‘Then do it.’
Atop a soaring tower of steel and glass, Archmagos Telok looked out over his dying world. His waxen features cracked in the semblance of a grin as he saw it clearly for the first time in twenty-five centuries.
Every universal assembler within five hundred kilometres was operating at maximum capacity, and Telok stood at the centre of the spreading calm. Beyond their influence, crackling columns of lightning flickered in the far distance, raising more of his crystalline army to the Speranza.
The attack there was progressing well. Many of the peripheral decks and Templum Prime had already been captured. With the achievement of a singularity of consciousness within the warrior-constructs, full control of the ship was a mathematical certainty.
Telok took a moment to savour the striking cerulean blue of the sky. Exnihlio’s atmosphere had been tortured with toxic discharges and electromagnetic distortion for so long, he had forgotten just how clear it could be.
The colour was as he’d imagined the skies of Terra to have once been. Or perhaps its oceans. Ancient histories were so full of hyperbolic allusions to such things that it was difficult to be certain of anything.
When he returned to Mars and remade the system’s star, the planets of the solar system would be reborn, free of the rotted institutions and hidebound cretins upon their surfaces.
Just as the surface of Exnihlio would soon be wiped clean.
Micromechanical disintegration had been endemic to this world’s every structure since the hrud’s entrapment, and without the Breath of the Gods to counter it, planet-wide decay was about to accelerate in exponential leaps.
Telok took a last look around the world he had built and decided he would not miss it at all. In fact, he looked forward to seeing it torn apart from orbit, undone in a devastating cascade of temporal quakes.
Nearly a kilometre below and rendered insignificant by distance, a thousand crystaliths thronged the base of the enormous tower, a glittering honour guard and witnesses to the culmination of his greatest achievement.
Like worshippers gathering to hear a sermon, they encircled the vast, silver-skinned dome into which Telok had guided the crystal ship and its incredulous passengers. Telok almost felt sorry for Kotov, the poor fool believing he was here to rescue a benevolent exile rather than become his ensnared prey.
He conceded that it had been a mistake to allow Kotov and his entourage to live, but vanity and ego would not let such a moment pass without Kotov fully aware of Telok’s genius. It vexed him that the Tindalosi had not slaughtered them at their first encounter, but the magos with the censure brands had proved resourceful in her employment of forbidden artes. The geas would be growing stronger within the Tindalosi, driving their thirst to depths of need that would be nigh unbearable. Already they were drawing the net tighter around Kotov.
Then that particular loose thread would be cut.
Telok lifted his jagged, crystalline arms to the sky, spreading them wide like some lunatic conductor poised to unleash his masterpiece.
And a previously invisible seam split the dome in two.
Its two curved halves began retracting, each folding towards the ground so smoothly that from here it appeared as though each previous segment was being subsumed into the next. The elliptical opening grew wider with every passing second, revealing a yawning void. The atmosphere grew tense, as though the fabric of the universe was aware of the paradigm shift taking place.
Eventually, both silver slices of the dome had fully retracted into the ground and in its place was a black chasm four kilometres wide. Wisps of ochre vapour drifted from below like breath.
Telok smiled at the appropriateness of the image.
He raised his hands, like a summoner in the throes of a mighty invocation or a telekine striving to lift a starship. Though in truth, he was doing none of the lifting.
A vaporous haze of reflected light emerged from the chasm, like a glittering swarm of microscopic flects. The distortion spread in a veiling umbra, a swaddling fog of electromagnetism that lifted the Breath of the Gods from its prison beneath the world.
It emerged without undue haste; too swift an ascent would disturb the intricate dance of its unknowable internal architecture.
As always, Telok was entranced by its magnificence.
Even after millions of years locked away by its creators and forced to endure the denial of its very existence, the Breath of the Gods still had the power to entrance.
The vast gyre of its impossible silver leaves and whirling facets emerged from its long entombment like a newly launched ship rising from a graving dock on its first ascent to the stars.
It seemed to Telok that its outer edges, already immeasurable and inconstant, were expanding. Had releasing it from the cavern in which he had assembled the guttering ruin of its alien consciousness allowed it to assume a loftier scale?
Liquid light spilled over the plaza, spreading over the assembled crystaliths like silver rain. The machine’s outline spun and clawed the air in mockery of all physical laws, each portion of the alien technology orbiting its own unknowable centre of non-gravity.
The Breath of the Gods rose into the air with stately grace.
To where the cavernous holds of the Speranza awaited it.
Blaylock let the sensorium of the Speranza fill him with its pain. Each fallen deck was a void within him, a loss keenly felt. Dahan and Captain Hawkins were doing their best to keep the crystalline boarders contained, but the overwhelming numbers of the enemy were now starting to tell. Instantaneous coordination and communication between the attackers’ various elements was overcoming the advantage conferred to the ship’s defenders by their preparedness and familiarity with its structure.
Blaylock sat sclerotic on the command throne, locked into the sensorium via a coiled MIU cable at his spine. The data prisms on the polished steel roof of the bridge were dull and lifeless, every inload now passing through him.
His consciousness was partitioned into hundreds of separate threads, each one managing a ship-wide system as he sought to keep the Speranza functional. The war to keep the physical spaces of the Ark Mechanicus intact was not the only one being fought.
Unknown assailants were fighting within the datasphere.
The golden weave of Galatea’s stranglehold was tightening on the Speranza’s vital systems, while another presence was systematically burning them out with code that was more potent and pure than anything Blaylock had ever seen.
Was the Speranza fighting back? Was this some form of innate and hitherto unknown defence protocol, like a sleeping immune system finally roused to combat an infection? Blaylock had no idea, but saw enough lethal code-fire being unleashed in the datasphere to know when to keep a safe distance.
Kryptaestrex and Azuramagelli were hardwired into their system hubs with multiple ribbons of cabled MIUs. The deadly combat in the datasphere made noospherics unreliable, and the violent tremors shuddering through the ship’s superstructure made haptic connections prone to disconnection.
Though both senior magi were belligerent, they had sense enough to leave the battle-management to Dahan. They too fought for the Speranza, but in their own way. Kryptaestrex ensured a constant flow of ammunition and war-materiel to the fighting cohorts, cutting power and gravity to sections taken by the enemy.
With Saiixek’s death, command of the enginarium had fallen to Kryptaestrex, but his every imprecation to their spirits was cast out, denied access to the firing rituals of ignition. Whether that was Galatea’s doing or Telok’s, the Speranza remained locked in orbit.
Azuramagelli fought his war beyond the Speranza’s hull, attempting to light the shields and engineer some form of defence against the relentless blasts of teleporting lightning. The shields stubbornly refused to engage, but by altering the density and polarity of the gravimetric fields around the Ark Mechanicus, he had been able to deflect numerous bolts into the void.
Passive auspex showed thousands of displaced crystal c
reatures, inert and devoid of movement, drifting in space. Each successful burst of gravimetrics or vented compartment brought a machine-bray of laughter from Azuramagelli and Kryptaestrex’s augmitters as they congratulated one another on a particularly impressive kill on the enemy.
Kryptaestrex unleashed a binaric curse as a transport car of rotary cannon shells riding the induction rail was intercepted by a freshly arrived host of boarders.
Azuramagelli snapped off a withering reply and turned his attention to the hull-surveyors in an effort to anticipate the next carrier bolt.
Only Galatea played no part in the ship’s defence, which didn’t surprise Blaylock. The machine-hybrid had said little since the attack had begun. It paced the nave and circumference of the bridge on its misaligned legs, twitching and limping as though at war with itself.
Blaylock transferred his primary cognitive awareness to the ship’s exterior. The bridge faded from his perceptions and he became a vast, disembodied observer of proceedings. It took him no time at all to see what Azuramagelli had seen. While the bulk of Exnihlio remained engulfed in hyper-kinetic storms or whiplashing electromagnetic distortion, a thousand-kilometre void had opened in the tempests below.
Like the anticyclonic storm of the Jovian Eye, it was a perfectly elliptical orb. Blaylock’s enhanced magnifications picked out the two geoformer vessels Kryptaestrex had launched earlier. Each ten-kilometre-wide slab of terraforming engineering was a thumbnail of black against the clearing sky below.
said Blaylock.
Blaylock considered the question.
Blaylock returned his focus to the bridge.
Galatea stood before the command throne, its head inches from Blaylock’s face. The silver eyes of its proxy body bored into him with a light that was a little too intense, a little too unhinged. Blaylock recoiled at the smell of overheated bio-conductive gels and the burned electrics of power sources working beyond capacity.
‘Galatea.’
‘Yes, Tarkis?’ it answered, pulling away from him with a distracted air.
‘What do you want?’
‘Want?’
‘Yes,’ said Blaylock. ‘What do you want?’
Was the machine-hybrid’s attention split into too many splintered pieces to maintain any single one with precision? A measure of clarity then appeared in the focus of those hateful silver eyes. Blaylock heard a painful whine of optical actuators.
‘Ah, Tarkis, what we want…’ said Galatea, clattering over to Azuramagelli’s station. But for one crucial difference in cognition, they might have sprung from the same forge-temple. ‘You see the gap in the atmosphere? You understand what it means, its significance?’
Blaylock was unsure as to Galatea’s exact meaning and applied his own interpretation.
‘It means we can send aid to Archmagos Kotov,’ he said.
‘Irrelevant,’ said Galatea. ‘And not what we meant at all.’
‘Then what did you mean?’
‘Kill the head and the body will die,’ said Galatea.
‘What?’
‘It means that, after thousands of years, we can finally fulfil our purpose in crossing the Halo Scar,’ said Galatea. ‘Now we can descend to Exnihlio and face Archmagos Telok.’
Vitali’s floodstream pressure was dangerously elevated, his noospherics ablaze with sensation, and he knew he was grinning like a lunatic at the lectern into which he was plugged. Viewed through the picter mounted in the skull above the door to Forge Elektrus, the processional approach was ablaze with zipping green energy streams and answering bolts of ruby-red las-fire.
Glassy debris from the attacking creatures littered the deck, along with a handful of torn-up skitarii corpses. The first clash had been a heaving broil of power weapons and energy blades of shimmering crystal.
Vitali imagined it to be like the battles of antiquity, when grunting, heaving men in bare metal armour locked shields and pushed against one another with swords stabbing at legs, necks and groins until one side’s strength gave out. Bloody, murderous and woefully inefficient.
Blooded, the skitarii had withdrawn to firing positions around the sealed door as the crystalline creatures launched wave after wave at Forge Elektrus, like hive-dominated brood hunters of the tyrannic swarms.
Linked to the external defence systems, Vitali and Manubia fought alongside the skitarii, albeit from within the safety of Elektrus.
said Vitali in the shared mindspace of Elektrus.
said Vitali, correcting the aim of a point-defence multi-laser.
Vitali read the warning in Manubia’s noospherics and didn’t press the matter, aligning the barrel of the multi-laser at a group of shield-bearing crystalline brutes.
Las-rounds spanked from the shields or dissipated harmlessly within their latticework structures. Skitarii were equipped with enhanced targeting mechanisms, but they didn’t have Vitali’s elevated view or lightness of touch. He shifted the multi-laser’s aim by a hair’s breadth to allow for enfilading diffraction and fired a six-pulse sequence.
The powerful las-bolts vaporised the embedded microscopic machines in a facsimile skull before being split and refracted to fell another three shield-bearers.
No sooner was the gap in the shields revealed than a pair of implanted grenade launchers dropped a pair of spinning canisters in the midst of the enemy. Vitali’s display fogged in the chaos of the detonation as shards of razored glass fell in a brittle rain.
Vitali shouted in excitement and gleefully hunted fresh targets.
Truer words had never been spoken.
An enormous beast lumbered around the corner, an ogre of glass and opaque crystal. It shrugged off las-rounds and a giant crater in its chest was filled with a nexus of crackling energies like an embedded reactor.
A torrent of green fire spewed down the approach corridor and exploded against the forge door. The external picters were burned away and their pain fed back through his link to the mindspace.
Vitali severed the connection and snapped his data-spikes free from the lectern. The sudden disconnect was disor
ientating, and Vitali felt repercussive pain jolt his limbs. His vision rolled with interference as his brain switched from perceiving the world through an elevated picter to his own optics.
Abrehem Locke still sat on the throne before the shaven-headed adepts of his choir. They chanted worshipful verses of quantum runes, basic incantations to increase the efficiency of a repaired engine.
The involuntary twitches throughout Locke’s body told Vitali the man was still engaged in his silent war with Galatea in the datascape of the Speranza. Locke’s two cronies lounged next to him, as if they thought they were superfluous to requirements. It irked Vitali that the one called Hawke bore an Imperial Guard tattoo, but had yet to pick up a weapon.
Directly across from Vitali, Chiron Manubia remained interfaced with her own lectern, her eyes darting back and forth beneath their lids. The sounds of battle beyond the forge were audible even over the thunder of its machinery: explosions, gunfire, feral war-shouts, breaking glass. The secondary entrance was holding, but what of the approach he’d been tasked with defending?
Vitali beckoned Locke’s fellow bondsmen over to him as five skitarii took up position behind defunct machinery piled in rough barricades flanking the door. White-green dribbles of molten metal ran down its inner faces and Vitali detected a significant deviation from the door’s normal verticality.
‘Should we be standing here?’ asked Coyne, nervously fingering the trigger guard of a heavy shock-pistol as though it was a venomous serpent. ‘That door’s giving in any moment.’
‘That is precisely why we need to be here,’ said Vitali, now understanding Manubia’s words about being in the firing line. He glanced back over to the throne, where a skitarii pack-master was dragging Hawke forward and thrusting a lasrifle into his hands.
The man would fight whether he wanted to or not.
As would they all.
Vitali lifted Manubia’s graviton pistol from his belt, reciting the Bosonic Rites as he pressed the activation stud. The weapon gave a satisfying hum, and he felt it grow heavier in his grip.
‘Interesting,’ said Vitali. ‘Local gravitational fluctuations. Only to be expected, I suppose.’
Gods of Mars Page 24