Lords of Mars Read online

  So focused was Vitali on this largely theoretical and largely unknown branch of Mechanicus art that at first he didn’t notice the bodies.

  He stopped in his tracks and all thoughts of quantum theorems were forgotten.

  The central hub chamber of the burns unit resembled an uprising in a slaughterhouse.

  Corpses and severed limbs lay scattered throughout the space like offal, too many and in too much disarray to even begin to guess at how many dead bodies surrounded him. Horrified, Vitali saw one body cut in half at the waist, sitting in a lake of oil-sheened blood, another that was little more than a truncated slab of meat with metallic nubs of bone protruding from its torn flesh. Mechanical parts were strewn amongst the hacked up meat, and Vitali saw the robes of magi, servitors and menials.

  The carnage had been indiscriminate, the exalted murdered alongside the enslaved.

  Worse, there was clear relish taken in these killings, a savage joy in the reduction of human flesh and machine augmentation to ruin.

  Prudence and logic dictated a retreat, but his daughter lay defenceless in one of this deck’s treatment chambers. Whatever maniac had perpetrated this senseless massacre might still be here, might still have designs on killing anyone he came across.

  Vitali was no warrior and had always eschewed the implantation of weaponry within his body-plan, but right now he would have gladly had an integral beam weapon or energy sword. Stepping around the worst of the blood and discarded body parts, Vitali picked his way towards the passage that led to Linya’s room.

  Scarlet droplets had sprayed the walls here, as though the murderer had swung his killing blade to spatter the lifeblood of his victims in some perverse act of vandalism. With a sinking heart, Vitali hurriedly followed the looping arcs like a trail of horrid breadcrumbs.

  ‘No, please, no,’ whispered Vitali as he saw the blood drops traced an unerring course to Linya’s room. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus, please no.’

  The door was ajar and Vitali heard sounds of movement from within.

  Though he had no ability to fight beyond what innate human nature had gifted him, Vitali didn’t hesitate and barged through the door.

  ‘Get away from her!’ he shouted without knowing who or what lay within.

  The grisly tableau before him halted him in his tracks and he sank to his knees in abject horror.

  Galatea squatted at the side of Linya’s bed, the silver-eyed tech-priest body hunched over his daughter like some predatory vampire creature. Blood haloed Linya’s head and Galatea’s arachnid limbs were wet where it had hacked its victims apart in the medicae hub.

  ‘Magos Tychon,’ said Galatea. ‘We are glad you could be here.’

  The machine intelligence straightened up and Vitali recoiled in horror.

  ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus!’ wailed Vitali. ‘What have you done? Omnissiah have mercy, what have you done to my Linya?’

  ‘We said your daughter was exceptional,’ said Galatea, as a web of micro-fine connector cables wormed their way inside a glass cylinder of bio-conductive gel to infest the newly-implanted organ within. ‘And now her mind will be exceptional within our neuromatrix.’

  The crystalline leviathan moved with a hypnotic fluidity that should have been impossible for something so enormous. The sheer magnificence of its construction and very conception was astounding, beyond anything even the most crazed techno-heretics imprisoned beneath the Baphyras Catena dared to dream into existence.

  It appeared to have no moving parts as any Mechanicus enginseer would understand the notion, its joints and segmented body parts seeming to move within and through one another in ways his ocular implants told him ought to be impossible; as though the bonds between the crystalline lattices within its body were fluid in ways no one had thought possible.

  Tanna shouted at him once more, but again he ignored the Space Marine’s words.

  What fate would there be for an archmagos who returned empty handed from an expedition that had suffered such loss? He would be stripped of his last holdings and reduced to his component parts to be reclaimed into servitor implants. How would that serve the Omnissiah?

  Better to die within sight of his goal than to flee towards disgrace.

  The aching blue of the sky and the lightning arcing between the giant tesla-coil towers glittered from its multi-faceted form. It had a beauty all its own, a lethal majesty that had a perfect symmetry of form that struck Kotov as being ostensibly similar to Galatea’s appearance. The comparison was a poor one; the hybrid machine intelligence’s mismatched body-plan was at best a crude approximation of this magnificent creature’s form.

  No. Not an approximation.

  A copy…

  Three figures appeared at his side and Kotov nodded to Sergeant Tanna, Colonel Anders and Roboute Surcouf.

  ‘You are not leaving?’ he asked.

  ‘I left Kul Gilad to die on the Adytum,’ said Tanna. ‘I will not leave you to die alone.’

  ‘I’ve come this far,’ said Surcouf. ‘Seems a shame to leave without seeing how it all ends.’

  Anders nodded in the direction of the leviathan as it loomed overhead, a titanic monster that could crush them underfoot without even noticing.

  ‘And even if we got into the air, that thing would swat us down in seconds,’ added Anders. ‘And I’m mechanised infantry through and through, I’d much rather die on the ground than in a burning wreck of a Thunderhawk. No offence to your flying skills, Tanna.’

  Kotov shook his head with an amused grin. ‘No-one is dying here today.’

  Anders looked set to disagree when the vast plaza was suddenly filled with the sound of splintering glass. Every one of the landing party craned their necks upwards as a million spiderwebbing cracks zigzagged over the surface of the towering scorpion creature. Its entire body began coming apart, as though it had been struck by a precisely resonant hammerblow at its most vulnerable point and its structure was revealed to be no more solid than grains of powdered glass.

  Cascades of glittering shards fell in a razored deluge from its upper surfaces as the immense war-engine began disintegrating from the top down. First the swaying stinger tail fell apart, dropping thousands of crystalline fragments to the plaza. Its body collapsed into itself, shedding mass like a ruptured sandbag. Its legs followed seconds later, toppling inwards like a row of dying Titans. The entire crystalline machine was falling apart, as though whatever molecular structure had allowed it to retain its shape was suddenly and catastrophically undone. The noise was deafening, the sharp-edged sound echoing from the surrounding structures and buildings in a thunderous crescendo of breaking glass and splintering rock.

  Vast drifts of crystalline debris slumped from the implosive ruin of the beast’s dissolution, towering dunes of broken glass spreading out in a tidal wave of lethally-edged shards. The rain of glassy fragments broke against the raised platform in a shattering tide, spreading around it with the fluidity of liquid. Such was the volume of the giant scorpion creature that the scale of its death filled the entire plaza with glittering debris.

  Then Kotov saw it was not debris and not death.

  It was deployment.

  The matter shed from the giant creature began cracking and splitting further, reorganising itself into new arrangements. Thousands of crystal-forms were taking shape from the dune sea of crystal, swiftly acquiring mass from the expelled matter of the host creature. Instead of one creature, now tens of thousands of crystal-forms surrounded the raised landing platform.

  ‘What in the Emperor’s name…?’ breathed Tanna, turning on the spot to see how thoroughly they were outnumbered. Like the vast army of statuary once assembled by a despotic ruler of Old Earth, the crystalline statues were arranged around the landing platform with perfect symmetry, their ranks as serried as any mass deployment of Imperial Guard on the muster fields.

  Kotov studied the figures at the base of the platform’s steps.

  Humanoid in outline, they resembled unfinished sculpts of a race o
f powerfully built warriors hailing from one of the Imperium’s primitive feral worlds. The crystalline warriors before them turned with robotic precision, parting like a crystal sea to form an avenue of approach like the triumphal route travelled by a victorious Lord General.

  Emerging from the army of crystal-forms was a being of hulking proportions, a terrible meld of metal, glass and steel. Superficially it resembled a malformed penitent engine, bipedal and roughly humanoid, but its legs were brutish, elephantine stumps that displayed none of the unfinished simplicity of the crystal-forms.

  Its movements were ungainly and awkward, as though its form was somehow misshapen and not at all what its creator had intended. Portions of its central mass were clearly formed from dark iron, and scraps of scarlet cloth draped arms that were spined with crystalline growths sprouting from every plane of its upper body. Arcs of heavy pipework looped over its shoulders like the cabling of an electromagnet, and an oil-streaked hood sat in the centre of its chest like the sarcophagus of a Dreadnought.

  ‘What is that thing?’ asked Anders, pulling his rifle tight to his shoulder.

  It reached the base of the steps and began to climb with a hideous, lopsided motion, the crystallising necrosis of its limbs making each flex of a joint a splintering nightmare. It left powdered glass in its wake and the closer Kotov looked at the partially obscured iconography on the metallic portions of its body, the more he understood that this was not a thing to be feared, but revered.

  Slithering metallic fronds drew back the scarlet hood at the creature’s chest and Kotov fought to conceal his mounting excitement as he saw a human face revealed, albeit one ravaged by the effects of crystallisation and extreme juvenat treatments.

  It was, nevertheless, a face he recognised.

  A face that had stared back at him from the pages of crumbling manuscripts and degraded pict-captures for centuries of his life.

  ‘Welcome to Exnihlio,’ said the creature, its wasted features moving like a poorly-operated flesh-puppet. ‘We hope you will forgive the theatricality of our introduction, but we had all but given up hope of ever receiving emissaries from Mars.’

  Kotov stepped forwards and said, ‘Archmagos Telok, I presume?’

  To be concluded in Gods of Mars.

  About the Author

  Graham McNeill has written a host of novels for Black Library, including the ever popular Ultramarines and Iron Warriors series. 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. Originally hailing from Scotland, Graham now lives and works in Nottingham.

  For Nik, Lorraine, Dan, Laura, Rob, Gemma and Jo at the Village for keeping me heavily caffeinated and letting me hog the big table all the time.

  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

  Cover illustration by Slawomir Maniak

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