Priests of Mars Read online

  Kul Gilad stepped back. ‘Begin!’

  Dahan did not attack at once, but circled his opponent carefully, using his optical threat analysers to accumulate data on this opponent; his reach, height, his weight, his likely strength, his foot patterns, his posture. He had expected to fight the bigger warrior with the laurel-wreathed helm, but if the Reclusiarch thought to confound his combat subroutines by presenting him with an unexpected foe, it was a poor gambit.

  He kept his Cebrenian halberd slightly extended, one of his servo arms above it, the other below. Crackling sparks of electricity popped from the forks, each shock-blade’s charge strong enough to stop the multiple hearts of a raging carnifex. He eased around on his waist gimbal, letting his dewclaws click on the deck in a slow tattoo. Just the sight of his combat-enabled body was enough to unnerve most opponents, but this warrior appeared unfazed.

  He decided to test the mettle of his opponent with something easy, a feint to gauge his reaction speed and reflex response. The Cebrenian halberd slashed at Yael’s head, but the Templar swayed aside and batted away the killing edge, spinning around and resuming his circling. He was employing Bonetti’s defence, a tried and tested technique, but one that would struggle against an opponent with four arms.

  Capa Ferro would be the logical mode of attack against such a defence, but from the motion profile he had already built up, Dahan suspected his opponent was luring him into such an attack. His footwork was that of the great swordsman of Chemos, Agrippa, but his grip was Thibault.

  A mix of styles, then.

  Dahan smiled as he realised his opponent was taking the measure of him also. He gave the warrior a moment’s grace, letting him truly appreciate the futility of attempting to fight an opponent who could predict his every move, who had broken down more than a million combat bouts to their component parts and analysed every one until there was no combination of attacks that could surprise him.

  The Guardsmen and skitarii surrounding them cheered and shouted encouragement to their chosen fighter, but Dahan shunted his aural senses to a higher frequency to block them out. Vocalised noise was replaced by hissing machine noise, code blurts and the deep, glacial hum of the Speranza’s vast mind emanating from the heart of the ship.

  Yael launched his first attack, a low cut with his combat blade, which Dahan easily parried with the base of his halberd. He rolled his wrists, pivoting on his waist gimbal to avoid the real strike from Yael’s chainsword. Dahan brought one metal knee into the Templar’s stomach, driving him back with a crack of ceramite. He followed up with a jab from his shock-claws. The blades scored across Yael’s arm, cutting a centimetre into the plate. A pulse of thought sent hundreds of volts through the blade, but the Templar didn’t react and stepped in close to drive his sword blade at Dahan’s chest.

  The second shock-claw blocked it, and he spun the base of his halberd up into Yael’s side. A burst of angry code blared in his ear as the halberd’s entropic capacitor sent disruptive jolts of paralysing code into the Templar’s armour. Yael staggered as his armour’s systems flinched at the unexpected attack, struggling to keep from shutting down and resetting. Dahan leaned back on one leg and brought his two front legs up to slam into the Templar’s chest, knocking him back with punishing force. Yael hit the deck hard and rolled, sparks flaring from his power pack.

  Dahan followed up with a leaping attack that drove the gold blade of the halberd down at the deck. Yael rolled aside, pushing himself upright with a burst of strength and speed that surprised Dahan. Clearly the bellicose spirits in Yael’s armour were better able to resist attack than most machine souls.

  Yael slashed his sword low, but Dahan lifted his leg over the sweeping blade. His halberd stabbed down again, the blade turned aside by a forearm smash. Yael spun inside Dahan’s guard and drove his combat blade up to his chest. Twin shock-blades trapped it a hair’s breadth before it plunged into his hardened skin. Dahan sent a burst of crackling force through the blades and the knife blew apart in a shower of white-hot shards of metal.

  Dahan slammed the haft of the halberd into Yael’s chin, leaning over almost at ninety degrees to his vertical axis to punch his shock-blades into his opponent’s side. Yael dropped to one knee with a roar of pain as coruscating lines of purple lightning danced over his armour. Even as he fell, Dahan was in motion, circling behind the fallen Templar and drawing back his halberd for what would be a beheading strike.

  He braced his legs and brought the blade around, but even as he did so he felt the sudden pressure of Yael’s sword against his groin assembly. Shocked, Dahan looked down. The Templar still knelt, as though at prayer, but the blade of his sword was thrust back between his torso and his left arm. The tip of the blade was touching Dahan’s body, its madly revving teeth now stilled. Instantaneous calculations showed that the blade would penetrate a lethal twenty-five centimetres before his own blade could end Yael’s life.

  ‘A killing strike,’ said Kul Gilad.

  ‘I do not understand,’ said Dahan, returning his shock-blade arms to the rest position at his back and pulling his halberd upright. ‘This is inconceivable. The permutations of Templar Yael’s fighting patterns, attack profiles and physical attributes did not predict this outcome.’

  Yael stood and turned to face the magos. He sheathed his sword and reached up to remove his helmet. The revealed face was bland, its sharp edges smoothed out by genetic manipulation and enhanced bone density. Isotope degradation from his skeletal structure told Dahan that Yael was no more than twenty-four Terran years old.

  ‘You fought to the classical schools,’ said Dahan. ‘Agrippa, Thibault, Calgar...’

  ‘I have trained in them, studied them, but I do not slavishly follow them,’ said Yael.

  ‘Why not? Each is masterful technique.’

  ‘A fight is about more than just technique and skill,’ said Yael. ‘It is about heart and courage. About a willingness to suffer pain, a realisation that even the greatest warrior can still be humbled by a twist of fate, a patch of loose ground, a mote of dust in the eye...’

  ‘I account for random factors in my calculations,’ said Dahan, still unwilling to concede that his combat subroutines could be in error. ‘My results are certain.’

  ‘Therein lies your error,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘There is no such thing as certainty in a fight. Even our greatest bladesman could be felled by a lesser opponent. To be a truly sublime warrior, a man must realise that defeat is always possible. Only when you recognise that can you truly fight with heart.’

  ‘With heart?’ said Dahan with a grin. ‘How might that be integrated to my repertoire, I wonder?’

  ‘Train with us and you will learn,’ said Kul Gilad.

  Dahan nodded, but before he could reply, a colossal, braying howl filled the training hangar. The sound echoed over the shattered city Dahan had constructed, filled with anger, with nightmares and with madness. The howl was answered and a towering structure of modular steel and permacrete in the heart of the city came crashing down in an avalanche of debris. Dahan’s optics cut through the haze of flame, dust and smoke, but what he saw made no sense.

  The Titans of Legio Sirius were making war on one another.

  Microcontent 12

  Wracking thuds of impact cracked the glass of the princeps tank, and howls of angry code blurts filled the command compartment of Lupa Capitalina. Pulsing icons flashed and warbled insistently as the Titan made itself ready for the fight of its life. Bellowing armaments clamoured for shells, void generators throbbed with accumulating power and the mindless questioning of distant gun servitors clogged the internal vox.

  And at the centre of it all was Princeps Arlo Luth.

  The amniotic tank was frothed with his convulsions, the milky grey liquid streaked with blood like patterns in polished marble. His limbless, truncated body twisted like a fish caught on a lure that fought for freedom. Phantom limbs that had long ago been sacrificed to the Omnissiah writhed in agony, and a wordless scream of horror bled fro
m his tank’s augmitters.

  It had begun only moments ago.

  Lupa Capitalina had been coming about from a successful prosecution of the outer defence districts, pulverising them with turbolasers then filling the ruins with simulated plasma fire. Canis Ulfrica completed the devastation with its barrage missiles, while Amarok and Vilka stalked the ruins to eliminate any last pockets of resistance in storms of vulcan bolter fire.

  Moderati Rosten had been working through the post-firing checklist to power down the guns when Canis Ulfrica had moved into the Capitalina’s field of view. Skálmöld had raised his guns in salute to his princeps, and every single alarm had burst into life.

  Princeps Luth screamed as a violent grand mal ripped through his ravaged flesh. Violent feedback slammed up through the consoles, killing Rosten in a heartbeat, flashburning his brain to vapour and setting him alight from the inside. Magos Hyrdrith was luckier, her inbuilt failsafes cutting off the Manifold just before the feedback hit, but such sudden disconnection brought its own perils. She spasmed on the floor, black fluids leaking from her implants and a froth of oily matter issuing from every machined orifice in her body.

  Koskinen also felt the sympathetic pain of Luth’s seizure, but he had been disconnected from the Manifold at the time. His distress came from seeing his princeps in extremis and his fellow moderati dead. He ran back to his station, flinging his arms up to ward off streams of sparks and hissing blasts of vapour escaping from pressure-equalising conduits. He slid into his contoured couch seat, taking in the readings at a glance. The hololiths surrounding him were alive with threat responders, warning of enemies approaching.

  ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ he said, alternating between reading the threats his panels insisted were drawing nearer with every second, and the ruined city they had just pulverised. Luth was screaming, a sub-vocal shriek of machine language that still managed to convey the terrible agonies he was suffering.

  Koskinen scrolled through the tactical display. According to the readouts, they were surrounded by thousands of enemies, monstrous swarms of fast-movers with hostile intent. They only told a fraction of the story, but without plugging back into the Manifold there was no way to be sure of what the engine thought it was seeing.

  ‘Hyrdrith!’ he yelled. ‘Get up! For Mars’s sake, get up! I need you!’

  Whether it was his words or coincidence, Hyrdrith chose that moment to push herself upright. She looked about herself, as though unable to process what was happening around her. She clambered to her feet as the deck swayed and the Capitalina took a faltering step.

  ‘Interrogative: what in the name of the Machine-God is happening?’

  ‘You don’t know? Everything’s gone to hell is what’s happening,’ shouted Koskinen. ‘Luth’s having some kind of seizure, and the engine thinks we’re about to come under attack from thousands of enemy units.’

  ‘Do you have the Manifold?’

  ‘No,’ said Koskinen. ‘I think... I think Lupa Capitalina has it...’

  ‘Then get in and take it from her,’ snapped Hyrdrith, bending down to swap the fused cable at her station for a fresh one extruded from her stomach like a coiled length of intestine. She worked with ultra-rapid speed, re-establishing her link to the machine heart of the battle-engine, reciting prayers with each twist of a bolt and finger-weld connection she made.

  ‘You’re insane, Hyrdrith,’ said Koskinen, twisting in his seat to point at the scorched ruin of the opposite moderati station. ‘Look what happened to Rosten.’

  ‘Do it,’ repeated Hyrdrith as the engine took another step and Luth’s howls changed in pitch to something altogether more dangerous. ‘Make the connection, we need to know what’s happening in the Capitalina’s heart.’

  ‘I’m not re-connecting,’ said Koskinen. ‘It’s suicide.’

  ‘You have to,’ replied Hyrdrith. ‘Your princeps needs you to drag him back from whatever affliction drives him to this madness.’

  Koskinen shook his head.

  Hyrdrith pulled back the sleeve of her robe and the stubby barrel of a weapon unfolded from the metal of her arm. A magazine snapped into the gun, engaging with a click and a rising hum.

  ‘Do it now, or I will shoot you where you sit.’

  ‘You’re crazy!’ shouted Koskinen.

  ‘You have until I count to three. One, two...’

  ‘Shit, Hyrdrith,’ barked Koskinen. ‘All right, I’ll plug in, just put that gun away.’

  ‘We plug in together,’ said Hyrdrith. ‘Understood?’

  ‘Yes, understood, damn you.’

  Koskinen hefted the Manifold connector, the gold-plated connector rods looking like daggers aimed at his brain. Normally communion through the Manifold was a sacred moment, attended to by a host of tech-acolytes, with numerous applications of oil balms and anti-inflammatory gels, but this was about as far from normal as it was possible to get.

  ‘Ready?’ asked Hyrdrith, sounding hatefully matter of fact.

  ‘Ready.’

  ‘Connect,’ said Hyrdrith, and Koskinen plugged in, feeling the cold bite of linkage through the golden connector rods in the back of his skull. A surge of furious anger and heat instantly enveloped his body, his back arching with the shock of it. Acidic data poured through neurological veins, stimulating every nerve ending with pain emissions, and pumping the full range of aggressor-stimms into his cardiovascular system. Koskinen bellowed with animal fury, feeling the angry heart of the Capitalina clawing at his mental processes.

  Coupled via a moderati’s Manfold link, his connection to the bellicose spirit of the Titan was superficial, yet almost overwhelming.

  What must it be like for Princeps Luth, twin souls woven together in one warlike purpose?

  Koskinen fought against the anger, knowing it wasn’t his own. Titanicus eidetic training took over, fencing off those parts of his brain worst affected and concentrating on restoring his situational awareness. Shoals of data light swam into focus as the full range of auspex inputs rose up to meet him. A hiss of terror escaped his lips as he saw the hordes of approaching creatures, millions of individual surveyor returns that blurred into one homogenous mass of inputs.

  ‘God of All Machines, save us...’ he hissed. ‘So many of them!’

  said a voice that cut across his thought processes. Magos Hyrdrith, also plugged into the Manifold.

  Koskinen took a deep breath and forced himself to relax his haptic grasp on the firing controls for the plasma destructor, unaware he’d even summoned them to his hand. The weapon’s power coils were charging of their own accord, but thankfully release authority still lay with the moderati. He ran an interpolation scan of the inloading surveyor inputs, seeing a vast swarm of creatures surrounding them, working with a terrifying degree of co-ordination that was chilling in its instantaneous reaction.

  And suddenly he knew what he was looking at.

  ‘It’s Beta Fortanis...’ he said. ‘Why does he think we’re back on Beta Fortanis?’

  said Hyrdrith.

  ‘He’s having a nightmare?’

  answered Hyrdrith.

  ‘Then how do we wake him up?’

 

  ‘Great,’ said Koskinen, looking closer at the hallucinatory auspex readings and feeling a gnawing wave of nausea clamp his gut. ‘I remember this attack pattern... Luth’s fighting the tyranid swarms at Sulphur Canyon! The battle where... oh, hell.’

  os bio-titan,> said Hyrdrith.

  ‘I’m trying,’ he grunted, pouring all his command authority into disarming the weapon. ‘But the Capitalina’s damn determined that she wants it.’

  The engine lurched around the last remains of what had once been a recreation of a clock tower, where enemy missile teams had hidden until Amarok had sawn its upper levels off with vulcan fire. Amid the spurious returns from the non-existent tyranid swarms, Koskinen picked out the panicked icons of the Legio’s Warhounds as they scrambled for cover. Canis Ulfrica moved through the ruins ahead of them, traversing the shattered buildings as it picked up speed in an attempt to get out of Lupa Capitalina’s path.

  Heat spikes burned his hand, and Koskinen flinched, even as he recognised the pain was illusory.

  ‘Plasma destructor’s coming online!’ he yelled. ‘I can’t stop it.’

  ordered Hyrdrith.

  Koskinen glanced over at Princeps Luth’s amniotic tank, the liquid trapped within churned like the bottom of a silty lake. A shape swam out of the murk, a wizened face of sutured eyes, coil-plugged ears and a tube-fed mouth. Amputated arms that trailed silver wires from the elbows beat the glass in fury, and the awful, stretched-parchment skin of the bulbous head smeared blood on the glass as it twisted left and right, staring out at them and seeing only enemies.

  Koskinen linked himself to Luth’s tank and, as calmly as he was able, said, ‘It’s not real, my princeps. What you’re seeing, it’s not real. This battle is a year old. They hurt us, yes, but we walked away from the fight alive. We beat those xenos bastards!’

  Luth’s monstrous head turned in his direction, though there was no way he could see him. Koskinen had no idea whether Luth could even hear him, thinking back to the chaos of the battle against the hive creatures in that claustrophobic canyon. Fighting blind in yellow steam that billowed up from sunken caverns, millions of scurrying, chitinous monsters swarming their legs, dropping from the cliffs above or soaring on the billowing thermals.