Lords of Mars Read online

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  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Dramatis Personae

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  About The Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  Dramatis Personae

  The Speranza

  Lexell Kotov – Archmagos of the Kotov Explorator Fleet

  Tarkis Blaylock – Fabricatus Locum, Magos of the Cebrenia Quadrangle

  Vitali Tychon – Stellar Cartographer of the Quatria Orbital Galleries

  Linya Tychon – Stellar Cartographer, daughter of Vitali Tychon

  Azuramagelli – Magos of Astrogation

  Kryptaestrex – Magos of Logistics

  Turentek – Ark Fabricatus

  Hirimau Dahan – Secutor/Guilder Suzerain

  Saiixek – Master of Engines

  Totha Mu-32 – Mechanicus Overseer

  Abrehem Locke – Bondsman

  Rasselas X-42 – Arco-flagellant

  Vannen Coyne – Bondsman

  Julius Hawke – Bondsman

  Ismael de Roeven – Servitor

  The Renard

  Roboute Surcouf – Captain

  Emil Nader – First Mate

  Adara Siavash – Hired Gun

  Ilanna Pavelka – Tech-Priest

  Kayrn Sylkwood – Enginseer

  Gideon Teivel – Astropath

  Elior Roi – Navigator

  Adeptus Astartes Black Templars

  Tanna – Brother-Sergeant

  Auiden – Apothecary

  Issur – Initiate

  Atticus Varda – Emperor’s Champion

  Bracha – Initiate

  Yael – Initiate

  The Cadian 71st ‘The Hellhounds’

  Ven Anders – Colonel of the Cadian Detached Formation

  Blayne Hawkins – Captain, Blazer Company

  Taybard Rae – Lieutenant, Blazer Company

  Jahn Callins – Requisitional Support Officer, Blazer Company

  Legio Sirius

  Arlo Luth, ‘The Wintersun’ – Warlord Princeps, Lupa Capitalina

  Marko Koskinen – Moderati

  Joakim Baldur – Seconded Moderati

  Magos Hyrdrith – Tech-Priest

  Eryks Skálmöld, ‘The Moonsorrow’ – Reaver Princeps, Canis Ulfrica

  Magos Ohtar – Tech-Priest

  Gunnar Vintras, ‘The Skinwalker’ – Warhound Princeps, Amarok

  Elias Härkin, ‘The Ironwoad’ – Warhound Princeps, Vilka

  The Starblade

  Bielanna Faerelle – Farseer of Biel-Tan

  Ariganna – Striking Scorpion Exarch of Biel-Tan

  Tariquel – Striking Scorpion of Biel-Tan

  Vaynesh – Striking Scorpion of Biel-Tan

  Uldanaish Ghostwalker – Wraithlord of Biel-Tan

  001

  Knowledge is power. They call that the first credo, but they are wrong. Knowledge is just the beginning. It is in the application of knowledge that power resides. After all, what is the value of discovery if we do not put what we learn into effect?

  Millennia have come and gone since I became Mechanicus, but even as a novitiate caster of quantum runes, I was aware I had blindly accepted many principles unverified by my own experience as being true. Consequently, the conclusions I later based upon such principles were highly doubtful. From that moment of realisation I was convinced of the necessity of ridding myself of all the principles I had unquestioningly adopted.

  I would build knowledge from my own self-discovered truths.

  010

  An ancient Terran order of techno-theologians once boasted heraldic devices emblazoned with the words Nullius in Verba, which even a basic proto-Gothic lexical servitor can tell you means Nothing upon Another’s Word. It is a credo I have lived by and by which I will die. The Venusian epistolarian who first scratched those words into cured animal hide was wise indeed, and the inheritors of the Red Planet would do well to recall his wisdom.

  But the priests of Mars have lost sight of what it means to be Mechanicus.

  The magi rejoice at scraps swept from the tables of gods and think themselves blessed. They bear such relics aloft like the greatest prizes, little realising that such intellectual flotsam and jetsam is worthless in the grand scheme of galactic endeavour.

  They are idiot children stumbling around the workshop of a genius. The tools and knowledge they require to rebuild the glory of Mankind’s past is at their fingertips, yet they see it not. They wield lethally unpredictable technologies like playthings, heedless of the damage they wreak and ignorant that they are losing as much as they gain with every fumbling step.

  So much that was lost has been rediscovered, they cry, but like a million scattered fragments of a puzzle, they are useless unless combined. With all that has been hidden beneath the sands of the Red Planet, we could rebuild the Imperium as it was in the halcyon days of the first great diaspora. We could achieve the dream upon which the Emperor was embarked in the fleeting moments of peace following the Pax Olympus.

  Ah, how I wish I could have been there. To see the Omnissiah when He walked in the guise of flesh. To bathe in His light and feel the serenity of perfect code flowing through my body. One as mechanistically-evolved as I is not supposed to miss the soft, ever-degenerating meat-body I left behind in my ascension through the ranks of the Priesthood, but I would
accept its infinite limitations just to have beheld that moment with organic eyes.

  011

  Now I see the world through organic silica membranes and glassine-meshed diamond. A thousand microscopic machines infiltrate the fluids that circulate within my new body of crystal and light. My limbs are powerful beyond even the strength of the Adeptus Astartes, my mind capable of ultra-fast calculations that allow cognition speeds far in advance of even the Fabricator General.

  But nothing of such worth is ever achieved without sacrifice, and nothing is so fatal to the progress of Mankind as to suppose our grasp of technology is complete. To believe that there are no more mysteries in nature or that our triumphs are all won and there are no new worlds to conquer is to invite stagnation.

  And stagnation is death.

  I have travelled the void like few others before me.

  I have crossed the barriers of time and space and seen further than any other. The elemental forces of the universe are mine to command. Time, space, gravity and light bend to my will.

  Like the great celestial engineers of a far distant epoch, I carve the flesh of the galaxy to suit my desires. And where ancient war and forgotten genocides have wiped the slate clean, I have brought life and the promise of civilisation reborn.

  The Mechanicus venerates those who draw closer to its vision of union with the God of all Machines, and they are right to do so.

  But they have chosen the wrong deity.

  By any mortal reckoning, I am a god.

  So bold a statement could rightly be construed as arrogance.

  In my case, it is modesty.

  A simple statement of fact.

  I am Archmagos Vettius Telok, and I am remaking what was lost.

  Such is the power of my knowledge.

  Barely worthy of being designated a planet, the doomed world hung in the fringes of Arcturus Ultra’s rapidly diminishing Kuiper belt at the farthest extent of the star system. Much of this spatial region was composed of frozen volatiles – drifting agglomerations of ice, ammonia and methane – and these were slowly being turned to vapour by the thermal death throes of the newly named star’s rapidly expanding corona. The Oort cloud had thinned to the point of vanishing altogether, allowing the vessels of the Kotov fleet to approach the system without fear of taking damage from the debris scattered like celestial litter at the system’s edge.

  The dying planet had been christened Katen Venia, and its likely lifespan could be measured in months at best. It would soon be destroyed by the very star that had once nourished an unknown number of habitable worlds in that slender astronomical region named for a flaxen-haired thief of ancient myth.

  The closest planets to the star had already been reduced to metallic vapour by its expanding heat corona and now only Katen Venia remained. Its outer layers of frozen nitrogen had almost entirely boiled off into space, exposing a surface of cratered ice and rock, soaring crystal growths of geometric beauty, abyssal canyons of sheared glaciers, and swathes of desolate tundra that had been ripped raw by the gravitational push and pull of its chaotic orbit.

  Any currently uncontested method of celestial cartography would regard Katen Venia as an unremarkable world, a bare rock devoid of any notable features warranting attention. Only the study of its demise would be of any interest to most magi. Yet for all its apparent worthlessness, there was one aspect to Katen Venia that rendered it valuable beyond measure.

  Telok the Machine-touched, whose explorator fleet had been lost with all hands, had come this way. Numerous legends of Mars spoke of his foolhardy quest into the unknown to unearth an ancient technological marvel known as the Breath of the Gods. Each tale was embellished with its own twist to Telok’s obsession, but all agreed that his quest had come to a bad end.

  But a newly-revealed relic of his doomed expedition had come to light, offering tantalising hints that the Lost Magos had actually found something in the unknown reaches beyond the light of familiar stars: a saviour pod beacon indicating that the newly-named Katen Venia was the final resting place of Telok’s flagship, the Tomioka.

  It was this that had brought an Adeptus Mechanicus explorator fleet of such magnitude as had not been assembled for millennia to leave the confines of the Milky Way and establish orbit around the planet’s northern polar regions.

  The heart of this fleet was a vessel that could be called unique without fear of contradiction. A mighty star-borne colossus. A relic of a time when the mysteries of technology were not shrouded in a veil of ignorance, and whose violent birth had destroyed a world. Its inhuman scale was the product of men who dared to build the greatest things their imaginations could conceive.

  Its name was Speranza, and it was Ark Mechanicus; the flagship of Archmagos Lexell Kotov.

  Unlike the battleships built in the Imperium’s fortified shipyards, the Ark Mechanicus had not been wrought with any martial aesthetic in mind, nor had it accrued centuries of encrusted ornamentation to glorify long-dead saints or heroes of war. It was a vessel that would never be called beautiful, even by those who had built it, for it had no symmetry, no clean lines nor even much of a straight axis that allowed for spurious notions of aerodynamics.

  The Speranza was a vessel forever bound to the void, and only the positioning of its vast plasma engines’ containment-field generators allowed an observer to know which end was the prow and which the stern. Its outer hull was a tangled arrangement of intestinal duct-work, exposed skeletal superstructure, and ray-shielded crew spaces. Its graceless topside and its bulbous underside were ribbed plateaus overgrown with geometric accretions of unchecked industry. Refineries, ore-processing plants, gene-holds, test ranges, manufactories, laboratoria, power generators and assembly forges clung to its flanks in a haphazard arrangement that owed nothing to any design philosophies other than need and practicality. The Speranza was a vessel of exploration and research, a mariner of the nebulae whose sole task was to be part of Kotov’s Quest for Knowledge.

  Though the bulk of the Ark’s unimaginable mass was given over to the workings of technology and construction, it was not without teeth. Conventional munitions and rudimentary void-weaponry punctuated its length, but desperate need had revealed the presence of weapon technologies many magnitudes more lethal, secreted within lightless compartments long since forgotten by all save the ship itself.

  The vessel was nothing less than a forge world cut loose from the surface of the planet whose death spasm had birthed it, a sprawling landmass of cathedrals to technology and the quintessential embodiment of the Cult Mechanicus’s devotion to the Omnissiah. At the heart of the Speranza was an electro-motive spirit formed from the gestalt conjoining of a trillion machines and more, a terrifyingly complex hybrid of intelligence and instinct that was close to godlike.

  Like any representation of the divine, it had devotees.

  A fleet of ancillary vessels kept station around the Speranza: fuel carriers, warships, troop transports, supply barques and a host of shuttles and bulk tenders that passed between them in strictly observed transit corridors. Moonchild and Wrathchild, twin reconditioned Gothic-class cruisers, patrolled the flanks of the Speranza, while Mortis Voss, the last survivor of the trio of vessels despatched from Voss Prime, drifted mournfully above the Ark’s dorsal manufactories.

  Honour Blade had been lost in an emergency translation from the warp at the very edge of the galaxy, while Blade of Voss had been torn apart by a gravitational hell-storm during the nightmare crossing of the Halo Scar. Nor had these been the most grievous losses suffered by the fleet on its perilous journey to sail beyond the galactic boundary.

  Cardinal Boras, a vessel of grand heritage that had braved the tempests of the warp from one side of the galaxy to the other, had been destroyed by ambushing eldar reavers. The Adeptus Astartes accompanying the fleet had likewise suffered grievous loss, for those selfsame reavers had gone on to board the Black Templars rapid strike cruiser that bore the proud name Adytum. Though the crusaders it carried had escaped to fight
another day aboard the Thunderhawk Barisan, their Reclusiarch was slain as the Halo Scar’s crushing gravity waves claimed the ship’s corpse of steel and stone.

  Those raiders had evaded the fleet’s retribution by the slenderest of margins, and the warships tasked with the Speranza’s protection were taking no chances of being caught out again.

  One other vessel of note made up the last element of Archmagos Kotov’s fleet. Though nearly three kilometres in length, the Renard was insignificant in comparison to the hulking ships of the Mechanicus, but she was fast and built with a grace and poise the Speranza lacked.

  Her shipmaster was Roboute Surcouf, and Katen Venia was the world he had named.

  He would be the first to see its skies.

  It was why he had come this far.

  ‘You know, for someone who lives in space, you’re bloody useless at putting on a void-suit,’ said Kayrn Sylkwood, enginseer of the Renard, refastening the seals of her captain’s bulky, baroquely-ornamented suit of exo-armour. ‘If I let you go outside like this you’ll be dead inside of thirty seconds.’

  Roboute Surcouf shook his head. ‘I live inside a starship so I don’t have to wear a void-suit,’ he said, his voice sounding scratchy and distant through his helmet’s vox-grille.

  Sylkwood wore the grey army fatigues and tight-fitting vest top of her former Cadian regiment, her broadly-built upper body permanently sheened with the oil, grease and incense of the propulsion decks that were as much a part of an enginseer’s uniform as any shoulder badge or rank pin. Functional communion augmetics made her shaven skull knotty with brutal implants, and haptic sub-dermals in her fingers and palms gave her a solid heft and a mean right hook.

  She made one last circuit of Roboute, tugging at seams, adjusting pressure connectors and checking the suit’s internal atmospherics on the bulky backpack. Satisfied, she took a step back and nodded to herself.

  ‘Happy now?’ asked Roboute.

  ‘Moderately less irritated at your stupidity would be a better way of putting it.’

  ‘I can live with that,’ said Roboute, turning away and stomping over the deck to where Adara Siavash helped Magos Pavelka prep the grav-sled for the surface. Little more than a heavy, rectangular slab of metal with a pilot’s compartment at one end and a repulsor generator mounted underneath, the sled was the workhorse machine of the Renard. Its engine was rated for a cargo load of sixty metric tonnes and a volume of a hundred cubic metres, though it had been a long time since it had carried anything of such bulk. It floated on a cushion of distorted air that made Roboute’s teeth itch even through the protection of his void-suit.