Magos Azuramagelli stood in awe of the machine sentience, its physical appearance so close to his own armature-contained form that they could have been crafted from the same STC. Of all the magi, he seemed the least revolted by the idea of a sentient machine augmented by human brains, perhaps because it was a single – albeit dangerous – leap of logic for him to attempt a transfer into a mechanical body with an inbuilt logic engine in which to imprint his personality matrix.
Saiixek paid the creature no mind, wreathed in an obscuring fog of condensing vapour as he applied subtle haptic control to the engines. Few had dared approach this close to the Halo Scar, and he was taking no chances that a rogue engine surge or reactor spike would hurl them into its depths at a speed not of his choosing. It would be Saiixek who would control the ship during their entry, guided by astrogation data provided by Galatea to the Tychons down in the astrogation chamber.
‘Magos Saiixek, are you ready?’ asked Galatea.
‘As I’ll ever be,’ snapped Saiixek, unwilling to pass any more words than were necessary with a machine intelligence.
‘Then we will begin,’ said Galatea.
Kotov gripped the arms of his command throne, thinking back to his fleeting image of the starship echoed in the mirror of distorted spacetime. Even now he couldn’t be sure of what he had observed, but the one thing he had been sure of was that the vessel he had seen was in great pain.
No, not pain.
It had been dying.
Hundreds of decks below the command bridge, Vitali and Linya Tychon stood before an identical rendition of the Halo Scar. The machine-spirits of the chamber were restless and not even Vitali’s soothing touch or childlike prayers were easing their skittishness. Linya held fast to her father’s hand, anxious and fearful, but trying not to let it show.
‘There isn’t enough data here,’ she said. ‘Not enough to plot a course. Even a primus grade hexamath couldn’t calculate a path through this. When the first gravity tide hits us we’ll be drawn into the heart of a dead star, crushed to atoms or pulled apart into fragments.’
Her father turned to face her, his hood drawn back over his shaven scalp. The plastek implants beneath his skin robbed him of most conventional expressions, but the one that always managed to shine through was paternal pride.
‘My dear Linya,’ he said. ‘I do not believe we have come this far to fail. Have faith in the will of the Omnissiah and we will be guided by his light.’
‘You should listen to your father, Linya Tychon,’ said a disembodied voice that echoed from the walls with a booming resonance.
And data poured into the astrogation chamber, information-dense light rising up like breakers crashing against the base of a cliff.
At the insistence of Kul Gilad, the Adytum was the first ship to enter the fringes of the Halo Scar. They were the Emperor’s crusaders, and as such they would be the first to drive the blade of their ship into the unknown. Ordinarily, such an honour would go to the flagship of the archmagos, but to risk a ship as valuable as the Speranza was deemed too dangerous, and the Reclusiarch’s demand was accepted.
Galatea fed its course to the Adytum’s navigation arrays, taking the ship into the Scar on a low, upwardly curving trajectory through a patch of distorted light that shed spindrifts of gravitational debris. Archmagos Kotov watched the Space Marine vessel with a mixture of fear and hope, desperately hoping that Galatea’s madness was only confined to its homicidal behaviours and that its computational skills were undiminished.
The Adytum’s voids clashed and shrieked as conflicting field energies pulled at the ship from all directions and quickly-snuffed explosions spumed along its flanks as the generators blew out one after another. It appeared as though the Black Templars ship was stretching out before them, but as their closure speeds brought them up behind the smaller vessel, that extrapolation diminished.
Purple and red squalls of space-time flurries closed in around the Black Templars ship and it was soon lost to sight. Moonchild followed, its longer hull shuddering under the impact of rogue gravity waves. Portions of armour plating peeled back and spun off into space, like wings pulled from a trapped insectile creature by a spiteful child. Like the Adytum before it, Moonchild lost its voids in a silent procession of explosions marching along its length.
Cardinal Boras went next, following the exact same trajectory as Moonchild, for Galatea had been very specific: to deviate from its course would invite disaster and expose a ship to the tempestuous wrath of the Halo Scar. It too vanished into the cataclysmic nebula of primal forces and was soon swallowed by blossoming curtains of electromagnetic radiation, hideous gravity riptides and celestial treachery.
Then it was the turn of the Speranza and her attendant fleet of support ships to enter.
Kotov felt the entire ship shudder as it was enfolded by the Halo Scar. The viewscreen entoptics hazed with static and a barrage of scrapcode gibberish. A wash of broken binary squealed from the augmitters and every machine with a visual link to the command deck blew out in a hail of sparks.
Bridge servitors with limited emergency autonomy assigned lower-sentience cybernetics the task of repairing those links and bringing the Speranza’s senses back online. Kryptaestrex oversaw the repair efforts, while Azuramagelli attempted to keep up with Galatea’s rapidly evolving calculations as the gravitational tempests surged and retreated, apparently at random, but which Galatea assured him conformed to patterns too complex for even the Speranza’s logic engines to identify.
‘You know, Tarkis,’ said Kotov. ‘If you’d spoken to me about turning back now, I might have listened to you.’
‘I doubt it, archmagos,’ said Blaylock. ‘You do not dare return to Mars empty-handed, and no matter the risks, you will always desire to push onwards.’
‘You say that like it’s a bad thing. We’re explorators, pushing onwards is how we advance the frontiers of knowledge. A little risk in such ventures is never a bad thing.’
‘The risk/reward ratio in this venture is weighted far more towards risk,’ said Blaylock. ‘Logically we should return to Mars, but your need to push the boundaries will not allow for such a course.’
‘Better to push too far than not far enough,’ said Kotov as another thunderous gravity sheer slammed into the Speranza. ‘Where would we be if we always played safe? What manner of Omnissiah would we serve if we did not always strive to achieve that which others deemed impossible? To reach for the stars just out of reach is what makes us strong. To fight for the things that demand sacrifice and risk is what earns us our pre-eminent place in the galactic hierarchy. By the deeds of men like us is mankind kept mighty.’
‘Then let us hope that posterity remembers us for what we achieved and not our doomed attempt.’
‘Ave Deus Mechanicus,’ said Kotov in agreement.
Blaylock’s floodstream surged with data, a blistering heat haze of informational light that made Kotov’s inload mechanisms flinch. A nexus of information ribboned through the air between Blaylock and Galatea, and Kotov took a moment to admire Blaylock’s attempt to match its processing speed. The data-burden was threatening to overwhelm Blaylock’s systems, and he was only parsing a tenth of what Galatea was feeding the fleet’s navigational arrays.
‘Give up, Tarkis,’ said Kotov. ‘You’ll burn out your floodstream and give yourself databurn.’
‘That would be sensible, archmagos,’ agreed Blaylock, his binary strained and fragmentary. ‘But to see such raw mathematical power unleashed is staggering. I have known nothing like it, and I suspect I never will again. Hence I will attempt to learn all I can from this creature before we are forced to destroy it.’
Kotov flinched at his Fabricatus Locum’s words. ‘Authority: Keep sentiments like that quiet.’
‘Informational: the cybernetic hybrid creature’s neuromatrix is under far too great a stress of computational astro-calculus to be directing any energy to sensory inloads at present.’
‘And you would risk everything
on that assumption?’
‘It is not an assumption.’
‘I don’t care,’ snapped Kotov. ‘Keep such thoughts to yourself in future.’
Kotov stared at Galatea, fearing that Blaylock was underestimating its ability to splinter its cortex and keep its sensory inloads going while the majority of its gestalt machine consciousness was devoted to its real-time navigational processing. It seemed that Blaylock was right, for Galatea was enveloped in spiralling streams of data, trajectories, storm-vectors, gravitational flux arrays and precise chrono-readings that spun, advanced and retreated with each hammerblow of gravity.
Like the ships before it, the Speranza’s voids blew out, and one by one the links to the other ships in the fleet began to fail. Conventional auspexes were useless in the Halo Scar, and even the more specialised detection arrays mounted on the vast prow of the Ark Mechanicus returned readings that were all but meaningless. Kryptaestrex bent all his efforts to appeasing the auspex spirit hosts and assigning a choir of adulators to the frontal sections to shore up the hymnal buttresses.
Warnings came in from all across the ship as local conditions proved too arduous for the different regions of the vessel to endure. Decks twisted and distorted by random squalls of gravity and time ruptured and blew their contents out into space, where they were crushed in an instant by the immense forces surrounding the ship.
Entire forges were torn from the underside of the ship as the keel bent out of true and underwent torsion way beyond its tolerances. Centuries-old temples to manufacture were flattened the instant they separated from the ship, and hundreds of armoured vehicles recently constructed for the Cadian regiment were pulled apart in seconds. Two refineries, one on either flank of the Speranza, exploded, sending wide dispersals of burning promethium and refined fyceline ore into the ship’s wake, where they ignited in garish streams of blazing light that gravity compression stretched out for millions of kilometres.
Kotov felt the ship’s pain as it it was torn from side to side, buffeted by tortured pockets of gravity and forced to endure swirling eddies of ruptured time. Where gravity pockets intersected, he shared its pain as its hull was torn open and its inner workings exposed to forces no sane designer could ever have expected it to suffer.
The Speranza was howling across every channel it possessed: binaric, noospheric, data-light, Manifold, augmitter and vox. Kotov sensed its distress along pathways even he had not known existed, and its pain was his pain. Its suffering was his suffering, and he offered a prayer of forgiveness to its mighty heart, supplication to the hurt it was suffering in its service to the Adeptus Mechanicus.
If they survived to reach the other side of the Halo Scar, then great appeasements would need to be made in thanks for so difficult a transit.
The ship dropped suddenly, as though in the grip of a planet’s gravitational envelope, and Kotov gripped the edges of his command throne as he felt steel and adamantium tear deep within the body of the ship. More explosions vented compartments into the hellstorm surrounding them, and the cries of the Speranza grew ever more frantic.
And this, thought Kotov, was the eye of the storm.
The shipquakes wracking the Speranza were felt just as keenly throughout the lower reaches of the ship. In the maintenance spaces, teams of emergency servitors cycled through the engine decks and plasma drive chambers emitting soothing binaric cants to the afflicted machines. Only those mortal workers deemed expendable were tasked with maintaining the volatile and highly specialised workings of the great engines of the Ark Mechanicus.
For once Abrehem’s revered status had worked in his favour. Together with Hawke, Crusha and Coyne, he had been singled out to spend the shuddering journey through the Halo Scar on a downshift. The respite was welcome, but Abrehem was itchy to get back to doing something that felt like it mattered. Ever since their escape from the reclamation chambers, his duties had become less physically onerous and much more obviously relevant to the operations of the engine deck.
For the last few shifts, he and Coyne had been given tasks that almost resembled the jobs they’d had on Joura, managing lifter rigs and directing the fuel transfers from the deep hangars to the plasma chambers. It was still thankless, demanding and dangerous work, but spoke of the deep reverence even their overseers had for those the Machine-God had singled out.
Totha Mu-32 was Vresh’s replacement, and where Vresh had been unthinking in his cruelty and uncaring in his ministrations, Totha Mu-32 was a more spiritual member of the Cult Mechanicus. He appeared to recognise the very real dangers faced by the engine deck crews and was cognisant of the vital nature of their work. Together with an up-deck magos named Pavelka and an enginseer called Sylkwood, Totha Mu-32 was working to get the engines functioning at full capacity by harnessing the devotion of the men and women in his cohorts. Pavelka was typical Mechanicus, but Sylkwood wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty in the guts of an engine hatch.
Conditions were still hard, but they were improving. Totha Mu-32 drove his charges hard, but Abrehem had always been of the opinion that work should be hard. Not impossible, but hard enough to feel that the day’s effort made a valuable contribution. Where was the reward and sense of pride if work were easy? How could such service be measured worthy of the Machine-God?
Hawke, of course, had laughed at that, pouring scorn on the idea of work as devotional service.
To Hawke, work was for other people, and the best kind of work was work avoided.
Like many of those on the downshift, Abrehem, Coyne and Ismael gathered in one of the many engine shrines dotted around the deck spaces while the ship groaned and creaked around them as though trying to pull itself apart. This shrine was a long narrow space slotted between a grunting, emphysemic vent tube and a bank of cable trunking, each thrumming cable thicker than a healthy man’s chest. It seemed wherever there was a space between functional elements of the engineering spaces, a shrine to the Machine-God would appear, complete with its own Icon Mechanicus fashioned from whatever off-cuts and debris could be scavenged and worked into its new form. Such off-the-schemata installations were, in theory, forbidden, but no overseer or tech-priest would dream of dismantling a shrine to the Omnissiah on an engine deck, a place where a servant of the Machine might be fatally punished for a moment’s lack of faith.
The bisected machine skull at the end of this particular nave was a mosaic constructed from plasma flects scavenged from the reclamation chambers. Abrehem and Coyne’s former dock overseer knelt before the icon, his hands clasped before him like a child at prayer. Ismael’s eyes had an odd, faraway look to them that spoke of a broken mind and fractured memory. The glassy skull glinted in the winking lights of the vent tube and a gently swaying electro-flambeau as the deck tilted from one side to the other.
‘That was a bad one,’ said Coyne as the vent tube groaned and a crack appeared in the weld seam joining two sections of pipework together. Hissing, lubricant-sweetened oil moistened the air with a chemical stink.
‘They’re all bad ones,’ said Abrehem, reading the frightened hisses, burps and squeals of binary echoing from the cables as they carried information throughout the ship. ‘The ship is scared.’
‘Bugger the ship, I’m just about ready to piss my drawers,’ said Hawke, pushing aside the canvas doors of the temple and sitting down next to Abrehem. Crusha followed behind Hawke, carrying a pair of bulky-looking gunny sacks over his shoulders. The walls shook, and Abrehem felt suddenly heavy as the ship lurched like a raft in a storm. He didn’t like to think of the kinds of forces that could affect a ship as colossal as an Ark Mechanicus.
‘Hush,’ said Coyne. ‘A bit of respect, eh? Remember where you are.’
‘Right,’ said Hawke, making a quick Cog symbol over his chest. ‘Sorry, just never liked being reminded I’m in a pressurised iron box flying through space.’
Abrehem nodded. It was easy to forget that the cavernous spaces in which they lived, worked and slept weren’t on the surface of a planet
, that they were, in fact, hurtling through the void at vertiginous speeds on a gigantic machine that had a million ways to kill them with malfunction.
‘You know, for once I find myself in complete agreement with you,’ said Abrehem.
‘Come on,’ said Hawke. ‘You make it sound like we disagree all the time.’
‘I can’t think of anyone else I disagree with more.’
‘Is the ship in... danger?’ said Ismael, still on his knees before the Icon Mechanicus.
‘Yes,’ said Abrehem. ‘The ship is in danger.’
‘Can you make it better like you made me better?’ asked Ismael, rising to his feet and coming to stand before him, hands slack at his sides.
‘I didn’t make you better, Ismael,’ said Abrehem. ‘You took a blow to the head and that rearranged bits of your brain, I think. The bits the Mechanicus shut off, they’re coming back to you. Well, some of them at least.’
‘Savickas,’ said Ismael, holding out his arm and letting the electoo drift to the surface again.
‘Yes, Savickas,’ smiled Abrehem, pulling his sleeve up to show the identical electoo.
‘You are right, the ship is in great pain,’ said Ismael, his words halting and slow, as though his damaged brain was only just clinging on to its facility for language. ‘We can feel its fear and it hurts us all.’
‘We?’ said Abrehem. ‘Who else do you mean?’
‘The others,’ said Ismael. ‘Like me. I can... feel... them. Their voices are in my head, faint, like whispers. I can hear them and they can hear me. They do not like to hear me. I think I remind them.’
‘Remind them of what?’ asked Coyne.
‘Of what they used to be.’
‘Is he always going to talk like that?’ asked Hawke, as Crusha laid the two gunny sacks at his feet before moving past Ismael to the skull icon at the far end of the shrine. Like Ismael, Crusha had a childlike respect for ritual and devotion.
Priests of Mars Page 31
