Such a grievous loss would have been catastrophic in isolation, but coming so soon after the fall of Arcetri, it had almost broken Kotov. The destruction of Palomar was the final nail in his coffin, or so his detractors had announced in strident, declarative tones. How could a magos who had allowed three forge worlds to fall to Mankind’s enemies be expected to maintain his holdings on Mars? Surely, they said, such forge temples as remained to Magos Lexell Kotov should be redistributed to other, more capable magi before his ill-starred touch could destroy them too?
Speranza had changed everything.
Arriving in Mars orbit with such a mighty relic from an age of miracles had sent his enemies slinking into the shadows. Most of them anyway; some were closer than ever.
The revelation of the Speranza had bought him time, but his continued failure to meet projected tithe quotas by such vast margins meant that it was only a matter of time until his Martian forges were stripped from him and the Ark Mechanicus seized.
This venture into unknown space in search of Telok’s lost fleet was his last chance to maintain what he had worked so hard to achieve. But it was more than simply the desire to hold on to what he had built that drove Kotov. In his rise through the ranks of the Mechanicus he had allowed himself to forget the first principles of the Priesthood, and the Omnissiah had punished him for his single-minded pursuit of worldly power.
To rediscover relics from the Golden Age of Technology was a goal whose worth no one could dispute, and if he could return with even a fraction of what Telok had hoped to find, he would be feted as a hero. The lost magos had claimed to be in search of nothing less than the secrets of the mythic race of beings he believed had brought the galaxies, stars and planets into being; technology that could change the very fabric of existence.
From the dusty reliquary-archives of far-flung ruins to the forbidden repositories in the dark heart of the galaxy, Telok was said to have spent his entire life in search of something he called the Breath of the Gods, an artefact of such power that it could reignite dying stars, turn geologically inert rocks into paradise planets and breathe life into the most sterile regions of wilderness space.
Of course, Telok had been ridiculed and scorned, his so-called proofs ignored and his theories discounted as the worst kind of foolishness.
And yet...
A last fragmented message, relayed to Mars from beyond the Halo Scar, spoke of his expedition’s success. A distorted scrap of communication relayed through the Valette Manifold station was all that remained of the Telok Expedition, an incomplete code blurt over three thousand years old. Not a lot upon which to base so comprehensive an expedition, but this voyage was as much about faith and pilgrimage as it was of contrition.
Kotov would find the Breath of the Gods and return it to Mars.
Not for glory, not for renown, and not for power.
He would do this for the Omnissiah.
Microcontent 08
Spinning back and forth, the needle on the astrogation compass wobbled on its gyroscopic mount before finally settling on a bearing. One that bore no relation to their actual course, but then this compass wasn’t part of the Renard. It had once been mounted in the heavily ornamented captain’s pulpit of the Preceptor, and had steered them true for many years before that idiot Mindarus had made one mistake too many.
Roboute sat behind a polished rosewood desk in his private stateroom, watching the needle unseat itself from its imagined course once again and begin its fruitless search for a true bearing. He tapped the glass with a delicate fingernail, and almost smiled as the needle stopped its frantic bobbing, like a hound that hears an echo of its long lost master’s voice. No sooner had it stopped than it jerked and bobbed as it sought a point of reference it could latch onto.
‘Catch a wind for me, old friend,’ said Roboute.
Soft music filled the stateroom, The Ballad of Trooper Thom, a wistful folk tune from ancient days that told the story of a dying soldier of the Five Hundred Worlds regaling a pretty nurse with the beauty of the home world he would never see again. Roboute liked the pride and elegiac imagery in the song, though it was seldom played now. Too many people thought it was in poor taste to sing of Calth’s former glories, but Roboute didn’t hold with that nonsense. It was a fine tune, and he liked to hear what the blue world had looked like before treachery had ravaged it.
Roboute’s stateroom tended towards the austere, with only a few indications of the man who captained the ship in evidence on its walls. Most shipmasters of Ultramar kept their cabins fundamentally bare, and Roboute was no exception, though the profitable years he had spent as a rogue trader had brought their own share of embellishments: a scarf from a girl who’d kissed him as he left Bakka, a series of framed Naval commendations, a laurel rosette from his time in the Iax Defence Auxilia – earned in combat against a raiding party of trans-orbital insurgents from a passing asteroid – and a small hololithic cameo depicting the tilted profile of a young girl with tousled blonde hair and a sad, knowing look in her eye. Her name was Katen, and Roboute remembered with aching clarity the day that pict had been taken. A passing pictographer had snapped it at the feast day of First Seed as the two of them wandered, arm in arm, through the gathered entertainers and gaily coloured pavilions selling carved keepsakes, fresh-grown ornaments, sweetmeats and sugared pastries.
She’d been distant all day, and he knew why.
His distinguished service in the Iax Defence Auxilia was coming to an end, but instead of hanging up his rifle and taking a position in one of the better Agrarian Collectives, he had submitted his service jacket to the Navy Manifold. He’d told Katen it had been no more than idle curiosity to see what they’d make of him, but within a month, a Navy recruiter came to Iax and aggressively pursued him for a position aboard an Imperial warship as a junior officer.
He’d told the recruiter he’d need some time, and the man had left his details with a wry smile that told Roboute he’d heard that many times before, and that he was prepared to wait. He and Katen had continued with their lives, but each of them knew in their heart of hearts that he’d be leaving Iax on the next conjunction with the Navy yards at Macragge. She’d stopped the pictographer, and though he’d wanted to get one of them together, she’d insisted on the individual portrait.
Looking at it now, he understood her reason.
She’d since married; a good man from an old family that could trace its lineage all the way back to the establishment of First Landing and was said to count a number of its scions within the ranks of the Ultramarines. Roboute hoped that was true, and that she was happy. He hoped she had strong sons and pretty daughters, and that she hadn’t spent too long mourning his death.
News of the Preceptor’s destruction would certainly have reached Iax; much of her internal fittings and decorative panellings had been fashioned from good Iaxian timber. The Naval fleet registry listed her as destroyed by an unknown Arch-Enemy vessel, lost with all hands. But that only told half the story.
Roboute shook off memories of subsisting on metallic icewater dripping into the last remaining oxygenated compartment on the shattered bridge and being forced to lick the frozen fungus off the exposed under-deck structures, since that was the only source of sustenance left to him. That was a time he’d rather forget, and the astrogation compass was the only keepsake of his time on the Preceptor he allowed himself. Any more would be too painful to bear.
He tapped his authority signifiers onto the desk’s surface and a hololithic panel of smoked glass hinged up from the rich red wood. Course vectors, fuel-consumption and curving attitude parabolas scrolled past as the Renard’s data engines fed him information from its own surveyor packages as well as those inloaded from the Speranza’s auspex arrays. He scanned the flood of information, letting the enhancements worked into the computational centres of his brain process the data without the need of his frontal brainspace. His natural Ultramarian aptitudes had ensured a rapid ascent through the Naval command ranks and saw hi
m implanted with a number of cerebral augmentations, all of which had proven their worth many times – both in space and ashore.
‘Whoever plotted this course knows their stars,’ he said as he extrapolated the waypoints through the next few sectors where they’d drop out of the warp to re-establish their position before moving on the Halo Scar at the galactic edge. Roboute’s fingers danced over the projected course, zooming in on portions, skipping past others and examining areas of particularly subtle hexamathic calculation. Much of it was beyond his limited understanding of such arcane multi-dimensional calculus, but he knew enough to know it was exquisite work.
Roboute opened a seamless drawer in the desk with a complex haptic gesture and a whispered command in a language his human throat could barely flex enough to voice. Inside was the gold-chased memory wafer from the saviour pod’s locator beacon. He’d studied the data encoded in the latticed structure of the wafer on a discrete terminal, though much of it made little sense without datum references of the celestial geography beyond the Halo Scar. Hopefully once they were on the other side of the Scar, they’d be able to find those reference points.
Even though the terminal he’d used to study the data wasn’t connected to the ship’s main logic engines, he’d purged it before their arrival in orbit around Joura, knowing full well that Kotov would try and lift it from the Renard’s memory stacks as soon as he learned what Roboute had done.
Sure enough, Magos Pavelka later found evidence of a subtle, but thorough infiltration of the ship’s cogitators, a deep penetration that had interrogated every system in search of the missing data. That had given Roboute a grin. As if he would be so lax in his data discipline!
A pleasing chime sounded from the desk, like a knife gently tapped on a wineglass, and Roboute cleared the course information with a swiped hand. A pulsing vox-icon bearing a Cadian command authority stub appeared at the corner of the smoky glass, and Roboute grinned, having expected a call from the colonel’s staff at some point.
He tapped the screen and the image of an earnest man appeared, youthfully handsome, but with a wolf-like leanness to him that reminded Roboute that even the staff officers of a Cadian regiment were highly trained and combat-experienced soldiers. He recognised the man from the meeting in the Adamant Ciborium, one of Colonel Anders’s adjutants, but couldn’t recall if he’d been told his name. The clarity of the image was second to none, thanks, Roboute suspected, to the high-end vox-gear aboard the Speranza.
‘Captain Surcouf?’ asked the man, though no one else could have answered this particular vox.
‘Speaking. Who are you?’
‘Lieutenant Felspar, adjutant to Colonel Anders,’ answered the man, not in the least taken aback by Roboute’s deliberately brusque reply.
‘What can I do for you, Lieutenant Felspar?’
‘I am to inform you that Colonel Anders is hosting an evening dinner in the officer’s quarters on the Gamma deck’s starboard esplanade at seven bells on the first diurnal shift rotation after translation. He extends an invitation to you and your senior crew to join him.’
‘A dinner?’
‘Yes, sir, a dinner. Shall I convey your acceptance of the colonel’s invitation?’
Roboute nodded. ‘Yes, along with my thanks.’
‘Dress is formal. The colonel hopes that won’t be a problem.’
Roboute laughed and shook his head. ‘No, that won’t be a problem, Lieutenant Felspar. We have a few clothes over here that aren’t entirely threadbare or too outrageous for a regimental dinner.’
‘Then the colonel will be pleased to receive you, captain.’
‘Tell him we’re looking forward to it,’ said Roboute, shutting off the vox-link.
He placed the astrogation compass in the corner of his desk and stood with a pleased grin. Straightening his jacket, he returned to the the bridge of the Renard and took his place in the captain’s chair. Emil Nader had the helm, though there was little for him to do given that they were slaved to the course of the Speranza.
‘What did the Cadians want?’ asked Emil.
‘Who said it was the Cadians?’
‘It was though, wasn’t it? Ten ultimas says it was the Cadians.’
‘It was, but that wasn’t too hard to guess. The message came with a request prefix. Any vox-traffic from the Mechanicus doesn’t bother with such niceties. Even Adara could have guessed it was the Cadians.’
‘So what did they want?’
‘Us,’ said Roboute, looking out at the shimmering starfield visible through the main viewing bay with a thrill of seeing new horizons. The stars were thinner and felt dimmer the closer they drew to the Mandeville point, as though they were reaching the edges of known space. It was an optical illusion, of course, a fiction crafted by the mind when approaching the edge of a star system.
‘Us? What do you mean?’
‘I mean they want us to come to dinner,’ said Roboute, calling up the shared fleet chronometer to the display. ‘So I’m afraid we’ll need to dig out those dress uniforms again. You, me and Emil are going over to the Speranza in eighteen hours.’
‘Dinner?’
‘Yeah,’ said Roboute. ‘You have heard of it? An assembly of individuals who gather to consume food and drink while sharing convivial conversation and a general atmosphere of bonhomie.’
‘Doesn’t sound like any dinner we’ve ever had,’ said Emil.
‘Probably not, but we can at least try not to disgrace ourselves, eh?’
‘So what do you think?’ asked Hawke.
‘Thor’s balls, I think you’ve just killed me!’ gasped Coyne, spitting a mouthful of clear liquid to the deck. He dropped to his knees and retched wetly, though he held onto the muck he’d just eaten in the feeding hall.
Abrehem swallowed the acrid liquid with difficulty, tasting all manner of foul chemicals and distilled impurities in its oily texture. It fought to come back up again, but he kept it down with a mixture of determination and sheer bloody willpower. When the initial flare of Hawke’s vile brew had subsided, there was, he had to admit, a potent aftertaste that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
‘Well?’ said Hawke.
‘I’ve certainly drunk worse stuff than this in dockside bars,’ he said at last.
‘That’s not saying much,’ said Hawke with a hurt pout.
‘It’s about the best recommendation I can give you,’ said Abrehem. ‘Give me another.’
Hawke smiled and bent to the collection of hydro-drums, fuel canisters, copper tubing and plastic piping that siphoned off liquids from Emperor-only-knew-where and filtered them through a tangled circulatory system of tubes, distillation flasks, filtering apparatus and burn chambers. None of its constituent parts looked as though it was fulfilling the purpose for which it had been designed, and Abrehem read entoptic substrate codes that suggested at least two dozen machines elsewhere were now missing vital parts.
‘How the hell were you able to build this?’ asked Coyne, rising to his feet and holding out his tin cup for a refill.
‘Guard knowhow,’ said Hawke, handing Abrehem a cup and taking Coyne’s. ‘It’s a bloody poor soldier who can’t figure out a way to make booze aboard a Navy ship on its way to a warzone.’
‘This isn’t a Navy ship,’ pointed out Abrehem. ‘It’s Mechanicus.’
‘Only makes it easier,’ said Hawke. ‘There’s so much stuff lying around that you can’t help but find a few bits and pieces no one’s using any more.’
Abrehem sipped his drink, wincing at its strength. ‘But some of these pieces are pretty specialised, how did you get hold of them?’
Hawke gave him a wink that might have been meant to reassure him, but which came off as lecherous and conniving.
‘Listen, do you want a drink or not?’ said Hawke. ‘There’s always ways and means you can get hold of stuff when you’re on a starship. Especially one where there’s men and women with needs. Especially one where a man with an eye to satisfying those needs can... facili
tate them to fruition. Let’s just leave it at that, okay?’
Abrehem wanted to ask more, but something told him that he wouldn’t like any of the answers Hawke might give him. Not for the first time, he wondered about the wisdom of allying himself with a man like Hawke, a man whose morals appeared to be situationally malleable to say the least.
They’d followed Hawke from the feeding hall into the dripping corridors that ran parallel to their dormitory accommodation. Steam drifted in lazy banks from heavy iron pipes that shed paint and brackish water in equal measure. Crusha led the way, ducking every now and then as a knot of pipework twisted down into the space, and Abrehem and Coyne were soon hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of needlessly complex corridors, side passages and weirdly angled companionways.
The chamber Hawke had finally led them to was wide and felt like a cross between a temple and a prison chamber. The ceiling was arched, and skulls and bones were worked into the walls like cadavers emerging from tombs sunk in some forgotten sepulchre. Faded frescoes of Imperial saints occupied the coffers on the ceiling, and a hexagonal-tiled pathway traced a route to a blocked-off wall inscribed with stencilled lettering rendered illegible by the relentlessly dripping water and oil. Whatever had once been written there was now lost to posterity, though Abrehem reasoned it couldn’t have been that important, judging by the neglect and abandonment of this place.
Hawke’s still was set up against the blocked-off wall, and Abrehem saw smeared shimmers of code lines snaking across it. None were strong enough to read on their own, and he blinked away the afterimages, wondering why there would be any power routed through this section at all.
‘How did you even find this place?’ asked Abrehem.
‘And what is it?’ added Coyne. ‘It’s like a crypt.’
Hawke looked momentarily flustered, but soon shook it off.
‘I needed somewhere out of the way to get the still put together,’ he said, with a lightness of tone that sounded entirely false. ‘Took a walk one night and found myself just taking turns at random, not really knowing where I was going. Found this place, and figured it was perfect.’
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