Gods of Mars
Page 35
Steeling his courage, Vitali hitched up his robes and broke cover. He ran from this portion of the battle to where Chiron Manubia coordinated the defence of the second approach to Elektrus. Connected to a lectern of brass and wood, Manubia’s hands cut the air in arcane lemniscate patterns as she managed a dozen weapon systems and exloaded battle-cant to the Protectors fighting in the secondary approach.
Vitali placed a hand on the lectern and let his haptics merge with the network. The interior of the forge fell away as his awareness shifted to the spaces beyond its gates.
A demi-century of Protectors fought here, led by Totha Mu-32. Wave after wave of crystal creatures fought to breach Forge Elektrus, and it seemed to Vitali that there was a desperate urgency to their assault. Forking blasts of green fire filled the approaches, burning the walls or absorbed by the Protectors’ storm shields.
A dozen concealed weapon emplacements blazed into the attackers, emerging to open fire and retracting into their armoured housings before the enemy could respond.
Why hadn’t he thought of that?
A fresh assault came in hard in the wake of a furious storm of green fire, but Totha Mu-32 was ready for it. His Protectors surged upright from their barrier of locked storm shields, shock-staves held out before them like lances.
They hit the crystal beasts hard, bent low, arms thrusting. Shock-staves unleashed vitrifying blasts of high-energy pulses. Follow-up blows shattered limbs and skulls, and with the breaking of the first wave, the Protectors withdrew in good order to their rally points.
It was quite the most ordered method of warfare Vitali had ever seen. The polar opposite to what was happening at the forge’s other entrance.
Linya opened her eyes, breathless and exhausted. Both sensations were chemical reactions to the complex hexamathics required to reach out to Archmagos Kotov within the sun-hot arena of the bridge, but the feeling was no less real.
The midnight-black dome of perfectly geometric cubes was gone, and in its place was Linya’s favourite viewing dome within the Quatrian Galleries. Smaller than the others, it had only a basic observational device, a piece quite useless for viewing much beyond a planetary sphere, but said to have once belonged to the composer of Honovere.
Arrayed to either side of her were her fellow magi: Syriestte on her right, Haephaestus to her left. Natala gave her a nod of respect, and the sad determination on each and every face would have broken her heart had she one left to break.
Standing at the farthest extreme of the viewing dome was the adept in black. Galatea’s avatar within the mindspace. Except, she knew better than that now, didn’t she? He looked around, as though surprised to see himself here.
Linya remembered all the times this adept had tortured her, forcing her to experience extremes of pain she hadn’t believed possible, and her resolve hardened. His silver eyes were lustreless now, stripped of any power they once had to intimidate.
‘You think you can defeat me?’ said Galatea.
‘Me?’ said Linya, stepping forwards. ‘Not referring to yourself as a plurality any more?’
‘There seems little point in the mask now.’
‘True, then I’ll address you as Telok.’
‘Archmagos, if you please,’ said the black-robed figure. ‘After all, I earned the rank.’
‘Then you cast it away when you forgot the ideals of your order.’
‘Forgot them? No, I was finally able to realise them.’
‘You are no longer Mechanicus, archmagos, and this is over.’
The adept laughed. ‘Over? I think you forget that you are still in my neuromatrix. And if you thought the tortures you have already endured were excruciating, believe me, I have many more that are far more terrible. Your tricksy little code has kept you beyond my reach for a time, but it won’t last much longer.’
‘It’s already lasted long enough,’ said Linya.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Look around you, this isn’t your neuromatrix anymore. It’s mine. See how everything has that sheen of real memory, not pilfered thoughts shaped into the recreation of a memory.’
The black-robed adept suddenly realised his danger and flew at Linya, his form swelling as it drew the shadows to it. Wide, bat-like wings erupted from the adept’s back, the data-daemon that had devoured Kleinhenz reforming before her.
Linya smiled and held her hands out, palm up.
The data-daemon slammed to a halt in mid-air.
She ripped her hands to the side, as through pulling open a veil, and the data-daemon exploded into a cloud of perfectly cubic flakes of ash. They faded like dying embers, leaving the robed adept sprawled before her.
‘I told you,’ said Linya. ‘This is my neuromatrix.’
The adept backed away from her on all fours as Linya walked towards him. He rose to his knees, hands held out before him in supplication. She read his terror. He knew full well the horrors she could inflict.
But Linya had no inclination towards torture or revenge.
Instead, she turned to her fellow magi, and said, ‘It’s time.’
They nodded in unison as Magos Syriestte said, ‘The implanted code will be unequivocal and unsparing in its execution.’
‘I know, but it’s better this way,’ said Linya, unlocking the last hexamathic cell within her mind. The activation algorithms for the kill-code flooded into her consciousness. They merged with previously released binaric strings, becoming something utterly lethal to the electrical activity of the brain.
It grew, it replicated.
It destroyed.
The kill-code had penetrated deepest into Magos Haephaestus, and the venerable techno-theosopher was first to feel its effect. He bowed his head and vanished as the implanted kill-code woven into their linked neural network took effect. Linya felt Haephaestus die, and Telok’s avatar screamed as a portion of its heuristic neuromatrix was sheared away.
The kill-code destroyed Magos Natala. Then Txema, then Chivo.
With each brain-death, Telok’s avatar howled in loss, convulsing like a madman on the polished terrazzo floor of the viewing dome. One by one, the imprisoned magi were extinguished until only Linya and Telok’s avatar remained.
She felt each loss and tried not to hate the wretched, shrunken thing writhing before her like a hooked maggot on a line. She knelt beside the avatar. Stripped of its gestalt consciousnesses, it was a barely sentient conduit of data, a sheared potion of a much larger mind.
It was almost pitiable.
Almost.
‘Kill me and be done with it,’ said the avatar.
‘No,’ said Linya. ‘I still need you to do something for me.’
So much death…
Bielanna felt the last of her kin die.
The crystaliths tore them apart, perhaps realising what she attempted. Their strength now filled her, and Bielanna felt each spirit move within her rapidly crystallising flesh. The rapid push a
nd pull of Exnihlio’s death spasms had imbued her with extraordinary power, but it had hurled her headlong towards the eventual fate of all farseers.
It came over her like an ultra-rapid shock-freeze.
No rest for her within the Dome of Crystal Seers.
They surrounded her, their limited awareness ill-equipped to process this new variable. Their orders were to kill creatures of flesh and blood, and they had done that.
Bielanna’s flesh was cold and hard, as glassy and reflective as the crystaliths. Her spirit and those of her fellow eldar burned brightly inside her. She took that energy and wove it around the power the Breath of the Gods had unleashed. The energy of a supernova condensed into a pure form of thought and expression.
Bielanna was done with her body of flesh and blood, and it had no more need for her. Only one realm called to her, a place of dreams and joy, where past and future entwined and the fate of all things was revealed.
Where the Path of the Seer inevitably led.
Bielanna cast off her mortal shell and threw her spirit into the skein. Freed from mortal constraints, she saw more than ever before, with a clarity the living could never know.
From this vantage point, Exnihlio appeared as a single atom out of place in the structure of a vast crystal. Any force applied to the crystal would always be concentrated on that atom. Soon another atom would be out of place, then another. And another.
Through such mechanisms were cracks in the universe begun.
And once begun, they propagated.
Like scissors cutting fabric.
But if that atom could be removed from the lattice…
Another Cadian died as Galatea speared him through the chest with a lancing strike of its mechadendrites. It tossed the man’s body across the bridge like a ragdoll before turning its attention upon Sergeant Rae. Kotov watched in slow motion as a blade-limb stabbed through the meat of the man’s thigh, pinning him in place as a coiling mechadendrite whipped up like a stinger.
To his credit, Rae didn’t flinch, but raised his useless lasrifle in a futile attempt to block the incoming strike.
‘Come on then, you bastard!’ shouted the Cadian.
The strike never came.
A grand-mal seizure wracked Galatea’s body, its palanquin vibrating like an engine on the verge of exploding. The limb pinning Rae to the deck wrenched clear as Galatea loosed a binaric scream of anguish so profound that it broke Kotov from his enhanced mode of cognition. His perception of time’s flow returned to its normal mode of operation, and the world seemed sluggish in comparison.
Telok staggered, as though whatever pain was wracking Galatea was stabbing him in the heart also. Given what Kotov knew of the symbiotic relationship between Telok and Galatea, perhaps it was.
An evil scarlet light swept around the palanquin, moving from brain jar to brain jar. The bio-gels within each jar instantly clouded, like stagnant water in a sump. Kotov had served two decades aboard a Tempestus battle-engine and saw the unmistakable signs of amniotic death.
Only one brain resisted the mass extinction, and Kotov knew instantly to whom it belonged. Coupled with the spectral visitation he had seen earlier, Kotov knew exactly what he had to do.
Galatea’s legs folded beneath it and its misaligned body crashed to the deck with a booming clang of dead metal. Its proxy body flopped over onto its front, black floodstream chemicals pumping from suddenly unmaintained bio-mechanical organs.
The Cadians stepped back, wary of some trick, but Yael was on Galatea in a heartbeat. He wasted no time in bringing his sword around in brutal, two-handed overhead strikes like an ironworker at the anvil. Surcouf joined him a second later, his Calthan blade wreaking terrible harm on Galatea’s robed body.
‘Leave the brains intact!’ shouted Kotov.
If Linya Tychon had indeed slain Galatea from within, then perhaps there was a chance to extricate her from the belly of the beast. How cruel a trick of fate would it be for her to avenge her mutilation only to be killed in the process?
Then Telok was amongst them.
His ironwork and crystal body throbbed with dark reds and crimsons. Plumes of scalding gases vented and his greasily artificial face was twisted in rage. Tearing claws smashed Cadian soldiers to boneless meat, ripped them to shredded matter.
Gone was the genius archmagos who had reconstructed the ancient machine of a long-dead race of galactic engineers. All that remained was a howling berserker creature, drowning its pain and grief in slaughter.
Kotov was never going to get a better chance than this.
‘With me,’ shouted Kotov. ‘By your lives or deaths, get me to the command throne.’
Kotov ran past the bloodshed, slipping on the lake of blood spreading across the deck. He kept his mind focused on putting himself back where he belonged.
‘Kotov!’ bellowed Telok.
He almost turned at the sound of his name.
Was almost stunned to immobility by the furious rank signifiers that matched his own.
‘Go!’ shouted Carna, pushing him forwards.
Kotov didn’t see the skitarii warrior’s death, but felt it resonate in the noosphere as a vast quantity of blood sprayed him. The second skitarii, whose name he hadn’t bothered to inload, died a second later, torn in two at the waist.
Kotov kept going. Thundering impacts sounded behind him.
He didn’t dare look round. He felt hot, dead breath on him. Crystalline claws swept down to cleave him apart.
Then Yael and Surcouf were there.
The rogue trader was smashed to the deck, no match for Telok’s vast strength. Only Yael had the power to take the blow, his genhanced physique a match for Telok’s hideous crystalline embellishments.
Even so, he was driven back, the plates of his armour broken, the bones of his arms shattered.
It was foolish defiance, the last act of desperate men with nothing left to lose.
But it was just enough.
Kotov threw himself onto the Speranza’s command throne, slamming his hands down onto haptic connectors that still bore traces of molten metal and flesh.
Telok loomed over him, his inhuman features no longer recognisable as anything sane. His clawed arm pulled back, the blood of countless innocents upon it. The killing energies of Exnihlio burned along every blade.
Telok’s claw hammered through Kotov’s chest and into the throne.
Its haptics burned hot. Golden illumination, like the birth of all machines, rammed into Kotov’s skull.
A conduit was established, a connection made.
Like a surge tide in spate, the world spirit of the Speranza rose up to engulf Kotov and Telok.
And not just the Speranza’s.
I have been here before.
That was the first thought to enter Kotov’s head as he saw the neon-bright datascape of the Speranza open up to him.
I should be dead, was the second.
He remembered Telok’s claw punching down through his chest, a shattering blow of awful power. Kotov’s body was largely mechanised, but enough remained of his nervous and circulatory system to make such damage almost certainly fatal.
A glittering megalopolis spread before him, the flow of information that formed the hidden arteries of the Speranza. It was mountainous, rugged with hives of light and vast termite mounds of agglomerated data. Abyssal cliffs of contextually linked information hubs spiralled into fractal mazes of answers that led to ever more questions.
Datacores burned like newborn suns in constellations of linked neural networks. The Speranza was in constant dialogue with itself, learning and growing with every solution gained.
Heuristic in the purest sense of the word.
Every paradigm of scalable time, from the cosmic day to the compression of universal history to a single hour, failed utterly to capture the datascape’s infinite scope. Its mysteries went back to the first stone tools hacked from river bedrock and stretched into the Omega Point, the Logos and Hyparxis all in one.
And for all that this aspect of the Speranza was a place of knowledge and understanding, it was also one of metaphor, allusion and maddening symbolism.
Highways of light were easy enough to interpret, but what of the vast, serpentine coils arcing above and below to encircle the world before coming around to engulf itself? What of the conjoined helices of light that split apart like the branches of a towering tree with its roots dug deep into the datascape?
Could he even see these things truly or was his hominid brain simply interpreting the unknown in ways he could process?
Looking down (if down was even a concept that could be applied to infinitely dimensional realms of thought) it was clear how foolish and naïve he had been to claim he was Speranza’s master.
Knowledge was not a something to be claimed, it existed for all those with the wisdom to seek it, for only in the acceptance of ignorance could that void be filled. That felt like revelation, but Kotov suspected it was ancient wisdom he and his order had long forgotten.
Kotov turned and saw Telok soaring above the datascape, no longer the monstrous being he had become, but the magos he had once been. His robes were black, his optics a glittering silver. The resemblance to Galatea was so startling, Kotov wondered how he had not seen it before.
said Telok, circling Kotov like a stalking predator. The Lost Magos swept his gaze around the infinite landscape and Kotov felt his burning need to possess it.