Entry to the assembler had been achieved without difficulty, its wide base pierced by numerous rounded archways. Within, the tower was little more than a gargantuan chimney, its internal faces lined with aluminium ducts, none less than seven metres in diameter. These ran the height of the tower, linking to colossal fan mechanisms and filtration rigs before diminishing to a vanishing point high above.
They had been forced to abandon the ore-hauler just beyond one of those arches. The floor space within the tower was too crowded with a gnarled mess of bellowing engines, filters and suction pumps. The air thrummed with the vibration of the tower’s beating heart, and puffs of sulphurous vapours sighed from every engine. The impression was of a host of slumbering beasts, just waiting for an incautious intruder to awaken them.
The eldar had been as good as their word. Even as the Cadians and Black Templars pushed into the universal assembler, Bielanna and her warriors emerged from the surrounding machinery as though they had simply been waiting for them to arrive.
Every surface within the tower glistened with moisture and the air was humid with heavy vapours. Milky deposits gathered on outcroppings of iron and stone, and where they dripped, spiralling stalagmites reared like glassy teeth.
Rising from the heart of the chamber was a towering column with a coiling ramp ascending for half a kilometre in a steep curve. And at the top of that ramp was the activation hub of the universal assembler, a circular gallery with a number of elliptical bridges that led to other towers and structures beyond.
At the centre of the activation hub stood a circular control mechanism, replete with brass dials, winking gem panels and a host of iron-runged activation levers not dissimilar to those found on the bridge of the Tabularium. As archaic a means of activation as this was, Kotov had been relieved to see the hub was at least equipped with inload/exload ports.
While the warriors kept watch for signs of pursuit, Kotov and Pavelka slotted into the control hub. Kotov had told Tanna he believed he could render the universal assembler functional, but now he wasn’t so sure.
Few means of interaction were as pure as communion within a machine. Mortal interactions were an inefficient mix of verbal and somatic cues, with much of the inherent meaning dependent on prior experience, non-verbal inflexions and situational markers.
No such ambiguity existed within Mechanicus dialogues.
To enter communion with another magos was to know them as intimately as a lover – or so Kotov had been told. Their inner thoughts were laid bare, though only the most boorish would reach beyond the conventional boundaries of communion to learn every secret of a fellow magos. Such flows of information were reciprocal; what passed one way could pass the other.
As such, Kotov did not venture beyond the brands of censure he read in Pavelka’s noospheric aura. An archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus was entitled to know every detail of those who served beneath him, but this was neither the time nor the place to exercise that right.
Kotov hesitated before answering, any admission of failure anathema to him.
Pavelka reached deeper into the machine, her touch light and coaxing. Her binary was gently formed, beguilingly so, and the machine was responding. Kotov formed a matching algorithm of command with his rank signifiers.
One suited to a gentler form of control.
Pavelka’s presence within the machine retreated fractionally, and Kotov wondered if he had stepped over some unknown boundary. Then Pavelka’s focus returned to the matter at hand.
Pavelka signalled her understanding, and Kotov was pleased she saw the logic in his proposal to send the Speranza away.
Kotov felt the required codes rising to the surface layers of the hub, a spiderweb of logarithmic sequences that would trigger the activation of the machines below. He studied each one as it arose, and any hopes that this desperate plan might work turned to ashes as he saw the acausal locks binding them.
said Pavelka.
Kotov sensed Pavelka’s guilty hesitation. Little could be hidden from one another in a mindspace communion.
‘Everything all right, archmagos?’ asked Roboute Surcouf.
Kotov took a moment to realign himself and restore his communications to flesh-voice.
‘I am not sure,’ he said.
‘You said you could make this machine work,’ said Tanna.
‘There are locks on the rites of activation, Sergeant Tanna,’ said Kotov. ‘Secure beyond anything you can imagine. I cannot break them, but Magos Pavelka assures me she can.’
‘You cannot break them, but she can?’ said Tanna.
‘Ilanna has plenty of tricks up her sleeve,’ said Surcouf, and Kotov wondered if he knew what
secrets Pavelka was keeping.
No sooner had Surcouf spoken than the control panel came to life with a sudden burst of blaring static and flickering illumination. Sparks erupted from the exload ports and a screeching wail of betrayed machine-spirits cut through the noosphere.
Kotov stumbled. A sharp spike of pain stabbed into the back of his skull. He sank to his knees, dizzy and disorientated by the sudden binaric assault.
Pavelka staggered from the console, her mechadendrites trailing crackling arcs of lightning. Surcouf ran to her as she collided with the railing.
But for his grip on Pavelka’s robes, she would have fallen.
Kotov blinked away the streams of corrupt binary cascading through his vision like digital tears. His entire body felt as though it had taken a jolt of aberrant current. He felt sick to the core with nausea.
‘What did you do?’ demanded Kotov. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus, what did you do?’
‘What I had to,’ said Pavelka.
The taste of bile and a bitter electrical tang filled Kotov’s mouth. Backwashed floodstream. As close as an adept of the Mechanicus ever came to vomiting. He knew of only one thing that could cause such revulsion in blessed machines.
‘Scrapcode?’ hissed Kotov. ‘You stored scrapcode? No wonder you bear censure brands! Omnissiah save us from those who choose to dabble in the shadow artes! You are no better than Telok!’
‘It’s not scrapcode,’ insisted Pavelka, still leaning on Surcouf for support. ‘It’s a hexamathic disassembler language I designed to break the bond between a machine and its motive spirit.’
‘Why would you ever invent such a curse?’ demanded Kotov, spitting the word invent like an insult.
Pavelka ignored the question and said, ‘You wanted the locks disabled. Now they are. If you are so keen for us all to die here, then what does it matter how I did it?’
Kotov forced down his anger and the terrible ache at his temples as the machines below ignited with a boom of engaging gears and thunderous roars of motorised filters. High above, the enormous fan mechanisms began turning, drawing in vast breaths of the planet’s befouled atmosphere.
The upper reaches of the tower fogged as inhumanly vast engines buried beneath the tower began the arcane process of undoing the damage the planet-wide industry had wreaked.
‘The tower is activated,’ said Tanna. ‘Send the message.’
Kotov nodded, pushing his horror at what Pavelka had done to one side as he sent a repeating data-squirt of vox towards Tarkis Blaylock on the Speranza.
‘Archmagos,’ said Surcouf, looking over the edge of the gantry to the base of the assembler. ‘Whatever you’re doing, do it faster – we’re about to have company.’
It was actually working. The joint operation to clear a swathe of Exnihlio’s atmosphere was actually working. Blaylock sat on the Speranza’s command throne and drank in the data coming from the main entoptic display with a sense of pieces falling into place.
The luminescent curtain represented Kryptaestrex’s geoformers as twin smears of liquid light, their auspex returns blurred by the churning hell of transformative reactions surrounding them. In the eye of their alchymical storm was a cylinder of inert space, through which Azuramagelli’s linked chain of geostationary servitor drones threaded a needle-fine path.
They hadn’t penetrated deep enough to reach the surface yet, but the vox-system was lousy with ghost howls of distorted machine voices where before all it had screamed was static.
Galatea stalked the bridge on its misaligned legs, turning to look at him when it thought he wasn’t aware of its scrutiny. The machine-hybrid appeared to be surprised at his choice of location to implement the atmospheric breach, as though it knew something he did not. That alone gave Blaylock confidence that the Mars Volta’s planchette had steered him true.
Watching the play of data-light around the bridge, Blaylock was filled with a renewed sense of purpose. Never before had he felt so close to the Omnissiah, a presence clear in the miraculous web of causality that had brought him to this place.
The vast spirit of the Speranza’s machine heart was a constant pressure all around him. Intrusive, but not unpleasantly so. As though he were being observed by a being so massive that it existed beyond the limits of his perception, like a fragment of shale’s awareness of the mountain above it.
Had it been the Ark Mechanicus that steered him towards the solution he required? Blaylock didn’t know, but understood the profound theological implications that lay at the end of that proposition. Already he could see the outline of a monograph on the subject he might compose upon their return to Mars.
‘It seems your bickering subordinates may prove us wrong after all,’ said Galatea. ‘By our estimation, virtually clear space exists almost to the edge of the thermosphere.’
‘Indeed so,’ answered Blaylock. ‘I expect breach of the Kármán line imminently. Followed by attainment of the troposphere within ten to twelve hours.’
‘Pushing your geoformers closer to the planet will prove more difficult at that point. Lowering their altitude farther will put both vessels at great risk.’
‘It will,’ agreed Blaylock. ‘But that is a risk I am willing to take if it allows us to re-establish communications with our people on the surface.’
‘When your knowledge of events on the planet’s surface is so woefully incomplete, logic does not agree with you.’
Blaylock shook his head, tired of Galatea’s constant carping.
‘The more I listen to you, the more it seems that you actively seek to discourage communications with Archmagos Kotov. Why would that be?’
‘Discourage?’ said Galatea with a hissing chuckle. ‘Why should we wish that when our stated goal is the death of Archmagos Telok?’
‘That is a very good question,’ said Blaylock, rising from the command throne and standing before Galatea. His squat servitors emerged from behind the throne, realigning the gurgling pipes linked to his nutrient canister. ‘That is your stated aim, but whether or not it is your actual aim is something else entirely.’
‘You doubt our sincerity?’ growled Galatea, rising to its full, lopsided height to better display the hideously malformed nature of its construction. ‘Telok freed us from the shackles of the Manifold, but look at the body we are forced to inhabit! What benevolent creator inflicts such suffering on a living being?’
‘You are not a living being,’ said Blaylock, anger overcoming caution. ‘You are an abomination unto the Omnissiah.’
‘Our point exactly,’ said Galatea. ‘You see the full horror of our malformed body, and you understand why we wish him dead.’
‘How do Telok’s actions justify what you did to those who came to the Manifold station? What you did to Mistress Tychon?’
‘We did what we had to in order to survive, as would any sentient being,’ said Galatea. ‘Telok gave us purpose and promised freedom, yet he abandoned us to a life of solitary agony, trapped forever like an insect in a web.’
‘As I recall, you were more akin to the spider.’
Galatea shrugged its black-robed proxy body.
‘Without fresh minds to occupy our neuromatrix, our consciousness would have been extinguished long ago.’
‘You will forgive me if I do not see that as a bad thing.’
Galatea clattered over to where the main entoptic showed the distortion-wracked globe of Exnihlio, extending a robed arm towards the display. ‘Without our help, you would never have crossed the Halo Scar alive. Without us, we would not be on the cusp of achieving all we desire.’
Blaylock couldn’t decide whether Galatea’s ‘we’ included the Mechanicus or was simply its maddening insistence on referring to itself as a plurality.
‘Magos Blaylock!’ cried Kryptaestrex. The Master of Logistics turned his square frame from his station, every aspect of his noospheric aura alight wit
h inloading data. ‘Contact! Contact!’
‘Atmospheric breach!’ added Azuramagelli.
‘Confirm: so soon?’ said Blaylock. ‘Current projections were a minimum of ten hours for tropospheric penetration.’
‘Confirmed, Magos Blaylock,’ said Kryptaestrex. ‘Atmospheric conditions seem to indicate the presence of a highly charged atmospheric processor on the planet’s surface.’
‘Almost directly beneath the geoformer vessels…’ said Azuramagelli, turning his latticework body to face Blaylock. Without facial features, it was left to the shimmering noospheric signifiers to convey his amazement. ‘How… how did you know…?’
Blaylock had not divulged to the bridge crew exactly how he had chosen this particular quadrant of the planet’s atmosphere. All he’d said was that the Omnissiah would surely guide their hand.
‘Yes, Tarkis,’ said Galatea, leaning down towards him with the dead silver eyes of its proxy body boring into him. ‘How did you know where to send the geoformers?’
Blaylock ignored the question, knowing on some unconscious level that to reveal his use of the Mars Volta to Galatea would be a mistake. The less the machine-hybrid knew of the secret workings of the Speranza the better.
Instead, he began issuing orders with all the curt efficiency for which he was known.
‘Cancel the automated vox-loop. If Archmagos Kotov is making contact with the Speranza, I want him to hear one of our voices,’ said Blaylock, moving from station to station and opening vox-links throughout the Speranza. ‘Magos Dahan? Your skitarii rapid responders?’
‘Are on immediate readiness alert,’ came the Secutor’s voice from the embarkation decks where he and his warriors were prepped and ready to fly. ‘Say the word and we are planetside.’
‘Prudence, Dahan,’ cautioned Blaylock. ‘Let us establish the situation before launching a full assault.’
Blaylock returned to the command throne and placed his metalled gauntlets upon its rests. Haptic connectors engaged and Blaylock’s servitors squealed as his data-burden spiked. He linked with the Speranza’s peripheral layers, feeling his presence expand within the noosphere as its vastness rose up around him.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 90