At least fifty ships remained in orbit, still suckled by the industry of the world below. The Guard muster for the Pergamus Sector still had weeks to go before its Lords Militant would consider their loading and supply complete. To muster enough men and materiel for a lengthy campaign was not an operation to undertake lightly. The presence of so many Mechanicus logisters had helped speed the process, and in thanks, the shipmasters of the muster ordered their gun decks to fire thunderous broadsides into space in their honour.
On the planet’s surface, millions of eyes turned to the heavens, staring in wonder at the shimmering bands of variegated colour that sparkled through the troposphere like an orbital barrage. Amid this glorious cascade of irradiated exhaust dust and expended munitions, the Kotov Fleet broke orbit with Captain Surcouf’s vessel in the lead. The fleet turned towards the unknown, on a journey whose ending no one could predict. Alongside the Renard, the Black Templars ship Adytum knifed through space like a blade thrust to the heart.
Where the rogue trader vessel was designed with a measure of flourish in its tall towers, flared wing section and needlessly aerodynamic profile, the shipwrights of the Adeptus Astartes had built their craft with but a single purpose. Though small in comparison to most ships employed by the Space Marines, the Adytum was a scrapper, a battle-scored veteran of a hundred or more vicious void engagements.
And with a battle squad of Space Marines led by a Reclusiarch aboard, its fighting prowess was multiplied exponentially.
A host of craft followed the three lead vessels: refinery ships, mining hulks, vessels that were little more than vast atomic reactors, manufactory ships, vast water-bearing haulers, repair ships, and a host of fleet tenders that could be employed as general workhorses to ferry men and war machines between the fleet. In addition to the working ships of the fleet, Archmagos Kotov had assembled a Mechanicus warfleet with which to pierce the veil of the Halo Scar.
The Retribution-class vessel Cardinal Boras had been constructed in the shipyards of Rayvenscrag IV nearly five thousand years ago and was no stranger to such voyages of exploration. As part of a fleet led by Rogue Trader Ventunius, it had ventured deep into the northern rim of the galaxy and had been one of only five vessels to return. Its guns had ended the Regime of Iron at the battle of Korsk, and its proud history included battle honours earned in over eighteen different sector fleets. It had fought as part of Battlefleet Gothic against the fleets of the Arch-Enemy, and with this latest secondment, it would once again venture beyond the light of the Astronomican.
Moonchild and Wrathchild, two Gothic-class cruisers that had been little more than blazing wrecks when the Mechanicus had salvaged them off the shoulder of Orion, flanked the Cardinal Boras like devoted followers. Rebuilt and refitted to better serve the Mechanicus, their hulls had been consecrated at the Terminus Nox of Phobos and Deimos, when the regenerative aspects of the Omnissiah were at their apogee. Stalwarts of the Adeptus Mechanicus fighting fleets, both vessels had been virtually conjoined since their rebirth and deployments to separate battlefleets had seen them suffer inexplicable mechanical breakdowns and system-wide failures until they had been reassigned to work together.
To repay a centuries-old Debita Fabricata to Archmagos Kotov, the forge world Voss Prime had despatched three heavily armed escort cruisers from Battlefeleet Armageddon to stand for Mars. Two Endurance-class vessels, Honour Blade and Mortis Voss sailed in arrowhead formation with Blade of Voss, an Endeavour-class ship killer. All three vessels bore honour markings bestowed by Battlefleet Armageddon, and Mortis Voss, whose mater-captain had delivered the deathblow to the greenskin flagship Choppa, bore the personal heraldry of Princeps Zarha, the fallen Crone of Invigilata.
Squadrons of modified frigates, destroyers and a host of local system vessels flew as an honour guard to the Explorator Fleet, though they would turn back at the system’s edge. With enough resources to sustain a fleet expedition beyond the stars for many years and enough firepower to fend off all but the most powerful enemies, the Kotov Fleet was as well prepared as it was possible to be.
Time would tell if that would be enough.
Intellect is the understanding of knowledge.
+++Inload Interrupt+++
Runestones fell from the delicately wrought bowl, the grain of the wood expertly nurtured by Khareili the Shaper to form rippled patterns that made sweet music when water poured through the microgrooves in the surface. It had been a thoughtful gift, one intended to calm the soul, but no soft music and no serene shaping could calm the aching sadness in Bielanna’s heart.
She sat cross-legged in one of the Aspect shrine’s many battle domes, its curved walls hung with swords, axes, pikes and blades that few armourers beyond Biel-Tan could name. Each was fashioned with the customary grace of Bielanna’s race, but possessed a brutal purity of purpose common to the warriors of her craftworld. Theirs was a martial philosophy, one of war and reconquest, and each aspect of Biel-Tan’s paths reflected that overriding ethos.
Bielanna knew she risked a great deal by coming to the Shrine of the Twilight Blade; the Aspect Warriors did not welcome outsiders to their sacred places. Few areas aboard an eldar ship of war were denied to a farseer, but even she might be punished for this transgression.
The red sand beneath her was soft and warm. Warriors had trained here recently, and she could read the ballet of their combat in the ridges, folds and depressions in the sand. A warrior of incredible skill had danced with one whose footwork was more complex, but who had – in the end – lost to the iron control of his opponent. As Bielanna’s senses flowed into the skein, she followed the threads of the warriors back into the past, seeing shadowy ghost-figures spinning and leaping around her. Their every movement was fluid, economical and deadly. The phantom shapes spun around her with ever greater fury as she looked down at the wraithbone runestones in the sand.
The Scorpion and the Doom of Eldanesh. Both lying atop the Tears of Isha.
The pattern was familiar to her, each one tracing the line of fate’s weave. Between them they represented skeins of futures that had already been realised, that were yet to be, and which might never be. They braided together in innumerable threads, and each one was – in turn – made up of a dizzying number of potential futures, making the task of interpretation and manipulation almost impossible.
The corners of her full-lipped mouth twitched at her choice of words.
Almost.
She had spent over a century learning how to read the winds of fate in the shrine of the farseers, but even so, her knowledge was woefully incomplete. The futures were fracturing, the threads of fate unravelling from their complex braids. Some were being extinguished, while others were revealed, but through all of the splintering of the future, one strand remained achingly constant.
One that no amount of her manipulations could avoid, a seemingly fixed point in fate.
‘It was a good bout,’ said a voice behind her. She hadn’t heard his approach, but nor would she have expected to hear the stealthy advance of so formidable a warrior. She was just surprised he had waited this long to reveal himself.
‘Vaynesh is very skilful,’ she said. ‘You have taught him well.’
‘I have, but he will never beat me. Anger clouds his concentration and blinds him to attack.’
‘You toyed with him,’ said Bielanna. ‘I counted at least three times you could have ended the fight with a killing strike.’
‘Only three? You are not looking close enough,’ growled the warrior, moving around to stand before her. ‘I could have killed him five times before I chose to take the deathblow.’
Tariquel was clad in his full Striking Scorpion aspect armour, with only his head left bare. Its plates were a subtle mix of green and ivory, edged with fluted lines of gold and inlaid mother-of-pearl. His features were hard-edged now, but Bielanna remembered when he had followed the Path of the Dancer and wept as he performed S
wans of Isha’s Mercy.
She blinked away the memory. That Tariquel was long gone and would never return.
The ice in his eyes told her that she had offended him. Had his war-mask been to the fore and fully enmeshed with his warrior Aspect, he might well have killed her for such a comment.
‘I apologise,’ said Bielanna. ‘My full attention was not on reading the sword dance.’
‘I know,’ said Tariquel, kneeling before her. ‘You should not be here. Seers are not welcome in the Shrine of the Twilight Blade. This is a place where threads are ended, not where they continue into the future.’
‘I know.’
‘Then why are you here?’
‘The human fleet is leaving the coreworld at this system’s heart,’ said Bielanna. ‘We will soon emerge from concealment to enter the webway in pursuit of their foolish expedition.’
‘The heartbeat of Khaine within the infinity circuit already told me that,’ said Tariquel. ‘You did not need to come here to deliver this news.’
‘True,’ said Bielanna, lifting a cloth-wrapped bundle from the sand beside her. ‘I came here because I wanted to bring you a gift.’
‘I do not want it.’
‘You don’t know what it is.’
‘It is irrelevant,’ said the Striking Scorpion. ‘Gifts have no place here.’
‘This one does,’ she said, holding out the cloth.
Tariquel took the bundle and unwrapped it with quick, impatient motion. His eyes fell upon what was contained within its folds and his features softened for the briefest moment as he recognised its significance.
‘It is ugly,’ he said at last.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘It is, but it belongs here, in a temple of war.’
Tariquel gripped the leather-wrapped sword hilt with fingers that were too delicate to handle such a brutish, clumsy weapon. The hilt was pugnaciously forged, its bellicose form beaten into submission with hammers and molten heat. No wonder the metal had failed in the crucible of combat and caused the black blade to snap a handspan above the quillons. What weapon would not turn on its wielder after so traumatic a birth?
A broken chain of cold iron dangled from the flared cross of its pommel, the last link cut clean through with a single strike.
‘Very well, I shall present it to Exarch Ariganna. She will decide if we should keep it.’
‘Thank you,’ said Bielanna.
‘Was this his sword?’
‘No,’ said Bielanna. ‘He was not among the slain of Dantium.’
‘Then you should take greater care in your rune casting,’ snapped Tariquel, his war-mask slipping over his features. ‘Eldar lives were lost in that battle. Now you say it was for nothing?’
Bielanna shook her head. ‘Nothing ever happens in isolation, Tariquel,’ she said, struggling for a way to explain to him the complexities of acting on visions from the skein. ‘What happened on Dantium needed to happen. It has brought us to this point, and without those human deaths, the future I must shape might never come to pass.’
‘Your words are fleeting like the warp spider and just as insubstantial,’ said Tariquel.
‘Human fates are so brief and fickle that they are difficult to follow with any real precision.’
‘So again we go to war to reclaim a lost future with uncertainty as our touchstone?’
‘We must,’ said Bielanna, gathering up her runes in the patterned bowl and swirling them around once more. Tariquel reached out with a blindingly swift hand and gripped her wrist hard enough to draw a grimace of pain.
‘The Starblade is a large vessel,’ said Tariquel. ‘Surely there are other places more suited to the casting of runes than an aspect shrine?’
‘There are,’ agreed Bielanna, as the warrior released her arm.
Tariquel nodded towards the runestones in the bowl, and the gentle soul he had been before Khaine’s siren song had called to him swam to the surface for a heartbeat.
‘Does what we do here bring the future you seek any closer?’
Tears welled in Bielanna’s eyes as she pictured the two empty cots in her chambers.
‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But it will. It must.’
He was a leviathan, a mighty bio-mechanical construct engineered far beyond the natural evolutionary norm for his kind. His structure was immense, self-sustaining and driven to grow larger, an amusingly biological imperative; exist, consume, procreate. To be of iron and oil, stone and steel was to know permanence, but if the fleshy remnants at the heart of these perceptions knew anything, it was that nothing fashioned by the hand of Man was permanent.
Seated upon his command throne and linked to the machine heart of the Speranza via dermal haptics, MIUs and the Manifold, Archmagos Lexell Kotov felt the spirit of his ship rushing through him, its millennial heart a roaring cascade of information that surged around his floodstream like a churning river of light. Even with so many points of connection, he only dared skim the uppermost levels of the enormous starship’s mind. Any deeper and he risked being swept away by its powerful magnificence, drowned in the liquid streams of interleaved data.
The Speranza’s machine-spirit was orders of magnitude greater than any bio-augmented sentience he had encountered. It could easily consume the totality of his mortal mind and leave his body a vacant, brain-dead shell with no more sense of its own existence than a servitor. Kotov had once risked linking his mind’s full cognitive functions with the wounded heart of a forge world to avert a catastrophic reactor failure, but the Speranza dwarfed even that mighty spirit.
Forge worlds were seething cauldrons of pure function, singularly directed to the point of mindlessness, entire planets of manufactories driven to extremes of production that could only be yoked by the tens of thousands of Martian adepts thronging their surfaces. The Speranza held that same function, but was unfettered from fixed stellar geography, a forge world that could travel the stars, a mighty engine of creation to rival the scale of those crafted in the Golden Age of Technology.
Its discovery had been accidental, a chance accretion of aberrant code bleeding from its slumbering mind-core into the data engines of Kotov’s high temple on the forge world of Palomar. At first, he had dismissed the binaric leakage, believing it to be ghost emissions from long-deactivated machines, but as his infocytes scoured the deep networks for similar code geometries, a pattern emerged that gradually revealed something unbelievable.
The full might of Kotov’s analyticae had been brought to bear, and the divergent paths of the data bleed were quickly identified. Even then, no one had fully realised the enormity of what the neurally-conjoined adepts were uncovering. Only after physical explorator teams had spent the better part of a century verifying the outer edges of the code footprint had Kotov dared to believe that what was being revealed could be true.
One of the legendary Ark Mechanicus.
Buried in the steel bedrock of his forge world for thousands of years.
Only a handful of such incredible vessels were said to exist, and to have discovered one intact was a miracle to rival that of stumbling across a fully functioning STC system. None of the recovered data scraps could identify the ship, which astounded Kotov, for it was a central tenet of the Mechanicus never to delete anything. For all intents and purposes, the ship had never existed before now. At first, Kotov believed its long-dead crew had somehow managed to land the vast starship intact on the planet’s surface and then subsumed it into the world’s metal strata.
Only as more of the ship had been revealed did Kotov finally understand the truth.
The ship was incomplete.
Portions of the starship remained to be constructed, and it had never been launched. For reasons unknown, its builders had abandoned the project in its final stages and simply incorporated the existing structure into the planet’s expanding skein of industry. The ship had been forgotte
n, and its halls of technological marvels and grand ambition were swallowed by the evolving forge world until no hint of its original structure could be discerned.
And so it had remained for millennia until the will of the Omnissiah had brought it back to the light. Kotov liked to believe the ship had wanted to be found, that it had dreamed of taking to the stars and fulfilling the purpose for which it had been designed.
It had taken him three centuries to prise it loose from the structures built onto its submerged hull, and another two to coax it into space with a fleet of load lifters and gravity ballast. Its unfinished elements had been completed in the orbital plates, the disassembled components of three system monitors providing the necessary steelwork and missing elements of tech. His shipyards had the expertise and required STC designs to render the ship space-worthy, but reviving its dormant machine-spirit had been another matter entirely. It had slept away the aeons as a forgotten relic, and Kotov knew he had to remind it of its ancient duty to continue the Quest for Knowledge.
Kotov had communed with dying forge worlds, calmed rebellious Titans and purged corrupted data engines of primordial scrapcode, but the ancient spirit of the Speranza had almost destroyed him. At great risk to his own mind, he had dragged its torpid soul into being, fanning the bright spark of the Omnissiah that lay at the heart of every machine into a searing blaze of rapturous light.
But such a violent birth was not achieved without cost, for all newborns fear leaving the peace of solitude in which they have endured the epochs. Like a wounded beast, it had lashed out in agonised bursts of archaic code all around the bio-neural networks of Palomar. Its machine screams overloaded the forge world’s carefully balanced regulatory networks and brought the planet to ruin in the blink of an eye. Hundreds of reactor cores were driven to critical mass in an instant and the subsequent explosions laid waste to entire continents. Irreplaceable libraries were reduced to ash, molten slag or howling code scraps. Millions of tanks, battle-engines and weapons desperately needed for Mankind’s endless wars were lost in the radioactive hellstorm.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 14