‘Die well, Ghostwalker,’ said Tanna.
‘Run,’ advised the wraith-warrior.
Uldanaish turned from the withdrawing mon-keigh, soul-sick that their leader actually believed he understood the true depth of what was to be lost here.
Hadn’t the human heard what Uldanaish said earlier?
His body had died a long time ago, but devotion to the Swordwind had seen his spirit preserved within the ghost lattice of the wraithlord’s spirit stone. A spirit stone now split to its heart and releasing that which it kept hidden from an ancient and hungry god.
This was the fear that lurked at the heart of the eldar race. From artist to exarch, the prospect of She Who Thirsts devouring and tormenting their spirit for all eternity filled even the stoutest heart with unreasoning horror. Who could ever have thought he would embrace such a fate for the mon-keigh?
Uldanaish clung to his wounded wraith-body with every fibre of his determination. Already he could hear cruel laughter pressing in around him, the monstrous hunger of a dark power that would swallow his soul and not even notice.
The Tindalosi were almost upon him as he took position at the exact centre of the bridge.
A wraithlord did not see as mortals saw. Wraithsight perceived the world in half-glimpsed dreams and nightmares, each redolent with ghostly emotions and shimmering hues. Without a farseer’s guiding light, it was difficult to sort real from unreal.
The eldar were ghost forms, concealed from She Who Thirsts by their spirit stones, but each mon-keigh was a plume of blood-red radiance, a being with an unlimited capacity for violence.
Bielanna was already within the building behind him, and Uldanaish felt a sudden fear at the prospect of his people entering that dread space. Something terrible lurked beneath it, something that reeked of unending pain and a world’s suffering.
Uldanaish wanted to warn them of the danger, but the Tindalosi were upon him. Like the mon-keigh, they were radiant things, phosphor bright and feral in their lust for violence.
That they were intelligent was beyond question.
Uldanaish had felt their twisted malevolence as soon as they entered the tower. What lurked within them were artificial minds so monstrous, so psychotic, that it beggared belief any sentient race would risk creating them.
It saw the leader beast immediately, a patchwork thing of evil and insatiable hunger that left blistered negative impressions on his wraithsight. Scratches of dark radiance flickered in the thing’s smoking eye-lenses, and its oversized jaw drooled lightning from bloodstained fangs.
They came at Ghostwalker five abreast.
He charged towards them with long, loping strides. He stabbed down, carving the first through the spine with his wraithblade. Sensing weakness, one went for his legs, another his skull. He cut the first almost in two with his gauntlet weapon. The second impaled itself on his blade. Another seized his gauntlet in its jaws and swung itself wide, using its mass to drag him with it.
The last beast gripped the vanes flaring from his shoulders and wrenched in the opposite direction. Ghostwalker loosed a bray of ancient pain as the vanes shattered like porcelain. He brought his blade back, shearing the legs from the beast biting his other arm.
With that arm free, he swung low from the hip and pummelled his fist into the monstrous hunter clawing his side apart. The impact buckled its midsection inwards, almost snapping it in two. It screeched a machine-like howl and landed hard on the parapet of the bridge. Uldanaish leaned back and kicked it over.
The beast whose spine he had carved unfolded from its hurt, fresh plates already extruding from some internal void. Green lights danced over the new steel. Uldanaish sent a threading pulse of laser fire though its eyes. They blew out in a screaming howl of hostile static.
Two of the beasts tried to push past him. He stepped back and kicked one in the ribs, almost flattening it against the iron-girder parapet. Uldanaish spun on his heel and pinned the other to the plated deck of the bridge with his wraithblade.
The leader beast crashed into him. They rolled. Uldanaish’s fist slammed into its side. Its wide mouth snapped shut on his skull, ripping out plate-sized shards of wraithbone. His blade scored deep cuts in its spinal ridges. Its hooked limbs ripped into his chest and broke his armour into long strips of wraithbone.
They broke apart. Uldanaish rolled to his feet and staggered as his right leg finally gave out. Psycho-active connective tissue ground like broken glass in the joint, and no amount of will could force it to bear his weight.
The Tindalosi faced him; he a wounded giant, they mechanised assassins that renewed themselves with each passing second.
Dragging himself back along the bridge deck on one knee, Uldanaish hauled himself upright. The spectral vista of his wraithsight was fading, yet the scratched outlines of the Tindalosi remained stark and black.
The sound of cruel laughter was closer now, like one of the eldarith ynneas coming to savour its victim’s degradation.
Now was the moment.
‘Come, hounds of Morai-Heg,’ he said. ‘We die together!’
Uldanaish extended his left arm and cut through the thick suspension cables with a sawing blast of high-energy laser pulses. At the same instant, his wraithblade sliced up through the entwined knot of cables at his shoulder.
The deck buckled as the bridge’s cardinal supports were removed at a stroke. The Tindalosi saw the danger and surged past him, but it was already too late.
With a scream of tearing metal, the bridge snapped in two, spilling the combatants into the explosively toxic clouds venting from the base of the tower. The Tindalosi howled as they fell, their metal hides blistering in the caustic fog.
Uldanaish Ghostwalker made no sound at all.
His soul had already been claimed.
The aura of abandonment Vitali felt looking at the cog-toothed entrance to Forge Elektrus reminded him of the plague-soaked sump-temples of the Schiaparelli Sorrow of Acidalia Planitia. The Gallery of Unremembering within Olympus Mons depicted that great repository in its heyday, a towering pyramid filled with data from the earliest days of mankind’s mastery of science.
Martian legend told that the Warmaster himself had unleashed a fractal-plague known as the Death of Innocence, which obliterated twenty thousand years of learning and transformed an entire species-worth of knowledge into howling nonsense code.
Vitali and Tarkis Blaylock had scoured some of the deepest memory-vaults for surviving fragments of that knowledge. The plague had evolved in the darkness for nearly ten millennia and all they found were corrupt machines, insane logic-engines and lethal scrapcode cybernetics haunting the molten datacores.
This wasn’t quite on the same level, but being below the waterline on the Speranza while it was under attack gave Vitali the same sense of threat lurking around every corner.
Judging by the invisible cocktail of combat-stimms surrounding him, the twenty skitarii he’d commandeered from one of Dahan’s reserve zones clearly felt the same way.
Vitali had wanted a cohort of praetorians, but Dahan had point-blank refused, rank-signifiers be damned. After a heated binaric negotiation the Secutor had grudgingly released a demi-maniple to Vitali’s authority.
Each skitarii was encased in archaic-looking shock-armour that put them only just below the height of a Space Marine. Draped in an assortment of ragged pennants and mechanical fetishes, their feral appearance put Vitali in mind of the legendary Thunder Warriors of Old Earth, whose faded images were preserved on a dusty block said to have once been part of the Annapurna Gate.
Oversized gauntlets bore a mixture of blast-carbines, shotcannons or heavy electro-spears. A few had power weapons or rapid-firing solid slug throwers comparable to Adeptus Astartes bolters.
They’d moved through the Speranza at speed; diverting to avoid columns of running soldiers, past the sounds of gunfire and explosions, along corridors scored with laser impacts and strewn with glassy debris.
Traversing a suspended gantry a
rcing across a vaulted graving dock designed for Leviathans, Vitali had his first glimpse of the enemy. Crystalline warriors, identical to the ones he’d remotely seen aboard the Tomioka. Blitzing green bolts chased them over the gantry, but before any real weight of fire could be brought to bear, a flanking force of weaponised servitors emerged from opposing transverse through-ways. They punched through the enemy in a carefully orchestrated two-pronged attack. Vitali didn’t stay to watch the final annihilation of the invaders, pushing ever downwards towards his destination.
The approach halls of Forge Elektrus were dark and unwelcoming, its spirits glitchy and wary of the intruders in their midst. Vitali sensed fresh reworking in the code of the machinery behind the walls, which surprised him in a place so obviously neglected.
His jet-black servo-skull, an exact replica of his own cranial vault, floated beside him like a nervous child. A battle robot aboard the Tomioka had almost destroyed it, but Linya had brought it back and painstakingly restored it on the journey to Exnihlio.
The skitarii hadn’t shared the skull’s caution, and deployed into the approach hall as though they were ready to storm Forge Elektrus. They took cover against projecting spars of the bulkhead and covered the cog-toothed door with their enormous guns. A weeping skull icon of the Mechanicus drizzled oil to the perforated deck. The vox implanted within its jaws buzzed and the lumens flickered in time with its hostile binaric growl.
Vitali walked to the door and looked up at the skull.
‘My name is Magos Vitali Tychon, and I seek entry to Forge Elektrus,’ he said, pressing his hand to the locking plate and letting it read his rank signifiers. ‘I must see the senior magos within.’
The skull spat a wad of distortion.
‘For an audience or a fight?’ it said. ‘I’m hearing reports about invaders on the ship, and that’s a lot of nasty-looking men you have there. Two suzerain-caste kill-packs if I’m not mistaken.’
‘It’s quite a distance from the cartographae dome to Forge Elektrus,’ said Vitali. ‘And, as you say, the Speranza is under attack. I wanted to be sure I survived the journey.’
‘Given that you’re clearly mad to have even tried, tell me why I should let you in,’ said the skull.
‘Very well. I have reason to believe there is someone or something within this forge that can save the ship,’ said Vitali.
The skull fell silent, hissing dead air for thirty seconds before the forge door rolled aside and a waft of incenses used in the anointing of freshly sanctified machines blew out. Vitali found himself facing a strikingly pretty adept, whose features so closely resembled Linya’s that it sent a blistering surge of high voltage around his system. Her robes were oil-stained crimson. Golden light haloed her. She held an adept’s staff crowned with laurels and snared mammals in one bronzed hand, a humming graviton pistol in the other.
‘Magos Chiron Manubia at your service,’ she said, and gestured within the forge with the barrel of her pistol. ‘You can enter, but the kill-packs stay outside.’
Vitali nodded and issued a holding order to the skitarii before following Manubia inside. The door rolled shut behind him, his servo-skull darting in just before it closed entirely.
‘The interior of Forge Elektrus does not match its outward appearance, Adept Manubia,’ said Vitali, staring in wonder at a dozen gold-lit engines lining a mosaic-tiled nave.
‘None of my doing,’ she said.
Puzzled by her cryptic remark, Vitali moved down the nave.
The engines to either side of him crackled with eager machine-spirits, thrumming with more power than any one forge could possibly require. At the end of the nave was a throne worked into a wide Icon Mechanicus, and the light of the engines glittered in its cybernetic eye. Shaven-headed adepts of lowly rank tended to the engines or scoured flakes of rust from both throne and skull.
‘Your journeymen?’ asked Vitali.
‘Not anymore,’ replied Manubia, turning to face him with the pistol held unwavering at his chest. ‘Now tell me why you’re here. And be truthful.’
Manubia’s vague answers and hostility perplexed Vitali. She couldn’t possibly think he was a threat. What was going on in Forge Elektrus that compelled its magos to greet another with a sublimely rare and lethal weapon?
‘Well?’ said Manubia when he didn’t answer.
‘What I have to tell you will stretch your credulity to breaking point,’ he said, ‘So I am opting to follow your advice and embrace total honesty. I want you to know that before I begin.’
And Vitali told her of Linya and Galatea, and how the machine-hybrid had gone on to murder her body in order to harvest her brain and incorporate it into a heuristic neuromatrix. Manubia’s eyebrows rose in disbelief when he spoke of Linya’s manifestation within the dome, but a look of understanding settled upon her when he spoke of what he had been told during their brief communion.
‘That’s what made you cross half the ship to come down here?’
‘I would do anything to help my daughter,’ said Vitali. ‘And if that means crossing a ship at war, then so be it. I implore you, Adept Manubia, if you know anything at all, please tell me.’
‘She knows me,’ said a man in the coveralls of a bondsman who emerged from behind one of the largest machines.
The man was tall and rangy with close-cropped stubble for hair and the hollowed cheeks of a below-deck menial. A barcode tattoo on his cheek confirmed his status as a bondsman, but his eyes were tertiary-grade exosomatic augmetics and his right arm was a crude bionic with freshly-grafted haptics at the fingertips.
Vitali read the man’s identity from the tattoo and anger touched him as he recognised the name.
‘Abrehem Locke,’ said Vitali.
The man frowned in confusion as Vitali strode towards him, all traces of the genial stargazer replaced by the mask of a tormented father.
‘Your little revolution delayed getting Linya to the medicae decks,’ said Vitali. ‘You made her suffer.’
‘Easy there,’ said Manubia, following Vitali and keeping the graviton pistol trained on him. ‘This isn’t a subtle weapon, but I can still crack the legs from under you.’
Vitali ignored her. ‘Linya almost died because of what you did.’
To his credit, Locke stood his ground. ‘And I’m sorry for that, Magos Tychon, but I won’t apologise for trying to better conditions in the underdecks. If you knew the suffering that goes on there, how badly the Mechanicus treats those who toil in its name, you’d have done exactly the same.’
Vitali wanted to throw Locke’s words back in his face, remembering the agony he had suffered in trying to manage Linya’s pain, but the man was right. Vitali had even said words just like that to Roboute Surcouf on the Renard’s shuttle.
The anger drained from him and he nodded. ‘Maybe so, Master Locke, maybe so, but it is hard for me to entirely forgive a man who caused my daughter pain, no matter how noble the principle in which he acted.’
‘I understand,’ said Locke, meeting Vitali’s gaze.
Vitali looked carefully into the bondsman’s augmetics, sensing there was more to this man than met the eye. Was this lowly bondsman the key to fighting Galatea?
‘I think perhaps it was you I came here to find, Master Locke,’ said Vitali.
‘Me? Why?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Vitali, lacing his fingers behind his back, ‘but I will. Tell me, how much do you know of hexamathics?’
‘Nothing at all.’
Vitali turned to Adept Manubia.
‘Then you and I have a great deal of work to do.’
The structure his skitarii had cut into with their power fists and blades made no sense to Kotov. On a world where everything was given over to sustaining the Breath of the Gods, why would a place so large be left empty? Vast beams and columns of rusted steel supported a soaring roof obscured by an ochre smirr of mist. Decay and dilapidation hung heavy in the air, like an abandoned forge repurposed after centuries of neglect.
Behind him, the Cadians, eldar and Black Templars pushed into the building. They shouted and hunted for ways to seal the entrance behind them.
Roboute Surcouf and Ven Anders helped Magos Pavelka to the ground, their arms around her shoulders. Kotov didn’t need a noospheric connection to see her ocular augmetics had been burned away completely. Implant, nerve and neural interface were an alloyed molten spike of surgical steel and fused brain matter.
She would likely never see again.
Her head was bowed. In pain or regret?
Perhaps it was in shame for wielding profane code. If Kotov believed they might ever return to Mars, he would see to it that Ilanna Pavelka was irrevocably excommunicated from the Cult Mechanicus.
She had meddled with shadow artes and paid the inevitable price.
The thought gave him a moment’s pause as he considered the depth of his own hubris.
And what price would I have to pay…?
He pushed aside the uncomfortable thought and knelt at the ragged edge of the platform. Beyond the metal, the ground fell away sharply in a steeply angled quarried slope. Dull steel rails fastened to the bare rock reflected the light of the skull’s stablights, and Kotov followed their route to a battered funicular carriage sitting abandoned a hundred metres to his left.
He felt the aggression-stimms of the skitarii surge, and turned to see the eldar witch approaching. He stood his warriors down with a pulse of holding binary. Bielanna, that was her name, though Kotov had no intention of using it.
She removed her helm and knelt at the edge of the platform, staring down into the darkness. Kotov saw tears streaming down her cheeks. She reached out as if to touch something, then flinched, drawing her hand back sharply.
Gods of Mars Page 18