‘How far to the Tomioka?’ asked Auiden.
‘Unknown, but it cannot be far,’ said Tanna, aiming for a gap between two soaring mountains of disintegrating ice. ‘Kotov’s initial data suggested Telok’s flagship was no more than sixty kilometres from the landing fields. The distance waypoints on the avionics are non-functional, but my estimate is that it should be just beyond this valley.’
Auiden rose from the co-pilot’s chair. ‘Then I will ready the warriors.’
Tanna risked looking away from the view through the canopy and said, ‘The Mechanicus will not be far behind us, Auiden. I want this site secure before they get here.’
‘Understood.’
Tanna returned his attention to their flight path as he guided the Thunderhawk into the narrow valley. Away from the freezing fog clouds and blinding brightness of the nitrogen glaciers, he saw the valley was filled with glittering crystal towers arranged like vast columns in some ruined temple structure of Old Earth. Flickering traceries of emerald-hued lightning danced in the mist between the crystal spires, none of which were less than twenty metres thick, and fronds of poisonous light licked from their tapered tips like the sputtering flames of damaged electro-candles.
Whipping bolts arced between the columns and reached up to the gunship. Tanna pulled away from the flares of electrical energy and cursed as he felt power bleed away from the engines.
‘Something wrong?’ said Auiden, pausing at the cockpit hatch.
‘I do not know,’ asked Tanna, fighting for altitude as yet more of the arcing green bolts snapped between the crystal columns and the Barisan. An auspex-slate blew out in a shower of sparks, and Tanna felt the gunship’s airframe shudder like a wounded grox. Another surveyor panel exploded and smoke billowed from the ruined mechanism within.
Auiden was thrown back into the transport compartment as the gunship lurched as though swatted from above. Tanna’s head snapped forwards as the engines died, their fire snuffed out by a surging electrical overload. Smoke billowed around the wings and he fought to keep the Barisan’s nose up as it transitioned from a highly manoeuvrable assault craft into a hundred-and-thirty-tonne hunk of metal falling from the sky.
Black rock flashed past either side of the canopy, barely three metres from the Barisan’s wingtips. The gunship burst from the valley of crystal columns like a bullet from a gun, flying over a vast plateau enclosed by a ring of sharp-toothed peaks. The plateau resembled the surface of a turbulent lake that had instantly frozen in some far distant epoch, capturing every wavelet and ripple on its surface.
At the centre of the plateau was a sight that beggared belief, something so improbable that Tanna struggled to comprehend what he was actually seeing.
‘Brace, brace, brace!’ he shouted, hauling back on the control columns as the ground rushed towards the plummeting gunship. ‘We’re going down!’
Before he could say more, the Barisan ploughed into the glassy surface of the plateau with the sound of a million windows breaking all at once.
With typical Mechanicus functionality of language, the nine machines emerging from the towering cliffs of the bulk landers were known as Land Leviathans. Straight away, Roboute saw the term was insufficiently grand for such colossal machines. Not one was less than fifty metres tall, and one was at least twice that. Most moved on caterpillar tracks tens of metres wide, some on enormous, ultra-dense wheels the size of moderately-sized habitats, while others moved on vast, pounding machine legs.
No two were alike, for they had been constructed on many different forge worlds, over countless centuries by builders with differing technological resources, materials and aesthetic sensibilities. Here and there, it was possible to see that most shared the same basic chassis, but battle damage, centuries of attrition, addition and amendments had taken their subsequent evolution in many different directions. Above whatever form of traction gave it mobility, each Land Leviathan was a moving mountain upon which were grafted haphazard confusions of jutting towers, fragile-looking scaffolding and extrusions to which Roboute could ascribe no purpose.
Each bore a proud name, and each was emblazoned with heraldry belonging to its forge world of origin alongside binaric informationals denoting allegiances to various Mechanicus power blocs. Plumes of waste gases streamed from hundreds of exhaust apertures and electrical discharge flickered around their crenellated topsides.
Mightiest of all was the Tabularium.
Archmagos Kotov’s Land Leviathan walked on fifty vast trapezoidal feet, arranged in parallel rows of twenty-five, each row three hundred metres long. The main structure’s mass was connected to the feet by huge telescoping columns; complex, brutishly mechanical arrangements of muscular pistons and cog-toothed joints. Each was veined by dozens of ribbed cables and power lines, which were in turn connected to threshing coupling rods that thundered in and out of the propulsion decks. Each monstrous foot elevated five metres, cycled forwards, then slammed back down with earth-cracking force and thunderous echoes.
Like the Speranza, it was old, but where the Ark Mechanicus had taken to the stars comparatively recently, the Tabularium was said to have pounded its way across worlds conquered during the Great Crusade. Its vast hull bore the evidence of those long years in layers of stratified scar tissue – some earned in battle, others in no less brutal fits of redesign and expansion.
Outflung prominences of masonry and steel rendered its upper reaches into the form of a great stone city on the move, a representation of ancient Troi or Aleksandria given motion. Its frontal section rose to a tapered prow, like a galleon of old, upon which sat a void shielded dome of polished pink marble, gold and silver-steel.
Within the Tabularium’s gilded dome, the aesthetic of an ocean-going galleon was continued in the warm wood and brass fitments installed throughout the command deck. The gleaming hardwood floor reflected the diffuse glow of the lumens inset in the arched vault, and each of the hundred servitor and thrall crew wore brocaded frock-coats of a rich navy blue.
A vast ship’s wheel suspended from the ceiling, an archaic means of control, but this was a wheel that Martian legend told had been taken from the flagship of a great oceanic general of Old Earth after his great victory at Taraf al-Gharb. The wheel was operated by Magos Azuramagelli via a heavily augmented servitor whose torso was implanted into a bio-interface column and whose arms were telescoping arrangements of piston-driven bronze callipers. Azuramagelli’s own body possessed manipulator limbs fully capable of directing the Land Leviathan’s course, but he preferred to steer the Tabularium through the proxy of the servitor, a holdover from the days when he had possessed a body of his own.
Now, the Magos of Astrogation was an articulated framework of slatted steelwork in which several bell jars were suspended in layers of shock-resistant polymer. Each diamond-reinforced container contained a portion of Azuramagelli’s original brain matter, each excised chunk suspended in bio-conductive gel and linked in parallel with the Speranza’s cogitation engines which laughed in the face of Amdahl’s Law.
‘Holding station,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘Plasma reactor chiefs report steady temperatures and all propulsion decks are reporting readiness for forward motion. Is the word given, archmagos?’
‘Of course it is bloody well given,’ snapped Archmagos Kotov, the scale of his anger overwhelming his normal logical processes. ‘I want us after that damned gunship right now, Azuramagelli. You hear me? Burn those reactors hot and work the propulsion crews to death if it gets us to the Tomioka faster.’
‘By your command,’ said Azuramagelli, conveying the strength of the archmagos’s request in a terse blurt of binary to the engineering spaces.
The Leviathan’s command throne was set back on an elevated rostrum of bevelled rosewood and gold-veined ouslite, fully equipped with multiple interface options for its commander. Kotov wore a body fashioned from glossy plates of jade that concealed a hybrid amalgamation
of a vat-grown nervous system and cunningly interleaved cybernetics from a bygone age. Its perfectly proportioned form was moulded to match the entombed kings of a long-dead culture of Terra whose priests were able to preserve their rulers’ biomass for millennia.
Kotov’s shaven head glistened with a fresh baptismal of sacred oils, and spinal plugs interfaced him with the Leviathan’s noospheric network and its surging floodstream, while unconscious haptic gestures parsed summary data being fed to him by the magi commanding the other Land Leviathans.
He kept his consciousness split into several streams of concurrent data processing, each partitioned off in discrete compartments of his mind. Thrice-purified oils burned at his shoulders in braziers carved to recreate the snarling image of the legendary Ares Lictor, helping to dissipate the excess heat of his enhanced cognition. Numerous autonomous streams were embedded in the Tabularium’s control systems, but Kotov’s higher thought-functions maintained connection to Magos Blaylock and the Speranza in orbit.
Kotov’s mechanical fingers beat a rhythmic tattoo on the armrest of his throne, and a flourish of rotating light panels flashed into being at his side. Over a thousand icons, none bigger than a grain of sand, surrounded him like a cloud of dancing fireflies, each one bearing an identifying signifier and progressing on its assigned route towards the Tomioka’s resting place.
Except the Black Templars gunship had shrugged off its tether and raced ahead of Kotov.
Kotov’s first reaction had been fury; this was his expedition, assembled by his will and set upon his purpose, but in one moment of crusading zeal, the Black Templars had snatched away his moment of greatest triumph.
But six kilometres out from the Tomioka’s signal, the Barisan’s transponder signal had vanished.
From her position at the auspex, Linya Tychon sought to re-establish contact with Sergeant Tanna, but her best efforts had, thus far, been without success.
‘Where are they?’ demanded Kotov, when – even after a thousandth parsing – he was none the wiser as to the Space Marines’ location. ‘Why aren’t the auspex feeds reading that gunship’s transponder? Surely not even Templars would be foolish enough to tamper with its workings?’
‘I agree that would be unlikely,’ said Linya Tychon, sifting the millions of informational returns from the external surveyors. The Tabularium possessed thousands of varieties of auspex, but not one was able to locate the Barisan. But for the subtle glint of augmetics beneath her hair and the looping profusion of copper-jacketed wiring emerging from the sleeves of her scarlet robes, she might pass for a baseline human, but nothing could be further from the truth.
‘Could the Templars have disabled the transponder?’ Kotov asked Linya, who shook her head.
‘They do not possess a Techmarine,’ replied Linya. ‘Though it is the fact that none of the auspex feeds or remote drone surveyors are reaching beyond where the gunship’s signal was lost that troubles me more.’
‘An auspex blind spot?’ asked Kotov. ‘There will be many such instances on so entropic a world.’
‘True,’ agreed Linya, ‘but extrapolating the curvature of the blind spot shows a perfectly circular umbra of dead space centred directly upon the Tomioka.’
Kotov inloaded Linya’s data and saw she was correct. What he had assumed was sensor distortion caused by the planet’s demise was in fact something so perfectly delineated that it could not be other than artificial.
‘You don’t need to be a Techmarine to disable a transponder,’ said Kryptaestrex, holding station at the drive control interface, his blocky body more like the Martian Priesthood’s forerunners’ earliest conceptions of a battle robot than a high ranking Magos of Logistics. ‘One of them could have smashed it easily enough, it would be just the sort of thing I’d expect from non-Mechanicus.’
Kryptaestrex’s servo-limbs and crude articulation arms were drawn in tight to his body, their oversized couplings more used to manipulating the industrial fittings found on an engineering deck than the delicate inload ports of a command bridge.
‘No,’ insisted Linya. ‘You mistake their zeal for stupidity. The Space Marines hold their battle-gear in the highest reverence, and that extends to their transport craft. No warrior would risk his life by something as foolish as damaging the machine carrying him into battle.’
‘Except they’re not going into battle,’ said Magos Hirimau Dahan, Clan Secutor of the Speranza’s skitarii, pacing the deck like a sentry-robot with an infinite loop error in its doctrina wafer. ‘This is an explorator mission.’
‘Then we wonder if the Black Templars know something you do not,’ said a voice that was scratchy with interleaved tonal qualities, like audio-bleed on an overtaxed vox-caster.
Dahan turned his gaze on the abomination speaking to him, and his floodstream hazed with threat signifiers bleeding from his battle wetware. Kotov’s precision optics registered that the organic portions of Dahan’s physique were still bedding into Turentek’s superlative work to undo the damage done by the thermic shockwave of Lupa Capitalina’s plasma destructor. It was going to take time for Dahan to achieve full synchronisation with his array of lethal technologies and multiple weapon arms, but the Secutor was not a magos blessed with an abundance of patience.
‘I wonder if you know something we do not,’ snarled Dahan, his lower arms flexing into combat readiness postures. ‘Something you are not telling us about this world.
’The thing Dahan spoke to called itself Galatea, and it was a bio-mechanical perversion of every Universal Law of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
To outward appearances, it was hardly more outlandish than many chimeric adepts of the Cult Mechanicus; a heavily augmented body forming a low-slung palanquin of mismatched machine parts assembled to form something that was part arachnoid, part scorpion. The crimson-robed proxy of a silver-eyed Mechanicus adept sat at the heart of its mechanism, surrounded by seven brains suspended in bio-nutrient gel containers and conjoined by a series of pulsing conductive cables.
Galatea’s very existence was an affront to the Mechanicus; a heuristically-capable machine that had murdered the adepts assigned to its Manifold station over a period of millennia. It had assimilated their disembodied brains into its neural architecture and undergone a rapid evolution towards a horrific and long-outlawed form of artificial intelligence. But as each stolen consciousness realised it was trapped forever within an artificial neuromatrix, it descended inexorably into abyssal madness.
When the machine decided a mind was of no more use, the brain was cut from the gestalt consciousness in readiness for another horrific implantation.
‘Well?’ demanded Dahan, his lower arms flexing and his shock-blades snapping out with a succession of snicks. ‘Do you know something of this world you are not telling us?’
In any situation to be resolved with violence, there were few members of the Cult Mechanicus Kotov would rather have next to him than Hirimau Dahan. But so deeply had Galatea enmeshed itself with the Speranza’s operating systems that any attempt to harm it could be catastrophic for the Ark Mechanicus. Kotov had no doubts of Dahan’s ability to kill Galatea, but no matter how quickly he might do so, the machine intelligence would have more than enough time to destroy the Speranza.
Flickering light passed between Galatea’s conjoined brains. ‘We sense you are troubled by more than the disappearance of the Adeptus Astartes gunship. Have you not adjusted your worldview to incorporate our existence?’
‘You already know the Mechanicus will never accept your existence,’ said Kotov, rising from his throne and stepping down to the auspex and surveyor feeds. ‘So why not simply answer the Secutor’s question? Do you know what has become of the Black Templars?’
‘We do not answer because Magos Dahan’s anger amuses us,’ said Galatea, ignoring Kotov’s question and clattering over the deck on its misaligned limbs. ‘When you have spent four thousand and sixty-seven years
alone, you too will seek amusement wherever you find it.’
‘I will not live that long.’
‘You may,’ said Galatea. ‘Magos Telok has.’
‘How can you know that?’ asked Linya Tychon, looking up from the blue-limned glow of the auspex returns. ‘It has been thousands of years since he came here.’
Galatea waved an admonishing finger. ‘You of all people should know better, Mistress Tychon. Was it not the inconsistencies within the passage of time that led you and your father to accompany Magos Kotov in the first place? We have seen the data you have assembled from the Speranza’s surveyor feeds. You know the temporal flow of energies has been massively disrupted in this region of space. The few remaining suns beyond the galactic fringe are ageing far faster than they ought to, transforming from main-sequence stars into red supergiants in the blink of a celestial eye. If that can happen, what might a man who knows how to harness such energies achieve? And a man who can transfigure the life cycles of the engines of existence, is surely a man who might learn to endure beyond his allotted span and manipulate that technology to other purposes.’
‘So you’re saying the umbra is, what, a side-effect of what Magos Telok is doing?’ asked Linya.
‘We believe it is certainly an intriguing possibility,’ replied Galatea.
‘Is this umbra changing in any way?’ asked Kotov.
‘I am not detecting any discernible changes from the planet’s surface,’ answered Linya, calling up a representation of the geography ahead. ‘But my father’s readings on the Speranza show a high energy source reaching into space with a point of origin that exactly matches what would be the edge of an umbral sphere centred on the Tomioka. We can’t read what’s inside the umbra, but there’s something within that’s geysering exotic radiations and particle waves unknown to any Mechanicus database that can be detected when they leave it. Magnetic anomalies and sleeting particles of indeterminate charge are billowing up from the planet’s core like an electromagnetic volcano with enough force to reach into the exosphere.’
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 45