Forge of Mars - Graham McNeill
Page 112
Finally, weary and stripped of their most prominent aspects of genius, Telok and Kotov came apart above a deep datacore of molten gold. They bled light, mercury bright, and ashen memories of things once known drifted from them like tomb dust.
Linya and Abrehem finally caught up to Kotov and Telok, putting themselves in the dead space between the two archmagi.
Linya hurled herself at Telok, Abrehem at Kotov.
Both struck at the same instant, and Kotov felt the essence of Abrehem Locke’s Machine-touched spirit merge with every aspect of him. He felt as though his body was transformed, his perceptions turned inside out. Hard logic and reason blended with intuition and lateral thinking in ways he had never considered.
Kotov looked up and saw the same process under way within Telok as Linya Tychon merged herself with the core of his very being.
But where the union of spirits had been beneficial to Kotov, the opposite was true for Telok. His inner workings laid bare like a clockwork automaton on a workbench, Kotov saw why instantly. Linya Tychon was not simply Linya Tychon, but a spirit-host of vengeful tech-priests.
Each of whom bore within them a lethal hexamathic kill-code.
Telok howled as it was loosed within him, a viral fire against which he had no defence. It ravaged his systems, wiping decades of learning every second. Constantly evolving in self-replicating lattices, the kill-code transferred itself from system to system within Telok’s internal system-architecture.
It destroyed everything it touched, reducing his vast databases to howling nonsense code and rendering the accumulated knowledge of centuries of study to irrelevant noise.
Telok’s form twisted as the viral conflagration burned him alive from the inside out. His screams were those of a man who could feel everything he ever was being systematically ripped away.
But Telok was an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and even as Kotov watched, he was adapting, excising and rewriting his own internal structure to halt the cancerous spread of the kill-code.
Now, Archmagos Kotov, said a voice within him.
Locke.
You have the power of the Machine-touched now. Use it.
Kotov lifted his hands towards the molten gold of the datacore, feeling something indefinable move within him. It was power, but power unlike anything he had known before. Power like the first of the Binary Saints were said to have wielded, the ability to commune with machines as equals. To walk with them as gods on the Akashic planes on the road to Singularity.
Kotov drew on the light of the datacore.
And the Speranza’s soul poured into him.
Kotov’s eyes were burning discs of golden light, the secret fire that only suns know, the spark that ignited the universe. From first to last, he knew everything.
Everything.
Shimmering armour of gold and silver encased Kotov, battleplate as titanic and ornate as any worn by the legendary primarchs or even the Emperor Himself.
A sword of fire appeared in his hand, its hilt and winged quillons forming a two-headed eagle wrought in lustrous gold.
Pure knowledge, weaponised wisdom.
Telok writhed as he purged himself of the kill-code.
Almost nothing remained of it, but it had done what Linya intended, stripping Telok of vast swathes of armoured knowledge.
He plunged the blazing sword into Telok’s heart.
This was the end of all things.
The mon-keigh believed the End Times would come in a tide of battle and blood, of returned gods and the doom of empires. Even the eldar myth cycles spoke of a time called the Rhana Dandra, when the Phoenix Lords would return for the last great dance of death.
Bielanna knew of no species with legends that spoke of things simply ending. Where was the mythological drama in that?
The skein’s golden symmetry was unravelling, the futures collapsing. The fates of all living beings were unweaving from the great tapestry of existence. Entropy in the material world was mirrored in the skein, and its shimmering matrix was falling apart as the tear in space-time caused by Archmagos Telok ripped wider.
Bielanna plunged into the heart of the maelstrom of breaking futures, her spirit a shimmering ghost in the skein. The spirits within Bielanna quailed at being within the skein. Their fear was understandable. No longer protected from She Who Thirsts by their spirit stones, they feared the fate that had befallen Uldanaish Ghostwalker. They were warriors and the skein was a mystery to those who wore the war-mask; how could they possibly understand what she attempted?
With her body of flesh and blood no more, every moment in the skein was eroding her spirit’s existence. Only by the power her kin had freely given her was she here at all. If they died, she died and every sacrifice, every drop of blood shed would have been in vain.
Bielanna felt Tariquel steady them by reciting the Swans of Isha’s Mercy, the dance he had performed for Prince Yriel in the Dome of Autumn Twilight. His faith in her was an anchor to which the others could cling. She heard other voices too, Vaynesh and Ariganna Icefang, each adding their belief in her to her strength.
She whispered a thank you that shimmered in the weave and became part of its structure.
Bielanna followed the skein’s collapsing paths, walls of imagined gold and light folding in as the futures they represented no longer held any meaning to the universe. Bielanna flew though the destruction like the wildest Saim-Hann autarch, twisting through collapsing webways, pushing ever deeper into the psychic network.
Pathways closed behind her. Ways ahead snapped shut the instant before she took them. Swarms of warp spiders billowed from their lairs, skittering in their millions towards the few remaining paths into the future.
Cracks in the walls blew out like the ruptured hull of a wounded wraithship. The howling Chaos in the empty spaces beyond called to her, the laughter of She Who Thirsts and the whispered intrigues of the Changer of the Ways.
She felt their pull on her soul, but sped on, hardened to resist such blandishments.
Everywhere she looked, the potential futures were narrowing to a vanishingly small number. Bielanna wept to see the universe’s potential so cruelly snuffed out. To wipe out the future by design was a scheme of purest evil, but to erase it unknowingly… that was the act of a fool.
Another path into the future slammed shut, a billion times a billion unborn lives denied their chance to exist. Bielanna despaired as the skein folded in on itself everywhere she turned. With every slamming door, that despair threatened to overwhelm her and extinguish her spirit entirely. Bielanna wept as she realised she could see no way onwards. Every route was sealing ahead of her and closing off every avenue of hope.
Hope…
Yes, hope was the key.
Because other farseers must have seen this.
To believe otherwise spoke of great arrogance on her part. But if they had, why had none of them taken any action to prevent this universal extinction event from coming to pass?
Then Bielanna realised at least one of them already had.
After all, she was here right now in this moment.
Had her entire life been manipulated to bring her to this point?
Was she as much a pawn in some greater game as the lesser races of the galaxy were to her? Mon-keigh worlds were burned and their populaces consigned to death by the decrees of the farseers for the sake of a single eldar life.
If it was meant to
be that Bielanna was here, then it was because a seer council on some distant craftworld had foreseen it and had placed her here at just this moment, for just this purpose.
She wanted to hate these unknown farseers. She wanted so badly to hate them for consigning her and her kin to death. For denying her children their chance to be born.
But she could not.
She understood the cold logic at the heart of such a decision. She had made similar choices, knowing that by enacting them she was consigning sentient beings to death. Even the greatest seers could not see just how far the ramifications of their choices might reach.
That she was here at all told Bielanna that at least one seer had seen that she might prevent this cataclysm from coming to pass. And with that thought, the despair vanished like breath on cold wraithbone.
Bielanna saw one last path before her, a slender future that yet resisted extinction. Her spirit soared as she flew towards it, trailing a glittering stream of psychic light behind her. Bielanna blazed into this last path in the final instants of its existence.
Like threading the eye of a needle.
Archmagos Kotov opened his eyes and took a great, sucking breath of air, amazed he could actually do so. He blinked away the shimmering memory of a place of light and wonder, a place where there were no limits on the power of thought and the glories it could achieve.
The hulking form of Archmagos Telok filled his vision, his lunatic face frozen in an expression of hatred.
It took him a moment to comprehend that Telok was dead, that he, in fact, had somehow killed him. The face of the Lost Magos had always been artificial and unnatural, waxy with its plasticised textures and unknown juvenats, but now it was entirely crystalline.
He tried to pull away from that icy glare, but found himself locked in place by a bladed fist that skewered him to the Speranza’s command throne.
‘Ah, of course,’ he said. ‘Telok has killed me too.’
‘Not quite,’ said a voice at his shoulder. ‘Though he gave it his best shot to kill both of us.’
‘Tarkis?’
‘Indeed so, archmagos,’ said Blaylock. ‘Now, please, hold still while we cut you loose.’
Kotov tried to turn his head, but the blades pinning him in place kept him from moving. He felt the presence of others around him, but could not identify them, his senses still aligned to another place, another reality. He heard a high-pitched buzzing sound, a plasma cutter biting into glass.
‘I thought you were dead, Tarkis.’
‘As did I,’ replied Blaylock. ‘But rumours of my death, etcetera, etcetera. Telok incapacitated me with what I assume was some form of post-hypnotic command, buried within his overload attack when he destroyed our escort ships. Regrettably, I did not recognise the danger until it was too late.’
‘The same could be said for all of us,’ said Kotov. ‘The Speranza? Is it still ours?’
Blaylock nodded. ‘Reports are still coming in, archmagos, but, yes, it appears the enemy attack has stalled with Telok’s demise.’
Glass snapped with a brittle crack as the plasma cutter sliced through the last of Telok’s claws.
‘Ave Deus Mechanicus!’ cried Kotov as bio-feedback sent shock waves of pain around his ruined body.
‘All clear, Master Yael,’ said Blaylock.
Telok moved, but not through any animating force of his own. Like the statue of a freshly deposed ethnarch, Archmagos Telok was toppled by the equally hulking form of a Space Marine. He hit the deck hard and shattered into a thousand pieces, fragments of dull, lifeless crystal skidding across the deck and spilling tiny fragments of cubic nano-machinery.
‘What did you do to Telok?’ said Roboute Surcouf, bending with a grimace of pain to retrieve a long, dagger-like shard of crystal remains. ‘One minute we were getting horribly killed, the next he stabs you then turns to glass.’
The rogue trader’s face was a mass of bruised purple, and from the way he held himself, it was clear his collarbone was broken, as well as several ribs and probably his arm.
‘I…’ began Kotov, but his words trailed off. ‘I fought him in the datasphere, but I wasn’t alone. Mistress Tychon and Bondsman Locke were there too. Without them I would be dead.’
Kotov looked down at his ruined chest, a mass of shattered bio-organic circuitry and floodstream chemicals.
‘Diagnostic: it appears I was correct in my initial assessment. Why am I not dead? Damage from this blow should have killed me.’
‘You are correct in surmising that you should be dead,’ said Blaylock. ‘That you are not speaks volumes as to the singular nature of your experience within the datascape. Perhaps you will illuminate me as to its nature?’
‘One day, Tarkis,’ agreed Kotov, allowing himself to be helped from the command throne. ‘But not now. Telok is dead, but what of his army and the Breath of the Gods? What of the tear in space-time?’
‘See for yourself,’ said Blaylock, moving aside to allow Kotov an unimpeded view of the main display and the slowly restoring veils of data-light.
At first Kotov wasn’t sure what he was seeing.
Exnihlio was dying, that much was obvious. Its continents were cracking apart, each landmass fracturing in unsettlingly geometric patterns. Inset panels of low-level pict-scans showed vast mushroom clouds of atomic detonations as fusion stacks exploded and continent-wide electrical storms as the atmospheric processors finally exceeded their designed tolerances.
Everything Telok had built was being comprehensively destroyed, as if the violated planet were taking suicidal revenge for the havoc wreaked upon its environment. Soaring hives of industry toppled and colossal power plants spiralled to self-destruction as millennia of compressed time ripped through the planet’s structure. Thousands of manufactoria collapsed and the rapidly rising temperatures told Kotov a global firestorm was hours away at best.
Higher up, orbital space looked like the lethal aftermath of a battle, with vast swathes of glittering debris spread over hundreds of thousands of kilometres.
‘Is that the Breath of the Gods?’
‘What’s left of it,’ said Surcouf, limping over to Galatea’s tangled remains. ‘The two geoformer vessels rising in its wake triggered their engines and flew right into the heart of it. I don’t think we need worry about anyone putting it back together again.’
‘How? Who was able to take control of the geoformers?’
‘Tarkis says it was Galatea’s command authority that fired the engines,’ said Surcouf. ‘So I guess it was Linya that did it. Do you think she’s still in there?’
The machine-hybrid was nothing more than scrap metal now, its limbs and palanquin hacked to pieces in revenge for the death of Ven Anders. The black-robed proxy body looked like it had been through a threshing machine.
Its brain jars were shattered, leaking pinkish gel and trailing sopping wads of grey matter and brass connectors. One had been spared the fury, but its synaptic activity was fading.
Kotov shook his head. ‘I doubt it. And if there is anything left of Mistress Tychon, it will be gone soon. It is regrettable, but her sacrifice and assistance will be recorded.’
Surcouf’s jaw hardened in anger, and for a brief moment Kotov thought the rogue trader might actually attack him. The moment passed and Kotov turned back to the viewing bay. With Blaylock’s help he made his way to astrogation, where Magos Azuramagelli’s latticework form was still connected via a series of MIU ribbons.
‘Azuramagelli?’
A crackling stream of simplistic binaric communication told him that Azuramagelli was still functional, but only at the most basic level. Blaylock unsnapped a series of data-connectors and plugged them into the Master of Astrogation’s exload ports.
‘What’s happening out there, Azuramagelli?’ said Kotov.
Static crackled from beneath Blaylock’s hood, translating Az
uramagelli’s primitive binaric cant.
‘It’s a bloody hellstorm of epic proportions and we’re right in the middle of it, archmagos,’ said a gratingly artificial voice.
Standard issue speech rendition, but the words were unmistakably Azuramagelli’s.
‘Put simply, Exnihlio is tearing itself apart and collapsing into a primal cauldron of time singularities like the heart of a supermassive black hole. Once it reaches temporal critical mass, the fabric of space-time will tear itself apart. And, trust me, we do not want to be here when that happens.’
‘Just out of interest, how far away from something like that would we want to be?’ asked Surcouf.
The augmitters beneath Blaylock’s hood barked with Azuramagelli’s bitter answer.
‘Let me put it this way, Mister Surcouf. Within two hours this system and everything within it will cease to exist.’
Hawkins climbed from the turret of Mackan’s Vengeance and dropped to the deck beside the Baneblade’s forward track guard. Aside from one mangled sponson and a lot of blast scoring, Mackan’s Vengeance had come through the fight in good order.
He joined Karha Creed at the recreation of Vogen’s main gates in a sea of shattered crystal. The lieutenant was down on one knee, a handful of coal-dark particulates falling through her fingers.
‘You and your platoons fought well, Karha.’
She stood and brushed the black dust from her hands on her grey fatigues. ‘Thank you, sir. Any word from the rest of the regiment?’
‘Much the same as this so far,’ he said, pulling the coiled bead from his ear and letting it dangle over his sweat-stained collar. ‘Every deck’s reporting that the enemy forces froze in place then cracked and fell apart. It’s over.’
‘What do you think happened?’
Hawkins placed his fists in the small of his back and stretched the muscles there with a groan. All very well riding heroically into battle in the open turret of a tank, but he’d been bruised from pelvis to shoulder blades.
‘Damned if I know,’ he said. ‘Maybe Dahan killing that alpha-beast put them on a ticking clock, maybe the higher-ups managed to kill Telok or whoever it was controlling them, I don’t know. But if the regiment’s taught me one thing, it’s not to look a gift horse in the mouth. They’re dead, we’re alive. That’s good enough for me right now.’