Lords of Mars Read online

  Even over the enormous height of the Tabularium, Roboute could see the loping form of the alpha engine of Legio Sirius. Lupa Capitalina held station at the centre of the convoy, a mobile fortress protecting the Leviathans with its city-levelling firepower.

  ‘Can you see the Warhounds yet?’ asked Adara. ‘My da once said he saw one on Konor, but it ran off before he got a proper look at it.’

  Before now, Roboute would have poured scorn on the idea of a Titan running off, but having seen the speed with which Amarok and Vilka had deployed from their coffin ships, he was less inclined to laugh at Adara’s tale. Even the speed of the Warlord had shocked them, and the impatient brays of its warhorn echoed from the walls of the glittering ice valley.

  ‘No,’ answered Roboute, craning his neck around. ‘I haven’t, but that doesn’t surprise me. Warhounds are Scout Titans, ambush predators, and they don’t like you seeing them until it’s too late.’

  Adara nodded, but still kept looking.

  ‘Your father is certainly well travelled,’ said Pavelka, her voice sounding in Roboute’s helmet via subvocalised vibrations. ‘Calth, Iax, Konor… Is there any part of Ultramar he has not visited?’

  Pavelka’s dripping sarcasm was evident, even over the helm-vox and the thrumming bass note of the grav-sled’s repulsors.

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘Ilanna’s just teasing you,’ said Roboute, knowing how defensive the lad got if anyone dared to question the truth of his father’s tales.

  ‘Well she shouldn’t,’ said Adara. ‘My da served as an armsman to Inquisitor Apollyon on Armageddon, and you don’t go mouthing off about someone like that.’

  Roboute knew Pavelka wouldn’t be able to resist pulling that particular declaration apart, and gave the control column a shake to discourage her from picking holes in it.

  ‘Easy, Roboute!’ cried Adara, gripping the restraint bar on the door.

  The ground beneath the grav-sled was a mixture of frozen nitrogen and bare, metallic rock, like the surface of an oil-streaked glacier. The sled’s repulsor field reacted badly to patches of exotic metals and the ride was bumpier than Roboute would have liked. The controls were oversized to accommodate the inherent clumsiness in void-suit gloves, but even so, it felt like the machine was fighting him every step of the way, slewing left and right despite his best attempts to keep level.

  ‘I can control the sled through my MIU if you would prefer,’ said Pavelka. ‘It appears you are having some difficulty, captain.’

  ‘No,’ said Roboute, wrestling with the control column. ‘I’m fine taking us in.’

  Their route was winding a path through a steep-sided canyon that Roboute’s eyes were telling him rose to around a hundred metres or so, but was probably at least a couple of kilometres. The eye was easily tricked into forming manageable scales when denied any quantifiable points of reference. When he’d first eased the sled into the mountains, his mind had reeled at the sheer vastness of each canyon’s ice-blue walls, and without the measurable scale of the landing fields, it was impossible to define distances or perspective with any reliability.

  ‘How soon till we reach the crashed ship?’ asked Adara, his neck craned back as far as the gorget arrangement on his helmet’s collar would allow. Roboute risked narrowing the magnification of the slate, but gave up looking when the screeching, squalling distortion pattern didn’t let up. Only the slender thread of Blaylock’s route through the labyrinth remained unwavering.

  ‘Impossible to say through this interference,’ answered Pavelka, reading the same information instantly. Even through the imperfections of the vox-units, her excitement was palpable. ‘According to our distance travelled, we should be within sight of the Tomioka within seven minutes, assuming the current rate of advance continues.’

  ‘And assuming I don’t crash us,’ said Roboute.

  ‘A possibility I did not care to raise.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Roboute. ‘A grav-sled isn’t a precision instrument of manoeuvre, but I think I’m finally getting its measure. It just takes a little finesse and a little nerve.’

  ‘I suppose how much nerve is required depends on where one is sitting.’

  Adara sniggered. ‘And Mistress Tychon said the Mechanicus don’t have a sense of humour…’

  ‘She’s right,’ snapped Roboute. ‘They don’t.’

  Despite Pavelka’s commentary on his piloting skills, Roboute steered them with greater confidence with every passing metre. His Ultramarian ethic would not let him attempt a task without then mastering it, and curbing the vagaries of the grav-sled’s control was no exception.

  Their course evened out over the next few kilometres, and as Roboute eased around a sheer spur of violet-tinged ice that shed streamers of vapour like an industrial smokestack, the valley widened noticeably towards a cascade of smoking liquid nitrogen. It poured down through a fissure that glittered in the blue-shifted light, before vanishing into a gaping crevasse that cut the valley almost in two.

  Roboute guessed the crevasse was at least thirty metres wide.

  According to Blaylock’s path, the Tomioka lay on the opposite side.

  And the Black Templars, he thought, trying to keep a lid on his irritation.

  Where the crevasse didn’t quite reach the valley walls, cascading spumes of freezing gases collected in swirling eddies and whirlpools of shimmering liquid.

  ‘Will the Land Leviathans be able to get across that?’ asked Adara.

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Roboute. ‘Though the Tabularium might fall in and wedge itself tight to make a bridge for the others.’

  ‘You think there’s room enough for us to go round the edges?’

  ‘Just barely,’ answered Pavelka, blink-clicking measurement datum points and exloading them to the Mechanicus pioneer vehicles behind them.

  ‘Well, the Black Templars may have beaten us to the Tomioka, but I’ll be damned if anyone else is getting there before us,’ said Roboute, hauling the grav-sled around towards the edge of the valley, where vortices of nitrogen translated from gas to liquid and back again with alarming frequency.

  The pitch of the grav-sled’s engines increased, and the repulsor field skittered at the abrupt change in ground density. Roboute heard Pavelka mutter a whispered prayer to the Machine-God and felt her subtle imprecation to the engines’ magnetic field compensating for the unusual terrain.

  Buoyed up by Pavelka’s devotion, the grav-sled negotiated the foaming, streaming edges of the liquid nitrogen waterfall with aplomb and skirted the edges of the vast crevasse with only centimetres to spare. Roboute risked a glance over the edge and felt his stomach lurch as he saw the rift cut right into the heart of the planet. He switched his gaze back to what lay ahead of him as a nauseous sense of vertigo threatened to sweep over him. Roboute gunned the engine and the grav-sled surged to the jagged summit of the fissure.

  At long last, Roboute saw what had become of Magos Telok’s flagship, though it took him a moment to realise that was what he was seeing. He shielded his visor from the billions of points of light reflecting from the glassy plateau before him.

  ‘I thought the ship we were looking for was a wreck?’ asked Adara, tilting his head to the side.

  ‘So did I,’ said Roboute.

  ‘It didn’t crash?’ said Pavelka, her incomprehension turning her words into a question.

  ‘No,’ said Roboute in wonderment. ‘It… landed.’

  Smoke filled the pilot’s compartment, and Tanna tasted the reek of burning propellant, scorched iron and blood in the back of his mouth. He blinked away the disorientation of the crash, and checked his visor to see how long he had been unconscious. Four seconds. To a mortal, such a span was negligible, but to a Space Marine, it was an eternity. Angry with himself, he shook off his momentary weakness and pushed himself from the pilot’s chair. The angle of the Thunderhawk’s impact had driven the nose into the plateau, and Tanna was forced to use dangling straps and cables to haul himself back int
o the crew compartment.

  The warriors in the back had weathered the crash with relative ease, thanks to his managing their angle of descent and the grav-harnesses.

  ‘Anyone injured?’ he asked, pulling himself along the centre-line of the gunship.

  ‘Everyone is unhurt,’ said Auiden. ‘That was some landing, brother-sergeant.’

  ‘Some kind of interference blew out the engines,’ said Tanna. ‘I was lucky to get us down on our belly and in one piece.’

  ‘I know,’ said Auiden. ‘I meant no reproach.’

  Tanna shook his head. ‘Of course.’

  The grievances felt against him since Kul Gilad’s loss had made Tanna find fault in every word spoken to him, veiled insults in every comment. He took a moment to purge himself of that suspicion and moved to the fuselage doors of the gunship. With the nose of the Barisan buried in the ice, the side and rear exits were the only way out.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ he said, kneeling beside the fuselage door and pulling open the keypad hatch. He tapped in his command codes, but – as he’d expected – the door remained stubbornly shut.

  ‘Why is the… ngg, ngg… door not opening?’ asked Issur.

  ‘There is no power to the mechanism,’ answered Tanna. ‘It will need brute force to get us out.’

  The Barisan creaked and lurched with a squeal of tearing metal. Seams burst farther down the fuselage, and hissing streamers of escaping gas vented from cracks in the hull. Tanna grabbed onto a stanchion as the gunship shuddered, as though some giant beast had it locked in its jaws and was slowly trying to digest it.

  ‘Yael, Issur, help me,’ ordered Tanna. ‘Get the edge of the door.’

  ‘I can shoot us a way out,’ offered Bracha, unlimbering his implanted plasma gun, but Tanna shook his head.

  ‘I would rather not risk angering the Barisan by shooting it from the inside,’ he said.

  The three Black Templars took hold of the door and braced themselves against stanchions, struts and bench seats. More seams burst along the line of the fuselage. Tanna had a worrying image of the gunship caught in a wreckage compactor, being slowly crushed until it and they were nothing more than an ultra-dense cube of iron and meat.

  ‘Auiden, as soon as you see the locking mechanism, cut it.’

  The Apothecary nodded and bent before the lock-plate of the fuselage door. A painfully bright light spat into life from an extended blade, a fusion cutter for field amputations, and he pulled it back like an executioner ready to strike a killing blow.

  The Barisan groaned, like a beast in pain, and Tanna cursed that he had brought so fine a machine to so ignoble a fate. Glass shattered in the cockpit and the avionics panel blew out with a whooping electrical bang.

  ‘Now,’ yelled Tanna, and the three of them hauled back on the door. The fuselage of a Thunderhawk gunship was designed to be airtight during spaceflight and atmospheric insertion, but it wasn’t designed to withstand the combined strength of three Space Marines trying to haul it open from the inside.

  Tanna felt the door shift, millimetres at best, but here the deformations crushing the hull worked in their favour and a portion of the hull buckled inwards at the lock-plate. He saw the flash of Auiden’s fusion cutter and heard the hiss of dissolving metal. For a fraction of a second, the heavy door held firm, but then the cutter finished its work and it rumbled back along its rails.

  ‘Forgive us, great one,’ said Auiden as he sheathed the energised blade.

  Tanna nodded in agreement. The Barisan had carried them faithfully into battle and out of trouble more times than he could remember. To have wounded it just to escape seemed a poor way to repay its strength of heart, but he felt sure its machine-spirit would forgive them.

  ‘Everybody out,’ he ordered.

  Varda was first through, quickly followed by Issur and Bracha. Auiden went next, then Yael and finally Tanna dropped from the canted deck.

  He landed on the ground, which was just as he’d imagined it to be from the air; a vast plateau of ice. Where the gunship had smashed down was powdered like fine snow, but brittle like metal shavings. The Thunderhawk’s impact had ploughed a deep furrow, and Tanna knelt as he saw what looked like tendrils of frost reaching up from the ground along the hull of the downed flying machine.

  Like condensation on a pane of glass, it looked like the ice was reaching up to enfold the Barisan’s fuselage. Tanna looked back down to where the gunship’s nose was buried in the ice… except he saw now that it wasn’t ice at all, but some form of parasitic crystal. When he had recovered consciousness, he remembered seeing the vapour-struck sky through the crazed armourglass canopy, but the entire frontal section was now almost completely enclosed. As if the ‘ice’ had begun to swell and freeze instantly upon the gunship, like the planet was trying to drag it down into the crust.

  Even as Tanna watched, he saw the crystalline structure of the ground spread glittering fronds further over the body of the gunship. He scraped a hand over the fuselage, scattering the ice like sugar crystals that fell to dust as soon as they were no longer part of the whole.

  ‘What is this…?’ he wondered aloud, but no sooner had he removed his hand than the crystalline fronds renewed their attempt to engulf the Barisan.

  ‘Brother-sergeant,’ said Bracha from above. ‘You need to get up here now.’

  Tanna backed away from the strange crystalline growths attaching themselves to his gunship, and scrambled back along the length of the impact trough. Yael offered him a hand up, but Tanna ignored it and hauled himself onto the plateau.

  ‘Situation?’ he asked.

  No-one answered, and Tanna was about to repeat his question when he turned to see what his men were all staring at. He recalled his last sight before the gunship had gone down. He had seen the Tomioka with his own eyes, but the actuality of it rendered him speechless, unable to look away from the logic-defying, impossible sight before him.

  ‘Imperator,’ hissed Varda. ‘It’s impossible.’

  Tanna shook his head. ‘It is the Tomioka, no doubt about that.’

  A retrofitted Oberon battleship, the enormous vessel stood vertical along its long axis on the surface of Katen Venia like the last few kilometres of a towering hive spire. Such vast starships were never meant to enter the gravity envelope of a planet. Their superstructures were built to endure the multi-directional forces of void war and withstand pressures of acceleration and enormous turning circles.

  What they were manifestly not designed to do was cope with the titanic forces of re-entry.

  Tanna guessed that the ship’s engine section was buried at least two kilometres in frozen nitrogen, while the remaining five kilometres of its monolithic superstructure jutted into the sky, almost vanishing in a forced perspective that defied human scale. Its hull was as gothically ornamented as any Imperial ship of the line, redolent with cathedrals, crenellated battlements, rounded archways of gun batteries, ice-encrusted processionals of statuary and the bladed prow of a fighting vessel.

  Glaciers of buttressing ice surrounded the base of the ship, rising from the planet’s surface to a height of around five hundred metres, obscuring any obvious means of entry and helping to stabilise the towering edifice. Above the ice, vast swathes of the ship were encrusted with bizarre crystalline structures of intricate design, but which bore the clear hallmark of Mechanicus origin. Some had the look of power generators, others of communications relays, but the more Tanna looked, the more he understood that the Tomioka had been completely redesigned to be something other than a starship.

  ‘How could anyone… ngg, have done… nggh, this?’ asked Issur, the synaptic damage he’d suffered aboard the Manifold station making every word a struggle.

  ‘I do not know,’ admitted Tanna. ‘The ship should have torn itself apart.’

  ‘Do you think this was what the archmagos was expecting?’ asked Varda.

  ‘I don’t think it’s what anyone was expecting,’ said Tanna.

  An erupt
ion of ice crystals to either side of the Black Templars had them snap guns to shoulders and swords to en garde. Scores of detonations plumed like geysers of ice, except that Tanna knew the glassy substance on which they stood was not ice at all. Glittering particulates hung in the air, and Tanna saw a host of figures climb from each of the holes blasted through the planet’s surface.

  They had the bulk of Space Marines, but their bodies were formed from a translucent crystalline material with its own bioluminescence. A pulsing network of green veins threaded their bodies, like an illuminated nervous system or a map of blood vessels in a human body. Tanna saw they were not coming from beneath the ground, they were part of the ground. At least forty of the creatures surrounded them, and as the glassy dust of their arrival settled, Tanna saw they didn’t just have the bulk of Space Marines, their bodies were somehow formed in a crude imitation of Adeptus Astartes.

  Each crystalline form had the bulky curvature of auto-reactive shoulder guards, the broad sweep of a plastron and an elementary form of a helmet. They were like a child’s representation of Space Marines, crude and ill-fashioned, but recognisable enough.

  ‘What in the Emperor’s name are they?’ hissed Varda as the crystal creatures closed in.

  ‘The enemy,’ said Tanna, sighting down his bolter and pulling the trigger.

  If there was a lesson to be learned here, it was that he not doubt Amarok’s sense for something amiss. Gunnar Vintras walked the Warhound backwards through a thicket of tall crystalline spires, keeping the damaged side of his engine facing the canyon wall. His turbolaser was jammed, the servitor dead and the Titan’s machine-spirit desperately trying to find a workaround to get it firing again. Phantom agonies from his left arm kept Vintras from blacking out, and a constant flood of stimulants fought the effects of the pain-balms.