But still it refused to die.
Its electro-flails crackled with power and Varda cried out as the shock was delivered straight to his nervous system. The Emperor’s Champion dropped to his knees, and Tanna cried out as the Black Sword fell from his grip. The arco-flagellant wrenched its arm in Varda’s side, but the Emperor’s Champion had his hand wrapped around the writhing steel embedded in his body, holding it fast to his flesh.
Tanna then realised that Varda had not dropped his sword, but released it deliberately.
And now swung it on the fresh-forged chain Tanna had crafted.
The strike was as horrendous as it was unexpected, the blade slicing into the arco-flagellant’s shoulder. It ricocheted from the bone and tore into the meat and steel of its skull. Sparks and oil-infused blood sprayed from the wound as the arco-flagellant staggered away from Varda. It howled in a mixture of rage and pain, one arm hanging limply at its side as though the synaptic connections to the limb had been severed.
‘Finish it!’ commanded Varda.
Tanna surged to his feet and swept his bolter from the mag-lock at his thigh.
The aiming reticule was useless in the smashed visor, but Tanna didn’t need it.
But before he could squeeze the trigger, the integrity field at the opening of the embarkation deck blew inwards with the sudden passage of a damaged cargo rig. Given the unexpected and unauthorised arrival of this ship, none of the pressurisation differential protocols or energy damping generators had been initiated to receive an incoming vessel. Ice-cold air blew into the embarkation deck with hurricane force as the integrity field was breached for the briefest second and the battered rig slammed to the deck with a shriek of tearing metal.
It left a cascade of fat orange sparks in its wake as it skidded across the deck like a rampaging bull-grox, smashing cargo containers aside and ripping up a row of loader gurneys in its headlong rush across the deck space. Bondsmen and Cadians scattered like ants as they fought to get out of its pathway.
The violated integrity field snapped back into place, and a concussive e-mag pulse slammed through the deck and toppled those few men still standing like a fist to the guts.
The Speranza pulled out of its descending spiral into the atmosphere of Hypatia with less than thirteen minutes remaining before breaking orbit would have become impossible. The violent arrival of the Renard’s shuttle rig provided the necessary moment of calm for Colonel Anders and Abrehem Locke to impose a cessation of hostilities and restore a semblance of order.
It was a fragile ceasefire, one that could flare to violence in a heartbeat and might have done so had it not been for the sobering sight of Roboute Surcouf leading a sterile gurney from the crew compartment of the shuttle. Borne upon the gurney was the grievously injured Linya Tychon, and the sight of the horrifically wounded magos had instantly quelled every thought of conflict. Both sides withdrew to lick their wounds and, in Abrehem Locke’s case, vanish once more into the labyrinthine structure of the Ark Mechanicus.
As a Mechanicus bio-trauma squad encased Linya in a stasis-capsule, Roboute paused before leaving the embarkation deck, staring up at one of the vaulted chamber’s towering lancet windows; a vividly stained-glass window depicting a sprawling Leman Russ manufactorum atop Olympus Mons. One of the window’s lower panes was broken, and Roboute stared at it for several minutes with a curious expression on his face, like a man trying to recall a half-remembered dream, before following Linya and her father to the medicae decks.
Moments later, servitors throughout the Speranza returned to their normal working patterns, re-implanting themselves into the ship’s vital systems and, more importantly, re-establishing control of the overloading reactors in the enginarium decks. With dedicated binaric choirs appeasing the enraged spirits of the plasma cores, the runaway reactions within their nuclear hearts were cooled and normal operation restored, allowing the Speranza to pull out of its self-destructive descent.
Mechanicus clean-up crews arrived to salvage Roboute Surcouf’s shuttle and return the embarkation deck to functionality in time to receive the flotillas of cargo-haulers from the surface of Hypatia. With orbit restored, the resupply operation continued as before, though at a substantially increased altitude and measured pace.
No trace could be found of the arco-flagellant; it had vanished as comprehensively as its master, though indications were that Brother-Sergeant Tanna and Emperor’s Champion Varda had seriously damaged its biological components. Both Space Marines had suffered injury at the hands of the cyborgised destroyer, but without the ministrations of an Apothecary, they were forced to rely on basic medicae treatment intended for baseline humanoid anatomy, which could patch up the surface hurt, but do nothing for any underlying damage the arco-flagellant’s flails had caused.
No-one beyond the first victims of Guardsman Manos’s opening salvo had been killed in the fighting, which in itself was something of a miracle, but the medicae decks were filled with bondsmen and Cadians sporting broken limbs, deep cuts, fractured skulls and hefty concussions. Manos himself was now confined to the Speranza’s brig, a broken man with no memory of what had driven him to open fire.
All the subsequent deep neural trawls could establish was that sometime around the shooting, synaptic activity in Manos’s amygdala, the mass of nuclei buried deep in the temporal lobes of the brain, had increased tenfold. This section of the brain, often neutered during a senior adept’s passage through the upper echelons of the Cult Mechanicus, housed the body’s control mechanisms for fear and rage, which – together with the murder of Magos Saiixek – led some magi to speculate that an outside agency had exerted some form of psychic influence over the Guardsman. What that outside agency might be, no one was saying, but below the waterline speculation was rife, with talk of xenos boarders, warp creatures and a rogue psyker among the crew.
The coffin ships of Legio Sirius returned the mortally-wounded carcass of Amarok to the Speranza, and though there was no love lost between Elias Härkin and Gunnar Vintras, Vilka had escorted the fallen remains of its fellow Warhound to Magos Turentek’s repair cradles. A procession of Mechanicus mourners marched alongside the fallen engine, and spirit-singers encoded memories of its lost machine-soul within the Manifold to honour its sacrifice. The Omnissiah would reveal the Warhound’s new spirit in good time, ready for when its physical form was ready to walk again.
With the current crisis averted, and to prevent another revolution below decks, Archmagos Kotov had been forced to agree to several of Abrehem’s demands. At first he had demanded another military response, but after consultations with his senior magi and receiving counsel on mortal psychology from Ven Anders and Roboute Surcouf, he had been brought round to the idea of negotiation.
The end results of those negotiations were sweeping changes in the duty rosters of the bondsmen’s shift patterns, implemented on a ship-wide basis, together with an improvement in the quality of nutritional foodstuffs served in the feeding halls. Retroactively-applied maximum lengths of service were added to the servitude covenants between Archmagos Kotov and the Speranza’s bondsmen, and a charter of workers’ rights was to be drawn up that better outlined the exact duties and responsibilities of the starship’s crew.
All of which had served to enrage the master of the fleet to the point of apoplexy and a full system-purge. Being dictated to by menials was unheard of in the annals of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the thought of such present humiliation was only barely outweighed by the thought of future glory. Between them, Surcouf and Anders finally persuaded the archmagos to agree to the principles of Abrehem Locke’s terms – though both harboured doubts as to how long he would abide by the agreement when the Speranza returned to Imperial space.
The Ark Mechanicus remained in orbit around Hypatia for another five days, ferrying fleets of haulers from the surface to restock the depleted supply holds and carrying out swathes of badly-needed repair work. While B
laylock studied the temporal implications of the regressing world, both Kryptaestrex and Turentek petitioned for another week to fully replenish their stock of raw materials. Kotov refused these requests and ordered Azuramagelli to resume their course towards the unnamed forge world upon which he believed Archmagos Telok could be found.
As the Speranza set sail, Kotov sat upon his command throne and once more turned his gaze upon the geometric arrangement of stars at the heart of this quest into the unknown.
‘You still believe this venture can succeed?’ asked Galatea, easing into position at Kotov’s side.
‘I do,’ replied Kotov, unwilling to waste words on the machine intelligence.
The silver-eyed proxy body waved an admonishing finger.
‘We are not so sure,’ it said with a throaty, augmetic laugh. ‘You are a servant to lesser beings now. No longer master of your own vessel.’
‘My vessel,’ spat Kotov, shaking his head. ‘You said so yourself; this is your vessel now.’
It was cold, always cold. Marko Koskinen shivered in the freezing chill, even though he was swathed in furs and thermal layers. The black and silver mountain was long behind him, its frigid winds and ice-locked slopes a distant memory, but here evoked in the freezing temperature of the pack-meet. Breath misted before every assembled crewman of the Legio, from its gun-servitors – temporarily removed from their weapon mounts – through its moderati and all the way to its princeps.
Magos Hyrdrith had emptied the space of heat, an easy task on a starship travelling the void, and crackling webs of frost patterned the glass and steel of the forgotten chamber. No-one knew what purpose it had once served, and after today, no one would know what purpose it was serving now.
A hundred souls stood in two long ranks, facing each other across a central pathway to a raised rostrum upon which sat the life-support engines of the Legio’s senior princeps.
The Wintersun occupied the centre of the rostrum, his bio-support cradle surrounded by grey-robed adepts with canine pelts of fur and claw draped around their shoulders and skull masks obscuring their half-human, half-machine faces. The princeps’s truncated wraith-form drifted in the milky grey suspension, his sutured eyes and implant-plugged torso regarding proceedings like a withered monarch.
Beside him, the Moonsorrow occupied the position of Tyrannos, a rank of great significance that granted absolute authority in the absence of the alpha, a title recently bestowed upon Eryks Skálmöld in recognition of his honoured status and a clear symbol of his right of succession. Elias Härkin, encased in his wheezing, pneumatic exo-harness, stood at the base of the rostrum, honoured in his proximity to the senior princeps, but still subservient to their will.
Koskinen believed the Legio had been gifted a fresh start with the Wintersun re-establishing the proper hierarchy of dominance upon his and the Moonsorrow’s return from the Manifold.
And now this.
Koskinen and Joakim Baldur flanked Gunnar Vintras as they stood at the opposite end of the chamber to the Wintersun. The Warhound princeps’s shaven head was bowed and his shoulders were hunched, making him seem an utterly pathetic figure. Koskinen wanted to despise Vintras for what he had allowed to happen to Amarok, but the sight of the broken princeps told him that no rebuke he could offer would match the loathing the man had for himself.
Vintras wore his full Titanicus dress uniform: white and silver, with the twin canidae pins picked out in gold on the lapels of his crimson-edged frock coat. Without furs, Vintras would be chilled to the bone, but to his credit he let none of that discomfort show on his hollow-cheeked face.
‘Let’s get this over with,’ said Vintras, looking over at Koskinen.
Koskinen didn’t reply – it was forbidden to speak to an omega without the alpha’s permission – and looked over at Joakim Baldur. His fellow moderati nodded, and they each took hold of Vintras by the upper arms and all but dragged him towards the rostrum. The two men marched between the paired ranks of Legio personnel; who turned away from the disgraced princeps as they passed, directing their attention towards the Wintersun.
The cold at the rostrum seemed sharper and more dangerous, like a sudden freeze was imminent.
He and Baldur presented Vintras to the Wintersun, who drifted to the front of his tank with his unseeing eyes fastened upon his disgraced pack-warrior. His elongated and bulbous skull nodded once and Elias Härkin took a clattering, mechanised step forwards.
‘Gunnar Vintras, warrior of Lokabrenna and scion of the black and silver mountain, you come before us as princeps of Legio Sirius.’
The nasal distortion of Härkin’s pathogen-ravaged vocal chords was unpleasant to hear, but what he had to say next was even more so.
‘As princeps were you entrusted with the life and honour of the war-engine, Amarok?’
‘I was,’ answered Vintras.
‘And have you failed in that duty?’
‘I have,’ said Vintras. ‘My engine was mortally wounded and its machine-spirit extinguished. No-one but I bears the shame of that.’
Härkin looked back to the Wintersun, who floated back into the occluding viscosity of his casket. This was a duty for the Moonsorrow to perform, to fully cement his position as pack Tyrannos.
A machine-spirit is never extinguished,+ said the Moonsorrow. +It returns to the Omnissiah’s light. Bodies of flesh and blood can never outlive a body of steel and stone, a soul of iron and fire.+
‘I accept whatever punishment you see fit to impose, Moonsorrow,’ said Vintras.
You do not get to call me Moonsorrow. Only pack uses that name and you are no longer pack. You are omega.+
Vintras nodded. ‘So be it,’ he said, lifting his head and baring his neck.
Begin, Härkin,+ said the Moonsorrow. +Spill his blood.+
Härkin nodded and removed a long-bladed knife with a bone handle from a kidskin sheath attached to his leg calliper. Knowing what was required, Koskinen and Baldur once again held Vintras by his arms. Härkin took his knife and made two quick slashes, one across each of Vintras’s cheeks. As droplets of blood ran down his face, Härkin placed the knife against the princeps’s throat, drawing the blade over the skin; hard enough to draw blood, but not so deep as to end his life.
A princeps, even a disgraced one, was too valuable an individual to be so casually thrown away.
The required mental and physical demands of commanding a titanic war-engine were so enormous as to exclude virtually the entire human race. Only truly exceptional individuals could even train to become a Titan princeps, let alone become one. But censure had to be given and be seen to be given. Vintras would forever bear the ritual scar of failure upon his throat.
Härkin cleaned his blade on the fabric of Vintras’s uniform and sheathed it before reaching up to remove his canidae rank pins. He stepped back to his assigned position at the foot of the rostrum and nodded to Koskinen and Baldur.
Piece by piece, they stripped the Titanicus uniform from Vintras, letting each item of clothing fall at his feet like discarded rags until he stood naked before the Legio. His body was muscular and heavily tattooed, marked by honour scars and ritual branding marks indicating engine kills and campaign records. The skin beneath the inking was marble-pale and not even Vintras’s stoic demeanour could prevent the cold from finally impacting on him. He shivered in the freezing temperature, naked and vulnerable and brought low before his Legio.
Now you truly are the Skinwalker,+ said the Moonsorrow.
Vitali had been advised against siring an heir. The likelihood of emotional attachment would be high, his fellow magi told him. The risk to his researches would be incalculable in the time it would take to raise an offspring, for surely he would wish to observe the development of his clone first-hand. He had ignored them all, desiring a willing apprentice to continue his work after he had gone. The arrangement was to be purely functional, for Vitali was
a man obsessed with the workings of the universe and his concerns were cosmological, not biological.
But all that had changed when a one in ten trillion random fluctuation in the genetic sequencing of his clone had spontaneously mutated its code and transformed what should have been a genetic copy of Vitali into a distinct individual. A daughter.
Linya had surpassed his every expectation in ability and Vitali had grown to love her as much as any celestial phenomenon, even going as far as to name her after what many believed was the true name of the daughter –o r sister, no one knew for certain – of the composer of Honovere. Invasive augmentation of developing brain cells during her hothoused gestation period in the iron womb had given her an enhanced intellect and growth speeds from birth.
Within her first year of life Linya was already acting as his assistant, her enhanced mind housed within the equivalent bodyshape of a six-year-old child. Her physical growth had assumed a more traditional pattern soon after, but her mind had never stopped developing, and soon she was outstripping magi with decades more experience in mapping the heavens.
Traditional education had proved too stultifying for her quickened intellect, and she had fled one Mechanicus scholam after another, always finding her way back to the orbital galleries to study with her father. And so he had trained her in the mysteries of the universe, and she took her place at his side as his apprentice as he had always hoped, though with a bond of mutual respect and love as opposed to the functional arrangement he had anticipated.
Many pitied him or shook their heads at his foolishness, lamenting what he might have discovered or otherwise turned his intellect towards were it not for the distracting influence of flesh-kin to keep him from his duty to the Omnissiah.
They were wrong, knew Vitali.
Any loss to the sum of knowledge held by the Mechanicus had been Vitali’s gain.
Linya was going to surpass them all, she was going to rewrite human understanding of the stars and their aeons-long existence. The name of Linya Tychon would be mentioned in the same breath as those great pioneers who had championed the first transhumanism experiments; Fyodorov, Moravec, Haldayn and the vitrified enigma of FM-2030.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 70