Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill

by Warhammer 40K

  But it had, and now she had a chance to do some real harm.

  Venturing into Exnihlio’s depths had been a special kind of hell for Ilanna Pavelka. After being blinded by vengeful feedback from the control hub, the hrud warren had felt like wading naked through a plague pit. Groping through greasy, cloying air, dense with pollutants. Forced to feel her way with bare hands.

  Each step upwards had seen that horrific sensation diminish, but it was lodged like an infection in her flesh. Already her internal chronometers – having now recovered from the entropic field distortion below – registered at least a seven-year degradation of her organics. Her augmetics were similarly affected, and she wondered if anyone else knew how much of their lives had been stolen by exposure to the imprisoned xenoforms.

  Kotov must surely know, but had chosen to say nothing.

  Roboute and Ven Anders wouldn’t know, though both must surely be feeling a greater weariness than normal. Even with the restoration of her chronometers, it was impossible to say for sure how much time they had spent beneath the surface of the planet. The elasticity of time was a new sensation to Ilanna, who was used to a constant and completely accurate register of its passage.

  Without sight, she was unaware of the exact nature of the tunnel they were climbing, but passive arrays told her its composition had changed from bare rock and crystal to stone and iron.

  ‘We’ve left the cave systems below Exnihlio,’ she said, more to herself than to elicit any response.

  ‘Looks that way,’ agreed Roboute. ‘We’re climbing through deep industrial strata. It’s a bloody maze, but Kotov seems to think he understands the layout down here and says it won’t be long until we reach a transit hub on the surface.’

  Ilanna nodded, but didn’t reply.

  The quality of the air was markedly different, no longer pestilential decay, but the hard, bitter reek of industry. Heavy with the hot oil and friction of nearby engines, the smell should have been reassuringly familiar to her.

  Instead, it filled her with the unreasoning sense that they climbed towards something far worse than the senescent creatures below. Ilanna could find no logic to this, beyond the obvious threat of Telok, yet the feeling grew stronger with every reluctant step she took towards the surface.

  ‘Something wrong?’ said Roboute as she paused to clear her head.

  ‘No, I just–’

  A howl of something ancient exploded in the vault of her skull.

  Ilanna screamed as every atom of her flesh blazed with the imperative to flee. A cascade of catecholamines from her adrenal medulla catapulted her body into a state of violent tension.

  ‘Ilanna!’ cried Roboute, going to the ground as her weight dragged him down. ‘What is it?’

  ‘They’re coming!’ she cried, clawing at his arm and casting around for the source of her terror. ‘Didn’t you hear that?’

  ‘Hear what?’ said Roboute, kneeling beside her. She couldn’t see his face, but heard his concern. ‘All I hear are machines.’

  ‘They’ve come back,’ she sobbed. ‘They’re still coming for us. They won’t stop, ever.’

  ‘What are?’ said a voice Ilanna recognised as Tanna’s.

  ‘The Tindalosi,’ she said. ‘I can hear them in my head…’

  ‘They’re here?’ said Tanna, and Ilanna heard the scrape of damaged metal in his armour and the stuttering of his sword’s actuators. Its spirit was angry; many of its sawing teeth blades were missing.

  ‘No,’ she managed, triggering a burst of acetylcholine to regain a measure of homeostasis within her internal systems. ‘Not yet. I can hear them… in my head. I… I think that when I saw them, they… saw me too.’

  ‘Like a scent marker?’ asked Tanna.

  ‘That’s as good an analogy as any,’ said Ilanna, her fight or flight reaction beginning to recede. ‘Whatever hurts you and Ghostwalker did to them, it wasn’t enough.’

  ‘Then we will fight them again,’ said another Space Marine, Varda she thought. ‘And this time we will finish the job.’

  Ilanna shook her head. ‘No, you won’t. I mean no disrespect, Brother Varda, but you saw them. The beasts are imbued with some form of self-regenerative mechanism. You can’t hurt them. At least, not without my help.’

  An irritated flare of noospherics behind her.

  ‘Do not suggest what I know you are about to suggest, Magos Pavelka,’ said Archmagos Kotov.

  ‘It could help kill the hunting beasts,’ she said.

  ‘It is a curse upon machines,’ said Kotov. ‘You dishonour the Cult Mechanicus with such blasphemies.’

  ‘What is she talking about, archmagos?’ demanded Tanna.

  ‘Nothing at all, a vile perversion of her learning,’ said Kotov.

  ‘Speak, Magos Pavelka,’ ordered Tanna, and Ilanna almost smiled at the outrage she felt radiating from Kotov. Had they been anywhere within the Imperium, she had no doubt the archmagos would already have exloaded his Technologia Excommunicatus to the Martian synod.

  ‘When I was stationed on Incaladion, I–’

  ‘Incaladion? I might have known,’ said Kotov. ‘That is why you bear brands of censure in your noospherics? And to think I allowed a techno-heretic aboard the Speranza!’

  Tanna held up a hand to forestall further outrage from Kotov, and Ilanna was pathetically grateful to be spared a repeat of what she had heard from her accusers so long ago.

  ‘What is Incaladion?’ asked Tanna.

  ‘A forge world in Ultima Segmentum,’ said Ilanna. ‘I was stationed there a hundred and forty-three years ago when there were some… troubles.’

  ‘What sort of troubles?’ asked Tanna.

  ‘Researches into the shadow artes of the tech-heretek!’ snapped Kotov with a surge of indignation. ‘The worship of proscribed xeno-lores and artificial sentiences! Half the planet was in violation of the Sixteen Laws.’

  Kotov rounded on Ilanna. ‘Is that where you developed your heathen code?’

  ‘In service to Magos Corteswain, yes,’ answered Ilanna.

  ‘Corteswain? This just gets better and better!’ said Kotov.

  ‘Who was this Corteswain?’ asked Roboute.

  ‘He was a great man,’ said Ilanna. ‘Or at least he was before he disappeared on Cthelmax. He was Cult Mechanicus to the core, but a Zethian by inclination.’

  ‘I do not know what that means,’ said Tanna.

  ‘It means he held to ideals of innovation and understanding, of looking for explanations of techno-functionality that did not rely on the intervention of a divine being.’

  ‘You see?’ said Kotov. ‘Blasphemy!’

  Ilanna ignored him. ‘The possible applications of xeno-tech to existing Imperial equipment fascinated Corteswain, and he dared question established dogma regarding its prohibition. What you have to understand about Incaladion was that it was a world where a great deal of corrupted machinery ended up. Spoils taken in battle against the Archenemy. Machines and weaponry infected with scrapcode and infused with warp essences. Adept Corteswain developed a form of hexamathic disassembler language that could break the bond between a machine and whatever motive spirit lay at its heart.’

  ‘A curse on all machines!’ wailed Kotov.

  ‘It was a way to free those machines from corruption,’ said Ilanna with an indignant flare of binary cant. ‘Magos Corteswain saved thousands of machines whose souls were in torment.’

  ‘By killing them,’ said Kotov.

  ‘By freeing them to return to Akasha,’ said Ilanna. ‘Ready to be reborn in a new body of steel and light.’

  ‘Are you able to do the same thing?’ demanded Tanna.

  Ilanna nodded. ‘I broke Corteswain’s code into fragments and stored it within my backup memory memes. The dataproctors were thorough in their expurgatorius, but not thorough enough. It’s how I was able to
break the acausal locks of the universal assembler and get it working again.’

  ‘Could this code hurt the beasts?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Ilanna.

  ‘Sergeant Tanna, you cannot use this code,’ pleaded Kotov. ‘It violates every tenet of the Cult Mechanicus.’

  ‘Could it help fight these things?’ asked Tanna. ‘Answer honestly, archmagos, much depends upon it.’

  For a long time, Ilanna thought Kotov wasn’t going to answer, his noospherics warring between the likelihood of their death at the hand of the Tindalosi and the cost of allowing the use of unsanctioned technology.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last.

  Tanna pressed his sword into her hand.

  ‘Then do it.’

  Atop a soaring tower of steel and glass, Archmagos Telok looked out over his dying world. His waxen features cracked in the semblance of a grin as he saw it clearly for the first time in twenty-five centuries.

  Every universal assembler within five hundred kilometres was operating at maximum capacity, and Telok stood at the centre of the spreading calm. Beyond their influence, crackling columns of lightning flickered in the far distance, raising more of his crystalline army to the Speranza.

  The attack there was progressing well. Many of the peripheral decks and Templum Prime had already been captured. With the achievement of a singularity of consciousness within the warrior-constructs, full control of the ship was a mathematical certainty.

  Telok took a moment to savour the striking cerulean blue of the sky. Exnihlio’s atmosphere had been tortured with toxic discharges and electromagnetic distortion for so long, he had forgotten just how clear it could be.

  The colour was as he’d imagined the skies of Terra to have once been. Or perhaps its oceans. Ancient histories were so full of hyperbolic allusions to such things that it was difficult to be certain of anything.

  When he returned to Mars and remade the system’s star, the planets of the solar system would be reborn, free of the rotted institutions and hidebound cretins upon their surfaces.

  Just as the surface of Exnihlio would soon be wiped clean.

  Micromechanical disintegration had been endemic to this world’s every structure since the hrud’s entrapment, and without the Breath of the Gods to counter it, planet-wide decay was about to accelerate in exponential leaps.

  Telok took a last look around the world he had built and decided he would not miss it at all. In fact, he looked forward to seeing it torn apart from orbit, undone in a devastating cascade of temporal quakes.

  Nearly a kilometre below and rendered insignificant by distance, a thousand crystaliths thronged the base of the enormous tower, a glittering honour guard and witnesses to the culmination of his greatest achievement.

  Like worshippers gathering to hear a sermon, they encircled the vast, silver-skinned dome into which Telok had guided the crystal ship and its incredulous passengers. Telok almost felt sorry for Kotov, the poor fool believing he was here to rescue a benevolent exile rather than become his ensnared prey.

  He conceded that it had been a mistake to allow Kotov and his entourage to live, but vanity and ego would not let such a moment pass without Kotov fully aware of Telok’s genius. It vexed him that the Tindalosi had not slaughtered them at their first encounter, but the magos with the censure brands had proved resourceful in her employment of forbidden artes. The geas would be growing stronger within the Tindalosi, driving their thirst to depths of need that would be nigh unbearable. Already they were drawing the net tighter around Kotov.

  Then that particular loose thread would be cut.

  Telok lifted his jagged, crystalline arms to the sky, spreading them wide like some lunatic conductor poised to unleash his masterpiece.

  And a previously invisible seam split the dome in two.

  Its two curved halves began retracting, each folding towards the ground so smoothly that from here it appeared as though each previous segment was being subsumed into the next. The elliptical opening grew wider with every passing second, revealing a yawning void. The atmosphere grew tense, as though the fabric of the universe was aware of the paradigm shift taking place.

  Eventually, both silver slices of the dome had fully retracted into the ground and in its place was a black chasm four kilometres wide. Wisps of ochre vapour drifted from below like breath.

  Telok smiled at the appropriateness of the image.

  He raised his hands, like a summoner in the throes of a mighty invocation or a telekine striving to lift a starship. Though in truth, he was doing none of the lifting.

  A vaporous haze of reflected light emerged from the chasm, like a glittering swarm of microscopic flects. The distortion spread in a veiling umbra, a swaddling fog of electromagnetism that lifted the Breath of the Gods from its prison beneath the world.

  It emerged without undue haste; too swift an ascent would disturb the intricate dance of its unknowable internal architecture.

  As always, Telok was entranced by its magnificence.

  Even after millions of years locked away by its creators and forced to endure the denial of its very existence, the Breath of the Gods still had the power to entrance.

  The vast gyre of its impossible silver leaves and whirling facets emerged from its long entombment like a newly launched ship rising from a graving dock on its first ascent to the stars.

  It seemed to Telok that its outer edges, already immeasurable and inconstant, were expanding. Had releasing it from the cavern in which he had assembled the guttering ruin of its alien consciousness allowed it to assume a loftier scale?

  Liquid light spilled over the plaza, spreading over the assembled crystaliths like silver rain. The machine’s outline spun and clawed the air in mockery of all physical laws, each portion of the alien technology orbiting its own unknowable centre of non-gravity.

  The Breath of the Gods rose into the air with stately grace.

  To where the cavernous holds of the Speranza awaited it.

  Blaylock let the sensorium of the Speranza fill him with its pain. Each fallen deck was a void within him, a loss keenly felt. Dahan and Captain Hawkins were doing their best to keep the crystalline boarders contained, but the overwhelming numbers of the enemy were now starting to tell. Instantaneous coordination and communication between the attackers’ various elements was overcoming the advantage conferred to the ship’s defenders by their preparedness and familiarity with its structure.

  Blaylock sat sclerotic on the command throne, locked into the sensorium via a coiled MIU cable at his spine. The data prisms on the polished steel roof of the bridge were dull and lifeless, every inload now passing through him.

  His consciousness was partitioned into hundreds of separate threads, each one managing a ship-wide system as he sought to keep the Speranza functional. The war to keep the physical spaces of the Ark Mechanicus intact was not the only one being fought.

  Unknown assailants were fighting within the datasphere.

  The golden weave of Galatea’s stranglehold was tightening on the Speranza’s vital systems, while another presence was systematically burning them out with code that was more potent and pure than anything Blaylock had ever seen.

  Was the Speranza fighting back? Was this some form of innate and hitherto unknown defence protocol, like a sleeping immune system finally roused to combat an infection? Blaylock had no idea, but saw enough lethal code-fire being unleashed in the datasphere to know when to keep a safe distance.

  Kryptaestrex and Azuramagelli were hardwired into their system hubs with multiple ribbons of cabled MIUs. The deadly combat in the datasphere made noospherics unreliable, and the violent tremors shuddering through the ship’s superstructure made haptic connections prone to disconnection.

  Though both senior magi were belligerent, they had sense enough to leave the battle-management to Dahan. They too fought for the Speranza, but in
their own way. Kryptaestrex ensured a constant flow of ammunition and war-materiel to the fighting cohorts, cutting power and gravity to sections taken by the enemy.

  With Saiixek’s death, command of the enginarium had fallen to Kryptaestrex, but his every imprecation to their spirits was cast out, denied access to the firing rituals of ignition. Whether that was Galatea’s doing or Telok’s, the Speranza remained locked in orbit.

  Azuramagelli fought his war beyond the Speranza’s hull, attempting to light the shields and engineer some form of defence against the relentless blasts of teleporting lightning. The shields stubbornly refused to engage, but by altering the density and polarity of the gravimetric fields around the Ark Mechanicus, he had been able to deflect numerous bolts into the void.

  Passive auspex showed thousands of displaced crystal creatures, inert and devoid of movement, drifting in space. Each successful burst of gravimetrics or vented compartment brought a machine-bray of laughter from Azuramagelli and Kryptaestrex’s augmitters as they congratulated one another on a particularly impressive kill on the enemy.

  said Blaylock.

  answered Kryptaestrex.

 

  Kryptaestrex unleashed a binaric curse as a transport car of rotary cannon shells riding the induction rail was intercepted by a freshly arrived host of boarders.

  blurted Kryptaestrex, and the natural order of the world was restored.

  Azuramagelli snapped off a withering reply and turned his attention to the hull-surveyors in an effort to anticipate the next carrier bolt.

  Only Galatea played no part in the ship’s defence, which didn’t surprise Blaylock. The machine-hybrid had said little since the attack had begun. It paced the nave and circumference of the bridge on its misaligned legs, twitching and limping as though at war with itself.