Lords of Mars Read online

  Emil’s voice came over the vox from the Renard: ‘Now, captain, fire those engines for all they’re worth.’

  Roboute slammed the thrust controls out to their maximum deployment, applying a dangerous amount of energy within such close proximity to another craft. The shuttle lurched and the internal gravity wallowed as brutal acceleration strained to throw off the e-mag tether holding it in place. Roboute looked back through the rear-facing hull picters and experienced a moment of bowel-churning terror as the vast maw of the Renard filled the distortion-hazed screen and the pummelling bow wave of displaced neutron flow slammed into the shuttle’s hull.

  The image vanished in a flurry of static as the Renard swallowed the shuttle in its forward hold.

  Roboute fought to keep the controls steady as the vast bulk of the Renard snapped the shuttle’s tether and sent a squalling burst of feedback into the Speranza’s hull. The resulting explosion was lost to sight almost instantly. The shuttle’s engines filled the Renard’s cargo hold with a seething mass of plasma fire, and everything the servitor crews hadn’t removed was instantly incinerated. Only the instantaneous deployment of fire suppression systems kept the fire from burning through the rear bulkheads and gutting the rest of the ship.

  Those same systems were themselves incinerated by the plasma, but by then they had done their job. The shuttle slammed into the rear bulkhead of the cargo compartment, and the heat-softened metal buckled like melted wax before the forward momentum of the Renard crushed the engines and empty rear compartments of the shuttle, folding them up like a concertinaing bulkhead door. Flames billowed from ruptured fuel lines, and what little air hadn’t already been vented from the systems caught light and pinprick fires burned phosphor bright for seconds until oxygen starvation killed them.

  Roboute, pinned in place by the force of the impact, just barely managed to slam his fist down on the explosive release bolts holding the shuttle’s crew compartment rig to the cargo spaces. The rig’s manoeuvring boosters fired and the g-forces holding Roboute in place lessened as the absurdly powerful engines fired with short-burn force.

  Ahead of him, Roboute saw the flame-wreathed outline of the Renard’s cargo bay and fought to keep the tapered prow of the rig aimed at its centre. Burning the boosters with such power was depleting their fuel cells at an alarming rate, but the mouth of the cargo bay was now racing towards Roboute and he let out a wild whoop as the smaller rig roared from inside the Renard, its forward velocity beginning to outstrip the larger vessel.

  ‘The rig’s loose!’ shouted Roboute. ‘Cut your speed, Emil!’

  Suddenly all that was around Roboute was empty space and the whipping bands of vapour in the upper strata of the atmosphere. He kept the engines sun-hot until he estimated that any projecting portions of the Renard’s prow were now behind him before hauling the control column up and to the side.

  ‘Come on, come on!’ said Roboute through gritted teeth. Silent acres of azure steel and adamantium slid by beneath him as the Renard ploughed onwards, trailing a halo of fire from its battered frontal sections. His ship had never looked so beautiful.

  ‘Holy Terra, I can’t believe that worked!’ shouted Emil. ‘You’re alive? Really? We didn’t blow up and this is all just my last moments in slow motion?’

  ‘We made it, Emil,’ said Roboute, letting out what felt like ten lungfuls of breath and feeling his heart rate slow from its current triphammer speed. ‘Wait. You didn’t think we’d make it?’

  ‘Sure, yeah, I always knew I could do it,’ said Emil. ‘I just didn’t know if you could.’

  ‘Your faith in my piloting skills is touching,’ said Roboute, turning the rig back towards the Speranza. The sheer scarp of its hull loomed before Roboute and the small craft was slammed back and forth by rogue gravity waves thrown off by the enormous starship.

  ‘I see why ships need an e-mag tether now,’ he muttered, finding the nearest embarkation deck’s lodestar signal. His vox and avionics panels lit up with warning sigils and blaring binary code waving him off, but Roboute shut them all down and angled his course towards the Speranza.

  ‘Hold on, Linya,’ whispered Roboute.

  Tanna threw himself at the arco-flagellant, his fist arcing towards its skull.

  The blow connected, but instead of tearing the arco-flagellant’s head from its shoulders, it merely rocked the cyborg killer back on its heels. Tanna followed up with a thunderous punch, but the arco-flagellant swayed aside and slashed out with its gleaming electro-flail arms. The strike would have cut Tanna in two, but Varda’s black-bladed sword swept out and intercepted the lethal whips and sliced them from its wrist.

  Varda fired his pistol at the arco-flagellant at point-blank range, the bolt blasting a chunk of meat from the killer’s side, but, incredibly, it stayed upright as chem-stimms blocked out the pain and spurred its hyper-accelerated metabolism to heal itself. Fresh flails extruded from the arco-flagellant’s gauntlets as it threw itself at the two Space Marines. The red circle at its forehead pulsed like a heartbeat, and its gleaming fangs were bared as though it was relishing this chance to fight opponents capable of harming it.

  Varda backed away, using the Black Sword to keep the arco-flagellant from getting too close. Tanna drew his own sword now that he had a foe he could legitimately kill. He came at the cyborg killer from the opposite side to Varda, slashing low for its legs. The creature leaped over his blade, slamming a fist into the side of Tanna’s helm. He felt bone crack and was driven to one knee by the force of the blow. He threw his left arm up in time to block another fist, but he was powerless to prevent the slamming head-butt crashing full into his visor. The impact was monstrous and would have caved the skull of a mortal man. Tanna rocked back, his nose shattered and one eye filled with blood as he toppled to the deck.

  Tanna knew there was a scrum of desperate fighting going on all around him, but he could hear nothing beyond the ringing in his ears and his ragged breathing. His right eye lens was a cracked and static-filled mess. He felt the surge of power from his armour as the spinal plug blocked his pain receptors and released a burst of combat-enhancing stimms. He rolled, expecting a follow-up attack, but Varda was slashing his sword at the arco-flagellant’s neck.

  Except the killer was no longer there, moving with preternatural speed thanks to the volatile concoction of potent and highly dangerous drugs coursing through its hyper-stimulated metabolism. The arco-flagellant ducked beneath Varda’s blade and spun around him to ram suddenly ramrod-straight flail-talons into the Emperor’s Champion’s side. The energised spikes punched through Varda’s plate and he loosed a guttural roar of pain.

  But rather than let that pain master him, Varda turned into the arco-flagellant and put a bolt-round straight into its chest at a range of centimetres. The bolt punched into the killer’s chest and the explosive warhead detonated microseconds after, exploding from its back in a bloody exit wound.

  But still it refused to die.

  Its electro-flails crackled with power and Varda cried out as the shock was delivered straight to his nervous system. The Emperor’s Champion dropped to his knees, and Tanna cried out as the Black Sword fell from his grip. The arco-flagellant wrenched its arm in Varda’s side, but the Emperor’s Champion had his hand wrapped around the writhing steel embedded in his body, holding it fast to his flesh.

  Tanna then realised that Varda had not dropped his sword, but released it deliberately.

  And now swung it on the fresh-forged chain Tanna had crafted.

  The strike was as horrendous as it was unexpected, the blade slicing into the arco-flagellant’s shoulder. It ricocheted from the bone and tore into the meat and steel of its skull. Sparks and oil-infused blood sprayed from the wound as the arco-flagellant staggered away from Varda. It howled in a mixture of rage and pain, one arm hanging limply at its side as though the synaptic connections to the limb had been severed.

  ‘Finish it!’ commanded Varda.

  Tanna surged to his feet and swept his
bolter from the mag-lock at his thigh.

  The aiming reticule was useless in the smashed visor, but Tanna didn’t need it.

  But before he could squeeze the trigger, the integrity field at the opening of the embarkation deck blew inwards with the sudden passage of a damaged cargo rig. Given the unexpected and unauthorised arrival of this ship, none of the pressurisation differential protocols or energy damping generators had been initiated to receive an incoming vessel. Ice-cold air blew into the embarkation deck with hurricane force as the integrity field was breached for the briefest second and the battered rig slammed to the deck with a shriek of tearing metal.

  It left a cascade of fat orange sparks in its wake as it skidded across the deck like a rampaging bull-grox, smashing cargo containers aside and ripping up a row of loader gurneys in its headlong rush across the deck space. Bondsmen and Cadians scattered like ants as they fought to get out of its pathway.

  The violated integrity field snapped back into place, and a concussive e-mag pulse slammed through the deck and toppled those few men still standing like a fist to the guts.

  The Speranza pulled out of its descending spiral into the atmosphere of Hypatia with less than thirteen minutes remaining before breaking orbit would have become impossible. The violent arrival of the Renard’s shuttle rig provided the necessary moment of calm for Colonel Anders and Abrehem Locke to impose a cessation of hostilities and restore a semblance of order.

  It was a fragile ceasefire, one that could flare to violence in a heartbeat and might have done so had it not been for the sobering sight of Roboute Surcouf leading a sterile gurney from the crew compartment of the shuttle. Borne upon the gurney was the grievously injured Linya Tychon, and the sight of the horrifically wounded magos had instantly quelled every thought of conflict. Both sides withdrew to lick their wounds and, in Abrehem Locke’s case, vanish once more into the labyrinthine structure of the Ark Mechanicus.

  As a Mechanicus bio-trauma squad encased Linya in a stasis-capsule, Roboute paused before leaving the embarkation deck, staring up at one of the vaulted chamber’s towering lancet windows; a vividly stained-glass window depicting a sprawling Leman Russ manufactorum atop Olympus Mons. One of the window’s lower panes was broken, and Roboute stared at it for several minutes with a curious expression on his face, like a man trying to recall a half-remembered dream, before following Linya and her father to the medicae decks.

  Moments later, servitors throughout the Speranza returned to their normal working patterns, re-implanting themselves into the ship’s vital systems and, more importantly, re-establishing control of the overloading reactors in the enginarium decks. With dedicated binaric choirs appeasing the enraged spirits of the plasma cores, the runaway reactions within their nuclear hearts were cooled and normal operation restored, allowing the Speranza to pull out of its self-destructive descent.

  Mechanicus clean-up crews arrived to salvage Roboute Surcouf’s shuttle and return the embarkation deck to functionality in time to receive the flotillas of cargo-haulers from the surface of Hypatia. With orbit restored, the resupply operation continued as before, though at a substantially increased altitude and measured pace.

  No trace could be found of the arco-flagellant; it had vanished as comprehensively as its master, though indications were that Brother-Sergeant Tanna and Emperor’s Champion Varda had seriously damaged its biological components. Both Space Marines had suffered injury at the hands of the cyborgised destroyer, but without the ministrations of an Apothecary, they were forced to rely on basic medicae treatment intended for baseline humanoid anatomy, which could patch up the surface hurt, but do nothing for any underlying damage the arco-flagellant’s flails had caused.

  No-one beyond the first victims of Guardsman Manos’s opening salvo had been killed in the fighting, which in itself was something of a miracle, but the medicae decks were filled with bondsmen and Cadians sporting broken limbs, deep cuts, fractured skulls and hefty concussions. Manos himself was now confined to the Speranza’s brig, a broken man with no memory of what had driven him to open fire.

  All the subsequent deep neural trawls could establish was that sometime around the shooting, synaptic activity in Manos’s amygdala, the mass of nuclei buried deep in the temporal lobes of the brain, had increased tenfold. This section of the brain, often neutered during a senior adept’s passage through the upper echelons of the Cult Mechanicus, housed the body’s control mechanisms for fear and rage, which – together with the murder of Magos Saiixek – led some magi to speculate that an outside agency had exerted some form of psychic influence over the Guardsman. What that outside agency might be, no one was saying, but below the waterline speculation was rife, with talk of xenos boarders, warp creatures and a rogue psyker among the crew.

  The coffin ships of Legio Sirius returned the mortally-wounded carcass of Amarok to the Speranza, and though there was no love lost between Elias Härkin and Gunnar Vintras, Vilka had escorted the fallen remains of its fellow Warhound to Magos Turentek’s repair cradles. A procession of Mechanicus mourners marched alongside the fallen engine, and spirit-singers encoded memories of its lost machine-soul within the Manifold to honour its sacrifice. The Omnissiah would reveal the Warhound’s new spirit in good time, ready for when its physical form was ready to walk again.

  With the current crisis averted, and to prevent another revolution below decks, Archmagos Kotov had been forced to agree to several of Abrehem’s demands. At first he had demanded another military response, but after consultations with his senior magi and receiving counsel on mortal psychology from Ven Anders and Roboute Surcouf, he had been brought round to the idea of negotiation.

  The end results of those negotiations were sweeping changes in the duty rosters of the bondsmen’s shift patterns, implemented on a ship-wide basis, together with an improvement in the quality of nutritional foodstuffs served in the feeding halls. Retroactively-applied maximum lengths of service were added to the servitude covenants between Archmagos Kotov and the Speranza’s bondsmen, and a charter of workers’ rights was to be drawn up that better outlined the exact duties and responsibilities of the starship’s crew.

  All of which had served to enrage the master of the fleet to the point of apoplexy and a full system-purge. Being dictated to by menials was unheard of in the annals of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the thought of such present humiliation was only barely outweighed by the thought of future glory. Between them, Surcouf and Anders finally persuaded the archmagos to agree to the principles of Abrehem Locke’s terms – though both harboured doubts as to how long he would abide by the agreement when the Speranza returned to Imperial space.

  The Ark Mechanicus remained in orbit around Hypatia for another five days, ferrying fleets of haulers from the surface to restock the depleted supply holds and carrying out swathes of badly-needed repair work. While Blaylock studied the temporal implications of the regressing world, both Kryptaestrex and Turentek petitioned for another week to fully replenish their stock of raw materials. Kotov refused these requests and ordered Azuramagelli to resume their course towards the unnamed forge world upon which he believed Archmagos Telok could be found.

  As the Speranza set sail, Kotov sat upon his command throne and once more turned his gaze upon the geometric arrangement of stars at the heart of this quest into the unknown.

  ‘You still believe this venture can succeed?’ asked Galatea, easing into position at Kotov’s side.

  ‘I do,’ replied Kotov, unwilling to waste words on the machine intelligence.

  The silver-eyed proxy body waved an admonishing finger.

  ‘We are not so sure,’ it said with a throaty, augmetic laugh. ‘You are a servant to lesser beings now. No longer master of your own vessel.’

  ‘My vessel,’ spat Kotov, shaking his head. ‘You said so yourself; this is your vessel now.’

  It was cold, always cold. Marko Koskinen shivered in the freezing chill, even though he was swathed in furs and thermal layers. The black and silver moun
tain was long behind him, its frigid winds and ice-locked slopes a distant memory, but here evoked in the freezing temperature of the pack-meet. Breath misted before every assembled crewman of the Legio, from its gun-servitors – temporarily removed from their weapon mounts – through its moderati and all the way to its princeps.

  Magos Hyrdrith had emptied the space of heat, an easy task on a starship travelling the void, and crackling webs of frost patterned the glass and steel of the forgotten chamber. No-one knew what purpose it had once served, and after today, no one would know what purpose it was serving now.

  A hundred souls stood in two long ranks, facing each other across a central pathway to a raised rostrum upon which sat the life-support engines of the Legio’s senior princeps.

  The Wintersun occupied the centre of the rostrum, his bio-support cradle surrounded by grey-robed adepts with canine pelts of fur and claw draped around their shoulders and skull masks obscuring their half-human, half-machine faces. The princeps’s truncated wraith-form drifted in the milky grey suspension, his sutured eyes and implant-plugged torso regarding proceedings like a withered monarch.

  Beside him, the Moonsorrow occupied the position of Tyrannos, a rank of great significance that granted absolute authority in the absence of the alpha, a title recently bestowed upon Eryks Skálmöld in recognition of his honoured status and a clear symbol of his right of succession. Elias Härkin, encased in his wheezing, pneumatic exo-harness, stood at the base of the rostrum, honoured in his proximity to the senior princeps, but still subservient to their will.

  Koskinen believed the Legio had been gifted a fresh start with the Wintersun re-establishing the proper hierarchy of dominance upon his and the Moonsorrow’s return from the Manifold.

  And now this.

  Koskinen and Joakim Baldur flanked Gunnar Vintras as they stood at the opposite end of the chamber to the Wintersun. The Warhound princeps’s shaven head was bowed and his shoulders were hunched, making him seem an utterly pathetic figure. Koskinen wanted to despise Vintras for what he had allowed to happen to Amarok, but the sight of the broken princeps told him that no rebuke he could offer would match the loathing the man had for himself.