by Guy Haley
‘Mindless,’ said Galenius. ‘Slaves.’
‘Enough,’ said Sanguinius.
Galenius stalked back.
‘Doesn’t the Martian know the enemy are at the gates?’ the sergeant complained. ‘This is no time for posturing.’
‘Politics never cease, not even in war,’ said Sanguinius. ‘Maintain calm.’
‘As you command, lord,’ said Galenius. ‘My choler gets the better of me.’
‘Then perhaps I should have you transferred to Captain Amit’s command.’
‘You are not the first to make that suggestion, my lord,’ Galenius chuckled. ‘I sometimes think Captain Raldoron keeps me around to remind himself why he doesn’t like Captain Amit.’
‘That is a disloyal assertion,’ said Sanguinius.
Galenius would not be rebuked, even by his genesire. ‘As you said, my lord. Politics.’
Without warning, the Mandragora formation divided itself into two halves and turned inwards, so that the left-hand side of the legion was facing the right. A ripple of scarlet passed up their ranks as they took several steps back, opening a path to the cylindrical building. The clash of iron feet on stone echoed from the surrounding spires, then ceased as suddenly as it began.
‘They have made their point. That is my invitation.’
‘Squad Galenius, form up!’ the sergeant commanded.
‘Sometimes the best move in politics is to refuse the game in the first place,’ said Sanguinius. ‘You will remain here, Galenius.’
‘As you so command.’
Sanguinius strode towards the building alone, the reflections from ten thousand sets of glowing eyes glinting off his golden armour. As the primarch drew near, the smooth surface of the cylinder split. Two great sections withdrew, sinking deep into the structure, then angled back and slid aside, opening a door onto an interior ablaze with light.
Five figures waited for the primarch. Four carried banners depicting the skull and cog of the Machina Opus. The fifth, ahead of the others, was obviously female. Upon the steps leading into the interior of the cylinder the delegation struck an imposing sight, until Sanguinius climbed beside them and dwarfed them with his presence.
‘Greetings to you, son of the Emperor,’ said the female.
‘Well met, Ambassador Vethorel,’ said Sanguinius. ‘The architect of the solution to the Binary Succession. I am honoured to meet you.’
‘The honour is mine, son of the Emperor.’
Vethorel was outwardly human looking, fair of face, though the subtle signs of suppressed ageing marked her flesh. She had few visible augmetics, and what were displayed were finely wrought to enhance her humanity rather than diminish it. Her voice was modulated to bring out pleasing, if unmistakably machinic, tones. She was the Martian ambassador to the Imperium, and therefore her modifications were cynically chosen to influence baseline humans. Nothing too deviant from the standard form, everything designed with Terran aesthetics in mind. Sanguinius appreciated the art of it nonetheless.
‘Beautiful,’ said Sanguinius.
‘I… Thank you, my lord,’ said Vethorel. Her eyes appeared human until she dipped her head. In the shadow of her hood they glowed with concealed bionics.
‘The Fabricator General is here?’ asked Sanguinius.
‘He awaits you below,’ said the ambassador. She bowed lower. Robes stiff with brocade circuitry rasped on the marble step. ‘Magos Kane, most exalted, gives his humble apologies that he cannot greet you himself, but there is much to be done.’
Such as making a point about how important he is, thought Sanguinius, who was by now impatient with the charade. Outwardly he displayed nothing but a warm smile.
‘Of course.’
‘Please, I shall take you to him.’ Vethorel held up her arm. Sanguinius stepped within the gates. They closed behind him.
Once Sanguinius was inside, the entire floor of the cylinder slowly sank, bearing him away down a shaft of gleaming plascrete to the heart of the mountains. When the lifter platform was well below ground level, three iris doors of adamantium hissed shut overhead, each of sufficient thickness to withstand a direct hit from a void-ship weapon. Strings of faint lumens recessed into the walls emitted a dim light. The plascrete gave way to melta-bored rock. The geoforming was recent, the cuts clean, yet already the deep earth wept out its moisture where the stone’s grain had not vitrified fully under the fusion beams. Down there, the weight of Terra’s history pressed in. The wars of men seemed distant and unimportant.
Like the Grekan bard Orphee, Sanguinius descended into the underworld.
The lifter was made for Titans, and the shaft stretched up and up. He could have flown if he had chosen, yet still a stuffy claustrophobia pressed on him. His wings twitched. He felt caged enough to remove his helmet, and expose his face to the chill, moist air.
The lifter platform came to a slow halt twenty minutes later. A huge tunnel, lined with skitarii of the most elite legions, stretched off for a kilometre or more, where the tunnel terminated in a huge cavern.
‘This way, please,’ said Vethorel. She walked beside Sanguinius, her bannermen following at a respectful distance.
The sounds of hymns and rhythmically striking tools echoed down the way. The work of the tunnel was less smooth than the shaft, for the lifter had intersected with older workings. The ground beneath the Palace was riddled with caverns, mostly artificial, delved out in humanity’s long, uneven history. There the new tunnel cut through the past. The walls were pocked with dark openings, some blocked and pale with fresh rockcrete.
‘Kane commands significant resources,’ said Sanguinius, gesturing at the legions to show he had noticed the Fabricator General’s efforts to impress him.
‘These are the personal guard of the Fabricator General, augmented to the highest degree, their wills subsumed utterly to the command of the Machine-God,’ said Vethorel. ‘As you know, appearances must be upheld, even if they can be deceptive. Much of the Adeptus Mechanicus’ might is lost. We shed an empire’s worth of blood holding the webway for your father, and so many of our kind pledged for the Warmaster.’
He expected the reply Vethorel gave him. Even with the issue of the Binary Succession resolved, and the Mechanicum become the Adeptus Mechanicus, the war strained relations between Terra and Mars to the limit.
‘When this war is done, my father will set all to rights,’ said Sanguinius.
‘To the Machine-God we pray,’ said Vethorel. ‘We ask only that the Omnissiah be permitted victory so Mars might be restored to us.’
Diplomatic, but she is unconvinced, thought Sanguinius. Does Rogal know the depths of their dissatisfaction? he wondered.
‘Yet we remain mighty. Ahead you will see more of Mars’ manifest power,’ Vethorel added.
They passed into the cavern. Multiple tunnels radiated from it, like spokes from a giant wheel. In the spaces between the spokes, runs of alcoves were carved, each housing a god-engine of the Collegia Titanica.
The cavern was larger than Sanguinius expected, capped with a huge dome of raw rock ribbed by plasteel and flying rockcrete buttresses that rested on columns the size of towers. Alone, these physical supports were insufficient to hold back the weight of the mountains and the Palace atop them, and between the architectural matrix shimmered the telltale blue of structural integrity fields.
Thousands of tech-priests laboured in this subterranean world, attended by an army of servitors and thralls, all of them hard at work upon the Titans. Giant machines, dwarfed by the war engines they attended, ground back and forth across the cavern. The floor sprouted forests of machinery. Tangles of cables ran everywhere. Despite the enormous volume of air the cavern contained, the place was thickly redolent of oil, incense, hot metal, cooling ceramite and all the myriad scents of technological worship running at a high gear.
‘Behold, one-tenth of all the Legio Titanicus’ strength upon Terra.’ Vethorel swept her arm around the dozens of machines being serviced. ‘This cavern is one o
f several such facilities. Within them, the priesthood of Mars labours night and day to restore what god-machines we possess, for although this may appear a potent assembly, my lord, it is a fraction of our former strength.’
Vethorel turned her gaze upon him, and Sanguinius was shocked to see the hatred burning through her diplomat’s mask.
‘Be careful here, my lord,’ her tone took on a steely edge. ‘Despite your successes at Beta-Garmon, many of our magi believe that the campaign was a mistake. So many god-machines lost. I am sure you understand.’
‘I do,’ he said, ‘and I thank you for your warning.’
She bowed, and her voice reassumed its former gentle beauty. ‘The Fabricator General awaits you there,’ she said, pointing to a large, many-legged vehicle whose flat back sported a bewildering array of mechanical arms, all of them in motion. ‘I will take my leave of you, my lord.’
‘I thank you again,’ Sanguinius said, but Vethorel was already walking away, and she did not look back.
Amid the thickets of constantly moving mechanical arms, Zagreus Kane rode the machine upon a dais. It was edged in brass and big enough to accommodate his tracked body along with a dozen of the most exalted magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The machine moved no quicker than walking pace, allowing its busy upper limbs to perform their tasks. Sanguinius caught it easily. He ignored the glares of hostility emanating from the tech-priests he passed.
Kane made an elaborate pantomime of speaking with his chief advisers in a torrent of binharic. Sanguinius understood the machine speech, though no being without extensive mechanical alteration could hope to speak it. Kane said nothing important. His whole purpose was to force Sanguinius to wait. Despite his show, when Kane deigned to turn his attention onto the primarch, he seemed affable enough.
‘I am grateful that you came to see me, Lord Sanguinius,’ said Kane. His advisers shuffled away, indifferent to the Angel when they were not openly hostile.
‘How could I not? You are the master of the Adeptus Mechanicus, ruler of the Martian Mechanicus Empire, and one of the most powerful beings in the Imperium. I am but a primarch, a tool of war. I thank you for receiving me.’ Sanguinius bowed.
Kane’s internal mechanisms chattered. ‘You always were one of the most gracious of the Omnissiah’s sons, but we are honest men, you and I. You are the son of the Emperor, glorious by holy design. I am merely a quester after knowledge. My appointment to this position is an accident of circumstance. It is I who am grateful. If I were as important as you say, my messages would have been acted on with more speed. The Praetorian could have come himself, but Lord Dorn does not answer me.’
Sanguinius stepped to Kane’s side. The slender, diffident technocrat Sanguinius had first met years before had gone. Kane wore his enhancements lightly in the past, but he had evidently changed his way of thinking, for now he was more akin to a small tank than a man, his heavily modified torso sitting atop a set of tracks, and his human face buried beneath a dozen individual augmentations.
‘Lord Dorn sends his apologies. He asked me to come only because he is busy.’
‘Gracious again, Lord Sanguinius. The truth is he does not rate my abilities as a military commander. I am an irritation to him. He sees me as a block on his ability to command, because the armies of the Adeptus Mechanicus answer to me and not to him directly,’ said Kane. ‘Please, if you are about to, do not lie to save my pride. I know I am no general. The knowledge may be acquired, but talent cannot easily be engineered. Kelbor-Hal unfortunately is far better versed in the arts of war than I. I was always more concerned with creation than destruction.’
‘A finer sentiment for the best of men,’ said Sanguinius, and meant it.
‘Alas, not in these times,’ said Kane bitterly.
Kane had once been a gentle man. War reforges all it touches, thought Sanguinius, not always for the better.
‘You are loyal to the idea of concord between Terra and Mars, and to the ideal of human unity,’ Sanguinius said. ‘If you will not accept my first compliment, then know that this second attribute is far more valuable than any other you may possess.’
Kane touched no controls nor gave any audible commands, but the legged machine stopped and its multiple arms froze. Plasma torches blinked off. Cargo was deposited smoothly on the floor. The arms folded back and locked into position. The machine’s legs rippled in series like a millipede, turning it around, and with a soft lurch it set off again at greater speed.
‘That is so,’ said Kane, ‘but there are many thousands of adepts in this hall, and a good portion of them believe we of Mars have sold ourselves cheaply to the Imperium of Terra.’
‘Someone might tell them that we live through times where every hour brings difficult choices.’
‘Oh I have. They are aware,’ said Kane. ‘I make those choices for them. I understand why it must be this way, even if they do not. I believe this is for the best.’ Something clicked repetitively deep in Kane’s chest. ‘The Omnissiah’s vision is the will of the Machine-God. I truly believe this. It cannot be realised if Mars and Terra remain divorced. In all alliances there must be compromises.’ He turned his head to look meaningfully into Sanguinius’ eyes. ‘And sacrifices.’
Kane referred to the massed engine battles of the Garmon Cluster that saw hundreds of valuable Titans destroyed, but Sanguinius felt the words as a knife twist in his guts, as if Kane referred to him and knew the awful truth that he would not last out the war.
The Fabricator General returned his attention ahead, to the side of the cavern where sixteen god-engines in the mottled white and green of the Legio Solaria underwent the attentions of their wardens.
‘What I think and believe are only two strands in the data stream of our new adepta’s collective opinion,’ Kane went on. ‘There are still those among us who doubt your father is the Omnissiah. To many of my people, I will forever be only Fabricator Locum, a lieutenant to the true ruler forced into the role of the Fabricator General, and my elevation a gross modus unbecoming.’
‘Your followers are loyal,’ said Sanguinius. ‘That is all that matters for the time being.’
‘To Mars, they are loyal,’ agreed Kane. ‘Unquestioningly. They abhor Kelbor-Hal and all his works. They lust for the forbidden knowledge of Moravec, but unlike our estranged kin in the so-called New Mechanicum they are wise to its dangers. Men are not meant to blend the essence of the warp with that of the materium. Nor should they dabble in the evils of the Silica Animus. The last loyal Titans of Mars wait for Lord Dorn’s order to walk, and they anticipate the summons with righteous fury knowing it may be their last. They will fight and they will die for the cause. But if you were to ask me whether the magi are loyal to Terra’s Imperium, then the answer might well be different.’ Kane paused. Mechadendrites extruded themselves from his shoulders and slipped back inside in a peculiar display of discomfort. ‘We have to win this war, and we need to win convincingly. At the moment our aims are the same. The destruction of Horus and his traitors must be accomplished. But I need your word that the interests of the Martian Empire will be addressed fairly when this is all done, or we may end one war only to begin another. I tell you, you must make your father listen.’
‘Or what will happen?’ said Sanguinius hotly. ‘Did you call my brother to threaten him? You will find me no less disdainful of such tactics.’
An angry noise blurted from Kane’s innards. ‘It is not a threat. It is the truth. Who else am I supposed to speak with? The Emperor is locked away. Politics do not go away because the enemy has come.’
‘I have had my fill of politics,’ said Sanguinius.
‘I have had my fill of war,’ said Kane. ‘No man can expect the life he wishes for, even less demand it be the way he wants.’
Conversation ceased until the platform’s rattling legs clattered to halt, and they stopped.
‘Forgive me,’ Kane said. ‘I spoke more angrily than I wished to. I did not contact Dorn for this discussion. In point of fact, I si
ncerely believe he is already well aware of how things stand. I see you, and I see someone to spend my frustration on.’
‘That is understandable,’ said Sanguinius.
‘What I contacted him for was to convey some news that may be of use to us all.’ Kane gestured up at a Warlord Titan ahead. It had been badly damaged, and was cocooned in gantries, scaffolds and sheeting. On floating platforms and crane lifts, dozens of repair teams were busily at work.
‘This is Luxor Invictoria, the command Titan of the Legio Solaria. This is all that remains from that proud order.’ He pointed out the handful of machines around it.
‘I recognise it. It fought at Nyrcon City. I thought it fell in battle.’
‘It did, but where the Titan survived, the Grand Master of the Legio did not.’
‘Who has succeeded her?’
‘Her nominated heir, who fought on Beta-Garmon Three, at the Carthegia Telepathica.’
Luxor Invictoria emanated more than the diffuse awareness of an electric soul. Its eye-lenses seemed to be looking at Sanguinius with human intelligence. ‘He is within the Titan now?’ the primarch ventured.
‘She. The princeps is the daughter of the last Grand Master. All members of the Order Solaria are of the XX gender designation, as is the custom of this particular Legio. Her name is Esha Ani Mohana Vi. Great Mother of the Imperial Hunters, though hers is a murdered brood. The Legio Solaria is a shadow of its former self. It is not alone in being so.’ Kane bleeped sadly. ‘But who she is is not pertinent. What she saw is. She is why I wished to speak with Dorn. The new Great Mother was badly injured, and has only recently awoken from therapeutic coma. I am sure you will find her tale as intriguing as I did. This information will prove uplifting to the morale of our soldiery, and may prove to be of even greater use than that.’ Kane glanced up at the primarch. ‘Replace your helmet, my lord. This is a conversation that should be conducted privately. I have enjoined Esha Ani from sharing her story, until you and your brothers have decided what should be done with it.’