Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill

by Warhammer 40K

  Kotov and the skitarii followed as they moved into a wide, hangar-like area with thick, vaulted beams and bare iron columns supporting a corrugated sheet roof. Vast silos and ore hoppers took up the bulk of the floor space, connected by a complex network of suspended viaducts and hissing distribution pipes.

  Enormous, hazard-striped ore-haulers rumbled through the hub on grinding tracks, the yellow of their flanks grimy with oil and dust. Warning lights blinked and the omnipresent screeching crackle of binary passed back and forth between enormous machines that rose like templum organs on stepped plinths. Hundreds of goggled servitors with implanted rebreathers tramped through the chamber, hauling carts of raw materials through plumes of vent gases. Roboute coughed a wad of granular phlegm, blinking rapidly as his eyes watered in the caustic atmosphere.

  ‘Here,’ said Pavelka, handing him a glass-visored filter hood from a rack next to the elevator car.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Roboute, dragging it over his head. His breathing immediately evened out as the air-pack pumped stale, centuries-old air into his lungs.

  Tanna led them through the hangar, avoiding the labouring servitors and slow-moving ore-haulers. The eldar spread out, moving like ghosts in vapour clouds.

  Ven Anders jogged over to them.

  ‘How far did you say it was to the universal assembler tower?’ he asked, his voice muffled by his helm’s rebreather.

  ‘Seventy-three point six kilometres,’ answered Pavelka.

  ‘Then we’re going to need transport,’ said Anders. ‘I’m thinking we should commandeer one of those ore-haulers. It’s not a Chimera, but it’ll do. Can you drive one of those things?’

  Pavelka nodded and said, ‘Their drive protocols will be locked to this location, but it is doubtful they will have anything too complex to overcome.’

  ‘Then get to it,’ said Anders. ‘The sooner we’re moving the better chance we have of staying ahead of Telok.’

  Roboute and Pavelka set off with the Cadians as their escort, leaving Kotov and his skitarii to catch up. Pavelka climbed into the cab of an ore-hauler as the Black Templars dragged the hangar doors open. Led by Uldanaish Ghostwalker, the eldar slipped out in groups of three to reconnoitre the area ahead.

  Roboute followed them outside, shielding the lenses of his hood against the brightness of a storm-cracked sky. Looping highway junctions converged in a wide plaza before the hangar, complete with complex directional controls and turnplate assemblies.

  He looked for any sign that they were about to walk into an ambush, but with the exception of a few servitors gathered around a transformer array, he could see no one.

  ‘A materials distribution hub,’ said Kotov.

  ‘What?’ said Roboute, surprised by Kotov’s appearance at his side. The archmagos turned and pointed a mechadendrite at the radial patterns of painted lines on the floor that led to numerous other elevators at regular intervals within the hangar.

  ‘This hub will link to dozens of chambers like the one we just left,’ explained Kotov. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus, the scale of what Telok has achieved here is staggering.’

  ‘I’d be more impressed if he wasn’t trying to kill us,’ said Roboute.

  ‘True,’ agreed Kotov. ‘And the more I see of this world, the more I realise what a dreadful mistake I made coming here.’

  Roboute nodded slowly, but said nothing, knowing any words he might say would sound flippant in the face of Kotov’s rare moment of candour. Instead, he stared out into the industrial hinterlands of Exnihlio.

  The sky burned a smelted orange, streaked with pollutants and chemical bleed from the planet-wide industry below. A saw-toothed assemblage of the same monolithic structures he’d seen while travelling aboard the crystal ship, smoke-belching cooling towers and domed power plants that crackled with excess energies, stretched into the distance as far as he could see.

  Roboute reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out the brass-rimmed form of his astrogation compass.

  ‘Catch a wind for me, old friend,’ he said for old time’s sake.

  He couldn’t say what had prompted him to take the compass from his stateroom aboard the Renard, but it was as good a touchstone as any on an unknown world. His only keepsake from the doomed Preceptor, the compass was an unreliable navigator, but its needle was unerringly pointing towards a vast tower wrought from cyclopean columns of segmented steel.

  ‘Is that the universal assembler?’ he asked Kotov.

  ‘Yes.’

  It dominated the skyline like a looming hive spire, a haze of smog wreathing its base and an enormous megaphone-like device aimed skywards at its summit.

  A maze of ochre blocks, steel-sided forges and Imperator alone knew what else lay between them and its soaring immensity. Reaching it alive might prove to be impossible, for Telok would surely predict their plan, but what other choice was there?

  ‘Not as far as I thought it was going to be,’ said Roboute, slipping the compass back into his pocket.

  Kotov’s withering reply was drowned out by the throaty roar of the ore-hauler’s engine and the whooping yells of the Cadians.

  ‘Looks like we have transport,’ said Roboute, grinning as he saw Ven Anders slap Pavelka’s shoulder.

  The Cadian colonel leaned from the cab as the rear loading ramp of the ore-hauler lowered.

  ‘Everyone on board!’ he yelled. ‘That tower’s not going to activate itself!’

  Blaylock’s quarters aboard the Speranza were virtually identical to those at the heart of his forge in the Cebrenia Quadrangle. As a rule, he disliked change for change’s sake, and found those adepts who claimed that such things fostered creativity to be tiresome in the extreme.

  He had no need to sleep; augmentations within his cranial cavity simulated the experience with no need of a bed, and the chemicals dispensed from his spinal cylinder provided nutrients and hormones far superior to those produced naturally.

  Thus his private quarters were more of a workshop than a place to rest and recuperate. With his hunched servitors dormant behind him, Blaylock sat on a reinforced stool at his workbench, bent over a hardwood square of wood that could have come straight from the communion chamber of an astropath.

  It measured precisely forty-five centimetres square, and its lacquered sheen was a rich red to match the sands of Mars. Harvested from the gene sample of an extinct Calibanite tree known as a Northwild, its grain and workability were analogous to the equally extinct mahogany of Old Earth. Its surface colour had deepened evenly in the centuries since Magos Alhazen had presented it to him upon his ascension to the Cult Mechanicus. Like Blaylock, it had matured with a precision that was to be admired in something fashioned from the unpredictability of organic matter.

  Embossed gold lettering ran around its edges, a mixture of quantum rune combinations, binaric shorthand and the divine ordinals of the Machine-God’s aspects. Looping curves and ellipses, like patterns inscribed by a rotating orrery, were etched into its surface, and it was across these lines that Blaylock moved a planchette of wood cut from the same tree.

  Alhazen had called it a Mars Volta, a conduit to the Omnissiah once favoured by the Zethist cults, but Blaylock had never used it until now. He wasn’t sure what had driven him to seek it out, but pondering the conundrum of establishing vox with the surface, the image of it stowed in his quarters had come to him unbidden.

  Such objects had fallen out of favour in the Mechanicus over the centuries. Most were held only as curios by the more superstitious priests of Mars, but if there was even the remotest chance it could help him in this hour of need, then Blaylock was prepared to explore any option, no matter how illogical it might seem.

  Kryptaestrex’s geoformer vessels were mere hours from launching, laden with alchymical saturators and a host of Azuramagelli’s astrogation servitor probes filling their cavernous holds. Neither adept’s idea on its own
would likely breach the distortion in Exnihlio’s atmosphere, but together they might offer a fleeting window to the surface.

  But even two geoformer vessels could only run their processors over a limited area of atmosphere, perhaps a sixteenth of the planetary volume. Not enough to be sure that anyone on the surface could receive or transmit a signal. Whichever portion of the planetary atmosphere was cleared would need to be more or less right over Archmagos Kotov for it to be any use.

  Azuramagelli had the bridge, sending a constant stream of vox-hails to the surface, while Kryptaestrex oversaw the deployment of his vastly complex geoformer vessels. Such ships were ungainly constructions, designed to sit in low orbit or within a hostile planetary biosphere. What they were not designed for was establishing geostationary orbit in chaotic electromagnetic storms on the edge of the mesosphere.

  Blaylock had studied every orbital scan of Exnihlio a thousand times in picoscopic detail, searching for clues as to where best to despatch the geoformers. Every analytical tool at his disposal had yielded nothing; no region where the distortion was thinner or any hint that a location of particular significance lay below.

  And so it came to this. He placed his metallic fingers placed lightly on the wooden planchette atop the Mars Volta. He had no idea how to begin, and settled for one of the first, most basic prayers to the Machine-God.

  ‘With learning I cleanse my flesh of ignorance.

  ‘With knowledge I grow in power.

  ‘With technology I revere the God of all Machines.

  ‘With its power I praise the glory of Mars.

  ‘All hail the Omnissiah, who guides us to learning.’

  It had been centuries since Blaylock had said these words. The incantation was taught to novices with barely an augmentation to their name and its reassuring simplicity pleased him.

  And then the planchette moved.

  Blaylock’s surprise was total. He hadn’t truly expected anything to come of consulting the Mars Volta. Blaylock discounted ideomotor responses, his artificial nervous system was immune to such things, but he could detect no conscious direction to the motion of his arms.

  The planchette moved from one number group to another as it slid effortlessly across the board. Blaylock watched it with a growing sense of the divine moving within him, a holy purpose that had long been absent from his life.

  His servitor dwarfs jerked as his floodstream surged with excitement. They jabbered meaningless glossolalia as the power flowing through him passed to their mono-directed brains.

  Blaylock’s arms were no longer his own, but extensions of the Machine-God, a way for it to pass its wisdom from the infinity point to the mortal realms. The numbers kept coming until at last the planchette halted in the middle of the board.

  Blaylock lifted his trembling hands from the wooden pointer.

  The numbers were etched in his mind, precise and unambiguous.

  Blaylock engaged the embedded holo-slate on his workbench and fed in the planetary scans of Exnihlio, followed by the number strings he had just learned.

  And a segment of the planet’s orbital volume illuminated.

  As modes of transport went, the ore-hauler wasn’t the worst in which Roboute had travelled. That honour belonged to a medicae Chimera with a misaligned track unit and an air-filter a careless enginseer had inadvertently attached to the bio-waste sump.

  But it was a close second.

  Pavelka sat at the controls, with Archmagos Kotov plugged in next to her. Both had extended mechadendrites into the wall of the cab behind them and were using the ore-hauler’s simple logic-engine as a proxy to carefully explore the local noospheric network.

  The Cadians and Black Templars rode in the empty materials hopper behind them, holding on to whatever they could to keep from being shaken apart by the ore-hauler’s juddering movements. Ariganna Icefang had point-blank refused to allow her warriors to be carried in the back of the ore-hauler like livestock.

  ‘We are fleeter on foot,’ said Bielanna when the eldar’s refusal almost sparked an outbreak of violence. ‘We will keep pace with you, Archmagos Kotov. Have no fear of that.’

  Roboute sat next to Pavelka and Kotov, staring through the armourglass canopy at the incredible vistas beyond. Every now and then he would take out his astrogation compass, each time finding the needle pointed towards the universal assembler.

  ‘You’d trust that thing over my route?’ said Pavelka.

  ‘Never hurts to have a second opinion,’ replied Roboute, tapping the glass of the compass. ‘Besides, it’s agreeing with you.’

  Their route wound its way between a labyrinth of forge-temples and generatoria, and now led them through a vast forest of soaring electrical pylons. Latticework towers of gleaming steel, each was like the framework of a stalagmite not yet clothed in rock. Sparking cables traced graceful parabolas high above them and intersected in Gordian knots, junction boxes and transformer hubs. Sputtering power still coursed along them, dripping like rivulets of molten metal. Roboute didn’t doubt that if the ore-hauler even brushed against one, everyone aboard would be killed instantly.

  Static crackled from every metal surface in the cab, so Roboute kept his hands placed firmly on his lap while the ore-hauler traversed this glittering forest of steelwork towers.

  Ahead, the universal assembler tower loomed over everything. Closer now, Roboute could truly appreciate the enormous scale of the device. Set against such vast structures, it wasn’t easy to accurately gauge its height, but Roboute estimated it towered well over three kilometres. The ore-hauler was eating up the distance, and Pavelka confidently predicted that, barring unforeseen incidents, they should arrive at its base in twenty-one minutes.

  ‘I truly believed the Omnissiah had brought me here,’ said Kotov, staring up at the universal assembler. ‘Every aspect of the quest was a blessed sign, confirmation I was doing the right thing. How could I have known what it would lead us to? Surely I cannot be blamed for Telok’s insanity?’

  ‘You interpreted the signs the way you wanted to,’ said Pavelka with a rueful shake of her head. ‘An archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus undone by confirmation bias. It would almost be amusing if not for the terrible threat you have unleashed.’

  ‘The signs did lead here,’ answered Kotov. ‘We found Telok. If it wasn’t me, someone would have found their way here eventually.’

  ‘Then I’m sure the Imperium will forgive you in a few thousand years,’ said Pavelka bitterly. ‘Assuming Telok hasn’t remade it in his own image by then.’

  To Roboute’s surprise, Kotov didn’t rise to Pavelka’s barb.

  Instead, he nodded reflectively and said, ‘Did you know that Telok was a hero of mine for many years? His early work was quite brilliant – visionary even. Until his obsession with the Breath of the Gods took over his researches, he was a pioneer within the Mechanicus. Some believed he might one day be Fabricator General.’

  ‘If we don’t stop him he might yet,’ said Roboute. ‘And you know they say you should never meet your heroes. They’ll never match the image you’ve built up for them.’

  ‘That sounds like personal experience talking, Master Surcouf.’

  ‘It is,’ said Roboute. ‘I was on Damnos and met someone I’d idolised for years. It didn’t work out quite as I’d hoped.’

  Pavelka and Kotov fell silent. Both had clearly heard of the terrible wars fought across that blighted world.

  ‘Were you part of the campaign that saw it reclaimed for the Imperium by the Ultramarines?’ said Kotov.

  ‘No, I was there when it first fell,’ said Roboute. ‘Back then I was a junior Naval officer, part of the flotilla that made dozens of mercy runs down to Kellenport. The planet was lost by the time we arrived, and tens of thousands of people needed to be evacuated from the surface.’

  Roboute paused, seeing an echo of the unnatural skies over th
e space port in Exnihlio’s. With half-closed eyes, he could still picture the furious battles raging at Kellenport’s many gates; the thousands of silver-skinned alien horrors and the tiny bands of determined heroes in cobalt-blue armour.

  ‘To honour our part in the evacuation, the pilots of the drop-ships who flew the mercy runs were granted an audience with the leader of the Ultramarines force, a warrior named Cato Sicarius. I knew of him, of course. Who in Ultramar didn’t? I knew every battle he’d fought, every victory he’d won and had studied every tactica he’d ever written. I couldn’t wait to meet him.’

  ‘Was he not everything you’d hoped?’

  ‘Damnos was lost from the start,’ sighed Roboute. ‘No force in the Imperium could have won that first war. We saved over thirty thousand people from certain death, which was a victory in itself, but Sicarius didn’t see it that way.’

  ‘How did he see it?’

  ‘That he’d lost. That he’d been beaten,’ said Roboute. ‘Not the Ultramarines. Him personally. He had no interest in meeting us, but someone higher up than him must have insisted on it. Months after we left Damnos, a helot escorted us to one of the fighting decks where Sicarius was busy demolishing combat servitors by the dozen. He thanked us for our efforts through gritted teeth, and looked at us like we’d betrayed him by taking part in the evacuation rather than fighting.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have told me that story before we set out?’

  ‘Perhaps I should have,’ agreed Roboute. ‘Would it have made a difference?’

  ‘Probably not,’ admitted Kotov. ‘I am not a man given to changing his mind.’

  ‘Archmagos, we’re going to stop him,’ said Roboute. ‘Telok, we’re going to stop him.’

  Kotov’s face crumpled and he shook his head. ‘I admire your optimism, Master Surcouf. No doubt a product of your Ultramarian upbringing, and evidence for nurture over nature. But you heard Telok. How can we hope to hide on a world of his making? No, I estimate we will all be dead within six hours at the most.’