Gods of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  ‘Brother Yael?’ said Roboute. ‘Where are others? Why is the gate closed?’

  Yael shook off the portal’s effects with a shake of his head.

  ‘They are not coming,’ he said. ‘The witch claims that, with time, she can undo the damage Telok has done. My brothers are giving their lives to grant her that time.’

  ‘They’re staying on Exnihlio?’

  ‘Did I not just say that?’ snapped Yael, turning away and leaving the stateroom.

  Roboute understood. Tanna had sent Yael back to the Speranza as the Templars’ legacy. A necessary order, but that wouldn’t make it any easier to bear for a warrior denied a glorious death alongside his comrades.

  ‘You have to go,’ said Ilanna. ‘Stop Telok.’

  Roboute nodded and bent to kiss her forehead before turning and following Yael onto the bridge. Kotov was already there, plugged into what was normally Pavelka’s station on the portside array. Low-level crackles of binaric communication burbled and squawked from the speaker grilles.

  As Roboute entered, Kotov stood and disconnected. Anders was on the vox, his face a picture of concentration.

  ‘The Speranza is under attack,’ said Kotov.

  Roboute nodded. ‘Makes sense. How else was Telok going to get back to Mars? Is it crystaliths?’

  Kotov nodded. ‘An army of them, attacking throughout my ship.’

  He spoke like a man who had just woken to find his clothes infested with parasites and had no idea how to remove them. Kotov nodded towards Ven Anders and said, ‘Captain Hawkins and Magos Dahan are coordinating the defence, but much of the ship has already fallen.’

  ‘Where is Telok?’ demanded Yael.

  ‘Unknown, but it must be assumed he will head for the bridge.’

  ‘Then so will we,’ said Roboute, heading to the weapons rack at the rear of the bridge. He unlocked it with a key hanging next to it, which wasn’t exactly secure, but it meant he could get to his weapons quickly. Roboute unsnapped a drum-fed combat shotgun and slung it over one shoulder then gathered a host of fresh powercells for his pistol. Finally, he lifted out a worn leather sword belt and buckled it around his waist.

  The blade was a Calthan vorpal with a solid-state energy core worked into the handle. Anything he cut with this blade wouldn’t be getting back up.

  ‘We’re pretty close to the bridge, but if there are crystaliths aboard, then it’s likely we’ll have to fight our way there,’ he said. ‘We could use some more men to help get us there.’

  ‘I’ve detached some men from Captain Hawkins’s forces in the training deck,’ said Anders, setting down the vox and slapping a fresh powercell into the hilt of his sword. ‘They’ll link with us in the Path to Wisdom.’

  ‘Then let’s go,’ said Roboute.

  They took a transit elevator to the forward loading ramp, and Yael ducked down and dropped to the deck before it was even half lowered. Roboute heard a voice cry out in alarm and slid off the edge of the ramp as he realised it was one he knew.

  Yael held Emil Nader by the neck.

  ‘That’s my pilot,’ said Roboute as the Cadians fanned out from the ramp to surround Emil. Kotov and the skitarii followed as the Space Marine lowered Emil to the deck.

  Emil Nader was ashen and looked like he’d just run from one end of the Speranza to the other. Behind him, still trailing scads of icy vapour from its recent arrival, was the Renard’s shuttle.

  ‘Roboute?’ he said. ‘How the hell did you get on board?’

  ‘Long story,’ said Roboute. ‘Are you all right? I saw you on the shuttle with Galatea.’

  Emil massaged his bruised neck and glared angrily at Yael.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I thought they were going to kill me after I got them on board, but they couldn’t have cared less about me. It was like I was an insect to them.’

  ‘How long have they been gone?’ demanded Kotov.

  Emil took a step back from the archmagos, staring in horror at his ruined shoulders.

  ‘Twenty minutes, give or take.’

  ‘Can you not be more precise, Mister Nader?’ said Kotov.

  ‘Not really, I was trying not to puke in terror at the time,’ snapped Emil.

  Roboute hid a grin and said, ‘Emil, I need you to head to my staterooms. Ilanna’s there, and she’s hurt. Badly. Look after her.’

  Emil nodded, grateful not to have been asked to accompany the war party. ‘Of course, Roboute. I’ll take good care of her.’

  ‘Where’s Adara?’ asked Roboute, moving past Emil. ‘If there was ever a time for him to earn his keep, it’s now.’

  Emil grabbed his arm, and Roboute didn’t like the look he saw in his pilot’s eyes one bit.

  ‘Roboute, Adara’s dead,’ said Emil. ‘Galatea killed him.’

  The news hit Roboute like a sledgehammer to the gut. The air was pulled from his lungs.

  ‘And that’s not all you need to know.’

  ‘What…?’

  ‘It’s about Mistress Tychon,’ said Emil.

  When the door to the bridge swung open to the sound of shouting skitarii protection details, Blaylock checked the feed from his various cognitive streams. Had he missed the fall of a transit deck or a sudden assault he’d not known was coming?

  No, Hawkins and Dahan still had the main thrust of the enemy assault contained on the training deck. The attackers were spread throughout the ship like an infection, and Blaylock even saw a measure of confused inaction in their movements.

  Blaylock turned his head as far as the MIU connections of the command throne allowed. He couldn’t see the entrance to the bridge and was too enmeshed with the Speranza to easily disconnect.

  The fact that he wasn’t hearing any gunfire reassured him that nothing untoward was happening. The skitarii were behaving aggressively because that was how they were trained to be.

  Then he heard the clash of blades, screams of pain and the wet meat sound of cleaving flesh. The sound was short-lived, and Blaylock felt a crushing presence of grating, archaic code as a hideous amalgam of iron and flesh, crystal and glass entered his field of vision.

  As broad as a Dreadnought and just as bulky, the monster climbed to the raised mezzanine level of the bridge with the awkward gait of a load-lifter with degraded functionality in its locomotive limbs.

  It turned to face Blaylock and even though the face at the centre of its torso mass was rendered in artificial plasflesh, there was no mistaking its features.

  said Blaylock.

  The Lost Magos took a crashing step towards him, and the reek of dead flesh and chemicals was almost overpowering. Telok extended a fused gauntlet of steel and crystal, and placed a clawed finger the size of a sword on Blaylock’s chest.

  ‘Flesh-voice if you please, Tarkis.’

  Blaylock nodded and said, ‘Where is Archmagos Kotov?’

  ‘Dead.’

  Blaylock nodded. It had been the only logical answer.

  Galatea appeared behind Telok, the black robes of its proxy body soaked in the blood of skitarii and its blade-limbs coated in the stuff. Chunks of hewn flesh lay like butcher’s offal on its lopsided palanquin, where the brain jars of its captive minds crackled and glimmered with furious activity. Blaylock saw one of the jars had been broken, the grey matter within now absent. He wondered who had been discarded from Galatea’s neuromatrix.

  ‘It was close to a statistical certainty that you would betray us,’ said Blaylock.

  ‘Betray is such a hostile word, Tarkis,’ said Galatea. ‘We were merely following the precepts of a plan set in motion millennia ago. That we had to deceive you to see it to fruition was a small price to pay.’

  Blaylock saw movement behind Galatea.

  Kryptaestrex.

  Disengaging from his station and powering up his overpowered manipulator limbs. Never before had Blaylock been more grateful for a senior magos who resembled a load-lifting combat servitor than he was right at this moment.

  He kept his voic
e entirely neutral.

  ‘What do you intend?’

  Telok smiled and the gesture was as alien as anything Blaylock had ever seen.

  ‘Come now, Tarkis, you already know what I intend,’ said Telok, withdrawing his claw and lifting his arms to encompass the bridge. ‘The Speranza is now my ship. I intend to return to Mars with the Breath of the Gods and take control of the Mechanicus.’

  Now it was Blaylock’s turn to laugh.

  ‘Until we reached this world, I never believed you really existed. And even then I assumed the years of isolation must have made you mad. I see now that I was entirely correct in this latter assumption.’

  Kryptaestrex was now fully disengaged from his MIUs. He just had to keep Telok’s attention for a little longer. Within a compartmentalised section of his mind, Blaylock constructed a shut-down code like the one he had used to prevent Vitali Tychon from killing Galatea.

  Oh, how he regretted that decision.

  ‘The ship is not yours yet,’ said Blaylock. ‘Our military forces will repel your crystalline army. Already their cohesion is falling away in the face of superior skill and strength.’

  ‘Yes, I felt the demise of the nexus-creature I sent aboard,’ said Telok. ‘But I have already assumed command of the crystaliths aboard the Speranza. And when we regain control of the datasphere, we will purge every last deck of oxygen and heat to kill your soldiers deck by deck.’

  Regain control…?

  Then the war in the datascape Blaylock had witnessed was some part of the Speranza fighting back as he had hoped. Telok’s careless words also implied that Galatea’s hold on the ship’s vital systems was no longer in place.

  If ever there was a time to strike, it was now.

  Blaylock reached into his compartmentalised thoughts at the same time as Kryptaestrex made his move. He unleashed a focused spear of stand-down codes straight at Telok, each binaric string freighted with every authority signifier and title proof Blaylock possessed.

  Such a searing volume and intensity of code would have staggered a Warlord Titan, but it had no visible effect on Telok.

  Kryptaestrex snapped his claws shut on Galatea’s torso, crushing the proxy body. He wrenched it backwards, and an oil-squirting stump of writhing, chrome-plated spinal column erupted from the machine-hybrid’s belly.

  Telok spun and hammered his monstrously oversized fists into Kryptaestrex’s chest. Crystalline claws punched through the boxy housing of his body like the power claws of a chrono-gladiator.

  Kryptaestrex was simply obliterated.

  Blaylock initiated an emergency decoupling from the command throne, its MIU ribbon connectors retracting into their spinal ports. Finished with his murder, Telok turned to face him with a look of profound disappointment.

  ‘Really, Tarkis? That was the best you could do?’ said Telok. ‘I’d hoped Magos Alhazen would have better prepared you.’

  ‘How could you possibly–’

  Telok didn’t let him finish.

  ‘Perhaps something more like this,’ said Telok. ‘Tyger, tyger.’

  The effect was instantaneous.

  Blaylock’s mind went into spasms as it suffered a synaptic overload comparable to an epileptic seizure. Even as he tumbled from the command throne the perceptual centres of his brain were overwhelmed by the fearful symmetry of an orange and black feline stalking a moonlit forest.

  What Telok had done was as catastrophic as it was complete.

  He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak.

  Only his visual systems had been left unaffected.

  Galatea looked down at him with its lifeless silver eyes. Its proxy body had been savagely twisted and broken, hanging limply over the palanquin like a lifeless marionette.

  Yet it was still, hatefully, functional.

  The machine-hybrid jerked, as though mocking Blaylock’s spasming contortions. The brains flickered, in time with Galatea’s involuntary motion. Were they the cause of its internal distress? Impossible to tell, but perhaps Mistress Tychon was causing more trouble than the vile machine had banked upon.

  Galatea turned away and limped out of his angle of vision in the direction of Azuramagelli’s station. Blaylock could see nothing of what was happening, but from the sound of breaking glass and snapping MIU ribbons, knew it was nothing good.

  ‘The astrogation hub is secure,’ said Galatea.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Telok. ‘Then plot a course for Mars.’

  Even with the Speranza under attack, the Path to Wisdom was still thronged with tech-priests. They huddled around the vast columns in a fug of incense, endlessly studying the unending streams of ticker-tape and nonsense binary streaming from the carvings wrought into the doric capitals atop each column.

  They ignored the Renard’s grav-sled as Roboute steered it towards the gigantic doors at its far end. A heavy slab of rectangular iron with a pilot’s bay at one end and an underslung repulsor generator, the sled scattered chanting groups of lexmechanics bearing armfuls of rolled scrolls. Servo-skulls crossing the vaulted space loosed squeals of irritated binary as they flitted from its path.

  Much like the rest of them, the grav-sled had seen better days. Its structure and engine had been shot, pummelled and overloaded on Katen Venia to the point of it being very nearly written off by Kayrn Sylkwood upon its eventual return to the Renard.

  Roboute had made a sacred vow to repair the sled, and though it had taken him the best part of the journey to Exnihlio to do it, he had been true to his word.

  The grav-sled wasn’t a passenger transport, it was a cargo carrier. Its rear compartment was little more than a corrugated cuboid space capable of bearing sixty metric tonnes.

  More than enough to transport Sergeant Rae’s men and their lethal mix of weapons. The veteran sergeant and his men had rendezvoused with them at the dorsal end of the Path to Wisdom, looking like they’d been in the fight of their lives. Rae was genuinely pleased to see his commanding officer, but looked distinctly unhappy at his current assignment.

  Roboute didn’t care.

  All he cared about was getting to the bridge and killing Galatea. The machine-hybrid had always been a thing to avoid, but with its revealed treachery, together with its killing of Adara Siavash and its mutilation of Linya, it had become Roboute’s sworn enemy.

  His cheeks were wet with tears as he guided the sled along the Path to Wisdom. He ignored its many incredible sights, the diamond and chromium-plated pillars, the lapis-lazuli inscriptions and golden wirework murals. The soaring vault of the ceiling, with its circuit diagram frescoes of ancient Mars, was an irrelevance to him. Nothing now had any meaning to Roboute.

  He’d wanted a life beyond the stars, beyond the Imperium, but all he had found were the same treacheries, the same greed and the same insane ambition. Now Adara was dead and Ilanna likely blinded for the rest of her life.

  How many more of his friends would have to suffer for his quixotic desire to leave the Imperium? None, he decided.

  Kotov and Yael sat to his right, both lost in thought.

  Why had they crossed the Halo Scar?

  Yael was a crusader of the Black Templars, and the warriors of his Chapter were driven by an imperative from a time before the Imperium. Bound to notions of expanding the Emperor’s realm, they could no more have turned from this quest than stopped breathing.

  Desperation, greed and, yes, perhaps even a truthful desire to expand mankind’s reservoir of knowledge was at the heart of Kotov’s motivations. Each of them had crossed the Halo Scar seeking something to fill a void, to satisfy a need they hadn’t even admitted to themselves.

  Were their reasons any more or less noble than his own? He didn’t think so. The worst thing was that they had each found what they were looking for.

  And now they were paying the price for that.

  ‘Galatea killed my friends,’ Roboute said. ‘So when we get to the bridge, does anyone object if I kill it?’

  ‘My brothers lie dead beneath an alien sun, t
heir legacy left unharvested,’ said Yael, and suddenly he no longer looked like a young warrior. ‘Telok and Galatea die by my hand.’

  ‘The Speranza is a Mechanicus vessel,’ said Kotov, reasoned, logical hatred in every word. ‘Taken by an abomination and a traitor. A servant of the Omnissiah must be the one to end them.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Roboute. ‘Then everyone gets to kill it.’

  The vast doors to the bridge loomed ahead of them, and Roboute slowed the grav-sled as he saw a scrapyard’s worth of broken machinery heaped at their base.

  Praetorians, weaponised servitors, combat-hulks, skitarii kill-packs. At least two hundred shattered, las-burned and hacked-apart bodies. There had been a ferocious battle fought here, but something was missing.

  ‘Who were they fighting?’

  ‘They did this to themselves,’ said Kotov.

  ‘They killed each other?’ asked Yael.

  ‘The placement of the bodies and the nature of their wounds offers no other conclusion,’ said Kotov as Roboute brought the sled to a swift halt.

  ‘Telok?’ said Roboute.

  ‘Telok or Galatea,’ replied Kotov. ‘Not that it makes any difference. They’re still dead.’

  Yael dropped to the ground as Colonel Anders, Sergeant Rae and ffiteen Guardsmen clambered from the back of the grav-sled. They spread out in a loose arrowhead formation, rifles unwavering in their sectors of responsibility. Yael moved away from the sled, his bolter sweeping for targets.

  Anders craned his neck to look up the length of the door.

  ‘That’s a big damn door,’ he said. ‘Anyone know how to open it?’

  Climbing down into the midst of the dead Mechanicus soldiery, Roboute had to agree with Kotov’s assessment of how they had died. He slung his rotary shotgun around, wrapping his fingers around the textured grip and placing his other hand on the recoil stabiliser.

  The archmagos picked his way quickly through the shattered bodies to a lectern panel at the side of the huge door. A pair of circling skulls floated above the lectern, their jaws open wide in expressions of horror, witnesses to the slaughter.