This cavern shelf was, like the rest of the steps cut through the planet’s rock, lined with split crystalline panels and littered with granular black ash. The eldar and Black Templars were already here, keeping a wary distance between each other. Most of Ven Anders’s Cadians kneaded the muscles in their legs or drank the last of their water.
Anders himself paced like a restless lion, eager to get back into the fight.
‘Long climb, eh?’ grinned the Cadian colonel, looking like he’d only been for a brisk walk. ‘Best to keep the legs moving. You don’t want to get a cramp and seize up. Pull that Achilles tendon and it’ll be months before it’s fit for purpose.’
‘I’ll take that chance,’ said Roboute.
‘Come on,’ said Anders. ‘I thought you Ultramar types were fit?’
Roboute wanted to hate Anders right now, but only ended up envying the man’s fitness. He nodded and said, ‘Back in the day, I’d have given you a run for your money, Ven. But right about now I feel like I’ve climbed to the very summit of Hera’s Crown. It’s times like this I wish I’d kept up my defence auxilia training regimes aboard the Renard.’
Anders grinned and offered Roboute a canvas-wrapped canteen.
‘This climb isn’t so tough,’ said the Anders. ‘Reminds me of the livestock trails over the Caducades Mountains I used to run when I was a lad.’
‘Everything here reminds you of Cadia,’ said Roboute, taking a mouthful of water.
Anders shrugged. ‘Because it’s all so Emperor-damned awful.’
Roboute didn’t have an answer to that.
Finding a route out of the hrud prison complex had proven to be more difficult than getting in, though the eventual solution turned out to be far simpler. The rusted funicular had made its last journey in bringing them to the repulsive alien warrens, and no amount of coaxing by Kotov could force it to move. The archmagos had refused Pavelka’s offer of help, and when Roboute asked her about it, all she would say was that Kotov was a man closed to alternative thinking.
In the end it had been one of Kotov’s servo-skulls that found a way out, a crooked canyon of steps concealed against the cave wall behind a mass of collapsed crystalline machinery. The skitarii and Templars cleared the crumbling shards of crystal and so the climb back to the surface had begun.
Roboute had thought himself reasonably fit, but soon lost track of time after the first four hours of climbing through the claustrophobic stairs burrowed through the rock. The gruelling ascent punished his every indulgence and excuse to avoid exercising in each muscle-burning step and laboured breath.
An hour later, he’d paused to reach into his coat pocket and check his astrogation compass. Since pointing unerringly towards the universal assembler, the needle had resumed its old habit of bouncing between every possible direction.
‘Does that guide you?’ asked one of the green-armoured eldar, standing above him on the steps. Roboute tried to decide if the alien was male or female beneath the armour, but quickly gave up.
‘Sometimes,’ he said between breaths. ‘But not now.’
‘The Phoenix King teaches us that talismans only guide us when we are lost and without purpose,’ said the eldar warrior.
‘I feel pretty lost right now,’ said Roboute.
The warrior looked puzzled by Roboute’s admission. ‘Why? We have a thread to cut, a life to end. No surer path exists anywhere in the skein.’
‘And here I thought Bielanna was the farseer.’
‘In matters of death, all warriors are seers,’ said the eldar, springing away and making a mockery of Roboute’s exertions.
He bit back an oath and continued onwards, step by grinding step.
Every footstep crunched over broken shards of glass and ash, making the ground treacherous underfoot. He and Pavelka steadied each other, him guiding her hesitant steps, her augmented limbs helping to keep him upright.
Kotov and his skitarii brought up the rear, the two cybernetic warriors helping to steady Kotov, whose gyros were having trouble in keeping him balanced on the crooked steps.
Now, slumped with his back against the wall, Roboute finally had the opportunity to catch his breath. This chance to rest was a blessing straight from the hand of the Emperor Himself.
Roboute eased his breathing into a more regular pattern, flexing the muscles of his legs and closing his eyes. It seemed ridiculous to want to sleep at a time like this, but he’d been sustaining such a heightened edge of perception for so long that the rest of his body was beginning to shut down.
Despite his best efforts, sleep eluded him, so he gave up and ran through a series of muscle-lengthening stretches and mental exercises to order his thoughts and clear the mind.
He pictured the world above and replayed the secrets Telok had voiced in the expectation of their imminent death. Meaningless to Roboute for the most part, but he remembered one thing Telok had said that struck a note of unreasoning horror within Kotov.
A name that even to Roboute had overtones of darkness that blighted his thoughts. What was the name…?
‘The Noctis Labyrinthus,’ he said when it finally came.
Kotov immediately looked up, as Roboute knew he would.
‘What did you say?’
‘The Noctis Labyrinthus, what is it?’ said Roboute. ‘When Telok mentioned it, you knew what it was and it scared you to the soles of your boots. So what is it and why did Telok need to recreate it to get the Breath of the Gods to work?’
‘It is nothing I wish to speak of.’
Roboute shook his head. ‘I think the time for secrets is over, don’t you, archmagos?’
Kotov stared at him, as though weighing the cost of revealing what he knew against the likelihood of their survival. At last he came to a decision.
‘Very well,’ said Kotov. ‘The Noctis Labyrinthus is a maze-like system of steep-walled valleys within the Tharsis quadrangle of Mars. Most likely formed by volcanic activity in the ancient past, perhaps even by a long-ago eruption of Olympus Mons.’
‘What’s that got to do with Telok and why were you so shocked when he mentioned it? What’s inside those valleys?’
‘I am getting to that,’ said Kotov. ‘The region was declared Purgatus millennia ago after it was revealed that a sentient weapon technology from pre-Unity was discovered to be still active. The Fabricator General of the time claimed it would lay waste to Mars if it escaped, so the entire area was quarantined and fortified. It has remained so ever since.’
‘Sounds like a smokescreen to me,’ said Roboute.
‘People needed to be kept away,’ said Kotov. ‘That seemed like the best way to achieve that.’
‘Wait,’ said Pavelka. ‘You mean there was no ancient weapon technology?’
‘Correct,’ said Kotov.
‘So what is there?’ asked Roboute.
‘I suspect no one knows the full extent of what lies beneath the Noctis Labyrinthus, but as an archmagos I was privy to the old legends circulating the higher echelons of the Cult Mechanicus, of course. Unfounded speculation mostly, noospheric gossip and the like. And since the word of those… crescent-moon xenos ships landing in the deepest valleys began to circulate, the rumours have only grown stronger.’
‘What kind of rumours?’ asked Tanna, coming over to listen.
Kotov seemed hesitant to continue, baring as he was the innermost secrets of his order.
‘That there was necrontyr technology beneath the red sands,’ said Roboute.
‘How could you possibly know that?’ demanded Kotov.
‘Remember, I saw the fall of Kellenport on Damnos,’ said Roboute. ‘I’ve seen ships like you described and I’ve seen necrontyr war machines. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw Telok’s device.’
Kotov sighed and nodded as if Roboute had passed some kind of test.
‘Very we
ll, Mister Surcouf, I believe you may be correct. Perhaps some aspect of necrontyr technology does lie at the heart of the Breath of the Gods, and if that is the case, then it is doubly imperative we prevent Telok from leaving this world.’
‘Why?’ said Anders, ‘I mean, besides the obvious?’
‘Because if there is any truth to the old legends, then it is entirely possible that a vast shard of one of the ancient necrontyr gods lies entombed within the Noctis Labyrinthus.’
And suddenly it all made a twisted kind of sense to Roboute. He turned to Bielanna, who appeared to be studiously ignoring their conversation.
‘You knew, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘You said as much back in the cavern. What did you call it? “The infernal engine of the Yngir?” I’m going to assume that’s your word for the necrontyr gods.’
Bielanna nodded slowly.
‘Now you see why we fought so hard to stop you,’ she said. ‘And why we now spill our blood to help you.’
Roboute began pacing, as he always did when he needed to force a train of thought to its logical conclusion. His fatigue fell away from him as he spoke.
‘I’d bet every ship in my fleet that one of these Yngir is at the heart of the Breath of the Gods. Or at least it was. It’s dying now or Telok used the last of it transforming Katen Venia’s star. That’s why Telok’s so desperate to get back to Mars, to open the Noctis Labyrinthus and resurrect the god in his machine.’
Linya was burning. Flames filled the cramped access compartment in Amarok’s leg. She was trapped inside the Titan again, the access hatch leading to safety just out of reach.
The pain was unbearable.
Linya could feel every part of her body dying.
Flesh slid from bone like overcooked meat. The surgical steel of her implants turned molten within her internal organs. She felt each one liquefy.
Incredibly, the vox within the compartment was still working, but no one was answering her cries for help.
Her father’s screams echoed from the burning iron walls of the Titan’s leg. He shrieked with unimaginable pain, a sound it should be impossible for a human being to make. Terror and accusation all in one.
You did this, it said. You are killing me with your wilfulness.
Hot tears sprang from Linya’s eyes, instantly turning to vapour.
Her father’s accusations hurt worse than the flames. His pain was her pain. She felt his every screaming howl of agony as though she made it herself.
‘Please…’ she begged. ‘Make it stop!’
But the pain was relentless, the guilt unbearable. She tried to pull herself towards the opening using the rungs on the inner face of the compartment. Her body was wedged fast. Her fingers melted to the metal.
Linya screamed anew with the searing agony ripping up her arms.
Except it wasn’t her flesh…
This wasn’t real. She knew that. Knew it with a certainty that was as unbending as it was irrelevant.
No matter how hard she willed herself to accept that this was fiction, her brain couldn’t fight the dreadful stimulus it was under. Linya knew better than most how easily the machinery of the mind could be tricked into believing the impossible.
But that wasn’t helping her now.
As far as it was possible to be certain of anything, this was the sixth time she had burned to death in the Amarok. Previous to this, she had been buried alive, ripped apart by devourer beasts of an unknown tyrannic genus, crushed in a depressurising starship and burned to cinders on the Quatrian Gallery as its orbit degraded into the planetary atmosphere.
Each death excruciating, each pain stretched over a lifetime, each experience a learning curve. Galatea was unsparingly inventive in its tortures, but the Amarok was a particular favourite of the machine-hybrid.
Tar-black smoke filled her mouth. Her lungs dissolved within her chest. Burning light roared over her in a torrent of liquid fire.
Linya screamed.
And found herself on her knees, flesh untouched and body intact.
Cold deck plates under her palms, bare steel walls to either side and dim light above. A cool breeze drifted from the recyc-units on the ceiling. Tears ran down her cheeks at the cessation of pain and shuddering breath emptied her lungs.
Yet even these sensations were false, this new environment no more real than the last.
Linya pushed herself to her feet and canted a disgustingly biological insult, careful to render it in hexamathic cant.
The black-robed adept that was Galatea’s proxy body emerged from the shadows, anonymous and giving no hint as to the true abomination that lay within.
The adept shook his head and a fresh jolt of pain drove Linya back to her knees. She gritted her teeth and fought to keep her scream of pain inside.
Linya stood once more and walked away from Galatea, subtly marshalling her consciousness into carefully constructed partitions.
Galatea followed her, its hands moving in a complex geometric pattern that appeared to describe a Möbius curve in space-time.
The machine-hybrid was less vigilant when it was angry.
she said, modulating her tone to convey a wholly fabricated indignation.
Galatea laughed, and the silver lenses of its eyes shone with its amusement.
They passed into the main gallery chamber, a domed structure that stood out like a blister on the exterior of the orbital station. Linya had always loved this part of the Gallery and, as such, it had been recreated by Galatea with the greatest fidelity.
Far-seeing telescopes weighing hundreds of tonnes hung on slender suspensor armatures that allowed them to be moved with ease. Scattered around the walls of the dome, differently focused glass and brass-rimmed rotator-lenses threw colour
ed beams to the floor. Starlight glittered on walls of black marble, distant constellations and vast galactic spirals she’d never see again.
Linya laughed.
Galatea spun her around, and Linya felt the build-up of hostile binary within its neuromatrix as the dome darkened and the white light of the stars turned blood red. Oily shadows slithered across the floor and Linya smelled burning skin and bone.
She slapped the hand away and let the walls between the partitioned compartments in her consciousness drop. The individual code accretions, innocuous by themselves and meticulously crafted in tiny fragments, now rapidly combined in a dizzyingly complex series of hexamathic code-structures.
Galatea sensed the sudden build-up of unknown code within her, and Linya savoured its shock. The machine-hybrid blurted a crushingly basic series of binaric barbs, designed for maximum shock and pain to an augmented mind.
And with a squall of furious binary, Galatea’s proxy-form exploded into a hash of pixellated static that blew away in a non-existent breeze.
Linya let out a relieved binaric breath. Split into so many pieces, she hadn’t been certain her painstakingly crafted code would work.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 98