Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill

by Warhammer 40K

  Rearing towers of insulated distribution pipework filled the vaulted chamber like looping coils of intestinal tract. Far beneath the surface of Exnihlio, they soared to its distant ceiling and plunged to shadowed depths an unknown distance below. Lightning arced between them and the air crackled with the barely caged force of titanic energies being wrought by subterranean generators and the unimaginable geological forces at work in the planet’s core.

  Thunderous engines pounded within each column, the sound filling the chamber with a booming mechanical heartbeat.

  And this was but one of tens of thousands of such chambers.

  On suspended walkways and floating control stations, near-blind servitors, wretched and wasted things, toiled to maintain the machines. Hairless and emaciated, few resembled the forms they had once known.

  The only light was the light flickering between the towers.

  Or at least it was until a golden radiance spilled over a cantilevered control platform overlooking the plunging canyons of power distribution. It illuminated the deck plates like the sunlight that could never reach this deep.

  First one, then more figures spilled from the light. Like soldiers pouring from the burning wreck of a transport vehicle, they cried out in terror and confusion, scrambling away from the scintillating light of the webway gate.

  Roboute Surcouf was the first onto the deck, quickly followed by Ilanna Pavelka. Their eyes were wide and fearful, horrified by the things they had seen, but would never fully remember, save in their nightmares. The wounded figure of Archmagos Kotov came next, held upright only by the strength of Yael and Bracha of the Black Templars. The two skitarii emerged, trailing a handful of stoic Cadians and their colonel.

  The eldar ghosted through without effort, quickly followed by the rest of the Black Templars.

  Both forces spread out, hostile and wary.

  Each expecting treachery from the other.

  Last to come through the portal was Bielanna, and no sooner had her feet touched the steel plating of the chamber’s floor than she collapsed, drained utterly by the cost of opening a path through the webway.

  The sunset gate winked out of existence with a bang of air rushing to fill its void. The golden light vanished, and Bielanna let out a shuddering breath of soul-deep weariness.

  Roboute picked himself up, dizzy from travelling in such a wondrous yet fearful way. The world around him felt somehow thin, as though it were simply a facade protecting him from deeper, more terrifyingly real perceptions. For once in his life, Roboute was thankful for his limited human senses.

  At least when humans travelled the warp, they were shielded from the worst of its effects by a Geller field.

  The webway afforded no such protection.

  Yael and Bracha gently lowered Kotov to the ground. The eyes of the archmagos were tightly closed. His head shook with pain and recriminatory binary spilled from his augmitters. Roboute didn’t know what bio-feedback technology Kotov possessed, but suspected the source of his pain was more to do with Telok’s treachery than any physical sensations.

  One skitarii warrior stood over the wounded archmagos, the other bent to his damaged shoulders. Dispensing tools from a cavity within his chest, the cybernetically enhanced warrior began to efficiently and wordlessly seal off the squirting floodstream pipes and isolate hopelessly damaged circuitry.

  Roboute knelt beside the skitarii, a brute of a warrior with metallic implants running the width of his shoulders, spine and upper arms. A shoulder-mounted cannon was locked on a rotating scapula mount, and his right arm was a heavily modified power claw with an integral lascarbine.

  ‘Is he going to die?’ asked Roboute.

  ‘Not if you shut up and let me work,’ growled the warrior without looking up.

  ‘We can help,’ said Roboute.

  The warrior lifted his ironclad head and bared sharpened steel teeth. Roboute flinched at the raw hostility in his eyes.

  The warrior saw Pavelka and said, ‘You can’t. Her. Just her.’

  Roboute waved Pavelka forwards and a crackling stream of binary passed between her and the skitarii. Roboute left them to it, seeing that Kotov’s living or dying might become a moot point in a second.

  With the farseer on her knees, helmet hung low with its visor pressed to the deck, the eldar warriors were acting on their own authority.

  Tanna, Yael, Bracha, Issur and Varda formed a kill ring as the sinuously lethal xeno-killers moved to encircle them. Ven Anders and his Cadians had their lasguns tight to their shoulders, each man tracking an alien warrior.

  The eldar had their guns and blades at the ready. All it would take was a single spark to turn this standoff into a bloodbath.

  ‘Suffer… n..not the alien to live,’ stuttered Issur through gritted teeth. Though his nervous system had been ruined in the fires of an electrostatic charger on the Valette Manifold station, the tip of his sword was unwavering. Varda had his black blade at his shoulder, tensed and ready to strike.

  ‘Brother Issur, stop talking!’ cried Roboute, seeing the eldar tense at his words in expectation of a killing order.

  ‘Lower your blades or you all die,’ promised a warrior in armour of gold, jade and ivory.

  Roboute knew an exarch when he saw one, and was well aware that she could make good on her threat. Her movements reminded him of the camouflage predators of Espandor’s forests, feline hunters whose prey never even knew they were a target until it was too late.

  Yael and Bracha had their weapons tracking the woman, but Roboute doubted even their aim was good enough to hit her.

  Towering over the eldar was the wraithlord, its glossy armour blackened and corroded by Telok’s fire. To fight against such a monster would be suicide, but that didn’t seem to matter to the Black Templars.

  Roboute put himself between the Space Marines and the eldar, his arms held out before him. He couldn’t help remembering what had happened to Archmagos Kotov when he had tried a similar tack to prevent violence.

  ‘No one do anything stupid here,’ he said. ‘We just escaped certain death, so let’s not do Telok’s work for him.’

  ‘These xenos killed Kul Gilad,’ said Bracha. ‘The Blood of Sigismund demands vengeance.’

  ‘One mon-keigh life?’ demanded the exarch, her enormous chainsabre held out before her. ‘By your actions are scores of my kin dead. For that alone I should slay you a thousand times over.’

  ‘Then why haven’t you?’ demanded Tanna.

  Roboute sighed. ‘Do you want her to kill you?’

  He turned to the exarch and dug deep for his recall of the eldar language. ‘Greetings, exarch. I am Roboute Surcouf of Ultramar, rogue trader and loyal servant of the Emperor. We thank you for your aid, and offer no violence to you or your kin.’

  The exarch couldn’t hide her surprise at Roboute’s use of her language, and he hoped his pronunciation wasn’t so poor as to get them all killed by unwittingly insulting her family lineage.

  ‘You speak our language,’ said the exarch. ‘Alaitocii inflexions with a crude human tongue. I should kill you for befouling it.’

  ‘But you won’t,’ said Roboute.

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  Roboute pointed towards Bielanna. ‘Because she told you to save us, didn’t she? She’s had a vision of some sort. She’s seen that if we die here, something very bad is going to happen, right?’

  The exarch lowered her blade, but her posture didn’t relax one iota. Roboute knew she could go from stationary to murdering him in a heartbeat, but he’d guessed right.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, switching back to Low Gothic and addressing both the eldar and the Black Templars. ‘The bad blood between us is over, finished. Done with. It has to be or we’re all going to die here. The fact of the matter is that we’re trapped on this planet with a madman who wants to kill us and steal our way hom
e. Now, do any of us want to die? I’m going to go ahead and assume the answer to that is no, and suggest we put aside our differences and work together while we have a common enemy.’

  ‘Fight along… alongside xenos?’ demanded Issur.

  ‘It’s happened before,’ said Roboute. ‘I’ve seen Ultramarines make war with eldar allies. I just hope you can understand that cooperation offers us the best chance of survival.’

  ‘You are correct, Roboute Surcouf of Ultramar,’ said Bielanna, rising smoothly to her feet and removing her helmet. The face Roboute had last seen aboard the Speranza was paler than he remembered, the farseer’s elliptical eyes dulled and sunk deeper into her oval face. Her scarlet hair was still beaded with crystals and gemstones, but two ice-white streaks now reached back from her temples.

  She came towards him with such grace that it was as though she moved over ice. ‘I have seen dark things in the skein,’ said Bielanna. ‘Things this mon-keigh Telok’s lunacy will unleash upon the galaxy unless we can drag the future from its current path. So make no mistake, we do not fight with you, we fight to stop Telok from ever leaving this world.’

  ‘Then our purposes align,’ said Archmagos Kotov.

  Roboute turned to see the master of the Speranza standing with Pavelka and his two skitarii. Black fluid oozed from the seals applied to his shoulders, but at least he was upright.

  ‘For now,’ said Bielanna.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Kotov. ‘How could I possibly have known what madness had claimed Telok?’

  Bielanna’s fists clenched and she all but spat her words in Kotov’s face.

  ‘Because nothing in your species’s behaviour would ever suggest any other possibility,’ she snapped. ‘You ask me how you could have known? I say how could you have expected anything different?’

  ‘So how did you do it?’ asked Coyne.

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Abrehem, holding out his augmetic arm as though it might suddenly turn on him. ‘I had my hand on the book of quantum runes and it just sort of… happened.’

  Hawke grunted, and Abrehem couldn’t decide if the sound was derisive laughter or he was choking on the meat product in his stew paste.

  He wasn’t sure which he’d prefer.

  They sat on the wide-based plinth of Virtanen, the lifter-rig Coyne and Hawke worked in Turentek’s prow forge. An overseer called Naiiorz had taken over Abrehem’s position in the command throne atop the towering lifter, but he seldom bothered to disconnect from the noosphere until the end of the shift.

  Across from them, the crew of Wulfse eyed Abrehem’s visit to his old rig-crew warily. Especially a man with a badly rendered wolfshead electoo on his skull and a stained bandage wrapping his chest and shoulder.

  ‘What in Thor’s name are you lot looking at?’ Hawke shouted over to them. ‘You want him to get his psychotic friend back?’

  The man looked down, and his fellow bondsmen slunk away.

  ‘Hawke, shut up,’ hissed Abrehem.

  Hawke grinned and slapped a comradely hand on Abrehem’s shoulder that was purely for show. Hawke cared for no one but Hawke.

  ‘Just letting the masses see what good friends you and I are,’ said Hawke. ‘Doesn’t do my reputation as a man with friends in high places any harm.’

  ‘I almost got one of them killed.’

  ‘You mean Rasselas X-42 almost got one of them killed,’ said Coyne, ever ready with a correction where none was needed.

  Rasselas X-42 was an arco-flagellant that had bonded with Abrehem during the eldar’s aborted boarding action. The cyborg killer had become Abrehem’s unlooked-for protector, and came close to killing the Wulfse’s crewman when he’d threatened his charge.

  Abrehem could still see the blood pouring from the man as the arco-flagellant skewered his shoulder with one blade-flail and held the sharpened tips of the other millimetres from his eye.

  ‘Can’t say the bastard didn’t deserve it,’ said Hawke. ‘Man can’t run a rig worth a damn.’

  ‘And you’ve been working rigs for, what, a few weeks?’ said Abrehem. ‘Suddenly you’re an expert?’

  ‘Better than him,’ grumbled Hawke. ‘Anyway, where is the big lad? He was handy to have around, what with Crusha getting his head cut off.’

  ‘He’s gone,’ said Abrehem.

  ‘Yeah, but where?’

  ‘Do you really think I’m going to tell you?’ said Abrehem.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’d only try and get him out and use him like you used Crusha,’ said Abrehem.

  ‘And that’s a bad thing, why?’ said Hawke. ‘After all, never hurts to have someone who can rip a man’s arms off watching your back. You don’t need him now, so why stop someone else having a turn with the good stuff?’

  ‘Good stuff? X-42 was a mass murderer,’ said Abrehem. ‘He slaughtered millions of people before they turned him into an arco-flagellant. I’ve seen through his eyes, Hawke, and trust me, that’s not someone you want “watching your back”.’

  Hawke shrugged. ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘If you think he’s too dangerous, then that’s good enough for me.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘What, you think I’m going to try and find a deranged killer on my own and use him to further my own ends?’

  Abrehem and Coyne both nodded.

  Hawke grinned and threw up his hands. ‘Oh, Thor’s ghost, save me from these untrustworthy, suspicious souls!’

  Abrehem and Coyne both laughed, but before they could say any more, Totha Mu-32 appeared from behind Wulfse’s baseplate and strode purposefully towards them.

  ‘Here comes your new best friend,’ sneered Hawke, all traces of the easy familiarity they’d just shared snuffed out in a heartbeat. ‘Off to take you to spark school.’

  ‘Shut up, Hawke.’

  ‘So you’re going to be one of them now, is that it?’ said Hawke, nodding in the direction of Magos Turentek’s bulky ceiling-rig as it clattered over the vault of the prow forge. ‘When me and Coyne here next see you are we going to have to bow and scrape to you? Yes, magos, no, magos… by your leave, magos.’

  The venom in Hawke’s voice was bitter, but not unexpected.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Abrehem. ‘But after all we achieved when we took the servitors offline, showing the Mechanicus that they can’t treat us like animals, I think I can make a real difference if I become a magos. More than I can as a bondsman, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re an idealist,’ laughed Hawke. ‘You’re going to change the Adeptus Mechanicus from within all on your own?’

  ‘One man can start a landslide with the casting of a single pebble,’ said Abrehem.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A quote,’ said Abrehem. ‘I think Sebastian Thor said it. Or some cardinal, I don’t remember. But the point is that maybe I can make a difference. Maybe I can make things better. At least I have to try.’

  ‘You’re no Sebastian Thor,’ said Hawke.

  ‘You’re a piece of work, Hawke, you know that?’ said Coyne.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Hawke, and his betrayed expression at Coyne’s support for Abrehem was laughable.

  ‘Can’t you be happy for Abe?’ said Coyne.

  ‘Happy?’ said Hawke. ‘Didn’t you hear me? He’s going to be one of them now! Give it a year and he’ll be the one working you to death. He’ll forget all about you and leave us down here in the shit, while he lords it over us like some inbred hive-king!’

  ‘I’ve known men like you before, Hawke,’ said Abrehem. ‘You’ve got skills and you could actually do something with your life, but you’re so consumed by jealousy that you’d rather tear down anyone else who achieves something than try to better yourself.’

  ‘You haven’t achieved anything, Abrehem Locke,’ snapped Hawke. ‘You inherit
ed those eyes from your old man and if it wasn’t for me getting hold of that faulty pistol you wouldn’t have that arm. Handed to you on a silver platter, they were. You didn’t earn being Machine-touched, it just came easy to you. What chance did the rest of us have with you around?’

  Abrehem was incredulous.

  ‘You’re seriously saying I should thank you for getting my arm burned off?’

  Hawke shrugged, but didn’t answer as Totha Mu-32 finally reached Virtanen’s baseplate and looked up at them.

  ‘Come, Abrehem, it is time to return to Adept Manubia’s forge,’ he said. ‘We have a great deal to do, and no time to waste in idle banter.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Hawke. ‘Off you trot, Magos Locke. Don’t want to be wasting time with the scum, eh?’

  As councils of war went, Tanna had seldom seen stranger.

  They gathered around a hexagonal control hub from which they had removed four servitors that appeared to have expired at their stations. Dust lay thick and undisturbed across their corpses and the control hub’s numerous blank cathode ray panels.

  He and Varda stood to one side of the hub, with Issur, Bracha and Yael a step behind. Roboute Surcouf and Ven Anders sat on its integral bench seats, taking the opportunity to rest. The Cadian had taken a burn to the arm from a crystalith weapon, but bore his wound without complaint. Magos Pavelka worked at an open panel on the hub, and Archmagos Kotov knelt at its base, rewiring the guts of its machinery with a trio of chain-like mechadendrites that unfurled from his back. Tied-off cables and spot-welded seams closed off his ruined shoulders where the skitarii had worked on his augmetic frame.

  Opposite the Imperials stood the eldar witch, who Surcouf told him was called Bielanna. Next to her was a warrior named Ariganna Icefang.

  Tanna had only seen her fight for a few fractions of a second, but that had been enough to convince him that when the time came to kill her – as it surely must – she would be a formidable foe.

  The giant warrior-construct was also part of the council.

  ‘Is it not a robot?’ Varda asked Bielanna after the farseer identified it as Uldanaish Ghostwalker.