Priests of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  ‘And that’s just what happened,’ said Roboute, turning to his crew. ‘I had Magos Pavelka identify the coil containing all local stellar references to where this pod went down and remove it. As you’ve already seen, there’s enough left to verify the provenance of the beacon, so I suggest we all calm down and get ready to break orbit.’

  ‘Why would you do such a thing?’

  ‘I’ve done my research, and I know you didn’t get to be an Archmagos of Mars by always honouring every bargain you’ve struck.’

  ‘What is to stop me asking the Reclusiarch to take that memory wafer from you by force?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Roboute. ‘Though it is very fragile, and I doubt you could reconstruct its data once I’ve crushed it under my boot.’

  The magi gathered around the table recoiled from Roboute’s threat, horrified at the idea of destroying such priceless knowledge.

  ‘Very well, Captain Surcouf, what payment do you hope to gain over and above what we have already agreed by keeping this information from me?’

  ‘I don’t want more money or tech if that’s what you’re thinking,’ said Roboute. ‘I just want the chance to fly the Renard at the forefront of this fleet once we’re on the other side of the Halo Scar and be the first to encounter what lies on the other side. When we get there, I’ll gladly give you the memory wafer. On my honour as a loyal servant of the Golden Throne.’

  Roboute pocketed the data wafer as he saw Kotov’s realisation that he had no choice but to accede.

  ‘Right then,’ he said, leaning forwards and placing both hands on the red stone of the table. ‘Shall we get under way?’

  Microcontent 06

  Abrehem watched the bald man fall, his body twisting and spinning through the air. His name was Vehlas, and he screamed until his skull struck a protruding spar of the cyclic rotator scaffold. After that he fell in silence. By the time he spread his body over a wide area of the deck plates, five hundred metres below, most of the rest of the work detail had returned their attention to the vast plasma cylinder being lifted towards them. The gantry was narrow and swayed with the motion of a work crew below them. Abrehem watched them detach their own plasma cylinder from the greased chains securing it and manoeuvre it towards the yawning mouth of the drive chamber.

  ‘He hit yet?’ asked Coyne.

  Abrehem nodded, too numb and exhausted to reply.

  ‘Why do you always watch?’ asked Hawke.

  ‘I keep hoping someone might do something to save the ones that fall,’ said Abrehem.

  ‘Not bloody likely,’ grunted Hawke. ‘Mechanicus don’t care about us, we’re just slaves. Not even human. They think they’re honouring us by letting us kill ourselves in here. Some honour, eh?’

  ‘I’ve seen four men die just fuelling this engine alone,’ said Abrehem, wiping sweat from his forehead with the grimy sleeve of his overalls. They had started out garish red, but were now a sodden, oil-stained muddy black.

  ‘Four,’ mused Coyne. ‘I thought it was more than that.’

  ‘No, the last man didn’t hit the deck,’ said Hawke, casting a venomous glare at Vresh, the robed overseer directing their labours from a floating repulsor pod. ‘Poor bastard landed on one of the lower work crew gantries. He didn’t die, but he looked all broken up.’

  The apathy displayed by their Mechanicus masters horrified Abrehem.

  ‘Men are dying, but that’s just an inconvenience to the engine overseers.’

  ‘We’re collared,’ said Hawke. ‘What did you expect?’

  Abrehem nodded and sank to his haunches, pressing his face into his hands. They stank of sweat, burst blisters and engine grease. Along with Hawke, Coyne and Crusha, he worked with a hundred other men on a narrow gantry forming part of the the enormous rotator scaffolding that moved like a giant wheel around the outer circumference of a vast fusion reactor. The seething plasma reactor formed part of the ventral drive chamber. Three-quarters of a kilometre in diameter, each of the fifty drive chambers required two dozen plasma cylinders, each the size of an ore silo, to be loaded in like bullets in a revolver before the Speranza would have enough power to break orbit.

  The reactor temple resonated to the sounds of heaving loader rigs, rattling chains thicker than support columns, squealing binaric hymnals, beating hammers and the volcanic thunder of venting plasma. It reeked of caustic gases, and the air rippled with heat haze from the plasma flares and flashing warning beacons. Heat exhaustion had caused more than a dozen men to be replaced on the gantries, and the water piped in through dirty plastic tubes was brackish and tasted of metal.

  As each thrumming plasma cylinder was brought in from the sealed munitions decks, the rotator scaffold would move around until it was aimed at the grooved tunnel into which it was to be slotted. Work crews occupied each gantry, manually guiding the colossal cylinders along greased rails until they were locked into the drive chamber. Then the rotator scaffold would turn again and another cylinder would emerge from below decks to be manhandled into place.

  It was hard, dangerous and thankless work. Four men had already fallen to their deaths, and several had been horribly injured when an anchor chain snapped and a plasma cylinder crushed them against the gantry railings.

  ‘Watch out,’ said Coyne, looking out over Abrehem’s shoulder. ‘Here comes the next one.’

  The shift continued for another five hours, their work crew loading in another six plasma cylinders before the klaxon blared and the rotator scaffold jerked and squealed around its central hub to deposit them on the hot deck. A series of exit hatches slid up on the bare metal walls of the reactor temple, and the exhausted workers marched in ragged ranks towards the steps that led down to their dismal quarters in the belly of the Speranza.

  Like an army of defeated soldiers being led into captivity from which there could be no escape, the workers shuffled with their heads downcast. Abrehem glanced up as Hawke nudged him in the ribs and nodded over to where Vresh’s repulsor disc had drifted down to inspect the seal on a recently locked-in cylinder.

  ‘Hey!’ shouted Hawke, waving his fist at the overseer. ‘You up there!’

  ‘What are you doing?’ hissed Abrehem, grabbing Hawke’s arm. ‘Be quiet!’

  Hawke shrugged off Abrehem’s hand. ‘Hey, you’re killing us down here, you bastard!’

  ‘Shut up, Hawke,’ said Coyne, but the ex-Guardsman’s bitter anger was in full spate.

  ‘This isn’t right, what you’re doing! I served the Emperor in battle, damn you! You can’t treat us like this!’

  Vresh finally deigned to look down, the overseer’s metal-masked face scanning the crowds of sullen workers with a flickering blue glow of augmetics. He fastened his gaze on Hawke and a hard bark of code screeched over them. The repulsor disc dropped lower, and Vresh stamped his crackling shock-staff against it.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Abrehem, pulling Hawke away. ‘He probably can’t even understand you.’

  ‘He understands me just fine,’ snapped Hawke. ‘He might be a jumped-up robot, but Vresh was once like you and me. He knows what I’m saying.’

  ‘Maybe he does, but he’s not listening.’

  ‘One day I’m going to make the bastard listen,’ said Hawke.

  To an outside observer, the command deck of the Speranza would be an uninspiring place of cold steel, sunken rows of hardwired servitors sealed in modular booths, and isolated nubs of metal that looked like the shorn trunks of silver-barked trees. But to Linya Tychon, whose prosthetic optic nerves were noospherically-enabled, it was a place of wonder, a place where entoptic machinery generated flows of data that floated in the air like unimaginably delicate neon sculptures.

  Like the Adamant Ciborium, the interior of the command deck was an elliptical space, its walls alive with crawling circuitry and exposed pipes and cabling. Ceiling-mounted data hubs pulsed with light and pushed streams of squirming information throughout the holographic lattice of the deck, a ship-wide floodstream of staggering complexity.
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  Information blurts passed between nodes of agglomerated facts, before being filtered for relevancy and then passed on through data prisms that spliced them to their destinations. Infocyte terminals, where multi-armed haptic seers parsed a million micro-packets of inloaded data a second, were gushing fountains of volcanic light, almost too bright to look upon directly.

  A ship as big as the Speranza generated a colossal amount of information every second: hull temperature fluctuations, gravitational drag factors, inertial compensation, reactor bleed, Geller field integrity, warp-capacitance, fuel tolerances, engine readiness, ablative voids, weapon arsenals, life-support, floodstream, Ancile gravity shields, teleport arrays and a billion other pieces of data to be processed by the awesomely complex logic engines of the ancient ship. Information hung in bright veils, reams of icons, numbers and readouts unravelling in skeins of light, a neural network of unimaginable intricacy and multi-dimensional geometry.

  Linya had brushed her myriad senses over the surface of the ship’s deep consciousness, amazed and a little bit frightened at its seemingly infinite depths. To know the Speranza was old was one thing, but to feel that age in the densely wound code-spirit at its heart was quite another. She read the ship’s readiness to depart in every shimmered curtain of phantom light.

  The Speranza strained at the leash, eager to be on its way.

  ‘Welcome to the command deck,’ said Lexell Kotov, the central dais upon which the Archmagos Explorator sat rotating to face them. ‘I imagine neither of you will ever have seen anything quite like this.’

  ‘I have never seen its like,’ agreed her father, as he made his way up the gentle slope leading from the arterial passageway at the deck’s only entrance to the rostrum upon which the higher functions of the craft were directed. Vitali and Kotov spoke in binaric cant, each code blurt tonally modulated with signifiers of respect and mutual admiration. No words passed between them, only the purity of precise and uncorrupted data.

  ‘Nor I,’ said Linya, following her father and registering ever more complex forms of algebraic, geometric and algorithmic representations of information. Some of it passed through her, assimilating elements of her floodstream into its numinous admixture, while other fragments darted around her like startled fish.

  ‘A rare jewel in the heavens,’ said Vitali. ‘Wonderful to see an atmosphere so redolent with data.’

  Kotov frowned at Vitali’s overt use of metaphor, but let the emotive sentiment pass unremarked.

  ‘Few have, even among the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ he responded. ‘Quatria must be very quiet by comparison.’

  ‘That it is, though I rather enjoy the peace of my humble orbital galleries,’ said Vitali. ‘There is something almost mystical in the contemplation of the stars. To know that the light we gather is already ancient and the lives lived beneath their radiance have ended before we even knew of their existance. To view such things is to find peace and equanimity, archmagos, to feel at one with the universe and know your place in it. When we return from this expedition, you should join me there for a time. To look upon the past gives a man perspective.’

  ‘Perhaps I shall visit,’ said Kotov masking his impatience with a crooked grin, as though he thought a gesture of humanity would somehow appear comradely. Like most biological micro-expressions discarded by adepts of the Mechanicus along their route of ascension to machinehood, once it was gone it was near impossible to recover with any conviction. ‘But that is a pleasure I shall have to postpone, for the secrets of the Halo Scar await discovery. Magos Azuramagelli has almost completed his calculations for optimal orbit breaking and passage to the galactic fringe.’

  ‘So I see,’ said Vitali, nodding in respect to where Magos Azuramagelli stood immobile at one of the silvered nubs of metal that rose from the deck, linked via a series of MIU cables extruded from his irised-open trunk. The green lights that bathed his disassembled brain were directed upwards, and a number of haptic claws sifted through streams of information passing between the ships that made up the Explorator Fleet.

  Azuramagelli did not acknowledge their entry to the bridge, his full attention directed to factoring the complex statistical inloads of Magos Blaylock into his avionics packages. To plot a course through an inhabited system was a task of great complexity, one that required intimate knowledge of planetary orbits, local stellar phenomena and potential immaterial interference bleeding through the real space/warp space divide at the Mandeville point. Yet Azuramagelli had not only computed such a course, but one that incorporated every aspect of their journey over three sectors to the Halo Scar itself.

  Woven chains of Boolean logic-code bristled from his epidermal haptics like cilia as he shed irrelevant data. Linya watched his calculations coalesce to a mandala of symmetry, an expression of numerals and astro-navigational data rendered in light and fractal geometry.

  Azuramagelli straightened as a delicate sculpture of latticed light floated free of the silver data hub. Weaving mechadendrites turned it this way and that as his brain-optics examined its purity and complexity from a multitude of angles.

  ‘Is the course ready for insertion?’ asked Kotov.

  ‘It is,’ answered Azuramagelli, exloading the course data to Kotov’s throne.

  ‘Very good,’ said the archmagos. ‘Yes, very good indeed. This should see us to the scar in forty-three days, plus or minus one day. Prepare to–’

  ‘If I may?’ said Linya, stepping towards the gently spinning light crafted by Azuramagelli with her hands outstretched. The Magos of Astrogation lifted his creation away from her, his floodstream rising in irritation at her interruption. Mechadendrites flared like startled snakes, and several of his martial systems surged to life. The light in his bell jars flickered an angry red.

  ‘Interrogative: what are you doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘I wish to examine your computations.’

  ‘Statement: out of the question.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Clarify: Why what?’

  ‘Why is it out of the question?’ asked Linya. ‘I am a magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Surely I can examine a fellow priest’s work?’

  Azuramagelli barked in the negative. ‘The calculations are too complex for those not versed in hexamathical logic equations. You could not comprehend the multi-dimensional integer lattices without augmentation or inloaded wetware.’

  Linya smiled and allowed elements of her honorifics to come to the fore of her noospheric aura.

  ‘I think you’ll find that I am a hexamathical-savantus; secundus grade,’ she said. ‘I see that you are tertiary grade, Magos Azuramagelli. I assure you that I will understand what you have done.’

  Azuramagelli turned his armatured body towards Kotov, perhaps expecting him to rebuke her, but Linya suspected her logic would appeal to the archmagos.

  ‘Let her look,’ said Kotov. ‘What harm can it do?’

  Linya forced herself to ignore the faintly patronising comment and held out her hand to Azuramagelli. Reluctantly, the ball of light drifted towards her, like a frightened animal coaxed closer with a promise of a comforting hand.

  ‘Change nothing,’ warned Azuramagelli. ‘The geometric data is fragile and easily prone to exponential degradation if it is altered without care.’

  ‘My daughter is very gifted,’ said Vitali with pride.

  ‘You don’t need to explain, father,’ said Linya. ‘I’ll let my calculations do that.’

  Linya reached up and exploded the ball of light with a rapid spread of her fingers. The shimmering algebraic architecture of Azuramagelli’s course plot spun around her, gossamer threads of holographic information of such complexity that it took her breath away. A billion times a billion calculations, statistical extrapolations and inloaded astrogation datum points from tens of thousands of sources surrounded her like a shoal of glitter-scale oceanids.

  For the most part, his workings were exemplary and beyond the reach of even those who held the exalted rank of a primus grade hexamath.
Yet Linya held an innate grasp of such concepts that bordered on preternatural, an instinctive understanding of the way numbers integrated with one another that had seen her crack previously insoluble proofs with apparent ease. All that had prevented her from ascending to primus grade had been a lack of any desire to travel to Mars and spend half a century in the scholam temples of Olympus Mons when Quatria’s galleries offered the mysteries of the universe to gaze upon.

  ‘Your calculations are exquisite, Magos Azuramagelli,’ said Linya.

  ‘You tell me what I already know, Mistress Tychon,’ said Azuramagelli, reaching a manipulator arm to coalesce the light into a data transfer packet. ‘Now, if I may continue–’

  ‘Exquisite, but wrong,’ said Linya, spinning the light with a twist of her wrist and zooming in on a jagged, fractal-edged numeral hive.

  ‘Wrong?’ said Azuramagelli. ‘Impossible. You are mistaken.’

  ‘See for yourself,’ said Linya. ‘A single flawed data inload from a microscopically deviant gravometric reading has been magnified exponentially throughout the calculation, going unnoticed as it spread its error margin to the entire working. This course will add four days to our journey, and force us to divert around the emergent Jouranion cometary shower.’

  ‘My daughter has something of a fondness for logging cometary phenomena,’ said Vitali.

  Azuramagelli’s optics snapped in close and his silence told her that he now saw the error.

  ‘Is she correct?’ asked Kotov.

  ‘So it would appear,’ replied Azuramagelli.

  ‘The error was not one of Magos Azuramagelli’s making, archmagos,’ said Linya hurriedly, though she knew it was too little too late. She hadn’t set out to humiliate the magos of astrogation, and already regretted her grandstanding.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Kotov, also examining the highlighted data. ‘Yet he failed to notice the irregularity in data parity.’

  ‘Which given the staggering volume of inloaded data is hardly surprising,’ pointed out Linya.