Gods of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  ‘You walk the Path of the Seer,’ said Ariganna. ‘You are trapped by that role just as I was trapped by the Path of the Warrior. You could no more fail to act on what you had seen than I could deny the pleasure I took in killing in the name of Kaela Mensha Khaine. Just answer me this… Knowing of the deaths your visions have led us to, would you go back and choose a different path? One that would not lead to your daughters’ birth?’

  ‘I would not, and that shames me,’ said Bielanna.

  ‘Feel no shame,’ said Ariganna, ‘for I would have it no other way. I would hate to die knowing your purpose was not as strong and sure as the Dawnlight.’

  ‘Would that we had Anaris,’ wept Bielanna. ‘Nothing could stand before you then.’

  ‘I am sure Eldanesh thought the same thing before he faced Khaine, but I take your point,’ said Ariganna, her voice growing faint. Her hand reached up, and Bielanna assumed she looked for her chainsabre. The weapon was gone, lost in the fight with the Tindalosi. Bielanna drew her rune-inscribed sword and pressed it into the exarch’s hand.

  Ariganna shook her head and passed the weapon back as the last warriors of the Starblade gathered behind Bielanna. ‘I will die as I was… before I… sought Khaine.’

  Bielanna understood as Vaynesh and Tariquel knelt beside their exarch and released the clasps holding her broken helmet in place. They gently lifted it over Ariganna’s head and stepped away.

  Ariganna Icefang’s features were cut glass and ice, violet-eyed and lethal, but that changed as the war-mask fell from her. As though another face entirely lay beneath her skin, the warm features of a frightened woman with the soul of a poet swam to the surface.

  ‘Laconfir once told me there was no art more beautiful and diverse than the art of death, but he was wrong,’ said Ariganna with the face she had worn before entering the Shrine of the Twilight Blade. ‘Life is the most beautiful art. I think I forgot that for a time, but now…’

  The former exarch reached beneath her cracked breastplate and withdrew her clenched fist.

  ‘Though my body dies, I remain evermore,’ said Ariganna, placing her hand upon Bielanna’s outstretched palm. ‘My spirit endures in all my kin who yet live.’

  The exarch’s hand fell away, revealing a softly glowing spirit stone. And Bielanna loosed an ululating howl of depthless anguish that blew out every window of the funicular in an explosion of shattering glass.

  The sight of the crystalline war machine might have put other soldiers to rout, but the Cadian 71st had fought the armies of the Despoiler across Agripinaa’s industrialised hellscape. The Archenemy’s war engines were blood-soaked things of warped flesh and dark iron, wrought to horrify as much as kill.

  Having faced them and lived, this thing’s appearance gave the Cadians only a moment’s pause.

  Las-bolts refracted through its translucent body, shearing away fused shards of crystal. Grenades cracked the glassy surface of its bullet-headed skull. They were hurting it, but too slowly.

  Spiked extrusions from its segmented back spat emerald lightning. The bolts arced and leapt across the barricade, and not even Dahan’s annealing particulates or the kinetic ablatives could withstand their power. Howling soldiers were vaporised in the coruscating electrical storms, the skin melting from their bones in an instant.

  Hawkins turned to Rae and shouted, ‘With me, sergeant!’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Don’t ask, just follow,’ said Hawkins, and pushed off the barricade. He ran to the top of the ramp, hearing Rae cursing him with all the force and inventiveness of a Cadian stevedore.

  He forced himself to ignore wounded soldiers calling for help, weaving a path through the rubble piled atop scores of the dead. Lethal bolts of green fire spanked the ground, and Hawkins bit back a shout of pain as searing heat creased his shoulder.

  A steady stream of fire blitzed the war machine, but lasguns and plasma guns just weren’t cutting it. He skidded into the cover of the Rapier, taking a moment to catch his breath. Rae tumbled in behind, breathless and streaked in sweat.

  ‘Can you even fire this thing?’ asked Rae.

  ‘Callins showed me the basics when we served on Belis Corona,’ said Hawkins. ‘Easy as stripping a lasgun, I reckon.’

  Rae gave him a sceptical look as he scrabbled to his feet and turned around, doing his best not to expose himself to fire. He ran his eyes over the control mechanism. A mixture of amber and green gem-lights blinking on a brass-rimmed panel. Dozens of ivory switches that could be turned to a number of settings.

  But, reassuringly, a set of rubberised pistol handles with brass spoon-triggers.

  ‘How hard can it be?’ he said, gripping the firing mechanism and mashing the oversized triggers.

  A bolt of blinding light stabbed down the ramp and punched through the bulkhead to the left of the advancing war machine. The beam’s white-hot point of impact reduced two dozen crystalline foes to microscopic fragments, but left the war machine untouched.

  ‘How in the name of the Eye did you miss?’ yelled Rae, as the war machine pushed more of its bulk into the transit. Hawkins looked for a control to adjust the Rapier’s aim, but came up empty. Why would he have expected this to be easy?

  ‘Push it,’ he shouted over the hiss of lasguns and metallic coughs of grenade detonations. ‘A metre to the left.’

  Rae looked up at him as though he were mad.

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘I don’t know how to shift its aim. Now get around this thing and push it!’

  Rae rolled his eyes and scrambled around the bulky weapon system. Flurries of snapping energy bolts tore up the ground and portions of the barricade next to him. The sergeant rammed his shoulder into the side of the Rapier, grunting with the effort. It didn’t move.

  ‘Put your back into it, man!’

  Rae shouted something obscene that Hawkins chose to ignore as a number of Guardsmen broke from cover to help. Two were cut down almost immediately, another fell with the flesh stripped from his legs. But enough reached the Rapier alive and slammed into it with grunts of exertion.

  Against Cadian strength, the weight of the Rapier had no chance, and the track unit shifted. Hawkins looked over the top of the machine. He stared down into the cavernous, blade-filled mouth.

  ‘Got you,’ he said and mashed the triggers again.

  This time the beam punched down its throat. It lit up from within as the awesome power of the beam refracted through its entire structure. The war machine detonated in an explosion of molten glass and glittering metal-rich dust.

  Its body slumped, coming apart in an avalanche of broken glass.

  And finally, to Hawkins’s great surprise, the gate began to close with a grinding screech of metal that hadn’t moved in centuries. Hawkins saw the lone tech-priest hunched in the lee of the pilasters at the side of the gateway. The adept was still connected into the hatch by trailing cables, and Hawkins swore he’d pin a Ward of Cadia on his damn chest.

  The gate slammed down with a booming clang and a crunch of pulverised crystal. The few enemy still on the Cadian side of the gate were swiftly gunned down with coordinated precision. Within thirty seconds, the area was secure.

  Hawkins forced himself to release the Rapier’s fire-controls, his fingers cramped after gripping so hard.

  ‘Sir,’ said Rae, carefully and calmly, ‘next time you want to put us in harm’s way like that could you, well, not…?’

  Hawkins nodded and let out a shuddering breath.

  ‘I’ll take that under advisement, sergeant,’ said Hawkins.

  The enemy wasn’t getting through this gateway any time soon, so it was time to consolidate. Well over half his men were down. Those too wounded to remain in place were evacuated to pre-established field-infirmaries. Fresh powercells and water were dispensed to those who remained.

  Replacement sections of barricade were installed and with reinforcements arriving from the reserve platoons, the position was secure within four minutes
of the attack’s ending.

  Hawkins checked with his other detachments, listening to clipped reports of furious firefights throughout his sectors of responsibility. Some were still engaged, some had repulsed numerous waves of attackers. Others had yet to make enemy contact. Only one position had been abandoned as crystalline foes appeared without warning in flanking positions in overwhelming numbers.

  Hawkins adjusted his mental map of the fighting, seeing areas of vulnerability, angles of potential counter-attack and areas of the Speranza where the greatest threats might arise.

  One location immediately presented itself as the greatest danger – as he’d always suspected it would.

  ‘Sergeant Rae,’ he said. ‘Assemble a rapid-reaction command platoon. I need to be moving on the double.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Just get it done, sergeant.’

  Rae nodded, dragging squads out of the line and hustling them into formation. Hawkins tapped the bead in his ear, cycling through channels until he reached the Mechanicus vox-net.

  ‘Dahan, status report?’

  The Magos Secutor’s response was virtually immediate.

  ‘I am orchestrating the ship’s defence from the Secutor temple. All skitarii positions holding, though the randomness of the enemy arrival points is proving to be most vexing.’

  ‘Always a pain when the enemy doesn’t play nice, isn’t it?’

  ‘A predictable enemy is an enemy that can be more easily overcome,’ agreed Dahan. ‘Observation: I discern a lack of cohesion in this assault. Each enemy contingent appears to be working to its own design, independent of the others.’

  ‘Keeping our attention divided,’ said Hawkins. ‘Trying to mask the real danger.’

  ‘What real danger?’

  ‘The training deck,’ said Hawkins. ‘Lots of ways in and a more or less straight run to the bridge. We’re on our way there now.’

  ‘An unnecessary redeployment, Captain Hawkins,’ said Dahan. ‘Skitarii forces are emplaced and all static weaponry has been granted full lethal authority.’

  Rae signalled the command platoon’s readiness, and Hawkins took his place in the line.

  ‘Call it gut reaction, magos,’ said Hawkins. ‘I get the feeling this attack will cohere soon enough, and when it does, they’re going to throw everything they’ve got at us.’

  Thanks to the empty window frames, the reek of stale air and turned earth had been growing stronger in the funicular with every kilometre travelled. By the time it reached the end of its long journey through the planet’s crust, the graveyard stench was almost overpowering.

  Even distanced from olfactory input by augmented sensory limiters, Kotov still registered the smell as unpleasant. From the looks of disgust on the faces of those without his advantages, it must be unbearable to baseline senses.

  The carriage doors squealed open, revealing the funicular’s final destination: a buckled terminus platform of bare iron within an ancient cave of gnarled rock. The ceiling was jagged with grotesquely organic stalactites of rotted matter, and pools of foetid liquid gathered beneath them in sticky pools.

  Tanna and the Black Templars debarked first, moving to the filth-encrusted walls and covering the only other exit, a cave mouth fringed with cloudy crystalline growths. The Cadians went next, following their colonel with rifles jammed in tight to their shoulders.

  ‘So do you think this is a better place, Master Surcouf?’ asked Kotov, taking a moment to enjoy the sight of the rogue trader pressing a wadded kerchief over his mouth and nose.

  ‘Well, we’re not being attacked by bloodthirsty mech-hunters, so I’d say it’s a step up from the universal assembler.’

  Kotov stepped from the funicular and almost immediately, his chronometer began glitching, the numerals speeding up, reversing and flickering in and out of sync with his implanted organs. The effect was disorientating, and he stumbled. His skitarii held him upright.

  ‘Archmagos?’ asked one, whose noospheric tags identified him as Carna. ‘Is something the matter?’

  Kotov disabled the chronometer and restored his equilibrium with a surge of internal purgatives. The unpleasant sensation passed and he nodded to his protectors.

  ‘I am fine,’ he said.

  Surcouf followed him onto the platform, with Magos Pavelka clinging to his arm. Surcouf was almost dragged to the ground when Pavelka was seized by the same nauseous sense of mechanical dislocation that had almost felled him.

  ‘Turn off your chronometer,’ Kotov advised her, though given Pavelka’s transgressions, he was inclined to let her suffer.

  As unpleasant as the effects of the cave were to Kotov and Pavelka, it was nothing to how the eldar witch reacted. Bielanna screamed and fell to her knees as soon as she stepped from the carriage. Her skin, which even to a Martian priest appeared unnaturally pale, grew ever more ashen. Her face contorted in grief, more so than when her piercing shriek on the carriage had almost deafened them all. Her face contorted as though invisible hands were pushing each muscle in different directions at once. Tears streamed down her face.

  ‘I told you…’ she said. ‘All the pain of this world is here. This is it, this is the locus of splintering time. This is where the fraying of every thread begins and ends. The flaw that tears the weave apart…’

  Her words made no sense to Kotov and he turned away.

  ‘You led us to this,’ spat Bielanna. ‘Your mon-keigh stupidity!’

  Carna growled, baring steel-plated teeth, but Bielanna ignored him. Her warriors helped her to her feet, but she shrugged them off, stalking towards Kotov like an assassin with a helpless target in sight.

  The skitarii raised their weapons, but Bielanna hurled them aside with a sweeping gesture of her palms. They slammed into the walls of the cave, and hoarfrost patterned the surface of their armour as she pinned them three metres above the platform.

  ‘What have you done here?’ said Bielanna, a distant, confused look in her eyes, as though she was having to force each word into existence. It seemed to Kotov that she was not really addressing him, but some unseen elemental force.

  ‘Time itself is being unmade here,’ sobbed Bielanna. ‘The future unwoven and the past rewritten! All the potential of the future is being stolen… No! This cannot happen… Infinite mirrors reflecting one another over and over… Oh, you came here with such dreams… Time and memory twisted into hate… Trapped here… We cannot escape, we cannot move… Oh, Isha’s mercy… The pain. To never move, to be denied the time-drift…’

  Bielanna’s skin shimmered with internal radiance, her eyes ablaze with anger. Her hands were fists of lightning, but with an effort of will, she flexed her fingers and the crackling psychic energies dissipated. She let out a shuddering breath that dropped the temperature in the cave markedly.

  The two skitarii fell to the iron platform. Both were instantly on their feet, weapons ratcheting into their kill-cycles.

  ‘Stand down,’ ordered Kotov, with an accompanying blurt of authoritative binary. Reluctantly – very reluctantly – the skitarii obeyed, but still put themselves between him and Bielanna.

  ‘Whatever you are seeing or feeling here is not my doing,’ said Kotov. ‘It is Telok’s. Save your rage for him.’

  And with that he turned away, marching towards the exit from the terminus, where the Cadians cast wary glances before and behind them. Kotov’s passive auspex – all he had allowed himself since the attack of the Tindalosi – registered powerful forces at work beyond the cave mouth.

  He passed the Cadians and entered a long tunnel, circular in section except where iron decking had been laid along its base. The walls were rippling, vitrified rock. Melta-cut. Here and there, scraps of rotted cloth and dust lay discarded like emptied sandbags. A flickering white-green light beckoned him on and as he drew closer he tasted the actinic tang of powerful engines at work.

  The tunnel opened onto a detritus-choked rock shelf overlooking a vast, subterranean gorge. Cliffs of stone soared o
verhead to a cavern roof that was ragged with spiralling horns of rock and dripping with foetid drizzle. Rusted iron spheres and enormous girders supported a network of arcane machinery that explained the source of the white-green light.

  Tanna and his warriors stood amazed at the edge of the abyssal plunge, amid a tangle of corroded iron barriers. Kotov’s chronometer flared back to life, and a gut-wrenching mechanical nausea surged through his floodstream. He shut the chronometer off again. It reactivated a moment later, spiralling back and forth through time-cycles.

  ‘Tanna, what–’

  Then Kotov saw the city.

  Spreading like a rusted fungus across the opposite wall of the huge cave was a hideous warren of disgusting scrap dwellings wrought from iron and mud and ordure. They clung to the vertical sides of the chasm, and a twisting network of wire-wrought bridges draped the structures like a web.

  Clearly of ancient provenance, the city was a grotesque fusion of organic growth and artifice. Portions had the appearance of having been built up from resinous secretions, pierced with tunnels like the lairs of burrower beasts, while others were formed from buckled sheets of scavenged metal. Hunched shadows moved between ragged tears in their walls, suggesting that this city was not dead at all, but occupied by some hideous troglodytic vermin. With halting steps that crunched over granular fragments of splintered crystal, Kotov put aside his discomfort and pulled himself forwards with the remains of the iron fretwork.

  ‘What has Telok done here?’ said Tanna, bending down to lift a robe of ragged hessian-like cloth from the ground. ‘What lives in that city?’

  Tanna held the robe out to Kotov. He took it from Tanna and turned it over in his manipulator digits. The material was ancient and crumbled at his touch. He remembered seeing similar scraps in the tunnel leading to the funicular terminal.

  ‘I do not know,’ said Kotov, ‘but this looks too familiar for comfort… I have seen remains like this before.’

  Tanna nodded and said, ‘The Tomioka.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Kotov.