Lords of Mars

by Graham McNeill

  ‘Heads up,’ said Hawke. ‘Dragon boy’s coming.’

  Abrehem didn’t have to look up to know that Totha Mu-32 was approaching, and wished he’d never told Hawke and Coyne what the overseer had told him about the sect that sought out those they believed were Machine-touched.

  The overseer leaned over the table, and said, ‘You need to go. Now.’

  Abrehem looked up and saw a look of genuine fear on the overseer’s face that his facial implants couldn’t mask.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I told you the senior magi would not tolerate you claiming stewardship of an arco-flagellant, remember?’

  Abrehem nodded.

  ‘They are coming. Now. Saiixek is on his way and he will demand you surrender Rasselas X-42 over to his custody. Then he will kill you and cut off your augmetic arm.’

  ‘What do we do?’ asked Coyne, all thoughts of better quality food forgotten.

  ‘You leave. Now. Find somewhere hidden,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘I know you now have several alcohol-producing stills hidden below the waterline, Bondsman Hawke. Take Abrehem to one of them, do not tell me which. You understand?’

  Hawke looked about to protest his innocence, but simply nodded.

  ‘Yeah, sure. Okay, let’s go.’

  ‘Too late,’ said Abrehem, as Magos Saiixek and a troop of twenty skitarii marched into Feeding Hall Eighty-Six via the port archway. Abrehem rose from the table and looked for another way out, but twenty more skitarii appeared at the opposite entrance.

  ‘No way out,’ he said, turning to his companions. ‘Get away from me or they’ll take you too.’

  ‘Way ahead of you,’ said Hawke, already backing away into the crowds of bondsmen. Coyne was right there with him, and Abrehem wasn’t surprised. His fellow rigman had always been more interested in himself than any notions of solidarity, but Abrehem couldn’t bring himself to be angry. If the Mechanicus were really going to kill him, or even if they would only take him for some kind of interrogation trawl or punishment detail, then better it was only him they collared.

  ‘Too bad you took X-42 back to his sleep chamber,’ said Hawke as a parting shot. ‘Looks like you could really use him right about now.’

  The skitarii closed in on Abrehem and Totha Mu-32, until the two of them stood within a circle of warriors. Armoured in glossy plates of black decorated with glitter-scaled scorpions, snakes and spiders, the Mechanicus troops looked like they’d give the Black Templars a run for their money. Shot-cannons, web-casters and shock mauls told Abrehem they wanted him alive, but didn’t care too much about how bruised he got.

  The ring of warriors parted long enough for Magos Saiixek to stand forth, the black-cowled adept of the Cult Mechanicus who had first “welcomed” Abrehem and the others aboard the Speranza. His robes and acid-etched stole were patterned with frost, the cylinders on his arachnid backpack venting breaths of freezing vapour and radiating cold from the looping cables encircling his body. His face was obscured behind a bronze mask worked in an angular recreation of a beaked plague-doctor from some backward feral world.

  ‘I am Saiixek, Master of Engines,’ said the magos, but Abrehem already knew that. He’d met him before, and the information bled from him in noospheric waves as surely as the misty fog of his machine-exhalations and his righteous indignation at Abrehem’s presumption. ‘Statement: you are to surrender the arco-flagellant to my custody immediately. Furnish me with its location, capabilities and trigger phrase, and once I have amputated that illegally affixed limb, you will receive a lower-rated punishment. Respond immediately.’

  ‘Rasselas X-42 has imprinted on Bondsman Locke,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘It would be dangerous for anyone to try and undo that. You must not attempt to break such a bond.’

  Saiixek inclined his head towards Totha Mu-32, like a man finding something unpleasant on the sole of his boot. ‘Identifier: Totha Mu-32, Overseer Tertius Lambda. You do not have sufficient rank protocol to make such a demand. Your breach of bio-implantation protocols has already earned you punishment. Continue with this defiance, and I will strip what rank you have and ensure your operational progression path never leaves the bio-waste reclamation decks.’

  ‘The Omnissiah chose Bondsman Locke to be X-42’s custodian,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘A killing machine like that is a chosen instrument of Imperial will. He was meant to find Rasselas X-42, I know this to be true.’

  Abrehem wanted to speak, to say that he was perfectly happy to surrender control of the arco-flagellant, that Totha Mu-32’s belief in him was misplaced. But the multiple barrels of heavy weapons pointing at him kept his mouth shut. Saiixek spoke again, and though none of his metal features moved, Abrehem felt his contempt in the surging ire of his floodstream. ‘You presume to know the will of the Omnissiah, overseer?’

  ‘No, but I recognise its working when I see it,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘As would you if you ever deigned to venture beyond the high temples of the enginarium.’

  ‘Enough,’ said Saiixek, waving a brass hand and dispersing the cold mists around him. ‘This is not a debate. Suzerain Travain, take them.’

  The skitarii next to Saiixek raised his shot-cannon, but before he could rack the slide, a metallic arm reached from Saiixek’s mist to wrench it from his hand. The gun snapped in two with a sharp crack, and Abrehem watched as Ismael pushed through the ring of skitarii to stand before Magos Saiixek.

  He dropped the broken pieces of the weapon and said, ‘You… need to… leave here, magos. Now.’

  Saiixek took a step back from Ismael, and Abrehem saw the surge of his abhorrence at the sight of a servitor addressing him with apparent self-will.

  ‘Blasphemy!’ hissed Saiixek. ‘You will all die for this techno-heresy.’

  ‘But I didn’t do anything!’ cried Abrehem. ‘He took a blow to the head, that’s all!’

  ‘The will of the Omnissiah moves within you, Abrehem,’ said Totha Mu-32. ‘Do not deny it.’

  ‘Will you shut up, please!’ snapped Abrehem. ‘Listen, Magos Saiixek, I’m not Machine-touched, this is all a bunch of stupid, random things that have happened to me. There’s no great mystery, it’s all… I don’t know, coincidence or someone’s idea of a sick joke!’

  His words fell on deaf ears, and Abrehem knew Saiixek wouldn’t believe them anyway.

  ‘All… of… you,’ said Ismael, his face contorted with the effort of speech. ‘Should… go. Abrehem Locke is… not to… be touched. We will… not… allow our restorer to be harmed.’

  Abrehem heard Ismael’s words without understanding them, but knew they were only pulling him deeper into the mire in which he was already neck-deep.

  ‘Admonishment: a servitor does not issue demands,’ said Saiixek, a measure of Mechanicus control finally asserting itself through his horrified disbelief.

  The tension on Ismael’s face relaxed. ‘This one does.’

  ‘Deactivate this instant!’ ordered Saiixek, unleashing a bludgeoning stream of binaric shut-down commands.

  Ismael staggered with the force of Saiixek’s authority signifiers, dropping to one knee before the red-robed magos with his head bowed. Saiixek stepped past the kneeling servitor, but Ismael’s servo-limb reached up and clamped down hard on his arm.

  Ismael’s iron-clad head lifted and he looked Saiixek straight in the eye.

  ‘No,’ said Ismael, rising to his feet. ‘We. Will. Not.’

  Only then did Abrehem realise why Ismael kept saying we.

  Encircling the skitarii in an unbroken ring of flesh and iron were hundreds of dispensing servitors, each one staring with a fixed expression at the drama unfolding in the feeding hall. Abrehem guessed there were at least five hundred servitors surrounding the skitarii, all heavily augmented with powerful servo-arms and pain-blockers.

  Ismael had once claimed to be able to hear the other servitors, but Abrehem had had no idea that line of communication worked both ways.

  ‘He made us remember,’ said Ismael, shoving Saiixek back. ‘A
nd we will… not let you take… Him.’

  Saiixek turned a slow circle and his horror was evident, even to those without augmentation. The natural order of the world had been overturned and the Master of Engines now realised he was in very real danger. The servitors were unarmed and individually were no match for highly trained, weaponised skitarii.

  But they had overwhelming numbers on their side, and if violence ensued, neither Saiixek or his skitarii escort would leave here alive.

  ‘What have you done, Bondsman Locke?’ asked Saiixek. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus… what have you done?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything!’ protested Abrehem.

  Ismael raised his mechanised arm above his head, the manipulator claw on the end clenched into an approximation of a fist.

  And all through the Ark Mechanicus, tens of thousand of fists rose in support.

  The Warhound was a swift hunter, an unseen killer on the ice. Amarok moved through the labyrinth of canyons with a silence that should have been impossible for such a huge machine, its heavy footfalls somehow making little or no sound as Gunnar Vintras wove a path through a glittering forest of crazily-angled crystalline spires jutting from the ice and rock like slender stalagmites of diamond.

  The Skinwalker lay back in the contoured couch of his Warhound, feeling the flex and release of his mechanised musculature, the acid-burn of exertion and the neutron winds whipping around his armoured carapace. He wore his silver hair shaved down to his skull, exposing wolf-eye tattoos surrounding the cerebral implant sockets in his neck. His actual eyes were closed, darting around behind the lids, and his sharpened teeth were bared in a feral snarl.

  Amarok was a beautiful machine to pilot, built by craftsmen of a bygone age who cared about the weapons they built, not like the sunborn adepts of today who just stamped out inferior manufactorum-pressed copies of mechanical art.

  It felt good to take his engine out onto a real hunting ground. Magos Dahan’s training halls aboard the Speranza were wide and expansive, but no substitute for walking on the surface of a real world. Vintras eased Amarok from a cautious stride to a slow lope, gradually feeding power from the reactor at the Warhound’s heart to its reverse-jointed legs of plasteel and fibre-bundle muscles.

  He felt Amarok’s desire to be loosed, to sprint through this crystalline forest of glassy spires on the hunt, but he clamped his will down upon it.

  ‘Not yet, wildheart,’ he said, feeling the volatile core of the spirit baiting him through the crackling link of the Manifold. Ever since they’d entered what Mistress Tychon was calling the umbra, arcing ahead of the course to be followed by the plodding Land Leviathans, the Titan’s spirit had been restless. It didn’t like this world, and Vintras couldn’t blame it. There was something… off about Katen Venia, as though it was spitefully hoping to drag others into its imminent demise.

  The auspex was a squalling mess of bounced returns from the crystalline spires surrounding him and crackling distortion caused by the umbra. He was relying on what Amarok’s external picters were telling him, walking by auspex-sight alone and bereft of any other sensory inputs.

  Princeps of larger engines would be horrified at such a limited sphere of awareness, but Warhound princeps were cut from a different cloth, and Vintras relished this chance to pilot his engine so viscerally. He couldn’t see the Mechanicus Leviathans, Lupa Capitalina or Vilka beyond the canyon’s walls, but that suited Vintras just fine.

  Ever since the Wintersun had opened fire on Canis Ulfrica, Vintras was in no hurry to walk in the Warlord’s shadow. These canyons were altogether too similar to the claustrophobic cavern runs of Beta Fortanis, and Vintras didn’t like to think of the Wintersun having any further reminders of that nightmarish battle. The Capitalina’s magos claimed the engine’s Manifold had been purged of data junk relating to that fight, but who really knew what ghost echoes lingered in the deep memory of a war machine as ancient and complex as a Warlord Titan?

  No, best to keep clear of Lupa Capitalina for now.

  His fingers flexed without conscious thought and the weapon mounts on his arms clattered as the threat auspex overlaid the topographical display with a red-hazed shimmer of threat returns. Autonomic reactions took over and Vintras slewed the Titan around, lowering the carapace and shrugging his weapon mounts to the fore.

  Ammunition shunts fed explosive shells into the vulcan, while the heavy duty capacitors of the turbolasers siphoned energy from the surging reactor. Vintras felt his arms swell with lethal power and the heat in his belly spread through his flesh-limbs.

  Keeping the Titan moving, he panned the snarling, lupine snout of his engine from left to right, searching for targets or anything that might have provoked such a response. Vapour bleed from the melting nitrogen ice made visibility a joke, but Vintras wasn’t seeing anything hostile.

  A few hundred metres away, a cluster of crystal spires crashed to the ground as the bedrock cracked open and they tore loose. Shards fell in glittering mineral rain, throwing back myriad reflections of his war-engine.

  Vintras let out a pent-up breath. There was nothing out here but him.

  ‘Seismic activity,’ he said. ‘That’s all it was, my beauty. Falling spires and shifting rock.’

  Boulders of ice fell from the lip of the canyon, and he danced his machine back to avoid the largest. The voids would spare him the worst of the impacts, but it never paid to antagonise a Titan’s spirit with needless damage. The ground cracked as the boulders landed, each one tens of metres across, and Vintras sidestepped away from the unstable ground.

  He dismissed the threat auspex and pushed forwards through the crystal spires once more, satisfied there was nothing out there to cause him concern. He felt Amarok’s displeasure in the rumble of the engine core and the resistance in its limbs.

  ‘Easy there,’ he whispered. ‘There’s nothing out there.’

  But still the Titan fought him, keeping its weapons armed and once again calling the threat auspex to the fore.

  Vintras cancelled it. ‘Enough,’ he snapped. ‘You’re getting as jumpy as the Wintersun.’

  The Manifold growled at his casual dismissal, and he felt the great machine’s ire in a surge of painful feedback through his spinal implant. Amarok was not an engine to patronise, its spirit that of a lone predator, the killer that lurks in the darkness and strikes without warning.

  Such an entity did not jump at shadows, and he had been foolish to forget that.

  ‘You want to hunt?’ he said. ‘Then let’s hunt. Full auspex sweep.’

  Katen Venia’s surface was painfully bright, even through the protective filters of Roboute’s helmet. Cold, ultraviolet-tinged illumination fell in shimmering, auroral bands, the red light of the star shifted along the visible spectrum by a cocktail of released gases surging in the temporary atmosphere that imparted a shimmering, undersea quality to their surroundings. Towering mountains of frozen nitrogen were visible through the drifting banks of vapour streaming from their jagged peaks as the heat from the dying star stripped the icy crust from the planet’s surface.

  Dazzling refractions of variegated light shone through the prisms of the ice mountains, and Roboute had never seen anything as grandly terrible in all his life. He felt as if he had been shrunk to microscopic size and was navigating a passage through the grooves and ridges on the surface of a cut-glass decanter. His earlier disappointment at the planet’s appearance had melted away as surely as the nitrogen icecaps in the face of what lay beyond the Mechanicus landing fields.

  This was the death of a planet, and like war, it was a beautiful thing to see from a distance.

  There was majesty in this global annihilation event, an inhuman level of destruction whereby mountain ranges were being abraded before his very eyes, continents unseated from their molten beds and the world’s metallic core being rendered down to its composite elements.

  Up close, it was even more beautiful and even more dangerous.

  Waterfalls of liquid nitrogen poured down r
azor-edged canyons. Boiling lakes expanded with every surge of melting chemically-rich ice then shrank back as they bled toxic vapour into the void. Under colossal geological upheaval, the planet was undergoing stresses it had not known since its birth in the star’s powerful gravitational tug-of-war. From orbit the planet’s crust had been a reticulated mess of random scoring where tectonic plates had been ripped apart. On the surface that translated to gorges hundreds of kilometres wide and who knew how many deep.

  The planet was in a heightened state of activity, and only the precision of Magos Blaylock’s calculations – married to inloads from adepts of the Collegium Geologica – had allowed the fleet’s Fabricatus Locum to plot a route to the Tomioka. The snaking, zig-zagging course offered the forces on the ground the best chance of reaching their goal, but Blaylock had been quick to point out that it was based purely on statistical probability rather than actual measurements.

  An inset slate on the control panel fizzed with static, but had just enough resolution to show the position of the grav-sled, together with the corridor of acceptably stable ground they were to follow. Widened out to maximum zoom, that corridor was still frighteningly narrow and allowed little margin for error. Roboute didn’t know what might happen if Blaylock’s calculations were awry or he strayed from the marked corridor, and was in no hurry to find out.

  Occasionally, they saw the remnants of servitor drones, buried in the sides of glaciers or smashed to a thousand pieces on the valley floor. Smoke trailed from their shattered canopies, and Roboute tried not to notice the ruptured bodies that spilled from them. A brief inload from Linya Tychon had mentioned an umbra of interference and distortion centred on the Tomioka, which went some way to explaining why they’d seen so many downed drones and were forced to rely on the workings of Tarkis Blaylock instead of precise route information.

  The Tabularium pounded the ice and rock with its multiple iron feet as it trudged after them like a relentless city that had managed to uproot itself from its foundations and give chase. The other Land Leviathans were arranged behind it, nose to tail, a caravan of steel that reached back nearly five kilometres. The Cadian armoured vehicles, a mix of transports and tanks, clustered around the mobile temples like scavenger creatures stalking a dying herbivor, and Roboute was glad at least one other element of this expedition would likely be feeling a sense of amazement at this exploration of a new world.