Gods of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Kotov’s skitarii went after him, and their fury at what had been done here was plain to see. Roboute followed at a more measured pace as Kotov’s mechadendrites opened a hatch at the base of the lectern. Blue light haloed Kotov’s features.

  Roboute tapped the wide-mouthed barrel of his shotgun against the metres-thick door to the bridge.

  ‘Does the fact that Telok can turn our weapons against us and paralyse our armour, or that his avatar is in control of the ship, give anyone second thoughts about what’s going to happen when we get through here?’

  No one answered.

  ‘Thought not,’ he said, picking a path towards Kotov. ‘So, can you get us onto the bridge?’

  The archmagos didn’t answer. A shower of hissing sparks exploded from the hatch. Kotov fell back, feedback current rippling along the length of his mechadendrites. Flames licked from the hatch, and molten metal dribbled down the lectern.

  ‘No,’ said Archmagos Kotov. ‘I cannot.’

  ‘On your left!’ shouted Tanna, blocking a blow and rolling his wrists to thrust his blade into the blank face of a crystalith. Varda swayed aside from the blow arcing towards his head, and spun on his heel to decapitate his attacker.

  The Black Templars were in constant motion. Circling the kneeling eldar. Like temple guards protecting priests whose credo forbade violence of any sort.

  Never stop, never give the enemy a chance to mass.

  A shimmering nimbus of light haloed the xenos, a sure sign of their witchery that would normally have earned Tanna’s undying hate. That it had come to this, warriors of the Black Templars fighting to protect the life of eldar, was a measure of the strange turns life could take.

  Bielanna sat in the centre of the eldar circle. Corposant danced along her limbs. Light bled from her eyes in mercurial tears.

  ‘Low on your right,’ said Varda, and Tanna swept his sword down.

  A crystalline blade shattered on the hard edge of his notched sword. The grip still thrummed in his hand, the spirit within revelling in the fight.

  ‘Emperor bless you, Ilanna Pavelka,’ said Tanna. His blade was long blunted, but every blow that broke the surface layers of crystal was a killing one.

  Tanna barged with his shoulder, making space. The enemy was fast and strong, but he was a Space Marine. His boot thundered against a crystal kneecap, shattering it. His elbow spun out and pulverised a glassy skull. He fought with all the skill and strength bred into him by the fleshwrights of his Chapter and the genesmiths of a forgotten age.

  ‘For Kul Gilad,’ said Tanna, killing another animated monster.

  ‘And Bracha,’ shouted Varda in answer.

  ‘An… and Auiden,’ said Issur as they came together again.

  The honoured dead fought with them, carried in their very souls and every killing blow. And though he bled from a score of wounds, Tanna’s heart was that of Sigismund. A mighty organ forged upon the anvil of battle in the Imperium’s darkest hour.

  And while it still beat, he would fight.

  As would they all.

  Issur’s blade cut a deadly path through the crystaliths. His jawline was taut with the effort of controlling his spasms. His footwork was faultless, his bladework sublime. He would have made a formidable Emperor’s Champion had the war-visions come to him.

  That honour had gone to Atticus Varda, a warrior who had never once defeated Issur in the practice cages, but whose heart was unclouded by petty resentments. Clad in the Armour of Faith and wielding the Black Sword, Varda was a towering figure. A hero from the Chapter annals, worthy of mention in the same breath as Bayard, Grimaldus, Navarre and Efried.

  He moved with fluid economy, never stopping, finding space where no space existed. Earning that extra fraction of a second to parry or counter-attack. To watch Varda fight was to witness all that was best in a warrior.

  Tanna knew that he was the least of them. Skilled, but outclassed on every level. His sword bludgeoned where theirs countered, hacked where theirs cut cleanly. Yet for all that his technique left something to be desired, the results spoke for themselves.

  The crystaliths massively outnumbered them in odds that were almost comically absurd. Thousands to one. Odds that not even the gene-fathers of the Legions themselves could have fought.

  Tanna doubted he had ever fought with such preternatural skill.

  His death would be magnificent.

  His flesh might not return to the Chapter, but Yael would carry his memory to the Eternal Crusader and the legacy of the Kotov Crusade would endure.

  Tanna blocked an overhead cut, swaying aside from a thrusting spike of crystal. The enemy hadn’t come at them with any energy weapons, just blades. And they had returned the favour. He felt a line of fire score across his hip and sidestepped, smashing his elbow down on a sword arm. The limb shattered and Tanna kicked his foe in the gut. He followed up the kick with a low sweep, wide and hard. Three crystaliths went down, and Tanna saw a gap open up before him.

  ‘Close ranks!’ shouted Varda.

  Too far extended, enemies on the left and right.

  A smashing cut struck Tanna on the shoulder, another on the thigh. The first bounced clear, the second drew blood. He killed both attackers, but he’d been staggered.

  Another blow caromed from his breastplate, and Tanna reeled from the force of it. Crystaliths poured past him as he pushed himself to his feet. More surged towards him. His only advantage was that they couldn’t all come at him at once.

  Tanna stepped back to the fighting formation of his brothers and hacked down a crystalith with its bladed arm buried in the back of an eldar warrior. The tip of the blade jutted from the alien’s chest, but she made no sound as she died. Another fell with his head almost severed. The remaining eldar groaned with each death, as though they felt the pain of each loss within themselves.

  Tanna returned the favour, beheading the eldar’s killer.

  ‘Push… th… th… them back on the right,’ shouted Issur. The swordsman’s blade had broken, snapped halfway along its length. No longer a broadsword, more a jagged gladius.

  Tanna took a quarter turn left and charged, shoulder low. Pain flared. He’d been hurt there before and his armour’s stimms were exhausted. He hurled the enemy back.

  ‘Step in,’ ordered Varda.

  The three Templars stepped together, forming the points of a triangle around the eldar. Pools of blood made their footing treacherous, but the debris of the destroyed crystaliths gave them traction. Not all of that blood was eldar. Both Issur and Varda bled from a score of wounds, and Tanna’s biology burned hot as it fought to heal and keep pace with the energy demands he was making of it.

  ‘No pity,’ said Varda, hammering his fist to his chest.

  ‘No remorse,’ answered Issur, holding his broken sword out before him.

  ‘No fear,’ finished Tanna.

  They circled again. Blocking, parrying and defending.

  This was not the kind of fight for which they had been wrought. They were crusaders, warriors who sought out foes to kill, battles to win. Yet this was the fight they were given.

  But it couldn’t go on, the enemy was too numerous, too relentless and unhindered by the need to protect those who could not defend themselves.

  Varda was the first to die.

  A glancing blow to the side of his helmet. A moment’s pause and they were on him. Stabbing, cutting and barging him. He grappled, unable to bring the Black Sword to bear. Blades punched up through his stomach and chest. Another lanced in under his shoulder guard.

  This last blow spun him around, his sword still buried in the heart of a crystalith. The arc of a glass-edged blade flashed. Opened his throat. Cutting into the meat of his neck like a razor.

  Blood fountained. The Black Sword wrenched clear.

  Tanna shouted a denial as Varda’s knees buckled and the Black Sword tumbled from his grip.

  Even as it fell, Issur was in motion.

  The crystaliths surrounded Varda, cutting
his body to pieces as if to defile him. Issur bludgeoned them aside, his body a battering ram. No thought for his own defence. A blade of crystal plunged into his back. Another opened the meat of his flank like a butcher dressing a carcass.

  Issur kicked them away from the Emperor’s Champion, stabbing with the spar of his ruined blade and punching with his free hand.

  He knelt by Varda’s corpse. His broken sword slashed down.

  And when he rose, it was with the Black Sword held aloft.

  ‘A Champion may fall, but he never dies!’ shouted Issur, and his words were free of the impediments that had plagued him since Valette. The snapped blade hung from an unbroken length of chain at his wrist. With the Black Sword gripped in both hands, Issur was reborn in blood as the Emperor’s Champion he had always desired to be.

  Tanna fought his way to Issur’s side, desperately blocking and parrying. The crystaliths sensed the end was near and pressed their attack. More of the eldar were dead. Apart from Bielanna, only two remained, the others hacked down in blood.

  ‘Castellan form,’ said Issur, his pain washed away in this last moment of apotheosis.

  They came together in a back-to-back defensive style.

  They fought like two halves of the same warrior, naturally complementing one another’s skills and strengths. They circled Bielanna, their swords a dazzling blur; one black, one silver.

  Tanna took a blade to the chest. He snapped it off with a downward smash of his forearm. Another stabbed into his side. They jutted like glass spines. Blood poured down his breastplate, running through the fissures of its ivory eagle.

  Tanna dropped to one knee, but Issur was there to haul him to his feet.

  ‘We don’t die on our knees, Tanna!’ shouted Issur, spinning the Black Sword around his head and cleaving it through half a dozen crystaliths in one mighty blow.

  Even with the weapon of the Champion, Issur’s strength was failing, his movements slowing. His wounds were too deep and too wide, his armour sheeted in red from the waist down.

  Tanna saw the thrust, tried to shout a warning.

  Issur twisted his sword in a crosswise block.

  An instant too slow.

  A diamond-hard blade with glittering, knapped edges.

  It caught the light of the blue sky, and the splintered blue edge turned vivid crimson as it buried itself in Issur’s heart.

  Issur’s mouth went wide with pain.

  His eyes locked with Tanna’s.

  ‘Until the end, brother,’ he said.

  And hurled the Black Sword to Tanna as a flurry of stabbing glass blades cut him down.

  The Black Sword spun through the air, a perfect throw. Tanna caught it with his free hand and brought it around in an equally perfect arc to slay Issur’s killer. With chainsword in one hand, Black Sword in the other, Tanna threw himself at the crystaliths with a roar of hatred for all they had taken from him.

  Twin swords cut and thrust, striking with an exactitude he had never before possessed. Every blow found the precise gap in his foes’ defences, every parry arose at just the right moment to protect Bielanna from a cowardly thrust at her silent form.

  A blade cut through the cuisse of his right leg. It clove to the bone, fragmented. Long shards of razored glass stabbed up and down through the meat of his thigh.

  Tanna bit down against the agony. His mouth filled with blood.

  The pain was ferocious, intense, blinding in its white heat.

  He felt every piercing blade entering his flesh. In his back, side and chest. One in the neck, another punching up through his armpit and breaking off in his right lung. A last lancing thrust that split his heart.

  Tanna fell onto his back, staring into the painfully blue sky. He pulled both swords onto his chest, like the carven lid of a sarcophagus within the candlelit sepulchres of the Eternal Crusader.

  An apocalyptic quantity of blood was flooding from his body. Numbing cold enveloped him. His fight was done.

  A hand brushed his face. Delicate, porcelain smooth, cold like glass.

  And the pain went away.

  ‘Until the end,’ said Bielanna.

  said Abrehem.

  replied Linya, feeling a cold that had nothing to do with temperature seeping into her consciousness. The reality of what she had set in motion with her magi imprisoned within Galatea’s neuromatrix was now manifesting within her.

  Anger at the machine-hybrid had sustained her, given her purpose, but now, for the first time, Linya felt real fear.

  said Abrehem, and Linya could barely bring herself to look upon him.

  she said.

  His body was fragmenting, literally fragmenting the nearer they drew to the bridge. As though the intensity of its light and the concentration of raw data was stripping his essence like ice from a comet approaching its perigee with a sun.

  But that wasn’t it at all.

  he said.

  Abrehem’s diminishing had nothing to do with the searing luminosity of the bridge. He was dying, bleeding out in Forge Elektrus despite the desperate ministrations of her father and Chiron Manubia.

  They hovered over the star-hot emissions of the bridge.

  said Abrehem.

  said Linya.

  Abrehem followed her gaze and said,

  said Linya.

  She knew he would understand her cold logic and hated herself for using him like this. Here, in this place, there could be no secrets between them, and he nodded in understanding, knowing what it would cost him.

  Abrehem swooped down and his fragmenting spirit form entered the door. The locking mechanism was cold and dead, murdered by a thing that claimed the same lineage.

  said Abrehem.

  Light poured from him, bathing the internal mechanics of the door in a furnace glow of molten gold. And as the dead machines of Forge Elektrus had responded to his touch, so too did the vast templum door at the terminus of the Path to Wisdom.

  It opened.

  It offended Kotov on every level to see Telok and Galatea on the bridge of the Speranza. Colonel Anders’s Cadians swept out to either side of him, as though performing a room clearance in one of Dahan’s battle-sims. Kotov noted that Sergeant Rae stood apart from the formation, taking careful, unwavering aim at Galatea.

  Yael and Roboute Surcouf marched at his right, his skitarii on his left. Telok turned to face them as the mighty door swung farther open, a look of weary irritation on his face.

  ‘Impossible,’ said Galatea, limping forwards with its proxy body almost severed from the palanquin. Kotov was gratified to see that someone had managed to grievously harm the machine-hybrid. ‘We extinguished the spirit within that door. How were you able to open it?’

  ‘I am an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ said Kotov, unwilling to admit that the door’s opening was a miracle he could not fathom. ‘You will find there is a great deal of which I am capable.’

  Telok sighed and his entire body heaved, venting steam, and the crystalline structures engulfing his frame ran the gamut of hues.

  ‘On Exnihlio it was intriguing,’ he said, ‘but your refusal to die has now passed beyond any amusement.’

  Kotov knew better than to bandy words with the Lost Magos, and gave the order he should have given a long time ago.

  ‘Kill Telok and his abomination,’ he said.

  He had hoped for the sound of gunfire, the snap of las mixed with the crackle of a plasma gun. He had hoped for it, but he had not expected it. The Cadians were frantically checking their rifles, slamming in fresh powercells, but Kotov already knew none of them would
fire.

  ‘A squad of Guardsmen and one Space Marine?’ said Telok, sliding the crystalline claws from his gnarled, crystal-grown gauntlet. ‘An entire vessel of skitarii and Guardsmen at war, and this is all you can muster? You must have seen the remains of your praetorians and skitarii. How could you possibly have believed I would allow your weapons to function in my presence?’

  ‘It was worth a try,’ said Kotov, as the Cadians fixed foot-long lengths of matte-black steel to their rifle muzzles. Yael and Surcouf both had swords drawn.

  Kotov smiled at the apposite nature of the sight.

  Clearly Telok saw it too. ‘You would fight for the most technologically advanced vessel mankind has ever built with knives?’ he said. ‘And when that fails, what then? Harsh language?’

  ‘Technology married to brute strength,’ said Kotov. ‘It is the Imperium in microcosm.’

  ‘There is truth in that,’ agreed Telok, stepping towards the centre of the bridge. The Breath of the Gods was no less nauseating on the viewing screen, its whirling flux of silver seeming to grow larger with every passing second. Two smears of light hung just behind it, geoformer vessels by the look of them.

  Kotov followed Telok onto the raised area of the deck, seeing Tarkis Blaylock sprawled before the vacant command throne. Was he dead? Impossible to know; his body was giving off innumerable radiations, febrile interactions of staggering complexity and every indication of massive data inloads comparable to a scrapcode attack.

  The command throne was empty, but just for a fleeting instant, a span of time so ephemeral it could hardly be said to have existed at all, Kotov was certain he saw the spectral apparition of a robed figure seated there.

  Beckoning him with a look of desperate urgency.

  Then it was gone, and Kotov saw what he at first took to be the shattered remains of an automated lifter machine scattered across the deck. Faint noospherics, like blood-trace at a murder, told him that this was no automated machine, but Magos Kryptaestrex.

  He looked towards astrogation. Magos Azuramagelli was still functional, though his latticework frame was buckled and twisted. Portions of his exploded brain architecture lay askew in bell jars half emptied of their bio-sustaining gels.