Priests of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Hawkins’s Guardsmen took their shots at the third cybernetic as it climbed over the bodies ahead of it. Hawkins’s shot blew out its lower jaw, while Manos removed the lid of its skull with a shot through its fleshy ear canal. Impact shock caused Paulan to miss, and Ollert’s shot took the servitor behind in the throat. Blood sheeted down its chest, but the creature kept coming. Two more pushed in behind it and a cybernetic with a hissing flame unit swept its weapon around with a whoosh of igniting fuel.

  ‘Down!’ cried Hawkins as a rolling blast wave of flaming promethium washed over them. He felt the heat scorch his armour and bit back a cry of pain as a red-hot metal fastening clip pressed against his undershirt and burned the skin. Paulan screamed as he was engulfed by the flames, the intense heat melting the skin from his bones and suffocating his cries as the air in his lungs was sucked out. He fell beside Stennz, who frantically tried to beat out the flames with her hands.

  ‘Leave him!’ shouted Hawkins. ‘He’s gone!’

  Ollert rolled upright and levelled his rifle at the flamer servitor, and was instantly hurled back as a high-velocity rivet blew out the back of his helmet. Stennz kept low as the chugging barrage hammered their cover, leaving scores of mushroom-shaped depressions on the underside of the workbench. Manos gathered up Ollert’s power cells and tossed one each to Hawkins and Stennz.

  An answering stream of gunfire from across the medicae bay silenced the rivet gunner, and Hawkins, Stennz and Manos rose to firing positions. Flames still licked at the workbench, and runnels of black smoke fogged the air. Half a dozen ork cybernetics were in the medicae chamber now, advancing with mechanistic aggression. Hawkins and Manos concentrated their fire on the flamer servitor, and succeeded in putting it down with a concentrated burst of full auto that emptied both their power cells. Stennz fared better, her shots fusing the metal skullcap of another rivet gunner and causing it to lock up like a statue.

  More servitors pushed into the room, and even over the raucous clamour of gunfire, Hawkins could hear the grating metallic laughter of the silver-eyed tech-priest. He ducked back into cover to replace his spent power cell.

  ‘Last one,’ said Manos. ‘I said we should have brought grenades.’

  ‘Onto a pressurised space station?’ replied Hawkins, fishing out his last charge pack. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘One spare,’ said Stennz. ‘Who wants it?’

  ‘You keep it,’ said Hawkins. ‘You’re the best shot.’

  Stennz nodded and slapped the power cell home.

  All three Cadians took up firing positions, and prepared to make their last shots count.

  The skitarii were in full retreat, their makeshift barricade smashed to broken spars of twisted metal by the attentions of a pneumatic hammer in the hands of a brutish ork servitor a full head and shoulders taller than the others. Searing arcs of crackling energy chased them and only programmed self-sacrifice kept Archmagos Kotov alive as two of his warriors hurled themselves in the path of the killing whip of electro-fire. Their bodies burst into flames and were ashes in seconds as the hammer-wielding ork strode towards the survivors.

  ‘Put that one down,’ said Hawkins, but before he could fire, Kul Gilad charged the monstrous cybernetic creature. The ork swung the energised hammer at the Reclusiarch, who caught the weapon on its downward arc and jammed his storm bolter in the ork’s face. Before Kul Gilad could fire, a pulsing electrical beam struck him and he spasmed as his armour’s systems overloaded with the influx of rogue energies.

  The pneumatic hammer slammed into the Reclusiarch, knocking him back and tearing the heavy shoulder guard from his armour. Hawkins felt a moment of stomach-churning terror at the sight of a Terminator brought low, but before the ork’s huge weapon could swing again, the Emperor’s Champion’s black sword was there to intercept it. The warrior hacked through the haft of the enormous hammer before spinning on his heel and driving the point of the blade through the cybernetic’s chest. The blow seemed not to trouble the giant ork servitor and it slammed its fist into the Templar’s chest as he fought to free his weapon from its unyielding form.

  The other Black Templars charged into the fight as Kul Gilad rose to his feet like a heroic pugilist with one last reserve of energy to win the fight of his life. The hammerer turned to face him, as though bemused that something it had hit was getting back up again. Kul Gilad didn’t give it a chance to recover and slammed his energised fist into the ork’s face. The blow landed with the full might of the Reclusiarch’s fury and tore the ork’s head from its shoulders, leaving only a jetting stump and strips of loose skin flapping from its neck.

  Hawkins had never seen anything like it and wanted to cheer, but Cadian discipline quickly overcame the urge.

  ‘That one,’ said Hawkins, firing the last of his power cell at the servitor carrying the crackling electro-fire weapon. His shots tore portions of the device away, sending fountains of sparks and arcs of crackling power flailing from the generator unit on its back. Stennz and Manos finished the job, their last shots puncturing something vital and causing it to explode with a thunderous crack of earthing power that set the ork alight from head to foot in ozone-reeking flames.

  Smoke and fire filled the end of the medicae chamber and the flesh curtains were curling in the heat and scorching with a sickening stench of burning skin.

  ‘I’m out,’ said Manos.

  ‘Me too,’ answered Stennz.

  Hawkins nodded and slung his rifle, loath to discard it even without any cells to empower it. He drew his Executioner, the Cadian combat blade of the discerning knifeman, and said, ‘Cold steel and a strong right arm it is.’

  The others drew their blades and they vaulted the smouldering remains of what remained of their cover as Archmagos Kotov and the last of the skitarii joined forces with the Black Templars to face the growing number of cybernetics pushing into the chamber. Hawkins, Manos and Stennz picked their way through the piles of corpse, debris and smashed furniture.

  Kul Gilad turned to face him, and Hawkins was astounded the warrior was still able to stand, let alone fight.

  ‘Until the end,’ said Kul Gilad.

  Hawkins didn’t know exactly what that meant, but understood the finality of it.

  ‘For the Emperor,’ he said by way of reply.

  ‘In His name,’ replied the Reclusiarch.

  The ork cybernetic hybrids advanced on the beleaguered Imperials, under the watchful gaze of the silver-eyed tech-priest. There were too many to fight, even for the Black Templars, and Hawkins picked the enemy he would kill first; an ork with a gleaming bronze plate wired into its skull and stevedore’s hooks instead of arms.

  ‘Tell me, archmagos,’ said Hawkins. ‘Did you think your quest for Magos Telok’s lost fleet would end like this?’

  The servitors flinched at his words, and their advance halted, as though he had just said some esoteric command word.

  ‘No,’ said Kotov grimly. ‘This scenario played no part in my expectations.’

  ‘Thought not,’ said Hawkins, reversing his grip on his Executioner blade.

  The cybernetics lowered their weapons and stood immobile, as though awaiting orders.

  ‘Wait, what’s happening?’ said Hawkins, when the servitors still didn’t advance. ‘Why aren’t they attacking?’

  The data screens above the surgical slabs crackled with interference for a moment and the image of the silver-eyed tech-priest was replaced by the hooded form of Magos Tarkis Blaylock. His voice was overlaid with static, but eventually the words resolved themselves.

  ‘-chmagos? Please respond,’ said Blaylock. ‘This is the Speranza, can you hear us?’

  ‘Yes, we can hear you,’ said Kotov.

  ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus!’ said Blaylock, and Hawkins was surprised to hear what sounded like genuine relief at the archmagos’s survival. ‘Did you encounter difficulties?’

  ‘It’s fair to say we encountered great difficulties,’ said Kotov.

  ‘The Manifold station activa
ted a cyclical frequency vox-damper and I have only just succeeded in re-establishing contact after your signal was lost,’ said Blaylock.

  Hawkins placed the vox-bead dangling over his collar back in his ear as he heard Lieutenant Rae’s voice shouting on the other end. He shut out Blaylock and Kotov’s words as he cut across Rae’s insistent demands for an update.

  ‘Calm down, Rae,’ said Hawkins, touching the sub-vocal transmitter at his neck. ‘What’s your situation? Did you come under attack?’

  ‘Aye, sir, we did, but we held them off,’ said Rae. ‘Truth be told, they weren’t trying very hard. I think they just wanted to keep us from getting through to you.’

  ‘That sounds about right,’ nodded Hawkins. ‘Any losses?’

  ‘None, sir,’ said Rae, and Hawkins could hear the man’s pride even over the vox. ‘You?’

  ‘We’ve men down and a few cuts and scrapes at this end, so send a medic up.’

  ‘I’ll come with him myself,’ promised Rae, and cut the link.

  Hawkins took a moment to regain his equilibrium. It had been a hard fight, and had looked like it was going to be one he didn’t walk away from. Strangely, the thought didn’t concern him overmuch. On Cadia, children were taught to live with thoughts of their own mortality from an early age, which made for bleak childhoods but fearless soldiers. He kept a wary eye on the servitors, just in case they suddenly resumed hostilities.

  ‘Blaylock, did you shut down the Manifold station’s servitors?’ asked Kotov.

  ‘Negative, archmagos,’ said Blaylock. ‘I had no knowledge of there being any to shut down.’

  ‘He didn’t shut them down, we did,’ said a blended gestalt voice that emanated from the rear of the medicae chamber. Hawkins spun around and raised his rifle, even though there was no charge in the power cell.

  A previously invisible heptagonal slice of the ceiling had detached from the deck above and was descending to the floor of the medicae chamber on a column of variegated light. Hawkins’s teeth itched, telling him that the column was a constrained repulsor field, like those used in skimmer reconnaissance vehicles. Squatting on the slice of ceiling was what looked like a bulky mechanical scorpion the size of a Leman Russ. Its body was metallic and fashioned as if from the leftover parts at the end of a manufactory shift; the mechanised legs were mismatched, with some reverse jointed and others displaying a more conventional mammalian orientation.

  Its legs sprouted from a circular palanquin, upon which sat the crimson-robed torso of the silver-eyed tech-priest, fused into the cupola at his bifurcated waist. A dozen fluid-filled caskets were arranged around the hooded priest, fixed in place by heavy-duty power couplings and flexing iron struts. Floating in each casket was an obviously-augmented human brain, hard-wired into the centre of this palanquin by a series of gold-plated connector jacks.

  Archmagos Kotov levelled his ornate pistol at the bizarre tech-priest.

  ‘In the name of the Omnissiah, identify yourself,’ he demanded.

  ‘Call us Galatea,’ said the tech-priest. ‘And we have been waiting such a long time for you, Archmagos Kotov.’

  Microcontent 17

  Stark light filled the emptied laboratory, recessed lumen-strips filling the white space with an unflinching, diffuse illumination. Heavily armed praetorians encased in plates of data-tight armour stood in the four corners of the room, each fitted with a variety of armaments, ranging from prosaic blast weaponry to more esoteric graviton guns and particle disassemblers.

  In a vestibule beyond the laboratory, Archmagos Kotov and Secutor Dahan watched the thing that called itself Galatea through a sheet of unbreakable transparisteel. The creature moved in a slow circuit of its new abode, either unaware or uncaring that it was a prison in all but name. The silver-eyed body atop the palanquin was, it transpired, little more than a mechanical mannequin, a constructed artifice to facilitate communications. It had willingly returned to the Speranza, and had spent the last five diurnal cycles rearranging the brains on its rotating palanquin body, swapping cables between jars and exchanging squirts of compressed binary between them. Magos Blaylock was even now attempting to crack the cryptography securing the thing’s internal communications, but had so far met with no success.

  ‘You’re sure these servitors are secure?’ asked Kotov. Since the fighting on the Valette station, he had kept a wary eye on the Speranza’s cybernetics, half-expecting them to mutiny at any moment.

  ‘They are secure,’ Magos Dahan assured him with an irritated grunt. The front half of his skull had been regrafted, the fresh skin still new and pink, but it hadn’t made his features any less grim.

  ‘I structured their wetware specifically for this interrogation; high-grade combat subroutines that don’t quite render them autonomous, but kisses the edge of making them thinking soldiers. Working with the Cadians helped, and I took inputs from Sergeant Tanna of the Black Templars to give them a little something extra. But the thing seems docile and co-operative for now.’

  Kotov nodded, reassured by Dahan’s words. The skitarii suzerain might be a grim killer, too in love with the mathematics of destruction for Kotov’s tastes, but he knew his combat wetware.

  ‘How are you adapting to the temporary body?’ asked Kotov.

  Dahan shrugged his enormous shoulders. ‘It will take time to adjust to the new physiology. Its weight distribution is uneven and the enhanced muscular/skeletal density makes me slow. But I am training with the Black Templars to adapt to its more organic demands on my combat procedures.’

  While his mechanical body parts awaited full restoration and consecration in Magos Turentek’s assembly shops, Dahan’s organic components had been grafted onto a temporary organic frame. Portions of the body had once been a combat-servitor’s, implanted with strength-enhancing pneumatics and muscle-boosters. Dahan’s Secutor robes looked absurdly small on its steroid-bulked body, like a full-grown man in an adolescent’s clothes. The original arms had been removed to allow for Dahan’s to be attached, and together with its heart, lungs and spinal column, they had been incinerated in the waste furnaces.

  Kotov nodded, not really caring about Dahan’s physical rehabilitation following his near death in the thermic shockwave of Lupa Capitalina’s plasma discharge, but wanting to delay their entry into the laboratory just a little longer. Galatea unsettled Kotov in a way that few other things could. Its appearance was nothing too fantastical – he had seen far more outlandish physical augmentation on Mars – but the way Galatea looked at him, like it knew secret, hidden things, made him acutely uncomfortable.

  Since boarding the Speranza, Galatea had been subjected to every conceivable means of cognitive definition at Kotov’s disposal: intra-cortical recordings, oscillatory synchronisation measurement, cognitive chronometry, remote electroencephalography, neuromatrix conductivity, synaptic density and a dozen more specialised tests.

  The results were beyond anything Kotov had seen before.

  Theta and gamma wave activity were off the charts, as was its hippocampal theta rhythm and recurrent thalamo-cortical resonance. Whatever cognitive architectural matrix was at work within Galatea’s body shell, it was way beyond the ability of even the greatest minds aboard the Speranza to comprehend.

  ‘So are we going in or not?’ asked Dahan, typically blunt.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Kotov, irritated at being rushed.

  He beckoned to a pack of chromed servo-skulls drifting in lazy orbits behind them, and they dutifully bobbed through the air to follow him. Some were fitted with picters, others with vox-thieves or binaric counter-measures, while one was fitted with a precision surgical laser that could boil a brain to vapour with one shot. Together with the weaponised servitors in the laboratory, the magi were as secure as could be managed.

  And still Kotov felt like he was walking into a carnifex’s den.

  He and Dahan, together with their escort of skulls, passed through the data-inert pressure lock and stepped into the pristine space. The walls were
bare where equipment had been stripped out and the ceiling was vaulted with embossed skulls of the Icon Mechanicus that stared down as though intrigued by the drama playing out below. Every point of connection to the wider datasphere had been cut and every inload/exload port had been disabled.

  The laboratory was sterile in every way that could be imagined.

  The weaponised servitors turned their targeting optics on them, and dismissed them as threats almost instantaneously. Their weapons returned to tracking Galatea’s movements.

  Kotov almost gasped as the door shut behind him and his intimate connection to every part of Speranza was severed. Like a voluptuary suddenly denied all his pleasures, Kotov was lost and utterly bereft. He had never known such a sense of loss or felt so achingly naked. Galatea swivelled on its palanquin, the legs folding awkwardly to bring its robed tech-priest body lower.

  ‘Unsettling, is it not?’ said Galatea. ‘It is very cold and very frightening when you are isolated from all you have known and all you can know. We are used to our own company, but we suspect you very much do not like it.’

  ‘It is... a novel sensation,’ agreed Kotov. ‘I will be glad to reconnect to the datasphere.’

  ‘Think on this. Such a state of being is how mortals exist every day of their lives,’ said Galatea, looking up at the chromed skulls darting around it with an amused glint in its silver optics. ‘It is sad for them, don’t you think?’

  ‘I do not think about it,’ confessed Kotov.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ said Galatea. ‘Why would you? The Adeptus Mechanicus thinks only of its own sense of entitlement.’

  ‘We would like to ask you some questions, Galatea,’ began Kotov, registering the caustic remark, but choosing to ignore it for now. ‘To better understand you and gain a clearer understanding of what has been happening at the Valette Manifold station. Are you ready to answer our questions?’