Toth looked at the Titan. Sparks danced from her joints as cutting and welding tools did their work in servitors’ mono-tasked hands. ‘A month?’
‘She is Syrgalah,’ the Ninth said. ‘She has of course been prioritised above all other considerations. The Archmagos Veneratus himself is operating on her.’
The Mechanicum overseer hove into view as if summoned. Slender, many-jointed limbs sprouted from a circular generator implanted between his shoulder blades. He needed no gantry or platform for support; his stick-insect limbs magnetically sealed to Syrgalah’s armour plating and allowed him to climb the Titan as he desired. They click-clanked, click-clanked as Vel-Kheredar made his way down the Warhound’s left side. Even when he made it to the deck, he refused the use of his own legs, letting the spider-limbs take his emaciated weight as he stalked over to the small group.
Three green eye lenses – none of them of uniform size, and none of them exactly where a human’s eyes should be – looked down from the darkness of his hood.
‘Moderati Bly and Moderati Kol.’
‘Archmagos,’ both said, as they bowed. The Ninth practically prostrated himself, which drew the Archmagos’s attention in a whisper of hood-silk and a whirr of eye lenses.
‘Eralaskesian Thyle Maraldi, Ninth of that Name.’
The Ninth rose. ‘My master?’
‘To your duties.’
‘At once, my master.’ The Ninth bowed and, with a final glance to his fellow crew members, made his way back to where he worked, on the joints of Syrgalah’s mangled foot-claws. They heard him muttering and redirecting the cutting lasers of his floating servo-skulls.
Toth looked awkward at his companion’s dismissal. Keeda looked annoyed. ‘Has the Ninth displeased you, Archmagos?’
The Martian lord lost half a metre in height as his spidery legs vented air pressure from their multiple gear-filled knees. He was still taller than any legionary, but lacked their bulky width. Keeda felt the tri-eye lenses focusing on her, revolving and whirring, clicking as they captured picts for future reference.
‘From available context, it is apparent you refer to Eralaskesian Thyle Maraldi, Ninth of that Name. And you refer to his dismissal as suppositional evidence of my displeasure. Perhaps, you reason, I perceive him as requiring to continue work at once to fulfil a certain quota of effort or achievement in the reparation of the Titan you call Syrgalah.’
Toth and Keeda shared a look. His was accusatory, that she’d started this. Hers was apologetic, for the same reason.
‘Forget I spoke, Archmagos.’
‘An impossibility. My neural structure prevents erosion of recorded data.’ His eye lenses refocused again. ‘To answer – and indeed, to allay – what I perceive as your fears, I will state: no. The Ninth has not displeased me. He was ordered to return to work because he commands his team of menials more adeptly than many others on the reparation crew, and his presence is required for the most complicated procedures currently taking place.’
The Archmagos emitted a blurt of vox-casted noise, the sound like a kicked beehive. ‘I would venture that in addition to his expertise, he also works to greater skill because of an unfortunate emotional investment in the god-machine itself. To use your parlance, he cares.’
Keeda frowned. ‘Is it unfortunate, if it makes him work harder?’
‘Emotion inevitably leads to intellectual compromise and, therefore, to weakness. But now is not an appropriate juncture to partake in an exchange of the subtleties in Martian positivistic philosophy. Tell me: now you have conversed with Princeps Ultima Lyrac regarding your reassignment, have you reached a final decision? The records require updating and we await the choices both of you must make.’
‘What?’ said Keeda and Toth at the same time.
‘Reassignment?’ Toth stammered. ‘That can’t be.’
‘Ah.’ The tech-priest lord rose higher on his insectile legs again. ‘A sudden event has demanded my immediate attention elsewhere. Be well, moderati.’ He turned to escape, skittering away.
‘Wait, please!’ Keeda called. For a wonder, the robed figure actually waited. ‘There’s no sudden event, lord. You’re a terrible liar,’ she told him.
‘I am more skilled at obfuscation in binaric cant,’ the Archmagos admitted. ‘Nevertheless, this is a matter for the Princeps Ultima to discuss with you both. I supposed incorrectly, and offer apology for the errors made in this dialogic-exchange.’
Toth wasn’t listening. ‘Reassignment? That fat son of a bitch.’
‘Where is the princeps?’ Keeda asked.
‘Aboard Syrgalah. I shall have him summoned.’
She nodded. ‘My thanks, Archmagos Veneratus.’
‘Your thanks are not necessary. My primary subroutine is to facilitate exchanges between the Mechanicum’s myriad elements. A moment, if you please.’
Toth and Keeda waited together, cursing between them. It took less than a minute for Audun Lyrac to emerge from the Titan’s insides, clambering down a ladder to reach the deck. He ran an oily hand through his thinning hair.
‘Greetings to you both,’ he said, offering a salute.
Keeda and Toth returned it. In truth, she was taken aback to see that he’d been working aboard Syrgalah. His face was beaded with perspiration and his sleeves were rolled up to reveal grime marking his skin.
‘Reassignment?’ Toth snarled at his superior officer. ‘Let’s get straight to business. You’re throwing us off the command crew?’
Keeda felt her anger diminish a little at the sight of Audun blinking in surprise. He didn’t seem smug or pugnacious, just startled. The princeps bristled, standing straighter and pulling the creases from his uniform.
‘I do not answer to you, Moderati Kol.’
‘This time you do.’ It was all Toth could do not to pull his laspistol and riddle the man with burn-holes. ‘I’ve given seven years of my life to Syrgalah, and sixteen to Audax. I’m the best steersman in the Legio, and Keeda’s the best gunner. Why are you doing this? Because of my arm? Because you’re trying to piss all over the old man’s legacy and make your own name?’
‘That’s enough.’ Audun narrowed his round eyes, inflecting his voice with as much cold threat as he could muster. Keeda found it surprisingly effective. ‘If you wished to refuse the honour,’ Audun said quietly, ‘you had only to say so.’
Keeda had a sudden sinking feeling. Something didn’t feel right.
‘The honour?’ Toth fairly spat the word. ‘Are you drunk?’
Audun rolled his sleeves down and rebuttoned them at the wrists. ‘Very well. I will offer the ranks to other officers.’ He shook his head, not just unnerved at the confrontation but a little disgusted, too. ‘Was this necessary? A simple refusal would have been enough.’
Keeda, silent so far, felt her sinking feeling give a sudden lurch. ‘What ranks?’ she asked.
Audun blinked again. ‘Have you even read the offers? I transloaded them to your quarters’ communication occuli this morning, with the request you seek me out as soon as you’d decided.’
‘We heard…’ Toth trailed off.
‘So that’s a No then. You haven’t read the offers.’
Keeda swore softly. ‘You weren’t demoting us. You were giving us our own Titans.’
Audun Lyrac looked at her like she was the basest breed of idiot. ‘Of course I wasn’t demoting you. Your records are beyond exemplary, and we have eleven Titans lacking commanders after the engagements in Armatura’s cities. Your promotions didn’t even need consideration.’
Toth cleared his throat. ‘We thought–’
‘I know what you thought, Moderati Kol. It may surprise you to learn that while I don’t have Solostine’s impressive battle-record, I am not a preening fool incapable of making good decisions. I’ve been managing promotions and reassignments for twenty years while the old man devoted
his entire focus to fighting. Who do you think had you both assigned to Syrgalah in the first place? When Venric asked for a new steersman, I advised him to choose you, Toth. When he needed a new gunner, I suggested you, Keeda.’
Both officers stood in awkward silence, taking the reprimand as it came.
‘Did you assume I was petty enough to throw you back into the menial ranks purely because we had a disagreeable first meeting?’
‘Uh,’ said Keeda.
‘Well,’ said Toth.
Audun sighed. ‘Go read the damn offers, both of you. If you wish to take command of Darahma and Seddah, then the Titans are yours. If you refuse, despite your clear lack of faith in me, I would welcome you serving as Syrgalah’s command crew when she walks again. And she will walk again, I promise you that. Her honour is Audax’s honour.’
With that, he waited for their salutes, and turned back to the Titan.
Keeda and Toth watched their princeps rejoining the hive of activity swarming over Syrgalah’s red and black skin.
‘Not our proudest moment,’ Toth confessed, making his new hand into another fist.
Keeda nodded. ‘Not our cleverest, either.’
The ship throbbed in transit, its engines running hot. It managed to hold itself together in the warp for now, but the Ultramarines had done their work well. At random intervals, with almost no warning, the flagship would come screaming back into realspace, trailing aethereal fire and mad laughter. Each time, the Fidelitas Lex would rip its way back to reality a moment later to guard the Conqueror while it revived its warp-engines.
Of their respective fleets, there was no sign. The primarchs had divided their Legions and warships yet again, sending more forces deeper into Ultramar to prey upon Imperial worlds while the XIII Legion was crippled at Calth. Both flagships had abandoned the need for anything but the meagrest escort squadrons, in favour of sailing alongside the Trisagion.
Lotara made her way to the Audaxica, through the wide avenue of the Conqueror’s central spinal corridor. A rat, stunted and black-furred, scuttled by her boots before disappearing through the iron grillework on the deck. She tutted.
‘Why do all Imperial vessels house colonies of rats? The Conqueror was built in orbit, and has never once landed on even a single world. Do we take crates of vermin on board when we dock for supplies?’
Behind her, Lhorke stomped on in noisy silence. He’d been awake several days now, and though he couldn’t yet sense the telltale weariness of extended activity, the headaches had already started. Whatever remained of his tortured husk in this armoured shell, it was beginning to suffer from the lack of rest.
They reached the massive, dense double doors that led into the Audaxica. Heavily-augmented Mechanicum skitarii stood watch at the sealed portal, though the group parted before her. Or did they move aside for Lhorke? Difficult to say for sure; they certainly couldn’t help themselves staring at the Contemptor.
Lotara braced herself as the Audaxica’s doors rumbled open. She knew what was coming, yet the dragon’s breath heat still hit her hard enough to rock her back on her heels. The char-scent of molten metal pushed at her, thick as treacle in her throat. The air was practically resinous with forge-smell.
The Audaxica itself was a chamber of monumental scale, wide enough to walk a pack of Titans abreast and tall enough that the arched ceiling was a dark blue, with its millions of etchings and carvings too distant to make out unaided. Colossal ground elevators transported Titans from the Audaxica to the Legio’s planetfall hangar below.
Every one of Audax’s Titans was a variant on the Warhound-pattern, bulkier from additional armour and each bearing a stylised head of dark metal resembling a jackal or a wolf baring its teeth. Lotara watched one of them rattle its way past in a gracelessly threatening hunch, splayed feet-claws crashing on the deck.
As the Titan cleared her field of vision, her gaze settled upon the motionless form of Syrgalah. She noted the showers of sparks streaming from its joints. Repairs were clearly under way. She even caught sight of Keeda and Toth pitching in, both of them up crew ladders, working on the cockpit’s interior.
Vel-Kheredar descended when she approached, his secondary limbs clicking against the Warhound’s armour, then across the deck. He brushed by Lotara without so much as a glance, coming to a halt before Lhorke.
‘Such an ironform,’ he vox-blurted, stalking in a circle around the Dreadnought. ‘Oh my, yes.’ Without asking permission, the tech-priest pressed his augmented hands to the Contemptor’s chestplate, where the symbol of the War Hounds still stood proud. ‘I can almost feel the life within.’
Lhorke tolerated this in silence. Lotara wasn’t certain how it was possible for a war machine to look irritated, but the evidence was right before her eyes.
Vel-Kheredar’s burnished hands smoothed over the Dreadnought’s head, cradling the oversized metal helm with its precious cargo of sensor nodes and visual auspex and pict-finders, linked to the foetal corpse curled up deeper within.
‘We fashion them with heads,’ Vel-Kheredar was saying, ‘to focus their awareness forwards. It helps create an impression within the corpse’s neurological sensory input/output that it is still alive, for it sees just as it saw in life: from a human perspective. Taller, though. Oh, yes. Much taller.’
Only then did he look down at Lotara. ‘How is the revenant pilot performing, Captain Sarrin? This unit is functioning within acceptable parameters, yes?’
It was ‘the unit’ that answered. Lhorke took a step back, joints giving heavy grind-snarls.
‘Get away from me, priest.’
Vel-Kheredar gave a droning vox-laugh, surprisingly human given his extensive cybernetic reconstruction.
‘Still such a temper, Legion Master.’
Lhorke’s answer was to reload his combi-bolters in twin, slow cranks. Vel-Kheredar’s tri-eye lenses rotated in some nameless and doubtlessly blunted emotion. He turned to Lotara, adjusting his height by lowering himself through venting pressure from his five stalk-legs. He was now the height of a legionary, rather than the towering Contemptor.
‘It is my supposition that you are here in answer to my request for a dialogic-exchange.’
Lotara, who was trying not to smile at Lhorke’s irritation, nodded to the Archmagos. Sweat was already painting her face from the haze of the Audaxica’s industry.
‘Do you have somewhere we can speak away from the heat?’
‘But of course. Come.’
He led them to a wide section of the floor marked by waspish hazard striping, and flipped open a compartment on the back of his mechanical forearm to reveal numerous telecommand dials. Vel-Kheredar pushed an activation rune and twisted one of the dials three notches. The deck gave an immediate shudder, juddering as the platform sank through the floor and into the steel-smelling darkness between decks.
Down.
Down, down. The relief from the forge-heat was immediate enough to make Lotara sigh.
Lhorke’s shoulder-mounted searchlight cracked into life, daggering through the black. Lotara winced when it beamed over her face. Vel-Kheredar merely refocused his eye lenses. The platform kept shuddering beneath them.
‘My ship,’ she said, ‘to coin a phrase, took a beating. What repairs can you make whilst we’re in transit?’
‘Anything that needs to be done, Captain Sarrin. It is my ship as well.’
She felt herself smiling. On Mars, this man – or whatever was left of the man within the augmetics – was a wealthy Machine Lord, owning a subterranean forge-city of several million souls all heeding his will and working towards his experimental vision. Here, in the deepest black of Ultima Segmentum, he was a much more amiable soul than his lofty position within the Machine Cult might suggest.
‘Is that some of the unfortunate affection you’re always criticising your lessers for?’
He fixed her with his
triple eye lenses. ‘I don’t know. I criticise them for so many things.’
‘Did you just make a joke, Archmagos?’
‘I made the attempt. Auditory analysis notes the tonal resonance of your voice as being negatively disposed since you entered the Audaxica. I sought to defuse your discomfort through the application of humour.’
‘Very funny,’ she lied. ‘Is there word from Mars?’
‘None,’ he replied. Not that fear was within his palette of emotion, but he did harbour concern for Sacred Mars, surely blockaded by Rogal Dorn in the wake of Horus’s rebellion. His city beneath the holy red sands could withstand orbital bombardment, but the internecine unrest would be a factor to consider. The whole world was likely at war by now. ‘None at all.’
They emerged into the harsher glare of strip lighting, descending from the primary muster hangar’s ceiling towards the deck far below. Titans in varying states of readiness already lined the walls, magna-bound in place, standing sentinel until they were called for loading into the great red-iron planetary landers at the far end of the vast hangar. The landing craft were round, bulbous things, all armoured efficiency without artistry.
Lotara affected casual disinterest, not caring how unconvincing it sounded. ‘I heard the primarch has commissioned a new blade from you.’
‘Affirmative.’
The platform finally settled into the lower deck, locking in place. ‘And that Khârn has secured your services for a similar project.’
‘The resurrection of the blade Gorechild. This is also affirmative.’
Vel-Kheredar led them along the deck, his stalk-legs clicking three times for every thump of Lhorke’s armoured feet.
‘Did his servitor team find all the missing axe-teeth?’
Another binaric spurt of coded amusement. ‘Not all. He seconded one of my preferred adepts to the task, but Lord Aurelian’s orders to terminate the planet came before the excavation’s completion. I am given to understand that Centurion Khârn improvised.’
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