‘Not if we keep moving,’ said Roboute. ‘We’ll get that assembler tower operational. Then we can get help from the Speranza.’
‘Help from the Speranza?’
‘If we can clear the atmosphere enough for vox, we can clear it enough to allow reinforcements to get to us. Trust me, after flying through Kellenport’s atmosphere, getting down here should be easy for a half-decent pilot. All we have to do is stay alive.’
Kotov looked strangely at him, a look of genuine puzzlement.
‘Reinforcements? No, that’s not what’s going to happen at all.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Master Surcouf, if we can make contact with Magos Blaylock, the first order I will give him is to get the Speranza as far away from this planet as he possibly can.’
The cartographae dome had always been a place of sanctuary for Vitali Tychon, somewhere the universe made sense. The movements of galaxies, stars and planets were a carefully orchestrated ballet, where it was easy to be fooled into seeing the hand of a creator rather than the beauty of fundamental universal laws.
He and Linya had known years of familial contemplation in places like this. From the gravitational wave observatories high on Olympus Mons to the Quatrian Galleries, they had stared deep into the farthest reaches of the universe in search of the unexplained.
Explorators of the mind, Linya had been fond of saying as she gently steered conversations away from his suggestions that she take a cartographae position on a Mechanicus vessel. Not that he wanted her to leave, but neither did he wish to deny her the chance to travel to the wonders they saw.
Without entoptic representations of the stellar environs, the hemispherical vault of the dome was an austere place, its polished slopes of cold metal bare and echoing. The acid-etched floor was cut steel, a cog of course, and Vitali found himself pacing like a condemned man.
Vitali had thought himself above petty notions of vengeance, but his actions on the Speranza’s bridge had shown him just how prey he was to first tier thinking. Adara Siavash had paid for that lapse with his life. Galatea had killed the boy, but that didn’t stop the guilt from weighing heavily on Vitali.
What chance had he to avenge Linya when whatever remained of her essence was held hostage and threatened with extinction? What kind of father allowed his daughter’s killer to live while he still breathed?
Vitali had believed his body to be incapable of manifesting grief in any physical way, but oh, how he had been proved wrong. Each time a particularly vivid recall of Linya surfaced, bilious eructations in his floodstream sent painful currents through his limbs and tore raw, animal cries of loss from his augmitters.
‘Part of me wishes I could feel nothing,’ he said to the empty dome. ‘To be so remote from my humanity that your loss would mean nothing. And then I remember you… and I wish I could be an ordinary man so I could grieve as a father should…’
Conceived as nothing more than a genetically identical replacement, an assistant at best, a billions to one mutation had transformed a cell culture of his DNA into a truly singular individual. Combining the best of Vitali and her own uniqueness, Linya had confounded his every expectation by exceeding him in every way.
He had long since surrendered his birth-eyes, but in the fractional blackness of each ocular cycle, he saw Linya.
…as a still-wet babe, freshly removed from the nutrient tank.
…a precocious child correcting the tutors in Scholam Excelsus.
…being inducted into the Cult Mechanicus on the slopes of the Tharsis Montes.
But most of all Vitali remembered her as Little Linya, his beloved daughter.
Beautiful and brilliant, she resisted every outward pressure to conform to the prototypical behavioural models of the Mechanicus. She trod her own path and forged her own destiny. Linya was going to shake the adepts of Mars to their foundations.
Galatea’s murderous surgery ended any possibility of that.
The machine-hybrid had destroyed something beautiful, and for what? Its own amusement? To cause Vitali pain? Perhaps both. He doubted it needed her brain tissue for any truly lofty purpose.
‘You claimed to have crossed the Halo Scar with us to kill Telok!’ cried Vitali into the dome. ‘So what need did you have for my Linya!’
His cry bounced from the cold walls of the dome, ringing back and forth in accusing echoes. Vitali sank to the acid-etched skull and buried his head in his hands. He wanted to cry, to have some biological outlet for his grief, some way to empty himself of the things he was feeling.
He didn’t see the light at first.
Only when the trickle of data-light triggered his passive inload receptors did Vitali look up in puzzlement. He glanced over his shoulder, seeing the control lectern dark and cold. Its spirit was dormant.
Then why was there a shimmering veil of light hovering in the centre of the dome? Vitali picked himself up and let the data inherent in the light wash through him. His floodstream pulsed with a beat of nervous excitement as he recognised the system being displayed.
Quatria.
Faint, barely visible.
Vitali took hesitant steps towards the light, fearful and hopeful of what this vision of his beloved Quatria might represent. Hexamathic calculus streamed around the orrery of light, complex equations that strained the limits of his understanding. He understood the principles of this arcane geometric binary, and was equipped with the necessary conversion implants to process it, but had always left such communication to…
‘Linya…?’ he said, the Mechanicus part of his mind berating him for even voicing the thought.
Echoes were his only answer.
Vitali reached out to the light.
It bloomed around him in an explosion of magnificent colour. Stellar mist and starlight surrounded him with the wondrous ellipses of planetary orbits, glittering nebulae and the pulse of reflected starlight that was already centuries old.
And there she was, standing in the slow-arcing parabola of Quatria itself, just as Vitali remembered her. Untouched by the fires that had taken her limbs and melted the skin from her bones. Whole again. Without any trace of the nightmarish excisions Galatea had wrought on her.
She smiled, and what remained of his heart broke once again.
‘Linya…’ he said, hoping against hope he wasn’t suffering from some cruel, grief-induced hallucination or floodstream leak into his cranial cavity.
Father.
No. The tone of her voice. The warmth. The slight upturn at the corner of her mouth and the crease of flesh beneath her eyes. They all told Vitali that this truly was Linya.
‘Linya, Ave Deus Mechanicus… I’m so sorry,’ he sobbed, but Linya held up her hand. ‘I–’
I don’t have much time, father. Galatea’s neuromatrix is pervasive, and it won’t be long before it detects this transmission. Hexamathics, that’s how we’ll beat it.
‘I don’t understand. Hexamathics, what about it?’
It can’t process it. It doesn’t know how. That’s how I’m able to speak to you now.
Vitali struggled to process his conflicting feelings. The analytical part of his brain recognised the risk she must be taking to project herself into this space, but the paternal part of him wanted nothing more than to hold her and tell her how much he missed her.
‘I can’t fight Galatea,’ he said.
You have to, you can’t allow it to exist. It’s too dangerous.
‘It said it would extinguish your essence,’ said Vitali. ‘I can’t risk that. I won’t lose you twice.’
Linya’s expression softened and she held her hand out to him. Vitali went to take it, and for a fleeting second it seemed as though he felt a measure of bio-feedback from the light.
But then it vanished, no more substantial than a hologram.
Forge Elektrus. You
need to find it, that’s the key.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Vitali. ‘What key?’
It’s where you’ll find someone whose light can hurt Galatea in the datascape, someone who can keep it from seeing what I’m assembling.
Vitali nodded, though he had no real idea what Linya meant.
‘Forge Elektrus,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. What else?’
Before she could say any more, Linya looked over her shoulder with a look of alarm at something out of sight.
I love you.
And then she was gone.
In theory, each of the Tindalosi were equal, but theory and reality were quite different. The first hunter Telok had awoken had always been the leader of this pack, even before there was a pack. Its inception date was centuries earlier than the others, when the mystery of its creation was still a jealously guarded secret.
Its bulk was greater, its armour accreted with patchwork repairs from the time when it had needed such attention. Its neural network was a hybridised collection of heuristic kill-memes and automated pattern recognition arrays. It had not been conceived with the capacity for autonomic reasoning, but the frequency-fractal processes of its supramolecular system architecture swiftly became capable of self-aware thought.
Its name was the result of a rogue decimal point within its ultra-rapid cognitive evolution, like a grain of sand caught in an oyster. Around that arithmetical error, a name grafted onto its awareness of self.
It called itself Vodanus.
Once it had hunted alone. It had slain the great orbital AI of Winterblind and torn the heart from the Arc-Nexus Emperor of a world that would go on to be known as Fortis Binary. But like most things in war, especially new and efficient forms of mass murder, what had once been unique, became almost commonplace. The enemies of its aeons-dead masters developed their own form of hellhounds, and the proliferation of such lethal assassins ended the forgotten conflict for which they had been created. What war could be fought when any commander would be hunted down and slaughtered within hours of their appointment?
But even with the war’s end, the lightning was out of the bottle and resisted being put back. Some hungers, once awoken, can never entirely be satiated. The hellhounds compiled kill lists of their own, and waged individual campaigns of annihilation.
The hellhounds’ newly united creators finally trapped their creations into automated void-hulks, devoid of life or viable prey. They hurled them into the hearts of stars and did their best to forget the monsters they had birthed ever existed.
A faulty drive saved the vessel bearing Vodanus from its appointed death. Drifting beyond the frontier of its former empire, its creators bid Vodanus good riddance. And so it had been for uncounted millennia, sealed in a cold tomb that slowly decayed and eroded the hellhounds’ existence one by one until only six remained.
Only the most astronomical odds saw the void-hulk drift into the celestial arena of Telok’s testing grounds. To detect a cold slab of virtually inert metal in the vastness of space was next to impossible, but the stellar surveys in preparation for the Breath of the Gods’ activation were necessarily precise.
And so the drifting void-hulk had been salvaged by Telok’s inter-system fleets and the Tindalosi were once again yoked into service as hunter-killers.
The six of them swept into the distribution hub like glittering, earthbound comets, claws extended and every augur sweeping for the code-trace they had torn from the Thunderhawk. That scent was already fading, and with every second of its diminishment, their pain grew in direct response.
The impossibly complex planetary schematics of Exnihlio named this place as Distribution Hub Rho A113/235, but Vodanus and its Tindalosi cared nothing for names.
All that drove them was hunger.
Every screed of their being ached to drink the prey’s code. Their bones were broken glass that could only be restored by the prey’s light. Their minds were ablaze with a fire that could only be quenched in the prey’s death.
A pulse of linked thought from Vodanus sent the Tindalosi racing through the distribution hub, slaloming between grumbling ore-haulers, climbing the scurfed tower-silos and circling the ore hoppers. The hundreds of servitors ignored them, glassy-eyed stares fixated on their labours in unending loops of servitude.
The Tindalosi quartered the area into search grids.
The prey’s scent was here, they could all taste it.
Fleeting hints of it drifted from droplets of floodstream. Where his mechadendrites had brushed the walls, they could sense Locardian fragments of transferred code-bleed.
Vodanus drew in the millions of microscopic traces, building a mental map of the prey and its movements. It looked for patterns, movements and things out of place. What was missing could tell it as much as what it found.
It rose up on its hooked legs, letting the data flood its hunter’s heart. The mind-screams of its brethren echoed in its skull, pleading to be allowed to feed. As if they knew anything of real hunger. Vodanus had slain kings and emperors. All they knew was the bland tasteless kills of lesser beings.
They begged and howled, desperate for their hunger to end.
Vodanus ignored them, loping over to where a yoked gang of servitors shovelled at an ore pit. A last trace of prey lingered here, strong where he had touched one of the master’s machines.
Vodanus reared over the cyborgised humans, its curved spine flaring with micro-cilia sensors. The ore pit was empty, but the servitors dug anyway, their mono-tasked routines clearly expecting it to be full.
An instantaneous inventory of the hub’s roster showed one of its ore-hauler vehicles to be missing. The noosphere showed no record of a reported fault, nor any exloaded docket of maintenance or transfer.
The vehicle’s absence was unauthorised. It had been taken.
Vodanus craned its elongated skull as two of its hellhound companions appeared behind the servitors. Relative to Vodanus, they were barely cubs. New machine souls.
Though their outward form had remained unchanged for millennia, they were lean and athirst. They circled the servitors, butting against them and slicing their leathery skin with quick flicks of finger blades.
The prey had brushed past these cyborg things. Transference had occurred. The hellhounds hungered to kill them, to sup those scraps of scent.
Vodanus snapped and hissed in a mathematical language from a time before the Mechanicus, from the machines of an alien culture.
No Kill. Bad Meat.
They hissed back, hostile and resentful, but obedient. The servitors continued their meaningless work at the empty ore silo, oblivious to the hideous appetite of the hunters circling them.
The prey-scent moved through the hub, and Vodanus had no trouble in following the trail now it knew what to look for. The prey had taken a vehicle, a crude and noisy thing that almost obscured the scent. Had that been the intention?
Could the prey be aware of the hellhounds’ pursuit?
No. The vehicle was simply a means of transport.
Vodanus dropped onto his many limbs and ghosted through the hub in a figure of eight pattern, sifting the competing scents of Exnihlio and triangulating the prey’s likely vector. A ragged red line lifted from the ground beyond the hub, like drifts of smoke in a volcanic cavern.
Its head snapped around as it heard the screech of tearing metal and the meat thud of claws through bone. The two Tindalosi it had warned away loomed over the ruined remains of two servitors. The first hellhound dissected the cyborgs like a gleeful butcher.
Flesh was waste matter, but metallic augments were snapped open. A rust-red extrusion from the hellhound’s skull sucked out the code like a scavenger hollowing marrow from bone.
Vodanus sprinted back to the disobedient Tindalosi. Threat signifiers blazed from it, and the remaining servitors stepped back from its screeching anger. Even they u
nderstood the terrible threat of this creature.
It slammed into the observing hellhound.
The impact was ferocious. Metal buckled as it was hurled back.
Overlapping rib plates caved inwards and two of its limbs snapped. It bellowed, but its spine bent in submission as coruscating emerald arcs of light flickered beneath its damaged sections. Its rib plates began unfolding, fresh limbs already extruding from within its archaic frame.
Satisfied this cub had not broken its geas, Vodanus spun around, ready to tear the feasting hellhound from its violation.
It was already too late.
The Tindalosi spasmed, scarlet lines bleeding through its convulsing body like a searing infection. It howled as the force of Telok’s geas prohibitions ripped through it in an indiscriminate storm of destruction. Ancient technologies melted to black slag within its body, trillions of bio-synthetic nerves and cortical synapses burned like fulminate.
Fine black ash poured from its body, inert blood of the machine.
The hellhound literally came apart at the seams, its silver-steel body parts falling into the ore pit in a clatter of components. The gleaming metal blackened as self-immolation protocols released ultra-rapid ferrophage organisms within its atomic structure that necrotised the body utterly.
The Tindalosi gathered around Vodanus. It showed them the prey’s red spoor. Their bodies snapped and grated in anticipation, eager to follow the trail to its source, but it held them fast, forcing them to watch the ashes of their brother scatter in the wind.
Bad. Meat.
Kotov had known his share of truculent machines and resistant code, but the binaric arrangements within the universal assembler were some of the most confounding he had ever encountered. Squirming hives of machine language were buried deep in the system architecture, but without the proper authorisation codes, Kotov could not force the rites of awakening to the command layers of the console.
That hub sat five hundred metres above ground level, atop a central column that rose up within the vast, hollow cylinder of the universal assembler.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 89