Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Quite a feat of arms,’ said Tanna, depositing him by the controls of the funicular transit elevator and turning to haul the lever into the up position. ‘I thought you said I was the warrior.’

  ‘An explorator must be prepared for all eventualities,’ said Kotov, finally regaining the power of speech as the elevator rumbled back up into the Tomioka. ‘And I am not a man to travel lightly.’

  With Lieutenant Rae supporting her, Linya scrambled down the length of the starship, breathless and fighting the building agony in her head. The fight on the bridge had been brief, bloody and one-sided, with the Cadian troopers hopelessly outgunned by an enemy they couldn’t hope to hurt. Captain Hawkins had seen the futility of staying to fight and immediately ordered the retreat.

  A squad of Guardsmen had covered their retreat, and even amid the confusion of being pulled from the bridge, Linya knew those soldiers were already dead. Heavy calibre shells tore the bridge to pieces, smashing ancient technology that had crossed the galaxy in search of wonder. One robot, its right arm a pulverising siege hammer, had smashed through bulkhead after bulkhead, shrugging off Cadian return fire from lasrifles, grenade launchers and even a direct hit from a plasma gun.

  Sixty men and women fell back from the bridge, keeping their pursuers at bay with ambushes and traps. One robot was pitched into a shaft that looked as though it ran the length of the starship’s long axis, and another had its leg blown off by a lucky grenade that managed to lodge in its pelvic joint. But the others were utterly relentless and Linya was forced to admire the lethal purity of whoever had punched the obedience routines of their doctrina wafers.

  It felt like they were running at reckless speeds back the way they had come, pursued by at least five Imperial battle robots with curious crystalline power sources in their chests that closely resembled what Magos Dahan had described on the Tabularium. Magos Azuramagelli led the way back down the Tomioka, his mental mapping unfazed by the danger threatening them and his body-plan altering and reshaping with a speed Linya found incredible.

  Her father’s servo-skull zipped alongside her, pausing every now and then to check behind it before scooting after her. She could hear his voice urging her onwards, but shut it out as a distraction. Somewhere along the way they’d lost Galatea, the machine intelligence fleeing along a different route when it could no longer follow the same line of retreat. Linya wondered if it would manage to escape and found she didn’t care either way.

  The ground shifted beneath her, and she sprawled to the ground as the welded deck plate serving as a floor pulled free from the wall. Rae pulled her roughly to her feet, all trace of his former concern for decorum forgotten in this flight from the enemy.

  ‘I can’t go on,’ she gasped.

  ‘Can’t be stopping, miss,’ said Rae, pushing her through a group of covering soldiers as they clambered over to a welded screw-stair. ‘At least these steps will slow the bastards up.’

  Linya scrambled down the stairs, hearing chugging bangs of rapid bolter fire echoing above her. Too loud and too fast for a regular bolter, these were rounds that would reduce the human body to an expanding vortex of vaporised blood and cooked flesh. Screams followed the thudding booms of detonation, howls of pain that no human should ever have to make.

  Tears ran down her face as she all but sprinted down the stairs, clutching the iron balustrade and remaining upright only by the grace of the Omnissiah. Close to the bottom, her luck ran out and her feet slid on the cold metal of the stairs. She fell from the last few steps onto the buckled metal of the walkway below. She rolled and grabbed onto the nearest spar of metal as the nitrogen rain of the embarkation deck soaked her.

  ‘Come on!’ shouted Rae, leaping from the last few steps. ‘It’s right behind us!’

  The ceiling sagged inwards under the force of a titanic hammerblow as something immense sought to bring down the stairs. Rae hauled her upright again as another blow struck the top of the stairs, accompanied by a screeching wail of dumb binaric fury. Rae backed into her and lifted his rifle, firing back up the stairwell on full auto, a blazing spread of crimson bolts that hissed as they left the focus ring of the barrel.

  ‘A lasrifle won’t harm a battle robot,’ said Linya.

  ‘Maybe not, miss, but if you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears!’

  He grabbed Linya by the shoulders and pushed her away as the stairwell buckled inwards and the blocky form of a Castellan battle robot crashed down onto the walkway behind them. The floor crumpled beneath its weight and a storm of debris cascaded over its hunched form. Rae went down under the ruptured service conduits and shattered steelwork, his lasrifle skittering over the canted walkway towards her.

  The robot had landed on one knee and now rose to its full height of nearly four metres. Its heavy bolter ratcheted from the protective cowling at its shoulder and its power fist crackled with deadly disruptive field energies. The Castellan’s armoured plating was scorched with las-burns and impact trauma. Its threat optics fastened on her with hostile intent.

  Her father’s servo-skull flitted in front of the robot, screeching deactivation codes spilling from its augmitter, but the weaponised machine simply swatted it aside. The skull cracked into a wall and dropped stone dead to the floor, the light fading from its optics.

  Linya wanted to bend to retrieve Rae’s rifle, but terror held her pinned to the spot.

  She heard someone shout her name as the heavy bolter swung out, the automated slide racking back as it prepared to fire.

  Linya closed her eyes and slid down the wall, but the shots never came.

  She felt cold hands pull her upright and fell into the arms of her rescuer.

  ‘We would not let such a primitive creation harm you, Mistress Tychon,’ said Galatea.

  Linya flinched and pushed herself away from the machine intelligence, repulsed beyond words at the thought of it touching her. Galatea’s palanquin body squatted close to the ground, its oddly-jointed legs twisted around to bring it so low. The silver-eyed tech-priest body rose up as she backed away from it.

  ‘Get away from me,’ she said.

  ‘Such ingratitude,’ said Galatea. ‘And after we risked our continued existence to rescue you.’

  Linya blinked away tears and turned to see the Castellan robot unmoving, its head sagging to one side with green-tinged fumes pouring from its contoured skull. Its chestplate belched smoke and the warlike binary that spalled from its weapons was silent.

  It was utterly dead.

  ‘How did you…?’ asked Linya, looking up through the rent torn in the ceiling to see another battle robot with smoke belching from its innards.

  ‘If we can take control of the Speranza, do you believe that overloading the cortex-doctrinas of a maniple of battle robots is beyond us?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Linya, as Cadian soldiers ran back to dig Rae from the debris. The lieutenant was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, but was already shouting at the men helping him that he was fine and to damn well leave him be.

  ‘You are too wondrous to be allowed to die,’ said Galatea, reaching out to stroke her cheek.

  Linya pulled away from its repellent touch. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said. ‘Not ever.’

  The machine intelligence rose up, the brains on its palanquin flickering with frantic synaptic activity as some unheard communion passed between them.

  ‘As you wish,’ said Galatea. ‘But you are precious to us.’

  Linya backed away from the loathsome creature, and pausing only to recover her father’s servo-skull, she followed the Cadians back down the Tomioka.

  Kotov could remember little of the journey back up the Tomioka, his mental processes too traumatised by the strain of maintaining so rapid a cognition speed. It had been short by mortal reckoning, but a lifetime by the terms of measurement employed by the Mechanicus. Tanna carried him most of the way, al
l but dragging his armoured body up ramps, stairs and ladders. The remodelled interior of the ship passed in a blur, but even his blunted senses registered that something unprecedented was under way.

  Portions of the Tomioka’s internal anatomy were reshaping themselves moment by moment. What he had mistaken for structural modifications to allow the vessel to stand upright were in fact carefully-placed moving parts that were now fulfilling some unknowable function.

  ‘Imperator,’ said Tanna, as they passed through a vaulted compartment that had once been an ordnance magazine. ‘So many of them.’

  Kotov lifted his head and followed Tanna’s gaze, seeing a multitude of reflective panels of machined steel rotated into predetermined positions and vast lengths of cable extruded from vacuum-sealed compartments before being fitted into place by a veritable army of floating servo-skulls. Thousands of the gold and silver-chased skulls filled the compartment, more than Kotov had ever seen in one place.

  ‘It’s like the crew chose to remain behind and carry on their duties…’ he said, the words coming only with difficulty.

  ‘Or were forced to,’ said Dahan, following behind them. ‘Who knows how long these skulls have been here, just waiting for this moment?’

  As fascinating as Kotov found it watching the thousands of skulls at work, Tanna dragged him ever upwards through the reconfiguring interiors. The dull green light that had illuminated their downward passage had been replaced by a stark brightness that shone from every polished plate and every overtaxed lumen. Vast arrays of structural steelwork rotated into place throughout the enlarged voids within the Tomioka, like the pylons of some planetary power generation system. Towering conduits unfolded from irising compartments and the interior volume of the starship’s long axis was rapidly filling with complex machinery that spun, pulsed and throbbed with imminent activity.

  Eventually, Kotov felt the pressure differential of an outside environment and looked up.

  A flattened oval tunnelled through the violet-tinted ice told him they had reached the entry point cut by the superheated mechanisms of Lupa Capitalina’s plasma destructor. Black Templars stood at the far end of the tunnel, waving at something he couldn’t see. Dimly he registered the sounds of artillery fire and high-energy weapon discharges.

  Magos Dahan stood with the Adeptus Astartes warriors and Kotov took a moment to realise that there were more people around him than he remembered.

  Cadian soldiers lined the walls and Kotov’s floodstream surged with relief as he saw Magos Azuramagelli and Linya Tychon near the far entrance to the ice-tunnel. Galatea stood at the opposite side of the tunnel, and even in his limited state of awareness, Kotov read the tension between it and his magi.

  Linya Tychon limped over to him, clutching a jet-black servo-skull.

  For a moment, Kotov was confused at the sight of the skull. Had she stopped to procure herself one belonging to the Tomioka? Then he read the faint binaric sigils on its polished dome and realised the servo-skull belonged to Vitali Tychon.

  ‘Archmagos,’ said Linya, her face bruised and swollen. ‘We have to leave. Now.’

  ‘I think that is self-evident,’ he said, finally managing to stand under his own power as his bodily control returned to a semblance of normality. ‘This ship is reconfiguring itself in some most disconcerting ways.’

  ‘No, I mean we have to leave this planet,’ said Linya. ‘In an hour it is going to be destroyed.’

  ‘Come now, you are being melodramatic,’ said Kotov, feeling more of his synaptic architecture re-establishing itself. ‘It will take months or years for the star’s death to fully dismantle this world and there is much we can yet learn.’

  Linya’s eyes narrowed. ‘Haven’t you been receiving Magos Blaylock’s evacuation orders?’

  Kotov hadn’t, but as more and more of his systems reset, he began picking out desperate bursts of communication transmitted from orbit via the Tabularium. Though it sent a flare of pain through his skull, Kotov processed the most urgent of them in three pico seconds.

  ‘This is a sacrificial planet,’ said Linya. ‘I don’t know all of what’s happening, but that much I do know. This ship is a giant receiver array, and the power that is about to be channelled through it is going to tear this planet apart for some purpose I can’t even begin to imagine.’

  Kotov nodded, and marched towards the end of the tunnel.

  Lupa Capitalina walked in all its war-finery, sheathed in the blistering envelope of voids that shimmered with rainbow hues as they dissipated the energies of a recent attack. Like a vast sauropod of the plains being attacked by raptor packs, the Warlord was surrounded by smaller, crystalline representations of its godly might. Bright green bolts of light shot from the glittering forms of its attackers, but the Warlord was no lumbering herbivore just waiting to be dragged down, it was the alpha of a deadly hunter pack.

  ‘I wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t seeing it with my own eyes,’ said a Cadian captain by the name of Hawkins. ‘I didn’t think they could move like that.’

  A lieutenant with half his face covered in blood answered Hawkins, ‘I’m thinking I took a bigger blow to the head than I thought.’

  Kotov would normally have thought to rebuke mere Guardsmen for disparaging the capabilities of a Mechanicus battle-engine, but even he was shocked at the speed and agility with which Princeps Arlo Luth was manoeuvring Lupa Capitalina. More often used as strongpoints, fire-bases or points from which to launch assaults, Warlord Titans were not highly mobile war-engines.

  Clearly the Wintersun did not hold to that view.

  The Legio Sirius pack fought as one entity, Amarok and Vilka snapping at the heels of their alpha as it advanced, retreated and sidestepped every attack. It moved in close to its attackers and crushed them beneath its clawed feet. It sawed a dozen to shards with gatling fire and vaporised half as many again with stabbing lances from its turbo-destructors. Its rapidly-moving bulk shattered dozens more and it achieved this without losing its voids to the criss-crossing trails of enemy fire.

  ‘Is it coming to pick us up?’ asked Hawkins. ‘The Titan, it’s coming back for us, right?’

  ‘Yes, captain,’ said Kotov, already having broadcast an extraction request. ‘Lupa Capitalina is coming back for us.’

  Kotov saw Hawkins’s desire to witness the god-machine at war was pulling against his Cadian duty to his men. He allowed the man an indulgence.

  ‘Stay,’ said Kotov. ‘Watch. To see a Titan in battle is to know the true power of the Omnissiah.’

  Hawkins nodded and said, ‘I’ve watched artillery batteries reduce greenskin fortresses to ruin in minutes, seen ten thousand charging Whiteshields on horseback and been part of orbital assaults that captured an entire planet in less than a day, but seeing a Warlord in action… that’s something special.’

  ‘And Legio Sirius are masters of their art,’ said Kotov in a rare moment of largesse.

  Lupa Capitalina turned, as though hearing its Legio name mentioned, and set off at a steady, rolling pace towards the Tomioka. Its attendant Warhounds followed, loping ahead to clear the way with punishing blasts of fire and howls of warning.

  Kotov steadied himself as the war-engine came closer, the thunderous reverberations of its colossal footfalls transmitted to the Tomioka even through the immense sheath of ice surrounding it. He and everyone else within the tunnel backed away as it drew nearer, for even the approach of an allied battle-engine was an event of some danger.

  ‘Everyone up and ready to move!’ shouted Hawkins. ‘We’re only going to get one shot at this.’

  The Warlord’s voids impacted upon the ice at the edge of the tunnel, sending deep cracks racing along the ceiling and floor. Crystalline shards fell like broken glass and shrieking bursts of exploding ice rippled along the length of the tunnel until the void shields finally dropped. The assault ramps slammed down onto a broken ledge of ice,
and Titan menials in orange boiler suits and armoured vests yelled at them to get aboard.

  Dahan and his surviving skitarii escorted Kotov and Azuramagelli, while the Black Templars and Cadians were last to board the war machine. Kotov had a moment’s vertigo as he looked down between the lip of the assault ramp and the crumbling edge of the ice. His internal systems quickly compensated for the unwelcome sensation as menials hauled him aboard.

  A tremendous impact rocked the Warlord, and even from here, Kotov felt the repercussive pain of its wounding. Engaged in this rescue mission, Lupa Capitalina was horribly exposed with its voids down and its weapon systems useless. The crystalline engines were taking full advantage of that, and explosions of green fire erupted all across the Titan’s rear quarters. Both Amarok and Vilka were keeping the enemy from surrounding their pack leader, but they could not protect it from the terrible fire raking its unshielded flanks.

  Kotov gripped the edge of the battlements tightly as Lupa Capitalina wrenched itself free of the ice and took a lurching backward step. The assault ramps were still down and two menials screamed as they fell from the open structure. Cadian soldiers ran to help in getting the ramps raised as the Warlord took another step, twisting on its axis as it did so. The walk to the Tomioka was made at a stately pace, but the Wintersun was in battle now; the insects crawling on its hull were of secondary importance to its own survival.

  The logic was undeniable, though it gave Kotov no comfort to be one of those insects.

  A hundred metres now separated the Warlord and the Tomioka, and Kotov saw that the transformations he had witnessed within the starship were being mirrored on its exterior. The crystalline growths on its hull were expanding organically to sheathe the entire upper reaches of the hull in what looked like a caul of glittering glass.

  A flare of static blinded him momentarily as Lupa Capitalina’s carapace void pylons ignited and clad the Titan in layers of ablative energies. The clashing harmonics and belligerent frequencies were antithetical to his implants, but Kotov was grateful for the protection.