Lords of Mars Page 12

  ‘And what do those studies tell you, archmagos?’ asked Anders. ‘Why bother protecting a ship that’s going to be destroyed along with this planet?’

  Kotov straightened, logic providing the only possible answer.

  ‘To keep the ship safe until it fulfils its function.’

  ‘And what function is that?’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Kotov. ‘I suspect we will only learn that once we go aboard.’

  The range-finder in Tanna’s helmet told him the Tomioka was two kilometres distant, though its immense scale made it look far closer. The Mechanicus contingent, a curious mix of warriors and explorers surrounded by Dahan’s atmosphere-capable skitarii, occupied the port-side assault battlement, while he and his battle-brothers stood on the starboard shoulder mount of Lupa Capitalina alongside a heavily-armed detachment of void-suited Cadians.

  Tanna had seen the mortal soldiers training and knew them to be competent fighters, but they weren’t Adeptus Astartes and that made them inherently unreliable. He kept his thoughts from Apothecary Auiden, his body frozen in the Tabularium’s morgue, knowing it would only compromise his squad’s efficiency. But no matter how he tried to compartmentalise his mind, allowing the grief to build behind walls of discipline and psycho-conditioning, Tanna felt the loss keenly.

  Yet another death that would see them lost without hope of returning to the Chapter.

  Tanna knew his warriors were suffering too, but he had no words for them, no soul-lifting oratory to salve the loss of their Apothecary. Like Kul Gilad’s death, Auiden’s loss could not be laid at his feet, but Tanna knew it was his responsibility to ensure every warrior under his command came back alive. A task that every commander of warriors knew they would ultimately fail.

  The Warlord’s rapid march was devouring the distance between the edge of the plateau and the vertical spire of the ship with every thunderous stride. Putting aside his mournful thoughts, he leaned over the cog-toothed battlements, seeing squadrons of Imperial Guard super-heavies and skitarii war machines following the god-engine. Both Warhounds wove a stalking path ahead of Lupa Capitalina, prowling like the superlative hunters they were.

  Far behind the Warlord’s advance, well-defended work crews from the Tabularium were digging the Barisan from its enveloping crystal prison. The honourable gunship was to be brought back aboard the Speranza and made whole once again.

  Tanna made a fist and placed it over his eagle-stamped breastplate.

  ‘You will fly again, great one,’ he whispered.

  ‘This isn’t right,’ said Varda, the Black Sword balanced over his shoulder guard and legs braced to counteract the swaying motion of the striding Warlord. ‘We came here expecting to find a crash site, the ruins of a dead ship rusting and decaying for the better part of four thousand years. But that vessel looks like it landed here a decade ago. What do you make of that, sergeant?’

  Tanna felt the scrutiny of his battle-brothers and knew they expected a meaningful answer.

  ‘It tells me that we should expect this ship to be defended at every turn.’

  Varda nodded, flexing his fingers on the hilt of the Black Sword.

  ‘By those crystal-forms?’

  Tanna nodded. ‘That, and worse,’ he said. ‘We took no measures to avoid detection on our approach to the Tomioka, so it is reasonable to assume that any Mechanicus presence here, even an old one, is aware of our arrival.’

  ‘Clearly,’ agreed Varda. ‘What is your point?’

  ‘If Archmagos Kotov is so sure there is someone here, why has there been no response to our arrival on this world?’

  ‘You don’t think those… gnnnh… crystal-forms that killed Brother… nggg… Auiden were a response?’ declared Issur, his anger making his involuntary twitches even worse.

  ‘If Archmagos Kotov is correct then those things were an automated response,’ said Tanna.

  ‘Perhaps the ship is damaged and can no longer detect orbital traffic,’ suggested Bracha, pointing to the crystal growths extruded from the Tomioka’s forward compartments. ‘Or it is possible those things, whatever they are, interfere with the ship’s surveyors.’

  Yael grunted. ‘Since when did you become a Techmarine?’

  ‘You have a better answer, boy?’

  Before Yael could rise to Bracha’s caustic words, Tanna intervened.

  ‘Even if whoever is aboard this ship has lost the capability of detecting vessels in orbit, they cannot have failed to miss a battle on their doorstep. Not to mention the sight of a Warlord Titan approaching. But they have not reacted to our presence at all.’

  ‘Suggesting what?’ asked Varda.

  ‘One of two things,’ replied Tanna. ‘Either there is no one aboard that ship or they are waiting for us to get closer before revealing themselves.’

  ‘An ambush?’

  ‘We will proceed under that assumption,’ said Tanna, and the posture of his knights racked up from readiness to combat imminent.

  ‘So it’s going… nggg… to be like an assault into a… nnng… void-lost hulk?’ asked Issur.

  ‘That is an acceptable paradigm for what we should expect,’ said Tanna, well aware of the difficulties in clearing a space hulk: the darkness, the blind tunnels, the labyrinthine internal structure of the agglomerated vessels – some of which would undoubtedly be of xenos origin. Not to mention the unspeakable horrors that often lurked within, tyrannic life forms, greenskins, fleshless abominations from the warp or worse.

  ‘At least we will have gravity,’ said Yael, ever the optimist.

  ‘True, but everything will be canted at ninety degrees,’ pointed out Varda. ‘There will be no floors, only bulkheads for footholds and cross-passages for secure footing. Every metre of our advance will be like the ascent of a cliff.’

  ‘Enough,’ said Tanna. ‘This is no different to any other assault. We go in, we kill what we find.’

  His certitude silenced them, but the unspoken consequence of their Apothecary’s death hung in the air between them like a curse. Nothing more was said until Lupa Capitalina’s advance had carried them to within five hundred metres of the Tomioka, and Tanna scanned the frozen cliffs encasing the lower reaches of the starship.

  Glacial ice shimmered with rainbow patterns of violet light and reflected metallic glints swam in its depths. Without impurities, it was virtually transparent, and the distorted image of the entombed ship was like looking at something submerged on a shallow river bed.

  Lupa Capitalina raised its plasma weapon to the level of its shoulders and traceries of blue-hot lightning arced from its power couplings. The plasma destructor was a vast, smooth-bored weapon the size of a boarding torpedo with heavy magnetic coiling wound tightly around its oval muzzle. The static buzz of developing power reacted with the voids in a series of squealing rainbow-hued borealis, causing the Cadians to flinch from the violent display of sun-hot energies. Shimmering waves hazed the air around the weapon – the heat of a star’s core primed and ready to be unleashed.

  But instead of firing its most potent weapon, Lupa Capitalina thrust its fist forwards as though throwing a punch. A bow wave of heat turned the ice to vapour long before any impact, a hissing curtain of superheated steam billowing from the disintegrating ice. The towering Warlord took a single sidestep and the chained plasmic energies burned away the ice, carving into the entombing glacier.

  The precision required for this manoeuvre astounded Tanna, who hadn’t truly believed the vast machine capable of achieving such finesse. Electrically-charged steam wafted through the voids, carrying the scent of incredible age, heated metal and chemically pure nitrogen.

  When the hissing clouds were dispersed by the churning atmospherics, Tanna saw a wide gallery had been cut through the thick buttress supporting the lower reaches of the starship. What had been impenetrable only moments before was now open to the world, and through a curtain of melted ice, Tanna saw the gleaming wet flank of the Tomioka.

  ‘No remorse, brothers,’ said T
anna, as the assault ramp extended from the battlements. ‘No pity.’

  ‘No fear,’ came the answer from each warrior.

  Abrehem turned over, trying to get comfortable on the makeshift bunk, no easy task when one shoulder was an unyielding metallic rotator-cuff. His weight was unbalanced and, until he’d had his arm replaced with an augmetic, he hadn’t realised how difficult that made it to sleep. The bed was a scavenged foldaway Hawke had sourced from Emperor-knew-where, uncomfortable, but better than what Abrehem had gotten used to. He stared at the chamber’s coffered ceiling, where faded representations of Sebastian Thor and his disciples looked back, always seeming to be highly interested in something just out of sight. The iron-wrought skulls worked into the black walls gave the impression of being in a tomb or a temple, an impression only reinforced by the hunched shape seated upon the golden throne in the adjacent dormis chamber.

  Rasselas X-42 wore the aggression-suppressing mechanisms of a pacifier helm, a device Totha Mu-32 assured him would keep the arco-flagellant in a trance-like state of childish bliss. Enraptured by visions of Imperiocentric ecstasy, Rasselas X-42 presented no threat to any living being unless Abrehem voiced the trigger phrase, something he had promised he would not do.

  But given his current predicament, that wasn’t a promise he was sure he’d be able to keep.

  Abrehem was a wanted man, a fugitive trapped on a starship with nowhere to run.

  After Magos Saiixek had withdrawn his skitarii from the feeding hall, Hawke and Coyne had fled with him through the passageways they knew intimately well and yet not at all. Letting the Speranza or the Omnissiah guide them, they’d eventually reached the site of Hawke’s first alcohol still; now revealed to be the activation chamber for an arco-flagellant.

  Even dormant, its malicious presence was palpable, a potential for horrific, bloody violence that infected the very air with toxic emanations. They’d cleaned the eldar blood and bodies away, but the memory of that near-instantaneous slaughter still haunted Abrehem. He shied away from thoughts of the slumbering killer and turned his attention to the chamber’s other occupant.

  Ismael de Roeven, freshly clad in a robe of pale cream, sat on the floor with his back to the wall. The restored servitor had his knees drawn up to his chest and hadn’t said a word about the incident in the feeding hall. No matter how much Abrehem tried to coax him into an explanation of how he had managed to control those other servitors, Ismael wouldn’t – or couldn’t – say.

  Abrehem had lost count of the hours he’d spent in this chamber while Totha Mu-32 and the others took stock of the Mechanicus response to a threatened servitor uprising. With nothing to do but wait until their return, Abrehem was growing ever more restless. He rolled onto his back and rubbed the heel of his flesh and blood palm over his eyes.

  When he took his hand away, he saw a trickle of noospheric code squirming through the walls, an irregular grid pattern enfolding the room like a cage. He’d caught sight of it every now and then, a liminal binaric ward-pattern that would fade as soon as it became aware of his scrutiny, but Abrehem turned his will upon it and the code-light shimmered brightly once more.

  His eyes followed the leading edge of the code as it circled the room. The rest of the chamber was in sharp focus, but wherever the code touched, he could feel its brittle, fading power. The binary was old, degraded and worn out. It had patrolled this chamber so many times, perhaps since the Speranza’s birth, that its potency was all but spent.

  There was a hypnotic quality to the pattern, and Abrehem felt himself drawn into its looping arrangement. Without conscious thought, he rose from the bed and let his eyes roam the contours of the walls. The code flowed over the polished domes of iron skulls, between the entwined eagles and cogs, following the hexagonal pathways. He followed the code as it travelled over the walls, and Abrehem was reminded of an old metaphor of electricity as civilisation’s lifeblood.

  His heart beat faster in his chest and his breath tasted of burnt metal.

  Footsteps echoed and Abrehem had the unpleasant sensation of the walls closing in on him. His coppery breath quickened and both hands closed into fists as an unformed anger took shape in his thoughts. The beguiling quality of the flickering binary glitched, and Abrehem blinked as its hold was broken and the machine-stamped walls swam back into focus around him.

  Abrehem let out a soft sigh of fear as he found himself standing before Rasselas X-42, his augmetic hand stretched out towards the complicated controls of the pacifier helm. He had watched Totha Mu-32 engage the helm and now realised he’d memorised the ritual movements and catechisms required for its use without conscious thought.

  Violent red intruded on his vision, a descending haze of scarlet falling over his eyes like a curtain of blood, the anger he had felt earlier sharpened into a bright spike of purest rage. Abrehem could not remember a moment in his life where he’d felt such unreasoning fury, a bone-deep urge to do harm to another human being. Memories of ripped bodies, torn-out entrails and screaming mouths that cried a name that wasn’t his own filled his skull. Abrehem’s initial horror was quashed by the unstoppable urge to kill, to violate unclean flesh, to murder something… anything…

  His trembling digits touched the bronze keys attached to the side of the throne and he tapped out the initialisation commands that began the process of decoupling the mechanisms of the pacifier helm. Slowly the soothing, calming imagery of Imperial saints, cherubs and golden bliss would be stripped away from the arco-flagellant’s perceptions, each loss driving it into a higher state of insane, murderous wrath.

  Rasselas X-42’s head rose up, still masked by the featureless pewter helm.

  His chest heaved and grunting spurts of stinking breath sighed from beneath the pacifier helm.

  The arco-flagellant was a loaded gun, primed and ready to fire.

  All it needed was the trigger phrase and it would be free to kill, maim and murder.

  Abrehem suddenly became aware of a presence at his side and felt a gentle hand upon his shoulder. The building horror of mutilations and violent degradation drained from his thoughts in a flood and his legs buckled beneath him. He fell into the arms of Ismael, sobbing as he realised how close he’d come to unleashing the full fury of the arco-flagellant.

  ‘I didn’t…’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have…’

  ‘I know,’ said Ismael. ‘But Rasselas X-42 is a living weapon, and a weapon has but one purpose.’

  Abrehem nodded and let Ismael lead him back to his cot bed, blinking away the nightmarish images of torture and mutilation. He sat down, heaving in gulping breaths and weeping at the horror of what he’d seen. He knew they were not his own thoughts, but memories of carnage wrought by Rasselas X-42 in his previous existence.

  Ismael held out his hands and Abrehem looked up into his eyes.

  The servitor’s distracted, vacant look was gone; in its place was an expression of such peace and understanding that Abrehem was rendered speechless.

  ‘He calls to your lust for violence,’ said Ismael, all traces of his halting speech vanished. ‘Rasselas X-42 is the quick and easy path to vengeance, the evil of the man he was distilled and perfected. You must be better than that, Abrehem, you must cast him out.’

  Abrehem shook his head. ‘I can’t. If the Mechanicus come for me, then I’ll need him.’

  ‘You do not need him,’ promised Ismael. ‘You already have all that you need.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Ismael held his hands out to him and said, ‘Then listen.’

  Abrehem hesitantly took Ismael’s hands and kept silent, alert for anything out of the ordinary, but beyond Rasselas X-42’s thwarted, animal breath and the constant mechanical beat of the Speranza’s workings, there was nothing to hear.

  ‘Listen to what?’ said Abrehem.

  ‘To all the lost souls,’ said Ismael, and Abrehem cried out as thousands of enslaved voices filled his head with their anguished cries.

  The appearance of the Tom
ioka’s exterior had shocked Kotov, but the interior was, if anything, even more outlandish. The starship’s internal plan had been extensively reshaped, rendering his ancient schematics utterly useless. With their entry point far above them, the darkness within was virtually absolute, leavened only by the helm-lamps of the skitarii and a pale, greenish hue that seeped from flexing cables that infested the ship’s dripping innards like pulsing arteries.

  Access ladders and stairwells that had been removed from their previous locations and re-fixed perpendicular to their original orientation allowed Kotov’s force to travel downwards without difficulty. Their route traversed vast, echoing interior compartments stripped of their original fittings and which were now connected in ways the Tomioka’s original shipwrights had never intended. They kept close to the ice-clad hull, and ghostly wisps of chill vapour curled from protruding structural elements like breath.

  ‘I feel like we are descending through biological anatomy,’ said Dahan, moving with a hunched gait to fit through the oddly-angled passageways. ‘It is an unpleasant sensation.’

  Kotov understood his sentiment, imagining they were passing through the literal guts of the starship. Like a living organism, the interior of the Tomioka was not silent, but a place of groaning echoes, creaking, flexing steelwork and a distant, glacial heartbeat.

  ‘Perhaps a biological aesthetic informed Telok’s work here,’ suggested Kotov.

  ‘No wonder they called him mad,’ observed Dahan distastefully. ‘Why then do we traverse the bowels while Mistress Tychon ascends to the brain?’

  ‘Because the greatest power source lies far beneath us, and it is the key to understanding the mystery of this vessel,’ answered Kotov. ‘Let Mistress Tychon plunder the archives, we will be the ones to learn the true revelations Telok left behind.’

  Dahan gave a blurt of dismissive binary and set off to rejoin his skitarii warriors.

  Kotov ignored the Secutor’s scepticism, attuning his senses to the chatter of background perceptions; Manifold inloads from Tarkis Blaylock and Vitali Tychon aboard the Speranza, encrypted vox-clicks from the Templars, Cadian intercom echoes and a crackling hiss of machine language that burbled just below his threshold of understanding.