And suddenly it all made a twisted kind of sense to Roboute. He turned to Bielanna, who appeared to be studiously ignoring their conversation.
‘You knew, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘You said as much back in the cavern. What did you call it? “The infernal engine of the Yngir?” I’m going to assume that’s your word for the necrontyr gods.’
Bielanna nodded slowly.
‘Now you see why we fought so hard to stop you,’ she said. ‘And why we now spill our blood to help you.’
Roboute began pacing, as he always did when he needed to force a train of thought to its logical conclusion. His fatigue fell away from him as he spoke.
‘I’d bet every ship in my fleet that one of these Yngir is at the heart of the Breath of the Gods. Or at least it was. It’s dying now or Telok used the last of it transforming Katen Venia’s star. That’s why Telok’s so desperate to get back to Mars, to open the Noctis Labyrinthus and resurrect the god in his machine.’
Linya was burning. Flames filled the cramped access compartment in Amarok’s leg. She was trapped inside the Titan again, the access hatch leading to safety just out of reach.
The pain was unbearable.
Linya could feel every part of her body dying.
Flesh slid from bone like overcooked meat. The surgical steel of her implants turned molten within her internal organs. She felt each one liquefy.
Incredibly, the vox within the compartment was still working, but no one was answering her cries for help.
Her father’s screams echoed from the burning iron walls of the Titan’s leg. He shrieked with unimaginable pain, a sound it should be impossible for a human being to make. Terror and accusation all in one.
You did this, it said. You are killing me with your wilfulness.
Hot tears sprang from Linya’s eyes, instantly turning to vapour.
Her father’s accusations hurt worse than the flames. His pain was her pain. She felt his every screaming howl of agony as though she made it herself.
‘Please…’ she begged. ‘Make it stop!’
But the pain was relentless, the guilt unbearable. She tried to pull herself towards the opening using the rungs on the inner face of the compartment. Her body was wedged fast. Her fingers melted to the metal.
Linya screamed anew with the searing agony ripping up her arms.
Except it wasn’t her flesh…
This wasn’t real. She knew that. Knew it with a certainty that was as unbending as it was irrelevant.
No matter how hard she willed herself to accept that this was fiction, her brain couldn’t fight the dreadful stimulus it was under. Linya knew better than most how easily the machinery of the mind could be tricked into believing the impossible.
But that wasn’t helping her now.
As far as it was possible to be certain of anything, this was the sixth time she had burned to death in the Amarok. Previous to this, she had been buried alive, ripped apart by devourer beasts of an unknown tyrannic genus, crushed in a depressurising starship and burned to cinders on the Quatrian Gallery as its orbit degraded into the planetary atmosphere.
Each death excruciating, each pain stretched over a lifetime, each experience a learning curve. Galatea was unsparingly inventive in its tortures, but the Amarok was a particular favourite of the machine-hybrid.
Tar-black smoke filled her mouth. Her lungs dissolved within her chest. Burning light roared over her in a torrent of liquid fire.
Linya screamed.
And found herself on her knees, flesh untouched and body intact.
Cold deck plates under her palms, bare steel walls to either side and dim light above. A cool breeze drifted from the recyc-units on the ceiling. Tears ran down her cheeks at the cessation of pain and shuddering breath emptied her lungs.
Yet even these sensations were false, this new environment no more real than the last.
Linya pushed herself to her feet and canted a disgustingly biological insult, careful to render it in hexamathic cant.
The black-robed adept that was Galatea’s proxy body emerged from the shadows, anonymous and giving no hint as to the true abomination that lay within.
The adept shook his head and a fresh jolt of pain drove Linya back to her knees. She gritted her teeth and fought to keep her scream of pain inside.
Linya stood once more and walked away from Galatea, subtly marshalling her consciousness into carefully constructed partitions.
Galatea followed her, its hands moving in a complex geometric pattern that appeared to describe a Möbius curve in space-time.
The machine-hybrid was less vigilant when it was angry.
she said, modulating her tone to convey a wholly fabricated indignation.
Galatea laughed, and the silver lenses of its eyes shone with its amusement.
They passed into the main gallery chamber, a domed structure that stood out like a blister on the exterior of the orbital station. Linya had always loved this part of the Gallery and, as such, it had been recreated by Galatea with the greatest fidelity.
Far-seeing telescopes weighing hundreds of tonnes hung on slender suspensor armatures that allowed them to be moved with ease. Scattered around the walls of the dome, differently focused glass and brass-rimmed rotator-lenses threw coloured beams to the floor. Starlight glittered on walls of black marble, distant constellations and vast galactic spirals she’d never see again.
Linya laughed.
Galatea spun her around, and Linya felt the b
uild-up of hostile binary within its neuromatrix as the dome darkened and the white light of the stars turned blood red. Oily shadows slithered across the floor and Linya smelled burning skin and bone.
She slapped the hand away and let the walls between the partitioned compartments in her consciousness drop. The individual code accretions, innocuous by themselves and meticulously crafted in tiny fragments, now rapidly combined in a dizzyingly complex series of hexamathic code-structures.
Galatea sensed the sudden build-up of unknown code within her, and Linya savoured its shock. The machine-hybrid blurted a crushingly basic series of binaric barbs, designed for maximum shock and pain to an augmented mind.
And with a squall of furious binary, Galatea’s proxy-form exploded into a hash of pixellated static that blew away in a non-existent breeze.
Linya let out a relieved binaric breath. Split into so many pieces, she hadn’t been certain her painstakingly crafted code would work.
But it had, and now she had a chance to do some real harm.
Venturing into Exnihlio’s depths had been a special kind of hell for Ilanna Pavelka. After being blinded by vengeful feedback from the control hub, the hrud warren had felt like wading naked through a plague pit. Groping through greasy, cloying air, dense with pollutants. Forced to feel her way with bare hands.
Each step upwards had seen that horrific sensation diminish, but it was lodged like an infection in her flesh. Already her internal chronometers – having now recovered from the entropic field distortion below – registered at least a seven-year degradation of her organics. Her augmetics were similarly affected, and she wondered if anyone else knew how much of their lives had been stolen by exposure to the imprisoned xenoforms.
Kotov must surely know, but had chosen to say nothing.
Roboute and Ven Anders wouldn’t know, though both must surely be feeling a greater weariness than normal. Even with the restoration of her chronometers, it was impossible to say for sure how much time they had spent beneath the surface of the planet. The elasticity of time was a new sensation to Ilanna, who was used to a constant and completely accurate register of its passage.
Without sight, she was unaware of the exact nature of the tunnel they were climbing, but passive arrays told her its composition had changed from bare rock and crystal to stone and iron.
‘We’ve left the cave systems below Exnihlio,’ she said, more to herself than to elicit any response.
‘Looks that way,’ agreed Roboute. ‘We’re climbing through deep industrial strata. It’s a bloody maze, but Kotov seems to think he understands the layout down here and says it won’t be long until we reach a transit hub on the surface.’
Ilanna nodded, but didn’t reply.
The quality of the air was markedly different, no longer pestilential decay, but the hard, bitter reek of industry. Heavy with the hot oil and friction of nearby engines, the smell should have been reassuringly familiar to her.
Instead, it filled her with the unreasoning sense that they climbed towards something far worse than the senescent creatures below. Ilanna could find no logic to this, beyond the obvious threat of Telok, yet the feeling grew stronger with every reluctant step she took towards the surface.
‘Something wrong?’ said Roboute as she paused to clear her head.
‘No, I just–’
A howl of something ancient exploded in the vault of her skull.
Ilanna screamed as every atom of her flesh blazed with the imperative to flee. A cascade of catecholamines from her adrenal medulla catapulted her body into a state of violent tension.
‘Ilanna!’ cried Roboute, going to the ground as her weight dragged him down. ‘What is it?’
‘They’re coming!’ she cried, clawing at his arm and casting around for the source of her terror. ‘Didn’t you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ said Roboute, kneeling beside her. She couldn’t see his face, but heard his concern. ‘All I hear are machines.’
‘They’ve come back,’ she sobbed. ‘They’re still coming for us. They won’t stop, ever.’
‘What are?’ said a voice Ilanna recognised as Tanna’s.
‘The Tindalosi,’ she said. ‘I can hear them in my head…’
‘They’re here?’ said Tanna, and Ilanna heard the scrape of damaged metal in his armour and the stuttering of his sword’s actuators. Its spirit was angry; many of its sawing teeth blades were missing.
‘No,’ she managed, triggering a burst of acetylcholine to regain a measure of homeostasis within her internal systems. ‘Not yet. I can hear them… in my head. I… I think that when I saw them, they… saw me too.’
‘Like a scent marker?’ asked Tanna.
‘That’s as good an analogy as any,’ said Ilanna, her fight or flight reaction beginning to recede. ‘Whatever hurts you and Ghostwalker did to them, it wasn’t enough.’
‘Then we will fight them again,’ said another Space Marine, Varda she thought. ‘And this time we will finish the job.’
Ilanna shook her head. ‘No, you won’t. I mean no disrespect, Brother Varda, but you saw them. The beasts are imbued with some form of self-regenerative mechanism. You can’t hurt them. At least, not without my help.’
An irritated flare of noospherics behind her.
‘Do not suggest what I know you are about to suggest, Magos Pavelka,’ said Archmagos Kotov.
‘It could help kill the hunting beasts,’ she said.
‘It is a curse upon machines,’ said Kotov. ‘You dishonour the Cult Mechanicus with such blasphemies.’
‘What is she talking about, archmagos?’ demanded Tanna.
‘Nothing at all, a vile perversion of her learning,’ said Kotov.
‘Speak, Magos Pavelka,’ ordered Tanna, and Ilanna almost smiled at the outrage she felt radiating from Kotov. Had they been anywhere within the Imperium, she had no doubt the archmagos would already have exloaded his Technologia Excommunicatus to the Martian synod.
‘When I was stationed on Incaladion, I–’
‘Incaladion? I might have known,’ said Kotov. ‘That is why you bear brands of censure in your noospherics? And to think I allowed a techno-heretic aboard the Speranza!’
Tanna held up a hand to forestall further outrage from Kotov, and Ilanna was pathetically grateful to be spared a repeat of what she had heard from her accusers so long ago.
‘What is Incaladion?’ asked Tanna.
‘A forge world in Ultima Segmentum,’ said Ilanna. ‘I was stationed there a hundred and forty-three years ago when there were some… troubles.’
‘What sort of troubles?’ asked Tanna.
‘Researches into the shadow artes of the tech-heretek!’ snapped Kotov with a surge of indignation. ‘The worship of proscribed xeno-lores and artificial sentiences! Half the planet was in violation of the Sixteen Laws.’
Kotov rounded on Ilanna. ‘Is that where you developed your heathen code?’
‘In service to Magos Corteswain, yes,’ answered Ilanna.
‘Corteswain? This just gets better and better!’ said Kotov.
‘Who was this Corteswain?’ asked Roboute.
‘He was a great man,’ said Ilanna. ‘Or at least he was before he disappeared on Cthelmax. He was Cult Mechanicus to the core, but a Zethian by inclination.’
‘I do not know what that means,’ said Tanna.
‘It means he held to idea
ls of innovation and understanding, of looking for explanations of techno-functionality that did not rely on the intervention of a divine being.’
‘You see?’ said Kotov. ‘Blasphemy!’
Ilanna ignored him. ‘The possible applications of xeno-tech to existing Imperial equipment fascinated Corteswain, and he dared question established dogma regarding its prohibition. What you have to understand about Incaladion was that it was a world where a great deal of corrupted machinery ended up. Spoils taken in battle against the Archenemy. Machines and weaponry infected with scrapcode and infused with warp essences. Adept Corteswain developed a form of hexamathic disassembler language that could break the bond between a machine and whatever motive spirit lay at its heart.’
‘A curse on all machines!’ wailed Kotov.
‘It was a way to free those machines from corruption,’ said Ilanna with an indignant flare of binary cant. ‘Magos Corteswain saved thousands of machines whose souls were in torment.’
‘By killing them,’ said Kotov.
‘By freeing them to return to Akasha,’ said Ilanna. ‘Ready to be reborn in a new body of steel and light.’
‘Are you able to do the same thing?’ demanded Tanna.
Ilanna nodded. ‘I broke Corteswain’s code into fragments and stored it within my backup memory memes. The dataproctors were thorough in their expurgatorius, but not thorough enough. It’s how I was able to break the acausal locks of the universal assembler and get it working again.’
‘Could this code hurt the beasts?’
‘I think so,’ said Ilanna.
‘Sergeant Tanna, you cannot use this code,’ pleaded Kotov. ‘It violates every tenet of the Cult Mechanicus.’
‘Could it help fight these things?’ asked Tanna. ‘Answer honestly, archmagos, much depends upon it.’
For a long time, Ilanna thought Kotov wasn’t going to answer, his noospherics warring between the likelihood of their death at the hand of the Tindalosi and the cost of allowing the use of unsanctioned technology.
‘Yes,’ he said at last.
Tanna pressed his sword into her hand.
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