Gods of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  ‘See for yourself,’ said Blaylock, moving aside to allow Kotov an unimpeded view of the main display and the slowly restoring veils of data-light.

  At first Kotov wasn’t sure what he was seeing.

  Exnihlio was dying, that much was obvious. Its continents were cracking apart, each landmass fracturing in unsettlingly geometric patterns. Inset panels of low-level pict-scans showed vast mushroom clouds of atomic detonations as fusion stacks exploded and continent-wide electrical storms as the atmospheric processors finally exceeded their designed tolerances.

  Everything Telok had built was being comprehensively destroyed, as if the violated planet were taking suicidal revenge for the havoc wreaked upon its environment. Soaring hives of industry toppled and colossal power plants spiralled to self-destruction as millennia of compressed time ripped through the planet’s structure. Thousands of manufactoria collapsed and the rapidly rising temperatures told Kotov a global firestorm was hours away at best.

  Higher up, orbital space looked like the lethal aftermath of a battle, with vast swathes of glittering debris spread over hundreds of thousands of kilometres.

  ‘Is that the Breath of the Gods?’

  ‘What’s left of it,’ said Surcouf, limping over to Galatea’s tangled remains. ‘The two geoformer vessels rising in its wake triggered their engines and flew right into the heart of it. I don’t think we need worry about anyone putting it back together again.’

  ‘How? Who was able to take control of the geoformers?’

  ‘Tarkis says it was Galatea’s command authority that fired the engines,’ said Surcouf. ‘So I guess it was Linya that did it. Do you think she’s still in there?’

  The machine-hybrid was nothing more than scrap metal now, its limbs and palanquin hacked to pieces in revenge for the death of Ven Anders. The black-robed proxy body looked like it had been through a threshing machine.

  Its brain jars were shattered, leaking pinkish gel and trailing sopping wads of grey matter and brass connectors. One had been spared the fury, but its synaptic activity was fading.

  Kotov shook his head. ‘I doubt it. And if there is anything left of Mistress Tychon, it will be gone soon. It is regrettable, but her sacrifice and assistance will be recorded.’

  Surcouf’s jaw hardened in anger, and for a brief moment Kotov thought the rogue trader might actually attack him. The moment passed and Kotov turned back to the viewing bay. With Blaylock’s help he made his way to astrogation, where Magos Azuramagelli’s latticework form was still connected via a series of MIU ribbons.

  ‘Azuramagelli?’

  A crackling stream of simplistic binaric communication told him that Azuramagelli was still functional, but only at the most basic level. Blaylock unsnapped a series of data-connectors and plugged them into the Master of Astrogation’s exload ports.

  ‘What’s happening out there, Azuramagelli?’ said Kotov.

  Static crackled from beneath Blaylock’s hood, translating Azuramagelli’s primitive binaric cant.

  ‘It’s a bloody hellstorm of epic proportions and we’re right in the middle of it, archmagos,’ said a gratingly artificial voice.

  Standard issue speech rendition, but the words were unmistakably Azuramagelli’s.

  ‘Put simply, Exnihlio is tearing itself apart and collapsing into a primal cauldron of time singularities like the heart of a supermassive black hole. Once it reaches temporal critical mass, the fabric of space-time will tear itself apart. And, trust me, we do not want to be here when that happens.’

  ‘Just out of interest, how far away from something like that would we want to be?’ asked Surcouf.

  The augmitters beneath Blaylock’s hood barked with Azuramagelli’s bitter answer.

  ‘Let me put it this way, Mister Surcouf. Within two hours this system and everything within it will cease to exist.’

  Hawkins climbed from the turret of Mackan’s Vengeance and dropped to the deck beside the Baneblade’s forward track guard. Aside from one mangled sponson and a lot of blast scoring, Mackan’s Vengeance had come through the fight in good order.

  He joined Karha Creed at the recreation of Vogen’s main gates in a sea of shattered crystal. The lieutenant was down on one knee, a handful of coal-dark particulates falling through her fingers.

  ‘You and your platoons fought well, Karha.’

  She stood and brushed the black dust from her hands on her grey fatigues. ‘Thank you, sir. Any word from the rest of the regiment?’

  ‘Much the same as this so far,’ he said, pulling the coiled bead from his ear and letting it dangle over his sweat-stained collar. ‘Every deck’s reporting that the enemy forces froze in place then cracked and fell apart. It’s over.’

  ‘What do you think happened?’

  Hawkins placed his fists in the small of his back and stretched the muscles there with a groan. All very well riding heroically into battle in the open turret of a tank, but he’d been bruised from pelvis to shoulder blades.

  ‘Damned if I know,’ he said. ‘Maybe Dahan killing that alpha-beast put them on a ticking clock, maybe the higher-ups managed to kill Telok or whoever it was controlling them, I don’t know. But if the regiment’s taught me one thing, it’s not to look a gift horse in the mouth. They’re dead, we’re alive. That’s good enough for me right now.’

  She nodded and kicked a heat-dulled shard of crystal. ‘So much for the no-win scenario.’

  ‘It very nearly was,’ replied Hawkins, slapping a palm on the side of Mackan’s Vengeance. ‘I think we all owe Jahn Callins a drink at Spit in the Eye.’

  ‘And maybe Gunnar Vintras.’

  Hawkins made a face, turning to watch as the towering battle-engines of Legio Sirius marched back through the ruined cityscape of Vogen. Lupa Capitalina and Canis Ulfrica were already deep within the city, but both Warhounds hung back at the edges of the Palace of Peace. Amarok turned towards the battlescape and raised its weapon arms in salute.

  ‘Vintras is Legio,’ said Hawkins. ‘He can afford his own.’

  The Warhound strode into the city, its war-horn braying throughout the deck, echoing from its enclosing walls.

  ‘I’m buying Jahn his first drink,’ said Creed.

  ‘Get in line.’

  They walked from the idling superheavy back towards the centre of the plaza, where regimental flags of red, gold and green flew in the blustering gusts of the recyc-units. Hawkins paused to salute the colours to which he and so many others had given their lives. Images of the Emperor stared back at him, and Hawkins felt a surge of pride at seeing them resplendent.

  Medicae teams were working furiously on the wounded, and Munitorum preachers were intoning prayers over the dead. A tinny voice sounded from the vox-bead at his collar, but he ignored it as Magos Dahan approached.

  Like the rest of them, Dahan hadn’t come through the fight without scars. The Secutor walked with a pronounced imbalance and one arm hung loose at his shoulder. The Cebrenian halberd was slung over his back, its blade notched along its length.

  ‘Captain Hawkins,’ said Dahan. ‘Your vox-bead is out.’

  Even though Dahan’s face was almost entirely metallic and his voice artificially rendered, something in the abruptness of his greeting made Hawkins wary.

  ‘I needed a minute,’ he said.

  ‘You should replace it.’

  Hawkins sighed and fitted the contoured bud into his ear. He listened for a few moments then closed his eyes.

  ‘Sir?’ said Creed. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Looks like they were right,’ said Hawkins. ‘It was a no-win scenario after all.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s Colonel Anders,’ said Hawkins, sinking to his haunches and resting his elbows on his knees. ‘He was killed in action.’

  Roboute knew Azuramagelli’s grim pronouncement should have left him more afraid. In fact, it should have scared him to the soles of his boots. After all they had gone through, to have come so close to victory,
only to have it snatched away. That should have left him raging at the cosmic unfairness of it all.

  Instead, he reached into the breast pocket of his frock-coat and said, ‘You’re wrong, Magos Azuramagelli.’

  ‘Wrong? Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped Azuramagelli via Blaylock’s augmitters. ‘The evidence is right before me.’

  Roboute withdrew the compass and set it on the astrogation panel. The once wavering needle was aimed unerringly along the precise bearing Galatea had plotted back to Mars.

  ‘What is that?’ said Blaylock.

  ‘A talisman,’ said Roboute, keeping his hand pressed to the brass surround of the compass. ‘It’s the one thing that’s always guided me home. It’s never been wrong before, and I don’t think it’ll be wrong now.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Surcouf,’ snapped Azuramagelli. ‘It’s not a question of knowing the course, I know the way to Mars perfectly well. It’s a question of escaping this system before the fabric of space-time tears itself apart!’

  ‘Just follow the compass,’ said Roboute, feeling it grow warm beneath his fingertips, as though it formed a bridge between him and somewhere impossibly distant and yet intimately familiar.

  ‘I will remember you,’ said Roboute.

  He closed his eyes…

  …and opened them in a place he knew he had travelled, but could not remember. He knew instinctively that he was not truly here, merely a passenger in another’s soul. A soul he’d touched when their hands and minds had met on Exnihlio, when she had used his love for his friends to open a gateway back to the Speranza.

  Bielanna was dead, at least in any conventional way Roboute understood it, but her spirit yet lived, an arcing needle of light that flew at the speed of thought in a realm few mortals ever saw or were even aware existed. Everything about it spoke of great beauty and great sorrow. Its beauty came from the wondrous potential in everything he saw, its sorrow from understanding in his soul that it had once been so much more.

  Roboute and Bielanna flew through the skein together, though the context of the word was lost on him – drawing the threads of the past behind them. He understood that much because it was what Bielanna wanted him to understand.

  They plunged into the futures, narrowing paths of perfect geometry, curves and lines that arced in golden parabolas. They stretched beyond a temporal event horizon, and even Roboute understood that what he was seeing was a fraction of what should be.

  The futures were collapsing, fraying into random chaos, but the potential of what Bielanna attempted was clear to him.

  Azuramagelli had likened space-time to fabric, fearing that it was tearing. The analogy was an apt one, for Bielanna’s spirit was the needle, the golden lines of the past her thread to sew space and time together again.

  The sense of speed was incredible, and Roboute felt more than saw the compressed nature of time everywhere he looked. The potential of all that could ever be still existed, it was not lost. The skein still held everything that ever was, and what had once been could always come again.

  Snapshots of epochs passed in a blur, ancient wars, dreams of Unity and ages once thought unending turned to dust. All is dust, wasn’t that a famous maxim once, or had Roboute simply imagined it? It was impossible to be certain of anything here. Potential was everything, certainty consigned to history, where – even then – it could be reshaped by the twin pressures of memory and time.

  That was what Bielanna attempted, to reshape the universe as it was into what she needed it to be. Roboute’s image of a soaring, glittering needle returned to him as they plunged onwards through the hidden passageways of time.

  He saw trillions upon trillions of lives, more than the human mind could conceive, spend their lives in the blink of an eye. Numbers beyond reckoning crowded behind them, faceless lives that might have been, but never were. The unfertilised eggs, the children never born, the paths not taken.

  So many…

  Roboute wept phantom tears at the sight of them, their aching desire to be almost crushing him with the weight of sadness. At the forefront of the faceless host were two children, eldar by the grace of their tapered chins and honeyed eyes. So close, he felt he could reach out and touch them. Their unborn features drifted just beyond reach, like figures receding in mist.

  It was all for them.

  Roboute and Bielanna soared, the weave of threads closing behind them, pulling tight as the momentum of the tear threatened to overcome their speed. It seemed that they slowed, and Roboute felt Bielanna’s pain as his own, as though the bonds between the molecules of his body were being twisted with ferocious torsion.

  It felt like his entire body was coming apart.

  Hold on, we must hold on!

  Roboute clamped down on the feeling that his entire body was on the verge of exploding into its constituent atoms, focusing on all that made him the man he was: his honesty; a sense of duty and honour hammered into him since birth; his loyalty; his capriciousness; his reckless love of the unknown, and – most of all – his love for his friends and desire to see them prosper.

  He was a good man, or at least he liked to think he was. Like everyone, he had his faults and could sometimes be cruel and sometimes heedless of the needs of others. All these things made him a person worthy of remembrance, and he was not alone in that.

  Roboute thought back over the lives he had known, the lives he had touched and those he had yet to know.

  Yes, what can be dreamed, need never be forgotten.

  His own recollections were scattershot, without focus or structure. Bielanna’s were rigorously ordered by a mind trained for centuries to allow memories to be controlled, thoughts to be shackled on a single path. His way of thinking was anathema to her, wildly unpredictable and dangerous.

  Together they crested a rising path of golden light, its walls like red-veined marble the colour of fresh milk. He felt a subtle vibration, like the faint tremor in the superstructure of a capital ship. Behind him, the threads of past lives and experiences were growing thicker as more and more were drawn to their headlong flight through the ruptured skein.

  It seemed they were soaring higher, towards a glittering horizon, radiant with possibility. Roboute ached to see that far distant shore, to know its secrets and tread its warm sands.

  Then they flew over its glittering boundary, and Roboute saw an infinite realm of light stretching out as far as it was possible to imagine. Bielanna released the threads of the past, letting them fall into the weave of light opening up before them. They fell like golden strands of hair, splitting and branching like a growing network of nerves in a newborn life.

  Everywhere he looked, he saw the threads of the past spread into the future, growing exponentially more complex, accelerating into the future at the speed of possibility.

  And then, an awful sense of separation, of letting go.

  He fought to hold on, terrified at the thought of being trapped here. This was not his realm, he didn’t belong here. To see such a place was magnificent, a boon he hoped with all his heart he wouldn’t forget, but to exist here?

  That way lay madness for a mortal.

  Open your eyes, go home. Live.

  Bielanna’s presence fell away from Roboute, fading into the infinite golden weave she had wrought. What Telok had put asunder, she had remade, but such a feat was not without price.

  He watched her spirit fall, dissipate, blending into the warp and weft of past, present and future. He desperately wanted to say some sort of farewell, but what words of his could possibly convey the depth of what every living being that now had a chance to exist owed her?

  Bielanna Faerelle vanished into the skein, its golden light enfolding her and the spirits of her warriors, beyond the reach of She Who Thirsts. In the instant before Roboute returned to the Speranza, he had a last glimpse of the unborn eldar children.

  Their faces were still undefined, but he knew they were smiling.

  Welcoming their mother.

  The viewing dom
e of Quatria was empty, as Linya knew it would be. The magi taken by Galatea were gone, finally released to return to the light of the Omnissiah. The hexamathic kill-code she’d crafted had, as Syriestte said, been unequivocal and unsparing in its execution.

  She missed them.

  The walls around her were hazy and indistinct, like reflections on panes of smoked glass. The brass and gold observational instruments shimmered like ghostly memories of themselves. But beyond the crystalflex of the dome, the stars burned brightly, brighter than she ever remembered seeing them.

  Linya smiled to see this last vision of the heavens.

  Her power to hold this imagined place was diminishing with every passing second. Soon it would fade entirely as the kill-code wormed its way into her mind.

  She had held it at bay long enough.

  Now there was just one thing left to do before surrendering to the encroaching darkness.

  Linya held her hands out and lifted them to shoulder height.

  As her arms raised the floor bulged upwards in the shape of an enclosing dome formed from the same tiny geometric cubes with which she’d fashioned her firewalls to keep Galatea at bay.

  It was here she’d imprisoned the last fragment of Galatea/Telok, the flickering ember of consciousness she’d needed to order the geoformer vessels to fire their engines.

  The glossy facets of the black cubes folded back on themselves, falling away in a cascade.

  The prison was empty, the wretched, foetal thing she’d locked away now nothing more than fine black cinders. Had Archmagos Kotov’s golden sword been so thorough in its execution that it had expunged every last screed of Telok’s existence? Or, more likely, had Telok extinguished himself rather than face judgement?

  Either way, Linya had to admit she was disappointed.

  She’d hoped for a sense of closure, a way to twist the knife in Telok’s heart just a little. But she was denied even that. She sighed, and the cinders blew away, disintegrating until not even they remained to tell of the existence of Archmagos Vettius Telok.