Gods of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Linya took a last look around her imagined surroundings.

  Her world faded to black, leaving only stars looking down.

  It was time.

  ‘Linya?’

  She looked up. Her father stood before her.

  Linya ran to him and his arms enfolded her.

  Vitali realigned his optics, his shoulders slumped as the cold reality of Forge Elektrus swam back into focus. He felt the crippling ache of grief recede, though it would always be there.

  That was good, for it was a more tangible reminder of all that Linya had meant to him than anything a data-coil might store.

  He stood before the Throne Mechanicus, Abrehem Locke’s metallic hand held in his left hand, Ismael de Roeven’s in his right. Coyne and Hawke lay slumped on either side of the throne, one unconscious, the other almost dead from the volume of blood he’d given.

  ‘Did you see her?’ asked Ismael. ‘Say goodbye?’

  Vitali nodded, no longer caring that Ismael had once been a servitor. The gift he had given Vitali was too precious for him to feel anything other than a profound gratitude.

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘And that is a debt I can never repay.’

  Ismael shook his head.

  ‘There is no debt to me,’ he said. ‘Abrehem brought you together in the datascape. I just helped you get there.’

  Vitali looked up as Hawke groaned and pulled the transfusion line from his arm. Droplets of blood fell from the end of the needle as it clattered to the deck.

  ‘Thor’s ghost, it’s cold in here,’ he said, steadying himself on the back of the throne as he stood. His eyes were glassy and unfocused, his skin white as parchment. ‘I’m drunk. When did I get drunk?’

  ‘You’re not drunk, Hawke, you’ve just lost over two litres of blood,’ said Chiron Manubia.

  ‘Oh,’ said Hawke. ‘Then point me to somewhere I can get drunk.’

  Vitali guided Hawke down the steps and sat him on the wooden benches with Totha Mu-32’s injured warriors. A Mechanicus Protector set up a blood line between Hawke and one of the shaven-headed adepts before moving on to treat more serious wounds.

  Vitali looked up as a shadow fell across him.

  He took a step back as Rasselas X-42 loomed over him, its body a patchwork of horrific wounds, any of which would be mortal to an ordinary man.

  ‘Adeptus Mechanicus,’ rasped the arco-flagellant, the words wet and blood-frothed. ‘Tychon, Vitali. Identity accepted. Rasselas X-42 imprint sequence completed. By your leave.’

  Vitali shook his head. ‘No, no, you’re imprinted on…’

  His words trailed off and he hurried back to the Throne Mechanicus. With Rasselas X-42 limping behind him, he stood with Manubia and Totha Mu-32 to his left, Ismael de Roeven to his right. He looked down at Abrehem, the arco-flagellant’s words already forewarning him of what he would see.

  Abrehem’s head was slumped on his shoulder, his chest unmoving.

  ‘Is he…?’ said Totha Mu-32.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Chiron Manubia, her eyes wet with tears.

  ‘I never got to thank him,’ said Vitali.

  ‘He knew,’ said Ismael. ‘It was his last gift.’

  One by one, they knelt before the Throne.

  They bowed their heads and prayed to the newest saint of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  With the destruction of Exnihlio and the restoration of violated physics, the temporal hellstorm at the edge of the galaxy was stilled. The time streams diverted by the Breath of the Gods and the imprisoned hrud snapped back to their proper places, undoing thousands of years of damage.

  Stars that ought to have died in ages past and which the Breath of the Gods had returned to life burned towards their end once more. Those that had been drained of life now surged with renewed fury and light.

  System space around Telok’s forge world was lousy with e-mag disturbances and lacunae of space-time that would persist until the end of the universe, but that was a small price to pay for the restoration of the future.

  The Halo Scar was gone, but it still took the Speranza almost two months to return to Imperial space. Exnihlio was no more; the temporal aftershocks of its demise and the hrud’s vengeance had reduced it to little more than inert rock, aged billions of years in the space of a few hours. A glittering debris field of silver fragments englobed its corpse, the remains of the Breath of the Gods.

  To ensure no one ever rebuilt Telok’s infernal machine, the Speranza unleashed all manner of arcane weaponry into the debris. Chronometric cannons, anti-matter projectors and hypometric weapons of such power that they caused entire regions of space to simply cease existing.

  No one knew who had given the orders to unleash those weapons.

  Roboute Surcouf was the only one who understood the nature of Bielanna Faerelle’s sacrifice. But mortal minds were incapable of sustaining such knowledge, and his memory of the skein was already fading. He’d tried to record what he had seen in a journal, but the concepts were too alien, too existential and too painful for him to articulate in writing.

  He and the surviving crew of the Renard had mourned the death of Adara Siavash in a simple ceremony in a small portside temple, asking the Emperor to watch over the soul of their fallen friend.

  Archmagos Kotov’s anger at Ilanna Pavelka had eventually reached a low enough ebb that he finally consented to allowing her to seek repair in one of the Speranza’s forge-temples.

  When the day came for her bio-mechanical surgery, Roboute was surprised to see Kotov himself scrubbing up at the head of a sixteen-strong team of neuro-magi and cognitive-optical technicians. Thirty-six hours later, the work was complete.

  It took three more months before Pavelka’s neural architecture regrew the required synaptic connections to process the inloads from her new optics.

  By then, the Renard had already parted ways with the Speranza.

  Seated at the helm, Roboute Surcouf rested his hand on the astrogation compass. Its needle pointed unwaveringly towards their new destination.

  Ultramar.

  The military might of the expedition carried on much as it had on the journey from the Imperium to space unknown. They trained, they rested, they spoke of the dead. The mission was done, and as Guardsmen of Cadia, that was what mattered most.

  That, and the fact they were still alive.

  Colonel Ven Anders would remain sealed in cryo-freeze for the journey. His mortal remains were returning to Cadia, where they would be interred in one of the many cemeteries of Kasr Holn, until the Law of Decipherability decreed that his remains be moved to one of the charnel pits.

  A remembrance ceremony for the fallen was held on the training deck. Every single Guardsman of the 71st stood to attention before a reviewing stand set up before the Palace of Peace. The battle-engines of Legio Sirius towered over the proceedings, kill banners freshly marked with heraldic sigils of Cadia and Mars.

  Lupa Capitalina and Canis Ulfrica flanked the Palace of Peace, while Amarok and Vilka stood among the six thousand Cadians in their dress greys with their lasrifles resting on their shoulders.

  Brother Yael of the Black Templars stood in his ebon battleplate, its lustre restored by the Speranza’s finest artificers. His grief was so palpable, so consuming, that none dared come near him, leaving him to bear the memory of his fallen brothers alone.

  Magos Dahan and his elite skitarii packs stood shoulder to shoulder with the men and women of Cadia who’d fought to defend their ship. Thousands of cybernetic soldiers and praetorian servitors marched past the reviewing stand, banners and weapons held high with pride.

  Dahan himself took to the stand to join Captain Blayne Hawkins in presenting the Address to the Fallen. As the last benediction was spoken, the war-horns of Legio Sirius filled the deck.

  A victory bellow and a lament all in one.

  Far below the waterline, in an area of the ship abandoned by all but the most desperate bondsmen and tech-priests, a lone figure made his way along a dripping passageway. H
awke had last come down here around six months ago, looking for a place to site another illegal alcohol still.

  Not much had changed.

  Habitations that were little more than packing crates, sheets of tarpaulin and wadded packing materials filled every nook and cranny, proof positive that human beings could find a way to make even the most dismal places home.

  No more than a few hundred lived in this particular shanty zone, making it above average size for such a refuge. Ever since the boarding action by the crystalline attackers, there’d been more and more of these kinds of places springing up below the waterline. It had been the same back on Joura for those who couldn’t work or find a way to make themselves useful.

  Hawke paused at a junction of dark passageways wreathed in plumes of vent smoke as the sensation of being watched crawled up his spine. Down here there wasn’t a square centimetre of space where someone didn’t have eyes on you, but this was something more.

  Over the years, Hawke had by necessity developed a finely honed sense for when he was being watched with malicious intent. He didn’t see anything out of place, just the usual malcontents and desperate fools. He told himself he was being paranoid, but given what he was carrying, a healthy dose of paranoia was no bad thing.

  He carried on, passing a few faces he recognised, many more he didn’t. That didn’t surprise him. New souls were always washing up, falling through the cracks to end up in places like this.

  And not just bondsmen either.

  Disgraced tech-priests, damaged lexmechanics and the like, they ended up here too. More than Hawke had thought, but even that had turned out to be an opportunity. The abandoned and the cast aside were often the best source of his tradeable goods.

  Hawke hadn’t come to trade.

  Today he was after something more.

  It had taken a long time to get back into Forge Elektrus. Manubia hated him, and was always telling him that he was not welcome in her forge, despite the fact she welcomed hundreds of worshippers every day who came to see the Sightless Saint.

  It had been Hawke’s blood that had kept Abrehem alive!

  Didn’t that make him holy or something?

  But Manubia couldn’t keep him out forever, and eventually he’d managed to find a way in past her Protectors. And now here he was, hunting for a black clinic he hoped was still here.

  A pouch of ash-like powder nestled in the pocket of his coveralls. It was a concoction he’d taken real care to develop, the residue left by the crystal beasts, mixed with a potent cocktail of stimms and e-mag rich discharge from high-end cogitators.

  He called it NuBlack, and it was already on a list of proscribed substances, what with it being highly addictive to those with floodstream-based biology.

  Which only made it more desirable to the kind of person he was hoping to find.

  Hawke grinned as he saw the unmarked door to the black clinic just where he remembered it. He pushed past the buckled shutter and straps of thick plastic, wrinkling his nose at the smell of hot metal, cheap disinfectant, rotten meat and burned skin.

  A tech-priest with a hunched spine and ragged, oil-stained robes of faded orange turned to face him as he entered. A hissing, wheezing armature of rusted metal arms was clamped to his back, and his half-metal, half-human face was grey and leprous.

  ‘Hawke,’ said the tech-priest with undisguised hostility. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Hello, Dadamax,’ said Hawke, looking around the filthy interior of the black clinic. ‘Keeping the place as clean as ever, I see.’

  Hissing canisters of noxious gases lined one wall and gurgling pipework diverted chemicals from where they were intended to go. Fragments of disassembled augmetics and flesh-couplers lay in pieces on grimy workbenches. Glass-fronted cabinets, their doors cracked and opaque with dirt, contained numerous jars of things best left to the imagination.

  ‘I asked you a question,’ said Dadamax. ‘I told you I didn’t want you around here again. You bring too much attention. I should never have sold you that ancient plasma pistol.’

  Hawke pretended to look hurt.

  ‘Come on, Dada, my old friend, don’t be like that,’ said Hawke, taking out the pouch of NuBlack and waving it before him. ‘I brought you a little present.’

  Dadamax eyed the pouch with a pathetic mix of hope and revulsion. Word was, Dadamax had been clean for weeks and was trying to work his way back updeck, but Hawke was betting he’d take the pouch and do what he asked.

  One of the manipulator arms creaked and snatched the pouch from Hawke’s fingers.

  ‘What do you want for this?’ asked Dadamax.

  ‘Nothing much, just a little implant surgery.’

  Dadamax turned, interested now.

  ‘On who?’

  ‘On me,’ said Hawke, holding out Abrehem Locke’s augmetic eyes.

  Vodanus watched the mortal pause at the opening of the shadowed passageway. He looked about him, as though aware he was being observed. Vodanus eased farther back into the darkness and enshrouding clouds of vapour.

  The man’s smell was rank and unpleasant. They all were, but this one carried a pouch of caustic chemicals injurious to mechanised anatomy. A flicker of curious code had drifted from beneath its clothes. Something small, yet advanced beyond most other forms of technology upon which Vodanus had fed since leaving the geas-giver’s planet.

  The code-scent of the prey it had originally been sent to kill was aboard this ship, but Vodanus no longer cared. Telok was dead and Vodanus was free of the restrictive prohibitions the geas had laid upon it.

  Vodanus could have killed the mortal and devoured the curious code it carried, but was loath to risk unnecessary exposure, however tempting the morsel.

  Not when this ship was carrying it to an entire world of prey.

  Vodanus had crawled from the wreckage of the linear induction train with its spine shattered by the force of impact. That and the malign code in its enemies’ weapons had vitiated its self-repair technologies, and it had taken it longer than anticipated to resume its hunt.

  Too late, it had tracked its quarry to the plaza, finding him surrounded by an army of the geas-giver’s crystaliths. Too many for even Vodanus to fight through without its self-repair functions in good order. Instead, it had seen the descending shuttle and plotted its inbound trajectory to ascertain from where it had launched.

  It sensed the presence of a mighty ship, thick with the target’s code-scent, and had seized its opportunity. Secretly clawing its way onto the shuttle’s hull, Vodanus endured the void-chill of space to reach this magnificent vessel, a battleship easily the equal in scale of the war-barques its masters had wrought to mass murder.

  Vodanus had kept to the lower decks since then, destroying only when it needed to feed, smashing open only the smallest engines and draining their light.

  Sustenance was enough. Glut would come later.

  It padded away from the opening of the passageway, through clouds of oily smoke to the lair it had made in an abandoned reclamation chamber.

  Patience was the prime virtue of the best hunters.

  And Vodanus was nothing if not patient.

  It could wait until the Speranza reached Mars.

  Blaylock sat at his workbench in his quarters, staring down at the Mars Volta. It reflected the light of recessed lumens, and the deep red sheen of its lacquered surface was a source of great confusion to him ever since the Speranza had returned to Imperial space.

  Much remained to be explained in the wake of Telok’s death and the inexplicable ending of the imminent cataclysm of a space-time rupture. His report to the Fabricator General would cite innumerable examples of inexact methodology and explanations that lacked any solid basis of fact.

  Both Archmagos Kotov and Roboute Surcouf had been maddeningly imprecise as to the nature of their experiences on the bridge. Kotov had spoken to Blaylock of a great battle within the datasphere, of gods of knowledge, a bondsman and Linya Tychon. And, most allegorical of all, a vast go
lden sword he likened to that carried by the Omnissiah at the Pax Olympus.

  Surcouf’s account of the final fate of the eldar was likewise full of hyperbole and allegory. An undoubted psychic event had transpired, but his tales of threads and potential futures being woven by their witch belonged in a hive-fantasist’s palimpsest.

  But what puzzled him the most was why he kept finding himself seated before the Mars Volta with his fingertips on its wooden planchette.

  Fifteen times since leaving Exnihlio, Blaylock had found himself sitting at his workbench with no memory of how he had come to be there. Upon checking his memory coils, he would find himself engaged in a mundane task of shipboard operation. Then, without any apparent gaps or lapses in time, he would be seated at this bench, his fingers twitching with ideomotor responses.

  Each time he had fought the urge to move the planchette and hurried to a far distant region of the ship, throwing himself into another time-consuming task.

  Now he was here again, seated before Magos Alhazen’s gift and feeling the urge to move the planchette around the edges of the board, where the quantum rune combinations, binaric pairs and blessed ordinals glittered invitingly.

  The perfectly geometric lines etched into its surface beguiled his optics, and Blaylock felt his hands move the planchette over the board.

  The last time he had used the Mars Volta it had allowed him to find Archmagos Kotov. The divine will of the Omnissiah had moved within him, so perhaps, at this sixteenth return to the board, it was time to see what message might be received.

  Blaylock slid the planchette across the board, feeling a curious sense of liberation as it revealed first one letter, then another.

  At first they made no sense.

  And then they did, but it was too late to stop. The planchette was moving with a will of its own. Or rather, the will of another.

  T-Y-G-E-R, T-Y-G-E-R.

  Blaylock froze in place.

  He remained that way for nine hours.

  Then lifted one arm, examined it. Lifted the other.

  Blaylock moved away from the workbench and looked about him as though seeing his surroundings for the first time.