‘And when I have remade the Mechanicus in my image,’ continued Telok, ‘I will use the Breath of the Gods to surge the heart of Terra’s sun to burn the rotting corpse of the Emperor and all his corrupt servants from its surface.’
The Black Templars’ speed and aggression were phenomenal.
No sooner had Telok spoken than they were on the offensive. No pause, no ramping up of fury. One minute the towering warriors were still, the next at full battle-pitch.
Telok raised a hand and each of the Space Marines froze in place, paralysed as thoroughly as the skitarii. Kotov read the frenetic tempo of the machine-spirits within their battleplate as they fought to overcome Telok’s paralysing code.
‘I will become the new Master of Mankind,’ laughed Telok. ‘A ruler devoted to the attainment of the Singularity of Consciousness.’
Kotov turned from Telok’s insanity as he heard the brittle sound of glass grinding on glass. Perhaps a hundred crystaliths were climbing onto the gantry from the inwardly curving slopes of the chamber, a similar number from below. They took up position all around the Cadians, extruded weapons ready to cut them down in a lethal crossfire.
‘What are you doing?’ said Kotov. ‘This is insane!’
‘Insane?’ said Telok derisively. ‘How could you possibly understand the mind of a god?’
‘Is that what you think you are?’ demanded Kotov.
‘I created this entire region of space,’ roared Telok, his voice afire with the passion of an Ecclesiarchy battle-preacher. ‘I have reignited the hearts of dead suns, crafted star systems from the waste matter of the universe and wrought life from death. If that does not give me the right to name myself a god, then what does?’
Quatria had always possessed a utilitarian aesthetic, but with her surroundings now crafted from memory, it had assumed an altogether bleaker aspect. The corridors were cold; though Linya knew, of course, that she wasn’t truly feeling cold. Her mind was conjuring that sensation based upon perceived sensory data.
As thorough and detailed a simulation as Galatea had rendered, the human mind was capable of seeing through almost any visual deception. The walls were just a little too crisply etched, the patterns not quite three-dimensional enough to entirely convince.
Linya walked with her arms wrapped around her body, as though hugging herself for comfort. Pointless, she knew. After all, what measure of physical comfort could be offered to a disembodied brain in a jar?
Yet some habits were too hard to break. It didn’t matter that her body was dead, her mind lived on. Enslaved by an abomination unto the Machine-God, yes, but enduring. Only by the slenderest margin had Linya held on to sanity at the sight of her skull hinged back and the bloody void within. Anyone not of the Mechanicus would likely have gone insane at such a vision, but the first lesson taught to neophytes of the Cult Mechanicus was that flesh was inferior to technology, that thought and memory and intellect were the true successors of flesh.
Indeed, wasn’t the final apotheosis striven for by the adepts of Mars, a freeing of pure intellect from the limitations of flesh and blood? Wasn’t that why so many of the Cult Mechanicus were so quick to shed their humanity and embrace mechanical augmentations in their ascent towards the ideal Singularity of Consciousness?
Linya had never subscribed to the notion of flesh’s abandonment, believing that to sacrifice all that made you human was to cut yourself off from the very thing that made life so wondrous.
Did her father know what had happened to her?
Grief swamped her every time she thought of him. She hoped he hadn’t been the one to find her. She hoped that someone had sanitised the scene of her physical death. She didn’t want to think what the sight of her lying on her medicae bed, cut open like a dissection subject, might do to his psyche.
Vitali Tychon was often dismissed as a harmless eccentric, but Linya knew him to have a determined, ruthless core. She hoped he hadn’t done something foolish upon learning of her death. Galatea would kill him without a second thought, and as fiercely intelligent as Vitali was, she knew Galatea would never risk assimilating him into its neuromatrix.
Linya had no idea how much time had passed since Galatea had first shown her the truth of her condition, that portion of her cranial implantation removed along with any conventional means of linking to the outside world. Her high-level implants appeared to be functional, but without advanced diagnostics it was impossible to be sure what the machine intelligence had left her.
Linya looked up as she heard a circular door iris open beside her. The confero. Every Mechanicus facility had one, a sanctified chamber where matters of techno-theology could be discussed and debated at length under the benevolent gaze of the Omnissiah.
Linya ignored the door and kept walking.
She had already explored every portion of the Quatrian Galleries as they were known to her. The parts she knew best were lifelike down to the smallest detail, but those areas she was less familiar with had an unfinished quality, like a Theatrica Imperialis set designed only to be viewed from a distance. The farthest portions of the orbital, which she had known only from schematics, were little more than bare, wire-frame walls and lifeless renderings of the most basic structural elements.
It was towards this region of Quatria Linya walked, finding Galatea’s false representation of a place she had once called home repugnant. Better to surround herself with obviously fake surroundings, to keep the truth of her imprisonment uppermost.
The corridor curved around to the left, but where she had expected to find the lateral transit that led to the central hub, she instead found herself in the communal deck levels. Along the wall, the irising door to the confero opened up once more.
‘I won’t be your puppet,’ said Linya.
She ignored the door and kept walking, taking paths at random and moving further into the orbital, trying to lose herself in its deeper structure.
But no matter which path she took, which direction she chose to confound her captor, every route took her back to the communal decks and the opened door of the confero. She sighed, knowing that in a constructed reality where Galatea controlled every aspect of the virtual architecture, she would always be brought back here.
‘Fine,’ she said, stepping through into the confero.
The space was larger than she remembered, but that shouldn’t have surprised her. A domed chamber of copper and bronze, with a circular table not unlike the Ultor Martius aboard the Speranza at its heart. A three-dimensional hologram of the Icon Mechanicus hung suspended over the table, and seated around it were eleven magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
All were robed in black or red, their vestments crisp and fresh-looking as their wearers remembered them in life. As varied an assembly of tech-priests as any she had seen, all had an air of great antiquity to them. If what she remembered of Galatea was to be trusted, then these were the magi it had ensnared in its web over the last three thousand years.
She saw their immediate consternation, looking at her through a variety of cumbersome-looking optic stalks and glittering augmented crystals as though she was speaking in some dead language. Linya saw they looked to a female tech-priest in the chequered-edged robes of a Mechanicus Envoy. Alone of the gathered tech-priests, her head was bare, and Linya was struck by the resemblance she saw to herself.
Noospheric tags identified her as Magos Syriestte, and Linya remembered the name from the transcript of Archmagos Kotov’s first interrogation of Galatea. Typically of envoys of the Mechanicus, the woman’s features were largely organic, the better to liaise with those who preferred to deal with an approximation of a human face.
Childishly simple binary streamed between the assembled priests and Magos Syriestte in an interleaved babble. Syriestte held up a hand to si
lence them and rose smoothly from the table. The Envoy’s lower limbs had been amputated and replaced with a repulsor pod and a series of multi-jointed manipulator arms. She floated over the table, her clicking, articulated lower limbs moving as though swimming her through the air.
Syriestte cocked her head to one side and her answer was formed in binaric cant that was absurdly simple, devoid of any hexamathic complexity or subtlety.
Linya repeated herself, but it was clear that neither Syriestte or any of the other tech-priests had understood her. Then it hit Linya why Galatea had first spoken to her in archaic cant and why her binary was as impenetrable to these adepts as xeno-dialect.
She rerouted her binarics through the simplest converter she still possessed and tried again.
Linya shook her head. ‘
Syriestte smiled.
Linya took hold of Syriestte’s arm as she rotated to face the table once more. Her grip was firm and unyielding, preventing Syriestte from moving.
One of Syriestte’s manipulator arms gently removed Linya’s hand.
said Linya.
Syriestte directed her next words at them as much as Linya.
said Linya.
Syriestte shook her head and drifted back to her place at the table.
Linya didn’t doubt that Galatea logged everything said within its neuromatrix, but her furious words provoked no response from the machine intelligence.
But she had neither expected nor desired one.
‘Weapons hot,’ said Ven Anders. ‘Halo formation on me.’
Despite the multitude of crystalline weaponry aimed at them, the Cadians lifted their lasrifles to their shoulders and fell into a defensive formation around their colonel.
Kotov stepped forwards with his hands raised, as though this unfolding drama could be resolved with diplomacy.
‘Archmagos Telok,’ said Kotov. ‘Please, let us all take a breath and think this through. We have travelled halfway across the galaxy to find you and your technology. With all you have achieved, you will return to Mars in triumph. You will be feted as a hero, an exemplar of all the Mechanicus strives to be. All you desire will be yours – renown, riches, resources… Just let us bring you back and we can forget that such incendiary words were ever spoken in the heat of the moment.’
‘You are wasting your time, Archmagos Kotov,’ said Surcouf. ‘Telok means to kill us all and take the Speranza. That has been his intention since the moment we landed. The only reason we’re alive right now is that Telok’s colossal ego wouldn’t let him just take the ship without us knowing why.’
‘No, no, no,’ said Kotov, shaking his head and waving away the rogue trader’s words with a golden arm of his cybernetic suit. ‘You have this all wrong, Surcouf,’ said Kotov. ‘All wrong.’
Telok took a step towards Kotov.
‘No, I am afraid Master Surcouf is right,’ said Telok. ‘But rather than thinking of my actions as egotistical, consider my allowing you to live this long a last gift. To see the Breath of the Gods in all its glory before you all die is an honour few others will receive.’
‘Kotov, step away from the traitor,’ said Anders.
‘We are all servants of the Omnissiah and the Emperor,’ pleaded Kotov, a man alone with his last hope of redemption turned to ash in the face of Telok’s betrayal.
‘Kotov!’ repeated Anders. ‘You really need to listen to me.’
‘You name yourself a god,’ said Surcouf. ‘But there’s only one being in the Imperium worthy of that title. And you’re not the Emperor.’
‘Not yet,’ said Telok.
Bielanna fought to hold on to her perception of the present in the face of the spinning maelstrom of glittering silver metal below her. The distortion in the skein had its origin with this Caoineag. She blinked away tears, feeling the temporal deformations it created just by existing.
‘What madman would create such monstrous technology?’
‘The mon-keigh,’ said Ariganna, perched atop the ironwork railings of the gantry overlooking the bickering ape-creatures below. ‘Who else?’
Bielanna shook her head. Sensory aftershocks exploded in her mind. A rock in a pool of potential futures. She saw the humans killing one another, the eldar dropping into their midst and slaughtering them all. She saw Lexell Kotov die a thousand times, a thousand different ways.
Torn apart by the crystalline beasts scurrying across the surface of this vast space like loathsome caricatures of warp spiders. Killed by a blast of green light from a glassy energy beam. Hurled to his death from the gantry.
Futures branched and split a thousand times and then a thousand more, but in each one where the mon-keigh died in this chamber one certainty emerged. Inviolable and unchanging in its outcome.
She saw the eldar die and this world torn asunder.
As fixed
a moment in the skein as anything in the past, this world’s doom would set in motion a cascade of death and destruction on a galactic scale. The murder the Lost Magos would unleash with his horrific technology would dwarf the death toll of even the greatest wars of ancient days.
Ariganna shook her head and gave a snort of soft laughter.
‘It seems the mon-keigh are doing our killing for us,’ she said, sheathing her blade. ‘The bloodshed has already begun.’
Bielanna pulled herself towards the gantry, lurching as the collisions of past and future came in waves. Ariganna looked back at her and Bielanna saw the trifold transformations weave through the exarch in rapid succession. The potential of Ariganna’s death loomed closer than ever.
The path of all their deaths hovered within a hair’s breadth of becoming inescapable.
Life and death. Spinning. Hanging on a slender, fraying thread.
‘No,’ said Bielanna, seeing the fighting below and following the one path she had never expected to tread. ‘I see it now… Kotov’s death is not the answer… it never was.’
A glassy blade slashed over Roboute’s head. He ducked and put a high-powered las-round through the crystalith’s head. The intense heat of the shot bloomed within its skull, vaporising the microscopic machines animating the creature. It halted, frozen like an ice sculpture straddling the railings of the gantry.
Another rose up next to it, blasts of green energy flashing from its tine-bladed fists. A flurry of whickering Cadian las-bolts blasted it from the railing in pieces. Roboute scrambled away as more zipping green darts of killing light slashed overhead. A portion of the gantry vanished in a flare of hissing fire as a bolt impacted next to him.
‘Ilanna!’ called Roboute, seeing a crystalith drop to the gantry behind the Renard’s tech-priest. Unlike him, she wasn’t armed. The crystalith extruded a pair of glittering hook-blades, limned with green fire. Ilanna screamed and extended her mechadendrites towards the creature, unleashing a torrent of dissonant binary that made Roboute flinch with sudden, gut-wrenching nausea.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 83