‘Then do you have strength enough to send a message to one of your kind aboard the Speranza?’ said Kotov.
‘There are none of my kind left aboard your ship,’ snapped Bielanna. ‘We are all that remains.’
‘Then send a message to one of the Cadian battle-psykers or one of my ship’s astropaths,’ snapped Kotov.
‘Even if I could communicate with such primitive minds, what makes you think they would believe me?’
‘She’s right, archmagos,’ said Anders. ‘Any psyker of the Seventy-First who reported hearing alien voices would be executed on the spot. Living on the edge of the Eye, you don’t take chances with things like that.’
‘There must be some way of reaching the Speranza,’ said Kotov, fixing everyone gathered at the hub with his unflinching gaze. ‘I have to warn Tarkis Blaylock of what Telok plans!’
Pavelka gestured to the static on the screens. ‘Even if we manage to find an active system, the interference around Exnihlio renders vox useless.’
‘Then we clear the atmosphere,’ said Tanna, picturing the toxic skies en route to the surface of Exnihlio. ‘We clear it long enough to get a message through.’
‘Clear the atmosphere?’ said Anders. ‘How?’
‘Those towers we saw coming in on the Barisan,’ said Tanna, turning to Kotov. ‘The ones you called universal assemblers? They were activated long enough to allow vox-traffic and safe passage to the surface. If we can get to one of those towers could you reactivate it and create a window where we might use our vox?’
Kotov nodded slowly. ‘I believe so.’
‘You believe so?’ said Tanna. ‘I thought the Mechanicus only dealt in certainties. Can you or can you not?’
‘I do not know,’ answered Kotov, the admission clearly hard to make. ‘Were this a loyal forge world, my answer would be an unequivocal yes, but this is Telok’s world. Its machine-spirits are loyal to him and him alone.’
‘It’s got to be worth the risk,’ said Surcouf.
‘Agreed,’ said Anders. ‘So where’s the nearest one?’
‘Working on it,’ replied Pavelka, scrolling through reams of data on the hissing screen. From the strain in her voice, it was clear the hub’s systems were proving uncooperative.
‘Got one,’ she said at last. ‘There’s a universal assembler tower seventy-three point six kilometres north-east of our position. Exloading an optimal route now.’
Tanna saw the schematics of the chamber overlay his visor’s display, complete with directional tags and waypoint markers.
‘Received,’ he said as the glass screens on the hub flickered and the waterfall of binary vanished.
And in their place was the grainy, distorted image of a leering, waxen-featured face.
‘Telok!’ cried Pavelka, withdrawing her mechadendrites from the hub as though it were poisoned. Surcouf and Anders leapt away as the eldar drew their blades.
The four servitors Tanna and Varda had removed from the hub’s bench seats sat bolt upright, their desiccated flesh creaking like old leather as they turned their heads towards the Imperials.
Implanted optics shone with pale light and the vox-masks of their lower jaws crackled with spitting static. The voice that issued simultaneously from all four was unmistakably that of Archmagos Telok.
‘Ah, there you are, Kotov,’ said the servitors with one loathsomely interwoven voice. ‘I wondered how long it would be before you revealed yourself with a clumsy attempt to inveigle your way into my systems.’
‘Shut it down!’ ordered Tanna. ‘Cut the link right now!’
‘I can’t,’ cried Pavelka.
Tanna unloaded a three-round burst of mass-reactives into the hub. It exploded from within, showering Pavelka, Anders and Surcouf with broken glass and molten plastic. The image of Telok vanished, but the link to the servitors remained hideously active.
‘I don’t mind admitting that the sight of your eldar allies surprised me,’ continued Telok via his corpse-proxies. ‘Tell me, was that some kind of warp gate the witch opened?’
‘The Adeptus Mechanicus has fallen far in my absence if it now stoops to such decadent bedfellows. The sooner I wrest control of Mars from the Fabricator General the better.’
‘You betrayed everything you once stood for, Telok,’ said Kotov, glaring at the servitors. ‘You betrayed me.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Kotov,’ laughed Telok, and the servitors attempted to mimic his amusement to grotesque effect. ‘Do you really think this was ever about you? All you are to me is a means to an end. You and your little band will not evade capture for long. I built this world. There’s nowhere you can hide where I won’t find you.’
‘I’ve heard enough,’ said Tanna. ‘Kill them.’
Ariganna Icefang was moving before he finished speaking. The exarch beheaded two of the servitors with one slash of her shrieking sabre and crushed the skull of a third with her segmented claw-gauntlet. Varda clove the last meat-puppet from collarbone to pelvis with a blow from the Black Sword.
Telok’s voice fell silent, but his threat hung over them like a corpse-shroud.
‘We need to go,’ said Surcouf. ‘Right now.’
If Vettius Telok had to pick a single flaw to which he was most beholden, it would, he reflected, most likely be vanity. How else could he explain leaving Kotov and his fellows alive long enough to escape into Exnihlio’s depths?
It momentarily amused him that even one as evolved as he could still fall prey to so mortal a vice, so human a failing. Being starved of contact beyond that of machines and slaves had rendered him susceptible to flattery, craving of adulation. He had paid for that vanity with an arm, hacked from his body by the blade of an eldar warrior-construct no less!
Who could have expected eldar to have come to Kotov’s rescue? The odds against such unlikely saviours appearing beyond the edge of the galaxy were so astronomical as to be virtually impossible.
And yet it had happened.
‘I should thank you, Lexell Kotov,’ said Telok. ‘I had almost forgotten the thrill of not knowing, the frisson of uncertainty.’
Telok’s crystalline body shimmered with the nanotech coursing through him: self-replicating, self-repairing and ever-evolving.
The hand he had lost was already regrown, a gleaming crystalline facsimile of his metallic gauntlet. Those portions of his body that were recognisably human or machine were now few and far between, a necessary price for his continued existence.
Telok had no need of a human face, but kept his own out of the desire to be recognised upon his return to Mars. What would be the point in assuming a blank-faced visage of augmetics that bore no relation to the man who’d set off on a quixotic quest in search of a legend?
Yet more evidence for his vanity…
This chamber was a relic cut from the wreckage of a lifeless alien hulk he’d found drifting in the debris at the galactic frontier. The creatures he’d found entombed within were dangerous, and, he suspected, decreed forbidden by the very people who had likely created them in an earlier age.
How typical of living beings to create weapons of total annihilation and then seek to put limits upon them.
Five hundred metres wide, and half that in length, its barrel-vaulted ceiling was inscribed with cracked frescoes depicting ancient wars.
Six sarcophagus-like caskets were emplaced on raised biers, each connected via hundreds of snaking cables to what could only be described as an altar at the far end of the chamber. Telok had seen his fair share of temples, yet this dated from before the Age of Strife, before the Mechanicus had been enslaved by dogmatic rituals and needless trappings of faith.
Telok had made this place his personal forge, utilising the space between the caskets to create his greatest masterpiece – the mechanism that allowed conventional energy technologies to awaken the ancient sentience at the heart of the Breath of the Gods.
The Black Templars Thunderhawk sat at the far end of the chamber where the lifter-crystaliths had deposi
ted it. It was called Barisan, and its machine-spirit was a snapping, feral thing. So aggressive that Telok had been forced to chain its wings to the deck plates and drain its reserves of fuel.
Its binaric exloads were hard-edged and uncompromising, but that would soon change.
Half-finished projects and mechanical follies lay in pieces on numerous workbenches: a clutch of servitor bodies that lay open as though in the process of being autopsied, glass-fronted nanotech colonies whose exponentially growing evolutionary leaps were recorded in minute detail before being eradicated by regular e-mag pulses. It had been centuries since Telok had studied their growths, but the results were part of an ongoing cycle of data-gathering that fed into the architectural growth patterns of Exnihlio’s infrastructure.
Crystal formations had colonised fully a third of the workspace, and Telok felt his body respond to their presence. A dozen glassine cylinders sat incongruously in the midst of the crystalline prison. A pinkish-grey fluid filled each cylinder, as unmoving as hardened resin, and the hunched bodies that hung suspended in each were frozen in time by acausal technologies that kept this dimensionally-fickle vermin species locked in this precise moment of space-time.
Perhaps that had been his greatest achievement, but then there were so many from which to choose.
Telok halted with his back to the altar, and a pair of glassy mechadendrites detached from his spine. They bored into the gnarled metallic form of the altar and Telok sighed at this most physical union with ancient archeotech.
The chamber’s activation codes had been hidden deep in the drifting hulk’s logic engines, secured behind layers of what, in its time, must have been considered unbreakable encryption. It had been simplicity itself for Telok to retrieve them, and he allowed the precise string of quantum equations to exload within the altar like a key in a lock.
Though millennia had passed since its creation, the machines within responded with alacrity, and each of the six caskets on the raised biers began humming with power. Glowing gem lights winked into life along their sides and streams of condensing vapours bled from louvred vents at each flanged apex.
Telok began intoning the names of the individual creatures suspended within. The degraded records of the hulk named them hellhounds, but their creators had originally chosen a class of mythical hunting beasts as their title.
Sinuous, hunched-over creatures emerged from each of the caskets in an exhalation of ghostly vapours. Dormant and without animation, all were locked into adamantium harnesses that kept every portion of their bodies immobile.
Their upper bodies were wide and ridged with armour plating like overlapping scapulae, with three pairs of arms corded with gurgling tubes and which glittered with fractal-edged claws.
Below the waist, their forms divided into powerful, hook-jointed legs. Their skulls were elongated, lupine horrors of serrated teeth and bulbous sensor pods. Power coursed through the feral machines, yet they were still without animation, without a vital spark to set them on the hunt.
Telok reached deep into the heart of Exnihlio and drew forth the Tindalosi’s spirits, six of the most vicious, lunatic essences he’d ever known. Their consciousnesses had been driven insane with isolation and a vicious regime of deletions and restorations. All six were haunted, viral things that hungered only to destroy. Keeping them divorced from their bodies was the only way to avoid unrestrained slaughter.
Their spirits rose from his deepest data sepulchres, along pathways long forsaken by spirits of nobler mien. They feasted as they went, absorbing the essences of slower machines that now fell silent as their internal sparks were devoured. With each morsel the lunatic spirits’ hunger to consume grew stronger until each was little more than a ravening data-vampire.
They manifested as scraps of light atop the altar, six glittering orreries of glitching, sparking static. Like dense atomic structure diagrams that would have plunged any who studied them into madness, they struggled against the bindings in which Telok held them.
One by one, Telok fed them into their dormant bodies. Each metallic death-mask lifted with a screaming howl, the furious static illuminating their distended ocular sensors with scribbled light and monstrous appetite. They fought the adamantium bindings locking them into their harnesses, but Telok wasn’t yet ready to unleash them.
First they needed the scent.
Like any evocation, an offering was required.
Telok detached from the altar and removed two broken lengths of golden metal from beneath his robes. The severed arms of Archmagos Kotov trailed lengths of snapped wiring and droplets of viscous floodstream chemicals.
Whipping blade-arms cut the air like razors, crackling with arcs of angry energy. The static-filled eyes of the Tindalosi blazed with aching desire, a soul-deep need to hunt the prey whose binaric scent enslaved their every sense.
With a pulse of thought, Telok unlocked the bindings holding the Tindalosi to their caskets. They surged free; enraged, famished and blaring with hostile binary. Phase-shifting claws flickered with unlight and Telok felt a thrill of fear as they encircled him like pack-wolves in the final moments of a hunt.
The geas he had bound them to would render him lethally toxic to their devouring hearts, but would their hatred of him overcome the prospect of extinction?
They howled as they caught the scent of Kotov, bounding towards the Barisan. They fell upon it with the thoroughness of the most rapacious ferrophage. Claws tore through armoured plates and ripped them from the gunship’s fuselage as they sought the source of their prey’s binary scent. The keel of the Barisan split as supporting structural members were torn asunder and the gunship was comprehensively dismantled in a furious unmaking.
Telok grinned as the gunship’s binaric screams filled the chamber, a drawn-out death howl of machine agony. Its once-proud spirit was dying piece by piece. Not devoured, not absorbed, but shredded into ever smaller fragments before being cast to oblivion.
Within minutes the Thunderhawk was a wreck, its warlike form broken down into a ruin of buckled iron, ripped plating and shattered, soulless components.
Most soldiers’ bars were raucous places, where drunken disorder was common and broken noses a nightly occurrence. But most bars weren’t Cadian bars. Spit in the Eye had once been an abandoned maintenance hangar for geoformer vehicles, which meant it had a ready-made system of pumps, storage vats and open spaces. A hundred off-duty Guardsmen sat at its tables, drinking, swapping stories, cleaning weapons and bellyaching that they weren’t with their colonel.
Captain Hawkins sat alone at a table near the corner of the makeshift bar, afforded an enfilading view down its length and a direct view of the entrance. His lasrifle sat propped against the table, his sword and kit bag hung on canvas slings across the back of his chair.
A number of his senior NCOs – Jahn Callins, Taybard Rae – and even a commissar named Vasken sat playing cards with their squad leaders, and Emil Nader and Kayrn Sylkwood from the Renard. Normally anyone who wasn’t part of the regiment could expect short shrift from its soldiers, but Surcouf’s folk had quickly found a welcome with their repertoire of inventive card games.
Hawkins grinned. If a life in the Imperial Guard had taught him anything, it was that soldiers seized on any way to sta
ve off boredom. And like all soldiers, Cadians loved cards. He couldn’t see what they were playing, but from the look of Jahn Callins’s face, it seemed like Nader was winning.
He resisted the urge to join them. They were NCOs and he was an officer. The relationship between Cadian ranks was less formal than in many other regiments, but Hawkins understood that downtime was precious to his soldiers and knew better than to intrude when they were off-duty.
Instead, he took a sip of the cloudy drink in the chipped glass before him. Its catch-all name between regiments was bilge hooch, but each Cadian enginseer of the 71st had his or her own fiercely guarded recipe and name. This one belonged to Enginseer Rocia, and was called Scarshine. A potent brew, if a tad chemical for Hawkins’s tastes, but what else would you expect from a drink brewed on a Mechanicus starship?
Despite its strength, not one Cadian in the Spit in the Eye would leave intoxicated. His soldiers knew how to handle their drink, and – more importantly – knew the disciplinary price of a hangover wasn’t worth the fleeting enjoyment of being drunk. Hawkins spotted a few of the younger troopers knocking back their drinks with gusto, but, equally, saw a number of the older troopers looking out for them.
Satisfied the men and women under his command would all be fit for their next duty rotation, Hawkins turned his attention to the schematics displayed on the data-slate propped up on the table before him.
Below the waterline they called it, in reference to some old naval term, and no matter how often Hawkins studied the Speranza’s lower deck plans, he couldn’t seem to reconcile the pages of handwritten defensive plans he’d drawn up on the many tours he’d made of the ship since leaving Hypatia.
Hawkins heard footsteps and looked up in time to see Rae approaching. The sergeant turned a chair around and sat across it with the back pressed to his chest.
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