Priests of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  Steel place settings carved with fractal-patterned designs based on an ever-decreasing sequence of perfect numbers indicated each guest’s allocated seat, and Roboute was pleased to find himself with Linya Tychon beside him. A magos with bulked-out shoulders and a skull that was half flesh and half bronzed steel sat on his left, and the two hulking Space Marines took their seats opposite him. Emil and Adara were situated farther down the table, and Roboute wasn’t surprised to see that Sylkwood had swapped places with a junior Cadian officer so as to be seated next to the engineering magos she’d cornered earlier.

  The first course was served by a cadre of slender-boned servitors; a rich soup of bold flavour that only those with taste buds were served. The adepts of the Mechanicus were instead presented with ornamented tankards filled with a liquid that steamed gently and gave off a faint, chlorinated aroma. Conversation was animated, though Roboute noticed that the Cadians seemed to be doing most of the talking.

  Linya introduced Roboute to the magos seated next to him, an adept by the name of Hirimau Dahan, whose rank was, he was brusquely informed, a Secutor.

  Seeing Roboute’s ignorance of the term, Dahan said, ‘I train the skitarii and develop battle schematics to enhance combat effectiveness in all the martial arms of the Mechanicus. My role aboard this ship is to fully embed all known killing techniques, weapon usage and/or tactical subroutines into our combat doctrine with optimal effectiveness.’

  The bearded Space Marine grunted at that, but Roboute couldn’t decide if it was in amusement or derision. Years before on Macragge, Roboute had spoken to a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes, but the encounter hadn’t been particularly successful, so he was wary of initiating another verbal exchange with a post-human.

  ‘You don’t agree with Magos Dahan’s approach?’ he asked.

  The Templar looked at him as though trying to decide what response was most appropriate.

  ‘I think he is a fool,’ said the warrior.

  Roboute felt more than saw Dahan’s posture change and tasted a bitter secretion of pungent chemical stimulants in the back of his throat. His hand curled into a fist of its own accord and a sharp flavour of metal shavings filled his mouth. He blinked away a sudden burst of aggression as Linya Tychon leaned close to him.

  ‘Breathe in,’ she whispered in his ear, and her breath was a soothing compound of scents, warm honey and ripe fruit that took the edge off his inexplicable anger. ‘You are being affected by Magos Dahan’s pheromone response. Combat stimms and adrenal shunts are boosting his aggressors, and you don’t have the olfactory filters to avoid the effects of being so close to him.’

  ‘Clarify: Explain the content of your last remark,’ said Dahan, and the taut desire to do violence was unmistakable in his body language.

  ‘Apologies, Magos Dahan,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘Brother-Sergeant Tanna spoke without proper thought. He is unused to dealing with mortals not bound to our Chapter.’

  ‘Mortals?’ said Roboute, latching onto the Reclusiarch’s emphasis on the word. ‘I wasn’t aware that Space Marines were immortal.’

  ‘An ill-chosen linguistic term perhaps,’ allowed Kul Gilad, ‘but no less true for all that. As our gene-seed returns to the Chapter, our biological legacy lives on in the next generation of warriors. But I sense that is not what you imply. Yes, for all intents and purposes, we are immortal. Brother Auiden is our Apothecary, but I am given to understand that our bodies experience senescence at an artificially reduced rate and that we were engineered to endure for a far longer span than less engineered physiologies.’

  ‘So you still die?’ asked Linya.

  ‘Eventually everything must die, Mistress Tychon,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘Even Space Marines, but a life of eternal crusading in the Emperor’s name ensures that few of us live long enough to discover what our span might be.’

  ‘Though longevity does not apparently equate to the proper observance of protocol,’ said Dahan.

  ‘Like you, Magos Dahan, we do not normally interact with outsiders,’ said Kul Gilad, and the deep well of power in his words made Roboute glad he wasn’t on the receiving end of his harsh glare. If Dahan felt intimidated by the Reclusiarch’s gaze, he did an admirable job of hiding it.

  ‘Then perhaps Brother-Sergeant Tanna might explain his meaning in a less provocative manner?’ suggested Linya. ‘Why does he disagree with Magos Dahan’s method?’

  ‘Of course,’ agreed Kul Gilad. ‘Brother-sergeant?’

  Though Tanna’s features were blunt and smoothed to the point of robbing him of the conventional micro-expressions that provided visual cues to his meaning, Roboute saw he did not want to speak aloud.

  ‘You speak of combat as though it can be reduced to numbers and equations,’ said Tanna. ‘That is a mistake.’

  Roboute waited for him to say more, but that, it seemed, was the extent of Tanna’s critique.

  ‘Combat is numbers and equations,’ said Dahan. ‘Speed, reach, muscle mass, skeletal density, reaction time. All these factors and more are measurable and predictable. Like any chaotic system, if you feed it enough data, the variations in outcome become negligible. Give me the measure of any opponent and I can defeat him with statistical certainty.’

  ‘You are wrong,’ said Tanna with a finality that was hard to dispute.

  Dahan leaned forwards and placed four hands on the table. Roboute hadn’t realised the magos had multiple arms, and saw the hands had eight fingers, each with more knuckles than was surely necessary.

  ‘Then perhaps an empirical demonstration of principles is required,’ said Dahan.

  Tanna considered this for a moment before replying. ‘You wish to fight me?’

  ‘You or one of your warriors,’ answered Dahan, his multiple fingers undulating across their many points of articulation. ‘The outcome will be the same.’

  Tanna looked to Kul Gilad, and the Reclusiarch gave a curt nod.

  ‘Very well,’ said Tanna. ‘A combat will be fought.’

  ‘I would very much like to see that bout,’ said Roboute.

  Tanna fixed him with a cold stare. ‘The Templars are not in the habit of putting on displays.’

  The next course was a platter of roasted meats, steamed vegetable matter and some form of boiled noodle that tasted faintly of sterilising fluids, but which was palatable when combined with a rich plum sauce poured from the regimental silverware. Roboute tucked into his meal with gusto, enjoying the novelty of a cooked meal instead of reconstituted proteins and brackish recycled water that had been around the Renard’s coolant systems more than once.

  The dammassine was poured freely, and Roboute felt himself becoming a little lightheaded despite the inhibitors in his augmetic liver filtrating and dissipating the alcohol around his system.

  He spoke to Magos Dahan of the logistics of compiling thousands of battle inloads, to Linya Tychon of her work on the orbital galleries of Quatria and to Kul Gilad of the time he had been fortunate enough to see a squad of Ultramarines on the streets of First Landing. The Reclusiarch asked numerous questions regarding his brother warriors’ bearing, their numbers, equipment and identifying markings. It took a moment before Roboute realised he was assembling a combat analysis, just as he would on an enemy formation. He wondered if the Adeptus Astartes had any other frame of reference with which to assimilate information. Was every fact and every morsel of knowledge simply a piece of a puzzle that would allow them to fight with greater aptitude?

  Perhaps their combat philosophy wasn’t so different from that of Magos Dahan after all.

  As the dinner progressed, Colonel Anders regaled the table with a charismatic retelling of the 71st’s most recent campaign on Baktar III against the xenos species known as the tau. The tale was told in fits and starts, with various officers interjecting with different aspects of the fight. A burn-scarred lieutenant told of how his company shot down squadron after squadron of xenos skimmers as they attempted to scout a route through a wooded river valley. A blithely handsome captain n
amed Hawkins spoke of the valorous actions of a commissar by the name of Florian who had kept the regiment’s colours flying even after a tau fusion weapon had boiled most of his flesh to vapour in the final moments of the battle.

  Heads nodded in respect to the fallen commissar, which struck Roboute as unusual. As a rule, commissars were feared and, in most cases, respected, but rarely were they honoured by the regiments over whose men they had the power of life and death.

  As the ensemble war story was concluded, Roboute had a sense there was more to it than the soldiers were revealing, but knew enough to know that what happened in the heat of battle ought to stay there. Anders rose to his feet with his glass raised, and Roboute stood along with the rest of the officers and the Mechanicus adepts.

  ‘The dead of Cadia,’ said Anders, downing his dammassine. ‘Fire and honour!’

  ‘Fire and honour!’ roared the Cadians, and Roboute yelled it along with them.

  Servitors quickly refilled the empty glasses in the moments of reverent silence among the officers as they remembered the dead of that campaign. At last everyone sat with a scrape of chairs on the metal deck, and the reflective mood was instantly replaced by one of good humour.

  ‘Right, now that you’ve all heard just how heroic we are, I think it’s time we heard some war stories from our guests,’ said Colonel Anders. ‘Captain Surcouf, when we first met, you said you’d tell the Reclusiarch how a man of Ultramar became a rogue trader. This seems like as good a time as any to make good on that promise.’

  Roboute had been expecting this, and was only surprised it had taken so long.

  ‘It’s really not that interesting a story,’ he said, but his words were drowned out by palms banging on the table and a chorus of demands for him to tell his tale.

  ‘I seriously doubt that,’ said Anders, his brass lizard-pet scuttling down his arm to the table, where it curled around the stem of his glass. ‘Any story that involves an Ultramarian starch-arse, no offence, going from his straight-up-and-down lifestyle to a planet-hopping brigand must be interesting. Out with it, man!’

  Roboute knew the colonel’s words were not meant as an insult, but simply the result of the common misconception that rogue traders were little better than planet-stripping corsairs who hauled looted treasures from all across the galaxy in their cargo holds. He looked across the table, and saw Kul Gilad staring at him intently. Right away, he knew that honesty would be his best course, and gathered his memories from a life he’d long ago put aside and compartmentalised.

  ‘Very well,’ said Roboute, ‘I’ll tell you how it happened, but you won’t like it.’

  Microcontent 10

  Roboute took a deep breath before beginning. ‘I’d taken a commission with the Navy; an ensign aboard a frigate patrolling the western reaches of Ultramar. The Invigilam, out of Kar Duniash. She was a good ship, reliable and kept us safe, so we returned the favour. I served aboard her for almost five years, steadily rising through the ranks until I was a bridge officer.’

  ‘I take it you saw action?’ asked Anders.

  ‘Twice,’ said Roboute. ‘The first was against a mob of greenskin ships that fell in-system from the northern marches. That didn’t test us much; we had a Dominator with us, Ultima Praetor, and its nova cannon punished them hard before they even got close to us. Once we were in among them, the Praetor’s broadsides and our torpedoes tore the ork junkers apart and had them sucking vacuum inside of an hour.’

  ‘I get the sense that your second action wasn’t as easy,’ said Anders.

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ agreed Roboute. ‘A tau fleet had been nibbling away at territory on the extreme edge of the Arcadian rim-worlds and we went in to drive them off. They hadn’t made any overtly aggressive moves, just some sabre-rattling really, but operational briefs told us that was typical of how the tau began their campaigns of expansion. We were a show of force, a reminder that this was our space, not theirs. And to make that point clear, the Ultramarines despatched Blue Lighter, a Second Company strike cruiser from the Calth yards.’

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Anders. ‘We know only too well how those aliens can fight.’

  ‘We kept pushing them back, doing little more than playing a game of jab and feint with them,’ said Roboute. ‘The Space Marines were pushing for an engagement, but the tau kept pulling back, scattering and regrouping. It was like they didn’t want to fight, but didn’t want to get too far away from us either.’

  ‘They were drawing you in,’ said Dahan.

  ‘As it turns out, yes,’ said Roboute. ‘Command authority automatically fell to the Ultramarines captain, and he was spoiling for a fight. Eventually, we cornered the tau ships in a pocket of hyper-dense gas fields filled with agglomerations of debris and streams of ejected matter from an ancient supernova. We thought we had them, but it was an ambush. There were a couple of warspheres hidden in the electromagnetic soup that we hadn’t seen. They hit us hard, really hard, and took damn near every scrap of voids we had. Blue Lighter took some bad hits, but that didn’t seem to bother it, and the Praetor took a beating. The tau fleet turned about and swarmed us like angry sulphur-wasps.

  ‘They’d hurt us, but they’d forgotten the first rule of an ambush: hit hard and fast, and then get the hell out. Navy ships are old, but they’re tough and can take a lot of punishment before they need to disengage. The tau thought they’d crippled us and they pressed the attack when they should have broken off. Blue Lighter turned and blew away two ships before they got close to us and then went for the warspheres.’

  ‘A Space Marine strike cruiser is a force multiplier not to be underestimated,’ said Kul Gilad.

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ said Roboute. ‘It gutted those warspheres. They couldn’t manoeuvre fast enough and the Ultramarines just savaged them, blowing out great chunks of their structure with their bombardment cannon and then broadsiding them again and again. It wasn’t pretty, and when the tau cruisers got in close with us, we showed them that it takes more than a sucker punch of an ambush to take Imperial ships of the line out of a fight. It got scrappy and ugly, but we pinned them in place, and when Blue Lighter charged in, it was all over.’

  ‘A worthy fight,’ said Dahan. ‘I am inloading the data from the Manifold now. You neglected to mention that you earned multiple commendations in that engagement, Captain Surcouf. You received a Bakkan Heart for being wounded in battle, and the Invigilam’s captain put your name forward for the Naval Laurel, the Macharian Star and recommended that you be given command rank at the earliest available opportunity.’

  ‘Captain Cybele was a good man,’ said Roboute. ‘He didn’t want to lose me, but he knew I wouldn’t be satisfied until I had my own ship.’

  ‘Ships do not belong to their captains,’ pointed out Magos Saiixek, his crimson robes billowing with escaping gusts of freezing air.

  ‘My apologies, magos, a figure of speech,’ said Roboute.

  ‘So did you get a command?’ asked Colonel Anders.

  ‘No, though I was promoted to the rank of executive officer aboard the Preceptor, a Gothic-class cruiser laid down in the orbitals of Gathara Station two thousand years ago. She’d been assigned to Battlefleet Tartarus, and Captain Mindarus... well, let’s just say he was a man who’d risen to captaincy through a combination of luck, connections and brazen riding on the coat-tails of his betters.’

  ‘Such a thing would never happen in a Space Marine Chapter,’ said Kul Gilad, as though daring anyone to contradict him. ‘Skill at arms alone decides who commands.’

  ‘The Preceptor is listed in the Manifold as destroyed with all hands,’ said Magos Dahan. ‘The data is corroborated by Naval fleet registry and has parity with Adeptus Mechanicus logs. How is it that you are still alive?’

  ‘Yes, the Preceptor was destroyed, and I was aboard it when it happened,’ said Roboute.

  ‘How is that possible?’ asked Linya.

  ‘Because Captain Mindarus was an arrogant fool who knew next to nothing abou
t void war. He came from an old Scarus family that had sent all its sons to the Navy, and he thought that was enough when it came to commanding a warship.’

  ‘So what happened?’ asked Anders.

  The dining room had grown quiet, every officer and magos gathered at the table listening intently to Roboute’s tale. He felt the room growing smaller; a gradual sense of claustrophobia settling upon him as he recalled the final voyage of the Preceptor. He took a deep breath and thought of the astrogation compass in his stateroom, with its needle’s doomed attempts to find a bearing.

  ‘We’d been hunting a reaver fleet that was using the Caligari Reef asteroid belt to raid convoys coming in through the Auvillard Mandeville point,’ began Roboute. ‘The Preceptor had a solid bridge crew and we felt confident we could take on anything they threw at us, even with Mindarus at the helm, but what we didn’t know was that the reavers weren’t acting alone, they had help.’

  ‘What kind of help?’ asked Magos Dahan.

  ‘Arch-Enemy help,’ replied Roboute, feeling the aggressive swell of emotion in the room. Cadians knew from bitter experience how terrible it was to fight the monstrous enemies that struck from the Eye of Terror. To Cadian regiments, battles against Archenemy forces were about more than just victory, they were personal. Though the fate of the Preceptor was clear to every man around the table, Roboute could feel them willing his tale’s ending to be different.

  ‘We never found out the name of the ship that attacked us,’ Roboute said eventually. ‘The vox-officers and auspex-servitors were killed in the opening minutes when it screamed at them. Flash-burned their brains in their skulls before we even realised it was there. A blood-red hellship rushed us from the cover of a rad-shearing asteroid and scattered our escorts in a frenzy of battery fire. At the same time it hit us with multiple lance batteries that tore down most of our shields in a matter of minutes.