Lords of Mars Page 34

  Tanna felt the gunship respond to his every command as though they had been flying together for centuries. It wasn’t exactly compliant per se, and could still shrug him off like a tiny biological irritant, but at least there was a measure of respect between them now.

  ‘The gunship has healed well,’ said Archmagos Kotov, seated beside Tanna in the co-pilot’s seat.

  Tanna nodded tersely and said, ‘Magos Turentek has my thanks.’

  The view through the canopy was a tempestuous melange of lightning-shot cloud banks and flickering geomagnetic storms that clashed, burst and roared and blazed with tortured energies. Streamers of plasma and forking traceries of vertical lightning shot up from the surface, making it feel as though the Barisan was evading a thunderous barrage of anti-aircraft fire.

  ‘It is like flying through a hundred thunderstorms at once,’ said Tanna as a booming pressure wave slammed into the gunship’s fuselage.

  ‘This is not a thunderstorm,’ said Kotov as Tanna corrected their flight path.

  ‘Then what is it?’

  ‘The inevitable consequence of planet-wide power generation,’ said Kotov, gesturing through the streaked canopy to where a vast dirigible-like device hung motionless in the sky. The billowing hull of the object was englobed in arcs of purple and amber lightning that coruscated down a thick length of metallic cabling hung from its underside and vanished into the roiling banks of charged vapour like a trailing arrestor hook.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Tanna as the floating contraption was swallowed by the clouds and disappeared from sight.

  ‘Some sort of energy collector I imagine,’ said Kotov admiringly. ‘It seems virtually every machine and temple on the surface of this world is given over to power generation, and that amount of power creates all manner of distortion in the upper atmosphere. I suspect Telok has unlocked a means to harness what would normally be classified as waste by-products.’

  ‘The Breath of the Gods requires such power?’

  Kotov hesitated before answering. ‘It is impossible to know the energy demands of something so far beyond our comprehension,’ he said. ‘In fact, it amazes me that one world can provide the power for something capable of such incredible reorganisation of matter and energy.’

  Another energy discharge rocked the Barisan, and Tanna swung the prow back around as a pair of the giant dirigibles hove into view through the vapour-slick clouds. This time, the view was clearer, and Tanna saw they were little more than vast bladders of a rippling metallic fibre constrained by mesh netting and hung with copper and brass mechanisms that spun and crackled with activity.

  Tanna brought the gunship lower, the altitude spiralling down as he followed the convoluted route to the surface. Had he not seen the atmospheric effects for himself, he would have believed they were being led down a deliberately circuitous flight path.

  ‘There has to be an easier way to the surface,’ he said, more to himself than Kotov.

  ‘Are you following the waypoint coordinates correctly?’

  Tanna didn’t even spare him a withering glance. ‘You would already know if I was not, because you would be screaming.’

  ‘Point taken, brother-sergeant.’

  ‘The waypoints are accurate, but it’s what we will find at the end of this flight that worries me.’

  ‘You suspect danger?’

  ‘I always suspect danger, archmagos,’ said Tanna. ‘That’s why I am still alive.’

  ‘Had Telok wanted us dead, he could have found an easier method than guiding us into a thunderstorm.’

  ‘Perhaps he has reasons to wish us alive when we reach the surface.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Tanna. ‘You are the Mechanicus here. This is your expedition.’

  ‘We are fellow crusaders, brother-sergeant, I thought you understood that,’ Kotov said. ‘Do you not think that I could have taken any number of Mechanicus transports down to the surface? I could have preloaded the route Telok sent us, but I chose you to fly me down to this historic meeting because I value what you represent. You are the Emperor, and I am the Mechanicus. Two facets of the Imperium working together. Our unity stands as testament to our sacred purpose in coming to this world.’

  ‘And it is never a bad idea to have a squad of Black Templars at your back when venturing into the unknown.’

  ‘That too,’ agreed Kotov, and Tanna could almost share the master of the expedition’s excitement.

  Despite everything they had suffered, they had actually reached their destination alive.

  The atmosphere grew thinner, and blocky shapes loomed from the clouds, vast cooling towers belching toxic fumes from the planet’s surface and squat funnels that shot plumes of green fire into the sky. Arcing static crackled in the air like fireworks at a triumphal parade and virtually every auspex panel fizzed with distortion. More of the dirigibles drifted past the Barisan, hundreds of them floating like blooms of jellyfish in a turgid ocean. The gunship flew lower still, and more of the titanic buildings – if buildings they were – emerged from the banks of cloud.

  Tanna saw towering steel structures wrapped in coils of energy, crackling pylons hundreds of metres in diameter and exosphere-scraping pyramids whose bases were thousand of miles wide. It was like flying over a gathering of hive-cities that had forsaken their individuality and simply merged into one continuous planetary crust of steel and caged fire. Tens of thousands of metres below the Barisan, tesla-coil skyscrapers jostled for space amid vast power domes and immense capacitor stacks.

  The entire surface was a coruscating, reticulated grid of lightning that spat from raised copper orbs as large as kroot warspheres and arced from conical towers fringed with hundred-metre spines. Streamers of light flowed through the gnarled mass of enormous structures, as though the planet were an organism with illumination for blood. Warm rain streaked the canopy as Tanna brought the gunship down, following a newly appeared graphic of approach markers on the avionics slate. The margin for error was minimal, and Tanna realised his earlier suspicion that there existed an easier way to reach the surface was incorrect.

  He gestured to vast, funnel-shaped towers rearing up to either side of their flight path like guide poles on a snow-locked runway. Each was topped with a flanged maw that drew in great lungfuls of the clouds and vapour banks.

  ‘Are those atmospheric processors?’ he asked.

  Kotov could barely tear his gaze from the magnificent spectacle of the colossal, planet-wide city of industry and the inhumanly vast structures passing on either side, but he nodded curtly.

  ‘Yes, I believe they are,’ he said. ‘They have the hallmark of early STC universal assemblers and are probably what makes the air breathable. What of them?’

  ‘Those towers are creating a stable corridor of calmer air for the gunship to fly through.’

  ‘Again I ask, what is your point?’

  ‘That this route was specifically created for us,’ said Tanna. ‘Right now, this is the only way anyone is getting to the surface.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘If those machines are switched off, we will have no way to get off this planet.’

  The Barisan set down in the rain on a landing platform of elevated stonework in the centre of an open plaza that resembled the civic square of an Imperial city. Steel and glasswork spires pierced the sky on every side, but dominating the eastern side of the plaza was a colossal hangar-structure with a vaulted silver-steel roof and glittering masts at its four corners. The sky was a painfully artificial shade of blue, striated with bands of deeper azure and pale streaks of cyan.

  Lightning coursed up the sides of every structure, as though their only purpose was to create and channel energy, making the air taste like biting down hard on a copper rod. Kotov marched down the Thunderhawk’s frontal assault ramp with a gaggle of scrivener savants in his wake. A pair of servo-skulls with iron-cog halos drifted in lazy orbits above him. His body was a part organic, part cybernetic hybrid in the fas
hion of an ancient order of theologic warriors from a now lost peninsula of Terra, with a flowing crimson robe whose every fibre was a fractal-formed binary equation.

  He had come armed, as was his right as an archmagos, with the same gold-chased pistol with which he had fought Galatea’s abominations aboard the Valette Manifold station. The volkite weapon was a relic of the deepest past, an artefact so precious it truly belonged in a stasis-sealed treasury case in one of the great Halls of Wonders within the Dao Vallis repositories. Two menials hastily robed in Mechanicus finery carried the remains of the Tomioka’s distress beacon taken from its saviour pod upon satin cushions, a symbolic gesture of the path that had led them to this place.

  As befitting an archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, he had come with an escort; eight skitarii in their black and gold armour bedecked with poisonous reptiles of Old Earth. Ven Anders had chosen a squad of his elite veterans, and Sergeant Tanna had come with his Space Marines. As the man who had brought him the locator beacon, Roboute Surcouf had, of course, been accorded a place in the landing party. He had brought young bodyguard and his ship’s magos, Pavelka, with him. Kotov read the censure brands in her noospheric aura with a note of vague curiosity. Surcouf was not the only one of the Renard’s crew to have flaunted authority, it seemed.

  Kotov stepped from the ramp, setting foot on a forge world that had not known the tread of a representative of the Imperium of Man in thousands of years. He marched to the edge of the stone platform, where a set of wide steps led down to the plaza, and surveyed his surroundings for any sign of Archmagos Telok or his agents.

  Kotov was not so vain as to have expected a triumphal welcome or a mass turnout of whatever workforce laboured in the power plants and forges of this world, but he had expected something. They had crossed the galaxy, endured all manner of hardships and indignities and suffered great loss to reach this world. A flicker of perturbation danced at the edge of his thoughts at the emptiness surrounding the Barisan.

  His skitarii took up position to his right, while Colonel Anders formed the Cadians up in two ranks on the left. Tanna and his Space Marines stood like giants carved from basalt and ivory at the base of the assault ramp; Surcouf and his people joined him at the steps, while the menial took a subservient position on his right. Kotov carried a long sceptre of gold and bronze, topped with a jet and bone representation of the Icon Mechanicus. Trails of incense pleasing to the Omnissiah wafted from its coal-red eye sockets.

  Putting aside the lack of any discernible form of greeting, Kotov instead turned his attention to the world itself, feeling the perpetual vibration in its bedrock that was common to planets entirely given over to the workings of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  But there was more to it than that.

  Kotov felt the unmistakable presence of grand designs, of new and unimagined workings taking place here. Deep in the very essence of what made him an archmagos, he sensed that magnificent things were afoot on this world. Technologies as yet undreamed, research that had stagnated millennia ago and which was now resurgent, developments in arenas of sophistication that the magi of Mars could not even begin to imagine.

  This was a world that was in the purest sense of the word, unique.

  And it was empty.

  Sergeant Tanna and Colonel Anders approached and stood to either side of him.

  ‘Were we not expected?’ asked Anders, clad in his dress uniform, regalia that only a Cadian would recognise as being any different from battledress.

  ‘We are expected, of course,’ replied Kotov, fighting down a mounting sense of unease. ‘We received detailed instructions for our landing.’

  ‘From an automated source,’ pointed out Surcouf. ‘That could be hundreds of years old or more.’

  ‘No,’ said Kotov. ‘Had that been the case, the given waypoints would not have delivered us to the surface, but seen us torn apart in the geomagnetic storms on our descent. The co-ordinates we were given are only relevant at this precise moment.’

  ‘Then where is Telok?’ demanded Tanna.

  ‘He will be here,’ said Kotov. ‘The authentic catechisms of first communion were exchanged with the binaric purity of genuine Mechanicus signifiers. We are expected and we will be met.’

  ‘I think you might be right,’ said Surcouf as previously invisible seams appeared in the facade of the enormous hangar-structure with the vaulted silver-steel roof. A titanic gateway was revealed, like one of the portals offering access to the vaults of arcana beneath Olympus Mons, and from it marched a glittering behemoth.

  Easily the equal of an Imperator Titan in height, but as wide and long as the largest Mechanicus bulk lander, it was an impossibly huge scorpion-like creature of glass and crystal. Its segmented body was veined with shimmering lines of emerald light and low-slung between enormous legs like frozen stalactites hewn from the roof of a colossal cave. It moved with the sound of breaking glass and grinding stone, and no one could miss the similarity to the bio-mimetic crystal-forms they had fought on Katen Venia.

  ‘Throne preserve us,’ breathed Tanna.

  ‘What in the name of Terra is that?’ hissed Anders.

  Kotov fought to hold back his own fear, but the sight of so monstrous a creation circumvented his rational neural pathways. Nothing could stand against such a towering war-engine, not the might of the Imperial Guard, not a Titan Legion, nor even the awesomely destructive war-engines of the Centurio Ordinatus. This was death in frozen, crystalline form.

  ‘Now that can’t be good…’ said Surcouf, backing away towards the Barisan.

  ‘We have been brought here to die,’ said Tanna.

  ‘No,’ said Kotov, though the evidence was hard to deny. ‘That makes no sense.’

  ‘Believe what you want, archmagos, but we are leaving!’

  ‘Is it even possible to get back?’ cried Anders over the clashing din of the crystalline beast’s stamping, seismic approach.

  ‘It has to be,’ said Tanna. ‘We reverse our course to the surface and hope the stable corridor through the atmosphere is still open.’

  ‘You’re staking our lives on a forlorn hope,’ said Anders.

  ‘Better a forlorn hope than no hope,’ pointed out Tanna.

  ‘True enough,’ nodded Anders, waving his own men back to the gunship.

  Kotov alone did not move, nor did his skitarii or his aides. He watched the approach of the crystal leviathan with transfixed awe.

  Tanna shouted at him to get to the Barisan, but Kotov ignored him.

  Better death than to return in disgrace.

  Though he had helped Kotov reach this world, Vitali Tychon had declined the chance to accompany the archmagos to the surface. It had been hard enough to leave his daughter under the care of the medicae staff for the time it took to begin the cartographae protocols on approach to Telok’s forge world.

  What if she were to wake while he was away?

  With his work complete on the command bridge, Vitali had ridden the mag-lev to the medicae deck and now hurried towards the burns unit. The attending surgical adepts were quietly confident that Linya would survive and recover much of her former operational utility. Her legs had been amputated at mid-thigh, but augmetic replacements had already been fashioned by Magos Turentek that closely mimicked the appearance of human limbs.

  The rest of the damage had been largely cosmetic, and the vat-grown skin patches were showing signs of renewed growth. It would never be the same as human skin, but it was as close as could be created without a clone donor – and Linya had always been adamant that she could never allow another life to be brought into being simply to act as a repository for spare organs.

  The corridors of the medicae deck were deserted, which was unusual, but with the ship in orbit around Telok’s forge world, Vitali was not entirely surprised. How often did an adept of Mars get to travel beyond the edges of the galaxy, let alone witness a forge world established in the depths of intergalactic space?

  He hoped Linya would be awake. He want
ed to speak to his daughter again, to hold her hand now that she was no longer at risk from infection and the counterseptic field was no longer required. He had no doubt that she would have insights into the nature of this world that had escaped the more traditionally minded magi.

  Besides, he could use the help in cataloguing the many anomalous readings he was detecting from the world below. Much like Hypatia, Telok’s forge world exhibited signs of aberrant senescence, appearing to experience periods of hyper-accelerated ageing balanced out by concomitant periods of renewal. Geological push and pull were all part and parcel of a planet’s existence as its orbit traced an elliptical path around its star, but this was something more, something unexplained and, for now, beyond his ability to fathom.

  Too many inexplicable anomalies that shared this same characteristic were mounting up for Vitali’s liking: the reports of the robotic guardians on the Tomioka being in a state of decrepitude but yet still functional; the apparent planetary youth of Hypatia and the presence of a pre-Age of Strife metropolis; and now these nonsensical readings.

  Whatever Telok had found in the wilderness space, it had effectively unravelled the fabric of space-time and made a mockery of the physical laws governing its operation. Vitali’s thinking was too literal and methodical to make sense of such things; he needed Linya’s ability to think in curves to galvanise their cogitations.

  Vitali turned into the burns unit and followed the familiar route through its sterile corridors, still turning over the problems of trans-dimensional fractures in space-time and their collateral effects on universal chronometry.