Dalia looked over Rho-mu 31’s shoulder, seeing terrified faces pressing against the wall of the corridor as they slammed fists, fire extinguishers or anything else they could get their hands on to smash the glass. Through the window on the door at the end of the corridor, Dalia could see bright flames and black smoke.
‘Hurry!’ shouted Severine. ‘For the love of the Omnissiah, hurry up!’
A searing white lance of plasma cut into the carriage, sawing through the metal and glass like a laser saw. The beam instantly sliced two-dozen people in half and Dalia wept as she smelled boiled blood and scorched meat.
‘Down!’ shouted Rho-mu 31, bearing Dalia and Caxton to the floor of the corridor. Severine was quick to follow and Zouche had already been borne to his knees by the stampede. The incandescent beam zipped along the corridor, killing as it went, and Dalia watched in mute horror as severed limbs, cleaved bodies and disembodied heads fell to the floor.
She rolled onto her side as the deadly beam passed overhead and droplets of molten metal splashed the floor beside her. She cried out as one scorched a thin line down her arm.
‘Sacred Fathers,’ hissed Zouche, rolling onto his front as an explosion further back whipped the mag-lev like a sine wave. Everyone screamed as it was lifted from the rails with a screech of torn metal and a crackling burst of arcing electrics.
Dalia scrambled on her knees towards Rho-mu 31 as the carriage tipped from the track and her world spun crazily. It crashed to the tunnel floor and the windows blew out with the force of the impact. A blizzard of crystalline fragments rained down.
The breath was knocked from her and Dalia felt blood dripping into her eyes. A heavy weight pinned her and she blinked away red tears as she heard more deafening blasts of gunfire. She couldn’t tell how close it was, but the stuttering, strobing flash of weapons fire felt as though it were coming from right outside their carriage.
Dalia fought to free herself from the weight pinning her to… the ceiling? Which way was up and which was down? She couldn’t hear any screams. Had the Kaban machine killed everyone?
A man’s body lay sprawled across her, or at least half of him, and she cried as she pushed his bifurcated body from her. The metal beneath her – the ceiling, she was sure of it now – was sticky with warm blood, and she whimpered in terror at the sight of heaped mounds of corpses filling the corridor. The iron stink of blood was thick in her nostrils and Dalia couldn’t remember a more awful smell.
She retched dryly at the sight of so many dead, terrified and numbed by the horror of how quickly their grand adventure had come to such a bloody end. Despite the stink of death, she took a deep breath and looked for her friends amid the wreckage and carnage.
Dalia saw Rho-mu 31 lying further along the buckled corridor with a jagged spar of metal impaling his shoulder. The Protector’s biometrics were fluctuating, but he was alive.
Zouche lay in a heap of bodies, his face a mask of blood, but she couldn’t tell whether it was his or belonged to someone else. Caxton was just behind her, pinned to the floor by a metal door in the midst of a spray of glass fragments. His eyes were open and pleading, a low moaning issuing from between bloodied lips.
Severine lay beneath a nutrient dispensing machine that had torn loose from the wall, her arm thrown out before her and twisted at an unnatural angle. Her eyes were closed, but her pained expression and rapid, shallow breaths told Dalia she was alive.
The carriage was still, no straining bodies or panicked shoving, and the only light came from smashed lumen globes that sparked and stuttered in the half-light.
After such a tremendous cacophony of violence and noise, the silence that enveloped her was as welcome as it was terrifying.
Dalia began to crawl towards Rho-mu 31. He saw her coming and shook his head, placing a finger to the grilled mouthpiece of his helmet.
At first Dalia didn’t understand.
Then she heard it.
Over the creaking wreckage and tinkle of falling glass, she felt the vibration of the heavy machine through the ground as it crashed metal and ruptured bodies beneath its tracks. Dalia craned her neck to look through the shattered window into the sputtering darkness of the tunnel, and fought down the urge to cry out as she saw the monstrous form of the sentient machine rambling towards where they lay.
She felt the crawling pressure of its corrupted mind as it swept the carriage for life signs, and heard the rattle of its autoloaders feeding its weapons fresh ammunition.
It drew nearer with every breath and in moments its auspex would register their presence. Then it would kill them.
PRINCEPS CAVALERIO FINISHED processing the feeds inloading into his casket at a rate of over six thousand data packets per second. The Martian networks had slowly returned to normal after the scrapcode plague, the diligence of the code-scrubbers and magos probandi all across the red planet finally re-establishing communications and information exchanges.
Fresh reports, petitions and pleas for aid from forges far and wide were streaming into Ascraeus Mons through the vox, across the noosphere and via optic feeds.
It was a bleak picture they painted of the Mechanicum’s future.
Cavalerio let his mind swim up through the reams of liquid information that flowed around and through him. He saw Agathe’s face before him, and set the biometrics of his casket from processing to consciousness.
His famulous nodded as she read the information on the slate fixed to the side of the casket and retreated to a subordinate position behind him.
Cavalerio’s Manifold senses processed his surroundings. His casket sat in the position of honour in the Chamber of the First, raised on a plinth before the mighty, towering form of Deus Tempestus, the First God Machine of the Legio.
Princeps Sharaq stood before him, waiting to hear whether he would give an order of execution. Though Sharaq had correctly appointed himself the acting Princeps Senioris of the Tempestus forces on Mars, he knew and welcomed the fact that any order to walk should come from the Stormlord.
Behind Sharaq were his Legio brothers, each awaiting the Stormlord’s decision.
Princeps Suzak, the grim-faced hunter who commanded the Warlord Tharsis Hastatus, watched with an impassive eye, while Princeps Mordant of the Reaver Arcadia Fortis strained like an attack dog on a leash.
The Warhound drivers – Basek of Vulpus Rex, Kasim of Raptoria and Lamnos of Astrus Lux – paced like caged wolves, and Cavalerio rejoiced in the fearful power he saw before him.
‘Stormlord,’ said Sharaq. ‘The princeps are gathered as you ordered.’
‘Thank you, Kel,’ said Cavalerio, before enhancing his augmitters to address the princeps of his Legio. ‘I know you’re all waiting to see whether I give an order of execution, but before I tell you my decision we need to understand what might happen as a result. I’ve given great thought to this, because a wrong choice will have consequences none of us can imagine.
‘The forges of Mars burn in the fires of schism, and factional violence is reaching epidemic proportions all across our home world. So far, that violence has been restricted to the Mechanicum. None of the Titan Legions have yet initiated any hostilities, but it’s surely only a matter of time until that happens.’
He could see their hunger to be unleashed, proud of their courage yet saddened by their eagerness to fight their erstwhile brothers.
‘Before you all rush to your engines, gentlemen, let’s be clear on one thing. If the Titan Legions march to war, there will be no coming back from it; we will have unleashed the fire of a civil war that will only be extinguished by the utter destruction of one side or the other.
‘I have always sought to keep our Legio free from the insidious poison of politicking. I
believe that the Titan Legions should remain true to their warrior ideals and not be instruments of political will, save that of the Imperium itself. Mars faces the gravest crisis in its long and glorious history, and warriors of honour and courage do not stand idly by in such times, they act. They stand firm in the face of aggression and in the defence of their allies.’
Cavalerio paused, allowing his words to hit home before continuing. ‘The idea that one Legio would fight another is anathema to me, but I am not fool enough to believe that such a time is not coming.’
‘It has already arrived,’ said Princeps Mordant. ‘Mortis is spoiling for battle.’
‘Indeed,’ said Cavalerio. ‘The blatantly provocative walk on Ascraeus Mons by the Mortis engines was little more than an attempt to bait us into a shooting war we could not win.’
He stifled their denials with a harsh blurt of impatient code.
‘I admire your bravery and faith in one another, but had we fought we would have died.’
‘So what do we do, Stormlord?’ demanded Princeps Suzak. ‘Do we swallow our pride and do nothing as Mars tears itself apart? We are a force for stability, use us!’
‘No, Vlad, we do not swallow our pride,’ said Cavalerio. ‘I will unleash the power of the Legio and we will rise to the defence of the ideals for which our world stands. The fury of Tempestus will fall upon the enemies of Mars and together we will scour them from the face of the red planet in a tide of fire and blood.’
‘You walk with us?’ asked Princeps Kasim. ‘How? The tech-priests say Victorix Magna is beyond their ability to restore.’
‘I know that, Zafir, but still I will walk with you,’ declared Cavalerio. ‘I will walk alongside you as I have always dreamed I would make my last walk, with the First God Machine of our Legio. I will become one with Deus Tempestus.’
Princeps Sharaq stepped forward. ‘Then is the word given?’
‘The word is given,’ said Cavalerio. ‘Tempestus goes to war.’
THE MACHINE PAUSED in its advance, Dalia could hear the throaty growl of its power plant and the hiss of its hydraulics, and could feel the fizzing heat of its electrical field. She could smell the smoky residue of hard-rounds fire and taste the ozone from the plasma discharges.
Her every sense was magnified and she fought the urge to cry as she saw the ground up flesh worked into the grooves of its tracks. Rho-mu 31 slid his hand towards his weapon stave, but Dalia knew it would be no protection against such a destructive machine.
Caxton, Severine and Zouche trembled in fear, too hurt to move, too afraid to breathe.
Blood dripped from Dalia’s brow onto her arm and she blinked away another drop as it formed on her eyelid. Shards of glass wobbled in the window frame before her and splinters fell like diamonds spilled from a pouch, landing with a tink, tink, tink.
Dalia held her breath as her fear rendered her immobile. Her limbs were frozen, she couldn’t think properly, and the idea that she was going to die here was as ridiculous as it was horrifying. She didn’t want to die.
Oh Throne, she didn’t want to die!
She looked over at Caxton and the others, feeling a terrible guilt that she had brought them to this. And for what? Some half-baked theory that an ancient creature was buried beneath the surface of Mars?
Dalia wanted to laugh at her foolishness, thinking back to all the things she had read and transcribed – what seemed, and might as well have been, a lifetime ago – that she’d never now have the chance to see: the oceans of Laeran, the great cliffs of Charo, the planet forests of Ae.
A million wonders and miracles yet to be known; wonders the Expedition fleets were seeing on a daily basis.
Neither would she ever learn more of the Carnival of Light on Sarosh, or vicariously live tales of battle like the Victory on Murder or the vanquishing of the Hexen Guild. Likewise, the future paintings of Leland Roget, the compositions of Jeacon Poul and the sculptures of Delafour were all lost to her. Nor would she read any more of the poems by Ignace Karkasy that she had grown fond of, despite their slightly pompous tone.
This was no way to die, and the injustice and unfairness of it railed against the cruel fate that had brought her to this moment.
She closed her eyes, her fear of the dark vanishing instantly in the face of this new, immediate threat. In the face of death, her desire to live surged and her connection to the aether pushed aside conscious thought. Dalia felt her mind reaching out beyond her body as it had when she had seen how to construct the throne of the Akashic reader, but this time it saw further and deeper than ever before.
This time she saw into the heart of the Kaban Machine.
The connection lasted the merest fraction of a moment, but in that moment she saw the very essence of its existence.
She saw golden lines, bound together in a glowing web, each strand an answer to a question she hadn’t yet asked. In this realm of the senses, she saw the light that was the mind of the Kaban Machine, a filthy, corrupted world of artificially created synapses and neurons.
Its auspex crawled over the wreckage like an invisible host of hungry spiders, and her flesh crawled with goose bumps as she felt the tread of a million legs across her skin. The machine’s senses sniffed like a scavenger hunting out juicy morsels to devour.
Dalia’s inner vision bored into the burning heart of the machine’s consciousness, marvelling at the intricacy of the design, the complexity and magnificence of the work, and the infinite patience that had gone into crafting such a miraculous engine. A perfect meld of organics and artificial components had been used to fashion the Kaban Machine, and the genius of Lukas Chrom, the adept whose name and skill she could read in every aspect of the design, was a thing of beauty.
She saw the wonder of what Chrom had created and felt the horror of what it had been made to do, what its builders had done to it. They had made it kill a man it had called friend, and then exposed it to something so dark and so terrible that Dalia’s floating consciousness recoiled from its warped malignancy.
Its memories were of feelings and emotions, the memories of a newly created intelligence too inexperienced to realise how such things could be manipulated by the unscrupulous. Corruption lay in the heart of its consciousness, like a bloated spider sitting at the centre of a web that spread its blood-hungry canker to everything it touched.
The folly of creating an artificial sentience, a forbidden science since a forgotten age of war, only to pervert it to the cause of murder struck Dalia as typical of mankind’s skewed brilliance.
It was a machine that could think for itself and its first autonomous act was to kill.
Just what did that say about its makers?
For all its brilliance, however, it was still a machine and bound by the fundamental principles of machines. It still gathered information the way any other sentient being did, and such things could be fooled.
Though the infinitely dense strands of light that were its warped consciousness were corrupt beyond imagining, Dalia sought out the neural pathways and areas of the machine’s brain that controlled its perceptions of the outside world. With a natural sense for such things, Dalia blocked the machine’s ability to process the inputs coming from its auspex, and though she felt its sensory apparatus sweep over her body and those of her friends, the signals never reached the action centres of its consciousness.
As though sensing that something was wrong, the machine swept its auspex over the ruins of the corridor once more. She sensed its confusion.
It knows we’re here, she thought. And it’s going to keep looking until it finds us.
With another twist of its mind, Dalia created a tremor of life signs further down the mag-lev, and sensed its savage joy as its targeting systems acquired the false readings.
Thunderous, roaring, crashing gunfire erupted from its weapons, and Dalia felt the mag-lev shudder with the impacts. Las-fire and heavy, explosive rounds tore into the distant wreckage and obliterated the dead bodies within.
It
s guns ceased fire and Dalia allowed the counterfeit life signs to blink out, feeling its feral glee as it revelled in the slaughter. The image of blood dripping from a brass throne onto a mountain of skulls filled its thoughts.
Again its auspex swept over the mag-lev. Dalia felt the machine’s disappointment as she blocked its perceptions of them, and it concluded that it had killed everyone aboard.
Its task complete, the machine turned smoothly on its axis and moved off down the tunnel.
As it went, Dalia read an encrypted data squirt confirming the killings travel through the airwaves to its masters in Mondus Gamma and Olympus Mons.
Dalia kept her grip on its perception centres until it had travelled beyond the range of its targeting auspex before letting out a breath and opening her eyes.
The smashed interior of the mag-lev corridor came back into sickening focus and Dalia’s stomach lurched as her brain struggled to adjust to the sudden transition from the domain of the mind to that of the physical.
The aftermath of the machine’s attack – blood, burned plastic, seared flesh, and the sight of so many corpses – was overwhelming and she vomited copiously. Dalia coughed, retching and heaving until she felt her grip on reality solidifying.
She heard voices speaking in hushed and amazed tones that they were still alive, and she smiled, even though searing pain pounded inside her head.
‘It’s gone,’ said a voice that Dalia recognised as Zouche’s.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Caxton, his voice on the edge of hysteria.
‘Thank Ares,’ breathed Severine tearfully. ‘Please? Can anyone help me? I think my arm’s broken.’
‘Dalia?’ said Rho-mu 31. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Not especially,’ she replied with forced levity, ‘but I’ll live, which is more than I thought I’d be able to say a few minutes ago.’
‘Can you move?’
‘Yes, but give me a minute.’
‘We don’t have a minute,’ said Rho-mu 31. ‘We have to move in case it comes back.’
Mechanicum Page 27