conveyor rails and swung over abyssal chasms by servitor-crewed loader rigs, Abrehem felt a heavy thump as their container was at last deposited with an air of finality. Ceiling-mounted illuminators burst to life and the rear wall of the container rumbled forwards on protesting gears, inexorably flushing the human cargo out onto industrially stamped metal deck plates.

  Containers identical to theirs stretched out left and right, hundreds or perhaps even thousands of them. Crowds of bewildered looking men and women milled uncertainly around them, blinking in the harsh light and looking fearfully for anything that might give them comfort.

  Abrehem tried to hide his amazement at the space in which they stood, but failed miserably.

  A vast steel cliff face of a wall stretched up into darkness before them, a writhing collection of pipes and ductwork spiralling across its surface like exposed arteries to shape the black and white Icon Mechanicus. Steam poured from one eye of the great skull at its centre and a furnace-red light pulsed from behind the other. Stained-glass windows ran the full length of the walls, bathing the scene in a surreal blend of multi-coloured lights.

  Vast statues of winged adepts and machine-cherubs filled deep alcoves and enormous cylindrical pipes hung from the ceiling on perilously thin strands of cabling. Powerful waves of heat sweated from them. Coolant gases vented from grilles along their length, and Abrehem caught the acrid, chemical tang of plasma venting. A thudding rumble vibrated through the deck plates, and he guessed the vast engine compartments were close by. Towering pistons pumped like drilling rigs at the edges of the chamber, and the squeal of metal on metal echoed in time with the ancient heartbeat of the vessel.

  Vast machines filled the chamber, towering stacks of black iron, rotating cogs, pumping metal limbs and hissing flues that burped plumes of caustic gases. Standing before the front rank of these machines were a hundred warriors encased in the same black, beetle-gloss armour worn by the men who’d taken Ismael away. Bare-armed to better display their guild tattoos and implanted muscle enhancers, they carried a mixture of vicious shock mauls, shot-cannons and whips. Faceless behind black helms, they were fearsome killers, psychopaths yoked by iron discipline and devotion.

  ‘Skitarii,’ said Abrehem, and the men within earshot flinched at the word.

  They’d all heard the stories of the mortal footsoldiers of the Adeptus Mechanicus, former Guardsmen enhanced with all manner of implants, both physical and mental, to render them into remorseless killers and zealous protectors of the holy artefacts of their tech-priest masters. Little better than feral wildmen, they were said to decorate their armour with the skin of those they had slain and collect trophy racks of enemy warriors’ skulls.

  So the stories went, but these men looked nothing like the stories.

  They looked like pitiless, highly disciplined warriors against whom only a Space Marine might hope to prevail. Arranged in ordered ranks like robots, there was very little of these warriors that could be described as feral. A hundred boots slammed down in unison as the skitarii snapped to attention and a grav-plate descended into their midst from the enormous skull.

  A rippling energy haze surrounded the edges of the plate, and a reverberant hum filled the chamber as it hovered a few metres above the deck. Two figures stood side by side on the plate; the larger of the pair clad in armour similar to that worn by the skitarii, though much more heavily ornamented and augmented. The other wore hooded vestments of deep crimson, around which hung a black and gold stole with cog-toothed edges, acid-etched with the sixteen laws in a host of numerical languages. A heavy generator pack clamped around his torso like an murderous arachnid, and a swirling haze of freezing air swirled around the machine priest like trapped mist. Abrehehm felt cold just looking at him.

  With a start, he recognised the magos from Joura, the one directing the collarmen. This was the man who’d torn him from his old life, and a bright nugget of hatred took hold in his heart.

  ‘Who do you suppose they are?’ asked Coyne.

  ‘Can you tell, Abrehem?’ asked Hawke.

  ‘I’m trying to,’ he said. ‘But it’s not easy. The sheer volume of data being inloaded and exloaded from their floodstreams every second is immense...’

  ‘Listen to him,’ sneered Hawke. ‘You’d think he was one of them.’

  Abrehem ignored the sniping remark and concentrated on the two figures as the Mechanicus adept in red drifted to the front of the grav-plate. Noospheric data cascaded in a waterfall of invisible light above his head in a halo of radiance, and the information Abrehem sought – though embedded on his every inload – was difficult to read.

  ‘Saiixek,’ said Abrehem. ‘The bastard’s called Saiixek.’

  A burst of what sounded like static erupted from unseen speaker horns, deafening and abrasive. The distortion squalled and squealed like a badly-tuned vox-caster until Abrehem finally realised the magos was speaking to them. Gradually, the static diminished and the words came through, as the magos finished his pronouncement in unintelligible machine language and switched to his flesh voice.

  ‘Informational: I am Magos Saiixek, Master of Engines,’ he began, his voice artificial and devoid of any human inflection. ‘You have been brought to the Adeptus Mechanicus vessel, Speranza. This is a great honour. Every one of you is now bonded to the Priesthood of Mars and your service will allow the great machines of this vessel to function. By your exertions will the great engines burn hotter than stars. By your blood will the ship’s wheels and gears be greased. By the strength in your bones will the mighty pistons empower its great heart and its fists of light. Your lives now serve the Omnissiah.’

  ‘As far as inspiring speeches go, I’ve heard better,’ said Hawke, and a ripple of gallows laughter spread through the men and women of their container.

  The shoulder of Saiixek’s robe twitched and a series of whirring, reticulated arms emerged from a number of concealed folds. They clicked and snapped as they unfolded, each one terminating in unfolding metallic grips, tools and needle-like appendages that looked more like instruments of torture than engineering manipulators.

  The plate descended to the deck, and the figure in black stepped down. Now that he was on the same level as the newly-arrived men and women, Abrehem saw his shoulders were almost absurdly oversized. Augmented with
mechanical prosthetics, muscle enhancers and numerous weapon implants, the warrior was as hulking as the Space Marines were said to be. He carried a long polearm, its top surmounted by a serrated blade and its base fitted with a clawed energy pod the purpose of which eluded Abrehem, but which was no doubt intended to cause harm.

  The man’s skull was a hairless orb, the front half pallid and waxen, the rear encased in bronze and silver. His teeth were gleaming and metallic, and a red-gold Icon Mechanicus was embedded in the centre of his forehead. This was no skitarii chieftain, this was a tech-priest, but one unlike any Abrehem had seen before.

  The warrior-magos stopped directly in front of Hawke and regarded him through eyes with the glassy sheen of artificiality. Abrehem recognised high-end implants, sophisticated targeting mechanisms, threat analysers and combat vector-metrics. He’d only ever heard of quality like that on high-ranking Mechanicus adepts.

  The man’s head twitched in Abrehem’s direction, no doubt reading the passive emanations of his own augmetics. His exposed flesh was wet with chemical unguents and hot oil lubricants. The additional limbs partly concealed beneath his black cloak were sheened black iron. Quickly Abrehem was dismissed as a threat, and the warrior-magos leaned down over Hawke, easily a metre taller than him. His lip curled in a sneer as he read his biometric data from the fealty brand.

  ‘Hawke, Julius,’ he said in a voice that sounded like crushed gravel. ‘A troublemaker.’

  ‘Me, sir? No, sir,’ said Hawke.

  ‘It wasn’t a question,’ said the brutish figure.

  Hawke didn’t reply and continued to stare at a point just over the warrior’s shoulder, which was no mean feat given the height difference between them. Hawke’s face assumed a slack, vacant expression, common to all soldiers of low rank when facing an irate superior officer.

  ‘I am Dahan, Secutor of the Skitarii Guilds aboard the Speranza,’ said the brutal giant. ‘Do you know what that means; Hawke, Julius?’

  ‘No, sir,’ answered Hawke.

  ‘It means that I have the power of life and death over you,’ said Dahan. ‘It means your biometrics have been recorded and filed. Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, I will know it. I destroy troublemakers like you without effort, and I have a thousand men who would happily do it for me. Do you understand your place aboard this ship?’

  ‘Sir, yes, sir,’ responded Hawke.

  Dahan turned away, but instead of retuning to the hovering grav-plate and Magos Saiixek, he marched to join his warriors. Abrehem let out a pent-up breath, but Hawke just grinned as the hulking warrior departed, leaving only the faint reek of his chemical anointments.

  Magos Saiixek resumed speaking as Dahan joined the ranked-up skitarii.

  ‘Each of you has been branded with a unique identifier, indicating which honoured task you have been allotted aboard the Speranza. Move to the end of this chamber, where you will be directed to your storage facility and instructed on how to carry out your duties.’

  The vox-grilles barked as a rotating series of binaric cants and recitations in High Gothic filled the chamber. Abrehem could only catch the odd word here and there; enough to know that he was hearing machine hymns in praise of the Machine-God, but not enough to make much sense of it.

  ‘Well, that was interesting,’ said Hawke.

  ‘Thor’s blood, I thought that skitarii magos was going to kill you,’ said Coyne, his skin glistening with sweat. ‘Did you see the bloody size of him?’

  ‘I’ve seen his type a hundred times before,’ said Hawke, raising his voice just enough for those nearby to hear him. ‘The trick is to never make eye contact and only say yes or no. That got me through ten years of service in the Guard, and you can have that one for free, lads!’

  Wary smiles greeted his comment, but Abrehem kept his expression neutral as the vast iron cliff face before them split down its middle with a boom of disengaging locks. The grinning skull slid apart on friction-dampened rails as the ranks of skitarii warriors turned with a thunder of boots. They marched aside as the enormous door before the newest crew members of the Speranza opened to reveal a series of ironwork channels, like funnels used to guide livestock to the slaughterman’s knife.

  Glowing red light shone from beyond the vast gateway, and the fire of voracious furnaces, ever-thirsty plasma engines and hungry weapon batteries awaited them.

  Microcontent 04

  Sitting high in the cupola of his faithful Hellhound, Captain Blayne Hawkins watched the loading operations of the 71st Cadian (detached formation) with exasperation. His soldiers had transferred from warzone to warzone often enough that the movement of an entire regiment was something the support corps could usually manage with a degree of finesse. Moving ten companies should have been child’s play.

  But this was the first time they had embarked upon a Mechanicus vessel.

  A degree of belligerent co-operation existed between the crews of Navy carrier vessels and the Guard units they were transporting, but no such bond, begrudged or otherwise, was in evidence between the Cadians and the Adeptus Mechanicus logisters. Nearly a hundred armoured vehicles were snarled in the embarkation deck, engines throbbing and filling the air with the blue-shot fug of exhaust fumes, while Cadian supply officers and Mechanicus deck crew argued over the best means of untangling the log-jammed vehicles.

  His drivers were well practised in the best way to manoeuvre their tanks into berthing holds, but the Mechanicus logisters had different ideas. It hadn’t taken long until a couple of squadrons had become entangled and a number of vehicles inevitably collided. In the ensuing anarchy, a Leman Russ threw a track and a pair of Hellhounds had broadsided one another as each driver received conflicting orders.

  ‘Emperor damn it, we’re supposed to be in the berthing hangar by now,’ he snapped, clambering from the hatch and swinging his legs out over the tank’s forward turret. Fresh faced and young, by other regimental standards, to hold a captaincy, Hawkins had earned his stripes as a warrior and commander by the time he’d left the violet-lit world of Cadia, and had only gone on to cement his reputation as a tenacious and competent officer in the years since leaving his home world for good.

  Hawkins dropped to the deck, feeling the rumble of the mighty starship’s engines through the soles of his boots. He was used to the scale of Navy bulk handlers, but the Speranza was many times greater than any vessel he or his men had berthed in. Each starship had its own sound, its own feel and its own smell. He remembered Thor’s Light; it had reeked of fyceline and almonds from its time as an ordnance carrier. Azure Halo always smelled of wet permacrete, and the internals of Maddox Hope had inexplicably dripped with moisture as though its very superstructure was melting.

  He knelt and placed his palm on the deck plates, feeling the immense presence of the starship, a bass hum of incredible power and age. This ship was old, older than the ships of the Navy, which had already sailed for thousands of years. Colonel Anders had hinted that the vessel’s keel had been laid down before the ancient crusade to reunite the fragmented worlds of Men, but where he’d learned that particular nugget, he hadn’t elaborated.

  Hawkins could well believe it to be true. Unbreakable strength rested in the ship’s ancient bones, yet despite its obvious age, there was a newness to the ship that belied its unimaginable scale. It felt welcoming, so perhaps this mess of entangled vehicles wasn’t the bad omen he feared.

  ‘Rae, get down here,’ he yelled, knowing his adjutant wouldn’t be far away. Taybard Rae was a veteran lieutenant of the regiment, a stalwart of the company and a man without whose steady presence many a battle line might have buckled. Hawkins rose to his full height as Rae appeared from behind an idling Chimera, his uniform already crumpled and untidy. Hawkins had watched a freshly-pressed uniform become creased and looking like it had just been through a battle in the time it took Rae to walk from the barracks to the parade ground.

  ‘Bloody Mechanicus meddling if ever I saw it,’ said Rae.

  ‘Looks like
it,’ agreed Hawkins.

  ‘The colonel on board yet?’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Hawkins, setting off through the press of tightly-packed armoured vehicles, towards the source of the hold-up. ‘I want to get this sorted before he sees this damn mess.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ said Rae. ‘I’ve just been up front. There’s three tanks jammed in the link tunnel to the berthing hold, and everyone else is rammed tight up their arses. It’s going to take hours to get them untangled.’

  ‘Where’s Callins? He’s supposed to keep things like this from happening.’

  ‘Arguing with the Mechanicus logisters. It’s not pretty.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘Remember that time with those greenskins and the ogryns on Peolosia? Where they just stood and pounded on each other until they both dropped? It’s like that, but without the finesse.’

  Hawkins swore, carefully negotiating the narrow paths between trapped Leman Russ battle tanks, idling Salamanders and the regiment’s signature Hellhound tanks. Hawkins approached the sound of arguing voices, his temper fraying with every step. He ducked under the sponson mount of Kasr’s Fist, a Leman Russ Destroyer with numerous kill markings etched into its pockmarked hull. Still painted in the urban camouflage of Baktar III’s ruined industrial wastelands, its rightmost lascannon was wedged tightly against the hull of Creed’s Pride and a number of the rivets holding it in place had buckled against the pressure.

  ‘The colonel’s not going to like that,’ said Rae, examining the popped seams along the edge of the sponson mount.

  A dark-coated supply corps officer was arguing with a number of Mechanicus logisters in bright robes and a bulked-out machine-skull at the front of the tank. The Mechanicus adepts were gesturing with green-lit illuminator wands and barking commands in vox-amped irritation, but the Cadian supply officer was giving as good as he got. Major Jahn Callins was at the heart of the argument, and Hawkins didn’t envy the logisters the full force of his wrath. He’d seen colonels and generals retreat with their tails between their legs in the face of Callins’s blunt procedural anger.