Gods of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Vintras turned from the hijacked body of Magos Ohtar, seeing bolt after bolt of alien lightning explode onto the deck.

  Luth saw the same thing.

  +Mount your engine, Skinwalker,+ he ordered. +Fight as Pack!+

  Kotov’s last hope crumbled in the face of Telok’s pronouncement. With Galatea at his side, every aspect of the machine-hybrid’s actions made a new and terrible sense. Roboute Surcouf’s analogy of the spider in its web was now proven entirely correct.

  Like a dreadful puppet-master, Archmagos Telok had orchestrated every aspect of Kotov’s quest from the start. What level of commitment and preparedness must have gone into such a plan? Kotov could have almost admired the dizzying complexity of Telok’s machinations from beyond the edge of the galaxy were they not about to see him dead.

  Kotov stared at Galatea with a hatred he had not known himself capable of experiencing. The machine-hybrid had set its snare with a tale of abandonment and vengeance, with just enough truth at the heart of its falsehoods to be credible.

  And he had fallen for its lies.

  ‘Galatea,’ he said as the revelation of its true loyalties unlocked yet another. ‘From the myth of Old Earth, yes? That should have told me everything you said was a lie. The tale of the sculptor who crafts an ivory statue that he falls in love with, and which is then given life by a god… It is all right there.’

  ‘What’s right there?’ said Surcouf.

  ‘That Galatea was a creature of Telok’s,’ said Kotov. ‘Don’t you see? We assumed Galatea was what it claimed to be, a thinking machine, but it is not. It is both more and less than that.’

  ‘Then what is it?’ asked Tanna.

  Kotov made his way to the landing platform, where Galatea squatted beside Telok. Microtremors shook its body, and the connections passing between the brain jars were strangely hostile, as though no longer entirely under Galatea’s control. The Lost Magos appeared oblivious to this, and nodded like a mentor encouraging a struggling pupil towards deeper understanding.

  ‘Go on,’ said Telok. ‘You’re so close, archmagos.’

  ‘It’s you,’ said Kotov. ‘Galatea isn’t a thinking machine at all. It’s been you all along, hasn’t it? Before you crossed the Halo Scar you excised a portion of your own consciousness and grafted it into the heuristic mechanisms of the machine’s neuromatrix. Every dealing we have had with Galatea has been with an aspect of your personality, hived from the throne of your cerebral cortex and given autonomy within this… this thing. You practically told me as much, with all your metaphysical nonsense about alphas and omegas and the self-created god. Your ego couldn’t pass up any chance to taunt us with your presence as a ghost in the machine.’

  Kotov shook his head ruefully. ‘It beggars belief that I did not see it.’

  ‘As Galatea, I told you what you wanted to hear, Kotov,’ said Telok, ‘and in your desperation you chose to ignore the truth that was right in front of you.’

  ‘Why tell us that Galatea wanted to kill Telok?’ asked Surcouf.

  ‘Few motives are as pure as vengeance,’ said Galatea, its voice modulating to match Telok’s. ‘Would you have found us as credible if we simply offered to help you? We think not.’

  By now Kotov and his attendant warriors had reached the foot of the landing platform. Kotov paused at the iron steps as he felt the particle vibration and neutron flow of the layered voids passing over him. Complex field interactions caused his noospherics and floodstream to grey out for a second.

  In that instant, the Black Templars and Cadians had their weapons locked to their shoulders. They knew, as Kotov knew, that they were inside the voids protecting the raised platform.

  ‘Kill them,’ ordered Tanna.

  Bolter fire erupted. Flashing las followed.

  The eldar launched themselves into the air, going from complete standstill to bounding motion with no intermediate stage. They landed on the platform with a speed and sure-footedness that made Kotov gasp with astonishment.

  Explosions erupted all over Telok’s body, but none impacted.

  Ablative energy integral to his crystalline flesh ignited the bolt warheads prematurely and vaporised the flashing discs of the eldar weapons. Telok’s density was so enormous not even the kinetic force of the detonations staggered him.

  Kotov’s skitarii put themselves between him and the gunshots. Their blades and weapons locked to Galatea. Issur and Varda climbed towards Telok, their swords singing from scabbards. The eldar reached him first, their swords shrieking blurs of ivory. They surrounded Telok, cutting and lashing him with crackling forks of anbaric energy.

  Telok extended his clawed arms, sweeping around like some ancient practitioner of weaponless combat.

  The eldar were too nimble, and laughed as they vaulted and swayed aside from his clumsy swipes.

  But catching them had never been Telok’s aim.

  A blitzing tempest of electrical vortices built around his arms and exploded outwards in a hurricane of white-green fire. The eldar warriors were hurled away, their armour melting and the plumes on their tapered helms ablaze. Telok’s laughter cut through their howls of pain.

  Then Varda and Issur charged in.

  The Emperor’s Champion swept below a bladed fist the size of a Contemptor’s claw. The Black Sword gouged a valley in Telok’s flank. Issur’s blow was blocked and before he could sidestep, a fit of rogue muscle spasms staggered him.

  His paralysis lasted a fraction of a second only, but even that was too long. Telok bludgeoned him from the landing platform and Issur flew thirty metres through the air to land with a bone-crunching thud of cracked ceramite.

  The Black Sword erupted from Telok’s hybridised metal and crystal body as Varda ran him through. Telok spun as Varda wrenched the blade clear, unleashing a storm of crackling binary that froze the Emperor’s Champion rigid.

  Telok’s enormous claw closed on Varda’s body, ready to tear him apart. Before he could crush the life from Varda, a weave of glittering light engulfed his twisted features.

  Kotov saw Bielanna down on one knee, her hands pressed to her forehead as she directed her energies into obliterating Telok’s mind with heinous witchcraft. Howling psychic energies blazed around Telok and he hurled Varda from the platform as a jagged, crystalline sheath rose from his shoulders.

  ‘Enough!’ roared Telok and Bielanna screamed as the arcane mechanisms wreathing his skull flared with incandescent energies.

  ‘This has gone on long enough,’ said Telok, as he and Galatea climbed onto the shuttle’s ramp. ‘Even my vanity has limits when it compromises my designs. The acausal bindings securing the hrud warrens are no more, so this world is entering its final entropic death spasms. I would ask you to bear witness to Exnihlio’s final moments, but you will be corpses long before it dies.’

  Telok lifted his arms and the vast structures enclosing the plaza erupted with lightning from dozens of latticework vanes at their roofs. Forking bolts of energy arced down and slammed into the ground with deafening whipcracks of searing fire.

  Kotov saw freshly wrought shapes emerge from the strobing after-images, glossy and humanoid, marching in lockstep to form a perfect circle around the landing platform.

  A thousands-strong army of crystaliths.

  She’d missed a lot of things about the regiment, but until now Kayrn Sylkwood hadn’t realised just how much she’d missed the thrill of marshalling armed forces under fire. The attackers were appearing without warning, materialising in explosions of writhing bonfires of lightning like a teleport assault.

  The mechanics of their arrival didn’t matter.

  It was, as her old drill sergeant used to say at every objection to his orders being completed on time, irrelevant.

  Hurricanes of green fire flashed through the deck, flickering in opposition to bright bolts of red las. Percussive shock waves of explosions and thundering engines echoed from the hangar walls. Shouting squad leaders and the cries of burning soldiers put an extra punch in Ka
yrn’s step.

  Every minute these tanks remained in the hangar was costing the lives of Cadian soldiers on the training deck.

  Kayrn ducked into cover behind a train of ammo gurneys currently serving as cover to a Cadian infantry platoon. Jahn Callins was issuing orders to a gaggle of serious-looking junior officers. Two ran off to with vox-casters to enact those orders. The third stayed at his side.

  He glanced up. ‘How’re the starboard racks looking?’

  ‘Empty,’ she answered. ‘Two through seven are clear. The rails on eight and nine are buckled beyond immediate repair. Those tanks aren’t coming down without lifter-rig support.’

  ‘Damn it,’ snapped Callins. ‘There’s Stormhammers up there. You’re sure they’re non-functional?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ she said, and Callins knew better than to doubt her.

  ‘Captain Hawkins isn’t going to be pleased.’

  ‘We’ve gotten four more squadrons of superheavies into the ready line,’ she said. ‘That ought to cheer him up.’

  All four of those squadrons were even now rumbling towards the starboard egress ramps after the quickest blessing and anointing the Mechanicus could muster. Throughout the deck, armoured tanks rammed damaged vehicles out of their way. Cadian infantry squads traded shots with their crystalline attackers from the cover of overturned gurneys and wrecked tanks.

  ‘The Leman Russ are next,’ continued Kayrn, running a finger down the order of battle displayed on her static-fuzzed slate. ‘APCs are mustering at the rear to pick up the infantry.’

  Callins nodded and said, ‘Fast work, Sylkwood. Remind me to find out why you’re not with a Cadian regiment when this is over.’

  ‘Buy me a drink and I might just tell you.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ grinned Callins.

  A bolt of green fire punched through the crate above Kayrn’s head. She ducked closer to the deck as Guardsmen either side of her returned fire.

  ‘These crates empty?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, apart from a few loose bolter shells.’

  ‘Not exactly the best cover.’

  ‘No, but it probably won’t explode if it takes a hit.’

  ‘Good point, well made.’

  A pair of frags coughed from portable launchers. Rattling bursts of stubber fire blazed from a heavy weapons team to Kayrn’s left.

  ‘None of the turret weapons are firing?’ she asked.

  ‘In a hangar filled with ordnance and fuel?’ said Callins, putting away his slate and checking the load on his lasgun.

  ‘Sure, why not?’ said Kayrn. ‘I remember back on Belis Corona we had whole squadrons of Shadowswords firing on a pack of Archenemy battle-engines inside a fyceline depot.’

  Callins shook his head.

  ‘This isn’t a Black Crusade, and we’re not that desperate yet.’

  As if to contradict him, the deck plates shook as three ammo gurneys laden with gunmetal-grey warheads and drums of promethium went up like a volcanic eruption. Secondary explosions took half a dozen fuel trucks with them.

  Servitor fire-teams deployed to fight the blaze, but streams of enemy fire cut them down. Blazing gouts of promethium spilled in all directions. Tar-black smoke spread like a shroud over the fighting, making the air heavy with toxins.

  ‘Damn the Eye,’ said Callins, but even as the curse left his lips a flood of oxygen-depleting liquids rained from a score of swinging extender-arms belonging to Magos Turentek’s vast rig apparatus. The boxy arrangement of bio-sustaining hubs that made up the Fabricatus Locum was swarming with crystalline attackers, but Turentek wasn’t sparing any of his functionality for defence.

  All that mattered was his forge.

  In seconds the vaulted space was awash in hard water residue, and Kayrn was soaked to the skin. The fires guttered and died in the suddenly thin air, suffocated by Turentek’s esoteric deluge.

  Their sheltering gurney rocked with the force of a nearby explosion, and Kayrn risked a glance through one of the ragged holes scorched through the ammo crates.

  Emerging through the black rain were hundreds of glistening crystalline beasts. From humanoid warriors that looked oddly like Space Marines, to lumbering things that powered forwards on vast forelimbs and things that looked like weaponised servitor guns.

  Kayrn wiped her face clear and steadied her pistol on the top of the crate. She had enough shots and spare cells to take out maybe twenty or thirty targets.

  Las-fire blasted into the charging creatures. Beside her, Callins pumped shot after shot from his lasrifle. This was how Cadians fought, shoulder to shoulder in the face of insurmountable odds. Fighting to the last. No retreat, no surrender.

  Fighting until the job was done.

  The deck shook with a thunderous, booming vibration.

  ‘What the–’ said Kayrn, looking through the downpour to see what new threat was incoming.

  A firestorm of detonations erupted among the crystalline monsters. Blinding storms of heavy las ripped through their ranks. Chugging detonations and enormous impacts ploughed great furrows in the deck. Fulminate-bright traceries of high-intensity turbo-fire tore the enemy apart in blitzing explosions that sawed back and forth in a torrent of unending fire.

  Another teeth-loosening thud shook the deck, each crashing impact like the hammerblow of a god.

  Realisation struck. Kayrn turned and looked up.

  And up.

  Lupa Capitalina and Canis Ulfrica stood side by side, rain-slick and haloed by dying fires. Burning exhaust gases plumed from louvred vents and dark water flashed to vapour on their weapon arms. Amarok and Vilka stalked before their titanic cousins and Kayrn joined the cheers of her fellow Cadians.

  Legio Sirius were in the fight.

  Far below the surface of Exnihlio, entropy was afoot. The hated machinery of ancient design that had kept the eternally migratory swarms of hrud fixed in time and space failed one after another.

  Technology the likes of which had never been seen within the Imperium burned white-hot against the senescent power of so many imprisoned aliens. One hrud could drive a mortal to the grave in minutes, a warren of them was entropy distilled and honed like a breacher drill punching through soft clay.

  Gold and brass gobbets of molten metal fell in a glittering rain, transmuting to base metal and then to dust as it fell from the cavern roof. Every scavenged sheet and spar of metal forming the slum-warrens corroded to ruin in moments, like a time-lapsed picter. The rock upon which their prison had stood crumbled and turned to powder as millennia of erosion took hold.

  The collapse was total, thousands of tonnes of disintegrating metal and rock tumbling into the geothermal abyss over which it had been built. Had this been any mortal settlement, thousands would already be dead, thousands more killed in the cascade of collapse.

  By the time the first dilapidated structure fell from the porous and crumbling cliff-face, the hrud had already gone. Freed from the iron grip of machines holding them fast to this moment in time and space, they shifted their wholly alien physiology through multi-angular dimensions unknown to the minds of humankind.

  Unfettered by such limiting notions as matter, time and space, the hrud migration from Exnihlio began in earnest. They would cross galaxies and oceans of time to be rid of this world’s constricting touch.

  But first they would have vengeance for their stolen freedom.

  Submitting to one last notion of fixed vectors, the hrud burrowed invisibly down through the rock to the planet’s core.

  Ultimate entropy took hold of Exnihlio’s molten heart.

  And crushed it.

  Bolter shells chased the Renard’s shuttle into the sky, but the vessel was too fast to bring down with small-arms fire. Tanna shot anyway, but lowered his weapon when the shuttle climbed beyond range.

  Surcouf shouted Ultramarian curses at the ascending vessel. Ilanna Pavelka knelt beside him with her head bowed. If she still had eyes, Tanna might have thought her weeping. Ven Anders and his soldiers formed a
loose circle around Kotov, who watched Telok’s departure with a mix of despair and frustration.

  The eldar warriors surrounded their seer. Her alien features were too inscrutable to read with certainty, but it seemed to Tanna that the corners of her lips were upturned. As though their failure to stop Telok had been her plan all along.

  ‘Did you know this would happen?’ he asked, priming himself to rip her head from her shoulders if her answer displeased him.

  ‘This? No,’ she said, and, strangely, Tanna believed her. ‘It was merely one of myriad possible outcomes, but it is a moment in time that opens up so many potential futures I had not dared hope might ever come to pass.’

  She looked out over the slowly advancing army of implacable crystaliths, as though this particular future had been inevitable.

  ‘I will never meet them,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’ asked Tanna, working fresh shells into his bolter.

  ‘My daughters. I will never birth them, never hold them and never see them grow,’ said Bielanna, her face wet with tears. ‘I hoped your deaths would restore the future where they are given the chance of life, but such ill-fated intent only brings further misery. Everything I set out to change has come to nothing.’

  Tanna drove a round into the breech.

  ‘Nothing is for nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Do you realise how ridiculous that sounds?’

  ‘You set out to change something,’ said Tanna, remembering the last words of Aelius before his death at Dantium Gate. ‘That you failed does not diminish the attempt. Knowing you might effect change, but failing to try… That is contemptible.’

  Even as he spoke, Tanna was struck by the utter incongruity of a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes offering words of comfort to the xenos witch who had killed his former Emperor’s Champion.

  Beyond the galaxy, far from the light of the Emperor, such a thing did not seem so far-fetched. Tanna took a breath, knowing that even if he lived to return to the Imperium, he would take that thought to his grave.

  The army of crystalline monsters were a hundred metres out, drawing close at a measured, inexorable pace. Tanna moved away from the eldar. Their deaths were to be their own, and he would not have his body’s final resting place among them.