Lords of Mars Read online

  Outflung prominences of masonry and steel rendered its upper reaches into the form of a great stone city on the move, a representation of ancient Troi or Aleksandria given motion. Its frontal section rose to a tapered prow, like a galleon of old, upon which sat a void shielded dome of polished pink marble, gold and silver-steel.

  Within the Tabularium’s gilded dome, the aesthetic of an ocean-going galleon was continued in the warm wood and brass fitments installed throughout the command deck. The gleaming hardwood floor reflected the diffuse glow of the lumens inset in the arched vault, and each of the hundred servitor and thrall crew wore brocaded frock-coats of a rich navy blue.

  A vast ship’s wheel suspended from the ceiling, an archaic means of control, but this was a wheel that Martian legend told had been taken from the flagship of a great oceanic general of Old Earth after his great victory at Taraf al-Gharb. The wheel was operated by Magos Azuramagelli via a heavily augmented servitor whose torso was implanted into a bio-interface column and whose arms were telescoping arrangements of piston-driven bronze callipers. Azuramagelli’s own body possessed manipulator limbs fully capable of directing the Land Leviathan’s course, but he preferred to steer the Tabularium through the proxy of the servitor, a holdover from the days when he had possessed a body of his own.

  Now, the Magos of Astrogation was an articulated framework of slatted steelwork in which several bell jars were suspended in layers of shock-resistant polymer. Each diamond-reinforced container contained a portion of Azuramagelli’s original brain matter, each excised chunk suspended in bio-conductive gel and linked in parallel with the Speranza’s cogitation engines which laughed in the face of Amdahl’s Law.

  ‘Holding station,’ said Azuramagelli. ‘Plasma reactor chiefs report steady temperatures and all propulsion decks are reporting readiness for forward motion. Is the word given, archmagos?’

  ‘Of course it is bloody well given,’ snapped Archmagos Kotov, the scale of his anger overwhelming his normal logical processes. ‘I want us after that damned gunship right now, Azuramagelli. You hear me? Burn those reactors hot and work the propulsion crews to death if it gets us to the Tomioka faster.’

  ‘By your command,’ said Azuramagelli, conveying the strength of the archmagos’s request in a terse blurt of binary to the engineering spaces.

  The Leviathan’s command throne was set back on an elevated rostrum of bevelled rosewood and gold-veined ouslite, fully equipped with multiple interface options for its commander. Kotov wore a body fashioned from glossy plates of jade that concealed a hybrid amalgamation of a vat-grown nervous system and cunningly interleaved cybernetics from a bygone age. Its perfectly proportioned form was moulded to match the entombed kings of a long-dead culture of Terra whose priests were able to preserve their rulers’ biomass for millennia.

  Kotov’s shaven head glistened with a fresh baptismal of sacred oils, and spinal plugs interfaced him with the Leviathan’s noospheric network and its surging floodstream, while unconscious haptic gestures parsed summary data being fed to him by the magi commanding the other Land Leviathans.

  He kept his consciousness split into several streams of concurrent data processing, each partitioned off in discrete compartments of his mind. Thrice-purified oils burned at his shoulders in braziers carved to recreate the snarling image of the legendary Ares Lictor, helping to dissipate the excess heat of his enhanced cognition. Numerous autonomous streams were embedded in the Tabularium’s control systems, but Kotov’s higher thought-functions maintained connection to Magos Blaylock and the Speranza in orbit.

  Kotov’s mechanical fingers beat a rhythmic tattoo on the armrest of his throne, and a flourish of rotating light panels flashed into being at his side. Over a thousand icons, none bigger than a grain of sand, surrounded him like a cloud of dancing fireflies, each one bearing an identifying signifier and progressing on its assigned route towards the Tomioka’s resting place.

  Except the Black Templars gunship had shrugged off its tether and raced ahead of Kotov.

  Kotov’s first reaction had been fury; this was his expedition, assembled by his will and set upon his purpose, but in one moment of crusading zeal, the Black Templars had snatched away his moment of greatest triumph.

  But six kilometres out from the Tomioka’s signal, the Barisan’s transponder signal had vanished.

  From her position at the auspex, Linya Tychon sought to re-establish contact with Sergeant Tanna, but her best efforts had, thus far, been without success.

  ‘Where are they?’ demanded Kotov, when – even after a thousandth parsing – he was none the wiser as to the Space Marines’ location. ‘Why aren’t the auspex feeds reading that gunship’s transponder? Surely not even Templars would be foolish enough to tamper with its workings?’

  ‘I agree that would be unlikely,’ said Linya Tychon, sifting the millions of informational returns from the external surveyors. The Tabularium possessed thousands of varieties of auspex, but not one was able to locate the Barisan. But for the subtle glint of augmetics beneath her hair and the looping profusion of copper-jacketed wiring emerging from the sleeves of her scarlet robes, she might pass for a baseline human, but nothing could be further from the truth.

  ‘Could the Templars have disabled the transponder?’ Kotov asked Linya, who shook her head.

  ‘They do not possess a Techmarine,’ replied Linya. ‘Though it is the fact that none of the auspex feeds or remote drone surveyors are reaching beyond where the gunship’s signal was lost that troubles me more.’

  ‘An auspex blind spot?’ asked Kotov. ‘There will be many such instances on so entropic a world.’

  ‘True,’ agreed Linya, ‘but extrapolating the curvature of the blind spot shows a perfectly circular umbra of dead space centred directly upon the Tomioka.’

  Kotov inloaded Linya’s data and saw she was correct. What he had assumed was sensor distortion caused by the planet’s demise was in fact something so perfectly delineated that it could not be other than artificial.

  ‘You don’t need to be a Techmarine to disable a transponder,’ said Kryptaestrex, holding station at the drive control interface, his blocky body more like the Martian Priesthood’s forerunners’ earliest conceptions of a battle robot than a high ranking Magos of Logistics. ‘One of them could have smashed it easily enough, it would be just the sort of thing I’d expect from non-Mechanicus.’

  Kryptaestrex’s servo-limbs and crude articulation arms were drawn in tight to his body, their oversized couplings more used to manipulating the industrial fittings found on an engineering deck than the delicate inload ports of a command bridge.

  ‘No,’ insisted Linya. ‘You mistake their zeal for stupidity. The Space Marines hold their battle-gear in the highest reverence, and that extends to their transport craft. No warrior would risk his life by something as foolish as damaging the machine carrying him into battle.’

  ‘Except they’re not going into battle,’ said Magos Hirimau Dahan, Clan Secutor of the Speranza’s skitarii, pacing the deck like a sentry-robot with an infinite loop error in its doctrina wafer. ‘This is an explorator mission.’

  ‘Then we wonder if the Black Templars know something you do not,’ said a voice that was scratchy with interleaved tonal qualities, like audio-bleed on an overtaxed vox-caster.

  Dahan turned his gaze on the abomination speaking to him, and his floodstream hazed with threat signifiers bleeding from his battle wetware. Kotov’s precision optics registered that the organic portions of Dahan’s physique were still bedding into Turentek’s superlative work to undo the damage done by the thermic shockwave of Lupa Capitalina’s plasma destructor. It was going to take time for Dahan to achieve full synchronisation with his array of lethal technologies and multiple weapon arms, but the Secutor was not a magos blessed with an abundance of patience.

  ‘I wonder if you know something we do not,’ snarled Dahan, his lower arms flexing into combat readiness postures. ‘Something you are not telling us about this world.
r />   ’The thing Dahan spoke to called itself Galatea, and it was a bio-mechanical perversion of every Universal Law of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

  To outward appearances, it was hardly more outlandish than many chimeric adepts of the Cult Mechanicus; a heavily augmented body forming a low-slung palanquin of mismatched machine parts assembled to form something that was part arachnoid, part scorpion. The crimson-robed proxy of a silver-eyed Mechanicus adept sat at the heart of its mechanism, surrounded by seven brains suspended in bio-nutrient gel containers and conjoined by a series of pulsing conductive cables.

  Galatea’s very existence was an affront to the Mechanicus; a heuristically-capable machine that had murdered the adepts assigned to its Manifold station over a period of millennia. It had assimilated their disembodied brains into its neural architecture and undergone a rapid evolution towards a horrific and long-outlawed form of artificial intelligence. But as each stolen consciousness realised it was trapped forever within an artificial neuromatrix, it descended inexorably into abyssal madness.

  When the machine decided a mind was of no more use, the brain was cut from the gestalt consciousness in readiness for another horrific implantation.

  ‘Well?’ demanded Dahan, his lower arms flexing and his shock-blades snapping out with a succession of snicks. ‘Do you know something of this world you are not telling us?’

  In any situation to be resolved with violence, there were few members of the Cult Mechanicus Kotov would rather have next to him than Hirimau Dahan. But so deeply had Galatea enmeshed itself with the Speranza’s operating systems that any attempt to harm it could be catastrophic for the Ark Mechanicus. Kotov had no doubts of Dahan’s ability to kill Galatea, but no matter how quickly he might do so, the machine intelligence would have more than enough time to destroy the Speranza.

  Flickering light passed between Galatea’s conjoined brains. ‘We sense you are troubled by more than the disappearance of the Adeptus Astartes gunship. Have you not adjusted your worldview to incorporate our existence?’

  ‘You already know the Mechanicus will never accept your existence,’ said Kotov, rising from his throne and stepping down to the auspex and surveyor feeds. ‘So why not simply answer the Secutor’s question? Do you know what has become of the Black Templars?’

  ‘We do not answer because Magos Dahan’s anger amuses us,’ said Galatea, ignoring Kotov’s question and clattering over the deck on its misaligned limbs. ‘When you have spent four thousand and sixty-seven years alone, you too will seek amusement wherever you find it.’

  ‘I will not live that long.’

  ‘You may,’ said Galatea. ‘Magos Telok has.’

  ‘How can you know that?’ asked Linya Tychon, looking up from the blue-limned glow of the auspex returns. ‘It has been thousands of years since he came here.’

  Galatea waved an admonishing finger. ‘You of all people should know better, Mistress Tychon. Was it not the inconsistencies within the passage of time that led you and your father to accompany Magos Kotov in the first place? We have seen the data you have assembled from the Speranza’s surveyor feeds. You know the temporal flow of energies has been massively disrupted in this region of space. The few remaining suns beyond the galactic fringe are ageing far faster than they ought to, transforming from main-sequence stars into red supergiants in the blink of a celestial eye. If that can happen, what might a man who knows how to harness such energies achieve? And a man who can transfigure the life cycles of the engines of existence, is surely a man who might learn to endure beyond his allotted span and manipulate that technology to other purposes.’

  ‘So you’re saying the umbra is, what, a side-effect of what Magos Telok is doing?’ asked Linya.

  ‘We believe it is certainly an intriguing possibility,’ replied Galatea.

  ‘Is this umbra changing in any way?’ asked Kotov.

  ‘I am not detecting any discernible changes from the planet’s surface,’ answered Linya, calling up a representation of the geography ahead. ‘But my father’s readings on the Speranza show a high energy source reaching into space with a point of origin that exactly matches what would be the edge of an umbral sphere centred on the Tomioka. We can’t read what’s inside the umbra, but there’s something within that’s geysering exotic radiations and particle waves unknown to any Mechanicus database that can be detected when they leave it. Magnetic anomalies and sleeting particles of indeterminate charge are billowing up from the planet’s core like an electromagnetic volcano with enough force to reach into the exosphere.’

  Kotov came forwards to examine the image on the auspex table.

  The map was centred on the Land Leviathan, but grainy and skewed with unintelligible static where normally the Tabularium’s many surveyors would eliminate uncertainty. It displayed a real-time capture of the landscape to a radius of a hundred kilometres. Sixty kilometres south of the landing fields, in the exact centre of the umbra, lay the object of their search.

  The last resting place of Magos Telok’s lost flagship.

  ‘Are there any other effects of this umbra, besides blinding us to whatever forces might lie within it?’ asked Dahan. ‘Is it dangerous?’

  ‘To people or machines?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘I wouldn’t recommend prolonged exposure, but in ray-shielded void-suits, it should be safe for your skitarii for a few hours at a time,’ said Linya.

  ‘And for machines?’ asked Kotov.

  Linya shook her head. ‘Let me put it this way, archmagos. Given how little we know about the exact nature of the umbra, I wouldn’t risk entering it on anything that wasn’t close to the ground.’

  ‘An excellent suggestion, Mistress Tychon,’ said Kotov, opening an encrypted martial vox-link and awaiting connection. Hostile binarics snapped around his floodstream before the map vanished from the auspex table and the canidae symbol of Legio Sirius shimmered into focus.

  +This is the Wintersun, state your request.+

  ‘Princeps Luth,’ said Kotov. ‘I’m going to need your Scout Titans.’

  Their roles in the under-deck environment might have changed for the better, but the one constant in their daily existence was the quality of the food. Feeding Hall Eighty-Six was still the same cavernous chamber of clattering flatware and grunting men and women trying to shovel as much food into their mouths as they could get their hands on. In theory, each bondsman was dispensed an equal amount by the sustenance servitors, but as with all large groups kept in confinement, the strongest stayed strong by stealing the food of the weakest.

  Not that Abrehem, Hawke and Coyne had ever needed to worry about that thanks to the presence of Crusha, the ogryn swept up along with them by the Mechanicus collarmen back on Joura. Crusha was dead now, killed by the same eldar warrior Abrehem had killed, but even without his hulking presence, they had no need to worry about a nutritional deficit.

  Now they had a surplus; votive offerings and gifts passed along the table by those who had heard about the miracle of the plasma gun and the rumour of Rasselas X-42. When Abrehem had returned to the feeding hall with a newly-grafted bionic limb, it had only cemented his reputation as a favoured son of the Omnissiah.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong…’ said Coyne, jamming a stale hunk of bread into his mouth. Even moistened by the beige paste in the plastic tray’s bowl depression, it still took him nearly thirty seconds to chew it to a level where he could continue speaking. ‘It’s good we’re being recognised, and the new duties in Magos Turentek’s forge-temple are a blessing, but is there any way you could use your… influence to get better food as opposed to more of the same crap?’

  ‘We shouldn’t be taking any of it,’ said Abrehem.

  ‘Come on, Abe,’ said Hawke. ‘What’s the point of being a somebody if you can’t make use of it?’

  ‘But I’m not a somebody,’ protested Abrehem.

  Hawke grinned, putting his hands together in prayer. ‘Spoken like a man of true divinity.’

  ‘Have you hear
d what they’re calling you?’ said Coyne, in a conspiratorial whisper.

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘The Vitalist,’ said Coyne. ‘After what you did to Ismael.’

  Abrehem twisted on the bench seat, looking over rows of tables to where Ismael de Roeven, once his duty-overseer back on Joura, but now rendered down into a cyborg servitor, placed a food tray before a hunch-shouldered bondsman. Like the hundreds of other servitors in the feeding hall, Ismael followed an unchanging pattern of dispensing food, collecting trays and cleaning the hall in preparation for the next shift.

  ‘But I didn’t do that,’ said Abrehem. ‘Ismael’s cranial hood was damaged when the Mechanicus vented the lower decks to save the ship from that plasma discharge. The impact restored whatever the cranial surgery left of the poor sod’s memory and old life, not me.’

  ‘Yeah, but he came to see you afterwards, didn’t he?’ asked Hawke, loud enough so that people two tables over could hear him. ‘Doesn’t take a savant to see you had something to do with it.’

  ‘But I didn’t,’ hissed Abrehem, looking up to see that Ismael had paused in his work to turn towards him, as though somehow aware they were talking about him. He gave Abrehem an almost imperceptible nod before carrying on with his work. Every bondsman he passed surreptitiously reached out to touch the servitor’s hands and arms as though he were a divine talisman.

  ‘If I had done it, don’t you think I’d have given him his whole memory back?’ continued Abrehem. ‘What kind of sick bastard would bring someone back halfway from virtual brain-death? Thor’s light, can you imagine living like that? Knowing you were something more than a mindless drone, but only able to remember broken fragments of your old self… it’s monstrous.’

  ‘It’s better than what he was,’ said Coyne.

  ‘Is it? I’m not so sure,’ said Abrehem. ‘I reckon if he knew how much he’d lost, he’d want to go back to remembering nothing.’