‘Emperor save me, if he isn’t a sight for sore eyes!’ said Rae.
Hawkins had to agree, Magos Dahan was indeed a welcome sight.
The skitarii chanted something as Dahan’s Widows fired again. It sounded like a name, but it wasn’t one Hawkins recognised.
‘Ma-ta-leo! Ma-ta-leo!’
At its every shout, Dahan held his halberd aloft.
Bellicose roars of binary brayed from Dahan’s chest augmitters, a war cry that sent a shiver down even Hawkins’s spine. The quad bolters took down the two crystalline weapon beasts in precisely targeted bursts. Without them to punch through the Cadians, infantry power was stopping the rest of the advance.
For now.
As the skitarii pushed out to secure the edge of the ruined Law Courts, Dahan guided the Iron Fist towards the centre of the Cadian line. Mechanicus Protectors bearing shimmering energy shields and bladed staves ran alongside the modified vehicle.
‘Welcome to the Palace of Peace,’ said Hawkins as Dahan jumped down into the cover of the rubble-strewn berm of plascrete.
Dahan nodded and said, ‘I expected you to recognise it.’
‘Was a nice touch,’ said Hawkins.
‘Not one of mine,’ said Dahan. ‘I assumed you ordered it.’
Hawkins shook his head. ‘No.’
Rae got down on his knees and kissed the deck.
‘What in the name of the Eye are you doing, Rae?’
‘Thanking the Speranza, sir,’ said Rae. ‘Who else do you think did this for us? Told you the old girl would look out for us.’
Hawkins gave Dahan a quizzical look, but the Secutor seemed to accept Rae’s idea that the ship had wrought this arena to give them an advantage.
He shrugged. ‘As good as explanation as any, I suppose.’ he said. Figuring that was a mystery for another day, he gestured to the chanting skitarii fighting in the ruins.
‘Who’s Mataleo?’
‘I am,’ said Dahan.
‘I thought your first name was Hirimau.’
‘It is. Mataleo is what I believe you call a nickname.’
‘What does it mean?’ asked Rae.
‘Lion-killer,’ said Dahan. ‘A soubriquet I earned in my more organic days on Catachan. A soldier named Harker bestowed it upon me and its bellicosity appealed to the skitarii despite my best attempts to discourage its use.’
‘Outstanding,’ said Hawkins. Dahan had already won his respect, but earning a war-name from a Catachan? That was impressive.
‘I don’t suppose you saw any Cadian tanks on your way here?’
‘No, our paths did not intersect, but they are en route,’ said Dahan. ‘Assuming they encounter no resistance, they will arrive in twenty-seven minutes.’
‘Twenty-seven minutes, damn it all to the Eye,’ said Hawkins as more blasts of green fire streaked across the square and mushrooming explosions erupted along the Cadian line. Cries of pain and shouts for ammo echoed across the deck.
‘What in the Emperor’s name are you doing?’ said Hawkins, as Dahan stood and extended the crackling tines of his lower arms. ‘Get down!’
Dahan’s Cebrenian halberd pulsed with lethal energies as he climbed onto the crumbling ridge of debris. Flames licked around his clawed feet and his cloak snapped in the hot winds.
‘It is here,’ said Dahan.
‘What is?’ said Hawkins, peering through a gouge of vitrified plascrete. A host of crystalline warriors were advancing across the width of Angel Square. Broad and tall, each was armed with shimmering energy spines and long-bladed polearms that matched those of the Protectors.
At the centre of these elite killers was a towering thing of glass and crystal, a hideous amalgam of scorpion and centaur. Shield-bearers attended it. Las-fire and explosions bounced from their reflective shields.
‘The alpha-creature,’ said Dahan, springing onto the back of the Iron Fist. ‘Kill it and we regain the initiative.’
The vehicle’s engine revved madly, its machine-spirit eager to be loosed. Its tracks sprayed rubble as the vehicle crested the rise. Chem-rich exhaust fumes jetted from its rear vents.
‘You can’t fight that thing,’ shouted Hawkins.
The chanting skitarii bellowed the Secutor’s war-name as they marched out to fight alongside him.
‘Then you don’t know Mataleo,’ said Dahan.
The walls of the confero were no longer steel and glass, but an undulant vault of perfectly geometric cubes that formed an all-enclosing dome of impenetrable darkness. With Linya’s expulsion of Galatea from the shared neuromatrix, all pretence of reality had fallen away.
Hexamathic firewalls had thus far prevented the machine-hybrid from reaching them, keeping Linya and her fellow captives safe from its wrath.
Linya sat cross-legged in the centre of a circle of her fellow magi, the illusory retention of their physical forms the one concession to notions of three-dimensional space.
She cast her gaze around the circle and, one by one, each magos gave a curt nod until only Syriestte remained.
Syriestte nodded and said,
Linya began with a recitation of the first, most basic prayer to the Omnissiah, each of the captive magi joining in as she spoke.
Volatile deletion algorithms emerged from Linya’s mouth, like the ectoplasmic emissions of a psyker. But this was no immaterial by-product; these were lethal combinations of spliced kill-codes.
Dormant for now, they twisted around her like glittering chains of droplets on spider-silk, moving outwards towards the magi.
Haephaestus was first to be touched. His back arched and he gave a cry of agonised binary as the kill-codes enmeshed with his mind. Next was Natala, who took the pain stoically, then Syriestte.
The largely organic features of the Mechanicus Envoy twisted in horrendous pain, her eyes going wide at the shock of it. The kill-code moved around the circle of magi, touching each one until it had bonded with all but Magos Kleinhenz.
A portion of the oil-dark barrier bulged inwards.
The black cubes expanded at a ferocious rate, rearranging their mass and density into the form of a hideous data-daemon pushing into the vault. Its arms ended in hooked talons and draconic wings spread at its back.
This was an image birthed in primal nightmares, something bestial from an age when humankind huddled in caves around dying fires. Its roar was inchoate and murderous. The talons wrapped around Magos Kleinhenz and dragged him from the circle. He thrashed in the data-daemon’s grip, his outline distorting with strobing after-images of his screaming face.
His cr
ies descended into meaningless scraps of binaric fragments as he broke apart into drifting scads of data-light. Linya thrust her hands towards the data-daemon and shouted a canticle of hexamathic calculus.
It howled in pain as its nightmarish form was drawn back into the darkness, leaving the vault’s fluidly cubic perimeter rippling like the surface of a tar pit.
The last fragments of Kleinhenz drifted like fractal snowflakes. Haephaestus and Natala tried in vain to save some last aspect of their comrade, but it was already too late.
Syriestte turned to Linya, her organic face twisted in grief.
Just as she had sent a sliver of her consciousness into the datasphere to make contact with her father, Linya now sent her mind into the fulminate-bright realm of the Speranza’s informational landscape.
She closed her eyes and…
…found herself amid brilliant grid lines of data as they passed through the Ark Mechanicus in the Speranza’s hidden space of knowledge. Constellations of starfire surrounded her, brighter than she had ever seen them. Dazzling in the purity of the wealth of understanding stored within each and every pinprick of illumination.
The last time Linya had flown the datascape it had been a hallucinatory place of shared functionality. Phosphor-bright with continental-scale cores of learning and informational exchange.
Now it was a battleground.
Datacores burned with searing intensity, like supernovae on the verge of explosion. The last time Linya had seen them they had been dull with parasitic infestation, thick with Galatea’s self-replicating strangleholds. The machine-hybrid had held the Mechanicus hostage with its control of every vital system.
Now that control was all but gone. Only the last, most vital systems remained in its grasp. Still enough to kill every living being upon the Speranza should it so choose, but its hold was slipping even as Linya watched.
She saw a figure drifting high above the datascape. Arched spine, arms thrown wide and head tilted back. Golden light streamed from his hands, and where it touched Galatea’s parasitic growths and viral threads they melted like frost before the dawn.
He looked down as she flew towards him.
She heard the strain in his voice, saw the light bleeding from his ethereal body.
He looked at her strangely, as though seeing straight through her. He gave a crooked smile that was as melancholy as it was empathic.
Abrehem nodded and turned towards the molten brightness of the Speranza’s bridge. Searingly hot with convergent knowledge, the nexus of the ship through which every fragment of data passed and was rendered known.
For all that Abrehem Locke had managed to disrupt Galatea’s control of the Speranza, the machine-hybrid still controlled the vital systems of the Ark Mechanicus. Telok felt Tarkis Blaylock trying to deny the Renard’s shuttle access to the foremost embarkation deck, but Galatea overruled his every attempt.
‘If you only knew,’ said Telok, watching the enormity of the Speranza fill the shuttle’s viewscreen. ‘You would welcome me aboard personally.’
The shuttle shuddered as it passed through the gravimetric fields surrounding the gargantuan ship. The violence of the transition surprised Telok, but he had never known a ship of such inhuman dimensions.
‘That thing coming up behind us,’ said Emil Nader at the helm. ‘It’ll be torn apart before it gets anywhere near the Speranza.’
Telok laughed, the booming sound filling the command deck of the shuttle.
‘The Breath of the Gods reshapes the cosmos, and you think mere gravity waves will trouble it?’
Nader shrugged. ‘I’m just saying it looks pretty fragile.’
Telok leaned over and placed a clawed hand on the pilot’s shoulder. ‘Indeed it is delicate, incredibly delicate. Even the slightest imbalance in its gyre would tear it apart. But if you were thinking of attempting something reckless, perhaps using this ship as a missile or simply ramming us into the side of the Speranza, know that I would snap your neck the instant I detected even a micron of differential in our course. And then I would allow Galatea a free hand with that atrophied thing you call a brain. I am led to believe you have some familiarity with what it can do in that regard.’
Nader shot a venomous glance at Galatea. The machine-hybrid’s palanquin sat low to the deck, its proxy body twitching with random synaptic impulses. Its brain jars flickered with activity, though one was shattered and trailed a host of dripping wires. The presence of Telok’s excised consciousness within Galatea granted him complete understanding of what was happening within his avatar’s neuromatrix.
‘The Stargazer’s daughter yet frustrates us,’ said Galatea, fully aware of Telok’s scrutiny.
‘It was a mistake to incorporate her,’ agreed Telok. ‘We greatly underestimated her will to resist.’
Galatea’s silver eyes flickered and its right arm spasmed in response. ‘Our body is under attack from within and without. It is most discomfiting.’
‘Once I have full access to the Speranza’s noospheric network and have inloaded the secrets of hexamathics, I will purge the neuromatrix of these rebellious presences.’
‘Purge the others, but leave Linya Tychon to us,’ said Galatea.
‘As you wish,’ said Telok, linking his senses with the exterior surveyors of the Renard’s shuttle.
Ninety kilometres below was the Breath of the Gods, slowly ascending towards a ventral cache vault. Originally designed for Centurio Ordinatus, these were the only spaces large enough to contain the spinning matrix of the machine.
And below the Breath of the Gods came twin geoformer vessels. Their tech-priest crews had pushed their reactors to breaking point attempting to resist the lure of its arcane mechanics before finally accepting that nothing could prevent them from trailing in its wake.
The entrance to the embarkation deck grew ever larger in the viewscreen and Telok increased the pressure on Emil Nader’s neck as they approached the terminal point of the docking manoeuvre.
‘Hold us steady, Mister Nader,�
�� warned Telok.
‘This is steady. You think it’s easy flying so close to something this big?’ said Nader, checking the avionics panel. ‘Feels like our ascent’s running a tad imbalanced or like we picked up some extra weight.’
Despite Nader’s concern, the shuttle slipped through the shimmering veil of the integrity field without incident. Telok felt the presence of a billion machine-spirits wash over him.
‘Control is not as complete as it ought to be,’ he said, instantly assimilating the flow of data through the unseen body of information within the Ark Mechanicus.
‘Mistress Tychon was resourceful in recruiting an ally within the body of the ship,’ said Galatea. ‘All indications are that he will soon be dead, allowing us to fully establish control of the Speranza once more.’
The shuttle touched down with a booming thud of landing claws, and Telok sighed as the presence of something infinitely greater pressed against the walls of his enhanced consciousness.
‘I feel its great heart beating deep within this body of iron and stone,’ he said. ‘Hidden deep within its matrices of logic and binary, but there for those with the vision to see.’
‘The Speranza,’ said Galatea.
‘Is but one of its names,’ said Telok as the shuttle’s forward ramp lowered. ‘But I will learn them all.’
The fates unspooled around Bielanna. She saw them all, lived them all. The world was cracking, torn asunder by the entropic vengeance of the hrud. She felt the alien host shift, migrating from this fleeting aspect of reality.
The power of the skein surged in her mind.
Time chained by the push and pull of the hrud and the Yngir engine now roared through Bielanna in a tsunami of temporal energies. She was the heart of the tempest, kneeling at the centre of her warriors as power flowed through her. She was a conduit for all the things that might yet be and all that never would.
Bielanna wept as she the felt the presence of the Dark Reaper touch her soul, Kaela Mensha Khaine revelling in his aspect of the Destroyer.
She was that Destroyer. She saw that now, the threads of those around her inextricably bound to her doom. None could escape their fate.
She had killed them all.
Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill Page 105