Priests of Mars Page 10

  ‘Yet you saw the flaw almost immediately,’ said Kotov. ‘Perhaps I should elevate you to command deck status?’

  ‘That will not be necessary,’ said Linya. ‘My expertise would be more efficiently employed in the cartographae as per the original mission parameters.’

  Kotov rubbed a hand that streamed dermic information into the atmosphere and nodded, which in turn sent drifts of information into the ship-wide noosphere.

  ‘Agreed,’ he said at last. ‘Azuramagelli, update your course with the corrections implemented by Mistress Tychon and inload the new information to the ship’s data engines.’

  ‘Yes, archmagos,’ said Azuramagelli, collapsing the updated course and pressing it back into the silver hub before him. Golden traceries of light bled into the cylinder, flowing like molten metal into the information network of the Speranza, which welcomed the new data with a surge of perfect numbers and harmonic proofs that chimed from the very walls.

  And a distant vibration of firing engines.

  Despite their lack of augmentation, Magos Dahan had to admit the Cadian troopers were effective soldiers. Though the 71st Hellhounds had been aboard the Speranza less than six hours, they had already run through numerous training scenarios with aggression and competence that belied their months of transit to Joura from the punishing warzones of the Eastern Fringe.

  It was a fact of the Imperium’s vast scale that most Guard regiments suffered a substantial degradation in their combat effectiveness after long periods of transit in the holds of a Navy mass-conveyor. Soldiers and officers alike fell prey to a lassitude engendered by long periods of absence from the front line and the detrimental effects of prolonged immaterium travel.

  Not so with these Cadians.

  Three times the generator building had been captured, and with every assault the time between the opening shots being fired to the final room being cleared was getting shorter. The building shook with flat, muffled bangs and flickered with the strobing flashes of concussion grenades. Shouting troopers yelled in terse shorthand, a simple battle cant that had clearly been honed over years of service together on their benighted home world.

  It had taken Dahan less than a second to comprehend the simple codings of their cant, relying as it did on local argot and embedded cultural references. A simple index scan of database: Cadia, and a matching of shouts to actions provided the necessary syntax key to unlock the more complex orders. An inefficient means of relaying commands, but without access to the noosphere or any binaric link between soldiers, it was the best means of conveying orders in the heat of battle without compromising operational security.

  The vast training deck echoed with barks of las-fire and detonations, shouted orders and the roaring of tank engines. Spanning almost the entire width of the Speranza, this area of the ship was entirely given over to combat drills, training facilities and exercise grounds. Entire armies could train here, utilising the time between origin and destination to turn newly-raised regiments into battle-ready formations by the time a journey was over.

  Any number of battlescapes could be mocked up. Entire cities could be raised in prefabricated permacrete, deserts sculpted by dozer rigs or vast forests embedded in the ground. The training deck was Dahan’s fiefdom aboard the Speranza, and he prided himself that there were no battle-scapes he could not create with his logistical resources, no testing ground that would not offer a host of challenges to a training force.

  Accompanied by a cluster of servitor scribes, skitarii guildmasters and apprentice magi, Dahan made his way through the safe zone in the centre of the deck on the back of an open-topped variant of the Rhino chassis with a quad-mounted battery of heavy bolters fitted to its glacis. Known as an Iron Fist, it had been developed from a scrap of STC data uncovered on forge world Porphetus prior to its loss to the bio-horrors of the Great Devourer. It had yet to achieve full Mechanicus ratification, but Dahan liked its blunt profile and the single-mindedness of its purpose enough to employ it regardless of its unofficial status.

  Its machine-spirit was a bellicose thing, eager to be at war, and he could feel its urge to take part in the battle drills being carried out to either side. Dahan shared its desire, for he too had been built for war and the taking of life. Every facet of his flesh was enhanced to kill: implanted rotator cannons sheathed over his shoulders, sub-dermal lightning claws and digital scarifiers in his wrists and fingertips, target prioritisers, electrically-charged floodstream, flame-retardant skin coatings, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree combat awareness surveyor packages, and enhanced substrate ammunition storage.

  Dahan was a killing machine, a mathematician of death.

  With over sixteen billion combats inloaded and structurally analysed, his statistical synthesis of the fighting styles of a hundred and forty-three life forms had enabled him to compile a database of almost every combat move possible. Few were the opponents who could surprise Hirimau Dahan, and fewer still would have a chance of besting him.

  Dividing his multi-faceted eyes and senses between the various battle drills being carried out around his tank, Dahan soaked up the myriad sources of information being generated by the thousands of soldiers working through punishing combat simulations.

  Cadian tanks rolled through a mock-up of a ruined cityscape, driven with machine-like precision as automated gun emplacements set up to mimic dug-in enemy units opened fire. No sooner was each position revealed, than a pair of supporting tanks would engage the enemy as the target tank raced for cover. With the enemy suppressed, twin Hellhound tanks would roll in from the flanks and unleash blazing streams of promethium over their position.

  Infantry moved up in support of the tanks, ensuring any remaining enemy soldiers were eliminated. Sniper units riding on the roofs of Chimera armoured fighting vehicles took shots of uncanny accuracy to take out ambush teams armed with missile launchers or any other form of tank-killer.

  With each pass, Mechanicus gene-bulked ogryns and heavy lifter rigs would move in and rearrange the cityscape’s plan in ever more elaborate and deadly ways, with blind corners, fire-pockets, kill-zones, funnel-streets and herringbone crossfires. And every time, the Cadians rolled through with cool, disciplined fury, meeting every new threat with confident rigour. Even on the most testing of battlefield arrangements, few tanks were lost, and even then none were beyond the ability of Atlas salvage teams to recover and repair.

  Other units practised marksman drill, yet more close-combat operations. Officers in black and grey, with bronzed breastplates and peaked caps, shouted orders, and even the black, storm-coated commissars were training as hard as any of the soldiers; something of a rarity among the Guard units Dahan had fought alongside.

  It was, Dahan reflected, a thing of beauty to watch battle being given with purity of purpose.

  Few flesh and blood regiments could achieve anything close to Mechanicus levels of efficiency in war, and Dahan had to admit that Kotov had chosen well by requesting a formation of Cadians.

  Yes, they were an efficient fighting force, but they were no skitarii.

  Dahan’s own warriors fought through a battlescape comprising a mixture of terrain types. Urban ruins, rugged desert and dense forests. Armoured in black, with form-fitting body armour, the skitarii fought without the grunting, sweating exertion of the Cadians. With physiques boosted by stimm-shunts, adrenal boosters and dormant muscle-enhancers, they had not the need for the aggressive yells that dulled the fear response and triggered hormonal changes to enable a soldier to flout his body’s survival instinct.

  Carefully controlled chemical stimulants drove skitarii bodies, together with mechanised augmentations to boost accuracy, strength and speed. Already the best of the regiments from which they had been plucked, these soldiers were the elite of the Mechanicus, rendered into some of galaxy’s premier fighting men and women.

  Very infrequently, Dahan would observe a combat manoeuvre being carried out with below-optimal efficiency and a terse burst of binary would blurt from his thr
oat augmitter to issue rectifying commands and punishment data. Dahan was a master of the arts of war, a tactician and a warrior, a magos who had become his own test-bed for the weapon upgrades and fighting styles inloaded from other skitarii forces through the forge world Manifold. To fight and kill in ever more inventive and efficient ways was Dahan’s means of drawing closer to the Omnissiah. As the Machine-God revealed new and ever more deadly forms of ending life, Dahan made it his mission in life to learn them all and to excel in all the lethal arts.

  He paused by the ruined structure of a barracks building as a mob of sweating soldiers emerged from within. Their skin was ruddy and gleaming with sweat. Uniforms were rumpled and dusty, and to all outward appearances, the troopers appeared to be an ill-disciplined bunch. Their captain led them from the building with a rifle slung over his shoulder, its muzzle drooling fumes from heat-discharge.

  The building’s noospheric data registered it as cleared, and Dahan scanned for death markers on the soldiers. The barracks structure was one of the most lethal facilities to assault, and Dahan paused and halted the Iron Fist with a pulse of thought along the MIU linked to its machine-spirit.

 

  Reams of data streamed from the walls of the barracks like illuminated smoke. Each of the automated defence systems, servitor-crewed weapons and random kill permutations designed to inflict maximum casualties were fully functional.

  Yet the Cadians had captured it without losing a single trooper.

  The side of the Iron Fist opened up and Dahan unplugged from the machine-spirit as he stepped down to the deck. The Cadians altered step, ready to give him a wide berth, but he held up a hard-skinned hand to stop them.

  ‘Captain Hawkins, your soldiers took the barracks structure.’

  ‘Is that a question?’ asked the captain.

  ‘No,’ replied Dahan, pushing back his hood to reveal his half flesh, half machine skull. ‘Did it sound like one?’

  ‘I suppose not, but my ears are still ringing from a concussion grenade Manos threw a little later than I’d have liked.’

  The chastened trooper shrugged and said, ‘I can’t help it if you’re so eager to get to grips with the enemy, you don’t wait for the blast. Sir.’

  Hawkins nodded grudgingly. ‘Fair point, Manos. So, adept, what can we do for you or are you just here to congratulate us on another sterling operation?’

  ‘I am Hirimau Dahan, and this is my training deck. I design the combat simulations and engineer the differing tactical situationals.’

  ‘Then you’re doing a bang-up job,’ said Hawkins. ‘These are some pretty tough fishes.’

  ‘Fishes?’ said Dahan. ‘I am not familiar with piscine life as it applies to combat operations.’

  Hawkins grunted in what Dahan assumed was amusement, but it was an officer whose biometrics identified him as Lieutenant Taybard Rae that answered. ‘It’s an acronym, sir. Stands for Fighting In Someone’s Hab. It’s what we call building clearances.’

  ‘I see,’ said Dahan. ‘I shall add it to my combat lexicon: Cadians.’

  Hawkins jerked his thumb in the direction of the barracks. ‘Yeah, we captured it, though it was a close run thing.’

  ‘You lost no men.’

  ‘That’s usually the way I like to run my operations,’ said Hawkins, earning grim chuckles from a few of his troopers.

  ‘The barracks structure is one of the most lethal buildings to fight through,’ said Dahan. ‘I am surprised you were able to take it without loss.’

  ‘Then you don’t know much about Cadians.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Dahan, ‘I have inloaded over thirty thousand combat engagements logged by Cadian regiments and/or recorded by Mechanicus forces to which they were attached.’

  ‘You don’t look much like a magos,’ said Hawkins. ‘Are you some kind of skitarii officer?’

  ‘I am a magos,’ said Dahan. ‘A Secutor to be precise. I specialise in combat mathematics, battle metrics and warfare at all levels: from close combat to mass mobilisations.’

  ‘Yeah, you look pretty handy in a fight,’ said Hawkins. ‘You should train with us sometime. Be good to see how the Mechanicus fight. Your skitarii look like they can handle some tough scrapes.’

  ‘They are the most efficient fighting force aboard the Speranza,’ said Dahan, allowing a modulation of pride to enter his voice as he communicated the sentiment via noospheric means to his troopers.

  Lieutenant Rae nodded towards a gantry railing that ran the length of the training deck.

  ‘I think they might argue with that,’ he said.

  Dahan turned as his combat awareness routines flashed up with a red-lined threat warning.

  High on the gantry above them stood seven figures, Kul Gilad and six warriors in black power-armoured warplate. The Black Templars surveyed the battle drills playing out below them, but Dahan could discern nothing of their reactions. The warriors’ armour was dark to him, their machine-spirits uncommunicative and silent to his interrogatives.

  Dahan called up to Kul Gilad. ‘Do you join us for combat operation drills?’

  The towering Reclusiarch shook his head. ‘No, Magos Dahan. We merely observe.’

  ‘On this deck, no one observes,’ said Dahan. ‘You fight or you leave.’

  ‘Training in this arena would serve no purpose,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘Its environments are too forgiving to test us.’

  ‘I believe you are mistaken,’ said Dahan.

  ‘Then you don’t know much about Black Templars,’ said Kul Gilad.

  Fifteen hours later, the Speranza finally broke the gravitational bonds of Joura. It turned its prow towards the outer edges of the system as the blue-hot sun of its engine section flared and shifted it from geostationary anchor. Even shifting its attitude fractionally was enough to boost the craft away from the blue-green planet below, and in deference to those that had helped ready it for its journey, Magos Saiixek feathered the engine outputs to create a swirling flare of variant radiation outputs that descended through the atmosphere to produce a vivid aurora over the northern hemisphere. Though such a gesture seemed out of character for the adepts of the Mechanicus, it was customary for departing explorator fleets to acknowledge the labours of those who had furnished them with the means to venture into the unknown.

  At least fifty ships remained in orbit, still suckled by the industry of the world below. The Guard muster for the Pergamus Sector still had weeks to go before its Lords Militant would consider their loading and supply complete. To muster enough men and materiel for a lengthy campaign was not an operation to undertake lightly. The presence of so many Mechanicus logisters had helped speed the process, and in thanks, the shipmasters of the muster ordered their gun decks to fire thunderous broadsides into space in their honour.

  On the planet’s surface, millions of eyes turned to the heavens, staring in wonder at the shimmering bands of variegated colour that sparkled through the troposphere like an orbital barrage. Amid this glorious cascade of irradiated exhaust dust and expended munitions, the Kotov Fleet broke orbit with Captain Surcouf’s vessel in the lead. The fleet turned towards the unknown, on a journey whose ending no one could predict. Alongside the Renard, the Black Templars ship Adytum knifed through space like a blade thrust to the heart.

  Where the rogue trader vessel was designed with a measure of flourish in its tall towers, flared wing section and needlessly aerodynamic profile, the shipwrights of the Adeptus Astartes had built their craft with but a single purpose. Though small in comparison to most ships employed by the Space Marines, the Adytum was a scrapper, a battle-scored veteran of a hundred or more vicious void engagements.

  And with a battle squad of Space Marines led by a Reclusiarch aboard, its fighting prowess was multiplied exponentially.

  A host of craft followed the three lead vessels: refinery ships, mining hulks, vessels that were little more than vast atomic reactors, manufactory ships, vast water-
bearing haulers, repair ships, and a host of fleet tenders that could be employed as general workhorses to ferry men and war machines between the fleet. In addition to the working ships of the fleet, Archmagos Kotov had assembled a Mechanicus warfleet with which to pierce the veil of the Halo Scar.

  The Retribution-class vessel Cardinal Boras had been constructed in the shipyards of Rayvenscrag IV nearly five thousand years ago and was no stranger to such voyages of exploration. As part of a fleet led by Rogue Trader Ventunius, it had ventured deep into the northern rim of the galaxy and had been one of only five vessels to return. Its guns had ended the Regime of Iron at the battle of Korsk, and its proud history included battle honours earned in over eighteen different sector fleets. It had fought as part of Battlefleet Gothic against the fleets of the Arch-Enemy, and with this latest secondment, it would once again venture beyond the light of the Astronomican.

  Moonchild and Wrathchild, two Gothic-class cruisers that had been little more than blazing wrecks when the Mechanicus had salvaged them off the shoulder of Orion, flanked the Cardinal Boras like devoted followers. Rebuilt and refitted to better serve the Mechanicus, their hulls had been consecrated at the Terminus Nox of Phobos and Deimos, when the regenerative aspects of the Omnissiah were at their apogee. Stalwarts of the Adeptus Mechanicus fighting fleets, both vessels had been virtually conjoined since their rebirth and deployments to separate battlefleets had seen them suffer inexplicable mechanical breakdowns and system-wide failures until they had been reassigned to work together.

  To repay a centuries-old Debita Fabricata to Archmagos Kotov, the forge world Voss Prime had despatched three heavily armed escort cruisers from Battlefeleet Armageddon to stand for Mars. Two Endurance-class vessels, Honour Blade and Mortis Voss sailed in arrowhead formation with Blade of Voss, an Endeavour-class ship killer. All three vessels bore honour markings bestowed by Battlefleet Armageddon, and Mortis Voss, whose mater-captain had delivered the deathblow to the greenskin flagship Choppa, bore the personal heraldry of Princeps Zarha, the fallen Crone of Invigilata.