Kryptos Read online

  ‘We are, but there are some insertions you just can’t make. Some defences are so tight that no tactical approach is going to get you past them.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Meaning that if we can’t get inside, we get the enemy to bring the Kryptos out.’

  Given the devastation wrought around the forge temple, it was a simple matter to locate exposed data trunking that linked the temple to the planetary network. Much of the wiring was damaged or melted beyond repair, but a few bundles of oily cable still functioned, and it was upon these that Wayland directed his efforts. Numerous wiring clips and clicking devices extruded from his scrimshawed gauntlet, and even the tiny sparks of corposant arcing between his tools were making Sharrowkyn nervous.

  ‘They won’t detect this, will they?’

  ‘Only if you keep distracting me,’ answered Wayland, running a cable from the tangle of wiring to a boxy device clipped to his belt. The Mechanicum cipher engine whirred as it chewed through high-level encryption with a touch soft enough to avoid detection.

  ‘I’m in,’ said Wayland, as a blurt of coded binary hissed from the cipher engine. ‘High-grade noospheric intercommunications. Only the best for the Kryptos…’

  ‘Keep it light,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘If the traitors so much as think we’re out here, this mission is over.’

  ‘Just because I am Iron Hand does not mean I cannot be subtle when the occasion demands it, Nykona,’ said Wayland, deliberately using his first name. ‘I trained on Mars and Adept Zeth’s innovation in noospheric networks is not unknown to me.’

  ‘So you’ve interfaced with this kind of system before?’

  ‘I have studied it extensively,’ said Wayland.

  ‘Studied it?’ said Sharrowkyn, spotting the deflection. ‘You mean you’ve never actually used something like this?’

  ‘Not as such, but I am confident I will be able to interface successfully,’ said Wayland, lifting a connector plug and sliding it home in the base of his modified gorget.

  ‘I’ll remind you of that if we have to run for our lives,’ said Sharrowkyn.

  Wayland didn’t answer, stiffening as a flood of information surged from the golden cables into his augmented cortical implants.

  The Iron Hand moved his gauntlets through the air, manipulating operating systems, power and data flow only he could see. Haptically-enabled fingertips sifted reams of noospheric data with each blink of an eye lens as the barrage of information filled him.

  Sharrowkyn left Wayland to his infiltration of the forge temple’s data systems, and returned his attention to its defences, looking for any sign their intrusion had been detected.

  ‘It helps me…’ whispered Wayland, and Sharrowkyn inclined his head to listen.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The forge,’ said Wayland, his voice sounding distant and strained. ‘It hates what it has become, and wishes me to end its suffering. Its systems are overwriting my data footprints.’

  Sharrowkyn shifted uncomfortably at the idea of the forge temple exhibiting anything that might be construed as sentience. Though the Mechanicum were an invaluable part of the Imperium, their belief in a divine force behind the machines they maintained and built was at odds with the Imperial Truth.

  But as with most useful things, expediency and utility outweighed conviction.

  ‘I have it,’ said Wayland, twisting one hand and punching in what looked like an access code on an invisible panel. ‘Expect to see some activity soon.’

  Sharrowkyn returned his attention to the temple as a number of warning sirens blared throughout the complex. Emergency lights flashed and barking announcements in gurgling cant brayed from klaxons mounted on defence towers. Streams of armed men poured from the iron structures, a mix of feral skitarii cohorts and panicked Army units.

  ‘I don’t know what you did,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘But it’s got them running scared.’

  ‘With the temple’s consent, I disengaged the control rods from the atomic core of its reactor and altered the composition of the catalysing elements to bring the isotopes to critical mass at an exponential rate. When that happens, everything within a hundred kilometres is going to be vaporised.’

  ‘Including us?’

  ‘No,’ said Wayland, tapping another Mechanicum device attached to his belt. ‘Not us.’

  The enemy troops converged on a point just outside the main gates of the temple, assuming a defensive formation as they stood waiting. A palpable sense of fear gripped the enemy, and when an opponent was off balance was the perfect moment to strike.

  ‘There,’ said Wayland. ‘That’s got to be it.’

  Sharrowkyn looked to where Wayland was indicating. A warrior in burnished red plate, awash with fluttering, wax-sealed scrolls, escorted a nondescript adept in a flowing black robe. Bereft of the reticulated machine arms and augmentation common to most tech-priests, there was nothing to outwardly mark this adept as special.

  ‘Word Bearer,’ said Sharrowkyn, his voice tight with controlled hatred.

  ‘The magnetic discharge will block vox-traffic,’ said Wayland. ‘But we have less than five minutes to take possession of the Kryptos.’

  ‘Then let’s move,’ replied Sharrowkyn, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Is it ready?’

  Wayland engaged the slave mechanism of their captured ferrovore.

  ‘Oh, it’s more than ready,’ he said.

  Booming geysers of superheated, radioactive steam blew out domes and walls of the forge temple, and burning traceries of inverted lightning arced through the volatile atmosphere. As the atomic core of the temple boiled itself to destruction, venting systems and dispersal protocols were wilfully deactivated or simply failed to function. The few adepts that remained at their stations found their efforts to avert the temple’s impending destruction thwarted at every turn.

  Nor was the chaos of the temple’s doom confined to its structural elements as Sabik Wayland and its dying machine-heart took their vengeance. Automated gunfire blitzed from defence turrets to strafe traitor positions with armour-penetrating shells. Trip-switches designed to detonate buried mines when certain parameters were met blew out in a rolling series of thunderous explosions that shook the earth and toppled nearby structures in roaring fireballs. The ferrovores convulsed as their cortical implants received contradictory orders, opening fire and scooping up swathes of skitarii to devour their metal-sheathed bodies.

  Sharrowkyn and Wayland ran through the strobing hell of explosions and gunfire with the cool precision of hunters.

  Wayland moved with his implanted rifle barking out deafening sub-sonic rounds. Each shell detonated explosively within the carapace armour of a skitarii warlord or discipline master, each target carefully chosen to hinder the command structure of the enemy from regaining control. He moved in mechanical precision with the bellowing ferrovore as its guns unleashed arcs of searing fire and electrified harpoons to cut a path through those few traitors that recognised them as enemies.

  The launchers on its back sent salvos of air-bursting rockets into the gathered traitors, multiple shells exploding and showering the ground with hundreds of plasma bomblets. Searing bursts of blue-hot fire crackled among the traitorous Army units, fusing metal and flesh and bone with a grotesque hissing sound.

  Sharrowkyn’s carbine was lighter than Wayland’s, but no less deadly in the hands of a master marksman. Each pull of the trigger shattered an enemy skull or tore out an exposed throat; kill shots that took a target’s life before they were even aware there was a danger.

  ‘He’s running,’ said Sharrowkyn, as the Word Bearer threw the robed adept over his shoulder and bolted for a low-roofed structure at the corner of the temple compound.

  ‘Can you catch him?’ asked Wayland, pumping a bolt-round through the chest of a screaming skitarii warrior with a bloodied animal pelt draped over his fanged sho
ulder guards.

  ‘Please,’ said Sharrowkyn.

  ‘Find me in sixty seconds or you won’t make it off this world.’

  Sharrowkyn nodded and triggered his jump jets, soaring away from Wayland and the berserk ferrovore. The Word Bearer was too distant to reach in one jump, and Sharrowkyn slammed down on the run, firing on full-auto as he built speed for his next leap. The jets blazed and as he arced up into the air Sharrowkyn saw the Word Bearer had reached the structure, its roof irising open to reveal a silver-bodied flyer with enormous engine nacelles.

  ‘It’s not the enemy you see that gets you,’ hissed Sharrowkyn. ‘It’s the one you don’t.’

  His carbine blazed and the Word Bearer staggered as high-velocity needles punched into the side of his helm and shoulder. Mangled metal and ceramite flew from the impacts, and Sharrowkyn slid the weapon around his shoulder as he landed with a crack of stone in a billow of heated smoke.

  Sharrowkyn drew two black-bladed gladiuses from shoulder-sheaths and threw himself at the Word Bearer. The traitor tossed his ruined helmet aside, and Sharrowkyn saw his face was grey and ashen, covered in a writhing mass of tattoos that slithered beneath his skin like worms of sentient ink.

  The Word Bearer dropped the Kryptos and brought his bolter to bear. Sharrowkyn hacked through the barrel with his first gladius and buried his second in the centre of the Word Bearers’s plastron. The warrior grunted in pain and fell back as the shell in the breech of his weapon exploded. He lashed out with a clubbing fist, but Sharrowkyn was already moving. He spun around the Word Bearer and drove the monomolecular tip of his gladius down through the warrior’s neck.

  Sharrowkyn’s blade clove the Word Bearer’s spinal column. He wrenched the sword up, and his foe’s head lolled to the side as it tore free. Even before the body fell, Sharrowkyn turned and lifted the black-robed adept from the ground. Its hood had fallen back, and he flinched as he saw the creature’s horrific face. Its flesh was as pale as his own, the lower half of its face a nightmarish arrangement of moving parts, augmitters, vox-grilles and sound-producing elements that bore no relation to anything Sharrowkyn had ever seen. What remained of its skull was like the punch-interface of a cogitator, a brass and flesh arrangement of alien anatomy meshed with glass compartments that left portions of an augmented brain visible.

  The Kryptos brayed with a sound that screeched like iron nails on slate, and a stream of garbled machine noise grated from a mouth that moved with abominable mechanised clicking and a wetly animal gurgle.

  ‘Just what I was thinking,’ said Sharrowkyn, hauling the Kryptos onto his shoulder and calling up the icon that displayed Wayland’s location. The Iron Hand was in the thick of the fighting, keeping in the shadow of the ferrovore as it tore into its erstwhile allies. Sharrowkyn leapt through the air on a trail of fire, landing in the crater of a sonic mine’s detonation. A second leap carried him over a group of cowering mortals and his third landed him beside Wayland.

  ‘Cutting it fine as usual,’ said Wayland. ‘The core is at critical mass.’

  ‘How long?’ asked Sharrowkyn, pulling the Kryptos from his shoulder.

  Wayland unclipped the second device the Mechanicum adepts had given him and placed it on the ground between them. He flipped up the trigger mechanism, his thumb hovering over the activation stud.

  ‘Ready?’ he said.

  ‘Do it,’ said Sharrowkyn as the sky flashed impossibly bright, and furious radiance wiped the forge temple from the face of the planet in a bellow of nuclear fire.

  Time ceased to have meaning.

  An age or the blink of an eye passed for Sharrowkyn, a span of time impossible to gauge. Light and shadow billowed and faded, the world beyond the shimmering bubble of unreality that sheltered them from atomic annihilation moving like a picter reel in overdrive. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t think, and – for all intents and purposes – he didn’t exist.

  And then the world snapped back into focus as the timer on the stasis field generator reached zero. Hot winds surged around them, irradiated and laden with toxic poisons that would render this region of Cavor Sarta uninhabitable for millennia. Nothing remained of the forge temple, only a glassy plain and a deep gouge in the earth where its molten core had sunk deep into the rock of the planet. A kilometres-high mushroom cloud seethed with fire, and the hammer-blow pressure waves of its power rumbled through the atmosphere. Caustic tornadoes of heavy metals twisted in the nightmarish ruins of the atomic explosion, and lightning storms surged and roared in electromagnetic melees.

  Wayland still knelt beside the stasis field generator, but stood and shook off its lingering aftereffects. Sharrowkyn swept his gaze around the devastation, amazed they had survived ground zero of a nuclear holocaust.

  ‘I think that went satisfactorily,’ said Wayland.

  ‘We’re alive and we have the Kryptos,’ agreed Sharrowkyn, watching as the cringing adept creature curled into a foetal ball, babbling in its unnatural, inexplicable cipher-language as the radiation worked upon its frail body.

  ‘And the traitors will be none the wiser to our involvement. As far as anyone will know, this was simply an accidental meltdown.’

  ‘Do you think the enemy will believe that?’

  ‘Given the lack of cohesion and mechanical expertise among the occupying forces, such events are far from uncommon,’ said Wayland. ‘I believe our involvement will go undetected.’

  Sharrowkyn nodded and activated the integral teleport homer of his armour to signal the Iron Hands vessel concealed in the orbital debris surrounding Cavor Sarta. The electromagnetic storms would cover any trace of the teleport beam, and they would be gone before any enemy forces arrived to search the ruined site.

  ‘Good work, Sabik Wayland,’ said Sharrowkyn.

  ‘Good work indeed, Nykona Sharrowkyn,’ answered Wayland.

  All in all, thought Sharrowkyn, it was a bad day to be a traitor.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Hailing from Scotland, Graham McNeill worked for over six years as a Games Developer in Games Workshop’s Design Studio before taking the plunge to become a full-time writer. Graham’s written a host of SF and Fantasy novels and comics, as well as a number of side projects that keep him busy and (mostly) out of trouble. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Graham lives and works in Nottingham and you can keep up to date with where he’ll be and what he’s working on by visiting his website.

  Join the ranks of the 4th Company at www.graham-mcneill.com

  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

  Cover layout by Rachel Docherty

  © Games Workshop Limited 2012. All rights reserved.

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  ISBN 978-0-85787-749-9

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