‘How much longer will that star last before it explodes?’ asked Roboute.
‘Judging by its radiation output and the composition of the ejected matter, perhaps another few million years,’ said Kotov.
Roboute nodded. He hadn’t really felt as though the star was in danger of catching them unawares with a sudden supernova event, but the strangeness and hostile nature of its current incarnation made him wary of the unseen reactions taking place in its core.
‘I can barely even think of those kinds of spans,’ he said. ‘It’s enough time for entire races to spring into being, countless stellar empires to rise and fall, and dozens of periods of species extinction.’
‘The human mind is virtually incapable of visualising such colossal spans of time relative to its own infinitesimal existence,’ said Galatea. ‘It makes events such as this seem almost static, when the reality could not be more energetic.’
Roboute stared at the machine that hunkered down in the centre of the command deck like a grotesque ambush predator settling into its new lair. Kotov had explained the nature of the gestalt creature to him, but Roboute had the sense there was as much left unsaid as had been explained.
The magi on the command deck were deathly afraid of it, that much was obvious, and given the ease with which it had inveigled itself onto the Speranza, he suspected there was good reason for that fear. None of that mattered to Roboute. Once he had led Kotov to Katen Venia, there was nothing left to bind him to the cause of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
He was free and clear of the Imperium, a servant to no man and limited only by his own sense of discovery and imagination. It took all his willpower to remain seated and not rush down to the Renard and fly off in the direction of the nearest habitable system and see what was out there.
Second star on the right, and straight on till morning...
+++Inload Addenda+++
Abrehem awoke to the sound of ratcheting machinery and the stink of hot metal. He was lying on his back on an uncomfortable metal gurney, somewhere with a ceiling tiled in bottle-green ceramic. The smell of counterseptic and drifting incense was powerful, and he tasted the unpleasant tang of overcooked meat and burnt hair from somewhere nearby. He blinked, and his eyes registered a number of binaric locators etched into the walls.
‘Ah, you are awake,’ said a voice, metallic and muffled by a voluminous hood.
Abrehem tried to sit up, but his limbs were not his to control.
‘Why can’t I move?’ he said, not yet alarmed by this turn of events.
‘You are still feeling the effects of the muscle relaxants and motion-dampers,’ said the voice. ‘It’s quite normal to feel a little disorientation after surgery.’
‘Surgery? What surgery?’
‘How much do you remember of the eldar attack?’
The last thing he remembered was the horrific pain of...
‘My arm!’ he gasped, attempting to turn and look at his arm. His head wouldn’t move, but at the farthest extent of his vision he could see a pair of medicae servitors bending over his shoulder and a number of floating surgical servo-skulls with darting suture-calipers and nerve-graft lasers.
‘Don’t worry, the surgery was a complete success,’ said the voice.
‘What did you do to me?’ cried Abrehem. ‘You’re not turning me into a servitor, are you?’
‘A servitor? Ave Deus Mechanicus, no!’
‘Then what are you doing?’
‘Fixing you,’ said the speaker, and now the owner of the voice leaned over Abrehem as the servo-skulls floated away. The medicae servitors gathered up their equipment and a number of kidney bowls filled with what looked like lumps of blackened, overcooked meat.
‘Was that my arm?’ asked Abrehem.
‘It was,’ said the hooded adept, and Abrehem recognised him as the overseer, Totha Mu-32. ‘It was far beyond saving, and will be disposed of with the rest of the biological material lost in the attack.’
‘Imperator,’ gasped Abrehem, fighting to control his breathing. ‘My arm...’
Totha Mu-32’s blank silver mask and pale blue optics managed to register surprise.
‘Ah, of course,’ he said, bending to a gurgling machine that Abrehem couldn’t quite see. A hissing pump mechanism engaged and a crackling hum of power that Abrehem had taken for the background noise of the room fell silent.
Warmth and feeling returned to Abrehem’s limbs almost immediately, and he flexed his fingers, enjoying the sensation of movement until he realised something didn’t make sense.
He was flexing the fingers of both his hands.
He sat up sharply, feeling a brief moment of nausea as the lingering effects of the drugs he had been given sloshed around his bloodstream. He sat on a surgical slab in a green-tiled medicae bay with banks of silver workbenches, mortuary compartments and suspended machinery with enough blades, drills and clamps to look like excruciation engines.
‘I have a new arm,’ he said.
His right arm was fashioned from dark metal, with a bronze cowling at the junction of flesh and machine. The fingers were segmented bronze, and the elbow a spherical gimbal that allowed for three hundred and sixty degrees of rotation. Abrehem flexed the fingers, finding them slightly slower to respond than their flesh and blood counterparts, but still able to articulate in every way that mattered.
‘It is not a sophisticated augmetic, but it was the best I could do, I’m afraid,’ said Totha Mu-32.
‘You arranged this?’ asked Abrehem. ‘Why?’
Totha Mu-32 chuckled. ‘You really don’t remember, do you?’
‘Remember what?’
‘Killing the eldar war-leader?’
‘I remember shooting him with Haw... I mean, with that plasma pistol.’
Totha Mu-32 waved away the question of the weapon’s ownership and said, ‘Exactly. That weapon was six hundred years old and its power cell didn’t have so much as a pico-joule left in it. And its plasma coil had corroded so badly that it should never have fired at all.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Abrehem. ‘What are you saying?’
Totha Mu-32 leaned forwards, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I am saying that they are right about you, Abrehem Locke. You are Machine-touched. The Omnissiah watches over you and a spark of his divine fire moves within you.’
‘No,’ said Abrehem, shaking his head. ‘You’re wrong. I don’t know how that pistol fired, but it was nothing to do with me. It was an accident, a fluke.’
‘Then how do you explain that?’ said Totha Mu-32, pointing over Abrehem’s shoulder.
Abrehem turned and saw the iron-masked killer who had carved up the eldar warriors in the time it took to blink. His physique had returned to something approaching normal, though he was still vastly muscled and insanely powerful looking. He had been clothed in a black vest and a pair of grey fatigues, and wore heavy iron-shod boots. The writhing silver flails were retracted into his bronze gauntlets, making him look as though he had slender claws for hands.
The red Icon Mechanicus on his forehead was like a burning third eye, and he bared gleaming fangs as he sensed Abrehem’s gaze.
‘By your leave,’ he growled, bowing his metal-encased head.
‘What is it?’ asked Abrehem, feeling a lethal sense of hair-trigger danger from the biological death machine.
‘An arco-flagellant,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘Your arco-flagellant.’
Booming hymnals in praise of the Omnissiah in his aspect of the Life Giver echoed from the forge-temple of Magos Turentek as the heavy piston cranes angled the reclining fabricator cradle from horizontal to vertical in a necessarily slow arc. The Ark Fabricatus himself, a hardwired collection of assembly equipment, dangling construction arms, lifter gear and a cab from which his biological components could oversee the work in his many forges, moved across the ceiling rails at a pace that matched the ascent of the fabricator cradle.
To have achieved so much in so short a time was nothing short of
miraculous, and the deafening hymns and cascades of binary were prayers of thanks to the Machine-God for facilitating the work he had done here. On any vessel other than the Speranza, the task would have been impossible, but not only had Turentek achieved the impossible, he had done it ahead of schedule.
Sheets of tarpaulin like the sails of ocean-going ships fell from the cradle and mooring lines were blasted clear with pneumatic pressure. Vats of blessed oils and lubricants upended over the enormous cradle and a baptismal rain coated the renewed carapace of heavy armour and a warrior restored to his former glory.
As Turentek’s great feat of engineering was revealed, the warhorns of its brethren howled in welcome, drowning out the throngs of adepts, devotees and magi who had assisted in bringing the god-machine of Legio Sirius back from the brink of death.
Amarok and Vilka loped back and forth, the Warhounds beckoning to their restored pack-mate.
And Canis Ulfrica took a ponderous step from the fabricator cradle, the booming echo of its splay-clawed foot drawing forth yet more cries of adulation and welcome. Eryks Skálmöld walked his Reaver fully from its cradle, reborn and restored, the grey, blue and gold of its armour like new.
The wounds that the Moonsorrow had suffered were now fully repaired and a new blooding banner added to its oil-dripping carapace. The physical reminder of its humbling had been erased, but the mental repercussions were far from healed, and Skálmöld halted the Titan as he looked up into the wolf-mask of his packmaster’s engine.
Lupa Capitalina towered over the host, magisterial as it surveyed the thousands of Cult Mechanicus swarming at its feet. For the briefest instant, a sensor ghost flickered through the Warlord’s Manifold, too inconsequential to be noticed by anyone save a senior princeps, a skittering bio-echo of a long ago vanquished foe.
Canis Ulfrica’s snarling snout flinched, and its shoulders cranked as it too felt the echo through the Manifold. The Reaver and the Warlord met each other’s gaze, and a moment of silent communion passed between the singular minds encased within their amniotic tanks.
Canis Ulfrica lowered its head in a gesture of submission.
But only the Wintersun felt how grudgingly it was made.
Images scrolled through Magos Blaylock’s optical feeds, frozen moments of history captured for posterity and any potential future records of his life and deeds. Centuries of material was stored in his exo-memory coils and decades within his own skull-memes. His life had been one of achievement and dutiful service, and he had ensured a comprehensive record of the Kotov expedition for the undoubted inquiries to follow.
He had no personal agenda with Lexell Kotov, but knew that his own organisational abilities and powers of statistical analysis far outstripped those of the archmagos. To have lost three forge worlds was inexcusable, and with the resources of Kotov’s Martian forges at his disposal, Blaylock knew with a significant degree of statistical certainty that he could extend the power of the Adeptus Mechanicus into regions of space that had yet to fully develop their potential.
But those were ambitions for a later day.
First, this expedition needed to be discredited, and Blaylock believed he had found his first weapon.
The images he had blink-clicked while in the stateroom of Roboute Surcouf swam into focus, meaningless commendations in the armed services of Ultramar, Naval commissions and rank pins from various ships of the line. The images flickered past with a pulse of thought, captured images moving in rapid procession like a child’s flipbook animation.
At last he came to the image he sought, and what until now had only been a suspicion aroused by an anomalous data discrepancy in the Manifold record was moved up to a certainty as he zoomed in on the document hung behind the rogue trader’s desk.
The Letter of Marque bore Segmentum Pacificus accreditation, and the winged eagle of Bakkan sector command was a complex multi-dimensional hololith, with numerous deep layers of encryption that made it virtually impossible to convincingly counterfeit.
Virtually impossible, but not entirely impossible.
Blaylock’s floodstream swelled with what approximated pleasure for an adept of the Mechanicus.
Surcouf’s Letter of Marque was a fake.
The Black Templars bowed their heads in prayer, six grief-stricken warriors kneeling in one of the Speranza’s few temples dedicated exclusively to the glory of the Emperor. None of them wore armour, and each warrior’s bare back was scoured with the whips and hooked chains of self-mortification. Thick clots of sticky blood ran down each warrior’s flayed skin and Brother-Sergeant Tanna knew that such pain could never be enough to atone for their failure.
Their Reclusiarch was dead and not one of them had so much as lifted a blade in his defence.
The Black Templars were now warriors without a place to call their own, bereft of their spiritual leader and everything that connected them to their past and their duty. The Speranza was not their ship, and its inhabitants were not their people. The six of them were all that remained of the Scar Crusade, and Tanna found it almost impossible not to believe that they had been cursed since the death of Aelius at Dantium Gate.
The death of an Emperor’s Champion was a moment of unimaginable loss to the warriors of the Black Templars, and though Kul Gilad had claimed this crusade was neither penance nor punishment, it was hard not to think of it that way. Cut off from their fellow crusaders and trapped on the far side of the galaxy, they were as alone as it was possible to be.
Yet for all that, this was a chance to continue the work of the Great Crusade, a chance to bring the Emperor’s light to those that had never been blessed to know of its existence. He had tried to mitigate Kul Gilad’s loss with such sentiment, but the wound was too fresh and too raw for his warriors. No mere words of his could salve their broken pride and savaged honour.
Tanna cursed his limitations. He was a sergeant, a battle leader who knew how to follow orders and drive the men around him to complete them. But with no one to give those orders and no one to fill their hearts with fire and blood, what was left to them? Tanna was no great orator, no great innovator of tactics or philosophy.
He was a stalwart of the battle line, a redoubtable fighter and a reliable killer.
He was not a leader, and the warriors around him knew it.
For the first time since his elevation to the Fighting Companies, Tanna felt utterly alone.
Though he had fought and bled alongside these heroic warriors for the better part of two centuries, even Tanna knew an unbreakable bond of trust had turned to ashes between them. Varda claimed not to judge him for giving the order to launch the Barisan and fly the Thunderhawk through the gravitational storms towards the Speranza, but a subtle and steadily widening gap had opened between the two brothers.
And though Varda was a mere battle-brother, he was this Crusade’s Emperor’s Champion, and that gave him a seniority that no rank could afford to ignore.
Tanna rose from his prayers, his chest, shoulders and back gouged with self-inflicted wounds of shame. In one hand he carried a barbed chain and in the other his combat blade. Both were wet with his lifeblood. He turned to address his warriors, and their cold stares upon him were more painful than the flesh-scourges could ever hope to be.
‘Trust in the Emperor at the hour of battle,’ he said, falling back on ritual catechism.
‘Trust to Him to intercede, and protect His warriors as they deal death on alien soil.’
‘Turn these seas to red with the blood of their slain.’
Tanna broke with tradition as he spoke the last line of this battle-oath with his warriors.
‘Crush their hopes, their dreams. And turn their songs into cries of lamentation.’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hailing from Scotland, Graham McNeill worked for over six years as a Games Developer in Games Workshop’s Design Studio before taking the plunge to become a full-time writer. Graham’s written a host of SF and Fantasy novels and comics, as well as a number of side projects
that keep him busy and (mostly) out of trouble. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller and his Time of Legends novel, Empire, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award. Graham lives and works in Nottingham and you can keep up to date with where he’ll be and what he’s working on by visiting his website.
Join the ranks of the 4th Company at www.graham-mcneill.com
For Alexander Dembski-Bowden. An M.41 Auspex would have shown you that…
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
Cover illustration by Slawomir Maniak
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