Priests of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Squadrons of modified frigates, destroyers and a host of local system vessels flew as an honour guard to the Explorator Fleet, though they would turn back at the system’s edge. With enough resources to sustain a fleet expedition beyond the stars for many years and enough firepower to fend off all but the most powerful enemies, the Kotov Fleet was as well prepared as it was possible to be.

  Time would tell if that would be enough.

  MACROCONTENT COMMENCEMENT:

  +++MACROCONTENT 002+++

  Intellect is the understanding of knowledge.

  +++Inload Interrupt+++

  Runestones fell from the delicately wrought bowl, the grain of the wood expertly nurtured by Khareili the Shaper to form rippled patterns that made sweet music when water poured through the microgrooves in the surface. It had been a thoughtful gift, one intended to calm the soul, but no soft music and no serene shaping could calm the aching sadness in Bielanna’s heart.

  She sat cross-legged in one of the Aspect shrine’s many battle domes, its curved walls hung with swords, axes, pikes and blades that few armourers beyond Biel-Tan could name. Each was fashioned with the customary grace of Bielanna’s race, but possessed a brutal purity of purpose common to the warriors of her craftworld. Theirs was a martial philosophy, one of war and reconquest, and each aspect of Biel-Tan’s paths reflected that overriding ethos.

  Bielanna knew she risked a great deal by coming to the Shrine of the Twilight Blade; the Aspect Warriors did not welcome outsiders to their sacred places. Few areas aboard an eldar ship of war were denied to a farseer, but even she might be punished for this transgression.

  The red sand beneath her was soft and warm. Warriors had trained here recently, and she could read the ballet of their combat in the ridges, folds and depressions in the sand. A warrior of incredible skill had danced with one whose footwork was more complex, but who had – in the end – lost to the iron control of his opponent. As Bielanna’s senses flowed into the skein, she followed the threads of the warriors back into the past, seeing shadowy ghost-figures spinning and leaping around her. Their every movement was fluid, economical and deadly. The phantom shapes spun around her with ever greater fury as she looked down at the wraithbone runestones in the sand.

  The Scorpion and the Doom of Eldanesh. Both lying atop the Tears of Isha.

  The pattern was familiar to her, each one tracing the line of fate’s weave. Between them they represented skeins of futures that had already been realised, that were yet to be, and which might never be. They braided together in innumerable threads, and each one was – in turn – made up of a dizzying number of potential futures, making the task of interpretation and manipulation almost impossible.

  The corners of her full-lipped mouth twitched at her choice of words.

  Almost.

  She had spent over a century learning how to read the winds of fate in the shrine of the farseers, but even so, her knowledge was woefully incomplete. The futures were fracturing, the threads of fate unravelling from their complex braids. Some were being extinguished, while others were revealed, but through all of the splintering of the future, one strand remained achingly constant.

  One that no amount of her manipulations could avoid, a seemingly fixed point in fate.

  ‘It was a good bout,’ said a voice behind her. She hadn’t heard his approach, but nor would she have expected to hear the stealthy advance of so formidable a warrior. She was just surprised he had waited this long to reveal himself.

  ‘Vaynesh is very skilful,’ she said. ‘You have taught him well.’

  ‘I have, but he will never beat me. Anger clouds his concentration and blinds him to attack.’

  ‘You toyed with him,’ said Bielanna. ‘I counted at least three times you could have ended the fight with a killing strike.’

  ‘Only three? You are not looking close enough,’ growled the warrior, moving around to stand before her. ‘I could have killed him five times before I chose to take the deathblow.’

  Tariquel was clad in his full Striking Scorpion aspect armour, with only his head left bare. Its plates were a subtle mix of green and ivory, edged with fluted lines of gold and inlaid mother-of-pearl. His features were hard-edged now, but Bielanna remembered when he had followed the Path of the Dancer and wept as he performed Swans of Isha’s Mercy.

  She blinked away the memory. That Tariquel was long gone and would never return.

  The ice in his eyes told her that she had offended him. Had his war-mask been to the fore and fully enmeshed with his warrior Aspect, he might well have killed her for such a comment.

  ‘I apologise,’ said Bielanna. ‘My full attention was not on reading the sword dance.’

  ‘I know,’ said Tariquel, kneeling before her. ‘You should not be here. Seers are not welcome in the Shrine of the Twilight Blade. This is a place where threads are ended, not where they continue into the future.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Then why are you here?’

  ‘The human fleet is leaving the coreworld at this system’s heart,’ said Bielanna. ‘We will soon emerge from concealment to enter the webway in pursuit of their foolish expedition.’

  ‘The heartbeat of Khaine within the infinity circuit already told me that,’ said Tariquel. ‘You did not need to come here to deliver this news.’

  ‘True,’ said Bielanna, lifting a cloth-wrapped bundle from the sand beside her. ‘I came here because I wanted to bring you a gift.’

  ‘I do not want it.’

  ‘You don’t know what it is.’

  ‘It is irrelevant,’ said the Striking Scorpion. ‘Gifts have no place here.’

  ‘This one does,’ she said, holding out the cloth.

  Tariquel took the bundle and unwrapped it with quick, impatient motion. His eyes fell upon what was contained within its folds and his features softened for the briefest moment as he recognised its significance.

  ‘It is ugly,’ he said at last.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘It is, but it belongs here, in a temple of war.’

  Tariquel gripped the leather-wrapped sword hilt with fingers that were too delicate to handle such a brutish, clumsy weapon. The hilt was pugnaciously forged, its bellicose form beaten into submission with hammers and molten heat. No wonder the metal had failed in the crucible of combat and caused the black blade to snap a handspan above the quillons. What weapon would not turn on its wielder after so traumatic a birth?

  A broken chain of cold iron dangled from the flared cross of its pommel, the last link cut clean through with a single strike.

  ‘Very well, I shall present it to Exarch Ariganna. She will decide if we should keep it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Bielanna.

  ‘Was this his sword?’

  ‘No,’ said Bielanna. ‘He was not among the slain of Dantium.’

  ‘Then you should take greater care in your rune casting,’ snapped Tariquel, his war-mask slipping over his features. ‘Eldar lives were lost in that battle. Now you say it was for nothing?’

  Bielanna shook her head. ‘Nothing ever happens in isolation, Tariquel,’ she said, struggling for a way to explain to him the complexities of acting on visions from the skein. ‘What happened on Dantium needed to happen. It has brought us to this point, and without those human deaths, the future I must shape might never come to pass.’

  ‘Your words are fleeting like the warp spider and just as insubstantial,’ said Tariquel.

  ‘Human fates are so brief and fickle that they are difficult to follow with any real precision.’

  ‘So again we go to war to reclaim a lost future with uncertainty as our touchstone?’

  ‘We must,’ said Bielanna, gathering up her runes in the patterned bowl and swirling them around once more. Tariquel reached out with a blindingly swift hand and gripped her wrist hard enough to draw a grimace of pain.

  ‘The Starblade is a large vessel,’ said Tariquel. ‘Surely there are other places more suited to the casting of runes than an aspect s
hrine?’

  ‘There are,’ agreed Bielanna, as the warrior released her arm.

  Tariquel nodded towards the runestones in the bowl, and the gentle soul he had been before Khaine’s siren song had called to him swam to the surface for a heartbeat.

  ‘Does what we do here bring the future you seek any closer?’

  Tears welled in Bielanna’s eyes as she pictured the two empty cots in her chambers.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘But it will. It must.’

  Microcontent 07

  He was a leviathan, a mighty bio-mechanical construct engineered far beyond the natural evolutionary norm for his kind. His structure was immense, self-sustaining and driven to grow larger, an amusingly biological imperative; exist, consume, procreate. To be of iron and oil, stone and steel was to know permanence, but if the fleshy remnants at the heart of these perceptions knew anything, it was that nothing fashioned by the hand of Man was permanent.

  Seated upon his command throne and linked to the machine heart of the Speranza via dermal haptics, MIUs and the Manifold, Archmagos Lexell Kotov felt the spirit of his ship rushing through him, its millennial heart a roaring cascade of information that surged around his floodstream like a churning river of light. Even with so many points of connection, he only dared skim the uppermost levels of the enormous starship’s mind. Any deeper and he risked being swept away by its powerful magnificence, drowned in the liquid streams of interleaved data.

  The Speranza’s machine-spirit was orders of magnitude greater than any bio-augmented sentience he had encountered. It could easily consume the totality of his mortal mind and leave his body a vacant, brain-dead shell with no more sense of its own existence than a servitor. Kotov had once risked linking his mind’s full cognitive functions with the wounded heart of a forge world to avert a catastrophic reactor failure, but the Speranza dwarfed even that mighty spirit.

  Forge worlds were seething cauldrons of pure function, singularly directed to the point of mindlessness, entire planets of manufactories driven to extremes of production that could only be yoked by the tens of thousands of Martian adepts thronging their surfaces. The Speranza held that same function, but was unfettered from fixed stellar geography, a forge world that could travel the stars, a mighty engine of creation to rival the scale of those crafted in the Golden Age of Technology.

  Its discovery had been accidental, a chance accretion of aberrant code bleeding from its slumbering mind-core into the data engines of Kotov’s high temple on the forge world of Palomar. At first, he had dismissed the binaric leakage, believing it to be ghost emissions from long-deactivated machines, but as his infocytes scoured the deep networks for similar code geometries, a pattern emerged that gradually revealed something unbelievable.

  The full might of Kotov’s analyticae had been brought to bear, and the divergent paths of the data bleed were quickly identified. Even then, no one had fully realised the enormity of what the neurally-conjoined adepts were uncovering. Only after physical explorator teams had spent the better part of a century verifying the outer edges of the code footprint had Kotov dared to believe that what was being revealed could be true.

  One of the legendary Ark Mechanicus.

  Buried in the steel bedrock of his forge world for thousands of years.

  Only a handful of such incredible vessels were said to exist, and to have discovered one intact was a miracle to rival that of stumbling across a fully functioning STC system. None of the recovered data scraps could identify the ship, which astounded Kotov, for it was a central tenet of the Mechanicus never to delete anything. For all intents and purposes, the ship had never existed before now. At first, Kotov believed its long-dead crew had somehow managed to land the vast starship intact on the planet’s surface and then subsumed it into the world’s metal strata.

  Only as more of the ship had been revealed did Kotov finally understand the truth.

  The ship was incomplete.

  Portions of the starship remained to be constructed, and it had never been launched. For reasons unknown, its builders had abandoned the project in its final stages and simply incorporated the existing structure into the planet’s expanding skein of industry. The ship had been forgotten, and its halls of technological marvels and grand ambition were swallowed by the evolving forge world until no hint of its original structure could be discerned.

  And so it had remained for millennia until the will of the Omnissiah had brought it back to the light. Kotov liked to believe the ship had wanted to be found, that it had dreamed of taking to the stars and fulfilling the purpose for which it had been designed.

  It had taken him three centuries to prise it loose from the structures built onto its submerged hull, and another two to coax it into space with a fleet of load lifters and gravity ballast. Its unfinished elements had been completed in the orbital plates, the disassembled components of three system monitors providing the necessary steelwork and missing elements of tech. His shipyards had the expertise and required STC designs to render the ship space-worthy, but reviving its dormant machine-spirit had been another matter entirely. It had slept away the aeons as a forgotten relic, and Kotov knew he had to remind it of its ancient duty to continue the Quest for Knowledge.

  Kotov had communed with dying forge worlds, calmed rebellious Titans and purged corrupted data engines of primordial scrapcode, but the ancient spirit of the Speranza had almost destroyed him. At great risk to his own mind, he had dragged its torpid soul into being, fanning the bright spark of the Omnissiah that lay at the heart of every machine into a searing blaze of rapturous light.

  But such a violent birth was not achieved without cost, for all newborns fear leaving the peace of solitude in which they have endured the epochs. Like a wounded beast, it had lashed out in agonised bursts of archaic code all around the bio-neural networks of Palomar. Its machine screams overloaded the forge world’s carefully balanced regulatory networks and brought the planet to ruin in the blink of an eye. Hundreds of reactor cores were driven to critical mass in an instant and the subsequent explosions laid waste to entire continents. Irreplaceable libraries were reduced to ash, molten slag or howling code scraps. Millions of tanks, battle-engines and weapons desperately needed for Mankind’s endless wars were lost in the radioactive hellstorm.

  By the time the Speranza’s birth rages had subsided, every living soul on the planet’s surface was dead and every surviving forge irradiated beyond any hope of recovery, leaving a gaping shortfall in Kotov’s production tithes. Yet the loss of an entire forge world was a small price to pay, for the ancient starship now remembered itself and its glorious function. Though a number of the ship’s lower decks had been impregnated with contaminated dust blown up by planet-wide radiation storms, the majority of its structure had been spared the worst ravages of the destruction it had unleashed.

  Having freed it from the world of its birth, Kotov named the ship Speranza, which meant ‘hope’ in one of the discarded languages of Old Earth. It had welcomed the name and Kotov watched with paternal pride as the vast machine-spirit flowed into the body of the ship, learning and developing with every iteration of its growth.

  The Speranza’s mind swiftly became a gestalt entity woven from the assimilated spirits of all the machines that made up its superlative structure. Even the great data engines of the Adamant Ciborium were little more than specks in the mass of its colossal mindspace, a linked hivemind in the purest sense of the word. In the heart of the Speranza all cognition was shared in the same instant, and no purer form of thought existed.

  Just to gaze upon so perfect an accumulation of data was to be in the presence of the Omnissiah.

  Abrehem had thought fuelling the plasma drives had been the most thankless task he had ever been forced to endure, but pressure-scouring their vent chambers of the byproducts of combustion had surpassed even that. Every ten hours, the drives would excrete a volcanic mix of plasma embers, toxic chemical sludge and residual heavy metals burned from the internal coatings of t
he drives.

  This was dumped from the undersides of the drive cylinders into arched reclamation halls below the combustion chambers, gigantic open spaces with black walls that burbled with faint blue ghosts of code that Abrehem perceived like reflected light on the underside of a bridge. Glassy, razor-sharp waste materials lay heaped in great dunes of reflective grey chips, much of which would be recycled for use elsewhere in the ship. The reclamation halls were choking wastelands of poisonous chemicals, mordant sludge, highly flammable fumes and caustic fogs. Enormous dozer-vehicles with vulcanised wheels that smoked from the corrosive effect of the engine leavings ploughed through the billowing drifts of waste, bulldozing it into the enormous silos mounted on the backs of rumbling cargo haulers.

  Once the dozers had been through, lines of bondsmen in threadbare environment suits that had probably been old when the primarchs bestrode the Imperium advanced in ragged lines like soldiers on some archaic battlefield. The first wave struggled with long pressure hoses that blasted boiling water at the floor, while the second came armed with wide shovels and sweepers to gather up every last screed of loosened material.

  Nothing was wasted, and shimmering veils of glassy particulate thrown up by the work sparked in the air, clogged air filters and ensured that every man coughed up abraded oesophageal tissue the following day. After only a day in the reclamation halls, Abrehem noticed his arms and face were covered with an undulating layer of scabbed blisters. Everyone on reclamation duty bore the scars of the day’s work, but no one seemed to care. Abrehem’s eyes stung with chemical irritants and the granular dust caught in the folds of skin around his eyes, making him weep thin rivulets of blood.

  Days and nights became indistinguishable in the artificial twilight of the starship’s underbelly, a constant rotation of brutally demanding tasks that seemed calculated to erode any sense of passing time. Abrehem’s chest ached, his hands and feet were blistered and torn, his hair had begun to thin noticeably and his gums were bleeding. Their existence was a benighted treadmill of thankless effort that stripped away everything that made life worth living. Each day wore their humanity down until all that was left was little better than an organic automaton. It was enough to break the spirits of even the most defiant bondsman. With each day that passed, the complaints grew less and less as the fight was driven out of everyone by the relentless grind and unending horror of each task.