Mechanicum

by Graham McNeill

  As if relishing this method of murder, the scrapcode then killed the astropaths of Medusa Fossae, altering the breathing mix of their life support until each psyker was being fed hydrogen cyanide gas. Within minutes, over six thousand astropaths were dead, and after one plaintive death scream that was felt in the Emperor’s vaults beneath the surface of Terra, Mars fell utterly silent.

  Ipluvien Maximal was one of the lucky few able to sever his links with the networks before too much damage was done, though three of his fusion reactors along the Ulysses Fossae suffered critical meltdowns, the mushroom clouds of their detonations drifting east and north, forever irradiating thousands of square kilometres of the Martian soil.

  The same story was enacted all across the surface of the red planet, machines rebelling as their internal workings were overloaded with contradictory commands. The death toll climbed into the millions within minutes as forges exploded, toxic chemicals spilled through manufactories and mass-storage facilities of explosive materials cooked off in devastating daisy chains of detonations.

  In years to come this night would become known as the Death of Innocence.

  Only the forge of Adept Koriel Zeth escaped unscathed, the torrents of crackling scrapcode unwilling or unable to travel the glittering golden wires that had recently carried the Emperor’s light along them. Like positively charged iron filings flowing around a similarly charged magnet, the scrapcode bypassed the Magma City altogether.

  It was the one ray of hope in an otherwise bleak night.

  CAXTON AND ZOUCHE needed a shave and Severine looked as though she hadn’t slept in days. Even Mellicin, logical, unflappable Mellicin, looked deflated in the aftermath of the disastrous trial of the Akashic reader. They sat around Dalia’s bed in the medicae wing of the Magma City, fussing over her as medical servitors drew blood and monitored her vitals.

  The room smelled of counterseptic, soap and the lapping powder Adept Zeth was fond of using on her armour.

  ‘You gave us quite a scare, young lady,’ Zouche had said as he entered the room and saw that Dalia was awake. Dalia had been touched at the genuine emotion she saw in the gruff machinist’s face.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Didn’t mean to, she says,’ said Caxton with a forced laugh, though Dalia could see the dark shadows under the young man’s eyes, the puffiness where his tears had fallen. ‘Yanks open a door to a chamber flooded with psychic energy and says she didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Well I didn’t,’ said Dalia, aware of how foolish she sounded. ‘I just couldn’t leave Jonas in there.’

  None of them would meet her gaze and they had shared a moment of regret for the dead.

  Severine had taken Jonas’ death particularly hard, and Dalia reached out to take her hand. The severity she had first seen in her face had melted away over the last few weeks and Dalia’s heart ached to see the sadness in her friend’s eyes.

  Not a single trace of Jonas had been found in the chamber, not so much as an atom of his body to prove that he had existed at all. Likewise, none of the psykers encased in the coffered dome had survived the titanic energies of the Astronomican, their desiccated corpses withered and contracted into foetal balls.

  All told, the death toll was two thousand and thirty-seven, and that figure was like an adamantium chain of grief around all their necks. They did not yet know of the night of devastation that had been so recently unleashed and how slight a loss this was compared to that suffered by the rest of Mars.

  Dalia had since been told that she had been languishing in the grip of an unchanging coma for over seven days, watched over by Caxton, a host of bio-monitors and a pict-camera linked to the nearby medical station.

  She learned that Caxton had refused to leave her bedside, despite repeated assurances from the others that they would take shifts in watching her. It had been five hours since Dalia had woken, though the bulk of that time had been spent being questioned by Adept Zeth. Her friends had only just been granted access to her.

  ‘What’s Adept Zeth saying about what happened?’ asked Severine after they had exchanged hugs and shed tears together. ‘She must be disappointed the machine didn’t work.’

  ‘Didn’t it?’ asked Zouche, narrowing his eyes. ‘It overloaded, but the machine functioned as it should have, just not for very long.’

  ‘What did Adept Zeth ask you, Dalia?’ asked Mellicin, cutting to the heart of the matter.

  Dalia saw their inquisitive looks, knowing that they too were curious as to what had transpired within the chamber of the Akashic reader.

  ‘She wanted to know everything that happened in the chamber and everything Jonas Milus said to me.’

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Caxton.

  She squeezed Caxton’s hand, glancing up at the pict-camera in the upper corner of the room.

  ‘He just died,’ said Dalia. ‘He didn’t say anything at all.’

  THE MEDICAE PRONOUNCED Dalia fit to resume her duties the following morning, and the next six rotations were spent in Zeth’s inner forge rebuilding the Akashic reader, replacing those parts that had burned out and recalibrating those that had survived.

  Zeth and Dalia had made assumptions and now they were paying for them. Dalia should have requested clarification on Zeth’s figures, but she had been so focused on the minutiae of the project she had not thought to doubt the adept’s numbers.

  That wasn’t going to happen again. Rigorous double testing and checking procedures were enforced and every servitor had its work reviewed by a living, breathing adept.

  The silver wiring in the floor had melted through and whole sections were pulled up and replaced with slabs impregnated with a higher gauge of cable. Every aspect of the machine’s parts was examined and re-evaluated to see if there were ways of improving its performance and ensuring that it did not fail again.

  Scores of adepts and servitors laboured in the dome alongside Dalia and her friends, though there was none of the shared sense of wonder that had enthused them when previously working on the Akashic reader. Only the biting drills of the servitors broke the silence of the dome as they lifted floor slabs and carried them away.

  The coffers in the dome were empty, and as unnerving as it had been working beneath the sightless eyes of the bound psykers, everyone felt their absence more acutely. The vacant berths were a grim reminder of the deaths caused by the machine they were working on, and the assembled workers kept their heads fixed firmly on the job at hand.

  Zeth spoke little to Dalia, the adept forced to spend most of her time dealing with the fallout from their abortive experiment. The adept left her apprenta, a magos named Polk, in charge, and, under his and Rho-mu 31’s supervision, work continued much as before.

  Dalia had asked Rho-mu 31 once why Adept Zeth was absent from the dome, but all the robed Protector had said was, ‘She has matters of greater importance to attend to.’

  Dalia had thought the Akashic reader was Zeth’s greatest work, so clearly there had been consequences that not even an adept of Zeth’s stature could ignore. Those few times Dalia and Zeth had passed words, she simply reaffirmed that Jonas Milus had not spoken to her.

  Zeth would nod in weary acceptance, but Dalia could read the adept’s disbelief in her noospheric aura… as well as veiled fear that spoke to Dalia of events far more terrible than a failed test.

  She wasn’t exactly sure why she was unwilling to share the empath’s words with Zeth, but the intuitive part of her mind, the part that had led her to the design of the Akashic reader, told her that to inform the adept of what she knew – which wasn’t much anyway – could very well be dangerous.

  Knowledge is power, guard it well, wasn’t that one of the Mechanicum’s aphorisms?

  Dalia intended to guard this knowledge very well and there were only a few people she dared trust with it.

  Adept Zeth was not one of them.

  WORK ON THE newly reconstructed Akashic reader was almost complete, the tolerances an
d capacity of the receptors altered to allow for the increased power expected to flow through the device upon its next activation.

  Many months would need to pass before Mars and Terra would be in alignment once more, but for the next few rotations, the power of the Astronomican was still a vast resource of harvestable psychic energy.

  Fresh psykers were already being installed within the coffers, though there had been no sign of another empath for the throne atop the dais, a fact for which Dalia was pathetically grateful.

  As the activity in the dome neared completion, Dalia approached the workbench where Zouche and Caxton worked on the helmet assembly. Zouche was plugged into the lathe via extruded dendrites in his wrist, and the hissing of the laser lathe cutting through high-grade steel was a shrieking banshee howl.

  Dalia winced as the sound bit into the meat of her brain.

  Caxton saw her coming and smiled, lifting his hand in greeting. She smiled and returned the gesture as Zouche looked up from his labours and shut off the lathe.

  ‘Dalia,’ said Zouche, withdrawing his mechadendrites from the workbench and flipping up his protective goggles. ‘How are you today?’

  ‘I’m fine, Zouche,’ she said, her gaze shifting to the dais where the bronze armoured figure of Adept Zeth and Rho-mu 31 supervised the work of Mellicin and Severine. ‘Please, can you turn the lathe back on?’

  ‘Back on?’ asked Zouche, glancing over at Caxton. ‘Why?’

  ‘Please, just do it.’

  ‘What’s the matter, Dalia?’ asked Caxton. ‘You sure you’re allright?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ repeated Dalia. ‘Please, turn the lathe back on, I need to talk to you both, but I don’t want anyone to hear.’

  Zouche shrugged and reconnected with the workbench to activate the laser. Once again, the hiss of cutting metal filled the air as the manip plate moved the steel around the spitting lathe. Both Zouche and Caxton leaned in as Dalia spoke.

  ‘The damper we used in the reader, the part that blocks external interference from interfacing with the empath’s helmet, can you make a portable version of it?’

  Zouche frowned. ‘A portable one. Why?’

  ‘To block out vox-thieves and disrupt pict-feed,’ said Caxton, guessing Dalia’s meaning.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Dalia. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I’m not sure about this,’ said Zouche. ‘I don’t like the notion of secrecy. Nothing good can come of it.’

  ‘Look, can you make it or not?’ asked Dalia.

  ‘Of course, we can,’ said Caxton, his boyish face alight at the prospect of mischief. ‘It’s simple, isn’t it, Zouche?’

  ‘Yes, it’s simple, but why would you want such a device?’ asked Zouche, ‘What’s so secret that you need to stop anyone hearing it?’

  ‘I need to talk to you, Mellicin and Severine too, and I need to be sure we’re the only one’s listening.’

  ‘Talk to us about what?’

  ‘About what Jonas Milus said to me.’

  ‘I thought you said he didn’t say anything,’ pointed out Caxton.

  ‘I lied,’ said Dalia.

  THEY MET AT the end of shift in the refectoria hall, an echoing space filled with replenishing servitors and hungry labourers, menials and adepts. The hall was rife with rumour, the few information networks that were functional burbling with fragments of frightened talk of catastrophic accidents and unnatural incidents all across Mars.

  Gathering like conspirators, they sat as far from any listening ears as it was possible to get, but with each clique muttering their suspicions about what was happening beyond the walls of Adept Zeth’s forge, no one was paying them any mind anyway.

  As they huddled around the smallest table that could accommodate them all, Dalia took a long, hard look at her friends, judging how they might react to what she was about to tell them.

  Caxton seemed to be enjoying himself immensely, while Zouche looked nervous at their conspiratorial gathering. Mellicin’s posture spoke of her unease, and Severine looked as expressionless and pale as she had since Jonas Milus’ death.

  ‘Zouche?’ said Dalia. ‘Did you bring it?’

  ‘Aye, girl, I did,’ nodded Zouche. ‘It’s working. No one can hear what we’re saying.’

  ‘What’s this all about, Dalia?’ asked Mellicin. ‘Why did we have to meet like this?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t know how else to do this.’

  ‘Do what?’ asked Zouche. ‘I don’t see why we need to skulk about like this just because the damned empath spoke to you.’

  Severine’s head snapped up and her eyes flashed. ‘Jonas spoke to you?’

  Dalia nodded. ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Not much,’ admitted Dalia. ‘And what he did say didn’t make much sense then.’

  ‘And now?’ asked Mellicin, the wan light of the refectoria gleaming from the metallic half-mask of her face. ‘Your words imply they make more sense now.’

  ‘Well, sort of. I’m not sure, but maybe.’

  ‘Clarity, Dalia,’ said Mellicin. ‘Remember clarity in all things. First of all, tell us what the empath said.’

  ‘His name was Jonas,’ snapped Severine. ‘He had a name. All of you, he had a name and it was Jonas.’

  ‘I am well aware of that,’ said Mellicin, without pause. ‘Dalia, if you please.’

  Feeling everyone’s eyes upon her, Dalia reddened and took a deep breath before speaking. The words came easily to her, each one seared onto her brain like an acid etching on glass.

  ‘He said, “I have seen it! All knowledge.” And even though he was right in front of me it sounded like he was speaking from somewhere really far away, like the other side of Mars or somewhere far underground.’

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Severine, disappointment plain on her angular face.

  ‘No,’ said Dalia. ‘I told him I was sorry about what was happening to him and he said that he didn’t want my pity. He said that he’d seen the truth and that he was free.’

  ‘Free of what?’ asked Zouche.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dalia. ‘He said, “I have seen the truth and I am free. I know it all, the Emperor slaying the Dragon of Mars… the grand lie of the red planet and the truth that will shake the galaxy, all forgotten by man in the darkness of the labyrinth of night.” It was horrible, his mouth burning with fire and his voice fading away with every word.’

  ‘The labyrinth of night?’ asked Caxton. ‘Are you sure that’s what he said?’

  ‘Yes, absolutely,’ said Dalia. ‘The labyrinth of night.’

  ‘The Noctis Labyrinthus,’ said Mellicin, and Caxton nodded.

  Dalia looked at the pair of them. ‘Noctis Labyrinthus… what’s that?’

  ‘The Labyrinth of Night, it’s what Noctis Labyrinthus means,’ replied Caxton.

  ‘What kind of place is it?’ asked Dalia, elated to have found some meaning in words that had previously been meaningless. ‘Is it a mountain, a crater? What?’

  Mellicin shook her head, a nictitating membrane flickering over her augmetic eye as she dredged information from her memory coils.

  ‘Neither. The Noctis Labyrinthus is a broken region of land between the Tharsis uplands and the Valles Marineris,’ said Mellicin, the words spoken with the tone of someone retrieving data from an internal memory coil. ‘Notable for its maze-like system of deep, sheer-walled valleys, it is thought to have been formed by faulting in a previous age. Also, many of the canyons display typical features of grabens, with the upland plain surface clearly preserved on the valley floor.’

  Dalia frowned, wondering what this desolate region of Mars had to do with what Jonas had said. ‘Is it empty?’

  ‘More or less,’ said Caxton. ‘Adept Lukas Chrom has his Mondus Gamma forge to the south of it, but apart from him, we’re the nearest forge.’

  ‘So there’s no one there at all?’

  ‘It’s not a region of Mars anyone has any real interest in,’ said Mellicin. ‘I
’m told a number of adepts attempted to found their forges there, but none lasted very long.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know, they just didn’t. Supposedly the forges were plagued by technical problems. The adepts claimed the region was inimical to the machine-spirits and they abandoned their workings to set up elsewhere.’

  ‘So nobody knows what’s there?’ said Dalia. ‘Whatever Jonas was talking about is somewhere in the Noctis Labyrinthus, it’s got to be. The grand lie and this great truth.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ conceded Mellicin, ‘but what do you think he was talking about? Have you any idea what this… Dragon is he speaks of the Emperor slaying?’

  Dalia leaned in closer. ‘I don’t know exactly what it is, but I’ve been working through my remembrances of the texts I transcribed back on Terra and I’ve found out quite a bit.’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Severine.

  ‘Well, Jonas spoke about the Emperor slaying the Dragon of Mars, so I looked into any references to dragons first.’

  ‘Looked into how?’

  ‘You know, in my memory,’ said Dalia. ‘I told you, I read stuff and I don’t forget it.’

  Mellicin smiled. ‘That is a useful talent, Dalia. Continue.’

  ‘Right, well, we all know about mythical dragons?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Zouche. ‘Children’s stories.’ Dalia shook her head. ‘Maybe, but I think there’s more to Jonas’ words than that. Some of it, anyway. I mean, yes, I found lots of stories of heroic knights in shining armour slaying dragons and rescuing maidens in return for their hands in marriage.’

  ‘Typical,’ said Severine. ‘You never read of a maiden rescuing a man from a dragon.’

  ‘I guess not,’ agreed Dalia. ‘I suppose it didn’t fit with the times when they were written.’

  ‘Carry on, Dalia,’ said Mellicin. ‘What else did you learn?’