When he took his hand away, he saw a trickle of noospheric code squirming through the walls, an irregular grid pattern enfolding the room like a cage. He’d caught sight of it every now and then, a liminal binaric ward-pattern that would fade as soon as it became aware of his scrutiny, but Abrehem turned his will upon it and the code-light shimmered brightly once more.
His eyes followed the leading edge of the code as it circled the room. The rest of the chamber was in sharp focus, but wherever the code touched, he could feel its brittle, fading power. The binary was old, degraded and worn out. It had patrolled this chamber so many times, perhaps since the Speranza’s birth, that its potency was all but spent.
There was a hypnotic quality to the pattern, and Abrehem felt himself drawn into its looping arrangement. Without conscious thought, he rose from the bed and let his eyes roam the contours of the walls. The code flowed over the polished domes of iron skulls, between the entwined eagles and cogs, following the hexagonal pathways. He followed the code as it travelled over the walls, and Abrehem was reminded of an old metaphor of electricity as civilisation’s lifeblood.
His heart beat faster in his chest and his breath tasted of burnt metal.
Footsteps echoed and Abrehem had the unpleasant sensation of the walls closing in on him. His coppery breath quickened and both hands closed into fists as an unformed anger took shape in his thoughts. The beguiling quality of the flickering binary glitched, and Abrehem blinked as its hold was broken and the machine-stamped walls swam back into focus around him.
Abrehem let out a soft sigh of fear as he found himself standing before Rasselas X-42, his augmetic hand stretched out towards the complicated controls of the pacifier helm. He had watched Totha Mu-32 engage the helm and now realised he’d memorised the ritual movements and catechisms required for its use without conscious thought.
Violent red intruded on his vision, a descending haze of scarlet falling over his eyes like a curtain of blood, the anger he had felt earlier sharpened into a bright spike of purest rage. Abrehem could not remember a moment in his life where he’d felt such unreasoning fury, a bone-deep urge to do harm to another human being. Memories of ripped bodies, torn-out entrails and screaming mouths that cried a name that wasn’t his own filled his skull. Abrehem’s initial horror was quashed by the unstoppable urge to kill, to violate unclean flesh, to murder something… anything…
His trembling digits touched the bronze keys attached to the side of the throne and he tapped out the initialisation commands that began the process of decoupling the mechanisms of the pacifier helm. Slowly the soothing, calming imagery of Imperial saints, cherubs and golden bliss would be stripped away from the arco-flagellant’s perceptions, each loss driving it into a higher state of insane, murderous wrath.
Rasselas X-42’s head rose up, still masked by the featureless pewter helm.
His chest heaved and grunting spurts of stinking breath sighed from beneath the pacifier helm.
The arco-flagellant was a loaded gun, primed and ready to fire.
All it needed was the trigger phrase and it would be free to kill, maim and murder.
Abrehem suddenly became aware of a presence at his side and felt a gentle hand upon his shoulder. The building horror of mutilations and violent degradation drained from his thoughts in a flood and his legs buckled beneath him. He fell into the arms of Ismael, sobbing as he realised how close he’d come to unleashing the full fury of the arco-flagellant.
‘I didn’t…’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have…’
‘I know,’ said Ismael. ‘But Rasselas X-42 is a living weapon, and a weapon has but one purpose.’
Abrehem nodded and let Ismael lead him back to his cot bed, blinking away the nightmarish images of torture and mutilation. He sat down, heaving in gulping breaths and weeping at the horror of what he’d seen. He knew they were not his own thoughts, but memories of carnage wrought by Rasselas X-42 in his previous existence.
Ismael held out his hands and Abrehem looked up into his eyes.
The servitor’s distracted, vacant look was gone; in its place was an expression of such peace and understanding that Abrehem was rendered speechless.
‘He calls to your lust for violence,’ said Ismael, all traces of his halting speech vanished. ‘Rasselas X-42 is the quick and easy path to vengeance, the evil of the man he was distilled and perfected. You must be better than that, Abrehem, you must cast him out.’
Abrehem shook his head. ‘I can’t. If the Mechanicus come for me, then I’ll need him.’
‘You do not need him,’ promised Ismael. ‘You already have all that you need.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Ismael held his hands out to him and said, ‘Then listen.’
Abrehem hesitantly took Ismael’s hands and kept silent, alert for anything out of the ordinary, but beyond Rasselas X-42’s thwarted, animal breath and the constant mechanical beat of the Speranza’s workings, there was nothing to hear.
‘Listen to what?’ said Abrehem.
‘To all the lost souls,’ said Ismael, and Abrehem cried out as thousands of enslaved voices filled his head with their anguished cries.
The appearance of the Tomioka’s exterior had shocked Kotov, but the interior was, if anything, even more outlandish. The starship’s internal plan had been extensively reshaped, rendering his ancient schematics utterly useless. With their entry point far above them, the darkness within was virtually absolute, leavened only by the helm-lamps of the skitarii and a pale, greenish hue that seeped from flexing cables that infested the ship’s dripping innards like pulsing arteries.
Access ladders and stairwells that had been removed from their previous locations and re-fixed perpendicular to their original orientation allowed Kotov’s force to travel downwards without difficulty. Their route traversed vast, echoing interior compartments stripped of their original fittings and which were now connected in ways the Tomioka’s original shipwrights had never intended. They kept close to the ice-clad hull, and ghostly wisps of chill vapour curled from protruding structural elements like breath.
‘I feel like we are descending through biological anatomy,’ said Dahan, moving with a hunched gait to fit through the oddly-angled passageways. ‘It is an unpleasant sensation.’
Kotov understood his sentiment, imagining they were passing through the literal guts of the starship. Like a living organism, the interior of the Tomioka was not silent, but a place of groaning echoes, creaking, flexing steelwork and a distant, glacial heartbeat.
‘Perhaps a biological aesthetic informed Telok’s work here,’ suggested Kotov.
‘No wonder they called him mad,’ observed Dahan distastefully. ‘Why then do we traverse the bowels while Mistress Tychon ascends to the brain?’
‘Because the greatest power source lies far beneath us, and it is the key to understanding the mystery of this vessel,’ answered Kotov. ‘Let Mistress Tychon plunder the archives, we will be the ones to learn the true revelations Telok left behind.’
Dahan gave a blurt of dismissive binary and set off to rejoin his skitarii warriors.
Kotov ignored the Secutor’s scepticism, attuning his senses to the chatter of background perceptions; Manifold inloads from Tarkis Blaylock and Vitali Tychon aboard the Speranza, encrypted vox-clicks from the Templars, Cadian intercom echoes and a crackling hiss of machine language that burbled just below his threshold of understanding.
Kotov couldn’t understand it, but one thing was clear.
It was getting stronger.
‘I take it you hear that, archmagos,’ said a bobbing, gold-chased skull floating beside him, kept aloft by a tiny suspensor and embellished with a single flared wing that fluttered back and forth at its occipital bone. One eye socket was fitted with an ocular-picter, the other with a sophisticated augur implant that recorded and relayed its findings back to the Speranza.
‘Yes, Tarkis,’ said Kotov. ‘I do, but it irks me that I cannot understand it.’
‘The ship’s cogitators are struggling too,’ said the skull with Blaylock’s voice. ‘I am applying all sanctioned enhancements and filters to the source code, but they are statistically unlikely to retrieve anything of use.’
‘Understood, Tarkis,’ said Kotov. ‘But keep trying. I want to know what this ship is saying.’
The skull clicked its jaws and drifted back to its position at Kotov’s shoulder as the downward journey through the Tomioka continued down welded ladders, crudely-formed ramps and repositioned stairwells.
Kotov followed the Black Templars down a screw-stair welded to the side of a corridor, letting his fingers brush against a line of angular symbols that resembled ancient hieroglyphics or a forgotten branch of mathematics. He’d seen variations of these symbols ever since they’d boarded the Tomioka, each ideogram connected to another like the holy writ of a circuit board. Linya Tychon believed it to be an impossibly complex form of organic language belonging to a hitherto unknown xenos breed, a declaration that had only heightened the tension among the Mechanicus boarders.
Where Kotov, Dahan’s skitarii and the Black Templars were forging a path down through the Tomioka’s internal structure, Vitali Tychon’s gifted daughter was ascending. Escorted by a company-strength detachment of Cadian storm troopers led by Captain Hawkins, she had eagerly seized this chance to venture into the unknown. Curiously, Galatea had chosen to accompany her, the abominable machine intelligence keen to explore Telok’s flagship now that the threat beyond its hull had been dealt with. Magos Azuramagelli had been seconded from the Tabularium’s command deck to oversee the mission to the ship’s bridge, assuming such a location still existed.
Kotov reached the bottom of the screw-stair to find himself in a high-roofed transverse corridor that had been sealed at either end by heavy panelling fashioned from elongated panels torn from the ship’s prow blade. There appeared to be no way to continue downwards, though skitarii melta gunners were hunting for weak points in the floor and strangely scraped walls to attempt a breach. Kotov detected heavy deposits of lubricant grease and felt the presence of electrical current.
Magos Dahan beckoned Kotov over to a jury-rigged control panel against the far wall, but before he could join him, Tanna intercepted him.
‘How much farther down do you believe we need to go, archmagos?’ asked Tanna.
‘I believe we are close, sergeant,’ replied Kotov.
‘With every level we descend, the danger increases.’
‘We are explorators, Sergeant Tanna,’ Kotov reminded him. ‘Danger comes with the territory.’
‘You are an explorator, I am a warrior.’
‘Then you should be used to danger, sergeant,’ snapped Kotov.
The Space Marine’s anger was unmistakable, but Kotov paid it no attention and moved past him to join Dahan. A series of gem-lights winked on the panel, indicating that it had power. Its only other component was a simple lever that could be racked to an up or down position.
‘Elevator controls,’ said Dahan. ‘Funicular transit ones ripped from an embarkation deck by the size of them.’
‘This whole chamber is a descent elevator,’ said Kotov, now understanding the nature of the scrapes on the walls and the excessive presence of lubricants.
‘The enginarium spaces should be beneath,’ said Dahan. ‘The source of the power emanations?’
‘Possibly,’ said Kotov taking hold of the descent lever. ‘If whatever is below us bears any resemblance to the original plan.’
Kotov pulled the control lever into the down position. ‘So let us find out,’ he said.
The chamber shuddered and ground downwards on bleating hydraulics and clanking gear chains.
Entire structural elements had been removed from the upper reaches of the Tomioka’s hull and replaced with crystalline panels that refracted outside light through the enclosing ice in strange ways. Linya blink-clicked images of rainbow-hued prismatic beams dancing in the open spaces, the light catching glittering motes of dust and reflecting from the polarised visors of the Cadians’ enclosing helmets. The brightness gave the impression of space and peace, but that was, she reminded herself, an illusion.
‘Wondrous, is it not?’ asked the voice of her father. ‘Reminds me of the magnificent processional cathedrals of ice and glass within the Artynia Catena.’
Vitali Tychon’s voice emerged from a jet-black servo-skull flitting through the air like a curious insect, the audio scratchy with distortion and warbling with singsong static. The presence of the umbra surrounding the Tomioka made standard orbital vox impossible, so all transmissions between the ground forces and the Speranza were relayed through the Tabularium to the landing fields before finally being hurled into space.
‘There’s a resemblance,’ agreed Linya, addressing the floating device, which had been built from removed segments of her father’s own skull after he had decided to enlarge his cranial cavity with an artificial replacement to allow for additional implants. ‘But we are not on Mars, we are exploring the hostile environment of an ancient madman.’
‘Madman? Visionary? Often the two are separated by a hair’s-breadth,’ observed Vitali, as twin callipers mounted under the jawbone produced a quick sketch of the view before his proxy skull.
‘I know which one I would use to describe Telok,’ said Linya.
‘Before I saw this, I might have agreed with you, but this is incredible,’ said Vitali as the servo-skull floated ahead to where Magos Azuramagelli was ascending a narrow stairwell by folding his ratcheting machine body into a more compact form. Contrary to what Linya had expected, Azuramagelli was negotiating the convoluted spaces within the Tomioka with relative ease, swiftly climbing ladders with multiple arms, and reordering his brain-fragments within the armature of his protective casings to facilitate his transit.
Given the self-assembled crudity of Galatea’s form, it had no such ability to alter its body-plan and was forced to take looping detours to avoid the more cramped routes to the bridge. Linya had been glad of the respite from its presence, but each time they reconnected with the hybrid machine intelligence, she wondered just how it managed to get ahead of them. She and the Cadians were supposed to be following the most direct route to the bridge, but each time the dimensions of a blast door or cored shaft prevented it from proceeding Galatea would be waiting for them in a wider space beyond.
What, she then thought, was it doing while it was beyond their sight?
Linya shook off such suspicions and concentrated on her own progress, following four squads of void-suited Cadian troopers as they forged a path upwards, moving in fits and starts as different groups advanced higher into the ship in mutually supporting cover formations. Another three squads followed behind, and Linya admired the effectiveness with which Captain Hawkins was leading his men; from the front and with nothing asked of them he wasn’t prepared to do first.
Cadian combat argot was terse and tactically precise – for a verbal form of communication – with clear commands and unambiguous meanings. Skitarii mind-links were a far more efficient means of combat communication, but required cranial implants she suspected most soldiers of the fortress-world wouldn’t accept.
Despite Kotov’s gloomy predictions, their winding upwards passage through Telok’s ship was meeting with no resistance, either in the form of the crystal-form creatures or impassable architecture. While her father’s servo-skull flitted ahead as a gleeful scout, she and the Cadians climbed the Tomioka’s cavernous internal chambers via chugging freight elevators haphazardly fixed to the walls with docking clamps, scaled vertical transit shafts on multiple ladders welded to the deck and scrambled up ramps of canted ceiling plates.
The crystalline panels sent their light deep into the heart of the ship, creating an airy, open feeling; which was a novel sensation for
Linya, who normally found being aboard a starship tiresomely claustrophobic, even one as vast as the Speranza.
She paused at a makeshift landing that looked out over a wide open space that had probably once been an embarkation deck. Light flooded the area through a series of opened docking hatches far across the chamber, through which gaseous mist billowed. The temperature gradient formed clouds in the upper reaches of the embarkation deck, and moisture fell through the interior in a soft shimmer of rain that patterned her hood with vapour trails.
‘Don’t think we should dawdle, Miss Tychon,’ said a Cadian trooper whose shoulder patch identified him as Lieutenant Taybard Rae. ‘Sooner we get you and your… friends to the bridge the sooner we can get out of here.’
Something in the soldier’s manner was instantly disarming and Linya smiled within her environment hood. Like the Cadians, she was protected from the hostile conditions, but the technology keeping her alive was far more advanced; a self-generated, full-body integrity field and flexing cranial canopy with a multi-spectral sensorium.
‘You don’t like it in here?’ asked Linya, looking through the glittering nitrogen rain. ‘Sights like this do not come often. They need to be savoured.’
‘Begging your pardon, Miss Tychon, but Captain Hawkins said we weren’t here on a sightseeing trip. And trust me, you don’t want to get his dander up when we’re on a mission.’
Linya recalled Captain Hawkins from the regimental dinner she and her father attended in the Cadian billets. Her impression had been that Hawkins was a man of few words, though he had been coaxed to loquaciousness when toasting the fallen soldiers of Baktar III.
‘He is a strict officer?’ she asked.
Rae looked perplexed at the question. ‘Aren’t we all?’ he said.
‘I suppose so, though I confess I have only met a few.’
‘Ach, he’s not so bad,’ said Rae, slinging his rifle and leaning out over the balcony. ‘I’ve served under a lot of captains and colonels in my time, so when you get a good one, you try and keep him alive. You know what senior officers are like, miss, always trying to get themselves shot or blown up. They’re like children really, they need their lieutenants to keep them out of trouble.’
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 53