Priests of Mars Read online

  Kotov nodded and bent to expose a maintenance panel beneath the pict screen. His digital dendrites writhed into the mass of winking lights, wires and exposed copper connectors.

  ‘Magos Kotov, may we assist you in navigating the Valette Manifold station?’ repeated the voice.

  ‘No, and you are not to offer assistance again unless I specifically request it,’ said Kotov, sealing the maintenance hatch behind him. The pict screen went dark and Hawkins was thankful to see it power down. Each time a screen came to life, it felt like the station was watching them.

  ‘This way,’ said Kotov, gesturing to the left. ‘In a hundred metres, there will be a set of access stairs that will allow us to ascend to the upper levels and the control deck.’

  Kul Gilad nodded and moved on with the Emperor’s Champion on his left and Sergeant Tanna on his right. Leaving Rae’s men to secure the airlock vestibule, Hawkins led his squad after the Space Marines, alert for any signs of something amiss. Even through his padded environment suit, the hard air of the station seemed to leach the warmth from his bones. Shadows moved strangely and the light reflected harshly from frost-limned wall panels. Hawkins didn’t like this place, and his Cadian instincts were telling him that something was very wrong.

  He glanced over at a blank pict screen, its glass crazed by a powerful impact.

  The screen flickered to life and Hawkins almost yelled in surprise, bringing his rifle around as battlefield-honed reflexes took over. He managed not to pull the trigger, and let out a shuddering breath as adrenaline dumped into his system.

  The silver-eyed tech-priest stared at him, but didn’t say anything.

  Kotov appeared at Hawkins’s side, kneeling before this screen’s maintenance panel.

  ‘What did you do?’ demanded the archmagos.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Hawkins. ‘It just came on by itself.’

  ‘Did it say anything?’

  Hawkins shook his head, and once again the archmagos deactivated the pict screen. In the silence that followed, Hawkins heard a squeal of metal from farther around the corridor. Before the sound had a chance to echo, seven Space Marine bolt weapons were instantly trained into the darkness.

  ‘Douse those lights!’ ordered Kul Gilad, and instantly the skitarii’s lamps were snuffed out.

  ‘Defensive posture,’ ordered Hawkins, shouldering his rifle as he dropped to one knee. ‘Squad Creed, watch ahead. Guardsman Manos, look for anything coming up behind us.’

  The sounds came again, a thudding iron footfall and a scrape of metal on metal. Hawkins flipped down his helmet’s visor and the hallway before him was suddenly splashed in a haze of emerald light, with his rifle’s targeting reticule painting a bright smear on the curved wall ahead of him. A phantom shadow was thrown out on the deck. Something was approaching from deeper within the station. He slipped his finger around his rifle’s trigger as a shape emerged slowly from around the arcing corridor.

  The figure was broad-shouldered and moved with a lurching groan of protesting servos. Its breathing was frothed and heavy, like a labouring beast of burden. Hawkins let the air out of his lungs as he saw an augmented servitor, dragging a mangled leg behind it. A sparking arm swung in a repeating circular motion. He eased his trigger finger free.

  ‘It’s just a servitor,’ said Kotov. ‘Stand your men down, Reclusiarch.’

  The guns of the Black Templars didn’t waver a millimetre, and Hawkins wasn’t about to lower his rifle until they did. He kept the aiming reticule centred over the servitor’s skull, a thick hunk of bone and flesh that seemed to squat on the servitor’s shoulders without a neck. It was hard to make out much detail through the blurred nightsight visor, but there seemed to be something fundamentally wrong with the proportions of the servitor’s skull.

  ‘Put it down, Tanna,’ said Kul Gilad.

  ‘No!’ cried Kotov, but the ignition of a bolter shell filled the corridor with noise as Tanna’s round blew the top of the servitor’s skull clear, leaving only a sloshing, blood-filled basin of pulped brain matter. The cybernetic took half a dozen more steps before its stunted physiology finally accepted that it was dead and it collapsed to the deck. Its sparking leg twitched and spasmed, still trying to move its body forwards, and the oversized arm fizzed and whined as it attempted to recreate the motions it had been making while its bearer was upright.

  Kotov and his skitarii swept down the corridor towards the downed servitor.

  ‘Do not approach it, archmagos,’ warned Kul Gilad.

  ‘Your sergeant killed it, Reclusiarch,’ snapped Kotov. ‘Servitors may be physically resistant and feel no pain, but even they struggle to be a threat without a head.’

  ‘That’s not a servitor,’ said Kul Gilad.

  Hawkins waved two of his men to come forwards with him, following the Black Templars as they escorted Archmagos Kotov towards the downed servitor.

  ‘Omnissiah’s bones,’ hissed Kotov, making a penitent symbol of the Cog Mechanicus over his chest. ‘What has happened here?’

  At first, Hawkins wasn’t sure why Kotov was reacting so badly, but then he saw the shreds of skin that flapped loose on the remains of the servitor’s skull. Kul Gilad knelt beside the creature and took hold of a wide strip of waxen skin. He peeled it back, revealing muscle, sinew and organic tissue, exactly as would be expected

  But Hawkins’s eyes widened as he finally grasped the nature of the creature’s physiognomy; the jutting lower jaw and protruding tusks, the battered porcine snout. Hawkins had to fight the ingrained urge to draw his pistol and put a pair of bolt rounds in its chest to make sure it was dead.

  The servitor was an ork.

  Flensed of its green hide and clothed in a sutured sheath of human skin, but still recognisably a greenskin marauder.

  Kotov knelt beside the ork and placed a hand on its mechanised parts. Writhing nests of cables extruded from each of his hands and fixed themselves to its augmetic leg and arm.

  ‘God of All Machines, in the name of the Originator, the Scion and the Motive Force, release these spirits from the blasphemy into which they have been bound. Free them to fly the golden light to your care, and renew them in your all-knowing wisdom to return to us. In your mercy, make it so.’

  ‘What was that?’ snarled Tanna. ‘You feel pity for this thing?’

  ‘For the machines grafted to this unclean monster’s flesh,’ said Kotov, turning and nodding to one of the skitarii, who drew a set of cutting tools from his utility pack and bent to the grisly task of removing the machine parts from the ork’s body.

  ‘I’m guessing it’s not normal to make servitors from greenskins,’ said Hawkins, watching as the skitarii fired up up a shielded plasma-cutter and began stripping back the flesh around the graft. A fungal stink of rotten vegetable matter and scorched skin filled the corridor. Hawkins felt himself gag through the filter of his rebreather.

  ‘What has been happening here, archmagos?’ demanded Kul Gilad.

  ‘Trust me, Reclusiarch, I would know that too,’ said Kotov. ‘It is an abomination to graft blessed machines to such non-human savages.’

  Hawkins heard the distant rumble of something powerful coming to life deep within the station. Lights flickered on along the curve of the walls and a hum of activating machinery rose from beneath the metal grilles of the deck plates.

  ‘I think the station’s waking up,’ he said.

  ‘This creature’s destruction has alerted the system core to our presence,’ agreed Kotov. ‘We should proceed with all speed to the central command deck. The station may now perceive us as attackers.’

  As if to ram that point home, an armoured blast containment shutter hammered down behind them, cutting off the route back to the airlock vestibule. Dull thuds of metal slamming together told Hawkins that a number of similar shutters were sealing off entire areas of the station from one another. Instantly, Hawkins’s ear filled with squalling bursts of shrieking static, and he wrenched the vox-bead out with a grunt of pain.

&nbs
p; ‘Vox is down,’ he called.

  ‘Prepare for battle,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘Kotov, open that shutter. I’ll not be cut off from the Barisan.’

  Kotov shook his head. ‘The core systems are reviving, Reclusiarch. Only the ranking magos has authority to override the blast containment system.’

  ‘You are an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ snarled Kul Gilad, pushing Kotov towards the blast shutter. ‘Assert your authority and get that door open.’

  Before Kotov could move, another pair of pict screens fuzzed to life, each bearing the image of the tech-priest with the silver optics. A gabble of binaric anger spat from them, and the mirror images of the tech-priest looked up, the gleaming light of their optics narrowing to focused points.

  ‘You have attacked our servants,’ said the tech-priest, shaking his head in disappointment. ‘We cannot allow that while we still have need of them.’

  ‘That’s not a recording, is it?’ said Hawkins.

  ‘No,’ replied Kotov. ‘I do not believe it is.’

  In the lower reaches of the Manifold station, a thermal generator spooled up with an ultra-rapid start cycle, utilising a series of linked machines that encircled the station’s inner circumference. Each of these linked machines had been developed from technology designed to rouse the plasma reactors of battle Titans to full readiness in the shortest time possible. An almost complete STC discovered by Magos Phlogiston less than half a millennium ago had described the construction of such ‘kick-starters’, but its missing fragments had contained the information required to prevent such devices from driving their reactors into uncontrolled critical mass in a matter of seconds. Thus the designs were archived instead of being put into production.

  The Valette kick-starters bore all the hallmarks of Phlogiston’s recovered STC, but were fitted with a series of inhibitors built to a design that no analyticae would find in any forge world’s data repositories or even the most comprehensive databases of Olympus Mons. Only one son of Mars had the nous to craft such devices, and he had destroyed every trace of their design before leaving the bounds of galactic space.

  Within ninety seconds of Tanna’s bolter shot, the power systems for the Valette Manifold station were operating at full efficiency. The fierce thermal reserve coursed around the upper and lower reaches of the station with virtually no heat loss via a series of ultra-insulated pipes that threaded the walls, floors and ceilings like a circulatory system.

  In vaulted chambers where the skeleton crew of Adeptus Mechanicus tech-priests and servitors had once toiled in service to the Machine-God, power now flowed for a very different purpose. In every laboratory, library and workshop, the temperatures within three hundred fluid-filled cryo-caskets rose as their occupants were roused from deep slumber. Controlled current fired through augmented synapses, warmed super-efficient blood pumped through flexing veins, and stimulated stratified layers of deep muscle tissue.

  Billowing clouds of chill air sighed from the three hundred caskets as icy fluid was drained and vented from their upper tiers in freezing crystalline jets. Glass doors opened and dripping figures encased in webs of copper cabling and plastic tubes took their first natural breaths in fifty years.

  In every revivification space, a pict screen came to life and the silver-eyed tech-priest appeared.

  ‘More intruders have come,’ said the tech-priest in a voice that was an unnatural amalgam of machine cadences and overlapping flesh tones.

  ‘Orders?’ grunted one of the awoken sleepers, its cranium encased in synaptic enhancers and its neural pathways surgically altered to allow it a measure of autonomy.

  ‘Kill the warriors,’ said the tech-priest. ‘Bring us the Mechanicus personnel alive.’

  Hawkins could feel his heartbeat thudding through the heavy stock of his lasgun. Despite the cold, beads of sweat formed on his brow and he fought the urge to lift his visor to wipe them clear. The corridor was brightly lit now, the shadows banished, but strangely that didn’t make him feel any better. The station was rousing further with every passing second, with glowing bulbs kept behind wire cages flashing as though some emergency was imminent. Burbling streams of binary issued from speaker-horns mounted on the ceiling, but what message they imparted was a mystery to him. The vox was still down, and he’d been unable to raise Rae’s squad or anyone back on the Speranza.

  He and his men were arranged in the cover of ironwork buttresses, their lasguns aimed unswervingly down the corridor, each man ready to fill his assigned fire sector with a slew of carefully placed shots. The Black Templars hadn’t moved since the first signs of the station’s reawakening, braced like immovable statues with their weapons locked at their hips.

  Kotov worked at a panel to the side of the blast shutter, but the string of binaric curses and bursts of sparks told Hawkins that he was having little success. Fighting with your back to something solid was all well and good when you were defending a static position, but when it cut you off from your supporting forces and your only way out, it was something else entirely.

  Hawkins slid from cover and drew level with Kul Gilad.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ he said.

  ‘It is a good position,’ said the Reclusiarch. ‘Enemy forces cannot outflank us.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Hawkins. ‘Kotov can’t open that door, but that damn magos with the silver eyes certainly can. Without any line of retreat, we’re as good as dead if this fight goes against us.’

  ‘To admit defeat is to blaspheme against the Emperor,’ said Kul Gilad.

  ‘Really? Because I seem to remember you saying something about defeat always being possible and how recognising that makes you a great warrior.’

  ‘I said it makes a man fight with heart.’

  ‘Yeah, well no matter how much heart we have, this position reeks of a last stand, and that’s something Cadian officers prefer to avoid wherever possible. I know you Space Marines like your glory and heroics, but I’d rather live through the next hour if that’s all the same.’

  Kul Gilad turned to him, and the red eye-lenses of his helm fixed him with their steely glare. For a moment, he thought the Reclusiarch might strike him down for his temerity, but the moment passed and the giant Space Marine slowly nodded his skull-faced helm.

  ‘You are right,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘We will take the fight to the enemy.’

  ‘Keep moving forwards,’ said Hawkins. ‘That’s the Cadian way of doing things.’

  The Terminator-clad Reclusiarch turned to Kotov and said, ‘Archmagos, forget the shutter, we are moving on to the central command deck as you suggested. Whatever is at the heart of this, we will meet it on our terms.’

  Kotov nodded and withdrew his digital dendrites from the door panel.

  ‘The door will not open anyway,’ said Kotov in disgust. ‘I have status and protocol on my side, but the machines do not heed me. They are enslaved to the will of something inhuman and rebuff every signifier of my exalted rank.’

  ‘No matter,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘The time for subtlety is over.’

  ‘Good thing too,’ said Hawkins. ‘I was never very good at subtle.’

  Microcontent 16

  With the Black Templars in the centre, and the Cadians and skitarii on the flanks, the boarders moved off down the corridor at speed, and it only took a few moments for the wisdom of that choice to become evident. The blast containment shutter that had thwarted Archmagos Kotov withdrew into the ceiling with a rumble of machined servos.

  A host of heavily muscled servitors crafted from the same hideous form as the one Tanna had killed stood revealed. They were unmistakably orks, but with human skin grafted to their oversized bulk. The effect was sickening and terrifying at the same time. Like malformed ogryns, the orkish servitors were armed with a varied collection of energised blades, crackling prods and heavy mauls. To Hawkins’s lasting regret, they didn’t move like servitors, but with the relentless, simian gait of their savage species.

  ‘Move faster,’ ordered Kul
Gilad. ‘We need to reach the upper levels. Archmagos, how far away are those stairs to the upper decks?’

  ‘Fifty-two metres,’ said Kotov. ‘This way!’

  The Black Templars marched backwards in perfect unison, firing a thunderous volley of bolter fire back down the corridor. The mass-reactives barely had time to arm before detonating within the hard flesh of the greenskin servitors. Explosions of meat and bone erupted across the front rank of enemies, gaping wounds that would reduce a mortal body to bone fragments and vaporised blood, but which only staggered the robust physiology of the greenskins. A handful fell, but the rest came on without heed of their losses. Ork resilience and servitor immunity from pain was combining to make these enemies near impossible to put down unless taken apart. Cadian and skitarii fire augmented the shooting of the Space Marines, but it was the mass-reactives that were doing the bulk of the killing.

  Moving back to a better shooting position, Hawkins fired a three-round burst at the nearest enemy, a brute with an iron-encased skull and a series of hideous surgical sutures zig-zagging their way across its thick features. His shots all struck home, burning through the centre mass without effect. Another deafening roar of bolter fire slammed the servitors, blowing the limbs from more of them. Hawkins shifted his aim, took a breath and squeezed the trigger twice.

  His first shot punched through the nasal cavity of the ork, the second vaporised its eyeball and cored through its skull to the brain cavity. The hunk of organic matter that animated the ork cooked to burned meat in the enclosed vault of its cranium, and the cybernetic abomination dropped without a sound as its brain functions were sheared.

  ‘And stay down!’ shouted Hawkins, sighting at another servitor; one with a set of enormous bolt-cutting shears that could lop off a limb or slice through a neck with equal ease. Blasts of bolter fire threw off his aim, and his shots burned chunks of flesh from the ork’s head and left its jawbone hanging loose.

  The orks were dangerously close now, almost close enough to bring their lethal tools to bear.