‘Not really,’ said Emil. ‘Just that it was a bad one. You remember the last time he had a nightmare?’
Roboute did. ‘On the run between Joura and Lodan. The night before we translated into the warp and that crazy pysker went nuts and almost killed us all. What’s your point?’
‘That maybe your need to get away isn’t worth us all getting killed.’
‘Shut the door on your way out,’ said Roboute, his expression hardening.
With Emil gone, Roboute put his head in his hands and slid the astrogation compass towards him. He tapped the glass again, harder this time, and a strange feeling of inevitability swept through him as he stared at the needle.
Ever since they had translated in-system the needle hadn’t so much as twitched.
Its course and his were aimed unerringly for the heart of the Halo Scar.
The Halo Scar. No one knew how it had come into existence, a graveyard of stars aged beyond their time and a region of gravitational hellstorms that bent the local spacetime by orders of magnitude. Navigators who strayed too close to the Scar with their third eye exposed were killed instantly, their hearts stopped dead mid-beat. Astropaths caught in a nuncio trance went mad, screaming and clawing at their skulls as if to expunge horrors they could never put into words.
Even those who looked with mortal eyes began to see things in its tortured depths. Gravitational crush pressures that would compress entire planets to a molecule-sized grain in a heartbeat twisted and distorted the passage of light and time with a reckless and random disregard for causality.
To approach the wound that lapped at the edge of the Imperium a ship had to blind itself to the realities beyond those perceived by mortal senses, and even then it was dangerous to approach too closely. The Speranza had halted three AU from the edge of the Halo Scar, and Saiixek was already having to increase engine output to maintain their position as questing tendrils of gravity sought to pull them into the Scar’s embrace.
A maddened froth of relativistically colliding light and time painted a bleak picture across the far wall of the Speranza’s command deck. From one side to the other, an entoptic representation of the Halo Scar’s immense and impossibly tempestuous depths seemed to mock the gathered magi, as if daring them to explain it or venture a hypothesis as to how it might be navigated. Streams of hyper-dense gaseous matter flailed at the edges, hard enough to cut through a capital ship like a hot wire through thin plastek. Billowing clouds of flexing light reached out like the tendrils of some deep sea cephalopod hunting for prey.
Colours boiled and spontaneously altered their electromagnetic wavelengths with each passing second, and swirling eddies of distorting gravity threw up images of dying stars, cascading streams of debris from the birth of those self-same stars. Light from the same star registered over and over again as it was bent tortuously by the unimaginable gravitational forces, juddering through spacetime in multiple waves. Digital hallucinations of celestial madness flickered in and out of focus as the protesting imaging machines struggled to represent the impossible region of space before them.
‘What was that?’ asked Kotov as another phantom image flickered onto the panoramic display.
Magos Blaylock instantly synced his vision to where Kotov was looking, but by then the image had vanished.
‘What did you see, archmagos?’ inquired Blaylock.
‘A starship,’ he said. ‘I saw a starship. In the Scar.’
‘Impossible,’ said Azuramagelli, his armature flexing in irritation. ‘Our ships are the only vessels out here for millions of kilometres.’
‘I saw a ship out there,’ said Kotov. ‘One of ours. The Cardinal Boras.’
‘A future echo,’ said Galatea. ‘The gravitational forces are throwing back reflections of light and spacetime that has yet to reach us. What you saw was most likely an imprint of the fleet as it will be as we enter the Scar.’
Kotov said nothing, unsettled by what he had seen, but unwilling to expound on its details.
A number of remotely-piloted drones had already been sent out into the fringes of the Halo Scar, some with servitors aboard, others with menial deck crews picked up by skitarii armsmen, and their findings appeared to support Galatea’s hypothesis.
In all cases, the result had been the same; the craft had been crushed or torn apart within seconds of reaching an arbitrary line that corresponded to the edge of the anomaly. Biometric readings from the implanted crewman fed back to the Speranza, but showed nothing that couldn’t be surmised from the fluctuating readings being processed by the data engines; pressure, heat and light readings beyond measurement.
The only discovery of note achieved by the deaths of the implanted crew was a wild distortion of chronometry that suggested that time itself was compressed and elongated by the gravitational sheer within the Halo Scar.
‘Rapturous, is it not?’ said Galatea, rocking back and forth on its palanquin beside Kotov’s command throne. ‘Over four thousand years of study and data collection, and even then we know only a fraction of its secrets.’
‘That’s not very reassuring, when you’re supposed to be guiding us through it,’ said Kotov, his hindbrain ghosting through the Speranza’s noospheric network while his primary consciousness resided on the command deck. Galatea’s touch was everywhere in the ship’s guts, millions of furcating trails of lambent light that bled and divided all through the vital networks of the ship. Not invasively, but close enough to life-support, engine controls and gravity to ensure that he dared order no hostile moves against Galatea.
‘When traversing a labyrinth, we only need to know the correct path, not everything around it,’ said Galatea. ‘Fear not, archmagos, we will guide your ship through this labyrinth, but it will not be a journey without peril. You should expect to suffer great losses before we reach the other side.’
Magos Kryptaestrex looked up, his heavy, rectangular form flexing with the motion of his numerous servo-arms and manipulators. More like an enginseer than a high-ranking magos, Kryptaestrex was brutish and direct, an adept who was unafraid of getting his metaphorical hands dirty in the guts of a starship.
Like the rest of the senior magi, Kryptaestrex had been horrified at the devil’s bargain Kotov had struck with Galatea. More than anyone – even Kotov himself – Kryptaestrex had a deep connection with the inner workings of the ship, and it had been his inspection of its key systems that convinced the others that Kotov had no choice but to allow Galatea to as good as hijack the ship.
‘Nothing of worth is ever achieved without loss,’ said Kotov. ‘All those whose lives are sacrificed in the Quest for Knowledge will be remembered.’
‘That’s right,’ giggled Galatea. ‘The Mechanicus never deletes anything. If only you knew how true that was, you would see how blinded you have become, how enslaved you all are by your own hands and lack of vision. The truth is all around you, but you do not see it, because you have forgotten how to question.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Kotov. ‘The core tenet of the Adeptus Mechanicus is to seek out new knowledge.’
‘No,’ said Galatea, as though disappointed. ‘You seek out old knowledge.’
And for a fraction of a second, Kotov dearly wished he had a squad of Cadian soldiers on the command deck, warriors free of augmentation or weapons that could be deactivated, overloaded or turned on friendly targets. Just a handful of Cadian veterans with gleaming Executioner blades...
Of course Magos Dahan and Reclusiarch Kul Gilad had proposed an armed response to wrest Galatea from the Speranza, but Kotov had quickly scotched the idea, knowing that it was in all likelihood able to hear their discussions. Nowhere on the ship could be considered secure, and this close to the Halo Scar, taking a ship out beyond the voids would be suicide. At the slightest hint of threat, Galatea could wreak irreparable damage to the ship, maybe even destroy it. Given the current alignment of their purpose and that of Gal
atea, the safest course of action was to go along with its wishes and turn a scriptural blind eye to the techno-heretical fact of its existence.
Magos Azuramagelli stood in awe of the machine sentience, its physical appearance so close to his own armature-contained form that they could have been crafted from the same STC. Of all the magi, he seemed the least revolted by the idea of a sentient machine augmented by human brains, perhaps because it was a single – albeit dangerous – leap of logic for him to attempt a transfer into a mechanical body with an inbuilt logic engine in which to imprint his personality matrix.
Saiixek paid the creature no mind, wreathed in an obscuring fog of condensing vapour as he applied subtle haptic control to the engines. Few had dared approach this close to the Halo Scar, and he was taking no chances that a rogue engine surge or reactor spike would hurl them into its depths at a speed not of his choosing. It would be Saiixek who would control the ship during their entry, guided by astrogation data provided by Galatea to the Tychons down in the astrogation chamber.
‘Magos Saiixek, are you ready?’ asked Galatea.
‘As I’ll ever be,’ snapped Saiixek, unwilling to pass any more words than were necessary with a machine intelligence.
‘Then we will begin,’ said Galatea.
Kotov gripped the arms of his command throne, thinking back to his fleeting image of the starship echoed in the mirror of distorted spacetime. Even now he couldn’t be sure of what he had observed, but the one thing he had been sure of was that the vessel he had seen was in great pain.
No, not pain.
It had been dying.
Hundreds of decks below the command bridge, Vitali and Linya Tychon stood before an identical rendition of the Halo Scar. The machine-spirits of the chamber were restless and not even Vitali’s soothing touch or childlike prayers were easing their skittishness. Linya held fast to her father’s hand, anxious and fearful, but trying not to let it show.
‘There isn’t enough data here,’ she said. ‘Not enough to plot a course. Even a primus grade hexamath couldn’t calculate a path through this. When the first gravity tide hits us we’ll be drawn into the heart of a dead star, crushed to atoms or pulled apart into fragments.’
Her father turned to face her, his hood drawn back over his shaven scalp. The plastek implants beneath his skin robbed him of most conventional expressions, but the one that always managed to shine through was paternal pride.
‘My dear Linya,’ he said. ‘I do not believe we have come this far to fail. Have faith in the will of the Omnissiah and we will be guided by his light.’
‘You should listen to your father, Linya Tychon,’ said a disembodied voice that echoed from the walls with a booming resonance.
And data poured into the astrogation chamber, information-dense light rising up like breakers crashing against the base of a cliff.
At the insistence of Kul Gilad, the Adytum was the first ship to enter the fringes of the Halo Scar. They were the Emperor’s crusaders, and as such they would be the first to drive the blade of their ship into the unknown. Ordinarily, such an honour would go to the flagship of the archmagos, but to risk a ship as valuable as the Speranza was deemed too dangerous, and the Reclusiarch’s demand was accepted.
Galatea fed its course to the Adytum’s navigation arrays, taking the ship into the Scar on a low, upwardly curving trajectory through a patch of distorted light that shed spindrifts of gravitational debris. Archmagos Kotov watched the Space Marine vessel with a mixture of fear and hope, desperately hoping that Galatea’s madness was only confined to its homicidal behaviours and that its computational skills were undiminished.
The Adytum’s voids clashed and shrieked as conflicting field energies pulled at the ship from all directions and quickly-snuffed explosions spumed along its flanks as the generators blew out one after another. It appeared as though the Black Templars ship was stretching out before them, but as their closure speeds brought them up behind the smaller vessel, that extrapolation diminished.
Purple and red squalls of space-time flurries closed in around the Black Templars ship and it was soon lost to sight. Moonchild followed, its longer hull shuddering under the impact of rogue gravity waves. Portions of armour plating peeled back and spun off into space, like wings pulled from a trapped insectile creature by a spiteful child. Like the Adytum before it, Moonchild lost its voids in a silent procession of explosions marching along its length.
Cardinal Boras went next, following the exact same trajectory as Moonchild, for Galatea had been very specific: to deviate from its course would invite disaster and expose a ship to the tempestuous wrath of the Halo Scar. It too vanished into the cataclysmic nebula of primal forces and was soon swallowed by blossoming curtains of electromagnetic radiation, hideous gravity riptides and celestial treachery.
Then it was the turn of the Speranza and her attendant fleet of support ships to enter.
Kotov felt the entire ship shudder as it was enfolded by the Halo Scar. The viewscreen entoptics hazed with static and a barrage of scrapcode gibberish. A wash of broken binary squealed from the augmitters and every machine with a visual link to the command deck blew out in a hail of sparks.
Bridge servitors with limited emergency autonomy assigned lower-sentience cybernetics the task of repairing those links and bringing the Speranza’s senses back online. Kryptaestrex oversaw the repair efforts, while Azuramagelli attempted to keep up with Galatea’s rapidly evolving calculations as the gravitational tempests surged and retreated, apparently at random, but which Galatea assured him conformed to patterns too complex for even the Speranza’s logic engines to identify.
‘You know, Tarkis,’ said Kotov. ‘If you’d spoken to me about turning back now, I might have listened to you.’
‘I doubt it, archmagos,’ said Blaylock. ‘You do not dare return to Mars empty-handed, and no matter the risks, you will always desire to push onwards.’
‘You say that like it’s a bad thing. We’re explorators, pushing onwards is how we advance the frontiers of knowledge. A little risk in such ventures is never a bad thing.’
‘The risk/reward ratio in this venture is weighted far more towards risk,’ said Blaylock. ‘Logically we should return to Mars, but your need to push the boundaries will not allow for such a course.’
‘Better to push too far than not far enough,’ said Kotov as another thunderous gravity sheer slammed into the Speranza. ‘Where would we be if we always played safe? What manner of Omnissiah would we serve if we did not always strive to achieve that which others deemed impossible? To reach for the stars just out of reach is what makes us strong. To fight for the things that demand sacrifice and risk is what earns us our pre-eminent place in the galactic hierarchy. By the deeds of men like us is mankind kept mighty.’
‘Then let us hope that posterity remembers us for what we achieved and not our doomed attempt.’
‘Ave Deus Mechanicus,’ said Kotov in agreement.
Blaylock’s floodstream surged with data, a blistering heat haze of informational light that made Kotov’s inload mechanisms flinch. A nexus of information ribboned through the air between Blaylock and Galatea, and Kotov took a moment to admire Blaylock’s attempt to match its processing speed. The data-burden was threatening to overwhelm Blaylock’s systems, and he was only parsing a tenth of what Galatea was feeding the fleet’s navigational arrays.
‘Give up, Tarkis,’ said Kotov. ‘You’ll burn out your floodstream and give yourself databurn.’
‘That would be sensible, archmagos,’ agreed Blaylock, his binary strained and fragmentary. ‘But to see such raw mathematical power unleashed is staggering. I have known nothing like it, and I suspect I never will again. Hence I will attempt to learn all I can from this creature before we are forced to destroy it.’
Kotov flinched at his Fabricatus Locum’s words. ‘Authority: Keep sentiments like that quiet.’
‘Informational: the cybernetic hybrid creature’s neuromatrix is under far too great a stress of computational astro-calculus to be directing any energy to sensory inloads at present.’
‘And you would risk everything on that assumption?’
‘It is not an assumption.’
‘I don’t care,’ snapped Kotov. ‘Keep such thoughts to yourself in future.’
Kotov stared at Galatea, fearing that Blaylock was underestimating its ability to splinter its cortex and keep its sensory inloads going while the majority of its gestalt machine consciousness was devoted to its real-time navigational processing. It seemed that Blaylock was right, for Galatea was enveloped in spiralling streams of data, trajectories, storm-vectors, gravitational flux arrays and precise chrono-readings that spun, advanced and retreated with each hammerblow of gravity.
Like the ships before it, the Speranza’s voids blew out, and one by one the links to the other ships in the fleet began to fail. Conventional auspexes were useless in the Halo Scar, and even the more specialised detection arrays mounted on the vast prow of the Ark Mechanicus returned readings that were all but meaningless. Kryptaestrex bent all his efforts to appeasing the auspex spirit hosts and assigning a choir of adulators to the frontal sections to shore up the hymnal buttresses.
Warnings came in from all across the ship as local conditions proved too arduous for the different regions of the vessel to endure. Decks twisted and distorted by random squalls of gravity and time ruptured and blew their contents out into space, where they were crushed in an instant by the immense forces surrounding the ship.
Entire forges were torn from the underside of the ship as the keel bent out of true and underwent torsion way beyond its tolerances. Centuries-old temples to manufacture were flattened the instant they separated from the ship, and hundreds of armoured vehicles recently constructed for the Cadian regiment were pulled apart in seconds. Two refineries, one on either flank of the Speranza, exploded, sending wide dispersals of burning promethium and refined fyceline ore into the ship’s wake, where they ignited in garish streams of blazing light that gravity compression stretched out for millions of kilometres.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 34