Kotov had no answer for him and pulled away from the vertiginous shaft as the visible circumference of the shimmering green orb suddenly expanded, doubling its diameter in the blink of an eye. The tides within its unknown structure grew more violent and the light pouring from it filled the chamber with searing brightness.
‘What’s happening, archmagos?’ demanded Tanna, backing away from the object.
Kotov had no firm evidence upon which to base his answer, but there could be only one possible explanation.
‘Whatever Telok has planned for the Tomioka. It’s happening now.’
The machine-spirit at the heart of the Tomioka was sluggish and hostile to Linya’s enquiries, not that she could blame so venerable a machine for reacting badly to an unknown presence in its neuromatrix after so long a time spent dormant. They had reached the bridge; it was exactly where they had expected it to be, and Captain Hawkins’s Cadians had secured it without incident. Linya had been surprised at how little its structure appeared to have been altered, given the nature of the rest of the ship, though it was, of course, turned through ninety degrees.
Servitors sat strapped into their consoles, and a number of battle robots were still mag-locked in place within their defence alcoves; beyond the thick layers of dust that had accumulated on numerous surfaces, it felt like the bridge crew might return at any moment.
While Azuramagelli and her father’s servo-skull attempted to access the ship’s avionics log, Galatea made a circuit of those areas of the bridge it could traverse. Linya hunted for a compatible inload port she could reach and which matched the quaintly archaic interface augmetic in the palm of her hand. If there was any data to be salvaged from the ship’s data core, she would dig it out.
Incredibly, the ship’s cogitators and deep logic engines were still functional, maintained by a dim, slumbering spirit that rested in the deep strata of cogitation. Connection to the data-engines was made via a simple series of Mechanicus hails, but she would need to go deep to find anything of value.
Linya closed her eyes, letting her functional awareness flow farther into the Tomioka’s datasphere, feeling the presence of numerous security screens and invasive protection algorithms marshalling at her continued presence. She tested their integrity with gently inquiring probes that were rebuffed without exception.
‘Only to be expected,’ she said, tapping out a binaric mantra with her left hand.
She tried a more direct approach, shaping her interrogative with aggressive signifiers of rank and demand protocols. Once again, the data-engine rejected her attempt and sent a painful jolt of bio-feedback through Linya’s hand. Not enough to hurt, but enough to remind her that she was not authorised to access this ship’s records.
The machine-spirit’s defences resisted her every attempt at infiltration until she registered the presence of an inloaded code-breaking algorithm that carried the noospheric tags of Magos Blaylock. Linya had no memory of receiving such an inload, but couldn’t deny its usefulness right about now.
She opened the inloaded data packet and let out a soft gasp at the geometric complexity of the algorithms worked into the code. Tarkis Blaylock was another tech-priest it was hard to like, but his grasp of hexamathic calculus and statistical analysis was second to none; this looked like the most perfect binaric skeleton key she had ever seen. Like a hound on the hunt, the decryption algorithm meshed seamlessly with the Tomioka’s datasphere, and the security systems woven around the info-logs fell away like mist before a hurricane.
Almost immediately, Linya realised her mistake.
A tsunami of stellar information poured into her and she let out a cry of terror as the data-burden overloaded her neural capacity in a heartbeat. She tried to pull away from the ship’s flow of information, but like a victim of electrocution, she found she could not disengage from the very thing that was killing her. Numerous implants in her skull shorted out, one after the other, and Linya convulsed as the bio-electric feedback vaporised thousands of synaptic connections within the architecture of her brain.
Just as the data-burden surged with an even larger packet of impossibly dense celestial calculus, Linya felt herself torn from the data-engine with a physical jolt and a searing blaze of disconnection agonies. She hit the floor, wrapped in Lieutenant Rae’s arms, dizzying vertigo seizing her.
Her hands flew to the sides of her head as pounding waves of shrieking pain stabbed through her skull like an instant migraine. Blinding light filled her eyes, and sickening nausea cramped in her gut. She heard her father’s voice through the ebon skull, the gleaming red optics hovering just before her face, but couldn’t process what she was hearing.
Shouted voices surrounded her.
‘Mistress Tychon,’ said Rae. ‘Begging your pardon, but are you all right?’
She tried to nod, but rolled onto her side and vomited the contents of her stomach instead.
Linya felt the presence of something clanking and metallic moving past her and pushed herself upright in time to see Galatea plugging itself into the smoking inload port.
The silver-eyed proxy-body turned to regard her slumped form.
‘One mind cannot handle this data-burden,’ said Galatea. ‘Only we can do this.’
The surging pain in Linya’s skull receded a fraction and she pulled herself upright on wobbling legs, feeling an unaccountable need to stop the machine from taking her place. Lieutenant Rae supported her, and she clung to him to keep from falling.
‘What’s happening?’ she asked, straining to regain her senses and mental equilibrium.
‘Don’t know, miss,’ said Rae, bringing his lasgun around as Cadian battle-cant filled the bridge and the bridge’s defence robots climbed from their alcoves. Linya saw their chests were alight with a curious green illumination, their weapons systems coming online one after another.
Gunfire and shouts filled the bridge.
Both war machines were vigilant, stalking the icy plains around the Tomioka like wary predators circling dangerous prey that may or may not be playing dead. Amarok was still feisty after the fight in the canyon, its guns and voids restored, and Princeps Vintras allowed its virile machine-spirit to come to the fore in the Manifold.
He looped over the trail of Vilka, carefully avoiding the deep tracks the Ironwoad was leaving in the crystalline structure of the glassy plateau. It took finesse to walk a Warhound like this, sidestepping and moving forwards at the same time. He kept his targeting auspex loose, letting the aiming reticule drift back and forth in search of something to kill.
Vintras was getting twitchy too, the result of a potent cocktail of drugs pumped into his system after the fight with the facsimile engines. Word had come down that they were some form of machine-tech that could mould the crystalline structures of the dying world into the shapes of elements they perceived as threats.
The ground underfoot was unstable, the Warhound’s complex stabilisation sensors perceiving an ever growing, ever spreading wave of seismic tremors building from far beneath the ground. Which was only to be expected; this world was dying after all, being pulled apart by geological stresses and celestial cataclysm. Such disturbances were only going to get worse and the surface of Katen Venia would soon become untenable for Titan engines.
With its boarders delivered, Lupa Capitalina had retreated from the towering form of the Tomioka and taken up an unmoving position before the starship. Even after the Wintersun’s attack on Moonsorrow, there was still something magnetic about the vast scale of the Warlord, a potential for such awesome destruction that transcended all notions of morality. Just to share the battlefield with a Warlord was an honour, and to be pack with a god-machine of its power was to be a part of history. Yet for all that Vintras revered the incredible Titan, the idea of remaining static was anathema to him. As much as he longed to rise within the ranks of the Legio, he was loath to consider the possibility of leaving Amarok for
a battle-engine that won wars by marching straight at the enemy.
‘Are you hearing this?’ asked Elias Härkin, intruding on Vintras’s thoughts. The Vilka’s princeps’s voice was gruff and had been augmetically-rendered for decades, but hearing it over the vox only made it more unpleasant.
‘Hearing what?’ asked Vintras, irritated he’d allowed his mind to wander.
‘The Mechanicus,’ snapped Härkin.
‘What about them?’
‘Call yourself a Warhound driver?’ asked Härkin. ‘Use your damned eyes and open your vox!’
Vintras slewed Amarok to the side, increasing his pace and weaving across the landscape to circle around the Tomioka as the ground shook with another earth tremor, this one more powerful than the last. Vintras compensated, keeping the Warhound’s centre of gravity low until he completed his circuit of the landed starship.
In the aftermath of the Legio’s rescue of the Space Marines and skitarii, the Land Leviathans and support vehicles had poured over the bridge and onto the edge of the plateau, where they waited like observers too afraid to approach the object of their scrutiny.
Vintras switched his vox-input to accept non-Legio traffic, and immediately the Manifold flooded with prioritised threat warnings and withdrawal orders coming direct from the Speranza.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ asked Vintras.
‘What does it bloody look like?’ grunted Härkin. ‘They’re leaving.’
The informational flow through the Speranza’s bridge had increased significantly, but the gathered magi, calculus-logi and lexmechanics were still able to handle the data-burden. Largely thanks to the co-ordinating power of Magos Blaylock, whose higher thought processes were streamlined to render such vast arrays of data into manageable chunks.
‘Word from the surface?’ asked Blaylock.
‘Evacuation has begun,’ said a magos whose identity signifiers were lost in the haze of noospheric data filling the bridge. ‘The first Leviathan is en route to the landing fields. The others are aligning behind it and are in the process of crossing Magos Kryptaestrex’s bridge.’
Blaylock turned to Vitali Tychon, who encompassed the Manifold links within his datasphere to co-ordinate the logistical nightmare of an emergency planetary withdrawal.
‘Vitali,’ said Blaylock, his urgency prompting him to dispense with titles and protocol. ‘How long before the energy source reaches the planet?’
‘One hour, thirteen minutes, Tarkis,’ said Vitali Tychon, without needing to look up. ‘Still no word from the archmagos or my daughter. Neither has responded to the summons back to the ship.’
Hearing the worry in the venerable magos’s voice, Blaylock said, ‘Keep trying.’
Blaylock brought up the system plot that displayed the fleet’s position around Katen Venia and the approaching energy source hurtling through space towards them.
No, not towards them, towards the Tomioka.
Too late, he now realised what Telok’s flagship was and why the Lost Magos had gone to the trouble of landing it in the first place. Together with the infinitesimal concavity of the plateau, the entire structure of the Tomioka was a vast receiver array; a hundred kilometres wide receiver that would channel a surging stream of unimaginable energy through its structure and into the planet’s core. The purpose of this was still a mystery, but that anything nearby would be instantly obliterated was all too obvious.
Vitali was running a back-trace to the source of the energy beam, but it would take time to locate it amid the ferocious amount of background radiation from the dying star. Even trying to measure the beam was proving to be next to impossible, its qualities all but unknown to their auspex and of greater magnitude than could be readily quantified.
That such an unimaginable quantity of energy could travel so far without losing its power to the vacuum was staggering. Blaylock knew of only one thing said to be capable of such a monumental feat of power generation.
The Breath of the Gods.
Gunfire echoed weirdly within the chamber as the Black Templars bracketed one of the rusted battle robots with carefully coordinated bolter shots. With the swelling of the seething energy globe, a measure of its tidal energies had bloomed throughout the cavern in a single pulse of atmospheric power transfer.
Numerous skitarii had collapsed, their enhanced neural pathways blown out by the blast – even Dahan had staggered with the force of it. The nature of the power transfer hadn’t been immediately obvious, but when the first sawing blasts of autocannon fire tore through the skitarii, its purpose became self-evident.
The battle robots left to rust throughout the cavern were no dusty relics of a forgotten conflict, but dormant sentries, tasked with waiting until such a time as they would be required to defend the arcane processes under way. The crystalline lattice worked into the robots’ chest cavities pulsed with necrotic green light, and despite their advanced state of disrepair, each moved and fought as if fresh from the forge.
A maniple had come at them at battle pace, but Dahan killed the first one with a beam of white heat from his plasma gun. Skitarii weaponry broke apart the second, and a broadside of bolter explosions shattered the third into a storm of metallic junk.
‘I told you we should have destroyed them all,’ said Tanna, walking backwards as he slammed a fresh magazine into his bolter.
‘Duly noted,’ said Kotov, cycling through his implanted weaponry until he came up with a tight-beam graviton gun. More of the robot maniples were closing in from all sides, and via Magos Dahan’s threat-optimisers he saw at least sixty more approaching.
Kotov knelt and directed his implanted weaponry towards the nearest robot, triggering an invisible beam of intense gravometric energies. The robot, a clankingly archaic design of Cataphract, crumpled and bent double as its upper section was suddenly quadrupled in mass. Its already rusted spine collapsed under the weight and it fell in a welter of spilled oil and buckled plates.
Autocannon shells killed more of the skitarii, but no warrior was left behind. As they had against the crystal beasts, Dahan’s men brought their dead and wounded with them. The robots had bigger guns and there were more of them, but they were slow and did not have the fire discipline of the skitarii.
Every metre of their retreat was earned in blood. Once beyond the structural elements of the Tomioka, there was no shelter and no strategy except flight. Kotov’s implanted auspex registered another power surge from the energy sphere, and once again its diameter swelled, almost filling the width of the shaft over which it was suspended. The blaze of light from the emerald sun’s depths filled the cavernous space beneath the Tomioka, and the tip of the glittering prism above it was less than ten metres from making contact. Kotov had no idea whether that would be a bad thing or not, but the part of him that relished symmetry and connectivity in things suspected that when it and the seething energy globe came into contact, it would be very unpleasant to be anywhere nearby.
Kotov crushed the chests of another ten robots with his graviton beams before the internal capacitors registered power loss. To fire it again, he would need to divert power from some other system. Instead, Kotov retracted the exotic weapon and cycled through to a more mundane rotary cannon. The design was an old one, a modified Dreadnought weapon that had been deemed too flimsy for deployment with Adeptus Astartes forces, but which Kotov liked for its brutal simplicity. The backplate of his body rotated to reveal louvred vents, and a long bullet-chain extended from his arm to link with an internal ammunition chamber.
Recoil compensators deployed along Kotov’s shoulders and legs as a series of readiness icons flashed before his eyes. Kotov slaved his targeting arrays to inloaded threat data from Dahan, and pushed his consciousness into a higher state before opening fire.
A blazing stream of fire tore from Kotov’s arm, fully three metres long, and whatever it touched simply exploded in a haze of torn-up
metal and shattered plates. Each burst was precisely controlled, and it seemed that Kotov could see every shell, his cognitive functions moving so swiftly that he could watch each explosion in slow motion, switch targets and engage the enemy without wasting a single round of ammunition.
All around him, the Space Marines and skitarii were moving like figures in a slow-running pict-feed, their motions painfully measured. Sounds reached him at a glacial rate, and even the light of explosions and muzzle flare seemed to expand like slow-blooming flowers. Wherever Dahan registered a threat, Kotov swung his weapon to bear and eliminated it with a precise burst of high-explosive shells.
Waves of excess heat from such increased cognition were dispersed through coolant flow across his scalp, but such an overclocking could only be maintained for a minute of subjective time at most and he was almost at his limit.
In the end it was Kotov’s ammunition that gave out first, and the spinning barrels clicked dry as the ammo hopper sought in vain to keep the tide of shells coming. Kotov felt the urge to keep going, to switch out to another weapon. To process information and stimuli with such speed was intoxicating, a wholly addictive feat of cognition that had seen more than one adept of the Mechanicus boil the organic portions of his brain within his skull. Kotov disengaged the rapid-thought functions and staggered as the searing heat in his skull temporarily overwhelmed him. The energy demands on his body, which ran to narrow enough tolerances as it was, suddenly found themselves with an unsustainable deficit.
Kotov’s limbs folded up beneath him, but before he hit the ground, Sergeant Tanna caught him and hauled him back, firing his bolter one-handed as he went. Kotov tried to speak, but the pain in his skull was too intense, the chronic drain on his mental faculties shutting down all non-essential functions as they fought to restore order in his synaptic arrays.
He was dimly aware of more robots closing in on their position, but he could not make out how many or how far away they were. He saw Dahan firing his implanted weapon, surrounded by perhaps thirty skitarii warriors, some wounded, some bearing the bodies of the dead. The Black Templars fell back behind relentless salvos of bolter fire, halting a battle robot with each one.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 55