Priests of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  ‘And you’re no beautiful Sejanus,’ grinned Hawke.

  Abrehem forced a smile in agreement. Between them, they’d lost numerous teeth and their skin had a gritty, parchment-yellow texture to it. Abrehem’s hair, his youthful pride and joy, had begun to fall out in lumps, so as a group they’d taken the decision to shave their scalps bare. If the Mechanicus wanted them to be identical drones, then that’s what they would get.

  ‘But that was when I was a boy,’ continued Hawke. ‘I used to think the Emperor and His sons were watching over us, but then I grew up and realised that there weren’t nobody looking out for me. The only person that looks out for Hawke is Hawke.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Abrehem, pushing away his tray. ‘Let’s get a drink.’

  ‘Best idea I’ve heard all day,’ said Coyne, and the four of them rose from the table, heading for the cramped passageways that led to Hawke’s concealed still. The decompression of the lower decks hadn’t touched the strange chamber, and Hawke claimed it was a sign that the Omnissiah was happy for him to keep up production and make a tidy profit along the way.

  Heads bowed, and Abrehem heard muttered prayers as they passed. Emaciated hands reached out to brush his coveralls as he went by and he tried not to look at the men and women who stared at him with something he’d long ago forsaken.

  Hope.

  Thankfully, they passed out of the feeding hall and into the passageways that threaded the heavy bulkheads and myriad work-chambers of the engineering deck. Walls of black iron that dripped with hot oil and hissed with moist exhalations enfolded them. The gloom was a welcome respite from the stark glare of their work spaces. Hawke led the way, though he professed never to know the route to the still. Abrehem had long ago given up trying to memorise their route. It seemed to change every day, but no matter how many twists and turns they made, their steps always unerringly carried them to the arched chamber that looked more like a tomb the more they visited it.

  ‘What the...?’ said Hawke as he rounded the last corner.

  They weren’t the first to come here tonight.

  Ismael de Roeven stood at the end of the hexagonal-tiled pathway that ended at the blocked-off wall covered with the obscured stencilling. The servitor had his arm extended and his palm rested on the wall. Abrehem’s optics registered a fleeting glimpse of hissing code from behind the wall, a whispering binary source that retreated the instant it became aware of Abrehem’s scrutiny.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ wondered Coyne.

  ‘Damned if I know,’ answered Hawke. ‘But I don’t like it.’

  ‘Ismael?’ said Abrehem, approaching the servitor created from their former overseer. Over a third of their shift was now made up of cybernetics, and Abrehem had been absurdly relieved to find that Ismael had not perished in the venting of the lower decks. For another piece of home to have survived along with the four of them felt like an omen, but of what he wasn’t so sure.

  Coyne snapped his fingers in front of Ismael’s eyes, but the servitor didn’t react. Fat droplets fell from the pipework above and pattered in a drizzle from the top of his gleaming skull.

  ‘It’s like he’s crying,’ said Abrehem, wincing as he saw the concave impact damage in the plating covering the left side of the servitor’s head. Ismael might have survived the trauma of explosive decompression, but he hadn’t escaped it without injury.

  ‘Servitors don’t cry,’ said Hawke, angry now. ‘Come on, get him out of here.’

  ‘He’s not doing any harm,’ said Abrehem.

  ‘Yeah, but if someone notices he’s missing and comes looking for him, they’ll find all this.’

  Abrehem nodded, accepting Hawke’s logic. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll get him back to the feeding hall.’

  He reached up to lower the servitor’s arm.

  Ismael turned his head towards Abrehem.

  His face was lined with black streaks of oil and lubricant, and Abrehem drew in a shocked breath as he saw an expression of confusion and despair etched there.

  Ismael held out his arm, and the sub-dermal electoo shimmered to the surface of the skin.

  ‘Savickas...?’ he said.

  Microcontent 15

  Something clanged against the fuselage of the Barisan and Hawkins tried not to imagine a piece of space-borne debris smashing through and killing them all. He’d heard the horror stories of fast moving trans-atmospheric craft striking pieces of orbital debris and being torn apart in a heartbeat, and tried to push them from crowding his thoughts. It was all right for the Templars, locked in restraint harnesses and sealed in their heavy, self-sufficient plate armour. They’d survive decompression, but the sixteen men of the 71st wouldn’t be so lucky.

  Even in bulky hostile environment suits, the Cadian Guardsmen were too slight to be secured in the Thunderhawk’s crew seats, and were forced to endure the flight holding onto heavy bulkheads, support stanchions and vacant harness buckles to keep from being thrown around the crew compartment. Penetrating the Speranza’s neutron envelope made for a bumpy ride, and Hawkins felt his teeth rattling around his jaw as another rogue gravity wave slammed them to the side.

  The riptide graviometric fields that surrounded the Speranza made it impossible to dock directly with the Valette Manifold station, so here they were riding the Barisan through the buffeting turbulence with Kul Gilad’s Space Marines, Archmagos Kotov and his praetorian squad of five skitarii. Though Cadian officers were used to leading from the front, it surprised Hawkins that such a command ethic should be part of the Mechanicus mindset.

  Metal clanging bounced along the Thunderhawk’s topside and Hawkins instinctively ducked, as though expecting the roof to peel back like the top of a ration can.

  ‘You all right, captain?’ asked Lieutenant Rae, who seemed to be enjoying himself immensely.

  ‘Damn, I hate aerial insertions,’ he said. ‘Leave that kind of stupidity to the Elysians. Give me a bouncing Chimera any day.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ said Rae. ‘I’ll remind you of that next time we’re charging into enemy fire in the back of Zura’s Lance. I don’t reckon there’s any good way to put yourself in harm’s way.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Hawkins, watching the battered display at the front of the compartment. The crackling screen relayed the pict-feed from the cockpit, and Hawkins saw the glossy, ice-slick bulge of the Manifold station drawing nearer, its multiple extended spars of metal reaching up and past the picter’s field of view. Hawkins held tight to his stanchion as the pilot banked to avoid a particularly large panel of scorched metal. Starlight glinted from its surfaces, and Hawkins saw some kind of painted glyph; a grinning maw with two enormous tusks, but it spun away before he could be sure of what it was.

  ‘Was that...?’ said Rae.

  ‘I think it was,’ said Hawkins.

  The hulking mass of the Manifold station slid to one side as the pilot brought them in side-on.

  ‘Here we go,’ said Hawkins as the sound of metal scraping on metal came through the fuselage, the groping of an automated docking clamp as it sought purchase on the side of the Barisan. The interior of the gunship changed in an instant. One minute the Space Marines were immobile, seated statues, the next they were up and arranged for deployment. Hawkins hadn’t even noticed it happen. Their armour was big and bulky, even more so when you were crammed next to it in a fully laden gunship. The plates gave off a muted hum of power and there was a faint suggestion of ozone and lapping powder.

  One of the Space Marines looked down at him, the bulky warrior with a white laurel carved around the brow of his helm. Hawkins sketched him a quick salute. The Templar hesitated, then gave him a curt nod.

  ‘Fight well, Guardsman,’ said the warrior with clumsy camaraderie.

  ‘That’s the only way Cadians fight,’ he replied as the light above the Thunderhawk’s side door began flashing a warning amber. ‘Wait, are you expecting to fight?’

  ‘The Emperor’s Champion always expects to fight,’ said the warrio
r, loosening the straps holding his enormous sword fast to his shoulder.

  Hissing plumes of equalising gases ribboned from the door seals, and Hawkins felt his ears pop and the metal pins in his repaired shoulder tingle. The armoured panel slid back to reveal an umbilical with a steel decking floor and a ribbed, plasflex corridor. At the end of the corridor was a frost-rimed door that dripped water that had last been liquid millions of years ago. The Space Marines moved along the umbilical in single file, though it was easily wide enough for three of them to stand abreast. They moved with short, economical strides, bolters held loosely at their hips.

  Hawkins chopped his hand left and right, and dropped down into the umbilical, feeling it sway alarmingly underfoot. It had looked utterly steady when the Space Marines traversed it. With his rifle pulled in tight to his shoulder, Hawkins advanced along the umbilical with a squad of soldiers strung out behind him to either side.

  He moved to the front of the umbilical, feeling the cold radiating from the bare black structure of the Manifold station. The ironwork was pocked with micro-impacts, and condensing air ghosted from the metal. A broad airlock barred entry to the station and a shielded housing concealed an oversized keypad and a number of input ports. Kul Gilad looked ready to tear the door from its housing, but Archmagos Kotov had decreed a less forceful entry.

  The archmagos swept along the umbilical with his red cloak of interleaved scales billowing behind him. His automaton body was perfectly sculpted in crimson, like a templum statue come to life, and his steel hand gripped the hilt of his sheathed sword tightly. Behind a shimmering energy field, his soft features were sagging and jowly, like an old general who has spent too much time from the front line. Yet his eyes were those of a virgin Whiteshield when the las-rounds start flying.

  ‘You can affect an entry?’ asked Kul Gilad.

  ‘I can,’ said the archmagos, reaching out to touch the cold metal with his smooth black hand. Unprotected skin would have been stripped from his flesh, but Kotov gave a sigh of pleasure, as if he were touching the smooth curves of a loved one. Long seconds passed and a recessed panel slid up beside the door. Instantly, the Space Marines had their bolters levelled, and Hawkins was gratified to find that his own men’s weapons weren’t far behind them.

  ‘This is the Valette Manifold station, sovereign property of the Adeptus Mechanicus,’ said an artificially modulated voice. ‘Present valid entry credentials or withdraw and await censure.’

  The image on the pict screen was badly degraded and chopped with static, but was clearly a hooded tech-priest with a quartet of silver-lit optics.

  ‘Is that a real person?’ asked Hawkins, his finger tightening on the trigger housing of his lasrifle.

  ‘Once,’ said Kotov. ‘It is a recording made a long time ago. An automated response to an unexpected attempt at entry.’

  ‘Does that mean the station is aware of us now?’ said Kul Gilad.

  A light flickered behind Kotov’s eyes. ‘No, this is just a perimeter system, not the central data engine. The schemata for this station indicate that its core administrative functions were controlled by a heuristic bio-organic cybernetic intelligence.’

  ‘A thinking machine?’ said Kul Gilad.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Kotov, the idea abhorrent. ‘Simply a cogitating machine that could have its functions situationally enhanced with the addition of linked cerebral cortexes to its neuromatrix.’

  ‘So this is an element of that?’ said Hawkins.

  ‘In the same way that your hand is a part of you, Captain Hawkins, but it is not you. Nor is it aware on any level of the greater whole of which it is part. In truth, such machines are rare now; their employment fell out of favour many centuries ago.’

  ‘Why was that?’ asked Hawkins.

  ‘The machine’s artificial neuromatrix often developed a reluctance to allow the linked cortexes to disengage and diminish its capacity. The tech-priests could not be unplugged without causing them irreparable mental damage. And if left connected too long, the gestalt machine entity developed aberrant psychological behaviour patterns.’

  ‘You mean they went mad?’

  ‘A simplistic way of putting it, but in essence, yes.’

  ‘I’m thinking that’s the kind of information that might have been worth including in the briefing dockets for this mission,’ said Hawkins.

  Kotov shook his head. ‘There was no need. The Fabricator General issued a decree six hundred and fifty-six years ago stating that all such machines were to have their linking capacity deactivated. Only the most basic autonomic functions are permitted now.’

  ‘So if we get this door open, will it rouse the station from hibernation?’ asked the Reclusiarch.

  ‘That rather depends on how we open it,’ said Kotov, kneeling by the panel and sliding the shield to one side. A number of wires extended from his fingertips, inserting themselves into the sockets beside the keypad. Hawkins watched the archmagos at work, the fingers of his free hand dancing over the keypad, too fast to follow as he entered hundreds of numbers in an ever-expanding sequence.

  ‘It appears the central data engine is still dormant,’ said Kotov. ‘It will remain so unless we make a more direct interference with the Manifold station’s systems.’

  ‘Can you get us in or not?’ asked Sergeant Tanna, moving towards the door.

  Kotov withdrew his digital dendrites and stood back with a satisfied smile.

  ‘Welcome, Archmagos Lexell Kotov,’ said the static-fringed image of the silver-eyed tech-priest.

  A booming clang of heavy mag-locks disengaging sounded from deep inside the door, and it slid up into its housing. Dangling punch-card prayer strips attached to its base fluttered in the pressure differential, but it was clear there was atmosphere within the station. Stale and fusty, but breathable.

  The Reclusiarch was first through the door, the vast bulk of his Terminator armour forcing him to angle his body. Tanna and the rest of the Space Marines went in after him, followed by Kotov and his retinue of combat-enhanced warriors. Hawkins stepped into the station, feeling a shiver of cold travel the length of his spine as his boots clanged on the metal grille floor.

  The airlock vestibule was a vaulted antechamber with dulled stained-glass orison panels and hooded figures set within deep recesses in the bare metal walls; iron statues of tech-priests draped in icicles. A lumen-strip on the ceiling sparked and struggled to ignite, but succeeded only in flickering on and off at irregular intervals. Another pict screen burbled to life, and the familiar voice of the recorded tech-priest spoke once again.

  ‘Welcome aboard the Valette Manifold station, Archmagos Kotov. How can we assist you today?’

  ‘How does it know your name?’ said Hawkins.

  ‘I shed data like you shed skin,’ said Kotov. ‘Even a basic system like this can read my identity through my digital dendrites.’

  ‘Welcome aboard the Valette Manifold station, Archmagos Kotov,’ repeated the tech-priest. ‘How can we assist you today?’

  ‘I do not require your assistance,’ said Kotov.

  ‘Interrogative: do you require us to rouse the higher functions of the central data engine to facilitate your purpose in coming here?’

  Kul Gilad shook his head and placed a finger to the lipless mouth of his skull helm.

  ‘No,’ said Kotov. ‘That will not be necessary.’

  ‘As you wish, archmagos,’ said the crackling tech-priest before fading into the background static.

  The skitarii lit their helmet lamps. The stark illumination threw sharply-defined shadows onto walls that were slick with defrosting ice.

  ‘No one’s been here in a very long time,’ said Rae.

  ‘Eighty years, to be precise, Lieutenant Rae,’ said Kotov, moving on to the next door with Black Templars flanking him. Hawkins felt there was more to this emptiness than simply a lack of visitors; the station felt abandoned, like something broken and left to slowly decay. Droplets of moisture landed on his helmet, and sl
ithered down his face. He wiped them away, and his hand came away streaked with black oil.

  He flicked the oil away and said, ‘Right, keep an eye on our rear. I want to make sure our exfiltration route isn’t compromised if we need to get out of here in a hurry. I’ll take Squad Creed, Rae, you take Kell. Watch your corners, check your sixes and keep a wary bloody eye out. I don’t like this place, and I get the feeling it doesn’t like us much either.’

  Hawkins turned and followed the bobbing lumens of the skitarii.

  The Manifold station’s schemata indicated that its construction took the form of a central hub reserved for power generation, with a main access corridor that travelled the circumference of the station. Numerous laboratories, libraries and living quarters branched off this central corridor, with levels above and below reserved for personal research spaces, astropathic chambers and maintenance workshops. The airlock they had breached was in the bulbous central section and the arched corridor beyond the airlock led them out onto the main access route around the station.

  Six metres wide, with an arched ceiling and walls of black iron stamped with numerical codes and images of the cog-rimmed skull, it curved left and right into darkness. Hawkins spread his men against the walls, keeping his rifle and his eyes matched as they scanned the empty corridor. The only illumination came from the skitarii’s suit lamps and the fading glow-globes hanging on slender cabling. The lights swayed gently in the freshly disturbed air, and the sound of distantly moving metal sighed along the corridor like far-off moaning.

  A broken pict screen came to life on the wall. The silver-eyed tech-priest jumped and squalled through the static.

  ‘Magos Kotov, may we assist you in navigating the Valette Manifold station?’

  ‘Can you shut that damn thing up?’ said Kul Gilad. ‘Until we know what we’re dealing with, I don’t want to attract any more attention than necessary from this station’s systems.’