Gods of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  ‘Give me something I can use to fight them,’ said Tanna.

  Pavelka shook her head, seeing the approaching machines in a way Tanna never could. ‘Their spirits are degenerate, ancient things. Mass-killers from a war millions of years ended. They scream their name in my head… Tindalosi! Tindalosi!’

  ‘Interesting, but irrelevant,’ said Tanna.

  ‘Can you stop them?’ asked Surcouf.

  ‘Only if I do not need to protect you and Kotov.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Surcouf, helping Magos Pavelka away.

  ‘Templars!’ yelled Tanna, drawing his sword and making his way swiftly to the head of the ramp. His warriors stood to either side, Varda and Issur with their swords drawn, Bracha and Yael with bolters locked and loaded.

  ‘Sigismund, chosen of Dorn, son of the Emperor, guide my blade in your name,’ said Varda, lifting the Black Sword so that its quillons framed the coal-red eye-lenses of his helm.

  The others mirrored Varda’s sentiment as Colonel Anders chivvied his Guardsmen to the edges of the gantry. Hellguns blazed as the Cadians opened up on the creatures. Tanna didn’t doubt that most of their shots would find a target.

  The jade-armoured warriors of the eldar took up position to either side of the Templars. Tanna bristled at the flanking xenos, but suppressed his natural combative instincts.

  ‘Their placement makes sense,’ said Bracha over the internal vox. ‘But I do not like it.’

  Tanna nodded and squared his stance. ‘When these things come at us, fight them with all your heart, but never forget there are aliens at our back as well.’

  The eldar in the form-fitting ivory plates and blood-red plumes sprinted to the edge of the gantry. They effortlessly vaulted the railing, swords in one hand, gripping the metal with the other. Like acrobats, they swung in graceful arcs and dropped to the level of the ramp above the speeding hunters.

  Tanna didn’t bother watching them.

  Even over the thunder of the tower’s machinery and the snap of gunfire, he heard the clash of swords amid the dying echo of the eldar battle scream.

  A shadow loomed and Tanna turned to see Uldanaish Ghostwalker. The wraith-warrior stood with the Black Templars at the head of the ramp as the clash of swords from below was silenced. Cadian las-fire resumed.

  Meaning the eldar below were dead.

  He rolled his shoulders in anticipation, loosening the muscles for the hard-burn of close-quarters battle. He risked a glance over the curve of his black and ivory shoulder guard.

  Kotov and his skitarii were already moving across the gantry to a radial bridge leading to the tower’s exterior. He didn’t know what lay beyond, but that it was away from here was good enough.

  Tanna addressed Ghostwalker as the crash of metallic claws tearing up the ramp drew ever closer.

  ‘You are a little bigger than the warriors I usually fight alongside,’ said Tanna.

  ‘Are you concerned you might hit me?’

  ‘That does not concern me in the slightest,’ said Tanna.

  ‘Then perhaps you worry I may hit you in the chaotic mêlée?’

  ‘It crossed my mind.’

  Ghostwalker leaned down. ‘Know this, Templar. If I strike you, it will be entirely deliberate.’

  ‘As it will be when I strike you,’ said Tanna.

  The warrior-construct gave a booming laugh and straightened to its full height as the hellhounds bounded into sight.

  Silver creatures with wide, ursine shoulders. Narrow spines and the powerful legs of lean hunting hounds. Too-wide jaws, filled with tearing metal saw-fangs. Glittering, compound eye structures like scratches of light in a cave.

  Their howls were shrieks of thirsting need. Blades snapped erect on their every limb.

  Bolter fire and hails of whickering, razor-edged discs flensed them. Explosions blasted fragments of molten metal, and ribbons of steel pared back from every slicing impact of an eldar projectile.

  One volley was all they got.

  Uldanaish Ghostwalker took the first impact as two of the Tindalosi leapt at him. The wraith-warrior’s blade moved too fast for something so huge. A Tindalosi howled, impaled, its gut ripped open and spilling shredded metal. Ghostwalker hurled it aside. Hellgun fire battered the fallen beast’s gleaming flanks.

  The second bit down on his arm, and sickly green fire bled into the wound. The creature’s rear limbs curled to claw at the wraith-construct’s chest. Tanna stepped in and hammered his blade into its haunches, tearing through to its spine.

  It fell away, rolling clear of his follow-up.

  Ghostwalker’s gauntlet-mounted weapon swung to bear. Buzzing projectiles tore into the Tindalosi with a breaking-glass sound that was curiously musical. Three hounds snapped and clawed the ramp, poised to launch themselves at the Space Marines.

  Tanna spun his sword back up to his shoulder and stepped forwards to give himself room. He kept his bolt pistol low at his thigh. He turned just enough to invite attack and when it came he pulled back in an oblique turn. His sword deflected the leaping beast’s snapping jaw. He rolled his wrist and shoulder barged it, pushing the thing backwards and down. He dropped a knee to its ribs and jammed the muzzle of his pistol into its exposed throat.

  The mass-reactive punched through the metal and into the ramp.

  The Tindalosi bellowed, and pungent, viscous gel sprayed Tanna’s helm, necrotic oils of something long past its time to die.

  It rolled away, the torn metal of its neck knitting together in a slick of green light.

  Step back. Consolidate awareness.

  They still held the top of the ramp. Hellguns and bolters fired enfilading volleys. Kotov and his skitarii almost out. Surcouf and Ven Anders shouting at Pavelka, who had plugged herself back into the control hub. No time to wonder why. Cadians surrounded the three of them, bulky hellguns pulled in tight as they awaited the colonel’s order to withdraw.

  Varda’s sword flashed and the black blade plunged into a howling skull and tore it half away. Tanna swivelled and the pauldrons of the three Space Marines clashed together. Shoulder to shoulder in a circle of steel and adamantium they stood, ravaging all that came within reach.

  A slash of talons came at Tanna’s head and he parried with the body of his pistol. The weapon went off and he chopped his blade into a leg as hard as adamantium.

  The creature staggered and Tanna worked the roaring blade hard into its chest. He hauled it free and kicked the beast back. He blinked and shook his head.

  The monsters Ghostwalker had downed were up again. Shimmering green lightning played across their bodies. Opened guts were closed and buckled limbs straightened. Only once had Tanna fought creatures so difficult to kill, so unwilling to die.

  The Tindalosi charged, but just before the instant of contact, two leapt to the side. Their powerful legs easily carried them over the railings of the gantry. Not his concern. Something for the Cadians and eldar to deal with. Behind him, Yael and Bracha opened fire with their bolters. Mass-reactives plucked one from the air, twin impacts punching it out over the gantry. Its howl rang from the tower walls as it fell.

  ‘Into them!’ shouted Tanna.

  They met the charge of the hunting beasts head on. The impact was thunderous, like iron girders colliding. Legs braced, Tanna felt the curve of his pauldron crumple. Muscle mass deformed and blood dispersed within the meat of his shoulder. His sword punched up. Screaming teeth tore metal. More viscous gel sprayed him.

  A clawed arm slammed into his plastron, tearing loose the Templar’s cross and gouging finger-deep grooves through the ceramite. The force hammered him to the side.

  Tanna’s sword snapped back up to block a tearing blow from above that drove him to his knees.

  His armour thrummed with power. Tanna straightened his legs with a roar, hammering his sword’s crossed pommel into a bellowing metallic skull that was part wolf, part saurian. Noxious machine-blood flew.

  He lunged with the pistol, drove it into the belly of a bea
st. The shot exploded hard against armour and Tanna bit back a shout of sudden pain. His gauntlet filled with hot fluid, blood streaming down his forearm.

  The creature snapped at him again. He thrust his chainsword, teeth scraping on steel as it parted metal and split a spine. He twisted it out, kicking the flailing creature back down the ramp.

  Straighten up, breathe and blow, shake the pain. His chest was tight, his throat raw. Had he been screaming a battle shout?

  ‘Too… t… too far forward, Tanna!’ shouted Issur.

  Get back.

  The Tindalosi barged one another in their frenzy to break past the choke-point, their bladed limbs constricted, one machine-like killer obstructing another. He saw their confusion. They were not used to victims who could fight back like this.

  ‘Find the openings,’ yelled Tanna, to himself as much as everyone else. ‘Kill them, kill them all.’

  A blow glanced off his helm and hammered into his damaged shoulder guard. He grunted and punched a sword blow to the belly of a silver-skinned beast.

  ‘Step in again!’ he grunted. ‘Keep them at bay!’

  Tanna threw an upward sword cut to a thigh of hooked metal, a backstroke to the guts and a thrust to the chest. In deep and twist. Don’t stop moving. Movement to the right, a howling bovine skull with fangs like daggers. He slashed it in the eyes. It screamed.

  Move on. Face front, step back. Find another.

  Two came at him. No room to swing. Another pommel strike, stove in the first’s ribs. Stab the other in the belly, blade out.

  The beasts withdrew, torn up and weeping emerald light from their ruptured bodies.

  ‘Tanna! For the Emperor’s sake stop pushing so far down the ramp!’ shouted a voice.

  Varda?

  Tanna stepped back until he drew level with Varda and Issur. Each was slathered from helm to greaves in blood. Vivid red theirs, tar black that of the foe. They stood abreast at the summit of the ramp with Uldanaish Ghostwalker behind them.

  The wraith-warrior’s armour was cracked and clawed. One leg tremored, as though ready to collapse, the other leaked a molten amber-like sap from its knee joint. Something glittered through a dreadful gash in his helm, a faintly luminous gemstone.

  The Tindalosi came at them again.

  ‘Back to back!’ roared Tanna.

  Blaylock slumped from the Speranza’s command throne, feeling like every cell within him had chosen this moment to attack its host body. His vision snapped to black as cerebral inhibitors shut down in an attempt to block the surging inloads of spurious data.

  His dwarf servitors squealed in distress as he shunted vast quantities of data to their overspill capacity. Two died instantly, their brains flash-burned by the immense overload. Another fell onto its side, spasming and losing control of every bodily function as rogue signals ripped through its body.

  Blaylock heard warning sirens, alarm klaxons and squalling wails of binaric pain. The machines of the Speranza were howling with animal distress. Blaylock struggled to regain his feet, but that was proving to be harder than he’d expected. With virtually every facet of sensory apparatus shut down, he had no spatial awareness, no sense of up or down.

  He pressed his hands to what he assumed was the deck and pushed, feeling it move away from him. Or was he moving away from it? Blaylock’s lower body was a mixture of piston-driven bracing limbs and callipered counterbalances. It made for an efficient means of locomotion for a being of his mass and density, but right now he would have happily traded them in for a pair of organic legs.

  Voices called his name with interrogative pulses of binary, complex logarithmic squirts of machine code and flesh-voices. None of it made sense.

  He tried to speak, but his augmitter sub-systems – both binaric and hexamathic – were offline. His mouth opened, but only an exhalation of scorched air emerged, as though viral fires burned within his lungs.

  Hands gripped him and hauled him into what he assumed was an upright position. A sudden, vertiginous sense of dislocation assailed Blaylock as he became aware of three-dimensional space around him. His lower body pulsed through its gyroscopic diagnostics and quickly found his centre of balance. Bracing limbs slammed down and the rest of his body swiftly followed in a series of hard resets.

  Some portions of his internal system architecture still felt somehow wrong, but now was not the time for a shut-down and full diagnostic assessment. Sight returned. Slowly. Fearful of shocking him with what it might reveal.

  ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus,’ he managed at last.

  Strong hands still gripped his robes, soaked through where his feeder pipes had torn loose. The canister at his back was angled strangely, leaking clouds of acrid vapours.

  He turned to thank the individual who had helped him to his feet, a magos in dark robes with silver eyes. His body was a crudely put together thing that somewhat resembled an arachnid.

  Galatea, Blaylock’s memory coils reminded him as they finished the purge of redundant data.

  With its identity recalled, so too was the dreadful fact of its existence. The lies it had told, the violations of every Mechanicus law it represented and the lives it had ended. Blaylock pulled away from its infectious touch as though burned.

  Almost every glittering entoptic veil burned with hissing, jumping static. Only the central display remained intact, though even it glitched and rolled with inloads of malicious code.

  ‘Magos Blaylock!’ shouted a boxy, robotic-looking thing that looked like it belonged in a loading dock rather than a starship’s bridge. ‘Are you rendered incapable?’

  Kryptaestrex, Master of Logistics.

  ‘No,’ said Blaylock, though he felt anything but capable.

  Another magos appeared beside Kryptaestrex. A latticework frame on robotic legs, within which an exploded diagram of a brain was held in suspension, spread between numerous linked plastek cubes.

  Azuramagelli, Master of Astrogation.

  ‘Magos Blaylock, you really need to see this,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘There is… something happening on the surface.’

  ‘Something?’ snapped Blaylock as yet more of his systems realigned after the attack on his augmetic nervous system. ‘Since when do adepts of Mars employ such vague phraseology? Coherence, precision and logic. Remember them. Use them.’

  ‘Apologies, Magos Blaylock,’ said Azuramagelli, gesturing to his station with a spindly manipulator arm. ‘I have not the terminology to accurately describe what I am seeing.’

  Blaylock moved as fast as he could towards Azuramagelli’s data hub, realising that he was perhaps not as fully realigned as he had thought when the deck of the Speranza seemed to lurch beneath him.

  He reached astrogation and pushed past Azuramagelli, carefully inloading the readings from the data hub, wary of any lingering fragments of malign code. He had been set to chastise Azuramagelli once again, but his admonishments went unsaid as he failed utterly to interpret the energy readings building to enormous levels on the planet’s surface.

  The data being gathered by the Speranza’s auguries was beyond anything Blaylock had ever seen. He had no idea what it might indicate, but the last vestiges of his human instincts of fight or flight screamed at him that this was dangerous.

  ‘Raise the voids, Kryptaestrex,’ he ordered. ‘Immediately.’

  ‘Magos, I have been trying to raise them for the last thirty seconds,’ said Kryptaestrex.

  ‘Trying?’

  ‘They will not light. My every command is being denied access to the rituals of ignition.’

  Blaylock all but ran to Kryptaestrex’s data hub. Bleeding veils of red filled the slates. His haptics were useless, burned out by the surge attack, and his noospherics were still resetting.

  But he could still issue commands manually.

  His fingers danced over the floating entoptic keyboard, ordering the Speranza to protect itself.

  But not even his exalted rank signifiers could reach the heart of the Ark Mechanicus. He was being kept out
of his own ship’s core controls by some external force.

  The main display lit up with a flare of radiance building on the planet’s surface beneath the huge electrical storms. A continental-scale flare that blew out the atmospheric tempests it had taken the geoformers hours to becalm. The horrifying sight put Blaylock in mind of a stellar flare or a coronal mass ejection.

  ‘What is that?’ he said.

  ‘The Breath of the Gods,’ said Galatea with awed reverence.

  Moonchild was the first vessel to be hit.

  An arc of parabolic lightning rose from the surface of Exnihlio, passing through the tortured skies without apparent effort. Seen from space it appeared to expand at leisurely pace, but was in fact moving at close to four hundred kilometres per second.

  It wasn’t actually lightning – such atmospheric discharges could only exist within a planetary atmosphere – but it was the best description the Moonchild’s captain could articulate.

  His Master of Auspex shouted a warning, but the captain already knew the energised arc was moving too fast to avoid. Even with the Gothic’s shields partially lit, the tracery of light struck the ventral armour of the prow.

  Void-war was messy. It left vast clouds of debris and drifting hulks venting fuel and oxygen in their wake. It fouled space with squalling electromagnetics for decades and was rarely conclusive. The ranges at which most engagements were fought made it relatively easy for a vessel incapable of continuing a fight to go dark and slip away.

  There would be no slipping away from this fight.

  Moonchild exploded sequentially along its length. First the wedge of its bow vanished in a silent thunderclap of blue fire, then its midships, and finally its drive section in a searing plasmic fireball. It burned with blinding radiance for a few brief seconds as the oxygen trapped within its hull was consumed.

  The fires swiftly burned out, leaving Moonchild a charred skeleton of drifting wreckage. Lifeless. Inert. Ten thousand dead in the blink of an eye.

  Another pair of lightning arcs coiled up from Exnihlio.

  And Wrathchild and Mortis Voss joined Moonchild in death.