Lords of Mars Page 14

  +Tarkis, were you aware of the electromagnetic discharges emanating from the Tomioka and the dissonant area of geostationary dead space above it?’

  +I registered both items earlier, yes.+

  +And what did you believe them to be?+

  Blaylock brought up a cascade of discarded auspex junk, sifting through it with haptic sweeps of his hands, processing the information through a multitude of senses.

  +Nothing more than irrelevant by-products of the chaotic systems within the atmosphere intersecting with rogue electromagnetic emissions from the planet’s core. It has likely already been subsumed into the background radiation.+

  +You are dead wrong, Tarkis,+ said Vitali.

  Blaylock’s floodstream surged with irritation he did not bother to modulate. +I am seldom wrong, Magos Tychon.+

  +Seldom does not mean never, look again,+ said Vitali, sweeping a series of extrapolations and speculative interpretations of the surveyor inloads over to Blaylock’s throne.

  Blaylock digested the data, then brought up the backlogged surveyor data and ran it forward at speed to the present moment. As absurd as Vitali’s conclusions were, it was hard to dismiss their inevitable logic.

  +Are you sure about this?+ he asked.

  +Sure enough to know that we need to get everyone off that planet,+ said Vitali.

  +Yes, of course,+ agreed Blaylock. +When will it reach us?+

  +My most accurate projection says two hours and fifty-four minutes.+

  +Ave Deus Mechanicus!+ said Blaylock, sending a stream of imperative binary through the noosphere, Manifold and vox-networks. +Contact Kryptaestrex and have him prep every landing craft for immediate lift-off. Get everyone off that planet. Now!+

  The space had once been the Tomioka’s enginarium, but that purpose had long since been sacrificed in service of another. The funicular transit elevator had carried them deep into the bedrock of the planet, their angle of descent taking them from walls of steel into regions stratified with aeons of geological change. When at last the elevator halted, it was immediately clear that the cathedrals of the engine spaces had been enlarged many times over by the simple expedient of drilling out the rock for kilometres in all directions.

  An enormous cavern had been created beneath the Tomioka that extended far beyond the boundaries of the starship, but just how far was impossible to tell, for only the dimmest green light illuminated the cavernous space. The heat down here was immense, the air hazed with steam and ferocious temperatures radiating from the vast quantities of towering machinery that lined the walls.

  Innumerable glowing green cables threaded the walls, coiled together like nests of snakes and pulsing with a hypnotic rhythm. Tens of thousands extended from the nearest machines, thousands more from others farther around the circumference of the immense cavern. Tangled masses of the cables all converged on a distant point where a dancing light glimmered in the half-darkness.

  ‘What is this place?’ asked Tanna.

  ‘I do not know,’ said Kotov, following the vanguard of skitarii towards the centre of the chamber. ‘But whatever plan Telok had for his ship, this is the heart of it.’

  ‘It has the look of the xenos to it,’ said Tanna, and Kotov was forced to agree.

  ‘It could be that Telok’s crystal technologies incorporate alien technology,’ suggested Dahan. ‘Might that be how he finally succeeded in getting it to work?’

  ‘That is certainly one possibility,’ conceded Kotov.

  Tanna raised a fist and his Space Marines dropped to their knees, each one with a weapon aimed.

  Dahan was at his side in an instant.

  ‘What is it, sergeant?’

  ‘Battle robots ahead,’ said Tanna. ‘They’re not moving, but look at the chests. There is something wrong with them.’

  The Mechanicus advanced behind the Black Templars and Kotov saw Tanna was quite correct.

  A maniple of immobile Conqueror battle robots in dusty armour of blue and red stood ranked up as though awaiting doctrina wafers. Their sunken heads stared unseeing at the floor and their weapon arms hung slack at their sides. Kotov counted five robots, each four metres tall, brutish and harshly-angled, with rusted plates of ablative shielding crumbling at their shoulders.

  In all respects but one, they appeared to be nothing more than relics of a long ago war.

  Each robot’s chest cavity, where Kotov would expect to find its power source, was filled with finely-woven crystalline filaments like the finest blown glass.

  ‘This is the same crystal-form we fought above,’ said Tanna, instantly bellicose.

  Kotov raised a delicately-machined hand. ‘Be at peace, sergeant. These machines have not been active in hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.’

  ‘That gives me no comfort,’ said Tanna, gesturing to his fellow warriors. ‘Destroy the crystals.’

  ‘Wait!’ cried Kotov. ‘I cannot allow you to simply destroy Martian property.’

  ‘And I cannot allow a potential threat to remain along our line of retreat.’

  ‘Sergeant Tanna,’ said Kotov, placing himself between the towering warrior and the battle robot. ‘We did not come all this way just to vandalise the first piece of technology we do not yet understand. The discovery of new things is what brings us out here, yes?’

  ‘It’s what brought you out here, archmagos,’ said Tanna. ‘We came to honour a debt. I thought you understood that.’

  Kotov shook his head and rested a hand on the nearest robot’s arm. Rust flaked away and fragments of corroded metal drifted to the ground. ‘These are Mechanicus artefacts, it would be a crime against the Omnissiah to defile them.’

  ‘That crystal isn’t Mechanicus,’ said Dahan, standing alongside Tanna. ‘That crystal is xenos technology, and the alien mechanism is a perversion of the True Path. That’s what you are destroying, are you not, sergeant?’

  The Space Marine nodded and an unheard order passed between him and his warriors.

  Though Kotov was unhappy about such wanton destruction, he knew he had little choice but to accede to the Black Templars’ tactical decision. Tanna put a fist through the lattice in the nearest robot’s chest, the crystalline web shattering into powdered fragments. Within seconds the battle robot had its chest cavity emptied of crystal, and this act of destruction was a knife to Kotov’s heart.

  Dahan knelt beside one of the robots, where a scrap of loose cloth lay under its foot. He lifted it with the inactive prongs of his scarifiers, dust trickling from the folds like the ash of an ancient revenant.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Kotov.

  ‘Some sort of robe,’ said Dahan.

  ‘Mechanicus?’

  Dahan shook his head as the threads began to fray and the cloth fell apart. ‘Too small.’

  The scrap of cloth fell to the floor, now little more than coarse-woven threads that unravelled and rotted away even as they watched.

  ‘There’s more of them,’ said Tanna, moving behind the robots. The Space Marine knelt beside another of the robes, this one with a semblance of a shape beneath it. No larger than a small child, it was swathed in identical rags, but as Tanna touched it, the robe lost its shape and puffs of dust sighed from its edges as whatever it concealed disintegrated.

  Something gleamed beneath the rags, and Tanna sifted through the dust to retrieve it.

  ‘What do you have there, sergeant?’ asked Kotov.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Tanna. ‘A mechanism of some sort.’

  Tanna stood and held his discovery out to Kotov. A bent piece of metal, corroded and pitted with age, it had the look of a flint-lock belonging to some primitive black powder weapon. Tanna held the shaped metal on the palm of his hand, but before Kotov could give it a closer examination, it crumbled to powder.

  ‘Accelerated decay, perhaps a side-effect of this world’s dissolution,’ said Dahan.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Kotov, pushing deeper into the chamber. ‘But a mystery for later on, I think.’

  Leav
ing the ancient robots and rotted fabric forms behind, Kotov pushed deeper into the chamber, seeing yet more isolated groups of rusted battle robots deeper in the shadows either side of their route of march. Soon it became clear that the centre of the chamber was directly beneath the Tomioka, as the chamber’s roof changed from bare rock to the cross-section of a gutted starship.

  Structural hull members, tens of metres thick, stood like vast pillars at the entrance to a templum; once beyond this permeable barrier, Kotov saw a vast circular chasm had been excavated at the base of the starship. At least five hundred metres in diameter, its edge was delineated by hundreds of thousands of the faintly glowing cables that plunged into its depths. What looked like a vast data prism hung down from the ceiling formed by the Tomioka, resembling an enormous spear-point fashioned from a single block of ice.

  But it was the flickering globe suspended over the exact centre of the shaft that commanded Kotov’s full attention.

  A ball of greenish fire hung in the air like an emerald sun caught in an invisible force field. Its surface rippled with coruscating lines of force, as though formed from viscous fluids stirred by internal tides. No part of Kotov’s sensorium could measure its dimensions, mass or density, and had he relied on any input beyond his optics, he would never know the object was there at all.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Tanna.

  ‘Some kind of reactor?’ ventured Dahan.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Kotov, rechecking the passive augurs worked into the armoured body he wore. Whatever the object was, it was beyond his ability to measure, and what readings he was getting were fluctuating meaninglessly, as though the object was transitioning from one state of being to another at any given moment. His chronometric readings flatlined, as though caught within the temporal null of a stasis bubble.

  Kotov tore his gaze from the nuclear green fire and stared down into a bottomless black abyss as Dahan manoeuvred his skitarii around this segment of the shaft. Kotov saw no obvious means of descending into the chasm, but counted that as fortunate, feeling a strange sense of observation rising from its depths.

  ‘Whatever this place is, it is clear that Telok never intended this ship to fly again,’ said Kotov, perching precariously at the chasm’s edge. ‘The engines have been completely dismantled.’

  ‘Why would Telok have done that?’ asked Tanna.

  Kotov had no answer for him and pulled away from the vertiginous shaft as the visible circumference of the shimmering green orb suddenly expanded, doubling its diameter in the blink of an eye. The tides within its unknown structure grew more violent and the light pouring from it filled the chamber with searing brightness.

  ‘What’s happening, archmagos?’ demanded Tanna, backing away from the object.

  Kotov had no firm evidence upon which to base his answer, but there could be only one possible explanation.

  ‘Whatever Telok has planned for the Tomioka. It’s happening now.’

  The machine-spirit at the heart of the Tomioka was sluggish and hostile to Linya’s enquiries, not that she could blame so venerable a machine for reacting badly to an unknown presence in its neuromatrix after so long a time spent dormant. They had reached the bridge; it was exactly where they had expected it to be, and Captain Hawkins’s Cadians had secured it without incident. Linya had been surprised at how little its structure appeared to have been altered, given the nature of the rest of the ship, though it was, of course, turned through ninety degrees.

  Servitors sat strapped into their consoles, and a number of battle robots were still mag-locked in place within their defence alcoves; beyond the thick layers of dust that had accumulated on numerous surfaces, it felt like the bridge crew might return at any moment.

  While Azuramagelli and her father’s servo-skull attempted to access the ship’s avionics log, Galatea made a circuit of those areas of the bridge it could traverse. Linya hunted for a compatible inload port she could reach and which matched the quaintly archaic interface augmetic in the palm of her hand. If there was any data to be salvaged from the ship’s data core, she would dig it out.

  Incredibly, the ship’s cogitators and deep logic engines were still functional, maintained by a dim, slumbering spirit that rested in the deep strata of cogitation. Connection to the data-engines was made via a simple series of Mechanicus hails, but she would need to go deep to find anything of value.

  Linya closed her eyes, letting her functional awareness flow farther into the Tomioka’s datasphere, feeling the presence of numerous security screens and invasive protection algorithms marshalling at her continued presence. She tested their integrity with gently inquiring probes that were rebuffed without exception.

  ‘Only to be expected,’ she said, tapping out a binaric mantra with her left hand.

  She tried a more direct approach, shaping her interrogative with aggressive signifiers of rank and demand protocols. Once again, the data-engine rejected her attempt and sent a painful jolt of bio-feedback through Linya’s hand. Not enough to hurt, but enough to remind her that she was not authorised to access this ship’s records.

  The machine-spirit’s defences resisted her every attempt at infiltration until she registered the presence of an inloaded code-breaking algorithm that carried the noospheric tags of Magos Blaylock. Linya had no memory of receiving such an inload, but couldn’t deny its usefulness right about now.

  She opened the inloaded data packet and let out a soft gasp at the geometric complexity of the algorithms worked into the code. Tarkis Blaylock was another tech-priest it was hard to like, but his grasp of hexamathic calculus and statistical analysis was second to none; this looked like the most perfect binaric skeleton key she had ever seen. Like a hound on the hunt, the decryption algorithm meshed seamlessly with the Tomioka’s datasphere, and the security systems woven around the info-logs fell away like mist before a hurricane.

  Almost immediately, Linya realised her mistake.

  A tsunami of stellar information poured into her and she let out a cry of terror as the data-burden overloaded her neural capacity in a heartbeat. She tried to pull away from the ship’s flow of information, but like a victim of electrocution, she found she could not disengage from the very thing that was killing her. Numerous implants in her skull shorted out, one after the other, and Linya convulsed as the bio-electric feedback vaporised thousands of synaptic connections within the architecture of her brain.

  Just as the data-burden surged with an even larger packet of impossibly dense celestial calculus, Linya felt herself torn from the data-engine with a physical jolt and a searing blaze of disconnection agonies. She hit the floor, wrapped in Lieutenant Rae’s arms, dizzying vertigo seizing her.

  Her hands flew to the sides of her head as pounding waves of shrieking pain stabbed through her skull like an instant migraine. Blinding light filled her eyes, and sickening nausea cramped in her gut. She heard her father’s voice through the ebon skull, the gleaming red optics hovering just before her face, but couldn’t process what she was hearing.

  Shouted voices surrounded her.

  ‘Mistress Tychon,’ said Rae. ‘Begging your pardon, but are you all right?’

  She tried to nod, but rolled onto her side and vomited the contents of her stomach instead.

  Linya felt the presence of something clanking and metallic moving past her and pushed herself upright in time to see Galatea plugging itself into the smoking inload port.

  The silver-eyed proxy-body turned to regard her slumped form.

  ‘One mind cannot handle this data-burden,’ said Galatea. ‘Only we can do this.’

  The surging pain in Linya’s skull receded a fraction and she pulled herself upright on wobbling legs, feeling an unaccountable need to stop the machine from taking her place. Lieutenant Rae supported her, and she clung to him to keep from falling.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asked, straining to regain her senses and mental equilibrium.

  ‘Don’t know, miss,’ said Rae, bringing his lasgun around as Cad
ian battle-cant filled the bridge and the bridge’s defence robots climbed from their alcoves. Linya saw their chests were alight with a curious green illumination, their weapons systems coming online one after another.

  Gunfire and shouts filled the bridge.

  Both war machines were vigilant, stalking the icy plains around the Tomioka like wary predators circling dangerous prey that may or may not be playing dead. Amarok was still feisty after the fight in the canyon, its guns and voids restored, and Princeps Vintras allowed its virile machine-spirit to come to the fore in the Manifold.

  He looped over the trail of Vilka, carefully avoiding the deep tracks the Ironwoad was leaving in the crystalline structure of the glassy plateau. It took finesse to walk a Warhound like this, sidestepping and moving forwards at the same time. He kept his targeting auspex loose, letting the aiming reticule drift back and forth in search of something to kill.

  Vintras was getting twitchy too, the result of a potent cocktail of drugs pumped into his system after the fight with the facsimile engines. Word had come down that they were some form of machine-tech that could mould the crystalline structures of the dying world into the shapes of elements they perceived as threats.

  The ground underfoot was unstable, the Warhound’s complex stabilisation sensors perceiving an ever growing, ever spreading wave of seismic tremors building from far beneath the ground. Which was only to be expected; this world was dying after all, being pulled apart by geological stresses and celestial cataclysm. Such disturbances were only going to get worse and the surface of Katen Venia would soon become untenable for Titan engines.

  With its boarders delivered, Lupa Capitalina had retreated from the towering form of the Tomioka and taken up an unmoving position before the starship. Even after the Wintersun’s attack on Moonsorrow, there was still something magnetic about the vast scale of the Warlord, a potential for such awesome destruction that transcended all notions of morality. Just to share the battlefield with a Warlord was an honour, and to be pack with a god-machine of its power was to be a part of history. Yet for all that Vintras revered the incredible Titan, the idea of remaining static was anathema to him. As much as he longed to rise within the ranks of the Legio, he was loath to consider the possibility of leaving Amarok for a battle-engine that won wars by marching straight at the enemy.