Priests of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Abrehem. ‘I’ve never heard of a servitor retaining any knowledge of its former life, so I’m guessing really.’

  ‘It sounds like deep down they remember who they were,’ said Coyne.

  ‘Thor’s balls, I hope not,’ said Hawke. ‘Trapped in your own head as a slave, screaming all the time and knowing that no one can ever hear you. That’s just about the worst thing I can imagine.’

  ‘Even after all the stuff you said you saw on Hydra Cordatus?’

  ‘No, I suppose not, but you know what I mean.’

  ‘I don’t think they remember anything consciously,’ said Abrehem, hoping to avoid another retelling of Hawke’s battles against the Traitor Marines. ‘I think their memory centres are the first things the gemynd-shears cut. All that’s left once they’re turned into a servitor is the basic motor and comprehension functions.’

  ‘So one bang on the head and he remembers who he is?’ said Hawke. ‘We should do that to them all and we’d have a bloody army.’

  Abrehem shook his head as Hawke rummaged through the first gunny sack. Another shipquake shook the cramped shrine, and Abrehem quickly made the Cog over his heart.

  ‘I don’t think it’s as simple as that,’ said Abrehem. ‘You can’t mess with someone’s brain and know exactly what might happen.’

  ‘Ah, who cares anyway?’ said Hawke, pulling a plastic-wrapped carton from the gunny sack and tearing the packaging away with a sigh of pleasure. ‘There you are, my beauties.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Coyne, trying and failing to mask his interest.

  Hawke grinned and opened a packet of lho-sticks, lighting one with a solder-lance hanging from his belt. He blew out a perfect series of smoke rings and, seeing Coyne and Abrehem’s expectant looks, begrudgingly passed the carton over. Coyne took three, but Abrehem contented himself with one. Hawke lit them up, and they smoked in silence for a moment as the ship shuddered around them once again and the electro-flambeau clinked on its chain.

  ‘So where did you get these?’ asked Coyne.

  ‘I got a few contacts in the skitarii now,’ said Hawke. ‘I don’t want to say too much more, but even those augmented super-soldiers have a taste for below-decks shine. A few bottles here, a few bottles there...’

  ‘What else have you got in there?’

  ‘This and that,’ said Hawke, enjoying keeping his answers cryptic. ‘Some food, some drink that hasn’t got trace elements of engine oil and piss running through it, and some bits of tech I think I can use to trade with some of the overseers. Turns out they’re pretty far down the pecking order too, and aren’t averse to the odd bit of commerce that makes life a little more comfortable.’

  ‘What could you have that an overseer would possibly want?’

  ‘Never you mind,’ said Hawke, wagging an admonishing finger. ‘I’m already telling you too much, but seeing as how we’re practically brothers now, I’d be willing to cut you boys in on a piece of the action.’

  ‘What kind of action could you get?’

  ‘Nothing too much to start with. I’m thinking maybe we can get some extra food or some pure-filtered water. Then if things work out, we might see about getting some better quarters or transfer to a deck that isn’t killing us with rad-bleed or toxin runoff. Give me six months and I’ll have us in a cushy number, where we don’t have to do any work at all. It’s all about who you know, and that’s just as true on a starship as it ever was in the Guard.’

  ‘You could really do that?’ asked Coyne.

  ‘Sure, no reason why not,’ said Hawke. ‘I’ve got the smarts, and I’ve got Crusha if folk start getting uppity.’

  ‘You start making moves like that you’re going to piss off a lot of people,’ warned Abrehem. ‘And Crusha can’t keep you safe all the time.’

  ‘I know, I’m not an idiot,’ said Hawke. ‘That’s why I got this.’

  Hawke reached into the second gunny sack and pulled out a scuffed and battered case, held closed by a numeric lock. He punched in a five digit code and removed an ancient-looking pistol with a long barrel of coiled induction loops and a heavy power-cell that snapped into the handle. The matt-black finish of the gun was chipped and scratched, but the mechanism appeared to be well-cared-for, an antique with sentimental value.

  ‘Holy Throne, where did you get that?’ said Coyne.

  ‘I told you, I got to know some of the skitarii,’ said Hawke. ‘They heard I was ex-Guard and we got to talking, and... here we are.’

  ‘Does it even work? It looks like it’s about a thousand years old.’

  Hawke shrugged. ‘I think so. I’m betting it doesn’t matter though. You point it at someone and all they’re going to be worried about is getting their head blown off.’

  ‘Put it away,’ hissed Abrehem. ‘If the overseers see you with that, you’ll be thrown out of an airlock or turned into a servitor. And probably us too.’

  ‘Relax,’ said Hawke, ‘they’re not going to find it.’

  Hawke looked up as Ismael appeared at his shoulder, the servitor looking confused and disorientated.

  ‘What do you want?’ spat Hawke.

  ‘That gun,’ said Ismael. ‘Helicon Pattern subatomic plasma pistol, lethal range two hundred metres, accurate to one hundred metres. Coil capacity; ten shots, recharge time between shots; twenty-five point seven three seconds. Manufacture discontinued in 843.M41 due to overheat margin increase of forty-seven per cent per shot beyond the fifth.’

  ‘You know about guns?’ asked Hawke.

  ‘I know about guns?’ asked the servitor.

  ‘You tell me, you’re the one who just recited the bloody instruction manual,’ said Hawke.

  ‘I... had... guns,’ said Ismael, haltingly. ‘I think I remember using them. I think I was very good.’

  ‘Really?’ said Hawke. ‘Now that is interesting.’

  Microcontent 19

  The first indication that the crossing of the Halo Scar would involve sacrifice came in a broad-spectrum distress call from the Blade of Voss. The nearest vessel to the escort was Cardinal Boras, and its captain, a hoary veteran mariner by the name of Enzo Larousse, was a shipmaster who had sailed treacherous regions of space and lived to tell the tale. As executive officer of the Retribution-class warship he had traversed some of the worst warp storms ever recorded, and as captain had brought his ship back from Ventunius’s disastrous expedition to the northern Wolf Stars.

  Larousse ran a tight ship with a firm hand that recognised the value each crewman brought to the ship. His bridge staff were well-drilled and efficient, his below-decks crew no less so, and a palpable sense of pride and loyalty was felt on every deck.

  The screams on the vox were awful to hear, sometimes distorted and stretched, like a recording played too slow, sometimes shrieking and shrill. Crushing gravity waves compressed the time and space through which the vox-traffic was passing, twisting the words of each message beyond recognition, but leaving the terrible sense of terror and desperation undiminished.

  Larousse’s bridge crew felt the horrific fear of their compatriots aboard Blade of Voss, and waited for their captain to give an order. Seated on his command throne, Larousse listened to the screams of fellow mariners, all too aware of how dangerous the space through which they sailed was, but unwilling to abandon the stricken ship.

  ‘Mister Cassen, slow to one third,’ he ordered.

  ‘Captain...’ warned Cassen. ‘We can’t help them.’

  ‘Deck officer, raise the blast shutters, I want to see what in the blazes is happening out there,’ said Larousse, ignoring his Executive Officer. ‘Surveyor control, see what you can get, and someone raise the bloody Speranza. They need to know what’s happening here.’

  ‘Captain, we have a precise course laid in,’ said Cassen. ‘Orders from the archmagos are not to deviate from it.’

  ‘To the warp with the archmagos,’ snapped Larousse. ‘He’s already abandoned one ship, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to
leave another one behind.’

  ‘Surveyors are dead, captain,’ came the report from the auspex arrays.

  ‘No auspex, no vox, no voids,’ snarled Larousse. ‘Another bloody fool’s errand.’

  ‘Blast shutters raising.’

  Larousse turned his attention to the hellish maelstrom of ugly, raw light that spilled around them, the excretions of dying stars and the bleeding light and spacetime surrounding them. Hypnotically deadly, coruscating shoals of ultra-compressed stellar matter painted space before the Cardinal Boras with splashes of light that writhed and exploded and snapped back as it was deformed by the titanic energies of the tortured gravity fields.

  ‘Holy Terra,’ breathed Larousse.

  In the bottom quadrant of the viewing screen was the Blade of Voss, close enough that it could be seen without the need for surveyors, auspex or radiation slates. The ship was caught in a squalling burst of gravity from a star that appeared to be no bigger than an orbital plate or the great segmentum fortress anchored at Kar Duniash. Convergent streams of gravity were coalescing into a perfect storm of hyper-dense waves of crushing force.

  And the Blade of Voss was caught at the bleeding edge of that storm.

  Plates of armour tens of metres thick were peeling back from her hull and the ship had an unnatural torsion breaking her apart along her overstretched keel. Compounding gravitational sheer forces were tearing the ship apart, and though her mater-captain was fighting to break the ship free, Larousse saw that was a fight she couldn’t win.

  ‘Take us in, Mister Cassen,’ ordered Larousse. ‘Full ahead and come in on her starboard side. If we can block some of the wavefronts from hitting the Blade, she might be able to break free.’

  ‘Captain, we can’t get too close or we’ll be pulled in too,’ warned Cassen.

  ‘Do as I order, Mister Cassen,’ said Larousse, in a tone that left no room for argument. ‘We’ve got more fire in our arse than she has. We can break free. She can’t.’

  Even before Cassen could carry out his order, Larousse saw it was too late.

  Blade of Voss came apart in a sucking implosion as it was crushed to fragments by the nightmarish forces at work in the Halo Scar. Strengthened bulkheads split apart and the ship’s structural members blew away like grain stalks in a hurricane. In seconds the ship’s remains were scattered and drawn into the corpse-star’s mass, each piece compressed to a speck of debris no larger than a grain of sand. Larousse watched the death of the Blade of Voss with heavy heart, the honourable escort vessel dissolving as though constructed of sand and dust.

  ‘Captain, we have to turn back to our allotted course,’ said Cassen, as alarms began ringing from the various auspex stations and the edges of the storm that had destroyed Blade of Voss reached out to claim another victim.

  Larousse nodded. ‘Aye, Mister Cassen,’ he said slowly, as though daring the storm to try and fight them. ‘Bring us back to our original heading.’

  ‘Captain!’ shouted the junior officer stationed at surveyor control. ‘I have a proximity contact!’

  ‘What?’ demanded the captain. ‘Which ship is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, captain,’ said the officer. ‘Auspex readings are all over the place.’

  ‘Well what in blazes do you know? Where is it?’

  ‘I think it’s right behind us.’

  The first volley from the Starblade’s prow pulse lances struck the rear quarter of the Cardinal Boras with deadly precision. Guided not by any targeting matrix, but rather by Bielanna’s prescient readings of the skein, the Eclipse cruiser’s guns were more accurate than ever before. Three engine compartments were vented to space and entire decks were cored with searing wychfire. The eldar ship kept station above and behind the Imperial warship, pouring its fire down onto the shuddering vessel. Though the Starblade’s launch bays were laden with fighters and bombers, none were launched as they would be exposed to the withering fire of the warship’s close-in defences, and Bielanna was loath to risk eldar lives when there was no need.

  Caught without shields and unable to outmanoeuvre its attacker, the Cardinal Boras suffered again and again under the relentless battering of lance fire. Crews fought to contain the damage, but against repeated hails of high energy blasts they had little chance of success. Captain Larousse attempted to turn his vessel to bring his own guns to bear, but no sooner had the heavy, wedged prow begun to turn than the Starblade darted away, always keeping behind the heavy warship.

  A sustained burst of fire took the Cardinal Boras’s dorsal lances, tearing them from their mountings as incandescent columns of light penetrated sixty decks. Vast swathes of the fighting decks were immolated as oxygen-rich atmosphere ignited and filled the crew spaces with terrifying fires that burned swiftly and mercilessly. Gun batteries pounded out explosive ordnance at as steep a rake as possible, but none could turn enough to target the merciless killer savaging them from behind. Torpedoes were spat from the prow launch tubes, their machine-spirits given free rein to engage any target they could find.

  It was a tactic of desperation, but Captain Larousse had no other options open to him.

  The enormous projectiles arced up and over the eagle-stamped prow and circled in lazy figure of eight patterns over its topside, the spirits caged in the warheads bombarding their local environment with active surveyor blasts in an attempt to locate a target. Most were quickly dragged off course and destroyed by the powerful gravity waves buffeting the warship, but a handful managed to lock onto the ghostly auspex return that flitted around the engines of the Cardinal Boras.

  Yet even these solitary few flashed through a phantom target, a shimmering lie of a contact generated by the Starblade’s holofields. What appeared to the war-spirits as a target worthy of attack turned out to be a mirage, a transparency of capricious energy fluctuations, rogue electromagnetic emissions and trickster surveyor ghosts. Only one torpedo detonated, the others flying on for a few hundred kilometres before being torn to pieces by the gravitational forces.

  Starblade was merciless in her attentions, raking the Cardinal Boras from stern to bow with streaming pulses of lance fire. In a conventional fight, the Starblade would have had little hope of besting so powerful a warship. Imperial ships favoured battles of attrition, where their superior armour and unsubtle weapon batteries could transform the space around them into explosive hellstorms of debris and gunfire. But stripped of her void shields and without escorts to keep this rapacious predator from her vulnerable rear, there was nothing she could do but suffer.

  And the Cardinal Boras suffered like few other ships of the Gothic sector had ever suffered.

  Fires boiled through its giant hallways and cathedrals and those few saviour pods that managed to eject were destroyed almost instantly in the harsh physics of the Halo Scar. Fighting for her very survival, the Cardinal Boras went down hard, every scrap of firepower and speed wrung from her shuddering frame until there was nothing left to give. With the fight beaten out of her, the Cardinal Boras spent her last moments screaming out the nature of her killer.

  Reduced to little more than a burned-out drifting wreck, the ancient warship finally succumbed to the inevitable and broke apart. Its keel, laid down over four and a half thousand years ago in the shipyard carousels of Rayvenscrag IV, finally split and the clawing forces of gravitational torsion ripped the vessel apart along its length.

  The swarming riptides of powerful gravity storms finished the job, disassembling the remnants of the warship’s structure and scattering them in a bloom of machine parts.

  Satisfied with the murder of Cardinal Boras, the eldar vessel set its sights on its next victim as a furious heat built in its belly. A silent procession of warriors trapped on the path of murder and war marched in solemn ceremony towards a shrine at the heart of the Starblade, a scorched temple of cold wraithbone that now seethed with molten heat and volcanic anger.

  The brutally graceful eldar war-vessel knifed through the gravitational haze towards the Adytum.


  Its guns retreated into their protective housing, for they would not be used in this attack.

  The death of the Space Marine vessel would be a much more personal slaying.

  The Swordwind was to fall upon the Black Templars.

  Kul Gilad heard the shouted commands from the bridge of the Cardinal Boras cease, and knew the mighty vessel was dead. Even before he heard the dying ship’s tortured vox-emissions identifying the source of the raking gunfire that was killing her, the Reclusiarch had known who the attackers would be. Ever since the eldar wych-woman had slain Aelius at Dantium Gate and cursed him with her eyes, he had felt this doom stalking him.

  It had only been a matter of time until she returned to finish what she had started.

  Perhaps by facing that doom he might end it.

  The bridge of the Adytum was a spartan, metallic place of echoes and shadow. A boxy space with a raised rostrum at the narrowed proscenium before the main viewing bay, it was laid out with the rigorous efficiency of all Space Marine ships. Chapter serfs manned the key systems of the ship, wolf-lean men plucked from the crew rosters of the Eternal Crusader. Each one was a fighter, a warrior of some skill and renown amongst the mortals who served the Chapter, but Kul Gilad counted none of them as being of any worth in the coming fight.

  The ship’s captain was named Remar, a seconded Naval officer bound to the Black Templars for the last fifty years, and it was fitting that he had also fought the eldar above the burning cities of Dantium. As with any battle against the eldar, history had a habit of recurring with fateful resonances.

  ‘Captain Remar, seal the bridge,’ ordered Kul Gilad.

  ‘Reclusiarch?’

  ‘Full lockdown. No one comes in and no one leaves,’ said Kul Gilad. ‘Only upon my direct authority does that door open. Do you understand me?’

  ‘I understand, Reclusiarch,’ said Remar and his fingers danced over the keypad on the command lectern to enact Kul Gilad’s will.

  ‘Ready the Barisan for flight.’