The grav-sled’s rear section slewed around as the engine finally blew out with a bray of thrashing machine parts and squalling repulsor fields. The ventral fin ploughed a furrow, and the sled’s frontal section slammed into the ground with a shriek of tearing metal. Roboute was thrown forwards into the buckled canopy struts, his cheek cracking painfully on the inner face of his helmet.
The sled had broken its back in the crash, spilling the body of the fallen Black Templar to the ground. The warrior with the white-wreathed helmet immediately leapt from the wreckage and swung his enormous black sword in a wide arc. Three crystal-forms shattered, and two more fell back with emerald light streaming from mortal wounds to their chests.
The rest of the Templars were at his side in moments, fighting to clear a space around their downed brother as the enemy closed in. The sled was wrecked, and Roboute slammed his fist against the controls.
‘Bloody useless thing!’ he yelled
‘Time to get out of here, captain?’ said Adara.
‘I think you might be right,’ said Roboute, seeing hundreds of crystal-forms closing in through puffs of oxygen streaming from wide cracks in his helmet’s faceplate. ‘But I don’t think we’re going anywhere in a hurry.’
He dragged his gold-chased laspistol from its holster and stood in the buckled doorway of the cab.
‘Come on then, you bastards!’ he yelled. ‘Come and get us!’
He held his pistol in the classic straight-thumb grip and started shooting into the clashing, crystalline host that surrounded them. His first target dropped with a neat hole cored through its skull, the second with an identical wound.
The third exploded into glassy vapour as though hit by a Vanquisher shell, leaving a giant crater in its wake. Roboute fell from the sled as the pounding shockwaves of the blast swatted him to the ground. Scores of smoking shell cases rained down around him, and he rolled onto his back as the shadow of a snarling beast reared over him.
Its weapon arms bucked with the force of blazing mega-bolters, and the pair of warhorns mounted at its jutting, fanged maw unleashed a howling battle cry.
‘Vilka!’ cried Pavelka, hearing its name woven into the howl.
The Warhound stomped over the wreckage of the grav-sled, sheeting bursts of fire clearing the ground of enemies for tens of metres in all directions. It trampled the crystal-forms to powder beneath its enormous clawed feet and carved white-hot-edged gouges in the earth with its guns.
Nor had it come alone.
A second Warhound loped from a blizzard of spinning crystal shards, twin weapon arms spitting thunderous volleys of las-fire and explosive shells. Its flank was scored with deep wounds, and blessed oils sheened its armoured hide. Like its twin it howled its fury, darting in to make kills at every blast of its warhorn.
Roboute scrambled into the cover of the smoking grav-sled, pulling himself upright as he fought to keep his breaths shallow. Already he was feeling giddy and lightheaded, a curious numbness seeping into his limbs.
‘God-machines…’ he said, staring up at the snapping, howling war-engines keeping the enemy creatures at bay.
He felt the ground vibrate with titanic impacts, the footsteps of a true god-machine.
Hands grabbed Roboute under the shoulders and dragged him back onto the sled. Black-armoured warriors surrounded him, and a robed tech-priest whose half-human features were familiar to him wrapped a snaking metallic arm around his waist.
‘Hold on, captain,’ said a voice he knew he should recognise, but which he just couldn’t place. ‘They’re coming for us!’
‘Of course they are,’ said Roboute. ‘Why wouldn’t they…?’
He craned his neck up as a giant of myth strode into view, a soaring engine of destruction and power. Its size was incredible, a monstrous god of steel and adamantium with a sun at its heart and death in its fists. A gargantuan foot with four pneumatic buttress claws swept over them, trailing a rain of crystalline debris and pulverised rock. The god-machine’s enormous foot hammered down and sent seismic shockwaves through the earth.
Pistoning clamps punched into the ground as auto-loaders fed ammo hoppers into hungry breeches and dozens of ratcheting missile hatches cycled open. In deference to the mortals at its feet, Lupa Capitalina’s plasma weaponry remained inactive, but an artillery battalion’s worth of blazing heavy ordnance rippled from its shoulders. Streaking missiles traced parabolic trails over the battlefield, twenty-four in the first second, another twenty-four a second later. Plumes of white-hot fire exploded from the terrifying gatling blaster, and thousands of shells sawed from the spinning barrels of the vast, snub-nosed rotary cannon.
The plateau instantly vanished in sky-high curtains of fire and pounding explosions as the arcing streams of missiles slammed down in a never-ending series of punishing hammerblows. Roboute closed his eyes against the brightness, feeling his chest tighten and his thoughts drift off in what he knew was nitrogen narcosis.
As ways to die went, this at least had the virtue of being painless.
He smiled, thinking it apt that he should die on a world he had named.
Would anyone remember that name?
He didn’t know, but it seemed important.
Over the unending barrage of the three god-machines, Roboute heard a heavy clang of metal on metal and felt a thrumming vibration through his void-suit. A sense of weightlessness clutched at him, and he opened his eyes to see the ground spinning away from him as the grav-sled was hoisted into the air.
Beneath him, a world burned in the fire of the god-machines.
‘Below the waterline’ was an expression from the days when vessels plied the seas of Old Earth; meaningless now that Mankind’s vessels had left their earthly oceans behind, but which still had currency among the bondsmen of the Speranza. Instead of referring to areas of a ship that would flood in the event of a hull breach, it now applied to the ventral regions of the Ark Mechanicus that were known to be dangerous for all sorts of additional reasons.
Magos Casada had recently been assigned a supervisory role among the bondsmen after ten years spent in data-transmission, a move he’d hoped would see an end to the comparatively mundane duties of informational flow paths and the chance to be in charge of more than just binary bits and infocyte logs. But with only two work-shy loafers and three servitors following him down the iron screw-stairs into the cold darkness he didn’t feel like he was in charge of much at all.
Everyone was on edge, which at least kept their minds on their surroundings instead of looking for ways to skive off.
Or so Casada had thought.
‘How come we get to do this?’ asked Knox, picking something dripping and oily from his nose.
This was repairing a faulty transmission hub in one of the port-side conduit arrays, a repair made rather more than mundane due to the sudden nature of the fault’s occurrence and its location in a region of the ship that had suffered more than its fair share of malfunctions in recent times.
‘Because this is what we were assigned,’ said Casada, following a jumping, flickering noospheric map projected in the air before him. ‘Every duty in service of the Omnissiah is valued and important, from the lowliest to the–’
‘Spare us the motivational crap, magos,’ said Knox. ‘You got it because you’re new here and don’t kiss the right overseer’s arse. Anyone with a brain cell rattling around their skull avoids the lower decks. Too dark, too packed with machinery that can take your arm off, disembowel you or vaporise your bones to dust to be healthy.’
‘I heard these decks got irradiated when the Speranza threw her moorings at her launch,’ said Cavell.
Casada knew he should quash their seditious talk, but there was truth to what they were saying and he was a firm believer in allowing those beneath you an awareness that you shared their concerns.
‘There’s a measure of truth to that,’
he allowed, taking a high-ceilinged transit passageway his map told him should lead to processional steps down to the conduit. ‘There are heightened radiation levels in the lower decks, yes, but nothing to give us undue concern; we’ll not be going down into the deeper regions of the ship.’
‘Just as bloody well,’ said Knox. ‘Ain’t nobody knows nothin’ of what’s down there nohow.’
Forcing himself to ignore Knox’s murderous grammar, Casada said, ‘Correction: that just isn’t true. I have plentiful maps of the regions we must traverse to reach the transmission hub.’
‘You’re in the deeps now, magos, down past the waterline,’ said Knox. ‘Try navigating by those maps here and you’ll be lost like all them other crews that went down too far.’
‘Ah, gruesome tales of hauntings and disappearances in uncommon regions of a starship,’ said Casada. ‘I am familiar with such shipboard rumours and scare-stories. They are nothing but invented fantasies to explain away industrial accidents and fill lacunae of information. It is my contention that such tales are spread as a means of creating a unity of experience among the uninitiated.’
‘Shows what you know,’ said Cavell. ‘You’re new here, but you’ll learn.’
‘Or he won’t,’ said Knox, drawing a finger across his throat.
Casada tried not to be put out by their obviously scaremongering behaviour, but it was true he was having a number of difficulties in following their assigned route. Access ports weren’t where they were supposed to be, corridors and companionways marked as passable were blocked by thrumming machinery or simply weren’t there. Thus far, his noospheric adaptations had found workarounds, but sooner or later Knox and Cavell were going to realise he wasn’t entirely sure where they were any more.
‘And what about them?’ asked Knox, jerking a thumb at the three servitors following mutely behind them. ‘How do we know they’re not going to murder us when we’re too deep to call for help?’
Rumours of the incredible events in Feeding Hall Eighty-Six had circulated the various shifts throughout the ship, and despite the Mechanicus’ best efforts to quash their spread no one was looking at the servitors in quite the same light. That the instigators and their apparently autonomous servitor were said to have escaped Magos Saiixek’s skitarii and fled into the depths of the ship only added a level of revolutionary verisimilitude to the talk of holy presences.
‘These ones certainly appear to be appropriately servile,’ said Casada.
‘Yeah? Well perhaps that’s just to lull us into thinking they’re brain-dead cyborgs and not heartless killers that want revenge for being made into servitors,’ said Cavell.
‘Now you are being ridiculous,’ said Casada, frowning as they reached the end of the passageway to find the expected processional archway fringed with sparking cabling. A broken coolant pipe billowed hot steam and spilled a waterfall of scum-frothed water down the stairs. The effect was akin to a pict Casada had seen of a waterfall in a mangrove swamp, overhung by jungle creepers and humid with torpid vapour.
‘Down there?’ asked Knox, peering into the darkness where water-damaged lumens strobed and spat. ‘Tell me you’re joking.’
Casada heard what sounded like heavy footfalls, but were most likely some deeper machinery echoing through the tunnels. Something scraped on metal, but in such unvisited regions of a ship as large as an Ark Mechanicus, that wouldn’t be unusual. A lack of regular maintenance would give rise to all manner of apparently inexplicable auditory peculiarities.
Cavell ducked under a bundle of conjoined cabling, bending this way and that to get a better look at where it had been broken.
‘This ain’t right,’ he said, reaching up to touch the insulated sheath around the break point.
‘We have seen many such breakages,’ said Casada. ‘After the nightmarish crossing of the Halo Scar, many cable runs have snapped under increased tensile loads.’
‘No,’ said Knox. ‘He’s right, look. They’ve been cut. Deliberately.’
Casada examined the cable run being held by Cavell, running a three-dimensional mapping laser over the damaged portion.
‘Tell me I’m wrong,’ said Cavell.
‘The separation appears to be clean,’ admitted Casada. ‘I see no evidence of the stresses and weakening of the insulation sheath I might expect from tear damage. It is impossible to be certain, but it appears that, yes, this cable has been cut. Who cut it and why is another matter entirely.’
Even as he said the words, he knew he wasn’t being entirely truthful. The break in the cable was so precise, with so infinitesimal a deflection in the adjacent fibres, that there was little possibility it could have been achieved by any known device or blade.
At least none known to the Mechanicus.
Another booming echo sounded from below, that deeper, sub-deck machinery again, but when it came again, Casada realised it was closer than before. He looked down the processional stairs, but instead of flickering lumens, the wide stairwell was wreathed in impenetrable darkness.
‘Perhaps we should find another way down,’ said Casada, backing away from the steps.
Knox looked up, picking up on his building anxiety.
The man followed Casada’s gaze and his eyes widened in fear as something huge surged from the darkness below. Its elongated emerald skull was bulbous and glossy, its ivory limbs slender and grasping as it raced up the steps with a loping, horrifically organic gait.
Whispering streams of displaced air scythed up the steps.
Cavell simply vanished, his body coming apart so thoroughly it was as though he’d clutched an armed frag mine to his chest. Ruined body parts tumbled down the steps, and Knox set off at a sprint lest he suffer the same fate.
He made three steps before he was felled by the towering, spindle-limbed construct. Its monstrous hand seemed to merely brush over the top of the man’s head, but the lid of his skull came away as surely as though a precision trepanning laser had sliced clean through it.
The animal part of Casada’s brain howled in terror, flooding his body with adrenaline, and he screamed as he turned to run. He pushed past the unresisting servitors, fighting to escape, to get away from this below the waterline daemon of the dark. He risked a glance over his shoulder and let out a whimper of naked fear as he saw four porcelain-limbed figures with cherry red plumes streaming from their howling, death-mask faces.
‘How did–’ was all Casada managed before a shrieking wail buckled the air between him and his pursuers. His high-function aural implants blew out under the lethal sonic assault and blessed lubricant poured from his eyes and ears.
Casada howled in pain as his optics fizzed with bleeding binary static and his skull filled with nerve-shredding feedback. Denied the heightened sensory input of his enhancing augmetics, Casada’s brain implants began rerouting his synaptic pathways to once again employ his birth-senses. Viewed through the obscuring lens of his blown implants, Casada’s natural vision was blurred and grainy with lack of use. He saw a wavering, smeared-lens image of the killers coming towards him and pushed himself to his feet. He knew he couldn’t escape, but ran anyway, his terror driving his limbs in a vain attempt to prolong his life. The after-effects of the mind-shredding scream still ravaged his body. Hideous nausea churned in his gut and a sickening vertigo made his lurching steps comically drunken.
Casada couldn’t see where he was going, his unaugmented senses painfully blunted.
He blundered into an iron wall, striking his head on a protruding flange and falling to his knees. Blood poured down his face from this latest indignity. He crawled like a beast on its belly, a wounded animal stalked by a predatory creature that revels in its prey’s suffering.
Through his sobs he heard the unmistakable sounds of blades through flesh. One by one, the servitors he had led into the depths were butchered without resistance; beasts led blindly into the slaughterhouse.
‘Please,’ he begged, as he heard distorted echoes of footsteps behind him. ‘Please don’t kill me.’
The tip of something dreadfully sharp pressed on the nape of his neck.
‘Ave Deus Mechanicus…’ he said, drawing his hands together beneath his body in the Cog Mechanicus. ‘The Machine-God is with me, I shall fear no evil…’
A sharp thrust and the blade sliced cleanly through Casada’s spinal cord.
The earlier mood of optimism that had suffused the expedition upon establishing the landing fields had evaporated utterly. A great many machines and lives had been lost on the plateau, and an atmosphere of shared contrition now filled the command deck of the Tabularium. Still clad in his gleaming armour, Kotov had gathered his commanders around Linya Tychon’s surveyor station. Each warrior and magos was studiously examining the hololithic projection of the Tomioka as it stubbornly refused to divulge its secrets to any of the available augurs.
Kotov stared at the gently rotating image, as though he could simply will its interior structure to reveal itself by virtue of his vaunted rank.
Ven Anders stood in the shadow of Sergeant Tanna and his white-wreathed Emperor’s Champion. Though Dahan’s losses currently stood at three hundred dead and fifty-seven injured, Tanna’s loss was perhaps the greater. Coming face to face with the Black Templars, Kotov had thought to berate them for their foolishness, but upon learning of Brother Auiden’s death, he had instead offered only sincere regrets. The loss of a single Space Marine was bad enough, but to lose an Apothecary was something else entirely and Kotov could clearly see Tanna’s need to atone for his misguided zeal.
Azuramagelli and Kryptaestrex were plugged in on opposite sides of the plotting table, their petty bickering put aside in the face of this bloody setback. Galatea leaned over the surveyor station, its hand idly tracing the outline of the holographic starship.
‘It has been over four thousand years since we saw her. Many long years…’ said the hybrid construct, turning the rotating image back and forth with soft haptic gestures.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 51