Gods of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  More lightning flared towards the Speranza.

  Roboute hauled Pavelka’s robes, but he might just as well have been trying to pull a section of the tower itself. The Renard’s magos was rooted to the spot, her data-spikes locked into the control hub. Flickering data-light scrolled down the optics beneath her hood and her limbs jerked with involuntary twitches. She was fighting the hub’s code and, like an unbroken colt, it was fighting back.

  Angry blasts of electrical discharge coruscated along the length of her mechadendrites and into her body. Roboute was uncomfortably aware of the repulsively mouth-watering reek of cooking meat.

  ‘Ilanna! Disconnect!’ he shouted, alternating his attention between the furious clash of blades and claws at the head of the ramp and the snap of las-fire from Cadian rifles. ‘We have to go!’

  ‘Just. Keep. Them. Off me…’ hissed Pavelka.

  ‘We don’t have time for this,’ said Ven Anders, one hand holding his rifle, the other gripping the hilt of his power sword. ‘Get her free, Surcouf, or I’ll cut her loose myself.’

  Roboute nodded. He had no wish to remain here. He’d seen the thirsting, ribbed and fanged shapes of the monsters bounding up the ramp. The bulk of the Black Templars and the wraithlord kept him from seeing them any closer.

  A state of affairs he was keen to see continued.

  Bracha and Yael stood on the far side of the control hub, pumping shots into the enemy whenever a target presented itself.

  The Templar swordsmen were faring less well. Tanna was down on one knee. His left arm hung limp at his side, his pistol a molten wreck on the ground. Issur spasmed in the grip of a crackling electrical field that was burning him to death within his armour.

  Only Atticus Varda still fought unbowed.

  His black blade hacked into the silver armour of the Tindalosi, sending cloven shards of silver and bronze spinning in all directions. The Emperor’s Champion fought with the precision of a duellist and the power of a berserker, both war-forms distilled into a cohesive whole. It was quite the most extraordinarily disciplined feat of swordsmanship Roboute had ever seen.

  But even so sublime a warrior could not fight forever.

  ‘Ilanna, please,’ begged Roboute, risking a hand on her shoulder. He felt the furious micro-tremors of a body largely composed of machines working at full-tilt.

  The heat coming off her body was ferocious.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she barked. ‘Almost. There.’

  ‘Too late!’ shouted Ven Anders as two of the Tindalosi vaulted over the railings to the main floor of the gantry. One was punched from the air by a pair of three-round bursts from Yael and Bracha. The explosive impact of the mass-reactives blew the hellhound over the edge, and Roboute yelled in triumph as it fell with an ululating howl.

  That still left one, and the Cadians turned their hellguns upon it. Blazing streams of las-fire punched out with a speed and accuracy that only a lifetime’s worth of training could bring.

  Not a single shot hit the Tindalosi.

  A heartbeat later it was amongst them.

  Vodanus snapped a living body in two, tossing it aside and clawing another in half from shoulder to pelvis. This was more like it. This was the kind of foe it relished.

  Soft, mortal, fleshy and without any distracting code-scent that could break its geas. Its claws slashed and six bodies emptied of blood. Its hide whipped electricity. It burned, cut and melted its foes. Venomous oils secreted from its hooks left the meat screaming on their bellies.

  Some were tough and sinewy, others light as air.

  Different species?

  It made no difference, both were just as fragile.

  Energy beams stabbed it. Minor irritations. Its armour was proof against such primitive low-emission weapons. Crackling arcs of strange storm-lights struck it, psychic body blows of doom-seeking power. Ancient null-circuitry worked into its body dissipated these attacks harmlessly.

  Did these meat-things know nothing of Vodanus?

  Green-armoured warriors danced around it, darting in to bite it with crackling mouth-parts and slash with buzzing blades. It fired electromagnetic micro-pulses that exploded their internal organs.

  It heard screams from these ones, terrified screams that didn’t come from any vocal organs. It filed the information away for later perusal. No species it had thus far slain evinced such behaviour upon its death.

  Its jaws snapped on a mortal’s head, wrenching the body from side to side and letting the serrations of its teeth do the rest. The fast meat-things kept coming at it, unaware yet that they could not kill Vodanus. Their weapons sparked against its armour, vespid stings against a leviathan.

  Two of the black-armoured warriors rounded upon Vodanus – Space Marines, Telok’s data had called them – together with a slender warrior armed with a screaming-toothed sword. The weapon was clearly too large for her to wield, but Vodanus recognised that she too was a lethal huntress.

  These Space Marines were tougher and more deadly than anything its long-forgotten masters had wished dead. Each was encased in toxic armour of machine-spirits that could kill a hellhound with one wrong-placed bite or the temptation to feast. Vodanus did not fear these killers, but knew to be wary of them.

  Its prey was within sight, escaping along an outflung bridge of mesh steel and wire. Still within its grasp, but the first rule of any hunt was to leave none alive who might hunt the hunter.

  A pair of thundering impacts slowed its charge as the Space Marine warriors fired their heavy guns. Vodanus twisted into the air, killing another of the soul-screaming meat-sacks with a flick of its hooked back leg. Explosive ammunition followed it down, caroming from the curved plates of its shoulder as it landed in front of the three warriors that mattered.

  It howled in fury, but they didn’t run, which made them unique.

  Everyone ran from Vodanus.

  But, Vodanus reminded itself, these things did not know it.

  Another blast of explosive rounds hammered its armour.

  One detonated within its chest, and the momentary pain staggered it. Vodanus had not known pain of this kind in millennia. The pain of isolation and madness, yes. The knowledge that its existence was fragmenting moment by moment, certainly.

  But the pain of being wounded?

  That stirred old memories, old hurts and old joys.

  The power Telok had imbued it with from the ancient machine began its hateful work, cannibalising mineral reservoirs within its body to re-knit the damage, undo its hurt.

  It sprang forwards, faster than they could avoid. One clawed arm rammed into the chest of a Space Marine with all the force Vodanus could muster. Black and white became saturated with red. So bright, so vivid. So much.

  Vodanus clawed the body into the air and bit it in half.

  It spat the crumpled debris of meat and metal from its mouth.

  The huntress vaulted into the air as the second warrior ducked a hooked sweep of its arm. She spun the enormous blade as though it weighed nothing at all and clove it through a section of Vodanus’s spine. The Space Marine rammed his own toothed sword into the renewing sections of Vodanus’s body.

  Once again, Vodanus knew pain, but this pain was welcome. It had been too long since it had faced any foe capable of hurting it. Its body rolled in mid-air and Vodanus rammed a bladed foot into the huntress’s chest.

  She screamed and crumpled, almost broken in two, her sword skidding across the gantry. Vodanus bellowed with howling laughter as it hooked a claw through the armour of the Space Marine and tossed him aside like offal. He slammed into the high column of the control hub, crashing back down with his armour cracked and the ivory wings on his chest shattered into a thousand fragments. Bleeding code vapour streamed from the broken pieces of black metal, but Vodanus ignored the sweet scent.

  To taste it would be to die.

  Instead, it turned towards a last handful of soft, meaty bodies that awaited murder. Most were code-free, bare flesh and fear, but one sto
od at the control hub, violently enmeshed with the ancient spirit at its heart.

  This one bled code, bad code. Her machine arms snapped clear of the hub, drawing into her body. She cried a warning to the others.

  Vodanus howled and relished the terror it tasted.

  It bunched its hooked legs beneath it.

  And the world exploded in screaming white fire.

  Roboute and Anders had their guns drawn, but the giant beast that had so easily slaughtered most of the eldar and Cadians collapsed. It howled in pain, limbs convulsing in lethal swipes that tore up the metal of the gantry.

  Even incapacitated it was lethal. To approach it was to die.

  From the cessation of sound at the top of the ramp, Roboute knew something similar had happened to the Tindalosi facing Tanna’s swordsmen and the wraithlord. His analytical mind flashed through a lightning-swift assay of their current situation.

  Bracha was dead, no question of that, but Yael was already picking himself up with a groan of pain.

  Roboute felt his mouth go dry. The very idea of a Space Marine experiencing pain was something he’d never expected to see. Every devotional pict spoke of the Adeptus Astartes’ invincibility, their utter inability to feel pain or know fear. Roboute was realist enough to know that picts like that pedalled what the Imperium wanted its people to believe, but even he was shocked by the volume of blood leaving Yael’s body.

  Ariganna Icefang limped over to Bielanna, her armour torn all across her chest. Blood as bright as Yael’s ran from her helm’s eye-lenses like red tears. She’d been hurt badly. Maybe even mortally. She said something to Bielanna, but her dialect made the words unintelligible. Bielanna shook her head. Whatever the exarch was asking of her, the farseer could not deliver.

  Roboute turned from the eldar as Pavelka slumped to her knees. Heat sinks worked into her rib-structure billowed the fabric of her robes with scorching vapours. She held a hand out to Roboute, feeling the air like a blind man. He took it, grimacing at the pain of her metal grip.

  ‘What did you do, Ilanna?’

  ‘Ask her later!’ yelled Anders, slinging his rifle and helping Roboute get the stricken magos to her feet. If Anders was pained by the searing heat of Pavelka’s body, he gave no sign.

  Between them, they hauled her away from the control hub, trying not to step on any of the hacked-apart limbs and bodies the hunting machine had left in its wake.

  The speed with which it had killed was phenomenal.

  How many were dead?

  Eldar and human bodies lay intertwined, making it impossible to tell. Tanna, Varda and Issur ran over, together with the few surviving Striking Scorpions and Howling Banshees.

  ‘Was that you?’ Tanna asked Pavelka.

  She nodded. ‘I tricked the hub into accepting a self-replicating piece of damaged code into every machine within this tower. Its viral form angered the spirits within them, and they explosively purged it into the noosphere. Invisible to you, but painfully blinding to anything that uses augmetic senses.’

  Roboute glanced beneath Pavelka’s hood, seeing her ocular implants were dull and blank where normally they shone with pale blue illumination. Thin tendrils of smoke curled from the scorched rims.

  ‘No, Ilanna… Are you…?’

  ‘It needed to be done,’ she said. ‘Now let’s go!’

  Wrathchild, Mortis Voss and Moonchild were lifeless wrecks, blackened and lit from within by sporadic flashes of dying machinery. The lightning that struck the Speranza came straight from the heart of Exnihlio and phased through the hull of the Ark Mechanicus without apparent effort. Existing on an entirely different phasic state of existence to that which had obliterated the Speranza’s escorts, it destroyed nothing until it reached its point of focus.

  The first blast coalesced within the Speranza amidships on Deck 235/Chi-Rho 66, a high-ceilinged turbine chamber filled with rank upon rank of thundering engines that provided toxin-scrubbed air to a quadrant of ventral forge-temples.

  A tempest of blazing lightning arcs, white-hot and fluid, filled the central nave between the turbines. Ghost shapes moved within the light, hurricanes of microscopic machinery that had travelled the length of the faux-lightning from Exnihlio in seconds.

  The crackling bolt provided the energy, the particulate-rich air of the Speranza the raw material as solid forms began unfolding from the compressed molecules in which they had been carried.

  The deck’s servitors ignored the furious storm, oblivious to the threat manifesting among them. Those whose inculcated task routes carried them close to its wrath were instantly burned to cinders, their flesh and matter now fuel for the coalescing invasion.

  At first the Mechanicus adepts struggled to find fault with their systems, believing some ritual or catechism had been overlooked or an incorrect unguent applied. Alarm klaxons blared throughout the deck and alert chimes rang through adjacent forges and engine-temples. By the time Chi-Rho 66’s adepts realised this was no machine malfunction, it was already too late.

  The first crystaliths to emerge from the lightstorm were crude approximations of Adeptus Astartes. Glassy and smoothly finished, each was freshly wrought from the molten light and filled with thousands of Telok’s unique nano-machines. They marched in glittering ranks, hundreds strong, and filled Chi-Rho 66 with blasts of emerald fire. Machines exploded, servitors died, devastating chain reactions were begun.

  Binaric vox-blurts raced frantically to the bridge, warning of the boarders, but Chi-Rho 66’s warning would not be the last. Fresh arcs of lightning from the planet’s surface struck all across the Speranza, a dozen at a time, and each storm disgorged hundreds of crystaliths. Some were a basic warrior-caste, others were larger, formed with heavier weapons and bladed claws, and carried sheets of reflective armour like heavy, glassy mantlets.

  Last to form onto Chi-Rho 66 were the war machines.

  What Telok had once described as things of terror.

  Above the tower, the crackling fury in Exnihlio’s upper atmosphere had stilled. Tanna was struck by the pale clarity of the sky. It reminded him of the murals aboard the Eternal Crusader, the ones that depicted the pastoral idyll of Old Earth.

  That illusion was shattered the instant his eyes fell from the sky and saw the unending vistas of gargantuan generator towers and forge-complexes stretching to the horizon.

  The radial bridge that led from the tower opened up onto a tiered set of stairs enclosed within a chain-link cage. The wide gantry offered routes to higher levels or down into roiling banks of flame-lit exhaust gases venting from the tower’s base.

  A cable-stayed suspension bridge connected the universal assembler to a vast, boxy structure five hundred metres away. Clad in sheets of rusted corrugated sheet-steel, the building offered no clues as to its purpose beyond a number of smoke stacks that belched soot-dark smoke and rained a greasy, ashen snow over the roofs of lower buildings.

  It reminded Tanna of the giant, industrial-scale crematoria on worlds like Balhaut and Certus Minor.

  He hoped that wasn’t an omen.

  ‘Bracha?’ asked Varda.

  Tanna shook his head, and the Emperor’s Champion cursed.

  ‘Yael?’

  ‘Alive,’ said Tanna, pointing to the far side of the bridge where Yael covered his battle-brothers with his bolter. They ran to join him, with Uldanaish Ghostwalker limping behind them.

  The damage done to its legs had robbed the wraith-warrior of its speed and grace. Beside Yael, Kotov’s skitarii were hacking an entrance into the structure ahead through a shuttered door of concertinaed steel.

  Tanna glanced over his shoulder, searching for signs of pursuit.

  Issur saw him look and said, ‘You th-th-think the adept kill… killed them?’

  ‘Doubtful,’ replied Tanna. ‘I laid enough mortal wounds on those beasts that they should have been destroyed a dozen times over. If they can survive that, they will survive Magos Pavelka’s cantrip.’

  ‘Those beasts are tough,’ agre
ed Varda. ‘I only ever fought one foe that could survive the kill-strikes I favoured them with.’

  Tanna nodded. ‘Thanatos?’

  ‘Aye, the silver-skinned devils that kept coming back no matter how hard I hit them or how many mass-reactives took them apart.’

  ‘Is th-tha… that what these are?’ asked Issur.

  ‘No,’ said Uldanaish Ghostwalker, his voice no longer deep and resonant, but thin and distant. ‘These things are not servants of the Yngir, they were wrought by living hands and given the power to undo mortal wounds by Telok’s mad sorceries. But you are correct, they will be back.’

  As if to underscore the wraith-warrior’s words, the hounds burst from the tower. Some stood on their hind legs, others hunched over on all fours as they searched for their prey. Even a cursory glance told Tanna the damage he and his brothers had inflicted was entirely absent.

  The beasts saw them crossing the bridge and sprinted after them, bounding closer with howling appetite. Sparks flew from hooked claws on the mesh grille of the bridge deck.

  ‘Templars, stand to!’ shouted Tanna.

  ‘No,’ said Ghostwalker, standing athwart the bridge. The curved, bone-bladed sword snapped from its gauntlet. ‘This is where I will fight, as Toralven Gravesong did at Hellabore.’

  Tanna guessed what the giant warrior intended and said, ‘Tell me one thing, Ghostwalker. Did Toralven Gravesong live?’

  The wraithlord turned its emerald skull towards him, and Tanna saw through the awful wound torn there that the smooth gemstone within was cracked. Its light was fading.

  ‘Toralven Gravesong was a doom-seeker,’ said Ghostwalker.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘That he had walked the wraith-path for more lifetimes than you or I will ever know,’ said Ghostwalker. ‘Perhaps too many.’

  Tanna understood. ‘On Armageddon, I met a warrior of the Blood Angels whose duty was to hear the final words of those whose death was upon them. It was his burden to end their suffering, but he spoke of the peace those lost souls sometimes knew when he told them that death had brought an end to their duty.’

  Tanna, Varda and Issur raised their swords in salute.