Priests of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  ‘Kill it!’ ordered Dahan, but whatever custom wetware he had implanted in his praetorians was no match for the barrage of dominant code streaming from Galatea. None of the servitors opened fire, and instead turned their guns towards their commander. Each wore an expression of horrified disbelief, but to Kotov’s immense relief, none had opened fire.

  ‘Please, Secutor, it is almost insulting that you believed these poor, enslaved cybernetics could ever have stopped us,’ said Galatea. ‘We could have them kill you right now, then see everyone aboard this ship dead within the hour. This Speranza is old, but its machine-spirit is inexperienced and much of it still slumbers. It is no match for us and the things we can do. We do not wish to enslave so noble a spirit as the Speranza, but we will if necessary.’

  Data flowed in rutilant streams from every surface of the room, and whatever esoteric data collection implants Galatea was equipped with, it needed nothing so prosaic as an inload/exload port to gather information.

  ‘What is it that you want?’ asked Kotov.

  The silver of Galatea’s eyes grew brighter as it answered.

  ‘We told you what we want, archmagos. It is what you want. We want to travel beyond the Halo Scar and find Magos Telok.’

  ‘And if you find him?’ asked Dahan. ‘What then?’

  ‘Then we will kill him,’ said Galatea.

  Roboute stared at the visitor to his stateroom with a measure of curiosity and guardedness, unsure why Magos Blaylock would choose to make a social call on the eve of their entry to the Halo Scar. The Fabricatus Locum made a show of examining his commendations and the Utramarian Rosette on the wall, his optics blink-clicking, but the observation of social mores was a pretence. His stunted attendants mirrored his movements, their rubberised smocks rustling loudly, and Roboute wondered what function they served aside from arranging and rearranging the pumping pipework that encircled Blaylock’s body and carried fluids to and from the humming pack unit on his back. He could see nothing of their features through the dark visors of their hazmat helmets, and wondered if they were organics or automatons.

  ‘You’re learning, Tarkis,’ said Roboute, rotating the astrogation compass in his right hand while running his fingertip around the rim of a glass of fine amasec. ‘I may call you Tarkis, yes?’

  Blaylock turned from the hololithic cameo of Katen and laced his elongated arms at his stomach. ‘If it allows you a greater degree of familiarity, then you may. Inquiry: what am I learning, aside from your exemplary service record in the Navy and Defence Auxilia?’

  ‘Interactions with us mortals,’ said Roboute. ‘Pretending to be interested in someone else is what makes us human.’

  ‘Pretending?’

  ‘Of course. None of us are really interested in what other people are all about,’ said Roboute. ‘We feign it to get what we want, and that’s the chance to talk about ourselves.’

  ‘On the contrary, I am very interested to know more of you, Captain Surcouf,’ said Blaylock. ‘The tales you told at Colonel Anders’s dinner were fascinating.’

  ‘So I was told,’ snapped Roboute.

  ‘You are irritable today, captain,’ said Blaylock. ‘Have I missed some micro-expressive or verbal cue that has caused me to upset you?’

  Roboute sighed and drained the amasec in one swallow. He slid the glass across the surface of the table and shook his head.

  ‘No, Tarkis, you haven’t upset me,’ said Roboute, tapping the glass of the astrogation compass and watching the needle intently. ‘I apologise for my boorish behaviour.’

  ‘No apology is necessary, captain.’

  ‘Maybe not, but I offer it anyway,’ said Roboute, waving to the seat opposite him. ‘Being so close to the edge of known space always brings out the worst in me. Please, sit down. Give your little helpers some time off.’

  ‘Thank you, no,’ said Blaylock. ‘With my locomotory augmentation, sitting in a conventional chair would be impossible without occluding my circulatory flow. And it would be inadvisable for the chair. I am heavier than I look.’

  Roboute smiled and said, ‘Now, aside from a pressing desire to study my many commendations, what brings you to the Renard on the day we finally breach the Halo Scar? I would think you have more important things to do.’

  ‘I have a great many duties to attend to, it is true,’ said Blaylock. ‘Which is why I wished to speak to you before others are added to my roster.’

  ‘Okay, now I’m intrigued,’ said Roboute, putting down the compass and resting his chin on his steepled hands. ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘I want you to give me the memory wafer you removed from the distress beacon of the Tomioka’s saviour pod. The Speranza is about to enter a region of space from which none have returned, and it is time for you to end your theatrics. I want that wafer, Captain Surcouf.’

  ‘Ah, and you were doing so well...’ said Roboute. ‘Short answer, no. I’m not going to give you the memory wafer.’

  ‘I do not follow your logic in refusing my request, captain,’ said Blaylock, pacing the length and breadth of the room. ‘You already have the in perpetuitus refit contract for your trade fleet. There is no need for you to risk your ship in the Halo Scar.’

  Roboute sat back and swung his feet up onto his desk.

  ‘That’s always what it is with you Mechanicus types,’ he said. ‘Not everything is about need. Sometimes it’s about want. I want to enter the Halo Scar. I want to see what lies on the other side. You have your quest for knowledge, but you’re not the only ones with a hankering to discover unknown things and venture into new places.’

  Blaylock paused in his pacing, looking at something over Roboute’s shoulder with a blink-click of interest. Roboute rose from his seat and moved to stand in front of Blaylock.

  ‘This isn’t open for discussion, negotiating, threats or wagers,’ he said. ‘I’m not giving you the memory wafer, so you might as well go and get on with those many duties you have.’

  ‘And that is your final word?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Then I will take my leave,’ said Blaylock.

  ‘You do that,’ said Roboute, angry now.

  Blaylock turned and made his way from the stateroom, his followers fussing over the train of cables and pipes trailing from beneath his robes. Roboute stood alone in the centre of the room. He let out a deep breath and poured himself another glass of amasec. His forehead throbbed, and though he told himself it was the proximity of the aberrant celestial anomaly they were about to enter, he knew there was more to it than that. He looked up at the wall to see what Blaylock had been studying before Roboute had sent him packing.

  ‘What was all that about?’ said Emil Nader from the open doorway.

  ‘Don’t you knock any more?’

  ‘Touchy, touchy,’ said Emil, getting himself a glass and sliding it over the desktop.

  Roboute filled the glass and slid it back.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Well, what did your new best friend and his little dwarf gang want?’

  ‘He wanted the memory wafer.’

  ‘Did you give it to him?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Roboute, sitting down again.

  Emil took a drink, swirling the liquor around his mouth before speaking again.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, why not?’ said Emil. ‘We’ve got our payment. We’ve flown out this far. We don’t need to go into the Scar.’

  ‘That’s just what Blaylock said.’

  ‘Then maybe he’s not so ignorant after all.’

  ‘I’m not giving them it,’ said Roboute. ‘Not until we’re through. I have to do this, Emil.’

  ‘Why? And don’t give me that crap about new horizons. That kind of line might work on pretty girls, but this is me you’re talking to. And while I know I’m pretty, I’m not stupid.’

  ‘You’re not pretty,’ said Roboute.

  ‘Okay
, maybe not, but I’m certainly not stupid.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Roboute. ‘But you’re wrong. Everything I told them about why I want to do this is true. All that talk of venturing into the unknown, seeing things that no one’s ever seen before. I meant every word of it, every damn word. I’m not cut out for a life of trading and merchants, I’m an explorer at heart. I want to see something that’s not stamped with skulls or covered in dust or just waiting to get torn down by the next invader. All I’ve seen in this galaxy is war and death and destruction. I’ve had my fill of it, and I want to find somewhere that’s never heard of the Imperium or the Ruinous Powers or orks or witches. I want to get out of here.’

  ‘You don’t mean to come back, do you?’

  Roboute shook his head. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Were you planning on telling me?’

  ‘I think I just did.’

  ‘What about the Renard?’

  ‘She’ll need a good captain,’ said Roboute. ‘And I can think of only one man I’d trust with her if I’m not going to fly her.’

  Emil sipped his drink and shook his head. ‘She needs you at the helm, Roboute. You’re her captain, not me. Hell, I’d just lose her in a bad hand of Knights and Knaves.’

  ‘You lose my ship in a card game, I’ll come back from beyond the galaxy and shoot you myself.’

  ‘There, you see, you can’t leave,’ said Emil, finishing his drink and heading back out to the bridge. He paused at the door and turned back to face Roboute, his face draped in uncertainty, as though he wanted to speak, but wasn’t sure he should.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Roboute.

  ‘Nothing really,’ said Emil. ‘It’s just that Gideon had himself a nightmare.’

  Gideon Teivel was the Renard’s astropath, a ghostly individual who rarely joined the crew at food or relaxation. He spent most of his time alone in his solitary choir chamber, studying his oneirocritica or wandering the empty halls on the upper decks. For him to have spoken to one of the crew was certainly out of the ordinary.

  ‘Did he say what was it about?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Emil. ‘Just that it was a bad one. You remember the last time he had a nightmare?’

  Roboute did. ‘On the run between Joura and Lodan. The night before we translated into the warp and that crazy pysker went nuts and almost killed us all. What’s your point?’

  ‘That maybe your need to get away isn’t worth us all getting killed.’

  ‘Shut the door on your way out,’ said Roboute, his expression hardening.

  With Emil gone, Roboute put his head in his hands and slid the astrogation compass towards him. He tapped the glass again, harder this time, and a strange feeling of inevitability swept through him as he stared at the needle.

  Ever since they had translated in-system the needle hadn’t so much as twitched.

  Its course and his were aimed unerringly for the heart of the Halo Scar.

  Microcontent 18

  The Halo Scar. No one knew how it had come into existence, a graveyard of stars aged beyond their time and a region of gravitational hellstorms that bent the local spacetime by orders of magnitude. Navigators who strayed too close to the Scar with their third eye exposed were killed instantly, their hearts stopped dead mid-beat. Astropaths caught in a nuncio trance went mad, screaming and clawing at their skulls as if to expunge horrors they could never put into words.

  Even those who looked with mortal eyes began to see things in its tortured depths. Gravitational crush pressures that would compress entire planets to a molecule-sized grain in a heartbeat twisted and distorted the passage of light and time with a reckless and random disregard for causality.

  To approach the wound that lapped at the edge of the Imperium a ship had to blind itself to the realities beyond those perceived by mortal senses, and even then it was dangerous to approach too closely. The Speranza had halted three AU from the edge of the Halo Scar, and Saiixek was already having to increase engine output to maintain their position as questing tendrils of gravity sought to pull them into the Scar’s embrace.

  A maddened froth of relativistically colliding light and time painted a bleak picture across the far wall of the Speranza’s command deck. From one side to the other, an entoptic representation of the Halo Scar’s immense and impossibly tempestuous depths seemed to mock the gathered magi, as if daring them to explain it or venture a hypothesis as to how it might be navigated. Streams of hyper-dense gaseous matter flailed at the edges, hard enough to cut through a capital ship like a hot wire through thin plastek. Billowing clouds of flexing light reached out like the tendrils of some deep sea cephalopod hunting for prey.

  Colours boiled and spontaneously altered their electromagnetic wavelengths with each passing second, and swirling eddies of distorting gravity threw up images of dying stars, cascading streams of debris from the birth of those self-same stars. Light from the same star registered over and over again as it was bent tortuously by the unimaginable gravitational forces, juddering through spacetime in multiple waves. Digital hallucinations of celestial madness flickered in and out of focus as the protesting imaging machines struggled to represent the impossible region of space before them.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Kotov as another phantom image flickered onto the panoramic display.

  Magos Blaylock instantly synced his vision to where Kotov was looking, but by then the image had vanished.

  ‘What did you see, archmagos?’ inquired Blaylock.

  ‘A starship,’ he said. ‘I saw a starship. In the Scar.’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Azuramagelli, his armature flexing in irritation. ‘Our ships are the only vessels out here for millions of kilometres.’

  ‘I saw a ship out there,’ said Kotov. ‘One of ours. The Cardinal Boras.’

  ‘A future echo,’ said Galatea. ‘The gravitational forces are throwing back reflections of light and spacetime that has yet to reach us. What you saw was most likely an imprint of the fleet as it will be as we enter the Scar.’

  Kotov said nothing, unsettled by what he had seen, but unwilling to expound on its details.

  A number of remotely-piloted drones had already been sent out into the fringes of the Halo Scar, some with servitors aboard, others with menial deck crews picked up by skitarii armsmen, and their findings appeared to support Galatea’s hypothesis.

  In all cases, the result had been the same; the craft had been crushed or torn apart within seconds of reaching an arbitrary line that corresponded to the edge of the anomaly. Biometric readings from the implanted crewman fed back to the Speranza, but showed nothing that couldn’t be surmised from the fluctuating readings being processed by the data engines; pressure, heat and light readings beyond measurement.

  The only discovery of note achieved by the deaths of the implanted crew was a wild distortion of chronometry that suggested that time itself was compressed and elongated by the gravitational sheer within the Halo Scar.

  ‘Rapturous, is it not?’ said Galatea, rocking back and forth on its palanquin beside Kotov’s command throne. ‘Over four thousand years of study and data collection, and even then we know only a fraction of its secrets.’

  ‘That’s not very reassuring, when you’re supposed to be guiding us through it,’ said Kotov, his hindbrain ghosting through the Speranza’s noospheric network while his primary consciousness resided on the command deck. Galatea’s touch was everywhere in the ship’s guts, millions of furcating trails of lambent light that bled and divided all through the vital networks of the ship. Not invasively, but close enough to life-support, engine controls and gravity to ensure that he dared order no hostile moves against Galatea.

  ‘When traversing a labyrinth, we only need to know the correct path, not everything around it,’ said Galatea. ‘Fear not, archmagos, we will guide your ship through this labyrinth, but it will not be a journey without peril. You should expect to suffer great losses before we reach the other side.’

  Magos Kryptaestrex looked up, hi
s heavy, rectangular form flexing with the motion of his numerous servo-arms and manipulators. More like an enginseer than a high-ranking magos, Kryptaestrex was brutish and direct, an adept who was unafraid of getting his metaphorical hands dirty in the guts of a starship.

  Like the rest of the senior magi, Kryptaestrex had been horrified at the devil’s bargain Kotov had struck with Galatea. More than anyone – even Kotov himself – Kryptaestrex had a deep connection with the inner workings of the ship, and it had been his inspection of its key systems that convinced the others that Kotov had no choice but to allow Galatea to as good as hijack the ship.

  ‘Nothing of worth is ever achieved without loss,’ said Kotov. ‘All those whose lives are sacrificed in the Quest for Knowledge will be remembered.’

  ‘That’s right,’ giggled Galatea. ‘The Mechanicus never deletes anything. If only you knew how true that was, you would see how blinded you have become, how enslaved you all are by your own hands and lack of vision. The truth is all around you, but you do not see it, because you have forgotten how to question.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Kotov. ‘The core tenet of the Adeptus Mechanicus is to seek out new knowledge.’

  ‘No,’ said Galatea, as though disappointed. ‘You seek out old knowledge.’

  And for a fraction of a second, Kotov dearly wished he had a squad of Cadian soldiers on the command deck, warriors free of augmentation or weapons that could be deactivated, overloaded or turned on friendly targets. Just a handful of Cadian veterans with gleaming Executioner blades...

  Of course Magos Dahan and Reclusiarch Kul Gilad had proposed an armed response to wrest Galatea from the Speranza, but Kotov had quickly scotched the idea, knowing that it was in all likelihood able to hear their discussions. Nowhere on the ship could be considered secure, and this close to the Halo Scar, taking a ship out beyond the voids would be suicide. At the slightest hint of threat, Galatea could wreak irreparable damage to the ship, maybe even destroy it. Given the current alignment of their purpose and that of Galatea, the safest course of action was to go along with its wishes and turn a scriptural blind eye to the techno-heretical fact of its existence.