Lords of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Portions of the Tomioka’s internal anatomy were reshaping themselves moment by moment. What he had mistaken for structural modifications to allow the vessel to stand upright were in fact carefully-placed moving parts that were now fulfilling some unknowable function.

  ‘Imperator,’ said Tanna, as they passed through a vaulted compartment that had once been an ordnance magazine. ‘So many of them.’

  Kotov lifted his head and followed Tanna’s gaze, seeing a multitude of reflective panels of machined steel rotated into predetermined positions and vast lengths of cable extruded from vacuum-sealed compartments before being fitted into place by a veritable army of floating servo-skulls. Thousands of the gold and silver-chased skulls filled the compartment, more than Kotov had ever seen in one place.

  ‘It’s like the crew chose to remain behind and carry on their duties…’ he said, the words coming only with difficulty.

  ‘Or were forced to,’ said Dahan, following behind them. ‘Who knows how long these skulls have been here, just waiting for this moment?’

  As fascinating as Kotov found it watching the thousands of skulls at work, Tanna dragged him ever upwards through the reconfiguring interiors. The dull green light that had illuminated their downward passage had been replaced by a stark brightness that shone from every polished plate and every overtaxed lumen. Vast arrays of structural steelwork rotated into place throughout the enlarged voids within the Tomioka, like the pylons of some planetary power generation system. Towering conduits unfolded from irising compartments and the interior volume of the starship’s long axis was rapidly filling with complex machinery that spun, pulsed and throbbed with imminent activity.

  Eventually, Kotov felt the pressure differential of an outside environment and looked up.

  A flattened oval tunnelled through the violet-tinted ice told him they had reached the entry point cut by the superheated mechanisms of Lupa Capitalina’s plasma destructor. Black Templars stood at the far end of the tunnel, waving at something he couldn’t see. Dimly he registered the sounds of artillery fire and high-energy weapon discharges.

  Magos Dahan stood with the Adeptus Astartes warriors and Kotov took a moment to realise that there were more people around him than he remembered.

  Cadian soldiers lined the walls and Kotov’s floodstream surged with relief as he saw Magos Azuramagelli and Linya Tychon near the far entrance to the ice-tunnel. Galatea stood at the opposite side of the tunnel, and even in his limited state of awareness, Kotov read the tension between it and his magi.

  Linya Tychon limped over to him, clutching a jet-black servo-skull.

  For a moment, Kotov was confused at the sight of the skull. Had she stopped to procure herself one belonging to the Tomioka? Then he read the faint binaric sigils on its polished dome and realised the servo-skull belonged to Vitali Tychon.

  ‘Archmagos,’ said Linya, her face bruised and swollen. ‘We have to leave. Now.’

  ‘I think that is self-evident,’ he said, finally managing to stand under his own power as his bodily control returned to a semblance of normality. ‘This ship is reconfiguring itself in some most disconcerting ways.’

  ‘No, I mean we have to leave this planet,’ said Linya. ‘In an hour it is going to be destroyed.’

  ‘Come now, you are being melodramatic,’ said Kotov, feeling more of his synaptic architecture re-establishing itself. ‘It will take months or years for the star’s death to fully dismantle this world and there is much we can yet learn.’

  Linya’s eyes narrowed. ‘Haven’t you been receiving Magos Blaylock’s evacuation orders?’

  Kotov hadn’t, but as more and more of his systems reset, he began picking out desperate bursts of communication transmitted from orbit via the Tabularium. Though it sent a flare of pain through his skull, Kotov processed the most urgent of them in three pico seconds.

  ‘This is a sacrificial planet,’ said Linya. ‘I don’t know all of what’s happening, but that much I do know. This ship is a giant receiver array, and the power that is about to be channelled through it is going to tear this planet apart for some purpose I can’t even begin to imagine.’

  Kotov nodded, and marched towards the end of the tunnel.

  Lupa Capitalina walked in all its war-finery, sheathed in the blistering envelope of voids that shimmered with rainbow hues as they dissipated the energies of a recent attack. Like a vast sauropod of the plains being attacked by raptor packs, the Warlord was surrounded by smaller, crystalline representations of its godly might. Bright green bolts of light shot from the glittering forms of its attackers, but the Warlord was no lumbering herbivore just waiting to be dragged down, it was the alpha of a deadly hunter pack.

  ‘I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t seeing it with my own eyes,’ said a Cadian captain by the name of Hawkins. ‘I didn’t think they could move like that.’

  A lieutenant with half his face covered in blood answered Hawkins, ‘I’m thinking I took a bigger blow to the head than I thought.’

  Kotov would normally have thought to rebuke mere Guardsmen for disparaging the capabilities of a Mechanicus battle-engine, but even he was shocked at the speed and agility with which Princeps Arlo Luth was manoeuvring Lupa Capitalina. More often used as strongpoints, fire-bases or points from which to launch assaults, Warlord Titans were not highly mobile war-engines.

  Clearly the Wintersun did not hold to that view.

  The Legio Sirius pack fought as one entity, Amarok and Vilka snapping at the heels of their alpha as it advanced, retreated and sidestepped every attack. It moved in close to its attackers and crushed them beneath its clawed feet. It sawed a dozen to shards with gatling fire and vaporised half as many again with stabbing lances from its turbo-destructors. Its rapidly-moving bulk shattered dozens more and it achieved this without losing its voids to the criss-crossing trails of enemy fire.

  ‘Is it coming to pick us up?’ asked Hawkins. ‘The Titan, it’s coming back for us, right?’

  ‘Yes, captain,’ said Kotov, already having broadcast an extraction request. ‘Lupa Capitalina is coming back for us.’

  Kotov saw Hawkins’s desire to witness the god-machine at war was pulling against his Cadian duty to his men. He allowed the man an indulgence.

  ‘Stay,’ said Kotov. ‘Watch. To see a Titan in battle is to know the true power of the Omnissiah.’

  Hawkins nodded and said, ‘I’ve watched artillery batteries reduce greenskin fortresses to ruin in minutes, seen ten thousand charging Whiteshields on horseback and been part of orbital assaults that captured an entire planet in less than a day, but seeing a Warlord in action… that’s something special.’

  ‘And Legio Sirius are masters of their art,’ said Kotov in a rare moment of largesse.

  Lupa Capitalina turned, as though hearing its Legio name mentioned, and set off at a steady, rolling pace towards the Tomioka. Its attendant Warhounds followed, loping ahead to clear the way with punishing blasts of fire and howls of warning.

  Kotov steadied himself as the war-engine came closer, the thunderous reverberations of its colossal footfalls transmitted to the Tomioka even through the immense sheath of ice surrounding it. He and everyone else within the tunnel backed away as it drew nearer, for even the approach of an allied battle-engine was an event of some danger.

  ‘Everyone up and ready to move!’ shouted Hawkins. ‘We’re only going to get one shot at this.’

  The Warlord’s voids impacted upon the ice at the edge of the tunnel, sending deep cracks racing along the ceiling and floor. Crystalline shards fell like broken glass and shrieking bursts of exploding ice rippled along the length of the tunnel until the void shields finally dropped. The assault ramps slammed down onto a broken ledge of ice, and Titan menials in orange boiler suits and armoured vests yelled at them to get aboard.

  Dahan and his surviving skitarii escorted Kotov and Azuramagelli, while the Black Templars and Cadians were last to board the war machine. Kotov had a moment’s vertigo as he looked down between th
e lip of the assault ramp and the crumbling edge of the ice. His internal systems quickly compensated for the unwelcome sensation as menials hauled him aboard.

  A tremendous impact rocked the Warlord, and even from here, Kotov felt the repercussive pain of its wounding. Engaged in this rescue mission, Lupa Capitalina was horribly exposed with its voids down and its weapon systems useless. The crystalline engines were taking full advantage of that, and explosions of green fire erupted all across the Titan’s rear quarters. Both Amarok and Vilka were keeping the enemy from surrounding their pack leader, but they could not protect it from the terrible fire raking its unshielded flanks.

  Kotov gripped the edge of the battlements tightly as Lupa Capitalina wrenched itself free of the ice and took a lurching backward step. The assault ramps were still down and two menials screamed as they fell from the open structure. Cadian soldiers ran to help in getting the ramps raised as the Warlord took another step, twisting on its axis as it did so. The walk to the Tomioka was made at a stately pace, but the Wintersun was in battle now; the insects crawling on its hull were of secondary importance to its own survival.

  The logic was undeniable, though it gave Kotov no comfort to be one of those insects.

  A hundred metres now separated the Warlord and the Tomioka, and Kotov saw that the transformations he had witnessed within the starship were being mirrored on its exterior. The crystalline growths on its hull were expanding organically to sheathe the entire upper reaches of the hull in what looked like a caul of glittering glass.

  A flare of static blinded him momentarily as Lupa Capitalina’s carapace void pylons ignited and clad the Titan in layers of ablative energies. The clashing harmonics and belligerent frequencies were antithetical to his implants, but Kotov was grateful for the protection.

  +Archmagos Kotov,+ said a voice that cut into his mind with icy disdain. +Are you secure?+

  ‘I am,’ he replied, sending his words into the caustic tundra of the Sirius Manifold.

  +Then we are ready,+ said Princeps Arlo Luth.

  ‘Ready? Ready for what?’

  +To abandon this world.+

  Watching Katen Venia’s last moments was a moment of great sadness for Roboute Surcouf. He had named this world and it was never easy to watch something beautiful die. Roboute remembered the girl whose name the planet shared, wondering if he would ever see her again and silently berated himself for so maudlin a thought.

  Sickly bands of variegated light enveloped the planet in traceries of continent-wide lightning storms like a vast net cast around its splintering mass. The brightest point of light was centred on the northern pole, where the abortive expedition to the Tomioka had foundered. The evacuation of Katen Venia was over, with the majority of the embarked crew already back aboard the Speranza.

  The Mechanicus had been forced to discard a great deal of materiel and resources in the flight from the surface, of which the Land Leviathans – Krakonoš, Adamastor and Fortis Maximus – were the most grievous loss. Much of their crew, adepts, tech-priests and menials alike, had chosen to remain with their machines rather than abandon them, and those men were almost certainly dead.

  Roboute shook his head at their stupidity before remembering that, until recently, he had always believed that he would die aboard the Renard. He had survived his brush with death after the grav-sled had been winched to safety by the Tabularium’s docking clamp and a team of medicae had strapped an oxygen mask to his face. Adara was unhurt, as was Magos Pavelka, which – given the frantic nature of their excursion to the surface – was nothing short of a miracle.

  The bridge of the Speranza was thronged with the senior members of the Kotov expedition; Mechanicus, Adeptus Astartes and Imperial Guard, drawn together to watch the final moments of Katen Venia and the loss of everything they had crossed the galaxy to discover. Azuramagelli was once again ensconced by the navigation arrays, with Kryptaestrex plugged in next to him. Vitali Tychon kept close to his daughter, a protective arm around her shoulder. From the bruises on her face, it seemed the excursions into the Tomioka had been as plagued by trouble as events outside.

  Galatea stood in the centre of the command bridge, its low-slung palanquin connected to the Speranza in ways Roboute couldn’t begin to imagine. Pavelka had given him a rough idea of the heretical reality of Galatea, and the concept of a thinking machine gave Roboute cold chills whenever he thought of the onward implications.

  Archmagos Kotov himself sat upon his command throne, looking like an exhausted king at the end of his reign and surrounded by courtiers just waiting for him to die. Hard on the heels of that thought, Roboute’s gaze shifted to Tarkis Blaylock, who stood at Kotov’s shoulder like a plotting vizier. He had no reason to suspect Blaylock of any such ambitions, but the image – once imagined – was hard to shake.

  Roboute himself reclined in the noospheric-enabling chair he had occupied the last time he had come to the bridge, connected to the ship’s vast datasphere by inload sockets in the back of his neck. The vast majority of what this enabled him to see was meaningless lingua-technis or binaric cant, but he knew enough to know that no one gathered here really understood what they were seeing.

  ‘Are we far enough away from the planet?’ asked Roboute, trying to make sense of the energy emissions streaming from a port-side data hub.

  Azuramagelli rotated a brain case to face him, though the disembodied slice of cerebral cortex had no outwardly obvious sensory apparatus to render such motion necessary. ‘The surveyor arrays are registering a build-up of energies beyond anything we have ever seen before. There is no way to tell what minimum safe distance would be required.’

  ‘So we might be in danger right now?’

  ‘Very likely,’ agreed Kryptaestrex, his thick robotic body disconnecting from the navigation stations and rumbling over to the motive power linkages and plugging in. ‘Saiixek began preparations for breaking orbit upon receipt of Magos Blaylock’s orders, but the engines will not be manoeuvre-ready for another six hours.’

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with recent events,’ snapped Roboute, ‘but we’ll be lucky if that planet lasts another six minutes.’

  Kryptaestrex bore Roboute’s outburst stoically and said, ‘There is little that can be done save to alter our aspect to the planet to reduce blast damage in the event of an explosive energy outburst.’

  ‘Explosive?’ asked Roboute, twisting in his seat to look up at Kotov. ‘Is that what we’re looking at? Is that planet going to blow up?’

  Kotov waved a dismissive hand. ‘Magos Kryptaestrex should know better than to voice such evocative terms,’ he said. ‘Planets do not blow up, they fracture along established fault-lines, implode on their collapsing core or they simply become geologically inert. In all my centuries with the Mechanicus, I have never yet seen a planet explode.’

  ‘After everything we’ve seen on this expedition, that’s not exactly filling me with confidence.’

  Kotov ignored him, and Roboute turned his attention back to the death throes of Katen Venia.

  Clearly something was happening to the planet, something that was just as clearly almost complete. The fact that no one aboard the Speranza was admitting they had absolutely no idea what that might be was the white grox in the room.

  The energy that had travelled from a vastly distant source to reach Katen Venia with virtually no degradation in field strength had begun a chain-reaction throughout the planet and, even now, Blaylock and Vitali were attempting to determine what had sent it.

  ‘Archmagos,’ said Azuramagelli, withdrawing all but his most basic connections to the navigation array. ‘Something’s amiss.’

  The vagueness of Azuramagelli’s comment was so unlike anything an adept of the Cult Mechanicus might say that every eye in the bridge turned towards him.

  ‘Clarify, Azuramagelli,’ said Magos Blaylock with a clipped flush of admonitory binary.

  ‘I cannot,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘What I am seeing has no empirical precedent.’


  Roboute skimmed the surface of the Speranza’s data inloads and was forced to agree with the Master of Navigation. What he was seeing made no sense. Every single external augur capable of receiving input from the planet below had either completely flatlined or registered an onrushing tide of impossible readings that were completely beyond measure.

  The sudden influx of anomalous readings acted like a gout of raw promethium into an engine cowling, as space beyond the Speranza was abruptly filled with vastly contradictory states of being.

  The Ark Mechanicus was simultaneously bombarded with exotic cosmic radiation of such complexity that it defied easy categorisation, while in the same moment finding itself adrift in space utterly bereft of a single electromagnetic transition. Such physical states of being were utterly at odds with one another and impossible in the same region of space at the same instant.

  The Speranza resolved this paradox by blowing out numerous data hubs and surveyor stations in blurts of distressed binaric cant. A dozen servitors suffered instantaneous brain death and slumped to the deck with oil-infused blood squirting from their cranial implants.

  ‘The instant of creation and the time of heat death,’ said Vitali, rushing over to one of the few remaining surveyor stations and plugging himself in with haptic implants in his rapidly splitting fingertips.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked Roboute, seeing that – with the exception of Vitali – every single magos had removed himself from any connection to the ship’s augurs. The illuminated streams pulsing between data prisms vanished as the libraries-worth of information was cut off in a single stroke.