Vitali nodded and issued a holding order to the skitarii before following Manubia inside. The door rolled shut behind him, his servo-skull darting in just before it closed entirely.
‘The interior of Forge Elektrus does not match its outward appearance, Adept Manubia,’ said Vitali, staring in wonder at a dozen gold-lit engines lining a mosaic-tiled nave.
‘None of my doing,’ she said.
Puzzled by her cryptic remark, Vitali moved down the nave.
The engines to either side of him crackled with eager machine-spirits, thrumming with more power than any one forge could possibly require. At the end of the nave was a throne worked into a wide Icon Mechanicus, and the light of the engines glittered in its cybernetic eye. Shaven-headed adepts of lowly rank tended to the engines or scoured flakes of rust from both throne and skull.
‘Your journeymen?’ asked Vitali.
‘Not anymore,’ replied Manubia, turning to face him with the pistol held unwavering at his chest. ‘Now tell me why you’re here. And be truthful.’
Manubia’s vague answers and hostility perplexed Vitali. She couldn’t possibly think he was a threat. What was going on in Forge Elektrus that compelled its magos to greet another with a sublimely rare and lethal weapon?
‘Well?’ said Manubia when he didn’t answer.
‘What I have to tell you will stretch your credulity to breaking point,’ he said, ‘So I am opting to follow your advice and embrace total honesty. I want you to know that before I begin.’
And Vitali told her of Linya and Galatea, and how the machine-hybrid had gone on to murder her body in order to harvest her brain and incorporate it into a heuristic neuromatrix. Manubia’s eyebrows rose in disbelief when he spoke of Linya’s manifestation within the dome, but a look of understanding settled upon her when he spoke of what he had been told during their brief communion.
‘That’s what made you cross half the ship to come down here?’
‘I would do anything to help my daughter,’ said Vitali. ‘And if that means crossing a ship at war, then so be it. I implore you, Adept Manubia, if you know anything at all, please tell me.’
‘She knows me,’ said a man in the coveralls of a bondsman who emerged from behind one of the largest machines.
The man was tall and rangy with close-cropped stubble for hair and the hollowed cheeks of a below-deck menial. A barcode tattoo on his cheek confirmed his status as a bondsman, but his eyes were tertiary-grade exosomatic augmetics and his right arm was a crude bionic with freshly-grafted haptics at the fingertips.
Vitali read the man’s identity from the tattoo and anger touched him as he recognised the name.
‘Abrehem Locke,’ said Vitali.
The man frowned in confusion as Vitali strode towards him, all traces of the genial stargazer replaced by the mask of a tormented father.
‘Your little revolution delayed getting Linya to the medicae decks,’ said Vitali. ‘You made her suffer.’
‘Easy there,’ said Manubia, following Vitali and keeping the graviton pistol trained on him. ‘This isn’t a subtle weapon, but I can still crack the legs from under you.’
Vitali ignored her. ‘Linya almost died because of what you did.’
To his credit, Locke stood his ground. ‘And I’m sorry for that, Magos Tychon, but I won’t apologise for trying to better conditions in the underdecks. If you knew the suffering that goes on there, how badly the Mechanicus treats those who toil in its name, you’d have done exactly the same.’
Vitali wanted to throw Locke’s words back in his face, remembering the agony he had suffered in trying to manage Linya’s pain, but the man was right. Vitali had even said words just like that to Roboute Surcouf on the Renard’s shuttle.
The anger drained from him and he nodded. ‘Maybe so, Master Locke, maybe so, but it is hard for me to entirely forgive a man who caused my daughter pain, no matter how noble the principle in which he acted.’
‘I understand,’ said Locke, meeting Vitali’s gaze.
Vitali looked carefully into the bondsman’s augmetics, sensing there was more to this man than met the eye. Was this lowly bondsman the key to fighting Galatea?
‘I think perhaps it was you I came here to find, Master Locke,’ said Vitali.
‘Me? Why?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Vitali, lacing his fingers behind his back, ‘but I will. Tell me, how much do you know of hexamathics?’
‘Nothing at all.’
Vitali turned to Adept Manubia.
‘Then you and I have a great deal of work to do.’
The structure his skitarii had cut into with their power fists and blades made no sense to Kotov. On a world where everything was given over to sustaining the Breath of the Gods, why would a place so large be left empty? Vast beams and columns of rusted steel supported a soaring roof obscured by an ochre smirr of mist. Decay and dilapidation hung heavy in the air, like an abandoned forge repurposed after centuries of neglect.
As far as Kotov could make out, the building had no floor beyond the wide, cantilevered platform of rusted metal reaching ten metres beyond the shuttered door. His two skitarii stayed close to him as he ventured out to its farthest extent. He sent his servo-skulls out over the void. Stablights worked into their eye sockets failed utterly to penetrate the immense, echoing and empty space.
Behind him, the Cadians, eldar and Black Templars pushed into the building. They shouted and hunted for ways to seal the entrance behind them.
Roboute Surcouf and Ven Anders helped Magos Pavelka to the ground, their arms around her shoulders. Kotov didn’t need a noospheric connection to see her ocular augmetics had been burned away completely. Implant, nerve and neural interface were an alloyed molten spike of surgical steel and fused brain matter.
She would likely never see again.
Her head was bowed. In pain or regret?
Perhaps it was in shame for wielding profane code. If Kotov believed they might ever return to Mars, he would see to it that Ilanna Pavelka was irrevocably excommunicated from the Cult Mechanicus.
She had meddled with shadow artes and paid the inevitable price.
The thought gave him a moment’s pause as he considered the depth of his own hubris.
And what price would I have to pay…?
He pushed aside the uncomfortable thought and knelt at the ragged edge of the platform. Beyond the metal, the ground fell away sharply in a steeply angled quarried slope. Dull steel rails fastened to the bare rock reflected the light of the skull’s stablights, and Kotov followed their route to a battered funicular carriage sitting abandoned a hundred metres to his left.
He felt the aggression-stimms of the skitarii surge, and turned to see the eldar witch approaching. He stood his warriors down with a pulse of holding binary. Bielanna, that was her name, though Kotov had no intention of using it.
She removed her helm and knelt at the edge of the platform, staring down into the darkness. Kotov saw tears streaming down her cheeks. She reached out as if to touch something, then flinched, drawing her hand back sharply.
‘It’s here,’ she said.
‘What is?’ asked Kotov.
‘All the pain of this world.’
Ven Anders removed his helmet and dropped it at his feet. He closed his eyes and craned his neck to let the drizzling moisture wet his skin. He rubbed a hand over his face, clearing away the worst of the blood. Little of it was his, but he’d been standing next to Trooper Bailey when the Tindalosi eviscerated him.
Cadian Guardsmen fought on the very worst battlefields of the Imperium, knew all the myriad ways there were to die in war, but Anders had seldom seen cruelty as perfectly honed as he had in the Tindalosi.
Against the lids of his eyes he saw the hooking slashes of their claws, the bloody teeth and the phosphor scrawls of eyes that seemed to be looking at him even
now. He shook off the sensation of being watched and hawked a mouthful of bitter spit over the edge of the platform.
He tasted metal and felt a buzzing in his back teeth that told him a Space Marine was standing next to him. Power armour always had that effect on him.
‘For a big man, you step pretty light,’ he said.
‘Walk softly, but carry a big stick, isn’t that what they say?’
Anders opened his eyes and ran his hands through his hair. Longer than he was used to. Time aboard the Speranza was making him lax in his personal grooming.
‘I didn’t know it was possible for a Space Marine to walk softly,’ said Anders, looking up into Tanna’s flat, open features.
‘We have Scouts within our ranks,’ said Tanna. ‘Or did you think that was an ironic title?’
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ admitted Anders. ‘Then again, I’ve never seen Space Marine Scouts.’
‘Which is exactly the point,’ said Tanna, before falling silent.
Anders understood that silence and said, ‘I grieve for the loss of Bracha. Was he a… friend?’
‘He was my brother,’ said Tanna. ‘Friend is too small a word.’
‘I understand,’ said Anders, and he knew Tanna would see the truth of that.
‘We were a small enough brotherhood when we joined the Kotov Fleet,’ said Tanna. ‘And when we are no more, the courage these warriors have shown will pass unremembered. I would not see it so, but know not how to carve our mark into history’s flesh.’
Tanna’s words of introspection surprised Anders. He had encountered only a few Space Marines in his lifetime, but instinctively knew how rare this moment was.
And so he returned Tanna’s honesty.
‘I’m no stranger to death,’ he said, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers. ‘Stared it down a hundred times on a thousand battlefields and never once flinched. That’s not bravado, it’s really not, because it’s not fear for my own life that keeps me pacing the halls at night…’
‘It is for the lives of those you command.’
Anders nodded. ‘No officer wants to lose men under his command, but death walks in every Guardsman’s shadow. You go into battle knowing with complete certainty that you’re going to lose men and women along the way. You have to make peace with that or you can’t be an officer, not a Cadian officer anyway. But it was my job to keep those soldiers alive for as long as I could. I failed.’
‘It was your job to lead those soldiers in battle for the Emperor, just as it has fallen to me to lead mine,’ said Tanna, gripping Anders’s shoulder. ‘You did that. No commander can ever be sure of bringing all their warriors home, but so long as the foe is slain and the mission complete, their deaths serve the Emperor.’
Tanna held out his gauntlet and Anders saw a handful of gleaming ident-tags. Each had been cleaned of blood, each one stamped with a name and Cadian bio-numeric identifier.
‘I retrieved these from the bodies of your honoured dead,’ said Tanna. ‘I thought you would be glad of their return.’
Anders stared at the ident-tags. There hadn’t been time to gather them from the torn-up corpses. Or at least he’d assumed there hadn’t. That Tanna had risked his life and the lives of his warriors to retrieve them was an honour beyond repayment.
‘Thank you,’ said Anders, taking the tags and reading each name in turn. He pocketed them and held his hand out.
‘The Emperor watch over you, Sergeant Tanna.’
‘And you, Colonel Anders. It has been an honour to fight alongside you and your soldiers.’
Anders grinned, a measure of his cocksure Cadian attitude reasserting itself, and said, ‘You say that like the fight’s over, but Cadians aren’t done until the Eye takes them. And we don’t flinch easy.’
‘Two questions,’ said Surcouf, standing before the battered funicular carriage with his arms folded. ‘Does it work and where do you think it goes?’
‘It appears to be fully operational, though the mechanisms are corroded almost beyond functionality,’ said Kotov, scraping rusted metal from the control levers. ‘As to a destination, I can see no topographical representations of where it might ultimately lead.’
‘Who cares where it ultimately leads?’ said Surcouf. ‘It goes away from here, that’s the most important thing, surely? At least it’ll give us a chance to regroup and figure out our next move.’
‘Our next move?’ said Kotov. ‘What moves do you think we have left to us? Magos Blaylock will already be sailing the Speranza away from this cursed world. We have done all we can, Surcouf. Either Telok has the Speranza or Blaylock has departed. Either way, our chance to affect the outcome of this situation is over.’
Surcouf looked at him as though he hadn’t understood what he’d just said. Kotov reran his words to check they had not been couched in ambiguous terms. No. Low Gothic and clear in meaning.
Clearly Surcouf did not agree with him.
‘Even if you’re sure Tarkis got the message, how can you be certain he managed to break orbit?’ said Surcouf. ‘Do you really think Telok went to all the trouble of ensnaring a ship like the Speranza just to let it sail away? No, we have to assume that Telok’s cleverer than that.’
‘What would you suggest, Master Surcouf?’ said Kotov. ‘How, with all the manifold resources at our disposal, would you propose we fight against the might of an entire world?’
‘One big problem is just a series of smaller problems,’ said Surcouf. ‘Small problems we can deal with.’
Kotov sneered. ‘Optimistic Ultramarian platitudes will do us no good now.’
‘Neither will your Mechanicus defeatism,’ snapped Surcouf. ‘So our first priority is to get away from here. Ilanna’s bought us some time, so I suggest we don’t waste it.’
Sergeant Tanna and Ven Anders entered the carriage, and the metal floor groaned alarmingly with their combined weight.
‘Can you get this carriage working, archmagos?’ asked Tanna.
‘I already informed Master Surcouf that it was functional.’
‘Then let’s get going,’ said Anders.
The transit between the two decks was a wide processional ramp with an angled parapet to either side, where dust-shawled statues and machines hissed and chattered in streams of binary. Perhaps it meant something important, perhaps the Speranza was trying to tell him something, but what that might be, Hawkins didn’t know.
A twin-lascannon turret rested on a gargoyle-wrapped corbel above him, but it looked so poorly maintained, Hawkins doubted it could even move let alone fire. Kneeling Guardsmen took cover in the shadow of the machines on either side of the ramp, lasguns aimed at the wide gateway below.
Magos Blaylock had assured Hawkins that all the gates between main deck spaces would automatically seal, but that hadn’t happened here. Reports of those gates that stubbornly refused to close crackled over the vox-bead in his ear, together with word of enemy movements.
Hawkins ran across the top of the ramp, where roll-out barricades were being hauled into place. Sergeant Rae issued orders to the seventy-six Cadian soldiers occupying this position in a voice familiar to Guardsmen across the galaxy. They prepared fire posts, bolted on kinetic ablatives or layered sacks of annealing particulates over the barricade. Hawkins was more used to sandbags, but Dahan assured him these were far superior in absorbing impacts than mere dirt.
And anyway, where could you get dirt on a starship?
A black-coated commissar worked alongside a support platoon setting up their plasma cannons in a prepared bastion. Supply officers set caches of ammo in armoured containers as a team of enginseers directed a pair of Sentinels hauling quad-barrelled Rapiers. One of the automated weapons was fitted out with heavy bolters, the other with a laser destroyer. Just as he’d ordered.
These powerful weapons would eventually seal this route, but
until they were in place, it was grunts with lasrifles.
Taking up position at the centre of the barricade, Hawkins reached up and tapped the vox-bead at his ear.
‘Company commanders, report.’
‘Valdor company, no contact.’
‘Sergeant Kastagir, Hotshot company, under moderate attack.’
‘Where’s Lieutenant Gerund, sergeant?’
‘Hit to the arm, sir. The medics think she might lose it.’
‘Do you need support?’ asked Hawkins.
The vox crackled and the sounds of angry voices came down the line. ‘Don’t you dare, sir,’ said Lieutenant Gerund. ‘We’ve got this one. Just took an unlucky ricochet, that’s all.’
‘Understood,’ said Hawkins. He had complete faith in each of his lieutenants, and if Gerund said she didn’t need help, Hawkins believed her. He continued down his leaders.
‘Creed company engaging now!’
‘Squads Artema and Pious under fire. No significant losses.’
The rest of his forces provided a mix of contact/no-contact reports. Within four minutes of the boarding alarm going out, the Cadians had deployed to pre-assigned defence points, and a picture of the boarders’ attack pattern – or rather, their lack of one – formed in Hawkins’s mind.
A good defence rested on anticipating where an enemy would attack. Armouries, power plants, life-support, main arterials, inter-deck transits, vital junctions, connecting thoroughfares and the like. These were all vital targets, but the invaders were teleporting in at random. Some appeared in threatening positions, while others materialised in sealed-off portions of the ship or places of negligible importance.
‘Callins,’ said Hawkins, connecting to the prow forges where Jahn Callins was lighting a fire under Magos Turentek’s adepts to get the armoured vehicles moving.
‘A little busy here, sir,’ replied Callins.
‘We’re not exactly sipping dammassine and playing cards down here, Jahn,’ he said. ‘Where’s my armoured support?’
‘Tricky, sir,’ said Callins. ‘These Mechanicus imbeciles have got half our inventory chained up in the damn air or hitched onto lifter-rigs. I’m trying to sort it, but it’s taking time.’
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 94