‘Consider this, brothers. If the Speranza is a machine and Arch-magos Kotov is the cogitator at its heart, then the magi are the levers of control and the overseers are the gears. That makes us the raw material the machine devours! But we are raw materials that don’t intend to be devoured. We won’t be used and spat out or cast aside. We are not slaves to be bought and sold, traded like animal flesh at a meat market. No, Archmagos Kotov, we are human beings!’
This time, Abrehem’s words brought wild cheers and pumping fists. He felt them echoing through the farthest corners of the Ark Mechanicus, from its command deck all the way to the deepest, darkest sumps below the waterline. An angry undercurrent that had been bubbling just under the surface, with no way to express itself, suddenly found an outlet in Abrehem. Bondsmen threw plastic food trays to the floor and climbed onto the tables. They roared hatred at their overseers and shouted words of support and devotion.
Abrehem threw his fists into the air, one of flesh and one of metal, like a victorious prizefighter.
‘The Speranza is a great machine, and the operation of that machine has become so odious, made us so sick at heart, that we can no longer take part! We cannot even passively take part! So we will put our bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers and upon all the apparatus! We will make the machine stop! And together we will show Archmagos Kotov that unless we are free, his great machine will be prevented from working at all!’
The feeding hall was in uproar now, and Abrehem could no longer see any armsmen or overseers. They had retreated from the growing unrest of the thousands of bondsmen, pulling back to regroup with the armed forces closing in on the feeding hall from all directions. Abrehem dismissed them from his thoughts. They were irrelevant now.
He had an ace in the hole that would make all the guns on the ship meaningless.
Abrehem lowered his arms and turned to Ismael.
‘Are you sure you can do this?’ he asked.
Ismael nodded. ‘I can. They are ready to listen.’
‘Then do it,’ said Abrehem.
Ismael nodded and closed his eyes.
One by one, on deck after deck, tens of thousands of cybernetic servitor slaves simply stopped what they were doing. They stepped away from their stations, unplugged from their machines and refused to work another minute.
The Speranza ceased to function.
Consciousness returned slowly, Linya’s implants inducing an artificial coma-like state while running diagnostics on her entire neuromatrix. Satisfied the damage to her skull would not impair her cognitive functions, they stimulated the active cerebral functions, effectively jump-starting her consciousness as intravenous reservoirs flooded her body with stimms.
Linya’s eyes snapped open and she drew in a vast, sucking breath of hot, electrically tainted air. The compartment was filled with acrid smoke from the shattered slates and flames burned the sacred machinery behind them to a tangled mass of dripping plastek and molten copper. The one functioning gyroscope told her the entire war-engine was canted over at an angle of fifty-seven degrees.
The heat was intolerable, her skin slick with sweat.
Her head hurt, and blood coated her left temple and cheek. She blinked away tears of pain as she heard her voice being called. She twisted in the entangling restriction of the impact harness, struggling to free her arms as she realised she was trapped. Her internal augmentations were registering dangerously high temperatures that were steadily rising.
Dimly she remembered the fury of the earthquake, the buildings crashing down like sculptures of ash in a rainstorm, the deafening noise… the…
‘We fell,’ she whispered. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus, we fell…’
Linya struggled against her restraints, pulling and tugging at the leather before forcing herself to calm. She took a breath of hot air, feeling it burn her throat. She heard her name called again, and this time recognised her father’s voice echoing in her skull.
Linya! Linya, are you there!+
‘I’m here,’ she said, before realising the communication was in the Manifold.
Something nearby creaked and popped, and her compartment lurched suddenly, her angle from the vertical widening to sixty-three degrees.
Linya!+
I’m here,+ she said. +I’m all right. What happened? We fell?+
We did,+ replied her father. +But you have to get out of there. Right now. The leg is sinking. Right now, your compartment is sunk into the crevasse, and enveloped by hot magma.+
Magma?+
Yes, technically it’s still underground, so I’m calling it magma and not lava, but that’s beside the point. Now, can you move? Can you climb up through the femoral companionway?+
Linya twisted her neck up and saw the metal around the narrow hatch above her was shimmering in a heat haze. She nodded and reached down to unsnap the locking mechanism of the impact harness. The metal was hot to the touch, burning her skin as she unbuckled herself, but she forced herself to ignore the pain and remove each neural connection. Where the regular servitor crewman would have required a full suite, she had only the bare minimum thanks to her body’s greater sophistication.
I’m out of the harness,+ she said.
Linya, please hurry,+ said her father. +The Titan won’t be upright for much longer.+
As if to underscore her father’s words, the compartment was slowly illuminated by a hot metal glow of orange light. Linya looked down to see the floor shimmering in a haze as it began to melt in the ferocious heat. The hem of her robes was smoking, and it wouldn’t take long before it burst into flames. The thought of being cooked alive in this cramped, coffin-like space spurred her to haste, and she swiftly shrugged off the last of the straps and snapped out the final connection.
Linya wriggled out of the impact harness and reached up to grab the metal rungs on the compartment walls.
She screamed as the skin was burned from her palms, and fell back into the harness-seat.
Fighting back tears of pain, Linya wrapped the fabric of her robe around her burned hand and tried again. She gritted her teeth and forced herself upwards, squeezing her body up through the compartment and feeling the onset of a sudden and almost overwhelming claustrophobia.
The hatch was numerically-locked and in a single, terrifying second, Linya realised she had no idea of the code. As soon as the thought occurred, Linya gasped as the correct digits rammed into her mind, as forcefully as though they had been blasted into her cerebral cortex by a cranial shunt.
Thank you, father,+ she said. +But you could have just spoken the code.+
Don’t thank me,+ said Vitali. +That was Amarok.+
Blinking away inload trauma, she tapped the code into the panel and the hatch’s lock disengaged with a thudding series of ratcheting clangs.
‘Thank you, great one,’ she said, pressing a cloth-wrapped hand to the Mechanicus icon stamped into the metal collar of the hatch. Linya pushed up and slid the hatch aside, climbing into a space barely wide enough for a malnourished adolescent. Ribbed with bracing struts and complex nests of gyroscopic mechanisms, power relays and repercussive filters, the femoral companionway linked the Warhound’s leg with the pilot’s compartment, but she wouldn’t have to climb that far.
Ruddy daylight poured in through an emergency hatch just below the complex arrangement of gears and gimbals at the Titan’s pelvic joint. The air reeked of burning machinery, cooking lubricants and steaming oils. Linya squeezed through the tube, twisting her shoulders and forcing her body into all manner of strange contortions to push past protruding mechanisms and jutting outcrops of reinforcement spars.
Below her, the temperature gradient suddenly spiked and she knew the magma in the crevasse had melted through the floor of the compartment in which she had sat. The Titan sagged as its leg sank deeper, and Linya pulled in desperate fear as she felt the lower reaches of her robe
burst into flames. Her shoulders were too wide, and she couldn’t shift her body upwards.
Linya!+ yelled Vitali.
‘I can’t get out!’ she screamed, reaching blindly for the achingly close oblong of daylight just above her. Her feet were burning, the meat seared from her bones and sloughing from her legs like molten wax. Linya’s cranial implants registered her pain and did their best to block the worst of it while still allowing her to function, but the sheer awful, intolerable, overwhelming force of it was too hideous for anything designed by the Mechanicus to overcome.
‘I can’t get out!’ screamed Linya, before the heat scorched the words from her lungs.
Archmagos Kotov heard the words echoing throughout the Speranza from Feeding Chamber Eighty-Six, but couldn’t believe they were real. Bondsmen did not speak out against their rightful masters, they accepted their role within the machine and were honoured to be part of such an interconnected hierarchy. So had it always been before, so would it be now.
‘…We will make the machine stop!’ shouted the voice that had been positively identified as Bondsman Abrehem Locke. ‘And together we will show Archmagos Kotov that unless we are free, his great machine will be prevented from working at all!’
As outraged as he had been by such presumption, it was nothing to the horror that followed as the bridge servitors sat bolt upright in unison and, in perfect synchrony, unplugged themselves from their duty stations. Those that could stand, rose from their bench seats and turned to face his command throne, and though he must surely be imagining it, Kotov felt the heat of their accusation.
‘Ave Deus Mechanicus,’ he said, stepping forwards and turning around to see that same look in every servitor’s face.
The noospheric network surged with alarms and warning icons as previously maintained systems began to falter or shut down altogether. Forge control, engine stability, reactor core protocols, life-support… everything was shutting down or already lost. Only the most basic autonomous functions were still active, and even they would soon degrade without intervention.
Throughout the Speranza, tech-priests and lexmechanics rushed to every abandoned station in a desperate attempt to restore control, but as numerous as they were, the sheer number of duties undertaken by cybernetics far outweighed any hope of control by the Martian priests.
‘What in the name of the Omnissiah has he done?’ demanded Kotov.
Magos Blaylock was wired into a dozen systems, via every method of connection available to him. His entourage of stunted vat-creatures stood curiously inert, as though they had decided to no longer assist their master.
‘Statement: unknown,’ said Blaylock. ‘Without exception, every servitor aboard the ship has ceased in its appointed task. They have either shut down their active systems connections or disconnected themselves… voluntarily…’
The last word was breathed as a whisper, as if by its very utterance, the evidence before their senses might be refuted. Kotov looked over at Blaylock, who, for the first time since he had been appointed Fabricatus Locum, looked utterly helpless.
‘How has he done this?’ asked Kotov, stepping down to the deck and dragging noospheric sheets of light to him. He saw the truth of Blaylock’s words. Throughout the Speranza, the previously compliant servitor crew had ceased their functioning, standing as immobile as the flesh-statues in the cavernous cyberneticising-temples on Mars before the implantation of their encoded routines.
Kryptaestrex was a flaring beacon of angry noospheric code as his carefully structured resupply plans were hopelessly disrupted and the loading docks ceased operating. Across from the Master of Logistics, Azuramagelli struggled to reroute every avionics package previously controlled by a cadre of navigational servitors to his station. The sheer volume of computational data delegated to cybernetics was staggering, and Kotov winced at the data-burden crackling between Azuramagelli’s brain fragments.
‘We need to re-establish control,’ said Kotov, extending a mechadendrite and hooking himself into the control web that oversaw the smooth running of the ship’s servitors. ‘Immediately. Send a restorative activation code to every servitor aboard the ship.’
No sooner were the words spoken than his mechadendrite surged with feedback. Kotov snatched the sinuous limb from the connection port, trailing a froth of belligerent code and golden sparks.
‘The servitor networks are shutting themselves off from us,’ said Blaylock. ‘Locking themselves behind walls of binaric white noise. Even if we could establish a connection, they wouldn’t hear us.’
‘We need to get them back,’ snapped Kotov. ‘I will not be shut out of my own ship by a damned bondsman. A bondsman you have singularly failed to dig out from his wretched hiding place. This is your fault, Tarkis, you should have found and executed this man long before now.’
‘Rebuttal: this bondsman all but vanished from the Speranza,’ said Blaylock. ‘No amount of armsmen or bio-signature survey sweeps revealed any trace of his presence. It is my belief he has had help from Mechanicus personnel in evading capture.’
Kotov forced a measure of calm into his floodstream, knowing that such recriminations were pointless. Accusations could be made once control had been re-established.
‘How close are our armed forces to the feeding hall?’ he asked. ‘I want Abrehem Locke dead.’
‘Cadians and armsmen are within four minutes,’ answered Kryptaestrex. ‘But we need this bondsman alive. What if he is the only one able to restore the servitors to their proper place?’
‘It’s not him,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘It’s the damned servitor that had its memory restored.’
‘Impossible,’ snapped Kryptaestrex. ‘That was just a rumour, a ridiculous farrago spread by the lower menials. I’ve heard its like a hundred times or more.’
‘Then explain this,’ said Azuramagelli.
Kotov shut them both up with a harsh blurt of binary.
‘A servitor that had its memory restored?’ he asked.
‘So the lower-deck rumour mill has it,’ answered Azuramagelli.
‘Tell me everything you have heard,’ ordered Kotov. ‘Before I lose complete control of my ship.’
The enginarium templum of the Speranza was a place of miracles, where the power of the Omnissiah was at its most controlled and most violent. Forget the explosive death of munitions, forget the murderous power of the Life Eater. In the plasma containment chambers was where the raw, primal essence of the Machine-God and the genius of the Mechanicus were most sublimely combined.
Or so Magos Saiixek had thought until three minutes and fourteen seconds ago.
Now he realised he was standing at the heart of what was likely to be a colossal explosion of superheated plasma energy that would reduce the vast structure of the Speranza to vapour. Chiming alarm bells pealed from on high, drowning out the binary hymnals of appeasement as geysers of emergency venting spewed columns of superheated steam into the air. Moist banks of humid, chemically-rich vapour gathered about the reactors like jungle-fog, refracting the scintillating illumination of the emergency lights in golden rainbows.
Each cylindrical reactor was five hundred metres in diameter and two kilometres in length – almost eighty-five per cent of their mass comprised layers of ceramite heat shielding and containment field generators. One reactor alone was capable of supplying the energy demands of a mid-sized hive for centuries, and Saiixek was looking at twelve such reactors stretching off towards a vanishing point at the far end of the chamber.
Entire cadres of servitors had been devoted to regulating the unimaginable core temperatures with mantras of prayer or ministering to the many hundreds of machine-spirits inhabiting the mechanisms empowering the reactors. The never-ending catechisms of maintenance and the continual ritualised workings were attended to by five hundred servitors for each reactor and, until three minutes and twenty-five seconds ago, they had been attending to th
eir duties in perfect order.
Now those same servitors simply stood and watched the reactors to which they had been bound relentlessly and inevitably spiral to destruction. Every override code, every mastery file and every Servitudae Obligatus had been rejected, like a high-functioning data-engine ignoring the advances of a lowly technomat. Power was no longer being fed to the engines, and the Speranza’s orbital track, already far lower than was prudent, was decaying at a rate that would soon see the ship caught within the planet’s gravity envelope beyond hope of escape.
Assuming Saiixek didn’t lose control of the reactors before then.
Standing atop the latticed mezzanine, overlooking the array of runaway fusion reactors, Magos Saiixek now understood how perilously tenuous his grasp on their control had been. He had stood at this very station and issued orders to these monolithic machines and thought himself their master.
But what he had mistaken for mastery was little more than an illusion.
Every single mechadendrite Saiixek possessed, from thickly-segmented cables like gleaming snakes to fibre-fine sensory wands, was engaged with the control stations to either side. Cold mist surrounded him, the cooling mechanisms of his upthrust backpack coating everything nearby in a veneer of hoarfrost. His black robes cracked in the frozen temperatures, though his metallic skull steamed with excess heat bleed from his monstrously overclocked cognitive processes.
Like a conductor before an impossibly vast and complex orchestra, Saiixek had subsumed the capacity of every magos within range to process the insanely complex hexamathics of uncontrolled fusion in an attempt to keep the reactions from achieving critical mass.
It was an impossible task, and the best he had managed was simply to keep the reactors from exploding. The geometric progression of the calculations’ complexity would soon outstrip his borrowed capacity to process, making his efforts a holding action at best, one that would see him burn out large sections of irreplaceable brain matter.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 65