Vitali nodded, though he was clearly very far from all right.
‘My daughter lies dying before my very eyes,’ said Vitali. ‘Within sight of one of the greatest technological marvels of the galaxy. There’s an irony there somewhere.’
Roboute knelt beside Vitali and placed a hand on the venerable stargazer’s shoulder. He felt vibrations running through Vitali’s body, the micro-tremors of a man holding back an ocean of unimaginable, fiery agony.
‘Pain has to go somewhere,’ said Vitali, the muscles in his face tensing and twitching with the effort of keeping his daughter alive. ‘And I couldn’t let her last hours be filled with suffering.’
Roboute had heard that Vitali was managing Linya’s pain, but seeing the traumatic reality of that process was horrifying. He felt his admiration at Vitali’s devotion to his daughter soar – the Ultramarian core of him knew he could do no less.
He stood and used the vox-panel on the wall to open a channel to the Renard.
After a minute of clicking, static-filled growls, Emil Nader’s voice barked from the augmitter.
‘Roboute,’ said Emil. ‘Are you aboard yet? We can’t get anything from the Mechanicus, all the internal systems are down. What in Konor’s name is going on?’
‘Shut up and listen, Emil,’ snapped Roboute. ‘We don’t have much time. The Speranza’s on lockdown, and the shuttle’s snagged on an e-mag tether.’
‘Hell, and I guess you know the orbital track of the Ark’s decaying?’
‘Painfully aware,’ replied Roboute. ‘Now listen, we need to get back aboard right bloody now, and I’m going to need your help to do it.’
‘Go ahead, whatever you need.’
‘You remember that lunatic hauler pilot out of Cypra Mundi, the one with the ship that had those giant green eyes painted on its prow?’
‘Rayner? The captain of Infinite Terra?’
‘That’s the one,’ said Roboute. ‘You remember how he died?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Emil. ‘I still get nightmares thinking about the evacuation of Brontissa.’
‘Yeah, tyranids do make things messy,’ agreed Roboute. ‘Now listen up, Emil. We’re stuck out here, and unless Mistress Tychon gets to a proper medicae deck soon, she’s going to die.’
‘Shit! What do you need us to do?’
Roboute took a deep breath, knowing that what he was about to ask of his first mate was so dangerous that it might charitably be called suicidal.
But if there was one pilot in the galaxy Roboute would trust to pull this off, it was Emil Nader.
‘I need you to do what Rayner tried,’ said Roboute. ‘But I need you to pull it off.’
It felt strange going into a hostile situation without his ubiquitous Hellhound tanks at his back or the roaring form of a Leman Russ Conqueror beneath him. Colonel Ven Anders firmly believed that marching towards the enemy on foot was a tactic of last resort or a way for gloryhounds to get themselves killed trying to make a name for themselves.
Yet here he was, marching towards the towering shutters of the embarkation deck at the head of a command squad of twenty Cadian Guardsmen, and not a single battle tank to be seen. Archmagos Kotov wasn’t about to let him negotiate with Abrehem Locke without a show of force from the Mechanicus, and thus Magos Dahan and three Cataphract battle robots marched with him.
Anders wished the archmagos had despatched someone else. Dahan was twitchy and full of blistering indignation at this strike, just the sort of mindset that could turn this negotiation into a full-blown firefight. Bringing three hulking battle robots didn’t exactly display a willingness to reach a peaceful solution.
Sergeant Tanna and a warrior named Varda were also part of the detachment, but were at least keeping a low profile to the back of this detachment – or as low a profile as two Space Marines could keep. Anders’s original plan of keeping a human face on the negotiations was starting to look less and less convincing, but he’d extracted oaths from both Dahan and Tanna that they would make no aggressive moves. Beside him, Captain Hawkins fought to keep his hands from reaching towards his pistol and sword.
‘Steady, captain,’ said Anders as they reached the embarkation deck. ‘We don’t want to upset the natives, now do we?’
‘Sorry, sir,’ replied Hawkins, conspicuously forcing his hands to his sides. ‘Force of habit.’
‘Understandable, but I want it absolutely clear that there is to be no weapon drawn without my express order. I don’t even want bad language or unkind thoughts, you understand?’
‘Absolutely, sir,’ said Hawkins. ‘I’ve passed the word, and anyone that messes up will have Rae to answer to.’
‘I think Lieutenant Rae will be the least of anyone’s worries if this goes to hell.’
‘Right enough, sir,’ said Hawkins as the shutter began to grind its way aside, accompanied by the wheezing clatter of gears and protesting servos.
‘Here we go,’ whispered Anders, marching into the embarkation deck. ‘Once more into the Eye.’
The cavernous space beyond the shutters should have been filled with industrious labour; with servitors, bondsmen and Mechanicus logisters co-ordinating deck operations to Kryptaestrex’s detailed resupply plans. A dozen recently-arrived cargo haulers sat before the shimmering integrity field at the opening to the void, their hulls icy and sealed shut. Stevedore-servitors stood dumbly at the cargo doors, unmoving and rendered uncooperative by whatever power Abrehem Locke’s restored servitor had exercised over them.
Ready to meet them were around fifty men in the dirty red coveralls of Mechanicus bondsmen. Anders saw thousands more behind them, lounging on stacked crates, milling in conspiratorial groups or sprawled on the deck asleep. To see men asleep while the clock ticked down to extinction almost beggared belief, but Anders had long since learned that human beings were capable of the strangest behaviour in times of crisis.
Their welcoming committee had ripped the sleeves from their uniforms or otherwise disfigured them in an obvious attempt at visibly throwing off the shackles of their perceived oppressors. Every one of them was armed, either with a heavy length of steel piping or a buzzing power tool of some description. Anders recognised the leader of this group immediately; Julius Hawke, an ex-Guardsman and a die-hard malingerer according to his file. He carried a rusted las-lock, and despite a long list of disciplinary infractions and poor performance evaluations, it was clear he knew how to use it.
‘You Anders?’ asked Hawke.
‘I am Colonel Ven Horatiu Anders, Colonel of the 71st Cadian Regiment of Hellhounds. Why aren’t you in uniform anymore, Guardsman Hawke?’
‘Been a long time since anyone’s called me that,’ laughed Hawke, a sour bark that spoke of years spent undermining authority and mocking his betters. Despite what he’d said to Hawkins, Anders felt a strong desire to draw his sabre and run this affront to soldiery through. ‘I’m just Hawke now, and I am in uniform. This is the uniform of the ain’t going to take any more shit regiment.’
‘I am here to speak with Abrehem Locke,’ said Anders. ‘So I’d be obliged if you’d take me to him.’
Hawke shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’
The man’s tone was infuriating and Anders bit back an angry retort.
‘I was told he would be here.’
‘Yeah, he is, but we didn’t say nothing about bringing three bloody battle robots and a couple of Space Marines hiding at the back,’ said Hawke. ‘You think we’re stupid?’
Anders dearly wanted to give the answer he knew he shouldn’t, but contented himself by saying, ‘Every second of my time you waste brings this ship closer to destruction. You tell me if that’s stupid.’
‘I’ve seen your sort before,’ said Hawke. ‘Think they’re better than the rest of us grunts. You know, I knew an officer called Anders once before. A cocksure bastard, that’s for sure. Got himse
lf killed on Hydra Cordatus.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Anders. ‘I read your statement on the way here. During a supposed attack by Space Marines of the Archenemy, wasn’t it?’
Hawke nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’
‘On a dead world of no material or strategic significance,’ said Anders. ‘An attack both the Adeptus Mechanicus and Adeptus Astartes claim never happened.’
‘That’s what the Mechanicus want you to believe,’ sneered Hawke, as though Anders were the very model of gullibility. ‘Course they’re not going to admit there was a fortress there and that the enemy came and took it off them like coins from a drunk.’
‘Can you take me to Bondsman Locke or not?’ asked Anders, tiring of Hawke’s rambling.
‘Yeah, I can, but just you.’
Captain Hawkins stepped forwards and said, ‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘Now who’s wasting time?’ asked Hawke.
Anders waved Hawkins back. ‘If that’s what it takes to end this.’
‘Sir, you can’t just–’
‘Captain, remain here with the men,’ said Anders.
‘Sir, I can’t let you walk in there alone,’ insisted Hawkins.
Anders ignored Hawkins’s protests and said, ‘I will be quite safe, I assure you. I need you to maintain discipline and keep the ranks straight. Oh, and if I’m not back in twenty minutes…’
‘Sir?’
‘You have my permission to kill everyone on this deck.’
Anders turned back to Hawke, whose face was a picture in stunned shock.
‘Right then, Bondsman Hawke,’ said Anders. ‘Take me to your leader.’
Making her way through the guts of the humans’ starship was childishly easy. Its gloomy corridors were draped in shadows and threaded with passageways even its crew appeared to have forgotten. The sepulchral gloom masked Bielanna’s ascent from the depths of the ship as she slid through the shadows of towering machines that had not moved for centuries and along abandoned passageways ankle-deep in rat-infested water.
Towering metallic skull-on-cog icons stared down at her at every turn, nestling cheek by jowl with fretted stone gargoyles and gleaming machinery of brutish complexity: all pneumatic gears, clanking chains and smoke-belching pistons. The humans’ starship was a mass of contradictions: a nightmarish temple where inhuman machinery was venerated and a breeding ground for the teeming masses of humanity who crewed it.
Bielanna would never understand the mon-keigh, a race so numerous and wantonly fecund that they outnumbered the stars. But the unimaginable scale of their species did not give them solace, but rather filled them with fear and drove them to stamp out any form of life and worship that did not match their own. Such unthinking hatred could only ever breed hatred in return, but the humans could not see that by their own actions were they damning themselves to an eternity of strife.
The more Bielanna saw of the humans aboard this ship, the less she thought of them as sentient beings at all. They were living grease in a grinding mechanical engine, corpuscles shunted from place to place in service of the great machine’s continuance. How they could not see that they were little better than microbes crawling within the body of a larger beast was beyond her.
‘They are not worshipping you,’ she whispered, pausing beneath one of the half-machine, half-human skulls stamped on a sheet steel wall. ‘You enslave them and they believe themselves blessed.’
The skull belched a gout of flame and smoke from its empty eye socket, and Bielanna slid away into the darkness, following the threads of fate that had led her to risk moving into the occupied areas of the ship.
The vision had come suddenly, staggering her with its potency.
A gathering of humans in one of the vast chambers used to bring their ugly cargo ships aboard.
The meeting of a warrior and a man reluctantly fated to be both a saviour and a destroyer.
Most human lives were so ephemeral that their influence on the skein was microscopic, so infinitesimal that they were virtually an irrelevance, but whoever these two men were, they were worthy of notice, men whose actions could actually have an impact on the future.
Ariganna’s impatience had made the meeting of these men inevitable, a fixed locus upon the skein around which a million times a billion possibilities revolved. The exarch had grown tired of skulking in the depths of the starship and given in to her war-mask’s urge to kill. Where she had previously confined her slayings to those mon-keigh that unwittingly entered their shadowy lair, now she actively hunted the upper decks as a lone predator of unparalleled savagery and limit-less cruelty. Bielanna had seen Ariganna kill the magos controlling the lethally volatile engine reactors, a bewilderingly complex web of infinite possibility exploded before her eyes.
As Bielanna had hoped, her connection to the skein had become stronger with every passing day and every light year the ship travelled from the reborn star system. But instead of cohering her sight of the future, that strengthening had only made her interpretations more ambiguous. Entwined memories of the past and visions of the future’s infinite variety filled her every waking moment, and Bielanna found it almost impossible to distinguish between what was real and what was imagined.
Yet the vision of these two men remained constant whenever she looked into the future.
She came at last to the place where the thread of fate she had been following now branched out beyond her ability to trace with any certainty, a towering stained-glass window depicting a grey-steel temple atop a red mountain that churned out armoured vehicles and smoke in equal measure. One of the window’s lower panes was broken, and Bielanna eased herself through, emerging onto a stonework ledge overlooking a vast deck space with an enormous opening on its far wall that looked onto the void.
Thousands of the mon-keigh were gathered below her, flickering embers of life and fleeting existence. Some embers burned brighter than others, and she flinched at the radiance coming from two black-armoured giants, kin to the warrior the avatar of Kaela Mensha Khaine had killed. She had seen the fate-lines of Space Marines before, and they burned with a directness that was almost pitiable, but the fates of these warriors felt somehow familiar, as though she had flown the futures they too would walk.
Simmering aggression filled the deck like a sickness, and Bielanna needed no psychic sensitivity to feel the rippling undercurrents of fear and imminent violence oozing into the atmosphere.
That was good.
She could use one to provoke the other.
Leering cherubs with rebreathers instead of faces had been carved on either side of the window, and as she knelt at the corner of the ledge, the metallic skull of the nearest rolled a mechanised eye in her direction. Bielanna ignored it, feeling her gaze drawn to the flickering energy field that kept the deck pressurised. She felt a momentary tremor of unease at the sight of unknown stars that should not exist.
She shook off the sensation of being watched by these ghoulish stars and took a breath of polluted air as her senses eased into the flickering fate-lines of the mon-keigh. She sought the one whose fear was the greatest and most easily moulded, finding him easily among the mass of slave workers and shrouding his mind with emanations of his darkest nightmares.
The future was bewilderingly complex and inconstant, but one thing was certain.
The humans known as Anders and Locke could not be allowed to settle their differences.
Anders sat on a shipping crate on the far side of the embarkation deck. He and Abrehem Locke sat opposite one another, ringed by a laager of tracked Mechanicus earth-moving machinery. Anders had to admit to feeling a little let down by the sight of the firebrand whose rhetoric of insurrection had echoed from one end of the Speranza to the other.
Hollow cheeked and shaven headed, with metallic glints at the corners of his eyes, Abrehem Locke did not look or sound like a revolutionary
, and his augmetic arm wasn’t particularly impressive either without weapons or any form of combat attachments. He looked exactly like what he was; a Mechanicus bondsman on the verge of starvation, exhaustion and mental breakdown.
Anders could almost sympathise.
The arco-flagellant, however, was another matter. The cybernetic killer stared with an undisguised urge to kill him, but Anders dismissed it. If it attacked him, he would be dead before he even had a chance to react, so there was no point wasting time worrying about it.
‘You realise that if we fail to reach agreement, we all die,’ said Anders.
‘I’m aware of that,’ replied Locke.
‘Then tell me what I can do to end this.’
‘You can get Archmagos Kotov to release the bondsmen,’ said Locke. ‘I’d ask for the servitors to be reverse engineered if I didn’t think the iatrogenic shock would kill them.’
Anders nodded. ‘You know he’s not going to agree to that. Especially after you had the Master of Engines killed.’
Locke’s eyes narrowed and his shoulders squared in irritation. ‘Saiixek is dead?’
‘I believe that was his name, yes.’
‘Saiixek was the first magos I saw when I came aboard the Speranza,’ said Locke. ‘He worked a hundred men to death before we’d even broken Joura’s orbit, hundreds more just to reach the galactic edge. I won’t shed a single tear for that bastard, but we didn’t kill him. Unlike Magos Kotov, I don’t have blood on my hands.’
‘We all have blood on our hands, my friend,’ said Anders, surprised to find that he believed Abrehem. ‘All service to the Emperor requires sacrifice.’
‘I’d prefer my own sacrifice in the Emperor’s name to be a willing one,’ said Locke, lifting his bionic arm by way of example. ‘That’s what Kotov fails to understand. This ship is a machine to him, and all we are to him is human fuel to keep it going, to be spent and used up at will.’
‘You should try life in the Imperial Guard,’ said Anders.
Locke shook his head. ‘No, you misunderstand me, Colonel Anders. I know the realities of life in the Imperium. Everyone serves, whether they want to or not. Sure, maybe we didn’t all sign up for this, but we’re here now and we have a job to do. Treat us like slaves and all he’ll get is resentment and revolt. Treat us like human beings worthy of respect and everything changes.’
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 67