Lords of Mars Page 15

  ‘Are you hearing this?’ asked Elias Härkin, intruding on Vintras’s thoughts. The Vilka’s princeps’s voice was gruff and had been augmetically-rendered for decades, but hearing it over the vox only made it more unpleasant.

  ‘Hearing what?’ asked Vintras, irritated he’d allowed his mind to wander.

  ‘The Mechanicus,’ snapped Härkin.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Call yourself a Warhound driver?’ asked Härkin. ‘Use your damned eyes and open your vox!’

  Vintras slewed Amarok to the side, increasing his pace and weaving across the landscape to circle around the Tomioka as the ground shook with another earth tremor, this one more powerful than the last. Vintras compensated, keeping the Warhound’s centre of gravity low until he completed his circuit of the landed starship.

  In the aftermath of the Legio’s rescue of the Space Marines and skitarii, the Land Leviathans and support vehicles had poured over the bridge and onto the edge of the plateau, where they waited like observers too afraid to approach the object of their scrutiny.

  Vintras switched his vox-input to accept non-Legio traffic, and immediately the Manifold flooded with prioritised threat warnings and withdrawal orders coming direct from the Speranza.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ asked Vintras.

  ‘What does it bloody look like?’ grunted Härkin. ‘They’re leaving.’

  The informational flow through the Speranza’s bridge had increased significantly, but the gathered magi, calculus-logi and lexmechanics were still able to handle the data-burden. Largely thanks to the co-ordinating power of Magos Blaylock, whose higher thought processes were streamlined to render such vast arrays of data into manageable chunks.

  ‘Word from the surface?’ asked Blaylock.

  ‘Evacuation has begun,’ said a magos whose identity signifiers were lost in the haze of noospheric data filling the bridge. ‘The first Leviathan is en route to the landing fields. The others are aligning behind it and are in the process of crossing Magos Kryptaestrex’s bridge.’

  Blaylock turned to Vitali Tychon, who encompassed the Manifold links within his datasphere to co-ordinate the logistical nightmare of an emergency planetary withdrawal.

  ‘Vitali,’ said Blaylock, his urgency prompting him to dispense with titles and protocol. ‘How long before the energy source reaches the planet?’

  ‘One hour, thirteen minutes, Tarkis,’ said Vitali Tychon, without needing to look up. ‘Still no word from the archmagos or my daughter. Neither has responded to the summons back to the ship.’

  Hearing the worry in the venerable magos’s voice, Blaylock said, ‘Keep trying.’

  Blaylock brought up the system plot that displayed the fleet’s position around Katen Venia and the approaching energy source hurtling through space towards them.

  No, not towards them, towards the Tomioka.

  Too late, he now realised what Telok’s flagship was and why the Lost Magos had gone to the trouble of landing it in the first place. Together with the infinitesimal concavity of the plateau, the entire structure of the Tomioka was a vast receiver array; a hundred kilometres wide receiver that would channel a surging stream of unimaginable energy through its structure and into the planet’s core. The purpose of this was still a mystery, but that anything nearby would be instantly obliterated was all too obvious.

  Vitali was running a back-trace to the source of the energy beam, but it would take time to locate it amid the ferocious amount of background radiation from the dying star. Even trying to measure the beam was proving to be next to impossible, its qualities all but unknown to their auspex and of greater magnitude than could be readily quantified.

  That such an unimaginable quantity of energy could travel so far without losing its power to the vacuum was staggering. Blaylock knew of only one thing said to be capable of such a monumental feat of power generation.

  The Breath of the Gods.

  Gunfire echoed weirdly within the chamber as the Black Templars bracketed one of the rusted battle robots with carefully coordinated bolter shots. With the swelling of the seething energy globe, a measure of its tidal energies had bloomed throughout the cavern in a single pulse of atmospheric power transfer.

  Numerous skitarii had collapsed, their enhanced neural pathways blown out by the blast – even Dahan had staggered with the force of it. The nature of the power transfer hadn’t been immediately obvious, but when the first sawing blasts of autocannon fire tore through the skitarii, its purpose became self-evident.

  The battle robots left to rust throughout the cavern were no dusty relics of a forgotten conflict, but dormant sentries, tasked with waiting until such a time as they would be required to defend the arcane processes under way. The crystalline lattice worked into the robots’ chest cavities pulsed with necrotic green light, and despite their advanced state of disrepair, each moved and fought as if fresh from the forge.

  A maniple had come at them at battle pace, but Dahan killed the first one with a beam of white heat from his plasma gun. Skitarii weaponry broke apart the second, and a broadside of bolter explosions shattered the third into a storm of metallic junk.

  ‘I told you we should have destroyed them all,’ said Tanna, walking backwards as he slammed a fresh magazine into his bolter.

  ‘Duly noted,’ said Kotov, cycling through his implanted weaponry until he came up with a tight-beam graviton gun. More of the robot maniples were closing in from all sides, and via Magos Dahan’s threat-optimisers he saw at least sixty more approaching.

  Kotov knelt and directed his implanted weaponry towards the nearest robot, triggering an invisible beam of intense gravometric energies. The robot, a clankingly archaic design of Cataphract, crumpled and bent double as its upper section was suddenly quadrupled in mass. Its already rusted spine collapsed under the weight and it fell in a welter of spilled oil and buckled plates.

  Autocannon shells killed more of the skitarii, but no warrior was left behind. As they had against the crystal beasts, Dahan’s men brought their dead and wounded with them. The robots had bigger guns and there were more of them, but they were slow and did not have the fire discipline of the skitarii.

  Every metre of their retreat was earned in blood. Once beyond the structural elements of the Tomioka, there was no shelter and no strategy except flight. Kotov’s implanted auspex registered another power surge from the energy sphere, and once again its diameter swelled, almost filling the width of the shaft over which it was suspended. The blaze of light from the emerald sun’s depths filled the cavernous space beneath the Tomioka, and the tip of the glittering prism above it was less than ten metres from making contact. Kotov had no idea whether that would be a bad thing or not, but the part of him that relished symmetry and connectivity in things suspected that when it and the seething energy globe came into contact, it would be very unpleasant to be anywhere nearby.

  Kotov crushed the chests of another ten robots with his graviton beams before the internal capacitors registered power loss. To fire it again, he would need to divert power from some other system. Instead, Kotov retracted the exotic weapon and cycled through to a more mundane rotary cannon. The design was an old one, a modified Dreadnought weapon that had been deemed too flimsy for deployment with Adeptus Astartes forces, but which Kotov liked for its brutal simplicity. The backplate of his body rotated to reveal louvred vents, and a long bullet-chain extended from his arm to link with an internal ammunition chamber.

  Recoil compensators deployed along Kotov’s shoulders and legs as a series of readiness icons flashed before his eyes. Kotov slaved his targeting arrays to inloaded threat data from Dahan, and pushed his consciousness into a higher state before opening fire.

  A blazing stream of fire tore from Kotov’s arm, fully three metres long, and whatever it touched simply exploded in a haze of torn-up metal and shattered plates. Each burst was precisely controlled, and it seemed that Kotov could see every shell, his cognitive functions moving so swiftly that he could
watch each explosion in slow motion, switch targets and engage the enemy without wasting a single round of ammunition.

  All around him, the Space Marines and skitarii were moving like figures in a slow-running pict-feed, their motions painfully measured. Sounds reached him at a glacial rate, and even the light of explosions and muzzle flare seemed to expand like slow-blooming flowers. Wherever Dahan registered a threat, Kotov swung his weapon to bear and eliminated it with a precise burst of high-explosive shells.

  Waves of excess heat from such increased cognition were dispersed through coolant flow across his scalp, but such an overclocking could only be maintained for a minute of subjective time at most and he was almost at his limit.

  In the end it was Kotov’s ammunition that gave out first, and the spinning barrels clicked dry as the ammo hopper sought in vain to keep the tide of shells coming. Kotov felt the urge to keep going, to switch out to another weapon. To process information and stimuli with such speed was intoxicating, a wholly addictive feat of cognition that had seen more than one adept of the Mechanicus boil the organic portions of his brain within his skull. Kotov disengaged the rapid-thought functions and staggered as the searing heat in his skull temporarily overwhelmed him. The energy demands on his body, which ran to narrow enough tolerances as it was, suddenly found themselves with an unsustainable deficit.

  Kotov’s limbs folded up beneath him, but before he hit the ground, Sergeant Tanna caught him and hauled him back, firing his bolter one-handed as he went. Kotov tried to speak, but the pain in his skull was too intense, the chronic drain on his mental faculties shutting down all non-essential functions as they fought to restore order in his synaptic arrays.

  He was dimly aware of more robots closing in on their position, but he could not make out how many or how far away they were. He saw Dahan firing his implanted weapon, surrounded by perhaps thirty skitarii warriors, some wounded, some bearing the bodies of the dead. The Black Templars fell back behind relentless salvos of bolter fire, halting a battle robot with each one.

  ‘Quite a feat of arms,’ said Tanna, depositing him by the controls of the funicular transit elevator and turning to haul the lever into the up position. ‘I thought you said I was the warrior.’

  ‘An explorator must be prepared for all eventualities,’ said Kotov, finally regaining the power of speech as the elevator rumbled back up into the Tomioka. ‘And I am not a man to travel lightly.’

  With Lieutenant Rae supporting her, Linya scrambled down the length of the starship, breathless and fighting the building agony in her head. The fight on the bridge had been brief, bloody and one-sided, with the Cadian troopers hopelessly outgunned by an enemy they couldn’t hope to hurt. Captain Hawkins had seen the futility of staying to fight and immediately ordered the retreat.

  A squad of Guardsmen had covered their retreat, and even amid the confusion of being pulled from the bridge, Linya knew those soldiers were already dead. Heavy calibre shells tore the bridge to pieces, smashing ancient technology that had crossed the galaxy in search of wonder. One robot, its right arm a pulverising siege hammer, had smashed through bulkhead after bulkhead, shrugging off Cadian return fire from lasrifles, grenade launchers and even a direct hit from a plasma gun.

  Sixty men and women fell back from the bridge, keeping their pursuers at bay with ambushes and traps. One robot was pitched into a shaft that looked as though it ran the length of the starship’s long axis, and another had its leg blown off by a lucky grenade that managed to lodge in its pelvic joint. But the others were utterly relentless and Linya was forced to admire the lethal purity of whoever had punched the obedience routines of their doctrina wafers.

  It felt like they were running at reckless speeds back the way they had come, pursued by at least five Imperial battle robots with curious crystalline power sources in their chests that closely resembled what Magos Dahan had described on the Tabularium. Magos Azuramagelli led the way back down the Tomioka, his mental mapping unfazed by the danger threatening them and his body-plan altering and reshaping with a speed Linya found incredible.

  Her father’s servo-skull zipped alongside her, pausing every now and then to check behind it before scooting after her. She could hear his voice urging her onwards, but shut it out as a distraction. Somewhere along the way they’d lost Galatea, the machine intelligence fleeing along a different route when it could no longer follow the same line of retreat. Linya wondered if it would manage to escape and found she didn’t care either way.

  The ground shifted beneath her, and she sprawled to the ground as the welded deck plate serving as a floor pulled free from the wall. Rae pulled her roughly to her feet, all trace of his former concern for decorum forgotten in this flight from the enemy.

  ‘I can’t go on,’ she gasped.

  ‘Can’t be stopping, miss,’ said Rae, pushing her through a group of covering soldiers as they clambered over to a welded screw-stair. ‘At least these steps will slow the bastards up.’

  Linya scrambled down the stairs, hearing chugging bangs of rapid bolter fire echoing above her. Too loud and too fast for a regular bolter, these were rounds that would reduce the human body to an expanding vortex of vaporised blood and cooked flesh. Screams followed the thudding booms of detonation, howls of pain that no human should ever have to make.

  Tears ran down her face as she all but sprinted down the stairs, clutching the iron balustrade and remaining upright only by the grace of the Omnissiah. Close to the bottom, her luck ran out and her feet slid on the cold metal of the stairs. She fell from the last few steps onto the buckled metal of the walkway below. She rolled and grabbed onto the nearest spar of metal as the nitrogen rain of the embarkation deck soaked her.

  ‘Come on!’ shouted Rae, leaping from the last few steps. ‘It’s right behind us!’

  The ceiling sagged inwards under the force of a titanic hammerblow as something immense sought to bring down the stairs. Rae hauled her upright again as another blow struck the top of the stairs, accompanied by a screeching wail of dumb binaric fury. Rae backed into her and lifted his rifle, firing back up the stairwell on full auto, a blazing spread of crimson bolts that hissed as they left the focus ring of the barrel.

  ‘A lasrifle won’t harm a battle robot,’ said Linya.

  ‘Maybe not, miss, but if you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears!’

  He grabbed Linya by the shoulders and pushed her away as the stairwell buckled inwards and the blocky form of a Castellan battle robot crashed down onto the walkway behind them. The floor crumpled beneath its weight and a storm of debris cascaded over its hunched form. Rae went down under the ruptured service conduits and shattered steelwork, his lasrifle skittering over the canted walkway towards her.

  The robot had landed on one knee and now rose to its full height of nearly four metres. Its heavy bolter ratcheted from the protective cowling at its shoulder and its power fist crackled with deadly disruptive field energies. The Castellan’s armoured plating was scorched with las-burns and impact trauma. Its threat optics fastened on her with hostile intent.

  Her father’s servo-skull flitted in front of the robot, screeching deactivation codes spilling from its augmitter, but the weaponised machine simply swatted it aside. The skull cracked into a wall and dropped stone dead to the floor, the light fading from its optics.

  Linya wanted to bend to retrieve Rae’s rifle, but terror held her pinned to the spot.

  She heard someone shout her name as the heavy bolter swung out, the automated slide racking back as it prepared to fire.

  Linya closed her eyes and slid down the wall, but the shots never came.

  She felt cold hands pull her upright and fell into the arms of her rescuer.

  ‘We would not let such a primitive creation harm you, Mistress Tychon,’ said Galatea.

  Linya flinched and pushed herself away from the machine intelligence, repulsed beyond words at the thought of it touching her. Galatea’s palanquin body squatted close to the ground, its oddly-jointed le
gs twisted around to bring it so low. The silver-eyed tech-priest body rose up as she backed away from it.

  ‘Get away from me,’ she said.

  ‘Such ingratitude,’ said Galatea. ‘And after we risked our continued existence to rescue you.’

  Linya blinked away tears and turned to see the Castellan robot unmoving, its head sagging to one side with green-tinged fumes pouring from its contoured skull. Its chestplate belched smoke and the warlike binary that spalled from its weapons was silent.

  It was utterly dead.

  ‘How did you…?’ asked Linya, looking up through the rent torn in the ceiling to see another battle robot with smoke belching from its innards.

  ‘If we can take control of the Speranza, do you believe that overloading the cortex-doctrinas of a maniple of battle robots is beyond us?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Linya, as Cadian soldiers ran back to dig Rae from the debris. The lieutenant was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, but was already shouting at the men helping him that he was fine and to damn well leave him be.

  ‘You are too wondrous to be allowed to die,’ said Galatea, reaching out to stroke her cheek.

  Linya pulled away from its repellent touch. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she said. ‘Not ever.’

  The machine intelligence rose up, the brains on its palanquin flickering with frantic synaptic activity as some unheard communion passed between them.

  ‘As you wish,’ said Galatea. ‘But you are precious to us.’

  Linya backed away from the loathsome creature, and pausing only to recover her father’s servo-skull, she followed the Cadians back down the Tomioka.

  Kotov could remember little of the journey back up the Tomioka, his mental processes too traumatised by the strain of maintaining so rapid a cognition speed. It had been short by mortal reckoning, but a lifetime by the terms of measurement employed by the Mechanicus. Tanna carried him most of the way, all but dragging his armoured body up ramps, stairs and ladders. The remodelled interior of the ship passed in a blur, but even his blunted senses registered that something unprecedented was under way.